The Magnificent Spinster

by May Sarton

  But as the train swung along by the shore, she drank in the scene, and felt the mounting excitement of New York City and her wonderfully beautiful and interesting nieces, Angela and Ruth, who would be meeting the train and would sweep her off to dinner and the theater, or a concert. It was restful to have these hours of just sitting and thinking or reading. At noon she ate her sandwich, drank her milk, and had a little nap, and suddenly she found they were stopping at 125th Street and she had better get herself together. What fun!

  And there they were, the dear things, running down the platform to meet her, Angela in a red coat and plaid skirt and Ruth in an old trench coat, her fair hair flying.

  “Is that all the luggage you have?” Angela said, taking her bag from her.

  “Well, I’m only away for three nights,” Jane said, laughing. “I suppose you expected more!”

  “Let me take the briefcase,” Ruth said.

  And before she knew it Jane was being whisked off in a taxi while they talked and laughed as always. Neither of the girls looked like their mother, but they sounded like her and Jane drank their voices in like an elixir, Angela so buoyant and full of her new job with the New York Symphony, and Ruth quiet and humorous. They were enjoying New York, clearly. They who had seemed before the war permanent exiles rooted in Italy, in love with Florence … and perhaps one of them, Ruth, in love with someone there whom she could not marry.

  “You’re looking so well, Aunt Reedy,” Ruth said when they had settled down in her apartment in the village, on East Tenth Street.

  “She looks ten years younger,” Angela agreed. “It’s not teaching, isn’t it?”

  “I bet it’s great to be free,” Ruth said. “So what about a glass of champagne before we go out to dinner? It’s an occasion, after all.”

  Jane laughed, “You know me … I can’t take more than a sip. So is it worth opening a bottle?”

  “Of course it’s worth it—and besides, it’s only a half bottle. There won’t be more than a sip.”

  Jane was greatly amused always by the extravagance these two had been brought up to … that was their father’s legacy.

  There was so much to talk about that the time flew and they had finally to run to the restaurant just around the corner, because they were going uptown afterward to see Katharine Cornell in Chekhov’s The Three Sisters.

  “Let me order, Aunt Reedy.…” Ruth said.

  “That will prevent her from ordering the least expensive thing on the menu,” Angela agreed at once.

  “When it comes to food, Aunt Reedy, you are a little child,” Ruth said quite tenderly, “so I’m going to order Chateaubriand with braised endive, carrot soup first maybe, and those wonderful chocolate meringues for dessert … is that all right?”

  “Splendid! But isn’t it awfully expensive?”

  “Aunt Reedy, I’m making a good salary these days … not to worry.”

  Soon they dived into talk, about Russell first of all.

  “He seems quite happy in that school,” Ruth said. “It was a good decision, after all.”

  “Lucy has been wonderful about going out to see him,” Jane assented, “and she feels it is the right place. It’s not easy because he is so big now and looks so grown-up.” They all knew that Russell would never be more than four years old inside, and sometimes had violent rages. That was all very well when he was six or seven, but now that he was twenty-five he could hurt someone.

  “He’s a handsome young man,” Ruth said. And no one said what they were all three thinking, that it was a cruel stroke of fate that Edith had died, for while she lived Russell could be taken care of on the ranch, and even do small tasks like feeding the dogs.

  These thoughts were blown away by the arrival of the Chateaubriand.

  “Mmmmm—what a feast!” Jane said after tasting a first mouthful.

  “I bet you don’t eat properly out there in Sudbury,” Ruth said, “Do you really cook for yourself now?”

  “Well,” Jane said, “I’ve learned to cook scrambled eggs in a double boiler … it’s great.”

  At this the two girls exchanged a look and burst into laughter. “I suppose you have that every night?” Angela teased.

  “Not every night,” Jane said. “I have hamburger quite often, and all those frozen vegetables are so easy.”

  “You are going to fade away,” Ruth said.

  “Not likely,” Jane answered. “And that reminds me of Jacob.…” Jacob was the other brother, just graduating from Yale. As he was the youngest of the four, their mother’s death had been hardest on him.

  “Why does it remind you of Jacob?”

  Jane felt a little shy suddenly. “Oh, because when he comes to Sudbury he always brings steaks and all sorts of extravagant things because I know he fears starvation!”

  “Jacob looks out for himself,” Angela said, smiling without malice. “When he comes to see us on weekends he orders the most expensive thing on the menu without batting an eye.”

  “I bet he does.…” The laughter was indulgent. Jane asked, “What is he planning for the future? Have you any idea?”

  “He wants to start a publishing house … that’s his last idea.”

  Jane really could not get used to everyone growing up, and she could not imagine dear Jacob, so vague and dreamy, being a publisher. “How would he finance such a project? He seems awfully young for such responsibility.”

  “He’s a slow learner,” Ruth said, “that’s for sure. He just gets through by the skin of his teeth.”

  “And with the help of a very good tutor,” Angela said. “He’s raised money, though. I really think he can be persuasive.”

  “But that’s starting at the top.…” Jane felt suddenly irritated and didn’t conceal that. “Shouldn’t he go through some sort of apprenticeship first?”

