Spinster (19 page)

There is a girl in N.Y. who has been much more to me than any other girl I ever knew. We are not engaged and it is practically sure that we never shall be. She is a “new woman,” ambitious and energetic, a hard worker, more or less disliked by all my friends that know her, and she has no idea of getting married, at any rate to me.

I double-checked the dates. May 1898 was the month Neith's first
Vogue
column appeared. She'd been seeing him the whole time? Was she actually Beatrice to his Benedick?

In the end, Neith's abstract fears proved no match for a man she described as “a warm spring breeze bursting into the room,” not only “unreasonable, unexpected, surprising,” but also “honorable, kindly,” a man who “wanted to make every little dinner that they had together a festival.” Her autobiography concludes in 1899, less than a year after her final Bachelor Girl column ran in
Vogue
, on the night she took her place among the “vast majority”—but on her own terms. The marriage to Hutch would
be completely egalitarian, as well as “tentative” and not “till death did them part.”

The wedding was held in New York on July 22, 1899, at eight o'clock in the evening. The hairdresser had ruined Neith's coiffure; when she left the house, her hair was still damp and heavy beneath her veil. She and her father drove to the church in silence.

Upon arriving, she took her father's arm to walk down the aisle, and “like lightning a scene from the long past flashed back upon her”: that moment from childhood when he had led her into the parlor full of small white caskets holding the corpses of her siblings.

We like to pretend that only single people are lonely, and coupledom the cure. The belief dates back to Plato's myth about the first human beings, shaped like spheres, with four hands and legs apiece, and two faces, like something you'd see in a video game. “Whenever they set out to run fast,” he wrote, “they thrust out all their eight limbs…and spun rapidly, the way gymnasts do cartwheels.”

These beings were too powerful and ambitious for the gods to keep around, but too useful to destroy, so eventually Zeus decided to simply slice them in half. “At one stroke they will lose their strength and also become more profitable to us, owing to the increase in number,” he explained.

Afterward Apollo helped him turn each strange half-being into a whole, stretching the skin over the body-long gash, giving each a navel, and molding the breasts “using some such tool as shoemakers have for smoothing wrinkles out of leather on the form.” The result, Plato concluded, is that “each of us is always seeking the half that matches him,” and when this happens, “the two are struck from their senses by love, by a sense of belonging
to one another, and by desire, and they don't want to be separated from one another, not even for a moment.”

It's doubtful, though. Science tells us that, as with happiness, our predisposition to loneliness is encoded in our genes. Others are born into isolating circumstances that inculcate a propensity for more isolation. And studies have proven that long periods of extreme, unrelenting loneliness actually alter a person's molecular makeup, weakening the immune system.

But every life includes at least some loneliness. Most people merely suffer it like a recurrent pain that can subside for months or years at a time and then blaze up when conditions are just right: moving to a new city where you don't know anyone; staying in a bad marriage; losing someone you love; even just running an errand, when out of nowhere you feel to the core how alone we all are in the world, and it takes everything you've got to not set your basket of groceries on the linoleum and walk out of the supermarket.

Learning that Neith had conjured a funeral while at her own wedding made me wonder if emotional trauma can also strike like a lightning bolt and change every cell in a body, turning a person into a before and after, where before there was garden-variety loneliness, and after is a chronic condition that can be overcome with applied effort but forever alters that person's point of view.

Neith's marriage both did and didn't fulfill the implications of her wedding-night flashback. By nearly any measure she was extremely successful, both as a wife and a writer: Between 1902 and 1910 she had four children—two girls and two boys—and published four books; on the publication of her second novel,
The Folly of Others
, a newspaper critic named her and Edith Wharton “the two most interesting young writers of 1904.” In 1908 she
helped Gertrude Stein publish her first book,
Three Lives
. In 1915 she banded together with Susan Glaspell and Eugene O'Neill to found the famous Provincetown Players
*
²
theater company, for which she wrote and produced her own plays. By 1923 she'd published three more novels, a memoir, and scores of short stories in major magazines. Her themes—among them the need for men and women alike to experience periods of sexual experimentation, and the struggle to retain autonomy in marriage—were progressive and germane at a time of great social upheaval and, as such, found a ready market. With her earnings she bought a farm outside Richmond, New Hampshire.

For all that, Neith didn't write or publish as much as she hoped. Had the couple not left such an extensive written record of their marriage—letters, diaries, obvious depictions in their plays and published books—it would be perfectly reasonable to attribute the roots of her dissatisfaction to the demands of domesticity. In 1911 Hutch's father bought the couple an enormous twenty-room house in Dobbs Ferry, a pastoral town just north of the city, and the family left the Village for good. For the next eleven years, Neith stayed home changing diapers while Hutch traveled around the country reporting for his book and newspaper articles, making a name for himself as an anarchist labor writer.

In truth, however, it was Neith's old
Vogue
editor, Mrs. Redding, who called the score when she warned her not to marry “that virile man.” Neith was by no means miserable; she loved her children and her husband, but life with him wasn't easy. Perhaps not surprisingly, he became interested in a form of free love popular among bohemians at the time, called “varietism.” Unlike standard-issue polyamory, in which one person shares her/himself
equally among several partners, varietists engage in multiple relationships in order to enhance the primary attachment—in other words, what today is called an open marriage, though at the time there was little precedent.

Make that a one-sided open marriage: Hutch kept the door open for himself, stepping out often, and obsessively urged Neith to, as well. She simply wasn't interested (in a letter to him she described varietism as “crude & unlovely—and besides, it takes all the zest out of sinning!”); she tended to stay home vacillating between genuine indifference and occasional jealousy. Those rare times she did attempt to test the waters, he, evidently, flipped out. In 1908, after she fell in love with his good friend and proposed a ménage à trois, Hutch, furious, grabbed her by the throat. Later that year she suffered a nervous breakdown.

In 1918 their first child, eighteen-year-old Boyce, died in the Spanish influenza pandemic, and in some ways Neith and Hutch never recovered. After publishing his sixth book in 1919, Hutch stopped book-writing for twenty years; in 1939 he published a wanly received memoir of his own cultural displacement,
A Victorian in the Modern World
, and he died five years later, in 1944, at seventy-five. As for Neith, in 1923 she published her last two books—a memoir about Boyce and a novel she'd been working on when he died—and then stopped writing altogether, other than sporadically working on her never-published memoir. In the 1930s she started drinking heavily. For the seven years after Hutch's death she lived with her daughter Beatrix, before dying in Provincetown in 1951, at seventy-nine.