The Magnificent Spinster Read online

  Finally, when Jane was all dressed before lunch Mamma came in with a little black velvet pouch. “You had better have something to put a handkerchief in,” she said.

  “Oh dear, thanks, I’m bound to cry,” Jane said.

  “Try not to, dearie, you don’t want to embarrass Maurice.”

  “I can’t help it, Mamma. She’s going to die on the stage.”

  “Well, don’t begin now,” Snooker laughed at her.

  At last it was half past one. Jane had not been able to eat and swallowed down a glass of milk only at Mamma’s insistence. She was all ready in her blue coat with a fur collar and a dark blue velour hat with a wide brim; she had on Edith’s white gloves when the doorbell tinkled.

  “You look splendid,” said Maurice. “What a splendid girl!”

  Mamma and Pappa waved them off, and then Jane was alone with someone she hardly knew, in a hansom cab, a conveyance she had never experienced before. What an adventure!

  It took an hour to go from Cambridge to the theater by cab, but for Jane the time simply flew. For once she was allowed to talk as much as she wanted to someone who seemed genuinely interested and amused. “Alix is the only person who ever listens to me,” she said at one point, “so you must stop me if I go on too long.” She had made Maurice laugh by describing her French teacher, who was able to make a whole dramatic scene out of a small incident which if spoken in English would have seemed negligible if not boring, and who wore Paris hats and a black velvet ribbon round her throat. In the heat of this piece of theater Jane took off her hat and swung it in the air, saying, “Vive la France!” And then, “Ouf! Je suis bien mieux sans mon chapeau, n’est-ce pas, Oncle Maurice?”

  “Yes,” he said, giving her a critical look, “you look like Alice in Wonderland.” And so she did with her long fair hair, just slightly wavy from being plaited, and a dark-blue velvet ribbon holding it back.

  She gave a sigh and leaned back against the leather seat. “Don’t you love the smell of leather?”

  “Mmm, yes.”

  “Especially when it’s mixed with the smell of horse.”

  And for a second then Jane looked at him, really looked at him without shyness, because she felt they were friends. The mood changed, and she began asking him questions about himself, what it was like to be a lawyer and what exactly it meant and how it felt to sit at a desk all day poring over huge volumes, and Maurice found himself telling her things he didn’t often talk about. “Anything worth doing has a lot of tedious work involved, but it’s a little like a hunt. You always hope to find a precedent that will give you something to stand on, so it’s worth all the digging.…”

  And Jane was grateful because he was talking to her quite seriously without condescension.

  “What do you dream of doing?” she asked.

  “Do you really want to know?”

  “Of course.”

  “It’s not ‘of course,’ but I’ll pretend you mean it.”

  “I don’t say things I don’t mean.”

  He turned to give her a piercing look. “No, I guess you don’t. Most people do.”

  “Because of what Mamma calls the ‘amenities.’ When you grow up you have to lie a lot of the time.”

  “And you think you won’t … when you’re grown-up?”

  “It depends on what I decide to do,” Jane said. “I mean I’m not going to be like Viola and Edith, who are only interested in getting married.”

  “Bravo for you!” Maurice said, smiling at her. “But …”

  “Oh, I know, people change. They can’t help it. But right now I am who I am, and please tell me your dream.”

  Maurice’s dream was to found a law firm which would be designed to help people who cannot afford a lawyer, who have learned the hard way that they don’t have much of a chance.

  “What do they do now?” Jane asked, her eyes wide.

  “Pay up. Go to jail.”

  “That’s awful,” Jane said.

  “Yes … well, it means getting the government interested. It would have to be financed, so I may have to go into politics first to get anything of the sort accomplished.”

  “Pappa would like to hear about that,” Jane said.

  But they were now in a throng of carriages on Charles Street, and life outside the cab was so interesting that they became absorbed in watching the drivers pull in and out and Jane became suddenly anxious that they might be late.

  “Don’t worry, they’ll hold the curtain for such important people,” Maurice told her.

  And indeed they were settled in their seats, fifth row on the aisle, ten minutes before the curtain went up. “I can’t believe it,” Jane whispered, as the orchestra tuned up in the pit and launched into the prologue of Traviata. “Sarah Bernhardt in Camille.” She was hugging herself with excitement, the bliss of it, leaning forward in her seat, as the lights dimmed and they waited for the immense red curtain to go up. And when it made that slight rustle as it glided upwards she turned to Maurice with a smile of pure joy. But after that, nothing existed for her except what was going on on the stage, except the slight figure in white and the strange haunting slightly nasal voice of Bernhardt. Every now and then Maurice glanced over at the uplifted face beside him, a person literally entranced, totally unaware that she was being observed. He had never before witnessed someone who could give herself up so completely. And he wondered how life would use this power … or abuse it, and what it really was.

  In the intermission he asked if she would like to stretch her legs, but she shook her head, and as she clearly wished not to talk, he left her and went out to the foyer to have a smoke and be greeted by various acquaintances, including his Aunt Maude, a great gossip who asked, “Who is that pretty girl you have with you, Maurice?”

  He explained that she was Jane Reid, “I am her surrogate uncle, this afternoon.”

