The Magnificent Spinster

by May Sarton

  “I have to fling myself upon your mercy,” he said so dramatically that Jane had to suppress laughter. But she then perceived that he was weeping, and said, “Well, old dear, you are in a bad way. What is it?” It was hard not to be impatient … there the work lay and must be pursued, willy-nilly. “But whatever it is, don’t you think we might talk about it later? We really must get on with things, Jay.”

  “You are such a governess,” he growled, “pitiless. But this is real, Jane,” he said soberly. “You have to help me.”

  Jane found something stiff-necked rise up in her. She found that she resisted hearing whatever it was. She wanted to be left in peace this morning, and above all not to be disturbed by an emotional outburst from a man her age … it was disconcerting. So she was not able to control the slight coldness with which she said, “Well, Jay, come and sit down. I’ll help, of course, in any way I can.”

  “Will you? Will you really?” He sat down then in the other chair and pulled it closer to hers. “It will mean going to the police,” he burst out.

  “What happened? Did you fall asleep at the wheel?”

  “Oh, Jane,” he groaned, “it’s much worse than that.” He covered his face with his hands.

  Jane waited what seemed an eternity. Finally Jay clasped his hands and bowed his head in a curiously touching gesture of desolation. “I was caught propositioning a boy in Central Square last night.”

  Jane had of course heard rumors about Jay’s escapades … her mind instinctively took shelter with that “safe” word from a less kind one. But she had refused to believe the rumors, or chose not to.

  “I suppose you think I’m a monster.” He raised his head now and looked her straight in the eye. “But I’m not.”

  “Of course you’re not,” Jane said vehemently. “What I find a little hard to understand is that you would take such a risk, Jay. Can you talk a little about it? Can you help me?” For Jane felt as though a dark well had opened at their feet. She felt dread. Jay did not need to tell her that from the point of view of the world, of the police, anyway, he had performed a criminal act, or had been caught, she corrected herself, with the intention of performing one.

  His confession made, Jay was pulling himself together. “You know, Jane, you are quite extraordinary,” he said humbly. “I’m overwhelmed.”

  “I can’t see why.…”

  “Your question, can you help me? Me? It shows such an open heart where most people close theirs against men like me … and,” he added, “there are a lot more of us than most people know. That’s what’s so hard … feeling always that you have to hide what you are. Punished for what is deepest in one, that need.…”

  “Have you ever had a friend, I mean a lasting encounter of this kind?” Jane asked gently. She felt if she could get hold of one positive element in all this it would be easier to cope with her instinctive distaste, and even revulsion.

  “Don’t you remember David?”

  “David?” Her eyes opened wide. “That beautiful young man who helped with your last book … of course I remember him.”

  “We were lovers for two years.”

  In this house, Jane thought, where the presence of Benjamin Trueblood in all his genius, charm, and authority still lived? It came as quite a shock.

  Jay went on unburdening himself. “Then he graduated and went home to Oregon … he’s married now, I believe.”

  “That must have been awfully hard,” Jane murmured.

  “One has to accept what the gods give and take away,” Jay said and Jane realized that he really meant it. It was not just more dramatic words. And she honored him for it.

  “How much pain goes into learning just a little wisdom,” she said. “I feel for you, Jay.”

  Jay sighed. “Now I’m an old man. Old and finished. Left in the desert to roam around, hungry and desperate.”

  “No,” Jane said. Self-pity had come in now to ruin what had sounded so dignified a moment ago. “What most people see is a distinguished scholar and lover of the arts, a grandson of Benjamin Trueblood. Self-pity is not going to get you anywhere. We can’t have it, Jay.”

  “Oh, very well, have it your way.” Then he gave her a keen look. “I don’t suppose you have ever been in love … you are above all that, like the student in The Cherry Orchard. You’re as cold and smug as all the Reids are. The Truebloods have the passion … to love and to create.”

