The Magnificent Spinster

by May Sarton

  For a few hours we were free of phone calls. And while we drank our soup, under Jane’s gentle probing I told the whole story of the morning. It all poured out, every detail of it, as though I had made a record while it was happening and now must play it over and over.

  “I should have made her see a doctor. I could have prevented this … I could have,” I said drily. For now guilt had simply occluded grief. “It’s my fault.”

  “I don’t think that is quite true, Cam. Ruth made that decision herself, and all you could do you did, which was to beg her to see a doctor. We can’t force people to do what seems right, can we?” Then she looked down, then up at me. “We all have guilt when someone dies, you know. It is the human thing. I wasn’t there when Edith died. That haunts me. But one has to accept it, the guilt. Come to a sense of proportion. I finally came to see it was a kind of egotism in me that made the guilt.”

  “Thank you for telling me.”

  “May I make a suggestion?”

  “Of course.”

  “When I call Ruth’s family I wonder whether it might not be a good idea to put them up in a hotel. It will be hard for you to have them here, and I’ll be in the guest room.”

  That meant that Jane could stay.

  “I intend to stay as long as you need me, dearie. Of course I will,” she assured me.

  And then, with sunlight streaming through the windows suddenly and lighting up the bunch of daffodils on the table, and before we cleared away, we talked about Ruth. Until then there had been too many things in the way. Her death had taken over her life.

  “We had twenty years, Jane. That’s a lot. I was lucky.”

  “Yes,” Jane said, “you were. I always felt when I was with you that you had a rare understanding. And,” she went on thoughtfully, “I do believe that every good, fruitful relationship is a sort of beacon, a lighthouse. It must have comforted a lot of people to see you and Ruth together. You shed light.”

  This was a new idea to me and I felt it deep down, so I couldn’t find a word to say. “Ruth was such a wise, honest person,” I said after a moment. “Much wiser than I could ever be.”

  “Maybe … but less brilliant.”

  “I’m not brilliant, at best adequate as a professor of history, a little better as a scholar, I suppose.”

  Jane looked amused. “I wasn’t really thinking about professional life. I was thinking of you as a person, that flame in you.”

  “Oh well,” I laughed then, “the mad hare.” But I wanted to talk about Ruth now. I wanted to bring her into this room alive. “What Ruth had was an amazing capacity to get inside people, to unknot their problems, to know when to be silent and when to open things up with a word. I envied her patients sometimes.…”

  “Yes, I can imagine.”

  “Because, you see, they got something from her that I rarely saw … only when Mother died, I learned so much from Ruth. She could be a blessed presence without saying a word. That is what she did for Mother at the end … she could sit there by the bed and just be a help. Oh Jane, I couldn’t do that.”

  “Love can get in the way,” Jane said gently. “It did between me and Marian. I know.” This was such a gift, Jane’s saying that to me, that it really got to me only long afterwards. She looked at her watch. “Dearie, I think we had better go to the funeral home.” She reached across the table and held my hand in hers for a second. Then we quickly cleared off and were on our way.

  There we found what seemed endless stumbling blocks. I knew that Ruth wanted cremation. So I was not prepared for the pressure the rather stern, kindly man we talked with put on me about the coffin. Here Jane’s help was invaluable, and her natural authority. She could insist that we wanted the cheapest possible coffin, and do it without the shame I would have felt at seeming to haggle. That small, pale-gray box we chose seemed to me so unreal, the fact that Ruth would be placed in it so unreal, the fire to come so unreal … death itself so unreal that I felt icily calm. Neither of us went to church, so I was at a total loss when it came to the funeral.

  “No funeral?” Jane murmured when I suggested that. “You know, Ruth’s friends and family, and her patients, may really want to make a farewell. I think you should not deprive them. It is, in my view,” she added quickly, “a meaningful ceremony.”

