The Magnificent Spinster (24 page)

It seemed preposterous that Jane should be so humble about this, and I didn't like it. After all, she was who she was and they had better remember that.

“What is wrong with Alix?” I asked.

“She had pneumonia and a spot on the lung doesn't heal,” Jane said. “But that's not it,” she added, giving me a quick glance as though deciding what she could say. “She has lost the will to live. Even the doctors have come to that conclusion.” Jane's eyes had filled with tears. “I feel so helpless, Cam. I go and sit with her but it is as though she wasn't there, as though she had closed herself off. She and I were the little ones, you know, set apart because we were a few years younger than our sisters. So Alix and I had a life of our own within the family. It seems so strange, so hard, not to be in touch with her now … to watch her moving so far away.”

“She took Fredson's death very hard, you told me.”

“Yes … her children are married, and Alix is first of all a family person like Muff. I think when Fredson died she felt abandoned, though she never talks about it. She is such a reserved person, Cam. I feel I have failed her, that I should have been more aware.” Then she gave a quick sigh and looked up at me. “That's enough about miseries, isn't it?”

She wanted to hear all about Ruth and how my work was going while she ate chocolate mousse, small spoonful by spoonful “to make it last longer.”

Even when what we talked about was depressing, I could not be with Jane for an hour without feeling more alive, in some indefinable way understood and blest.

But we were not through with the miseries that day, because over coffee Jane surprised me by expressing anxiety about my mother. “Please try to get her to see a doctor, Cam. I can't make any headway there.”

It was my turn to feel abashed, as I had been unaware that anything was wrong. These days Mother and I were each busy—in the-summer holidays she always got back to painting—and we did not see each other often.

Jane and I had talked for over an hour and the restaurant was emptying. It was time to go, especially as I now needed to drop in at my mother's before going home.

“We've just about covered everything, Cam, haven't we?” Jane slipped the check into her purse.

“Now see here, I invited you to lunch,” I protested.

“You've invited me to lunch often enough,” she said firmly.

“Very well. But next time, Miss Reid, you won't get away with this!”

Alix died in a nursing home in June. I find it hard to write about this major event in Jane's life because I hardly knew her sister, did not go to the funeral, and was preoccupied by my mother's illness, which had by then been diagnosed as a rare form of cancer, and in those days before chemotherapy there was little that could be done. I moved back to Cambridge to be with her and arranged for a leave of absence for the autumn term, should she still be alive by then, but the doctors had been frank with me and suggested she had at most six months of life ahead, if what she was suffering could be called life.

It seemed suddenly as if everything were going to pieces around me … is one ever prepared for the death of one's parents? I certainly was taken by surprise, and when I heard that Jane would leave for Germany in August I must say I felt cross. How could she just walk out on everything at home, go to Germany, that hell? What made her so determined to do it? In my heart of hearts, of course, I did know why—she needed a big job to do. One day on an impulse I dropped in on Muff to talk things over.

“Well, Cam!” she said. She was sitting by the fire sewing the hem on an evening dress for one of the English girls, and there was something comforting about her being there as she nearly always was, comforting to walk into that house where nothing changed, except that Mary, the maid, had grown very old, and Snooker did not come downstairs anymore. She must have been well over ninety. But Muff looked exactly the same. Because she had never seemed young, she now did not seem old. “A cup of tea?” she asked at once. “Mary would be happy to get it for you.”

“Don't bother. I can only stay a moment.”

“Sit down then and tell me the news,” she said gently.

“Mother's dying, you know,” I blurted out.

“Yes, Jane told me. It must be awfully hard for you, Cam. When my mother died I felt the world had come to an end,” she smiled her wry smile, “but it hadn't.”

“And Jane is off to Germany!” I guess there was a shade of anger in my voice, for Muff came at once to her sister's defense.

“It will be good for her, however strange it may seem to us.” So, she was admitting that it did seem strange.

“Germany of all places!”

“But that's it, that's the point, isn't it?” Muff said, laying down her sewing. “Jane is such an idealist … you don't remember World War I and how little we did then to help rebuild a defeated people. Jane feels we must do better this time.”

“And so prevent another Hitler, I suppose?”

“She sees a great need.…” Muff was silent for a moment before she added, “And then she has always been enormously influenced by Frances Thompson. She wants, I think, to be part of this new endeavor, part of what Frances sees as of primary importance.”

“Mother feels that Frances treated Jane badly about resigning.”

“Some people may have thought so,” Muff said, “but rather characteristically Jane blames only herself.”

“She's such a great person,” I murmured.

“I'm glad someone is aware of that!” Muff said in, for her, quite a vehement tone of voice, then picked up her sewing again. “She spends herself so lavishly—is that greatness? I wonder whether I would use that word about Jane myself.” And this retreat from any tendency toward exaggeration was typical.

“I would,” I said firmly.

Muff smiled. “You were in the seventh grade once at a time when you were perhaps like one of those goslings who gets an imprint—Konrad Lorenz has written about it, as you no doubt remember—and then follows whomever takes care of it.”

At this I laughed aloud. “And so I have become a great goose, Muff!”

“A faithful goose, Cam,” she amended, smiling.

“I used to think of her as a princess then, and I expect I still do.” It came to me that Jane must have missed that glow that surrounded her when I was a child at the school. Would she perhaps recapture it in Germany? Was she in search of a role that would give her back that sense of herself? “I just hope she won't be disappointed. It seems such a risk!”

“Jane couldn't live without risk.”

“It seems awfully Christian, too—love your enemy and all that.”

“She doesn't analyze herself, Cam, you know that as well as I do. Jane does what she wants to do.”

And there the conversation ended. It gave me a lot to think about.

