The Magnificent Spinster (7 page)

When I referred to the notes I made immediately after the funeral I found the phrase “She was never virginal,” and I suppose what I meant was that she did not resemble anyone's idea of a spinster, dried up, afraid of life, locked away. On the contrary it may have been her riches as a personality, her openness, the depth of her feelings that made her what she was, not quite the marrying kind … a free spirit.

She was intensely romantic but it occurred to me that she had almost nothing of the narcissistic young woman whose romanticism has at least something to do with being admired. Jane wanted to admire, not so much to be admired, and she wanted to throw herself into some heroic act or life, as a follower, not a leader. The need to dominate which one sees rather often in powerful women was not in her.

Outside the college itself and all the life there and in the summers on the island, World War One created a highly emotional climate. Young men came to say good-bye, among them Quentin Blake, just graduating from Harvard and snatched by the army as he was about to enter law school. He managed to take a night train up and had two days in which to woo Jane, something he found quite frustrating, for the island had become an enterprise for raising food, and Jane met him in her gardening khaki pants and shirt, and as soon as he had changed she took him to the big cleared place where Martha and Alix and Pappa were hard at work hoeing between long rows of corn and cabbage for what seemed an eternal two hours before she relented, and allowed that they might go for a swim. At least for the walk down to the pool he had her to himself. He lost no time.

“Oh Jane,” he said, “you're beautiful!”

“Don't,” she pleaded, and he saw her blush.

“Don't what?”

“Don't say flattering things. Can't we be just as we always were? Remember when you chased me down to the dock and I fell in?”

“I wanted to kiss you then and I want to kiss you now. Please Jane, try to be human for a change.” He felt quite cross. Jane didn't play the game, and how did one get hold of such an elusive person?

He had touched her to the quick and her response was slow in coming. They walked along side by side and he felt diminished in every way … even the fact that she was taller than he was a humiliation. Finally she looked at him, then looked down as she said, “Quentin, it's human not to want to kiss someone, isn't it? You're my dear friend, but I'm not ready to commit myself. Don't you see?”

“One kiss isn't that serious, is it?” he teased, blocking her way.

“It might not be for you—I suppose you've kissed a hundred girls,” and her eyes flashed dark blue, close to anger, he could see.

“I don't understand you,” he said bitterly, as she pushed past him.
“Belle dame sans merci
… the role doesn't suit you.”

But this sally had the unexpected effect of making Jane, who had been so serious a second before, suddenly burst into laughter, and run down the path until he caught her by the hand.

“The
belle dame sans merci
.” She faced him, still laughing. “Oh Quentin, you are such an idiot!” But under the laughter she herself had to recognize that she simply did not like being wooed, if that was what Quentin was doing.

And it was quite a relief when the others joined them at the pool and she could swim in peace while Quentin, still disgruntled, sat at her mother's feet.

I am a little in love with him, she thought, floating on her back and looking up at the sky, watching a gull fly over, but something in her violently resisted being swept away into all sorts of feelings she was not ready to accept. No, she told herself, I want to find out first what I can do myself. She hated the pressure put upon her by his feeling as though she were a wild animal and he had a net in his hands. Why do I feel like this? she asked herself, startled by the force of the image that had come out of the blue. It did not help that Alix was in love already and that Edith seemed on the verge of marrying a young psychologist from Colorado. When Jane tried to talk to Alix, she was told, “Don't worry. You're just not in love. When you are there won't be any problem. You'll just
know
.…”

Quentin, Norris, Paul … Jane felt hedged around with young men who wanted something of her she could not quite give. And since she was not a
belle dame sans merci
, not a flirt by nature as Viola and even sweet Alix were, she could not enjoy this predicament. It seemed to get in the way of everything she did want, the dream of heroic action, of proving herself as every young man going off to war was about to do.

Most of what was happening came from far away to people at home, the horrible trench warfare which the men who were living it did not even talk about in letters, but in 1918 something did happen at home: an epidemic of influenza raced through the army camps. Two acquaintances of the Reids died in their tents, without ever getting to France. It seemed so useless and unbearable. James Reid had gone to Minnesota when a call went out for volunteer nurses for the Boston hospitals, packed with the ill and dying.

