The Magnificent Spinster Read online

  They lived in a huge house full of old velvet furniture and knickknacks, comfortable and sedate, but somehow not at all like Miss Reid. I liked her mother and it was impressive to be waited on at table by a waitress in a white apron. I realized for the first time that Miss Reid must be very rich, although I had heard that she was the granddaughter of Benjamin Trueblood. So I figured it out and dared to ask Mrs. Reid if she was the daughter he had written a poem about.

  “Yes, Cam, believe it or not, I am his daughter, referred to, as you remember, as ‘radiant Allegra.’” And her eyes twinkled. But her face was very wrinkled and of course she was terribly old. She smiled at me then in such a warm way that I felt it was all right that I couldn’t think of anything appropriate to say. Besides, I rather wanted to eat my creamed chicken in peace. And we had strawberry ice cream and brownies for dessert. An unforgettable day for me.

  That night when mother came to say good night I said, “I didn’t know you knew Miss Reid so well. She thinks you’re a wonderful person.”

  I knew mother would be pleased. She hugged me and said, “Sweet dreams, Cam.”

  “Don’t put out the light. I have to read Tacitus.” I was proud of having to read Tacitus. Not just any old textbook.

  In the middle of that year I had a disaster, and pride came before a fall. The school had decided to experiment with something called the Dalton plan. The idea was to give a month’s assignments ahead so that the students could go at their own pace. There was a big board on the wall with our twelve names on it and squares you checked off as an assignment was completed. There were various texts to be read, among them Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar, which we were to compare with a contemporary text, and five written papers. One was to imagine the day of a centurion on the Scottish border. I was a quick reader and quite a good writer, so I plunged in and was crossing off squares like mad by the second week of the four and had done everything ahead of everyone else by the start of the fourth week. So for a week I could make maps and do anything I felt like, and I lorded it over the class, I’m afraid.

  We were kept in suspense for a week after all the papers were in because Miss Reid had to go over them. Except in math, there were no grades at Warren, but you knew when you had done well, all right. Finally the day came when I expected an accolade. Joan, a quiet girl in glasses, and Peter, a brilliant kid who did everything well, got high praise, and almost everyone else had done pretty well, it seemed. I was the last to be commented upon and I was still hopeful. Maybe Miss Reid was keeping the best for last.

  Then she explained that the purpose of the Dalton plan was to give a student the responsibility of planning his own work, and (here I remember she smiled), “speed is not really what it is all about. It is not a race, Cam. But that is how you took it. You did sloppy work fast and the results are far below your own standard.”

  At that I hid my face in my hands and groaned, which made the class laugh. But Miss Reid didn’t like that at all. I guess it had been hard for her to be so severe, and she suggested that we have a little talk after class. Of course I dreaded that and stopped clowning right away. I felt terribly humiliated.

  After class I sat at my desk and waited. I could hear the other kids shouting out in the playground. Finally Miss Reid came back and sat down beside me instead of at her desk. She sat with her long hands clasped.… I’ll never forget that talk. She was solemn and unlike herself, a little stiff.

  She didn’t find the words easily, but what she said made a deep impression on me and was a piece of true education as I see it now. She made me see that my tendency to talk a lot in class sometimes prevented shyer students from contributing. She warned me that being very quick and bright had its dangers, and they had been proved in the superficial work I had just done. “You have great things in you, Cam, but you are letting yourself get away with gliding over the surface. You just have to go deeper and take more time,” she said. And then finally she did smile and told me the fable of the tortoise and the hare. “So try to be a tortoise instead of a hare.”

  It became a joke between us, and when I handed in a good piece of work she sometimes wrote on it, “Good for tortoise-Cam!”

  Another hard thing took place that year. I wanted terribly to play Nicolette in Aucassin and Nicolette, which our class was going to put on at assembly. But Deborah was chosen instead. It didn’t seem fair. I knew I would have been better at it. Deborah was rather slow and too fat. Almost anyone would have been better than Deborah. So why did Miss Reid choose her? Finally one day I couldn’t stand it any longer and burst out with it. “Why?”

