Spinster (28 page)

No wonder Maeve, ever the lone wolf, chose different quarters. (Also, the minuscule, Spartan rooms were not up to her standards.)

In 1954, to everybody's surprise, Maeve agreed to marry St. Clair McKelway, a charismatic, irresponsible, hard-drinking, thrice-married writer at the magazine. She was thirty-seven; he was forty-nine. Their wedding was what she called a “very fancy” reception at Café Nicholson, a Parisian-style Midtown restaurant popular among fashionable artistic types (it closed in 2000). Their friend
New Yorker
writer Roger Angell compared the couple to “two children out on a dangerous walk: both so dangerous and so charming.”

Soon after marrying, they moved to Snedens Landing, a somewhat tony community of artists and writers a fifty-minute drive north of the city (Betty Friedan was a neighbor). Maeve wrote less and less. Bourke speculates that McKelway's ebullient personality and their active social life as a couple left her much less in control of her time than she was used to. It didn't take long before his drinking got to be too much, and in 1959, when Maeve was forty-two, the couple amicably divorced.

According to all accounts, after the divorce, things went south
for Maeve. Though she immediately started writing again, better than ever before, and found a homey stability in a friend's Hamptons summer cottage during the off-seasons, by the late 1960s she was moving constantly among rented apartments and hotel rooms and soon started widening her circle to include writer's colonies in New Hampshire and Cape Cod. Everywhere she went she brought at least five cats, and sometimes twelve. She continued to write but remained under the popular radar—beloved by readers who followed her work but unknown by the general public.

Around 1965 she wrote a letter to William Maxwell that included the following evocative passage:

I will send you a note later about the specific difference between those writers who possess the natural confidence that is their birthright, and those fewer writers who are driven by the unnatural courage that comes from no alternative. It is something like this—some walk on a tightrope, and some continue on the tightrope, or continue to walk, even after they find out it is
not there
.

In 1969, when Maeve was fifty-two, her first two books came out:
In and Out of Never-Never Land
, twenty-two of her short stories from
The New Yorker
, and
The Long-Winded Lady
, her forty-seven collected columns, published for the first time under her own name. In a review of the latter for
The Atlantic
, titled “Talk of a Sad Town,” John Updike recalled his own days as a cub
New Yorker
reporter in the 1950s, when he wasn't exactly “avid to extract from the Eisenhowered, sullen if not yet apocalyptic metropolis of those years the enchantment of Baghdad-on-the-Subway celebrated by O. Henry, by Scott Fitzgerald and Edna Millay,” and applauded “Miss Brennan” for putting “New York back into
The New Yorker
.”

The author herself, however, was not faring as well. In his
review, Updike had noted her eccentric fondness for, “dismally enough,” the West Forties, “those half-demolished blocks of small hotels and cellar restaurants and old coin shops between Fifth and Eighth Avenue.” By now she was a full-time denizen of that blighted area, “living in a series of apartments and hotel rooms, pursued by creditors,” Bourke writes. At this point Maeve wore her hair in a beehive, the dyed-red tower growing ever higher, her lipstick more sloppy. Her once-captivating enthusiasms had become unpredictable, overpowering obsessions. Bourke describes how at one point Maeve discovered Billie Holiday and bought every single one of her records, “which she played over and over again, for hours at a time, even in the office, on a portable phonograph,” veteran editor Gardner Botsford told her.

I paused at this detail. Billie Holiday was born in Philadelphia in 1915, only two years before Maeve; by the 1940s, when Maeve moved to New York, Holiday was one of the most famous jazz singers in America, a legend in her own time—before dying at age forty-four of liver and heart failure. Both women had married briefly, unhappily. But I knew it was specious of me to compare them as single women; the political, social, and economic forces that shape the African-American single experience is an entire book unto itself. Bourke links the two women as creative souls who made themselves vulnerable in pursuit of the insights their arts express.

Maeve eloquently articulates that sense of communion in a Long-Winded Lady column published in November 1967. She's alone in a friend's apartment in the Village, sitting through a rainstorm on a green velvet sofa, listening to a cocktail party across the hall. She switches on the phonograph without changing the record she'd been listening to that morning:

The music strengthens, and moves about, catching the pictures, the books, and the discolored white marble mantelpiece as firelight
might have done. Now the place is no longer a cave but a room with walls that listen in peace. I hear the music and I watch the voice. I can see it. It is a voice to follow with your mind's eye.
“La Brave, c'est elle.”
There is no other. Billie Holiday is singing.

In the years following the publication of Maeve Brennan's books, anyone at
The New Yorker
outside of William Maxwell and Gardner Botsford—the only people close enough to know how continuously hard she was working—must have thought Maeve's best was behind her. And then, on March 18, 1972, she published the story that changed her life. Alice Munro called it one of her favorite short stories of all time. In Angela Bourke's words, it's a “swan song, or her kamikaze flight…and a suicidal assault on her own family.”

