Spinster (42 page)

Yvonne Jerrold, Maeve's niece, turned out to be very easy to find: she has her own website. In all of two minutes I learned that she lives in Cambridge, England, where, after a career as an architect and garden designer, she now writes novels and makes stone carvings. I read a 2008 clipping from her local newspaper, in which she explains that her rather hilarious-sounding second novel,
A Case of Wild Justice?
, about a group of elderly neighbors who turn themselves into crime-fighting suicide bombers, was inspired by the outrage she felt after her eighty-nine-year-old mother—Maeve's sister Deirdre—endured a series of burglaries. The accompanying author photo showed a woman with a kind expression and short, wispy blond hair. In January 2013 I sent her an e-mail with the subject line “Your Aunt Maeve.”

Before I knew it, I was sitting at my desk in Brooklyn, astonished to be talking on the phone with someone who was actually related to Maeve Brennan.

Jerrold's primary memories of Maeve are necessarily those of a child, and sporadic, at that. Jerrold was born in Washington, DC, a couple of years before Maeve moved to New York, but in 1950 her father died, and her mother brought the family back to Dublin, where Maeve made infrequent visits.

I asked if her aunt had had an influence on her life anyhow.

“Quite a lot!” she said. “Probably because I had secret ideas about wanting to be a writer. I found her such an attractive, interesting person. Everybody did—she just
was
.”

It pleased me to hear this. I hoped my nieces might say something
similar about me someday, if anyone should ask. By now my brother and his wife had two small daughters, and I was already looking ahead to many happy decades as an aunt.

But there I was again, comparing myself to Maeve, a person I'd never met, a long habit that now felt more specious than ever as Jerrold drew a portrait that both did and didn't match the one I'd been carrying now for fifteen years. Talking about a person is entirely different than reading about them. And listening to someone who knew that person talk about her is yet more different.

She started with Maeve's physical self. “She was neat, slim, well-dressed, disciplined, elegant, controlled—in a ballerina sort of way, like a teacher, or a librarian.” This I could tell from photographs. When she described her “enormous grin” and green eyes—“the twinkliest eyes you could imagine”—I realized I'd never seen Maeve in color.

“Her wit was the most important thing,” she added. “She laughed all the time. When she wasn't sitting smoking and watching people, she was making wry ironic observations about life and people, and joking about herself and others with obvious glee. She was interested in most things, and came up with some crazy ideas.” She described her humor as “cerebral and sophisticated and mischievous and self-deprecating.”

What about Maeve's romantic life?

“She had lovers and affairs, and her heart was broken from time to time. She did things she never would have dreamt of in Ireland. But she did not come across as a sensual person. She did not act in a sexy way. She was most unsexy. When she was in Ireland, she appeared modest and demure, as any convent-educated Irish woman normally would in the 1950s. Nowadays women are sexy all over the place!”

We laughed. So true!

“She never talked about wanting to have children. I believe she wanted solitude and cats. She was crazy about animals. I
think she didn't find married life particularly congenial. She was very undomesticated and always had home help. I can't imagine she made a conscious decision about how her life would go, apart from her early ambition to write, which I think never left her. That was her focus. She carried an enormous black patent-leather purse around with her. I asked why it was so big and she said it was to carry whatever she was writing at the moment.”

I asked what Maeve's relatives thought about her.

“Her Irish relations in Wexford found her strange and exotic,” she said. “She drank, she smoked. She was very thin, wearing slim, elegant, New York City clothes, and high heels. She didn't drive, so she'd hire a driver and go down to see her cousins in Wexford, causing excitement among the local children. Nobody had a car in those days.”

Reading Bourke's biography, Jerrold had been surprised to get the impression that Maeve was actually very sad. “I asked my mother about this, and she said that yes, Maeve was quite a sad person. As a child I never saw this. I saw her cross, furious, irritated. But never, ever sad.”

Well, was she lonely? I asked.

“She was a loner, which was understandable,” Jerrold said. “You're a writer—you know. When you're a writer, you don't want to waste time or energy on people who require you to be social. She never sought that comfort. She sought independence, experience, and observation. She wanted to experience the world.”

I didn't confess that my Achilles' heel is my sociability. This wasn't about me. Or was it?

“She didn't need people. Writing was the center of her life. Everything else was peripheral. Ultimately, at a writer's center, there's a hard core.”

I thought suddenly of a photo shoot I'd been the subject of not long before, in which the photographer kept making me scowl, and I kept resisting. “I'm not a scowler—that's just not how I walk
around the world,” I'd said. “How about when you're sitting down at your desk writing?” he'd asked. “That's the person I'm trying to capture.”

How was I supposed to know what I look like when I'm writing? Because I couldn't picture it, I stood there in front of the camera and imagined I was actually sitting at my desk, staring into the computer screen, and I felt the muscles around my eyes tighten, and those around my mouth relax—if not a scowl, exactly, definitely not an inviting countenance. Yes, I realized. There is a hard core at my center, and a great deal of my personality is constructed around not ever letting anybody see it. Even
I
don't “see” it—I'm acquainted only with my blank expression in the bathroom mirror as I wash my face in the morning, my toothy smile in a snapshot, and the extremely rare glimpse in a mirror of my top lip tugged into an involuntary sneer by the effort of lifting a weight at the gym, the sight of which never ceases to shock me.

