Spinster (29 page)

Charley bought the box for five dollars and called his good
friend Richard Rupp, at the time a professor of English at Appalachian State University. Rupp had never heard of
Allegiance
and thought it incredibly good, worthy of reissuing; in his efforts to do so he tracked down Maeve at Lawrence Nursing Care Center in Arverne, New York, found her brother's name in a Miami phone directory at the Library of Congress, and mailed a letter to her niece, Yvonne Jerrold (using an address off one of the envelopes he'd found in the box), alerting her family to her whereabouts.

In 1992, Jerrold received a package in the mail: a photograph of Maeve grinning at the camera and a letter claiming, in a frail, shaky hand, “I write every day in
The Irish Press
and get paid…. I am married to John Kyoss. That is not how it is spelled & I have a lot of children, boys and girls.”

The Irish Press
was the newspaper her father had founded. Angela Bourke speculates that “Kyoss” could be “Jyoss.” “Perhaps at the end of her days,” she writes, “Maeve's fantasy husband was James Joyce.”

On November 1, 1993, before her niece could visit her, Maeve died suddenly of heart failure.

It was almost too horrible to be true. Maeve actually had ended up a bag lady on the streets of New York. A fate feared by so many single women, it's become a cliché.

What did it mean that this was the woman I'd aspired to be?

Credit 7.1

Edith Wharton, early 1900s

In a society organized around a stable family unit, the choice to live alone is, by default, unconventional. At one end of the spectrum are those who are truly alone. The recluse or hermit—the secular person who shuns human society in all forms—tends to be regarded as eccentric, usually with disdain. The loner is romanticized as a rebel, as long as he's a he (James
Bond, the Lone Ranger, the Marlboro Man) and doesn't reveal himself to be a psychopath.

At the other end of the spectrum is the “gregarious recluse,” as the writer Annie Dillard calls herself. When an interviewer asked if this made her an introvert or an extrovert, she said it was a toss-up. I've always considered myself to be similar. I'm no recluse, but, like an introvert, I need a lot of time alone to reflect and recharge, and I am easily drained by being around others, but at the same time, like an extrovert, I'm energized by parties and conversation.

At the midpoint is what I think of as “social aloners,” those who live alone amid like-minded people. Nuns and monks are a timeless example; for centuries, joining a convent was the only respectable way for a single woman to live apart from her family, whether she was genuinely devout or simply pragmatic, preferring vows of comfortable poverty and chastity to the miserable drudgery of a peasant marriage. The most glamorized version is the artist or bohemian who's drawn to a geographical area at a certain moment in time, such as Greenwich Village in the 1890s.

Some of these social aloners consciously prioritize their autonomy above all else. Growing up in Philadelphia in the mid-1800s, Mary Cassatt was so determined to become a professional artist that she decided early on, in spite of being born into a wealthy family, that she would never marry and would be self-supporting. In 1866, when she was twenty-two, she moved to Paris and struggled for years, until finding a home in the late 1870s among the then-radical Impressionists, then finally hitting her stride in the late 1880s with the deeply felt explorations of mothers and children that made her one of the most celebrated painters of her time.

Others pursue what I think of as “turbulent aloneness” by maintaining a volatile romantic attachment to another person (or persons) that enables seesawing between periods of intense
isolation and connection. Frida Kahlo married Diego Rivera in 1929 when she was twenty-two, divorced him in 1939, and remarried him in 1940; the tumult created by her many affairs (and his) served her art well, as did their choice to live in separate houses.

I began dreaming about the idea of separate living spaces in 2000, when I read Brooke Kroeger's biography of Fannie Hurst, the highest-paid short-story writer of the first half of the twentieth century, and the first to publically pioneer this arrangement. In May 1920 (the year Edna turned twenty-eight, and Neith forty-eight; Maeve was a mere babe),
The New York Times
broke the story that the famous author, heretofore considered single, was not only married and had been for five years, to the pianist Jacques Danielson, but that she and her husband lived in separate studio apartments in the same building on West Sixty-Ninth Street. The article opens:

FANNIE HURST WED; HID SECRET 5 YEARS

Sailed Into Matrimony with Pianist “in a Bark of Their Own Designing,”

LIVE APART, THEIR OWN WAY

Meet By Appointment—It's a New Method Which Rejects “Antediluvian Custom.”

In the story Hurst explains that she considers nine out of ten marriages to be “sordid endurance tests overgrown with the fungi of familiarity and contempt,” and that by living separately from her husband she is able to keep her most sacred relationship a “high-sheen damask” rather than a “breakfast cloth, stale with soft-boiled egg stains.”

