The Magnificent Spinster Read online

  As I was then, to be an aristocrat meant being beautiful and grand and having money, lots of it, and a blue convertible Dodge that made her seem like a princess. I figured out that the bill at the inn must have been about forty times what my allowance of a dollar a week amounted to. Whew!

  Leaving Warren and going into the High and Latin school as sophomores added to our sense of being strangers from another planet. The freshmen had already made alliances, chosen clubs and sports, when we entered the following year, and we were really a little like addicts deprived of our drug, suffering withdrawal symptoms. If Warren had a flaw it was to be a world so exciting in its demands and rewards and so rare in its human quality that all of us who graduated from there felt—it sounds absurd but it is a fact—a little like exiles for the rest of our lives. Of course this was poignant for me because of my parents’ divorce. Tommy, with whom I could have talked about that, had disappeared to Exeter. Of my best friends only Anne had gone on with me to the Cambridge High and Latin. In a way I suppose that first year there was a year of mourning.

  It can’t have been easy for Jane Reid, our lodestar, to manage an occasional visit as she did, although that year she was beginning the ordeal of arranging her grandfather’s papers at the Trueblood House, and this, on top of her teaching, really devoured her life. My mother was quite firm with me at that time not to “run in” and try to see Jane at home. But when her father died I wrote her a letter and got one back in her clear, handsome writing, and it was an event because I felt I was being treated as a friend rather than a pupil: “It was good of you, dear Cam, to find time to write to me. The loss of one’s father seems at the time like the worst thing that can ever happen. The house without Pappa feels terribly empty. For Mamma his sudden death has been a shock she was not prepared for, but she is her usual valiant and serene self. You must come and cheer us up.”

  Of course I did, the very next Sunday afternoon, and we went for a walk along the Charles on a cold November day. It was tremendously exciting for me because I realized that I had very rarely been alone with Jane, and never before, perhaps, had a real conversation in which I was treated as an equal. It would not be the last time that we argued about politics. Hoover had just been nominated by the Republicans and Jane Reid felt that he would make a good president because of the tremendous job he had done organizing war relief in 1919. I was passionately for Smith, “the happy warrior,” even though he was a Catholic and I heard on all sides that he would be influenced by church dogma and not be able to act as a free man. I felt he was flexible and imaginative, and cared more for people. “Hoover cares about people—he has proved it.” Jane Reid flushed as she said it, a little angry, I could sense.

  “But Hoover is for big business, you can tell.”

  “Smith is for ending Prohibition,” she answered hotly. Then we laughed, and I slipped an arm through hers as we trudged along. It was a great moment.

  “I suppose you’re a dyed-in-the-wool Republican,” I teased, intoxicated by the subtle change in our relationship.

  Then she became serious, and we stopped for a moment before turning back, stopped and looked at some rather miserable ducks at the frozen edge of the river. “I’m not a dyed-in-the-wool anything, I hope. And anyway the Republicans have not provided very well lately—Harding, Coolidge! No, I’ll vote for the man not the party any time.”

  “So will I when I can.”

  It was amazing to be talking like this. It was my first experience of Jane Reid’s way of being apart from school and family, the fact that she felt deeply about politics but wanted to be reasonable, not partisan, that she would think about this a lot. Somehow that surprised me. And I felt glad that the glamorous person, “the princess” I had adored, was turning into a different person, that the distance between us was diminishing, not because she had changed, but because I was growing up.

  I suppose that I was forced to grow up by the situation at home. My father was being mean about the divorce, giving mother the house and barely enough to live on. He wanted to marry someone else and build a house for her, Mother told me. She looked drained and strained, as though some vital fluid were being lost every day, and I’m afraid my reaction was to close myself off and stay away as much as I could because it had become too painful. Meanwhile my father gave me an English bike and a suede jacket for my birthday and asked me to lunch with him on Saturdays, which wrecked the day for me … and besides, I felt I was betraying Mother by enjoying it, if I did, which was rarely. It felt as though we were sitting among the ruins there in the comfortable Harvard Club eating some extravagant dessert—and it usually ended in a row about something, mostly politics. My father, a corporation lawyer, was cynical and, I felt, arrogant, pretending always to have inside information which transformed any idealistic statements I might come up with into sentimental foolishness. No doubt I judged him harshly, but listening to him talk did make me rather sceptical about the rich at an early age.

  That is one of the reasons why Jane Reid haunted me, I suppose, for she was the only very rich person I have known who was wholly uncorrupted by her money, and the power it inevitably gave her. She was, in my mind, the great exception.

  She used her power in very imaginative ways always, and that year when my mother was going though hell, Jane suddenly invited her to join three Vassar friends of hers, including Lucy of course, on a month’s trip to France. What a marvelous gift it was! And actually it was a gift to me, also, as Faith’s family invited me down to their summer place in Duxbury for that month, where we played baseball (Faith had three sisters) and swam, and Faith and I even resumed our secret language, a reprieve for me from the tension of home.

