The Magnificent Spinster

by May Sarton

  At this I laughed aloud. “And so I have become a great goose, Muff!”

  “A faithful goose, Cam,” she amended, smiling.

  “I used to think of her as a princess then, and I expect I still do.” It came to me that Jane must have missed that glow that surrounded her when I was a child at the school. Would she perhaps recapture it in Germany? Was she in search of a role that would give her back that sense of herself? “I just hope she won’t be disappointed. It seems such a risk!”

  “Jane couldn’t live without risk.”

  “It seems awfully Christian, too—love your enemy and all that.”

  “She doesn’t analyze herself, Cam, you know that as well as I do. Jane does what she wants to do.”

  And there the conversation ended. It gave me a lot to think about.

  Jane knew that when she left for Germany she would not see Mother again, and that made her almost daily visits have an intensity I sometimes felt may have been too much for Mother, who made a great effort while Jane was there at her side to be herself again but was often exhausted after she left.

  “But it’s worth it, Cam,” she whispered to me when I suggested that we might ask Jane to limit her visits. “It’s the essence now—I’m not turning my back yet on life.”

  Jane’s relation to my mother was rather different from any other that I knew about in her life. Jane was the rock and haven for so many friends of all ages, but in this case my mother had often been the rock and haven for Jane, especially during the hard time at the Warren School. So I sensed that Jane was determined to make these last times memorable in any way she could. Once when I tiptoed in she was reciting “I have been one acquainted with the night.” Another time she had put on a Mozart flute concerto and they were listening to it in silence. More than once I saw the tears in Jane’s eyes as I met her on the stairs.

  Perhaps, in the end, it was a relief for Mother, too, when we all knew this would be the final farewell.

  I did see Jane myself once more before she took off, saw her at Muff’s house up in her bedroom, where she was packing. It was like her to be able to sit down and have a real talk in the midst of suitcases and piles of clothes, to set all that aside for a half-hour.

  We talked about death and dying and Jane told me a little about Marian and how hard it had been for her to accept that death, to accept that Marian must die so young, at just forty-six. “I found it unbearable,” Jane said, “because she was such a genius at living. Why, of all people, should she go, she who could use every moment to its fullest?”

  I had no answer for that.

  “People vanish,” she murmured, “and that’s why I gathered Marian’s letters together and published them … and it was a way, I suppose, in that year after her death, of still being with her, of keeping her alive.”

  “And perhaps a hundred years from now, they will be discovered.”

  “Perhaps.”

  I suspected that Jane must have suffered because none of Marian’s letters to her had shown the intimacy and the kind of passionate ecstasy of appreciation she had been able to give to other friends. I myself had been astonished that the scholarly Marian Chase had been capable of such intensity of feeling. They had explained to me why Jane had loved her so deeply—and had been so hurt by Marian’s aloof bearing where she herself was concerned.

  “Why am I talking about this, Cam?” she asked, giving me a deep look of pain and astonishment.

  “Death is with us today.”

  “Yes.” She paused to think. “Perhaps I have been moved to talk about Marian and her death because somehow I do not have that agonizing sense of the incomplete where your mother is concerned, of a promise unfulfilled. Your mother has achieved a remarkably complete life—that is not quite right,” she amended. “But Eleanor is ready to go … because in some strange way she has come to fruition. Oh, how I have felt that these last weeks!”

  “Dear Jane,” I managed to utter, “she shines when you are there, but it’s a hard death just the same. Awfully hard.” I knew if I tried to say more I would dissolve in tears.

  “I wish I didn’t have to leave you, leave you carrying the weight.” She had, until now, not been thinking about me, I realized and I saw that as a compliment.

  “I just feel totally inadequate,” I said. “The loneliness … dying is such a lonely business.”

  “What matters is your being there, Cam.”

  “But I can’t sit beside her as you did—I’m afraid I’ll begin to cry and then I could never stop.”

  “Cam, dear,” Jane said gently, “we do what we can. I think your mother understands. I’m sure she does.”

  But this time I was not comforted.

  I did not see Jane again, but for those last weeks she managed to write often from Germany and it was a tremendous help for me to be able to tell her what was happening almost day by day. That she was able to keep closely in touch and to infuse courage from so far away is amazing.

  Mother refused to see my father because I think she knew he didn’t want to come. He did come through with some help when I had to get a night nurse in the last two weeks. But when I tried to tell him about symptoms and how awful it was for me to watch her wasting away, he simply would not or could not listen. So, added to what I was suffering as I watched my mother die was rage, a rage that could not be healed. After Mother’s death I saw my father very rarely. So in a way I was losing both parents.

  Without Ruth I do not know what I would have done. She came on weekends, did all kinds of practical things like bringing splits of champagne, which, near the end, was almost the only thing Mother could swallow. But more importantly, Ruth could sit with my mother because she was not torn apart and could control both compassion and grief.

  At last, in November, death, which had become a friend, death we longed for as deliverance, came. Mother died in her sleep a few hours after I had kissed her good night.

  During the Christmas holidays Ruth helped me close the house and empty it. And when that was done, and the new term started, I went gladly back to teaching.

