by May Sarton
Well, it was not nearly good enough. But I was awfully glad to have been given the chance to say my say in praise of Jane to all those people. It occurs to me, however, that I would do it differently and, I hope, better now. I was so pleased when I found the scrap of yellow paper in the pages of an old journal, found what I did say so many years ago, that I wanted to place it here in this book. It is at least not “made-up,” but authentic.
Faith and I went to the Square for a beer afterwards because we had to talk it all over. Bill was at home with the children so she didn’t have to rush back. The Hofbrauhaus was noisy and jammed but we shut it all out.
When we had settled into a booth she said, “I feel sort of bereft; I don’t know why!”
“I know why I do,” I answered quickly, “but it can’t be your reason. I felt a little jealous of Tom and Adele, so many of the people there married, with children at the school, involved still in a way I can’t be. In a way you still are.”
“But Cam, you didn’t want all that, did you?”
“No, I didn’t. I like my life the way it is.”
“So?”
“Oh, feeling like an outsider, I suppose.”
“But Cam, almost all the teachers celebrated tonight never married, after all. And surely they didn’t feel like outsiders. Jane didn’t.”
“I sometimes wonder … she is the universal friend, but in a way she is always an outsider … except at the island.”
“It must be wonderful to see her there now, in command. Did you and Ruth have a great time last summer? Oh, it’s such ages since we have met, you and I! Where does time go?”
“Like water off a duck’s back … time, I mean,” and we laughed. “There are a lot of married teachers at Warren now … that’s certainly a change.”
“But I don’t honestly know how they do it,” Faith said, frowning. “That’s why I felt bereft, I guess. I just couldn’t make it as a teacher, you know. I wanted to, but the conflict was too agonizing between family and school. And I felt Bill was carrying too much of the load.…”
“I remember how relieved you were when you gave up the sixth grade. Do you really regret that decision?”
“I do and I don’t. Oh, the awful choices … it’s all very well to mind not having a family, but I can assure you it’s a hell of a lot easier to live as you do.”
“But,” I defended myself, “I am just as conflicted—between teaching and trying to be a scholar. I live in a perpetual state of guilt.”
“You do? Well,” Faith said, “that does make me feel better.” Our eyes met in a moment of sheer communion and then laughter.
“What idiots we are!” I said. “Yes,” I added, “to go back a bit, the summer was marvelous—we were there ten days. It’s like being a child all over again, so sheltered, so much fun, and Jane’s voice singing on the stairs … why do you suppose that although she is, after all, a spinster she is not and never will seem like an old maid?”
“She’s not at all sexual, is she?” Faith asked, thinking this over.
“Ruth thinks she is but it is all sublimated … and that is what gives her a kind of glamour.”
“A pretty old-fashioned view.”
“Glamour or sublimation?”
“Both, I guess. But, Cam, Jane is different from the others—Miss Everett, Miss Ford, even Frances Thompson. They are recognizable old maids, wouldn’t you agree?”
“It’s hard for me to talk about it … but it’s true, adolescents would never write ardent poems to any of them, but I did, to Jane, and all of us who went on to high school together did. What was it that made us fall in love with her? That’s the key, maybe, I mean we did really fall in love.”
Faith looked alarmed. “But—you didn’t want to touch her, I mean, did you?”
“How puritanical you sound!” I felt quite cross suddenly. “Let’s drop it.”
“Just when we are getting close to some reality outside my ken … don’t leave me there.”
But at that time I was not ready to go farther. I could only fumble. “I suppose to us then she was like a goddess. I know that sounds ridiculous.”
“Not to me.”
“But men did fall in love with her, you know, and probably women too … so there must have been sexuality. I mean, you can’t really imagine a man falling in love with Miss Ford, can you?”
“Too pure, too single-minded, and, well, asexual, let’s face it.”
“It does occur to me that it has not been as easy as it looks to be Jane Reid.”
And we left it at that as we walked through the Square, arm in arm, to where I had parked my car, and then I drove Faith home. How we hated to say good-bye!
