Spinster (44 page)

After Konecky and I had finished our cocktails and eaten dinner at the Japanese restaurant across the street, she sent me home with a legal-size manila folder of Maeve memorabilia: twelve airmail letters, all sent to Konecky from Ireland; eight scraps of paper with quick little notes, presumably from their time together at MacDowell; a slim, dove-gray envelope from the old
New Yorker
offices on West Forty-Third Street, firmly stapled all around the edges.
It was in the pocket of my gorgeous lime green coat
, is scrawled across the back with a turquoise ballpoint pen in Maeve's distinctive looped cursive. Whatever the improvised package once held—a key? an earring?—is long gone.

Two pages torn from a spiral-bound calendar, dated January 1975, are jotted full of quotations and thoughts. On the twentieth, she paraphrases a line from Albert Camus's essay “Rebellion and Art”: “Oh, if only one living creature had definite shape.” Beneath that is “Edith Konecky (Rubin) is the Phoenix.” On the twenty-seventh is the cryptic yet intuitively logical equation:

Mirror—Need—Feeling

Window—Mind—Observation

There are also typewritten transcriptions from Edith Konecky's own diary. On February 13, 1974, she wrote:

Maeve's call tonight from NY…. [Her] advice to me: “Make a list of everything you did today before you go to sleep and then write down what you're going to do tomorrow. Go to the supermarket and burn off some of that nervous energy…. Get up and do something tomorrow. Shine your shoes.”

I was touched to see evidence of Maeve's almost motherly concern for Konecky, and I was deeply heartened by the breezy ease of her tone, the shorthand of two friends who see each other frequently. It was a completely different side of Maeve than the one I'd seen in her letters to Gardner Botsford.

Botsford had existed for Maeve as a sort of beneficent, almost idealized parental presence—a man who took care of her and asked in return nothing but what she wanted to give, her writing. Konecky was a peer. On paper, at least, Maeve confided in her less than she did her editor, but it's obvious that the two women had a very deep and well-maintained connection, which took root in the soil of their actual, lived, everyday lives, in the dining hall and small cabins of an artists' colony in the New Hampshire woods, the stuffy living rooms of overheated city apartments in winter, day trips out to the beach, dinners at Midtown restaurants. Whereas with Botsford the correspondence was the relationship, with Konecky it was merely part of a life spent sharing other activities.

Living alone forces people to figure out how to manage their emotional needs. My father likes to joke that those who talk way too much “suffer from undelivered discourse”—as in, they spend so much time not speaking that when they get the chance, they can't stop. It's a slightly cruel way of thinking about the truly lonely, but useful for others. It inspired me to diversify my portfolio of attachments, so to speak, parceling out different aspects of myself to different people, partly so I wouldn't overwhelm any one person with the fire hose of my “undelivered discourse,” but
also to protect myself from leaning too heavily on a buttress that couldn't and shouldn't sustain my full weight.

Maeve was long supported and protected by her
New Yorker
colleagues, but after she “burned all her boats,” as her niece had put it, and spun further and further away from the professional sphere, she entered a sisterhood of writers who understood firsthand her daily challenges—if not her illness exactly, at least the struggle to be a woman who also writes. I began to realize this after reading the following, which appears a little farther down in Konecky's diary entry about Maeve's phone call from that February night in 1974:

Then call from Tillie [Olsen]. Tillie sounding tired, mournful, stammering with fatigue. Maeve sounding high, funny, unself-pitying. But Maeve, I fear, is teetering on the brink. Fragile. Tillie takes better care, protects herself. Both so solitary, reclusive. Maeve needier.

Tille Olsen was also a writer, as well as something of a soothsayer about the ways in which the demands of domesticity can limit women's literary production. In her book
Silences
, published in 1978, she asks: “What
are
creation's needs for full functioning?” Her answer: “Wholly surrendered and dedicated lives; time as needed for the work; totality of self.”

I liked knowing that Maeve and Tillie Olsen had been friends. After several decades of enjoying very few female friendships, not to mention her geographical and emotional alienation from her family, befriending women who took their writing as seriously as she did must have felt to Maeve like a miracle. Finally, she'd found her people—who were also lucky to be found, and they knew it.

