The Mermaid's Daughter

by Ann Claycomb

  She sang three more songs at the crowd’s urging, people shouting out requests and Kathleen asking the band, with just a tilt of her eyebrow, if they knew the song in question before nodding and waiting for her cue. I was so focused on her that I didn’t notice until the last song that someone was standing at our table, behind Kathleen’s chair. It was the elderly nun I’d noticed earlier. She stood perfectly still, her hands clasped in front of her as if she was praying, her eyes fixed on Kathleen. When the set was over, Kathleen relinquished the mike and came back to the table. Behind her, the band members were applauding along with everyone else. The keyboardist even put his fingers in his mouth and whistled shrilly. Kathleen looked over her shoulder at him and laughed as she slid into her seat. The face she turned back toward me was visibly, wickedly delighted.

  “Kath—” I began, nodding to the old woman, but before I could say more, the nun actually put out a blue-veined hand and touched Kathleen’s hair.

  “Deirdre,” she said, and then almost immediately, “no. You can’t be.”

  Kathleen twisted around in her chair.

  “My grandmother’s name was Deirdre,” she said.

  “Your grandmother,” the nun whispered. “Your grandmother, not your mother but your grandmother. Am I really that old? She would have been your great-grandmother then.”

  “My great—” Kathleen swung back toward me and stretched out her hand. “Harry, did you hear that? My great-grandmother!”

  I grabbed her hand. I was praying, to no deity in particular, that this woman not turn out to be delusional. Please let her know something, I thought. Please. But she was so frail. Above her stiff white collar her neck was crimped and colorless.

  “Not Deirdre and not Deirdre’s daughter either, but of course not—her daughter didn’t favor her. Her daughter had curly hair and freckles. What was her name?”

  “Moira,” Kathleen said. “My mother.”

  “Your mother, Deirdre’s daughter. And Deirdre was your grandmother.”

  Kathleen strained toward her. The nun still had her hand on Kathleen’s hair. “Did you know her?” Kathleen asked. “Did you know my grandmother?”

  “Know her?” The little nun shook her head. “I didn’t know her. I watched her grow up but I never spoke to her. I was afraid to.”

  “Afraid?” Kathleen’s fingers tightened in mine. “Why?”

  The nun glanced back over her shoulder at the man she’d left behind. He had turned in his seat and was leaning in, frankly observing us but not intervening. Perhaps, I thought—I hoped—that meant that this woman wasn’t in need of a keeper, that she knew her own mind. Her gaze traveled next to our clasped hands, mine and Kath’s, and her eyes widened. Her hand was still on Kathleen’s hair. She seemed to realize it then. She stroked Kathleen’s hair once and then drew her fingers back.

  “You—what’s your name, child?”

  “Kathleen. Please—” Kathleen let go of my hand and gestured to the nun. “Would you like to sit down for a minute?”

  But the nun had turned to me. “And you, young lady. What’s your name?”

  “My name is Harriet.”

  “You love her,” she said. “You love her very much.”

  I had left my hand out on the table. I let it fall into my lap. I felt exposed.

  “Yes,” I said.

  “Please . . .” Kathleen said again.

  The nun nodded. “I loved her,” she said. “We used to hold hands, but only when we were sure we were alone.” She looked at Kathleen and then back at me and seemed to make a decision. She stood up straighter, shifted her shoulders. “I would like to sit down, thank you. I would like that very much. Michael”—she turned and spoke over her shoulder—“I’m going to speak to these young women for a few minutes. I have a story to tell them. I won’t be long.”

  Kathleen had sprung up in that instant and slid over an extra chair. The nun took it. “He’s my nephew,” she said, “takes me to dinner once a week. He’ll be perfectly happy to sit and eat his food without worrying about ordering another beer. I don’t care one bit how much he drinks but”—she leaned in and lowered her voice to a whisper—“he’s afraid of offending my sensibilities.”

  “Does your nephew know this story?” I asked.

  The old woman smiled. She had a lovely smile. Her mouth tilted up more on one side than the other and her eyes stayed sad.

  “No one knows this story, my dear,” she said, “not even my confessor.”

  “About Deirdre?” Kathleen asked.

  The nun shook her head. “No, no,” she said. “I told you, I never knew Deirdre. I only watched her from afar. This is about her mother, Caolinn.” Her smile slipped as she repeated the name. “Caolinn Linnane,” she said, “my own true love.”

  WHEN YOU PERFORM an aria outside the context of its opera, you can choose to tamp down the character and the emotion in favor of sheer musicality. Singing one of Mimi’s arias from La Bohème in a concert recital, for example, most sopranos choose not to interrupt themselves with the coughing fits that signal Mimi’s soon-to-be fatal consumption. They save those for full performances, when they’re being asked to be Mimi, not merely sing a piece of her. What distinguishes some great singers is their ability to infuse an aria with the entire weight of its surrounding story without resorting to things like coughing or reaching out to a lover who isn’t onstage. They can make you hear Manon’s faithlessness or Butterfly’s naiveté, the coldness that underscores the duke’s playfulness in “La Donna è Mobile.”

