The Magnificent Spinster (28 page)

I placed a bunch of orange and deep-gold chrysanthemums in her room and put
The Oxford Book of English Verse
(shades of Marian) by her bed, and, just as a joke,
Peter Rabbit
and
Squirrel Nutkin
, as well as
The Manchester Guardian Weekly
and
The New Statesman
, to which I subscribed. It was wonderful to be getting ready to receive Jane in my own home, and if I had been feeling rather sedate, I was suddenly as excited as a child at the prospect of her arrival.

Buying the house had been quite an adventure for Ruth and me … it didn't seem possible that we had lived in it, then, for five years. In that time Ruth, who was the gardener, had created a charming three-sided group of flower beds, and we had planted dogwood and one or two tree peonies under them, our greatest pride. The house itself was a rather ordinary nineteenth-century one with a small porch at the back which we had added on after two years, and there we lived all summer.

Inside there were one or two eighteenth-century pieces, a corner cupboard in the small dining room, a bureau in the living room from Ruth's family, and a small, rather elegant sofa from Mother's house with one of her paintings of flowers above it. Ruth and I each had a study downstairs. Upstairs there were two bedrooms, ours and the guest room. I like to think that the house gave an impression of light, flowery and elegant.

And Jane caught this at once. “It's so like your mother,” she exclaimed. “It's so airy and comfortable … oh my dears!” We sat down by the fire to have tea, and all the time she was noticing little things.

“What a perfect guest, Ruth, isn't she?”

“Am I?”

“Nobody ever notices anything … but you do. Imagine your noticing that mouse on the mantel!” And we laughed with the pleasure of it.

“It seems incredible that I have never managed to come for all these years! To see you and Ruth at home.”

“After tea you must walk round the garden. That is Ruth's domain.”

“I shall, I shall.”

But over tea and shortbread, much appreciated too, we were soon talking about Muff, of course, and Jane's mood changed. “Of us all only Viola and I are left—it seems so strange. But I must tell you, upstairs in my room I delved right into
The Oxford Book
, and you know what it opened to? See if I can say it, and of course I hear it in Marian's voice,” and she recited:

“Very old are the woods;

And the buds that break

Out of the brier's boughs,

When March winds wake,

So old with their beauty are—

Oh, no man knows

Through what wild centuries

Roves back the rose.”

“Is it de la Mare?” I asked. “I seem to remember.…”

“Of course.” I saw her eyes were bright with tears. “Why does it make me think of Muff? But it does.”

“She was an ancient person.”

Jane laughed then, her whoop of sudden laughter. “Ancient?”

“I mean she was in some odd way ancient from the beginning … that is what I always felt.”

“Oh.” Then she grew thoughtful, “Yes, I see … yes.”

“You were young from the start and she was ancient … does that make any sense? I fear not.”

“I am always surprised by Cam,” Ruth said, smiling. “She does think of the most extraordinary things.”

“But Jane,” I wanted to get at what was to happen now. “What is going to happen about the house? About Sarah … where will she go?”

“Another cup of tea might help me try to tell you,” Jane said, passing her cup, then setting it down and looking into the fire.

“You don't need to,” I said. Perhaps she was not ready for that kind of planning. Perhaps she needed time.

“Oh, I must,” she said quickly. “It's all in my head, you know, has been for two weeks. We are selling the house.” (Who was “we,” I wondered?) “Mary will go over to the Trueblood house to help out there—that was one of my chief concerns now that Snooker is dead. What to do about Mary. She has been with us for thirty years.” Then Jane paused. “I'm keeping Sudbury for a while … the Mormon couple want to stay on and I'm not ready, really, to give it up.”

It all sounded to me like an earthquake going on … so much that had seemed would last forever breaking up. “Surely not,” I said. “You can't be thinking of that!”

“Well …” Jane sipped her tea and looked thoughtful. “You know Muff always felt it was too far away, too hard to go back and forth to. I see now that she was right.”

