Mrs. Stevens Hears the Mermaids Singing Read online

  There in a Motel it had all happened, for Mar the first intoxicating experience of touch, of discovering inch by inch another body like his own, discovering it with awe, with tenderness, of being able to feel in the marrow of his bones his own sensation touching another in just the same way, above all of finding a climactic outlet at last for all the pent-up flood of feeling he had had to contain for so long. “I was alive!” He shouted in his rage. “I felt no guilt, do you understand?”

  “Yes.”

  “Do you remember what it’s like?” he asked in a hard voice.

  “Yes.”

  “I felt holy. I felt I had just been born.” Hilary caught the rasp in the hard voice like weeping. “Next morning Rufus wouldn’t speak to me. He doesn’t answer my letters. He’s through.”

  “It was too much for him,” Hilary said quietly, remembering the Dean and knowing very well what it must have been to have a pail of garbage thrown at this shining grace. “He panicked, don’t you see?”

  “And he’s right. And I’m wrong. That’s why I go out and sail half the night, don’t you see?”

  Well, it was worse and harder than she had supposed. She got up without a word, picked up the pitchfork, and went back to the iris bed and began to dig out hunks of grass. Mar stood there and watched her. Suddenly she flung down the tool in a gesture reminiscent of his own a few moments before. “Right? Wrong?” she said. “He doesn’t hear the mermaids singing, and you do. But that doesn’t mean he’s right, does it? Or maybe even that what’s right for you is right for him, dear boy.” She walked over and put a hand on his shoulder in a fraternal gesture. “The trouble is you’ve got to get through to him inside yourself; you’ve got to understand him, Mar, him as well as yourself … tough row to hoe.” She stood there with both hands in the pockets of her smock, rocking slightly on her heels. “The only way I can imagine doing it is to write some real poems. Poetry has a way of teaching one what one needs to know … if one is honest.”

  It was as if she and the boy were standing in a great cleared place. As if everything were to be begun again, for her as well as for him. When she told him to write poems, she was addressing her self also. Troubled, moved, she knew in herself the chaos that had to be born somehow out into harmony, had to be clarified. She felt the curious humming in her ears, the pressure.

  “Do you think I can? You said the first one was bad.”

  “It was bad,” she flashed back. “You don’t learn how in a day. Poetry is not feeling.”

  “What is it, then?”

  “Of course feeling first, but anyone can do that! Making a poem is something else, the ordering, the understanding of feeling. Not being, making.” She came to the point abruptly. “Begin by getting this Rufus down … a portrait, watching for birds maybe. Oh I don’t know. You know!” She gave him a keen hard look and decided to take the risk. “That poem was full of self-pity, Mar. You can’t afford self-pity. Too much is at stake. Your whole life maybe. Use your bean, start thinking!”

  “It seems to me I have been doing nothing else!”

  “Going around in a circle isn’t thinking. You have to find some way to get outside it, don’t you know? Try making a poem as if it were a table, clear and solid, standing there outside you.”

  “I don’t know how,” he said frowning his sullen frown.

  “Well, there’s nothing like trying. You’re all slack and seedy, slouching about here. Get your teeth into something hard!”

  His eyes narrowed. “You should have been a teacher.”

  “Oh no,” Hilary laughed, “that kind of power doesn’t interest me.” Then she took a cigarette out of her pocket and lit it, blowing out the smoke with a kind of joy. “Besides if you teach, you have to take them as they come, the dull, the amorphous, the half-baked. You have to care. I’m too busy with my own problems.”

  “I’m half-baked. You just told me so.”

