The Magnificent Spinster Read online

  “To study under Miss Lockwood and really learn about socialism. I have to be prepared, you see. Somehow I want to work with labor, with the workers, the real people.” I think I wanted to get a rise, and I did.

  “By your definition then Miss Lockwood isn’t real!”

  “Oh Jane, you know what I mean.” I wanted to talk about it. “Ever since the Sacco-Vanzetti horror I have somehow had to put them, their innocent dear letters, beside President Lowell—I feel strongly that they were real in a way maybe he is not. They were not cushioned by wealth and position. They were so pure.”

  “Yes …” Jane murmured. “They certainly seemed so—”

  “It was a dirty business!”

  “Oh Cam, we don’t really know that, do we? We have been guessing. But President Lowell reviewed the whole case.… It’s too easy,” she said, flushing, “to attack someone simply because they are well off and come from a great family. That seems to me just as crude as blaming someone because he is a poor immigrant.”

  She was right, of course.

  “I guess the trouble is that when it comes to politics everyone oversimplifies … and being passionately convinced is narrower than being moderate, I suppose. But Jane, nothing would get done without passionate conviction!”

  It is strange that now, fifty years later, I remember that conversation and how deprived I felt when we got to the pool because we had only just begun to explore things of the utmost importance to me and to my whole life ahead. Jane was swept away by Matthew’s shout, “You said you’d teach me to dive this summer!”

  Marian Chase left on a rainy day. I had meant to go down to the dock and see her off as everyone was apt to do when a guest had to go back to the mainland, but I was upstairs reading Shaw and making notes, and forgot the time. I was sorry because I had certainly come to understand in these few days that I had misjudged her and to understand, too, her elusive charm.

  Perhaps to get over the parting and fill in the absence, Jane asked Martha at supper the next night whether she might have Captain Philbrook and West Wind and plan a climb and picnic on the small mountain just opposite the island, one of the smaller mountains below Cadillac. “Matthew and I have a secret,” she said, a twinkle in her eye.

  “Don’t tell, Aunt Jane!” he said, his mouth full of apple pie.

  “Well,” Martha said in her gentle voice, “I had thought to go over to the mainland and pay a call on old Mrs. Charles.…” It seemed a little awkward suddenly. I saw Jane flush and pretend to be absorbed in her own dessert. “I suppose I could put that off. Then there’s the picnic.…”

  “Oh, we’ll do that,” Jane broke in swiftly.

  “It will be a lot to carry … how many will you be?”

  “Cam, Eleanor, Matthew, and I. But all we’ll need is a thermos of milk, one of coffee, and some sandwiches. I’m sure we can manage.” But her tone, for once, was uncertain, and she waited for Martha to assent.

  “There are brownies,” Martha said, so apparently she had come to her decision. “Very well, if it looks like a good day.”

  “It can’t rain forever,” I said.

  “Oh,” and Martha gave one of her rare smiles, “it has been known to do so.”

  But the gods were with us and it turned out to be a just-about-perfect island day, a taste of autumn in the air, all the outlines sharp as we crossed the bay toward the humpback mountain we were going to climb. It looked quite formidable as we came in to dock, but I remember looking forward to the exercise.

  Jane Reid’s passion for this place, her awareness of every lichen-covered stone and bunchberry leaf, her acute ear for any bird, a towhee scratching in the underbrush, was contagious. I found myself looking at everything around us with intense interest. Then, after scrambling over the rocky path, to stop and take in the view over the island toward other islands, the grand perimeter, gave us a whole other dimension. None of us, except Jane, were avid climbers. Matthew, who had started out by running ahead shouting, “I’m going to find the place!” soon tired and dragged his feet.

  Jane teased him gently about the fact that one can’t take a mountain by storm. “You’ve run out of steam, dearie, and we’re only a quarter of the way up … the thing is to pace yourself and take it slowly.”

  “Tortoises win,” I reminded her as we rested for a moment and took off our knapsacks.

  Jane laughed aloud. “To think of your remembering that!”

  “I’ll never forget it.”