  Jane Reid flushed right to the roots of her hair and her eyes got that dark blue they did when she was upset or angry. “Sometimes someone has to be given a chance,” she said very quietly. “I think Deborah needs to have a good part. Maybe you could help her,” she said tentatively.

  “I don’t like her,” I said, furious with her and with myself.

  “Cam, all your life you are going to have to get along with people you may not like, and if you are wise you’ll come to see that half the trouble is with yourself.”

  “What’s wrong with me?” I asked bitterly.

  “You think I’ve been unfair. Is that the trouble?”

  I nodded.

  “You’ll just have to take it on faith for a while that I try to be fair. Maybe you have to think of the class as a community of people helping each other. That’s the thing you’ve still got to learn, Cam.”

  Well, I didn’t quite understand then. But I liked her a lot, so I tried to believe she was right. And I had to admit that Deborah was really quite good in the part. She learned to speak out and not to mumble, for one thing. We all learned that at Warren because we often performed in assembly and could get on our feet and tell the school what we had been doing in science, for instance, and not be shy.

  It is strange how vivid that whole year in the seventh grade remains nearly sixty years later. I had other good teachers, but what made the year exceptional was Jane Reid. At twelve, I was at the right age for her enthusiasm and the imaginative way she made things happen in the classroom. Everything from that year has stayed with me, and when Ruth and I took a trip to England and saw the Roman wall, it felt almost as though I had been a soldier guarding that wall in another life, although that other life was simply the seventh grade at Warren. I found myself remembering:

  My father’s father saw it not

  And I belike shall never come

  to look on that so holy spot

  The very Rome.

  And she taught me a great deal outside the actual subject matter in class. She seemed always to have time to look at things, a spider making its web across a windowpane, the first song sparrow. She stopped right in the middle of a sentence, I remember, and listened intently; then her face lit up. “It’s the song sparrow,” she announced. “Be quiet and let’s listen.” Best of all was her sense of humor. She could make a joke of almost anything and the class was often dissolved into a gale of laughter at nothing at all.

  If she had a flaw it was her worship of self-control. She would never allow herself to show that she was angry, though we knew very well when she was by the quick flush, and then a kind of stiffness that made me, at least, uncomfortable. She would ask the offender to see her after class, and that “little talk” was painful in the extreme because she was so determined to reason something out that might have been settled at once and in a healthy way by an instant rebuke.

  What she did do, and very effectively, was to demand that we respect each other. I could see that she went out of her way, for instance, to get Alice, a very shy girl, to have a chance, and tried not to let the talkers dominate. I was one of the articulate, eager to please and to respond at once to any question she might ask, so I was apt to be put down at least once a day. Occasionally I resented this, and once she must have caught my sullen silence for the rest of the period, for she stopped me as I was running out the door for recess and said, “Cam, you have a lot to
say, but so do other people, don’t you see?”

  “I feel stifled,” I answered because I was still cross, and determined not to give in.

  “I’m sure you do,” and her eyes twinkled, and suddenly she couldn’t help laughing and I felt she liked me, so it was all right. At any rate, by the end of the year I knew that being quick and bright was not enough.

  On quite another level I suppose, as I look back, that something else was happening to me at the Warren School. It is hard even now to put into words, but reading those ardent poems made me realize that we were being in some subtle way fertilized as sentient beings. A whole world of feeling had been opened up in me, and if at times that took absurd forms, it was essentially a door opening into womanhood, into what it might be to become a woman. Here both Frances Thompson and Jane Reid were inspiring role-models, and I understood why Jane Reid’s eyes always shone whenever she spoke of Frances Thompson. These two extraordinary women never married, but each in her own way radiated a kind of influence which had very little to do with intellect.

