“I have not eaten a warm dinner . . .” Barnum began.
“. . . since you bought this place.” Levi sighed the sigh of those who’ve heard it all before.
He ought to have used a less-worn theme, Barnum reflected. He’d repeated this statement frequently since the opening of the museum to communicate his devotion to its success. But Levi didn’t have the same investment he did. It didn’t say Lyman’s American Museum outside above the balcony where the band played. It said Barnum’s.
Barnum rapidly sorted and discarded several statements. He couldn’t think of anything, which was unusual for him. So he lit a cigar, pushed away from his desk, and said, “Hell, Levi.”
Levi gave Barnum an unreadable look.
“She’s not a mermaid, you know,” Levi said.
“I’ll believe in mermaids if it will sell tickets,” Barnum said.
“It will likely take you just as much money to sell the illusion as you’d make,” Levi said. “Never mind if someone decides she’s indecent. That’s a whole other set of problems.”
“Why are you borrowing trouble? We don’t have the woman here yet and you’re already thinking like a lawyer, looking for traps that aren’t there.”
“I am a lawyer,” Levi said dryly. “Even if I’ve been a part-time performing monkey for you.”
“I don’t pay the performing monkeys,” Barnum said. “Help me out, Levi. We can both profit by this.”
“And what about this woman?” Levi asked.
“She can profit by it, too, if she plays her part,” Barnum said easily.
He had the other man now. He knew it. Levi never relented a little bit unless he was going to relent the whole way.
“I don’t want her used,” Levi said. “If she wants to leave, then she’ll be allowed to leave?”
The shadow of Joice Heth hung over both of them, and for a moment Barnum thought he heard the old woman’s voice speaking, an ancient croaking drawn up from her wizened body, asking him to release her.
“Let me go to die and go to glory as a free woman.”
Barnum looked up. It wasn’t Joice’s voice he’d heard, but Levi’s.
“That’s what she said, Barnum,” Levi said.
Levi never called him Barnum unless he was upset. He’d been halfway to agreeing until the Heth business came up. Now Barnum was going to have to soothe the other man down so he’d go to Maine and collect this woman they were arguing about. Except they weren’t really arguing about the mermaid. They were arguing about the past. Barnum wasn’t interested in revisiting the past. The past was the past, and only the future could bring profit.
“Levi—”
“I was the one who was with her all day, Barnum. Not you. You didn’t hear her.”
Barnum nodded. He had heard her, heard those very words, but he acknowledged that Levi had taken the worst of it. Barnum’s part had been to drum up business—put advertisements in the papers, sell tickets. Levi had accompanied the woman to every town and every stage, been the public face of the business, as it were. “If you go now and do this for me, I promise that I’ll give the woman a fair contract.”
Levi narrowed his eyes. “She’ll be paid? And permitted to leave if she chooses?”
Barnum privately thought that if the woman was really a mermaid—not likely, as Levi had said, but there was always hope—she wouldn’t be going anywhere. There wasn’t a chance in heaven or hell that Barnum would let something like that go once he had it. But he was careful not to let this show on his face as he answered his old friend.
“Of course, Levi. Anything you want.”
* * *
• • •
Levi didn’t like the ocean. At least, he thought he might like a tropical ocean—those oceans described in travelogues and seen in pictures of faraway islands with golden sand and palm trees.
As a child he’d imagined living on an island like Robinson Crusoe, complete with a parrot and a native servant. Of course, Robinson Crusoe had to contend with cannibals, and Levi didn’t think he was up to dealing with those kinds of problems. He had enough trouble with Barnum and his schemes.
The churning, cold green of the North Atlantic was not at all to his taste—nor, he reflected as his insides swooned about queasily, was it preferred by his stomach.
Barnum had insisted that a boat was more efficient for his purposes—if there really was a mermaid in Maine, then he wanted Levi to get her and bring her back to New York posthaste, and the patchwork of dirt roads leading through northern Maine did not lend itself to quickness.
However, there wasn’t a passenger boat from Boston to this obscure little town. Levi had taken a steamer to Rhode Island and then a train to Boston and now a horrible fish-smelling craft heading north to draw its trade from the seas. There was ice and crashing waves, and Levi wondered why on earth anyone would fish so early in the season, but Barnum had managed to find one crew of madmen, and the captain of these madmen had consented to take a passenger.
The fishermen on board laughed at his city shoes and inadequate coat and the way he turned up his nose at the hardtack for breakfast. Levi wanted badly to reach a place that had a feather bed that didn’t rock from side to side and all the whiskey he could drink.
But Barnum wanted a mermaid, so Levi was going to get him a mermaid.
Once upon a time, Levi thought he could have fame and fortune, that his life would be better, more glamorous, more exciting if he helped Barnum sell his humbugs to the public. Barnum was an old friend, and he’d convinced Levi that playing the showman was a lot like playing the lawyer, only more fun. He’d get to convince folks of a different kind of truth—an actor’s truth, a storyteller’s truth—rather than dig out the truth in a courtroom. And Levi had been dissatisfied with his quiet life and thought it would be a lark to go along with Barnum for a while.
