The Magnificent Spinster

by May Sarton

  “Isn’t it great to be here alone for a few days?” Jane said. “Time opens out. There’s no hurry.”

  On a foggy day the kitchen was certainly the place to be, warmed as it was by the huge coal stove, which was kept going all night and which Jane now replenished from the coal scuttle. “I love that roar,” she said as the coal clattered in.

  When they had settled with their breakfast and large cups of hot coffee, Lucy looked across at Jane and smiled her mischievous smile. “No hurry, Reedy? We only have to make six beds up, mend the sheets that are torn, get out towels, go over to the small house with blankets, check the bathhouse …” and she was suffused with laughter.

  “But somehow here it all gets done … although without you and those wonderful lists I doubt whether it would or could!” And Jane added after savoring a sip of hot coffee, “I only meant that somehow time is different on the island. It opens out instead of closing down. And we have three whole days before anyone comes.”

  “And that, dear Reedy, is a century, no doubt.”

  “Look, the titmouse is back—hunting for crumbs!” There was a bird feeder just outside the window where they sat and crumbs from their supper had been waiting for a customer. “There’s a purple finch, too!”

  So breakfast turned into a bird-watching breakfast and time did stand still for a half-hour. Then Jane brought out the big calendar where the names of guests were fitted in and jotted down during the winter, and they looked over once more the list of those who would arrive in the first week of July.

  “It’s such a big job, Jane. Who will take over eventually?” Lucy was the one to think ahead.

  “Well,” Jane laughed, “that we can’t know today. But Frances and Erika are due on the third. I am just dying to see them, so maybe we could get those rooms ready first.

  So the two women went upstairs and had in an hour of concerted work made up four beds, shaken out rugs, swept, and dusted. Frances of course would have the best room, with a balcony looking out over the sound. “Amazing how these spreads have lasted,” Lucy said as they flung the old Indian cotton spreads out. “They must be fifty years old!”

  “Mamma loved them. See how the colors are still brilliant, the tree of life.…” And for a moment Jane paused as she smoothed out one spread on the bed, paused to savor this rite, then, just to touch base, went over to the mantel and chuckled as she took the ancient photo of her cousin Jay, in an eighteenth-century costume with Edith also in fancy dress beside him, and dusted it off. “Jay in his glory,” she said, laughing. “Poor dear … he did so love dressing up.”

  Lucy meanwhile was sweeping out the bathroom. “I can’t understand why there’s so little dust,” she announced.

  “It’s so still all winter long, nowhere for dust to blow in from,” Jane said. “I’ll get the towels. Muff was a great investor in towels, as you may remember.”

  So the morning sped away, and by noon the sun was out and the gray, muffled world began to twinkle and shine as the drops of water on every twig and frond caught the gleam.

  “We simply must go out and take the air,” Jane said. “Lunch can wait, and don’t you love the expression ‘take the air’? Swallow it in all its freshness like a glass of champagne?”

  “Let’s,” Lucy agreed. “Lunch? I can scramble eggs and it won’t take a minute.”

  “We’ll walk down to the bathhouse and have a look around. I want to be sure there’s a rowboat out for the Speedwell kids.”

  It was rather like a perpetual getting-ready for a series of festivals, Jane was thinking, even as she noted that she must remember to plant nasturtium seeds along the path, to climb two great boulders later on.

  “Ah,” she sighed, “smell the smells!”

  The fog had brought in a strong smell of salt water and in this sort of weather the spruce and fir were pungent.

  “Think how many feet will be going down this path all summer!” Lucy said.

  The point of a walk, they agreed, was to take it slowly; there was so much to recognize and savor. And as always when she was happy, Jane was soon singing, this time “How Lovely Is Thy Dwelling Place, O Lord of Hosts” from the Brahms Requiem. But this burst into song stopped midway through because it was interrupted by the white-throated sparrow and they had to listen to that three-note song repeat itself like a litany.