“But that was it, to get right away, to have a sanctuary.… I'll never forget those months I spent there after Spain!”

“Yes, that was a great time, wasn't it?” she said gladly. “But you see, Cam, you are a person with a lot of solitude to draw on in you … I guess I need people, and the trouble with Sudbury is that it's not a place where people can drop in, you know. It would be different if I had a Ruth to share it with. Ever since I walked into this house an hour ago I have felt the sweetness of your life together.”

Ruth and I exchanged a look. I felt too keenly the admission this was to make a comment. For the first time I faced in myself that Jane would never have what we had. Her most intense affections had not been wholly returned. Or was she, whatever she said, a solitary who could not cope with the kind of intimacy Ruth and I shared? I couldn't know then and still do not know.

“What I am considering, but it's not a sure thing, is when we sell the house to arrange, if possible, to keep the barn and the apartment above it.” Here she paused, hesitated, leaned back in her chair and looked up at the ceiling. “For years and years it has been rented to the Hausmers … but dear Mrs. Hausmer has had to go to a nursing home and there is really no reason why I can't have it, I think. I am hoping to persuade Sarah to share it with me. There are two bedrooms.”

I took this in in silence. Was Jane ready to take Sarah on? Would Sarah, who had been Muff's intimate friend, want to move in with Jane?

“You have your doubts?” Jane said with a twinkle in her eye. “And so do I, my dear.”

“It sounds like a good plan,” Ruth said, perhaps because I was still silent, thinking about all that might be involved.

“Sarah has built herself into the family. She has been an absolute trump about the English children. Muff could never have managed the island without her. She fits in so perfectly. She is a very powerful woman, Cam, under the shyness and self-effacement.”

“That I can't know, of course.” I did feel an indefinable malaise, as though something free in Jane were about to be caught and tamed.

“She'll be away at school—you know she is librarian there—so we shall hardly be in each other's hair, as they say,” and she added quickly, “Sarah will have to make the decision. God knows we have our work cut out for us to empty the house when and if it is sold, and maybe that will show us whether we can work happily together. We'll just have to take it day by day.”

I felt anxious to move into less troubling waters and pounced on the island. “Of course you will now be the one to run things at the island … that's going to be fun, isn't it, Jane?”

“Yes.” Her eyes sparkled. “Let's plan right away. Will you and Ruth come for a week or ten days next summer? I expect I shall soon have a calendar and begin to write friends in. Oh yes, it will be fun! And there, Cam, Sarah will be the best right-hand man imaginable—oh, I hope she will want to come! She knows the ropes in a way I do not She will be the most immense help in making the transition.”

“It's rather like a puzzle, isn't it? Things fall into place. I begin to understand about Sarah. You are right. The French might call it a marriage of convenience,” I ventured.

“A friendship of convenience,” Ruth amended.

“And why not?” Jane seized on this idea with amusement “Why not?” she asked again.

“Oh dear, we've talked so long it's too dark for the garden!”

“And it's time I started our supper.” Ruth disappeared into the kitchen. I had set the table in the dining room before Jane arrived, so we had a little time alone together. And she was eager now to hear how we organized life.

“Ruth's the cook, is she?”

“Cook and gardener. I clean the house, make the beds, take out rubbish, and am, I suppose, what could be called the handyman. I cut the grass.”

“Did it take long to work it out?”

“Not really. We each did what we felt like doing … I cook sometimes when Ruth has a long day.”

“Does she have a lot of patients? It must be exhausting sometimes, listening to so many problems.” I sensed that Jane was rather at a loss about therapy. Everything in her resisted the idea, I suspected, although her brother-in-law, Edith's husband, had been a psychiatrist, at least until they moved to the ranch for Russell's sake.

“She looks drained when she gets home sometimes. But then she has a drink while I get supper, listens to some Mozart. Ruth is a very balanced person, as you can see.” And at that moment she came in with a martini for me and a glass of sherry for Jane. “We're talking about you,” I said.

“Oh?”

“Your ears must be burning.”

