Mrs. Stevens Hears the Mermaids Singing (4 page)

“In exchange for what?” she had asked, testing him. She was sick and tired of the expectations of the young, that they had rights and all must be done for them, with no return.

Mar had half shut his eyes, ducked his head, and made no answer.

“I need someone to dig up flower beds, spread manure, bring in wood,” she said sharply as if it made her cross. “I used to do those things myself, but lately I have found it cuts into my work, don’t you know? I get tired. So?”

“I don’t like doing any of those things,” he had said, “but if you need someone, I guess I’ll have to!” He had looked down at her from his spindling height in a rather fatherly way, and Hilary felt herself being tamed.

“Who are you, anyway?”

“Mar. Mar Hemmer.” He kicked a pebble with one sneakered foot, no longer fatherly, troubled by her probing gaze. Now she remembered. Why, she knew the boy! “Old Mar Hemmer’s grandson, of course!”

Cape Ann used to be full of these tow-headed Finns who came over in the days when the big stone piers berthed sailing ships that carried granite round the world; now the place was a honeycomb of abandoned quarries, many of them deep lakes, taken over by summer people for swimming naked in. The Finns had gone into factories. Yes, it appeared that Mar was living with his grandfather; that was all she learned that day. The facts came later; she had recognized at once her own kind, conflicted, nervous, driven, violent, affectionate.… Hilary had read all this in his shy glance and guessed at some trouble. Well, she could use a boy round the place, and she knew herself well enough to accept that anyone she took in would have to be taken into her heart, sooner or later.

Mar didn’t talk much but he worked hard, and little by little she came to know a good deal about him. She came to know, for instance, that his mother had been dead ten years; he had been spoiled in some ways, and in others treated with absurd severity by his father who concentrated all his own hopes and fears on this only child. The boy was both old and young for his age; he had learned to respond to the need of affection of the old, had already spent some secret source in himself, was, Hilary sometimes imagined, already gutted by his father’s demands, too anxious to meet that measure to be quite himself. She looked for some hardness, for the hard core that might protect him. Now and then she had had intimations that it was there, if one dug down deep enough, but his surfaces were still quivering. He was here, living with his grandfather, because he had gone to pieces in his second year at Amherst, couldn’t study, he told Hilary, was “shot to Hell” as he put it, but he didn’t tell her why or what had happened, majored in chemistry (his father’s idea, no doubt), had done all right for grades, well enough anyway so the college would take him back when he felt ready “to go back to the grind.” When he talked about Amherst, and he very rarely did, there was a sort of deadness in his tone, as if he stood before a blank wall. His father had done the right thing out of terror (the alternative was a psychiatrist), had sent Mar to his grandfather for six months, hoping that time itself, and a boat to sail, might mend whatever had been broken. The boat had been old Hemmer’s idea; in his view there was nothing the sea couldn’t cure. And Hilary approved. The old man let the boy come and go as he pleased; for the first time in his life Mar was free to live alone with himself.

Hilary was soon aware that he had found his way to her door not because he needed the pier, though having it handy saved him a considerable walk, but because he needed a woman around. It took longer for her to realize that there had been something else than a hunger for a feminine atmosphere in the back of his mind, something more definite: he wanted to find out about her as a writer. He was curious about her work. And this despite his almost total ignorance where literature was concerned. But this absence of the predigested and preconceived enhanced his value in Hilary’s eyes. She saw that he paid attention to things, that he listened when she explained how to prune an apple tree or why the compost heap was layered as it was, that he handled tools with rare respect, and above all that he was closely observant. She discovered that she cared what he might think about her poems; she was excited when she handed over the piles of books, as if this ignorant boy and his opinion mattered to her more than she was quite willing to admit. How would they look to him? Even now, old, and even at last, famous, she never had handed her work over to anyone without an inner tremor: every flaw leapt out. There seemed to be no single really good poem to show for all the years. But she felt the tremor now because she was handing her work over to someone absolutely open, ignorant of the world, unaware of what “they” had said or had not said, and it had become a test.

