The Magnificent Spinster

by May Sarton

  She came into the kitchen while I served the ice cream. “Sarah says they had an assembly before the children went home. She said they sang “The Battle Hymn of the Republic” and that, I expect, did everyone good.”

  Over dessert we talked about how children can be helped or approached about death, a death in the family, for that, we agreed, was how this assassination made us all feel.

  Jane remembered as a small child on the island finding a dead bird. “It seemed so meek,” she said, “the way the head flopped over when I picked it up, and the dead eyes. I’ll never forget it. I suppose that was the first time I faced the fact that a life, even a bird’s life, has limits. Of course I took it to Snooker and she helped me bury it in the moss drawing room in the woods. She always knew what to do.”

  Ruth then told us of her father’s death, how sudden it had been, and because she was far away at school, she had for years felt responsible, as though she could have saved him if she had been there. He died of a heart attack while mowing the lawn. “You see he had been saying all summer that he felt so tired, so terribly tired, and we all just told him he worked too hard and he ought to slow down. But nobody did anything!”

  It flashed through my mind that Ruth lately had complained often of being overtired … but I shied away from facing that.

  “We have been on a long journey this evening,” Jane said after a silence. “And maybe it is time to turn in, blessed people. How much we have shared.…”

  How did Jane keep her freshness, that spring of elation and responsiveness so near the surface during those years? Anyone else would have been overwhelmed by the sheer day-to-day demands. When Jay died she had the whole responsibility for running the Trueblood House, finding the right caretakers, not as easy as it sounded, for although they had a beautiful apartment to live in they had to be available on the two days a week when the house was open to the public. None stayed more than a year or so, so it was all to do again. Things that had been pushed aside in her active years were now accumulating in the “dump,” that small room opposite her bedroom. The French families, who now had grandchildren as well as children, expected at least a yearly letter from Jane and Lucy. And Jane’s own good health was not matched by that of many of her friends. One of her oldest Vassar friends went into a serious depression and had to be sent to McLean for a month. That meant visits to the institution where so many Bostonians went into retreat. Muffs interest in the Unitarian Church must be carried on, Jane felt. One of the last things Muff had done was to help financially in rebuilding the spire and painting the whole huge building. And there were still odds and ends to be tied up before the Trueblood papers went over to Harvard University. But none of these preoccupations ever blurred the moments of happiness with friends, the instant response to the suggestion of a picnic or a family gathering, a birthday or an anniversary where her presence would give delight, and she herself be brimming with joy and expectation about the occasion.

  I gathered that Portia and her children had become a new part of her immense “extended family” and ran in and out several times a week. Jane had kept a lien on the tennis court and the children came over to play. Through Sarah, Jane was also in touch with Warren, and several teachers depended on her advice and wisdom, and dropped in for tea on their way home, as Jane had used to do when my mother was alive. And under all these comings and goings, she was deeply concerned about politics. By 1965 Johnson’s “Great Society” had been swamped in the increasing anxiety and vast expense of the war in Vietnam. Student demonstrations were becoming more violent, draft cards were burned, at least one of her friends had a son in hiding in Canada. Whenever I saw her, which was not often except in the summer on the island, we talked about that.

  Jane instinctively withdrew from conflict. She did not like the violence of the students, and we had at least one rather hot argument about what was right about it, for I, by then, was strongly committed to ending the war by any means possible. But when Martin Luther King was assassinated in the spring of 1968, Jane was the one person I needed to talk with. And for once I remember she was in a state of such acute distress that she could hardly utter a word. “I just feel so ashamed, ashamed of us,” she kept saying. “What is happening to this country? When will it end?”

  It was hard not to be with her, to talk only on the telephone. I felt it was the worst day of my life, worse than Spain. “Thank goodness you were there,” I remember saying. “I needed to touch base so badly, Jane.” And when I put the receiver down I understood in a new way that Jane was “base” for more people than I knew or could imagine.

  When Ruth came home late that evening, looking white and drained, and we sat by the fire for an hour before going to bed, we talked about it.

  “Where does she get that spring in her? That source we all turn to?”

  “God knows,” Ruth said, and I thought she was too exhausted to talk about it, but in fact she was thinking, and after a considerable silence she talked about it “It is what is lacking in many of my patients—‘burned-out’ by an unhappy love affair, a failed marriage, agonizing self-doubt—what is lacking is what you call the source or spring, something that cannot be polluted, that can withstand whatever happens to throw one off balance, that is there, a foundation that sometimes seems to me below the personal. It is what the artist, the poet, draws on.”

  “But for an ordinary person, what is it? How do you help someone to find it who has lost it or never had it?”

  Ruth sighed. Then she looked across at me and smiled. “But Jane, whatever she may be, is not an ordinary person.”

  “I know.” And I ventured, “With Jane it is love, don’t you agree? The source, I mean, not personal love, not the way most people feel it … as I feel it for you.”

  “Maybe. But the burned-out people I see don’t have any love inside them, nothing left over to give. They cannibalize themselves, I sometimes think, live on grief and resentment.”

