The Magnificent Spinster Read online

  The Magnificent Spinster

  A Novel

  May Sarton

  In Memoriam

  Anne Longfellow Thorp

  1894–1977

  Contents

  PROLOGUE: Part I

  PART I: “Children Dear, Was It Yesterday?”

  PROLOGUE: Part II

  PART II: The Growth of a Friendship

  PROLOGUE: Part III

  PART III: The Giving Years

  PART IV: Waging Peace

  PART V: Homecoming

  PROLOGUE: Part VI

  PART VI: The House of Gathering

  EPILOGUE

  A Biography of May Sarton

  Prologue, Part I

  For the second time in my life—and I am now seventy—I am embarking on an effort which may well come to nothing but which has possessed my mind, haunts, and will not let me sleep. The first time was long ago and it was the war in Spain, but whatever is relevant about that experience will find its place later on as this second act of commitment on my part proceeds. I mention it here only because in the forty years between these two adventures so little has happened and I have led such a sedate, quiet life in the groves of academe.

  What then has driven me to attempt so late in my life to write a novel? Quite simply the unequivocal need to celebrate an extraordinary woman whom I had the good fortune to know for more than fifty years until her death a year ago. I am vague about dates these days, but it must have been a year ago because the Unitarian Church in Cambridge, that rather cold, white, pillared interior, had become a bower of spring flowers—iris, daffodils, narcissi, anemones, an unforgettable explosion of beauty in the midst of a February snowstorm. How appropriate the brilliance, the glow, and the innocence of all those flowers seemed! Jane Reid had died after a long, full life, so the funeral became a celebration rather than a time of mourning. One of my classmates gave the eulogy and it was just right, though I remember very little of what she actually said. I do remember she opened with a line of Stephen Spender’s, “I think continually of those who were truly great.”

  It was very fine, but what moved me to tears was our each being given a sprig of spruce from the island as we left the church. For those of us who had been to the island (and I expect many of those at the funeral had) it was a gesture of such intimacy and remembrance that it brought tears. Jane Reid always slipped a sprig into a buttonhole as every guest embarked for the shore at the end of a visit, and now she herself, one felt, was saying a last “Godspeed.” I expect that her friend Sarah, her companion all the last years, must have engineered this, and it was perfect.

  Snow was falling fast as I walked home that day, thinking about Jane. Was she “truly great”? Yes, I decided, she was. I lit the wood fire in the library and sat for quite a while as elation turned to depression and I realized that in a few years everyone who knew Jane would be dead. Who would remember her? In fifty years who would know she had existed? She never married. There would be no children and grandchildren to keep her memory alive. She was already vanishing like sand in the ocean.… Then, almost without thinking, I went into my study, forgetting all about lunch, and began to write. It was chiefly quick notes, whatever came with some urgency as I sat there. But in an hour that spurt of energy had gone, and by the time I heated up some soup I realized that I could not possibly sustain such an effort, and even if I could, self-doubt was eating into the impulse, for whatever tiny fame I have achieved has been in medieval history, and that, a matter of some papers on the trade routes, is of minor importance. I have no illusions. I shoved the notes into a drawer and that was that.

  Months later, by a curious stroke of fate, I was brought face to face with the Jane Reid I had first known when I was a student at the Warren School and had had her as my teacher in the seventh grade. Over the years a few of us from that memorable time had kept in touch, and one day Anne Strange turned up in Cambridge—she lives in Oregon—and called me on the telephone to see if she could come and see me. So there she was, recently widowed. She knew my dear friend Ruth had died some years ago, so at first we talked mostly about how one handles these losses of a central person in life. But, as always when students of Warren get together, we ended by speaking of the school and of Jane Reid. And, rather shyly, Anne took a small black leather notebook out of her purse, and said, “I thought you might like to see this.” It was an extraordinary moment, for what I saw written out in Anne’s clear hand was a whole book of poems four of us had written after we left Warren and were in the public high school. I was bowled over by the intensity of these poems, so much so that I could not read them, and asked if I might keep the book for a week and send it back.

