Mrs. Stevens Hears the Mermaids Singing

by May Sarton

  “Maybe drop the idea of each book in sequence.”

  “What do you think?”

  “I think if the Muse is the thing, it doesn’t matter about each book.”

  “O.K.” Peter’s head was bent over his pad and he was writing fast. “Maybe we’ll have a few minutes now to catch up.” Soon they were both hard at work, trying to recapture the word as it had been spoken. How important the silences had been, the expression in the eyes, so piercing and sometimes so remote! How to convey all this? They were so absorbed that they had no idea how long they were there in the great room alone.

  Hilary leaned her forehead against the window pane in her bedroom. I’m in a terrible fog, she thought, idiotic.… How can I ever tell them? It was like trying to extricate one straw from a tightly bound up bundle, bundle of living, bundle of writing. How to extricate style, the changes in style from the life changes? She felt tension building up; the sweat broke out on her forehead. Not the interviewers’ fault of course. How could they know that all this was like an earthquake, throwing up lava and pieces of rock and rubble; the whole past in eruption.… Oh dear, it might be a good idea to lie down for a few minutes, flat on her back, breathe deeply, and see if she could stop the whirling sensation, and pull herself together.

  But lying down did not have the desired effect, for there, the pressure of the buried memory, making its way up through layers and layers of consciousness, broke free. “I see,” she murmured, “I begin to see.” But what she saw would never be clear. It had been too strange.

  Where and how had Willa MacPherson come into her life? Odd how some things just dropped out, disappeared, flotsam and jetsam on the stream of time …, no doubt they had met through someone in the publishing house where Hilary worked as a reader when she came out of the hospital in that intoxicating year of release, when even waking up in the dreary furnished room in Hampstead was an adventure, for just being alive again, allowed to think and feel, to eat what and when she pleased, to take a bus to Kew on an impulse, to sit in Regent’s Park in a deck chair and watch the children and the ducks—when every simple ordinary act of existence seemed like a miraculous gift—and above all conversing with people again, not doctors, not nurses, but her own friends who sat up half the night talking about politics, books, psychoanalytic theory, art, more often than not in Willa’s living room on Clifton Hill. Hilary did not have to evoke that room: it was there, the worn comfortable chairs, the two Victorian sofas, the fire in the grate, piles of new books, records, endless cups of tea, and Willa herself with her gray Irish eyes, her wit, her personal style, sitting in the big wing chair. She was, as sometimes can happen, a remarkable person leading a quite unremarkable life, at least on the surface; she did odd jobs for publishers, reviewed for a provincial newspaper, brought up two boys still in school at that time, was always anxious about money, a divorcée.…, the frame was ordinary enough, yet within it operated genius of the rarest kind. How to define it? There had been legendary French women, radiant centers like this, critics of life itself, yes, but those women who created salons had been rich, had belonged to a rigid social ethos: Willa had no great house to offer, no prestigious name such as Lady Ottoline Morrell’s, the English equivalent in the ‘twenties of the aristocrat concerned with the arts. Willa worked hard all day for a living, had nothing to offer her guests but tea and conversation, but the conversation was marvelous, marvelous because of her ability to draw the expert out and enter into his world, while at the same time leading him to explore other worlds; so a young biochemist found himself suddenly conversing with a composer just back from Paris and Nadia Boulanger, and enjoying it. So an elderly, unfashionable woman painter found herself talking brilliantly in answer to Willa’s questions, forcing the others in the room to put off their condescension. How did Willa find time to know so much, to be so aware over such a wide range? Of course she hardly slept, was known to read half the night, but it was not really knowledge after all that operated here, so much as a kind of superior feminine power to absorb the essence of a human being. Her poverty, her own hard life gave her, too, that extra dimension, compassion. She was able to elicit confidence. Every one of the men and women who were her friends saw her alone at one time or another, by accident or by intent. The door of that amazing house was never locked.

