The Magnificent Spinster

by May Sarton

  “Where are we going? Where will it end?” Jane asked.

  “God knows. At the moment Roy Cohn is in Europe visiting American libraries to make sure ‘subversive’ writers like Thoreau, Dos Passos, and Hemingway are removed from the shelves.”

  “How strange … meanwhile in Germany books banned under Hitler are being put back and avidly read!”

  In the small room full of life we could not quite get away from the shadow of events, from fear. But there was some comfort at least in talking about it. Whatever had happened in Germany, Jane, I felt, had come back more politically minded, more aware than she had ever been. It made a new and precious bond between us.

  But we never finished that conversation because the doorbell buzzed and we heard children’s voices outside calling, “Aunt Reedy! Aunt Reedy!” Then some loud, deep barks. Jane excused herself and we heard her voice in a moment, after she ran downstairs to welcome them.

  “Come in, you splendid people!”

  “Can we bring Jumbo?”

  Hearing this Sarah got up. “Jumbo is a huge Labrador. Maybe I’d better go down and take him for a little walk. That tail, you know—I’m afraid our teacups might not survive.” We couldn’t help laughing.

  “Sarah does look after Jane, doesn’t she?” I whispered.

  Then two little girls in sneakers and jeans and their stout, smiling mother erupted into the living room where we sat, and we were introduced all round.

  “Can we have a cookie?” Nancy, the younger of the two asked at once, seeing the plate still half full.

  “You really should wait to be offered one,” Portia, their mother, said gently.

  “Aunt Reedy always has cookies for us,” was the answer.

  “Maybe you could pass them around,” Jane said with a twinkle in her eye.

  While they munched they looked around like squirrels, Prudence picking up the world atlas from the table by the window, Nancy going over to the piano and playing a few notes. She whirled around the piano stool. “How can you ever fit so many people in?” she asked. “It’s such a tiny place … is this where you eat?” for now she was facing the round dining-room table.

  “It feels very cozy and settled-in.” Portia came to the rescue.

  “Yes.” Prudence set the atlas down, “Squirrel Nutkin would like it.”

  “Do you still go to bed with Squirrel Nutkin under your pillow?” Jane asked.

  “That was ages ago,” Prudence said, with scorn. “It’s The Hobbit now.”

  “I am behind the times, I see.”

  “I like it here,” Nancy announced. “I like it very much. Only, where are the Brownies?”

  “In my bedroom … if you go down the hall and turn left you’ll find them.” And off Nancy went.

  “I think we’d better rescue Sarah,” Portia said then.

  “Yes, let’s all go down and find the croquet set … do you really think you can use it?” Jane asked Portia.

  “We have a perfect place, a flat place behind the house.”

  “Good.” Jane turned to Ruth and me and added, “You stay here and I’ll be back in a trice.” Then, “Come along, kids. We’d better get going.”

  Nancy’s wish to take the Brownies down with them—she had them in her arms when she came back—was gently quelled. “They are very old,” Jane said. “They mightn’t like being bounced around.”

  “All right … as long as I know they’re there,” Nancy agreed. And then there was thunderous noise on the stairs, and loud calls from below. “Jumbo, where are you?”

  “You see how she is with children,” I said to Ruth. It was good to be left alone and to sink back into our chairs in peace. And then I added, “She took the Brownies to Vassar, you know. They go way back.”

  “That’s the good feeling here, isn’t it?” Ruth said, “that everything goes back and has been built-in somehow. She hasn’t left the child in her behind.”

  “Yet she keeps on growing.”

  So we talked for a while, then looked at our watches. It was really time for us to be leaving … but Jane, wholly given to the moment, had very little sense of time, as I remembered. It must have been a good half-hour before we heard the car door slam and “Good-bye, Aunt Reedy … Good-bye” floating up to where we sat.

  When Sarah and Jane came back, Jane was apologetic. “I’ve been away too long. But it was that Meissen tureen; we had to find a way to pack it in with Jumbo and the kids and to keep it safe. Portia seemed very happy to have it, I’m glad to say.”

