The Mermaid's Daughter

by Ann Claycomb

  DEDICATION

  For Ryan, who doesn’t read fairy tales but believed in this one,

  for Erin, who does read fairy tales and believed in this one,

  and for Ellie, little mermaid swimming free.

  EPIGRAPH

  “I know what you want,” said the sea witch . . . “You want to get rid of your fish’s tail, and to have two supports instead of it, like human beings on earth, so that the young prince may fall in love with you . . . I will prepare a draught for you . . . Your tail will then disappear, and shrink up into what mankind calls legs, and you will feel great pain, as if a sword were passing through you. But all who see you will say that you are the prettiest little human being they ever saw. You will still have the same floating gracefulness of movement, and no dancer will ever tread so lightly; but at every step you take it will feel as if you were treading upon sharp knives, and that the blood must flow. If you will bear all this, I will help you . . . Put out your little tongue that I may cut it off as my payment; then you shall have the powerful draught.”

  “It shall be,” said the little mermaid.

  —HANS CHRISTIAN ANDERSEN, “THE LITTLE MERMAID”

  The water is wide, I can’t swim o’er.

  And neither have I wings to fly.

  Give me a boat that can carry two,

  And both shall row, my love and I.

  There is a ship and she sails the sea.

  She’s loaded deep as deep can be,

  But not so deep as the love I’m in.

  I know not how to sink or swim.

  —“THE WATER IS WIDE” (SCOTTISH FOLK SONG)

  CONTENTS

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Act 1 Kathleen: Aria for Soprano

  Kathleen: Aria for Soprano with Choral Intrusion

  Harry: Aria for Mezzo-Soprano

  Kathleen: Aria for Soprano

  Robin: Composer’s Notes

  Robin: Composer’s Notes

  Act 2 Harry: Aria for Mezzo-Soprano

  Kathleen: Aria for Soprano

  Harry: Aria for Mezzo-Soprano

  Act 3 Robin: Composer’s Notes on Duet Between Soprano and Mezzo-Soprano

  Kathleen: Aria for Soprano with Tenor Intrusion

  Harry: Director’s Notes

  Robin: Composer’s Notes

  Harry: Aria for Mezzo-Soprano and Duet with Soprano

  The Mermaid at the Opera

  Acknowledgments

  P.S. Insights, Interviews & More . . .* About the Author

  About the book

  Credits

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  Act 1

  KATHLEEN

  Aria for Soprano

  Kathleen,” she says, “you are going to go mad.”

  I have only just finished singing and I feel like I have surfaced from deep water, gasping like a fish desperate to be submerged again, to still be breathing the song. For a moment, hearing her words, I am terrified to have it confirmed. I am going to go mad: she knows it just looking at me, just hearing me. How does she know?

  There are only a hundred people in the audience, but they are all clapping, many of them on their feet. I can feel my voice recede from my throat like a tide dropping. I take shallow sips of air, keep my eyes on the woman who is holding my hands. She is smiling at me, shaking her head. Her voice, trained to fill much larger spaces than this one, cuts easily through the applause, silences it. Her hands are warm around mine.

  RUZENA IS A great soprano, an international diva, brought in to do a master class with three young singers handpicked by the faculty to show off the caliber of the school. Ruzena’s job was to listen to each of us sing, correct us on breathing, stance, tonal quality, pronunciation, gestures. Then she would pronounce judgment.

  Carianne has a light, sparkling voice, a true soubrette. The diva promised her Mozart roles and worked with her on balancing out the weightlessness of her voice with better breath control, especially when she sings longer phrases. Hyung is a mezzo with a break in her voice that she has learned to sing around. She masks her weakness with a huskiness that untrained audiences hear as sexiness. Ruzena saw right through it, took Hyung to task for not stretching her range, for not doing more vocal exercises to increase her flexibility.

