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

impeccable, were they also just faintly ridiculous? Why when so noble, was some elusive value just lacking …, this was the mystery. Was it that they lacked the aristocratic virtue of treating serious things lightly and light things seriously? Despite the elaborate family jokes and rites, the general atmosphere was frightfully earnest, and in a strange way, devitalized. There were times when she felt she loomed over her parents like some larger fiercer kind of animal, and where had she come from then, a sport from some ancestor, some wild Welshman from the eighteenth century?
    “I am nobody’s child,” she had shouted at her mother once in a fury. “I’m nothing like you or Pa and being like you would kill me!”
    “Well, you’re not Pallas Athene, that’s sure,” her mother had said with a touch of acerbity. “I labored twenty-four hours to bring you into the world, my girl.”
    “And after all that you wanted a boy!”
    “I never said so.”
    “You must have—anybody would.” Hilary was relentless.
    “ I wanted a girl,” her father said in his slightly teasing gentle voice, “so you really cannot pretend whatever you are trying to pretend this time.”
    “I wanted to be a boy, I guess,” Hilary had granted, standing at the window in the Beacon Street upstairs library and looking out on four or five boys of about her own age having a fierce snowball fight in the street. Her father could tame her when no one else could, tame her by his gentleness, by that quizzical look round his eyes when he looked at her; although he was so shy, she felt his love as an absolute certainty.
    With her mother it was so much more complicated … self-aware, terrified perhaps of spoiling an only child, punishing them both by refusing to give in to what she would have called mawkishness. Tenderness was only safe if given or received by the sick in bed and no wonder Hilary spent such large numbers of weeks as a child being ill! No wonder she had reacted so violently all her life to the fear of feeling, and to the fury who attended it, the sense of guilt. The wonderful thing about the English society into which Hilary had moved when she married Adrian was the total absence of this cramped and cramping sense of duty. It was a larger air; things could be taken for granted; money, power, could be taken for granted. The relief it had been!
    But when Hilary thought of her mother, the image was always of her sitting at the small desk in her bedroom, overwhelmed by what she had failed to accomplish, paying for every moment of pleasure with hours of self-castigating good works, driven to visit hospitals, driven to do far more than she needed to about opening and closing summer houses and camps, so she radiated anxiety and tension. Yet this image must be crossed with another, equally valid, of her mother coming down the staircase on her way out to dinner, looking brilliant, a little flushed, a plain woman who could suddenly become a beauty, who, unlike her daughter, flourished in social situations, loved good conversation with a passion, enjoyed pitting her mind and her personality against those of her peers—a woman whom men admired and (Hilary suspected) whom more than one had been more than a little in love with, a woman who could flirt with the man on her left and then with the man on her right, but who would have been horrified to be taken seriously by either of them.
    Hilary, leaning over the banisters, was melted by the apparition, the exquisite pale pink Worth dress, the subdued excitement in her mother’s voice, as she asked her husband,
    “Do I look all right, dear?”
    “Smashing!”
    “I am not quite sure about the pink.… It doesn’t look too young?”
    Hilary had run down the stairs and thrown her arms around her mother. “Oh you smell delicious!”
    “Careful, Hilary, don’t crumple me.” But was it, old Hilary wondered, as the scene came into focus with the felt pang intact, that Ma was afraid of being crumpled,