The Magnificent Spinster Page 6

  And when Pappa returned, dismayed to find his wife thinner and looking extremely tired, and Jane a little withdrawn and somehow older, they talked about it, “I can’t see why you have to exhaust yourself to feel that life is real, life is earnest,” he teased.

  “Oh Papa, if you had seen how people struggle to live, even very old people—and then how at a certain moment they are ready to die. Something happens, and there is a look on their faces … perfect peace. I’ll never be afraid of death again.”

  “Tell us about St. Paul, dear.…” Allegra, back to normal, deliberately changed the subject. Jane was becoming a little too intense, and besides, their experience had gone too deep to be discussed, she felt. They had done what they needed to, and now it was over. The hospital had been reorganized and qualified nurses brought in, but people were still dying like flies. Prayer seemed more appropriate to Allegra than talking about oneself, and this reaction was entirely characteristic. Jane went up to her room, feeling at a loose end. There she read and reread a letter from Lucy in Philadelphia. Lucy was working at the Red Cross but quite dissatisfied with her job of organizing volunteers to roll bandages and knit socks and sweaters and woolen caps: “I wish I could find some way to deal more directly with people, Reedy. Have you ever thought that when the war is over … and they say it can’t be long now … there will be enormous need for people to help in the rebuilding, and to take care of children? There will be so many orphans! Don’t you think we might go to France together and help somewhere, in an orphanage maybe?”

  Jane sat in the little rocker for a long time with the letter in her hand. France! The word itself. France had been a lodestar for so long—but could she afford a year away, not begin her life as a teacher as planned? Of course she could. At last the door was opening to something she could do, like the nursing, something really needed, acutely needed. And to do it with Lucy, quiet, steadfast, imaginative Lucy whom she loved as much as anyone in her own family, her chosen friend. It seemed almost too good to be true. The only awful thing was that they would have to wait a year or more … God knows how long!

  It would be a very long year of disasters, learned of through the newspapers and in letters from soldiers in France, a year in which President Wilson turned the United States from peace to war, and in doing so had to sabotage his own pleas for tolerance as the propaganda machine in Washington went into full gear and hatred of the Hun swept the country. Submarine warfare was sinking hundreds of thousands of tons of shipping and the holocaust in the trenches began to be nearly matched by the loss of men at sea. The world was to be made safe for democracy by the massacre of millions of young men, and among them Quentin, who was killed at Belleau Wood. Alix married and within a month went down to New York to say good-bye to Fredson, drafted and bound for Fort Bragg. Edith’s fiancé joined the medical corps. Everything cherished was in peril, Jane thought.

  And at the table Allegra’s wish to keep things as calm and peaceable as possible often failed. For, as the full horror of the trench warfare trickled in, Martha asserted that she was a pacifist and that nothing could justify the slaughter, and Allegra reacted strongly to any emotional wholesale condemnations of Germany. Jane, ardent, fiercely partisan on France’s and England’s side, reciting poems by Rupert Brooke as the gospel, had been swept with millions of others into a passionate rejection of everything German.

  “But, dearie, you can’t just brush Goethe, Beethoven, and Wagner away,” her mother would answer. “Hatred isn’t the answer.”

  “They are murdering little children … innocent people … they invaded Belgium, didn’t they? This whole horrible war is the Germans’ fault!”

  “Let us have peace at our table,” her mother said with unusual severity.

  At this point Snooker, who was usually a silent witness, burst into tears, and left the room.

  “I’m sorry,” Jane said. “It’s my fault.”

  But when she found Snooker in her room at the top of the house, there seemed no easy comfort. “Everything’s breaking apart,” Snooker sobbed. “When will it end?” Snooker, the controlled, the comforter, had, for once, really broken down, and this more than anything else brought Jane to her senses.

  A small matter? But small matters can change people. Jane was much too passionate to be naturally tolerant as Martha seemed to be. For her, tolerance had to be learned, and learned through living out strong convictions and the inevitable collisions that take place when strong conviction is confronted by reality, when a person actually lives what he or she believes. It had been a shock when quiet, gentle Martha spoke with such force about pacifism. In her heart of hearts Jane had to admit that this sister who had always chosen to stay in the background had a strength she had not suspected. And of course she had been wrong to speak so hotly against the Germans. Now in her room she blushed to think of her mother’s just reprimand.

  And on an impulse she took out her violin, tuned it, and played a Beethoven violin sonata. It would always be Jane’s instinct to do something active to solve problems.

  I am now once more confronted by my ignorance and must treat only briefly what was certainly a major experience. For at the end of 1918, soon after the armistice had been signed, Reedy and Lucy did manage to get to France and spent some months in an orphanage on the Norman coast. It was run by the order of Saint Vincent de Paul, those nuns who wear a white coif starched so that it resembles great white wings, and a dark blue habit. “Les Miss,” as they were immediately called, were welcomed into what I imagine as a dreadfully cold stone building to help take care of a hundred or more orphans, boys and girls, most of them under ten years old. No one was very well fed. It rained incessantly. No doubt “Les Miss” organized games and got the children outdoors as much as was permitted. They learned French willy-nilly, and created a good deal of laughter among the nuns with their sometimes ludicrous mistakes. Luckily they both had lively senses of humor, and Jane more obviously, Lucy more subtly, had a genius for lifting the spirits of both the overworked and exhausted sisters and the children.