  She had no corrections for me. When I finished singing she moved gracefully from where she had been standing behind the piano, put her hands on my shoulders, and turned me toward the audience. Then she took a step back and made a grand gesture of her own, of presentation. It’s the gesture the conductor usually makes when he presents the star: the falsely modest step back, the satisfied smile, the sweep of the arm inviting applause. She did nothing in this class but make this familiar gesture, award me her unqualified approbation, but it was enough—my God, more than enough—and she knew it. People stood for an ovation, some of my friends even whistled. In the front row, Harriet Evans, the mezzo who should have been picked for this class instead of Hyung, was one of the first to stand. There was nothing forced about her smile, like there would have been about mine if I’d been consigned to the audience. No, Harry just beamed, her cheeks flushed with love and pride. When she caught my eye, she stopped clapping long enough to blow me a kiss. Then Ruzena turned me back around to face her, took my hands in hers.

  “YOU ARE GOING to kill yourself,” she says. She puts her fingertips on my throat, her touch light and reverent. She is performing. She does not know anything real, is not predicting anything about me. She is talking about the roles I will play: Lucia, Mimi, Butterfly, Violetta, Norma, Manon. She is offering the highest possible praise.

  “You will stab yourself,” she says, “throw yourself into the sea.”

  Too close to home. I was only a baby when my mother filled her pockets with rocks and walked into the sea to die. I have no actual memories of my mother at all, but I tried to follow her when I was six, swam out until I couldn’t stand and let myself go under. The water was warm against my face and colder down below, where the sun had not touched it. The dark ribbon of cold seeped into my feet until they barely hurt at all, and my feet always hurt.

  They hurt now, as I stand with my fingers still loosely clasped in another woman’s hands. I can feel the rings she wears against my skin. If she squeezed my hands tight, the press of her rings would hurt, but of course it would: that kind of pain makes sense. My feet don’t make sense. They don’t ache or throb with the ordinary discomfort of walking too far or wearing bad shoes. When it’s really bad it feels like I’ve stepped on a broken bottle and not only have I cut my feet, I’m still walking on the shards. I wear ballet slippers all the time and pick through dirty Boston snowdrifts in them rather than resort to heavy boots. There’s no shoe in the world that can cushion my feet from jagged glass that isn’t there. In my little ballet shoes, though, I can step lightly enough to almost tiptoe, almost prance, without anyone noticing I’m doing it.

  I am supposed to smile at the litany of terrible fates in store for me, to show that I am in on the joke. I avoid even glancing over at Harry, who will have registered both the prediction and my reaction. I hate moments like this, when we are both recalled to my general—what?—precariousness? I like that word better than other possibilities.

  “I was thinking of throwing myself into the sea tomorrow.” I smile back, performing too. “It’s spring break and we’re going to drive to the beach.”

  “Well!” She squeezes my hands, releases them. “Enjoy it. Enjoy your vacation. But when you come back, you must promise to keep singing. Some day we will be cheering you on a much larger stage than this one.”

  “Once I’m resurrected from my tragic death?”

  “My dear,” Ruzena says, and now she
turns a little to include the audience, “you will die a thousand tragic deaths onstage. It’s the curse of the soprano. The tenor makes a fool of himself for love, the baritone must perfect an expression of evil glee, but we are the ones who die, my dear, every time.”

  I do glance at Harry now. For a moment I think I catch a glimpse of the fear that she generally hides so well, or masks with impatience and insistent caretaking. But then she rolls her eyes and grins at me, mouths a single word: sopranos!

  OH YES, WE are drama queens, every one of us. Harry is not. She’s a mezzo, for one thing—the loyal friend, the cousin, the lady-in-waiting. And she’s far too sensible to rush headlong toward a tragic, early end. In the crush of the reception after the class, she skirts the crowd around Ruzena to find me sitting in a chair by the windows with my shoes off and my feet tucked up under my dress.

  “Good,” she says, “you’re sitting down.”

