The Magnificent Spinster
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Authors: May Sarton
The Magnificent Spinster
A Novel
May Sarton
In Memoriam
Anne Longfellow Thorp
1894â1977
Contents
PART
I: “Children Dear, Was It Yesterday?”
PART
II: The Growth of a Friendship
PART
VI: The House of Gathering
Prologue, Part I
For the second time in my lifeâand I am now seventyâI am embarking on an effort which may well come to nothing but which has possessed my mind, haunts, and will not let me sleep. The first time was long ago and it was the war in Spain, but whatever is relevant about that experience will find its place later on as this second act of commitment on my part proceeds. I mention it here only because in the forty years between these two adventures so little has happened and I have led such a sedate, quiet life in the groves of academe.
What then has driven me to attempt so late in my life to write a novel? Quite simply the unequivocal need to celebrate an extraordinary woman whom I had the good fortune to know for more than fifty years until her death a year ago. I am vague about dates these days, but it must have been a year ago because the Unitarian Church in Cambridge, that rather cold, white, pillared interior, had become a bower of spring flowersâiris, daffodils, narcissi, anemones, an unforgettable explosion of beauty in the midst of a February snowstorm. How appropriate the brilliance, the glow, and the innocence of all those flowers seemed! Jane Reid had died after a long, full life, so the funeral became a celebration rather than a time of mourning. One of my classmates gave the eulogy and it was just right, though I remember very little of what she actually said. I do remember she opened with a line of Stephen Spender's, “I think continually of those who were truly great.”
It was very fine, but what moved me to tears was our each being given a sprig of spruce from the island as we left the church. For those of us who had been to the island (and I expect many of those at the funeral had) it was a gesture of such intimacy and remembrance that it brought tears. Jane Reid always slipped a sprig into a buttonhole as every guest embarked for the shore at the end of a visit, and now she herself, one felt, was saying a last “Godspeed.” I expect that her friend Sarah, her companion all the last years, must have engineered this, and it was perfect.
Snow was falling fast as I walked home that day, thinking about Jane. Was she “truly great”? Yes, I decided, she was. I lit the wood fire in the library and sat for quite a while as elation turned to depression and I realized that in a few years everyone who knew Jane would be dead. Who would remember her? In fifty years who would know she had existed? She never married. There would be no children and grandchildren to keep her memory alive. She was already vanishing like sand in the ocean.⦠Then, almost without thinking, I went into my study, forgetting all about lunch, and began to write. It was chiefly quick notes, whatever came with some urgency as I sat there. But in an hour that spurt of energy had gone, and by the time I heated up some soup I realized that I could not possibly sustain such an effort, and even if I could, self-doubt was eating into the impulse, for whatever tiny fame I have achieved has been in medieval history, and that, a matter of some papers on the trade routes, is of minor importance. I have no illusions. I shoved the notes into a drawer and that was that.
Months later, by a curious stroke of fate, I was brought face to face with the Jane Reid I had first known when I was a student at the Warren School and had had her as my teacher in the seventh grade. Over the years a few of us from that memorable time had kept in touch, and one day Anne Strange turned up in Cambridgeâshe lives in Oregonâand called me on the telephone to see if she could come and see me. So there she was, recently widowed. She knew my dear friend Ruth had died some years ago, so at first we talked mostly about how one handles these losses of a central person in life. But, as always when students of Warren get together, we ended by speaking of the school and of Jane Reid. And, rather shyly, Anne took a small black leather notebook out of her purse, and said, “I thought you might like to see this.” It was an extraordinary moment, for what I saw written out in Anne's clear hand was a whole book of poems four of us had written after we left Warren and were in the public high school. I was bowled over by the intensity of these poems, so much so that I could not read them, and asked if I might keep the book for a week and send it back.
And when I read it alone in bed that night, the past came back like an explosion. Had I ever felt that intensely? Had I really written such impassioned poems for anyone, for Jane Reid? I had. The evidence was before me of a whole emotional landscape I had buried for almost sixty years! Of course a crush on a teacher is fairly common, I expect. But how often does it take the form of such disciplined and impassioned utterance? And what was it about Jane Reid that had elicited such feeling?
I knew I could not escape the effort now. I must try to celebrate her somehow, in some way. And I began to imagine how I might approach the task. I saw that what had stopped me in the beginning was not so much doing it as
how
to do it. And little by little I became certain that a novel and not a memoir or biography had to be my way. At least a work of fiction would free me from the struggle with minute detail, with dates and facts. I had had enough of that in my professional life over the years. The essence was what mattered, after all.
Today it is snowing, as it did on the day of her funeral. My old cat, Snoozle, is asleep in a round black ball on the couch, and in the marvelous silence of the snow I dream of a summer morning almost seventy years ago on the island.
Jane Reid is a child.
Part I
“Children Dear, Was It Yesterday?”
