Mrs. Stevens Hears the Mermaids Singing Page 6

  She got up and went indoors, driven by the cold and anxiety to her desk, the one place where, during the hours she sat there, neither death nor taxes nor any present trouble could come near. Her desk was set perpendicular to a dormer window; so she sat with the sea on her left, and on her right a solid wall of books. Files of all shapes and sizes were scattered about; she used one as added desk space. On this, she noted with dismay, was a sheaf of old letters, part of her last night’s orgy. Stupid of her to have left them there, like wide open eyes she did not want to meet. Her life, which only a few moments before, had swung safely in the divine present of the May morning, now threatened to overpower her. She had come upstairs to work, not to relive what had better be left like the compost heap, to its own slow burning and self-renewal.

  What had been so disturbing during the night had been to endure the wake of the great wave of memories on which she had been transported, opening up all those boxes … the appalling complex of people who had entered deeply into her life, who had influenced, and changed, and enriched her. And it was absolutely untrue, she had discovered, to believe that age would diminish her power both to attract and to be attracted, to rush in to the collision with a new consciousness, to feel herself opening up like a sea anemone in the rich flood of feeling for a new person. Old, young, male, female—her capacity to be touched, to be involved, to care was, she realized, that still of a young girl. How did one keep growing otherwise? What was life all about otherwise? What separates us from animals except just this—that we can be moved by each other, and not primarily for sexual purposes? Granted, of course, that any deep collision, any relationship which profoundly affects one comes from the whole person, and can almost instantaneously shift from one phase to another, so that sex is never wholly absent and may come into play. Yes, that was the rub …, for then there is conflict. Someone gets hurt. And it was no use remembering that often she had been the hurt one: the fact remained that she had inevitably hurt others. “But I regret nothing,” she said aloud and firmly. For it hurts to be alive, and that’s a fact, but who can regret being alive and being for others, life-enhancing? We shall be dead a long time. Quite deliberately Hilary stuffed the letters into a drawer and bent her head toward the much-crossed-out worksheet of the poem she thought she might just possibly take by surprise and bring to an end on this morning of superior tension.

  After a time, and when she had murmured some lines aloud, she shot a sheet of paper onto the typewriter and tapped out with one finger what she had in her mind, tore it out, and began to scribble changes and queries into the margins. She became wholly absorbed, was not aware of the crick in her shoulder, nor of the French clock chiming eleven and then twelve. At twelve she laid the sheets aside. It had been a wild hope that she could solve the puzzle in two hours. Still, she had made a start. There was now one really good line, an armature for the whole poem.… Yes.

  “Good Heavens! The mail!” For once, because she was orbiting outside her usual routine, she had forgotten this daily blessing and curse. Usually she was standing at the mailbox when the postman drove up. Sometimes Mr. Willoughby was the only human being she spoke to during a whole day, and sometimes he brought a piece of fish with him for Sirenica, the shameless flirt, who had laid a spell on him with her blue eyes. But today of course he had long since come and gone; Sirenica was sitting beside the mailbox washing her face. Hilary reached in and found the usual packet of journals and letters. The very sight of it exhausted her, yet there was (she could not deny) always the same stab of expectation and of hope.… What surprise, what unexpected joy might be lurking among all the bills and requests for attention? And of course there was The New York Times.

  As always, when Hilary came out from the burrow of her work room, she saw everything with a rinsed eye. Now she sat down in the rocker in the kitchen and was dazzled by the beauty of a long slanting slab of sunlight on the white plaster wall. One might, she supposed, sit and take it in for half an hour, but say it? Next to impossible. These moments of vision when quite simple things became extraordinary were what she always meant to “get down,” but the impulse wavered, or got pushed aside. Hilary had always imagined that one of the blessings of old age would be that one might live by and for these essentials … the light on a wall. Instead one dragged around this great complex hive of sensation and feeling. “Bother!” she uttered, eagerly unfolding the Times to the obituaries.

