The Magnificent Spinster (25 page)

“Oh Sarah!” I said with such pleasure in my voice and face that she looked a little startled, “you are God-sent!”

At this Sarah laughed. “What is on your mind, Cam?”

“Come and have lunch with me and I'll tell you.”

Sarah was one of those ageless women who had not changed in any way that I could see for the last twenty years. And although she had lived first in the shadow of Martha and then after Muff's death in the shadow of Jane, she was very much her own person. I had always been at ease with her and when I first conceived the idea of this book tried to get in touch with her, but after Jane's death she had vanished, was traveling in England, I heard. So it was fortuitous indeed to run into her that crucial day when we sat in a booth in the restaurant where I had sat so often with Jane.

It was not easy to broach my subject. What if Sarah did not approve? What if she questioned my ability as I did so often myself? Sarah had known me as an historian, not a novelist. At seventy I was daring something even a young person might hesitate to undertake. But I was soon launched and very much relieved by Sarah's immediate interest and assent.

“This is very good news,” she said, smiling across at me. She did far more than approve; she offered to let me read Jane's letters to Lucy over all the years of their friendship, and including of course the voluminous correspondence during the years in Germany. I could hardly believe this stroke of luck. “You may keep them until the book is finished, Cam.”

“If it ever is,” I murmured.

“Of course it will be!” Then she startled me by quoting Shakespeare, a passage I had often heard in Jane's voice, as it had been a favorite of hers,

“I see you stand like greyhounds in the slips…

straining upon the start. Follow your spirit!”

“I'm a pretty old greyhound, Sarah, and it's Jane's spirit I have to try to follow.”

“Yes,” she said thoughtfully, “but any work of art has to do with both the interpreter and her subject, surely? You can't keep yourself out of it, can you?”

I had not thought of it like that. I had seen myself simply as an observer, a recorder, but I saw at once that she had hit the nail on the head.

“You're right, of course. Oh dear, you should be doing it yourself.”

“I couldn't possibly,” she said firmly. “I wouldn't have the courage.”

“Oh, it's not courage, you know—some kind of wild impulse seized on me after the funeral. I couldn't bear to think that soon no one will remember Jane Reid. And then, it has given me something to work at. Without Ruth life has been too empty for words.”

Sarah had always been a listener and she listened then with the greatest sympathy as I told her something of my life alone since Ruth's death. Finally we agreed that she would bring the letters over the next morning.

Reading the letters from Germany was enthralling, for it became clear at once that Jane used Lucy as a sounding board, a way of finding out what was happening to her. And Lucy, so far away in Philadelphia, shared in it all in an extraordinary way, often with a small, practical response. When the first letters were penciled because Jane's trunk had not arrived, a pen flies over by magic in the next post!

After reading for a week and thinking about how to use the letters I came to the conclusion that the only valid way was to quote Jane directly, let her in this instance tell her own tale.

But there is something, I felt when I finished reading, that the letters do not say in so many words and that concerns the relationship itself. Jane was in the position of a pupil with both Frances Thompson (after all, she had been her student at Vassar) and in a different way with the elusive and scholarly Marian. For Lucy, Jane was the star, and one might dare to paraphrase the Twenty-third Psalm to suggest what Jane must have known, “Goodness and Lucy will follow me all the days of my life.” With Lucy, Jane flowered.

Thirty-two years earlier, when Jane and Lucy had landed in France, they were together and could laugh about all the impossible things they had to face, but now, in August of 1950, Jane was alone and plunged into the German language, an ocean where she found it difficult to keep her head above water. She had to travel here and there to get the necessary permit that would take her from the American zone to Bremen, in the English zone, but after forty-eight hours, she was at last on a comfortable military train, flying through the night toward the destination she had imagined for so many months—the much-bombed city of Bremen, on the North Sea.

And there, at 7:30
A.M.
, she took a taxi to the Hotel Bremen, where the Unitarian Service Committee was billeted, to be met by Joan Plummer, head of the USC in Europe, and launched immediately into a day of meeting people and getting an idea of the city itself. For Jane it was a day of surprises. She had been prepared for the ruins, the powdery smell of smashed brick and dust, the desolation, but she was not prepared for the atmosphere of hope and vitality she sensed all around them. And in those first days of getting her bearings it was astounding to meet such friendliness from the German people. Remembering the resentment the French had felt under the German occupation, she had half expected that same sullen silence or obsequiousness toward Americans, but there was none. Everyone to whom they spoke smiled in the friendliest way. And the city felt busy and alive … people whizzing past on their bikes, talking and laughing.

The hotel was comfortable; Lucy's fears that Jane would not be well-nourished proved entirely false. Here they were billeted in an old, rich part of the city which had not been as badly bombed as the dock area. In its tree-lined streets, life seemed almost normal again.

But those first two days were gone almost too quickly, and then she, Joan, and Erika Housman, the moving spirit of the Unitarian Service Committee, were en route to Lundersen for Jane's first experience of the
Arbeiter Wohlfahrt
seminars.

There, in an old castle on a hill above the town looking out over fields and farms, thirty social workers had gathered for the seminar and Jane was able to watch Frances Thompson at work and the kind of response she elicited, and to write Lucy long, enthusiastic letters about what she saw happening. In some ways it was very much like a faculty meeting at the Warren School. Here again Jane was aware of how Frances operated, never didactic, rather challenging the German women to express themselves and their own views, so that discussion was always intense after she had spoken. Luckily there were several people who could translate for Jane when, especially at the end of a long morning, she found herself at sea.

Her letters to Lucy recounted it all vividly, and especially in a few vignettes, such as this, after Frances had given a talk on basic human needs:

After this talk the discussion was fascinating, especially an example one of the women social workers described, which happened in a home for disturbed children. One night a bunch of boys twelve to fourteen years old stole food and blankets and ran away and lived in the woods until their food was gone. Then they had to go back to the home, where the head was in doubt as to how to treat the matter.

