Spinster (26 page)

As we climbed, the thick maroon carpet swallowed our footsteps, so that her words sounded close and intimate. She was explaining that the building had originated as a single-family home in the mid-1800s and in the 1970s been converted into apartments, but I could hardly hear what she said, I was so distracted by the details: the white-painted wood scrollwork inscribing each landing with a long row of waves; the ornate arches embellishing every single doorway; the graceful swoop of the polished wood banister accentuating the staircase. (I later heard that in the 1980s the building had been full of homosexual bachelors and known as “The Flower House.”) On the third floor, I followed her down a dark, narrow hallway toward a tall brown door. When she unlocked it, we stepped into a soap bubble afloat in the Brooklyn sky: one big room and a separate eat-in kitchen; eleven-foot ceilings; thick, handsome moldings; and gigantic, towering windows covering three walls, through which the weather was its own miraculous event, enormous and panoramic.

It was the spinster wish—as a space, if not yet my life.

Pleasurable solitude incarnate.

My knees actually, literally went weak; I wilted sideways and, before she could notice, stopped myself with a hand against the doorjamb.

I both saw and didn't see the imperfections: chipped, cracked paint; scuffed wood floors; kitchen appliances older than all four of my (long deceased) grandparents; no dishwasher, of course, and
I'd have to bring my laundry out to a Laundromat, but none of this mattered, obviously.

“The trundle bed comes with the place,” she said, gesturing toward a single bed on the other side of the room.

I walked over and yanked on a handle, and a second, slightly narrower bed slid out beneath the first, like a jewelry-box drawer. The sun spilled through the empty frame, sketching a map of spindly shadows while the future unfurled: breezes gusting through the open windows as I curled up reading for hours; friends having a place to spend the night that wasn't my lumpy IKEA sofa; bringing a man home and—
screech
—becoming an urban legend: the single woman who sleeps in a weird single bed for children.

“Actually,” I said, “I'd like to have it removed. How much is the rent?”

“Well,” she said, “it's a little over your price range…”

My heart sank. I told her I'd have to think on it.

“Better hurry up,” she said. “This place will go fast.”

That night I couldn't sleep. In the morning I made a deal with myself: if the realtor could talk the landlord down one hundred dollars, which would be just one hundred dollars more than the very top of my price range, I would figure out a way to make it happen.

The landlord said yes.

A few weeks later, after dinner with a man I'd gone on a few dates with, I boldly invited him upstairs, “my first overnight guest,” I added as inducement.

The foyer is an event in itself: when you stand on the ground floor and tilt your head back, you see eternity for a moment, and then, at the very top, set into the roof, a stained glass window of many colors. The overall effect is of a barely maintained grandeur.

Tonight, though, the foyer had a very strong odor.

“I guess it's the sort of building where you can smell what everyone's cooked for dinner,” I lied, suddenly remembering that it had smelled like this, though less so, that morning, and then slightly less than that the day before. By now I suspected it was no longer just cooking smells, and possibly not even a dead mouse stuck in the wall, but perhaps a dead cat.

It had nothing to do with me, but I was slightly mortified.

Fortunately my apartment was odor-free. We had a very good night.

The next morning, after he'd gotten up and dressed and hitched his backpack onto his shoulders and turned the doorknob on the front door, he came crashing back into the bedroom, where I stood in my nightgown, confused.

When you're a single person of a certain age, stories from the dating trenches are your calling card. He's a jerk, you're a jerk—it doesn't matter. All that counts is there's a beginning, a middle, an end, and something embarrassing happens. Nobody doesn't like a dating story. There they are, your dinner companions, seated around the table, attentive faces ageless in the candlelight, the single among them nodding their heads in solidarity, the coupled relieved to not be you, or secretly envious, depending. You pause for a moment, take a sip from your wineglass, continue.

“And then he said, ‘That is not a
cooking
smell. Someone in this building has DIED. What we are smelling is a ROTTING CORPSE.' ”

“Oh, no!” they squeal in horrified delight.

“So I called the police to report the, um, problem, and they said they were already on it—they'd actually retrieved the body earlier that morning, before we'd woken up. Later, the super told me it was an old man I'd never met who lived in the apartment directly below mine. When the cleanup crew came to remove his corpse, the spine had lifted right up and out, like a feather, and the rest stayed on the bed in a thick, soupy puddle.”

“Gross.” “Please, I am eating.” “Bet that dude you were dating never came back.”

He did, actually.

In the days to come the odor of rot grew stronger, corpulent, sneaking like a plague of cockroaches through every conceivable crack, and lasted for weeks. I honestly couldn't tell which was worse: the agony of not knowing what that terrible stench had been, or the agony of knowing.

He was a smart guy, that guy I was dating, but we broke up eventually.

Him and another, and then another.

And then another! And on it went.

On a warm spring day in 2004 I sat at my desk ripping open yellow padded mailers, stuffing them into a recycling bin, and stacking the books they'd held into a pile. One advantage of my newspaper job was having access to the catalogs publishers send out to people in the industry announcing their forthcoming books—which is how I learned that at long last a biography of Maeve Brennan was in the works.