  Well, thank goodness, for once no one had died. Lately it had been a holocaust—everyone, it seemed, was dying. And what really was the point of living on, if one was to be the sole survivor of one’s world? No one to depend on any more, no one who really mattered. Hilary could not get accustomed to having become herself the older generation, nor could she really believe that the young might wait for a word of praise from her, as she had waited—so long, always—for a word of praise from her elders. These were dangerous thoughts; she warded off the tide of depression which might begin to rise at any moment now, by turning to the letters. First she tore open several second-class envelopes. Bishops in South Africa asking alms, the Civil Liberties Union, Core, Care. God knows, they all seemed to think that if you gave your mite, it should be doubled within the month! After this freight of anguish, and the inevitable rousing of guilt and shame—Why was she not richer? Why was she so selfish?—Hilary turned over a long envelope which might prove interesting. It contained a letter from a ninth-grade girl in a school in New Jersey, asking her to say in a few words why she, Hilary, wrote poetry and just how she wrote a poem. Only that! At once Hilary began inventing an answer: Dear Miss So-and-So, You are monstrously lazy and ill-bred; you think nothing of asking me to spend a morning answering two idiotic portmanteau questions.

  But of course she would never write any such letter …, instead, the effort of toning down her irritation and finding two or three appropriate sentences, might take a half hour tomorrow morning. Bother! It was to be that kind of mail, was it? For the next envelope contained a sheaf of terrible poems with a request for criticism; the hand was elderly; the need, obvious. The third letter she opened, by now exasperated, was from a publisher, asking her to read and, if possible, say a few words about a new novel (on its way in bound galleys under separate cover). There were two more of the same ilk. The house, Hilary sometimes imagined, would be buried under the avalanche of books, and she would never again be able to choose what she would read.

  So this was fame at last! Nothing but a vast debt to be paid to the world in energy, in blood, in time. And lucky she who had escaped it for forty-five years!

  At last Hilary turned up two personal letters from the huge pile, and tore into them happily. One was from her old school-friend, Nancy, the only one with whom she still kept in touch. Nancy, desperate as usual, though she was now a grandmother, fighting her life out inch by inch, valiant, original. “Dear Nancy!” Hilary murmured as she read, “Oh Hilary didn’t you think one would feel less naked in old age? Or at least not quite so desperate? Bob’s little boy has leukemia; my own Bob is in one of his remote states when I feel I married a zombie forty years ago. The garden is devoured by slugs. How are you? I hope you are thriving … do I really? No, I really hope you are so badgered by having become a celebrity that you will fly over and stay for weeks. You must admit that if we don’t manage to meet soon, one of us will be dead and the other, sorry.”

  No one is happy, Hilary thought, not Mar, not Nancy—and fifty years between them. Am I happy? She asked herself and was surprised to find that the immediate response from some inner part of her being was, “Yes … yes and no …,” but she did not stop to finish this thought, as she was now immersed in the second personal letter, written in a childish hand from a village in Maine. It was the quarterly report from dear old Susan who had nursed Hilary’s mother through her final illness; it was the acknowledgment of the usual check. “Your mother loved the lilacs and now they are in bud, I think of her every day. I never did thank you—or did I?—for the February check. I am getting old an
d forgetful and you must forgive me. My old cat, Tomboy, died. I thought you would like to know. I buried him under the apple tree. The place seems lonely now. When will you come and see us? I should have said me. Now Tomboy is dead, it is only me.”

  Dear old Susan. “I shall have to go, of course,” Hilary thought. “It is the least I can do.” But had her mother loved lilacs?

  The sun had gone under a cloud, and that vivid slanting white light was diffused on the wall. My mother, Hilary thought.… Did she love the lilacs? How little I knew her, really. Desolation ran through her like an electric current turned on …, but I simply must rest, Hilary said to the current, making an effort to turn it off. I must go and lie down. I must shut this out because the interviewers are coming, and I cannot disintegrate. I must meet them, fully armed.