  “I could ask the Unitarian minister, Jack Fulbright.” He had come to mind because he and I had worked together on civil rights matters and I knew Ruth liked him. It ended by my calling him there and then, and he promised to come and talk over the service with me the next day. The funeral could be on Saturday at eleven in the small chapel.

  We finally got home again at four. “How shall we ever get through all that has to be done?”

  “I must call the family right away. Why don’t you lie down for a half-hour, dearie? I’ll let you know when I’ve done that, and the newspapers.”

  “I guess that’s a good idea.” I felt suddenly exhausted, and as though everything ahead, including my life, were an interminable journey. But when I lay down I was wide awake, strung up, sleep out of the question. All I could think of was that I had put off writing out a final exam and there were still senior theses to read. How would I ever do it? Go on … how? I must have finally dozed off, for I woke to the phone ringing, and staggered up from a nightmare about trying to rescue Ruth from an oncoming train. It was really better to be awake.

  Jane had managed to reach both Alice, Ruth’s sister, and her mother, and they would come to the funeral and spend the night before at the hotel. Arrangements about a room had been made. Jane would meet them at the local airport. She had even found out that there was a plane that would make the connection from Boston.

  “Her mother asked about the will,” Jane said. “It seemed a little odd.”

  “Oh God, where is it?” I stammered.

  “There’s time,” Jane said quickly.

  “She left everything to me. I know that,” I said, “as I did in my will if I had died first.”

  Three people had called. One, my chairman, two, a colleague of Ruth’s, and the third, a young assistant professor at college who had been a patient for a few months the year before. Jane had told them about the funeral.

  “People will come to the house afterwards,” she said. “We had better have coffee and sandwiches ready.” I had had a rest but Jane’s face showed me that she was the one now to be given an hour’s relief, and I forced her to go upstairs.

  “We have all day tomorrow, Jane. We’ll manage.” But how could I tell her what it meant to be able to say “we”?

  By late that evening I was learning about death and the way it is handled in our society. Four friends had come by with casseroles, a salad, a chocolate cake, and a bottle of Scotch! While Jane rested I was glad that I had something to do. I was glad to play the record of Ruth’s dying over and over as though reciting it would eventually make it real. I found myself forgetting and talking about her in the present. But I was also touched especially by young Myra’s grief and the way she said, “I know she was your family,” and then, “You must comfort yourself that she was the one to go first, and not you. You are bearing the burden for her, you see. I mean, it would be worse for her the other way.” It made me want to howl like an animal, howl my grief, but I managed not even to cry. From now until after the funeral I knew I had to maintain icy control.

  “Thanks for coming, dear Myra.”

  The chairman of the department offered to give me two weeks off, but I knew that was not possible, not at the end of the term. “Oh no,” I said at once. “I shall need to get back into harness. It’s the only salvation.”

  And when people asked how I was managing I could say, “Jane Reid is here,” although some of them had no idea who she was.

  Jane Reid was there. She was there in a hundred ways, when she came down to put supper on the table while I talked with someone, to answer the telephone, and, when at last we sat down, to talk with me about what might be said, what music played at the funeral
.

  That was the real test, far more nourishing than lying down, to get down to essence and for half an hour forget about all the lists and things to do. I knew Jane felt it too by the way her own tempo slowed down and she said, “Let’s put our minds on it quietly,” and she added quickly, “Of course it’s your privilege, not mine. I’m just here to listen, dearie.”

  In the back of my mind was a poem written ages ago by a friend of mine, but all I could remember was one line: “Now the long lucid listening is done.” Mary had written it after the sudden death of her psychiatrist, but I had no copy I could lay hands on.

  I said the line twice. “Jane, that is what ought to be said somehow,” and I explained about its source.

  “I wonder,” Jane said, leaning her cheek on her hand. “That line says so much so well. Could it be read, and then music perhaps? Perhaps even repeated several times during the service?”