  Jane never told me anything about what it was like for a Unitarian to find herself in the middle of the Catholic mystique, nor whether “Les Miss” got up at four or five to join the nuns at Mass. I do know that her love of France and her intention to teach history to children led her to use any free time she and Lucy had in finding out everything she could about the life of medieval people and in immersing herself in the legends of Roland and Charlemagne. No doubt they made pilgrimages to such legendary places as Mont-Saint-Michel, the cathedral of Amiens, still in ruins from the war, and Jane with her power to imagine herself into the past surely felt all this on her pulse as a poet might rather than a scholar. She was never a “quick study,” never facile or glib, but she took into herself what she cared about deeply and re-created it much as a novelist or poet does. When she came back with every intention of joining Frances Thompson at the Parker School in Chicago, fate intervened in a curious way.

  But I must add one footnote to the little I know about the time in France. “Les Miss” did not abandon the children they had known the best and for the next forty years had a tradition of meeting at Thanksgiving time, busy though they each were, and taking out the large white copybook where the names and addresses were kept, the marriages, the children’s names, and finally the grandchildren, and writing each one a Christmas letter. There were many summer vacations spent going back to see them, scattered in time and in different provinces.

  Back from France I have an idea that the way in which fate intervened may have not been altogether to Jane’s liking. It must have been rather a shock, when she was all set to adventure far from home in her first teaching job, to learn that Frances Thompson had been invited to head the Warren School and would herself be coming to Cambridge. She offered Jane a position teaching medieval history.

  There was no doubt in Jane’s mind that she wanted to teach under Frances Thompson, so that was that. But it meant living at home. Naturally her parent
s were delighted, as was Snooker, who, increasingly frail, remained with the Reids as a friend. Martha and Jane were the only children still at home; Allegra and James, still very much themselves, were in their sixties. There could be no question, Jane felt, of moving out. But staying meant that she was still a child, finding meals waiting for her when she came back from school, and her mother and father and Snooker eager for a report on the day. It meant that she was part of a society that expected something of Trueblood’s granddaughter, and, overflowing with life as she was at twenty-five, young men were always inviting themselves to meals, or begging her to play a game of tennis, or to go to a concert or a dance. That was enjoyable up to a point.

  But in her own mind at least she was first and foremost a teacher at the Warren School, and that, she soon discovered, was really a twenty-four-hour-a-day job. Her mother occasionally suggested that she was refusing too many invitations.

  “Dearie, the Warren School is not a nunnery, after all!”

  It might as well have been in demanding the whole life of its teachers, and at that time there were very few men on the faculty, and few married teachers. Jane was teaching the seventh grade, twelve girls and boys. She was the classroom teacher. She taught medieval history and English. Each year at Warren was built around a central subject. Themes sprang out of the material they were studying. It was quite usual for the students to write a play and perform it, inspired by something they were reading in history. And there were no textbooks, for the theory was that teachers must use primary sources as far as possible. Jane had thought she was well prepared after her year in France, but she soon found out that being prepared meant hours in the library, hours copying out texts and getting them mimeographed, hours planning each class, and, on weekends, hours thinking ahead as well as reading papers.

  And that was only her own province. There were meetings after school, almost every afternoon, of one committee or another, and sometimes in the evening.

  Frances Thompson was in her first year of a gruelling job and relied on Jane for advice and comfort … they had come to the school together, as outsiders, in a very close community, and that fact drew them together in a new way. Jane was no longer a student of Frances’ but a powerful ally. The school was in a perpetual state of drama, self-criticism, and growth. Thirty teachers, most with strong personalities and often in violent disagreement about both theory and practice, had to be kept in balance.

  But for Jane every single day was an adventure. She left home at eight with her eyes shining. Her children in the class delighted, fascinated, irritated, kept her on her mettle, and partly because she was so young she felt an instant rapport with them all. She felt she had been catapulted, quite unprepared, into the thick of life, a life she loved passionately.

  Prologue, Part II

  I had not realized how much I had absorbed of Jane Reid’s childhood and youth until I began to write about them in these pages. So many small incidents and occasions welled up that it was almost as though I had been there on the island, at Vassar, in France, and finally of course at the Warren School, where I myself now enter the scene.

  Here I am finding problems I do not know how to solve, and it has taken weeks to make a start. How much of my own life, for instance, will have to be revealed? It is not my intention to indulge in autobiography, and in fact I feel extremely reluctant to do so. But I am the narrator, and who I am—and was as a child—and what I have done with my life is, at times, going to be relevant. And that is troubling. I have never been a very open person; when I was teaching in college my students knew very little about me, for instance. As I think it all over and remember the years at the Warren School, where I first met Jane Reid as her pupil in the seventh grade, I see that I changed a great deal more than she did over the fifty or more years of our friendship. For she remained as passionate, as unselfconscious, as committed to life in every way as she had been as a child, and that was one of her charms.