  “You once said that Jane had sublimated her sexuality. Is that part of it? If sublimation means learning to surpass the self. I’m not really sure what it does mean.”

  “Converting one kind of energy into another.”

  “King never doubted that he was serving something greater than himself, did he?” I was up against it now. “He did apparently have no doubt at all that he was serving God. But does Jane believe in that way? I doubt that somehow. She never talks about religion.”

  “I know,” Ruth said, “Jane is not a preacher, after all. Thank God for that!” And we laughed then, at last.

  “She knows who she is. But how does she know it?”

  “Well, as you’ve often told me, she has faith in a code of honor, in something deeply rooted in her by her mother and father, by her sense of family.”

  “Is that enough?” And I had to add, “Besides she has grown way beyond her family and all they stand for, it seems to me.”

  “Darling, I am beyond any more talk,” Ruth said then. “We’ll have to sleep on it.”

  If the last pages have in essence spoken of the bonding between Jane and me after her return from Germany, a bonding that had much to do with the terrible events in this country in the sixties, I come now to something private that for a time swept everything public out of my consciousness.

  For months I had been aware that Ruth was overtired and caught in the responsibilities of a profession and the acute needs of her patients that precluded rest. I had begged her to see a doctor, but she always put it off, and often said that a few hours in the garden would do the trick and that was all she needed. In April of 1969 we had a big snowstorm that buried the daffodils, many broken off by the weight, but some, we felt, would survive if we could brush off the snow. In a way it was beautiful, but when we went out, booted and gloved in the high wind, we found many of the small bushes and trees near to breaking and it was more of a job than we had foreseen from inside the house. I remember how beautiful Ruth looked in her red parka, snow on her eyelashes, battling away among the trees,
and the exhilaration of seeing one branch after another spring back, released.

  “Oh, isn’t this fun?” I shouted while I rescued daffodils.

  “Glorious!”

  It was early in the morning. We had rushed out before breakfast, in a strange twilight of snow. But after a half-hour the sun rose and everything sparkled. “That’s enough,” I called. “I’ll go and put the coffee on!”

  We had forgotten the time in our excitement, and when Ruth came in and looked at the clock, she had time only to take off her parka and put on a coat.

  “You must have a cup of coffee,” I begged.

  “No time … I’ll get one at the office.” I heard the garage door going up. Then silence. Was she having trouble starting the car? I waited a few moments, and decided I had better go and see if I could help. She was sitting in the car, ashen.

  “You’re ill,” I said. “Come back. Come in.”

  “Bring me some coffee,” she managed to say, “quickly, Cam.”

  I poured a cup as fast as I could, put a shot of brandy in it, and ran back, feeling lead in my feet, as though everything had slowed down, as if I could never get there, get to Ruth through centuries of time.

  She did manage to take a sip as I lifted the cup. “There,” I murmured, “that will help.” But she threw it up almost at once. “Shall I call an ambulance? Get you to emergency at the hospital?”

  “Don’t leave me,” she whispered.

  I got into the car then and held her close to me.

  “Good,” she managed to utter, “it’ll be all right.” Then, “So stupid…”

  I was holding her against my breast and could (eel the fast, shuddering heartbeat, but was it mine or hers? I wonder how long it was before I realized that it was mine. Then I took one of her hands and rubbed it hard. All I could think of to get the circulation back. But there was no response. The weight against me had suddenly become a dead weight. There was no lift and fall of breath. Death? It couldn’t be. What to do? I didn’t want to leave her. But what if…? Time was everything now. It was hard to extricate myself, unbelievably hard. But I managed to shift her over so she was half lying across the two seats, and ran, ran as fast as I could, to the telephone. Thank God we had an emergency number in clear view.

  The ambulance was there in fifteen minutes. I stood at the garage waiting what seemed an eternity. Tears of relief poured out. They were quick and efficient, and within a trice Ruth was strapped to a stretcher and we were off, oxygen being administered by a male nurse.

  “We’ll have a try,” he said, “you never know.”

  But I did know.

  “Death by coronary occlusion” was the verdict at the hospital.

  If I had felt numb for the past half-hour, I now became so speeded up I could not sit still. They had taken me to a private room and a nurse was with me. “Take it easy,” she said. “Let me get you some coffee.”

  But I couldn’t drink. I kept saying to myself, What do I do now? Where does Ruth go? I have to make decisions. But it seemed as though I couldn’t move although my mind was racing. Other people, a doctor, came in and talked to me. Someone had called a funeral home for me and there the body would be taken, I was told. The nurse wrote the address on a piece of paper and I put it in my pocket.

  “Is there someone you could call who could go home with you?” I heard someone ask.

  Suddenly I remembered the patients. “I have to go right away,” I said. “Her patients … they’ll wonder what has happened.”

  “She was a doctor?”

  “A therapist. I must go right away.”

  “Is there someone we could call for you?” the doctor, a very young man, asked. “You should spare yourself.”

  They did call the agency where Ruth worked, and one of her fellow workers promised to go over right away and deal with the patients.