  She was apparently always there for them: in what way were they there for her? Even after all that happened, Hilary never knew which, if any, of those distinguished men who frequented the house, had been her lover. Yet, although Willa sometimes appeared to be an intricate elegant machine, no one could fail to sense that the machine contained a living ghost, that this was a woman, and a woman first of all. How vulnerable, Hilary discovered, by chance.

  This is trauma, she thought, as she lay on her bed, reliving an event which had taken place forty years before, and bearing again its difficult freight of shock and revelation. And she wondered whether trauma was not always perhaps experienced when the person most affected was a witness, not an actor, or became an actor only through being a witness of something beyond his understanding. Hilary had come, that day, from a publisher’s luncheon in honor of Seamus O’Connor whose second novel was being launched; she was eager to tell Willa about it. What luck to find her, for once, sitting alone in the November dusk, listening to a record, her Briard dog, Gustave Flaubert, at her feet. Hilary flung off her cloche hat, and sat down on the sofa, glad of the few moments left of the Mozart concerto, the interval of listening while the reverberations of the last hours sorted themselves out. There were few rules in this house, but one did not interrupt a piece of music with talk, however urgent.

  “I had such a good time with Seamus O’Connor,” she began, when Willa rose to take the record off, “such a darling!”

  “Is he?” Willa’s back was turned as she fitted the record into its case.

  “But before I forget, I brought you a record, couldn’t resist, I felt so elated when I came out of the Café Royale!” And she laid the Brandenburg Concertos in Willa’s hands.

  Willa’s expression was strange, as if she was not quite sure she wanted to accept them. She went back to her chair and sat down rather stiffly, holding the album upright, her hands just touching its edge. “I did have these once. Tell me about O’Connor.”

  “He has bold blue eyes, rather hard, but so bright. Such an edge to him! A ruddy face, in fact he looks rather like a policeman. I liked him because he teased me about my novel, but in such a kind way I didn’t mind. And then we talked about landscapes, what kinds we feel for, what moves us.… The West of Ireland for him, Maine for me.” Reviewing the episode for Willa’s ears, Hilary, as always, was forced to evaluate. “I suppose what I enjoyed was the absence of literary talk, for once.”

  “Will you see him again?”

  “I don’t suppose so. He’s off to Sicily for six months, with his wife and children. But we did have fun!” Quite suddenly Hilary became aware of Willa’s silence. That final sentence, “we did have fun” sounded out of key. It hung there in the air between them, curiously embarrassing, while Willa made no response. She leaned her chin on the album. Finally she said, “Let’s hear these!”

  As soon as the music began, Hilary was aware that the atmosphere in the room had become highly charged. Yet there was Willa, listening as she always did, her chin leaning on the palm of one hand, her eyes looking sideways. How well Hilary would have said she knew that face, but now she saw it as if for the first time … the wide brow, a little bombée, under gray hair covering her ears like a casque and parted on one side, the severe mouth, above all the great liquid eyes, eyes which reflected her inwardness as water reflects the moods of the sky, extraordinary eyes which illuminated the intellectual frame they inhabited. Something Hilary had taken for granted about Willa, her always being present for whomever sat opposite her in that room, could not be taken for granted now: she was obviously not there for Hilary. And when the vital fugue of the Concerto in G Major began to weave its way in and out, the tensio
n grew so that Hilary would not have dared lift her eyes again, for fear of seeing something she was not meant to see.

  She was not alone. The Briard hauled himself to a sitting position, threw back his shaggy head, and uttered a long despairing howl. Hilary remembered that she was relieved by that howl because she suspected this sort of hallucination, but the dog’s reaction convinced her that she had not been wrong to imagine that some extraordinary event was taking place. He settled down again in response to a sharp command from Willa, nose on his paws, but the dark eyes still roved anxiously about as if he feared the return of whatever had caused him pain.

  At last the record came to an end. He gave a series of deep barks, more like howls than barks—one could only imagine them the expression of relief—got up, wagging his long plume of a tail, laid his head for a moment on Willa’s knee, then flopped down at her feet.