  “We really must get going,” I said with a glance at Ruth.

  “Oh, don’t go yet! Stay a moment,” Sarah intervened then, offering to get the things set aside for us while we talked. “That will save time.”

  Jane smiled. “I’m afraid I spend time as though I were a millionaire throwing money away—but it’s lovely to have time now.” She stretched out her legs, sitting as she was on the low velvet sofa, and leaned back, looking up at the ceiling. “I just can’t believe Maurice is a grandfather! That’s the thing, isn’t it? As one gets older one simply cannot believe that anyone else is getting old! It was quite a shock the other day to see that Maurice has snow-white hair, very becoming in a judge, I must admit, but for me he will always be an elegant young man who took me to see Sarah Bernhardt in a carriage which had a wonderful leathery smell.…” Then she laughed. “And now two little girls come and see me, his grandchildren.”

  Ruth and I got up when Sarah came back carrying a pile of plates which she laid on the table for us to see.

  “Oh, I do hope you will love them, as I do,” Jane said, taking one in her hands and holding it up to take a last look. ‘They’re Bavarian … some have been broken and mended because Lucy found a man who is an expert. Will you mind that they are mended?”

  “They’re charming,” I said, and indeed they were, brilliant flowers painted on them in small garlands—light pink, green, full of gaiety.

  “Pink ice cream and cake will look splendid on them,” Jane said. “Sarah really didn’t want them to go, but when I told her you would be the recipients she melted.”

  “The trouble is,” Sarah admitted without shame, “I can’t bear for anything to go. But I know Muff would want you to have them, so I’m happy about it. I really am.”

  It amazed me to realize that with the hundreds of objects they must have listed and decided to give this friend or that, this niece or nephew or that, the English girls too, there was still a pang at letting each go. Sarah was clearly the one who minded most.

  We talked about that, Ruth and I, on the way home, I holding the plates carefully on my lap while she drove. “I didn’t think we’d ever get them wrapped, did you?” For each had to be carefully wrapped in newspaper after we had looked at them.

  “It is like Jane to make this breaking-up of the house into a kind of festival, isn’t it?” Ruth said.

  “She never lets herself get bogged down. There’s always new life to be met at the door.” Then I added, “I wonder why Sarah seems so much more attached to the things … after all, it’s not her family.”

  “What is her family like?”

  “I have no idea, really. I just make a guess that her mother, a remarkable, very inward person, Jane once told me, was not at all domestic. Maybe Sarah basked in the taken-for-granted order and ease of the big house, maybe she hungered for that kind of security. But then,” I added, “think of what she did to help Muff with the English children! Taking them off skiing, teaching them to sail!”

  “It will be interesting to see how it all comes out,” Ruth said.

  “You mean Jane and Sarah.”

  “Yes.”

  For the rest of the way home we were silent, the kind of intimate silence we always enjoyed when we were together, each thinking our own thoughts; but because we were together and had shared the same experience, our thoughts had a keener edge—at least so I always felt—than if we had been alone.

  The plates found their way onto shelves in our kitchen,
exemplars of a life different from ours, treasured as honored guests. Our taste went to plain, modern pottery, so it was always a bit strange to take the bright-flowered ones out on special occasions, strange and touching. A little touch of Jane Reid and Muff, to be used with respect.

  Sometimes a big transition in a life happens quite casually and suddenly. As I think over the big move to the apartment and the start of the companionship with Sarah there, I have come to see that it marked an immense transition for Jane. She, the most undomestic person imaginable, found herself the housekeeper. That was natural enough since Sarah was away at school all day. But it can’t have been altogether easy. For the first time in her life since college Jane had no job, but for that reason her life seemed fuller than ever. Old friends, former students, family, all felt she was there and would welcome a visit, so hardly a day passed without someone “dropping in” and whatever she had been doing had to be laid aside. I, who guarded my time and was simply not available to my students except by appointment, never ceased to be astonished by Jane’s capacity to drop everything and welcome me, as though it was the best possible thing in the world to be interrupted, to make tea, to sit down for an hour, open to anything and everything I might have on my mind.

