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Chapter 42

“A Woman’s Place” by Evelyn Cabot

Mademoiselle, July 1983

Since my first column in 1956, I’ve been sharing my story of a single woman pursuing her own path in life. The example I set was an important one we didn’t see enough of back then. All these years later, though, I have a confession to make: The truth is, I’ve always had someone by my side, from neighbors willing to lend a hand to friends whose hands have lifted me up. I may be a sole proprietor, but Red Barn Books has been a joint venture from the beginning.

The village librarian, who started renting a room from me before my house was habitable, has been a constant companion since my arrival in Schuywich. In those early days, when I still cooked over an open fire and my house lacked modern plumbing, her mother nourished me with hearty meals, clean clothes, and hot showers. Her father helped make possible the miracle of a flushing toilet. Her brother’s dog came to the rescue when I accidentally let loose Mr. Green’s sheep. As for the librarian herself? Well, you can imagine how crucial her expertise and encouragement were when I decided to go into the book business. The parents I was born to aren’t worth the words it would take to name them; for all these years, my librarian lodger and her family have been my only kin. It’s about damn time I give her the recognition she deserves.

I’ve also been accompanied on my entrepreneurial journey by the various youngsters who’ve held summer jobs in the bookshop. When I first got the idea to convert the barn into a business, I hired a boy from a nearby farm to help me. Hardworking Joey hauled boxes and did odd jobs until the army sent him to Vietnam. Next up was Diana, the teenage daughter of a friend from my Greenwich Village days, whose mother understandably wanted her safely out of the city during that volatile summer after Rev. Martin Luther King was assassinated. Initially resentful of being exiled to sleepy Schuywich to camp out in the barn loft of an old maid she barely knew, Diana ended up falling in love with country life, coming back year after year right through college. In fact, the girl became so fascinated with my animals — in those days, a geriatric horse shared the barn with my aging flock of sheep — she was inspired to enroll in veterinary school. Diana was followed by Isabel, a drama student at Skidmore College who felt safer spending summer breaks in Schuywich than traveling home to Argentina under the Junta. She started a puppet theater in the children’s corner that proved so popular I was stuck taking it over after she graduated.

For the past six years, I’ve had the same young man by my side every day of summer vacation, and plenty of afternoons during the school year, too. When we first met, Warren was a waif of a boy who didn’t fit in with his rough-and-tumble peers. Everyone in the village knew his father had run off to Alaska, leaving his mother to work as a waitress to make ends meet. I took him on initially as a way of supplementing the family’s dire need for income. Soon, though, I recognized in Warren a fellow traveler, someone whose artistic temperament and imaginative outlook were ill matched to the insular tendencies of an upstate village.

Too young, at first, to man the register, and too shy to engage with customers, he was content to tidy shelves and arrange books and keep the shop in perfect order. At thirteen, he took over Isabel’s puppet theater, devising costumes and sets that delighted the children, whose appreciative parents spent freely on fairy tales and chapter books. The next year, he drew a picture of the book barn so adorable I had it printed into postcards customers could buy for a dime. By fifteen, when he became better with numbers than I was (which isn’t saying much, but still), I dubbed Warren the keeper of my books. He reinvented my haphazard approach to inventory control with a color-coded system of index cards that he typed on my old Smith-Corona. Last summer, I finally allowed him to redecorate the shop, something he’d been wanting to do for years. The string lights he hung gave the barn an entirely new look, and the displays he created have doubled my business in prints and cards and paperbacks.

As Robert Frost once wrote, though, “nothing gold can stay.” Warren’s light shines too bright for this obscure corner of the Empire State. His destiny lies not along the stony banks of the Battenkill but among the blazing neon of Times Square. I was hoping he’d give me one last season, but once he had his college acceptance letter in hand, Warren was too eager to begin his “real life,” as he put it, to spend another summer in Schuywich.

His mother was working her shift at the diner, so I’m the one who drove him to the Rensselaer station to catch his train to Manhattan. Warren had landed a summer job at Argosy Book Store on my recommendation and reserved a room at the YMCA until he could move into his college dormitory come September.