Jane, who had been reading the headlines by the fire in the Cambridge house, laid the paper down and glanced across at her mother. They exchanged a look of instant rapport and understanding.

“You want to volunteer.… I'll go with you. We'll do it together.”

“Oh Mamma!”

Never since the episode of Maurice's dismissal had Jane felt the barriers go down between herself and her mother. There had always been constraint, but now she felt that she and her mother were truly united. Of course if James had been at home, he would never have allowed his wife to take such a risk. But fortunately he was away and would not be back for two or three weeks. There were business and family problems to be seen to in St. Paul after the death of one of his brothers.

So the next morning they took the trolley in to the Massachusetts Memorial Hospital, where one of Allegra's cousins was a doctor. They were whisked into white gowns and set to work making beds in a former office that was being turned into a ward; then Allegra was summoned to help in one ward feeding the very weak with a spoon while in another Jane went about with a basin of warm water washing faces and hands, throwing each small cloth she used on a patient into a pail and reaching for a fresh one. The fear of infection was everywhere. So many nurses were themselves sick that volunteers had to do many things without much help. The doctors looked close to exhaustion. Jane was startled when Cousin Philip's familiar voice behind her said, “Good heavens, Jane, what are you doing here?”

“Mamma is here, too … I don't know where. They asked for volunteers.”

He seemed very upset and looked ill himself.

“But why should we be safe when everyone else is in danger?”

“As soon as you get home, wash thoroughly, take off everything you have worn, and see that it is washed,” he said severely.

Just then, the old woman Jane had been washing threw up and there was no time for conversation. “I'm sorry,” the old woman murmured.

“It's all right, just rest.” Jane laid a hand on the burning forehead. Then, after a moment, when the crisis appeared to be over, she ran down the hall to the nurses' room to get a clean sheet and another basin. There, a nurse was in tears of frustration and exhaustion.

“There isn't a clean sheet,” she said angrily. “You'll just have to do what you can. Three dead on this ward this morning.… It's becoming a morgue.”

Jane stood there for a moment catching her breath and then went back to what seemed now a kind of war in itself. She was very very glad to be there, strong and alive and able to help. However awful this was to witness, it was real. She was at last doing something needed. And she and her mother were very close during the month of long, exhausting days, so tired when they climbed onto the trolley for Cambridge after dark that Jane sometimes fell asleep. Allegra never did. She sat upright and could still manage a smile at a baby in a woman's arms. Jane had never had a chance until then to feel Allegra's strength, her unfailing spirit. So much, she realized, had been taken for granted, partly because they had been spared any ordeals such as serious illness. Terrible as it was, the war called out courage and endurance that were not tapped in “ordinary” life. That is what William James meant about “the moral equivalent of war,” Jane thought, recognizing that she was finding strength in herself that she had not known she had, not only the physical endurance to be on her feet all day, but a well of compassion beyond tears. She who wept so easily at the beauty of a fish hawk's flight or a grand poem did not have tears in her eyes as she washed and ministered to the dying. She was strangely happy in the simple concentration of transfusing something like love, a love she could understand and could give.

Cousin Philip had stopped scolding her now for being there. “You are doing a good job, Jane. Even the nurses are grateful.”

“There's so little one can do,” she said pushing her hair back and standing straight for a second, a relief after all the stooping.

“You Reids have a lot of stamina. Your mother is quite amazing.”

Three weeks before, praise from stern Cousin Philip would have delighted her. Now it didn't seem to matter. She was beyond anything as personal as that. How infinitely far away tennis parties and dances had become! Even the island seemed a little unreal. And when it was over Jane Reid knew that those things would remain precious, but she had to find a way to live that would involve and use the whole of her.

And when Pappa returned, dismayed to find his wife thinner and looking extremely tired, and Jane a little withdrawn and somehow older, they talked about it, “I can't see why you have to exhaust yourself to feel that life is real, life is earnest,” he teased.

