by Gail Sheehy
I went into Maura’s room to wake her. “Quick, get dressed, honey! I want you to see the surprise on our new doorstep!” I pulled on jeans and a shirt. Maura squealed over the bird.
“How did it get here?”
“It’s from Robin, my Irish sculptor friend. He remembered about our lovebird.”
Robin returned with jelly doughnuts and coffee and a bunch of jolly yellow mums. Maura fixed the flowers while I made us eggs. Robin was in the United States as a visiting writer at a North Carolina university. He wanted to invite me to come down for a weekend book festival that fall.
Maura asked if the bird would sit on her finger. “Oh, yes, they’re very tame,” Robin said. “Try it.”
The baby parrot was peach faced with a green body and looked like he was blushing. We were all captivated. Who knows what false move spooked him? Suddenly he was flapping around the dining room and then disappeared. We found him in my bedroom where the windows were wide open. Maura shrieked, “He’s going to fly into the park and get eaten by crows!”
“No he’s not!” I said. I slammed down the windows, one after the other.
Robin, the only one with the composure to find towels, led us in the chase. It turned into a great scramble with the poor bird squawking and flapping. Each of us failed by inches until Maura delicately dropped a blanket over the bird. The noise stopped. I lifted him back into his cage and covered it to calm him down. Up until this point, I had sworn to be guided by the Chinese proverb about cultivating creativity, “Before spontaneity comes discipline.” I was pretty good at discipline. Robin was all spontaneity. His presence reminded me that we need a healthy dose of both.
OVER THE NEXT YEARS, I enjoyed an emancipated bachelor woman’s life.
Traveling for research and speaking engagements brought me in contact with intriguing new men. Like most women in their mid- to late thirties, I was probably at the peak of my physical attractiveness. And being single, I was shamelessly flirtatious. The senator often came up to New York, and our romance blossomed, but like a day lily, not a perennial. I enjoyed dates with a dashing foreign correspondent, and dinners prepared by a documentary TV producer, curly headed and concupiscent, who once danced me through a rainstorm on the beach. My friend Chota at Air India introduced me to his eclectic clan of diplomats, filmmakers, and foodie friends. And how could I forget the painter with the body of a ballet dancer?
As I sit here collecting these memories into a list, I realize that it may sound as though they were superficial flings. On the contrary. They all evolved from infatuations into relationships and grew into lifelong friendships that I cherish. And then there was Jack and the spell of Sligo in the Celtic twilight.
Jack Deacy, a red-bearded Irishman with a perpetual laugh, was a writer I met while we were both contributing to the Irish issue of New York. When I was offered the loan of a house in Dublin by an Irish government official, it seemed curative to go back to Ireland under more promising circumstances. Once ensconced in an elegant Georgian town house with a lovely garden and mild weather, I yearned to throw a party. I discovered that Deacy was in Dublin and invited him. He brought along the actors and playwrights and newspaper people he knew. It turned into a long, lugubrious night at the end of which Clay called from London to ask me to join him for the weekend at David Frost’s. Deacy answered the phone. Clay was not pleased. Assuming that I was having a flaming affair—and worse, with another Irishman—he accused me of betrayal.
“But I can’t have an affair—we’re not married!”
As the English say, I might as well be hung for a sheep as a lamb. Deacy wanted to show me the west of Ireland. We drove up to Yeats country, reading to each other from The Collected Poems of W. B. Yeats. After driving around the shivering deep blue of Lough Gill, we found a beautiful old hotel, the Abbey Inn, in Dromahair. We had just finished reading a Yeats poem about Dromahair, “The Man Who Dreamed of Faeryland.” Deacy had an uncle, a musician-farmer, who lived nearby. He brought his traditional Celtic band to the hotel to play for us. The frenetic tin whistling and reel after reel of furious thumping on goatskin drums got us up and dancing until we ran out of breath. When we walked outside for air, astonished at the green of the fields lit by the full moon of a late Celtic twilight, we noticed a two-story stucco house next door. A For Rent sign hung on it.
I dreamed that night of living in this magical land.
The next day we met the genial owner of the hotel, Jack McGoldrick. He showed us the house with its six bedrooms and kitchen and commodious common room. If we knew any Americans who wanted an inexpensive getaway, with a bar and restaurant right next door . . . the owner had read my mind. When something sounds too good to be true, it probably is. But by then, I was hopelessly beguiled by the poetic Irish soul and the mellow beauty of Yeats country.
“What if we got some of our Irish writer friends to go in together and rent the place?” I said to Deacy over our picnic lunch. “We all need an inspiring oasis to write our books—each of us could maybe take it for part of the year.”
“A writers’ collective; I like it,” Deacy enthused.
And then we read another Yeats poem. I can’t resist reprinting the final stanza of “The Song of Wandering Aengus”:
Though I am old with
wandering
Through hollow lands and
hilly lands,
I will find out where she has gone,
And kiss her lips and take her
hands;
And walk among long dappled
grass,
And pluck till time and times are
done,
The silver apples of the moon,
The golden apples of the sun.
Why wait until we were “old with wandering” to make this little dream come true? The poem had given us a title for the writers’ house. Mr. McGoldrick, an uncommonly enterprising man, showed up the next morning with our title freshly painted on a sign.
GOLDEN APPLES OF THE SUN
SILVER APPLES OF THE MOON
A WRITERS’ COLLECTIVE
Then he quoted an unbelievably reasonable tariff. That clinched it. I telephoned Pete Hamill—he loved the idea—and Dennis Duggan, the bureau chief of New York Newsday—he couldn’t wait. It was agreed we would each take four months of the year. Before Deacy and I left, Mr. McGoldrick brought around his finest horse. “Would your daughter fancy him?” he asked. As I looked on the noble black stallion, haughty but friendly, all rationality deserted me. Maura loved horses and had been riding since she was a young child. A penny was pressed into my hand and I pressed it back into the owner’s hand, sealing the deal, Irish style. I went back to New York with a house and a horse. Of course, when it came time to collect for the shares in the house, everybody backed out.
I was able to negotiate my way out of the rental, but I was responsible for the animal’s keep, and he ate like a horse! Keeping him in hay was costing more than I paid for the meatless spaghetti that kept my child and me fed while I wrote the book. Fortunately, my good friend Tom Baer, a top-tier corporate lawyer, offered to take on, pro bono, what he called “the Dobbin case.” He saved me from a lifetime of supporting Dobbin.
MAURA WAS AT THE AGE to leave the relaxed, nurturing environment of Grace Church elementary school and move up to middle school. To my delight, she was accepted at the Brearley School, an all-girls enclave with a sterling reputation. This was one of my most cherished dreams: to provide my daughter with a first-class education. I used the full palette of the con artist in every good reporter to persuade my bank officer to give me a loan: “If you help me to pay for my daughter’s private schooling, I’ll give you my first mortgage.” He laughed, he sympathized, he signed. If I could give my child a better start in life than I had, I would work my heart out for the rest of my life to pay for it.
“Mommy, you gotta believe me, it’s like a game with too many rules,” Maura whimpered after the first few days at Brearley. The school had exceptionally high expectations
for each student to shine. Maura was bothered by a not-so-subtle class bias against anyone who didn’t belong to the privileged East Side establishment. Some of the mothers wouldn’t let their girls cross town to play with her, as if the West Side was some depraved lower depths populated by theater people, artists, writers, musicians, and flaming former Trotskyites (which it was).
Even though I was there every day when she came home, Maura did not have my full attention. When her eager face tipped up and the flood of words burst forth describing her day, my mind might still be tangled up in the knot of a chapter that I couldn’t unravel. Or fretting about how to pay the bills that week. When my bank balance was precarious, I would have to scare up a magazine assignment and rush off to profile a newsmaker. The life of a freelance writer is a roller coaster, but the ride shifts from full speed to sudden jolting stops. I was exhilarated by the scope of the book I had undertaken. But most of the time during Maura’s childhood, while I was struggling to find my way as a single mother, I looked only for external validation. I desperately needed to be successful as a writer. That was the ticket to self-esteem, since I had failed at marriage and was only half a parent.
I relied on Maura during those dutiful ages of nine to twelve to Xerox and file and assuage the volatile moods of an isolated freelance writer. My flashes of temper were sudden and sometimes extreme, like an Irish cloudburst. For me, moments later I could feel the shaft of sunlight, a calming. Yet anyone who had experienced that storm would feel drenched in apprehension and anger, and not fully safe around me again. I never blamed Maura, but being a child, she naturally felt somehow responsible for my distress. She was my comforter. When I slammed the closet door, she would write me a note saying she was sorry to have upset me, when she hadn’t. She took care of me as much as I took care of her. It wasn’t a fair swap.
What stays most vividly in my memory about those next three years is how attached Maura and I became once Clay’s demands no longer came between us. Her personality began to bloom. She had always made friends easily. Maura had a double set of intuitive antennae, reading people better than I could, inhaling everything deeply: adult conversations, dramatic plays, books. When we went skiing with a controversial author (who wrote for Clay), Jerzy Kosinski, and his girlfriend, Maura became engrossed in Kosinski’s most phantasmagorical novel, The Painted Bird. She couldn’t be pried off her air mattress until she’d finished all 234 pages. “That’s the best novel I ever read,” she told the author over dinner. It was the first adult novel she had ever read. She was only ten, but she got it.
Maura had a droll sense of humor. I loved seeing through her eyes the comical side of what was going on around us. And she certainly saw the comedy of me. She kept after me to give up cigarettes. “I’ll stop as soon as I finish this story,” I must have said countless times. One day she crossed her arms and stared at me: “Mom, writers are never finished.” That stopped me.
We got our first dog, a Lhasa apso, and named her Ms. in recognition of the new feminist appellation. Ms. went sledding with us on snow days and snuggled with us while Maura and I read together. I often fell asleep beside her. Then, around nine or so, a second wind would send me back to my bedroom and my brand-new IBM Selectric typewriter. Chewing on celery sticks and carrots, I would write until past midnight.
In the fall of ’73 I had to go on a tour for Hustling, my book on the world of prostitution. It started with my first national TV appearance, on the late-night Jack Paar show. It was a disaster. The aging comedian had planted a prostitute in the studio who shouted insults at me for exposing a “noble profession.” I called my mother right after the show to ask how badly I’d handled it.
Her answer spoke volumes. “I’m flying up to New York, honey. I’ll go with you on your tour.” How wonderful to have a mother who was now well and was able to be there for me.
But I had developed a fear of flying. Not the kind Erica Jong made famous with her startling book of that name. It wasn’t the “zipless fuck” that I was afraid of; it was death. Immediately following the traumas in Ireland, I had fled home on a turbulent flight and my anxieties became attached to flying. “Conversion reaction,” they call it. After appearing on The Phil Donahue Show, the flight between Dayton and Cincinnati through an electrical storm was a nine on the terror scale. My mother and I bailed on the connecting flight to New York and took a sleeper train. It was so bumpy, my mother fell out of her berth. The next morning I developed a new appreciation for a smooth jet plane ride to New York. And a surge of appreciation for my sweet sober mother. I took her to lunch at the Four Seasons and put her on a plane back to Florida.
I needed a wife.
God answered my prayers. She came in a guise that I didn’t recognize, as so often happens with God doings. When I opened the door for Ella Council, a dark-skinned African American woman sent by a household employee agency, my first thought was, This won’t work. We sat together on the sofa and had coffee and the interview was more than satisfactory. But I couldn’t ignore the elephant in the room.
“Ms. Council, let me be frank. Do you think, at this time of racial tensions, that a black woman can work for a white woman and not burn with resentment?”
Ella Council tilted her head and surveyed my face, then tilted her head the other way and stared me straight in the eye, and said, “Ms. Sheehy, I like your smile.”
Gail’s support system: Ella Council and Gail’s sister, Pat (Trish) Klein.
That was it. Almost. Ella and I had to test each other. Two weeks after she started, her Harlem apartment was robbed. Shaken, she asked to borrow the money to buy a decent security alarm; she would pay it back from her next paycheck. When she did, our bond of trust was sealed. Ella Council turned herself inside out to be my household manager, and when I traveled, she slept in to be Maura’s surrogate mother. She would stick by me, and I by her, for the next thirty-six years.
CLAY HAD HIS OWN FLINGS, with Barbra Streisand (I think) when she was flogging the dubious talents of her hairstylist boyfriend, Jon Peters, and wanted Clay to publish an article he had written about producing her remake of the film A Star Is Born. Clay played with the fire of mother-daughter rivalry by dating Kay Graham’s daughter, Lally Weymouth. As an Anglophile, he was easily captivated by the talented English novelist Sally Beauman, until she tried to browbeat him into espousing her Eaton Square Marxist views. Years later, I was touched to read a letter that his ex-wife, Pamela Tiffin, had written to him during that period of our estrangement. “I hear that you have stopped seeing Gail Sheehy. Don’t be foolish. She is a woman of fine character and great talent. Be good to her.”
The magnetism between Clay and me never did subside. Although we gave ourselves to others, we never gave up on each other. Once I buckled down to doing the research for the book on couples, I made a point of staying away from him, even from the editorial lunches he held at the Palm restaurant. I missed seeing the “family.” I missed giggling when Clay’s attention would be occupied by the slow transit of a slab of steak while he tried to listen to the drone of a boring mayoral candidate, his chin bobbing up and down to his chest, until he dozed off. I missed him.
Rumors swirled that Clay had bought the Village Voice. All the New York magazine contributors were summoned to the office for an important editorial meeting. I wrestled with myself but finally went. I said little at the meeting and avoided his glance. Stepping out of the closet-size toilet room, I was surprised to see him waiting for me. Would I ride uptown with him? I was speechless. My stomach wrenched like an old-fashioned washing machine, go, don’t go, yes, go, no no. He picked up my work bag and slid an arm around my back, his hand warm and possessive against a place that had not felt a man’s hand in a while.
As he got into the taxi behind me, he blurted, “It was so painful and exquisite to have you in my office again today. I was overwhelmed by longing. Gail, we’re part of each other. We’re each other’s history.”
I must have given him a cool and guarded look, so defended
was I against falling into another loop of passion followed by his retreat from commitment. Outside of his building, he stood on the curb with the cab door open. “I just have to run in and pick up my bags. I’m going to Europe for a week’s vacation.”
“How nice, with whom?”
“With myself.”
“What a waste.”
The mask of command slid off to reveal a boy’s eyes pleading for affection. “You wouldn’t ride out to the airport with me, would you?”
I hesitated. The churning. The door stood open.
“Hey, mistuh, you goin’ or comin’, I gotta start the meter again.”
“Run the meter and keep the lady happy,” he told the cabbie and, smiling, disappeared into his building.
Once inside the taxi, he resumed his role as my mentor. Had Dutton agreed to let me change the focus of the book from couples to the stages of adulthood? Yes. How was the writing going? It felt like swimming the English Channel. Would I still write for him? Of course. Suddenly, his head was nudging into my shoulder, his mouth nibbling my lips. He was hungering for the very certainty from which he would surely later back away. He said he was hoping his vacation in Europe would give him time to decide.
“But I’ve already decided,” I said.
He didn’t give me time to talk. He pulled me into his arms. “I don’t want to lose you.” He pulled his raincoat over us. We fondled and stroked each other. The world dissolved. I felt my power, the power women have to make men fall in love with us.
“Oh, Gail, you are the center of my life.”
“You want the center of my life to be your world. I can’t give you that now. I’ve been giving myself to the book and it’s working.”