  Mother came back more like herself than I had seen her for a year, bursting with adventures, for I gather they behaved like schoolgirls, packed into a big open phaeton, singing everything from Bach to Gilbert and Sullivan, picnicking somewhere every day, landing in strange towns to find a hotel often after dark. And Jane was the leader in all the fun, set free from the constraints of Cambridge and school, making everything a lark. The only tension apparently was the daily one of finding the right place for their picnic, and dreaming of the perfect place sometimes lasted until nearly two o’clock, on damp stones under a bridge or in a prickly furze under a blazing sun, famished, because they had not been able to decide. Once they came at dusk to a closed chateau and Jane fired them to spend the night in the courtyard, scrambling together some supper out of what was left from the noon picnic. They had no sleeping bags with them, but managed to improvize with the car rugs and their coats and sweaters. They lay and looked up at the stars for a while, but before light a frightful thunderstorm blew up and they had to creep into the car soaking wet and wait for the dawn. Finally, as the sun was rising and its light dancing in the poplar leaves, they found a workmen’s café open in the next town. There four boisterous women in wet clothes caused a sensation and the patron insisted they have a fine, on the house, with their coffee. Nothing, my mother said, had ever tasted as good as that café au lait with brandy.

  None of the four had been in the Dordogne, where they were bound. Mother’s eyes shone when she described the winding river with a fairy-tale castle around every bend, and the fortified towns, bastides, on the crests of hills, the Romanesque churches, the whole peace-inducing landscape. It had clearly been a kind of heaven. At night in the hotel they read history aloud and Jane, of course, acted everything out.

  “She is such a romantic!” my mother said, “and lives in what she is seeing or reading in such an extraordinary way—oh what a marvelous time she gave me, Cam, the generosity of it!”

  I could see what the trip had done for my mother, but in those weeks I too had been plunged into a new and electrifying experience that actually changed my life for the next ten years and that, for a time, made Jane Reid and her romantic ways distant from my own preoccupations. I was fifteen, and I think I guessed that in some ways I was already older than Jane Reid would ever be, or perhaps simply m
ore vulnerable and more conflicted. Perhaps, too, I recognized that Jane and my mother had become intimate friends. Sometimes when I got back from school Jane was there for tea … she had a way of turning up when Mother was feeling lonely and anxious … and then I would sneak upstairs on the pretense that I had homework to do, and leave them alone.

  I was learning about Jane then at one remove. From little things Mother let fall I gathered that Sam Dawson, active in the founding of the League of Nations, very much wanted to marry Jane and was pursuing her quite relentlessly. We talked about it over supper one evening. It made me feel very grown-up to be confided in.

  “They share a great deal,” Mother said thoughtfully. “Jane’s idealism and her passionate interest in the League … but …”

  “But what? Why doesn’t she marry him?” I felt somehow cross at the thought that she might marry.

  “I really don’t know. I think she is sometimes tempted but then she is so involved in the school and in doing everything she can for Miss Thompson.”

  “Why couldn’t she teach and marry too?”

  Mother smiled, the smile, I thought, of someone involved in a secret world. “Warren devours its teachers. I don’t think you have any idea how hard we work.” I did often see how tired Mother was when she got home, but she was older than Jane, and Jane had never seemed tired. “Besides,” Mother went on, “she would be expected to give dinner parties and go out a lot, and, unless they were separated half the year, go over to Geneva.”

  “Do you think she could be happy being so social?” I asked. It was all appalling, impossible, not to be believed.

  “Darling child, who knows?”

  “You don’t really think she’ll marry him?”

  Mother looked at me in that tender amused way she did when I knew she loved me a lot, “You don’t want her to, do you?” Then she laughed, “And I don’t know that I do myself.”

  “I want her to stay just as she is.” I was amazed at the violence of my feelings. For after all why shouldn’t she marry? That was the normal thing for a beautiful woman and an heiress, most people would think. What was it, then, that made marriage for Jane Reid seem preposterous? I couldn’t have said.

  “Well, that’s all very well, but none of us stay as we once were … there is old age, loneliness.…”

  “Oh Mother, don’t be so dreary.…” I had said it in a sharp tone and saw at once that I had hurt her, so I went and hugged her, and after that we cleared the table.

  What had happened in Boston in the month of August 1927, while Jane Reid and my mother were driving around in the Dordogne, was the execution of Sacco and Vanzetti. I don’t know quite how or why I had become involved except that everywhere it was the cause of passionate belief on the one hand in the two men’s innocence, and on the other an equally passionate fear of anarchism and, buttressed by the findings of a commission chaired by President Lowell of Harvard, the certainty that guilt had been proved, and the trial fair. The Franklins, with whom I was staying, did not want the issue discussed at table … they were firm in their trust in President Lowell. But Faith and I had become convinced through all we had read in the papers and through all the people we admired who were involved, especially the poet Edna St. Vincent Millay, that two such simple and poetic characters could not be guilty of murder. We walked the beach at Duxbury talking about it, wondering how President Lowell could have betrayed the two men, what a stuffed shirt he must be, and so on. We became experts in arguing about anarchism and what it really was … if Warren had taught us anything it was to go to sources and find out facts. We argued with our friends on the beach, and with Faith’s older sister Joan until we were all in tears of rage and frustration. And meanwhile the only hope now was that Governor Fuller would pardon the two men. We wrote letters to him as thousands of other people did, and finally, on the night of August twenty-second, we joined the vigil on the Common, having been expressly forbidden to do so by Mr. Franklin. Edna St. Vincent Millay was there. We caught a glimpse of her with a blue beret pulled down over her hair … at least we were sure the slight figure must be hers, and no doubt it was.

