The Magnificent Spinster

by May Sarton

“Yes,” Jane agreed, “I know.”

  “How can you know?” I asked passionately. “You have no doubts. You know you’re wonderful.”

  At this Jane laughed. “Little do you know, dear Cam. At school I’m being forced to learn my limitations every day … and one of them is I can’t do anything fast. So I’m afraid I have to go upstairs now and tackle papers.”

  I thought she was just being gentle with me about her own limitations, but I felt a lot better anyway.

  There is always a discrepancy between what we see of a person, especially one at a certain distance, and what has been actually happening to that person. I have painted a picture of Jane Reid as I saw her as a child in her class, and as a young woman in high school. Only many years later did I come to realize how much harsh reality, how much conflict and even rejection, she was experiencing during those years when she seemed chiefly a lover of life, a great life-enhancer, a glamorous, beloved teacher, running off to Europe in the summers, safe in the bosom of her family, always available as counsellor and friend wherever there was need, and communicating such joyous, inexhaustible response both to people and to nature that the image perceived was that of that rare person, a truly happy one.

  Many years later I learned by chance that the summer in London with Marian Chase had been a disaster. What feelings were involved on both sides, what irritations, what disillusionment I cannot know, I can only guess. I do know that Jane Reid held Marian Chase in the greatest esteem and had imagined that taking her to London and thus giving her a chance at doing some research she badly wanted to do was a privilege. Children usually are not wrong in their instinctive estimate of people, and the class’s dislike of Miss Chase was based, I think, on a sense that she was not a giver, that something withheld got in the way of any real exchange between her and the children she taught. She was discriminating and learned … these are not traits that appeal to thirteen-year-olds, but they had immense appeal, no doubt, for Jane. There was also something else, a breath of passion that took me by surprise when I read her letters—letters that Jane Reid had privately printed in two volumes after Marian’s death—and I saw what intense feeling Marian could show toward those she loved. But she did not love Jane in that way, and that was clear also in the published letters.

  Was it perhaps in part that Jane Reid’s mind did not interest her? Did she resent Jane’s wealth, feel uncomfortable as the recipient of her generosity just because she could not reciprocate the love Jane undoubtedly felt for her? Did she close herself off because to an ultra-sensitive like Marian not giving love where it was needed creates almost unbearable guilt? Whatever went on between those two will never be known and perhaps should not be, but Jane told my mother that after a month Marian had closed the door against her completely, and refused even to speak at meals or when they met for tea after a day’s work at the British Museum. Jane spent night after night weeping … and she herself never understood what went wrong.

  I have come to see that Jane’s attitude toward women was chivalrous (there she was always romantic), toward men humorously maternal, never taking them quite seriously, perhaps, and toward children childlike, for part of her immense charm was no doubt that the child she had been on the island never grew up. Jane’s attitude toward Marian did not change, and they stayed friends until Marian died; whatever pain had been involved was buried. But perhaps because of this rejection, I have a hunch that in the next year, my last at high school, when Marian had left Warren and was working on her book, Jane must have seriously contemplated marriage. Sam Dawson was no doubt a determined suitor. She was a perfect match for him, and he was not going to give up easily. But he, like others before him, came up against the one rival hardest to overcome, the Warren School. Invitations to theater or a concert had too often to be refused because of a meeting, a rehearsal, or papers to read, and he must have sensed that time with him was snatched from something that always tugged at her, those twelve boys and girls in the seventh grade, and Frances Thompson. On his side he could try to persuade her that she would be helping him with the League of Nations, a matter of world importance, that he needed her more than the children did. Besides, he must have asked, didn’t she want children of her own?

  Didn’t she? I ask myself as I write this. Strangely enough I cannot imagine her as a mother. She was the marvelous friend. She must have thought hard and no doubt had long talks about it with Lucy before she turned Sam Dawson down. Within a year he had married a handsome, rich Bostonian, and that was that. But Jane must have been aware that her decision was radical. If she did not marry Sam Dawson, she would not marry.

