The Magnificent Spinster

by May Sarton

  “You look like a tramp,” he said. “Why can’t you dress like the young woman you are?”

  I had on a khaki army shirt I had bought at a second-hand place in the Square, and a black skirt. “Oh Daddy, you never appreciate what I do. Look at my slippers. I took off an old pair of sneakers and put these on just for you.”

  “Well, what’s all this about?” he asked after we had ordered scrod and Prohibition beer.

  “I need to go to Spain for my work,” I said. It had just occurred to me that I could after all incorporate the war in Spain into my thesis by doing some juggling. I would meet with English Fabians who were volunteering. And Spain now was a test tube.

  “I really don’t follow you.” he said, eating, as he always did, so fast that he had half finished what was on his plate before I had done more than taste. “If the club does one thing well it’s hash-brown potatoes.”

  “Daddy, please listen to me.”

  “I’m listening.” Half listening, I thought. Half his mind was always on some case he was working on.

  “I cannot see,” he said after I had tried to explain why the war was so crucial, “why a civil war in Spain is any of your business. And I cannot see why I should help support a lot of commies, either … and that’s what you’ll be doing, you know. I do read the papers, strange as it may seem to you, and it’s clear that Russia is getting involved.”

  “So is Hitler.”

  “Exactly.”

  “Exactly what?”

  “What is a crazy young woman going to do in that crossfire! You won’t be fighting windmills, Cam. You’ll be fighting tanks. I’m sorry, but as your father I feel it would be totally irresponsible to aid and abet this mad scheme of yours. You might get killed!”

  “You’ll never understand,” I said gritting my teeth. I was near to tears, tears of frustration.

  “I’m quite willing to be called names to save my daughter’s life,” he said, trying to ease the tension now. And then he really did look at me. “I bet it’ll be all over before you can possibly get there. In fact, I’ll make a deal with you. If it’s not over by summer I’ll see what I can do.”

  “Wow!” I was so relieved I could hardly believe it. “Do you really mean that? You’re not just teasing me?”

  It was like my father to do what he did. He would put up a big fight about something like my going to Vassar and then suddenly, perhaps just to get on with things and get away, capitulate. He was a very impatient man. And I was, as usual, grateful, but wondering why I could not love him more for what he gave and realizing when he asked about my mother that I could not because of her and never would be able to until she died. Then many years later we did become friends.

  “Mother is awfully tired,” I answered. “She works too hard at school, and she is always worried about money.” I wished at once that I hadn’t said it. I saw his face go red with anger.

  “I’m not a millionaire,” he said. “I have two households to support now and things are very tight.”

  What was there to say? We each might have been screaming in a high wind. And so, as usual, we parted both feeling sore.

  In that autumn, the autumn while I worked away at my thesis and devoured every bit of news I could get about Spain, Jane’s house was at last nearly ready to be occupied. And in late October there was to be a housewarming. Marian Chase would be there, Mother said. She and I would bring Faith and little Edward. Martha had promised to come too, so it was quite a gathering, in Jane’s mind, no doubt, the first of many such gatherings to be, the plunge into a life of her own at last.

  It turned out to be a brilliant day, warm for the season, and we were all excited and happy, helping to bring things into the “shed,” as Jane called the big closed-in porch. There was already a wood fire burning in the fireplace and a delicious smell of wood smoke, and Martha and Marian chose to sit there and mind Edward in his playpen, as they had already seen the house earlier that morning. For the rest of us it was a thrill to go and explore as Jane suggested we do while she unpacked picnic things.