  The execution was to take place at 10:00 P.M., and up to the last minute everyone felt there was hope that Governor Fuller would be persuaded to pardon. The last ten minutes were excruciating. There was total silence. We hardly breathed, but when a clock struck ten the hundreds of people there gave a groan of such despair, such united grief and pain, that I shall never forget it.

  That night and the sense it gave me of some kind of commitment to “the people,” the people there, the people who were not cynical like my father but could believe that innocence existed, and could believe that anarchism was not a crime in itself—that night radicalized me, I suppose. From then on through college I identified myself with the unions battling for reasonable wages in the textile industry, in steel, and especially in the automobile industry, and by the time I was in college I called myself a radical and a socialist. The Depression when it came two years later only intensified my belief that something was very wrong with capitalism.

  And I was reading not only Marx but also Ibsen’s plays, and Alfred North Whitehead’s Aims of Education, which added fuel to my fire in my wars with some of the teachers at the High and Latin. It was a heady brew and led to some pretty hot discussions with Jane Reid. Once I went over to the Reid house when I had been told by my English teacher that I could not write a final paper on Ibsen “because Ibsen is immoral.” Even now I find it hard to believe, but it is true. Miss Pheasant had no doubt been brought up in a parochial school, and was rigid in her views. That evening in early spring, Jane herself opened the door and asked me in. She explained that she had to go over a batch of papers before the next morning, but she would love to hear my news first. I didn’t barge in that often and she must have guessed that I needed to talk. We sat in the billiard room to the right of the front door because Martha and her mother were sitting by the fire in the parlor. I was grateful for Jane’s making our talk private.

  It all spilled out then, my hatred of Miss Pheasant, “my mortal enemy,” I said passionately. “She doesn’t care about anything except grammar.” This made Jane laugh; she couldn’t help it, I could see. “It’s not funny,” I said.

  “But, dearie, after all her job is at least partly to teach the structure of language and how to use it, isn’t it?” And since I didn’t answer, she said, “I laughed because if you never have an enemy worse than one who tries to teach you grammar you’ll be a lucky person, Cam-the-Absolute.”

  I was not mollified, “But that’s not it, Jane.” Once in a while I dared to call her Jane now. “It’s that she is so narrow and bigoted she won’t let me write a paper on Ibsen!”

  “You are rather advanced for your age, perhaps.…”

  “It’s not that. She called Ibsen ‘immoral’!” I let the full horror of this sink in.

  Jane sighed. Everything she didn’t choose to say in words was always there in her eyes, and what I saw in them, that deep look as if you could actually see the soul come up into them, always demanded honesty.

  “I guess I’m pretty intransigent. But Ibsen is not immoral, you have to admit that.”

  “I doubt if you can change her mind, Cam, so maybe you just have to accept her as she is.”

  “I won’t! I won’t let Ibsen be so misunderstood.”

  “But perhaps it’s really not up to you. Maybe Ibsen will survive without your help.”

  “Oh dear, you’re just teasing me, making me into a child.”

  “I admire your fighting spirit, Cam, always have. The trouble is, you are so sure you are right. I feel rather sorry for Miss Pheasant.”

  “She has the power!” I said. I was nearly in tears, tears of frustration.

  “Maybe. But she has to face St. George out to kill the dragon every day in class … and that can’t be much fun.”

  “I don’t fight every day,” I murmured, “only when some outrageous thing happens. Then I go to Mr. Clevel
and.”

  “You do?” Jane lifted an eyebrow. “And what does Mr. Cleveland say?”

  “He usually says I have a point. He is very gentle about everything, you know. Then he says to calm down and try to see Miss Pheasant’s point of view … something like that.”

  “I doubt if there are many school heads who would let you come in and talk like that.”

  “I am rather violent, I guess.”

  “And awfully sure of yourself, Cam.”

  “The trouble is because of you, because of Warren, we’re way ahead of the other kids.”

  “And you feel superior.”

  It was said lightly but it brought me up short, for I saw at once that Jane was right, and I took it to heart. If I really believed all my own talk about the goodness and rightness of “the people,” if I were honest, I had to admit that my attitude at the High School was pretty bad. “I guess I’m pretty arrogant. I rush at things like a bull in a china shop without thinking them out.”

  “You’re so quick, Cam, such a blaze of brilliance—and impatience! Sometimes you don’t give other people a chance.” She turned away then and poked at the fire with a long poker. “I guess one of the hardest things to face is our limitations, but how else is one to grow?”

  “Why does it make for growth to recognize what one is not?” I was thinking aloud and knowing in my heart that one of the best things about Jane was that she wouldn’t let me get away with just quickness and what she called brilliance. My motto at that time, as I suddenly remember, was toujours l’audace. “It’s so hard to believe in oneself at all!”