Taking up twenty-seven pages of
The New Yorker
, “The Springs of Affection” chronicles three generations of two families in Ireland. It's told from the perspective of the never-married, eighty-seven-year-old Min Bagot, and opens with the death of her twin brother, Martin, whom she's been lovingly tending to in his final months. His wife, Delia, who'd “appeared out of the blue and fascinated Martin, the born bachelor, into marrying her” a half century before, died six years earlier, and now Min is the last sibling standing, which she finds fitting:

She was the only one of the lot of them who hadn't gone off and got married. She had never wanted to assert herself like that, never needed to. She had wondered at their lack of shame as they exhibited themselves…. They didn't seem to care what anybody thought of them when they got caught up in that excitement, like animals. It was disgusting, and they seemed to know it, the way they pretended their only concern was with the new clothes they'd have and the flowers they'd grow in
their very own gardens. And now it was over for them, and they might just as well have controlled themselves, for all the good they had of it.

Min's bitterness is rank and palpable, “a study in spite, a monster of heartlessness,” as Bourke describes. In the story Min ruminates over how, once upon a time, “she had believed she could fly sky-high, with her brains for wings,” but life didn't work out that way, and rather than recognize that she'd been “done out of my right,” everyone preferred to see her as a failure, saying, “She got too big for her boots, and Pride must have a fall.” There was nothing she could do about it. “It is impossible to prove you are not a disappointed old maid,” she thinks to herself. “A farmer's daughter is all she was, even if she had attended the Loreto convent and owned certificates to show what a good education she had.”

The story itself is fiction—and yet the landscape and characters, houses and rooms, are all pulled directly from real life, meaning Maeve's relatives experienced the brutal shock of seeing themselves transformed through another's unforgiving eyes. Everyone knew that Min was none other than Maeve's beloved spinster aunt, the eighty-five-year-old Nan Brennan, and everyone agreed that she didn't deserve such vicious treatment. After the story appeared, Aunt Nan wrote on the back of a snapshot of Maeve, “Greatly changed for the worse, 1972.”

And “so began a time that Maeve's New York friends cannot remember without pain,” Bourke writes. She grew paranoid, started spending her nights at the office, nursed a sick pigeon she'd found on the street. When she received her paycheck, she'd cash it and stand on the corner of Forty-Fourth Street and Fifth Avenue, handing out bills to whoever took them. Her friends despaired, doing everything they could to help, and
The New Yorker
opened a bank account in her name, making regular deposits
(she remained on staff until about 1980), but again and again she pushed away those who helped her. It's impossible to know what was happening: either the self-imposed estrangement from her family was taking its toll, her mental health was growing increasingly unstable, or some combination of both was unfolding.

In July 1973, when she was fifty-six, though she'd told everyone that her family was no longer speaking with her, Maeve flew home to Ireland, where she stayed for a little while at her sister's house in Dublin. In 1975, after Maxwell located her brother, Robert Patrick, to say she wasn't well, she left New York and moved in with his family in Peoria, Illinois. Within the year, without telling anyone, she returned to the city.

Maeve's Long-Winded Lady appears only twice more in the magazine. In September 1976 she recounts waking from a pleasant daydream of lying alone on the beach in East Hampton, where she'd once lived, to the realization that she is, in fact, on her bed in New York City, “and the cool ocean breeze is being provided by the blessed air conditioner.” The daydream was nothing but “a mild attack of homesickness,” she decides. “The reason it was a mild attack instead of a fierce one is that there are a number of places I am homesick for. East Hampton is only one of them.”

Five years pass without a peep, and then The Long-Winded Lady appears for the last time on January 5, 1981. She thought she had a few observations to share, she explains, but then she got up to make some coffee, and when she came back they had vanished. It's a good thing anyhow, she tells us, as:

They were a stilted crowd, and rather disagreeable, as though they had found themselves at a party that was not quite what they'd expected and where their clothes were all wrong. They all wore elaborate taffeta ball gowns that seemed to belong to the eighteenth century, and each ball gown was a different shade of green.

Come to think of it, she decides, they weren't observations after all, but complaints, and as such have gone to the complaints department, which she avoids at all costs, on account of there being “too many mirrors in there for my liking.” After recounting a childhood memory of celebrating New Year's Eve in Dublin, she concludes with her very last published words:

I must tell you now that I am praying to Almighty God for blessings on your house, with extra blessings to go with you whenever you leave the house, so that wherever you are you will be safe.

Blessings on your house. Happy New Year.

Later that year a recently hired
New Yorker
staffer named Mary Hawthorne stepped off the elevator one morning and found a small woman sitting in the chair outside the receptionist's cubicle, staring at the floor. As Hawthorne recounted in a later essay, the stranger's gray hair was unwashed, and she wore a big black jacket and long black skirt. The woman sat there until evening and returned the next day, and “all the while, she continued her expressionless musing, never raising her eyes.” It was Maeve, of course. Hawthorne had never heard of her before. She never saw her again.

After that, the track goes dark.

Sometime around 1990, a World War II veteran turned photo collector named Charley Justice who happened to be a fan of Maeve's writing was rummaging through a used bookstore and came across a blue box of her papers: her teenage diary, galley proofs for her
New Yorker
stories, letters to her sister and niece, and at the bottom, carbon copies of an autobiography of the Irish Revolution written by her father, published in Ireland in 1950, titled
Allegiance
.