The Magnificent Spinster (15 page)

On the way home we talked, Edward fast asleep on Faith's lap beside me, Mother in the back seat.

“It's wonderful,” she said leaning forward, “to see Jane so happy, isn't it? And even Martha appears to be reconciled.”

“Well, you know,” Faith said, “it's odd but it doesn't feel quite real to me. It feels a little like a playhouse designed for a child who imagined she would live there and then found it wasn't after all a real house.”

“Faith!” I was shocked. “What an awful thing to say.”

“Well, that's extreme, but something is missing.”

“What makes a house a real house?” I asked. “You know,” I said, turning to my mother.

“I don't know. Not necessarily a family, children, which is what comes to mind first. But something that can't be willed, some life going on inside the house which can be felt when one walks in. It's too new, Jane's house I mean … she's only just beginning to imagine her life there, let alone live it. So we have to wait and see … oh, I hope it will be all she dreamed—and more!”

“A lot depends on whether Marian Chase wants to come often and stay,” I ventured.

“All I can say is I never imagined when I married Bill how much time and energy I was going to spend just dragging in toilet paper and food!” Faith said and of course we laughed. “At least Jane won't be dragging in tons of diapers!”

As I think back on it now I see that Jane did that first year very consciously put down roots, and the dream began to be fleshed out. Very early on she began to drop in on Mrs. Cole, a near neighbor whose husband had a dairy farm and kept cows in the big barn attached to the small white house. He had died the year before and Mrs. Cole now lived there alone, sitting in a sun porch at the side where she kept geraniums, somewhat crippled by arthritis and always welcoming a visit. That was a real root, and another was Jane's first experience of Town Meeting in March. But it can't have been easy to drive back long after dark on school days and walk in to turn on lights and put up the furnace, and find herself in a silent house, having to get her supper. Once in a while, in a blizzard, she stayed with us for supper and the night, but I think she felt like a homing pigeon, tugged back to Sudbury, to her nest, and little by little she
was
thinking of it as her nest.

In the summer of 1938 I did go to Spain. When my father, not unexpectedly, reneged on his half promise, I spent a weekend in Sudbury at a point when I was nearly in despair and poured out my rage against him and at the same time why I felt it imperative that I get there, that I be in some way part of what was going on. Jane listened. I sensed that she was not entirely in accord, that she felt I was rushing into something I could not really know very much about, without needed skills. “You are not a nurse, Cam, after all, and who knows whether a woman will be allowed to drive an ambulance?” she asked at some point.

“Women went to the Civil War here,” I said at once, “without any skills, and nursed and rescued wounded after the battles.”

“Yes,” she said, “but they were in their own country, after all. They were rescuing their brothers.”

“Anyone fighting Franco is my brother,” I answered in the fervor of my commitment. The argument went on and on.

“Cam, the hare,” she murmured at one point, trying to break the tension.

“Maybe so, but the tortoise wouldn't get there in time … it's touch and go, Jane. Everyone who cares at all must get there fast, now. Madrid is being encircled …” and so it went on and on.

That day whatever Jane had planned to do was put aside. We did finally go for a walk in the rain, just to get out, and after tea by the fire when we got back, Jane went upstairs to work on school papers and I paced the floor and felt caged, until I remembered that mother had given me a box of brownie mix and a little can of walnut halves and suggested I make brownies. Jane loved chocolate almost as much as I did, as I well knew.

She came down the stairs saying, “What is that delicious smell of chocolate?”

“Want to lick the bowl?” I said.

“Do I!” She sat right down at the kitchen table and fell to with zest.

“I'm sorry I talked so much,” I ventured.

“Dear Cam, I need to know,” she answered, apparently wholly absorbed in getting the last smidgeon of chocolate scraped off the side of the bowl. “This time,” she said then, to my utter astonishment and even for a moment disbelief, “I'm betting on the hare. I would like to help you, Cam. And I think perhaps I can. Did you say one hundred a month plus the boat over?”

