Mrs. Stevens Hears the Mermaids Singing

by May Sarton

  Astonishing man! One spring day when the window was open to the evening air and the sleepy sounds of birds, he had cocked his head suddenly and uttered, “That bird is singing out of tune.” He had perfect pitch. And that purely mechanical gift had seemed to Hilary to be a symbol of his being: he was black and white. He was extraordinarily whole, direct, and uncomplicated. At another time, this might have been sometimes baffling, but in Hilary’s passive state, it was restful. It was as if he had the intuitions of a highly specialized animal. He could do things that in a less central being would have been cruel, and she could accept them because they sprang from a particular kind of masculine tenderness. He did not agonize: he went straight for the truth. So one evening, as he sat beside her bed, he said in his crisp New England voice, “Miss Gillespie has been taken off this floor. Your job is to get well; you have been getting too involved, Hilary, none of this waiting for one person, my dear.”

  “I wait for you,” Hilary protested. She was utterly taken aback that he knew (how observant he was) that she had become attached to Nurse Gillespie, with her austere closed face and clear blue eyes.

  Dr. Hallowell laughed. “Your temperature doesn’t go up when I am around!”

  “The Lord is not my shepherd. I shall want,” Hilary said bitterly.

  Dr. Hallowell got up and stood at the window, looking out, his hands in his pockets. “It’s hard, I know. But in these last two weeks, you have not been getting better. I am a doctor, Hilary.”

  “But the poems …,” she managed to say.

  “Keep the poems to objects, not people.” He was standing very straight at the window, as solid as a rock. “Look at that tree.”

  “I do look at it, morning, noon, and night!”

  “Have you even begun to see it?” he asked gently.

  For he was right, of course. She had not landed in all these weeks. She was still flying round and round in the air, like a homing pigeon, trying to find a resting place in personal feeling. Nurse Gillespie, or someone else, anything except to land on the earth alone, and face it, once and for all. So it had been since Adrian’s death, really, a feverish trying to land somewhere. She turned her face to the wall, knotted up into a tight knot of resistance. The life force itself rebelled.

  Dr. Hallowell came back to sit beside her. “Now listen to me,” he said with great firmness. “What we are trying to do here is to preserve a delicate, an exceptional instrument for registering feeling from busting apart. You are gifted, Hilary. But you are like an athlete who tries to climb Mt. Everest when he hasn’t the strength to climb Hampstead Heath. You’ve got to learn how to handle yourself, woman!”

  “I had an aunt who ended up at McLean.”

  “Well, you’re not mad, if that’s what you think! But you’ve used up a little more than your reserve of psychic energy. I can promise you one thing, Hilary. If you get well now, if you learn what you have to learn now, you will be safe. And it will never happen again.”

  “I’ll try,” she said, but it seemed grotesque that all the trying was to be directed toward not being herself, not feeling. “But what is it that I have to learn? What is it, really?”

  “I don’t know.” And he laughed. It was one of the strengths of Dr. Hallowell that he never pretended. “But I think perhaps you do. The problem is a certain kind of intensity. Sometimes in my mind I have seen you as a starfish, gripping any hard substance that it finds, as if you didn’t dare float on the tide. Miss Gillespie is a case in point: there had to be someone for the starfish to attach itself to. For some reason quite beyond my powers to understand, you only feel safe and able to function when you can attach yourself with fierce concentration to one person and not necessarily—this is the point—to someone with whom you could ever share your life on any deep level. Am I right?”

  “Someone who captures the imagination,” Hilary murmured.

  “Someone who starts that whole strange machinery of creation in motion for you.… Well, we are in deep mysterious waters, and possibly probing them is not, at the moment, to the point.”

  “I’m a baby, I suppose,” Hilary said, with self-contempt. “Ugh.”

  “Maybe—but don’t forget that compared to a grownup person every baby is a genius. Think of the capacity to learn! The freshness, the temperament, the will of a baby a few months old!”