  Yet they were very different. For all her sensitivity and shyness Frances Thompson was an initiator and a leader in educational theory, a pioneer in what was then called “progressive education,” and I suppose she was a spinster in a way Jane Reid never was. She was wholly dedicated to and absorbed in the school, perhaps because she was physically frail. Her power lay partly in her enormous empathy for any being suffering grief or malaise. Parents, children, teachers, all felt free to come to her with their problems. I never left her office without feeling restored to myself. But hers was a costly gift and Frances Thompson, I feel sure, was often near exhaustion. Whereas, at that time anyway, Jane Reid seemed able to handle a hundred relationships with ease, and what emanated from her, her influence if you will, was a deep and rich sense of life, an inexhaustible joie de vivre that encompassed men, women, and children, her parents, her pupils, her friends, and her suitors.

  The image that comes to my mind as I write is of the yearly garden party held at the Benjamin Trueblood house, where there was music and folk dancing all afternoon in a day in May. That year of the seventh grade brought me, amongst other things, my first friendship with a boy. Tommy Weston’s parents, like my own, were separating, and although we almost never mentioned it, this family upheaval—divorces were rare at the Warren School—had drawn us together. And we had decided to go to the Trueblood fete together. Tommy was a good dancer and so was I, so we had a great time, until, out of breath, we sat down under a tree to watch, especially Jane Reid, who had on a white dress with a blue sash and looked smashing. They were dancing “goddesses,” I remember, and she, tall and graceful and so light on her feet, seemed almost to be flying a little above the ground. It was rather special to think that Benjamin Trueblood’s granddaughter was our teacher.

  Afterwards, she saw us and came over and asked us to have some ice cream and cake with her, and that was so grand I was speechless for once.

  “She’s a great lady, isn’t she?” said Tommy as we walked home under the flowering chestnut trees, and stopped now and then to peer into secret gardens, here a small blue lake of scillas, there daffodils, and an ornamental cherry surrounded by a snow of petals.

  “A princess,” I amended the remark. “Lady” didn’t seem quite right for Jane Reid.

  “It’s going to be awful next year without her,” Tommy said. “I wish we could stay in the seventh grade.”

  Hearing it uttered like that, I felt a sharp pang. How could I live through a new year in another room with a new teacher? And I realized that something like love had happened to me. It had crystallized while we stood eating ice cream and Jane Reid’s eyes had looked incredibly blue. I was not going to let her go.

  Tommy had been right; the eighth grade was nothing like the seventh. Miss Chase, who taught us medieval history, was a true scholar and knew an awful lot, but she was very reserved, almost never laughed, and treated us with quiet authority, as though we were grown-ups. She would have been more comfortable with college students, and we, with the cruelty of children, disliked her and showed it by being uncooperative. Of course the trouble was that she was not Jane Reid; we had a standard she could not meet. All through October, while Cambridge became a gold and scarlet world and we scuffed leaves on the way to school, things got worse and worse. We passed notes and whispered in class, Miss Chase took no notice, preserving an icy calm. We were bored by the Venerable Bede, did not rise to the challenge of writing a medieval lyric. Nothing quite like this had ever happened at Warren before and I think Miss Thompson was nonplussed.

  Then one day Miss Reid appeared in our class to be greeted by shouts of joy and loud applause. Miss Chase, she told us, had the flu. But Miss Reid did not seem like herself. She was clearly nervous and upset. She looked at us quite coldly and did not smile at the applause or recognize that it had taken place.

  She said she was bitterly disappointed in us. She talked about Miss Chase and told us that we were missing a great experience, that this was a distinguished scholar whom we were very lucky to have teach us. Then she paused and thought before going on. Finally she said, and it was clearly difficult, that it was a poor kind of loyalty to someone else to close our eyes and ears to what was being so generously offered us every day. “You have been both rude and cruel,” she ended. “Your behavior this month doesn’t speak very well for me. You have made me ashamed.”

  We were absolutely silenced. No one dared to speak.

  “Very well; you may write a theme in this period on anything you choose.”

  After she left we talked, of course. For once Alice spoke up right away, “She doesn’t know,” she said bluntly. “She has no idea what Miss Chase is like.”

  “It isn’t fair,” Faith chimed in.