“Oh Papa, if you had seen how people struggle to live, even very old people—and then how at a certain moment they are ready to die. Something happens, and there is a look on their faces … perfect peace. I'll never be afraid of death again.”

“Tell us about St. Paul, dear.…” Allegra, back to normal, deliberately changed the subject. Jane was becoming a little too intense, and besides, their experience had gone too deep to be discussed, she felt. They had done what they needed to, and now it was over. The hospital had been reorganized and qualified nurses brought in, but people were still dying like flies. Prayer seemed more appropriate to Allegra than talking about oneself, and this reaction was entirely characteristic. Jane went up to her room, feeling at a loose end. There she read and reread a letter from Lucy in Philadelphia. Lucy was working at the Red Cross but quite dissatisfied with her job of organizing volunteers to roll bandages and knit socks and sweaters and woolen caps: “I wish I could find some way to deal more directly with people, Reedy. Have you ever thought that when the war is over … and they say it can't be long now … there will be enormous need for people to help in the rebuilding, and to take care of children? There will be so many orphans! Don't you think we might go to France together and help somewhere, in an orphanage maybe?”

Jane sat in the little rocker for a long time with the letter in her hand. France! The word itself. France had been a lodestar for so long—but could she afford a year away, not begin her life as a teacher as planned? Of course she could. At last the door was opening to something she could do, like the nursing, something really needed, acutely needed. And to do it with Lucy, quiet, steadfast, imaginative Lucy whom she loved as much as anyone in her own family, her chosen friend. It seemed almost too good to be true. The only awful thing was that they would have to wait a year or more … God knows how long!

It would be a very long year of disasters, learned of through the newspapers and in letters from soldiers in France, a year in which President Wilson turned the United States from peace to war, and in doing so had to sabotage his own pleas for tolerance as the propaganda machine in Washington went into full gear and hatred of the Hun swept the country. Submarine warfare was sinking hundreds of thousands of tons of shipping and the holocaust in the trenches began to be nearly matched by the loss of men at sea. The world was to be made safe for democracy by the massacre of millions of young men, and among them Quentin, who was killed at Belleau Wood. Alix married and within a month went down to New York to say good-bye to Fredson, drafted and bound for Fort Bragg. Edith's fiancé joined the medical corps. Everything cherished was in peril, Jane thought.

And at the table Allegra's wish to keep things as calm and peaceable as possible often failed. For, as the full horror of the trench warfare trickled in, Martha asserted that she was a pacifist and that nothing could justify the slaughter, and Allegra reacted strongly to any emotional wholesale condemnations of Germany. Jane, ardent, fiercely partisan on France's and England's side, reciting poems by Rupert Brooke as the gospel, had been swept with millions of others into a passionate rejection of everything German.

“But, dearie, you can't just brush Goethe, Beethoven, and Wagner away,” her mother would answer. “Hatred isn't the answer.”

“They are murdering little children … innocent people … they invaded Belgium, didn't they? This whole horrible war is the Germans' fault!”

“Let us have peace at our table,” her mother said with unusual severity.

At this point Snooker, who was usually a silent witness, burst into tears, and left the room.

“I'm sorry,” Jane said. “It's my fault.”

But when she found Snooker in her room at the top of the house, there seemed no easy comfort. “Everything's breaking apart,” Snooker sobbed. “When will it end?” Snooker, the controlled, the comforter, had, for once, really broken down, and this more than anything else brought Jane to her senses.

A small matter? But small matters can change people. Jane was much too passionate to be naturally tolerant as Martha seemed to be. For her, tolerance had to be learned, and learned through living out strong convictions and the inevitable collisions that take place when strong conviction is confronted by reality, when a person actually lives what he or she believes. It had been a shock when quiet, gentle Martha spoke with such force about pacifism. In her heart of hearts Jane had to admit that this sister who had always chosen to stay in the background had a strength she had not suspected. And of course she had been wrong to speak so hotly against the Germans. Now in her room she blushed to think of her mother's just reprimand.