The Magnificent Spinster (16 page)

After lunch I went upstairs to my room and slept sometimes for two hours. Then I took Nana for a walk and once in a while stopped in on my way to visit with Elizabeth Cole, Jane's only near neighbor, a tiny, frail woman, who was always there, sitting in her rocker on the porch or tending the geraniums in the window.

“Well,” she always said, as if totally surprised to see me, “I never. Come in, Cam.” She must have been close to eighty, but she seemed to manage all right. After I had dropped in several times she surprised me with some rather dramatic news.

“How is my friend Jane?” she asked that afternoon as she always did. Perhaps because Elizabeth Cole was outside Jane's life except as a neighbor, Jane confided in her, and I sensed this.

“She works too hard. She comes home absolutely white sometimes and then after supper corrects papers till God knows when.”

“I know,” Elizabeth Cole sighed. “She'll work herself to death. She used to stop in to see me often when the house was going up, but since then, with the Rosenfelds there and all, I don't see her.” She was rocking now slowly and looking out the window. But she came back to me and asked what had evidently been on her mind. “That man,” she said then. “Have you seen him around?”

“What man?”

“That rich man, Breckenridge, has the big place just across the road when you come out on route one seventeen.”

Jane had never spoken about him. “Well, you don't know about that, I guess.” She gave me a piercing look. “Maybe I had better hold my tongue.” Then she added with a half smile, “But I guess it's too late, and besides, since you are living there, you had better know. She was upset when he bought that place, I can tell you.”

“What is this all about?” Jane had always seemed so completely in control of her own life, it was hard for me to imagine any such drama going on. “Why did Jane mind his coming here?”

Elizabeth Cole looked me straight in the eye. “He's madly in love with her, that's why. She thinks he moved here just to pester her, wouldn't take no for an answer, you see.”

“He's not dangerous, is he?”

“Well, before the Rosenfelds came—and I was relieved when they did, I can tell you—he used to wander around the house with a gun and peer in the windows at her. He spied on her, and you know she never pulls the shades.”

“I can hardly believe it,” I murmured. The whole thing struck me as preposterous. “Is he crazy, or what?”

“He has time on his hands, in spite of those expensive horses, time on his hands and Jane on his mind. It's not good.”

“Can't she go to the police?”

“There is such a thing as harassment, but I can't see Jane going to law about such a personal matter, can you? She never talks about herself … only that one day she did. I've often wondered why. I suggested she get a gun and she laughed at the idea and said she did not think a shoot-out was the answer.” Elizabeth Cole chuckled, “Still,” she said, “I can't help worrying sometimes.”

“Why do you suppose she never married?” It was a question I had had on my mind the past weeks. I had been witnessing how much Jane gave out all the time to life. What nourished her? Marian was in England that year. There was a kind of emptiness at the heart of the house, I felt.

“Well, I've thought about that some. But I never knew a woman just like Jane so I can't figure it out. Can you?”

“She came close to marrying a few years ago, I think, a fellow high up in international affairs, but she finally turned him down and he married someone else. At school when I was a kid we imagined the man she loved was killed in World War I. But maybe it was just a rumor. Kids are pretty romantic.”

“She loves that school, doesn't she? That's when her eyes light up, when she talks about a play she is putting on.”

“She is a marvelous teacher—the best I ever had until I went to college.” And because in the last few minutes Elizabeth Cole and I had become friends, I could say aloud what I had been thinking. “I can understand someone being madly in love with Jane; she's so much more alive than most people, so free … and yet, there is a wall, I think. There is something she always holds in reserve. And if you were in love, it might drive you to do crazy things.”

“Well, now that the Rosenfelds are there, she's safe. And we can forget about Breckenridge … I've talked more than I should have, Cam. Bury all this, will you?”

I realized that it was not something I could ever mention to Jane and said so.

“Want a cookie? I made some of those ginger ones you liked last time. Take a few home for Jane, too.”

