The Magnificent Spinster

by May Sarton

  “Oh dear,” I murmured, “those are the questions I ask myself every day.”

  “But you keep on.”

  Now I lifted my head and looked right into the old eyes. “Yes, I keep on. You see, Mrs. Whitman, in fifty years no one will exist who remembers Jane Reid. I want to celebrate her. I want to make her come alive for those who never knew her.”

  “Millions of exceptional people die and are forgotten. It is an endless stream, generation to generation. You want to dam the stream. Can it be done?”

  “Probably not, but I’m going to have a try.” It was my turn to feel a little prickly now.

  And sensing it, the old woman softened. “Very well, ask me another question.”

  There were a hundred in my mind. I opted for one I had wondered about often. “What made her as different from her sisters as she seemed to be? Or am I wrong? They were all tall, they all had that long, recognizable Trueblood chin. They all had blue eyes. Yet Jane really seemed to be of a different breed. What was it in her that made the difference?”

  For a moment Laurel was silent, even closed her eyes, and I wondered whether I was tiring her. Then she lifted her head and said quite loudly, “Jane was passionate!”

  The answer took me by surprise and I thought about it for a second.

  “The others were all at heart conservative … in every sense of the word, politically, where matters of money were concerned, and houses, and how one behaved … you know what I mean. They gave money to Radcliffe College, to the Unitarian Church, that sort of thing. Jane adopted French orphans, invested in the black settlement house in Cambridge, in refugee organizations … you know all this. They were all five charming women, reserved, well-behaved, preoccupied with family matters. Jane just never could be contained in that frame … though you must never forget, Cam, how she venerated her grandfather!”

  “I don’t forget it. Was she passionate about old Trueblood?

  “In a way she was. At least she took on a lot of responsibility about the House when it was made a national monument … think how she worked on those papers!”

  “I haven’t come to that yet.…”

  “But you will. She was passionate about Trueblood because she felt that he was being put down and disregarded by the academic community. It was fashionable at one time to sneer at his novels. Thank goodness she lived long enough to see him reinstated.”

  “Passionate.” I had come back to that word. “Yet she never married, never, as far as I know, had a love affair. It seems odd.”

  “Odd, yes,” Laurel murmured. Then she gave me a rather penetrating look. “Take sexuality out of passion and you may have a clue.”

  At this notion I had to smile. “Is that possible?”

  “Nothing about Jane was possible, really … that’s what made her so interesting, so captivating.” But having said so much she now withdrew. “I think I’m getting a little tired … haven’t had such an interesting afternoon for years, but …”

  And as though summoned by telepathy her daughter now came in, flushed, her hands dirty, and apologized for having completely forgotten about tea. And I took my leave. “I can’t thank you enough.”

  “Nonsense, Cam, I feel rejuvenated. Come again … anytime.”

  My conversation with Laurel Whitman had done what I hoped, given me a fresh start, as though talking with her had pushed a button and set going a fountain of memories and insights. And gave me the courage, too, to see if Tom Weston would have the time for a talk. I hadn’t seen him for years, since the twenty-fifth reunion of our class, in fact, and I hardly dared add up how long ago that was. It was strange to imagine that he must be a grandfather and perhaps even retired, though that was hard to believe, he was such a live wire. And whether retired or not I felt sure he must still be active in the Civil Liberties Union, and still a pillar of the parents’ association at Warren, where his two sons and daughter had gone. He had headed the committee that managed to raise a million dollars for the school in the sixties. But I myself was not living in Cambridge at the time Jane resigned from Warren, after Frances Thompson did. Tom might be able to tell me more about that, for one thing.

  I knew that he and Adele had moved out to Lincoln some years back, and found their number in the phone book and was invited out to Sunday dinner.

  “I’m not the cook Adele was, but I can put a roast in the oven.”

  I told him I would bring dessert, and then, though overcome with shyness, not knowing how to ask, I murmured, “Adele?”

  “She died last year, Cam.”

  “Oh, how awful.”

