The Magnificent Spinster Page 5

  “What’s money if it makes you miserable and cuts you off from your best friend?”

  “It seems hard, I know, dearie, but you’ll get over it in time.”

  “I’ll never get over it,” Jane said quietly. “It’s rocked my faith in everything.”

  As far as anyone could see, she did get over it in time, but what they could not know was that when the tears stopped flowing—no one cries forever—a determination was forming to do things her own way as far as that was possible, And the first visible sign of this new firmness and will was Jane’s decision to go to Vassar. Who had ever heard of a Reid or Trueblood female not going to the Annex, Radcliffe College as it would soon become? Edith was there, doing brilliantly, and it had been taken for granted that Jane would live at home, and see young men, the brothers and friends of her schoolmates in the normal social life of Cambridge.

  James Reid was violently opposed to her wish. The first time Jane spoke of Vassar he had flung his napkin down and left the room, a gesture of such unusual violence that it silenced the whole family. Jane had blushed to the roots of her hair, but held her head erect. And perhaps because Allegra had minded dismissing Maurice more than she let on, she decided there and then to back Jane. That night in bed she and James had a long talk about it. And she was able to persuade him that real harm could be done if Jane ceased to trust her parents to be fair. “In time she will understand about Maurice … but she won’t understand if we force her in the matter of her education. And, truly, James, there is something to be said for leaving home to go to college. She will make friends on her own, people from other parts of the country.”

  “People from other parts of the country, as you put it, come to Harvard and Radcliffe … after all, I, her father, did so, and you didn’t meet me, my dear, by going to Vassar!” But the tone had changed and now they were laughing. Allegra knew it was going to be all right.

  Vassar did seem very far away compared, for instance, to Smith, Wellesley, or Mount Holyoke … but Jane was adamant, and when she told her parents that two of her class at school were entering Vassar, they felt reassured.

  There would be one more summer at the island before, as Martha put it, “everything starts breaking apart.” She had been thinking of the family, but what she could not know and none of them could know was that the guns of August would precipitate a world war that would radically change the safe, hopeful ethos of their childhood forever. For this was 1914.

  I have chosen to dwell on Maurice and that friendship at some length because, as I think over Jane’s life, it seems clear to me that it was of great importance in her growth as a human being, and perhaps the enforced parting set her on a course she would follow to the end of her life.

  After the year of silence, Jane and Maurice did see each other again. Nothing changed their ability to meet and talk about everything, and when he volunteered for the ambulance corps and went to France he wrote Jane at Vassar long, confidential letters. She was one of the bridesmaids at his wedding, and godmother to his first child, a daughter named for her.

  It is odd that, on the whole, novelists speak little of friendship between opposite sexes, and especially these days, when sexual encounters dominate everything else in most fictional characters. I am writing about a woman who had a genius for friendship with both sexes, and touched deeply an enormous number and variety of lives. Could she have done so to the same extent, and at the same depth, had she married? I think not. It is one of the questions I hope to be able to probe as I pursue my quarry.

  I now come to a block, for although Jane always glowed with happiness whenever she talked of Vassar, we had so much else to talk about when I knew her as a grown-up person myself that only rarely did I glean some facts about that seminal time in her life. But one thing is certain. She met at Vassar a young woman, Lucy Goodspeed, who was to be woven into the rest of her life as her most intimate friend. Jane’s nickname at Vassar was Reedy, possibly a reference to her height, or simply a diminutive of her family name, but whenever I was with her and someone called her Reedy, I knew that person had been a classmate at Vassar.

