Spinster (13 page)

There was a rectangle of light on the sidewalk, as if the streetlamp had dropped a train ticket, and I looked at it and thought about my fixation on Maeve Brennan, the way I'd imbued her with something resembling liberation: she'd been my passport out of myself, and Boston, and now here I was, finally, on a warm fall night in Brooklyn, not alone after all but with a man I loved, drunk, no choice but to look the truth right in the face: The Long-Winded Lady was about as asexual as a person could get.

Rather than deal with my growing curiosity about life on my own, I'd furiously buttoned it into a trench coat, waterproof and cosseted, where it remained safely apart from me, something to moon over and fantasize about, like an unrequited lover. Rather than openly and honestly being in my relationship with R, I'd developed an unrequited relationship with my own repression.

What had been merely a constant, low-grade yearning for even a sliver of conversation with my mother spiked into a feverish need to talk to
anyone
here in this new city where I knew hardly a soul and R was my only close friend.

“God,” I said. “You're right. What do we do?”

Here is what I did: In early December a man I'd interviewed for a freelance magazine assignment invited me to drinks, and at the
end of the night he kissed me and I kissed him back. I had forgotten about the power of the unknown. I pulled away and told him I had a boyfriend and couldn't see him again. And then I lost my mind. I saw him again—on my lunch hour, before class, in the library stacks. And then I stopped. But everything was changed. For six weeks I waded through the wreckage, searching for the courage to tell R what we both already knew and couldn't bear to admit: we were over.

For Christmas, R went to see his family in Cambridge, and I went home to mine. Though our mother had been gone four years now, my brother and I insisted on continuing her Christmas-morning ritual. Whoever woke first woke the other, and together we'd stumble downstairs, pour steel-cut oats into a pot of boiling water, and mix up scones from a favorite recipe she'd found while visiting relatives in Ireland. Like her, I appreciate a bit of pomp. I'd excavate my parents' gold-rimmed wedding china, the good silver, and linen napkins. In the dining room my father would build a fire, and because we could do this now that we were three instead of four, we'd pull our chairs around the hearth and balance our bowls and plates on our knees, the silver and porcelain glinting festively as we ate.

As usual, I was given quite a few books. When I peeled off the red paper and discovered a brand-new hardcover called
American Moderns: Bohemian New York and the Creation of a New Century
, by the historian Christine Stansell, I nodded uncomprehendingly, a touch embarrassed; I hadn't even known there'd been a bohemia before the 1950s Beat Generation. Apparently a bunch of Victorian radicals—
if ever an oxymoron!
I remember thinking to myself—had beaten Kerouac & Co. to the punch.

I still have the book. Inside the front cover my father wrote in
ballpoint pen: “To Kate…Who knows, they may one day write about you and the creation of this new century. All my love, Dad. Christmas 2000.”

“Hah,” I said. Coolness—“that perfect mastery (or numbness) of self that enables the ‘hipster,' the cool cat, to listen to the loudest and most throbbing jazz without displaying the least sign of emotion”—has been a membership requirement for every American bohemia since
The New York Times
published that definition in 1950. Nobody would mistake me for cool. Just that month a classmate had turned to me and said, “Were you
actually
born yesterday? Is it possible for an adult human being to get as excited about things as you do?”

On the train back to New York City I decided to give the book a go. I'd taken the bus into Boston's South Station to meet up with R, and after we'd found a pair of empty seats, we settled in to read, each of us cocooned in our own amber beam from the overhead lights. At some point he fetched our favorite Amtrak feast—cans of Budweiser and microwaved hot dogs—though I didn't notice until he returned and asked me to pull down the tray tables. Then I forgot him altogether. As the train lumbered along that grubby stretch of Northeast Corridor, I dropped straight out of the present and into the past.

I've always loved novels in which the house is a character in its own right—the “sea-moistened” island summer house in Virginia Woolf's
To the Lighthouse
, where during the off-season “loveliness and stillness clasped hands in the bedroom”; the savaged, roofless, half-lived-in Blackwood mansion in Shirley Jackson's
We Have Always Lived in the Castle
, “turreted and open to the sky”; Tara, the palatial antebellum plantation house that outlasts love and war in Margaret Mitchell's
Gone with the Wind
. Stansell expands on that tradition: a history of a moment in time centered on a public space. Washington Square Park is so integral to the
milieu she'd studied that it becomes the beating heart of the story she tells.

It just so happened that I'd been walking through that very park every day on my way to classes.

The site then, at the turn of that century, was in the process of becoming almost exactly what it looks like in this new one. In the 1870s the park was redesigned and improved—curved pathways wending beneath the towering maple and oak trees were carved into the grass; the big circular stone fountain at the center was relocated from Fifth Avenue and Fifty-Ninth Street. In 1895, what had been a plaster and wood Washington Square Arch was replaced by today's grand marble version. But every other specific was unfamiliar. This cognitive dissonance made one hundred years seem both a blink and an eon.

When my family first moved to Newburyport, and my parents scraped off the dingy, dated floral wallpaper put up by the previous owners, they uncovered another layer beneath, and then another. And so it was reading Stansell's book: she'd peeled off the globalized '90s and Gordon Gekko '80s and punk '70s and folk '60s and Beat '50s and bebop '40s—all the way down to the bare, unvarnished planks of the turn of the last century.

I got out of my seat to stretch my legs and buy us another round of beer. In college I'd majored in American Studies; the period Stansell explores wasn't completely foreign to me. But as I lurched down the aisle toward the snack car, I realized that I'd more or less ignored the birth of the modern era, an odd oversight that suggested to me I found it easier to identify with a pen-and-ink illustration of a Puritan sweeping her hearth in the year 1641 than I did actual photographs of the bustled, tea-sipping Victorian urbanites I'd come across in college textbooks.

A troubling thought: After forty years of historians writing women back into history, was I blocking them back out according
to aesthetic laziness; e.g., it was easier to imagine a broom than a bustle?

Well, wouldn't you know it—these very women I'd breezily dismissed were the ones who would have the most to teach me.

The period of time was brief: about 1890 to 1920. The cast of characters—journalists and novelists, artists and activists, male and female—is tiny. Nearly all have been lost to history, or have names that only ring distantly, from the radical journalist Louise Bryant to her husband, the radical journalist John Reed. Many weren't even known outside Greenwich Village, which wasn't connected to the rest of the city by subway until 1918.

But for a short while, this small enclave was home to a thriving community of late-Victorian rebels who laid the groundwork for a new way of living. Free love, socialism, Freudianism, pacifism—they practiced all of it, with an almost ecstatic earnestness, even agitating for birth control. Their mission, in short, was to create a better future through a fully emancipated society.

Essential to this revolution were women's rights and sexual liberation. “Certainly never before, and probably not since, did a group of self-proclaimed innovators tie their ambitions so tightly to women,” Stansell writes, “and not just a token handful but whole troops of women, waving the flag of sexual equality.”