There was no gratifying explosion of praise. But while they worked together, Hilary standing under a tree, Mar high up with the pruning shears, the boy would suddenly say something. He never talked except in some such awkward situation; his voice murmured from a tree or by a stone wall where he was kneeling to weed. “How did you happen to notice that about the lilac buds?” “When you begin a poem what comes first?”

“You know an awful lot about people,” he announced one day.

“I’ve lived a long time.”

“You knew a lot when you were young.”

“Doesn’t one?” she challenged.

But there was no answer. Mar trudged off with a load of dead leaves on the pitchfork, tossed them onto the compost heap, and came back, his shoulders drooping.

“Maybe we had better stop.”

“I’m not tired,” he sounded cross.

“Then hold up your shoulders. You look like an old man.”

“I’m tired inside, not outside.”

“Yes,” she said matter-of-factly, “I expect you are.”

“I’m tired of feeling so much.”

“Good God, boy, you’ve only just begun!” Hilary shouted. She cursed her violence, for he shut up like a clam, didn’t speak again that morning, all knotted up. Hilary was aware that he slept badly. Sometimes he turned up for work when he had been out in the boat since four or five o’clock in the morning.

“You’re driving yourself.”

“Something drives me.” Then he had blurted out, “I wish I could write poems.”

“It’s one way of meeting the enemy.”

“What enemy?”

“One’s self, of course.”

“Yes, I suppose so,” he said without enthusiasm.

“Sooner or later you’ve got to come to terms with whatever it is, Mar.”

He had shot her one of his intent looks but had not answered. Hilary had begun to understand how like a wild animal he was; she held her peace. Then he suddenly took a piece of crumpled paper out of his pocket and handed it to her without a word. It was a crude jumble of suffering and self-hatred.

“Yes,” Hilary said, handing it back to him. “One of those letters one writes to oneself. As a poem, not anything yet.”

“I know.”

“Why do you have to hate yourself?” she asked, busying herself with the trowel.

“I can’t tell you,” he answered after a considerable pause. And that was all that day. Hilary did not know she had such patience in her, but she was learning.

The day came when he asked, “Have you ever—I mean, in all those love poems—are any of them—?” He was red in the face. “I mean, what sort of love are you talking about?” Now it was out, he did not take his eyes off her.

“All kinds, I suppose.” What was he getting at, so circuitously and so purposefully?

“Could you tell me just what people you had loved when you were about my age?”

“Woof!” Hilary took out one of her father’s handkerchiefs and wiped her face and neck. “Too hot! Come and sit down on the wall, and I’ll try to remember.”

“You don’t
remember!
” Mar flung down his cutters with a rough angry gesture.

“Well, at least you didn’t throw them at me! It was only a manner of speaking—people slip in and out of one’s consciousness, don’t you know?”

“Mine don’t.”

“Oh well, you are obsessed by one person, I expect.” Hilary paid no attention to his reaction whatever it was, but sat down on the wall and became fascinated by a bee making its way into the apple blossom close at hand. Mar watched her.

“To be precise,” she uttered at last, “when I was your age I had been madly in love with a woman a good deal my senior, with an old man, a doctor, briefly with a nurse in the hospital, and then of course,” she added, as if it were in some way irrelevant, “with the man I married.”

“You can’t have loved all those people in the way I mean,” Mar said crossly.

“I loved them in the way one loves at any age—if it’s real at all—obsessively, painfully, with wild exultation; with guilt, with conflict; I wrote poems to and about them; I put them into novels (disguised of course); I brooded upon why they were as they were, so often maddening, don’t you know? I wrote them ridiculous letters. I lived with their faces. I knew their every gesture by heart. I stalked them like wild animals. I studied them as if they were maps of the world—and in a way, I suppose they were.” She had spoken rapidly, on the defensive … if he thought she didn’t know what she was talking about! “Love opens the doors into everything, as far as I can see, including and perhaps most of all, the door into one’s own secret, and often terrible and frightening, real self.”

Mar stamped out his cigarette and retrieved the cutters. “Thanks,” he said and made as if to go back to work.

“Come back here, and tell me what eats you!”

He stood about twelve feet away, glaring.