  And in the end I persuaded them to let me go home alone. They called a taxi for me. I wanted to see Ruth again. But that was not possible. Things happen so fast. No doubt the body had already been wheeled out, on its way to the nightmare of a funeral home. What was I doing here? I must be where Ruth was, I felt. But in the taxi I changed my mind. Home first. People to call. My mind was racing again. No time for grief. People to call. When we got there I found I had no money on me, of course.

  “Wait a minute, I have to go in to get my purse.”

  In a way it was good to have to rush in with such a factual matter on my mind and rush out again. It would have been even harder to go in after the taxi drove off, to go in to that silence.…

  What I had seen was Ruth’s red parka thrown on a chair in the living room. And that was what I went home to, pressing it against me and suddenly crying like an abandoned child. But the motor in my mind would not stop saying, “People to call.”

  Ruth had a sister older than she, married and living in New York. They had not been close, but she must be notified. I stood with the phone in my hands and her number before me, but the number I rang, the only person I needed to reach, was Jane’s, and by the grace of God Jane answered.

  “Oh dearie, I’ll come right away … just hang on. I’ll be there in under two hours.”

  “Thanks.”

  It never even occurred to me that it might be hard to get through. But the sun would melt the snow. And Jane, I knew, would make it somehow.

  What I could not know was that those two hours would be my only time alone for days. What I could not know was that death brings with it a thousand errands and responsibilities, and the bereaved are too busy to mourn or even to think. I had just sat down in the living room, trying to take in what had happened, when the phone rang. It was the funeral home. Would the funeral be in a church? Would I want an open coffin? Was I the next of kin? Would there be visiting hours at the home? Flowers? I did not have the slightest idea how to answer any of these questions. I just managed to say, “I’ll come this afternoon. I’ll make decisions then.” Jane would be with me. Jane would know what to do.

  Until she arrived I sat there, not even thinking, suspended in a sort of trance. Not grief. I have heard that when people are dying their whole life passes through their minds, and that in a way was what was happening to me. Floods of memories poured through me as though I could keep Ruth alive, keep her with me, by remembering. I saw her face so clearly, the deep line across her forehead, the rather stern mouth that opened in a smile in such a beautiful way. The dark eyes. Her strong, wise hands. And I could hear her warm voice. “Glorious!” she had called out to me only a few hours ago among the daffodils in the snow.

  Death—I remembered Jane speaking of the small dead bird, so frail, its head falling to the side, the weakness of it Ruth, Ruth, Ruth, Ruth.

  Finally I pulled myself together and wandered into the kitchen, for Jane, after all, would need some lunch. There was soup Ruth had made in the refrigerator and I got that out into a double boiler and some French bread. There was plenty of coffee since no one had had any breakfast. I set the table. Everything seemed almost insuperably difficult. Would a brandy help? No, I didn’t dare. I felt I was holding myself together and even one drink might bring all control tumbling down.

  And at last I heard the bell ring and dashed out to find Jane carrying a small suitcase and what looked like a hamper. I took these from her and for a long moment we hugged each other. The perfectly unselfconscious tears I felt on my neck did me good. I couldn’t cry.

  The hamper proved to have in it a cooked chicken from Sage’s, a pie, and Earl Grey tea. “It seems absurd,” Jane said, rather shyly, “to bring food, but you’ll have to eat, dearie, and it’s so hard to think of cooking.” And when we had put the things away she said, “Come, let’s sit down and talk about things.”

  Of course she saw the red parka on the chair and knew it was Ruth’s. “Shall I hang this up?”

  “Don’t,” I managed to say. “It’s what she was wearing when we tried to rescue the daffodils … it’s …” But I could not explain really that it was my securi
ty blanket and what I wanted to do was bury myself in it.

  “We’ll just leave it there, then,” Jane said and sat down by the cold hearth.

  “Cam,” she said then, “do you think it would be a good idea to make a list of what has to be done right away?”

  “I feel so bewildered.”

  “Of course you do. But I can help with all those decisions.”

  I went out to my study and got a pad and pencil. “First, the family. It would be wonderful if you could call Ruth’s sister and her mother, Jane. Neither of them has been close to us. They disapproved of me, I guess.”

  “Well, I’d better call them. But it would be better perhaps to wait until I can tell them when the funeral is to be.”

  “Will you come with me to the funeral parlor after lunch? Could we wait till then for the family?”

  I don’t know what I would have done without Jane. And I realized that she had had to face all this many times in the last few years. She knew the ropes about death. And even before we sat down to lunch she had called my department at the college and asked them to post a notice that I could not meet my classes till Monday. It was Thursday. She had gone over Ruth’s history and roughed out a short piece for the newspapers. Strange how all these definite, factual matters took my mind off Ruth herself. I even laughed at doing what sounded like a résumé, “as though one had to submit a résumé one last time before being allowed into heaven!”

  But then I thought of Ruth’s patients. What would become of them? How awful to lose a therapist when it was perhaps her hands that kept one from drowning.

  “Jane, what can I do about the patients? Oh, how terrible it is for them!”

  “Surely the institute will make arrangements. I wouldn’t worry about that, Cam. Though it’s like you, dearie, to think of them.”