The Magnificent Spinster

by May Sarton

  “But that was it, to get right away, to have a sanctuary.… I’ll never forget those months I spent there after Spain!”

  “Yes, that was a great time, wasn’t it?” she said gladly. “But you see, Cam, you are a person with a lot of solitude to draw on in you … I guess I need people, and the trouble with Sudbury is that it’s not a place where people can drop in, you know. It would be different if I had a Ruth to share it with. Ever since I walked into this house an hour ago I have felt the sweetness of your life together.”

  Ruth and I exchanged a look. I felt too keenly the admission this was to make a comment. For the first time I faced in myself that Jane would never have what we had. Her most intense affections had not been wholly returned. Or was she, whatever she said, a solitary who could not cope with the kind of intimacy Ruth and I shared? I couldn’t know then and still do not know.

  “What I am considering, but it’s not a sure thing, is when we sell the house to arrange, if possible, to keep the barn and the apartment above it.” Here she paused, hesitated, leaned back in her chair and looked up at the ceiling. “For years and years it has been rented to the Hausmers … but dear Mrs. Hausmer has had to go to a nursing home and there is really no reason why I can’t have it, I think. I am hoping to persuade Sarah to share it with me. There are two bedrooms.”

  I took this in in silence. Was Jane ready to take Sarah on? Would Sarah, who had been Muff’s intimate friend, want to move in with Jane?

  “You have your doubts?” Jane said with a twinkle in her eye. “And so do I, my dear.”

  “It sounds like a good plan,” Ruth said, perhaps because I was still silent, thinking about all that might be involved.

  “Sarah has built herself into the family. She has been an absolute trump about the English children. Muff could never have managed the island without her. She fits in so perfectly. She is a very powerful woman, Cam, under the shyness and self-effacement.”

  “That I can’t know, of course.” I did feel an indefinable malaise, as though something free in Jane were about to be caught and tamed.

  “She’ll be away at school—you know she is librarian there—so we shall hardly be in each other’s hair, as they say,” and she added quickly, “Sarah will have to make the decision. God knows we have our work cut out for us to empty the house when and if it is sold, and maybe that will show us whether we can work happily together. We’ll just have to take it day by day.”

  I felt anxious to move into less troubling waters and pounced on the island. “Of course you will now be the one to run things at the island … that’s going to be fun, isn’t it, Jane?”

  “Yes.” Her eyes sparkled. “Let’s plan right away. Will you and Ruth come for a week or ten days next summer? I expect I shall soon have a calendar and begin to write friends in. Oh yes, it will be fun! And there, Cam, Sarah will be the best right-hand man imaginable—oh, I hope she will want to come! She knows the ropes in a way I do not She will be the most immense help in making the transition.”

  “It’s rather like a puzzle, isn’t it? Things fall into place. I begin to understand about Sarah. You are right. The French might call it a marriage of convenience,” I ventured.

  “A friendship of convenience,” Ruth amended.

  “And why not?” Jane seized on this idea with amusement “Why not?” she asked again.

  “Oh dear, we’ve talked so long it’s too dark for the garden!”

  “And it’s time I started our supper.” Ruth disappeared into the kitchen. I had set the table in the dining room before Jane arrived, so we had a little time alone together. And she was eager now to hear how we organized life.

  “Ruth’s the cook, is she?”

  “Cook and gardener. I clean the house, make the beds, take out rubbish, and am, I suppose, what could be called the handyman. I cut the grass.”

  “Did it take long to work it out?”

  “Not really. We each did what we felt like doing … I cook sometimes when Ruth has a long day.”

  “Does she have a lot of patients? It must be exhausting sometimes, listening to so many problems.” I sensed that Jane was rather at a loss about therapy. Everything in her resisted the idea, I suspected, although her brother-in-law, Edith’s husband, had been a psychiatrist, at least until they moved to the ranch for Russell’s sake.

  “She looks drained when she gets home sometimes. But then she has a drink while I get supper, listens to some Mozart. Ruth is a very balanced person, as you can see.” And at that moment she came in with a martini for me and a glass of sherry for Jane. “We’re talking about you,” I said.