The press piled on with sanctimonious editorials and outraged letters to the editor, inciting her chivalrous mate to publish a charmingly sensible defense of their living situation. To
the charge of wastefulness, Danielson countered that “there are worse economic crimes being committed day after day in the average home of joint and domestic felicity.” Indeed, “free from the strain of a marriage that has narrowed down the woman's scope so that creature comforts come to assume unduly large proportions, we find ourselves, with our multitude of outside interests undiminished, content to live on scales that I confess are below the powers of our respective incomes.”

Finally, he punctured “the popular interpretation” that their life together was “one long rendezvous with alien interests.” Hurst, he posited, likely spent more time at home than the average woman. She was there working at her desk six hours a day, and had friends over for dinner three to four times a week. “We are both workers and must devote long evenings to study and reading and practice,” he added, “so all in all, I hardly thing [
sic
] we can be classified as a pair that has thrown off the responsibilities of the usual marriage ties in order that we may play promiscuously. Rather, as it has worked itself out, we have thrown off the rusty shackles of some of the outworn matrimonial impositions, in order that we may have more liberty to live up to more of the responsibilities of our lives and our work.” For a while, among those who could afford it, a “Fannie Hurst marriage” was much in vogue.

Today, there's a sociological term for their domestic arrangement, called “Living Apart Together,” or LAT. Hard numbers are impossible to come by, given that the Census Bureau doesn't yet count this demographic, but surveys indicate that in the United States between 6 percent and 9 percent of the population has a partner who lives elsewhere, and throughout northern Europe it's a solid 10 percent, a quarter of all those not married or cohabiting.

As with all categories, the lines between them are blurred. Throughout her life, even though she spent most of it abroad, Mary Cassatt maintained extremely close ties with her family;
in 1874, when she took up permanent residence in France, her sister, Lydia, also never married, came to live with her and stayed until her death in 1882. Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre shared a lifelong open relationship, yet unlike Neith and Hutch, Edna and Eugen, and Frida and Diego, they never married (or had children) and always lived apart. The never-married abstract expressionist Agnes Martin left New York City for Taos, New Mexico, in 1967, when she was fifty-five, built an adobe home, and lived alone until her late eighties, when she relocated to a one-bedroom apartment in a retirement community, where she died, at ninety-two. Though a recluse, she was religiously devoted to art, and by virtue of participating in an expressive form, even if she wasn't in direct communication with her peers, she shared characteristics of the bohemian.

Society's favorite version of the single woman is the Grande Dame (French for “great lady”). She is post-menopausal, and therefore sexually unthreatening, as well as wealthy and accomplished, though not necessarily professionally. The thrice-married, widowed Brooke Astor made the grade by single-handedly overseeing a massive family fortune with the political savvy, if not the credentials, of a stateswoman. Despite her advanced years, this made her the exact inverse of a Hag or Crone (
crone
derives from
carogne
, Old North French for “carrion”), those almost onomatopoetic denigrations of older women, which sound so much harsher to the ear than the male versions: Geezer, Old Dog, War-Horse. The grande dame may live alone, but unlike the hag she's not an outcast; her superior status relies on her relation to a moneyed elite. For instance, fashion designer Vivienne Westwood is a grande dame, while the pioneering primatologist Jane Goodall is not (or is, perhaps, only in chimpanzee circles). Were a grande dame a building, she would be the opulent Park Plaza Hotel but not the equally imposing, serious-minded Library of Congress.

Being single is like being an artist, not because creating a
functional single life is an art form, but because it requires the same close attention to one's singular needs, as well as the will and focus to fulfill them. Just as the artist arranges her life around her creativity, sacrificing conventional comforts and even social acceptance, sleeping and eating according to her own rhythms, so that her talent thrives above all else, nurtured the way a child might be, so a single person has to think hard to decipher what makes her happiest and most fulfilled. Studies show that a woman who lives alone is more likely to have an active social life, and maintain family bonds, than her married peers, not simply because she has extra time on her hands, but because those very bonds are what sustain her.

If it sounds as if I know what I'm talking about—well, it took me quite a while to get here.

In the fall of 2004 I switched from the newspaper's culture desk to lifestyle features, and I came to love being a newspaper editor. Assigning stories, working closely with writers, finding the just-right photograph or artwork, devising headlines and photo captions—it was all invigoratingly hectic and absorbing, and every day taught me something new about the city.

The old longing to write continued to nag, though to write about what, exactly, I still didn't know. Finally living alone, in an apartment I loved, was changing me, making me greedy to have absolutely everything be the way I wanted it to be. R and I had lived well together, but ultimately the security we'd created was false and became smothering. In comparison, sharing an apartment with a roommate had at first felt refreshingly temporary, and then, eventually, unnervingly so, as if it were a way station to some indefinable, always-distant destination rather than an actual home. Within the four walls of my own little studio I could create
the present on my own terms, which had the surprising effect of making the future seem closer at hand, as if it weren't at the end of some impossibly long hallway, after all, but as near as tomorrow. Maybe I could stay forever (as long as the landlord didn't hike up the rent or sell the building).