The Magnificent Spinster

by May Sarton

  We met again just before that event at our usual restaurant, “for auld lang syne,” as she put it on the telephone. She had been at the island all summer and I had not seen her, but there she was, looking younger than before she had taken off three years before, full of laughter, eager to be filled in on what had been going on in my life. I must admit I was put off at first by her repeated “Ja” at every pause, as she had no doubt been used to doing in Germany. It seemed incongruous, but when I said so, she just smiled and said, “Oh, what a relief to be back in English again!” Our conversation that day pivoted on her upcoming talk to the apprentices.

  “It’s marvelous that I have to pull myself away from all the things here, and take a look at what we achieved in Germany … sort it all out and see inside myself what really happened.”

  “I can’t believe you were there for nearly three years!”

  “Well, I could never have done it without Lucy … and of course I went off on some great trips, so it was not continuous. But I did get embedded!” she added, smiling at some memory that rose up as she spoke.

  “It’s hard for me to imagine,” I ventured. “I simply cannot love the Germans.”

  “I don’t see how you could have helped it, Cam, if you had been there.”

  “But all those ghosts … six million … I feel I would have seen a ghost behind every face. Did anyone ever talk about that? About the Holocaust?”

  Jane took a moment to find an answer while I wondered if I had been wrong to bring it up; but I couldn’t help it. “Ja,” she said then slowly (again that irritating Ja). “But you have to remember that the city of Bremen was anti-Nazi from the start. Two of my best friends, Herr Uhland and his wife, had taken great risks. Over there I could see what courage that must have meant! But I have to admit that the Germans are used to a strong leadership, and one of the things we had to try to do at the neighborhood house was to tame the instinct for rigid rules and the wish to organize everyone for efficiency’s sake.”

  “How did you do that?”

  “Well, Frances is a genius at getting people to come back to fundamentals and to talk things over. Her intensity brought walls down at every seminar. There I could sense the resistance sometimes, but also a slow, gentle change in a way of thinking. It was thrilling to watch Frances at work! It reminded me of the early days at Warren, for there, too, we were what you would call radicalizing a point of view about education. And there, too, she was dealing with strong individuals.”

  “And you?”

  “Well, at first the language was a real problem, as you can imagine. Whatever I did for the first year was minimal … perhaps I was some sort of listening presence. At least they came to know an American who wanted to learn. But, oh Cam, there was so much sheer detail, so much maneuvering before any decision could be made! There were times, I must confess, when I wondered if we would ever get to where we could start, even, before there would ever be a house, and we could begin to show what we were after instead of just endlessly hashing it out! So many organizations were involved, you see. Without the Ford Foundation, which did come in at a crucial time, with sorely needed money, I wonder whether we could have made it.”

  “I gather that Frances came and went but that you were the one to stay there and deal with the day-to-day problems? You were the tortoise and she was the hare?”

  “Dear Cam, will you ever forget that episode? It seems to have made an indelible impression!”

  “It did. And the proof is that lately I have become a tortoise myself.”

  Jane chuckled. “What sort of tortoise? I can’t quite see it.”

  “Oh, the hare, I guess, died in Spain. Life in an academic community demands a very long view.”

  “But you do love teaching?” And as I didn’t answer she looked at me quizzically. “Or don’t you?”

  “I get all revved up in the summer, working on my book on the trade routes, and then I bog down. The students devour me. Maybe that is the way it should be, but …” And then I asked, “Did you ever want to get out from under teaching?”

  “No, I guess that is what I wanted most to do … but I was not working on a book at the same time. I can see how you sometimes long for clear time.” She really looked at me, then, as though she was suddenly seeing me as I am now, not quite the Cam she had known as a wild, passionate child. “And Ruth? She must be a comfort.”

  “She is. She was absolutely wonderful while Mother was dying. I could not have managed without her. She is such a reserved person, but then she was able to give in ways I couldn’t because I was too upset.”

  I found I didn’t want to talk about this … so it was I who changed the subject. “Will you go back to Warren part time? What are your plans, Jane?”

  “I really don’t have any yet. Sudbury is rented to a young Mormon couple who are here for a few years while he gets his doctorate. It was a real blessing to find two such dears to take over while I was away and I can’t exactly put them out, so I’m living at Muff’s for the time being, catching up. I don’t think I’ll go back to school … we’ll see—but I do look forward to talking with the apprentices day after tomorrow.”

  “We have gotten away from that. And that’s still what I most want to hear about … why it is, for instance, that you seem so at peace with yourself, and a lot younger than when you left. It was, clearly, worth doing.”

  “Yes, it was. Although I still remember the awful pang it was to leave your mother and you at that time … but I had to go.”

  “Of course. And in the last weeks, Jane, no one could do very much for Mother. That was what was so hard.”

  “You, too, have been doing a lot of growing.”

  “If growth is shutting some things out, yes.”

  Inside I was appalled at how limited and sedate my life had become. But I didn’t say it then. I wanted to hear Jane’s answer to my question. “But you haven’t shut anything out, have you?”

