The Magnificent Spinster (4 page)

“No, but I have, I think, seen that look of an impending talk in his eye.”

“Oh dear.”

“Why not, after all? He's handsome enough, and very rich, from what I have learned.”

“That doesn't matter,” Allegra said firmly.

“Viola is so sure of herself—I would prefer she married someone well enough off so she would not rule the roost in that area at least. Besides, Viola wants a life of fashion, you know. She has that air already of a woman of the world, as they say.”

Allegra caught the twinkle in his eye. He knew very well that this family into which he had married prided themselves on not being worldly at all. It was one thing to give a million dollars to the Annex of Harvard, where women students were relegated; it was quite another to give balls and opera parties as Boston society did. The Truebloods were Cambridge and Cambridge was plain living and high thinking.

“We've produced a bird of paradise,” she said. “It seems very unlike us, James.”

Then they both laughed and Allegra got up and kissed the top of his head.

“If you think they'll be happy, dear …”

“That really cannot be foreseen, can it? One can hope, of course.… I like Vyvian. He has a sense of humor and seems a balanced young man. She could do worse, Allegra. Remember that Italian count?”

She remembered all too well. Luckily all that was left of him was a pale-blue officer's cape that Viola wore to dances.

And Allegra walked up to the garden, thoughtfully, comforted by the shouts of laughter that greeted her as Mr. Perkins and her little girls shared some secret joke. Nevertheless, she was frowning as she picked dead heads off the dahlias and salpiglossis, the velvety salpiglossis she loved. If only Viola could fall in love with an unworldly young man!

Though it was still light on the porch and the candles had not had to be lit for supper, when they all trooped into the big room, it was dark enough for the Aladdin lamps to be needed. The room was a little like a cave, shadowed on one whole side by the porch, and dominated by a great stone fireplace with a black bear rug before it, surrounded by deep sofas and velvet armchairs. This was the hour Jane loved almost best, the hour when they all gathered for an hour's reading aloud, the hour when she curled up on the bear rug, hugging its head, and listened dreamily to her mother's voice, sitting in the big chair under the lamp. Sometimes the logs crackled so loudly, and occasionally made a sound like a pistol shot, that it was quite an interruption, but tonight Daisy had lit the fire early and it had quieted to a lovely red glow. James sat opposite his wife, smoking a cigar. Mr. Perkins chose the corner behind the lamp, and the two couples were squeezed onto the big sofa. Alix had taken a cushion and was sitting with her head against Pappa's knee.

“We've just begun
Nicholas Nickleby
,” Mamma said, “but I'm sure you remember it, Mr. Perkins? So I'll go on to chapter two, if I may.”

In Jane's view Mamma's reading was perfection. She had a gentle voice capable of every inflection and irony, and enjoyed herself so much that the pleasure was contagious. And soon the attention was absolute, punctuated by a ripple of laughter now and then. When Jane lifted her head to exchange a glance with Alix she noticed that Vyvian held Viola's hand firmly in his. Whatever Dickens had to say at that moment went unheard, as Jane suffered one of those explosions of feeling that brought tears to her eyes. She buried her face in the bear's comforting head so no one would notice, but she felt acute discomfort and didn't know why, except that Vyvian and Viola were drawing a magic circle around themselves that excluded everyone else, and that would, eventually, break into and even destroy the precious family circle. I don't want it to happen, Jane thought fiercely. I don't want Viola to go away. I don't want anything to change. In some terrible way it seemed the beginning of the end. Mamma and Papa hadn't changed yet, but Jane in her gloom saw them grow old and die. Did passionate love always bring the shadow of death with it?

It was a relief when Allegra reached the end of the chapter and Snooker suggested that it was time for bed.

“Jane was fast asleep already,” said Alix, for once not in tune with her sister, and handed Jane her candle already lit. They said their good nights and, preceded by their long shadows, climbed the wide staircase, each holding her candle flickering in the air currents, so it must be shielded with one hand.

