The Magnificent Spinster

by May Sarton

  Meanwhile, a most astonishing thing took place in Cambridge. Martha, a true old maid, and the last person one would have imagined to do such a thing, decided to take in an English family of three children, nine, ten, and twelve years old, a boy and two girls—Jonathan, Alice, and Sally. This was the year of the bombing of Britain, and Americans had been asked to take in as many children as possible for the duration.

  Of course Martha could not have managed this without Sarah, who was librarian at Warren, where Martha also worked part time in the office, and who had come to live in the big house in Cambridge. Sarah, a natural-born leader on expeditions, taught the children to ski, took them on tramps and picnics, and in the summers taught them to sail. Nevertheless it was a stunning decision for the retiring, shy Martha to have made. And it must have taken Jane by surprise … for there suddenly was her sister with a family to bring up! And the house in Cambridge, which had seemed to be chiefly a receptacle of the past and of family traditions, suddenly came very much alive in the present.

  I find that I have been reluctant to take up what must surely have been the most difficult period in Jane’s life, that period during the forties when I myself hardly saw her, as I was carrying a heavy load at the college. What I know about it comes from what my mother told me, and then, the other day, my unearthing a few letters from Faith, who had decided to become an apprentice at Warren and go into teaching herself. She was assigned to Jane’s class in 1941-42 and for a while we wrote each other long letters again, because we were each involved in experiences that needed an ear to help us sort out, she rather excruciatingly aware that Jane was not any longer as able to communicate with children, I because I was in love with Ruth and at that time, forty years ago, such a relationship raised all sorts of questions and heart-searchings. I shall copy out some parts of Faith’s letters because they tell better than I can what was going on.

  September 1941

  My duck, it is great fun of course to be working with Jane, and seeing Warren now from a teacher’s point of view. But I am a little concerned about Jane. She doesn’t seem like the free spirit we knew and adored; she seems—it is so awful to say this even—somehow beaten down, and looks so tired sometimes that it hurts. She spends an unholy amount of time preparing each class and brings in wonderful material. There is no textbook, you know … wow, I am learning what that asks of the teachers! And sometimes I can help by going to the library myself and coming up with things. Jane, I have discovered, is a slow reader … that means that it takes her longer than it should even to correct papers. Luckily she is still very good at getting the kids to dramatize and act things out. We are working on an assembly about Roland and Oliver, and I can see that it’s going to be good. I’m just hoping Jane will have a real success and feel taken back into Miss Thompson’s fold. It is simply exruciating to sense that somehow Jane is no longer, as she was when we were at school, Miss Thompson’s right-hand man. She has been dropped from several committees this year. I know all this, my duck, of course, but can’t say a word. It would be too humiliating, I feel. And of course Jane never says a word of criticism of Miss T. There are rumors, by the way, that Miss T. herself is thinking of resigning, and that might be the best thing that could happen for Jane.

  February 20th

  Oh duck, Jane has been out with the flu, so I have been in command. It’s really quite thrilling, but also a little troubling because I get on better with the kids than she does, and have no problems keeping the class on an even keel. I have discovered that I can be quite sharp and definite when I have to … can you imagine it? But why can’t Jane do this? It’s as though she censors herself just when she should let go. What is so awful is that the wonderful sheen she had when we were here has gone. It can’t be just that she is middle-aged now, can it? I mean, Miss Stout must be much older, and her classes are absolutely quiet and attentive, just the way we used to be. And Edward adores his teacher, who is not young, either. I wish I could talk about it with with F. Thompson, but she is so driven herself, I hesitate to ask for time … and then what would I say? I mean, anything would be a betrayal.

