The Mermaid's Daughter

by Ann Claycomb

  “’Course you’re takin’ her,” he said. “I would’ve taken her mother away from here if I could’ve. Take her far away as you can. It’ll come out the same in the end. Grandmother, mother, daughter, granddaughter. It won’t matter where she is, lad. It’ll come out the same in the end.”

  Moira’s own mother had also killed herself when Moira was a baby. And her grandmother—the one people spoke of with pinched, disapproving faces—she’d drowned herself, and only her father’s tearful pleas to the priest had gotten her a Christian burial. Robin opened his mouth to ask his father-in-law what he meant—It’ll come out the same in the end.

  But he did not ask. Or if he did—years later, though he remembered having that conversation, he could not remember how it had ended—he did not get an answer.

  Robin’s own parents wanted to keep the baby while Robin finished his degree. But while he was gone his mother, who had never been able to have children after he was born, would have made Kathleen her daughter, not his and Moira’s. He packed up both his own things and Kathleen’s and brought her with him.

  In his first composition class at the conservatory, Robin discovered that his musical talent was bigger and stranger than he’d imagined it to be. It was not that his pieces were immediately good, but he had an instinct for melody and he could hear in his head how other instruments might support that melody, or play against it to interesting effect. By the time he finished his undergraduate program, he had a fellowship to continue on at the NEC, focusing on orchestral composition.

  Robin paid their bills by playing piano and singing in clubs around Boston. From the time Kathleen was four or five years old she was going with him, sitting in the corner on the floor and coloring one of her endless pictures of underwater palaces, with a free hamburger from the kitchen staff congealing on a plate next to her. Later in the evening she would curl up on his coat and fall asleep. But for as long as she was awake, and even as she carefully constructed her edifices of seashell and coral on the page, she would sing along with whatever he played. She had such perfect pitch that her child’s voice seemed to weave itself into the piano notes such that the casual, half-drunk listeners in the bar didn’t even hear her.

  Robin arranged voice lessons for Kathleen with a classmate: he taught the woman’s son to play the piano while she taught Kathleen the fundamentals of singing: how to breathe, how to count, how to listen. When the two adults stood together in his friend’s kitchen after the lessons, listening to her son pound out scales in the other room, she would shake her head and tell him that she had gotten the far better end of the deal. Kathleen was both gifted and disciplined. When she was ten, she stated her desire to be a singer, with a touch of amazement that such a thing counted as a job. It remained only to be seen what would happen with her voice in adolescence. She sang in the choir in middle school and high school, her voice soaring in the occasional solo moment, suspended above the massed choir in a delicate, shining arc that Kathleen herself seemed able to see as she held the notes.

  Robin came to every concert and never tired of seeing in his daughter’s face when she sang the joy that he had been afraid she would never feel. She had bouts of wrenching tears, whispered complaints of pain in her feet—whenever I walk, Daddy, it hurts like someone is stabbing me—and on her fair skin. Moira had suffered this way, Robin remembered, though she had never talked about it so clearly. He remembered the sweaters that his mother knitted for her, all good rough Irish wool, which she never wore. And he remembered a moment when Moira had caught him tucking a wool blanket around baby Kathleen and had snatched it away.

  “Don’t!” she had whispered—the more upset Moira was, the quieter she spoke. “Oh, don’t, you’ll hurt her.” And she wrapped the baby instead in a linen tablecloth that had been a wedding gift, so heavy and slippery and oversized that it spilled out of the cradle and dragged on the floor.

  Robin feared that these strange things were inherited markers on Kathleen of her mother’s depression. But though he had known Moira when they were both children, he had never really talked to her until she was a teenager. For a while, he recalled with a wry smile, they had not done much talking. And by the time the urgency of their physical connection had cooled, Moira had begun to retreat from him. There was so much about her that he never knew, so much that she did not want him to know.

