The Magnificent Spinster (29 page)

“Yes, it must be lonely without a central person, Lucy so far away, Marian dead. Oh Ruth,” I murmured, “how lucky we are!”

Over breakfast I did get a chance to ask about a lot of things. Lucy, for one. She had come to Muff's funeral but couldn't stay because she was needed at the school, but Jane would be going down as usual at Thanksgiving to see Russell, “and really catch up with Lucy, which I sorely need to do. Of course shell come to the island this summer.”

The island, I sensed, was going to loom large in the years to come, would even, perhaps, become the root endeavor and delight as Jane grew older. I asked about the Cambridge Center. There things had changed, too, and Jane no longer felt as closely involved as she had been when Ellen was the head, although she was still on the board, I gathered, and had no intention of resigning. My last question concerned the Trueblood biography, which had come out while Jane was in Germany.

“Oh dear,” she answered, looking very guilty. “I haven't managed to read it yet, have you?”

“No, but the reviews were good. I really think that young man has succeeded in reviving interest in Trueblood.”

“So I am told,” said Jane. It was clear that she felt some resistance about the book, didn't really want to read it, and when I asked her why, she answered so characteristically, “Any biography these days seems an invasion of privacy. Something in me rebels against that. I can't help it.”

“The dead are at the mercy of the living?” Ruth asked, pouring us second cups of coffee. “Another pancake, anyone?” No one could manage a fourth.

“That's it,” Jane answered, her eyes bright. “By what right must we demand to know
everything
about a person for one reason or another in the public realm?”

“I suppose it is the wish to bring someone down from a pedestal into the human family … yes, perhaps to humanize the myth,” Ruth answered.

“We went through hell, Jay and I, making decisions, but we finally decided that Austin must have all the journals, letters, everything.”

“Surely you were right,” I ventured.

“I'm not sure. I'll never be sure.” Then she looked at her watch. “Good heavens, dears, it's nearly ten and I must get back to Cambridge. The real estate agent is coming at noon with someone who may want to buy.…”

“You must just walk around the garden!”

“Of course there's time for that.… I'll just pack my valise and come right down.”

It had been such a good, a memorable visit that I hated to see her go. And when she drove off, a long arm waving good-bye from the window until we were out of sight, I felt a pang.

“It's lonely for her, Ruth, awfully lonely.”

“Well, I'm not so sure about that. Jane has made choices all her life from what you tell me. She has gone her own way.”

“Yes, with a hundred delicate threads binding a hundred lives to hers … you're right. I shouldn't mourn.” But I did mourn. I couldn't help it. She was always driving off somewhere alone.

We did not see Jane again till after Christmas, although we talked occasionally on the telephone and I was aware that she must be going through a period of very hard work, emptying the big house, getting the flat over the barn repainted and shipshape. Whenever we talked Jane glowed with praise at all Sarah was proving to be: “She is such a good organizer, keeps things listed for me … oh, it has been such a multitudinous trial by
things
,” and she laughed. “How does anyone accumulate as much as Muff did? Of course she inherited most of it, piles and piles of dishes and silver, and God knows what! Sarah is a great preserver of the past … she loved that house passionately, has not wanted things to be sold, you see.…” And then she insisted that we make a date to come for tea as soon as they had settled in “because I hope you will like what we have chosen for you and Ruth.”

So on a bright, cold January Sunday we set out, eager to see Jane settled in and to catch up on everything. It was strange to go right by the big house and out to the barn at the back. The house was not yet inhabited, but Jane had spoken with enthusiasm of the fact that it had been sold to a young architect and his wife and family, old acquaintances; and they, I gathered, were going to make some radical changes inside to modernize it. That work had not yet been begun.

It was exciting to stand by the small door to the right of the barn door, open to show it was now the garage and Jane's car safely inside, and ring the bell. It was Sarah who opened it for us, smiling warmly. “Come in. The stairs are a little steep.”

“Sarah, this is my friend Ruth Arbor.”

“Welcome! You are our first guests.”

Jane met us at the head of the stairs, looking very tall under the low ceiling. “Oh, what fun!” she exclaimed. “The kettle's on, and I'm dying to show you our domain!”