  March 1st

  Well, I did have a talk with F.T. I just felt I had to. She was honest with me and clearly disturbed herself, perhaps even glad to talk with someone who knows the whole situation and loves Jane. She agrees that Jane should get out of teaching but apparently she feels she can’t ask her to leave. But how can anyone else do it? She’s the head, after all. I must admit, duck, that I felt she lacks courage—but then we don’t know the whole story. There’s no doubt in my mind that Jane has been an immense support all these years, financially, and as a friend. You must be tired of hearing all this … but I know you care. I keep remembering how Jane defended Marian Chase to us that time and scolded us for behaving so badly. There is no one to do that for Jane now. I can’t, obviously, since she is my boss and in command. But I get very upset. It is hard to see such a great person humiliated and baffled … she herself does not know what the matter is. And children even in a school like this can be very cruel. One of Jane’s strengths as a teacher is her love of words and belief in precise use of language—you remember, duck! We used sometimes to think she was pernickety. But the other day one boy answered a query about the use of a word with “Fuck you!” I saw Jane flush to the roots of her hair, but she didn’t have the foggiest idea how to handle this “dare,” for that is what it was, of course. Jack was sent out of the room, I’m afraid, as a sort of hero.

  April 20th

  With spring here at last everything is a lot easier. I went home to tea with your mother the other day, haven’t seen her for ages. She looks washed out, but don’t we all? In some ways this school is a dragon that devours its teachers! Anyway, your mother feels she has to have things out with Jane. Someone has to.

  May 4th

  I decided to take Jane out to dinner last week. Mostly I wanted to thank her for all she has taught me this year; the breadth and depth of what she brings in to a class every day is just amazing, and the way she dramatizes and makes things come alive. There have been good days, duck, and I haven’t said enough about them, I fear. Anyway, Jane had on a lovely blue dress when I picked her up at Martha’s. You can hear her voice, the lilt in it, “How festive this is!” as we sat down in one of those booths in that place on Church Street where you and I have talked for hours. When am I going to see you? I ordered a glass of wine, though you know she does no more than take a sip, but it seemed appropriate.

  At first she asked all about you, how you are faring down there, whether I had ever met Ruth, what she is like. And I told her all I could, and that you are happy. She’s awfully fond of you, you know. Then she asked me how I had felt about being an apprentice. I tried to tell her something of what I had learned, and she listened with that wonderful look in her eyes of total listening. How rare it is!

  “Well, dearie, I’m glad someone learned in my class, for I’m afraid the children did not.”

  “That’s not true,’ I said quickly. “They’ll never forget Roland and Oliver!”

  “Maybe not altogether true,” she said with a smile, “but true enough so that I think the time has come for me to leave Warren.”

  But not, I gathered, right away. What she has in mind is to stay on after Miss Thompson leaves and help bridge the transition when the new head (who has not yet been found, so it may be a year or two still) takes over. In some ways I wish she were going to leave now. It’s a compromise of sorts … she talked about maybe working as a tutor with children who need reading skills, not being a class teacher any longer.

  Never once did she show me any of the pain or humiliation back of this decision. Really, duck, what a super human being she is!

  Reading those letters made me feel depressed, made me miss Faith acutely, and Ruth—both dead now. I seem to be a survivor. I suddenly wanted to touch base with someone who had known Jane well and admired her. I wondered if in these last pages I had exposed her as too flawed, and overemphasized
the struggle. Two people came to mind whom I might be able to talk things over with.

  Why wait another day? I reached over for the telephone and called Laurel Whitman. She had been at Vassar with Jane, one of the group of intimates who went off to Europe together, now and then. All this flashed through my mind while the phone was ringing. Finally a surprisingly young-sounding voice answered.

  “Is this Mrs. Whitman?”

  “Which Mrs. Whitman? I am May. Perhaps you wish to speak with my mother?”

  “Yes, I do. Tell her this is Cam Arnold—she may remember me.”

  After quite a wait, a frail voice came through. “Cam? Of course I remember you, Reedy’s friend. What can I do for you?”

  “May I pay a brief call today or tomorrow, whenever is good for you?” and I explained why I wanted to see her.