  Much as I had loved my mother, I had not been fully aware of what she had meant to innumerable people who took the trouble to write to me. Teachers and students, too, from the Warren School, fellow artists, friends who went back to her college days had felt the imprint of a remarkable human being. Was that what Jane meant when she told me she felt Mother had led a fulfilled life? The statement had startled me at the time because I knew too well how deprived my mother had been in her marriage, how much love and imagination had not been used or wilfully ignored by my father. So the letters brought me a kind of peace, for they helped me to see that whatever she had not experienced as fulfillment in the usual sense of the word, she had created herself, through her own gifts as painter and teacher, and by touching so many lives. In the academic world we are apt to judge people by achievement, by whether their Ph.D. dissertation was worthy of publication, by honorary doctorates, by position in the world. None of that applied to my mother, or mattered to her. She was a lavish spender of the life in her, never counting the cost.

  Ruth and I talked a lot about it that winter and spring, and of the wonderful way she had welcomed Ruth into the family when we decided to live together. “She has left us a trust fund,” I said once, laughing about it as I spoke, and I meant a fund of personal integrity which we must draw on as long as we lived.

  At this point in my tale I bogged down in a state of dismay and discouragement. How was I ever to deal with the German experience, so important in Jane’s life, when I knew next to nothing about it? I had a few letters but they became less frequent after Mother’s death. And once more I almost gave up.

  Then one spring day when I had wandered down to the Square with the idea of lunching there alone and reading The New York Times, I ran into Sarah, who knew everything about Jane in her last years, for had they lived together in the barn after Muff’s death and the sale of the big house.

  “Oh Sarah!” I said wi
th such pleasure in my voice and face that she looked a little startled, “you are God-sent!”

  At this Sarah laughed. “What is on your mind, Cam?”

  “Come and have lunch with me and I’ll tell you.”

  Sarah was one of those ageless women who had not changed in any way that I could see for the last twenty years. And although she had lived first in the shadow of Martha and then after Muff’s death in the shadow of Jane, she was very much her own person. I had always been at ease with her and when I first conceived the idea of this book tried to get in touch with her, but after Jane’s death she had vanished, was traveling in England, I heard. So it was fortuitous indeed to run into her that crucial day when we sat in a booth in the restaurant where I had sat so often with Jane.

  It was not easy to broach my subject. What if Sarah did not approve? What if she questioned my ability as I did so often myself? Sarah had known me as an historian, not a novelist. At seventy I was daring something even a young person might hesitate to undertake. But I was soon launched and very much relieved by Sarah’s immediate interest and assent.

  “This is very good news,” she said, smiling across at me. She did far more than approve; she offered to let me read Jane’s letters to Lucy over all the years of their friendship, and including of course the voluminous correspondence during the years in Germany. I could hardly believe this stroke of luck. “You may keep them until the book is finished, Cam.”

  “If it ever is,” I murmured.

  “Of course it will be!” Then she startled me by quoting Shakespeare, a passage I had often heard in Jane’s voice, as it had been a favorite of hers,

  “I see you stand like greyhounds in the slips…

  straining upon the start. Follow your spirit!”

  “I’m a pretty old greyhound, Sarah, and it’s Jane’s spirit I have to try to follow.”

  “Yes,” she said thoughtfully, “but any work of art has to do with both the interpreter and her subject, surely? You can’t keep yourself out of it, can you?”

  I had not thought of it like that. I had seen myself simply as an observer, a recorder, but I saw at once that she had hit the nail on the head.

  “You’re right, of course. Oh dear, you should be doing it yourself.”

  “I couldn’t possibly,” she said firmly. “I wouldn’t have the courage.”

  “Oh, it’s not courage, you know—some kind of wild impulse seized on me after the funeral. I couldn’t bear to think that soon no one will remember Jane Reid. And then, it has given me something to work at. Without Ruth life has been too empty for words.”

  Sarah had always been a listener and she listened then with the greatest sympathy as I told her something of my life alone since Ruth’s death. Finally we agreed that she would bring the letters over the next morning.

  Reading the letters from Germany was enthralling, for it became clear at once that Jane used Lucy as a sounding board, a way of finding out what was happening to her. And Lucy, so far away in Philadelphia, shared in it all in an extraordinary way, often with a small, practical response. When the first letters were penciled because Jane’s trunk had not arrived, a pen flies over by magic in the next post!

  After reading for a week and thinking about how to use the letters I came to the conclusion that the only valid way was to quote Jane directly, let her in this instance tell her own tale.

  But there is something, I felt when I finished reading, that the letters do not say in so many words and that concerns the relationship itself. Jane was in the position of a pupil with both Frances Thompson (after all, she had been her student at Vassar) and in a different way with the elusive and scholarly Marian. For Lucy, Jane was the star, and one might dare to paraphrase the Twenty-third Psalm to suggest what Jane must have known, “Goodness and Lucy will follow me all the days of my life.” With Lucy, Jane flowered.

