They don’t all have long golden hair, that’s just nursery talk. I seen one off Porto Rico had a mane red as sunset clouds, and I seen a fair old lot with thick dark hair like Julia Caterina’s. But I never touched none of them before. It weren’t me place to touch her neither, and Henry Lee standing by, too, but I done it anyway, like it were the hair asking me to do it, and not her. First twitch, it all come right down over me hands, ripe and heavy and hot—hot like I’d spilled cooking oil on meself, the way it clings and keeps burning, and water makes it worse. Truth, for a minute I thought me hands was ablaze—seemed like I could see them burning like fireships through that black swirly tangle wouldn’t let them go. I yelled out then—I ain’t shamed none to admit it, I know what I felt—and I snatched me hands right back, and of course there weren’t a mark on them. And I looked into her eyes, and they was green and gray and green again, like the salt wine, and she laughed. She knew I were frighted and hurting, and she laughed and laughed.
I thought there were nothing left of her then—all gone, the little Portygee woman who’d sat in me chair and said something nobody else never said to me before. But then the eyes was hers again, all wide with fear and love, and she reached out for Henry Lee like she really were drowning. Aye, that were the worst of it, some way, those last two days, ’acos of one minute she’d be hissing like a cat, did he try to touch her or pet her, flopping away from him, the way you’d have thought he were her worst enemy in the world. Next minute, curled small in his arms, trembling all over, weeping dry-eyed, the way mermaids do, and him singing low to her in Portygee, sounded like nursery rhymes. Never saw him blubbing himself, not one tear.
She didn’t stay in the bed much no more, but managed to get around the room using her arms and her tail—practicing-like, you see. Wouldn’t eat nothing, no matter Henry Lee cozened her with the freshest fish and crab, mussels just out of the sea. Sometimes at first she’d take a little water, but by and by she’d show her teeth and knock the cup out of his hand. Mermaids don’t drink, no more nor fish do.
They don’t sleep, neither—not what you’d call sleeping—so there’d be one of us always by her, him or me, for fear she’d do herself a mischief. We wasn’t doing much sleeping then ourselves, by then, so often enough we’d find ourselves side by side, not talking, just watching her while she watched the sea through the window and the moon ripened in the trees. The one time we ever did talk about it, he said to me, “You were right, Ben. I haven’t been punished nearly enough for what I’ve done.”
“Some get punished too much,” I says, “and some not at all. Don’t seem to make much difference, near as I can tell.”
Henry Lee shakes his head. “You got out the moment you knew we might have harmed even one person. I stayed on. I’ll never be quits for this, Ben.”
I don’t have no answer, except to tell him about a thing I did long ago that I’m still being punished for meself. I’d never told nobody before, and I’m not about to tell you now. I just did it to maybe help Henry Lee a little, which it didn’t. He patted me back and squeezed me shoulder a little bit, but he didn’t say no more, and nor did I. We sat together and watched Julia Caterina in the moonlight.
Come that nineteenth night, the moon rose full to bursting, big and bright and yellow as day, with one or two red streaks, like an egg gone bad, laying down a wrinkly-gold path you could have walked on to the horizon . . . or swum down, as the case might be. Julia Caterina went wild at the sight, beating at the window the way you’d have thought she were a moth trying to get to the candle. It come to me, she’d waited for this moon the same way the turtles wait to come ashore and lay their eggs in the light—the way those tiny fish I disremember flood over the beaches at high tide, millions of them, got to get those eggs buried fast, before the next wave sweeps them back out to sea. Now it were like the moon were waiting for her, and she knew the way there.
“Not yet,” Henry Lee says, desperate-like, “not yet—they’ve not . . . ” He didn’t finish, but I knew he were talking about the pale lines on her neck, darker every day, but still not opened into proper gill slits. But right as he spoke, right then, those same lines swelled and split and flared red, and that sudden, they was there, making her more a fish than the tail ever could, because now she didn’t need the land at all, or the air. Aye, now she could stay under water all the time, if she wanted. She were ready for the sea, and she knew it, no more to say.
