Mrs. Stevens Hears the Mermaids Singing

by May Sarton

  But what had they been to each other? she wondered for the millionth time about her parents. Had they been a real comfort to each other, or had her mother taken her distaste for physical things to bed? “It is that!” Hilary sat up in bed and ate the rest of her sandwich in a famished kind of way. She saw for the first time really what the flaw had been, what the missing value was in the etherial world where she had grown up. It was the fact that all bodily functions were regarded as slightly indelicate, the body itself a donkey one carried about and treated with disdain. It was greedy to enjoy food; it was soft to enjoy a comfortable bed, and ordinary physical needs such as evacuating induced real shame…, so under all the splendid riches there was a fundamental poverty, a distortion, which could have made me a cripple, Hilary thought. She supposed that what had saved her was the summers at Sorrento … but, what did she still have to track down, lost somewhere at the bottom of all her musing like a shining pebble of truth? The lilacs! Now the vision rose up of her mother in the garden, her hands and face scratched and dirty for she had been pruning roses, with a look of extreme sensuous delight as she lifted one dark red rose and buried her nose in it. So, no doubt, she had done with the lilacs, bending them down as if to eat their sweetness. Her mother had touched each single flower with a kind of tenderness she gave to nothing else, and during one summer of extended drought, she had herself seemed to wither, had lain in the dark, Hilary remembered complaining of migraine, because she could not bear to watch her garden dying of thirst. The vision stayed there, suspended like some angel over her head. So her mother had after all known what the senses can give, delight so sharp that it is poignant. Am I the child of passionate love? Hilary asked herself, hoping wildly that it might be so. But she would never know. All personal letters were solemnly burnt by her mother in an incinerator at the point, some years before her death. By then Hilary was an established novelist and poet. Was this act of her mother’s a final act of rejection? A defence? What was she protecting? Natural reticence before the formidable public life of an only daughter? … I did all the wrong things, Hilary thought, despair rising in her throat. “You are not like us,” her mother had said with a queer little gesture half tender, half dismayed, when Hilary’s first novel came out. “I feel I do not know you any more.”

  Hilary suppressed the answer: you never have. You have been so busy trying to mould me to some image you have in your head, that you never considered who or what I might be in myself.

  Yet when her mother received compliments from members of the Nucleus Club, she could not help showing that she was pleased and proud. “Our duckling has turned into a swan,” she would say, and laugh in a self-deprecating way. “It is so very odd.… Hilary has become a prima donna, that funny little awkward girl covered with mosquito bites.” The accolade could never be given simply and outright to any one of one’s family; that would have seemed arrogant.

  Once her father had almost come to the point of speaking. They were riding together, an early morning ride, taken in the hope of seeing two horned owls who were nesting at the end of the point. Delicious early morning chill and the smell of pine and wild roses and salt!

  Hilary heard his dry nervous cough, always the announcement that he had come to the point of uttering. They were walking the horses side by side.

  “I wonder …,” he said, and Hilary held her breath. “I do wonder how you have come to know all that you seem to know—about life. It makes me feel.…” But at this point he was overcome by shyness and roused his mount to a trot, so easy he was, at home in the saddle, so baffled by the human situation.

  Hilary that time made an attempt to answer the unasked question.

  “I knew enough when I was fifteen to write that book.”

  Her father chuckled. “Boarding schools must be rather more illuminating places than we had imagined.”

  “Anyone who is going to be a writer knows enough at fifteen to write several novels,” Hilary said crossly. “It’s too bad I’m a writer. I should have been a painter. Painters get away with murder, and nobody minds.”

  “Well!” Her father drew up old Baldy to a halt and gave her a smile of great relief. He had discovered a way to fit her in, after all. “I suppose you must have inherited all this from your Great Aunt Ida.”

  “She who ended her days at McLean?” Hilary laughed. “Honestly, do I have to fit into the family tree like a bird into some pre-planned nest? Why can’t I be myself? Why do I have to be like that insane old woman, who was a bad painter—we might as well face it!”