  But this was bravado and each of us in our heart of hearts knew we deserved the rebuke, and in the end maybe it did have some effect. Some of us made a real effort, but unfortunately Miss Chase never won our hearts.

  The next year, my last at Warren, my mother was teaching art part time, and she and Jane Reid became friends, so I began to know her in a new way as someone called “Jane,” not “Miss Reid.”

  In that last year I still used to stop by after school once in a while to have a talk or confide something that needed Jane Reid’s counsel, and she chose me to play the angel in the Christmas play, so for a few weeks I was working with her every day. She took words very seriously and I must have gone over my part a hundred times to get it right.

  Just before we graduated Miss Reid invited Faith and me to spend a night at an inn and have supper with her there. It was terribly exciting to dress in a blue dress and patent leather slippers, and to be going out with Miss Reid. Especially as the inn had been made famous in one of Benjamin Trueblood’s novels, one I liked a lot. By then I was aware that my hero, Benjamin Trueblood, was not very popular with grown-ups any longer. He was considered “old hat” and Victorian. But Jane Reid made it all seem magic. She took us to the small barn where Belinda was frightened by a horse and first met Andrew, the groom with whom she fell in love. We saw the well where they used to hide messages. We went all around imagining how it must have been when people rode up in carriages and the ladies carried muffs and wore violets in the fur collars of their jackets. Of course it was warm, a May evening, but in the novel it was winter most of the time, so we could almost hear the sleigh bells. Miss Reid’s eyes were shining, and I thought she must have been in love, the way she talked about Belinda and Andrew, but I didn’t dare ask. Our bedroom, Faith’s and mine, had a four-poster bed in it and underneath a trundle bed. It was like being in a play, and of course we giggled a lot when we were getting undressed and decided we would both sleep in the big bed rather than fight about who got it. We did have a pillow fight though and made rather a noise whooping it up. The inn was very silent except for us.

  Miss Reid came in to say good night in a lovely blue wrapper, with her hair in a long pigtail, and whispered, “Other people ma
y be trying to sleep, so maybe you could settle down, kids. I’ll knock on your door at eight tomorrow morning … sleep well.”

  But of course we couldn’t sleep. We lay awake and talked a long time, mostly about how awful it was going to be to leave Warren, to be parted because Faith was going to the Winsor School and I to the High and Latin in Cambridge.

  After a while it began to rain. We could hear it on the roof and suddenly decided we had to get up and go out. There was something about the rain and the smell of wet grass that excited us. We sneaked downstairs, terrified by every creak. Then we realized we would get our nightgowns wet, so we just took them off and left them in the hall. The inn was all closed down, not a light anywhere, and we had to unlock the door to get out. But the grass felt delicious and cool on our bare feet and we did a dance we made up, until we got into a fit of giggles and ran back in, so wet the rain poured down from our soaking hair all over our faces.

  I am struck as I remember this—and I do remember it in every detail—by how innocent and young we were at fourteen. We didn’t even smoke cigarettes! We thought the jazz records our parents played were soupy, and folk dancing was the only kind of dancing we enjoyed.

  I remember I felt a pang when Miss Reid told us, as we devoured a huge breakfast of pancakes and bacon, that she and Marian Chase were going to Europe for the summer, “to study” she said. “Marian is working on a book about guilds in the Middle Ages.” It was clear that she felt it a privilege to be travelling with that sobersides, and it did seem odd to me that a person as full of life as Jane Reid could attach herself to someone like Marian Chase.

  Anyway, it was a satisfaction to observe that she was treated with great respect by the manager of the inn when she paid the bill. I was dying to know how much it was—money had become very interesting lately, because my mother and I did not have much to live on. “It has been a pleasure to have Benjamin Trueblood’s granddaughter with us, Miss Reid,” the manager said. It dawned on me that Jane Reid might be called an American aristocrat. And I was proud to be with her. But it took many years before I knew what that meant in her case, how true it was, but not exactly in the way I envisioned such a person at fourteen.