  Moira had never sung like Kathleen sang, though. She’d had a lovely voice, but not a voice that silenced people with longing or awe. Sometimes when he watched Kathleen sing or held her while she cried from the pain, Robin thought of Moira, who should have been there. It seemed to him that she had become a shadow of her daughter in more ways than one. She lingered, always, in the background, her absence, her death, her suicide, put forth by therapists and doctors as the likely root of Kathleen’s “problems.” And for Robin, the only one left who knew—had known—them both, Moira also began to seem like a paler version of Kathleen. He found himself comparing the two women: their voices, their pain, the color of their hair. And he repeated to himself the word that he had settled on for his daughter: stronger. She was stronger than Moira had ever been and that would save her.

  MONDAY MORNING, AFTER the unsettling call with Kathleen, Robin was so distracted that Tae had to ask him three times what kind of tea he wanted.

  “I’m sorry,” he said. “I’m concentrating on not calling her back.”

  “Why?”

  “Well, for one thing I very much doubt she’s awake this early,” Robin said, “and beyond that, I want to call her back because I’m worried, which will make her mad. But she sounded agitated, the way she gets sometimes before she—” He hesitated.

  Tae lifted the tea bag from his cup, pressed the liquid out with slim, deft fingers, and deposited it on a saucer.

  “Before she has one of her bad spells? It’s been a while now, hasn’t it?”

  Robin nodded, still staring at his phone screen. If there had just been a message, something flip and typical—Sorry! Tom drama! No worrying! Hi to Tae!—he could have relaxed a little.

  “Rob?”

  Lifting his head, he caught the expression on Tae’s face before she hid it behind her tea. She was hurt. Robin could have smacked himself. Tae was first violin with the philharmonic and a technically brilliant violinist, her playing exquisitely clean and precise. Robin had always found her musicianship to be a perfect reflection of her personal and inner life. There was no suicide in her past, no messy and inexplicable syndrome. They’d been living together for two years now, and he believed that one of the reasons they were still happy was their mutual acceptance and appreciation of distance. But on a few occasions she had said something, offhand and quietly, that suggested that maybe the only one who needed or appreciated distance was him. When it came to his daughter, especially, Robin couldn’t sort out whether he was protecting Kathleen’s privacy by not letting Tae in or whether he just didn’t want to risk seeing distaste on Tae’s face in the midst of a crisis.

  “I’m sorry,” he said again. He slid his phone away from his plate. “Yes, it’s been a while now, since before she and Harry started dating. I could be overreacting of course, because she was asking questions that took me so off guard.”

  “So call her later and leave a message,” Tae said. “Invite them down some weekend. That gives her a reason to call you back without feeling like you’re just checking up on her. And we haven’t seen them since Christmas.”

  “That’s a good idea.”

  “What about today?” she asked. “What are you working on?”

  Robin made such a face that Tae laughed, her bell of black hair swinging around her face as she shook her head at him. “Let me guess. You have to tackle vocal music? Where are you starting? Hester?”

  He groaned and Tae’s smiled widened. “I’ve never seen you get nerves about composing before. It’s cute.”

  “It won’t be cute when I don’t have a single aria to show anyone in a few months,” Robin said.

 
“You’ve just got to start, isn’t that what I’m supposed to say? The blank page is your enemy. Write something down. Is Hester a soprano?”

  “I don’t know!” Robin managed not to glare across the table by frowning at his tea instead.

  “So write a song for Kathleen,” Tae said.

  “What?”

  “Leave Kathleen a message, then let it go until she calls back—which she will—and write a song for her instead of staring at your phone.”

  “She’d love it,” Robin murmured, “but I have to focus on this project.”

  “Oh bull,” Tae said. She kicked him lightly on the ankle with her bare foot. “That is nerves talking.”

  “Did you ever guess when I took this commission that you’d have to turn therapist?”