  “Your Aunt Ida had considerable talent, Hilary. You forget that she is hung in the Boston Museum of Fine Arts.”

  “In the cellar, by now.”

  “You are being rude.”

  Hilary flushed and galloped off. Better to get right away fast, than to utter the accumulated bitterness of all the years. When she had calmed down, Hilary felt shame; she had spoken cynically and without compassion of an old woman whom she loved. Aunt Ida had given her her first pair of opera glasses; she had talked to her as if she were a human being, not a child; and when she had been locked up (“Aunt Ida is very ill,” she was told, “and in a hospital”), Hilary at twelve had felt real grief. The old woman had tried to commit suicide—this fact oozed out somehow from under the pretenses. Then she was buried alive, and one more item was added to Alice Frothingham’s lists of “things to do,” the weekly visit to McLean with books and flowers, with paints and canvases, for there had been times when Aunt Ida moved from depression to elation and could for brief periods paint again. Hilary had not been allowed to see her. Perhaps they imagined that insanity was contagious.

  Oh, the awful tears had begun to flow out of her eyes, just as they had that day years ago when she had turned her horse back and managed to say, “I loved Aunt Ida, and I’m glad if I can be like her.… She was human.”

  “Well,” and her father coughed, “no need to be upset, Hilary. I was only saying that there does seem to be a streak of talent in the family.” And that was that.

  That was that then, but now after her troubled night, and in her state of suspense and tension before the interview, it seemed as if all Hilary’s feeling about her parents was dangerously close to the surface again. If only once they could have been proud, really and wholeheartedly proud, she thought. What I wanted and never got from them was recognition. But even fame seemed to them suspect; like the rich who spent money, it was too obvious to be quite appropriate to their way of life.

  You can’t break the mould and also be consoled for breaking it, old fool! Be realistic—every book you published must have caused them embarassment and dismay. Yet the cry that escaped her lips, as she searched for the handkerchief in her pocket was, “Mother! Father!” Does the mourning for parents ever end? she asked herself, blowing her nose, and resting her eyes on the quiet green light in the room. Searingly, excruciatingly private, this pain, yet she suspected that it might be the universal condition. Children have to hurt their parents or die, have to break themselves off, whatever the cost, even though the wound never heals.

  Nevertheless, young Hilary reminded old Hilary, you have not after all done too badly, old thing. You did not break down like Aunt Ida; you kept going; you have worked hard, and you have made a garden, which would have pleased your mother; and once in a while you have even been able to be of some use to another human being—Mar for instance. Now pull yourself together! Make like a genius (young Hilary enjoyed using slang) and get some armor on.

  The armor she decided on, after some fidgeting about in the closet, was a violet suede jacket, a gray tweed skirt, and a pale pink silk blouse with an open collar, to which she pinned a diamond fox with a ruby eye which Aunt Ida had left her in her will. There remained only to slip on some rather elegant slippers. She did rather admire her small feet, even if from there on up there was disintegration.

  It was three o’clock, and she must dig out that list of things not to forget on the tea tray. Also remember to light the fire in th
e big room. The spring inside her which had gone slack in the middle of the afternoon—even on ordinary days it was apt to—began to coil itself up and tighten.

  “It’s going to be fun, old thing!”

  Interlude: the interviewers

  Peter Selversen and Jenny Hare were rushing toward Hilary in a rented Volkswagen as Route 128 unwound itself, a long wide ribbon up and down hills. Nerved up, as the journey from New York neared its end, they were acutely aware of what they saw around them.

  The May day had kept its freshness, and at three o’clock still retained the quality of stained glass; they moved through a huge iridescent bubble of fresh greens and reds against a transparent blue sky without a cloud. Everywhere the lilac had burst into clusters of pale green pointed leaves; the small estuaries and tidal rivers floated the sky. For the moment they were talked out, full of what they were seeing and of the quarry before them, expectancy layered over conjecture, and the magic of the day itself layered over that; what would there have been to say? Besides they were still in the stage of “making conversation”; they had met only the week before, in order to prepare the interview.