Possibly because of the long-ago closeness she'd once shared with her sister, Maeve was skilled at being a good friend, generous,
fun, supportive. In Konecky's folder of memorabilia are several letters she wrote to Maeve long after she died. In February 2003 she wrote, “I wish I could ask you now how you like being dead,” and on the next page, “You told me once that you never really cared for sex, that you only had it out of pity for them (the men who were your lovers, husband) because they wanted it so much, poor things.” There is a passage of Maeve's, and beneath it, “Maeve, you wrote this to Tillie Olsen, who treasured it, and had it up on her studio wall. I copied it, and it's now on the [bulletin] board over my desk.” The passage reads:

I have been trying to think of the word to say to you that would never fail to lift you up when you are too tired or too sad [to] not be downcast. But I can think only of a reminder—you are all it has. You are all your work has. It has nobody else and never had anybody else. If you deny it hands and a voice, it will continue as it is, alive, but speechless and without hands. You know it has eyes and can see you, and you know how hopefully it watches you. But I am speaking of a soul that is timid but that longs to be known. When you are so sad that you “cannot work” there is always danger fear will enter in and begin withering around. A good way to remain on guard is to go to the window and watch the birds for an hour or two or three. It is very comforting to see their beaks opening and shutting.

This is
real
friendship—the kind that takes another's soul as seriously as one's own. Aristotle considered it the highest order of love,
philia
, or “friendship love,” in which tending to somebody else's welfare is central to our own flourishing.

Maeve's advice to Tillie Olsen to stand at the window and watch the birds opening and shutting their beaks made me think of the introduction she'd written in 1969 to
The Long-Winded Lady
, her collected
New Yorker
columns. The essay is very short and worth reading in its entirety, particularly for her description of New York City, which ranks up there with E. B. White's deservedly famous line, “On any person who desires such queer prizes, New York will bestow the gift of loneliness and the gift of privacy.” He wrote that in 1948. Twenty-one years later, Maeve entered the annals with: “These days I think of New York as the capsized city. Half-capsized, anyway, with the inhabitants hanging on, most of them still able to laugh as they cling to the island that is their life's predicament.”

What the birds and their beaks reminded me of was something more universal. Later in the essay she says that looking back at the forty-seven columns she'd written between 1953 and 1968, she sees that The Long-Winded Lady isn't interested in “the strange or exotic ways of people,” but instead “the ordinary ways, when something that is familiar to her shows.” She continues:

[The Long-Winded Lady] is drawn to what she recognizes, or half-recognizes, and these forty-seven pieces are the record of forty-seven moments of recognition. Somebody said, “We are real only in moments of kindness.” Moments of kindness, moments of recognition—if there is a difference, it is a faint one.

The kindness she's talking about is different than the Bible's “love is patient and kind,” and the Torah's
mitzvah
, and even the secular bumper-sticker encouragement to “Practice random acts of kindness and senseless acts of beauty,” which casts doing something nice for someone else as rather arbitrary and pranklike.

What Maeve suggests here is that a flash of recognition—of
the observed by the observer, or between two people—has the ordinary transcendence of a bird opening and shutting its beak. It reveals her deep appreciation for ephemerality, the small, often overlooked moments that are our day-to-day existence.

Judged according to traditional definitions of love and well-being, Maeve's ceaseless switching among apartments and hotels and writing colonies and friends' summer cottages in the off-season seems self-destructive. Had she stayed in one place and set down roots, we think to ourselves, she wouldn't have ended up dying alone in a nursing home. Looked at another way, however, through the lens of her own fascination with “moments of recognition,” she was arranging her life exactly as she wanted it. For Maeve, what sociologists call “strong ties”—the judgmental eyes of her sister and relatives; Ireland's excessively repressive, sexist culture—were asphyxiating; maintaining them might have spared her from dying alone (a fate none of us can guarantee evading), but would have definitely held her back while she lived. In New York City, surrounded by a constantly changing cast of colleagues and lovers, doormen and bartenders, chambermaids and taxi drivers, as well as, in late middle age, female friends, she was able to live amid a meteor shower of “weak ties” that sustained her everyday without encroaching on the freedom she needed to continue to thrive as a writer. They were her material, and she her own, too.