Spinster (27 page)

The second advantage was the support of a powerful woman. Presumably through family connections, Maeve landed an interview with Carmel Snow, the Irish-born editor-in-chief of
Harper's Bazaar
, and was hired as a fashion copywriter. Soon enough, she had her own apartment: “one enormous room at the top of a beautiful house,” as she later described it, just a few blocks north of Washington Square Park, off Fifth Avenue. The fireplace didn't work, and the stairs were dirty. But it had a wall of casement windows that overlooked the city and framed a “huge and always changing sweep of sky.”

Aesthetics were paramount to Maeve. Bourke meticulously describes how once Maeve arrived in New York, she developed her own style. She grew her dark curly brown hair long and pulled it back in a high, tight bun, darkened her lashes with thick mascara and her lips with crimson lipstick, and was rarely seen without high heels, seamed stockings, and a red rose or carnation in her lapel. She's been described in reminiscences and letters as a “pixie,” a “fairy princess,” a “changeling,” and inspired comparisons to her predecessor, Dorothy Parker, and Truman Capote's fictional Holly Golightly (she even smoked her cigarettes through a long, slender quellazaire). “Part of the enduring fascination of her writing,” Bourke argues, “is the consciousness it reveals behind the laminations of that mid-twentieth-century image of femininity.”

(My own arrival to the city coincided with the dawn of outrageously expensive “luxury” denim; R used to say that the moment I bought my first pair of $150 skintight, dark blue, cotton-spandex, low-waisted, boot-cut Diesel jeans—if not a personal style statement, at least a step toward one—he knew I was never going back to Boston.)

Maeve's living spaces were just as important as her appearance. She called it a gift for ambiance—by which she meant the ability to create a whole environment. Every single place she
rented had a fireplace (whether it worked seemed not to matter), but not necessarily a kitchen. Once, after she'd moved into an apartment she liked, the landlord removed the magnificent gilt mirror that had drawn her there to begin with—“the one thing that might have held me to the place,” she later wrote—so she moved out and back downtown, into two high-ceilinged rooms without a kitchen (but with, of course, a fireplace). When she joined the staff of
The New Yorker
, she had the walls of her tiny office painted white, the ceiling Wedgwood blue, and she brought in a little flock of potted plants.

After reading that Maeve finished off a pack of Camels a day (her colleague Philip Hamburger would surreptitiously leave them on the corner of her desk the night before), I didn't take up smoking, but the news that her perfume wafted entrancingly along the office corridors did inspire me to pitch a story on “signature scents,” that glossy women's magazine slam dunk, so I could order a free sample of her favored Cuir de Russie (French for “Russian leather”) from Chanel.

The day the box arrived—the publicist had generously sent me a full 6.8-ounce rectangular bottle—I almost trembled to open it. I was about to
smell
Maeve Brennan. Coco Chanel (herself a lifelong single woman) revolutionized the fragrance industry in the early 1920s by being the first to use heavy doses of aldehyde—a chemical compound that makes a perfume sparkle and last longer, as well as better conceal heavy odors, which must have been particularly appealing to all the women who'd suddenly taken up smoking. When I unscrewed the black top and spritzed my wrist, a thick, sumptuous fragrance filled the air, unlike anything I'd smelled before; I'm wearing it right now and I still find it difficult to describe. The promotional materials said “wild cavalcades, wafts of blond tobacco, and the smell of boots tanned by birch bark, which the Russian soldiers would wear” (according to Chanel's biographer Justine Picardie, Cuir de Russie “bottled
the essence of her romance” with the Grand Duke Dmitri Pavlovich of Russia). What reaches my nose is the enticing aura of a more stolid, not-yet-synthetic age, back before “fast fashion” and the Internet, when furniture came in heavy, matching sets, and clothes weren't woven through with spandex, and our environments were resolutely material, replete with their various aromas and textures.

Maeve started to write one of her best short stories, “A Young Girl Can Spoil Her Chances,” in the mid-1940s, when she worked at
Harper's Bazaar
(it wasn't published for another twenty years). As Bourke explains, the title was the sort of thing Maeve would have heard growing up in Ireland, “a backlash of Victorian righteousness that cautioned young women against competing with men, much less outshining them, and warned of the dangers of too much education”—an attitude that, of course, would contaminate America after the war. “It is easy to imagine an Irish woman's voice suggesting complacently that Maeve had ‘spoiled her chances,' ” Bourke writes. “Easy, too, to understand the fury this would have provoked in Maeve—for its irrelevance to the life she had chosen as much as for its lack of sympathy.”

The story itself—about an unhappily married woman's anger toward her passive-aggressive bully of a mother—is a sort of dramatic manifesto, expressed via narrative rather than rhetoric, against the inarticulate suffocations and invisible cruelties of domestic life, which Maeve was very consciously not choosing for herself. New York, Bourke points out, “did not require her to cook, or sew, or even hand canapés around, and did not particularly expect her to marry.”

Instead, she embraced the freedoms of a single woman, falling in and out of love, going to the offices of
Harper's Bazaar
every day, and out any night of the week she felt like it—not, I should note, with her co-workers. Though women socialized together during the day—shopping, going out for lunch—it was still
unheard of at night. After work, a date with a man was often a woman's only ticket out of the house.