  It was quite strange, I felt, to walk around in this absolutely immaculate house, the floors shining, the small-paned windows shining, but the furnishings still rather spare. It was beautiful, but a little cold. I couldn’t help trying to visualize Jane here alone. How would she manage cooking a meal when she finally got home from school after seven? Had she any idea what shopping for food, cleaning a house, keeping things in order would mean in time and energy? How would she fill the empty space? I had never really thought before what it is that makes a house come alive.… that was my mother’s great gift: a bunch of flowers on a table, a sense of the color and texture of things. And the two small mirrors she had painted for Jane with brilliant blue-and-green frames for the coat cupboard downstairs and the bathroom upstairs had just that signature which seemed a little lacking in the house so far. We did admire the brown-and-white star-patterned quilt on Jane’s four-poster double bed, a present, we learned, from Lucy in Philadelphia. Martha had come through with lovely sheets and blankets, yellow and blue. And in fact the house was the occasion for a whole lot of what seemed like wedding presents for Jane, who was marrying solitude.

  Had she imagined what living alone would be like? I asked myself, standing for a moment in her bedroom window looking out over the gentle pasture.

  “What are you thinking about?” Faith, who had followed me upstairs, asked. She slipped an arm through mine and we stood there a moment, silent, before I answered.

  “I wonder what will happen here … I mean inside Jane,” I said.

  “It’s a big adventure, isn’t it?” And then Faith laughed. “It’s so terribly neat, it scares me.”

  But then we were summoned to lunch to settle down in the shed for the festivities. There was much laughter and congratulating and a bottle of cider Mother and I had brought in which to toast the house and all the life beginning there. If I had doubts a moment earlier, one look—Jane’s shining look, brimming with the joy and the triumph of it all—dispelled them. She seemed, except for Edward, the youngest of us all. There was a moment when the bright pieces of talk and activity around eating our lunch coalesced as we drank our coffee, as Marian, who had been rather silent, spoke in her gentle, contemplative way about living alone and what it might be like. It made quite an impression on me, for I realized then that she brought something to Jane that no one else could, a way of looking at life that was unique.

  “You will hear the birds as you never have before,” she said, “and be conscious of the shadow of wings as they fly. Small sounds, a mouse in the wainscot, become momentous, and also light, touching the back of a chair, swashing down a wall. You will slowly find your places, the places where you sit to think.” This, I remember, brought a smile as Jane interrupted, “I never have time to think.” And the answer, “You will.”

  “The house,” Marian went on, still looking at the fire, “will become a presence in itself. It will shelter and enfold you. It will come alive in the silence—ah, the silence,” she ended.

  At that moment Edward, who had been as good as gold, sucking the ears of his teddy bear, suddenly let out a wail, and we all laughed.

  “I hope there’ll be human voices”—Jane smiled across at Marian—“like yours and Edward’s”—while Faith picked Edward up and held him on her lap—“as well as bird voices.”

  “No doubt there will,” Marian said. She got up then and announced that she thought she would go for a little walk.

  “I’ll come with you,” Jane said instantly.

  “But I would like to get the feel of it, alone.…”

  There it was again, the way Marian had of absenting herself just at the moment of almost intimacy. Perhaps fortunately, as we watched Marian walk down the pasture toward the brook, Caleb Smith, the architect, and his wife, Jenny, arrived to join in the celebrations. I had not met him before and was surprised to see a white-haired man, but it was evident in the way they greeted each other that he and Jane h
ad become real friends, and now she pulled him out to “sit on the front stoop, Caleb!” The two large granite steps had been one of the last things to fit into the puzzle and had only arrived that week. He walked slowly and was slow of speech, and I sensed that their tempo was alike as they settled themselves and chuckled and laughed as they remembered various extremities they had weathered together while the house was being built.

  Meanwhile, Jenny, a stout woman with something warm and tempestuous under her reserved exterior, had gotten into a conversation with my mother about gardening, and they went off to measure a place way down the field where Jane was planning to have a vegetable garden.

  I lay on my back in the grass by the steps half listening, half watching clouds move over. What was missing, I decided, was an animal, and I sat up then to ask Jane whether she might not want a dog.

  “Caleb wants me to have a dog,” she answered, her eyes twinkling, “and I’m sure my class would love me to have one, but somehow the idea of a dog remains in the back of my mind.”

  “Why in the back of your mind?”

