Mrs. Stevens Hears the Mermaids Singing (10 page)

“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.”

“But you haven’t answered! You don’t want to!”

He gave her his serious smile, “You’ve got me in a corner. What makes you think I know?”

“I think maybe you like women,” she said. It was her opinion that Geroge really did not like them. He was trying to fall in love, to catch it from her, but the Hell was that she knew and he knew that so far the operation had not been successful.

“Yes,” Peter said. “I do. I should have thought that a rather common masculine characteristic, like having to shave.” He chuckled.

“I think, for a lot of men, women
loom,”
she said sadly.

“Gods who have to be propitiated with human sacrifice?” He waited for her laugh and then saw that she was not laughing.

“I meant that as a joke, Jenny, let’s not be so serious,” he squeezed her hand fraternally.

“I have to be serious about this. I can’t help it. It’s my life after all.” She pulled her hand away. “I want to marry, Peter, and have children, and a house, and a dog, and several cats. I want to be treated like a human being and to
be
a human being, don’t you see?”

Peter accelerated and passed two huge trucks. The spurt of speed suggested impatience, and Jenny watched him out of the corner of her eye, in a sort of desperation.

“It’s all right for a man to have work and to be married, but when a woman does, it’s a threat.”

“Maybe a man wants a woman to be his woman, and not some art’s woman … maybe it makes him feel insecure,” he hazarded.

“What about F. Hilary Stevens then?” she asked aggressively. “She got married.”

“Her husband died young—we can’t know.”

“Colette had three husbands!”

“Exactly!” For the first time Peter felt needled and cross. “It wasn’t the sort of life you have just described so nostalgically, was it? A writer’s life is obsessed, driven, in the hands of powers he can hardly control himself. Writing must seem often the only reality. I just don’t believe you can do it with your right hand while your left hand rocks a cradle, Jenny!”

“But how can you be a good writer and not live? How do you ever know?”

“How did we ever get into this?” he asked the air, for Jenny’s head was turned toward the woods. “I have an idea your questions had better wait for the horse’s mouth. We should be there soon.”

“How soon?”

“Don’t panic. Just ferret about in my briefcase and find that yellow sheet with all the directions and tell me what it says. We must be close to Gloucester now.”

Jenny found the crumpled piece of paper, was amused to discover that F. Hilary Stevens’ typing was as erratic as her own. “It says, keep going past Gloucester and Rockport around Cape Ann, until you come to Folly Cove. At Folly Cove turn left on a rough unpaved road and keep going past two abandoned quarries to the end! …. Folly Cove? Abandoned quarries? How symbolic can you get? She’s fooling.” Jenny felt laughter rising in her, instead of the tears she had so feared would overcome her. And this bubble of laughter grew and grew and became irresistible. Peter chortled beside her, occasionally gasping “Folly Cove” and “quarries,” as relieved as Jenny was to be out of the dangerous passage. The furies had gone away.

Now they drove through delicious waves of salt air; it came and went, tantalizing, and after they had turned away from the classic prettiness of Rockport, there were occasional glimpses of the ocean, around a bend, or back of a house. It lay there, stretched silk on this windless day, perfectly serene, silencing the city-bred, opulent background to the tight white houses.

“Oh Peter, do stop! I want to look.…”

He turned off the road by an old stone pier, beside a lobster joint still boarded up for the winter. They got out and walked down to the end of the pier, taking deep breaths of the air, relieved to break for the moment the inexorable momentum of the drive.

“Imagine
living
here!” Jenny said lifting her face to the air as if to drink it.

“Rock, kelp, waves, light.…”

“Too much light. Too open. I could never utter a word! What could one say in front of this?” But Peter had bent his head and was not really listening. He walked off by himself then, and when he came back, said, concluding a train of thought, “Listen, Jenny, let’s be clear about one thing. I want you to keep in mind that as I see it, the crux of this interview has to do with the whole creative thing for a woman poet.”

“Why not just a
poet?
Why haul in the woman part?”

“Listen, porcupine, keep those quills down for a second, will you? You said a while ago that it was harder to be a woman writer.”

“
You
said it!”

“O.K., I said it. That’s not what I’m talking about anyway. What seems to me valid and interesting is the question posited at such huge length by Robert Graves in
The White Goddess
—who and what is the Muse? Here we have a poet who has gone on writing poems long after the Muse, at least in a personal incarnation, has become irrelevant. What sustains the intensity? Is there a White God?” he asked and immediately felt how funny it sounded. They both laughed.

“Of course not!”

“Well then.…”

Jenny looked out to sea. “Maybe Aphrodite rises from the waves now and then.…”

Peter looked at his watch. “Come on!” he called back, running to the car. “Well be late.”