  Thirty-two years earlier, when Jane and Lucy had landed in France, they were together and could laugh about all the impossible things they had to face, but now, in August of 1950, Jane was alone and plunged into the German language, an ocean where she found it difficult to keep her head above water. She had to travel here and there to get the necessary permit that would take her from the American zone to Bremen, in the English zone, but after forty-eight hours, she was at last on a comfortable military train, flying through the night toward the destination she had imagined for so many months—the much-bombed city of Bremen, on the North Sea.

  And there, at 7:30 A.M., she took a taxi to the Hotel Bremen, where the Unitarian Service Committee was billeted, to be met by Joan Plummer, head of the USC in Europe, and launched immediately into a day of meeting people and getting an idea of the city itself. For Jane it was a day of surprises. She had been prepared for the ruins, the powdery smell of smashed brick and dust, the desolation, but she was not prepared for the atmosphere of hope and vitality she sensed all around them. And in those first days of getting her bearings it was astounding to meet such friendliness from the German people. Remembering the resentment the French had felt under the German occupation, she had half expected that same sullen silence or obsequiousness toward Americans, but there was none. Everyone to whom they spoke smiled in the friendliest way. And the city felt busy and alive … people whizzing past on their bikes, talking and laughing.

  The hotel was comfortable; Lucy’s fears that Jane would not be well-nourished proved entirely false. Here they were billeted in an old, rich part of the city which had not been as badly bombed as the dock area. In its tree-lined streets, life seemed almost normal again.

  But those first two days were gone almost too quickly, and then she, Joan, and Erika Housman, the moving spirit of the Unitarian Service Committee, were en route to Lundersen for Jane’s first experience of the Arbeiter Wohlfahrt seminars.

  There, in an old castle on a hill above the town looking out over fields and farms, thirty social workers had gathered for the seminar and Jane was able to watch Frances Thompson at work and the kind of response she elicited, and to write Lucy long, enthusiastic letters about what she saw happening. In some ways it was very much like a faculty meeting at the Warren School. Here again Jane was aware of how Frances operated, never didactic, rather challenging the German women to express themselves and their own views, so that discussion was always intense after she had spoken. Luckily there were several people who could translate for Jane when, especially at the end of a long morning, she found herself at sea.

  Her letters to Lucy recounted it all vividly, and especially in a few vignettes, such as this, after Frances had given a talk on basic human needs:

  After this talk the discussion was fascinating, especially an example one of the women social workers described, which happened in a home for disturbed children. One night a bunch of boys twelve to fourteen years old stole food and blankets and ran away and lived in the woods until their food was gone. Then they had to go back to the home, where the head was in doubt as to how to treat the matter.

  The music teacher asked to be allowed to handle it himself. His solution was to write an opera on running away and to make it known that he needed some boys with inside knowledge. So he got the boys acting out the whole thing, the whispering over the plan, the stealing of food and of blankets, the creeping out in the night, and the adventure of camping in the woods. He himself wrote the music. The children performed it many times, each time differently, and somehow the antisocial act was transformed into a work of art and brought success and satisfaction instead of guilt and shame.

  At times like this, when her attention was fully engaged, it was terribly frustrating for Jane that she could not speak herself, but at least she found that her understanding grew with every session and her admiration for what the social workers achieved, often in isolated homes and very much alone. She writes:

  One day there was a lively discussion about their own needs, how desperately they wanted an opportunity to talk over personal problems and to be able to lead some sort of personal life … and
how hard that was when the staff was so small and a day off extremely rare. No wonder they all agreed that there should be someone to whom each individual could talk and so get relief, encouragement, and perspective, especially the head, who must manage both the children and the staff and often deal as well with opposition from the outside world.

  In the evening, after supper, in long talks between Joan, Frances, and Erika, Jane could participate because they spoke English. What a relief! The idea of the neighborhood house was beginning to be hammered out, and the complicated means to get it going. It would have to be supported by the Unitarian Service Committee, HICOG (American HQ), the Arbeiter Wohlfahrt, and the city of Bremen, a tall order, since all these organizations had to be persuaded of the need for a neighborhood house in the first place and then persuaded to help fund it. Now at last Jane began to see where she would fit in and be working, assisted by a German social worker, who would eventually take over.

  She writes to Lucy:

  Bremen is a Hanse city with its own senate and representative to Bonn. That representative is a most lovely man, Herr Uhland. He and his wife are devoted to Erika and very fond of Joan and Frances, and they have put time and labor into helping get the neighborhood house started. We are going there tonight to meet with a group of social workers whose support is needed, and the problem will be to try to get them to understand the neighborhood house purpose as we see it. They are accustomed to day care centers with someone in charge who makes a program and puts it through. For that you can calculate pretty clearly in advance the space needed. Our thinking is a house that will start small and grow as the neighborhood is built up and be flexible enough to meet the needs of the people around it—whether for small-child care, or youth groups, or a parent center, or all three. This is something to which they are not accustomed. Much in the plan has to be left open and that seems to them rather vague as if we didn’t know our own minds. All this communicating and interpretation would be impossible without Erika.

  Erika had been born in Germany, although she was an American citizen and had been a social worker in New York. She more than anyone in the group had the ability to make bridges, partly because she was at ease in the language and partly because she had a genius for human relations and the ability to handle even fierce disagreements with tact. Jane’s letters are full of her praises.