The music teacher asked to be allowed to handle it himself. His solution was to write an opera on running away and to make it known that he needed some boys with inside knowledge. So he got the boys acting out the whole thing, the whispering over the plan, the stealing of food and of blankets, the creeping out in the night, and the adventure of camping in the woods. He himself wrote the music. The children performed it many times, each time differently, and somehow the antisocial act was transformed into a work of art and brought success and satisfaction instead of guilt and shame.

At times like this, when her attention was fully engaged, it was terribly frustrating for Jane that she could not speak herself, but at least she found that her understanding grew with every session and her admiration for what the social workers achieved, often in isolated homes and very much alone. She writes:

One day there was a lively discussion about their own needs, how desperately they wanted an opportunity to talk over personal problems and to be able to lead some sort of personal life … and how hard that was when the staff was so small and a day off extremely rare. No wonder they all agreed that there should be someone to whom each individual could talk and so get relief, encouragement, and perspective, especially the head, who must manage both the children and the staff and often deal as well with opposition from the outside world.

In the evening, after supper, in long talks between Joan, Frances, and Erika, Jane could participate because they spoke English. What a relief! The idea of the neighborhood house was beginning to be hammered out, and the complicated means to get it going. It would have to be supported by the Unitarian Service Committee, HICOG (American HQ), the
Arbeiter Wohlfahrt
, and the city of Bremen, a tall order, since all these organizations had to be persuaded of the need for a neighborhood house in the first place and then persuaded to help fund it. Now at last Jane began to see where she would fit in and be working, assisted by a German social worker, who would eventually take over.

She writes to Lucy:

Bremen is a Hanse city with its own senate and representative to Bonn. That representative is a most lovely man, Herr Uhland. He and his wife are devoted to Erika and very fond of Joan and Frances, and they have put time and labor into helping get the neighborhood house started. We are going there tonight to meet with a group of social workers whose support is needed, and the problem will be to try to get them to understand the neighborhood house purpose as we see it. They are accustomed to day care centers with someone in charge who makes a program and puts it through. For that you can calculate pretty clearly in advance the space needed. Our thinking is a house that will start small and grow as the neighborhood is built up and be flexible enough to meet the needs of the people around it—whether for small-child care, or youth groups, or a parent center, or all three. This is something to which they are not accustomed. Much in the plan has to be left open and that seems to them rather vague as if we didn't know our own minds. All this communicating and interpretation would be impossible without Erika.

Erika had been born in Germany, although she was an American citizen and had been a social worker in New York. She more than anyone in the group had the ability to make bridges, partly because she was at ease in the language and partly because she had a genius for human relations and the ability to handle even fierce disagreements with tact. Jane's letters are full of her praises.

Jane accompanied Erika to endless committee meetings with the city officials and social workers in Bremen, but since she did not bear the burden of responsibility yet, it was all rather like a holiday. It was marvelous to be able to sleep until after eight, to be able to read and write letters in her room at the hotel, which had become home by then. There were books by her bed and often flowers on the table, for she was learning that in Germany the giving of flowers accompanies every visit and how delightful a custom that is. In fact her fears that she might not cotton to the Germans had been unfounded. She was finding an immediate warmth of welcome that bowled her over.

In November Erika and Frances went off on a holiday to Italy. Erika had now been in Germany for over two years and desperately needed a rest, so Jane was left to hold the fort with the help of Lisa, a young woman who spoke English and could interpret when needed. In December she herself went on holiday to Paris to visit some of the French families and the mother superior, now very old, of the order for which she and Lucy had worked in 1918.

She came back in February to bad news—there would be no funds from Frankfurt (the McCloy Fund). This was a blow, as the negotiating had been going on for months and Jane knew that their chief there, a colonel in the army, had been keen on it. That decision threw the whole responsibility back to the German board in Bremen. They couldn't afford to build, so they were considering taking over an army barrack as a temporary center. There was by now a lot of pressure to get things going somehow, and they waited impatiently for Erika to come back from her holiday.

Beyond the organization itself, what had to be negotiated little by little in endless meetings and discussions with the board was the philosophy of a neighborhood house. The idea of training young people by giving them responsibility, by letting them plan their own activities and run their own clubs, was a radical departure from German mores, in which training had been ingrained always to obey a leader whose word was law. But of course that change toward democracy was what the plan was all about.

The seminars under Frances played an important part in this reshaping of an ethos, but they lasted at most a few weeks. After that Jane went back to Bremen to struggle on, hoping to get things moving forward inch by inch. She was the anchor. And no doubt, in all those months of waiting, hoping, and making strategic moves, it was an asset that her own tempo was slow. She did not lose her patience, her nerve, or her faith that the dream could and would be accomplished.

But she had been in Bremen nearly a year, and she had to make a decision herself, as the time she had contracted for was nearly at an end, and the neighborhood house still had no director who would take over after she left.

During this period Jane's letters to Lucy, who was planning to come over for the summer months, are full of uncertainty and self-questioning. She says:

About the possibility of staying over—this is the way it begins to look to me. I have been a learner ever since I have been here, and really not much else, and pretty much at government expense too! I have watched and listened and tried to understand what was going on, and have had time to read and sleep as well. Now at last the job we had hoped to get started is beginning to stir. The essence of it is, of course, the working together with other social agencies, and the attempt to bring together the people of our neighborhood. For there is an awful separateness here between religions, political parties, departments of the city government, etc. These invisible things take a long while to grasp and even longer when you don't understand the lingo. So I feel that I have all this time been an apprentice and am only now beginning to pull my weight in the boat.