  When one saw Lucy and Jane together it was clear that Lucy had the greatest respect for her friend, that although she was herself head of a girls’ school, she deferred to Reedy out of love and something like honor. She honored Jane, and was able to prove it in singular ways. For instance, for years she went over Jane’s accounts (shades of dismal math days at school), which were apt to be in some confusion. Lucy was dark, with deepest brown eyes and a rather dark skin, and reminded me of a bird, a shy bird. My guess is that at Vassar she had entered Jane’s orbit as one of a group who gravitated toward that immense vitality and sense of adventure, for Jane was an imaginer of every sort of fun, an instigator of every sort of adventure, from picnics by the lake to plays. I have hesitated to use the tarnished word “glamour,” but there is no doubt that Jane Reid had it and that women as well as men were entranced by those extraordinary eyes, that women as well as men wanted to ally themselves with her in one way or another.

  But then Jane herself had an instinct for devotion, an intense need to follow as well as to lead. She could be swept off her feet, and at Vassar she was, by a young instructor in the English department, Miss Frances Thompson. Miss Thompson was very tall, very thin, quite plain, but she was a great teacher who could tease her students, only a few years younger than she, as well as inspire them, and she had a contagious passion for education. Also she opened doors for Jane into a new world, for Miss Thompson came from Chicago and her father was the well-known head of a settlement house there. She had been brought up among the poor with a burning sense of the injustices done to immigrants, and the need to help was bred into her bones. She brushed away Jane’s somewhat Victorian ideas of poetry by reciting Carl Sandburg’s “Chicago,” its terse, vigorous language and its celebration not of the beautiful but of the tough and harsh. This is what Jane had been looking for when she decided to go to Vassar. Not the genteel world in which she had been brought up, but the real world, or what she thought of as “real.” In the course of two years under Miss Thompson she came to the decision that teaching was what she wanted to do.

  So it came as a blow but also as an opportunity when Frances told her one day in Jane’s senior year that she was going back to Chicago to teach at the Parker School, and that if Jane would like to come along and get some training there, it might be arranged.

  All the charming, seductive things about college life were still there, but as the war dragged on and became more terrible, the young men with whom Jane had danced were volunteering for the Canadian army or, as Maurice had done, for the ambulance corps. France, greatly beloved, became almost as dear as the United States, and the students sang the “Marseillaise” on their way to classes. Lucy and Anne dreamed of getting over somehow as soon as they graduated. Like everyone else, they knitted socks and sweaters and rolled bandages in their spare time.

  As I ponder the very little I know about those years two images stand out above all others. The first I found out quite by accident, and it was illuminating. On my way to the island I had stopped to see a former classmate of Jane’s to deliver a present to her from a mutual friend, and thought Jane would be happy to hear what Jewel was like now that they were each in their seventies. I learned then that Jane had never forgotten and would never forgive a practical joke played on her by Jewel a few days after she arrived at Vassar, terrified, homesick, and taking comfort in a family of Brownies, small plump figures covered in silk, which were her fetishes at that time. When she came back to her room after supper, the Brownies had disappeared, stolen. There was anger in her eyes when she told me this story fifty years later, and it was clear that Jewel would never be forgiven—although she did return the beloved Brownies a few days later. It has stuck in my mind because it is an example of the child who never died in Jane and also of the intensity of her feelings. The Brownies were still kept on her bureau at the island. And it was of course that child wh
o came to life whenever Jane was with children, even into very old age. Though the unforgiving anger took me by surprise.

  The other image which not only Jane herself but several of her friends always mentioned when the Vassar days were referred to was, I imagine, the greatest experience of all. Far more important than her being class president or getting an A on her final paper from Frances Thompson. She was chosen to play Cyrano in Cyrano de Bergerac. Those who saw this performance never forgot it—“She was simply great,” they all agreed. Here her innate romanticism had full play in a role which she took into herself and made her own, that part of her that would have liked to be a man, swashbuckling, in love with language, with an irresistible power to woo … but doomed to failure because of an immense nose. In that role she could literally play out every romantic dream, every secret desire. And how she would have hated to have to play Roxane!

  When I referred to the notes I made immediately after the funeral I found the phrase “She was never virginal,” and I suppose what I meant was that she did not resemble anyone’s idea of a spinster, dried up, afraid of life, locked away. On the contrary it may have been her riches as a personality, her openness, the depth of her feelings that made her what she was, not quite the marrying kind … a free spirit.

