Spinster (43 page)

After I hung up with Maeve's niece, she e-mailed Edith Konecky, and Konecky e-mailed me, writing, “I knew her as well as one can know someone who is going mad, and I think I may have been the last person she trusted.”

Now here I was in downtown Manhattan on a cold February afternoon in 2013, walking from the subway to her apartment. The winteriness felt appropriate. Maeve loved snow and rain, and living by the ocean in the off-season, when the beaches were
empty. She loved so many things—cats, dogs, roses, people—that sometimes I wonder if she chose to be alone to best enjoy them all.

When I knocked on Konecky's apartment door, a dark-haired, middle-aged woman answered—Konecky's widowed niece, who'd started living there part-time that very week. She took my coat as her aunt approached. Tall and white-haired, with a mischievous glint in her eye, Konecky radiated charisma. Had her hands not trembled as she reached to get ice for our Scotch and sodas, I wouldn't have believed she'd just turned ninety.

I offered to manage the ice myself, and she led us into a spacious, book-lined living room, where she settled into a rocking chair and I sank into a plush, orange-striped sofa that bore an uncanny resemblance to the marmalade cat that now climbed into her lap. Konecky has published six books; the most recent, a novel called
Love and Money
, came out in 2011.

I asked when she'd first met Maeve.

“Nineteen seventy-two,” she said. Just a few months after Maeve published “The Springs of Affection.” Konecky was five years younger, fifty. “We were at the MacDowell Colony, in New Hampshire. I walked into the dining room, and there was a woman sitting at a table with a brown paper bag on her head, so of course I went over and sat there.”

“I'd have done the same!” I laughed, delighted and astonished. MacDowell was the artists' colony I'd gone to in 2006, the first time I'd tried to write about Maeve. I'd had no idea that she'd been there, too.

“She explained she'd just come from the beauty parlor and her hair wasn't dry,” Konecky continued. “I was fascinated by her—her Irish accent and quick wit. Cats weren't allowed, but she was there with at least five of them.

“Everything Maeve did was crazy.” She laughed. “She was very busy feeding and cleaning up after the cats all the time. One day she went downtown and found a little kitten in the snow. She
picked it up, put it in her coat, and went around to all the shops to ask whose it was. Nobody claimed it. For a while, I kept finding it in my bedroom—I'd pick it up and return it to Maeve's.”

One night Konecky went to bed and found the cat curled up adorably on her blankets. She asked Maeve if she should just keep it. Maeve said, “That cat needs a person, and you need a cat! I've been putting her on your bed every night.”

Konecky chuckled. “I'd never had cats. I never thought I'd like them. Maeve said that everyone should have a cat named Minnie. And so I named it Minnie, and that's how I came to cats.”

I tried to make eye contact with the cat in Konecky's lap and decided that, four decades on, the probability of her being one and the same Minnie was highly unlikely.

When she mentioned the name Elaine Dundy, my slack grasp on time loosened even further. I'd interviewed Dundy in 2007 about her 1958 novel,
The Dud Avocado
, considered the first-ever instance of what we now call “chick lit.” In it, the plucky American protagonist, Sally Jay Gorce, says about women, “It just isn't our century.” So I'd asked Dundy, at the time eighty-five, what she thought about the evolution of available heroines over the course of her lifetime. She told me that in 1964 she and a friend were so fed up with their era's “passive and put-upon” heroines that they decided to produce a magazine about it. “We published it in what you would call ‘menstrual red,' ” she said. “So I think I was ahead of everyone in saying that women are getting a very bad deal.” Dundy died the year after we spoke, in 2008.

One night at MacDowell, Maeve and Konecky and Dundy got very drunk. “Dundy was wearing a brown sweater, and Maeve
hated
that particular shade of brown, so when Dundy passed out, Maeve took the sweater and announced, ‘She'll never see that one again!' ”

I was in heaven listening to Konecky talk—memories, stories, gossip.

Another time, Konecky looked at Maeve with all her cats and said, “What are you? A woman who writes or a woman who keeps cats?”

Maeve said, “I'm putting them down, and you'll drive me.”

“Why not just set them free?” Konecky asked.

“It would be a terrible thing to think about them cold and lost,” Maeve explained. “I'd much rather think of them floating on a cloud.” And so she brought them to a vet and had them all killed.

“That,” Konecky said, “is how I knew she was a good Catholic.”

Then she added: “She was mad by then, and getting madder.”

