The Magnificent Spinster (10 page)

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 may 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.

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 more 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.”