The Magnificent Spinster Read Online Free PDF Page B

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