The Magnificent Spinster

by May Sarton

  “Why?” It was very hard for me to imagine such a thing happening in Jane’s class.

  “No reason. He was bored, I expect. It is quite clear that I bore him almost to death.”

  “What did you do?”

  “Asked him to pick up the rubbish he had strewn around.”

  “Did he?”

  “No, he went out to have a talk with Miss Thompson. He has her permission to go and have a talk with her whenever the spirit moves.”

  I sensed by Jane’s tone what she felt about that. “That doesn’t seem quite fair—to you, I mean.”

  “Fairness isn’t the point.” I felt she was reminding herself. “If this sort of freedom is going to help Ned, that is the point.”

  “But does it help him?”

  Jane gave me a searching look. Perhaps she felt she shouldn’t have said anything about this prickly subject. She smiled a kind of secret smile. “I guess it’s almost as hard for Frances to admit failure as it is for me.” Then she got up, once more on the way upstairs to work, but at the door she stopped and said, “A school maybe is a microcosm of the world. If Ned’s father were not so famous, things might be easier for us all.”

  Whatever did she mean by that? It made me feel very uncomfortable. Of course Ned’s father was a Nobel laureate in physics, and I felt the school’s prestige might be involved, but how could a whole class, and Miss Reid too, be sacrificed to pride? I hated the humiliation for Jane. But I also wondered what was going wrong for her as a teacher … how could a child in Jane’s class be bored? Could her kind of imaginative resourceful teaching ever become old-fashioned? I still don’t know the answer to that question. But even then I was aware that children were far more sophisticated ten years later than they had been in my day. Probably none of those in her present class would have read Trueblood, for instance. They would have been reading The Hobbit. And because Jane was a slow reader she could not keep up with all that was going on. And did her marvelous sense of fun get dampened by the negative atmosphere? No doubt it must have. She must have felt on trial that year, yet with her hands tied because of Frances Thompson’s attitude and demands. It hurt to think of Jane not being loved by her class, questioning her own value as a teacher and woman.

  I had been in Sudbury for a month—going for walks and, after two weeks of doing almost nothing but sleep and eat and wait for Jane to come home, setting myself a daily stint of uprooting sedge grass, which was taking over the lovely open hillside and pasture—I had been there all that time before Spain was mentioned. Jane must have sensed that I was not ready. But she had helped me go, after all, and at some point I knew I must try to reassure her, or at least share with her some of what I had been through. But to do that I had to come to terms with what felt inside me still like an ocean in tumult, in which I could drown if I allowed myself to go down into it, as, sooner or later, I knew I had to if I was ever to get out of this limbo of not feeling and hardly being alive. Even if I could have spoken, Jane was too preoccupied with the school for it to seem fair to lay this burden on her.

  And then one day she came home with a bad cold and decided to take a day off and stay in bed. It was lovely for me to be able to take her breakfast up and make a little bunch of wild asters and bayberries for her room, and then to let her sleep for once, as she did for most of that day while we crept around downstairs. The house had been made of pieces of a very old house, but unfortunately the walls were thin and it was the most trans-audible house I have ever been in. And I have sometimes wondered whether that explained why Marian never did come for a long stay as Jane so wished she would. And why the house itself gave the illusion of being an old house but never felt quite real, as a house where generations have lived and died does. To feel lived in, after all, a house has to be lived in. And Jane was simply not there enough.

  But on that day, lying in bed, dozing and waking, perhaps she did reach a center in herself … it may have been the only time where she could watch the light change from morning to evening. And by tea time, when I tapped gently on the door, she was ready for life to pour in again. I had brought tea on a tray, so although she may have been ready to get up, we had it there. I sat in a chair first, but after a while I climbed up on the bed and lay there at the foot of it, curled up. The atmosphere was so relaxed that it seemed the most natural thing in the world to talk.

