Read Online Mrs. Stevens Hears the Mermaids Singing by May Sarton - Free Book Online

with her tiger. How cruel memory is, forgetful memory that drops whole lives out without a qualm! It occurred to her, standing in the brilliant morning light, forty years later—and surrounded by her own life, her life alone—that among the letters she had unbundled last night there had been a touching one from Adrian’s father, the ink almost faded, thanking her for having given Adrian “those brief years of happiness.” Tears sprang to her eyes, because she could not remember the old man’s face.…
    Hilary wished she could stop the shuttle which for the last week had been so inexorably weaving the past and the present together.… She walked quickly down the big room to the French windows. No Mar. Perhaps after all he had been put off by her nervousness. But he shouldn’t make me so anxious, she thought, it’s not fair! And on an impulse, simply to get back firmly into the present, she went to the telephone and called Mary back.
    “It’s me, Hilary. I’m sorry I was cross, Mary, but I feel so badgered these days! Besides, you know very well I am not fit for society. I get overexcited and say the wrong thing.… You know, I do! … Besides, this afternoon two young people are coming to interview me about my whole oeuvre .… That’s what they said, oeuvre .… I feel like a hen who has laid a monstrous number of eggs or something. Don’t laugh, I’m serious.… Terrified.… I’ve been reading old letters and things to try to get some perspective, a frightful mistake. It has made me dreadfully depressed and confused.… Of course it’s flattering—of course I shall enjoy it! You are so literal, darling …, well—as long as you still love me.… Goodbye!”
    Sirenica had come to wrap herself around Hilary’s legs, rubbing her nose against Hilary’s sneakers with passion, and purring ecstatically. But when Hilary bent down to scratch behind the delicate white ears, the cat dashed off, holding her tail high. Wyatt’s poem welled up out of this little scene and Hilary was borne out into the garden on the wave of joy, as she found she could recite it still by heart—at least one thing memory had yielded up for keeps.
They flee from me that sometime did me seek,
With naked foot stalking within my chamber:
Once I have seen them gentle, tame, and meek,
That now are wild, and do not once remember
That sometime they have put themselves in danger
To take bread at my hand; and now they range,
Busily seeking in continual change .
    “And that’s for you, my pussy,” Hilary said, as Sirenica leapt into the air, paws outstretched, but missed the butterfly she was after, pretended it was all a gambol, and sat down decorously, tucking her paws in, under a rose bush.
    Hilary whistled a self-made tune as she went to the woodshed and got out her basket of gardening tools. On her way back, she heard the oriole give its piercing four notes from somewhere among the apple trees, and dropped the basket to climb swiftly over the stone wall, hoping to catch a glimpse of that orange flame. Elusive bird! Hilary leaned back under each tree, but no luck. She stood quite still and listened, the perplexities and anxieties of the morning gone, as if she had been released from a spell and allowed back into the world of Now. Even Mar was forgotten, while she noted, as she slowly returned, that the rose, Nevada, needed spraying, and she simply must weed the small border along the wall, or it would become a jungle.
    “After all, Sirenica, we have the whole morning. No work today.…”
    Any day when Hilary did not sit at her desk was automatically a holiday, even if there were interviewers lying in wait at the end of it. Soon her fingers were deftly pulling out tufts of grass and violets from around the bleeding heart; nothing like weeding to unknot the mind, nothing except the same thing in another sphere, pruning the fat out of a poem, cutting, shaping, give it space to breathe in.
    “Ow!” Her fingers had struck a rock. Gardening