  She was intensely romantic but it occurred to me that she had almost nothing of the narcissistic young woman whose romanticism has at least something to do with being admired. Jane wanted to admire, not so much to be admired, and she wanted to throw herself into some heroic act or life, as a follower, not a leader. The need to dominate which one sees rather often in powerful women was not in her.

  Outside the college itself and all the life there and in the summers on the island, World War One created a highly emotional climate. Young men came to say good-bye, among them Quentin Blake, just graduating from Harvard and snatched by the army as he was about to enter law school. He managed to take a night train up and had two days in which to woo Jane, something he found quite frustrating, for the island had become an enterprise for raising food, and Jane met him in her gardening khaki pants and shirt, and as soon as he had changed she took him to the big cleared place where Martha and Alix and Pappa were hard at work hoeing between long rows of corn and cabbage for what seemed an eternal two hours before she relented, and allowed that they might go for a swim. At least for the walk down to the pool he had her to himself. He lost no time.

  “Oh Jane,” he said, “you’re beautiful!”

  “Don’t,” she pleaded, and he saw her blush.

  “Don’t what?”

  “Don’t say flattering things. Can’t we be just as we always were? Remember when you chased me down to the dock and I fell in?”

  “I wanted to kiss you then and I want to kiss you now. Please Jane, try to be human for a change.” He felt quite cross. Jane didn’t play the game, and how did one get hold of such an elusive person?

  He had touched her to the quick and her response was slow in coming. They walked along side by side and he felt diminished in every way … even the fact that she was taller than he was a humiliation. Finally she looked at him, then looked down as she said, “Quentin, it’s human not to want to kiss someone, isn’t it? You’re my dear friend, but I’m not ready to commit myself. Don’t you see?”

  “One kiss isn’t that serious, is it?” he teased, blocking her way.

  “It might not be for you—I suppose you’ve kissed a hundred girls,” and her eyes flashed dark blue, close to anger, he could see.

  “I don’t understand you,” he said bitterly, as she pushed past him. “Belle dame sans merci … the role doesn’t suit you.”

  But this sally had the unexpected effect of making Jane, who had been so serious a second before, suddenly burst into laughter, and run down the path until he caught her by the hand.

  “The belle dame sans merci.” She faced him, still laughing. “Oh Quentin, you are such an idiot!” But under the laughter she herself had to recognize that she simply did not like being wooed, if that was what Quentin was doing.

  And it was quite a relief when the others joined them at the pool and she could swim in peace while Quentin, still disgruntled, sat at her mother’s feet.

  I am a little in love with him, she thought, floating on her back and looking up at the sky, watching a gull fly over, but something in her violently resisted being swept away into all sorts of feelings she was not ready to accept. No, she told herself, I want to find out first what I can do myself. She hated the pressure put upon her by his feeling as though she were a wild animal and he had a net in his hands. Why do I feel like this? she asked herself, startled by the force of the image that had come out of the blue. It did not help that Alix was in love already and that Edith seemed on the verge of marrying a young psychologist from Colorado. When Jane tried to talk to Alix, she was told, “Don’t worry. You’re just not in love. When you are there won’t be any problem. You’ll just know.…”

  Quentin, Norris, Paul … Jane felt hedged around with young men who wanted something of her she could not quite give. And since she was not a belle dame sans merci, not a flirt by nature as Viola and even sweet Alix were, she could not enjoy this predicament. It seemed to get in the way of everything she did want, the dream of heroic action, of proving herself as every young man going off to war was about to do.

  Most of what was happening came from far away to people at home, the horrible trench warfare which the men who were living it did not even talk about in letters, but in 1918 something did happen at home: an epidemic of influenza raced through the army camps. Two acquaintances of the Reids died in their tents, without ever getting to France. It seemed so useless and unbearable. James Reid had gone to Minnesota when a call went out for volunteer nurses for the Boston hospitals, packed with the ill and dying.