  And when I read it alone in bed that night, the past came back like an explosion. Had I ever felt that intensely? Had I really written such impassioned poems for anyone, for Jane Reid? I had. The evidence was before me of a whole emotional landscape I had buried for almost sixty years! Of course a crush on a teacher is fairly common, I expect. But how often does it take the form of such disciplined and impassioned utterance? And what was it about Jane Reid that had elicited such feeling?

  I knew I could not escape the effort now. I must try to celebrate her somehow, in some way. And I began to imagine how I might approach the task. I saw that what had stopped me in the beginning was not so much doing it as how to do it. And little by little I became certain that a novel and not a memoir or biography had to be my way. At least a work of fiction would free me from the struggle with minute detail, with dates and facts. I had had enough of that in my professional life over the years. The essence was what mattered, after all.

  Today it is snowing, as it did on the day of her funeral. My old cat, Snoozle, is asleep in a round black ball on the couch, and in the marvelous silence of the snow I dream of a summer morning almost seventy years ago on the island.

  Jane Reid is a child.

  Part I

  “Children Dear, Was It Yesterday?”

  Childhood is a place as well as a time. For James Reid’s five daughters the place was “the island,” as it was always called, although it has a name, Wilder. Their father bought the island off the Maine coast, and the old farmhouse on it, in the nineties, when he had already as a young man amassed a fortune from lumber in Minnesota, where he was born. At the wooded end Mr. Reid built one of those Henry Jamesian arks prevalent north of Boston, shingled, ample in porches, with a private bathroom for each bedroom, but then and up to the present no electricity—Aladdin lamps downstairs and candles to take up to bed. Cooking was done on a huge coal range. There were sailboats and rowboats to “mess about in,” and a captain to ferry guests back and forth from the mainland in an elegant canopied motorboat, West Wind, that kept a tranquil pace and bore no resemblance to the motor launches that whizz around making an infernal noise these days.

  Jane’s summer world had nothing to do with luxuries. Hers was the world of secret hiding places in the “moss drawing room,” a part of the forest floor covered in emerald and pale-green mosses like a sumptuous carpet. Her world had a great deal to do with escaping the grown-ups, and also escaping Snooker, who had been brought from England as a nanny for the two youngest, and would remain in the family, a cherished friend, until she died in her nineties. Jane’s world was running off with her sister Alix to pick blueberries, lying for hours in the soft warm grass, filling their baskets, or simply sneaking off to explore, if possible get lost, and frighten themselves with imaginary dangers, and frighten Snooker by being late for lunch.

  The narrator has said enough. Let me begin with a sample day on the island in 1910, when Jane was fourteen and Alix twelve.

  “Can’t we get up, Snooker? It’s nearly seven,” Jane whispered at Snooker’s door
.

  “What’s that?” a sleepy voice murmured.

  “We want to go and see the fish hawk’s nest—please let us!”

  By then Snooker had dragged herself out of sleep and put on her dressing gown. “You’ll be soaking wet; there is dew on the grass—”

  “Please, Snooker. You forget that I’m fourteen, after all. I’m not a baby.”

  “We’ll hold up our skirts, over our knees,” Alix said and began to giggle at such a scandalous idea.

  “Sh—sh—you’ll wake your mother and father. Very well, be off with you. But don’t be late for breakfast—blueberry pancakes, cook said last night.”

  “Darn it, I’ve got a hole in my stocking,” Jane said, by mistake aloud.

  This brought Snooker out of her room, a twinkle in her eye, “It might be better to darn it, than say ‘darn it.’”

  “It’s in the toe, Snooker. It doesn’t show.”

  “Be sure and give it to me when you come back.…”

  But her whisper got lost in the departure, as sneakered feet sped down the stairs, creating an impression of a mild thunderstorm.