  “Alix could imitate it perfectly,” Jane said as they walked on. Then she smiled. “Marian, however, said it was the most boring of bird songs … and I expect she was right.” Marian’s name brought with it a shadow, at least for Lucy, and she did not respond.

  Anyway, they had reached the formal garden now, a little thin early in the summer, when the bedding plants had only just been put in. “I do hope the salpiglossis will do well this year—they look rather spindly, don’t they?”

  The croquet set, which would soon be the scene of such fierce battles, had not been set out. They walked on across the great open field that had been a golf course in Jane’s father’s day and was still kept going in a rather rough way. At least the nine greens were kept cut, although all except their trimmed circles had been allowed to grow wild. Here they stopped for a moment to look out on the elegant outline of the hills across the bay with swirls of fog still caught here and there, “like dragon tails,” Jane said, taking a deep breath of the salty air and straightening up, perhaps aware of Lucy’s glance in her direction, for Lucy sometimes reminded her that in her seventies she was developing a slight stoop, a hunch in her shoulders. Jane’s response the first time Lucy mentioned this was to stand tall and then smile. “After all, Lucy, we are bending toward the earth now … it’s natural, my dear.”

  “But not for you,” Lucy had protested, “you are still so young—and so beautiful to look at,” she added warmly. And Jane, always a little embarrassed by a compliment, had laughed.

  “Well, then, hold me to the mark! But as for being beautiful, I gave up any idea of that years ago!”

  “I can believe it,” Lucy smiled, “since you almost never look in a mirror except when you are doing your hair.”

  They had now reached the boathouse, the scene not only of a lot of work getting the boats painted and shipshape in the spring, but all summer long of little boys making toy boats out of odd pieces of driftwood or leftover lumber. It was quite a large room, the door at the back framing the view of Southwest Harbor.

  “Bobbie will be down here in a trice as soon as the Speedwells have landed,” Jane was saying, “to see whether his bird houses are safe. See, they are … a little crooked, I must say, but no doubt birds will not pay attention to that!”

  “Time to go back and have lunch,” Lucy announced. “The island always makes me ravenous.”

  “But we haven’t seen the bathhouses,” Jane said, “and whether the swallows have nested again in mine!”

  “It’s after one,” Lucy said. “We can come down before supper.”

  “Very well, ravenous one.” This time propelled by hunger, they walked fast along the lumber road through the woods, noting on the way a patch of bunchberries still in starry flower, and they picked a few to put in a little vase on the mantel in the dining room, in front of the photograph of Jane’s parents.

  “Lunch is ready,” Lucy called from the kitchen.

  “Splendid. We’ll look at the mail pouch after we’ve eaten.” Captain Fuller had left the huge, worn leather pouch on the dining-room table while they were gone. “Maybe there’ll be a note from Erika. I do want to know when they plan to arrive.”

  “All in good time. Scrambled eggs must be eaten hot.”

  “Yum,” Jane said after a first bite.”

  Then they were silent for a while, finishing off with applesauce and gingerbread Lucy had brought with her.

  “Perfect peace,” Jane murmured. “Sometimes I wish no one were coming at all.”

  “It’s rather nice while it lasts,” Lucy agreed. “But I love getting ready for all the people.”

  “It’s great fun, isn’t it?�
�� Jane yawned. “Oh, I am sleepy! Let’s have a snooze, Lucy.”

  “You go right up. I’ll wash up, it won’t take a moment and you might wake up if you hung around.”

  “No, no, I’m going to help.” And what Jane really meant was that she didn’t want to leave Lucy. “Besides, we can talk while we do it.”

  Dishwashing took place in the pantry, in an ancient copper sink that was green with verdigris. On all sides were shelves and shelves of Italian and English plates and elegant demitasse cups and saucers and glasses. While Lucy washed Jane wiped and put away, and while they did this they settled a lot of things they might do and Lucy got the arrivals straight: Sarah and Annie, the cook, in two days, the Speedwells in three days, and maybe Frances and Erika at the end of the week.