I have to admit that I am very disappointed with this first attempt at novelizing. There seem to be so many details, and it was so hard to get at the core of the matter. Maybe it will be easier when I myself appear as a character later on, and when memory rather than imagination can operate. But for now I feel I must cheat and tell the reader something of what had to be left out, or what I lacked the art to render effectively. What was most in my mind was to suggest that the island was both a real place, as it still is, but also a metaphor—the island and the life lived there in 1910 are a vanished world. Jane was a child at a time when there was strong belief in the perfectibility of man, when nothing immediately threatened peace, in the world before 1914.

Those who experienced that world could not be prepared for cataclysm, or even for the income tax, which would make great wealth a little harder to come by. James Reid was already a rich man at thirty, when he married Allegra Trueblood, who was, herself, the inheritor of a fortune at a time when inheritance taxes were minimal. In those days a man could not propose marriage in their circles unless he could support his wife. But added to all this, the Reids were an especially close-knit family and the island enhanced the privacy of family life. I have hardly begun to suggest how rich and various this was through the summers when five daughters were growing up.

James Reid had grown up in Minnesota and had with his three brothers become an experienced woodsman and camper long before he went East to Harvard College. At least once every summer he would announce at breakfast that this looked like a good day for a night on the mountain. Sleeping bags were rolled up, the big enamel coffee pot and its mugs, eggs, bacon, bread, and milk were packed into rucksacks and baskets, and finally the expedition set out across the harbor for the climb. There was stargazing, and moonrise to observe, and a great sing around the fire, and nobody slept much, although when James got up at dawn to build the fire, he moved among what looked like half a dozen mummies.

Sometimes less elaborate outdoor feasts were held at various favorite picnic spots on the island, or they might decide to sail right up Soames Sound, the nearest thing to a Norwegian fjord on the entire east coast of North America, and find a niche under the steep cliffs for a picnic of corned beef hash and cookies. Or they might decide on Baker's Island and picnic on rocks facing open sea.

The whole family was mad about acting and would dress up on the least occasion and make up a play to perform in the evening of a rainy day, even when the audience was composed only of Captain Philbrook, Snooker, Daisy, and cook. Sometimes they read a Shakespeare play aloud, taking turns at the “best parts.” Jane at sixteen was a remarkable Lady Macbeth, I am told, coming down the stairs in her nightgown with a candle for the famous scene. And ever after there were jokes about “all the perfumes of Arabia.”

The weather, always changing, provided drama, too. More than once, boats grounded in the fog, and strangers loomed up, grateful for light, warmth, and a hot meal, and for help in getting the boat afloat and tied up to the dock for the night.

Guests came and went, and many were family: the aunts of course … Aunt Susan, who had taken the Harvard Annex under her wing, and Aunt Viola, who had married a Norwegian cellist and came over for a whole summer whenever she could bear to part with him, or when he was off on a world tour. The Minnesota cousins, two handsome boys, came one summer and it was always supposed that Martha's heart was broken by one of them. (Marriage with a first cousin was taboo.) There were days when fourteen sat down to luncheon on the porch, friends sailed over from Northeast Harbor or from Southwest Harbor. But all these guests and the older girls' beaus seemed like an extension of family, and in Vyvian's case eventually became family. They were the same kind of people.

Yet with all the goings and comings, the picnics and expeditions, there was ample room for solitary exploration and for adventure by oneself. If anything was lacking, I have sometimes wondered whether it was not intimacy between parents and children. When there are so many involved, when was there time, where a place for a quiet heart-to-heart talk? This happened perhaps only in a crisis. So that role, the role of understander and confidante, fell to Snooker, as far as Jane and Alix at least were concerned. It was to Snooker they ran in tears when deprived of something dearly wanted, such as to be allowed to row alone to Northeast Harbor to see a friend. It was Snooker who insisted that a doctor must be fetched when Jane had a high fever and a pain in her side which turned out to be appendicitis, the operation taking place just in time. It was Snooker above all who listened to the anxieties and woes of adolescence, for one of the salient characteristics of Allegra was extreme reticence when it came to any problem that might be interpreted as sexual. In this family, as in most families of the period, such things were never talked about.