  “What have these long, empty days been like for you?” she asked gently. “You do look less like a ghost, dearie, so I hope you are beginning to feel rested.…”

  I felt terribly frightened suddenly as though I was standing over an abyss and would fall in if I moved. “I don’t know … I can’t …” and suddenly tears began to rain down my cheeks, tears I could not stop. I blew my nose, and waited.

  “You don’t have to, Cam.”

  “Oh, but I want to … it’s only …” and again I was choked up. “It seems like the end of everything I believed in. I don’t know where to go from here, you see. Or who I am. So much died there, Jane, I mean, not only people.”

  “Yes,” Jane sighed, “the awful waste.” And I knew she must be thinking of World War I, when millions died.

  “It’s different from the world war—I know millions died then, but the vision didn’t die.”

  “I wonder …”

  “It was clear at least who was right.”

  “Maybe. But the peace got all muddled up. There was nothing clear about that.” Jane had her hands behind her head and was staring at the ceiling.

  “I almost envy John Cornford, Julian Bell, and so many others.”

  “They were your friends?” Jane asked.

  “Oh no, they were English poets … I never saw them. But I think about them because they died believing in something. They must rest easy in their graves.”

  “Oh Cam!” There was just a slight irony in her voice as though to imply I could be exaggerating. That made me angry, and I guess anger was what I needed to break through the fog and begin to exist again.

  “You don’t know. You can’t know!” I got off the bed and paced up and down.

  “It would help me if you would try to tell me all you can,” she said.

  “Well, I saw anarchists, who are supposed to believe man is so good he doesn’t need governments, line people against a wall and shoot them with machine guns—women and children, Jane—only because they suspected the village of belonging to another faction. I saw a whole village blasted off the face of the earth by Messerschmitts. No one seemed to know what was really happening.… The communists were absolutely cynical. On the one hand all of Spain was a kind of bloody playing field for Russia and Germany to experiment with … on the other hand the anarchists and communists were really at war with each other … it was just a rotten bloody mess. So many of us went believing it was the last chance against fascism, you see … so many of us believed!”

  “I wish you could tell me a little of where you were and what you were doing, Cam.”

  “But I can’t talk about it.” I stood shaking my head as though trying to disentangle myself from a twisted rope. The generalities were easy. But the abyss was still there. “What was I doing? Getting drunk on cheap wine, stealing bread out of bombed-out farms, if you must know. I wandered, Jane, for months I attached myself to anyone who had a jeep, crisscrossed between the lines. I was in Madrid for a while. I must have had a concussion when the house next door was hit. For a while I guess I was a little crazy and sick. But finally I joined the Friends’ ambulance corps. We moved with the International Brigades defending Madrid, pushed back, putting up our tents and then having to flee.”

  “You were nursing?”

  “Not exactly. I did the dirty work nurses had no time for, got water to the thirsty, dirty water, we never had any distilled water. It had to be boiled for the surgeons and I got very good at doing that.”

  “How brave you were.”

  “No. Glad to be with friends. And to have found a niche where I could be useful. I got so a little sleep was the on
ly thing that mattered, sleep anywhere, my head on my backpack, sleep for a half-hour, till we were ordered to strike the tents, leave the dying … that was the worst.” I wasn’t crying now. It felt more like vomiting. “Dr. Herman had been operating for twenty-four hours … we were running out of bandages. People tore up shirts. And then …”

  Jane was sitting on the bed in her wrapper now, and she made me sit down beside her, and laid a cool hand on my forehead just as though I had been vomiting. “You don’t need to go on,” she said quietly.

  “I have to. Let me go.” Long ago that is what I had said and she had helped me go. Now it was different. I drew away. “Dr. Herman—his head was blown off by a grenade. I was right there. I was covered with blood.”

  “Oh Cam!”

  But now it was said, I felt absolutely cold. No tears. No vomiting. Rage. “The filthy bastards.”

  “You had a Red Cross on the tent, I suppose?”

  “Of course.”