  Quickly she made herself a peanut butter sandwich, set it on a tray with a glass of milk, and fled to her bedroom. She pulled the curtains, lay down in the aqueous light, and fell half asleep in a kind of doze, forgetting to eat. It was the mail, of course. It took at least an hour of the day before the reverberations brought in by the mail died down. Foreign matter quite literally broke into one’s composure and shattered it with great booming sounds.…

  Had her mother loved the lilacs? Why had not Hilary ever known this as precisely as did an old nurse, no connection at all, a stranger? Her mother lived on in Susan’s awareness as a different person from the one who troubled Hilary’s sleep so often these days. In Susan’s hands her mother had become a loving infant … all the tenderness locked back through all the years had flowed out to this stranger; Hilary was the outsider, allowed in for brief formal visits. Oh, it was too painful! She turned over, hoping that a different physical position would somehow change the psychic position, but it was no use. “Absurd old woman,” young Hilary admonished old Hilary, “pull yourself together. Sit up, drink your milk, and eat your sandwich!”

  “Hilary has a fine mind, but she is too emotional,” she could hear her mother saying to her father; and during her childhood both her parents devised ways of teaching her what they considered proper control of the indecent extravagence of those wild tears, so often tears of rage. Well, she had learned something: it was to set herself a problem to solve when she was seized by “woe” as Nancy called it. So let’s have it out, she admonished herself. Think about your mother, old fool, and stop feeling so much; stop weeping over what is irrevocable and finished.

  “Irrevocable, maybe,” old Hilary answered at once, “but not finished! We may come into the world naked, but we go out of it clothed in anguish.”

  Where then did it all begin? Her mother and father had been second cousins, members of a vast Boston clan who congregated every summer in Sorrento, Maine, and regarded anyone not born in Boston as deprived and to be treated with faintly condescending kindness; just in the way they regarded anyone who spent money freely as slightly feeble-minded, a person to be spoken of as “Poor David has just bought a yacht,” or “those pathetic Richardsons have moved again into—of all things!—a French château on the Maine coast.” Their own lives were unassailable in their circumspection, hidden generosity, and good taste. Of course her father had spent a fortune on French Impressionists; no doubt his cousins at that time spoke of him as “Poor Jason …, crazy about those French painters,” but the joke was on them when their own safe shares in Kruger proved a total loss and Jason’s madness a giltedged security.

  Hilary, immersed already in one of her long ironic conversations with herself about Boston, stopped in full flight, to ask herself, but why the irony? What had been wrong? Why when they were so impeccable, were they also just faintly ridiculous? Why when so noble, was some elusive value just lacking …, this was the mystery. Was it that they lacked the aristocratic virtue of treating serious things lightly and light things seriously? Despite the elaborate family jokes and rites, the general atmosphere was frightfully earnest, and in a strange way, devitalized. There were times when she felt she loomed over her parents like some larger fiercer kind of animal, and where had she come from then, a sport from some ancestor, some wild Welshman from the eighteenth century?

  “I am nobody’s child,” she had shouted at her mother once in a fury. “I’m nothing like you or Pa and being like you would kill me!”

  “Well, you’re not Pallas Athene, that’s sure,” her mother had said with a touch of acerbity. “I labored twenty-four hours to bring you into the world, my girl.”

  “And after all that you wanted a boy!”

  “I never said so.”

  “You must have—anybody would.” Hilary was relentless.

  “I wanted a girl,” her father said in his slightly teasing gentle voice, “so you really cannot pretend whatever you are trying to pretend this time.”

  “I wanted to be a boy, I guess,” Hilary had granted, standing at the window in the Beacon Street upstairs library and looking out on four or five boys of about her own age having a fierce snowball fight in the street. Her father could tame her when no one else could, tame her by his gentleness, by that quizzical look round his eyes when he looked at her; although he was so shy, she felt his love as an absolute certainty.

  With her mother it was so much more complicated … self-aware, terrified perhaps of spoiling an only child, punishing them both by refusing to give in to what she would have called mawkishness. Tenderness was only safe if given or received by the sick in bed and no wonder Hilary spent such large numbers of weeks as a child being ill! No wonder she had reacted so violently all her life to the fear of feeling, and to the fury who attended it, the sense of guilt. The wonderful thing about the English society into which Hilary had moved when she married Adrian was the total absence of this cramped and cramping sense of duty. It was a larger air; things could be taken for granted; money, power, could be taken for granted. The relief it had been!