Henry Lee carried her in his arms all the way down from his grand house—their house until two nights ago—to the water’s edge, nobody to see nowt, just a couple of fishing boats anchored offshore. A dugout canoe, too, which you still used to see in them days. She wriggled out of his arms there, turning in the air like a cat, and a little wave splashed up in her face as she landed, making her laugh and splash back with her tail. Henry Lee were drenched right off, top to toe, but you could see he didn’t know. Julia Caterina—her as had been Julia Caterina—she swam round and round, rolling and diving and admiring all she could do in the water. There’s nothing fits the sea like a mermaid—not fish, not seals, dolphins, whales, nothing. There in the moonlight, the sea looked happy to be with her.
I can’t swim, like I told you—I just waded in a few steps to watch her playing so. All on a sudden—for all the world like she’d heard a call from somewhere—she did a kind of a swirling cartwheel, gave a couple of hard kicks with that tail, and like that, she’s away, no goodbye, clear of the shore, leaving her own foxfire trail down the middle of that moonlight path. I thought she were gone then, gone forever, and I didn’t waste no time in gawping, but turned to see to Henry Lee. He were standing up to his knees in the water, taking his shirt off.
“Henry Lee,” I says. “Henry Lee, what the Christ you doing?” He don’t even look over at me, but throws the shirt back toward the shore and starts unbuttoning his trews. Bought from the only bespoke gentlemen’s tailor in Velha Goa, those pants, still cost you half what you’d pay in Lisbon. Henry Lee just drops them in the water. Goes to work getting rid of his smallclothes, kicking off his soaked shoes, while I’m yapping at him about catching cold, pneumonia. Henry Lee smiles at me. Still got most all his teeth, which even the Portygee nobs can’t say they do, most of them. He says, “She’ll be lonely out there.”
I said summat, must have. I don’t recall what it were. Standing there naked, Henry Lee says, “She’ll need me, Ben.”
“She’s got all she needs,” I says. “You can’t go after her.”
“I promised I’d make it up to her,” he says. “What I did. But there’s no way, Ben, there’s no way.”
He moves on past me, walking straight ahead, water rising steady. I stumble and scramble in front of him, afeared as I can be, but he’s not getting by. “You can’t make it up,” I tells him. “Some things, you can’t ever make up—you live with them, that’s all. That’s the best you can do.” He’s taller by a head, but I’m bigger, wider. He’s not getting by.
Henry Lee stops walking out toward the deep. Confused-like, shaking his head some, starts to say me name . . . then he looks over me shoulder and his eyes go wide, with the moon in them. “She’s there,” he whispers, “she came back for me. There, right there.” And he points, straining on his toes like a nipper sees the Dutch-biscuit man coming down the street.
I turn me head, just for an instant, just to see where he’s pointing. Summat glimmers in the shadow of the dugout, diving in and out of the moonlight, and maybe it’s a dolphin, and maybe it’s Henry Lee’s wife, turning for one last look at her poor husband who’d driven both of their lives on the rocks. Didn’t know then, don’t know now. All I’m sure of is, the next minute I’m sitting on me arse in water up to me chin, and Henry Lee’s past me and swimming straight for that glimmer—long, raking Devonshire strokes, looking like he could go on forever if he had to. And bright as the night was, I lost sight of him—and her too, it, whatever it were—before he’d reached that boat. Bawled for him till me voice went—even tried to go af
ter him in the dugout—but he were gone. They were gone.
His body floated in next afternoon. Gopi found it, sloshing about in the shallows.
Her family turned over every bit of ground around that house of Henry Lee’s, looking for where he’d buried her. I’m dead sure they believe to this day that he killed Julia Caterina and then drowned himself, out of remorse or some such. They was polite as pie whenever we met, no matter they couldn’t never stand one solitary thing about me—but after she disappeared only times I saw them was at a feria, where they’d always cut me dead. I didn’t take it personal.
The will left stock and business to the family, but left both ships to me. I sold one of them for enough money to get meself to Buenos Aires, like I’d been wanting, and start up in the freighting trade, convoying everything from pianos to salt beef, rum to birdseed, tea to railroad ties . . . whatever you might want moved from here to there. Got two young partners do most of the real work these days, but I still go along with a shipment, times, just to play I’m still a foremast hand—plain Able-bodied Seaman, same as Henry Lee. The way it was when we didn’t know what he died knowing. What I’ll die knowing.
He left me the recipe for salt wine, too. I burned it. I’d wanted to buy up the stock and pour every bottle into the sea—giving it back to the merrows, you could say—but the family wouldn’t sell, not to me. Heard they sold it to a German dealer, right after I left Goa, and he took it all home to Berlin with him. Couldn’t say, meself.