  “It’s strange how I can’t get used to it.”

  “I know. Ruth, my friend, died ten years ago.”

  “So we’re both bereft. It will be good to see you, Cam. But to what exactly do I owe this pleasure? Raising money, maybe?” I could hear that he was smiling.

  “Heavens, no! I’m writing a novel about Jane Reid.”

  “You are?” Astonishment raced across the wire.

  “Yes, crazy, I expect. I’ll tell you more about it on Sunday,” and I added, “try to remember all you can.”

  “Right on. I’ll do my homework and expect you at twelve. Scotch okay?”

  It was a cold November day, and that, perhaps, added to the rather desolate air of the living room in spite of the wood fire burning at one end. But no flowers … I remembered that Adele had loved flowers. Piles of magazines and books everywhere and the smell of dank tobacco. A widower’s house.

  “Cam, you’re just the same,” Tom announced when we sat down with Scotch.

  “Preserved in amber like all retired professors!”

  “Come now. People preserved in amber don’t write novels.…”

  “Not a first novel at seventy, anyway!” I didn’t say it, of course, but Tom had changed. I couldn’t get used to his face with a shock of white hair above it, although his eyes were very bright under thick gray eyebrows.

  “It’s strange, isn’t it, what an indelible mark Warren left on all of us in that class … in that class, so I must believe that Jane Reid was at least partly responsible.” After a slight pause he asked, “What are you after, Cam?”

  Almost without thinking I uttered it. “‘I think continually of those who were truly great.’”

  “Yes, I see. Yes, she was. I grant you that. An extraordinary woman.”

  “I’m bogged down in all that went wrong in the middle years. Sometimes it feels like betrayal to be writing about it.”

  “You have your problems, honey.”

  “One of them is that I know so little about the last years at school. I was immersed in teaching, not living in Cambridge.”

  “Maybe I can help. My children were in school when Star-buck took over after the war, and Frances Thompson had gone off to Germany. I think maybe it was a good thing that Jane stayed on through the transition. She was one of the few of the old guard still teaching and she helped Starbuck—though of course he had taught in the school for a couple of years before he went off to the war.” Tom stopped and looked across at me. “May I just think aloud for a moment?”

  “Please do.” It was comforting to be with someone from our class, to feel Tom’s quiet strength again, and conviction. Especially as he was clearly enjoying this journey into the past.

  “Frances Thompson was a different breed, terribly intense. Her whole life was the school. And in a strange way what had been the strongest bond, between her and Jane, got pretty frayed at the end.”

  “Because Jane was losing her grip as a teacher?”

  “Yes,” Tom sighed. “My children didn’t get on with Jane at all. I couldn’t understand it. I blamed them, but Adele was a help in making me understand, I guess. She said Jane was out in the wilderness when Frances no longer asked her advice about crucial matters … and being out in the wilderness she lost her nerve.”

  “Oh Tom, do you really believe that?”

  “I don’t know what to say.…” He shook it off then and went on mor
e cheerfully, “Starbuck was very good for Jane. She gave up being a class teacher and worked for a while with remedial reading. And she was good at that. Her tempo and her endless patience were right for that. Hey, I had better think about cooking some vegetables. Come out to the kitchen and we’ll have a second while we get things together.”

  Out in the kitchen he and I were both more relaxed. I learned a great deal that I had not known. As a lawyer, Tom had been drawn into a painful episode, and he and Jane became friends as a result. During that time he was invited to a dance at Jane’s eldest sister’s château, and he told me all about that. I could feel the novelist in me coming to life again, and I knew that much of what I learned must come to life if I handled it as a novelist and that I intended to do in the next part, which I think of as “The Giving Years.” At the end, when we were again sitting by the fire with our coffee, Tom chuckled and told me a story.

  It seems that when they were raising money for Warren one of the new parents, whose husband had come to Harvard from California, had been assigned to do some interviews. Apparently, as Tom explained, the new method is to find out what people have in the bank by one means or another, and then to name a specific sum that might be offered.