  And of course all those threads and interests she had held in her hands still pulled her to the Community Center in Cambridge, to New York for the Refugee Association—extremely active as the Russians took over one country after another in the north, Estonia, Latvia; pulled her to Philadelphia to see Lucy and be sure all was well with Russell; pulled her to the island plans for the summer months, not only juggling the calendar to fit everyone in, but going up at least twice a year to arrange about the summer jobs, the opening of houses, the endless things to be attended to: boats, the vegetable garden, the bedding plants for Muff’s garden. Added to all this was Jane’s passionate interest in what was going on in the world.

  How she loved to tease me about my saying I was through with politics when it was clear that I was actually very much involved again. When it came to the Stevenson presidential candidacy, we were in total agreement. I remember Jane saying with her eyes very bright, “Isn’t it wonderful to be voting for someone for a change instead of against someone?” I had organized a kind of Stevenson brigade in the college and of course she was eager to hear about that. The only thing I remember disagreeing with her about during those years was that I was also active in trying to get a teachers’ union started. There Jane balked.

  “Oh Cam,” she said. “I feel that teaching is a vocation rather than a profession. It doesn’t seem right to me to go about getting fair salaries that way.”

  “We’ve tried every other way,” I reminded her. “There must be something wrong when the janitors and groundsmen are paid more than assistant professors … and they are because they have a union.”

  “But don’t you lose something in gaining that?”

  “What do we lose?”

  “Dignity. Pride.” She caught my quick denial. “Oh, I am probably wrong, but …”

  I had to smile. “But you are not going to change your mind, dear Jane.”

  “Must I?” she teased, and then more seriously, “I don’t think I can.”

  For her, I realized, teaching had never been a job. It had indeed been a vocation, and for her it was a little as though a priest or nun demanded a salary increase. But then Jane had not depended on her salary.

  “Noblesse oblige just doesn’t work in the everyday world, Jane.”

  “I can’t imagine any teacher at Warren feeling as you do.”

  “Warren is special. No one would teach there who wasn’t willing to work for next to nothing. God knows Mother did.”

  At this Jane blushed and I felt I had perhaps hit too near the mark, so I quickly siad, “Lots of profs at the college feel as you do. But I must say they are the ones with tenure and the best paid among us.”

  “For such a sedate person you do seem to be in the thick of it,” she laughed again. “I’m all for it”

  “Why? Why, since you don’t approve of what I’m in the thick of?”

  “Because you were standing outside, because you had been disillusioned. It wasn’t your real self, Cam.”

  And of course she was right. For all my willed detachment I was happier than I had been for years making war in a small college. When it came to the human situation Jane was nearly always right on target.

  Was it about then or much later? I am bad about remembering dates these days. But it must have been in the autumn of 1957 that a great dinner was planned to celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of the Warren School. I suppose I was asked to be the one to say a few words about Jane Reid as a teacher of history because history was my own field. At first I was terrified and wondered whether I should be able to find the words at all. I must have written a dozen drafts, and I was very nervous that night.

  But of course we were all lifted up by the occasion itself. It was held in a Cambridge hotel, a rather formal place for the Warren gang. But being formal, the men in black tie and the women in long dresses, added to the sense of importance, even solemnity, in spite of all the laughter. So many people of all ages rushing to shake hands and exclaim and all the teachers surrounded by men and women they had known as children. “Not Bob!” I heard Miss Everett, our excitable math teacher, exclaim as she recognized a tall, bearded man. “I never thought I’d see Bob Bernstein in a beard!”

  Jane looked beautiful in a soft green dress, surrounded by former students, including Faith, so I joined them. It seemed years since I had seen Faith and of course we shouted with joy and dashed off into a corner to catch up with all that had been happening, for a few moments speaking in our secret language just for the fun of it.