And so that remarkable conversation ended. Nana and I walked back to the house in the crisp autumn air, watching the leaves fall one by one. I wondered whether the whole fantastic tale could be true, but Elizabeth Cole was a realistic woman and a wise one. She would not have invented such a tale, so I had to believe it. What it did was to bring into sharp focus for me, as I thought about Jane, her extraordinary glamour. What was it that could make a Breckenridge behave like a lunatic? What had made me and Faith and even Tom fall in love with Jane and want to follow her to the ends of the earth, and weep floods of tears when we left Warren to go out into the world? Lying in my deck chair the next morning I thought about it—men, women, children, all came under her spell. But she herself was absolutely unselfconscious and unaware … or so it seemed … of the aura around her. None of her sisters had this quality, unless possibly the oldest one, who, I had heard, was worldly and sophisticated, but whom I had never set eyes on.

What was it then? An unusual capacity for enjoying life to the limit married to a great sense of responsibility? Jane was not at all self-indulgent. A single piece of chocolate was savored with the delight of a child. But she would deny herself a second. Nothing glamorous about that New England denial of the excessive! Was it the sheer exuberance? Maybe the thing about glamour is that it cannot be defined. A beautiful woman may not have it; an ugly woman can. So I finally came to the conclusion that it had to do in Jane's case anyway with something mysterious which I reluctantly (what an academic I have become) called soul. And it was visible in those extraordinary eyes through which joy, grief, wisdom, even anger flowed. “Pallas Athene” I had used to call her when I was in the seventh grade. The mystery was something held in reserve, something I now believed no one would ever touch and reach. And perhaps glamour always has to do with the distant, the unattainable,
la princesse lointaine
.

The day never seemed long until around six, when I began to wait for Jane to come home for supper. Then I allowed myself a Scotch from a bottle brought at some time by her brother-in-law, Alix's husband, for Jane never bought liquor. Then I usually read something for an hour or two, often not really taking in so much as a page. My mind wandered. It was time to turn on lights and put another log on the fire. Where was she? Sometimes I knew she stopped in to see my mother. Sometimes it was eight when Nana let out a volley of barks and we both ran out to help carry packages in, and life came back to the house where we had all been in limbo, waiting.

Jane always went in first to greet the Rosenfelds, then ran upstairs to wash and change into slippers, and finally came and sat down for a half-hour by the fire before our supper was served. The Jane I talked with then about what had been happening all day out in the world was not the glamorous Jane I had sometimes been thinking about. She was often dead-tired, and it showed. But still she recounted some hilarious thing that had happened that day at school and I drank it in, while Nana, beside herself with joy, tried to get into Jane's lap. So it always ended in laughter while Jane put on a big apron and let the dog climb all over her.

I couldn't help being amused by her lack of capacity to deal with a large, friendly animal. And it reminded me of school days, when the inability to show anger or speak sharply had sometimes seemed a little strange. A sharp command, which is what children as well as dogs need at times, must have seemed to Jane a fascist approach to life. One must treat every living thing with respect and never impose one's will.

“Get down, Nana,” Jane would say gently, but the tender tone had the opposite effect of that intended and made Nana indulge in an orgy of licks, till finally Jane had to push her off and put her outdoors. More than once I laughed aloud, as we went in to supper. “What's funny?” Jane asked, quite at sea.

“You're not cut out to be a
Gauleiter,”
I teased.

“I should hope not! You think Nana needs a
Gauleiter?”

“Dogs must be taught to obey and are happier when they learn to.” But I know I never convinced Jane of this truth.

After dinner more often than not the phone rang and there would be long talks full of laughter with Lucy in Philadelphia, with Edith in Texas, or with one or another of the dozens of friends in Jane's life. I was beginning to understand the breadth and depth of the relationships she kept going.

“How do you do it?” I asked once. “You never seem hurried, although you say you have papers to correct every night. You are always available to everyone who calls.”

Jane gave me a quizzical look. “Good heavens!” she said, “Would it were true! But there is so much I don't get done … answering letters, for instance. Half the time I simply fail to do what I want to do, what I know needs doing.”

“How could you? Warren takes so much energy and time.” These days I sometimes resented Warren a little.