They were, actually, close to the cove, though they could not see it, around the next point. It lay there, bounded on both sides by monumental rocks, shining and still. But in hot pursuit of the gods, they hardly looked. Besides, it was necessary almost at once to turn up the “rough” road on the left. Rough it was; it looked as if it had been created by a giant throwing rocks down a dry brook-bed, and Peter and Jenny were fiercely jolted. On the left they recognized one of the quarries, now a dark green pool at the foot of a steep cliff; clumps of iris around the lower edge gave it the look of a Japanese garden. They passed a shuttered clapboard house, still sealed up for winter. A bone-shaking crack brought “Damn!” to Peter’s lips.

“What was that?”

“A rock. I just hope it didn’t crack the axle.”

The car shuddered, but managed to grip the uneven surface again, and plunged upwards past some unattractive scrub, black birch, and locusts, past an overgrown apple orchard, and finally past a much larger quarry on the right, it too filled with water.

The quarries gave a classic air to the otherwise untamed landscape; the combination, it occurred to Jenny, did seem to have some relation to the poems. But it was impossible to speak at the moment because of the jolts.

“Look, there it is!” and Peter swung in through a narrow drive between two giant clumps of lilac and out into a circle in front of the house. Groups of daffodil and narcissus were in flower below a broken down stone wall. The house itself, not clapboard as they had somehow expected, but gray fieldstone, with white trim at the windows and a bright blue door, was more of an “estate” than Jenny at least had imagined it would be. She felt extremely nervous, as Peter stopped the car. In silence they gathered up notebooks and handbags, gently closed the car doors, performing these actions as if on tiptoe, very much aware of the possibility that they were being observed. They walked up to the blue door and Peter pulled the old-fashioned door bell. Inside they could hear a faint tinkle, so faint, and without reverberation, that it seemed as if the house might be empty.

“What if …,” Jenny whispered.

Part II: the interview

Before Jenny could finish her sentence, the door opened in their faces. They towered there like awkward giants looking down at the small stooped personage looking up at them, head a little on one side, who said in a surprisingly resonant voice to come from so frail a vessel.

“So it’s you! Do come in. You must be tired after your long journey. Planes are exhausting, I always feel; one can’t settle in somehow.”

F. Hilary Stevens did not look as Jenny expected her to look and was far less formidable than she had imagined. The fine childlike hair, cut short to cover the head as closely as a bird’s feathers, was disarming; disarming, too, one lock allowed to fall over the narrow forehead at a slightly rakish angle. Below this cap, the eyebrows, pale and tufted, the sharply boned nose, the penetrating light-gray eyes, half-hooded under sensitized drooping lids, gave her an owlish look. But no one could have called this extraordinary face a mask, even an owl-mask, it was far too mobile.

“You are Miss Hare, I presume? And this is Mr. Silver-stone.”

“Selversen.”

They shook hands. It was apparent that whatever went on inside F. Hilary Stevens she would have to be called a lady.

“Selversen, is it? Swedish or Danish. I sometimes think that people should always be named for animals. Then one might remember—Hare, for instance, is not forgettable. Perfect name for a writer, I should imagine, those wild eyes, and not to be tamed. Still, you look quite calm, Miss Hare. Would you like to wash?”

“Yes, thank you.”

“Up one flight, and to your left.
You
may use the downstairs facilities, if you will,” and she waved Peter toward a door under the stairs. “You will find me in the big room,” she called to the disappearing two.

Each was glad of the moment in which to register the complete sensation, the first—always so significant—impact, and to do it alone. Peter had caught at once an impression of a person advancing and retreating at the same instant, both transparent and secret, like her face, a person in continuous dialogue with herself. In the bathroom he hummed with excitement.

Jenny had no time to define what she had seen, for when she opened her bathroom door she was faced by a wall of photographs and pencil sketches, and scanned them rapidly, thinking, I must manage to come back here again before we leave. There was a faded brown photograph of a British officer, a riding crop in one hand. Captain Stevens, no doubt. There was an old man in a beret with a thick moustache like Joffre’s, in workmen’s corduroys, standing against an old stone wall. Beside him, in an oval gold frame, a pastel sketch of a woman in a huge Edwardian plumed hat, leaning on a closed parasol, her face bent toward a rose bush, so one caught only a tantalizing glimpse. There was a charming photograph of Elinor Wylie standing in a doorway, smiling; one of Mary Garden lying on a chaise longue, and beside it several other actresses or singers whom Jenny failed to recognize. No one on that wall can be under eighty now, and most of them must be dead, she thought. And it gave her a queer sensation; the woman waiting downstairs was so alive, so much in command, yet what a complex past a human being drags behind him by the time he is in his seventies … all those faces, all those lives, all one’s life, so much of it still undigested, so many doors closed on things one might rather not look back on, so much still troubling (but I am reading myself into this, and none of it may be true). Did F. Hilary Stevens suffer guilt? Did she weep in the night? Or did her generation itself provide her with a kind of immunity, moulded as she had been before World War I, and before Freud? But, after all, photographs freeze the current of life. It was there waiting downstairs, the electric current.