  “No,” Tae said promptly, “and I’ll only do it so long before I lose patience with you. I’ve played your music in performance. I know exactly how good you are and how good this opera will be. But writing a song for Kathleen is exactly what a good therapist would suggest right now, like the exercise people do when they’re grieving or recovering from trauma, write it all out and then delete it. Write this out and put it aside and then see if you can get back to Hester and—what’s his name?—the hunchback.”

  “Chillingworth,” Robin said absently. As Tae had talked, the measured cadence of her persuasion, the elegant rhythm that was Tae, had given way to, not music, exactly, but something else in his head. It was too soon to grasp at it; all he could do was listen. Tae got up to clear her dishes, her silk robe falling like water around her thighs.

  “I’m going to dress,” she said. “I’ve got a section meeting at nine.”

  THE SOUND HE’D been hearing was not music. It was the sound of Kathleen screaming. Robin supposed it was Tae’s reference to “trauma” that triggered that memory, though he couldn’t say who had been more traumatized by that terrible morning, him or Kathleen. The scream had been a rising note that went on and on, perfectly in pitch—My God, Robin had thought even as he plunged down the hall to her room. My God, how does she sustain it?

  Kathleen was sitting up in bed, scrabbling at her mouth with her fingers and still screaming. Robin knelt on the bed and grabbed her wrists. Her eyes were black and frantic, and though she saw him and knew him, she seemed to think that she couldn’t speak. She was soaked with sweat, he could smell it in her hair and feel it slick on the skin of her arms, and she kept trying to put her hands in her mouth. Robin fought her, using his greater strength to keep her hands imprisoned. He struggled with the urge to hit her to make her stop screaming. Talking to her—Calm down, Kath, calm down, it’s all right, you’re all right, drink this, just drink this, breathe, breathe, swallow—he felt a bizarre disconnect as he heard the soothing, crooning sound of his voice and felt the barely suppressed violence in his body as he restrained her. He did not identify his own emotion as fear until later, when he sat beside the hospital bed and watched her sleep. She had been sedated by then, and her face was so bleached of its normal high color that he could see a scattering of pale gold freckles across her nose that he had never noticed before. That he could fail to know something about his daughter so obvious as the fact that she had freckles on her nose; that he could have reacted so poorly when she needed help that he had hurt her—her wrists were circled with bruises from the pressure of his grip.

  Now he sat at the piano and tried to modulate the scream into something else. If it just slid down, down into a high E, then a melody was possible, a melody that would begin with faltering words and grow stronger as the vocalist sang herself away from the scream.

  Tae brought him a second cup of tea before she left that morning, but he only discovered it when he stood up from the piano hours later and nearly knocked it over. He was exhausted, exhilarated, stunned by the revelation of his daughter’s voice as an instrument. He knew its texture, its tonal quality, its range and power, knew that it would flow over a piano accompaniment like a river over rounded stones. He didn’t let the piano into the song until halfway through, because she was singing of pain. Instead he wrote a cello line underneath the voice. The sound would be darker, heavier, and occasionally flawed by moments of strong bowing—he notated them, uneven ground for Kath to sing over instead of a smooth path.

  The words to this song had come easily, though Robin knew he was no librettist. He’d simply used Kathleen’s own words, or versions of the words he had heard her use to talk about the pain in her mouth—my tongue cut out, my voice cut off. And in her feet—when I dance, I dance on knives. Clumsy, but he could fix them later. He felt a telltale vertigo, a sense of almost appalled awareness of the quality of what was taking shape on the page. The aria filled the room, then receded as he notated the final, tentatively hopeful phrase of the song—and perhaps the water will wash it away—just as Kathleen would sing it, on a fragile, fading note that nonetheless was not final, that left breath and melody open to begin another song. This one would be about the water, of course, about the sea.

  Robin smiled as he gathered the score sheets together. Tae would never say “I told you so,” but she’d be pleased with herself when he told her how he’d spent his day. Making room on the top of the piano for the new pages, he glanced at the much-scribbled-over page from several days ago on which he’d tried to start an aria for Hester Prynne, then reached for his pencil. Tae would really be hard-pressed not to gloat over this. He drew a bold line over all of the cramped, frustrated notations, and at the top of the page made one note, underlined for emphasis: “Hester—not soprano. Mezzo.”