  Lenore, the Californian, when it was suggested that she visit Jane Reid, who had retired by then, had sold the Sudbury house, and was living in a small apartment over the barn, back of the family house in Cambridge, said, “How can we ask Jane Reid for money?” Jane indeed lived so frugally that if one were not a New Englander it would appear preposterous to do any such thing. She was told to ask for one hundred thousand.

  “Whew!”

  “I must admit that even I felt it a bit much. Anyway, Lenore of course could hardly bring herself to say the words. Jane was sitting on a dilapidated old velvet sofa in the tiny living room, which was also the dining room. Lenore said she finally uttered the words, ‘We had thought you might give a hundred thousand.’ Apparently Jane did almost gasp, then smiled that secret smile she swallowed when she was amused by something and said, ‘No, I’m afraid I can’t quite do that. But I think I can give seventy-five thousand.’”

  We both laughed with the pleasure of it, and Lenore’s absolute astonishment. “I was afraid,” she told Tom later, “that I would burst into tears.”

  I felt I must race home and plunge into part three of the novel as quickly as possible. I felt so warmly toward Tom, and I guess he did too, that we hugged each other when we said good-bye.

  “You must come back, Cam! I am very interested in this resurrection.”

  Prologue, Part III

  When I reread what I had managed to put down so far it became clear that I was allowing the historian—and a rather dull one at that—to take over from the novelist, and that now I must plunge in and turn all that Tom had told me into an imaginary reconstruction. I never had realized before how hard this is to do. I have sat here at my desk for an hour unable to get things into sharp enough focus. What finally did it was when the house without the Rosenfelds came alive in my mind. They had left after two years because they felt too lonely and were now happily ensconced in a small, idealistic boarding school in Vermont where Mrs. Rosenfeld could mother a hundred boys and girls and Mr. Rosenfeld could escape to the nearby town for an occasional beer. I was happy for them, and for the great galumphing Nana, too, for she had gone with them. It was now Jane and her house alone.

  Part III

  The Giving Years

  The extraordinary thing for Jane was to wake in Sudbury in the silent house, before light, start out of a deep sleep thinking she must get up and go to school, then look at the clock and realize she could have another snooze, and not hurry at all. In some ways every day felt like a holiday, although once she was up, had had her breakfast, and had put out seed for the birds, she did still feel pounced upon by all there was to be done before nightfall. Jane woke herself up by singing as she went about the chores, and if the house was trans-audible, as Marian complained it was (“elephants appear to be thundering up and down the stairs”), Jane’s voice soared out in a very satisfactory way as she made the bed singing “Over the Sea to Skye” and “Men of Harlech” as she washed the dishes.

  When she stopped singing, the house did seem very silent, a shell that needed human voices to come alive, and she did also miss Nana and those eager barks. By the time she was dressed, however, the pressure to get going and be off to Cambridge for a session on the Trueblood papers with Jay Appleton was growing—and what would Nana have done without her all day?

  On the drive Jane prepared herself for some rather taxing hours. Jay was exactly her age—they had grown up together, acted in plays together on the island, but they had never worked together, and that, Jane was discovering, was a very different kettle of fish compared with the fancy-dress parties and dancing of their youth or the tennis matches which Jane always managed to win.

  It was now a rather prickly relationship. Jay Appleton had been for years ensconced in the back of the Trueblood House as caretaker. He was a student of the theater and rather an expert on Russian theater, had written several books but had no teaching position or other regular job, and unlike Jane and her sisters had not inherited a fortune. He was a warm, affectionate man who for some reason seemed perpetually flustered, disorganized, and on the defensive. For years he had been expecting to get at the Trueblood papers but had never gotten around to it. Now that he was being pinned down, it made him nervous and irritable.

  He was a grandson of the writer, just as Jane was, but because he had published books himself, he did not feel that Jane was equipped for the job they were doing and occasionally showed it.