  Harry and I will have been together a year in April, long enough to have started squabbling about the little things: my inability to put anything in our apartment away, her insistence on spending grocery money on healthy foods that neither one of us ever wants to eat. But we joke about those things; we don’t fight about them. We fight about this: my unexplained illness that’s never going to go away and her hovering over me about it like—and I did call her this once when I was really angry—a puffed-up mama hen. “Peck,” I said. “Peck, peck, peck.” Harry drew in a breath through her nose and for a minute I thought she’d snap back. But instead she pressed her lips together and left the room. I sprang after her and she shut the door in my face. I was so stunned that I stopped short. My feet hurt and my mouth hurt that day, badly. My skin burned as if with a rash, though in the mirror I saw only what I expected to see: my white skin stained red with temper along my cheeks and at my temples, my hair fairly crackling around my shoulders, my eyes black and dilated from the pain and the pills I’d taken. OxyContin, I think, that day, more than I’d been prescribed, and from a prescription I wasn’t supposed to have anymore.

  That was a bad fight.

  Now I try not to bristle, but I’m raw from the strangeness of the diva’s words, the sensation I had onstage that her predictions were settling over me like a net so finely woven as to be inescapable.

  “I only sang a master class, not a whole performance,” I say. “I’m not tired.”

  “But your feet were bothering you,” she says. She sits down beside me and touches my hair. Even in the midst of her anxiety, she can’t stop her face going soft when she touches me. We’ve been together nearly a year, but that hasn’t faded, thank God. I still want to touch her as soon as she touches me, wind a finger in one of her blond curls, push her back or down against something, and let my long hair fall like red curtains around our faces.

  I turn my face to kiss her palm, but then she ruins it.

  “Are you all right? I mean, I know what she was doing with the things she said, but still. I could have killed her. She could have found another way to tell you how wonderful you were.”

  “She couldn’t have known. Come on, Harry. It’s not a big deal.”

  “It is if you take what she said serious—”

  “Is there champagne?” I ask. “I thought I saw champagne going around, in real glasses, no less, not the usual plastic cups they use at these things. Can you get me some?”

  She lets her hand fall from my hair. “Are you sure that’s a good idea?”

  Champagne, like the pills and the pot and the other things that I’ve tried, doesn’t work on the pain. Harry thinks that if I’m going to self-medicate, at least it should help. I grant her that. But still, would it kill her just once to let it go? I unfold myself to get up, shrug my shoulder so my hair falls between us. “It’s just a glass of champagne,” I say. “I’ll get it myself.”

  “Kath”—her hand is on my arm then—“don’t. Stay here and rest your feet. I’ll get us both a glass.”

  When she’s gone, I slip out into the art gallery adjoining the room where the reception is being held. I don’t want to get caught alone by a board member; they tend to fawn over me, which is flattering but tiring. The gallery is small and pretty, lots of blond wood and stark white walls. I walk from one painting to the next not really seeing them, because Harry was right, of course: my feet are throbbing so badly it’s hard to focus on anything else.

  There’s only one thing, besides singing, besides the taste of Harry’s mouth, that really distracts me from the pain and suddenly here it is, in front of me.

  The sea.

  It’s not a big painting, not big enough to get really lost in or to evoke the smell of the water, the chilly, damp feel of the air above the waves. But it’s enough to stop me, enough to make me feel again the pang of longing I felt when the diva said I would throw myself into the sea. I thought then of Moira, my mother, and also felt the shock of desire I always feel at the thought of immersion.

  Paintings of the sea make me long for it and realize all over again that I can’t ever have it. Why, when people paint the sea, do they always include sunlight on the water and a cliff or rock for the waves to hurl white foam against? That creates a remove, an emphasis on the way that the sea is different from the land, from the air, and conveys such a flatness to the surface that it’s hard to imagine the depths I know are there. Paintings of the sea, even photographs or movies that venture underwater, are nothing like my dreams of it.

