Mermaid
to Eleanor McKay Van Cott
Mermaid © 1944 The Margaret Millar Charitable Unitrust
This volume published in 2017 by Syndicate Books
www.syndicatebooks.com
Distributed by
Soho Press, Inc.
853 Broadway
New York, NY 10003
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available
Mermaid eISBN: 9781681990071
Cover and interior design by Jeff Wong
Printed in the United States of America
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
CONTENTS
CHILD
WOMAN
MERMAID
CHILD
1
The girl was conspicuous even before she entered the office. It was a windy day and everything was in motion except her face. Her coat beat against her legs like captive wings and her long fair hair seemed to be trying to tie itself into knots. The sign above the door, Smedler, Downs, Castleberg, MacFee, Powell, Attorneys at Law, twisted and turned as if the partners were struggling among themselves.
Charity Nelson, Mr. Smedler’s private secretary, was taking the receptionist’s place during the lunch hour because she herself was on a diet and didn’t want to see or think of food.
The front door opened and the wind pushed the girl into the office. She looked surprised at what had happened. She was very thin, which made Charity think about food and sent nasty little pains up and down and around her stomach.
She said irritably, “What can I do for you?”
“I like the little cage.”
“Little cage?”
“The one outside . . . the one at the back.”
“That’s Mr. Smedler’s own elevator. It leads to his private office.”
“Do you think he’d give me a ride in it?”
“No.”
“Not even one?”
“Only if you were a client.”
The girl didn’t look like a client, at least not the kind who paid. She was quite pretty, with high cheekbones and large brown eyes as bright and expressionless as glass.
“Do you wish to see Mr. Smedler?” Charity said.
“I don’t know.”
She took a seat at the corner window and picked up a magazine. It lay on her lap unopened and, Charity noticed, upside down.
“Are you sure you came to the right office?” Charity said.
“Yes, I took a taxi. The driver knew just where to go.”
“I didn’t mean how did you get here. I meant did you have a specific reason for coming. You realize this is a law firm.”
“I’m bothering you, aren’t I? My brother Hilton is always telling me I mustn’t bother people, but how can I help it if I don’t know what bothers them?”
“Would you care to make an appointment with one of our attorneys?”
“I think I’ll just sit here for a while and look around.”
“Everyone’s out to lunch.”
“I don’t mind,” the girl said. “I’m not in a hurry.”
At 1:25 they began returning to the office: two typists, a file clerk, Mr. MacFee with a client, Mr. Powell and his secretary, a junior member of the firm and the receptionist, who looked, Charity noted bitterly, well-fed and contented.
The girl showed her first sign of excitement. She rose suddenly, dropping the magazine on the floor.
“That’s him,” she said. “He’s who I want to see, the one wearing the glasses. He has a nice face. What’s his name?”
“Tom Aragon. What’s yours?”
“Cleo.”
“Cleo what?”
“The same as my brother Hilton’s. Jasper, Cleo Jasper. It’s awfully ugly, don’t you think?”
“I’ll check and see if Mr. Aragon will have time to talk to you.” She told Aragon on the intercom: “Some chick is waiting to see you because you have a nice face. Can you buy that?”
“Sure. Send her in.”
“Better come out and get her, junior. She looks like she couldn’t find her way out of a wet paper bag.”
Aragon shared an office with another junior member of the firm. It was furnished as if no clients were expected, and in fact few came. Aragon’s duties were mostly confined to legwork for the senior lawyers, especially Smedler, whose cases often involved rich women. Cleo Jasper wasn’t yet a woman and she didn’t look rich. The straight-backed chair she sat down on seemed to suit her better than the overstuffed leather surrounding Smedler. Her clothes were oddly childish, a navy-blue jumper over a white blouse, white knee socks and shoes that looked like the Mary Janes of another era. She wasn’t carrying a handbag, but one of the pockets of her jumper bulged as though it contained a coin purse.
“What can I do for you, Miss Jasper?”
“I’ve never been to a lawyer before. You have a nice face—that’s why I picked you.”
“I suppose it’s as good a reason as any other,” Aragon said. “Why do you need a lawyer?”
“I want to find out my rights. I have a new friend. He says I have some rights.”
“Who claims you don’t?”
“Nobody exactly. Except that I never get to do what I want to do, what other people do.”
“Like what?”
“Vote. Not that I specially want to vote, not knowing anything about Presidents and things, but I didn’t even know I could.”
“How old are you?”
“Twenty-two. My new friend says I could have voted four years ago and nobody even told me.”
“Wasn’t the subject brought up in school?”
“I can’t remember. I have foggy times. Hilton says voting is just for responsible people, who don’t have foggy times.”
“Are you an American citizen?”
“I was born right here in Santa Felicia.” The girl frowned. “It was a terrible occasion. Hilton and his wife, Frieda, often talk about how it was such a terrible occasion.”