One of the first friends Maeve made when she arrived in New York was Brendan Gill, a
New Yorker
writer who introduced her to his colleagues Joseph Mitchell, Philip Hamburger, and the cartoonist Charles Addams, all of whom were more than happy to be her escort. Maeve never wrote directly about her romantic life, but Hamburger told Bourke that she was briefly involved with Addams (whether before or after his marriage to a woman who purportedly resembled Morticia Addams, matriarch of the cartoonist's fictional
Addams Family
, he didn't say), and that he suspected she'd had an affair with the married Gill, as well.

If there were a line on the census for mistresses, would we see an all-time peak during the 1940s? The conditions were uncommonly conducive. As during the American Revolutionary and Civil War periods, World War II greatly reduced the pool of eligible men. But the mid-century single woman's experience was radically distinct from that of those who came before her.

The history of adultery is as long as the history of marriage. Well into the twentieth century, a single woman had to be uncommonly self-actualized, highly sexually frustrated, extremely desperate, or very much in love to be a married man's mistress and risk losing the social respect conferred by her presumed celibacy. By the time Maeve was an adult, the consensus that sex was integral to a woman's mental and emotional health must have made it easier for a single woman to rationalize her way into a relationship with a married man as being better than nothing at all. In this way, the mid-century woman wasn't much different from us.

Also like us, she had the option of working and living alone in big, anonymous cities—all the better for clandestine liaisons.

But unlike us, she operated without the personal expectation of equality brought about by the women's movement of the late 1960s and early 1970s, and in this way she had more in common
with her Victorian predecessors. The balance of power between a married man and his mistress fit comfortably into familiar gender norms: nine times out of ten he not only had the emotional ballast and social sanction of a family, but he also made far more money. Too, because divorce was still anathema, and most people stayed in unhappy marriages, the age-old convention of men straying while wives looked the other way (whether consciously or not) remained.

It's easy to see how Maeve would have navigated this terrain. As a brilliant woman fiercely protective of her autonomy, she likely found the standard marriage-minded man and his conventional expectations rather boring, if not suffocating. When she joined the staff of
The New Yorker
in 1949, she was suddenly in very close proximity with quite a few appealing men, the majority of whom were married. Well, if they wanted to step out on their wives, that was their decision, wasn't it? Looked at this way, it's no wonder that professional single women were soon contending with a whole new stigma—that of the rapacious femme fatale, stealer of other women's husbands—that persists today.

The realization sent a chill right through me. The primary reason I've chosen to never be “the other woman” is my strong sense of sisterhood. It appalls me to think of betraying one of my own kind. But it stands to reason that women weren't feeling particularly sisterly during the 1940s and '50s. Back when we were confined to the home, we at least had the companionship of one another. As we started easing our way out—first to the textile mills, where we worked together all day and shared living quarters after hours; later, on the factory floors and in communal boardinghouses—we often forged a useful and consoling camaraderie. If not for this solidarity, the political actions taken by reformers from Jane Hull to Margaret Sanger, even the widespread culture of charity work that brought together working and upper-class women, might not have been so effective.

In comparison, urban professional life at mid-century was shockingly atomized for women. Long accustomed to regarding one another as romantic rivals, now we were also competing with one another for career advancement. Boardinghouses were largely obsolete, the marriage rate was spiking, and the age of marriage was lowering, meaning most women lived with their parents until sequestering off into a couple and disappearing into a house. This lack of time and space for communal experiences with other women, which was created
and
compounded by a society that did not prioritize such relationships, and placed marriage above all, ensured that “independence” was often a very lonely experience.

The famous Barbizon Hotel for Women was a gorgeously gothic backdrop for this toxic atmosphere. Built in 1927, it wasn't the first “women only” residence to cater to the working girl—the Martha Washington opened for business in 1903, the Trowmart Inn in 1906—but by the mid-1940s it was the most glamorous bachelorette address in town.

A 23-story, 700-room, pinkish-coral brick building on the corner of Sixty-Third Street and Lexington Avenue, the Barbizon lured ingénues from all over the country with glossy brochures promising a life of glittering good times. Essentially, an elite all-white sorority, dormitory, charm school, and convent rolled into one, it accepted applicants based on their looks, demeanor, and three letters of recommendation, and once there held them to “ladylike” standards (no male visitors without supervision; mandatory afternoon teas). Between the 1940s and the 1960s, everyone from Grace Kelly to Sylvia Plath to Joan Crawford was a “Barbizon Girl.”

In 1957, recent alumnus Gael Greene exposed the sad realities of the place that Plath had already hinted at in
The Bell Jar
with
a series of articles for
The New York Post
. Beneath the mystique, Greene reported, the Barbizon was little more than a holding pen for a lot of anxious women waiting to find husbands so their lives could begin. Drawn to the city by “something indefinable—something to do, a rent-paying job, romance, the alchemy that will transform an ordinary girl into an extraordinary woman,” a Barbizon Girl had only a few short years to launch herself; if a resident hadn't moved out by twenty-five, she was pitied and feared by incomers.