The shine had long since come off the work for Levi, but he didn’t much fancy going back to lawyering either. So he stayed and hoped that maybe he could find some of that magic again, the magic he had felt when he first started. And even if he couldn’t, then maybe he could stop Barnum from hurting someone else the way they had hurt Joice Heth. If Levi did that, even without the fame and fortune, it would be worth staying.
He didn’t believe in the mermaid story, of course, and he didn’t really think Barnum did, either. But Barnum was smart enough to know that if there were rumors about this woman, it would lend veracity to any tale they told once she was on exhibit. If a poking New York reporter decided to make this miserable journey to the north, then he would find the same stories that had drawn Levi there, and nobody would be able to prove the girl wasn’t a mermaid.
That was the trick, really—making sure nobody could prove what Barnum said wasn’t true. They were free to raise objections and make conjectures, but without proof . . . well, without proof every person who claimed the mermaid was false would just be giving Barnum free advertising.
Levi knew Barnum hadn’t liked the way people turned on him about the Heth woman, despite all of his bluster otherwise. For himself, Levi had never been able to feel entirely comfortable about the business. It had started off fun and quickly soured when he realized that Joice Heth didn’t want to be displayed like a dancing bear for the rest of her days. He’d tried his best to keep the old woman content, and surely he and Barnum had done a better job of it than her owner in the South.
But the truth was that Barnum had paid to put that woman on display, and paying for her made Barnum—whatever he might say—her owner, too. Levi didn’t know how he felt about slavery in the South, but he knew he didn’t feel so good about it when it was standing next to him.
Whatever the truth of this widow on the rocks (as Levi had come to think of her), he wouldn’t force her to return to New York if she didn’t want to go. He’d had enough of forcing people to do things they didn’t want to do just b
ecause Barnum said so.
And Levi would see that Barnum gave the girl fair pay for her work. It was her body people would be gaping at in the tank, after all. Barnum forgot about things like that sometimes. He saw every person passing as a potential coin in his pocket.
It never occurred to Levi, while contemplating his sea-borne misery and righteously demanding her compensation from Barnum in his mind, that the woman might not want to leave her home. He’d told Barnum that he would leave her in Maine if she truly didn’t want to come, but down deep he didn’t think she would refuse.
Of course there was no place more wonderful than New York City in all the world (Europe could keep their London and Paris), and any person would be thrilled to leave their country life to go there—especially if they had a free ticket and a job waiting. That was how Barnum had lured him away from Pennsylvania in the first place.
Levi was pretty certain that the woman wouldn’t turn down the chance to get away from the middle of nowhere. Everyone wanted to be someone, and how could you be someone when you lived in a cottage on the rocks by the sea?
But when Levi finally made it to the mermaid’s village, he discovered that the people there were carved from stone. Their faces looked like leather, and their accents made sounds he didn’t understand. They didn’t know anything about this woman he spoke of, and they weren’t interested in knowing. They narrowed their eyes in suspicion, and his money wasn’t good anywhere.
It was clear, overwhelmingly clear, that they had no use for him and did not want him and would do everything in their damned Yankee souls to drive him away before he reached his object.
The result of this was that Levi found himself holding his suitcase outside a tavern, sadly whiskeyless and unable to even find a patch of straw for the night, much less a feather bed.
He cursed Barnum’s scheming (under his breath, for there were sharp-eared ladies going about their afternoon shopping and his father would have boxed his ears if he’d heard him say such things before the fairer sex) and vowed that if he had to sleep on the sidewalk that night, he would never so much as carry a letter to the post for Barnum again.
Despite the complete lack of helpfulness from the townspeople, Levi wasn’t ready to go back to Barnum and explain why he’d returned to New York empty-handed. He knew the woman lived on the coast, not in the town, so all he had to do was make his way toward the sound of the crashing sea. Surely she would be easy enough to find then. How many seaside cottages could there be in this wretched state?
Several hours later, Levi admitted that first, there were quite a few seaside homes in this wretched state (an almost incomprehensible number, to his mind—who on earth wanted the sea encroaching on them all day and night?) and second, the coastline was longer than it appeared on a map.
As nightfall approached, he wandered, weary and foot-sore, along a kind of track in the snow (why was there still snow in April? It wasn’t natural) that ran along next to the enormous boulders that seemed to block off huge portions of the coast. At least they blocked off huge portions of the coast to sane persons—those who did not think it right, proper, or fun to clamber over rocks in order to reach the churning green ocean below. Levi did not like the ocean, and what he’d seen of it on this trip had done little to increase its appeal.
He had to admit that he was more than ready to give up this search. Nearly every home he’d encountered had been peopled by a flinty-eyed fisherman or his wife who, naturally, had no idea which of their neighbors might be a mermaid.
The best thing to do would be to hire a wagon to take him to the nearest town that was not filled with hostiles and give it up as a bad business. Perhaps he could convince Barnum that the dried-up monkey mummy of Kimball’s would do just as well.