  “Oh Cam, I’d love it! But you must be prepared for a very old lady who forgets things.” And she added, “Better come over today so I’ll remember you are coming. Teatime would be best.” She was laughing at herself, I could tell. “At least the past remains quite vivid … so I can tell you quite a lot about Reedy, though I shall forget your name.”

  I knew I would like her, and at four o’clock, walking over to Raymond Street, I was excited by the prospect of being able to talk about Jane, to enter a dialogue after being isolated for so long as I struggled to write day after day, to try to make Jane come alive for someone who could not have known her. I had been stuck for days, and when I reread what I had set down so far, I had terrible doubts.

  Autumn is fine in Cambridge, and at the gate to the Whitman House one maple was still glorious, a mass of gold that would have made Jane Reid cry out at its splendor. Carroll Whitman, I remembered, had been a professor of history at Harvard and had died some time ago. Evidently the daughter, unmarried I presumed, had moved in with her mother. It was a large house with a mansard roof and I felt comfortable with all that I saw, even to a wheelbarrow with bags of tulips and fertilizer in it. Then I rang the bell.

  “Come in, Miss Arnold, Mother is expecting you.” May Whitman took my coat and hung it up. “If you’ll excuse me, I’ll go out and get those tulips in before the light fades. Just go right into the drawing room, on your right.”

  Mrs. Whitman was sitting by a wood fire with a cane beside her chair, a round, pink-cheeked, blue-eyed old woman who raised a hand in greeting. “Sit there where I can hear you,” she commanded. I drew the small armchair even closer as I sat down.

  “May will bring in tea later on. I wanted to talk in peace.” Then she gave me a penetrating look and burst into laughter. “How can you be so old, Cam? One thing I cannot get used to is everyone being so old, myself included. Good heavens, child, I think of you as a seventh-grader in Reedy’s class!”

  “That was almost sixty years ago.” I laughed, too. “Can you believe it?”

  “No. And what have you been doing with yourself since then? Did Reedy tell me you were a brilliant professor of history somewhere or other?”

  “Not brilliant, alas. And I retired a few years ago.”

  “I can’t keep up with it all.” And again she chuckled. “I’m still twenty myself a lot of the time, still at Vassar, I’m afraid. It is very odd indeed to be told I am ninety. The thing is, when you get to be that age, the present seems to fade away.… I never can remember where I put my glasses … but the past becomes extremely vivid.”

  “Tell me about Jane.”

  “What do you want to know?” She sounded a little anxious, as though being pinned down frightened her.

  “Anything, everything … what you think of first when you think of her.”

  Laurel Whitman considered this for a long moment. “First? What I think of first? What fun she was … I have never known anyone in all my life who made everything seem such an adventure … because, you see, to her it was an adventure! Why, walking down to the Square with Reedy was an adventure. An ice cream cone was pure heaven! Some part of her never grew up, you know, maybe that is why she enjoyed teaching children. And then, unlike a lot of people, she had a marvelous childhood—she may be that rather unlikely person who actually would have loved to be a child again. Maybe nothing later on quite came up to that life on the island, especially on the island.” Mrs. Whitman was clearly enjoying herself and I did not want to interrupt this happy current. “And then she was completely unselfconscious, you know, bursting into song in the middle of Harvard Square! Acting things out all the time—did you ever see her be a mating great horned owl?

  “No, but I wish I had!”

  “It was hilarious. Of course she was a born actress.…”

  “I have heard that her Cyrano at Vassar was quite a performance.”

  Laurel Whitman gave a small hoot. “That’s putting it mildly. She had the whole college at her feet—it was glorious! Cam, she was the most glamorous young woman you can imagine in those days—not excepting Vincent.”

  “Vincent?”

  “Millay. We all called her Vincent, you know.” And again the old woman fell into thought, looking into the fire as if she could find Jane there in the flames. “She was adored, yet—and this is odd—she was not at all narcissistic, as Vincent certainly was. You know, Cam, as I think about Jane it comes to me that deep down she was a very humble person, and what she really wanted was not so much to be a leader herself as to follow someone great.”