  Outside the house, the two girls stood quite still for a moment, listening, and drinking in the piny scent, the cool of fresh morning air. Then they were off, walking fast, Jane’s long pigtail bouncing a little, so she pulled it round her neck and let it hang down in front.

  Usually they talked a blue streak but the stillness in the woods, the excitement of a wholly untouched morning world, made them silent, made them stop often to stand and drink it in. The white-throated sparrow repeated his three-note song and somewhere far off they heard a thrush. They were following the path along the shore that would bring them in a quarter of a mile or so to a tall pine that had been struck by lightning and topped. There, in the top of the broken trunk, fish hawks had built their raggedy nest.

  “There—look! There he goes!”

  The great wings had lifted off just before they could see the nest itself. They watched the huge bird fly away.

  “It makes a lump in my throat,” Jane said.

  “You’re not crying, are you?”

  “No.”

  “You’ve got tears in your eyes.”

  “I don’t know … the wildness.”

  “It’s funny to cry at beautiful things.”

  “I guess so.” Jane suddenly laughed, breaking through the moment’s mood of awe, “I’ll race you home … you take the moss path. I’ll go by the lumber road.”

  There was something thrilling about running alone as fast as you could through the woods. Jane pretended she was a deer being chased by hunters (occasionally in winter deer swam over from the mainland but were rarely seen). She was running fast now, bound to win, when she fell headlong to the ground, her foot having caught on an exposed root. It was so sudden that she lay there for a moment, stunned, then slowly felt her ankle, which hurt quite a lot. She found she could stand on it and even walk in a gingerly way, but it was humiliating to hobble home and find Alix, triumphant, waiting for her on the porch.

  “Dearie, do you have to be so violent?” Snooker asked, not cross but concerned. “Why tear through the woods, why not walk?”

  “I don’t know. I’m just so full of everything, I have to let off steam.”

  “Anyway, I won!” Alix said. “And we have blueberry pancakes for breakfast!”

  They were just finishing when Mamma and Pappa arrived for their breakfast before the older sisters and two young men, beaus of Viola’s and Edith’s, made their appearance. Breakfast was apt to be an extended feast on the island, where the Reids wanted life to be as flexible and free as possible for all concerned. Very occasionally, cook rebelled and announced that she would not serve breakfast after ten.

  “Can we sit with you till they come?” Alix asked, standing behind her father’s chair, her arms laced round his neck.

  “Tell us about Vyvian,” Jane begged, sitting down next to her mother. And then before a word could be said she added, “Is he going to propose?”

  Pappa laughed. “He’s only just arrived … you’re in a great rush, aren’t you?”

  “Viola is dying to get married. She told me so the other day.”

  “I should think she’d enjoy having all those beaus and not making up her mind,” Alix said. “I’d like that.”

  “I’d hate it,” Jane said passionately. “They suffer.”

  “You make them sound like a school of porpoises,” her father teased.

  “Vyvian is handsome,” Alix murmured.

  “I’d call him pretty … he’s not made anything of himself yet,” Jane said.

  “Well, in that case, why are you so eager for him to propose to your sister?” Allegra Reid turned to her daughter with an amused, tender look.

  “Oh, well …” Jane looked embarrassed. “It’s just that I’m dying to hear someone propose … how it’s done … does he go down on his knees?”

  “Fat chance he’d do that with a little sister hovering around,” Alix giggled.

  “I’m going to hide, that’s my plan, in the cupboard where the newspapers are.”

  “Jane!” Her father was serious. “You can’t do that. Eavesdropping! We can’t have that.”

  “You’ll have to wait till someone proposes to you, dearie,” her mother said gently.

  “I’ll never get married,” said Jane with complete conviction.

  “Don’t we set a good example, your mother and I?”

  “That’s it. That’s the trouble,” Jane answered. “You and Mamma are a little too good to be true. I never see anyone anything like you, Pappa. They’re all so dim.”

  Fortunately perhaps, the conversation ended there as Martha came and sat down, and Jane went around the table to give her father a hug, and kissed him.