I had much to think about on the way home. It had come to me as Faith and I talked that we were like twins and she was leading a life I might have led as I was leading a life she might have led. She was a brilliant student and, from all I heard from Jane and the others, a far better teacher than I would ever be. I don’t wonder that she envied me at times, perhaps felt in a strange way muffled, swamped in family life. But did she understand that I too felt muffled at times in university life?
I had to think also about the fact that I could never have talked with Jane in the way Faith and I had talked, and why that was. Not, I decided, a gap in our ages, but something withheld in Jane, a deep reserve. Hers was certainly not the confessional style that perhaps the coming of therapy had partly permitted and even encouraged. She never said so, but I sensed that she didn’t like it, that “telling your troubles” even to a psychiatrist seemed to her a failure of self-reliance and courage. And that stance may have partly explained her waning influence at Warren under Frances Thompson. For at that time many of the parents and many of the children were getting help in understanding themselves from a therapist. “I know, but I do not approve, and I am not resigned”—that line of Millay’s came to my mind, although she was talking actually about death. But I felt it did say something Jane might recognize.
I decided that I must have a talk with Ruth about sublimation.
I have, I see, found that the best way to handle these years of Jane’s late middle age is through my own meetings with her. I have no letters to Lucy from that period and am not a good enough novelist to invent episodes that never really happened, or that I can only imagine as having happened. That I think I shall attempt when I come to the final chapter. When I began this adventure in novel-writing, the only thing I was sure of was that it must begin and end at the island. For that reason I am loathe to bring life on the island under Jane’s aegis into this section on the late middle years of her life. Yet the island was the continuity of our relationship. For ten years or more Ruth and I spent ten days or so there every summer. And after Ruth died I went alone. So I am at present in a dilemma, again take long walks, talk with my cat, Snoozle, put a record on and take it off, wake up in the middle of the night in a fit of extreme anxiety as I did two years ago, at the beginning. I must discover a way to proceed.
Let memory come to my rescue. For memory does bring back moments of unforgettable intensity as I look back, moments shared with Jane, for one reason or another, during the years from 1960 to 1970.
One of them is that snowy January day when Jack Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson were inaugurated. I had come up to Cambridge for a meeting of the Civil Liberties Union and invited myself to supper. I had said I would bring dessert and picked up chocolate ice cream and macaroons at Sage’s on my way. On that cold, gray day, a light snow falling, and such hope and, excitement in the air, it was wonderful to climb the steep stairs and find myself enclosed in the warmth of the tiny apartment, hugged by Jane, her eyes overflowing with love and joy.
“What a grand day!” Jane said at once. “And we must be sure to look at the news at seven, so we had better have supper first—it’s all ready, the chicken’s in the oven.”
“And just time for a glass of sherry,” Sarah added.
“And a toast to our young president Hurrah!” I had no
t seen Jane so lit up for ages. And I basked in her fire, although I myself was not completely convinced, as she seemed to be, that Kennedy would be wise and strong enough at this time of trouble everywhere, rumors that we were going to send more advisers to Vietnam, increasing troubles and violence in the South.
But I soon realized as we sipped our sherry, Sarah and I, while Jane disappeared into the kitchen, where she could hear what we were saying and to some extent participate, that one of the reasons for her enthusiasm was not as much our new president but, as she said from the kitchen, “Great stuff to ask Mr. Frost to be part of the inauguration!”
And later, she came back to it. “It’s a landmark, isn’t it? My grandfather would approve. And while I was dishing out the peas I remembered ‘Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world’—but who said it? Do you remember, Cam?”
I didn’t so of course off she went to get Bartlett’s Quotations and look it up. “Well, I never! Shelley said it!”
“Jane, we really must eat,” Sarah reminded her.
“Shall we have a silent grace?” And after that moment of silence, Jane carved the chicken, remarking, as of some treasure, “It’s from Sage’s.”
“That’s where I got the ice cream,” I said, laughing. “What would we do without Sage’s?”