  “Oh?” Aunt Maude lifted an eyebrow.

  “She’s just fourteen, Aunt Maude—now, come.”

  It is the instinct of society to spoil everything, he thought as he turned away. He would not brook teasing about Jane. He wanted to guard her and himself, to guard something precious that he did not even want to define. And when he slipped into his seat beside her, he felt at home. They did not have to talk, to make small talk. How much he enjoyed being with a girl who didn’t have to flirt or ask some response from him to herself, a girl who could lose herself completely in an experience beyond them both.

  But in the last act, the agonizing waiting for Armand and his arrival like a touch of warm wind at last, as he handed Jane a large white handkerchief, her mother’s small one having been soaked, and saw the tears flowing down her cheeks, he wondered if all this was a little much for her.

  “Oh Maurice,” she whispered when the lights went on and the applause, rising in wave after wave, shattered the illusion and shocked Jane back into the theater, and made her cover her face with both hands.

  “We’ll stay a while,” he whispered, “till they’ve left.”

  “I can’t bear it to be over.”

  But it really wasn’t over because they had the long drive back to Cambridge and could talk about it all, and remember each gesture and intonation. Jane, who had been, as she said herself, “a wreck” a half-hour before, was sparkling with all she wanted to share and discuss, and astonished Maurice with what she had taken in even while being so deeply moved. They agreed that the actor who played Armand was rather a bore and simply did not have the passion in him required by his part. “I think it’s not easy to do,” Jane said thoughtfully. “But I would have done some things differently myself.”

  “Like what?”

  “I didn’t feel he really looked at her at the end … looked into her face, saw that she was dying.…”

  “Could you do that?”

  Then she laughed, “Of course not.… I just like to imagine.”

  They sat then in a companionable silence for some time, until they were on Brattle Street and nearly home.


  “I can’t bear for it to be over,” Jane said again.

  “Well, Hampden is coming in Cyrano de Bergerac after Christmas. How would you like to see that?”

  “Oh Maurice!”

  It was dark when they drove up to the door. There on the doorsill, Jane flung her arms around Maurice and kissed his cheek, “Thank you,” she said, just as Mamma opened the door.

  “Come in, come in, Maurice … and tell us all about it.”

  But he made an excuse of work to do, paid the cabbie, and walked over to the Square. Somehow he wanted to keep the Jane he had taken to the theater to himself, not be present as she was swallowed up by the family.

  Much later, when the tale had been told in every detail at supper, and when Snooker came to say goodnight to the girls, she asked, “What was he like, dearie?”

  “Perfect, just perfect,” Jane said. “He understands everything. He didn’t make me go out in the intermission. He gave me a big handkerchief when I needed it terribly, and we sat in the theater till everyone had gone.”

  “Mmm,” Snooker said solemnly, “it’s a wholly characteristic definition of perfection, a young man who does everything you want.”

  “Oh,” Jane said, blushing with the shame of it. “But Snooker, I think he understands me. We’re friends. Can’t you see?”

  “I’m teasing, dearie. You’re much too high up in the air to be teased right now.”

  “I’m happier than I’ve ever been, if that’s what you mean.”

  Alix, sitting up in her bed, threw a pillow at her sister and the entity was re-established with a pillow fight that ended only when they were both out of breath, and Snooker turned out the light.

  In the next year Edith entered the Annex at Harvard and Viola married Vyvian. Maurice was firmly entrenched as Jane’s friend, a circumstance Jane took quite for granted, but that was unusual, for the older girls were not allowed out with their beaus without a chaperone. Maurice had been persuasive that his role was that of an uncle, so he was allowed to take Jane to the rink to skate, and four or five times a year to the theater. Those were the gala afternoons, of course. None more memorable than Cyrano de Bergerac, their second outing, when Maurice proved his perfection in an unforgettable way. Jane, of course, was dissolved at the end, and had used up two large linen handkerchiefs by the time the curtain went down. This time she was crying not only because it was so sad, but because it was over. “I can’t bear it to be over, Maurice,” she said. But then he felt in the inside pocket of his jacket and brought out two tickets for the matinee the following week.

  “I knew we would have to see it again,” he told her.

  When Snooker was told about that, she shook her head. “I have to admit that that is perfection, dearie.”

  She did not add what she was no doubt thinking, that Jane had such abundance of life in her and responded so swiftly and at such depth to any event that she constantly took herself and everyone else by surprise.

  At school she was always in demand for plays and singing, but did not do as well as Alix in her regular lessons, except in the reciting of poetry. Snooker had puzzled about this from the time she was teaching Jane to read. She was quite slow at learning, and very stubborn. She wanted to do things in her own way … once took the first reader out of Snooker’s hands and went off into a corner with it, determined to work out the words by herself. Sometimes this trait irritated her teachers because Jane, determined to understand, continued to ask questions when the subject had been rather completely covered. In the ninth grade now, she had to write short papers, and they were always handed in late because she put off beginning in time, and then got in very deep, too late to do as good a job as she might have.

  “Jane is very thorough and works hard, but seems a little slow,” was the comment on one report. “Her emotions are ahead of her intellect at present. She is behind in math partly because she does not enjoy figures.”

