Songs without Words (12 page)

“Hello,” Harper said, holding out her hand. “I’m Harper Sheridan.”

“Come in,” Hilda said, taking her hand briefly. Her skin was dry and papery. “I’ve made us tea and scones. I thought you’d like that.”

Harper pulled the door shut behind her and followed, noticing how the delicate pink of the old woman’s scalp showed through the sparse field of her hair. The cottage was dark, musty and extremely cluttered with books, magazines and newspapers, stacks of them in and around bookcases that had long ago reached their capacity and, judging by the dust, hadn’t been touched in decades.
She could donate these books to some library
, Harper thought, realizing almost immediately that they weren’t really there for reading. They were companions, reminders of journeys of the mind and perhaps, in some cases, journeys of the body as well.

Books were like that to people who really love them, she thought. A book that you read once becomes a part of you. The physical entity on the shelf becomes a symbol of how it has lived in your mind, given itself to you and merged with your story like an ex-lover, as part of your experience for the rest of your life. The book may go on to have other adventures, to caress the imaginations of other readers, but what it means to you remains yours alone.

Harper sidled past a stack of books capped by a hardcover edition of
Canterbury Tales.
It was much better, she decided, for an old woman to surround herself with beloved books than with cats.

Hilda’s laboring gait took them through the main room, through the kitchen and into a small, sunny nook with two overstuffed chairs and a coffee table. It occurred to Harper that Hilda probably lived mainly here and in the kitchen, that the dark, cluttered main rooms of her house had become nothing more than storerooms.

“Let’s sit in here,” Hilda suggested. She poured the tea and offered Harper milk and sugar and then a blueberry scone.

“So,” said Hilda, letting herself drop into her chair, “tell me why you’ve come.”

“Well, as I told you, I’m a big fan of yours. I just wanted to meet you in person. Your books have been so inspirational to me.”

“Really? In what way?”

Harper didn’t know how to answer that. She hesitated. “Just as the voice of wisdom, you know? The things you say, they’re just so true. There’s a revelation on every page.”

“Oh, my dear!” Hilda laughed. “What an exaggeration.”

“No, really, that’s how it feels for me. I’m sure others have told you that.”

“Yes, I suppose. Other young women like you. Nobody comes around much anymore, though. My life here has gotten narrower and narrower.”

“You don’t write anymore?”

“I’ve tried to write but can’t really. Between the bad eyesight and the deteriorating mental state, it’s about all I can do to sign an autograph now and then. No creativity left up there.” She thumped her head with her forefinger. “Do you write, then?”

“No, I’m not a writer. I’m more of a musician.”

“That’s unusual. Most of the young women who come calling like you are writers or would-be writers. They’re looking for the magic words or something, as if I can bestow creative imagination on them with a touch, like knighthood. What is it you’re expecting to get then, from this visit?”

Again, Harper balked. “I just wanted to meet you. You’ve given me so much pleasure with your work. I don’t expect to get anything, particularly.”

It was hard to imagine this squinting old woman as the Hilda Perry of Harper’s imagination, the eccentric who traveled the world with a colorful entourage of fascinating characters, who took and cast off lovers of both sexes with alarming frequency, many of them renowned artists like herself. Her love affair with the poet Catherine Gardiner, at least as reported by biographers, had been nearly epic in its ferocity.

The legendary Hilda Perry was a rollicking spirit. Harper had been enthralled with her ever since reading an article about her several years earlier. The list of her lovers, or her alleged lovers, had captivated Harper’s imagination. Since then, she had thought of Hilda Perry as the model of the free spirit, as a woman leading the kind of life that Harper herself would have liked to lead—rich, full and devil-may-care.

“You’ve lived such a fascinating life,” Harper said. “So exciting.”

“Do you think so?” Hilda asked, sipping her tea. “And, yet, here I am—old, alone, sick and forgotten.”

“Hardly forgotten,” Harper objected.

“You know, these days, I am just as likely to hear someone say, ‘I thought you were dead,’ as anything else.” Hilda refilled Harper’s teacup.“Since you don’t write, I guess you aren’t looking for advice on how to become a published author. And you aren’t going to toss me a manuscript to read, thank God! So you’re just a very enthusiastic admirer of writers?”

“Not just writers. All artists.”

“I see. You’re an art groupie.” Hilda smiled thinly.

Harper recognized that she was being mocked, but she didn’t think it was malicious.

“Art has become my religion,” she replied. “The relationship between the artist and her art is where I think you can find the best lesson for how to live a meaningful life.”

“Ah, well, better than being a Baptist, I guess.”

“I was raised Catholic.”

“So was I.” Hilda raised her cup in a salute. “My condolences.”

Amused, Harper said, “Thanks.”

“I’m not sure I’m following you, though. How can an artist teach you to live a meaningful life?”

“I think artists are the only people living authentic lives,” Harper said sincerely. “I think art is the only way you can be in touch with your true self. There are truths that can only be experienced through stories, images or music. All of the other ways we interact with one another, like conversation or work or even sex, are imperfect and inevitably removed from the reality of our souls.”

