The Magnificent Spinster (19 page)

“She must have had beaus,” I ventured.

“Of course … several young men—she could have been quite a catch—but we were pretty enclosed in those days. And somehow I see her as happiest in the world of women.”

“I wonder why.”

That phrase brought Laurel Whitman back to me with a jolt. “Why should I tell you?” she said, half laughing, with just a shade of antagonism. “I don't know myself.”

“She never really fell in love, did she? Never head over heels in love.”

“She was in love with life. That I can say. Head over heels in love with it.”

I felt it was an evasion, but this was not the moment to press on, or to probe into what clearly was proving a little bothersome to Laurel Whitman. “But not the marrying kind, as they say?”

At this Laurel turned directly to me. “Cam, whatever made you embark on this project? And what is it really, a biography, or what? And why are you doing it? Is that too blunt a question?”

“First, it's a novel, not a biography.” It was a great relief to be talking about it at last, to have an ear at least, a kindly ear, “But the main problem is that I'm not a novelist—don't laugh! I mean, it's so crazy, isn't it? At seventy to embark on such a project. I feel sometimes like a person who never learned to swim and is trying to swim across the channel, floundering about and nearly drowning on the way!”

“You're a historian by profession … why not a biography?”

“Cowardice. I didn't want to be tied down to all the dates and facts. I wanted to be free to imagine just because in some areas I really don't know enough. Oh dear, nobody is going to like it, I'm afraid.”

“Cam, you amaze me,” she said then. “You're so brave.”

“Foolhardy, I suppose. But you see what interests me is the essence, not what happened in September 1939 precisely, but what was happening to the essential person. I'm tired of card indexes.”

“How far along have you got?” Laurel asked. I knew I had not satisfied her.

“Well, Jane is forty-five and is about to resign from Warren.”

“Oh. Yes. That was a bad time. It really was, you know. It seemed at the time like an earthquake that could destroy the foundations. I got quite anxious about her. We all did.” Then Laurel turned to me and laid a hand on my knee, “Between you and me, Cam, that dream house in Sudbury never quite worked out. Too far away. And the people she wanted most to come there never came.”

“Marian Chase, for one.”

“You do know quite a lot, don't you?”

I sensed not unexpectedly a trace of resentment. “Tell me about Marian Chase. I saw her of course, more than once after I was grown-up, but when we had her in the eighth grade we didn't like her at all.”

“I'm not surprised. Marian was for grown-ups, not for children.”

“Jane always came alive when Marian was around. That I did see … and the enormous respect.”

“Well, of course Marian was a scholar, a distinguished one. Reedy admired that in her, for she herself was not a scholar, not at all. She was a romantic.” Here Laurel paused, whether hesitating to go on, or not knowing what she wanted to say. “You know there was a chivalrous side to Reedy, a side that wanted to protect her women friends, wanted to help them in any way she could to do whatever they most needed or wanted to do. Sometimes it didn't work. That summer she spent in London with Marian was a disaster.”

“Yes, I know.”

“How do you know?”

“Jane confided in my mother … all through that time.”

“Hmph.” Laurel gave me a penetrating look. “At some point Marian balked. People do that, you know, and for different reasons—when it came to marriage, Reedy balked, herself, but she never understood why Marian did.”

“Why did she?”

“It's really none of our business, is it?”

“But I have to try to get at the truth.”

“What cause are you serving?” Laurel asked. We had come to an explosive moment and I knew it had to come. “Why do it? Why expose the dead to your delving around?”

“Oh dear,” I murmured, “those are the questions I ask myself every day.”

“But you keep on.”

Now I lifted my head and looked right into the old eyes. “Yes, I keep on. You see, Mrs. Whitman, in fifty years no one will exist who remembers Jane Reid. I want to celebrate her. I want to make her come alive for those who never knew her.”

“Millions of exceptional people die and are forgotten. It is an endless stream, generation to generation. You want to dam the stream. Can it be done?”

“Probably not, but I'm going to have a try.” It was my turn to feel a little prickly now.