  “And the helplessness, the dependency,” Hilary answered. “I find it disgusting.”

  “Well, you’re not a baby, of course. You are far from helpless,” and he beamed one of his rare smiles at her. “I’d like to talk a little about the poetry. I feel the greatest respect for your gift, Hilary. Whatever you want to do, you can do.”

  “How do you know?”

  “It’s a hunch. Over the years I have come to have confidence in my hunches.”

  Hilary recognized this positive opening as the prelude to concrete suggestion. So she waited.

  “Well, I’m going to dare,” he said. “It is daring because I’m not a poet and you can brush all that I say away as irrelevant if you wish, but what if you used the personal feeling as fuel, so to speak, to set the motor going, and tried writing about objects, for a change? Tried, well—I can only think of this in terms of the violin where what I have in mind would be practicing scales—let us say playing with words, for the sheer fun of the thing, playing it as a game, Hilary, with a little lighter touch!”

  “Lighter?” Hilary bristled.

  He gave her a canny look, hesitated, then said, “I’ll stick to it.”

  Why had she taken it from him when criticism from anyone else was apt to harden her own stance, to make her go her own way with a touch of belligerence? What was it about this man that made her pay attention, that made her humble? Because, she supposed, she knew that he was inside with her, not outside against her. “Bouncing a ball …,” she had said to herself. And looking back now, she saw how huge had been the influence at that crucial time. He had never lit her up as even the briefly contemplated Nurse Gillespie might have, but he did more, he nourished her. He made inexorable demands. Also he understood the fundamental being in her. Might a definition of rest be just this, the being understood? Had it ever happened again in her life, she wondered wryly? Yes, perhaps once when for a brief time the Muse was a person who could understand, as rare an event as a conjunction of two planets who cross each other once in a thousand years.

  “That marriage of yours, it was all right?” he had asked once,.suddenly red in the face, for this was not the sort of question Dr. Hallowell asked.

  “Yes.” She had met his eyes, and wavered. “Yes, it was love on earth. It was all that can be.”

  He nodded with instant comprehension. “And you are one of those who is looking for heavenly love on earth, is that it?” He nodded again. “Hard on you because it means hunger and thirst. But you are a poet,” he added, “that is the saving grace.” He looked at her quizzically. “But none of those impossible heavens here, Hilary. Objects, not people, for awhile. That’s an order.”

  And she was compelled by the sheer innocent-force of his person. Objects, yes, but objects described for the keen ear and eye of Dr. Hallowell. Does one ever write true poems for more than one person, she wondered?

  What she felt, as she sat in the wing chair, her eyes closed, was an essence. She did not, of course, repeat like an old record the words, the exchanges, but she felt the presence of Dr. Hallowell again, as if he were standing there beside her, life-enhancing, as if once more she felt the transfusion of faith as his masculine hand took her pulse, as if she were back in the weak, receptive period of the hospital when, for a time, clean sheets on the bed, or a swanlike cloud in the sky, appeared to her with the miraculous power and joy of visions, when, for those strange illuminating months, she was a baby and, perhaps at moments, a genius.

  Jenny and Peter had exchanged more than one querying glance, when Mrs. Stevens lifted her head, opened her eyes and said, “You see, in the hospital I had to learn about objects; people were forbidde
n. That book is the book of a grownup baby exploring every minute sensation.”

  “I see, but that doesn’t explain the technical achievement—babies can’t write poems, even grownup babies.”

  “You learn what you need to know in order to say what you have to say.”

  “A lapidary statement,” and Peter smiled. “But how do you learn?”

  “The way a tennis player learns to play tennis, by making a fool of yourself, by falling on your face, by rushing the net and missing the ball, and finally by practice.… The point is, partly at least, the intensity of the need to master a style, to play a particular game, in this case the game of translating concrete objects, sensation itself into poetry.…” She paused, as if startled by her own words. “Game,” she murmured. “It’s not my word.” She then looked hard at each of the interviewers, as if making up her mind whether to speak or not, and added, having apparently decided to take the risk, “I write for one person, but the person changes.”