“In this household at least,” Sarah smiled, “we could hardly manage at all.”
“There have been major changes here since we discovered what Sage’s can provide!” Jane said. It was evidently something of a joke between her and Sarah.
We put the dessert off until after the news, as it was nearly seven, and sat ourselves down before the TV set, a small one, sitting close together on the sofa to watch. And we were riveted to the screen after that. Of course we did not get the whole address. “Too bad they cut out so much,” Jane said. But we did get a sense of something stirring, fresh, inspiring in Kennedy’s delivery and his bare head in the cold wind, the youth of his stance, the hope and triumph in his voice. When it came to Mr. Frost (Jane always called him Mr. Frost, as she always called Trueblood Mr. Trueblood), oh dear, the papers blew out of his hands, he fumbled, and his voice was not clear. He looked a little bewildered, a very old man.
“Poor dear, he’s having quite a time,” Sarah said.
“It doesn’t matter,” Jane said with a lift of her chin. “Everyone will read that wonderful poem again.”
“Why don’t we?” I asked when the news left Washington, and we had turned it off.
“Let’s read it. Of course we’ll read it,” Jane answered. “But where is it, Sarah?”
“I’ll have a look.”
“While Sarah’s looking, tell me about Ruth, about you, Cam.”
“Ruth is awfully tired. I’m worried about her. She says it’s just her heavy load of patients these days. She often works at night now as well as all day, sometimes from six o’clock on. I wish I could get her to slow down, but how can she when so many people need help?”
“Yes,” Jane said, “it must be next to impossible to turn people away.”
Sarah came back empty-handed. “I can’t lay my hands on it, although I’m sure I saw it somewhere last week.”
“Well, let’s see what I can remember,” Jane said easily, rubbing her eyes with both hands as though to find the words behind them. Then she managed three lines:
“Something we were withholding made us weak
Until we found it was ourselves
We were withholding from our land of living.”
But that’s all I can catch hold of, I’m afraid.” And she repeated the lines again.
“That’s pretty good,” I said. “That’s really what Kennedy was saying, isn’t it? ‘Ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country.’ Maybe Frost said it even better,” I added.
That is what I remember of that evening, the hope in the air and Jane lit up by the joy of it. That and the rather scary drive home through the driving snow. They asked me to spend the night, but I was determined to get home to Ruth and be sure she had a hot drink after her long day.
As I looked up at the big, lighted window just before brushing the snow off the windshield, I saw Jane waving good-bye, a big wave of her long arm like a blessing.
It was a time of deaths and assassinations, of confrontation with the Soviet Union, of the CIA bungle at the Bay of Pigs, of increasing violence against the passive resistance in the South under Martin Luther King’s inspiring leadership, so it is not surprising that my vivid memories of Jane are tied to disaster in those years. In November of 1963 Ruth and I had hoped that Jane would come down and share our Thanksgiving dinner with us, but she was going to Philadelphia to be with Lucy and to see Russell as she had done for many years. So she suggested that she come down overnight on November twenty-second instead and we could then have a pre-Thanksgiving celebration.
Her imminent arrival lifted us out of a doldrum. Ruth made her special cranberry sauce and I stuffed the small turkey with a mushroom-and-onion stuffing my mother used to make, all these happy makings and doings going on the night before, of course. Ruth made a darling bunch of chrysanthemums and one late rose from the garden for Jane’s room and managed to change a late appointment so she could be home by six. I was just getting the Bavarian plates out for the “pink ice cream and cake” Jane had suggested would suit them when Ruth arrived, in a state of extreme distress, I could see at once.
“Cam,” she managed to say, “Kennedy has been shot.”
“How do you know? Are you sure it’s true?”
“When I came out of my office, I stopped to speak to the janitor about something. He is a very gentle man, but he was suddenly furious. ‘What is the matter, John?’ I asked and then he blurted it out. ‘Don’t you know? Kennedy has been shot.’ What I saw on his face was black rage. And then all the way home, Cam, people were standing by their cars listening to the radio. I saw a woman crying. And when I turned on my radio in the car I got it, the whole story.”