And sensing it, the old woman softened. “Very well, ask me another question.”

There were a hundred in my mind. I opted for one I had wondered about often. “What made her as different from her sisters as she seemed to be? Or am I wrong? They were all tall, they all had that long, recognizable Trueblood chin. They all had blue eyes. Yet Jane really seemed to be of a different breed. What was it in her that made the difference?”

For a moment Laurel was silent, even closed her eyes, and I wondered whether I was tiring her. Then she lifted her head and said quite loudly, “Jane was passionate!”

The answer took me by surprise and I thought about it for a second.

“The others were all at heart conservative … in every sense of the word, politically, where matters of money were concerned, and houses, and how one behaved … you know what I mean. They gave money to Radcliffe College, to the Unitarian Church, that sort of thing. Jane adopted French orphans, invested in the black settlement house in Cambridge, in refugee organizations … you know all this. They were all five charming women, reserved, well-behaved, preoccupied with family matters. Jane just never could be contained in that frame … though you must never forget, Cam, how she venerated her grandfather!”

“I don't forget it. Was she passionate about old Trueblood?

“In a way she was. At least she took on a lot of responsibility about the House when it was made a national monument … think how she worked on those papers!”

“I haven't come to that yet.…”

“But you will. She was passionate about Trueblood because she felt that he was being put down and disregarded by the academic community. It was fashionable at one time to sneer at his novels. Thank goodness she lived long enough to see him reinstated.”

“Passionate.” I had come back to that word. “Yet she never married, never, as far as I know, had a love affair. It seems odd.”

“Odd, yes,” Laurel murmured. Then she gave me a rather penetrating look. “Take sexuality out of passion and you may have a clue.”

At this notion I had to smile. “Is that possible?”

“Nothing about Jane was possible, really … that's what made her so interesting, so captivating.” But having said so much she now withdrew. “I think I'm getting a little tired … haven't had such an interesting afternoon for years, but …”

And as though summoned by telepathy her daughter now came in, flushed, her hands dirty, and apologized for having completely forgotten about tea. And I took my leave. “I can't thank you enough.”

“Nonsense, Cam, I feel rejuvenated. Come again … anytime.”

My conversation with Laurel Whitman had done what I hoped, given me a fresh start, as though talking with her had pushed a button and set going a fountain of memories and insights. And gave me the courage, too, to see if Tom Weston would have the time for a talk. I hadn't seen him for years, since the twenty-fifth reunion of our class, in fact, and I hardly dared add up how long ago that was. It was strange to imagine that he must be a grandfather and perhaps even retired, though that was hard to believe, he was such a live wire. And whether retired or not I felt sure he must still be active in the Civil Liberties Union, and still a pillar of the parents' association at Warren, where his two sons and daughter had gone. He had headed the committee that managed to raise a million dollars for the school in the sixties. But I myself was not living in Cambridge at the time Jane resigned from Warren, after Frances Thompson did. Tom might be able to tell me more about that, for one thing.

I knew that he and Adele had moved out to Lincoln some years back, and found their number in the phone book and was invited out to Sunday dinner.

“I'm not the cook Adele was, but I can put a roast in the oven.”

I told him I would bring dessert, and then, though overcome with shyness, not knowing how to ask, I murmured, “Adele?”

“She died last year, Cam.”

“Oh, how awful.”

“It's strange how I can't get used to it.”

“I know. Ruth, my friend, died ten years ago.”

“So we're both bereft. It will be good to see you, Cam. But to what exactly do I owe this pleasure? Raising money, maybe?” I could hear that he was smiling.

“Heavens, no! I'm writing a novel about Jane Reid.”

“You are?” Astonishment raced across the wire.

“Yes, crazy, I expect. I'll tell you more about it on Sunday,” and I added, “try to remember all you can.”

“Right on. I'll do my homework and expect you at twelve. Scotch okay?”

It was a cold November day, and that, perhaps, added to the rather desolate air of the living room in spite of the wood fire burning at one end. But no flowers … I remembered that Adele had loved flowers. Piles of magazines and books everywhere and the smell of dank tobacco. A widower's house.

