Mrs. Stevens Hears the Mermaids Singing Read Online Free

recommend all four of them to those who interest themselves in books for youngsters; like the best books for young people, they were written for adults, are wise, and do not condescend or lie. There is nothing else produced in this line lately that is nearly so good as Joanna and Ulysses, The Fur Person, The Poet and the Donkey , and Miss Pickthome and Mr. Hare .
    5 . Ruth Limmer, ed., What the Woman Lived: Selected Letters of Louise Bogan 1920–1970 (New York: Harcourt Brace Javonovich, 1973), p. 325.
    6 . Louise Bogan, A Poet’s Alphabet , ed. Ruth Limmer and Robert Phelps (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1970), p. 64.
    7 . W. H. Auden, “A Poet of the Actual,” New Yorker , 1 April 1972, p. 104. (Auden was reviewing a biography of Trollope.)

Part I: Hilary
    Hilary Stevens half opened her eyes, then closed them again. There was some reason to dread this day, although she had taken in that the sun was shining. The soft green silk curtains pulled across the windows created an aqueous light and added to the illusion that she was swimming up into consciousness from deep water: she had had such dreams! Too many people … landscapes … fading in and out of each other.
    “The thing is,” she told herself, “that I am badgered by something.”
    Perhaps if she turned over it would go away.
    Instead she was forced awake by the twice-repeated piercing notes of an oriole in the flowering plum just outside her windows. At the same moment the French clock cut through this spontaneous song with its rigid intervals. Six o’clock.
    “Old thing, it’s high time you pulled yourself together!”
    But the other party of the dialogue rebelled, wanted to stay comfortably in bed, wanted to ward off whatever was to be demanded, wanted to be left in peace. Lately Hilary had observed that she seemed to be two distinct entities, at war. There was a hortatory and impatient person who was irritated by her lethargic twin, that one who had to be prodded awake and commanded like a doddering servant and who was getting old, seventy as one counted years.
    First things first. The mind must be summoned back, then one might manage to lift oneself out of bed. Hilary closed her eyes and set herself to cope with consciousness. But oh to slip back into that other world, where in her dreams she flew, covered immense distances with ease, and so often came to such beautiful understanding and peace with those ghosts who in reality had represented chiefly anguish. The past had been extraordinarily present all night …, she was preparing herself.
    “For what?” the doddering servant wished to know.
    “The interviewers, you old fool. They are coming this afternoon!”
    This realization acted like a pail of water flung in her face, and Hilary found herself cold-awake, standing rather shakily, supporting herself with one hand on the night table. The room around her was in unusual disorder, open cardboard boxes of files standing about and, on the night table, photographs and old letters. Oh dear! She took refuge in the usual actions, those which began every day. She went first to the window and drew back the curtains. There in the distance, seen across granite boulders and an assortment of wild cherry and locust, lay the great quivering expanse of ocean, blue, blue to the slightly paler line at the horizon. There it was, the old sea, the restorer! Hilary drank it down in one swift glance, and then walked over to the bureau and, over the inexorable minute hand of the French clock, looked into her own eyes, shallow and pale in the morning light.
    “God, you look awful,” she told herself. “Old crone, with hardly a wisp of hair left, and those dewlaps, and those wrinkles.” Merciless she was. But there was also the pleasure of recognition. In the mirror she recognized her self , her life companion, for better or worse. She looked at this self with compassion this morning, unmercifully prodded and driven as she had been for just under seventy years. The sense of who