  “Dear Cam, I was hard on you, wasn’t I?”

  “You taught me a lot—about tortoises and other things.”

  “My feet hurt,” Matthew said crossly. “I’m tired of climbing.”

  “You can go back if you like … and wait for us down at the dock,” Jane said quite coldly.

  “But I want to find the place,” he whined.

  “All right then, let’s get there,” Jane said.

  “What place?” Mother asked. “Is it a secret?”

  “Shall we tell them?” Jane asked Matthew.

  “They’ll see,” Matthew said, his interest aroused once more.

  So Jane and he proceeded, keeping a little ahead of Mother and me. We took our time, savoring the climb, and Mother, I feel sure, was glad to take it slowly. The bay began to seem far below us now, the water appearing to be like wrinkled silk through which the wake of motorboats drew long V’s. After a while a schooner in full sail came around the island—a glorious sight. We heard Matthew shout, “Hey, Aunt Jane, look at that boat!”

  When we caught up with them a little later, they were standing under a small cliff, the granite cracked here and there with tufts of grass and moss, even a few tiny fir trees rooting themselves in the crannies. Jane and Matthew were facing it and appeared to be searching for something.

  “What are you looking for?” Mother asked.

  “Shall we tell them now?” Jane asked Matthew solemnly, and took a little leather pouch out of her pocket.

  “We’re going to hide a treasure,” he said. “We have to find a little pocket that we can put it in and then close it with a rock.”

  “And it must have some clue in it, so someone could find it again,” Jane explained.

  “A million years from now,” Matthew said, his eyes shining, “some boy will find it.”

  “It could be a girl, you know.”

  “No,” Matthew said rather crossly, “not a girl.”

  “We might find it ourselves in twenty years.…” Jane mused. She was standing on tiptoe, feeling along a crevice with her long, sensitive hands.

  “That’s too high,” Matthew said, doing the same thing further down. “Look, Aunt Jane, there’s a white line here through the rock. That could be the clue, if I can only find a little place.” And suddenly there it was, a fairly large stone in his hands and a small, perfect cave where it had been stowed.

  “Good for you, Matthew! That’s great!”

  There was quite a ceremony as Jane gave Matthew the pouch and he emptied it and showed us with a beatific smile a twenty-dollar gold piece and two ten-dollar gold pieces. “The treasure,” he said in a whisper. “Don’t tell anybody, will you?”

  After that memorable first visit to the island, Mother and I talked about Jane, of course, in her happy island incarnation and decided that she was probably a person who was more herself outdoors than indoors. But we agreed that living under an older sister’s rule both at home and on the holidays could not be altogether easy. She must have thought a lot about it, about herself and her own life now that she had evidently decided not to marry. But it was only four years later, after I had graduated from Vassar and come home to get an M.A. in modern history from Radcliffe, that Jane made up her mind to take a major step and build a house. She was thirty-eight years old.

  It was in early May when she came to see us at teatime in a great state of excitement. “Eleanor, I’m going to build myself a house,” she announced in much the tone of voice, that tone of surprise and delight, in which one might s
ay, “I’m getting married.”

  “Good for you,” my mother responded at once. “It’s time you had your own place.”

  “Where?” I asked, “Where is it going to be?”

  “You’ll see! In fact,” Jane added with a radiant smile, “why don’t you and your mother come and have a picnic on my land—Sunday, how about that? The day after tomorrow.” I heard the ring in her voice as she uttered the words “my land.” There was such excitement in it, a declaration of independence, I felt it was. Yes, a little as though she were getting married, leaving home, becoming her own woman.

  Mother insisted that we bring the picnic, knowing very well how Martha might react, so Jane picked us up in her Dodge with the top down, on a perfect May day.

  “The land” was further away than I had imagined, about forty-five minutes away, rather a long commute, it occurred to me. But when we arrived, I could see why Jane had fallen in love with it, why it had become such a dream to her, for it was a just about perfect exemplar of what a New Englander might consider as essential in a landscape. The house would stand, she told us, on a gentle knoll, backed by white-pine woods, and to its right a half circle of meadow dotted with juniper bushes, a kind of amphitheater. Below, an open field led to a brook. “Yes, even a brook!” Jane said leading us down.