  What did she know or guess about herself that informed the decision? Partly perhaps that she was attracted to Sam but not passionately attracted, partly that marriage would mean giving up her freedom—every woman, especially these days, recognizes this and has to come to terms with it. For the rest of her life, Jane, as I observed her, entered into families as a kind of fairy godmother whisking an exhausted mother away for a weekend, inviting a whole family of seven children and their parents to the island for a week, so that the mother could have a real rest. Possibly she sensed that her way of being a mother would turn out to be mothering the mothers.

  In the middle of that year Allegra Reid, Jane’s mother, died, quite suddenly, of a heart attack in her sleep. She had seemed to me ever since I was first invited to the house one of the happiest people I had ever known. The word that best describes her is “benign.” I could not imagine her angry or weepy or anything but cheerful as a robin, and much of the time quietly amused by the life around her, and immensely curious to the end so she drew one out not out of courtesy alone but with great enjoyment.

  I went to the funeral with my mother. The Unitarian Church was thronged with friends and relatives, some from considerable distances. Part of the Trueblood clan still lived in Portland, Maine, where Jane’s great-grandfather had been born. I was chiefly fascinated to see the five daughters, for once together, in the front pews, Edith with her husband and little boy (she had married a doctor); Viola in a purple toque with her handsome husband, Vyvian, and their two children, a boy and a girl; Alix and her husband, Fredson, and Martha and Jane, the two unmarried ones. They were very different one from another, those five women, but as I observed them, I was struck by the family resemblance. They had all inherited their mother’s long chin, they were all tall, all blue-eyed. They wore Trueblood on them like a signature.

  I was thinking about all this during the service, but when it was over and they came down the aisle, I turned away from Jane’s grief. She was unable to hide the tears flowing down her cheeks, unable to nod at a friend here or there as her sisters were doing. I closed my eyes. What would it be like now in that ark of a house alone with Martha? Martha, a little stooped now, an aging heron with a plain, wrinkled face? Would Jane really stay on there forever?

  Mother and I went back to the house after the funeral to join the family and friends for tea and cake. There for an hour or so Allegra’s presence was far more tangible than her absence. Everyone had some delightful story to tell about her humor and love of life, and the words “Mamma” and “Pappa” made of it all a litany of rejoicing rather than grief, a litany, too, of a family life that seemed relatively cloudless.

  In the midst of all this Jane came to sit on the arm of Mother’s chair and put an arm around her. “You know, you and Cam must come to the island this summer—could you? Would you?” There was an urgency to her request that I attributed to her need to have friends of her own there now that Allegra Reid would not be there, she who had created the atmosphere and set the standards for so long. As in a royal family, Martha would now be the power, the true inheritor of the island life, and its queen. “Of course I must ask Martha,” Jane added almost as an afterthought.

  I look back on that first visit to the island as the last great holiday, the end of childhood, and it seems quite miraculous in retrospect. I was coming from a painful week with my father on the Cape at an expe
nsive hotel in Barnstable. I think he was as bored as I was. Our long walks on the beach, swims, and miserable games of tennis, in which he always beat me, were amicable enough, but my fervent socialism infuriated him, and he kept throwing at me that going to Vassar was going to cost him too much and I should have settled for Radcliffe and living at home. I was as prickly as a porcupine and deeply resentful of his wife-to-be. It had been anything but a happy time.

  So the relief of being with my mother, who had given me Shaw’s Intelligent Woman’s Guide to Socialism for my seventeenth birthday, was bliss, and then the island! Because it is an island, the sense of being sheltered, of entering a magic world, makes itself felt already at the dock in Southwest Harbor. There we left the car and waited for Captain Philbrook to meet us in West Wind, an elegant motor launch with an awning to protect passengers from the wind, and an air of rather sedate luxury about it. Jane was on board lifting her long arms in wide waves as soon as she saw us, exuberant, beautiful in a bright-blue cotton dress, and so unlike the person I had seen bereft at her mother’s funeral that it was immensely reassuring.