  “Oh?”

  “Your ears must be burning.”

  “Can’t you join us?”

  “In a minute.…”

  “Mmmm,” Jane said, “there is an aroma of roast chicken floating in here.…”

  Ruth did fetch her martini then and sat down with us for a moment.

  “Now,” Jane said “you must tell me about McCarthy and that horrible committee of his. Is he as dangerous as he sounded when I was in Bremen? How can he be stopped?”

  “It’s a very bad situation,” Ruth said, “because what he taps is that ingrained fear of communism which Americans seem to suffer like an addiction. He’s already succeeded in getting the China experts fired from the State Department—Lattimore, for one—and the reason for that is that the experts all foresaw that the communists would take over in China … and were accused of being pro-communist as a result. It’s all a little crazy.”

  “Worse because it’s all like upside-down logic,” I interrupted. “When Tydings’ committee investigated McCarthy’s charges about the State Department they called them a ‘fraud and a hoax’ … and what happened? McCarthy charged them with being soft on communism! And Tydings was defeated for reelection … all the rightist organizations ganged up to ‘get him,’ and they did.”

  “And you mustn’t forget Madame Chiang Kai-shek’s machinations … and how she has wrapped everyone around her little finger, even Wellesley College, where she was a student, you may remember.” Ruth was vehement and flushed.

  “It’s scary.” Jane took a sip of her sherry and put it down. “I feel it, I guess, more than I would have before Germany. One can’t forget that Hitler’s trump card was always anti-communism. It could happen here.”

  “At present every liberal person is labelled. It happens where one could not have dreamed it could happen … imagine this, Jane: The other day the local head of the Civil liberties Union, after the last meeting, actually asked me if I had been a member of the party! I mean, there, in that context, it did seem preposterous.”

  “Cam was awfully upset when she got home that night,” Ruth said. “I had quite a time trying to calm her down.”

  “When I said I wasn’t a commie, Fred backed down … but he mentioned that I had been in Spain.”

  “That is called being a premature anti-fascist,” Ruth said, “but we had better have our supper and forget that mess for a while.” Ruth always sensed when the tensions rose too high.

  “It’s awfully good to be able to talk about it,” Jane said, as we went into the dining room.

  It was a real pleasure for me to see Jane enjoying her supper as she did, to be for once a hostess for her as well as a friend. In some way it set a seal on our long relationship. I felt very grown-up that evening. So grown-up that I didn’t argue when Jane talked admiringly of Eisenhower. I even resisted the temptation to remind her that he had shaken hands with McCarthy in Chicago before the election. Jane had always teased me about being absolute and she was right. When I saw that newspaper photograph I was through with Eisenhower—trimming his sails to get elected.

  After supper we listened to a Mozart quartet and went early to bed. Jane, with her leap of response to everything, never showed fatigue, but I knew she must be tired after the last weeks of grief and the endless decisions and chores that always accompany a death, and that in her case meant such upheaval on every side.


  “Sleep well, you two,” she said as we stood at the foot of the stairs. And she reached out and put an arm around each of us in a gesture of great tenderness that touched me.

  “You, too, sleep well,” I said. “And sleep as long as you can. We’ll have breakfast anytime.”

  “What luxury!” But at the top of the stairs she turned to look back at us. “Sure you don’t want help with the dishes? I feel rather guilty about that!”

  “Three’s a crowd in our kitchen,” Ruth said quickly. “Not to worry.”

  “I’m just going to bask in being here, then. Bless you both and good night”

  Later, when Ruth and I finally got to bed, we talked about Jane, of course. There were so many things I had wanted to ask, whether she would be going down to Philadelphia soon, for one.

  “She’s really alone now,” I whispered. “I wish it were Lucy who would share that apartment with her. I can’t help wondering about Sarah. Jane is so very different from Muff … will they get along?”

  “Sarah is needed, that’s for sure,” Ruth murmured, “especially on the island.”