“Wait. I must put the brownies in.…” I had almost forgotten them. Then I sat down opposite her. “Do you really mean it?”

“Well, I was thinking about you, Cam, and your fiery spirit. Sometimes one has to trust a person to know what is right, even when it feels a perilous venture. While I was upstairs I had a little talk with Lucy—Lucy is a very realistic person, you know.” Jane chuckled. “I found myself taking your side, Cam, as we talked,” and the chuckle turned to laughter. “So I had to realize that I was hooked, in spite of myself.”

“It's unbelievable,” I said, “I never thought …”

“I know you didn't.”

Then I laughed too, “I feel as if I had been running for months and have just fallen flat on my face!”

Jane looked at me thoughtfully, “There is only one possible obstacle—we must have your mother's consent.”

“You know Mother has always believed that I must do what I need to do—about going to Vassar, for instance.”

“Yes, but …”

“But what?”

“You did not risk your life by going to Vassar. You will surely be in danger of freezing, of being wounded or even killed. It makes me ache just to think of you in a war. A frightful war, as you say yourself.”

“Mother is with me,” I answered. “I know she is.”

I am still amazed now nearly fifty years later when I think that Jane did what she did for me. But it was like her, it was a perfect example of her wish and ability to help people realize a dream even when the dream was outside her ken. Hers was a life devoted to people, not to causes. Theoretically, perhaps, she was not convinced that the war in Spain was crucial, but she saw that it was crucial for the person I had become.

I learned then also what a team Jane and Lucy were. For Jane could see the need and had the means to help, but it was Lucy who came up with a lot of practical suggestions, Lucy who took the time and trouble to find out what the absolute necessities would be to take along, what medicines, what shots I should get. For years I kept her letters to me, and the two twenty-dollar pieces to sew into my belt in case of emergency. That was Lucy.

I was in Spain from September 1938 to the final debacle in 1939, and I learned all about the mixture of terror, horror, and boredom that war means. I was an ardent twenty-six-year-old when I managed to crawl over the Pyrenees with a small group of French and English volunteers, over the green mountains to the other side, barren, burned, hot as hell. I was in some ways an old woman when I disembarked from a freighter in the late summer of 1939. I have never been able to talk about what happened in that year, not even to Ruth, and I do not intend to do so here. I grew to hate the glamorous reporters who came back with books to write, all except Orwell, who was there as a soldier, and wrote the only good book,
Homage to Catalonia
.

Many of the men and women I knew were killed. I was not even wounded. But I came back with something gone from me that I would never get back, the fervor that had persuaded Jane Reid to help me go. I saw what seemed from a distance the one pure war turn into a war in which Russia and Germany used the Spanish people as guinea pigs, and I came back with the political idealism I had felt burned out of me. Never again would I be as committed, even in the war against Hitler. It took me years to get sorted out and able to function.

I was at first in a state simply of sterile exhaustion. I couldn't cry. I couldn't talk about the experience—partly, I suppose, because I had seen so much brutality on our side, and felt it would be a sort of betrayal to speak of it. I found it difficult to eat because my stomach fluttered constantly. That at least seemed a specific enough symptom for Mother to insist that I see a doctor. Unfortunately, this specialist proved to be an angry man, furious with me after a painful examination of the colon because there was nothing wrong! He never inquired about me. Apparently the stomach was all that interested him. And when he found no tumor he scolded me roundly for not taking care of myself better, said I should rest in the afternoon, which I had been doing since my return, and made me feel altogether like a fool or a worm.

It was then that my mother intervened. She said, “We are simply going to tell people that the doctor ordered you a complete rest for three months. Darling one, rest is what you need.”

“Limbo”—but how could I rest at home? I couldn't let Mother, who worked so hard every day at Warren, attend to meals and all the rest of it. How could I justify being a total dependent? I went up to my room and lay down, staring at the ceiling.