  “The person of the epiphany?” Jenny asked, feeling a tremor run through her, in case it was the wrong question.

  “Yes …,” then F. Hilary Stevens turned to Peter. “When I said that all poems are love poems, I meant that the motor power, the electric current is love of one kind or another. The subject may be something quite impersonal—a bird on a window sill, a cloud in the sky, a tree, don’t you know?”

  “But in the hospital,” Peter said gently, “you said you were locked away from feeling. Were you visited by an angel?”

  Hilary Stevens gave him a mocking glance. “Two angels,” she said. “But I’m not going to tell you who or what they were!” Then she amended with a murmur, “May we agree that private life is irrelevant? Multiple, mixed, ambiguous at best—out of it we try to fashion the crystal clear, the singular, the absolute, and that is what is relevant; that is what matters.” Then she laughed. “I’m being absurdly lapidary,’ am I not? The trouble is that you are too good, too kind an audience. I find it mildly intoxicating, after all these years, to be listened to.”

  “We have already been greatly rewarded,” Peter said in his most formal manner.

  “Well, what next?” Mrs. Stevens asked briskly, as if turning a page.

  “What is fascinating, isn’t it Peter,” Jenny offered, “is that the second book of poems is such a complete new thing, so personal: fifty love sonnets.”

  “For the second time, at under thirty you broke the mould. That’s rather wonderful—.”

  “Ultra-romantic, self-intoxicated, alive again, I suppose,” she said quite fiercely. “There was so much I still had to learn!”

  “That’s a pretty powerful sequence, just the same,” Peter said with conviction.

  “Maybe, but I am entombed in the anthologies with that book. And I have grown to hate it—after all it was forty-two years ago, and I have changed.” She laughed, “It would be too bad if I hadn’t, you will agree?” Then she asked Peter outright, “I would be very interested to know what you see in that book—so old-fashioned, so out of style? Do you really honestly find some permanent value in it?”

  “Yes,” he said, leaning forward and speaking in little rushes as he did when he was fully absorbed. “What seems significant to me in that book is the emergence of a definite ‘I’; the change of style is organic, has to do with the emerging person. You are taking a stance about yourself, about love, your own, if I may say so, peculiar and rewarding stance. What seems to me of value is this stance. Am I way off in thinking that there is something French rather than Anglo-Saxon about this passionate decorum, this insistence on love as a mystique, as a kind of heroic inner demand?”

  Mrs. Stevens was clearly interested. She nodded vigorously and waved him on with a smile.

  “Granted that this is a totally unfashionable point of view, I find it refreshing.”

  “Mmmm,” Mrs. Stevens seemed to be humming, rather like a hummingbird. They could feel her mind darting about among the flowers Peter had presented to her. “But did those sonnets seem masculine or feminine, if one can so define a work of art?”

  “I hadn’t thought. Does it matter?”

  “They are essences,” Jenny said, but she was interrupted by Peter who broke in with great eagerness to offer a further answer to the question. “The style is masculine; the content is feminine …, am I wrong?”

  “You frighten me, young man.” She turned to Jenny with an odd little gesture, rubbing one hand in the other, as she did when she was thinking something out. “Does he frighten you, Miss Hare? This omniscient being?”

  “Sometimes he does,” Jenny said. “Then I find myself hitting back,” and she gave Peter an amused glance.

  “Quite,” Mrs. Stevens paused, opened her two hands as if she were releasing something into the air, once and for all. “But there is in that book distortion—inflation—something that I no longer can entirely respect, the noble stance, don’t you know? The heroic comes dangerously close to the mock heroic.…” She paused and they waited.

  When she seemed to have finished, Peter begged, “Do go on.” His pencil was poised.

