The Magnificent Spinster (6 page)

“But it
is
important,” Jane answered passionately. “I can't graduate without math.”

Maurice came to the rescue and for three weeks spent two hours every Saturday afternoon helping Jane with algebra. He discovered that it was at least partly a matter of tempo. Jane simply could not be hurried, but if one had patience and she was allowed to make mistakes and Bounder for a while, the light was apt to dawn.

“Oh Maurice, I've got it. I see what I did wrong … there!”

And quite often she had to hug him with the relief of it.

This was a different girl from the one he took to the theater, one who seemed able to understand completely and to feel with things far beyond her age. It was also a different girl from the one with whom he waltzed at the rink and who had a wonderful flow and skill on skates, even though she was almost as tall as he and might have made him feel awkward. There was nothing awkward about her, and Maurice decided that that was because she seemed totally unselfconscious. He wondered sometimes if she was even aware that she was beautiful. Am I in love with her? Maurice sometimes asked himself. And decided that he was not, partly perhaps because he was very much aware that if he overstepped his role as surrogate uncle there would be hell to pay. And then their friendship was so unlike any other relationship he had ever had with a girl, he wanted to keep it as it was, innocent and deep.

He was asked to debutante parties as an eligible bachelor and enjoyed flirting and squeezing a girl's hand as much as any young man, enjoyed the sensation of holding a young woman in his arms in a waltz, the softness of a young woman. But somehow these feelings had never led him into a desire to go further, to capture one of these charming young ladies and make her his wife. And sometimes he worried about this. Would he ever fall in love? Twenty-eight seemed awfully old.

Jane was very sympathetic. “I can't understand anything about it,” she told him. “I don't want to be touched. Maybe there's something frightfully wrong with both of us!” And at that they laughed, secure in all they shared, glad to shut out what everyone else did and everyone else felt.

But in the year Jane graduated, Allegra and James came to the conclusion that now she was putting her hair up, Jane would have to stop seeing Maurice. Or only with a chaperone present. Maurice was asked to come for a little talk at eleven one Saturday morning while Jane, not told of this, was sent off to play tennis with Alix.

“I know you will understand, Maurice, that Jane is about to come out into society, and what was unusual even when she was only a child will now become impossible.”

“Mrs. Reid, you must believe that I have never by a word or gesture gone beyond the limits of an uncle and a niece.”

“Dear boy, I do believe you … your discretion and kindness have been impeccable. You have given Jane joys she will never forget. We are grateful.” There was a slight pause while Allegra arranged the bow at her throat. “But …”

Maurice observed this small firm person sitting very straight and wondered how on earth to deal with her conviction. “You don't know what you're doing!” he said passionately. “It's cruel!”

“Please don't make it harder for me than it is,” she said with great dignity. “I have often wondered whether our decision to permit such a friendship was wise. You will make me regret it, Maurice, if you persist.”

“Jane will never understand,” he said, rocking back and forth as though in physical pain. “How can you do this to her?”

“You are making me very unhappy,” Allegra said, but her glance did not yield. “I think you must promise me and my husband that you will not try to see Jane or communicate with her for a year. Give her a chance to meet other young men closer to her own age. I know you are fond of Jane, and I ask this for her sake.”

Maurice was close to tears, and so ashamed of the intensity of his feelings that he got up with only one instinct, to get away as fast as possible. “You have my promise, Mrs. Reid.”

“Thank you.”

She gave him a firm, warm handshake. And then, with a characteristic gesture, slipped an arm through his as she escorted him to the door. It was so unexpected he felt quite undone.

“Good-bye, dear Maurice.”

And then the door closed behind him. In the distance he could see a white dress, returning a serve, running, running to the net.

It was the first major crisis in Jane's life. No doubt she had been occasionally deprived of something she wanted very much to do, usually something that involved risk of one sort or another. But this attacked her inmost self, and seemed an invasion of her very being. It was so unlike Mamma, warm, loving Mamma, who often persuaded her husband to give her daughters a free rein, but when Jane had tried to argue her mother said, “The subject is closed,” and left the room.