  “He says the Yale Press will take him as an editorial assistant.”

  “Oh well, then, he’s all set,” Jane conceded. Still, it bothered her. What would Edith have thought about this? All these children thought in large terms. The world had always been their oyster, and maybe, she thought being brought up in Texas had something to do with this, brought up on the ranch, a small kingdom in itself. Their genial father too had had large dreams, and the fact that the ranch never made money, only cost money, did not affect him at all. “What troubles me a little,” she said out of these thoughts, “is that Jacob seems to have rather grandiose ideas as to what life is all about.”

  “We were not brought up in the Puritan tradition, that’s for sure,” Ruth said.

  “Was I, do you think?” Jane said quite humbly.

  “Well,” Angela exchanged a look with her sister, “in a way I suppose you were. You’re really quite rich, you know.”

  “What has that go to do with it?”

  “Yet you never spend money on yourself.”

  At this Jane laughed, it seemed so preposterous a view. “Don’t I? After all, I built the house in Sudbury and that was not a small expense, and I did it for myself. Why, it seems to me I’m quite extravagant.… I go to Europe. And then the island …” But this was an easy way for Jane to change the subject, as she was eager to do. “By the way, are you planning on the island this summer? Muff will need to know fairly soon.”

  “I would like to come,” Ruth said at once,” and maybe bring a few friends.” Their mother’s house had not been used much for years and so had been given to various friends.

  “Splendid! Muff will be so happy to hear that. She pines when the family can’t come. She so wants it to be a place of family times … as it used to be when Mamma and Pappa were alive.”

  “She’s quite feudal about it, isn’t she?” Ruth said.

  “Well, it’s an enormous job for her, organizing it all, and without Sarah she could never do it. Especially now that the English children are grown up … their family comes over, you know. I think Muff would welcome some help.”

  “Tell her I’ll come this summer,” Ruth said, looking at he
r watch. “Hey, we’d better get going!”

  “Just one more mouthful of heavenly dessert,” Jane said.

  “I’ll settle up,” Ruth said. “Angela, see if you can get a cab.”

  Jane basked in all this expert organizing by her nieces. She was rarely not “in charge” these days and it was a positive pleasure to have everything done for her in such an efficient and loving way. How precious family is, she was thinking! But in the cab, because she was feeling happy and at ease, she finally answered Angela’s question about teaching. “You think I’m enjoying my freedom, you dears, but I feel quite at a loss about my life these days.”

  “Oh Jane,” Angela said passionately, resorting to “Jane” instead of “Aunt Reedy.” “You’ve earned a rest.”

  “And to have some fun,” Ruth said. “You used to look so worn out.”

  “Did I?” Jane didn’t want to be reminded of that. “But I’m not sixty even. I’m not ready to retire!” And she laid a hand on Ruth’s knee in an unusual gesture of intimacy for her. “What I want is to go to Germany with Frances Thompson and work there with the Unitarian Service Committee.”

  “Good heavens, Jane. To Germany?”

  “Why not Germany? We have to help rebuild what was destroyed. The trouble is whether they’ll have me, whether I can be of use.”

  “Do you know the language?” Ruth asked.

  “I’ll learn it.”

  “What courage you have!” Angela said. “I can’t imagine wanting to go to Germany now … tike going into hell.”

  “Somehow we have to remake the world.… Of course I would never have the courage to do it alone, but Frances has gone over and comes back glowing about the seminars the Unitarian Service Committee has been organizing. There are some extraordinary German women involved … women who have been buried alive, she says, and can now come out and be heard.”

  “It sounds pretty Utopian to me,” Ruth said. But there could be no argument, as they had arrived at the theater, and solemn as Jane had been a moment before, she was now swept into eager excitement. A theater … since childhood she had been in love with the theater—since Cyrano, and long before. And she never entered a theater without remembering the magic occasions when Maurice had picked her up and taken her off in a cab to Boston to see a play. If going to Germany had seemed to be life as she longed for it to be for herself a moment before, life was now sitting in the dark, waiting for the curtain to rise, with a dear niece sitting on each side of her.

  “Isn’t it thrilling?” she whispered.

  Part IV

  Waging Peace

  It was spring before Jane’s dream of going to Germany with the Unitarian Service Committee began to seem a real possibility, but by then her sister Alix was seriously ill. Jane stayed at Muff’s, went to the hospital every day, and studied German with a tutor three times a week.

  At that time I had lunch with her more than once. I sensed that she felt rather at a loss, suffering from self-doubt about Germany, and perhaps about her life in general. The roots that had been so deeply planted in the Warren School were still dangling.

  “They are awfully high-powered people,” she told me, “the group Frances is working with.”

  “What’s wrong with that?”

  “Nothing,” she smiled across at me, “only I wonder whether I should go if I am asked—and I haven’t been asked yet,” she added.

  “Alix?” I ventured.

  “Oh, I won’t leave her … but the talk is for August, and …” She didn’t finish the sentence, but I gathered that Alix would probably not live that long. “Frances is over there now for one of the seminars. When she comes back, she told me, she’ll have a better idea of what is hatching and where I might be fitted in.”

