Free Mrs. Stevens Hears the Mermaids Singing by May Sarton

hive of sensation and feeling. “Bother!” she uttered, eagerly unfolding the Times to the obituaries.
    Well, thank goodness, for once no one had died. Lately it had been a holocaust—everyone, it seemed, was dying. And what really was the point of living on, if one was to be the sole survivor of one’s world? No one to depend on any more, no one who really mattered . Hilary could not get accustomed to having become herself the older generation, nor could she really believe that the young might wait for a word of praise from her, as she had waited—so long, always—for a word of praise from her elders. These were dangerous thoughts; she warded off the tide of depression which might begin to rise at any moment now, by turning to the letters. First she tore open several second-class envelopes. Bishops in South Africa asking alms, the Civil Liberties Union, Core, Care. God knows, they all seemed to think that if you gave your mite, it should be doubled within the month! After this freight of anguish, and the inevitable rousing of guilt and shame—Why was she not richer? Why was she so selfish?—Hilary turned over a long envelope which might prove interesting. It contained a letter from a ninth-grade girl in a school in New Jersey, asking her to say in a few words why she, Hilary, wrote poetry and just how she wrote a poem. Only that! At once Hilary began inventing an answer: Dear Miss So-and-So, You are monstrously lazy and ill-bred; you think nothing of asking me to spend a morning answering two idiotic portmanteau questions.
    But of course she would never write any such letter …, instead, the effort of toning down her irritation and finding two or three appropriate sentences, might take a half hour tomorrow morning. Bother! It was to be that kind of mail, was it? For the next envelope contained a sheaf of terrible poems with a request for criticism; the hand was elderly; the need, obvious. The third letter she opened, by now exasperated, was from a publisher, asking her to read and, if possible, say a few words about a new novel (on its way in bound galleys under separate cover). There were two more of the same ilk. The house, Hilary sometimes imagined, would be buried under the avalanche of books, and she would never again be able to choose what she would read.
    So this was fame at last! Nothing but a vast debt to be paid to the world in energy, in blood, in time. And lucky she who had escaped it for forty-five years!
    At last Hilary turned up two personal letters from the huge pile, and tore into them happily. One was from her old school-friend, Nancy, the only one with whom she still kept in touch. Nancy, desperate as usual, though she was now a grandmother, fighting her life out inch by inch, valiant, original. “Dear Nancy!” Hilary murmured as she read, “Oh Hilary didn’t you think one would feel less naked in old age? Or at least not quite so desperate? Bob’s little boy has leukemia; my own Bob is in one of his remote states when I feel I married a zombie forty years ago. The garden is devoured by slugs. How are you? I hope you are thriving … do I really? No, I really hope you are so badgered by having become a celebrity that you will fly over and stay for weeks. You must admit that if we don’t manage to meet soon, one of us will be dead and the other, sorry.”
    No one is happy, Hilary thought, not Mar, not Nancy—and fifty years between them. Am I happy? She asked herself and was surprised to find that the immediate response from some inner part of her being was, “Yes … yes and no …,” but she did not stop to finish this thought, as she was now immersed in the second personal letter, written in a childish hand from a village in Maine. It was the quarterly report from dear old Susan who had nursed Hilary’s mother through her final illness; it was the acknowledgment of the usual check. “Your mother loved the lilacs and now they are in bud, I think of her every day. I never did thank