  “Well, at least you’re in the oven!” On that they fell into a gust of giggles, and felt easy with each other again. It was the beginning of their real relationship, as if the decks were cleared. Mar knew now that she could accept him as he was; he could go to the limit of his being with her and not be denied. She accepted his suffering and his love as realities. For Hilary there was a listening ear again, a tension set up: as he began to fumble his way toward poetry, she felt in some way challenged by him, herself, as a poet. As if he were some jinni released from a bottle, he made huge strides, came into a kind of power so quickly that sometimes Hilary felt a stab of envy. She had the wit to lend him her Encyclopedia of Mythology, and somehow or other the tales of the great amoral beasts and gods unlocked his imagination. The poems were rough, violent, and rather gory, but they had thrust, and he was finding a style of his own, a short-cut language, often ungrammatical. He had an eye for the shape of a poem on the page. He used abrupt rhythms and …, a good sign, Hilary felt … he fought her criticisms with asperity, showed all the arrogance of the person who knows what he is doing. They often got angry with each other. For Mar took his turn at criticizing; the roughness, the honesty was tonic. Hilary cut her own poems to the bone, found herself drawing on the masculine side of her talent as she had not done since … really not since she had been a young girl. It was salutary to pit the new poems against someone so young and intransigeant—so ignorant too—who would have none of her hardwon virtuosity, who forced her back and back to the essence, who brought out the crude, original person. They fought bitterly, sometimes over a single word. Often she was in a rage when he left, but the rage shot adrenalin through her, gave her the strength to begin a poem again, tear it apart, make it harder and stronger so she could hurl it at Mar the next day in triumph. She had not imagined that she would be so fertilized by a human being again.

  Nevertheless, she thought, as she did finally get out of bed to begin the morning chores, she could have done without his violence and his depression just today. What she needed today was not the romantic impulse but the classic consideration. She needed distance, order, and not to be troubled by someone else’s problems. What could be the matter? Drat the boy! She had better pull on some clothes. It was nearly eight.

  The phone rang as she was carrying the tray downstairs, always a perilous business because she couldn’t see her feet The imperative ring hit her like a bullet. She stood halfway down while a wave of dizziness seized her and only just managed to get there before the ringing stopped.

  “Oh Alice.… I’m all right, just out of breath …, no, not possibly …, my dear woman, I never go to cocktail parties. Masses of people make me feel ill.… No doubt I am a lion, but I will not roar at your party! I sound cross? I am cross. What I want is to see you in peace, don’t you see? Not to have to get all gigged up and behave myself! … Well, sorry.”

  She put the receiver down, furious at her own agitation. Guilt would be sure to follow; it would take an hour for her to convince herself that if old friends tried to use her, now that she was suddenly a social asset again, they might as well learn. Oh dear. If one allowed a single crack in one’s armor, the wounds began to ache. She had not called on old Mrs. Balch for weeks, and she had promised to go and read Rose Macaulay’s letters aloud to her, and poor Philip was waiting, she knew, to be asked down over night for “a good talk” as he put it, which meant endless complaints about himself, his health, his loneliness, the general stupidity of the world, etc. I get so tired, she said to herself, resuming the dialogue, if they only knew. “They” who said, “How wonderful it must be to be a writer,” as if writing were a game of solitaire and one did not have to fight like a tiger for a moment’s peace and quiet! Not to mention the struggle itself, the daunting of the doddering old servant, the persistent will necessary to get down to it when one had finally clawed one’s way through to a piece of time.

  Well, she was dressed anyway, in one of the artist’s smocks she had used to wear in Paris—Mar liked them, and he would turn up, she supposed, any minute now. She paused for a moment at the mirror on
the kitchen wall to be reassured. “Pale as death,” she uttered to the mirror. The night had taken its toll. You can’t review a whole life, a life like mine, in twelve hours, and not feel the weight. “Up and at ’em!” she said aloud.

  First, the dishes must be washed. Fortunately she had had a window cut over the sink, so washing the dishes could be done absent-mindedly while looking out for birds. That oriole she had heard might be in the apple tree; also she could keep an eye out for Mar coming across the wall.

  But the dishes were dried and put away, and neither the oriole nor Mar had deigned to make an appearance. Hilary then made a list of things to do—she hoped she would be able to decipher it later on. It said “anchovy sandwiches for tea.” It said, “Be sure the tea pot is polished. Refill the sugar bowl. Lay the fire. Dig up an earthworm for the turtles if time.…” Her peace of mind was dependent on lists, but lately her hand had become so illegible that sometimes “house” looked like “mouse,” and she had hilarious moments when she read “Clean the mouse” or “prepare for marriage,” which she finally realized was actually “prepare the garbage” (the garbage collector came once a week).