  “Tonight we’ll have a fire,” Jane murmured, when they had settled into their beds and pulled blankets up, “and read something aloud.…”

  “We forgot all about the mail pouch” were Lucy’s last words. But Jane did not hear this, as she was fast asleep.

  An hour later she was awake, looking up at the ceiling with her arms crossed under her head to stretch her back. She looked over at Lucy and saw that her eyes, too, were open.

  “I’ve been thinking about old age,” she said. “Do you feel old, Lucy? I mean, after all, we are in our mid-seventies, aren’t we? But when I wake up I just don’t believe it, do you?”

  “No. I never imagined for a moment that the time would come when I could remember things seventy years ago. It’s quite preposterous.”

  “It’s only when someone I am with thinks of World War One as far back somewhere in a history book. Then I feel like Rip Van Winkle. It all is so vivid still … that time in France … only yesterday.”

  “The smell of wet wool clothing, the awful chilblains, and the hot café au lait after Mass.…”

  “What a lot we have shared, you and I,” Jane said. Then, coming to into the present, she sat up. “Do you think the new head at your school is doing a good job? I keep meaning to ask, but then we get so absorbed in things to be achieved.… Good heavens, Lucy, is it nearly half-past three?”

  “Yes, we had better have a cup of tea to wake us up and then get going at the little house.”

  And while Jane put the water on to boil, Lucy began to put new candles in the seven or eight candlesticks guests would take to bed.

  “My practical dear, come and have your tea.”

  Over tea Lucy did talk a little about her school and the problem it was that the parents still turned to her in any emergency and simply could not accept the new head, a young man whom they all liked, she said, “but they just are so used to me!”

  “He has a lot to learn,” Jane said. “I don’t blame them for going right to the source.”

  “Thanks, but he’s way ahead of me in some ways, braver about tackling political matters. After Kent State he organized two assemblies about the Vietnam War and why conscientious objectors were growing in numbers and why we all felt so bitterly about what happened there.”

  “But those kids are awfully young, it seems to me, for that.”

  “They grow up so fast now, Jane. Even in the sixth grade they were terribly upset, you know.”

  “So talking about it did make sense.” But Jane was not convinced. “I wish they could stay children longer.”

  “Oh my dear, things have changed. About a third of the children have divorced parents. They talk about things we would never have dreamed of at ten or twelve years old. They know things we could not have imagined.”

  “But is that good? I mean, after all, they may talk about sex but they can’t really know.”

  Lucy smiled. “I’m rather glad I don’t have to deal with it any longer. Let Frank plunge in where angels fear to tread.”

  The discussion went on while they gathered sheets, flashlights, towels, candles for the little house, and it was late in the afternoon when they finally got back.

  “I don’t really know how it all gets done,” Lucy said when they were finally sitting out on the porch to catch their breath and watch the sails go by out in the sound, in the evening light

  Jane laughed, “I haven’t the foggiest idea … but it does … thanks to you.”

  “Thanks to Sarah, and a good thing she arrives tomorrow with Annie!”

  “It’s marvelous that Annie agreed to come this summer. And of course she never would without Sarah.”

  They talked a little, then, about that rare friendship which had begun when Muff was still alive. Sarah had been to Ireland twice with Annie to meet her family near Cork, on the west coast. A rare friendship because Annie was not educated, quite ornery at times, a character in her own right, with not the slightest feeling of inferiority. But, quite simply, she loved Sarah and Sarah loved her. All the planning for meals was done by those two together, and Sarah never forgot to include Annie in a sail now and then, took time to sit down and talk with her, and every Sunday took her over to the mainland to Mass early in the morning.

  So whatever “class” might mean on the mainland, it did not exist on the island, and that was one of the small miracles every guest witnessed and all children learned by osmosis.

  By the time the Speedwells were expected, Annie and Sarah were settled in, and when their call came from Southwest Harbor, Captain Fuller set out at once in West Wind, and Lucy, Jane, and Sarah got ready to go down to the dock to meet them.