“Why?”
“My mother died. She was too old to have a baby but she had one anyway and I’m it. Hilton says she almost got into the record book because she was forty-eight. Hilton was already grown up and married when I was born. But I didn’t go to stay with him and Frieda until I was eight. I lived with my grandmother before that. She was very nice, only she died. Hilton says she wore herself out worrying over me. She left me a lot of money. I never get to use it, though.”
“Why not?”
“I’m exceptional.”
“I see.”
“Well, are you surprised or aren’t you?”
“Not particularly. All people are exceptional in one way or another.”
“You don’t understand. I’m . . . My new friend has lots of fun ways of saying it, like I have a few marbles missing or I’ve only got one oar in the water or I’m not playing with a full deck. It sounds better like that than spelling it right out that I’m . . . you know, retarded.”
He was, in fact, surprised. She had none of the Down’s syndrome physical features and she spoke well, expressing herself quite clearly. She even wanted to vote. Whether or
not she was simply echoing the ideas of her new friend, it seemed an unusual desire on the part of a retarded girl.
Not girl, he thought. She was a woman of twenty-two. That’s where the retardation was more obvious. If she’d claimed to be fourteen or fifteen he would have believed her.
“Can you read and write?”
“Some. Not very much.”
“What about your new friend? Does he read
and write very well?”
“Oh, gosh yes. He’s one of the . . .” She slapped her left hand over her mouth so quickly and decisively it must have hurt her. “I’m not supposed to talk about him to anyone.”
“Why not?”
“It would spoil things. He’s my only friend except for the gardener and his dog, Zia. Zia is a basset hound. Do you like basset hounds?”
“Yes.”
“I just love them.”
“Getting back to your new friend . . .”
“No. No, I really mustn’t.”
“All right. We’ll talk about the voting. I believe the only requirements are that you be an American citizen, at least eighteen years old, not on parole or confined to a mental institution and that you sign an affidavit to that effect. You are, of course, expected to be able to read the affidavit before signing.”
“I could practice ahead of time, couldn’t I?”
“Of course.”
Her lips began to move as though she was already practicing in silence. She had a small, well-shaped mouth with prominent ridges between the upper lip and the nose. According to old wives’ tales, when this area was clearly defined it indicated strength of character. Aragon looked at the timid, underdeveloped girl in front of him and decided the old wives must have been wrong.
She said finally, “Tell me about my other rights.”
“Which ones?”
“Suppose I just wanted to get on a bus and go somewhere . . . oh, somewhere like Chicago. Could I do that?”
“It depends on whether you have sufficient funds and whether you feel capable of looking after yourself in a large city. It would be a good idea to talk it over first with your brother and his wife.”
“No way.”
“Why not?”
“They wouldn’t let me go. I’ve never been anyplace except once last Easter on a boat. Me and some of the other students at Holbrook were taken on a cruise to Catalina on Donny Whitfield’s father’s yacht.”
Holbrook Hall was known throughout Southern California as a school for the troubled and troubling offspring of the very wealthy. In the more expensive magazines it was advertised as “a facility designed to meet the special needs of exceptional teenagers and young adults.”
“How long have you been at Holbrook Hall, Cleo?”
She blushed very faintly. “You called me Cleo. That’s nice. It’s friendly, you know.”
“How long?”
“Forever.”
“Come on, Cleo.”
“A year, maybe longer. I always had a governess before that. Also Hilton and Frieda gave me lessons in things. He’s really smart and she used to be a schoolteacher. Ted goes to college. He’s their son. He drinks and smokes pot and . . . well, lots of things like that. Imagine him being my nephew and he’s only a year younger than I am. He tells everybody I’m a half-wit that his parents found in an orphanage.”
“So you want to get away from Ted and your brother and sister-in-law.”
“Mainly I only want to know my rights.”
“Is there money available to you?”
“I have charge cards. But if I used any of them to do something Hilton disapproved of he would probably cancel them. At least that’s what my new friend says.”
“Your new friend seems to have quite a few opinions about your affairs.”
“Oh my, yes. Some I don’t understand. Like he says we are all in cages and we must break out of them. I thought if I could get inside the cage that goes up and down your building and then out by myself again I would sort of understand what he’s talking about.”
“Why not ask him?”
“I’m supposed to try and figure things out by myself. He says I’m not as dumb as I act. I don’t understand that part either and I try. I try real, real hard.”
“I’m sure you do,” Aragon said. Cleo’s new friend, whatever his motive, was feeding her stuff she couldn’t digest. “What else does your friend advise you to do?”
“He thinks I should take some money from my savings account and spend it on whatever I want, without Hilton’s permission.”
“Could you do that?”
“I guess. If I wasn’t scared.”