  It should by all the rules have been relieving to utter what I had held back for so long, to let it out, once and for all. But it did the exact opposite of what it should have done. What I felt was an immense distance from Jane, and from everyone I knew, as though talking about what happened in Spain—it seemed an eternity ago in another time, another life—was bound to be only betrayal. In the first place it could not be put into words. Words had never seemed to me so futile, so inexpressive.

  “I sometimes thought they used the Red Cross as a target. It would be no waste of ammunition, as a direct hit would be certain to kill doctors and wounded all in one go.”

  Jane was silent. What could she say, after all?

  “I shouldn’t say all this.”

  “Yes, you have to. And I and lots of other people have to know, Cam.” Then, as I did not respond, she took my hand. I was standing by the bed, turned away. “Do you think you might be able to write some of this down, make a record?”

  “And throw it in the wastebasket!”

  “Why?”

  “I got so fed up with the correspondents, the Hemingways, coming in for a few weeks with plenty of liquor stashed away and plenty of money, just to watch people getting killed. It made me sick.”

  “They were not important. The people you believed in, that surgeon, were important. You persuaded me that the war itself was crucial.…”

  “The more fool I.”

  “You don’t feel that now?”

  “I don’t know what I feel,” I said. “So I had better shut up.” How could I tell Jane that I had come back convinced … I had witnessed it … that Spain had become simply a wounded bull in the arena being gradually driven mad before the kill. The Russian communists and the Nazi and Italian fascists didn’t give a hoot for Spain. It had become simply a playing field for testing weapons and murdering hundreds of innocent people so when it came to a real war they would be able to do it better. Guernica was just a successful experiment.

  “Dearie, I am going to get dressed now,” Jane said. “Let’s go on talking by the fire.”

  She was right. Jane, who always allied herself with a moderate view, winced visibly before these intensities. And sometimes I found this irritating, but that day I sensed that she was wise. I had shot my bolt. I went and lay down on my bed, wishing my heart didn’t pound inside me like some imprisoned animal.

  Not that day, but perhaps a week later, we talked again after supper on a Saturday night, when, for once, she did not have to run upstairs to do schoolwork. I had begun to feel restless, took Nana on longer walks. Some mornings now there was frost on the grass, and the leaves, except for a few oaks, had about fallen. My sedge-grass digging went on, though. It was the one thing, the one positive thing, I was engaged in doing.

  “I feel as though something has gone out of me and I can’t get it back,” I said while Nana for once snoozed on the hearth.

  “You have to give yourself time, Cam.”

  “I’ve been here six weeks … just sleeping, doing nothing.”

  “Would you like to go home now? Maybe you need to see Tom and Faith. Tom graduates from law school this year.…” She was feeling her way. Perhaps she was suggesting that where she had failed, friends my own age might succeed. But I felt empty, too empty still for that sort of excited talk.

  “No,” I said without explaining. “It’s better here.”

  “That’s good news, for me, as you must know, Cam. It’s been wonderful to come home every night to a dear person.”

  “I feel such a dud.”

  “What you feel, I suppose, is only loss and pain. But what I see, dearie, is someone battling very hard things with a lot of courage.”

  “If only I could imagine something ahead!”

  “Do you still sometimes think of teaching history as a possibility?”

  “I don’t know. I feel as though I had no skin. The very thought of an interview makes me go into a sweat.”

  “But you could perhaps write some letters, send out a résumé … it wouldn’t mean facing an interview for quite a while. After all, it’s the middle of the academic year!”

  “Tortoises hibernate,” I said. “That’s what I am, I guess, a hibernating tortoise.” And we laughed because that was easier than trying to go deeper.