  “It’s like a Robert Frost poem,” my mother said, stooping down to pick a violet from the grassy slope. “It’s yours,” she said presenting it to Jane. “Your honest-to-God own violet, Jane.”

  “Oh, it’s so amazing,” Jane cried out, after slipping the violet into a buttonhole, “to own land … I mean, it doesn’t seem right, does it? Imagine owning a tree!” And as though she were already lavish in the gifts from her land, she suggested we go up the hill and fill our picnic basket with pinecones to take home. “I’m starving, aren’t you?”

  She spread a rug then right where the house would stand eventually, but the soft grass was so warm to sit on in the sun we ended by using the rug as a tablecloth and settled ourselves around it. There was a moment’s silence after Mother’s chicken-salad sandwiches had been unwrapped and cups of hot consommé poured. We sat and soaked in the warm sun, and the silence.

  “Mmm, what a great sandwich,” Jane murmured. “How did you make it taste so good?”

  “A little lemon juice in the mayonnaise, maybe.”

  “There are brownies, too,” I announced, having just discovered them in a tin box.

  Jane sighed a long, happy sigh. “Martha doesn’t approve.” She turned to my mother with a mischievous look.

  “Why not?”

  “Firstly, it seems extravagant, I expect, wildly extravagant when there is plenty of room for me in Cambridge.… Secondly, she thinks it’s too long a ride back and forth from school.”

  “I expect the real reason is that she minds your moving away,” Mother said.

  “Yes. But if I’m ever to have a life of my own, it has to be soon. I’m thirty-eight, after all.”

  “It wouldn’t seem strange if you were getting married,” I said. “It doesn’t seem fair.”

  “Well,” Jane chuckled, “Martha is worried that I’m getting into something I know very little about,” and she laughed aloud. “She’s absolutely right. A little lemon in the mayonnaise. You know that would never have occurred to me!”

  At that time in my own life domesticity was the last thing that interested me. But I was interested in the house. Jane would not feel comfortable in a modern house, I surmised. So what then? An imitation old one? That seemed so suburban. She was eager to tell us what the plans were, and to talk a little about Caleb Smith, her architect, “Oh such a dear,” she said. “He thinks we can build the house using the remains of an old one he has found that we can buy and tear down, using the exquisite eighteenth-century fireplace mantels and paneling. Then we have invented a screened-in porch with bunks in it for children and a big fireplace so we can cook there sometimes. It has a lovely design with oval doors so it doesn’t look like a porch but more like a wing of the house.”

  We listened and enjoyed all the plans, but I could not help wondering what it would all cost and feeling that Martha’s doubts about that were understandable. But I could tell too that Jane’s dream was to create an open house and fill it with children and friends in a way she could not do at home, fill it with her life. No wonder her eyes were shining, no wonder they looked bluer than ever on that day.

  Jane reached over and just touched my hair. “You and Eleanor are going to be an important part of all this, I hope.” Then she confided: “One of my dreams is that Marian will come for long visits—she needs the quiet and the peace, and since I’ll be at school all day, she would feel quite free and alone.”

  So, after all, I thought, Jane was not building a house only to escape. She was building it to be a haven.

  “You’re trying to put a halter on a unicorn,” Mother said gently, “Marian is elusive.…”

  “The whole thing is an enormous risk,” Jane murmured, half to herself. “But what an adventure!”

  During the next two years, while Jane’s house was being built, I hardly saw her or my mother either.… I was absorbed in a mixture of volunteer work, the writing of my thesis on the Fabians, and endless discussions over politics with Tom Weston, who was in law school at Harvard, and his friends and my friends in the Square. Roosevelt had taken over and we all felt the relief of someone who could and did take hold and do something about the Depression and the unemployed, whom one could not avoid seeing, as they were everywhere, selling apples. “Brother, Can You Spare a Dime?” and “Who’s Afraid of the Big Bad Wolf?” were the songs. As a convinced socialist one side of me rejoiced that capitalism, as we had known it, anyway, seemed to be proving to be impossible if one thought in terms of human beings. Frankfurter was our hero, or one of them. The word fascist was beginning to have a sinister ring as Hitler came to power in Germany. At twenty-three I felt that the world was coming apart. Only in Russia did there seem to be any real hope.