  THE NEXT DAY, when Kathleen hadn’t responded to his voice mail, Robin sent her a text suggesting a visit. He even had a specific weekend to suggest, when the string quartet that Tae played with was doing Brahms, one of Harry’s favorites. Then he started working on the second song for Kathleen that he had begun to hear, faintly, the night before. He knew better than to question the luxurious ease of this particular composition process. Eventually, and usually without warning, it would get hard again. He was still not sure what story he was telling. This one was once again for voice and piano and cello, but with a flute to play the lonely sound of the sea itself, of the singer’s longing, or both.

  Tae came to the doorway that evening and stood waiting for him to finish the phrase he was marking.

  “Come eat dinner,” she said. “If you ate lunch while I was gone it must have been the special invisible food we keep here.”

  “On an invisible plate,” Robin acknowledged. Tae moved into the room and he drew her down onto the bench next to him.

  “How was your day?”

  She made a face. “Several hundred sixth graders there to hear the 1812 Overture. I don’t know why they don’t just bring them in, give them the cannon fire and the fireworks, and send them home.”

  Robin laughed. “And the cymbals. Don’t forget the cymbals. Very important.”

  “I’ll take your word for it,” Tae said. She leaned over the music, then stopped herself and glanced at him.

  “I’m sorry, I just caught a glimpse—don’t give it to me if you’re not ready.”

  “It’s fine,” he said. “Nearly finished, I think.”

  Tae scanned the music in silence for a few minutes.

  “It’s lovely,” she said. “Where is it going?”

  “You mean the whole cycle?” Robin stood up and stretched, pulling her with him. “Don’t know yet. Any ideas?”

  “Well, they’re both very literal,” Tae said. “The one you showed me last night is about pain and this one is about missing the sea. Maybe one way to go with the next song is more abstract.” She moved to the door and then turned back, seeing that he had not followed her.

  “Robin,” she said. “Not until after you’ve eaten dinner, please.”

  “MAYBE IT’S ME,” Robin said on Thursday morning. They were in the bedroom, while Tae dressed for work and Robin packed his gym bag so he could work out before his lunch appointment.

  “Maybe
what’s you?”

  “The not calling back,” he said. “I just realized that Kathleen’s not the only one who hasn’t gotten in touch with me. I also haven’t heard from Allan Charpentier since I sent him the overture—what, almost two weeks ago now?”

  “But aren’t you having lunch with him today?”

  “Him and Jim, yes.”

  “So he knew when you sent it to him that he’d be seeing you and could give you feedback today,” Tae said. “That means that he liked it.”

  Robin checked the weather on his phone—still nothing from Kathleen—and switched from a cashmere sweater to a thinner merino one. “Why does the fact that he hasn’t followed up mean he likes it?”

  “Because if he didn’t—especially if he was actively worried about the quality of the music or the direction it was taking—he wouldn’t want to talk to you about that in front of Jim,” Tae said. She slipped her earrings in and tapped them lightly. They were pearls that Robin had bought her, set on a small dangle and with an unusual gold creaminess to them. For a long time he had assumed that Tae’s minimalist approach to dressing was entirely a choice, and it was, but it was more an expression of her consummate professionalism than her personal style. She didn’t wear perfume in case it bothered other players, didn’t wear rings or bracelets because they cluttered her hands and arms while she played, and of course lived in black and white. When Robin had gotten her those earrings and a coral-colored silk dress for her birthday last year, the expression on her face had been almost greedy.

  “We’re having dinner with Jim and Lorraine this weekend too, aren’t we?” she asked.

  “Unless Allan did hate the overture and I’m actually being fired over a steak salad.”

  Tae came over and slipped her arms around his waist.

  “You’re not seriously worried that Allan doesn’t like the overture, are you?”