There were torrents of tears and many a night her pillow was soaked after Alix was safely asleep. Even Snooker was hard put to say anything comforting. This was a matter of honor and she could not take Jane's side against her mother.

“It's the price you pay for being who you are,” she said.

“And who is that?” Jane cried out. “I'm not a criminal!”

“You are a beautiful young woman whom many a young man is going to want to marry, and …” here Snooker hesitated, but Jane might as well face reality while they were at it, “you will inherit considerable wealth someday.”

“What's money if it makes you miserable and cuts you off from your best friend?”

“It seems hard, I know, dearie, but you'll get over it in time.”

“I'll never get over it,” Jane said quietly. “It's rocked my faith in everything.”

As far as anyone could see, she did get over it in time, but what they could not know was that when the tears stopped flowing—no one cries forever—a determination was forming to do things her own way as far as that was possible, And the first visible sign of this new firmness and will was Jane's decision to go to Vassar. Who had ever heard of a Reid or Trueblood female not going to the Annex, Radcliffe College as it would soon become? Edith was there, doing brilliantly, and it had been taken for granted that Jane would live at home, and see young men, the brothers and friends of her schoolmates in the normal social life of Cambridge.

James Reid was violently opposed to her wish. The first time Jane spoke of Vassar he had flung his napkin down and left the room, a gesture of such unusual violence that it silenced the whole family. Jane had blushed to the roots of her hair, but held her head erect. And perhaps because Allegra had minded dismissing Maurice more than she let on, she decided there and then to back Jane. That night in bed she and James had a long talk about it. And she was able to persuade him that real harm could be done if Jane ceased to trust her parents to be fair. “In time she will understand about Maurice … but she won't understand if we force her in the matter of her education. And, truly, James, there is something to be said for leaving home to go to college. She will make friends on her own, people from other parts of the country.”

“People from other parts of the country, as you put it, come to Harvard and Radcliffe … after all, I, her father, did so, and you didn't meet me, my dear, by going to Vassar!” But the tone had changed and now they were laughing. Allegra knew it was going to be all right.

Vassar did seem very far away compared, for instance, to Smith, Wellesley, or Mount Holyoke … but Jane was adamant, and when she told her parents that two of her class at school were entering Vassar, they felt reassured.

There would be one more summer at the island before, as Martha put it, “everything starts breaking apart.” She had been thinking of the family, but what she could not know and none of them could know was that the guns of August would precipitate a world war that would radically change the safe, hopeful ethos of their childhood forever. For this was 1914.

I have chosen to dwell on Maurice and that friendship at some length because, as I think over Jane's life, it seems clear to me that it was of great importance in her growth as a human being, and perhaps the enforced parting set her on a course she would follow to the end of her life.

After the year of silence, Jane and Maurice did see each other again. Nothing changed their ability to meet and talk about everything, and when he volunteered for the ambulance corps and went to France he wrote Jane at Vassar long, confidential letters. She was one of the bridesmaids at his wedding, and godmother to his first child, a daughter named for her.

It is odd that, on the whole, novelists speak little of friendship between opposite sexes, and especially these days, when sexual encounters dominate everything else in most fictional characters. I am writing about a woman who had a genius for friendship with both sexes, and touched deeply an enormous number and variety of lives. Could she have done so to the same extent, and at the same depth, had she married? I think not. It is one of the questions I hope to be able to probe as I pursue my quarry.

I now come to a block, for although Jane always glowed with happiness whenever she talked of Vassar, we had so much else to talk about when I knew her as a grown-up person myself that only rarely did I glean some facts about that seminal time in her life. But one thing is certain. She met at Vassar a young woman, Lucy Goodspeed, who was to be woven into the rest of her life as her most intimate friend. Jane's nickname at Vassar was Reedy, possibly a reference to her height, or simply a diminutive of her family name, but whenever I was with her and someone called her Reedy, I knew that person had been a classmate at Vassar.