  But for reasons which will become clear later on, I did change, and by the time I was forty-five I was leading a secluded and settled life as a professor of history in a small college. And I had closed off some parts of me that Jane Reid had touched deeply when I was a child in her care. Perhaps that is why I have found it difficult to go back and unbury those years. The only way to do it is to become that child again. But the risk is very great.

  Part II

  The Growth of a Friendship

  It all began in the seventh grade at the Warren School, when I was at last in Jane Reid’s room. I had come to Warren in the sixth grade from a public school near where we lived on Raymond Street. I loved Warren at once; everything there was so interesting, such a challenge, after the pressures of being in a class of thirty under a rather tense spinster who always seemed to be on the verge of crossness and more interested in keeping order than in teaching us. Although my sixth-grade teacher at Warren scared me with her unexpected explosions and my life under her eye was made harder by the fact that I was not good at math, her subject, the atmosphere at Warren quickly won me over. The biggest change from the public school was that we laughed a lot, and for me at least that I made real friends, especially Faith Franklin, with whom I invented all sorts of jokes and finally a secret language which reduced us to helpless laughter whenever we spoke in it. I realize now that we must have been rather a handful for Miss Everett, and I can still hear her calling out, “Cam and Faith, keep down your nervous energy!”

  The school was open-air at that time, and the schoolrooms rather like barracks, low wooden buildings, walled-in windows which were kept open even in winter. We could not help being aware of Jane Reid’s seventh-grade classroom next door to ours; the children always appeared to be having such a great time. And Miss Reid, tall and beautiful, was glamorous indeed compared to round, plain Miss Everett. So I looked forward to being elevated to the seventh grade as to some marvelous unknown country where wonderful things were going to happen.

  Meanwhile it was exciting to find myself in a school which was as much a creation of the students as of the faculty, or so we children believed. I soon found out that Frances Thompson, the head, was open to suggestions and I could go in and talk to her almost any time. I liked her a lot. She treated me with respect, with a slight twinkle in her eye which I felt was not patronizing when, for instance, I complained that it was hard to write in mittens. In winter the classrooms were arctic, as a small potbellied stove in the front of each room near the teacher’s desk was the only source of heat!

  This Spartan atmosphere did cure me of a tendency to bronchitis, and in general colds were rather rare. Clothes never mattered. I loved dressing up in thick sweaters and heavy boots with thick socks inside, “woodsman’s socks” they were called in the Sears Roebuck catalog. I had always been a tomboy; in those days, sixty years ago, blue jeans for girls did not exist, and in most schools a girl was expected to look like a girl and wear dresses, so Warren, with its unisex clothing, was just what I needed.

  In the spring Miss Reid got a new convertible Dodge, one of the first where the roof could be raised and lowered automatically. I sometimes witnessed her arrival at school a little before eight, the top down, and the car filled with children she had picked up on her way. I wished I was not on a bicycle then, but on the other hand, it was two or three miles between our house and the school and it was easier on a bike to evade horrible little boys who threw stones and jeered, and safer, too, when crossing a kind of wild place near the Divinity School where I was sure danger lurked. As I look back I realize that at that time in my life, at age twelve, boys were a threat and a menace rather than anything else, a foreign tribe best kept at a distance.

  That year in the seventh grade, studying Roman history and the start of the Middle Ages, was a very good year. I used to stay around after school to talk to Miss Reid about things. Sometimes she was sitting at her desk, going over papers, and didn’t hear me come in. Then she lifted her head, “Oh Cam, it’s you. I thought I heard a mouse.”

&n
bsp; “I wanted to ask you about my theme.…”

  But that wasn’t it, of course. I wanted the chance to talk about myself and life in general. It was a good year at school, but my father and mother were not getting on very well, and as an only child I felt very uneasy and somehow rootless as a result. Half the time my father was not home for supper, saying he had work to do. My mother confided in me, which was perhaps not a very good idea. There were times when I dreaded going home. I was being forced to grow up a little too fast that year, and Miss Reid with her rather childlike enthusiasm and sense of fun was a real help. Once when I didn’t have my bike for some reason and had been hanging around after school she noticed and suddenly said, “Come on, Cam. I’ll race you to the car and drive you home.” With her long legs, she could run terribly fast.

  Once I asked her in to see my dog, a Cairn I called Andrew, and I guess she saw that my mother was pretty upset and said, “Why don’t I take Cam home for supper, Eleanor?”

  “Isn’t it too much? I mean, you’ve had a long day.”

  “I didn’t know you knew my mother so well …” I said, a little envious of this intimacy I had not suspected.

  “She’s on the parents’ committee on art,” Miss Reid said, “didn’t you know? Your mother is a tremendous asset on that committee. She’s so imaginative and quick to see what could be done—what a marvelous person!”

  It was quite a surprise to hear my mother praised out in the world. I took her so much for granted and my father never paid very much attention to what she said. But it was even more surprising to see Miss Reid at home and to meet her parents and sister, a very plain woman who seemed exceedingly shy.