  “Oh, what a good idea!” And it came to me in this atmosphere of peace that Ruth would have liked Patience, another friend of ours, to play the organ. So I called her, hard because she didn’t know about Ruth, I discovered, and at first was overcome. But she would love to do it, she said, and I told her the line we would build the short service around. She suggested Albinoni, that lovely slow movement. “Yes, yes … and could you end with Bach’s Toccata and Fugue?” Patience would come over the next day and suggested we meet at the church at Jack Fulbright’s convenience. Patience said she would call him and call us back, “to save you at least that,” and she added in a low voice, “I am so sorry, Cam. It shouldn’t have happened. Please know I am with you.”

  Memory is a strange thing. Most of that poem had dropped out of my mind, but I suddenly drew out of the magic box the last lines.

  “Listen to this, Jane. I’ve just caught the last lines of that poem. I’m changing the ‘he’ to ‘she,’ but Mary would not mind, would she? Here it is:

  “Because she cared, she heard; because she heard

  She lifted, shared, and healed without a word.”

  “That sounds excellent,” Jane said at once, and I experienced again that deep look she had when it seemed as though the soul was there at the surface from deep down. For a moment we considered, then Jane asked rather tentatively, “You don’t want anything from the Bible, Cam?”

  I was troubled and didn’t know how to answer that because partly I wasn’t sure how Ruth would have felt. “She was not a believer in the usual sense, you know, so why pretend that she was?”

  “Yes,” Jane murmured, “I see … but that caring life was rooted, just the same,” and she lifted her head and recited, “‘For I am persuaded that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor powers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor height, nor depth, nor any other creature, shall be able to separate us from the love of God!’”

  I let the words sink in. “Well, that would be all right. Ruth and I could go along with that.” For a second I felt Ruth was there with us, she seemed so close. Oh, not in a believer’s sense, but the way Jane and I were talking brought her very close. That half-hour had been a saving grace.

  So little by little the lists got crossed off. Myra offered to make sandwiches for after the funeral. Jane and I got in sherry. Everything got arranged with Jack Fulbright.

  In those days that seemed like years, they were so long and so exhausting, Jane had been the pillar of strength, so wise and so able to deal with the practical matters at the same time. But her greatest gift to me was something she did quite unselfconsciously after the funeral. I myself was moving through it all now like an actress on a stage. A funeral is after all a ritual that takes place in the theater of a church. We had spent over an hour arranging the flowers, there were so many. I couldn’t believe how many there were, how many people Ruth’s life, so private as far as I was concerned, had touched. And during the funeral itself I was detached like a producer, listening and wondering how it would all fit together. Many people cried, but I held myself tight, only relieved that our plan did seem to work, the words and the music. But when Fulbright came to the part of Romans that Jane had recited, it all cracked open and tears poured down.

  Jane left me afterwards to find Ruth’s mother and Alice as she would bring them to the house. And that was where she showed her sovereign gift. I felt at once that she had managed to say something to Mrs. Arbor, must have done so, because when I met them at the door, Mrs. Arbor kissed me. And Alice, so prim always, managed to say, much to my astonishment, “Thank you, Cam, for all you did for Ruth.”

  In fact, it was quite unbelievable to find myself sitting between them drinking coffee in the first natural and amicable meeting we had ever experienced.

  “Jane Reid seems to be a remarkable woman,” Mrs. Arbor said. “She has been very kind.”

  “She was my teacher in school,” I said.

  “Really?” Mrs. Arbor was obviously confused by this. “She seems such a lady—no, that isn’t the word … rather grand in a way.”

  “Oh well,” I tossed off, “she’s a granddaughter of Benjamin Trueblood after all.”

  “Oh, that explains it, then. They must be very rich.” Ruth always said her mother was the greatest materialist alive.

  “Maybe,” I said. “I wouldn’t know about that.”

  “She thinks the world of you … and Ruth.”

  At this Alice broke in, for once rather shyly, “She said she honors you. ‘Exemplary lives,’ she said. I never thought of that before … I mean, two women living together.”

  So that is what Jane had been up to! I had to smile.