  If all four walls of the room had fallen in at that moment, Hilary would have felt no surprise.

  “Is there an earthquake going on?” she asked.

  “An earthquake?” Willa’s voice was strained. “You are rather too perceptive.” She got up then, pressing one hand to her forehead. “Why don’t we go for a walk? Gustav is restless.”

  Off they went into the dripping mists of the November evening. Hilary walked beside Willa, following her and the great dog who led them both, tugging at the leash. Every now and then they came to a street lamp haloed in light, then crossed through it into the thickening whiteness.

  “Before we turn back,” Hilary finally asked, “tell me what all this is about, if you can.”

  “I know Seamus—very well.”

  “You do?” Hilary felt slightly cheated for having described him in such detail. Then Willa’s words flashed again through her consciousness. “Know … very well”: it could mean only one thing.

  “You’re a writer, and you might as well know all there is to know about human affairs. I’ll tell you a strange story,” Willa said. Then there was a pause.

  “Don’t, if you don’t want to.”

  “I’ve buried it for ten years. Maybe it’s time I told it.” She sighed. “A strange story. I was thirty five, he was twenty,” she began. “The classic case of the lodger who moves in. My marriage was breaking up. Perhaps we had conceived the idea of a lodger as a way of easing the strain. His presence at family meals would prevent our wrangling in front of the little boys. Seamus thrived on this position, loved having a borrowed family, helped me with the dishes, played with the boys, who adored him of course (you can imagine!), drew J. out about his rare books, was just what we needed, or so it seemed.”

  “Of course he fell in love with you. I can see that.”

  “I don’t know whether he knows what love is. I fell deeply in love with him, anyway.” They walked on in silence. “He’s Catholic.”

  “I suppose he felt guilty.”

  “There is nothing so frightening to an Irish Catholic as passion in a woman.” Willa laughed a hard dry laugh. “It’s all right for a man, but a woman capable of passion—that is the flesh and the devil!” Then she added in a flat voice, “He may have had to save his soul, but he didn’t have to do it in just the way he chose. No,” she said with a certain violence. “He didn’t have to do it in just that way!”

  “He must have loved you.”

  “Oh he loved me!” And again Hilary heard the mocking laugh. “He loved me so much that he had to murder me!”

  “Even I know that it is the privilege of those who fear love to murder those who do not fear it!”

  Then there was again a long silence. When Willa spoke again, she was able to sound like herself, for she said in her usual cool, speculative tone, “We live in a curious age, in an age where passion is suspect. We are lepers. We are treated like lepers. So Seamus treated me … like a leper. Worse. Lepers are sent off to their kind to die a natural death.”

  “And you?” Hilary breathed.

  “Burned to the ground.” Inexorably Willa’s voice went on, to expose what no one but Hilary would ever hear or know. What Seamus had done was to turn up one Sunday at tea time, having chosen an hour when he knew the whole family would be gathered together, bringing with him a young Irish girl whom he introduced as his fiancée.

  “What did you do?”

  “What did I do?” Hilary measured the strength of the woman beside her. “I welcomed Moira, and I never saw him alone again. Although he had the gall to stay on as lodger for a week.”

  “What made him do it?” Hilary cried out. “How could he?”

  “People will do a great deal in defence of their immortal souls!”

  “Yes, but he didn’t have to stay on!” His genial laughter, his sensitivity, his humor, his charm rose up in Hilary’s mind. How explain such a man? How encompass such cruelty? How do this twisting, torturing thing to the clarity, the light, the balance in the woman beside her? “I don’t understand,” she said.