“But I don't think she had a general loneliness,” Jerrold continued. “Her working life was full of people, mostly writing colleagues. Whenever she wanted to, she'd go to the office. Other times she would stay at her house in Long Island for weeks and weeks to write.”

She explained that Maeve was generous to a fault. “You couldn't stop her giving things away. She was not at all materialistic, and believed things should belong to the people who most valued them.”

She also had extraordinary presence and energy, Jerrold added. “I couldn't keep up with her intensity, her enthusiasms. She could make you feel inadequate. People like that do wear other people out,” she said. “I think there are actually two kinds of people: one draws all their energy internally and is giving out personality all the time, and the other draws their energy from other people and is always taking. The takers are exhausting to the givers.”

Maeve was a giver.
What kind am I
, I wondered. (
Kate, this is not about you
.)

But I already knew the answer. More than a few people have told me I wear them out. Several years ago a dear friend confessed that she “couldn't keep up with” my enthusiasms. “You have so many of them,” she said, “that I can no longer tell which ones are real and which are fleeting.”

Are “givers,” in Jerrold's terms, more likely to live alone, in part because they're just “too much” for other people?

Or does her equation actually describe something else—the two faces of the single woman? Home alone, she lives for herself, drawing on her own internal resources. Among others, she enacts a kind of performance, playing to an audience, whether for the sake of it, or because she's waiting to be plucked off the stage and brought home by a man.

Soon Jerrold was theorizing that her own mother, growing up in the shadow of her precocious, dominant older sister, never really became herself.

Jerrold's mother had made all the “right” decisions for a woman, yet when only thirty-one, she found herself a widowed mother of four. It's not surprising, then, that Maeve was an object of pity and possibly even envy—she had made the “wrong” decisions, yet lived quite well, and it must have been tempting on some level to want to punish her for having done so.

And yet for Jerrold, Maeve was an example of how to be successfully untraditional. Perhaps if it weren't for her aunt, all these years later she wouldn't have become a writer herself.

Sometimes, when I'm interviewing someone, and I get so caught up in the conversation that I lose track of what to ask, I resort to the lamest question of all: Is there something I'm not asking that I should? By and large the answer is no, and rightly so. But it was as if Jerrold had been waiting for someone to ask exactly that.

“I'll tell you one thing that people have not picked up on: Maeve grew up with more knowledge of the Irish troubles than my mother did, but all the family had mental scars from the violence of the time,” she said. “They'd grown up in poverty. Every now and then their father was dragged off to yet another prison. They grew up frightened. And they turned against politics.”

Their new life in Washington, she explained, had been peaceful and posh. The sisters were expected to act as ladies there.

“Some writers come out of tempestuous countries and write about it for the rest of their lives. This particular family was displaced by war, but Maeve never mentioned politics or the Irish war of independence in her writing.”

I asked her about the family rift caused by the publication of “The Springs of Affection” in 1972. She fell silent. Then: “There were a lot of bad feelings because of Maeve's false and unkind portrayal of her aunt. The family was very hurt,” she said finally. “Maeve seemed to have moved such a long way from her roots; I don't think she'd have done it if she was in Ireland. I think it was partly due to her grief over the death of her father when she was far away in New York, and partly due to the influence of her editor Maxwell, and partly due to the fashion at the time in
The New Yorker
for biographical short stories.

“I think it was a bad moment for Maeve when she returned to Ireland in the 1970s. She may have harbored a little feeling that someday she could come back, and instead she realized she'd gone too far, that through her own actions she'd burned all her boats. She was already ill by then.”

She paused again. “The trouble with Maeve was, she was volatile. As she began to lose her grip on reality, she alienated all her friends and colleagues. By the time she died alone in a nursing home, she'd alienated so many people that everyone felt sad and guilty.

“I couldn't afford to go to the funeral,” she continued. “Nobody from our side of the family went. She was close to her brother to some extent, and his sons arranged it. They, and my mother, all said don't bury her, it will become a pilgrimage place. Her ashes were scattered in the ocean. Very unsentimental.”

I was quiet.

As if reading my thoughts, Jerrold said, “People tend to romanticize her, but to me she's a person, not an icon or myth. You know, I was in New York recently, at a reading event for Maeve, and I met someone who'd known her at the end of her life.”

“What?” I said.

“Here we'd all thought she'd lost all of her friends. But it turns out after that—after she'd burned all her boats—she'd gone to an artist's colony and met a lovely woman named Edith Konecky. If Edith hadn't heard about the event, and shown up at the pub, I would never have known that Maeve had found a friend during some of her most troubled years.”

My heart sped up. There is no mention of Edith Konecky in the biography.

“How's this?” she offered. “I'll send her an e-mail and see if she's up to talking to you.”