Apparently, while I was up there, Jane dropped by for a cup of tea before going home, as she often did in those days, and persuaded Mother that it would be a positive boon if I would consent to go and rest and recuperate in Sudbury. She had just hired a couple, refugees from Hitler, to be general caretakers and to cook for her, and it was not proving to be an altogether happy arrangement because Jane herself was so rarely there, getting home for dinner sometimes at after eight, leaving the house at seven in the morning. Of course for me it was the perfect solution, and Jane picked me up late the next day to take me out to Sudbury.

On the way, on that September evening in the dusk, she suggested that I would find a surprise, and it was clear that she looked forward as much as I did to my discovering what it was. She told me a little about the Rosenfelds and I gathered that there were problems, partly because of the language. So maybe my rusty German would be of use, I thought, while I heard that Hans, who was supposed to do odd jobs around the place was totally unsuited to any such work. He had been a brilliant lawyer in Berlin, but he had been so starved and ill-used in three months' detention in a camp (not a concentration camp—they had escaped that) that he would never perhaps be able to resume an intellectual life. So everything depended on Thea, a huge woman with immense vitality who loved to cook … here Jane paused in her tale and seemed a little hesitant.

“The trouble is, I don't really want huge meals. I have dinner at school, you know, but Thea launches into pies and cakes and stews, and sometimes I just can't eat enough to justify all that, so …” she turned to me with a twinkle, “Cam, I hope you'll have a good appetite!”

How could I say that I had no appetite at all? But as we got nearer to the house I began to feel dread. “Will it be all right if I just sleep a lot?” I asked. I felt totally incapable of making a connection with anyone at that point.

While Jane was taking my suitcase out of the car and singing “Men of Harlech” as she did so, I was suddenly nearly knocked over by a huge Newfoundland puppy whose enthusiasm was immense. “That's Nana,” Jane said, and in the gentlest of voices, which had no effect at all, “Down, Nana.”

“Oh, so that's the surprise!” I couldn't help laughing, as my face had now been thoroughly licked. “Well, Nana, how are you? Are we going to be friends?” The trouble was that I felt incapable of dealing with anything as exuberant as Nana, and was quite glad to go upstairs to my room and unpack right away.

Everything felt a little strange and difficult at first. There was something stark about the house, and why I felt that when I had been sleeping often on the ground or on straw in a barn or in a shelled-out farmhouse seems strange. But I did. There was no cosy chair or sofa where one could curl up, I soon discovered. But if there was no warmth in the furniture there was great warmth in Thea. I felt it in the way she shook my hand when we were first introduced and it sustained me through that long autumn of convalescence.

I who had read omniverously found it impossible to concentrate for more than a half-hour, and anyway there were not many books around. I was amazed to discover that I could lie out in a deck chair with a steamer rug over my knees for hours, half dozing, aware of a bird flying past or a cloud going over, and not thinking about anything that might tear at the wound I was trying to heal. I did think a lot about Jane, as she was being revealed to me, not as the goddess of the seventh grade but on a far deeper level of reality. Those months knit together forever a friendship that was to last until her death.

One of the things I learned about Jane was her particular way of touching people she loved. Before she left for school at seven every morning, she never failed to come and lay a hand on my shoulder. It was a light touch, without pressure, as though aware of the weight it might lay on me of possessiveness, of a demanding warmth. I've never known another human being whose touch was as light and as comforting as hers.

After she had gone, the house would have felt cold and empty, except for the fact that Nana at that time of day was obviously longing for someone to throw a stick for her and I often obliged her for a half-hour or so before setting up my deck chair and settling in for a long doze, the dog at last lying beside me, her nose on her paws. Sometimes I was startled when Thea brought my lunch out on a tray … where had the morning gone? If it rained I had lunch with the Rosenfelds in the kitchen. They were eager to talk, but the language was a formidable barrier and our attempts often ended simply in laughter because we could not communicate anything well enough for our talk to be called a conversation. Hans anyway was silent more often than not. I sensed that, sheltered now, safe at last, the safety was something of a prison. Without a car, what could they do? Very occasionally they went for a walk. And I was in such a state of passive limbo that I could not put my mind on their problems.