When one saw Lucy and Jane together it was clear that Lucy had the greatest respect for her friend, that although she was herself head of a girls' school, she deferred to Reedy out of love and something like honor. She honored Jane, and was able to prove it in singular ways. For instance, for years she went over Jane's accounts (shades of dismal math days at school), which were apt to be in some confusion. Lucy was dark, with deepest brown eyes and a rather dark skin, and reminded me of a bird, a shy bird. My guess is that at Vassar she had entered Jane's orbit as one of a group who gravitated toward that immense vitality and sense of adventure, for Jane was an imaginer of every sort of fun, an instigator of every sort of adventure, from picnics by the lake to plays. I have hesitated to use the tarnished word “glamour,” but there is no doubt that Jane Reid had it and that women as well as men were entranced by those extraordinary eyes, that women as well as men wanted to ally themselves with her in one way or another.

But then Jane herself had an instinct for devotion, an intense need to follow as well as to lead. She could be swept off her feet, and at Vassar she was, by a young instructor in the English department, Miss Frances Thompson. Miss Thompson was very tall, very thin, quite plain, but she was a great teacher who could tease her students, only a few years younger than she, as well as inspire them, and she had a contagious passion for education. Also she opened doors for Jane into a new world, for Miss Thompson came from Chicago and her father was the well-known head of a settlement house there. She had been brought up among the poor with a burning sense of the injustices done to immigrants, and the need to help was bred into her bones. She brushed away Jane's somewhat Victorian ideas of poetry by reciting Carl Sandburg's “Chicago,” its terse, vigorous language and its celebration not of the beautiful but of the tough and harsh. This is what Jane had been looking for when she decided to go to Vassar. Not the genteel world in which she had been brought up, but the real world, or what she thought of as “real.” In the course of two years under Miss Thompson she came to the decision that teaching was what she wanted to do.

So it came as a blow but also as an opportunity when Frances told her one day in Jane's senior year that she was going back to Chicago to teach at the Parker School, and that if Jane would like to come along and get some training there, it might be arranged.

All the charming, seductive things about college life were still there, but as the war dragged on and became more terrible, the young men with whom Jane had danced were volunteering for the Canadian army or, as Maurice had done, for the ambulance corps. France, greatly beloved, became almost as dear as the United States, and the students sang the “Marseillaise” on their way to classes. Lucy and Anne dreamed of getting over somehow as soon as they graduated. Like everyone else, they knitted socks and sweaters and rolled bandages in their spare time.

As I ponder the very little I know about those years two images stand out above all others. The first I found out quite by accident, and it was illuminating. On my way to the island I had stopped to see a former classmate of Jane's to deliver a present to her from a mutual friend, and thought Jane would be happy to hear what Jewel was like now that they were each in their seventies. I learned then that Jane had never forgotten and would never forgive a practical joke played on her by Jewel a few days after she arrived at Vassar, terrified, homesick, and taking comfort in a family of Brownies, small plump figures covered in silk, which were her fetishes at that time. When she came back to her room after supper, the Brownies had disappeared,
stolen
. There was anger in her eyes when she told me this story fifty years later, and it was clear that Jewel would never be forgiven—although she did return the beloved Brownies a few days later. It has stuck in my mind because it is an example of the child who never died in Jane and also of the intensity of her feelings. The Brownies were still kept on her bureau at the island. And it was of course that child who came to life whenever Jane was with children, even into very old age. Though the unforgiving anger took me by surprise.

The other image which not only Jane herself but several of her friends always mentioned when the Vassar days were referred to was, I imagine, the greatest experience of all. Far more important than her being class president or getting an A on her final paper from Frances Thompson. She was chosen to play Cyrano in
Cyrano de Bergerac
. Those who saw this performance never forgot it—“She was simply great,” they all agreed. Here her innate romanticism had full play in a role which she took into herself and made her own, that part of her that would have liked to be a man, swashbuckling, in love with language, with an irresistible power to woo … but doomed to failure because of an immense nose. In that role she could literally play out every romantic dream, every secret desire. And how she would have hated to have to play Roxane!