  What was I going to do with my life? I envied Tom, who had it all clear in his mind that he would work for the Civil Liberties Union when he graduated. I worried because I was not in love … after all, at twenty-three should one not be? I felt full of fervor without any specific endeavor or person to invest it in, rather at a loose end in fact. And sometimes I envied Faith, who had married and was expecting a baby. Sometimes I dropped in on her and her husband, Bill Goodman, a very tall, thin man who was teaching (of all things, I thought then) at the Harvard Business School. Faith seemed so incapable of even putting together a decent meal that I wondered how she would cope with a baby, but strangely enough, she seemed beatifically happy, unconcerned, and in a sort of dream of motherhood which had little to do with reality.

  I am gliding over a great deal because this novel is not about me, yet I am present in it as narrator. So I have to exist as myself as I write, and this is proving awfully hard to do. I have often thought since I began to write that it is a crazy project for an old historian to attempt.

  It is also painful, of course, to go back … who would want to live her life over again? I simply can’t do it and don’t intend to. But when I did know exactly what I wanted to do, then there are two scenes that seem relevant. One was a devastating talk with my father at the Harvard Club in the autumn of 1936, when I knew that the war against Franco in Spain was the one place where fascism could be and must be stopped. Hitler was sending planes and pilots by then; the European powers and the United States had come out for nonintervention though everyone sensed that was a farce. I had been helping to raise money for an ambulance, standing in the Square rattling a box, and that seemed pretty frustrating at times. I got more arguments than I did quarters and dimes. And then I got tired of all the talk and began to feel that the only thing to do was to get over there and help. At the very least I could drive a truck or an ambulance. And maybe I could get some word back as to what was really happenning … was Hitler sending planes? Was Russia comi
ng in on our side? The newspapers were filled with rumors.

  I soon found out, of course, that American citizens could not get a passport for Spain, and my attempts to get sent as a correspondent by The Atlantic Monthly and The Boston Evening Transcript were abject failures. “They just treated me like a crazy kid,” I told my mother.

  “Darling one, it is a little crazy, isn’t it?” She looked at me in that quizzical way she had.

  “Only because I’m a girl. Plenty of men are volunteering. Mother, this war is going to decide the history of Western civilization for years and years to come. It’s the one chance, maybe, to stop the fascists, don’t you see?”

  “I do see,” she said gravely, “but the question is what you can really do if you do manage to sneak in somehow or whether you might not be an added problem in some unit. I don’t know, of course … nobody knows.”

  “Luckily I took Spanish in college … I was thinking of South America then.”

  “Cam, you’ll need to be self-supporting. How do you think you can finance this? I wish I could help, but I just squeeze through these days. Warren is not famous for paying teachers very well, and in these Depression years we have to carry more students than ever. Parents are losing their jobs.…”

  It was immensely generous of my mother to be as supportive as she was. Faith’s mother would have had a nervous breakdown if she had wanted to do such a mad thing. It was mad; I knew that in my heart. But at the same time I felt so strongly about the war, felt also, I suppose a great unused fervor and belief inside me that the tug was irresistible to go, to be part of it. I sensed that I would end up teaching history and here was a chance to help make it. How could I stay home studying and writing papers forever, when I could have helped prevent what I looked on then as a disaster for the civilized world?

  So I decided to ask my father to stake me to a year. I figured that I could manage on one hundred dollars a month plus the fare on a ship to Bordeaux. From there I could get in touch with socialists in France, who were already organizing help of various kinds. He agreed to take me to lunch at the Harvard Club, which was not too far from his office. After we were seated he started on his usual tack of putting me down. But I was determined not to get angry this time.