  “I’ve taken a lot in,” she smiled. “I don’t feel exactly younger, Cam. But I suppose I needed to be useful again. And I think I came to see that my slow tempo, which used to irritate you sometimes in the seventh grade, had its advantages in this experience in Germany. We did pull it off in the end!”

  “Something solidly achieved. One rarely experiences that in teaching.”

  “No … the achievement, I suppose, is not clear until students go on into their own lives, and one is rarely there to see that. How lucky I am to be able to feel that the Nachbarhaus is a going concern! And that Americans and Germans did it together. Was that the real achievement that I would like to communicate to the apprentices? Was that it?”

  “The miseries and triumphs of bringing two such different cultures together in a positive statement, a real ‘going concern’? Yes, I can see.”

  “Bless you, dear Cam. How you do help me!”

  So it was, as I had so hoped it might be, a real exchange. But when had it not been between Jane and me?

  “I’m worried about Muff,” she said out of the new found intimacy.

  “She isn’t well?”

  “She seems rather—how to say it?—not exactly diminished but not quite herself. Without Sarah to help with the island and the English girls—you know the boy has gone back to England, but they are in college here—without Sarah I don’t know what Muff would do these days.”

  “Has she seen a doctor?”

  “She is reluctant to … but I must persuade her to get some diagnosis soon. She seems so weak, eats next to nothing.”

  On that note of anxiety we parted.

  For the first time I felt a little envious. It occurred to me that Jane’s life had opened out just in the years when mine was closing in. She was still extraordinarily youthful, capable of great enthusism and what I felt was a faith which I entirely lacked. It had been very good to see her and to renew what now had become intimacy. I suppose my mother’s death had had something to do with it. I could never supplant what my mother had been for Jane in the last yea
rs, but I felt a tender regard in Jane’s eyes when she looked at me that I had not seen before. There was certainly no one in my life quite like her.

  But I wondered whether she would be happy without teaching or at least some part-time work at the school. Jane needed to be with children, to draw on her sense of fun and imagination, in a way perhaps to become a child again herself, I thought on the drive home. I have never liked children very much myself. I was far happier teaching at college age than I could have been in a lower school. I wanted a battle of wits and intelligence. I wanted to be with young minds that could catch fire. Jane perhaps still loved to make magic, and in a way to be magic, as she could be with children, as she could be by becoming a child again herself. What was life going to do about that, I wondered? Even her nieces and nephews were grown-up now, and none, so far, had children.

  I was soon engrossed in college affairs and it was after Christmas when I went up to Cambridge to do some research and dropped in at Brattle Street to see Jane again. I sensed at once by the way Mary, the old servant, whispered at the door, “I’ll just get Miss Jane” that there was a sinister hush in the house. And when Jane came she hugged me and I saw tears in her eyes.

  “What’s going on? I’ve come at a bad time.…”

  “Oh dearie, I’m glad to see you. Come and sit down.”

  It looked as though the parlor was not being used.

  “It’s Muff,” I ventured when we had sat down by the cold hearth where I always saw Muff, sewing or reading, the presiding presence. The room felt dead, filled with absence.

  “Yes,” Jane said quietly, “Muff is dying. One of us, Sarah or I, is with her all the time, so I can’t stay long.”

  “The dear thing,” I murmured. Muff had always been in the shadow, the one who could be turned to when no one else was around, the one who was always there. It struck me with great force that she was or had been in the last years the foundation of all the life here, and of course for the English children a mother and friend of supreme gentle authority. “Oh Jane …” We exchanged a silent look.

  “I wish I hadn’t been away so long … but I couldn’t leave that job half-finished.”

  “No, you mustn’t be sorry about that.…” I felt awkward, unable really to help.

  “We did have a wonderful Christmas, with the English girls and Sarah, of course, and Sarah’s sister came for a few days. Muff came down twice and saw the tree lit.” After a moment Jane said, “I think she would like to see you. Let me just go and ask.”

  So I was there in the strangely empty room alone. Does the furniture itself die when people die? I wondered. And it all came back in a rush how we had emptied Mother’s house, Ruth and I, and just wanted to get rid of things because the life had gone out of them. This house had been lived in for nearly a hundred years. Five girls had grown up here with their mother and father, Muff the last to live on in the unchanged surroundings, keeping something alive that would die now with her. I felt astonished at my own grief, for it was real. When Jane came down and whispered, “Do come up,” I was ready.

  I had never been upstairs in that part of the house before and found Muff, a tiny wizened face, almost smothered in small pillows, lying in a huge bed. I went over and sat in a red velvet chair close to her, and took one of her transparent hands in mine. It was very cold.

  “Cam, I’m glad to catch a glimpse of you,” she whispered and added with the ghost of a smile, “You have such warm hands.” There was a small vase with three pink roses placed where Muff could see it on a small table.

  “What beautiful roses,” I said, searching for something peaceable to utter.

  “Sarah,” Muff whispered, “she says autumn roses are the most beautiful … and I can see that they are.”

  “Sarah has a genius for bringing Muff little bouquets,” Jane said. “Isn’t that perfection?”

  But Muff, who had been present for a few moments, had closed her eyes, and at a signal from Jane, we tiptoed out.