  “Look,” Faith said, “isn’t that Mr. O’Neil, the janitor?”

  “It must be. He looks just the same but he must be a hundred years old!”

  Of course we had to go over and speak to him. “Ah,” he said, beaming, “it’s Cam! Faith!”

  “Do you remember us?” Faith asked. “That’s amazing!”

  He chuckled. “Of course I remember you.… Cam was always in trouble, you know, sent out of the room by Miss Everett.”

  “And you used to give me an apple. You didn’t take my being sent out seriously, so I felt better.”

  “Did you now? I guess I was a subversive. But I like kids with spirit,” he added.

  We had to break off, for there was Frances Thompson arriving to a great brouhaha of people wanting to greet her, and Faith and I happily among them. She was accompanied by Tom Weston, so we were soon talking about those days in the sixth and seventh grades, Frances apparently delighted to be for a moment with us who had been at the school when she was new at the job. Tom, I realized suddenly, was now head of the board of trustees.

  I had always liked Tom. We got to be friends because both our parents were getting a divorce. It had made a rather special bond. Now he introduced us to his wife, Adele, with whom he left us rather abruptly as he was to escort Frances to the head table.

  “What seems so extraordinary,” Faith was saying to Adele, “is that we have all grown so old and all these teachers, and even Mr. O’Neil, the janitor, all look exactly the same! I can’t figure it out.”

  “I know,” Adele said—she seemed to be an awfully nice woman. “My children are just about the age you were, I think, when Tom was in your class.”

  “Do they still think it’s the best school in the world, as we did?”

  “Of course,” and she laughed. “I feel quite deprived because I was not a Warren child.”

  And finally, after an hour of talk and drinks, we found ourselves at round tables, where whoever did the logistics had made masterly lists, so contemporaries found themselves together with one of their old teachers. I was disappointed not to be at Jane’s table, but we had quietly humorous Miss Ford with her bouffant reddish hair, the best science teacher I can imagine. And Faith was by my side. By then I was feeling rather
nervous and surreptitiously looked over my notes.

  I had been told that I would follow Tom who was to speak about Miss Ford. Of course he was quite a public person now and had all the ease and grace achieved by many an after-dinner speech. My heart sank. It was a long wait, but at last my turn came. From the podium I looked around to find Jane and there she was, giving me a most uncharacteristic wink, for she must have guessed that she would be my subject. It was a great help.

  So I started off: “I come to praise Jane Reid. How rare and dear an opportunity it is to praise a great teacher after one has grown up, for isn’t it true that with each decade we become more, not less, aware of what we learned between the ages of six and fourteen or fifteen and how incredibly lucky we were to have had teachers like Jane Reid! History happens in small rooms. It is thirty-five years since I sat in Jane Reid’s seventh grade, but the happening goes on and on. How fresh, joyful, and deeply moving were the hours we spent with her. As I look back I get the sense that every day opened to some grand adventure, for we did not so much study history as become history ourselves. We were Bernard de Clairvaux; we were that centurion walking Hadrian’s wall and dreaming of Rome; we were the early settlers of the eastern seaboard driven by the voice ‘as bad as conscience’ to climb over the Appalachian ranges to find ‘something lost behind the ranges, lost and waiting for you—go.’

  “Like them, we did not ever move very fast. We experienced the slowness, the humanness, the struggle very keenly. So if I were to name the two qualities which could sum up Jane Reid’s genius, they would be first, the sense of adventure, and secondly, the insistence that truth is hard-won. How carefully she taught us to read, to speak, to savor language—and life itself.

  “Alas, a seventh grade report card reminds me that ‘Cam has very interesting things to say, but she must give others a chance to talk too.’”

  The laughter and applause came, such a fulfilling wonderful sound to celebrate Jane! I didn’t dare look at her, but Frances caught my hand on my way back to the table and pressed it hard. “Well done, Cam!” And she whispered, “Richly deserved.”