Jane knew that when she left for Germany she would not see Mother again, and that made her almost daily visits have an intensity I sometimes felt may have been too much for Mother, who made a great effort while Jane was there at her side to be herself again but was often exhausted after she left.

“But it's worth it, Cam,” she whispered to me when I suggested that we might ask Jane to limit her visits. “It's the essence now—I'm not turning my back yet on life.”

Jane's relation to my mother was rather different from any other that I knew about in her life. Jane was the rock and haven for so many friends of all ages, but in this case my mother had often been the rock and haven for Jane, especially during the hard time at the Warren School. So I sensed that Jane was determined to make these last times memorable in any way she could. Once when I tiptoed in she was reciting “I have been one acquainted with the night.” Another time she had put on a Mozart flute concerto and they were listening to it in silence. More than once I saw the tears in Jane's eyes as I met her on the stairs.

Perhaps, in the end, it was a relief for Mother, too, when we all knew this would be the final farewell.

I did see Jane myself once more before she took off, saw her at Muff's house up in her bedroom, where she was packing. It was like her to be able to sit down and have a real talk in the midst of suitcases and piles of clothes, to set all that aside for a half-hour.

We talked about death and dying and Jane told me a little about Marian and how hard it had been for her to accept that death, to accept that Marian must die so young, at just forty-six. “I found it unbearable,” Jane said, “because she was such a genius at living. Why, of all people, should she go, she who could use every moment to its fullest?”

I had no answer for that.

“People vanish,” she murmured, “and that's why I gathered Marian's letters together and published them … and it was a way, I suppose, in that year after her death, of still being with her, of keeping her alive.”

“And perhaps a hundred years from now, they will be discovered.”

“Perhaps.”

I suspected that Jane must have suffered because none of Marian's letters to her had shown the intimacy and the kind of passionate ecstasy of appreciation she had been able to give to other friends. I myself had been astonished that the scholarly Marian Chase had been capable of such intensity of feeling. They had explained to me why Jane had loved her so deeply—and had been so hurt by Marian's aloof bearing where she herself was concerned.

“Why am I talking about this, Cam?” she asked, giving me a deep look of pain and astonishment.

“Death is with us today.”

“Yes.” She paused to think. “Perhaps I have been moved to talk about Marian and her death because somehow I do not have that agonizing sense of the incomplete where your mother is concerned, of a promise unfulfilled. Your mother has achieved a remarkably complete life—that is not quite right,” she amended. “But Eleanor is ready to go … because in some strange way she has come to fruition. Oh, how I have felt that these last weeks!”

“Dear Jane,” I managed to utter, “she shines when you are there, but it's a hard death just the same. Awfully hard.” I knew if I tried to say more I would dissolve in tears.

“I wish I didn't have to leave you, leave you carrying the weight.” She had, until now, not been thinking about me, I realized and I saw that as a compliment.

“I just feel totally inadequate,” I said. “The loneliness … dying is such a lonely business.”

“What matters is your being there, Cam.”

“But I can't sit beside her as you did—I'm afraid I'll begin to cry and then I could never stop.”

“Cam, dear,” Jane said gently, “we do what we can. I think your mother understands. I'm sure she does.”

But this time I was not comforted.

I did not see Jane again, but for those last weeks she managed to write often from Germany and it was a tremendous help for me to be able to tell her what was happening almost day by day. That she was able to keep closely in touch and to infuse courage from so far away is amazing.

Mother refused to see my father because I think she knew he didn't want to come. He did come through with some help when I had to get a night nurse in the last two weeks. But when I tried to tell him about symptoms and how awful it was for me to watch her wasting away, he simply would not or could not listen. So, added to what I was suffering as I watched my mother die was rage, a rage that could not be healed. After Mother's death I saw my father very rarely. So in a way I was losing both parents.

Without Ruth I do not know what I would have done. She came on weekends, did all kinds of practical things like bringing splits of champagne, which, near the end, was almost the only thing Mother could swallow. But more importantly, Ruth could sit with my mother because she was not torn apart and could control both compassion and grief.

At last, in November, death, which had become a friend, death we longed for as deliverance, came. Mother died in her sleep a few hours after I had kissed her good night.

During the Christmas holidays Ruth helped me close the house and empty it. And when that was done, and the new term started, I went gladly back to teaching.

Much as I had loved my mother, I had not been fully aware of what she had meant to innumerable people who took the trouble to write to me. Teachers and students, too, from the Warren School, fellow artists, friends who went back to her college days had felt the imprint of a remarkable human being. Was that what Jane meant when she told me she felt Mother had led a fulfilled life? The statement had startled me at the time because I knew too well how deprived my mother had been in her marriage, how much love and imagination had not been used or wilfully ignored by my father. So the letters brought me a kind of peace, for they helped me to see that whatever she had not experienced as fulfillment in the usual sense of the word, she had created herself, through her own gifts as painter and teacher, and by touching so many lives. In the academic world we are apt to judge people by achievement, by whether their Ph.D. dissertation was worthy of publication, by honorary doctorates, by position in the world. None of that applied to my mother, or mattered to her. She was a lavish spender of the life in her, never counting the cost.

Ruth and I talked a lot about it that winter and spring, and of the wonderful way she had welcomed Ruth into the family when we decided to live together. “She has left us a trust fund,” I said once, laughing about it as I spoke, and I meant a fund of personal integrity which we must draw on as long as we lived.

At this point in my tale I bogged down in a state of dismay and discouragement. How was I ever to deal with the German experience, so important in Jane's life, when I knew next to nothing about it? I had a few letters but they became less frequent after Mother's death. And once more I almost gave up.

Then one spring day when I had wandered down to the Square with the idea of lunching there alone and reading
The New York Times
, I ran into Sarah, who knew everything about Jane in her last years, for had they lived together in the barn after Muff's death and the sale of the big house.