Daring (26 page)

“What if we got some of our Irish writer friends to go in together and rent the place?” I said to Deacy over our picnic lunch. “We all need an inspiring oasis to write our books—each of us could maybe take it for part of the year.”

“A writers' collective; I like it,” Deacy enthused.

And then we read another Yeats poem. I can't resist reprinting the final stanza of “The Song of Wandering Aengus”:

Why wait until we were “old with wandering” to make this little dream come true? The poem had given us a title for the writers' house. Mr. McGoldrick, an uncommonly enterprising man, showed up the next morning with our title freshly painted on a sign.

Then he quoted an unbelievably reasonable tariff. That clinched it. I telephoned Pete Hamill—he loved the idea—and Dennis Duggan, the bureau chief of
New York Newsday
—he couldn't wait. It was agreed we would each take four months of the year. Before Deacy and I left, Mr. McGoldrick brought around his finest horse. “Would your daughter fancy him?” he asked. As I looked on the noble black stallion, haughty but friendly, all rationality deserted me. Maura loved horses and had been riding since she was a young child. A penny was pressed into my hand and I pressed it back into the owner's hand, sealing the deal, Irish style. I went back to New York with a house and a horse. Of course, when it came time to collect for the shares in the house, everybody backed out.

I was able to negotiate my way out of the rental, but I was responsible for the animal's keep, and he ate like a horse! Keeping him in hay was costing more than I paid for the meatless spaghetti that kept my child and me fed while I wrote the book. Fortunately, my good friend Tom Baer, a top-tier corporate lawyer, offered to take on, pro bono, what he called “the Dobbin case.” He saved me from a lifetime of supporting Dobbin.

MAURA WAS AT THE AGE
to leave the relaxed, nurturing environment of Grace Church elementary school and move up to middle school. To my delight, she was accepted at the Brearley School, an all-girls enclave with a sterling reputation. This was one of my most cherished dreams: to provide my daughter with a first-class education. I used the full palette of the con artist in every good reporter to persuade my bank officer to give me a loan: “If you help me to pay for my daughter's private schooling, I'll give you my first mortgage.” He laughed, he sympathized, he signed. If I could give my child a better start in life than I had, I would work my heart out for the rest of my life to pay for it.

“Mommy, you gotta believe me, it's like a game with too many rules,” Maura whimpered after the first few days at Brearley. The school had exceptionally high expectations for each student to shine. Maura was bothered by a not-so-subtle class bias against anyone who didn't belong to the privileged East Side establishment. Some of the mothers wouldn't let their girls cross town to play with her, as if the West Side was some depraved lower depths populated by theater people, artists, writers, musicians, and flaming former Trotskyites (which it was).

Even though I was there every day when she came home, Maura did not have my full attention. When her eager face tipped up and the flood of words burst forth describing her day, my mind might still be tangled up in the knot of a chapter that I couldn't unravel. Or fretting about how to pay the bills that week. When my bank balance was precarious, I would have to scare up a magazine assignment and rush off to profile a newsmaker. The life of a freelance writer is a roller coaster, but the ride shifts from full speed to sudden jolting stops. I was exhilarated by the scope of the book I had undertaken. But most of the time during Maura's childhood, while I was struggling to find my way as a single mother, I looked only for external validation. I desperately needed to be successful as a writer. That was the ticket to self-esteem, since I had failed at marriage and was only half a parent.

I relied on Maura during those dutiful ages of nine to twelve to Xerox and file and assuage the volatile moods of an isolated freelance writer. My flashes of temper were sudden and sometimes extreme, like an Irish cloudburst. For me, moments later I could feel the shaft of sunlight, a calming. Yet anyone who had experienced that storm would feel drenched in apprehension and anger, and not fully safe around me again. I never blamed Maura, but being a child, she naturally felt somehow responsible for my distress. She was my comforter. When I slammed the closet door, she would write me a note saying she was sorry to have upset me, when she hadn't. She took care of me as much as I took care of her. It wasn't a fair swap.

What stays most vividly in my memory about those next three years is how attached Maura and I became once Clay's demands no longer came between us. Her personality began to bloom. She had always made friends easily. Maura had a double set of intuitive antennae, reading people better than I could, inhaling everything deeply: adult conversations, dramatic plays, books. When we went skiing with a controversial author (who wrote for Clay), Jerzy Kosinski, and his girlfriend, Maura became engrossed in Kosinski's most phantasmagorical novel,
The Painted Bird
. She couldn't be pried off her air mattress until she'd finished all 234 pages. “That's the best novel I ever read,” she told the author over dinner. It was the first adult novel she had ever read. She was only ten, but she got it.

Maura had a droll sense of humor. I loved seeing through her eyes the comical side of what was going on around us. And she certainly saw the comedy of me. She kept after me to give up cigarettes. “I'll stop as soon as I finish this story,” I must have said countless times. One day she crossed her arms and stared at me: “Mom, writers are never finished.” That stopped me.

We got our first dog, a Lhasa apso, and named her Ms. in recognition of the new feminist appellation. Ms. went sledding with us on snow days and snuggled with us while Maura and I read together. I often fell asleep beside her. Then, around nine or so, a second wind would send me back to my bedroom and my brand-new IBM Selectric typewriter. Chewing on celery sticks and carrots, I would write until past midnight.

