Bachelor Girl_ The Secret History of Single Women in the Twentieth Century - Betsy Israel [27]
It’s a long walk back to Co’s, the original family homestead, miles it seems, all of it through snowy marsh. Corinne wishes out loud she’d worn her boots, but such is the weather of a spinster aunt. After what seems like an hour, she stops by a tiny house without lights, hears shrieking, and rushes her way to the back. Corinne hurries in to find a whalish woman jerking around on the floor. An impatient nurse, standing nearby, declares, “She has been this way the whole time.” Corinne comforts “Lulu,” the sprawling creature, announcing that “Sister” has come. Corinne and Lulu, as we’ve learned in a conversational aside between Juliana and her husband, are twins.
Meanwhile, back at Juliana’s, there’s another unexpected visitor, Aleck, a man once rejected by the busy, committed Corinne. As he explains, he has recently lost his wife and has come in search of his onetime love. Thrilled to learn that she’s just left, he rushes out to her house (in a closed carriage, mind you). He enters rapidly, then stops cold as he sees an old woman rise from her chair. “Miss Corinne Boyle?”
“I don’t wonder you ask, Aleck,” Corrine says, faltering, “but I should have known you anywhere.” Then she starts to sob. After a while, with her nose red and skin chalky white, they speak as old friends, although he cannot hide his disappointment and revulsion. His thoughts: “What a fool! What a sentimental simpleton he had been to forget that a woman must fade fast in a life like hers! Fade, and shrivel, and dry into hardness!”
For a while after he leaves, Corinne cries out to God at this unfairness. And yet as she calms down she reassures herself that God has guided her well in this life. Her ability to love, and receive love, was not to be within the realm of men; it is love born of commitment, honor, the keeping of a promise long ago made to a dying mother. She has kept her word and in return received unconditional love.
She has also upheld her end of one classical spinster formula: Divide a family of girls into wives and outcasts. The wives reign, and the outcasts, even if they chose their fate, as did Corinne, tell themselves elaborate religious stories about the rewards of their sacrifice. One recent example of this sisterly dichotomy occurs in Marvin’s Room, by Scott McPherson (1992), a play first and then a movie starring Meryl Streep and Diane Keaton as the sisters. The sister who has remained at home all her life to care for ailing relatives is now ill herself with leukemia. After some persuasion, the prodigal, biker-chick sister returns home with her surly adolescent son. After many conflicts and awkward attempts at reconciliation, the sick one explains to the prodigal how she was able to stand her life as family nurse. It’s because, simply, she has been unconditionally loved. And although she doesn’t say this, she has been able to shut herself off from the world, avoid sex and the messiness of men in exchange for an unshakable sense of nunlike purpose. In the voice of the deluded martyr, she cries: “I’ve had so much love.”
We are supposed to find this pathetic, and because it invokes such a profound denial of a fully lived life, we do. At the same time, she’s had the love she claims to have wanted. In remaining true to her vow, so has Corinne. But the reader understands the spinster formula, the essential code. We are never allowed to consider her choice as anything less than insane.
True, sometimes