In the cozy living room a large window, reaching the ceiling in a rather beautiful oriel at the top, gave an illusion of space and height. A big armchair, a small blue velvet sofa, and in the window a table piled high with books and magazines. At the end of the room near the kitchen the dining-room table was squeezed in by an upright piano. Over the sofa there hung a realistic painting of woods, perhaps on the island—Jane's taste in art remained conservative. I suddenly realized I had never before seen her in such a small space.

“It's amazing how homelike it feels already,” I said.

“Wait till you see my bedroom!” That was back down the hall where we had come in. “Don't look to the right,” Jane admonished us, “that is the dump at present. Total chaos!” But we then found ourselves in the very low-ceilinged room to the left. “It's a nest, isn't it? I feel just like a bird in a nest when I go to bed.” And indeed her big bed was set under the eaves, the Brownies on the pillow. I glimpsed a row of photographs on a shelf to the left of it, among them one of my mother. A small table served as a dressing table and that was all.

The tiny apartment, I sensed at once, had a quality of hominess which Sudbury had lacked. Sudbury had been too pure, too beautiful, a little self-consciously so. Here, in a fine clutter, the accumulations of a lifetime, the atmosphere breathed.

“I love it!” I said. “It's just right, isn't it?”

“Tea's ready!” Sarah called and we settled down around the low table in front of the sofa.

If I had had fears about Sarah and Jane as companions, they were being set at rest, partly by Jane's constant use of “we”: “We decided not to have curtains … the window is so beautiful—and see, it looks out on that great tulip tree. When we lived in the big house I never really noticed it. Now it's a constant joy. Rare to see one this far north.” She turned to Sarah. “Will you pour?” It was a tiny but unmistakable sign that Jane was the mistress of the establishment. And I was glad to note it.

“What a triumph to be settled in,” Ruth said.

“Well,” Sarah smiled, “it's a little helter-skelter, but we do live here.”

“And have our being,” Jane added. “It's wonderful, you know, to be in Cambridge … I mean, people can drop in. Maybe I had better warn you that Maurice's grandchildren may interrupt us. They are coming to get the croquet set, and my tennis racket.”

“And if Portia wants it, that Meissen soup tureen,” Sarah reminded her.

“Oh mercy, I'd forgotten that altogether! Where is it, Sarah? Do you have the foggiest idea?”

“In the barn all wrapped up in that big box.”

“Good girl. I should never have remembered.”

There was a moment of silence as we sipped our tea and were passed a plate of very thin, elegant cookies.

“Mary made them—wasn't it dear of her?” Then Jane, munching on a cookie, looked at us, all three, and sighed, “It is wonderful to be sitting down with friends.”

“We've hardly sat down for days,” Sarah said.

“I've fallen asleep over the newspaper every night,” Jane said. “I'm way behind … but I'm told that awful things are happening: Dulles backing down to McCarthy and forcing resignations in the State Department right and left. Poor Leonard, that star expert on China, has had to go.”

“Yes,” I said. Even here one could not get away from the disasters in Washington. “Leonard foretold that the communists would win. It's outrageous. I mean, you know the facts but if the facts don't agree with what Dulles and Eisenhower want them to be, you are punished. It's absolutely preposterous!”

Jane smiled, “I thought you said you had become sedate, Cam!”

Ruth laughed, “Cam imagines she is sedate, says she doesn't want to get involved, but …”

“I still care about the country, I'm still a citizen, after all. Dean Acheson is being called a traitor!”

“Where are we going? Where will it end?” Jane asked.

“God knows. At the moment Roy Cohn is in Europe visiting American libraries to make sure ‘subversive' writers like Thoreau, Dos Passos, and Hemingway are removed from the shelves.”

“How strange … meanwhile in Germany books banned under Hitler are being put back and avidly read!”

In the small room full of life we could not quite get away from the shadow of events, from fear. But there was some comfort at least in talking about it. Whatever had happened in Germany, Jane, I felt, had come back more politically minded, more aware than she had ever been. It made a new and precious bond between us.