“Can't you join us?”

“In a minute.…”

“Mmmm,” Jane said, “there is an aroma of roast chicken floating in here.…”

Ruth did fetch her martini then and sat down with us for a moment.

“Now,” Jane said “you must tell me about McCarthy and that horrible committee of his. Is he as dangerous as he sounded when I was in Bremen? How can he be stopped?”

“It's a very bad situation,” Ruth said, “because what he taps is that ingrained fear of communism which Americans seem to suffer like an addiction. He's already succeeded in getting the China experts fired from the State Department—Lattimore, for one—and the reason for that is that the experts all foresaw that the communists would take over in China … and were accused of being pro-communist as a result. It's all a little crazy.”

“Worse because it's all like upside-down logic,” I interrupted. “When Tydings' committee investigated McCarthy's charges about the State Department they called them a ‘fraud and a hoax' … and what happened? McCarthy charged
them
with being soft on communism! And Tydings was defeated for reelection … all the rightist organizations ganged up to ‘get him,' and they did.”

“And you mustn't forget Madame Chiang Kai-shek's machinations … and how she has wrapped everyone around her little finger, even Wellesley College, where she was a student, you may remember.” Ruth was vehement and flushed.

“It's scary.” Jane took a sip of her sherry and put it down. “I feel it, I guess, more than I would have before Germany. One can't forget that Hitler's trump card was always anti-communism. It
could
happen here.”

“At present every liberal person is labelled. It happens where one could not have dreamed it could happen … imagine this, Jane: The other day the local head of the Civil liberties Union, after the last meeting, actually asked me if I had been a member of the party! I mean, there, in that context, it did seem preposterous.”

“Cam was awfully upset when she got home that night,” Ruth said. “I had quite a time trying to calm her down.”

“When I said I wasn't a commie, Fred backed down … but he mentioned that I had been in Spain.”

“That is called being a premature anti-fascist,” Ruth said, “but we had better have our supper and forget that mess for a while.” Ruth always sensed when the tensions rose too high.

“It's awfully good to be able to talk about it,” Jane said, as we went into the dining room.

It was a real pleasure for me to see Jane enjoying her supper as she did, to be for once a hostess for her as well as a friend. In some way it set a seal on our long relationship. I felt very grown-up that evening. So grown-up that I didn't argue when Jane talked admiringly of Eisenhower. I even resisted the temptation to remind her that he had shaken hands with McCarthy in Chicago before the election. Jane had always teased me about being absolute and she was right. When I saw that newspaper photograph I was through with Eisenhower—trimming his sails to get elected.

After supper we listened to a Mozart quartet and went early to bed. Jane, with her leap of response to everything, never showed fatigue, but I knew she must be tired after the last weeks of grief and the endless decisions and chores that always accompany a death, and that in her case meant such upheaval on every side.

“Sleep well, you two,” she said as we stood at the foot of the stairs. And she reached out and put an arm around each of us in a gesture of great tenderness that touched me.

“You, too, sleep well,” I said. “And sleep as long as you can. We'll have breakfast anytime.”

“What luxury!” But at the top of the stairs she turned to look back at us. “Sure you don't want help with the dishes? I feel rather guilty about that!”

“Three's a crowd in our kitchen,” Ruth said quickly. “Not to worry.”

“I'm just going to bask in being here, then. Bless you both and good night”

Later, when Ruth and I finally got to bed, we talked about Jane, of course. There were so many things I had wanted to ask, whether she would be going down to Philadelphia soon, for one.

“She's really alone now,” I whispered. “I wish it were Lucy who would share that apartment with her. I can't help wondering about Sarah. Jane is so very different from Muff … will they get along?”

“Sarah is needed, that's for sure,” Ruth murmured, “especially on the island.”

“I just can't imagine it yet … except at Warren in the last years, Jane has controlled her own life. This seems like such a radical change.”

“She is a realist, Cam. And I imagine she is thinking about the future. She's nearing sixty, you said.”