  “I forgot all about flowers,” Jane said as they ran down. “I meant to pick some. The trouble is there isn’t very much yet.”

  “It will be chaos while they settle in,” Lucy said. “I doubt if they’ll miss flowers.”

  And in a little while, standing on the dock, they could see West Wind turning into the channel and already hands were waving.

  “What a thrill to see them!” Jane said, thinking that the last minutes of waiting were almost intolerably long. But at last they were within hailing distance and Jane could lift her long arms in a wide arc, up and down.

  “Hi, Aunt Jane, hi!” Bobbie called out from the prow, where he was sitting.

  “Where’s Nancy?” she called back, for only six people were visible.

  “Inside,” John, who was holding little Amy in his arms, called back. “She’s got a lame back.”

  Captain Fuller made a smooth landing right against the dock and threw the rope to Jane, who tied West Wind up. And by then everyone was tumbling out, laden with rucksacks. Little Amy, holding a huge teddy bear in her arms so she could not make the jump, had to be lifted off by Captain Fuller while John helped Nancy.

  “Welcome, welcome, my dears,” Jane said, an arm around Bobbie’s shoulders. She and Bobbie had always been an alliance. Tom, the eldest, who was now sixteen, was the shy one and was busying himself with endless sleeping bags, baskets, bundles of every shape and kind, and handing them to Wylie on the dock.

  “Nancy, dear,” Jane said, going to meet her and looking into her face with concern. “How did this happen?”

  “I don’t know. Isn’t it stupid?”

  “She’s just tuckered out, I guess,” John said. “Nothing the island won’t cure.”

  “It’s going to be a tight fit in the little house,” Jane said, exchanging a glance with Lucy, who, reading her mind, gave a firm nod. “I think we’ll just kidnap Nancy for a day or so,” Jane said. “What would you think about taking over, John? Think you can manage down there with only five to help you?” she teased.

  And before Nancy knew what was happening it was all settled. The children were loading bundles into the wheelbarrow and Lucy had volunteered to go to the little house and help settle them in while Jane and Sarah carried Nancy’s bag up.

  “It’s quite incredible,” Nancy said, an hour later, lying in the big bed in the guest room between Jane’s room and what would be Frances Thompson’s in a day or so. “I feel like a child who has been carried off on a broom by a beneficent witch. How did it all happen so fast?”

  “This is your chance to res
t,” Jane said, standing by the bed and giving Nancy’s foot under the covers a pat. “I think sleep is going to help that back more than anything.”

  “I don’t know what’s the matter with me.”

  “Well, I can guess,” and Jane smiled. “Packing for seven people might explain quite a lot.”

  “And then it’s always hard at the end of the school year”—for Nancy taught in a kindergarden, as well as all the rest she managed to do. It was clearly comforting to imagine for the moment that her back was only fatigued. Smiling, she closed her eyes, and after gently touching her forehead Jane slipped away.

  At nearly forty, Jane was thinking, Nancy looked amazingly young. She was very small-boned, with curly black hair cut short, and a narrow, intense face that lit up when she smiled and her very dark eyes twinkled. But there was strain. Nancy had always carried the world on her shoulders and Jane suspected that the war in Vietnam and all the protest meetings and marches had taken a toll. It had been a hard year all round, and the demands on good Quakers like John and Nancy were heavy.

  She considered all this on her way downstairs to see about a tray for Nancy’s lunch, with suddenly a warmth of thanksgiving about her heart, because, after all, this was what the island was for, to give a hard-pressed friend a respite, to shelter and make well. As she set up a tray, choosing a lovely cloth with flowers embroidered on it, she was singing “Over the sea to Skye.…”

  It was after one when Sarah, Lucy, and Jane sat down to their lunch out on the big porch, the first meal out there since Sarah had arrived.

  Lucy had been amused by the chaos at the little house and decided finally that she was not being a great deal of help, as the children fought over who would sleep where and John struggled to get the kerosene stove working.

  “John seemed quite relieved when I reminded him that they would all be expected up here for supper at half-past six.”