But we never finished that conversation because the doorbell buzzed and we heard children's voices outside calling, “Aunt Reedy! Aunt Reedy!” Then some loud, deep barks. Jane excused herself and we heard her voice in a moment, after she ran downstairs to welcome them.

“Come in, you splendid people!”

“Can we bring Jumbo?”

Hearing this Sarah got up. “Jumbo is a huge Labrador. Maybe I'd better go down and take him for a little walk. That tail, you know—I'm afraid our teacups might not survive.” We couldn't help laughing.

“Sarah does look after Jane, doesn't she?” I whispered.

Then two little girls in sneakers and jeans and their stout, smiling mother erupted into the living room where we sat, and we were introduced all round.

“Can we have a cookie?” Nancy, the younger of the two asked at once, seeing the plate still half full.

“You really should wait to be offered one,” Portia, their mother, said gently.

“Aunt Reedy always has cookies for us,” was the answer.

“Maybe you could pass them around,” Jane said with a twinkle in her eye.

While they munched they looked around like squirrels, Prudence picking up the world atlas from the table by the window, Nancy going over to the piano and playing a few notes. She whirled around the piano stool. “How can you ever fit so many people in?” she asked. “It's such a tiny place … is this where you eat?” for now she was facing the round dining-room table.

“It feels very cozy and settled-in.” Portia came to the rescue.

“Yes.” Prudence set the atlas down, “Squirrel Nutkin would like it.”

“Do you still go to bed with
Squirrel Nutkin
under your pillow?” Jane asked.

“That was ages ago,” Prudence said, with scorn. “It's
The Hobbit
now.”

“I am behind the times, I see.”

“I like it here,” Nancy announced. “I like it very much. Only, where are the Brownies?”

“In my bedroom … if you go down the hall and turn left you'll find them.” And off Nancy went.

“I think we'd better rescue Sarah,” Portia said then.

“Yes, let's all go down and find the croquet set … do you really think you can use it?” Jane asked Portia.

“We have a perfect place, a flat place behind the house.”

“Good.” Jane turned to Ruth and me and added, “You stay here and I'll be back in a trice.” Then, “Come along, kids. We'd better get going.”

Nancy's wish to take the Brownies down with them—she had them in her arms when she came back—was gently quelled. “They are very old,” Jane said. “They mightn't like being bounced around.”

“All right … as long as I know they're there,” Nancy agreed. And then there was thunderous noise on the stairs, and loud calls from below. “Jumbo, where are you?”

“You see how she is with children,” I said to Ruth. It was good to be left alone and to sink back into our chairs in peace. And then I added, “She took the Brownies to Vassar, you know. They go way back.”

“That's the good feeling here, isn't it?” Ruth said, “that everything goes back and has been built-in somehow. She hasn't left the child in her behind.”

“Yet she keeps on growing.”

So we talked for a while, then looked at our watches. It was really time for us to be leaving … but Jane, wholly given to the moment, had very little sense of time, as I remembered. It must have been a good half-hour before we heard the car door slam and “Good-bye, Aunt Reedy … Good-bye” floating up to where we sat.

When Sarah and Jane came back, Jane was apologetic. “I've been away too long. But it was that Meissen tureen; we had to find a way to pack it in with Jumbo and the kids and to keep it safe. Portia seemed very happy to have it, I'm glad to say.”

“We really must get going,” I said with a glance at Ruth.

“Oh, don't go yet! Stay a moment,” Sarah intervened then, offering to get the things set aside for us while we talked. “That will save time.”

Jane smiled. “I'm afraid I spend time as though I were a millionaire throwing money away—but it's lovely to
have
time now.” She stretched out her legs, sitting as she was on the low velvet sofa, and leaned back, looking up at the ceiling. “I just can't believe Maurice is a grandfather! That's the thing, isn't it? As one gets older one simply cannot believe that anyone else is getting old! It was quite a shock the other day to see that Maurice has snow-white hair, very becoming in a judge, I must admit, but for me he will always be an elegant young man who took me to see Sarah Bernhardt in a carriage which had a wonderful leathery smell.…” Then she laughed. “And now two little girls come and see me, his grandchildren.”