  She gave one more anxious glance outdoors. No Mar. Well then, nothing to do but keep going. First things first, and the first thing was to take a look at the living room and see to the flowers. “They” always said, “What beautiful flowers you have!” But “they” never imagined how much time this irrelevant passion took from her work, at least an hour every morning in summer. No man would trouble about such things; the imaginary man in her mind got up at six, never made his bed, did not care a hoot if there were a flower or not, and was at his desk as bright as a button, at dawn, with a whole clear day before him while some woman out of sight was making a delicious hot stew for his supper. Hilary had often asked herself why she felt the need for flowers …, but there it was. The house felt empty and desolate without them. They were silent guests who must be made happy, and who gave the atmosphere a kind of soul. She went out with her scissors and cut two or three daffodils, one white one and one or two yellow ones, and a few poeticus narcissi, and let them arrange themselves in a Venetian glass, taking it with her into the big room, standing there in the doorway, seeing it all through the eyes of the interviewers, New York eyes, sophisticated eyes. Would they feel the order and the peace, as much a creation as any poem she had written? This room, too, gathered together a huge complex of living and harmonized it, all focused on the small intimate glimpse of sea cut through the scrub and brush, framed in French windows at the end. But would they disdain the flowered chintz on the sofa as old-fashioned? Would they register the two Impressionist paintings as not quite first class?

  Hilary went to the Venetian mirror, set the flowers on the table under it, then walked back to stand at the fireplace and observe the effect. There in the mirror across the room she caught a glimpse of herself as Sargent had captured her, in the drawing over the mantel, at twenty five. There stood Age with Youth, like a ghost, suspended over her head. Without her glasses, Hilary saw the two figures as slightly blurred, as if seen through water …, they seemed strangely alike, as perhaps they were; one does not become less oneself with the years, but more so; that self-intoxicated, quizzical young charmer was less than the Hilary confronting her with just the same slightly mocking lift of her chin.

  She was not really seeing with her eyes. As always in this room, she was borne away on half-conscious stretches of memory. What “they” never understood about her solitary life was that it was a solitude so inhabited by the past, that she was never alone in it, except sometimes in the rich disorder of her work room upstairs. There the past did not exist; it was all and only the arduous joyful present.

  The Venetian mirror, eighteenth century, in a delicate scrolled gold frame, the glass clouded as if a ghostly breath had clouded it, had been a wedding present, the only thing Hilary had managed to keep.with her from that time. It had hung in hotel rooms, in lodgings, in rented cottages in England, in Vermont, who knows where? For Hilary it kept the natural warmth of her marriage alive, far better than did the faded photographs of herself and Adrian in ridiculous dated clothes. So now what came vividly to her mind, with its particular appropriateness to the day, was the morning when she and Adrian had first hung the mirror in their Chelsea flat. She remembered a beam of sunlight crossing its watery depths, and Adrian saying,

  “There, now we can invite a duchess to tea!”

  Hilary had always longed for someone who would tease her, and love her, and accept her as she was. She could lie in the crook of Adrian’s arm and stare at the ceiling, and feel absolutely sheltered and safe. He was as limpid as a Mozart Sonata, as unassuming and deep. When she had tantrums, he just looked at her with delight, told her how pretty she looked when she was angry, and hauled her out to walk it off along the river, taking her whole arm and holding it close to his side, so clearly confident of his own power, that she believed it, believed that he was the answer to all doubt, that she was moored at last. It was immensely real on the level on which it existed, their marriage, rooted in the endearing physical world—riding (Adrian had taught her to jump, and how patient and gentle he was when she panicked!), dancing, laughing, making love. Those three precious years had been like a long summer holiday, a rest, the only one she would ever have, from obsession, anxiety, and work. Once Adrian had found her sitting at the little chinoiserie desk (it had no resemblance to a work table), her chin on her hand, and had asked,

  “A penny for your thoughts!”

