Spinster (18 page)

On January 15, 2001 (so reports my steadfast journal), I finally found the courage to tell R we should maybe, possibly start thinking about breaking up. We were at home on the sofa. I didn't tell him that I'd cheated on him (several months later he'd find out by reading my journal). I sobbed as I spoke. Over the past three years he'd become my best friend. What was I doing? Beneath that was a more abstract fear: this might be my best shot at a good marriage and all that portended—security, children, grandchildren—and if I walked away now, I could live to regret it.

He was justifiably astonished, having had no idea what I'd been up to, but also, confusingly for both of us, comprehending. He knew me well enough to see that my craving to be on my own was real, even if he didn't want it for himself. It took us five painful months to extricate ourselves. In May he moved out. I was to leave the apartment in August, when the lease ended, and start my second year of graduate school.

Unlike Vivian Gornick, on that first morning alone I did not wake infatuated with solitude. Breakups are always painful, but at least in the past I wasn't also losing my home. I was such a wreck that within the week my brother came down from Newburyport to
keep me company, even though he'd just fallen in love. He found a dreadful temp job—something having to do with data entry, a class-action lawsuit, and mesothelioma—and stayed all summer long.

In July a friend and I took the subway to the end of the line and lay on Far Rockaway Beach beneath an overcast sky. I came home with a sunburn so severe, I couldn't take off my bikini or bear the touch of clothing and so lay on the sofa in the same bathing suit for two days, crying about the stupid mess I'd made of my life. My brother took photos and wouldn't let me see the results, because, he said, I looked like a crime scene. Later, my friend and I joked that we'd ruined our décolletages, but I actually had: where before there were perhaps seven freckles, now there are possibly one thousand.

I had one more year left in school. My graduate assistantship had ended, but I'd found a part-time administrative job elsewhere in the university and, between that and freelance writing, was able to cobble together a meager living. None of my activities, though, proved an emotional distraction. I couldn't stop obsessing over what I'd done. I'd ruined a perfectly good relationship for no good reason. I was willingly making my life harder than it needed to be. I missed R, desperately, and wanted to call him all the time, and did, for a while, until finally I made myself understand that it was selfish and cruel to seek solace from the person I'd hurt.

That summer I saw only those few people who could handle my breaking into tears unprompted, and I carried on reading Neith Boyce's unpublished memoir. The unbound sheaf of papers was too cumbersome to bring on the subway, so I'd wait until I was home in the evening and bring the stack down to the Promenade and read on a bench. Sometimes I'd pour white wine into a Mason jar and sip from it as if it were water.

One of the more unpleasant aspects of living in New York City is how daily proximity to wealth and glamour can instill a
desire for it where none existed before. Now that I was a grown woman, an impoverished student between semesters, so unhinged that she needed to be ministered to by her little brother, my life seemed particularly bereft and pathetic, the likelihood of ever seeing my writing in a fancy magazine such as
Vogue
, never mind being invited to dinner by its famously frosty editor, slim to none.

So it was especially gratifying to find Neith griping about the “fashionable literary” evenings at Mrs. Redding's apartment, where gentility “was a uniform assumed like dinner coat or evening dress,” and “talk, like wine, was served in little shallow glasses, and you had to be careful of them; you mustn't be excited by an idea or an emotion, or you might spill your wine.” She had no interest in idle chatter; “the last new book, the last new play evoked no opinions in her; she hadn't any.” But, observing that the other guests find her “good-looking but Sphinx-like,” rather than force herself to be agreeable, she simply sits quietly taking it all in, and only speaks when someone asks her a question.

One night, to my surprise, a letter slipped from the unbound pages.

It was one photocopied sheet, typewritten, from Neith to a mysterious “H,” dated June 19, 1898, during the time she was publishing her column in
Vogue
, about yet another dinner at Mrs. Redding's apartment. At first I chortled to see Neith at her most irreverent yet:

Do you know what Mrs. Redding reminds me of? I'll tell you if (as she says) you won't tell on me. Do you remember the little old red-nosed man who came into a restaurant where you and I were dining one night—with a basket full of alleged flowers made out of “garden truck”—beets, carrots, etc.? Well, I know it has not a kindly sound but she seems to me like that—a person who has outlived life (for the old man had seen better days!) and
spends what's left of it in whittling out queer superfluous little monstrosities that nobody wants.

After that, she retreats a touch, a little guilty:

Never tell, will you? With all that I like her and I admire her grit and pluck and the way she makes the best of things—and I love her for always wearing a hat when she looks so much better with one and also I like to hear her views of life, matrimony, etc. She likes me because I'm an independent young woman but I'm sure if she knew that I had ever thought of joining the vast majority her interest in me would cease and determine.

I looked up at the couples strolling along the Promenade. “Joining the vast majority”?

During the winter of 1898, the man who'd gotten Neith Boyce her job at the newspaper introduced her to his brother, Hutchins Hapgood. A Chicago native and recent Harvard graduate roughly her same age, “Hutch” had just returned from a world tour with his college chum Leo Stein, brother of Gertrude, and had joined the staff as a reporter.

“This was a rather short, broad-shouldered young man,” Neith reported in her memoir, “dressed in a light-colored tweed suit which seemed too big for him and made him look almost as broad as he was long, and it was wrinkled as though he had slept in it…. He had a ruddy-brown face and bright blue eyes, a look of physical vigor and fire.”

