IN EARLY MARCH, STILL REELING from the conversation with Boyd, I went to the Harvard Club of New York when it hosted a “Radcliffe Night.” Jay, who understood how emotionally fraught the project had become, agreed to keep me company.
The event was meant to inspire people to donate to the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, the research center that Radcliffe had dissolved into when it merged with Harvard, but it turned into a loaded discussion about the gaps in a community’s memory of itself. The dean of Radcliffe gave a talk about how we choose to forget aspects of the past in order to forge a collective identity. She called this cultural amnesia.
“There are many kinds of memory,” another speaker said, just as there are many kinds of forgetting. “But the ghosts of alternative histories always surface.”
The night ended with a question-and-answer session. A woman got up. She said that her relative, class of 1905, was one of the first Black graduates of Radcliffe. Where is her memory at Radcliffe, when it doesn’t seem like memories of Radcliffe have a place at Harvard? The mike cut off halfway through her question. It never turned back on. People laughed nervously.
* * *
Jay and I had barely put our bags down at his place in Mystic, Connecticut, en route to Boston to do some research in the Crimson archives, when I took a call from Jane’s friend Ingrid, now a practicing attorney. It was the second time we were speaking that month. The first was when I cold-called her during a lunch break at my café. A part of me knew that I had falsely assumed that the constraint of calling her at work would also limit the complexity of what I had yet to learn about Jane.
“Holy smokes!” Ingrid had said when I told her what I was writing about.
During our first chat, she’d told me that the Cambridge Police had interrogated her about Jane’s “history of involvement with certain men, at least one professor whose name also escapes me. But I can see his face—”
“Lamberg-Karlovsky?” I’d asked, still unable to let go of the early myth.
“No.” He was spooky, Ingrid had said, but not him. Someone else. Ingrid had remembered that she was “disturbed” by the nature of Jane’s relationship with the person whose name she couldn’t remember. “He was married and that troubled me. Because not only could it be very hurtful to his family, but also because it could be so destructive to Jane.”
She’d offered to search her memory and invited me to call her back.
Our second conversation turned out to be on her sixty-ninth birthday. On the call, as I wandered the backyard of Jay’s Connecticut home, Ingrid said she’d remembered only two things since our first chat. The first was that Jane had a cape, a voluminous red one that she sometimes wore instead of an overcoat. “It was the sort of thing that most people wearing it would look like hell and she looked wonderful,” she said. “The other thing is that the professor that I said that she had a brief affair with? I swear, the last name was Roth.”
My heart jumped. But it was a fact without context. Except for the feeling that Jane shouldn’t be playing “kissy face and huggy bear with married men and assume nothing bad is going to happen,” Ingrid didn’t remember anything more about the Roth affair.
We transitioned to talking about Jane’s sex life more generally. Sex may not have been a big deal to Jane, Ingrid said, but she wasn’t promiscuous. She was genuinely looking for love.
That duality, Ingrid explained, was common. “You want to remember that we were, in those days, crawling out—and I mean this literally—crawling out from the pre–Feminine Mystique days where if you graduated from college in 1960, you were still going to show up in the kitchen in an apron and heels and a skirt and you were going to stay home and you weren’t going to work.” When The Feminine Mystique came out, “at least in my case, [I] said ‘Oh my god, of course. Of course!’ And there was a great deal of anger.”
The anger manifested, in part, as a decoupling of desire and domestication. Sex as empowerment! But this new attitude toward sex didn’t immediately change the primacy of age-old stories about love. In Jane’s version of empowerment, she did not need a man to feel complete, but she could still long to be loved. It was a fragile stance that put independence at odds with itself.
I thought about Jay, waiting patiently in the kitchen of the house behind me. I thought about how, in the weeks leading up to this moment, I’d go off into my own head, unable to be fully engaged with him, because I could see, despite how badly I wanted to have finally found my person, that I remained unconvinced. He would quote me lyrics sometimes: “I don’t mind you disappearing / ’Cause I know you can be found.” We’d be lying next to each other, as physically close as two people could be, but he knew I was slipping away from him.
We had come a long way from the pre–Feminine Mystique days, but the model I’d inherited of being a strong, independent woman left no space for needing to be loved. And as I tried to own this power, I discovered, as perhaps Jane did, that this trailblazing did nothing to supplant the need for companionship. In fact, it only made the search harder, and the need greater.
There had to be ways to celebrate love without relying on dated and limiting fairy tales. There had to be new stories we could tell ourselves. In Jane’s duality, I felt like my version of femininity finally had room to breathe.
But I also knew the toll it must have taken on her. The image of Jane as a crystalline structure, with complicated interlocking facets each at odds with the other, made me sad. “I think that ability to participate and also be alone, and to have all of these different aspects of her personality—it doesn’t necessarily make for a happy person,” I said, talking about myself as much as I was talking about Jane.
“I don’t think she was happy,” Ingrid said. “Like everyone else in the universe, she wanted to be. I don’t think she was.”
She thought for a second, and added, “This is a puzzle that’s never going to be solved: the puzzle of who is Jane Britton is never going to be solved. Ever.”