  “Welllll.” Jane had a way of extending a word and that “well” became a rather long vocable. “I feel quite safe here as it is.” Then she swallowed a smile as though it were a joke on herself and said, “Have I time for a dog?”

  “Nobody expects you to work yourself to death,” Caleb teased.

  “No … but … well, I do have things to do that take me away a lot.”

  I was curious to know what they were (she could have taken the imaginary dog to school, of course). And I was glad that Caleb dared to press her on this. So she explained, rather as though she were adding it up for herself as well as for him, all those responsibilities I had hardly known existed until then. She had to go to New York periodically for the International Refugee Committee she was on, she said, “and that gets more important all the time.” She wanted to see Lucy and that meant Philadelphia. And to Texas to see her sister Edith. I learned then, or later, that Edith and Jim had a retarded boy, Russell, and had bought a sheep ranch so that he could stay at home and be safe and have things to do that he could do. “Besides all that,” Jane mused, “I don’t mean to give up going back to France now and then, to visit the children. So you see …”

  “It does appear to be rather a full life for a gentleman farmer,” Caleb smiled. “and all this time I thought I was building a house for a woman who wanted to be a rock and a root—to stay put, in fact!”

  “It will be a traveling rock, I guess.” But if there was conflict, Jane refused to acknowledge it. I could tell that she believed that her dream of the house could be realized, even so. And I wondered.…

  “About dogs,” Caleb intervened. “What you need is a housekeeper to look out for things when you are away, and have a hot supper ready for you when you get back from school on a cold winter night. A dog would keep the housekeeper company.”

  By now Jenny and my mother had joined us and Martha had brought a deck chair out. She had not said a word and I wondered if she had fallen asleep, but now she had something to say. “I’m afraid it would not be easy to get help way out here,” she murmured.

  “I just want to live here for a while,” Jane said, “feel my way, not make decisions.”

  Marian wandered back with a pine cone in her hand, “to light the fire tonight,” she said, giving it to Jane like a treasure.

  I was glad when we all got up then, to gather ourselves together, that Jane would not be alone on this first night in her new home, and especially that the person staying with her was someone she truly loved.

  On the way home we talked, Edward fast asleep on Faith’s lap beside me, Mother in the back seat.

  “It’s wonderful,” she said leaning forward, “to see Jane so happy, isn’t it? And even Martha appears to be reconciled.”

  “Well, you know,” Faith said, “it’s odd but it doesn’t feel quite real to me. It feels a little like a playhouse designed for a child who imagined she would live there and then found it wasn’t after all a real house.”

  “Faith!” I was shocked. “What an awful thing to say.”

  “Well, that’s extreme, but something is missing.”

  “What makes a house a real house?” I asked. “You know,” I said, turning to my mother.

  “I don’t know. Not necessarily a family, children, which is what comes to mind first. But something that can’t be willed, some life going on inside the house which can be felt when one walks in. It’s too new, Jane’s house I mean … she’s only just beginning to imagine her life there, let alone live it. So we have to wait and see … oh, I hope it will be all she dreamed—and more!”

  “A lot depends on whether Marian Chase wants to come often and stay,” I ventured.

  “All I can say is I never imagined when I married Bill how much time and energy I was going to spend just dragging in toilet paper and food!” Faith said and of course we laughed. “At least Jane won’t be dragging in tons of diapers!”

  As I think back on it now I see that Jane did that first year very consciously put down roots, and the dream began to be fleshed out. Very early on she began to drop in on Mrs. Cole, a near neighbor whose husband had a dairy farm and kept cows in the big barn attached to the small white house. He had died the year before and Mrs. Cole now lived there alone, sitting in a sun porch at the side where she kept geraniums, somewhat crippled by arthritis and always welcoming a visit. That was a real root, and another was Jane’s first experience of Town Meeting in March. But it can’t have been easy to drive back long after dark on school days and walk in to turn on lights and put up the furnace, and find herself in a silent house, having to get her supper. Once in a while, in a blizzard, she stayed with us for supper and the night, but I think she felt like a homing pigeon, tugged back to Sudbury, to her nest, and little by little she was thinking of it as her nest.