  But when Hilary thought of her mother, the image was always of her sitting at the small desk in her bedroom, overwhelmed by what she had failed to accomplish, paying for every moment of pleasure with hours of self-castigating good works, driven to visit hospitals, driven to do far more than she needed to about opening and closing summer houses and camps, so she radiated anxiety and tension. Yet this image must be crossed with another, equally valid, of her mother coming down the staircase on her way out to dinner, looking brilliant, a little flushed, a plain woman who could suddenly become a beauty, who, unlike her daughter, flourished in social situations, loved good conversation with a passion, enjoyed pitting her mind and her personality against those of her peers—a woman whom men admired and (Hilary suspected) whom more than one had been more than a little in love with, a woman who could flirt with the man on her left and then with the man on her right, but who would have been horrified to be taken seriously by either of them.

  Hilary, leaning over the banisters, was melted by the apparition, the exquisite pale pink Worth dress, the subdued excitement in her mother’s voice, as she asked her husband,

  “Do I look all right, dear?”

  “Smashing!”

  “I am not quite sure about the pink.… It doesn’t look too young?”

  Hilary had run down the stairs and thrown her arms around her mother. “Oh you smell delicious!”

  “Careful, Hilary, don’t crumple me.” But was it, old Hilary wondered, as the scene came into focus with the felt pang intact, that Ma was afraid of being crumpled, or afraid of the intensity with which she felt herself being hugged? She drove me into the arms of governesses, teachers, strangers … anyone who provided escape from the tightly controlled shining surface, the prison—anyone who could let in a little air.

  “What is wrong with our parents?” Hilary remembered asking Nancy one day.

  “We never get enough to eat!” The answer was so immediate and so true, that they fell into a fit of hysterical giggles. Frugality was one of the esteemed values in this particular Boston. (Later Hilary was amazed to discover that there were Cabots and Hallowells who ate exceed
ingly well and seemed to feel no guilt about enjoying food.) As it was, Hilary and Nancy spent a good part of their allowances, twenty-five cents a week, eating banana splits in a drugstore.

  “Also they go away too much.… They’re always going away and leaving us with Hellish governesses. You must admit, Hilary, it’s inhuman!” They were at the age, about thirteen, when every other word was spoken with emphasis and when they wrote letters, one underlining was seldom sufficient.

  “Inhuman,” Hilary murmured as she lay on her side, thinking the word over. Her parents would surely have been amazed that such a word could be seriously used. But had they had even an inkling of what the constant displacement, the endless trips to Europe did to a child? What being out of school for a year did to one at fourteen, for instance? And coming back to find oneself almost a total stranger to girls who had had a whole life without you, in that year away? But of course what they valued above all was “culture.” (How Hilary had hated the word!) It seemed far more important than physical or psychic comfort ever could. Frugality, industry, kindness, and never losing your temper, those were the values—those, and “culture,” a real and discriminating love of the arts. Yes, she had to admit that it was discriminating, and more, even passionate. Life at one remove could be allowed to be passionate. And Hilary smiled, wondering whether the massed gray heads and little furs at the Friday afternoon symphony had not perhaps concealed frustrated emotional drunkards who drank music as if it were liquor. Well, no doubt it all had a keen edge. Her mother, of course, had a very keen edge indeed, but she was not comfortable. One did not hug her. “Inhuman” then because it was the physical world which was continuously denied, which was somehow disgusting, giving in to it in any way being a sign of weakness. The one exception was the summer, Sorrento, when a certain amount of physical hardship no doubt justified the delight in picnics, swimming in the freezing water, tennis, and reading aloud. If there had been a root at all, it was Sorrento, the sea. There, Hilary considered, they had lived as total human beings, not split up into guilt, culture, and self-denial.