  “Dear Cam, thanks for coming,” Jane said, escorting me to the door. “You understand I must be with her. Is everything all right with you?” She put a hand on my shoulder in a gesture I loved, for it was so like her.

  “Everything’s fine,” I assured her, but I suddenly felt tears on my cheeks. And blundered away then, hardly able to see. Too many deaths. Too many.

  I had my first class on the day of the funeral and so did not go. I really did not want to go. I wanted to see Jane alone, and to be as supportive as I could after it was all over. Ruth welcomed my suggestion that we ask her to come down for a weekend as soon as she felt she could.

  “It might help her to get right away from it all, all the decisions,” I said. But I was not at all sure that she would come. She had never come down to us before. So I was happy when she accepted with joy and we set a date for three weeks later, in October. There were great confabulations about what to have to eat. We settled finally on roast chicken and a ratatouille, with apple pie for dessert. Jane, I reminded Ruth, was quite childlike about food … anything like liver or kidneys repelled her. I remember once ordering calves’ brains when I was with her in a restaurant and felt she could hardly bear to look at what I was eating.

  I placed a bunch of orange and deep-gold chrysanthemums in her room and put The Oxford Book of English Verse (shades of Marian) by her bed, and, just as a joke, Peter Rabbit and Squirrel Nutkin, as well as The Manchester Guardian Weekly and The New Statesman, to which I subscribed. It was wonderful to be getting ready to receive Jane in my own home, and if I had been feeling rather sedate, I was suddenly as excited as a child at the prospect of her arrival.

  Buying the house had been quite an adventure for Ruth and me … it didn’t seem possible that we had lived in it, then, for five years. In that time Ruth, who was the gardener, had created a charming three-sided group of flower beds, and we had planted dogwood and one or two tree peonies under them, our greatest pride. The house itself was a rather ordinary nineteenth-century one with a small porch at the back which we had added on after two years, and there we lived all summer.

  Inside there were one or two eighteenth-century pieces, a corner cupboard in the small dining room, a bureau in the living room from Ruth’s family, and a small, rather elegant sofa from Mother’s house with one of her paintings of flowers above it. Ruth and I each had a study downstairs. Upstairs there were two bedrooms, ours and the guest room. I like to think that the house gave an impression of light, flowery and elegant.

  And Jane caught this at once. “It’s so like your mother,” she exclaimed. “It’s so airy and comfortable … oh my dears!” We sat down by the fire to have tea, and all the time she was noticing little things.

  “What a perfect guest, Ruth, isn’t she?”

  “Am I?”

  “Nobody ever notices anything … but you do. Imagine your noticing that mouse on the mantel!” And we laughed with the pleasure of it.

  “It seems incredible that I have never managed to come for all these years! To see you and Ruth at home.”

  “After tea you must walk round the garden. That is Ruth’s domain.”

  “I shall, I shall.”

  But over tea and shortbread, much appreciated too, we were soon talking about Muff, of course, and Jane’s mood changed. “Of us all only Viola and I are left—it seems so strange. But I must tell you, upstairs in my room I delved right into The Oxford Book, and you know what it opened to? See if I can say it, and of course I hear it in Marian’s voice,” and she recited:

  “Very old are the woods;

  And the buds that break

  Out of the brier’s boughs,

  When March winds wake,

  So old with their beauty are—

  Oh, no man knows

  Through what wild centuries

  Roves back the rose.”

  “Is it de la Mare?” I asked. “I seem to remember.…”

  “Of course.” I saw her eyes were bright with tears. “Why does it make me think of Muff? Bu
t it does.”

  “She was an ancient person.”

  Jane laughed then, her whoop of sudden laughter. “Ancient?”

  “I mean she was in some odd way ancient from the beginning … that is what I always felt.”

  “Oh.” Then she grew thoughtful, “Yes, I see … yes.”

  “You were young from the start and she was ancient … does that make any sense? I fear not.”

  “I am always surprised by Cam,” Ruth said, smiling. “She does think of the most extraordinary things.”

  “But Jane,” I wanted to get at what was to happen now. “What is going to happen about the house? About Sarah … where will she go?”

  “Another cup of tea might help me try to tell you,” Jane said, passing her cup, then setting it down and looking into the fire.

  “You don’t need to,” I said. Perhaps she was not ready for that kind of planning. Perhaps she needed time.

  “Oh, I must,” she said quickly. “It’s all in my head, you know, has been for two weeks. We are selling the house.” (Who was “we,” I wondered?) “Mary will go over to the Trueblood house to help out there—that was one of my chief concerns now that Snooker is dead. What to do about Mary. She has been with us for thirty years.” Then Jane paused. “I’m keeping Sudbury for a while … the Mormon couple want to stay on and I’m not ready, really, to give it up.”

  It all sounded to me like an earthquake going on … so much that had seemed would last forever breaking up. “Surely not,” I said. “You can’t be thinking of that!”

  “Well …” Jane sipped her tea and looked thoughtful. “You know Muff always felt it was too far away, too hard to go back and forth to. I see now that she was right.”