  Happiness flooded in as, once the luggage had been stowed, we glided off. I felt sorry for the people on the dock, who were staying on the mainland, wondering no doubt who these people might be, bound for what unknown pleasures. I enjoyed the sense of privilege. Who is not occasionally a snob?

  The island was quite close to the mainland and once we had left the Coast Guard and the harbor we could see it clearly. I had imagined it way out to sea. But in a half-hour we had chugged past the great open field which had been a golf course in James Reid’s day, past the farmhouse and the farmhouse dock, past the swimming pool. We could now glimpse a house with blue-green shutters through the trees, but Jane explained that it was not the house, but her sister Alix’s. She and Fredson would be coming in August, Jane explained. Much to my dismay she said, as though she were giving us a special treat, that Marian Chase would be with us still for a few days.

  “That little boy waving on the dock is Matthew, Viola’s youngest. He’s with us this summer while his parents are abroad.”

  Something in Jane’s tone made me think Matthew might be a problem, but she had a twinkle in her eye when she said that Viola hardly ever came to the island. “She has built herself a French château on the North Shore … and Matthew is sent to us now and then, to be tamed.”

  “Is he wild?” I asked.

  “Oh dear no,” Jane said, chuckling, “I guess ‘tamed’ was not the right word.” And she left it at that.

  He was a fat little boy and seemed amiable enough as he caught the rope Captain Philbrook threw to him and tied us up. The luggage was put on a wheelbarrow and we set off up a mossy path to the big house still hidden among tall pines. The smell was salty and piny and delicious, and I was much too excited to do anything but breathe it in.

  “Dearie, you run ahead,” Jane said. I was sure she knew I wanted to come upon everything freshly by myself. She always knew things like that.

  I don’t know exactly what I had expected, but it was quite amazing to push open the big door on the encircling wide porch and find myself in a huge living room where nothing had been changed since it was built in the 1890’s and where no doubt nothing would ever be changed. The living room had a fire-place at each end, and in front of each a bear rug, one black, and one brown. In spite of a huge window to the second floor and a staircase at one side and a window seat there, the room was dark because of the wide porch that faced the bay, wide enough to contain the long table where we would eat all our meals, and the wicker chairs and hanging lounge where we would have tea every day, watching the sails go by.

  During the week we were there I had a chance to look at everything, the long Japanese painting of a carp in the dining room, the enlarged photographs of classical scenes that hung on the landing, the paintings of trees and ocean by an aunt long dead, the fascinating photographs of the family, one of which still haunts me. It showed men in white flannels and straw hats and women in long skirts walking single file across a field on the way to a picnic, several carrying baskets. Somehow it conveyed the essence of family life on an island and had something of the intimate charm of a painting by Vuillard. The dining room was dominated by a small photograph of James and Allegra on the mantel. They are sitting on a rock, exchanging a look of such sweetness and intimacy, such delight in each other, that a whole marriage is communicated in their glance. I noticed that Martha always had a small bouquet of pansies or nasturtiums there, and when I think of the island, that photograph stands out. Those two had created the life there and their presence was ubiquitous.

  I suppose all this penetrated more deeply because of my own parents’ divorce. We had no home where the past and present could flow together as it did here. As an only child I had felt a kind of emptiness in the air around me … and that was partly why the Warren School, a big extended family, had meant so much. On the island Mother and I shared a room at the back, for Marian Chase of course had the best guest room, with a balcony where she could lie out in the sun and read. The luxury was in the bathroom for each guest room. But it was otherwise fairly Spartan, as there was no electricity and we went to bed each carrying a candle. I discovered that reading by candlelight had its drawbacks and also that my bed was rather lumpy and hard. But it was fun to be with my mother, and we often talked for an hour or so in the dark about the day and all that had happened.