  We had reached a prickly subject and I was rather glad to be interrupted then by an old friend of ours from New York whom I got up to hug. “Daisy, you angel!”

  Of course later on Mrs. Arbor made some objections to the will, telling the lawyers I was surely not next of kin, but since the will was legal there was nothing she could do. We corresponded briefly about some things, a ring and a valuable small desk which she wanted back, and of course I was glad to oblige.

  Jane stayed another day and then had to leave, and I was alone in the empty house. But that long game of solitaire which has finally “come out,” I suppose, in my endeavor to write this book does not belong in it. I buried myself in work. I managed to survive. And finally, after I retired, I moved back to Cambridge with my cat, Snoozle.

  Prologue, Part VI

  I must now for the last time become a novelist and hope to suggest the quality of a whole life as it was lived in a month on the magic island. For there everything that made Jane remarkable was gathered together in the last years as each summer brought together friends from all her lives—tradition and the explosions of new life that flowed in and out with the tides, brought together in a seamless whole—while Jane herself came into her own as the moving spirit and reigning queen of the kingdom her father had founded and her sister had ruled for so long.

  Once when Ruth and I were there we amused ourselves on a rainy day by looking over the old guest books and comparing them with the one started in the last few years. In Muff’s day the names were almost all names of members of the family as well, of course, as the English children and their parents, who came over several times. Aunts, nieces, nephews, sisters made a goodly company. But the new book opened up new worlds as all Jane’s lives brought friends from Germany, Canada, Ireland, God knows where, as well as young teachers and their families from Warren, black friends from the neighborhood house in Cambridge, her architect and his wife, Ruth and me, an Italian contessa her nieces had worked for in Florence. We were amazed at the range of people of all ages who had suddenly, after Muff’s death, been invited to paradise for several days or a month. The sheer logistics of opening several houses and getting them ready again and again for new arrivals staggered our imaginations.

  How much, as I look back now, we took for granted! How much planning went into daily life that seemed to saunter along unplanned! Somewhere Jung has noted: “We must not forget that
only a very few people are artists in life; that the art of life is the most distinguished and rarest of all the arts. Who ever succeeded in draining the whole cup with grace?”

  So let me open the door now to a month on the island when Jane Reid was in her seventies and her life itself had become a “house of gathering.”

  Part VI

  The House of Gathering

  On a foggy morning in late June, Jane lay in her mother’s bed luxuriating in the fact that it was just after six and she did not have to get up for an hour. Before she turned over for a last snooze she looked over at Lucy burrowed into the other bed and still fast asleep. Even asleep, a blessed presence to wake up to, Jane was thinking. In this gray light the wallpaper with its small sprigs of blue flowers on a white background had a sprightly charm, and as always when Jane woke in this room that had been her parents’ she thought of them. The wallpaper must have been chosen by her mother and brought back memories of those summer dresses she wore, freshly starched and smelling of lavender. There was happiness in the very air of this room, and Jane felt it every morning and on this one could hardly separate dreaming from memory as she turned over with a sigh of contentment and went back to sleep.

  An hour later Lucy was the one to get up and go out on the balcony to taste the air, and peer out into a landscape almost blotted out by fog, a single fir looming up here or there. When she came in again, shivering, she was smiling as she looked around for something to wake Reedy up with and, on an impulse, picked the Brownies up from their place on the high bureau and tickled Jane’s cheek with a Brownie hand.

  “Oh!” Jane opened her eyes and seized the Brownie with a delighted smile. “So you are telling me it’s time to get up. The Brownies are wide awake, I see.”

  “No hurry,” Lucy said gently. “You have five minutes while I brush my teeth.”

  “What shall we do with the lazy sailor?” Jane was singing as she pulled on her stockings when Lucy came out. And so the day began. By the time Jane was dressed and had done her hair and tied her sneakers, Lucy had disappeared. And when she went down breakfast was nearly ready in the cozy kitchen and there was a delicious smell of bacon in the air.