  The editors of The Review felt that it might be a good idea to have a woman along, and picked Jenny because she was George’s girl friend (he was associate editor); she was not a poet, but she had won an O. Henry Award for a short story. She was sufficiently professional but had no axe to grind, and she was young. They hoped that the old writer would open up to a young woman, that Jenny might be able to pose certain questions more gracefully than Peter could.

  He, of course, was the star performer in the act; this particular kind of interview, related entirely to the work itself, serious and probing, had become his stock in trade. Many people subscribed to the magazine only for the sake of these exemplary exercises in tact and persuasion; indeed it was fascinating to watch “great writers” unbutton about their art, speak with frankness about their problems as writers. And Peter had realized from the beginning that even the very famous are surprised and delighted when it becomes clear that they have been read with the greatest sensitivity and attention, and that when they speak they are (for a change) being listened to. But he had rarely approached such an occasion knowing so little of a personal nature. No recent photograph of F. Hilary Stevens had been available; and almost no biographical material; the barest facts in Who’s Who (though she was not one of those who conceal their age); and, of course, the books themselves … two novels, and nine volumes of poems, mostly out of print, except for the last, this late success, the reason for the interview. He had been surprised himself to discover what a good poet she was, surprised and a little ashamed. And it was of this he was thinking, as he swerved in and out around lumbering trucks … of the ironies and the cruelties of what people called “the writing game,” the Olympic game of the spirit where so often the best do not win, at least in their lifetime. What gusto and conviction F. Hilary Stevens must have to break out of the tomb at seventy and thumb her nose at the critics and anthologists who had buried her alive! Very possibly he and Jenny would now meet the pent-up aggressions and bitterness. Certainly the poems did not suggest a mild old party! Well, it would be interesting.…

  It was Peter’s genius that he was always and omnivorously “interested.” Now he was interested not only in the quarry coming into view in an hour but also in the young woman at his side, hands clasped tightly on her knees, almost too conscious of her responsibilities.

  “O.K., Jenny?”

  “O.K.,” she answered without taking her eyes from the road. “I’m looking. It all feels so safe and pretty, but I suppose every one of those little factories is busily making some sort of infernal machine, right beside an old house where Hawthorne might have lived. New England is so peculiar.…” He was aware that this was Jenny’s first foray North of Boston. Like many New Yorkers, she came from the Middle West, Indianapolis, if he remembered, and Peter had a gift for remembering.

  “When I was at Harvard, this was still open country—ten years ago—cows lying around. It’s become a vast suburb. I hardly recognize anything. Just over there, for instance, used to be a turkey farm!” It was now a colony of cheap pink-and-white frame houses, adjacent to a factory. “Peculiar?”

  “Well, compared to the countryside I know best around Indianapolis it is higgledy-piggledy, cultivated, inhabited, layer over layer of different kinds of life. There’s no stretch where you see the same thing for more than a minute, it seems to me. That’s what’s peculiar.”

  “Yankee ingenuity at work! Those people built the clipper ships, and now they are busily building computers, or what have you!”

  “Those people, you say—as if they were a race apart!”

  “Yet they are actually mostly Italians, Greeks, Irish, I expect.”

  “Not in that house!” They flashed past a yellow clapboard house with a large barn attached to it, and a lovely oval fanlight over the door. “There’s the stamp of elegance; you can’t escape it. Even the old dories lying upside down over there in the mud have an air about them. One recognizes it, Peter …,” and then she asked, “What will F. Hilary Stevens be like, do you suppose?”

  “Not to be pinned down to this landscape is my guess. She’s been a wanderer, an oddity. She married an Englishman, lived abroad most of her life, came back here in her late fifties.… It’s complex.”

  “I’m scared,” Jenny said and, having admitted it, at last unclasped her hands.