  Listening to this woman—her name, she told us, was Marie, Sister Marie of the Convent of Mercy—felt like listening to an aria sung, out of context, by a singer who knew that the whole story mattered. She sat at our table and talked and talked and I thought, She doesn’t know anything. She doesn’t know that Deirdre killed herself. She doesn’t know that Moira did. And yet she did know—she knew more than she could tell us. She knew that there were things she didn’t understand about her own story, things she’d never forgotten because they were important. Inexplicable to her at the time, even more so now, after all these years, but important.

  She’d worn a lock of Caolinn’s hair in a locket around her neck for twenty years after she’d gone into the convent. It was ruler straight, she told us, lacking the natural wave and tendency toward ringlets in the damp air that Kathleen’s hair had. She’d had to tie string around it to keep it coiled tight enough to hide in the locket. And then one day she’d been on a ferry and the wind had caught the chain and torn it right off her neck. She put her hand to her throat as if she could still feel it there, the slight drag of it at her nape, the sliding of the locket itself against her chest under her clothes.

  What did she tell us that we didn’t already know? She told us how two girls could fall in love, even in Ireland in the 1940s, long after they should have been married and having babies. How they would walk together on the beach for hours, the one barefoot even in the coldest surf, and talk of running off together, to Shannon, to Dublin, to America. She told us that Caolinn used to sing in the pub in Doolin, sing with her bright red hair tucked behind her ears and her arms and shoulders dusted with gold freckles against the sleeves of her thin summer dresses. She told us that she used to sit in the back—just where we were sitting now, in fact—and watch her lover sing like a greedy child watching sugar spun into candy at a fair. She sat watching and longing and thinking mine, all mine while around her men sat thinking the same thing. Until one night one of them made it so, made Caolinn his at least in one way. Caolinn would never say who. Perhaps she didn’t know. But then there was a child, or was going to be a child, and somehow this was tangled up in the minds of the village with Caolinn and Marie holding hands on the beach, both of them bareheaded and bare-legged when they shouldn’t have been.

  She told us Caolinn had loved the sea, had drunk seawater sometimes, scooped it up in icy handfuls and let it run down her legs. She said that even when they talked of running away together, Caolinn
was reluctant, that she would tell Marie to leave on her own, to never see her again. “I’m not fit for love,” she’d whisper, her face pressed against Marie’s hair as they embraced, furtively, desperately, in empty fishing shacks, behind shocks of tall grass by the sea. “I’m not for you, Marie. I’m not for anyone. At least it will end with me, is all. There’s that.” And when Marie asked her to explain, she shook her head.

  But then there was going to be a child and the light left Caolinn’s face, left it, Marie said, like the color drains from the sea just before a storm comes in. Once, going to meet Caolinn in a long-abandoned hut, she found her lover on her hands and knees on the floor, hiding something under the rotting boards. She lingered after Caolinn had left—she confessed this later, her sin of mistrust, she confessed this when she did not confess anything else—and found a knife under the floor, smooth and slippery and half-buried in the sand. She was frightened. She left it where it was. Later, she thought she ought to have thrown it into the sea.

  Robin had found a knife too. It was like an aria that plays on a melodic through line, so that, listening, you feel sure you’ve heard it before: in the overture, in Act 1. Robin had found a knife. Had Deirdre’s husband? The same knife? It couldn’t be the same knife. And neither Caolinn nor Moira had used it, anyway, to kill themselves. Yet Sister Marie’s fingers twitched as she described the knife, recalled herself reaching out for it and shaking the sand from it. She told us the pieces of the story that mattered, the important pieces, the ones she’d held on to all these years.

  Caolinn was sent away to have her baby and Marie’s father told her it was a convent or marriage. She was sitting outside of the chapel with her face to the sun when an older nun leaned over her and whispered, her breath hot and meaty on Marie’s cheek, “Your sins are washed away now, child, and best you say a prayer of Thanksgiving to Our Lady for saving you from damnation. She’s gone, that one. Gone down and good riddance to her.” Marie knew then that Caolinn had died. She felt hot and cold at once, dizzy and feverish. She did pray. She prayed, Dear Lord, please let it not be the knife, because then it would be her fault. If she’d thrown it away . . . But it was not with a knife that Caolinn had killed herself. She’d drowned, was all Marie ever knew, taken a rotten boat out to sea and drifted until the water came in and the boat went down.