“Good luck, son,” I said, my hand on his shoulder. We were the same height now, his bright eyes level with my own. “Here are the names and numbers of some good friends of mine you can turn to if you ever find yourself in need of a helping hand.”

“Thanks, Miss Cabot,” he said, tucking the folded paper in his shirt pocket. “You’re not going to cry, are you?”

“Of course not,” I said, wiping tears from my cheeks.

“Thanks again for your help with my college application. I’d never have been able to attend without those scholarships.”

“It was nothing.” I wanted to warn him of the dangers lying in wait for a sensitive young man in Manhattan’s concrete jungle, but I wasn’t his mother, after all. “Promise me you’ll take care of yourself?”

“Sure thing.” The conductor’s whistle blew. Warren looked eagerly over his shoulder.

“Stay in touch?” I called. But the boy was already gone.

The whole drive home to Schuywich, I couldn’t stop thinking of all the ways Warren’s journey was the opposite of my own. It was 1956 when I turned my back on Manhattan to travel up the Hudson toward a simpler existence. Later today, Warren will step off the train at a bustling Pennsylvania Station. Though he won’t be greeted by the same soaring glass ceilings to which I bid farewell, I hope the city into which he emerges will inspire him to set his sights high.

Warren’s departure has brought home to me that an entire generation has been hatched and fledged since I last called New York City home. For nearly three decades, the United States Postal Service has been carrying these missives from my farmhouse in Schuywich to my editors on Madison Avenue, each one a little capsule of life from a woman bent on making her own way in the world. It’s a concept that’s no longer radical, or even unusual. In fact, I’ve been feeling downright quaint compared to today’s women who chair departments and sit on corporate boards and occupy corner offices.

Which is why I’m saying goodbye, dear readers, in this, my last edition of “A Woman’s Place.” I’ve had a remarkable run. If I told you I started out writing six columns a year, would you believe me? It dropped down to a semiannual update around the time a peanut farmer from Georgia became our president. A few of you still follow my adventures, but according to the magazine’s marketing department, interest has plummeted as accomplished young women like yourselves feel empowered to dream exciting dreams of your own. I’ll miss picturing you in your city apartments or suburban bedrooms, reading about one woman’s unconventional life well lived. I’ll miss responding to the scores of letters you used to mail to me at the magazine. Mostly, though, I’ll miss the woman I got to be when writing this column: overly confident, occasionally humbled, always finding the humor in my foibles.

I rarely shared with you the doubts and fears and heartaches that kept me up at night. Not because I didn’t trust you, but because those are the character traits I’ve learned to keep hidden, especially from myself. The parental hands that should have held me close taught me, instead, to cower and cringe. I don’t like to admit that the accomplished woman you’ve met in my columns stands on such a shaky foundation. I worry you’ll stop believing in me, even though it’s been my mission all these years to exhort you to believe in yourselves. Consider this hint of vulnerability my parting gift, and never forget: Your life is your own. Make of it what you will.

I leave with a heart full of gratitude for your interest and support over the years, and wish you all success and happiness in your every endeavor. For me, I’ll be putting down my pen and focusing on the friends I’ve made in this little village and managing my bookshop in a barn in upstate New York. Stop by sometime, won’t you?

Chapter 43

I’m stepping out of the shower when Sam’s truck rolls up my driveway. He wasn’t kidding when he said he was nearby, I think, hastily twisting my wet hair into a bun. I drop a linen sundress over my head and grab an old cardigan before running down to open the front door.

Instead of his usual uniform of polo shirt, cargo pants, and hiking boots, Sam’s wearing a flannel button-down, faded jeans, and high-top sneakers. His hair is past due for a shearing, but his unmasked face is even finer than I remembered.

“Hey, Sam.”

“Hey, Audrey.”

“You got here quick.”

“I was camping at Moreau State Park.” He yawns, the morning light catching the scar on his chin. “Pretty much rolled out of my tent and into the truck after you texted.”

“Come on in, I’ll make you some coffee.”