  “I’m as much a Trueblood as you are.” Jane had flushed under this attack. “Love?” She paused then, hesitant to give herself away. “Of course I have loved. Even governesses fall in love.” And she smiled her teasing smile.

  “Happily?” he asked.

  “No, not happily,” Jane answered, opening her long hands in a gesture as though letting a bird fly out which had been held tightly … Maurice, Quentin, Marian … Frances … she was shaken by the truth of it. None happily. But more she could not, would not yield. “Jay, what must I do now? What is involved with the police exactly? Do you need a lawyer?”

  “Well, unless it can be quashed, it will come up in court.”

  “You could go to jail?”

  “I don’t think so. I might be put on probation. But the danger is the papers, a scandal. The family … oh Jane!”

  She was being asked then, Jane realized, to use power, “pull,” behind the scenes, to keep Jay safe from the law. How could she do that when people without influence had no chance? “We’ll have to talk to Tom Weston,” she said. “We must have legal advice.”

  “He’s so young.”

  “Jay.” Jane said sharply, “I trust him. He’s a friend. It’s got to be someone we know well.”

  Jay put his head in his hands. “It’s so humiliating,” he said. “To think I should do this to you.”

  “Well, I’m awfully glad you felt you could talk with me about it, Jay.” Jane had recovered her equanimity, and was determined to get going and do quickly whatever could be done. No more bemoaning, she thought. And so she went downstairs and called Tom Weston.

  He was able to help entirely behind the scenes. He guessed, accurately enough, that Jane’s presence, her dignity, her sense of who she was, would be the best plea, and that it was she who must see the judge and get the whole thing settled and taken out of the hands of the police.

  But that took some persuading on Tom’s part. She was loathe to use “pull.” Why should her family be able to protect itself when a poor family with no great name would have to go through with it and “face the music,” as she asked him? What right had she really to protect Jay?

  Here they got into a brief argument. Tom’s generation was already more aware of the problems of the homosexual than hers had been. They had learned a little more than Henry James had been willing to face in The Bostonians. It became clear that it was the sexual element here, and especially one involved in “corrupting youth,” as the phrase was at the time, that Jane could not accept.

  “I can see it, Tom, where real love is involved … but picking someone up on the street! After all!”

  “No one thinks twice about a heterosexual man going to a prostitute … what’s the difference?”

  Jane was blushing, Tom noted. “Well, you know about these things and I don’t,” she said. Then she looked at Tom with a pained and embarrassed look. “I shall keep this to myself,” she said. “I shall not tell Muff. It would upset her terribly. She is so fond of Jay. Let’s keep this between you and me, Tom. You have been simply wonderful about it.”

  Neither of them ever mentioned that episode again. And the only time Tom saw Jay afterward was under wholly benign circumstances at a party given by Viola, Jane’s eldest sister, whom Adele knew because they had been on some committee to do with the Museum of Fine Arts that year. The party was held, of course, in the French château Viola and her husband had built on the North Shore, which was mentioned by the family, if at all, with something like chagrin. But Tom loved the luxury of it, the glittering chandeliers in the huge salon, the ubiquitous ser
vants who really should have been in livery, the champagne and the orchestra. This was in 1947, the first big party there since the war. “The flowers alone,” hundreds of white roses, often reflected in mirrors, “must have cost a fortune,” he whispered to Adele.

  “Oh good, there’s Jane,” she said, and pulled him over to where Jane was standing with Jay. He, in white tie and tails, gave Tom a curious look, then launched into talk.

  “Cousin Viola is doing us proud,” he said, every inch a Trueblood, Tom thought. “Isn’t she?”

  Tom thought Jane looked very distinguished in a dark-blue evening dress with a wide lace collar that showed off her long throat, and her eyes were shining with amusement and pleasure.

  “Splendiferous! All those roses! I must say, it’s quite a bash!”

  At that moment Viola herself joined the group and was introduced to Tom by Adele.

  “It is good of you to join us, Mr. Weston,” she said. “Adele has told me how hard you work, how terribly involved you are in making it a better world.” Perhaps there was a trace of irony?