“Does your friend ever bring up the subject of borrowing any of this money?”
“Oh, no. He hates money. He says it’s rotten, only that’s not the word he used.”
“‘The love of money is the root of all evil.’ Is that what he said?”
“Why, yes.” She looked pleased. “So you know him, too.”
“No. We’ve both read some of the same books. The quotation is from the Bible.”
“Is that what the Bible really says about money?”
“One of the things.”
“Then I suppose it’s true. It’s funny, though, because Hilton is very Christian, yet he works all the time to make more of it.”
“People often do.”
“Hilton quotes the Bible quite a bit. Ted says it’s a bunch of—he used a bad word. Ted knows more bad words than anyone in the world except Donny Whitfield at school. Donny talks so dirty hardly anybody can understand him. He’s fat. On our free afternoons from school we each get five dollars to spend and Donny spends his all on ice cream. His afternoons are never really free, he has to have a counselor with him every minute to keep him out of trouble. He’s a bad boy. Why are there good boys and bad boys?”
“No one can answer that, Cleo.”
“You’d think if God was going to the trouble of making boys in the first place he’d just make good ones.”
Charity Nelson, Mr. Smedler’s secretary, stuck her head in the door. When she saw that the girl was still there she raised her eyebrows until they almost disappeared under her orange wig.
“Mr. Smedler wants to see you, junior.”
“Tell him I have a client.”
“I told him. He didn’t believe me.”
“Tell him again.”
“You’re playing with fire, junior. Smedler had a big weekend.”
When Charity closed the door again the girl said, “That woman doesn’t like me.”
“Miss Nelson doesn’t like many people.”
“I’d better leave now.” She glanced uneasily at the door as if she were afraid Charity might be hiding behind it. “I took too much of your time already.”
“Fifteen minutes.”
“Hilton says every second counts. He says time and tide wait for no man, whatever that means. It must mean something or Hilton wouldn’t say it.”
“What brought you to this office in the first place?”
“Nothing. I mean I pass here every day on my way to Holbrook Hall. Frieda and Hilton drive me mostly but sometimes Ted when he’s home from college. That’s scary but sort of fun, too. Anyway, that’s how I saw the little cage moving up and down and wanted a ride in it and . . . and . . .”
She had begun to stammer and he couldn’t understand her words. He waited quietly until she calmed down. He didn’t know what had excited her, all the talking she’d done or memories of riding scarily with Ted or something deeper and inexplicable.
She pressed her fists against the sides of her mouth as if to steady it. “Also I wanted to see a lawyer about my rights. I thought if I came here I’d get to ride in the little cage.”
“Sorry. That’s not possible today.”
“Some other time?”
“Maybe.”
“Maybes never happen,” she said. “Not the nice ones anyway.”
“This one will.”
She stood up and removed the coin purse from her pocket. “I’ll pay you now.” She emptied the contents of the purse on his desk: three one-dollar bills, two quarters and a nickel. “I hope this is enough. I had to pay the taxi to bring me here and this is all that’
s left of my free-afternoon money.”
“Let’s make the charge one dollar. This is your first visit and I haven’t helped you very much.”
“You tried,” she said softly. “And you have a nice face.”
“Shall I call you a taxi?”
“No, I can walk. I think I’ll go to the museum. The staff likes us to go to the museum on free days. They think we’re learning something. How far is it from here?”
“About a mile and a half. Do you know the way?”
“Oh sure. I’ve been there millions of times . . .”
He watched from the window as she left the building. The museum was due north. She walked rapidly and confidently south.
2
The table was long and dark walnut, carved in the intricate Georgian style and designed for an elegant English dining room. But Hilton sat at the head of it as though he were a captain instructing his crew on how to maneuver through stormy seas, which to Hilton meant taxes, Democrats, inflation, undercooked lamb and bad manners.
The crew wasn’t paying much attention. His wife, Frieda, had brought a copy of TV Guide to the table and was surveying the evening’s listings. She was a pretty woman given to fat and to peevish little smiles when she was annoyed and didn’t want to admit it. They appeared frequently during mealtime when she was struck by the gross unfairness of Hilton being able to eat everything in sight and never gain an ounce, while she couldn’t even walk past a chocolate éclair without putting on a pound or two.
The rest of the crew was equally inattentive. Lisa, the college student who served dinner every night because the cook refused to work after seven o’clock, moved rhythmically in and out and around and about as if she had an invisible radio stuck in her ear. Her skintight jeans and T-shirt were partly hidden by an embroidered white bib apron, the closest thing to a uniform that Frieda could coax her into wearing. She was the same age as Cleo but the two seldom had any personal communication except for occasional shrugs and eye rollings when Hilton was being particularly boring.
Cleo sat with her left hand propping up her head, her eyes fixed on the plate in front of her.
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