  It is strange how when one looks back on a scene years later, the emphasis changes. Small details remain indelible. A large inner world may simply be forgotten. I spent the mornings, till it was time for the ritual late-morning swim, writing pages and pages to Faith, making all kinds of resolutions about college and what my aims would be there, demanding to know everything about her attraction to an English boy she had met that summer, and hanging around on the porch steps when Captain Philbrook arrived with the groceries and the mail pouch every morning, hoping for a letter. Sometimes there were ten pages in her little cramped handwriting, and I went away into the woods to read them. But it is not those letters and all my feelings, so acute and sometimes painful, that have stayed by me. It is the shelter and peace of the island that week for me and my mother, for she had arrived exhausted and, I sensed, depressed.

  If I had heard that Marian Chase would be among us with less than enthusiasm, I now began to see, in spite of myself, what it was about her that fascinated Jane. She was extremely delicate; even her features had a delicacy, an elusiveness, that I had not appreciated when I was younger and in her class. She had the beauty of a pencil drawing of an eighteenth-century lady. She was shy, extremely reserved, but she had a delightful sense of humor and a way of seeing things and saying things that was highly original. I think Jane enjoyed her language as much as anything. It was the language of a poet, exact, and therefore often made Jane smile with recognition, savoring the words, as when Marian spoke of the “creaking of tulips.” They do creak on their brittle stems, but who but Marian would have said that? The other thing was her passionate love of poetry. She knew hundreds of poems by heart, and one of the games we played by the fire after supper was to see how many each of us could remember and recite. Marian always won, though Jane came in a close second.

  Toward Marian, Jane’s attitude was one of deference. She seemed sometimes almost hesitant in suggesting a walk or a swim and was always protective. Because of what I knew about the hard time in London, I marveled at her capacity to resolve the pain, or so it appeared, for the sake of what had obviously remained precious to her in the relationship. It suggested a kind of generosity that I recognized as rare.

  With Matthew, on the other hand, Jane was positive and commanding, though she sometimes seemed on the point of laughter, for his clumsiness could be disastrous, and his love of food ever-present. Occasionally the cookie jar was found to be empty. Jane could be sharp when he whined as he had a way of doing (I found him rather repulsive, I must admit), but she never stopped treating him with hope, d
rawing him out, getting him to look at things, helping him collect moss and tiny trees for a Japanese dish garden. How did she find time for all she did, for all she gave? She was the center of activity and yet at the same time managed to make each guest feel cherished in a special way. She always had time to drop whatever she might be doing, and listen.

  Among other things she listened to the cook’s complaints and teased the waitress, new that summer and very shy. I came upon her one day when I was hanging around waiting for the mail, having a cup of coffee with them in the enormous kitchen, trying to get Cathy, the new one, to understand about the kitchen stove, an ancient coal range. Apparently it had twice been allowed to go out in the night because the damper had not been adjusted properly. But what might have been a cause of some irritation on both sides ended in gales of laughter. When Jane saw me standing in the doorway, she got up, still laughing, and said, “Come on, Cam, let’s waltz.” How she loved to dance! I was swept along while she hummed “The Blue Danube.” Jane could lead very well, I discovered.

  The others had already gone down to the pool, except for Marian, who was writing letters, so I had the luck to walk down alone with Jane. Lately I had seen her only with my mother, but the dancing had set me at ease, and it was easy to talk about real things. For she asked me at once about my mother. “It’s been such a hard year for her; I have been really anxious; she has looked so tired these last months.”

  “She feels depressed … I think it’s my father marrying again.”

  “It’s too bad you’ll be away this year.…” No doubt she didn’t mean it as an accusation, but I reacted hotly.

  “I have to go, Jane. I couldn’t bear Radcliffe.”

  “I know; at your age I felt the same way … and my family couldn’t understand.” She laid an arm around my shoulder for a moment. “So …”

  “I have to go to Vassar for one reason.”

  “And what is that?”