  It seemed preposterous that Jane should be so humble about this, and I didn’t like it. After all, she was who she was and they had better remember that.

  “What is wrong with Alix?” I asked.

  “She had pneumonia and a spot on the lung doesn’t heal,” Jane said. “But that’s not it,” she added, giving me a quick glance as though deciding what she could say. “She has lost the will to live. Even the doctors have come to that conclusion.” Jane’s eyes had filled with tears. “I feel so helpless, Cam. I go and sit with her but it is as though she wasn’t there, as though she had closed herself off. She and I were the little ones, you know, set apart because we were a few years younger than our sisters. So Alix and I had a life of our own within the family. It seems so strange, so hard, not to be in touch with her now … to watch her moving so far away.”

  “She took Fredson’s death very hard, you told me.”

  “Yes … her children are married, and Alix is first of all a family person like Muff. I think when Fredson died she felt abandoned, though she never talks about it. She is such a reserved person, Cam. I feel I have failed her, that I should have been more aware.” Then she gave a quick sigh and looked up at me. “That’s enough about miseries, isn’t it?”

  She wanted to hear all about Ruth and how my work was going while she ate chocolate mousse, small spoonful by spoonful “to make it last longer.”

  Even when what we talked about was depressing, I could not be with Jane for an hour without feeling more alive, in some indefinable way understood and blest.

  But we were not through with the miseries that day, because over coffee Jane surprised me by expressing anxiety about my mother. “Please try to get her to see a doctor, Cam. I can’t make any headway there.”

  It was my turn to feel abashed, as I had been unaware that anything was wrong. These days Mother and I were each busy—in the-summer holidays she always got back to painting—and we did not see each other often.

  Jane and I had talked for over an hour and the restaurant was emptying. It was time to go, especially as I now needed to drop in at my mother’s before going home.

  “We’ve just about covered everything, Cam, haven’t we?” Jane slipped the check into her purse.

  “Now see here, I invited you to lunch,” I protested.

  “You’ve invited me to lunch often enough,” she said firmly.

  “Very well. But next time, Miss Reid, you won’t get away with this!”

  Alix died in a nursing home in June. I find it hard to write about this major event in Jane’s life because I hardly knew her sister, did not go to the funeral, and was preoccupied by my mother’s illness, which had by then been diagnosed as a rare form of cancer, and in those days before chemotherapy there was little that could be done. I moved back to Cambridge to be with her and arranged for a leave of absence for the autumn term, should she still be alive by then, but the doctors had been frank with me and suggested she had at most six months of life ahead, if what she was suffering could be called life.

  It seemed suddenly as if everything were going to pieces around me … is one ever prepared for the death of one’s parents? I certainly was taken by surprise, and when I heard that Jane would leave for Germany in August I must say I felt cross. How could she just walk out on everything at home, go to Germany, that hell? What made her so determined to do it? In my heart of hearts, of course, I did know why—she needed a big job to do. One day on an impulse I dropped in on Muff to talk things over.

  “Well, Cam!” she said. She was sitting by the fire sewing the hem on an evening dress for one of the English girls, and there was something comforting about her being there as she nearly always was, comforting to walk into that house where nothing changed, except that Mary, the maid, had grown very old, and Snooker did not come downstairs anymore. She must have been well over ninety. But Muff looked exactly the same. Because she had never seemed young, she now did not seem old. “A cup of tea?” she asked at once. “Mary would be happy to get it for you.”

  “Don’t bother. I can only stay a moment.”

  “Sit down then and tell me the news,” she said gently.

  “Mother’s dying, you know,” I blurted out.

  “Yes, Jane told me. It must be
awfully hard for you, Cam. When my mother died I felt the world had come to an end,” she smiled her wry smile, “but it hadn’t.”

  “And Jane is off to Germany!” I guess there was a shade of anger in my voice, for Muff came at once to her sister’s defense.

  “It will be good for her, however strange it may seem to us.” So, she was admitting that it did seem strange.

  “Germany of all places!”

  “But that’s it, that’s the point, isn’t it?” Muff said, laying down her sewing. “Jane is such an idealist … you don’t remember World War I and how little we did then to help rebuild a defeated people. Jane feels we must do better this time.”

  “And so prevent another Hitler, I suppose?”

  “She sees a great need.…” Muff was silent for a moment before she added, “And then she has always been enormously influenced by Frances Thompson. She wants, I think, to be part of this new endeavor, part of what Frances sees as of primary importance.”

  “Mother feels that Frances treated Jane badly about resigning.”

  “Some people may have thought so,” Muff said, “but rather characteristically Jane blames only herself.”

  “She’s such a great person,” I murmured.

  “I’m glad someone is aware of that!” Muff said in, for her, quite a vehement tone of voice, then picked up her sewing again. “She spends herself so lavishly—is that greatness? I wonder whether I would use that word about Jane myself.” And this retreat from any tendency toward exaggeration was typical.

  “I would,” I said firmly.

  Muff smiled. “You were in the seventh grade once at a time when you were perhaps like one of those goslings who gets an imprint—Konrad Lorenz has written about it, as you no doubt remember—and then follows whomever takes care of it.”