  “It’s not that I don’t enjoy math,” she said to Mamma when this report was explained to her. “I just can’t get it through my head. When Miss Rogers explains I can feel my mind going blank right away. My head gets so hot, I think it’s going to burst!”

  “Miss Rogers is very violent,” Alix came to the rescue. “She shouts at Jane … she treats any mistake as a sin, Mamma!”

  “It appears to be a collision between two powerful forces,” Pappa murmured from behind the Boston Evening Transcript. “I have an idea you’re getting into your own way. Just pretend it isn’t important.”

  “But it is important,” Jane answered passionately. “I can’t graduate without math.”

  Maurice came to the rescue and for three weeks spent two hours every Saturday afternoon helping Jane with algebra. He discovered that it was at least partly a matter of tempo. Jane simply could not be hurried, but if one had patience and she was allowed to make mistakes and Bounder for a while, the light was apt to dawn.

  “Oh Maurice, I’ve got it. I see what I did wrong … there!”

  And quite often she had to hug him with the relief of it.

  This was a different girl from the one he took to the theater, one who seemed able to understand completely and to feel with things far beyond her age. It was also a different girl from the one with whom he waltzed at the rink and who had a wonderful flow and skill on skates, even though she was almost as tall as he and might have made him feel awkward. There was nothing awkward about her, and Maurice decided that that was because she seemed totally unselfconscious. He wondered sometimes if she was even aware that she was beautiful. Am I in love with her? Maurice sometimes asked himself. And decided that he was not, partly perhaps because he was very much aware that if he overstepped his role as surrogate uncle there would be hell to pay. And then their friendship was so unlike any other relationship he had ever had with a girl, he wanted to keep it as it was, innocent and deep.

  He was asked to debutante parties as an eligible bachelor and enjoyed flirting and squeezing a girl’s hand as much as any young man, enjoyed the sensation of holding a young woman in his arms in a waltz, the softness of a young woman. But somehow these feelings had never led him into a desire to go further, to capture one of these charming young ladies and make her his wife. And sometimes he worried about this. Would he ever fall in love? Twenty-eight seemed awfully old.

  Jane was very sympathetic. “I can’t understand anything about it,” she told him. “I don’t want to be touched. Maybe there’s something frightfully wrong with both of us!” And at that they laughed, secure in all they shared, glad to shut out what everyone else did and everyone else felt.

  But in the year Jane graduated, Allegra and James came to the conclusion that now she was putting her hair up, Jane would have to stop seeing Maurice. Or only with a chaperone present. Maurice was asked to come for a little talk at eleven one Saturday morning while Jane, not told of this, was sent off to play tennis with Alix.

  “I know you will understand, Maurice, that Jane is about to come out into society, and what was unusual even when she was only a child will now become impossible.”

  “Mrs. Reid, you must believe that I have never by a word or gesture gone beyond the limits of an uncle and a niece.”

  “Dear boy, I do believe you … your discretion and kindness have been impeccable. You have given Jane joys she will never forget. We are grateful.” There was a slight pause while Allegra arranged the bow at her throat. “But …”

  Maurice observed this small firm person sitting very straight and wondered how on earth to deal with her conviction. “You don’t know what you’re doing!” he said passionately. “It’s cruel!”

  “Please don’t make it harder for me than it is,” she said with great dignity. “I have often wondered whether our decision to permit such a friendship was wise. You will make me regret it, Maurice, if you persist.”

  “Jane will never understand,” he said, rocking back and forth as though in physical pain. “How can you do this to her?”

  “You are making me
very unhappy,” Allegra said, but her glance did not yield. “I think you must promise me and my husband that you will not try to see Jane or communicate with her for a year. Give her a chance to meet other young men closer to her own age. I know you are fond of Jane, and I ask this for her sake.”

  Maurice was close to tears, and so ashamed of the intensity of his feelings that he got up with only one instinct, to get away as fast as possible. “You have my promise, Mrs. Reid.”

  “Thank you.”

  She gave him a firm, warm handshake. And then, with a characteristic gesture, slipped an arm through his as she escorted him to the door. It was so unexpected he felt quite undone.

  “Good-bye, dear Maurice.”

  And then the door closed behind him. In the distance he could see a white dress, returning a serve, running, running to the net.

  It was the first major crisis in Jane’s life. No doubt she had been occasionally deprived of something she wanted very much to do, usually something that involved risk of one sort or another. But this attacked her inmost self, and seemed an invasion of her very being. It was so unlike Mamma, warm, loving Mamma, who often persuaded her husband to give her daughters a free rein, but when Jane had tried to argue her mother said, “The subject is closed,” and left the room.

  There were torrents of tears and many a night her pillow was soaked after Alix was safely asleep. Even Snooker was hard put to say anything comforting. This was a matter of honor and she could not take Jane’s side against her mother.

  “It’s the price you pay for being who you are,” she said.

  “And who is that?” Jane cried out. “I’m not a criminal!”

  “You are a beautiful young woman whom many a young man is going to want to marry, and …” here Snooker hesitated, but Jane might as well face reality while they were at it, “you will inherit considerable wealth someday.”