  “If you will put that notebook away. It makes me nervous.”

  “But you don’t want to be misquoted!”

  “I couldn’t care less!” The airy tone did not conceal the steel beneath. “I ceased a long time ago to pay the slightest attention to what might be said about me.”

  “This will not be about you. It will be yourself speaking. We are not critics. We are recorders.”

  “But happily not the recording angel!” she shivered. “Put another log on the fire, will you? It feels cold at this time of day—or there is a change of wind. Soon it will be time for a drink.” She looked at her watch, and nodded. “When you live alone you have to have rules. One of mine is no liquor before a quarter to six …, although the old need stoking, and once in a while I cheat a little.”

  “What are some of the other rules?” Jenny asked, feeling a rush of affection.

  “Oh,” Mrs. Stevens shrugged, “up at seven, some work at my desk every day, come hell or high water, no self-indulgence,” she twinkled as if this were a private joke. “Sirenica, my cat, is the self-indulgence. She has to be indulged, you see, as every afternoon she wants very much to be petted and to go to sleep on my bed, so I too have a nap.” Then as if this digression had been a short rest in itself, she came back to the subject with a flash of renewed energy. “Now let me put my mind back on your wheel for a moment. I feel I have been evading the issue. What we are talking about is the Muse.”

  She laid this card on the table, and closed her eyes, which gave Peter a chance to lean forward and give Jenny’s hand an exhilarating squeeze of triumph.

  “Yes, the Muse has been very much on our minds,” Peter said. “We agreed—didn’t we Jenny?—in the car on our way here, that the Muse was the question. It is wonderful that you are willing to speak of this.”

  She opened her eyes. “But can I? Is it possible, I mean?”

  “May I venture this—the epiphanies you have told us are behind each book—are these actual vistitations of the Muse? An incarnate Muse?”

  “Of course, you idiot. Naturally!” For some reason Mrs. Stevens seemed irritated. Perhaps she regretted having broached the subject. She piled up the tea cups and saucers with a busy clatter. “Oh well—,” she said half to herself, and leaned back in the big chair, gazing down at them through the mesmerizing half-closed lids. “Graves calls her, if you remember, ‘sister of the mirage and echo.’ … That phrase has an extraordinary relevance to the Muse in question, the Muse of the sonnets.” She closed her eyes and leaned her head against the back of the chair. In an instant the life which had been rising through her transparent skin like a wave, ebbed. She looked wan. The dialogue, through which conscience in some form peculiar to herself always reared its head, had evidently been resumed. Neither Peter nor Jenny would have thought of asking a question; it would have been like interrupting a piece of music. But they were taken aback when
she suddenly rose to her feet, and stood in front of the fire, to say quite casually, “This is getting rather boring. One reaches a dead end sooner or later, talking about these things.”

  “But we have only just begun!” Peter said.

  “You couldn’t be boring,” Jenny threw in, desperate to recapture the moment of revelation which seemed to have just eluded them. “We listen, as it were, to the Delphic oracle.”

  “That clever one!” Hilary Stevens sniffed. “She never said a thing that couldn’t be taken six ways at once.”

  “You are sometimes not exactly as clear as crystal,” Peter said lightly.

  “I mean to be.” The response was serious. “I mean to be crystal clear—Well then, about the Muse.… On that word, perhaps I had better see to the liquor. Mr. Selversen, be so good as to bring the tea tray into the kitchen for me, will you?”

  He came back a few moments later bearing a tray holding glasses, a bottle of Scotch, a bowl of ice, and a jug of water, but he came back alone.

  “Where is she?” Jenny whispered.

  “I don’t know. She told me to get out the ice, and I suppose she must have vanished while I clattered about.”

  “So far, is it going well, Peter?”

  “Marvelous, if we can only get it all down! What worries me, though, is that there’s a Hell of a lot of ground to cover still. Will she hold out?”