Free Mrs. Stevens Hears the Mermaids Singing by May Sarton Page A

you—or did I?—for the February check. I am getting old and forgetful and you must forgive me. My old cat, Tomboy, died. I thought you would like to know. I buried him under the apple tree. The place seems lonely now. When will you come and see us? I should have said me. Now Tomboy is dead, it is only me.”
    Dear old Susan. “I shall have to go, of course,” Hilary thought. “It is the least I can do.” But had her mother loved lilacs?
    The sun had gone under a cloud, and that vivid slanting white light was diffused on the wall. My mother, Hilary thought.… Did she love the lilacs? How little I knew her, really. Desolation ran through her like an electric current turned on …, but I simply must rest, Hilary said to the current, making an effort to turn it off. I must go and lie down. I must shut this out because the interviewers are coming, and I cannot disintegrate. I must meet them, fully armed.
    Quickly she made herself a peanut butter sandwich, set it on a tray with a glass of milk, and fled to her bedroom. She pulled the curtains, lay down in the aqueous light, and fell half asleep in a kind of doze, forgetting to eat. It was the mail, of course. It took at least an hour of the day before the reverberations brought in by the mail died down. Foreign matter quite literally broke into one’s composure and shattered it with great booming sounds.…
    Had her mother loved the lilacs? Why had not Hilary ever known this as precisely as did an old nurse, no connection at all, a stranger? Her mother lived on in Susan’s awareness as a different person from the one who troubled Hilary’s sleep so often these days. In Susan’s hands her mother had become a loving infant … all the tenderness locked back through all the years had flowed out to this stranger; Hilary was the outsider, allowed in for brief formal visits. Oh, it was too painful! She turned over, hoping that a different physical position would somehow change the psychic position, but it was no use. “Absurd old woman,” young Hilary admonished old Hilary, “pull yourself together. Sit up, drink your milk, and eat your sandwich!”
    “Hilary has a fine mind, but she is too emotional,” she could hear her mother saying to her father; and during her childhood both her parents devised ways of teaching her what they considered proper control of the indecent extravagence of those wild tears, so often tears of rage. Well, she had learned something: it was to set herself a problem to solve when she was seized by “woe” as Nancy called it. So let’s have it out, she admonished herself. Think about your mother, old fool, and stop feeling so much; stop weeping over what is irrevocable and finished.
    “Irrevocable, maybe,” old Hilary answered at once, “but not finished! We may come into the world naked, but we go out of it clothed in anguish.”
    Where then did it all begin? Her mother and father had been second cousins, members of a vast Boston clan who congregated every summer in Sorrento, Maine, and regarded anyone not born in Boston as deprived and to be treated with faintly condescending kindness; just in the way they regarded anyone who spent money freely as slightly feeble-minded, a person to be spoken of as “Poor David has just bought a yacht,” or “those pathetic Richardsons have moved again into—of all things!—a French château on the Maine coast.” Their own lives were unassailable in their circumspection, hidden generosity, and good taste. Of course her father had spent a fortune on French Impressionists; no doubt his cousins at that time spoke of him as “Poor Jason …, crazy about those French painters,” but the joke was on them when their own safe shares in Kruger proved a total loss and Jason’s madness a giltedged security.
    Hilary, immersed already in one of her long ironic conversations with herself about Boston, stopped in full flight, to ask herself, but why the irony? What had been wrong? Why when they were so