“Utter, man!” But she did not wait for his answer, carried along on her own torrent. “I’m not afraid!”

“Afraid of what?”

“Afraid of feeling, you poop! It’s people that matter, Mar, not sexes or ages.” Then as suddenly as she had begun, she stopped, gave her light laugh, looked at him quizzically, “I suppose you knew you would open Pandora’s box with that question.… Who is this fellow?”

It was a guess, but not based on nothing. And Hilary had decided that one of the privileges of old age was that no holds were barred. You were permitted to be absolutely honest. But she knew she had taken a risk. Her absurd heart was beating so fast she felt it pulsing in her throat, as if she were a frog! Would he dash away and never come back?

No, he sat down some distance away, hands between his knees, rocking back and forth.

“You got married!”

It was the last remark Hilary had expected to hear and she was startled into laughter. “Why not? It’s not a crime as far as I know.” Then she added quite gently, “I consider myself a total human being … do you think I’m a monster?”

“No. I think I am.” His voice had gone dead. She mustn’t lose him now. She mustn’t by clumsiness or violence slam the door. How to keep it open? By rambling on, she sensed, give him time.

“So you have got yourself deep into some real feeling, and instead of thanking God that you are not a zombie like most people I see about, you decide you are a monster! Mar,” she spoke slowly, testing every word, “it’s hard to be growing up in this climate where sex at its most crude and cold is O.K. but feeling is somehow indecent. The monsters are those who go rutting around like monkeys, not those who choose to be human whatever it costs, and it costs a great deal, of course.” Mar was silent, but she felt the concentrated attention he was giving her. “The first time you ever came here, I recognized you.”

“You did?” he asked, visibly afraid. “What do you mean, ‘recognized’?”

“I saw you as a person of primary intensity—they are rare. They live in Hell a good part of their lives, a Hell of their own making, but they are the only people who ever amount to anything, as far as I can see. You’ve got to accept that it’s going to be tough all the way to be the person you are, but do you honestly think one can ever regret loving? The odd thing of course is that we so often choose inappropriate people—I grant you that!” And she laughed her queer light laugh, queer because it sounded so young, and so vulnerable, even shy. “Well,” she said as if she were throwing down a glove, “I’ll tell you the truth. I loved my husband, but …, others touched the poet as he did not. It’s mysterious.”

“Yes.…” Mar uttered only one word, but Hilary knew that she must be very quiet, not let her enormously articulate person overwhelm or break the small thread that was at last there between them, the thread of communion when two human beings, whatever their age or sex may be, give themselves away. It does not happen often; it never happens lightly, and when it has happened, there is a bond between the two that nothing can ever wholly destroy.

“I’m not afraid. It’s other people.” The story, withheld so long, poured out; Hilary had not been wrong in her guess. The only real friend Mar made at Amherst was a young instructor in chemistry, Rufus Gilbert; they had come to know each other because they shared an interest in birds and soon made a habit of going out at five on Saturday mornings, on long walks in the country.

Of course such friendships do not go unnoticed, and a passion for bird-watching is not quite the regular thing. No doubt the gang at the dormitory had been waiting for a chance to get at Mar, who was something of a maverick anyway, and had a way of vanishing into silence. The more precious his friendship with Rufus became, the more secretive he was about it, the more the pack instinct was roused against him. It began with the usual razzing; Mar was followed by whistles and birdcalls when he crossed the campus. Once the gang followed the two young men and cawed like crows from behind some bushes: that time Rufus had turned on them with such contempt that they had gone rather sheepishly about their business. But the barbarians were aroused and out for blood; they egged each other on, and finally openly jeered at Gilbert in the class room. This time he was dismayed and upset enough himself to go to one of the Deans for advice. The Dean had called Mar in for a friendly talk (oh with the best intentions, no doubt!), but, as Hilary guessed, he had not known how to go about it at all. Even the fringes of this subject aroused so much fear, of course, that it was usually mishandled by people in authority, as if they were not dealing with loyalty and love!

“The filthy bastard made me feel filthy!” Mar shouted. The tight coil was sprung at last.