One evening back in the city Maeve invited several women over for drinks in a bar she'd set up in her living room. At some point, a man walked in, an odd fellow from the colony whom Maeve obviously couldn't stand. She yelled at him to get out. He did. After he left, Konecky warned Maeve to be careful, because that man was clearly “schizo.” Maeve said, “I am, too!”

For a while, Maeve slept in one of Konecky's bedrooms.

“What was she like as a houseguest?” I asked.

Konecky mused. “She wasn't like a guest. She was always rather critical of me. Why wasn't I writing? Why hadn't I finished that book? Why was I involved with that woman?” (Konecky was married until her forties, when she was seduced by a woman at a different artists' colony and realized she was bisexual.)

Maeve was undeniably complicated to be around, but she was clearly a devoted, generous friend, always encouraging Konecky to fight her insecurities and write. In 1976, when Konecky finally published her first book, an excellent coming-of-age novel called
Allegra Maud Goldman
, Maeve provided a blurb: “The only thing wrong with Edith's novel is that it's too short.”

Thirteen years later, in 1989, when Konecky published her second novel,
A Place at the Table
, she and Maeve were no longer in touch. The book closes with a heartrending chapter in which the protagonist, Rachel, thinks she's spotted her old friend Deirdre in the East Village. “I don't know why I looked a second time, bag ladies are such a common sight,” she says. But she does look—“dressed in layers of filthy rags, she is running clumsily on broken shoes in pursuit of a stray cat”—and when the woman disappears down the steps to the L train, Rachel nervously follows her onto the subway and finds a seat directly across from her:

The fingernails are bitten to the quick, the hands are dirty and veined, but they are Deirdre's hands, disproportionately large and strong for the rest of her…. There is no sign of recognition…. Her teeth must be gone, I think…. Her teeth, the inky black of her hair, probably her spirit, all gone.

Rachel silently studies her for several stops, until out of nowhere Deirdre says, “You've lost weight, Rachel.” The conversation that follows is disjointed, jarring. At some point Deirdre says, “Why are you following me? What are you doing here?”

“Is it morbid curiosity?” Then, her voice rising to a scream, really frightening me, she asks, “Am I that fate worse than death?”

I stare at her.

“Is that what it is? Are you using me to face your own fears? Or to eva-a-a-de them?”

I am too shaken to respond.
Is
it that I need to know the worst that can happen?
Is
this the worst that can happen?…

“
Answer
me, Rachel.” She spreads her arms wide, a theatrical gesture. She was never given to theatrical gestures. “I am calling to you from the black abyss that you have always known
was there,” she chants, like a witch, like a wraith, “the abyss that you have always skirted so glibly. Am I your demon, your doppelganger, your dark side?”

“I think so. Maybe,” I say. “Yes.”

She sighs. “Well, I am not,” she says in her normal voice.

The spell has broken. They talk amicably until they reach Canarsie, the end of the line (“Cheap symbolism,” Deirdre mutters), and the train doubles back. Deirdre rummages in the dirty bags at her feet, producing a bottle of wine and two smudged plastic tumblers. They toast each other's health, inquire after mutual friends, family, their work. When Deirdre says she doesn't write anymore because there's nothing more to write about, Rachel thinks to herself how much there is for her to write about: “Confessions of a New York Bagperson, Living Off the Land, The Woman Who Threw It All Away, Slouching Toward Canarsie, Waiting for Godot, Queen Lear.”

As the train passes under the East River Deirdre says, “I watch and I listen…and I think about what I have seen and heard…. Yes. That is what I do. The really frightening thing in life, I think, lies in our capacity for inattentiveness to it.”

“Maybe she's right,” Rachel muses to herself. “Maybe that's why we do it, why we write, why we live. Because we're interested. Curious. Attentive. Because we're children who've never acquired blinders.”

Back at Fourteenth Street Rachel gets off the train knowing that she'll never see her old friend again.

The book is fiction, yet the scene is so intense, it feels real. I asked Konecky if it had actually happened.

“I saw a woman chasing a cat outside the subway at Fourteenth
Street and First Avenue,” she said. “She was shabby. A bag lady. It could've been Maeve. I hadn't heard from her in a while. So I imagined it was her and followed her down into the subway—but from there on out it's fiction. She hadn't been put away yet.”

The cat slunk off her lap and wandered down the hall.

“She kept looking for a place that felt like home,” Konecky said, “and never found it.”