  “What are the plans for today, Pappa?” Martha asked, pouring syrup on her pancakes.

  “Well, I presume Vyvian and Lawrence will want to play tennis with the girls later on. And Mr. Perkins is coming at four. We might all be down at the dock to welcome him.”

  “Can we go over with Captain Philbrook and fetch him at the town dock?” Alix asked.

  “What do you think, Allegra?”

  “I think Mr. Perkins would be gratified, especially if Jane puts on a clean skirt and ties a ribbon round her hair.”

  “An excellent idea,” Viola was standing in the door with Vyvian at her side. “You look as though you had been climbing a tree!”

  Jane flashed her sister an angry glance, then melted as she took Viola in, impeccably dressed in a striped blouse with starched white collar and cuffs and dark blue skirt.

  “I fell,” Jane said. “We were racing, Alix and I!”

  But, suddenly self-conscious, she then got up and went upstairs to Snooker, and lay down on the bed while Snooker rocked in her low rocking chair and mended the toe in Jane’s stocking.

  “I’ll never never look like Viola,” she said crossly. “It’s hopeless.”

  “Well, she’s an elegant young lady, there’s no denying that, but you’re yourself, Jane. And if you ask me, she’ll never have your look.”

  “What’s my look? Oh, I wish I knew what it was!” she said passionately.

  Snooker lifted her head and smiled, “And if I told you it might go to your head!”

  “Viola and Edith treat me like nothing, as though I were a little girl. I’m fourteen, after all, it’s an awful age.”

  “It won’t last long. Next year you’ll be putting up your hair.”

  “The trouble is, I don’t want to. I don’t want to grow up, Snooker.”

  “Dearie, there’s no way out of that.”

  “I suppose not.” She got up then and took the mended stocking Snooker handed to her. “I don’t know what I’d do without you, Snooker. Somehow you always make me feel better.”

  The cuckoo clock announced the hour, ten “cuckoos.” Jane counted them and ran off down the stairs singing out “The Duchess! The Duchess! Oh, my ears and whiskers!”r />
  Alix was dressing her large teddy bear down in Pappa’s office. “Where is everybody?” Jane asked. “We’d better hurry.”

  It was always like this on the island. The day began at a slow, casual pace and gathered momentum, and for Jane and Alix time began to leap and carry them away long before noon.

  “Come on, Alix. They’ll be playing by now with no one to chase balls—you’re too old to be dressing bears.”

  “Am I?” Alix looked startled. Then said firmly, “I intend to dress this bear until I die.”

  “All right, you loon, but please come now. I’m bursting.”

  Snooker went down to the kitchen for a cup of tea with Cook and Daisy, the waitress. They all three enjoyed a half-hour of peace and quiet with everyone launched on the day. The dishes were still piled up in the pantry, but they could wait, and soon someone must put more coal in the stove, but that could wait too.

  “Mrs. Reid wants strawberry shortcake for dinner, but I’m not sure Captain Philbrook can find enough for eleven. Mr. Perkins will be here for tea, you know. And what will I do if there aren’t strawberries? A lemon meringue pie … he’s fond of that.”

  “Is his beer on the ice?” Snooker asked.

  “Naturally,” Cook answered as though she would forget!

  “Does he have beer, now?” Daisy, new this summer, asked, astonished, for not a drop of wine or liquor had been served in the house so far.

  “Mr. Perkins is privileged,” Cook said, smoothing down her starched white apron with an air of complicity.

  “I’ve always wondered how he managed it about the drinking,” Snooker said, shaking her head.

  “And who is Mr. Perkins?” Daisy asked. It seemed quite dramatic that he could come onto the island and expect such preferential treatment.

  Cook glanced over at Snooker, who was the one who knew everything.

  “He’s an old bachelor, a cousin, I think, of some friends of Mr. Reid’s in Minnesota. He’s been coming for years. Always brings a huge box of Sherry’s chocolates with little crystallized violets on the top. And that’s all I can tell you about Mr. Perkins!”