  Jane, who had been reading the headlines by the fire in the Cambridge house, laid the paper down and glanced across at her mother. They exchanged a look of instant rapport and understanding.

  “You want to volunteer.… I’ll go with you. We’ll do it together.”

  “Oh Mamma!”

  Never since the episode of Maurice’s dismissal had Jane felt the barriers go down between herself and her mother. There had always been constraint, but now she felt that she and her mother were truly united. Of course if James had been at home, he would never have allowed his wife to take such a risk. But fortunately he was away and would not be back for two or three weeks. There were business and family problems to be seen to in St. Paul after the death of one of his brothers.

  So the next morning they took the trolley in to the Massachusetts Memorial Hospital, where one of Allegra’s cousins was a doctor. They were whisked into white gowns and set to work making beds in a former office that was being turned into a ward; then Allegra was summoned to help in one ward feeding the very weak with a spoon while in another Jane went about with a basin of warm water washing faces and hands, throwing each small cloth she used on a patient into a pail and reaching for a fresh one. The fear of infection was everywhere. So many nurses were themselves sick that volunteers had to do many things without much help. The doctors looked close to exhaustion. Jane was startled when Cousin Philip’s familiar voice behind her said, “Good heavens, Jane, what are you doing here?”

  “Mamma is here, too … I don’t know where. They asked for volunteers.”

  He seemed very upset and looked ill himself.

  “But why should we be safe when everyone else is in danger?”

  “As soon as you get home, wash thoroughly, take off everything you have worn, and see that it is washed,” he said severely.

  Just then, the old woman Jane had been washing threw up and there was no time for conversation. “I’m sorry,” the old woman murmured.

  “It’s all right, just rest.” Jane laid a hand on the burning forehead. Then, after a moment, when the crisis appeared to be over, she ran down the hall to the nurses’ room to get a clean sheet and another basin. There, a nurse was
in tears of frustration and exhaustion.

  “There isn’t a clean sheet,” she said angrily. “You’ll just have to do what you can. Three dead on this ward this morning.… It’s becoming a morgue.”

  Jane stood there for a moment catching her breath and then went back to what seemed now a kind of war in itself. She was very very glad to be there, strong and alive and able to help. However awful this was to witness, it was real. She was at last doing something needed. And she and her mother were very close during the month of long, exhausting days, so tired when they climbed onto the trolley for Cambridge after dark that Jane sometimes fell asleep. Allegra never did. She sat upright and could still manage a smile at a baby in a woman’s arms. Jane had never had a chance until then to feel Allegra’s strength, her unfailing spirit. So much, she realized, had been taken for granted, partly because they had been spared any ordeals such as serious illness. Terrible as it was, the war called out courage and endurance that were not tapped in “ordinary” life. That is what William James meant about “the moral equivalent of war,” Jane thought, recognizing that she was finding strength in herself that she had not known she had, not only the physical endurance to be on her feet all day, but a well of compassion beyond tears. She who wept so easily at the beauty of a fish hawk’s flight or a grand poem did not have tears in her eyes as she washed and ministered to the dying. She was strangely happy in the simple concentration of transfusing something like love, a love she could understand and could give.

  Cousin Philip had stopped scolding her now for being there. “You are doing a good job, Jane. Even the nurses are grateful.”

  “There’s so little one can do,” she said pushing her hair back and standing straight for a second, a relief after all the stooping.

  “You Reids have a lot of stamina. Your mother is quite amazing.”

  Three weeks before, praise from stern Cousin Philip would have delighted her. Now it didn’t seem to matter. She was beyond anything as personal as that. How infinitely far away tennis parties and dances had become! Even the island seemed a little unreal. And when it was over Jane Reid knew that those things would remain precious, but she had to find a way to live that would involve and use the whole of her.