  In the summer of 1938 I did go to Spain. When my father, not unexpectedly, reneged on his half promise, I spent a weekend in Sudbury at a point when I was nearly in despair and poured out my rage against him and at the same time why I felt it imperative that I get there, that I be in some way part of what was going on. Jane listened. I sensed that she was not entirely in accord, that she felt I was rushing into something I could not really know very much about, without needed skills. “You are not a nurse, Cam, after all, and who knows whether a woman will be allowed to drive an ambulance?” she asked at some point.

  “Women went to the Civil War here,” I said at once, “without any skills, and nursed and rescued wounded after the battles.”

  “Yes,” she said, “but they were in their own country, after all. They were rescuing their brothers.”

  “Anyone fighting Franco is my brother,” I answered in the fervor of my commitment. The argument went on and on.

  “Cam, the hare,” she murmured at one point, trying to break the tension.

  “Maybe so, but the tortoise wouldn’t get there in time … it’s touch and go, Jane. Everyone who cares at all must get there fast, now. Madrid is being encircled …” and so it went on and on.

  That day whatever Jane had planned to do was put aside. We did finally go for a walk in the rain, just to get out, and after tea by the fire when we got back, Jane went upstairs to work on school papers and I paced the floor and felt caged, until I remembered that mother had given me a box of brownie mix and a little can of walnut halves and suggested I make brownies. Jane loved chocolate almost as much as I did, as I well knew.

  She came down the stairs saying, “What is that delicious smell of chocolate?”

  “Want to lick the bowl?” I said.

  “Do I!” She sat right down at the kitchen table and fell to with zest.

  “I’m sorry I talked so much,” I ventured.

  “Dear Cam, I need to know,” she answered, apparently wholly absorbed in getting the last smidgeon of chocolate scraped off the side of the bowl. “This time,” she said then, to my utter astonishment and even for a moment di
sbelief, “I’m betting on the hare. I would like to help you, Cam. And I think perhaps I can. Did you say one hundred a month plus the boat over?”

  “Wait. I must put the brownies in.…” I had almost forgotten them. Then I sat down opposite her. “Do you really mean it?”

  “Well, I was thinking about you, Cam, and your fiery spirit. Sometimes one has to trust a person to know what is right, even when it feels a perilous venture. While I was upstairs I had a little talk with Lucy—Lucy is a very realistic person, you know.” Jane chuckled. “I found myself taking your side, Cam, as we talked,” and the chuckle turned to laughter. “So I had to realize that I was hooked, in spite of myself.”

  “It’s unbelievable,” I said, “I never thought …”

  “I know you didn’t.”

  Then I laughed too, “I feel as if I had been running for months and have just fallen flat on my face!”

  Jane looked at me thoughtfully, “There is only one possible obstacle—we must have your mother’s consent.”

  “You know Mother has always believed that I must do what I need to do—about going to Vassar, for instance.”

  “Yes, but …”

  “But what?”

  “You did not risk your life by going to Vassar. You will surely be in danger of freezing, of being wounded or even killed. It makes me ache just to think of you in a war. A frightful war, as you say yourself.”

  “Mother is with me,” I answered. “I know she is.”

  I am still amazed now nearly fifty years later when I think that Jane did what she did for me. But it was like her, it was a perfect example of her wish and ability to help people realize a dream even when the dream was outside her ken. Hers was a life devoted to people, not to causes. Theoretically, perhaps, she was not convinced that the war in Spain was crucial, but she saw that it was crucial for the person I had become.

  I learned then also what a team Jane and Lucy were. For Jane could see the need and had the means to help, but it was Lucy who came up with a lot of practical suggestions, Lucy who took the time and trouble to find out what the absolute necessities would be to take along, what medicines, what shots I should get. For years I kept her letters to me, and the two twenty-dollar pieces to sew into my belt in case of emergency. That was Lucy.