All through my dalliances with Neith and Edna I'd never lost sight of her. She'd become something like the amalgamation of all the women in my family: a vision of my future self who'd actually lived in the past; who was only eight years younger than my maternal grandmother, Margaret Healey O'Keefe, herself a first-generation Irish-American, who outlived Maeve by a year; a chimerical ever-presence I felt deeply connected to yet could muse about without the painful longing I felt for my mother. The thought that someone else might review the book made me sick with anxiety; immediately I secured an assignment with
Vogue
.

Whenever I'd met someone who seemed remotely interested
in literary history, or was even tangentially connected to
The New Yorker
, I'd ask if they'd ever heard of her. When the answer was yes, I'd invariably hear the same two rumors: she'd dressed beautifully (her editor, the writer William Maxwell, said that to be around her was to see style being invented), and she'd wound up a bag lady on the streets of New York.

I happily believed the first rumor and, because of this, refused to accept the second. Judging by her essays and short stories, I felt safe in considering Maeve to be one of the most healthily independent people I'd ever encountered. Everything she wrote issued from the same deep, pure well of integrity. She was funny, open-minded, empathetic, never egotistical, sophisticated without being pretentious. It was impossible that someone so exceptional could ever be defeated. Now that someone had written her biography, I could finally get the whole story.

That I believed I could assess a person's mental competence by the carapace of art that surrounds and more often than not obfuscates her is, sadly, just another instance of my willful naïveté, and my ignorance of the gulf between the person and the page.

The Irish scholar Angela Bourke had discovered Maeve around the same time I had, to even greater astonishment: Bourke's home in central Dublin was only two miles from Ranelagh, where Maeve had lived as a child. Over the course of seven years she found and interviewed seemingly anyone alive who had ever crossed paths with her subject—family, friends, colleagues, even an army officer who'd once flirted with Maeve over drinks in the lobby of the Algonquin Hotel—and came to the conclusion that, even though she'd lived in relative obscurity as a writer, her “courageous life as a woman alone in metropolitan America makes her an icon of the twentieth century even if she is not as well known as Marilyn Monroe, Billie Holiday, or Colette.”

Like Neith Boyce and Edna Millay before her, Maeve had come to New York City in her twenties to become a writer, and
though she was of a different generation—she was twenty-five years younger than Edna, who was twenty years younger than Neith—the conditions under which all three sought their independence were more similar than not.

While the years between 1890 and 1920 had been the single woman's most glorious moment yet, the two decades following were up for debate. After the vote was achieved in 1920, the sense of purpose—whether political or personal—that had galvanized and united freethinkers such as Neith and Edna petered out, and the flapper swanned into the public eye. Like
spinster
before it, the term had crossed over from England, where it emerged in the 1890s to describe both a prostitute and teenage girl; by the early 1920s it encompassed an entire emergent category of young women living lives unlike those of their mothers—in the eyes of an alarmed public, they might as well have been prostitutes.

Flappers were easily mistaken as New Women masquerading in a different silhouette: while stiff, restrictive corsets had created and accentuated their mothers' feminine curves, flappers wore new, more supple undergarments that smoothed the female figure, from elbow to knee, into the slim, straight stalk of a flat-chested boy's. Like their predecessors, the flappers challenged traditional gender roles and broke with convention, though in the eyes of many of the suffragists who had worked long and hard to engineer the emancipation of women, their methods of rebellion—smoking and drinking in public, bobbing their hair, wearing short, revealing dresses—seemed like so much empty posturing.

The flapper vanished with the Great Depression, as did anything smacking of frivolity and hedonism, at which point, for the first time in forty years, the single woman's status dropped. Now that heterosexual sex was considered integral to mental health, unmarried women were increasingly represented as lonely, celibate spinsters. Meanwhile, the labor market became a battlefield.
With so many people out of work, jobs became the privilege of men with families to feed—as if many single women weren't also supporting their parents, siblings, and families. (Wives fared even worse: by 1932, married women were prohibited by law from working in twenty-six states.) In 1939 the liberal journalist Norman Cousins reported that roughly ten million people were unemployed, while ten million married and single women held jobs. His solution: “Simply fire the women, who shouldn't be working anyway, and hire the men. Presto! No unemployment. No relief rolls. No depression.” With the onset of World War II, when we started needing more bodies in the workplace again, single women enjoyed a short, sweet revival (before being devoured altogether by the 1950s). When Maeve Brennan arrived in New York City, several years into the war, the magazine industry was thriving, and single women were in a good place—for the time being, at least.

Aside from embarking on her career at a fortuitous moment in history, Maeve shared two other important advantages with Neith and Edna. The first was her parents: she, too, was born into a family that encouraged its most ambitious daughter to flourish. Her mother and father, Una and Robert, were political agitators who'd fought hard for Ireland's national emancipation movement, to which gender equality was integral. Robert served as Irish Under-Secretary for Foreign Affairs and director of publicity for the Republican Forces during the Irish Civil War, and in 1930 helped to found
The Irish Press
, which he managed until 1933, when he was appointed secretary of the Irish Legation and moved the family to Washington, DC. In 1942, when Maeve was twenty-five, after graduating from American University and working as a librarian, she moved by herself to New York, to the consternation of her parents; five years later they and her younger brother returned to Ireland. Her sisters, Emer and Deirdre, who'd both married in 1940, stayed in Washington. (All three were named after early queens of Ireland.)