I seen her a time or two since. Once off the Hebrides—leastways, I’m near about sure it was her—and once in the Bay of Biscay. That time she came right up to the ship, calling to me by name, quiet-like. She hung about most of the night, calling, but I never went to the rail, ’acos I couldn’t think of nothing to say.
The Mermaid of the Concrete Ocean
Caitlín R. Kiernan
The building’s elevator is busted, and so I’ve had to drag my ass up twelve flights of stairs. Her apartment is smaller and more tawdry than I expected, but I’m not entirely sure I could say what I thought I’d find at the top of all those stairs. I don’t know this part of Manhattan very well, this ugly wedge of buildings one block over from South Street and Roosevelt Drive and the ferry terminal. She keeps reminding me that if I look out the window (there’s only one), I can see the Brooklyn Bridge. It seems a great source of pride, that she has a view of the bridge and the East River. The apartment is too hot, filled with soggy heat pouring off the radiators, and there are so many unpleasant odors competing for my attention that I’d be hard pressed to assign any one of them priority over the rest. Mildew. Dust. Stale cigarette smoke. Better I say the apartment smells shut away, and leave it at that. The place is crammed wall to wall with threadbare, dust-skimmed antiques, the tattered refuse of Victorian and Edwardian bygones. I have trouble imagining how she navigates the clutter in her wheelchair, which is something of an antique itself. I compliment the Tiffany lamps, all of which appear not to be reproductions, and are in considerably better shape than most of the other furnishings. She smiles, revealing dentures stained by nicotine and neglect. At least, I assume they’re dentures. She switches on one of the table lamps, its shade a circlet of stained-glass dragonflies, and tells me it was a Christmas gift from a playwright. He’s dead now, she says. She tells me his name, but it’s no one I’ve ever heard of, and I admit this to her. Her yellow-brown smile doesn’t waver.
“Nobody remembers him. He was very avant-garde,” she says. “No one understood what he was trying to say. But obscurity was precious to him. It pained him terribly, that so few ever understood that about his work.”
I nod, once or twice or three times, I don’t know, and it hardly matters. Her thin fingers glide across the lampshade, leaving furrows in the accumulated dust, and now I can see that the dragonflies have wings the color of amber, and their abdomens and thoraces are a deep cobalt blue. They all have eyes like poisonous crimson berries. She asks me to please have a seat and apologizes for not having offered one sooner. She motions to an armchair near the lamp, and also to a chaise lounge a few feet farther away. Both are upholstered with the same faded floral brocade. I choose the armchair and am hardly surprised to discover that all the springs are shot. I sink several inches into the chair, and my knees jut upwards, towards the water-stained plaster ceiling.
“Will you mind if I tape our conversation?” I ask, opening my briefcase, and she stares at me for a moment, as though she hasn’t quite understood the question. By way of explanation, I remove the tiny Olympus digital recorder and hold it up for her to see. “Well, it doesn’t actually use audio tapes,” I add.
“I don’t mind,” she tells me. “It must be much simpler than having to write down everything you hear, everything someone says. Probably, you do not even know shorthand.”
“Much simpler,” I say and switch the recorder on. “We can shut it off anytime you like, of course. Just say the word.” I lay the recorder in the table, near the base of the dragonfly lamp.
“That’s very considerate,” she says. “That’s very kind of you.”
And it occurs to me how much she, like the apartment, differs from whatever I might have expected to find. This isn’t Sunset Boulevard, Norma Desmond and her shuffling cadre of “waxwork” acquaintances. There’s nothing of the grotesque or Gothic—even that Hollywood Gothic—about her. Despite the advance and ravages of ninety-four years, her green eyes are bright and clear. Neither her voice nor hands tremble, and only the old wheelchair stands as any indication of infirmity. She sits up very straight, and whenever she speaks, tends to move her hands about, as though possessed of more energy and excitement than words alone can convey. She’s wearing only a little makeup, some pale lipstick and a hint of rouge on her high cheekbones, and her long grey hair is pulled back in a single braid. There’s an easy grace about her. Watching by the light of the dragonfly lamp and the light coming in through the single window, it occurs to me that she is showing me her face and not some mask of counterfeit youth. Only the stained teeth (or dentures) betray any hint of the decay I’d anticipated and steeled myself against. Indeed, if not for the rank smell of the apartment, and the oppressive heat, there would be nothing particularly unpleasant about being here with her.