Neith uses the word
fire
three more times in her one-paragraph description of her new suitor. That very night, Hutch began bringing
her along to the new immigrant theaters he was discovering for the paper—German, Italian, Yiddish, Chinese. They'd start each evening at one of downtown's many small “foreign” restaurants and talk about books and plays and writing.

She explains that their biggest disagreement was over what she called “life.” Hutch, son of a self-made millionaire, was

lyric about it; he found something interesting and likeable in almost every person, his sympathies were unbounded, he was open to experience and shut himself off from nothing.

Neith, the sole survivor of five children, thought it “a skin game in which the dice were stacked against you and you were bound to lose.” She quoted Swinburne, Swift, and Hardy. He shot back with William Wordsworth and Margaret Fuller (“I accept the universe”). By spring Hutch was trying to woo her by reading aloud poetry by Heine, and she was telling him she was too afraid to love or marry.

As you might expect, her arguments were numerous and well considered. She worried that a woman might be easily swamped by the demands of “physical” and family life (by which I presume she meant sex, pregnancy, and child-care), particularly with a man like Hutch, who did nothing by halves. When she finally confided in Mrs. Redding, the editor told her point-blank that marriage, to Hutch in particular, would destroy her career. “I hope you won't marry that terribly virile young man,” she said.

Mrs. Redding's objection must have weighed heavily on Neith; more than anything, she worried about her ability to find the time and energy to write. When Hutch argued that “living in an ivory tower wasn't the way to produce good stuff,” she retorted with the examples of Jane Austen and Mary Eleanor Wilkins, “presumably spinsters when they were doing their main work,” and even Edith
Wharton, ten years her senior, who was married at the time, but “might be considered to have the brevet rank of spinster, since she had no children.”

She was onto something. Austen never married, Wharton didn't fully come into her own as a writer until she'd divorced her husband, and Mary Eleanor Wilkins—a wildly successful fiction writer in her day, who, like Maine's never-married Sarah Orne Jewett before her, often chose spinsters as her subjects—did in fact produce her best work before she married at age fifty.

In an effort to better explain her complicated feelings to Hutch, Neith shared with him one of Wilkins's most famous stories, “A New England Nun,” published in 1891. It opens with a woman named Louisa Ellis, who lives alone in a little country cottage, peacefully sewing in her sitting room. At teatime she sets out a spread so lovely, it's as if she's “a veritable guest to her own self”—a beautiful concept, and one that Wilkins expanded on to prove the courage of her character's self-respect: “Louisa used china every day—something which none of her neighbors did. They whispered about it among themselves.”

Her betrothed, Joe Dagget, who's been away in Australia the past fourteen years making his fortune, has just returned to claim his bride; they'll be married in a week. His presence is disruptive, to say the least. When the couple sits down at the table, he idly rearranges her books; she puts them back neatly in place. When it's time to leave, he inadvertently knocks her sewing basket to the floor. For his part, “sitting there in her delicately sweet room, he felt as if surrounded by a hedge of lace.”

While Joe was halfway across the globe, both Louisa's mother and brother had died, and she'd been very much alone, but she'd come to discover that solitude suited her:

Greatest happening of all—a subtle happening which both were too simple to understand—Louisa's feet had turned into
a path…so straight and unswerving that it could only meet a check at her grave, and so narrow that there was no room for any one at her side.

By chance, she finds an honorable way to wriggle free from her commitment to Joe (I won't spoil the story by telling you how), and though the parting itself is mournful, upon waking the next morning, “she felt like a queen who, after fearing lest her domain be wrested away from her, sees it firmly insured in her possession.”

The story closes with Louisa sitting alone at the window, gazing “ahead through a long reach of future days strung together like pearls in a rosary, every one like the others, and all smooth and flawless and innocent, and her heart went up in thankfulness…prayerfully numbering her days, like an uncloistered nun.”

When Neith showed the story to Hutch, he gruffly implied that she herself was something like Louisa, and “what happened to old New England spinsters was that they went dotty.”

But Neith was seriously moved by the story:

If a woman wanted to live in peace and quiet and keep her house neat, without somebody tracking it up, and wanted to make preserves and potpourri of rose leaves, and sit by her window and sew a fine seam, why shouldn't she? There were always enough who wanted to get married and carry on the race…. If a woman liked to play with words and set them in patterns and make pictures with them, and was taking care of herself and bothering nobody, and enjoyed her life without a lot of bawling children around, why shouldn't she?

Hutch shared an apartment with two friends at The Benedick, a residence for unmarried men named after the protagonist of
Much Ado About Nothing
, also on Washington Square Park (today it's a coed dorm). In the play, the young Lord Benedick carries on “a merry war” with the lovely, witty Beatrice, both of them proclaiming to despise marriage and each other—until their friends trick them into seeing otherwise; the final act is their wedding. By Hutch's time,
benedict
was used to describe a male newlywed, particularly one previously thought to be a confirmed bachelor. In the tradition of the best romantic comedies, both roommates “pronounced Hutch a perfect bachelor and said she [Neith] was ruining him.” Even the eternal optimist himself was skeptical. In May 1898 he wrote to his mother: