For a while her letters to me went into the office files and then, because The New Yorker was rather absent-minded about its archives, I decided to keep them in a drawer in my desk, and so I still have them. They tended to be about animals — her cats, a black Labrador retriever who figures in some of her stories, a baby skunk she rescued from the cold; or unexplained ruminations that could have been lifted from her journal; or descriptions of some natural phenomenon like an ice storm; or about people, or about something imaginary; or about money: “I think I feel as Goldsmith must have done, that any money I get is spending money, and the grownups ought to pay the big ugly bills”; or about life: “All we have to face in the future is what has happened in the past. It is unbearable,” and in another letter, “There is no lesson to be learned from experience.”

Between these two grim statements I would like to place a note I once got from her, on pink paper and undated:

Dear William

it is all a fairy tale

best love

Maeve

These are our lives —

I can’t get over it

The Morning after the Big Fire

__________

FROM THE TIME I was almost five until I was almost eighteen, we lived in a small house in a part of Dublin called Ranelagh. On our street, all of the houses were of red brick and had small back gardens, part cement and part grass, separated from one another by low stone walls over which, when we first moved in, I was unable to peer, although in later years I seem to remember looking over them quite easily, so I suppose they were about five feet high. All of the gardens had a common end wall, which was, of course, very long, since it stretched the whole length of our street. Our street was called an avenue, because it was blind at one end, the farthest end from us. It was a short avenue, twenty-six houses on one side and twenty-six on the other. We were No. 48, and only four houses from the main road, Ranelagh Road, on which trams and buses and all kinds of cars ran, making a good deal of noisy traffic.