  “We’re understaffed.…”

  “Come with me,” Viola said, taking his hand and pulling him away, “you must meet Professor Tucker—you know, of course, how involved he has been with MacArthur, bringing civil liberties to Japan?”

  “But,” Tom murmured, “Adele …”

  “I believe in separating married couples,” Viola said firmly, “otherwise everyone huddles together and nothing happens. Come along.… I’ll see that Adele isn’t lost; besides, every man in the room wants to dance with her!” She laughed then. “Don’t look so wary, I won’t bite.” With that she let Tom’s hand go.

  It was not wariness that explained Tom’s look, but amazement at the contrast between Viola and Jane. Amazing that they could be sisters! Viola was dressed in white, a long dress embroidered in spirals of white beads, with a large diamond pin at her throat. She had the Reid blue eyes, but hers were scintillating. What a sheen of money and power there was about her! Tom felt helpless against it. But Tucker, an old gentleman with white hair and an immensely warm and enthusiastic personality, was not at all what Tom had expected, and they got along famously. So for a half-hour Tom forgot all about Adele—after all, she was with Jane.

  But when the orchestra launched into a waltz he tried to extricate himself, which was not easy to do. Their group had now been joined by several other men and Tucker was being quizzed about MacArthur, who was not, Tom gathered, popular in this particular world.

  “He is, whatever you may think, very aware of what is civilized about Japan—the austerity and purity of Japanese art,” Tucker was saying. “Has it crossed your mind how strange it is, that perfect taste, the sobriety and elegance of it, and the violence under the surface? MacArthur is quite good about that.”

  “You might say the same about Germany,” someone ventured.

  “They can’t be compared,” Tucker was vehement. “Look at German architecture, so heavy and pretentious.”

  “I really must find my wife,” Tom murmured and made his escape.

  Adele, he found, was dancing with someone who turned out to be their host, Vyvian Porter. Where was Jane? There, he discovered, in a corner talking with a very old gentleman, and Tom went to the rescue. “May I have this dance?”

  “I’d love to,” Jane said. “I haven’t waltzed in ages.”

  If Tom felt shy at first because he was not quite tall enough as a partner, they were soon whirling away, and he forgot everything but the pleasure of it, for Jane was so light on her feet he was hardly aware of leading her.

  “Vyvian has made off with Adele,” she whispered as they floated past. “He was a great tennis player, you know.”

  Tom didn’t know. What he saw now was a rather stout man, still handsome, and tall enough to look down at Adele. “What does Vyvian do?”

  “Insurance. I’m told he’s a wizard.”

  “I suppose they travel a lot?”

  “Oh yes. I never know where Viola is. And then there are all those houses to open and close … Palm Beach, the Adirondacks, Pebble Beach. They are here only in the spring and fall.”

  “I can’t put you two together as sisters.”

  “Oh, she is very grand indeed,” Jane said, swallowing a smile in the way she did when she was not saying all she was thinking.

  “But so are you!” Tom protested.

  “Grand? Dearie, my sister thinks of me as an old-maid schoolteacher, an ex-old maid schoolteacher, at that. Once in a while she invites me to one of her parties.…”

  “And when you come she is immensely flattered,” said the ubiquitous Viola, who had overheard Jane’s last remark as the music stopped. “Jane is so busy I hardly ever see her.” And turning on Tom her glittering smile she added, “Jane has the most interesting friends—I caught a glimpse of her the other day at the Faculty Club with a handsome black man. Who was that, Jane?”

  “John Jackson … we’re on the board of the Cambridge Community Center together. He’s a professor of anthropology.”

  “You see!” Viola said triumphantly, “Jane moves in the most distinguished circles!”

  Jane gave Tom a wink as Jay broke in to ask Viola for the next dance. She accepted gracefully, though, Tom discerned, with little enthusiasm. He noticed that before long Jay was led to one of the tables for a glass of champagne, as he proved to be an awkward though voluble dancer.