  I dreamed of the sea before I ever saw it, lovely dreams of a blue-lit world where everything undulated softly all around. Swimming through murky castles and fields of black sea grass, I was happy. As soon as I started reading picture books, my favorite ones were all about the sea and fish and underwater creatures. And when I could put words to the pictures, I interrupted my father during bedtime reading with endless questions about the sea: How many fish are there? In the whole ocean, how many fish? Can any of them talk? Can people live in the ocean? Why not? Why can’t we ride seahorses? Are you sure there aren’t any bigger seahorses? Why are they called that if they’re fish and not horses? Where is the sea, Daddy? How big is it? Could we go there? When? When?

  Robin, my father, didn’t figure out until it was too late that what I wanted was not the seashore or the beach, but the sea itself, underwater. I was five when he took me to see the ocean off the coast of Nantucket. We drove straight to the beach, took off our shoes in the car. I remember running toward the water, abandoning him in my eagerness. And then I stopped. I wish I didn’t remember this too, the shock of disappointment that knocked me off my feet, the tears that wouldn’t stop. I cried as though my heart would break, cried until I could barely breathe, and my poor father, having caught up, knelt beside me and stroked my hair, utterly perplexed.

  It was nothing at all like the beautiful underwater world I had dreamed. From above, from even a little distance, the ocean smelled sad to me, like dead things and things left behind. I had imagined its depths and its tides of shifting color, but it was nothing but a ragged gray blanket. Robin tried to calm me down, and when that failed, he said gently that we could leave now, it was all right, he was sorry, we could just go home.

  But I couldn’t leave without touching the water. I got up, still hysterical—No, Daddy! No, no! I don’t want to leave! I don’t want to!—and stumbled into the surf. My wet pants dragged around my ankles and my feet felt funny, tingly and buoyed up. I sat down in the sand and a wave rushed up and soaked me to my shoulders. My father’s shadow fell over me and I heard him asking anxiously if I was all right. The salt water, my first taste of the sea, filled my mouth. I waited for each new wave to drape itself over me, and whenever and wherever my skin was actually in the water—even under the layers of clothes—I felt wrapped in comfort.

  “THERE YOU ARE.” Harry comes up beside me, stops when she sees the painting. Knowing Harry, she’s seeing a great deal more: my hands clenched at my sides, feet shifting up and down as I try to take my weight off them, my throat working against the nausea
that rises when I recall the taste of the sea in my mouth and then feel its absence.

  For a moment, though I know she sees everything, she says nothing. Maybe she has decided she doesn’t want to fight either.

  “Is your mouth bothering you too?” she asks finally. That’s the other phantom pain, the sudden blinding agony that started when I was a teenager and only flares up occasionally, thank God, or I would be crazy. As it is, the pain in my mouth makes me scream, makes me throw up, sends me to the hospital for Demerol and yet another psych workup. I’m a singer, after all, and I’ve let more than a dozen doctors examine my mouth. There’s nothing wrong. No reason why I should sweat and gag against my own tongue, the pain the same with every attack, as if it were happening anew each time.

  I shiver, thinking about it. Swallow.

  “No, my mouth’s okay.”

  “You want me to leave you alone a little while longer?”

  She doesn’t say that she already took as long as she could, probably stopped and talked to people, soaked up the praise of my singing for me. She’s got two glasses in her hands but she’s not even offering me one yet. She’s trying to help me come back to her, to the room, the party next door.

  I shake my head, feel tears brimming because my feet hurt and the sea in the painting in front of me is small and far away and Harry, beside me, is gazing at me with love and worry in her gray eyes. She doesn’t approve of how I handle the pain or the need for the sea, but she believes me. She doesn’t think I’m crazy. I take a deep breath, then another, and try to come back.

  “I’m okay.”

  “Champagne? As requested?”

  I take the glass she offers, and she tips her face up to kiss me. I curl my free hand around the back of her neck, kiss her more insistently than I know she planned in public, touch her tongue with mine.