I retrieve a stenographer’s pad from my briefcase, then close it and set it on the floor near my feet. I tell her that I haven’t written out a lot of questions, that I prefer to allow interviews to unfold more organically, like conversations, and this seems to please her.
“I don’t go in for the usual brand of interrogation,” I say. “Too forced. Too weighted by the journalist’s own agenda.”
“So, you think of yourself as a journalist?” she asks, and I tell her yes, usually.
“Well, I haven’t done this in such a very long time,” she replies, straightening her skirt. “I hope you’ll understand if I’m a little rusty. I don’t often talk about those days, or the pictures. It was all so very long ago.”
“Still,” I say, “you must have fond memories.”
“Must I now?” she asks, and before I can think of an answer, she says, “There are only memories, young man, and, yes, most of them are not so bad, and some are even rather agreeable. But there are many things I’ve tried to forget. Every life must be like that, wouldn’t you say?”
“To some extent,” I reply.
She sighs, as if I haven’t understood at all, and her eyes wander up to a painting on the wall behind me. I hardly noticed it when I sat down, but now I turn my head for a better view.
When I ask, “Is that one of the originals?” she nods, her smile widening by almost imperceptible degrees, and she points at the painting of a mermaid.
“Yes,” she says. “The only one I have. Oh, I’ve got a few lithographs. I have prints or photographs of them all, but this is the only one of the genuine paintings I own.”
“It’s beautiful,” I say, and that isn’t idle flattery. The mermaid paintings are the reason that I’ve c
ome to New York City and tracked her to the tawdry little hovel by the river. This isn’t the first time I’ve seen an original up close, but it is the first time outside a museum gallery. There’s one hanging in Newport, at the National Museum of American Illustration. I’ve seen it, and also the one at the Art Institute of Chicago, and one other, the mermaid in the permanent collection of the Society of Illustrators here in Manhattan. But there are more than thirty documented, and most of them I’ve only seen reproduced in books and folios. Frankly, I wonder if this painting’s existence is very widely known, and how long it’s been since anyone but the model, sitting here in her wheelchair, has admired it. I’ve read all the artist’s surviving journals and correspondence (including the letters to his model), and I know that there are at least ten mermaid paintings that remain unaccounted for. I assume this must be one of them.
“Wow,” I gasp, unable to look away from the painting. “I mean, it’s amazing.”
“It’s the very last one he did, you know,” she says. “He wanted me to have it. If someone offered me a million dollars, I still wouldn’t part with it.”
I glance at her, then back to the painting. “More likely, they’d offer you ten million,” I tell her, and she laughs. It might easily be mistaken for the laugh of a much younger woman.
“Wouldn’t make any difference if they did,” she says. “He gave it to me, and I’ll never part with it. Not ever. He named this one Regarding the Shore from Whale Rock, and that was my idea, the title. He often asked me to name them. At least half their titles, I thought up for him.” And I already know this; it’s in his letters.
The painting occupies a large, narrow canvas, easily four feet tall by two feet wide—somewhat too large for this wall, really—held inside an ornately carved frame. The frame has been stained dark as mahogany, though I’m sure it’s made from something far less costly; here and there, where the varnish has been scratched or chipped, I can see the blond wood showing through. But I don’t doubt that the painting is authentic, despite numerous compositional deviations, all of which are immediately apparent to anyone familiar with the mermaid series. For instance, in contravention to his usual approach, the siren has been placed in the foreground, and also somewhat to the right. And, more importantly, she’s facing away from the viewer. Buoyed by rough waves, she holds her arms outstretched to either side, as if to say, “Let me enfold you,” while her long hair flows around her like a dense tangle of kelp, and the mermaid gazes towards land and a whitewashed lighthouse perched on a granite promontory. The rocky coastline is familiar, some wild place he’d found in Massachusetts or Maine or Rhode Island. The viewer might be fooled into thinking this is only a painting of a woman swimming in the sea, as so little of her is showing above the waterline. She might be mistaken for a suicide, taking a final glimpse of the rugged strand before slipping below the surface. But, if one looks only a little closer, the patches of red-orange scales flecking her arms are unmistakable, and there are living creatures caught up in the snarls of her black hair: tiny crabs and brittle stars, the twisting shapes of strange oceanic worms and a gasping, wide-eyed fish of some sort, suffocating in the air.
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