  “They’re not worth a penny,” she had said, because she could not bear to hurt him, and because also she wanted to pretend even to herself that her life with him was all she needed or wanted. How could she say to this total being, “I am still sometimes haunted by demons. I want to write poems. I want to feel the pull of the impossible again.… I want to be myself.”

  “Aren’t you yourself with me?” he would have asked, smiling in the pleasure of himself, in the pleasure of her, his wife. He would have asserted their union by lifting her right off her chair and taking her to bed where the particulars of selfhood were submerged in the great primal darkness, where their union was deep and complete enough to transcend the personal, and Hilary felt carried out of herself on a tide of urgency and renewal. Why then did she sometimes wake the next morning with depression hanging over her like a fog? Would it have been different if they had created the child they each wanted so much? It was troubling to feel sometimes so empty, emptied out of herself.

  Adrian, on the other hand, was driven by an inexhaustible urge for life, and life for him meant using his physical being to the limit of his strength, and beyond. He refused to pay any attention to his old wounds (shrapnel had had to be extracted from four different places), though he sometimes felt sick after riding too hard, but laughed it off, took some medicine, and a half an hour later was off to play tennis. After all, he had survived the trenches. What could touch him now? And if he took to drinking rather a lot, so did everyone else in their world. They were surrounded by ghosts; all of them like Adrian had lost all but two or three of the friends they had known at Eton and Oxford. The gay parties, where women always outnumbered men, had their poignance. You could be wild, funny, eccentric, but you must not weep or ever, ever look back; war was the one taboo subject, but it was always there at the feast, looking out of a drunken eye, or making a loud laugh suddenly harsh and bitter.

  Sometimes lying in the dark, hearing Adrian’s heart beat against her temple as she lay in the crook of his arm, Hilary felt his mystery, the mystery of all those who had come back and could not talk about it. Somewhere inside that warm, life-giving body, there was a great black cavern; there was more death than could be stomached. She ran a finger along his cheek, and down his neck, and across his great shield of a breast, touched the bone under her palm, and came to the crisscross thread of the wound, as if she were exploring a sacred object; she felt reverence, but no real understanding. What could their life be like as it
went on? What are we rooted in? she wondered in those panics of early dawn. Adrian’s job was a made job in an insurance company of which an uncle was member of the board. It meant little or nothing except as a painless way of paying bills until he came into his inheritance. She, on the other hand, was famous or infamous as the writer of a first novel which had had a succès de scandale … the last thing she had wanted or expected, not realizing that honest probing of matters generally discussed with lifted eyebrows at dinner tables could shock. And, in fact, her marriage had proved a refuge from anonymous letters and a kind of notoriety which induced such distaste in its subject that Hilary thought for a time that she would never again commit herself to print. She married Adrian in a total revulsion from one part of herself, yet whether she ever published a word again or not she could not stop being the person she was. There was the rub! She was young, witty, on the defensive, and more than once at a dinner party, she had let herself go, had talked from her own center, honestly, had enjoyed feeling her powers in action, until she had caught Adrian’s look across the table, a troubled look, a slightly hostile look. Afterwards she had an attack of self-doubt. “I talked too much, didn’t I?” she asked while they drank cocoa before going to bed.

  “You were brilliant.”

  “Oh.”

  “What’s wrong?”

  “It’s evidently wrong to be brilliant. You didn’t like it, did you?”

  “Well,” Adrian said warily, for by now he. had learned to be wary, “You are rather intense, you know. You take everything so hard, Hilary … it isn’t quite.…”

  “Done?” And she could hear the rising shrillness in her voice, feel the tiger she tried so hard to keep out of sight, begin to pace and lash its tail. “Sometimes I feel I can never be my real self here. I’m an American, after all.”

  “Yes, darling, I know,” he said gently. “But could you be your real self at home, if by that you mean being more naked and more honest than most people ever dare to be?”