“But who did it? Why?”
“They shot him in Dallas in an open car—Connally is badly hurt but they think will live.”
We stood there in the kitchen in a state of shock, tears pouring down our faces.
But it was comforting to know Jane would soon be with us. It seemed to me suddenly a huge, lonely country we were in, with what I felt then was a stranger for president.
She came, bearing a bottle of sherry, and looking so expectant and happy to be with us, it was awful to hear the lilt in her voice as she hugged us each and said, “What a splendid Thanksgiving before Thanksgiving it is, dearies!”
But then she looked at us and saw that something was very wrong.
“Kennedy—he’s been shot. He’s dead.”
“Oh …” She stood there, I remember, still holding the bottle of sherry, looking at me, then away as her eyes filled with tears.
“We’d better sit down,” Ruth said. “Open the sherry. We’re pretty shook up.”
“I’m so glad you’re here, Jane. I’m so glad we can be together tonight,” I managed.
“I should call Sarah,” Jane said. “She’ll come home alone to this news. It’s so very bad.”
Ruth took Jane’s coat and lit the fire in the living room while I found glasses and a tray, all these usual gestures suddenly hard to make. I felt as though my arms had turned to lead.
“Dallas,” I said bitterly when we had settled by the fire. “Apparently they even had car stickers saying ‘Get Kennedy’ or something like that on them.”
“Don’t…” Jane said gently.
“Anger is so close to grief,” Ruth said in her wisdom. And she told Jane about John, the janitor.
“Who did it? Do they know?” Jane asked then.
Ruth looked at her watch. “It’s nearly 6:30 … we can look at the TV. They must know something by now.”
I felt paralyzed and let Ruth take over, turn the oven down, hold up supper, as we would surely not want to interrupt wha
tever news could be gleaned. It seemed unbelievable that we could see it all now, the open cars, the blur of Kennedy falling forward, as though we were there. The somber hall in the hospital, Jackie in her blood-stained suit. We watched it all in silence.
“Some madman,” Jane said at one point. “It is quite unbearable.” She turned to me with a helpless gesture lifting her hands in a kind of despair and letting them fall.
At nearly eight we finally sat down to supper. Ruth lit the candles while I carved. And then I asked Jane to say grace. It was not something Ruth and I did, but I felt it fitting to ask Jane. She took a moment to think, then most unexpectedly said:
“Brightness falls from the air,
Kings have died young and fair,
Lord have mercy on us.”
“That’s perfect,” Ruth said.
“You changed it around a little,” I added.
“Marian used to say it, but I couldn’t quite remember the whole stanza.” And suddenly we were smiling for the first time in two hours. And suddenly I, at least, was ravenous.
“Grief may be close to anger, but it seems also to be close to hunger,” I said, diving into my turkey.
And suddenly all the things we had each been thinking poured out, the sense of something horribly unfinished, the promise savagely broken. And we talked about violence and the fragility of human beings. And we somehow seemed to be growing together as we talked.
“It’s very different from Roosevelt’s death,” Jane said. “Then it seemed we had to go on without him, but he had had time to show the way, as though a father had died, I suppose. Now it is the shock of the unfinished, the undone, and we are unprepared.”
“I can’t help resenting Johnson,” I confessed. “He must be torn because after all he is president now, and that is something he could hardly have dreamed of … yet he is president in the midst of tragedy, so he can’t exactly rejoice, can he?”
“We’ll just have to see,” Ruth said.
“Those little children,” Jane murmured.
When it came to bring out the Bavarian plates, Jane remembered Sarah and impulsively went out to the telephone. “May I call her?” We could not help hearing what she said and I was touched at how imaginative she was, for her first words were, “It must have been a very hard day at school—oh, that was a good idea, so the children could be together and everyone feel part of it. Try to get a night’s sleep. I’ll be home tomorrow.”