The Magnificent Spinster (11 page)

“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. Cleveland.”

“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!”

“Yes,” Jane agreed, “I know.”

“How can you know?” I asked passionately. “You have no doubts. You know you're wonderful.”

At this Jane laughed. “Little do you know, dear Cam. At school I'm being forced to learn my limitations every day … and one of them is I can't do anything fast. So I'm afraid I have to go upstairs now and tackle papers.”

I thought she was just being gentle with me about her own limitations, but I felt a lot better anyway.

There is always a discrepancy between what we see of a person, especially one at a certain distance, and what has been actually happening to that person. I have painted a picture of Jane Reid as I saw her as a child in her class, and as a young woman in high school. Only many years later did I come to realize how much harsh reality, how much conflict and even rejection, she was experiencing during those years when she seemed chiefly a lover of life, a great life-enhancer, a glamorous, beloved teacher, running off to Europe in the summers, safe in the bosom of her family, always available as counsellor and friend wherever there was need, and communicating such joyous, inexhaustible response both to people and to nature that the image perceived was that of that rare person, a truly happy one.

Many years later I learned by chance that the summer in London with Marian Chase had been a disaster. What feelings were involved on both sides, what irritations, what disillusionment I cannot know, I can only guess. I do know that Jane Reid held Marian Chase in the greatest esteem and had imagined that taking her to London and thus giving her a chance at doing some research she badly wanted to do was a privilege. Children usually are not wrong in their instinctive estimate of people, and the class's dislike of Miss Chase was based, I think, on a sense that she was not a giver, that something withheld got in the way of any real exchange between her and the children she taught. She was discriminating and learned … these are not traits that appeal to thirteen-year-olds, but they had immense appeal, no doubt, for Jane. There was also something else, a breath of passion that took me by surprise when I read her letters—letters that Jane Reid had privately printed in two volumes after Marian's death—and I saw what intense feeling Marian could show toward those she loved. But she did not love Jane in that way, and that was clear also in the published letters.

Was it perhaps in part that Jane Reid's mind did not interest her? Did she resent Jane's wealth, feel uncomfortable as the recipient of her generosity just because she could not reciprocate the love Jane undoubtedly felt for her? Did she close herself off because to an ultra-sensitive like Marian not giving love where it was needed creates almost unbearable guilt? Whatever went on between those two will never be known and perhaps should not be, but Jane told my mother that after a month Marian had closed the door against her completely, and refused even to speak at meals or when they met for tea after a day's work at the British Museum. Jane spent night after night weeping … and she herself never understood what went wrong.

I have come to see that Jane's attitude toward women was chivalrous (there she was always romantic), toward men humorously maternal, never taking them quite seriously, perhaps, and toward children childlike, for part of her immense charm was no doubt that the child she had been on the island never grew up. Jane's attitude toward Marian did not change, and they stayed friends until Marian died; whatever pain had been involved was buried. But perhaps because of this rejection, I have a hunch that in the next year, my last at high school, when Marian had left Warren and was working on her book, Jane must have seriously contemplated marriage. Sam Dawson was no doubt a determined suitor. She was a perfect match for him, and he was not going to give up easily. But he, like others before him, came up against the one rival hardest to overcome, the Warren School. Invitations to theater or a concert had too often to be refused because of a meeting, a rehearsal, or papers to read, and he must have sensed that time with him was snatched from something that always tugged at her, those twelve boys and girls in the seventh grade, and Frances Thompson. On his side he could try to persuade her that she would be helping him with the League of Nations, a matter of world importance, that he needed her more than the children did. Besides, he must have asked, didn't she want children of her own?

Didn't she? I ask myself as I write this. Strangely enough I cannot imagine her as a mother. She was the marvelous
friend
. She must have thought hard and no doubt had long talks about it with Lucy before she turned Sam Dawson down. Within a year he had married a handsome, rich Bostonian, and that was that. But Jane must have been aware that her decision was radical. If she did not marry Sam Dawson, she would not marry.

What did she know or guess about herself that informed the decision? Partly perhaps that she was attracted to Sam but not passionately attracted, partly that marriage would mean giving up her freedom—every woman, especially these days, recognizes this and has to come to terms with it. For the rest of her life, Jane, as I observed her, entered into families as a kind of fairy godmother whisking an exhausted mother away for a weekend, inviting a whole family of seven children and their parents to the island for a week, so that the mother could have a real rest. Possibly she sensed that her way of being a mother would turn out to be mothering the mothers.

In the middle of that year Allegra Reid, Jane's mother, died, quite suddenly, of a heart attack in her sleep. She had seemed to me ever since I was first invited to the house one of the happiest people I had ever known. The word that best describes her is “benign.” I could not imagine her angry or weepy or anything but cheerful as a robin, and much of the time quietly amused by the life around her, and immensely curious to the end so she drew one out not out of courtesy alone but with great enjoyment.

I went to the funeral with my mother. The Unitarian Church was thronged with friends and relatives, some from considerable distances. Part of the Trueblood clan still lived in Portland, Maine, where Jane's great-grandfather had been born. I was chiefly fascinated to see the five daughters, for once together, in the front pews, Edith with her husband and little boy (she had married a doctor); Viola in a purple toque with her handsome husband, Vyvian, and their two children, a boy and a girl; Alix and her husband, Fredson, and Martha and Jane, the two unmarried ones. They were very different one from another, those five women, but as I observed them, I was struck by the family resemblance. They had all inherited their mother's long chin, they were all tall, all blue-eyed. They wore Trueblood on them like a signature.