  “Frances Thompson,” I uttered.

  “Of course. What really happened to Reedy at Vassar was Frances Thompson … and from there the Warren School.”

  “Was she a brilliant student, I mean at Vassar?”

  “Not really. She did well enough, you know, she worked hard. What she did best was write papers for Frances Thompson. And even that didn’t seem quite as important as acting, and going off on picnics with her circle of friends—Lucy and I and three or four others.”

  “She must have had beaus,” I ventured.

  “Of course … several young men—she could have been quite a catch—but we were pretty enclosed in those days. And somehow I see her as happiest in the world of women.”

  “I wonder why.”

  That phrase brought Laurel Whitman back to me with a jolt. “Why should I tell you?” she said, half laughing, with just a shade of antagonism. “I don’t know myself.”

  “She never really fell in love, did she? Never head over heels in love.”

  “She was in love with life. That I can say. Head over heels in love with it.”

  I felt it was an evasion, but this was not the moment to press on, or to probe into what clearly was proving a little bothersome to Laurel Whitman. “But not the marrying kind, as they say?”

  At this Laurel turned directly to me. “Cam, whatever made you embark on this project? And what is it really, a biography, or what? And why are you doing it? Is that too blunt a question?”

  “First, it’s a novel, not a biography.” It was a great relief to be talking about it at last, to have an ear at least, a kindly ear, “But the main problem is that I’m not a novelist—don’t laugh! I mean, it’s so crazy, isn’t it? At seventy to embark on such a project. I feel sometimes like a person who never learned to swim and is trying to swim across the channel, floundering about and nearly drowning on the way!”

  “You’re a historian by profession … why not a biography?”

  “Cowardice. I didn’t want to be tied down to all the dates and facts. I wanted to be free to imagine just because in some areas I really don’t know enough. Oh dear, nobody is going to like it, I’m afraid.”

  “Cam, you amaze me,” she said then. “You’re so brave.”

  “Foolhardy, I suppose. But you see what interests me is the essence, not what happened in September 1939 precisely, but what was happening to the essential person. I’m tired of card indexes.”

  “How far along have you got?” Laurel asked. I knew I had not satisfied her.

  “Well, Jane is forty-five and is about to resign from Warren.”

  “
Oh. Yes. That was a bad time. It really was, you know. It seemed at the time like an earthquake that could destroy the foundations. I got quite anxious about her. We all did.” Then Laurel turned to me and laid a hand on my knee, “Between you and me, Cam, that dream house in Sudbury never quite worked out. Too far away. And the people she wanted most to come there never came.”

  “Marian Chase, for one.”

  “You do know quite a lot, don’t you?”

  I sensed not unexpectedly a trace of resentment. “Tell me about Marian Chase. I saw her of course, more than once after I was grown-up, but when we had her in the eighth grade we didn’t like her at all.”

  “I’m not surprised. Marian was for grown-ups, not for children.”

  “Jane always came alive when Marian was around. That I did see … and the enormous respect.”

  “Well, of course Marian was a scholar, a distinguished one. Reedy admired that in her, for she herself was not a scholar, not at all. She was a romantic.” Here Laurel paused, whether hesitating to go on, or not knowing what she wanted to say. “You know there was a chivalrous side to Reedy, a side that wanted to protect her women friends, wanted to help them in any way she could to do whatever they most needed or wanted to do. Sometimes it didn’t work. That summer she spent in London with Marian was a disaster.”

  “Yes, I know.”

  “How do you know?”

  “Jane confided in my mother … all through that time.”

  “Hmph.” Laurel gave me a penetrating look. “At some point Marian balked. People do that, you know, and for different reasons—when it came to marriage, Reedy balked, herself, but she never understood why Marian did.”

  “Why did she?”

  “It’s really none of our business, is it?”

  “But I have to try to get at the truth.”

  “What cause are you serving?” Laurel asked. We had come to an explosive moment and I knew it had to come. “Why do it? Why expose the dead to your delving around?”