“Do you suppose everyone lives with a sense of failure?” Jane had been standing at the door ready to go upstairs and work, but now she came and sat down in the snowshoe chair and seemed to want to talk. “Sometimes these days I feel so inadequate at school.”

I held my breath. Jane had never confided in me before, but I knew from what Mother had said that she had a difficult class this year. Now she turned to me. “Why can't I reach those kids?”

“You certainly reached us.…”

“You were a marvelous class.”

“How we adored you!”

Jane laughed. “I don't want to be adored, Cam. But I sure would love to be allowed to teach without constant rebellion and brouhaha.” She said it still smiling, but I could feel the hurt underneath.

“Mother told me there's one awful boy.…”

“I go and talk to your mother when I'm at the end of my tether—what a comfort she is!” Jane looked thoughtful, a little tense. “Ned is not awful, but he does react from the gut, one might say … yesterday he took the wastebasket and emptied it all over the room.”

“Why?” It was very hard for me to imagine such a thing happening in Jane's class.

“No reason. He was bored, I expect. It is quite clear that I bore him almost to death.”

“What did you do?”

“Asked him to pick up the rubbish he had strewn around.”

“Did he?”

“No, he went out to have a talk with Miss Thompson. He has her permission to go and have a talk with her whenever the spirit moves.”

I sensed by Jane's tone what she felt about that. “That doesn't seem quite fair—to you, I mean.”

“Fairness isn't the point.” I felt she was reminding herself. “If this sort of freedom is going to help Ned, that is the point.”

“But does it help him?”

Jane gave me a searching look. Perhaps she felt she shouldn't have said anything about this prickly subject. She smiled a kind of secret smile. “I guess it's almost as hard for Frances to admit failure as it is for me.” Then she got up, once more on the way upstairs to work, but at the door she stopped and said, “A school maybe is a microcosm of the world. If Ned's father were not so famous, things might be easier for us all.”

Whatever did she mean by that? It made me feel very uncomfortable. Of course Ned's father was a Nobel laureate in physics, and I felt the school's prestige might be involved, but how could a whole class, and Miss Reid too, be sacrificed to pride? I hated the humiliation for Jane. But I also wondered what was going wrong for her as a teacher … how could a child in Jane's class be bored? Could her kind of imaginative resourceful teaching ever become old-fashioned? I still don't know the answer to that question. But even then I was aware that children were far more sophisticated ten years later than they had been in my day. Probably none of those in her present class would have read Trueblood, for instance. They would have been reading
The Hobbit
. And because Jane was a slow reader she could not keep up with all that was going on. And did her marvelous sense of fun get dampened by the negative atmosphere? No doubt it must have. She must have felt on trial that year, yet with her hands tied because of Frances Thompson's attitude and demands. It hurt to think of Jane not being loved by her class, questioning her own value as a teacher and woman.

I had been in Sudbury for a month—going for walks and, after two weeks of doing almost nothing but sleep and eat and wait for Jane to come home, setting myself a daily stint of uprooting sedge grass, which was taking over the lovely open hillside and pasture—I had been there all that time before Spain was mentioned. Jane must have sensed that I was not ready. But she had helped me go, after all, and at some point I knew I must try to reassure her, or at least share with her some of what I had been through. But to do that I had to come to terms with what felt inside me still like an ocean in tumult, in which I could drown if I allowed myself to go down into it, as, sooner or later, I knew I had to if I was ever to get out of this limbo of not feeling and hardly being alive. Even if I could have spoken, Jane was too preoccupied with the school for it to seem fair to lay this burden on her.

And then one day she came home with a bad cold and decided to take a day off and stay in bed. It was lovely for me to be able to take her breakfast up and make a little bunch of wild asters and bayberries for her room, and then to let her sleep for once, as she did for most of that day while we crept around downstairs. The house had been made of pieces of a very old house, but unfortunately the walls were thin and it was the most trans-audible house I have ever been in. And I have sometimes wondered whether that explained why Marian never did come for a long stay as Jane so wished she would. And why the house itself gave the illusion of being an old house but never felt quite real, as a house where generations have lived and died does. To
feel
lived in, after all, a house has to
be
lived in. And Jane was simply not there enough.