In the fall of '73 I had to go on a tour for
Hustling
, my book on the world of prostitution. It started with my first national TV appearance, on the late-night Jack Paar show. It was a disaster. The aging comedian had planted a prostitute in the studio who shouted insults at me for exposing a “noble profession.” I called my mother right after the show to ask how badly I'd handled it.

Her answer spoke volumes. “I'm flying up to New York, honey. I'll go with you on your tour.” How wonderful to have a mother who was now well and was able to be there for me.

But I had developed a fear of flying. Not the kind Erica Jong made famous with her startling book of that name. It wasn't the “zipless fuck” that I was afraid of; it was death. Immediately following the traumas in Ireland, I had fled home on a turbulent flight and my anxieties became attached to flying. “Conversion reaction,” they call it. After appearing on
The Phil Donahue Show
, the flight between Dayton and Cincinnati through an electrical storm was a nine on the terror scale. My mother and I bailed on the connecting flight to New York and took a sleeper train. It was so bumpy, my mother fell out of her berth. The next morning I developed a new appreciation for a smooth jet plane ride to New York. And a surge of appreciation for my sweet sober mother. I took her to lunch at the Four Seasons and put her on a plane back to Florida.

I needed a wife.

God answered my prayers. She came in a guise that I didn't recognize, as so often happens with God doings. When I opened the door for Ella Council, a dark-skinned African American woman sent by a household employee agency, my first thought was,
This won't work
. We sat together on the sofa and had coffee and the interview was more than satisfactory. But I couldn't ignore the elephant in the room.

“Ms. Council, let me be frank. Do you think, at this time of racial tensions, that a black woman can work for a white woman and not burn with resentment?”

Ella Council tilted her head and surveyed my face, then tilted her head the other way and stared me straight in the eye, and said, “Ms. Sheehy, I like your smile.”

Gail's support system: Ella Council and Gail's sister, Pat (Trish) Klein.

That was it. Almost. Ella and I had to test each other. Two weeks after she started, her Harlem apartment was robbed. Shaken, she asked to borrow the money to buy a decent security alarm; she would pay it back from her next paycheck. When she did, our bond of trust was sealed. Ella Council turned herself inside out to be my household manager, and when I traveled, she slept in to be Maura's surrogate mother. She would stick by me, and I by her, for the next thirty-six years.

CLAY HAD HIS OWN FLINGS,
with Barbra Streisand (I think) when she was flogging the dubious talents of her hairstylist boyfriend, Jon Peters, and wanted Clay to publish an article he had written about producing her remake of the film
A Star Is Born
. Clay played with the fire of mother-daughter rivalry by dating Kay Graham's daughter, Lally Weymouth. As an Anglophile, he was easily captivated by the talented English novelist Sally Beauman, until she tried to browbeat him into espousing her Eaton Square Marxist views. Years later, I was touched to read a letter that his ex-wife, Pamela Tiffin, had written to him during that period of our estrangement. “I hear that you have stopped seeing Gail Sheehy. Don't be foolish. She is a woman of fine character and great talent. Be good to her.”

The magnetism between Clay and me never did subside. Although we gave ourselves to others, we never gave up on each other. Once I buckled down to doing the research for the book on couples, I made a point of staying away from him, even from the editorial lunches he held at the Palm restaurant. I missed seeing the “family.” I missed giggling when Clay's attention would be occupied by the slow transit of a slab of steak while he tried to listen to the drone of a boring mayoral candidate, his chin bobbing up and down to his chest, until he dozed off. I missed
him
.

Rumors swirled that Clay had bought the
Village Voice.
All the
New York
magazine contributors were summoned to the office for an important editorial meeting. I wrestled with myself but finally went. I said little at the meeting and avoided his glance. Stepping out of the closet-size toilet room, I was surprised to see him waiting for me. Would I ride uptown with him? I was speechless. My stomach wrenched like an old-fashioned washing machine, go, don't go, yes, go, no no. He picked up my work bag and slid an arm around my back, his hand warm and possessive against a place that had not felt a man's hand in a while.

As he got into the taxi behind me, he blurted, “It was so painful and exquisite to have you in my office again today. I was overwhelmed by longing. Gail, we're part of each other. We're each other's history.”

I must have given him a cool and guarded look, so defended was I against falling into another loop of passion followed by his retreat from commitment. Outside of his building, he stood on the curb with the cab door open. “I just have to run in and pick up my bags. I'm going to Europe for a week's vacation.”

“How nice, with whom?”

“With myself.”

“What a waste.”

The mask of command slid off to reveal a boy's eyes pleading for affection. “You wouldn't ride out to the airport with me, would you?”

I hesitated. The churning. The door stood open.

“Hey, mistuh, you goin' or comin', I gotta start the meter again.”

“Run the meter and keep the lady happy,” he told the cabbie and, smiling, disappeared into his building.

Once inside the taxi, he resumed his role as my mentor. Had Dutton agreed to let me change the focus of the book from couples to the stages of adulthood? Yes. How was the writing going? It felt like swimming the English Channel. Would I still write for him? Of course. Suddenly, his head was nudging into my shoulder, his mouth nibbling my lips. He was hungering for the very certainty from which he would surely later back away. He said he was hoping his vacation in Europe would give him time to decide.

“But I've already decided,” I said.

He didn't give me time to talk. He pulled me into his arms. “I don't want to lose you.” He pulled his raincoat over us. We fondled and stroked each other. The world dissolved. I felt my power, the power women have to make men fall in love with us.