  “There has to be an edge or nothing happens. I suppose these interviews are a kind of collision.”

  “Head-on?” And Jenny laughed on the wave of excitement, and also on the wave of her pleasure in him. She had got fond of him, she suddenly discovered, fond of his pockmarked face, his deep-set dark eyes, his way of speaking in rushes as if a certain amount of contained pressure had to be released. She sensed that he had the detachment and kindness of the person who is by nature an observer rather than an actor. He would never be conflicted, rent in two as she was most of the time. He could afford to be genial in a way that she could not. He was, indeed, an endearing companion.

  “Yes, in a way, head-on. We are rolling toward her at sixty, and no doubt she is, inside herself, approaching us at the same speed.”

  Was he deliberately building up the tension in himself, Jenny wondered? She found the image of F. Hilary Stevens hurtling toward them like some jinni out of a bottle, terrifying.

  “Light me a cigarette, will you?” As he turned to take it, he noticed the thin line of sweat on Jenny’s upper lip, and it touched him. He had been rather put off at first by her moonlike face, gray eyes magnified behind glasses, had pigeonholed her as one of those ambitious women who live from the neck up. But here was total response. The poor kid was scared.

  “I find it comforting that she is old,” he said.

  “Why?”

  “I suppose I have a thing about old women. Their characters may be rather stylized, but once you get past mannerism, they are, well? how to put it? Transparent. It isn’t worth it any longer to wear a mask.”

  “I suppose young people do; I suppose you are right,” Jenny resisted the temptation to argue this. “Children and old people. They are either emerging or have emerged. They are not in the middle battling it out.” She lit a cigarette for herself and took a puff, thinking this over. “I suppose you and I do wear masks.” She gave him a mischievous, sidelong glance.

  “Only compare for a second what you really feel like and what you show to the world! Sheer self-protection, Jenny. Sometimes I think one has a different mask or shield, or whatever it is, for every relationship. I fear I do.”

  “And you think F. Hilary Stevens doesn’t? Don’t forget that the people she could feel at ease with must be dying out, the real people.”

  “Real people?”

  “Her contemporaries, friends—also those she admired, longed to be like, her own masters.”

  “Her masters were dead when she began. She goes right back to Wyatt, Skelton—
and in certain odd moments to Traherne.”

  “Anyway I don’t suppose a poet can wear a mask. How I envy her being a poet!”

  “You think it’s easier?”

  “Don’t pounce! You scare me.”

  “I’m interested, Jenny,” he pleaded. Talk to a writer about writing and invisible hackles begin to rise. God knows, he had observed it often enough: noli me tangere.

  “I’m sorry.” The fact was that she was nervy enough any way and the imminent ordeal made her more so. “Perhaps it is that poets are accepted as slightly mad to begin with. But I am so tired of being treated like a threat, some sort of Medusa image. You know, Peter! I am not making this up, am I?”

  “Making what up?”

  “I have seen people freeze when they hear I am a writer—that, or they pour out their life story and tell you it is a gift and you can use it for your next novel! Or—even worse—they imagine you are so eager for experience that they can make a pass and get away with it.… You are never, never treated just as a woman.…”

  “Isn’t the thing maybe that you are not just a woman?” Peter asked gently. “And my guess is that you don’t want to be.”

  “It’s so lonely, Peter, if you only knew!” She wondered with excruciating anxiety now whether he and George had talked about her. She had no idea what these two would be like together alone, in their world, the impenetrable masculine world. “Say something!”

  “I’m thinking.” He sensed the spiral of intensity, which so often in women coiled itself up, only to loose itself finally in tears, beginning its nerve-wracking ascension, and he was afraid. It would never do for her to arrive at their destination in a state of inner dishevelment. He was nervous of the furies who seemed at the moment to be swooping down over their heads. “I guess women pay a pretty high price for whatever talents they have. I guess it’s harder for them than it is for a man, always.”