“Cam, you're just the same,” Tom announced when we sat down with Scotch.

“Preserved in amber like all retired professors!”

“Come now. People preserved in amber don't write novels.…”

“Not a first novel at seventy, anyway!” I didn't say it, of course, but Tom had changed. I couldn't get used to his face with a shock of white hair above it, although his eyes were very bright under thick gray eyebrows.

“It's strange, isn't it, what an indelible mark Warren left on all of us in that class … in that class, so I must believe that Jane Reid was at least partly responsible.” After a slight pause he asked, “What are you after, Cam?”

Almost without thinking I uttered it. “‘I think continually of those who were truly great.'”

“Yes, I see. Yes, she was. I grant you that. An extraordinary woman.”

“I'm bogged down in all that went wrong in the middle years. Sometimes it feels like betrayal to be writing about it.”

“You have your problems, honey.”

“One of them is that I know so little about the last years at school. I was immersed in teaching, not living in Cambridge.”

“Maybe I can help. My children were in school when Star-buck took over after the war, and Frances Thompson had gone off to Germany. I think maybe it was a good thing that Jane stayed on through the transition. She was one of the few of the old guard still teaching and she helped Starbuck—though of course he had taught in the school for a couple of years before he went off to the war.” Tom stopped and looked across at me. “May I just think aloud for a moment?”

“Please do.” It was comforting to be with someone from our class, to feel Tom's quiet strength again, and conviction. Especially as he was clearly enjoying this journey into the past.

“Frances Thompson was a different breed, terribly intense. Her whole life was the school. And in a strange way what had been the strongest bond, between her and Jane, got pretty frayed at the end.”

“Because Jane was losing her grip as a teacher?”

“Yes,” Tom sighed. “My children didn't get on with Jane at all. I couldn't understand it. I blamed them, but Adele was a help in making me understand, I guess. She said Jane was out in the wilderness when Frances no longer asked her advice about crucial matters … and being out in the wilderness she lost her nerve.”

“Oh Tom, do you really believe that?”

“I don't know what to say.…” He shook it off then and went on more cheerfully, “Starbuck was very good for Jane. She gave up being a class teacher and worked for a while with remedial reading. And she was good at that. Her tempo and her endless patience were right for that. Hey, I had better think about cooking some vegetables. Come out to the kitchen and we'll have a second while we get things together.”

Out in the kitchen he and I were both more relaxed. I learned a great deal that I had not known. As a lawyer, Tom had been drawn into a painful episode, and he and Jane became friends as a result. During that time he was invited to a dance at Jane's eldest sister's château, and he told me all about that. I could feel the novelist in me coming to life again, and I knew that much of what I learned must come to life if I handled it as a novelist and that I intended to do in the next part, which I think of as “The Giving Years.” At the end, when we were again sitting by the fire with our coffee, Tom chuckled and told me a story.

It seems that when they were raising money for Warren one of the new parents, whose husband had come to Harvard from California, had been assigned to do some interviews. Apparently, as Tom explained, the new method is to find out what people have in the bank by one means or another, and then to name a specific sum that might be offered.

Lenore, the Californian, when it was suggested that she visit Jane Reid, who had retired by then, had sold the Sudbury house, and was living in a small apartment over the barn, back of the family house in Cambridge, said, “How can we ask Jane Reid for
money?”
Jane indeed lived so frugally that if one were not a New Englander it would appear preposterous to do any such thing. She was told to ask for one hundred thousand.

“Whew!”

“I must admit that even I felt it a bit much. Anyway, Lenore of course could hardly bring herself to say the words. Jane was sitting on a dilapidated old velvet sofa in the tiny living room, which was also the dining room. Lenore said she finally uttered the words, ‘We had thought you might give a hundred thousand.' Apparently Jane did almost gasp, then smiled that secret smile she swallowed when she was amused by something and said, ‘No, I'm afraid I can't quite do that. But I think I can give seventy-five thousand.'”