  “Well, you said it yourself. People who cannot feel punish those who do. It’s an instinct like shooting a mad dog. I suppose he would say now that he did it in self defence.… He used to call me a pagan.…”

  Then for a long time there was silence between Willa and Hilary. They walked in the dark, separately, side by side. Out of that long silence, Willa for the first time turned toward Hilary, included her. “It was too strange. You walked into the house speaking of Seamus, and you brought the Brandenburg Concertos. You see, that is what we had played during those months, over and over again, as if they held the key to everything we were together. Even the dog knew. It was too strange,” she said again.

  “Yes,” Hilary said.

  “I was dead, and now I’m alive again.”

  Hilary experienced something like jealousy before a kind of passion she sensed that she herself would, perhaps, never know.

  “Devastating, useless!” Willa added.

  “Feeling is never useless.”

  “I wonder.…”

  “It has made you what you are. It’s why you can do what you do for everyone who comes to your house. It’s the other side of your detachment, of your power to include everyone and everything—don’t you see?”

  “People don’t have to be broken in pieces to be useful, Hilary.”

  “But something has to open people, and it’s always terrible.”

  “How do you know?” Willa asked in almost her usual tone of voice. “You’re a poet. You can turn it all into something else.”

  “Maybe,” Hilary said. “But that’s not easy, either.”

  She said it without really knowing. But in the weeks and months that followed she came to know; present when the earth quaked, given to sense the deep tremor, Hilary had been seized by poetry in a new way. Inspiration? It felt more like being harnessed to wild horses whom she must learn to control or be herself flung down and broken. The sonnet form with its implacable demand to clarify, to condense, to bring to fulfillment, became the means to control. Now for the first time she understood about form, what it was for, how it could teach one to discover what was really happening, and how to come to terms with the impossible, how it was not a discipline imposed from outside by the intellect, but grappled with from inner necessity as a means of probing and dealing with powerful emotion. From that night on, for weeks, nearly every day Hilary brought Willa a sonnet. Early in the morning, late at night, whenever she could break away from her job for half an hour, she brought one more attempt to contain, to express the long suspended passionate plea—for what? What did those poems ask? To be taken into the flood, to be part of it.

  Willa listened. She accepted the poems as the true Muse does with detached, imaginative grace: she brought to bear her critical intelligence, illuminated by something like love, the inwardness, the transparency which had been opened in spite of herself on the night of the Brandenburg Concertos. Above all she succeeded in making Hilary accept that the poem itself was the reality, accept, at least at first, that together, for some mysterious reason, they made p
ossible the act of creation. It was intimacy of a strange kind.

  On the surface Willa was exactly as she had been before, witty, cool, the good listener, but there was something—and Hilary was acutely aware of it—that she could no longer control, that rising flood of feeling which had been buried so long. She confessed to Hilary that both men and women among those who had used to come to the house for the good conversation, for the atmosphere of intellectual comfort, had suddenly begun to make personal demands, were drawn to her as lovers.

  “What am I to do about this, Hilary? It is so disturbing …,” and she laughed. “There’s no use telling them I am through with all that. No one believes me!”

  Willa had laughed her light cool laugh, but there was considerable stress under it, and Hilary knew that she herself contributed to the stress. The poems themselves denied that Willa was “through with all that.” And the time came when Hilary could no longer accept that the Muse must not be involved except as a spectator. She wanted to break through the detachment, through the admirably lucid understanding of what she was doing as a poet, to break through to the woman herself in Willa, to appease the flood with a human gesture. More than once Hilary had crossed the room as if it were a continent or an ocean, taken one of those small tensile hands in hers, and kissed it. At such moments Willa simply waited for the seizure to pass, waited, impassive as some goddess to whom a devotee makes an oblation. There was no human response. But not even this absolute control on Willa’s part, this implacable façade, could keep the tension from growing between them. They were being carried on a wave of such depth and force that Hilary could not doubt its reality, and somewhere sometime it would have to break, before it could be sucked back into the deep from which it had come. So she believed with her whole being.

  Yet the day came when Willa spoke out sharply. “Hilary, you force me to speak plainly. I simply am not one of those ambidextrous people who can love women as well as men. You’ll have to accept me as I am.”