  All this was in Jane’s mind as she drove from Sudbury to Cambridge. Some of it she understood all too well—getting down to things was sometimes hard for her, too. But she was determined to get the Trueblood papers in order because the pressure from students of literature, scholars, professors, and especially the young man who was writing Trueblood’s biography, was clamorous, and once she had taken on the enormous task, she wanted very much to get it done. In some ways it seemed an obstacle to all that she most wanted to do now with her life.

  What they did share, she reminded herself, was a deep respect for the material itself and for the man who had written all those letters and journals. If the pace sometimes seemed frightfully slow, it was partly because they sometimes became too involved in what they were sorting out. Then there were perpetual differences of opinion over what should be destroyed and what opened to the public. Trueblood’s first wife had suffered from melancholia and committed suicide before she was twenty-five. How much of this should be kept? There was a poignant journal, in which she told of two miscarriages and how inadequate she felt as a wife.…

  Thinking about this, Jane stopped at Martha’s, two doors down from the Trueblood House, to have a cup of coffee with her sister. Luckily Martha was not going to work that day, and the sisters sat by the fire for a half-hour in quiet conversation.

  “I sometimes think we’ll never get it done, Muff … it’s awfully hard for Jay to buckle down.”

  “Poor man,” Martha said gently—she was always the peacemaker—“he does make things hard for himself.” Jay was family, after all, and one did not criticize family.

  “Oh dear, you make me feel guilty,” Jane sighed. “I try to be patient!”

  “Take it a day at a time, Jane. You can’t change Jay now … it’s too late.”

  At this Jane suddenly laughed. “I’m not trying to change the leopard’s spots, just hoping he’ll be out of bed by the time I go over!”

  “Of course he works half the night … you have to remember that.”

  “And his eyes are tight shut in the morning.”

  “Why don’t you work in the afternoon?” This gentle suggestion was, Jane felt, so exactly like Muff that she had to smile.

  “I never thought of that … and it’s a very good idea.” Then she added, “But he falls asleep at any time of day or nigh
t … he took me to see Gielgud in Hamlet and we sat in the front row. Gielgud uttered the first words with tears straming down his cheeks, ‘A little more than kin and less than kind,’ and at that second Jay gave a loud snore and woke up. I wanted to disappear, it was so embarrassing.”

  “He can’t help it, you know … I sometimes wonder whether he has narcolepsy.”

  “Heavens, Muff!”

  “Well, it’s not quite normal, is it?”

  Jane made no answer to this. Something even more troubling was in the back of her mind. “Well, Muff,” she said briskly, brushing that thought away, “I’m off. Thanks for the coffee. It’s been a rousing start to the day!”

  Whatever was going to happen, Jane never entered Jay’s study without feeling excited, a large room with four or five tables covered with boxes of letters and Jay’s own work standing about, two old revolving chairs where they would work, and a charming window seat in one of the long windows. She never walked in, either, without a delighted glance at the ceiling, which was covered in Japanese fans, glued on in a casual design.

  Jay was apparently not up when she arrived, so she set herself to going through one box open on the desk. These were easy to go through as they concerned Benjamin Trueblood’s first trip to Europe after he became famous, the year he took his daughter Allegra, Jane’s mother, along with him and met so many English aristocrats. It was great fun reading these, but Jane forced herself to proceed without pausing to savor. What riches the young biographer would find! She was so concentrated that she didn’t hear the door open until she heard Jay’s voice.

  “Good morning,” he said in sepulchral tones.

  “Oh there you are,” but as she lifted her head she saw an unusually rumpled figure in an old seersucker wrapper over pajamas. He looked quite a wreck, she thought. “Are you all right, Jay?”

  “No,” he said. “No, I’m not.”

  “Would you like to take the day off? You don’t look well.”

  He shook his head. Jane could not get used to someone her own age looking so old. Jay had deep lines carved into his face, his hair was rough and gray and tousled at the moment, but he always seemed in some strange way a very young person to her nevertheless—and that is why his “old” look shocked.