  “I just can’t imagine it yet … except at Warren in the last years, Jane has controlled her own life. This seems like such a radical change.”

  “She is a realist, Cam. And I imagine she is thinking about the future. She’s nearing sixty, you said.”

  “Yes, it must be lonely without a central person, Lucy so far away, Marian dead. Oh Ruth,” I murmured, “how lucky we are!”

  Over breakfast I did get a chance to ask about a lot of things. Lucy, for one. She had come to Muff’s funeral but couldn’t stay because she was needed at the school, but Jane would be going down as usual at Thanksgiving to see Russell, “and really catch up with Lucy, which I sorely need to do. Of course shell come to the island this summer.”

  The island, I sensed, was going to loom large in the years to come, would even, perhaps, become the root endeavor and delight as Jane grew older. I asked about the Cambridge Center. There things had changed, too, and Jane no longer felt as closely involved as she had been when Ellen was the head, although she was still on the board, I gathered, and had no intention of resigning. My last question concerned the Trueblood biography, which had come out while Jane was in Germany.

  “Oh dear,” she answered, looking very guilty. “I haven’t managed to read it yet, have you?”

  “No, but the reviews were good. I really think that young man has succeeded in reviving interest in Trueblood.”

  “So I am told,” said Jane. It was clear that she felt some resistance about the book, didn’t really want to read it, and when I asked her why, she answered so characteristically, “Any biography these days seems an invasion of privacy. Something in me rebels against that. I can’t help it.”

  “The dead are at the mercy of the living?” Ruth asked, pouring us second cups of coffee. “Another pancake, anyone?” No one could manage a fourth.

  “That’s it,” Jane answered, her eyes bright. “By what right must we demand to know everything about a person for one reason or another in the public realm?”

  “I suppose it is the wish to bring someone down from a pedestal into the human family … yes, perhaps to humanize the myth,” Ruth answered.

  “We went through hell, Jay and I, making decisions, but we finally decided that Austin must have all the journals, letters, everything.”

  “Surely you were right,” I ventured.

  “I’m not sure. I’ll never be sure.” Then she looked at her watch. “Good heavens, dears, it’s nearly ten and I must get back to Cambridge. The real estate agent is coming at noon with someone who may want to buy.…”

  “You must just walk around the garden!”

  “Of course there’s time for that.… I’ll just pack my valise and come right down.”

  It had been such a good, a memorable visit that I hated to see her go. And when she drove off, a long arm waving good-bye from the window until we were out of sight, I felt a pang.

  “It’s lonely for her, Ruth, awfully lonely.”

  “Well, I’m not so sure about that. Jane has made choices all her life from what you tell me. She has gone her own way.”

  “Yes, with a hundred delicate threads binding a hundred lives to hers … you’re right. I shouldn’t mourn.” But I did mourn. I couldn’t help it. She was always driving off somewhere alone.

  We did not see Jane again till after Christmas, although we talked occasionally on the telephone and I was aware that she must be going through a period of very hard work, emptying the big house, getting the flat over the barn repainted and shipshape. Whenever we talked Jane glowed with praise at all Sarah was proving to be: “She is such a good organizer, keeps things listed for me … oh, it has been such a multitudinous trial by things,” and she laughed. “How does anyone accumulate as much as Muff did? Of course she inherited most of it, piles and piles of dishes and silver, and God knows what! Sarah is a great preserver of the past … she loved that house passionately, has not wanted things to be sold, you see.…” And then she insisted that we make a date to come for tea as soon as they had settled in “because I hope you will like what we have chosen for you and Ruth.”

  So on a bright, cold January Sunday we set out, eager to see Jane settled in and to catch up on everything. It was strange to go right by the big house and out to the barn at the back. The house was not yet inhabited, but Jane had spoken with enthusiasm of the fact that it had been sold to a young architect and his wife and family, old acquaintances; and they, I gathered, were going to make some radical changes inside to modernize it. That work had not yet been begun.