Snooker, always deferential toward her employers, had a mind of her own, and a fanatical devotion to her two girls. Without exactly criticizing their parents, she made it quite clear that she sometimes did not agree with a decision or rule. She was the refuge in time of trouble, the comforter in time of woe, and perhaps Snooker was at least partly responsible for Jane's flowering as she did. Mamma and Pappa may have been rather like gods, adored, but seen as always a little distant—partly because they were deeply in love, held themselves apart. They enjoyed their children mightily, however, of that there could never be any doubt.

What did it do in the deepest sense to be brought up in a world like this? And how did the Jane Reid I knew emerge finally as herself from such a patterned background, in essence conventional? It did not happen as revolt, but as I put together the bits and pieces, I have come to believe it happened as simply an overflowing love of life that took her on adventures that stemmed from a vivid response to people and from pressures inside her to feel and experience everything possible. So she was drawn out of the family circle quite naturally without the need to break out, or to deny anything for the sake of something else. For example, she had a good ear and when she was fourteen was given a violin by her Aunt Susan, who had enjoyed hearing her sing, for I have omitted a very important gift in the preceding pages. Jane had a beautiful alto and burst into song whenever she was alone and whenever there was a chance within a group. At school this meant singing in the yearly Gilbert and Sullivan performances, where both her voice and her acting ability, and the fact that she was tall and loved taking men's parts, gave her the chance at big parts when she was still a child. She felt an instant rapport with her violin and played well enough to be in the school orchestra, but the problem was to find time to practice. How often between the ages of fourteen and sixteen she must have heard some teacher say, “You could do very well, Jane, if you would only concentrate!” But how concentrate when every day brought such an infinity of things one wanted to do? How choose?

At fourteen she was, one might say, simply a loving, warm young person, a kind of all-round person who might turn out to be one of a hundred things, including a wife. But there was, nevertheless, something that already set her apart from her sisters, something that Mr. Perkins had noted. It was in her eyes, in the way the soul leapt up through their blue, the spell they cast entirely unconsciously, for at fourteen she was far from being a beauty and was too aware of what beauty could be as she observed Edith and Viola. But “spell,” it occurs to me, suggests a sexual attraction … it was not that at all. It was an amazing openness and power to be moved, a power that could be embarrassing, for it might carry her into an explosion of laughter, or a flood of tears, that seemed out of proportion in an adult world, and sometimes got her into trouble.

It was what delighted Maurice Hadley, a young lawyer who had been invited to dinner to meet Edith. The talk had turned to Sarah Bernhardt, who was playing in Boston, and Jane said, “I would give anything to see her.…” Maurice Hadley saw the blue flame in her eyes, met the intensity of it by chance across the table, and on an impulse said,

“I'll take you to the Saturday matinee … may I, Mrs. Reid? May I capture your daughter for an afternoon?”

There was a second's hesitation as Allegra and James queried each other in a glance.

“Oh, please, Mamma, Pappa!”

“I think it would be all right. Maurice can act as a kind of surrogate uncle,” James said with a twinkle in his eye.

“It is awfully kind of you,” Allegra assented.

It did seem a little strange that this handsome dark-eyed young man should choose Jane, a little girl, they all felt, but he seemed sincere in his wish to give her a pleasure she wanted desperately. And after all, why not? Snooker beamed.

“The only trouble is we'll be living with Sarah Bernhardt for at least a week after you come back,” Edith teased. “Jane can mimic anyone, Maurice, even a great horned owl!”

“As long as it does not involve getting a leopard to live here,” Viola added.

“Or a coffin to sleep in,” Martha giggled.

“Don't tease me,” Jane said, blushing furiously. And Maurice showed his tact by changing the subject to politics.

“Oh, Snooker, how can I ever wait till Saturday?” Jane asked when Snooker came to tuck her in that night.

“Dearie, try not to get overexcited. Remember, it's a little hard on Alix, this sudden interest in you. You've always done things together.”