Childhood is a place as well as a time. For James Reid's five daughters the place was “the island,” as it was always called, although it has a name, Wilder. Their father bought the island off the Maine coast, and the old farmhouse on it, in the nineties, when he had already as a young man amassed a fortune from lumber in Minnesota, where he was born. At the wooded end Mr. Reid built one of those Henry Jamesian arks prevalent north of Boston, shingled, ample in porches, with a private bathroom for each bedroom, but then and up to the present no electricityâAladdin lamps downstairs and candles to take up to bed. Cooking was done on a huge coal range. There were sailboats and rowboats to “mess about in,” and a captain to ferry guests back and forth from the mainland in an elegant canopied motorboat,
West Wind
, that kept a tranquil pace and bore no resemblance to the motor launches that whizz around making an infernal noise these days.
Jane's summer world had nothing to do with luxuries. Hers was the world of secret hiding places in the “moss drawing room,” a part of the forest floor covered in emerald and pale-green mosses like a sumptuous carpet. Her world had a great deal to do with escaping the grown-ups, and also escaping Snooker, who had been brought from England as a nanny for the two youngest, and would remain in the family, a cherished friend, until she died in her nineties. Jane's world was running off with her sister Alix to pick blueberries, lying for hours in the soft warm grass, filling their baskets, or simply sneaking off to explore, if possible get lost, and frighten themselves with imaginary dangers, and frighten Snooker by being late for lunch.
The narrator has said enough. Let me begin with a sample day on the island in 1910, when Jane was fourteen and Alix twelve.
“Can't we get up, Snooker? It's nearly seven,” Jane whispered at Snooker's door.
“What's that?” a sleepy voice murmured.
“We want to go and see the fish hawk's nestâplease let us!”
By then Snooker had dragged herself out of sleep and put on her dressing gown. “You'll be soaking wet; there is dew on the grassâ”
“Please, Snooker. You forget that I'm fourteen, after all. I'm not a baby.”
“We'll hold up our skirts, over our knees,” Alix said and began to giggle at such a scandalous idea.
“Shâshâyou'll wake your mother and father. Very well, be off with you. But don't be late for breakfastâblueberry pancakes, cook said last night.”
“Darn it, I've got a hole in my stocking,” Jane said, by mistake aloud.
This brought Snooker out of her room, a twinkle in her eye, “It might be better to darn it, than say âdarn it.'”
“It's in the toe, Snooker. It doesn't show.”
“Be sure and give it to me when you come back.⦔
But her whisper got lost in the departure, as sneakered feet sped down the stairs, creating an impression of a mild thunderstorm.
Outside the house, the two girls stood quite still for a moment, listening, and drinking in the piny scent, the cool of fresh morning air. Then they were off, walking fast, Jane's long pigtail bouncing a little, so she pulled it round her neck and let it hang down in front.
Usually they talked a blue streak but the stillness in the woods, the excitement of a wholly untouched morning world, made them silent, made them stop often to stand and drink it in. The white-throated sparrow repeated his three-note song and somewhere far off they heard a thrush. They were following the path along the shore that would bring them in a quarter of a mile or so to a tall pine that had been struck by lightning and topped. There, in the top of the broken trunk, fish hawks had built their raggedy nest.
“Thereâlook! There he goes!”
The great wings had lifted off just before they could see the nest itself. They watched the huge bird fly away.
“It makes a lump in my throat,” Jane said.
“You're not crying, are you?”
“No.”
“You've got tears in your eyes.”
“I don't know ⦠the wildness.”
“It's funny to cry at beautiful things.”
“I guess so.” Jane suddenly laughed, breaking through the moment's mood of awe, “I'll race you home ⦠you take the moss path. I'll go by the lumber road.”
There was something thrilling about running alone as fast as you could through the woods. Jane pretended she was a deer being chased by hunters (occasionally in winter deer swam over from the mainland but were rarely seen). She was running fast now, bound to win, when she fell headlong to the ground, her foot having caught on an exposed root. It was so sudden that she lay there for a moment, stunned, then slowly felt her ankle, which hurt quite a lot. She found she could stand on it and even walk in a gingerly way, but it was humiliating to hobble home and find Alix, triumphant, waiting for her on the porch.
“Dearie, do you have to be so violent?” Snooker asked, not cross but concerned. “Why tear through the woods, why not walk?”
“I don't know. I'm just so full of everything, I have to let off steam.”
“Anyway, I won!” Alix said. “And we have blueberry pancakes for breakfast!”
They were just finishing when Mamma and Pappa arrived for their breakfast before the older sisters and two young men, beaus of Viola's and Edith's, made their appearance. Breakfast was apt to be an extended feast on the island, where the Reids wanted life to be as flexible and free as possible for all concerned. Very occasionally, cook rebelled and announced that she would not serve breakfast after ten.