  It was exciting to stand by the small door to the right of the barn door, open to show it was now the garage and Jane’s car safely inside, and ring the bell. It was Sarah who opened it for us, smiling warmly. “Come in. The stairs are a little steep.”

  “Sarah, this is my friend Ruth Arbor.”

  “Welcome! You are our first guests.”

  Jane met us at the head of the stairs, looking very tall under the low ceiling. “Oh, what fun!” she exclaimed. “The kettle’s on, and I’m dying to show you our domain!”

  In the cozy living room a large window, reaching the ceiling in a rather beautiful oriel at the top, gave an illusion of space and height. A big armchair, a small blue velvet sofa, and in the window a table piled high with books and magazines. At the end of the room near the kitchen the dining-room table was squeezed in by an upright piano. Over the sofa there hung a realistic painting of woods, perhaps on the island—Jane’s taste in art remained conservative. I suddenly realized I had never before seen her in such a small space.

  “It’s amazing how homelike it feels already,” I said.

  “Wait till you see my bedroom!” That was back down the hall where we had come in. “Don’t look to the right,” Jane admonished us, “that is the dump at present. Total chaos!” But we then found ourselves in the very low-ceilinged room to the left. “It’s a nest, isn’t it? I feel just like a bird in a nest when I go to bed.” And indeed her big bed was set under the eaves, the Brownies on the pillow. I glimpsed a row of photographs on a shelf to the left of it, among them one of my mother. A small table served as a dressing table and that was all.

  The tiny apartment, I sensed at once, had a quality of hominess which Sudbury had lacked. Sudbury had been too pure, too beautiful, a little self-consciously so. Here, in a fine clutter, the accumulations of a lifetime, the atmosphere breathed.

  “I love it!” I said. “It’s just right, isn’t it?”

  “Tea’s ready!” Sarah called and we settled down around the low table in front of the sofa.

  If I had had fears about Sarah and Jane as companions, they were being set at rest, partly by Jane’s constant use of “we”: “We decided not to have curtains … the window is so beautiful—and see, it looks out on that great tulip tree. When we lived in the big house I never really noticed it. Now it’s a constant joy. Rare to see one this far n
orth.” She turned to Sarah. “Will you pour?” It was a tiny but unmistakable sign that Jane was the mistress of the establishment. And I was glad to note it.

  “What a triumph to be settled in,” Ruth said.

  “Well,” Sarah smiled, “it’s a little helter-skelter, but we do live here.”

  “And have our being,” Jane added. “It’s wonderful, you know, to be in Cambridge … I mean, people can drop in. Maybe I had better warn you that Maurice’s grandchildren may interrupt us. They are coming to get the croquet set, and my tennis racket.”

  “And if Portia wants it, that Meissen soup tureen,” Sarah reminded her.

  “Oh mercy, I’d forgotten that altogether! Where is it, Sarah? Do you have the foggiest idea?”

  “In the barn all wrapped up in that big box.”

  “Good girl. I should never have remembered.”

  There was a moment of silence as we sipped our tea and were passed a plate of very thin, elegant cookies.

  “Mary made them—wasn’t it dear of her?” Then Jane, munching on a cookie, looked at us, all three, and sighed, “It is wonderful to be sitting down with friends.”

  “We’ve hardly sat down for days,” Sarah said.

  “I’ve fallen asleep over the newspaper every night,” Jane said. “I’m way behind … but I’m told that awful things are happening: Dulles backing down to McCarthy and forcing resignations in the State Department right and left. Poor Leonard, that star expert on China, has had to go.”

  “Yes,” I said. Even here one could not get away from the disasters in Washington. “Leonard foretold that the communists would win. It’s outrageous. I mean, you know the facts but if the facts don’t agree with what Dulles and Eisenhower want them to be, you are punished. It’s absolutely preposterous!”

  Jane smiled, “I thought you said you had become sedate, Cam!”

  Ruth laughed, “Cam imagines she is sedate, says she doesn’t want to get involved, but …”

  “I still care about the country, I’m still a citizen, after all. Dean Acheson is being called a traitor!”