“What do you mean by
‘
soul,’ exactly?” Hilda asked.

Harper smiled. “Of course you wouldn’t let that go without a challenge. I used the wrong word. I should have said ‘mind’ or ‘self.’ ‘Soul’ is an artifact left over from my days of religious brainwashing.”

“No, no,” Hilda said, putting down her cup. “It was the word you chose without overthinking it, so, following your own train of thought, it’s the right word, isn’t it?”

“Oh, sure, I see your point. Well, then, the soul that I’m referring to would be the part of you that is you and not someone else. It’s the part of you that is so difficult to show someone else, for all sorts of reasons, but primarily because it’s unique, so no one else can really experience it. They don’t know how to look at it. They usually see you in the context of their own reality, how they see the world, and that distorts you to fit the expected model.” Harper stopped to take a breath. Hilda waited patiently, so she continued. “So art allows a person to strip away conscious thought and create something that expresses that authentic identity. Does any of this make sense? Am I rambling?”

“You are sort of rambling, but I think I understand. So that’s what you think I’m doing when I write, expressing my authentic self, revealing my soul, so to speak?”

Harper nodded.

Hilda raised one eyebrow. “The irony is that ‘art’ is the same word as ‘artifice,’ and that’s what poetry and prose and painting and music are. One of the definitions of art, in fact, is ‘that which is not nature,’ something not found in the natural world. Works of art are inventions, and so one has to question whether they can ever possibly express this authentic self that you’re talking about.”

Harper sighed admiringly. “Then what am I trying to say?”

“I can’t tell you that! But I think the non-verbal arts, like fine art and music, are better at expressing actual emotion than the written or spoken word, so in that sense, I agree. As a musician, you must know that music is a more natural expression of feeling than speaking. It doesn’t get filtered through language, which is inherently flawed, being an arbitrary system of symbols. I love words. I love the English language, don’t get me wrong, but it’s a dimension removed from actual thought. It’s unnatural. Even a master at stream of consciousness like James Joyce can’t do more than hint at what our minds are doing. There is no way to create a sentence that properly displays the process of thinking, feeling and remembering several things at once.”

“Music can’t do that either,” Harper observed.

“No, it can’t. And it doesn’t try to. Art, any type of art, creates order out of a naturally chaotic reality. That’s the point of art, isn’t it? It doesn’t show you the ugly, twisted, complicated stuff as it really is. It tames it into something else, something we can look at dead-on without horror.” Hilda paused and smiled, a benign expression that seemed out of place in her emphatic speech.

“For my money, though,” she continued, “the only way to reveal yourself honestly to another person is to be unconditionally in love.” Hilda studied her for a moment, then asked, “Have you ever been in love, Harper?”

Harper thought briefly of Eliot, dismissed that thought and shook her head.

“Too bad. Someday, when you are, you won’t need any art or artifice to share your soul with another person. I spent my life falling in and out of love. All of those books there in your bag aren’t my attempt to share my authentic self with the rest of the world. They’re my inability to keep all of the rantings, ravings and exultations of my heart to myself.”

Harper would have liked to write that down, but it seemed rude to actually do so. She hoped she could commit it to memory.

“Haven’t you ever noticed,” Hilda said, her voice low but clear, “that a poet writes her first poem when she falls in love for the first time? It doesn’t have to be with another person. It can be with a puppy or life or a flower. But it’s love, that overwhelming joy or pain that can’t be contained. It requires expression. It bubbles over like a boiling pot, and then you have art. Art, in its purest form, doesn’t give a damn if there’s anyone out there looking or listening. If it were alone in the universe, it would still express itself just the same, howling into the dark cold emptiness of space.”

Harper, awestruck, said nothing.

“Yes, it’s all about love,” Hilda said in summation.

Wow
, Harper thought.
Is she right,
is
it all about love?
She herself had no prospects for falling in love. Eliot had moved to Washington where he’d gotten a teaching job, leaving her more or less free to find other romantic interests. They had vowed to continue their relationship from a distance, getting together when they could, but she didn’t really think that would happen. Nothing serious had come of it, but when Eliot found out she was seeing other men, he had become furious. “I’m not going to wait here chastely for you like Penelope,” she had responded. “I’m not your wife.” With no real choice in the matter, Eliot had agreed to her terms, and they had embarked on what Harper described as “a free and open liaison,” a situation that delighted her.

So she had loved, but she really had never been in love, not in the way that the poets described it. She was definitely open to it, though. She turned back to Hilda with an expression that she hoped would convey her appreciation of the older woman’s insights.

“Are you straight or gay?” Hilda asked her.

Harper was taken off guard.

“Most of the young women who seek me out are lesbians,” Hilda explained. “I just wondered.”

Harper, completely recovered, said, “‘As long as they know how to use it, it doesn’t matter much to me what they come equipped with.’”

Hilda laughed loudly, an open-mouthed chortle that filled her face with delight and gave Harper a glimpse of the woman she had expected to find here. “You know, I never actually said that. The biographer made that up!”

Harper grinned, pleased with herself for remembering the quote and entertaining her host.