He dropped his case in the snow on the track beside him. In addition to everything else, there was more snow up here than Levi had ever seen in his life, and he’d been trudging through it for hours. The sun was going down, he was nowhere near civilization, and he’d had enough.
And then he saw her.
She stood on the cliff staring out to sea, her unbelievably long witch-hair not blowing in the wind from the ocean but seeming to embrace it, to twine around the very air and move with it in an impossible dance. The cold did not appear to disturb her, for she wore only a rough wool dress and boots and no coat or even a shawl to cover her shoulders. She was young, much younger than any of her neighbors near or far, and even from this distance—perhaps a quarter mile—Levi could tell her skin would gleam like a pearl in candlelight.
He saw then the rough little cottage tucked onto the rocks behind her and the slight curve beneath it that would lead to a cove beneath.
This was the woman. He was sure of it.
As he picked up his case and hurried toward the still figure, he hoped that at the very least the woman would be hospitable, for if he didn’t get out of the cold, he felt certain his toes would freeze together.
His feet crunched in the snow, and he must have sounded like a lumbering bear to her, but she did not turn or indicate that she heard him at all until he called out.
“Hello!” he said.
He stopped when he was a few feet from her, not wanting to startle her. Her back was very straight, and the wind carried her scent to him, the salt of the sea mixed with the oil he could see gleaming in the coils of her hair.
She turned then, but very slowly, almost as if she were under a spell and wanted to stay there. Her eyes were closed, the lashes thick and dark against her white skin.
Then the lids rose, and he thought, Of course she’s a mermaid. What else would she be?
Those eyes were not of the shore, he thought. They were as grey as the storm that boiled below them, the constant swirl and crash that was the sea. But more than that, they were alien. The expression in them was not of a fellow human but of one who was apart from humanity and looked at him as something strange and curious.
He felt himself shrinking beneath that gaze and wondered suddenly if this was how Joice Heth had felt—the discomfort of being dissected by a look, the desire to shrivel up and disappear under eyes that wouldn’t stop watching.
“Yes?” the woman said.
Levi shook away the fancy that struck him. Of course she wasn’t a mermaid. Her gaze wasn’t any more or less forthright than the rest of the folk around here. He just hadn’t seen grey eyes very often, and certainly not ones just that shade of storm-tossed ocean.
“I was hoping you could help me,” Levi began, then stopped. Now that he was here, what was he to say to this woman?
“Yes?” she asked again. Her tone was disinterested. It said it wasn’t any matter to her if they stood upon the rocks in the cold wind forever.
Her witchy hair blew all around her face now that her back was to the wind. Levi was sure that if he approached her, the tendrils would grab him and pull him into the water and he would drown.
She was making him fanciful, and Levi knew better than to be fanciful. But there was something about her, something strange and compelling, and he understood why rumors flew so thick about her.
He understood, too, in the part of him that was Barnum’s spiritual kin, that those eyes and that hair and that so-direct look would draw crowds into the museum like no other.
She might not really be a mermaid, but by God, Levi and Barnum could sell her as one.
* * *
• • •
Could I trouble you for a cup of tea?”
That was what the man asked, in that way people did when they thought it would be no trouble at all. Amelia had tea, of course, but she didn’t know that she particularly wanted to share it with a stranger. And this stranger stared at her with too-avid eyes, eyes that told her he’d heard the rumors about her and come to see if they were true.
It had been a decade, give or take a few years, since Jack’s death. For a long time afterwa
rd, Amelia found she was unable to change, to even approach the sea. It had become something hateful to her—the mistress who’d stolen her husband away.
Amelia had stood upon the rocks and cursed it and wished all of her grief and anger on the vast unfeeling waves. She wished for a sudden shifting of the earth so that all the water would drain away from her sight, or that a vast fireball would descend from the sky and scorch all of the ocean into a desert.
In short she wished for ridiculous, impossible things but none more ridiculous or impossible as when she bent over in heartbreak and wept long tears over the rocks and promised anything, anything, anything at all if only the ocean would return her love to her.
And though she cursed and wept and pleaded and bargained, the ocean never listened or acknowledged the troubles of one small land-or-sea dweller. The ocean has a rhythm, but it has no heart.
After a long time had passed, Amelia stopped looking for his boat or wishing the great ocean would be destroyed because of the whim of her broken heart. Somewhere far away lived her family and her people, and perhaps she might like to return to them someday, and she would not be able to if the ocean was gone forever.
More than that, though, she realized her grief had ebbed. While it would always be an ache in her chest, the hard knot of it had loosed, her sadness slowly unraveling.
She’d felt some panic then—panic that the loss of sadness would be the loss of Jack. When she tried to remember his face, she could not. All she could see was the boat moving slowly away from shore, away from her.
Amelia ran into their bedroom then and found one of his sweaters, burying her face in it. His smell clung to the wool, just faintly, and when she breathed it in there he was again—the lines around his eyes, the flash of his teeth when he laughed, the clomp of his boots on the floor.
The Mermaid Page 4