  “How mysterious families are,” Tom said as he watched them go. “Who could believe you are sisters?”

  “But we all have the same frame,” Jane said. “We really are all variations on a theme, tall, blue-eyed,” and she laughed, “all with big mouths. Anyone would recognize a family resemblance I think, a race of herons!” Then, as though perhaps she had seemed earlier critical of this sister, Jane said, “I admire Viola, you know. She broke right out into this world about as far as one could get from that of our parents. It took courage.”

  “Of a sort.”

  “I suppose it is what Mr. Frost says, ‘We love the things we love for what they are.’”

  Tom felt they were suddenly back in Jane’s world and knew how precious it had become to him. “How do you interpret that exactly?”

  Jane hesitated. She did not think aloud easily, “Well, we love what is, not what might have been or even what ought to have been. In her way Viola is very fine.”

  “And what is her way, then?”

  “We just saw it—making an ugly duckling into a swan … carrying social grace to a high level. You saw her building me up just now!”

  “You value that.…”

  “I value something done supremely well.” Then she suddenly laughed. “Of course it made me feel quite ludicrous, Tom.” And then, “Let’s go and join Jay. He looks a little lost.”

  Tom finally did get to dance with Adele, just before Jane and Jay left at precisely eleven. And they soon followed and had great fun on the drive home talking the whole affair over.

  “I just hope Jay was sober enough to drive,” Adele said.

  “My guess is that Jane will drive. He’s apt to fall asleep, you know.”

  Jay and Jane were now pushing harder than ever on the Trueblood papers because Austin Richards was breathing down their necks. “I have to have the letters and journals to do with his first marriage,” he had told Jay. “I simply can’t wait. I have been stopped short.”

  Partly because the unfortunate episode with the police had drawn them together, partly because Jay was on his mettle now, the work was going well. It led them into serious discussions about the responsibility of any biographer.

  “I think we have to have a talk with Austin,” Jane said. “I think we have to have some idea about what he is after.”

  So on a fine June day they had agreed to meet with him in the front parlor downstairs. On Mondays the house was not open to visitors. A large marble bust of Trueblood and a painting of him surrounded by his daughters hung on the wall behind the sofa where Austin had chose
n to sit. It was rather a cold room, cold partly because nothing had been changed in it for years and years and the Victorian furniture and tables covered with heavy green cloths were really not beautiful. It had the atmosphere of a museum rather than a lived-in house and lacked the warmth and charm of Jay’s study with its Japanese fans on the ceiling. Jay and Jane sat on either side in stiff Victorian armchairs.

  “What am I after?” Austin said in answer to Jane’s question.

  “Jane means that we feel we have to have some idea of the trend of your thought about Benjamin Trueblood. We can’t expose his intimate papers to someone who, for instance, has the attitude of patronizing contempt that appears to be fashionable these days, at least in academic circles.”

  “I see your point,” Austin said.

  “What made you want to write this biography?” Jane asked, for this was after all, the point, she felt.

  “I am being interrogated, then,” Austin said, looking a little uncomfortable.

  At this Jay chuckled. “We are not Russian commissars, Austin.”

  There was a short pause, in which Austin glanced up at the marble bust of Trueblood, looking down at them from the end of the room. “I think I can best say what I have in mind by directing your attention to that marble portrait over there. I want to bring Benjamin Trueblood to life, restore him, resurrect him if you will. At present he is encased in pious legends, a serene old bore, if you will forgive me, an eminence like something on a tomb!”

  “Yes, I can see that,” Jane said gently. “George Washington had to be rescued from the cherry tree.”

  “Exactly. I want to come at the human being, the complex and in some ways mortally wounded man.”

  “Mortally wounded?” Jane asked, mystified.

  “Well, surely the suicide of his first wife must have been traumatic!”

  “I don’t see that exposing such a painful matter is relevant,” Jay broke in. He was flushed. “I mean, of course it has to be told, but why delve into it?”