  Maybe I could get a job as an instructor in some small college, I thought, but how could anyone teach who had lost some vision, some certainty that it seemed to me a teacher must have? That is what had been burned out of me in Spain. What would I be teaching from? I said it aloud: “A teacher has to have some belief.… I seem to have lost mine, Jane. What was so wonderful at Warren was that we really thought we were part of some great ongoing hope, that we could help make things better.…”

  “Yes, we did, and I still do … but it’s very slow, Cam. After the World War we really believed it was the war to end all wars. We thought the League of Nations would lead the way to lasting peace.”

  “So we now know there is no such thing as a war to end all wars, or a war to free people as in Spain. What’s left?”

  “What’s left is to go on trying to educate people that war is not the answer, that we have to find better ways to make radical change.”

  “But radical change is never achieved by moderate means.…”

  “Maybe not now.” I felt the tears start in my eyes, the prick of deep feeling brought alive. I wanted to bury my head in her, to hug her fast. But Jane was not someone one could easily embrace. I learned in those two months that people teach mostly by what they are. Quite unconsciously she was helping me knit myself together.

  How did she see herself? Some people have a sense of destiny, of something “meant” about their lives. People with a specific talent have it. But I haven’t a clue as to what Jane thought of herself. She lived as fully as possible—this person who loved picnics, who loved children, who loved history and loved teaching it—but did not apparently think much about her role or roles, except—and perhaps this is the clue—she did have an ingrained, unselfconscious belief in noblesse oblige, that a fortune such as hers must be used, that her own gifts were to be used, spent, in a constant outward flow, that more was asked of her because of her heritage than could be asked of those less fortunate.

  Jane hesitated to spend money on herself. Building her house was the one great extravagance. When I lived there she sometimes laughed at herself because she was wearing the sweater she had worn for days. “Lucy,” she said with a twinkle in her eye, “would not approve. She always goes with me to buy clothes and her ideas are much grander than mine.” Then she looked down at herself. “Oh my dear, there’s a button gone!” Then she smiled. “Who cares?” Nevertheless she let me sew it on for her and changed into a dress. And as she went off, a bulging briefcase in one hand, she waved and called back, “Now I’m respectable, if not beautiful!”

  “Very respectable.” But I wanted to say, “Very beautiful.” At forty-five she still was. My mother, who observed such things, always said, “She has the profile of Nefertiti,”
and it was true. The long chin, and something in the way she held her head, had that air of a queen about them. An Egyptian queen with very blue eyes!

  It did not surprise me that she was being pursued by that neighbor, although I never did catch a glimpse of him and Jane never mentioned that he existed.

  Here I am writing a book about Jane Reid and I keep discovering that I know nothing about her, about the inner person.

  But I did know by the end of the two months that we were friends for life. Something fluid between us, partly her instinctive withdrawal before my exaggerated feelings as an adoring pupil, had solidified into a real and deep affection.

  And at the end of those months fate intervened and I was handed a temporary job teaching American history at a girls’ school in Concord, a position left open by the sudden loss of a teacher because of a heart attack. In a way it was an accidental start to a career; providential, as it swung me back into life and kept me too busy to question what I was doing or where it was taking me. Almost by accident, then, I became a history teacher, and finally moved into college teaching after World War Two. There at a small college south of Boston I met Ruth Arbor, with whom I lived until her death ten years ago.

  Jane was forty-five in 1941. As I now—from my own perspective at seventy—think back over her long life, it becomes clear that those middle years between forty-five and fifty-five were the hardest. Within the immediate family there was illness. Her younger sister Alix’s husband had a severe heart attack and had to take a leave of absence from his job as President Conant’s assistant at Harvard. During his convalescence he came more than once to Sudbury, and Jane must have been happy to see the house become the haven that she had envisioned it might be, and that it had been recently for me. Fredson’s death a few years later left Alix terribly bereft and Jane saw more of her then than in the years before. Then Edith, who, as they grew up, had become the closest to Jane of the four, had to face inoperable cancer and months of decline. That year Jane managed to go out to Texas on every holiday and help plan what would happen to the retarded boy Russell, around whom life on the Texas ranch had been planned.