  “I DIDN’T CRY,” Marie whispered. Her voice was fading from talking so much. She took a sip of the glass of water I pushed in front of her. “I didn’t cry then. I was afraid to, because I was still a novitiate and the other nuns were watching me. I couldn’t let them see me cry for her. Some of them knew about us and didn’t care, even sympathized I think. But others who knew, like the one who told me—” She hunched into herself and put her hand again to her throat.

  “I didn’t cry for her until I lost her hair,” she said, “because it seemed like God was really taking her from me then. The chain was under my habit where I always wore it, and the wind, when it came, it ripped it right out and off before I could grab for it. And when it went into the sea, I imagined that the waves were reaching for the last of her, the only bit they hadn’t already taken.” Her mouth trembled briefly. She looked at us both. I don’t know what she saw in our faces. “I hated God for that loss as much as for the loss of her,” she said. “Why couldn’t he have left me that much?”

  I opened my mouth to say something, I had no idea what. But Kathleen spoke first.

  “Where were you?” she asked.

  “Where was I?” Marie repeated, clearly puzzled.

  “When the wind took the locket of Caolinn’s hair. You said you were on a ferry. Where were you going?”

  “I was going to her grave,” Marie said. “For a long time I couldn’t even ask where it was. I couldn’t ask anyone about her. When so many years had passed that I thought it wouldn’t matter anymore, I asked. She was buried on Inis Mór.” When we both stared blankly, Marie smiled, briefly shifting from tragic storyteller to contemptuous native. “Inis Mór,” she repeated. “The Aran Islands off the coast, where her mother’s people came from.”

  “Did you know Caolinn’s mother?” I asked. “When you were younger?”

  Marie frowned. “No,” she said. “No, her mother was gone. Caolinn’s father had brought her over to the mainland when she was just a baby.”

  “Her mother was gone?” Kathleen asked.

  I didn’t want to look at her. I made myself do it, certain that she would flick me one of her lightning glances that conveyed both a flash of bitter humor and an “I told you so.” But she was focused entirely on the little nun. Her face, in profile, was pale and calm, but the pulse in her neck was beating visibly. So it wasn’t “I told you so” at all, I realized. Kathleen wanted it not to be true as much as I did.

  But of course it was true.

  “Drowned,” Marie said. She reached for her water glass again, her hand shaking. “I don’t remember. But I think—drowned. When Caolinn was a baby.” She sipped again, spilling some water onto the table. “It’s been so very long, my dear, I’m sorry. I don’t—I don’t remember.”

  “It’s all right,” Kathleen said. “Thank you for telling us the story. I didn’t know anything about my family and that’s what we came here to find. So thank you.”

  Marie regarded Kathleen over the rim of her glass and her eyes welled over.

  “You look so like her,” she said. “So like them all. I’d have known you were theirs if I’d seen you anywhere in the world.”

  “Thank you,” Kathleen said again, gravely. The nephew, who had sat patiently through the entire recital, only looking curiously over at our table occasionally while he ate his meal and nursed a second beer, now wiped his mouth and rose. Kathleen leaned toward the old woman. “Can I tell you something before you go, Marie? I don’t know if you’ll believe me—I don’t know why you should believe me—but it’s true. I know it’s true.”

  Marie nodded.

  “God didn’t take your necklace from you,” Kathleen said. “It was the sea. That’s all it was. Like you said, the sea wanted all of her and she wanted to belong to the sea.”

  Christ, Kath, I thought, don’t scare the poor thing. She doesn’t know. But of course she did. She’d loved Caolinn, who had always wanted to walk barefoot in the surf and who had hidden a knife in the sand but then drowned herself. Marie wasn’t the one Kathleen was scaring. Marie pressed Kathleen’s hand as she rose and allowed her nephew to help her out of the bar. And Kathleen watched them go while I sat beside her with my hands clenched in my lap and my stomach hurting. I was the one who was scared. The sea wanted all of her and she wanted to belong to the sea. Was that it? Was that what we’d come to Ireland to learn?

  And what of the others who loved the Little Mermaid, the ones of whom the familiar tale has so little to say? She left behind the grandmother who had raised her, the father who had been her king, and seven older sisters, as powerless as spectators at a play. For many months they watched their sister walk with her two-legged lover on the beach at sunset. They saw how lightly she moved, how little she leaned upon him even when he drew her close, how stealthily she edged toward the water so that the sea could ease the pain in her feet.

  “We did not know,” they said to one another, “that she could be so brave. I could not. Could you?”

  “Not I.”

  “And you, sister?”

  “Not I, not for a man.”

  But for her, they began to tell themselves, to tell one another, for her perhaps they could be so brave.

  They waited until it was almost too late to come to us. We felt the supple parting of the water at our gates as it moved over the seven tails that hovered there, hesitating, then swimming away. Three times they came to us and turned away, never passing under even the high curving whale bones that mark the entrance to our gardens. Finally they entered, seven in a long, lovely line, their faces set and pale, shining with the force of their fear and their hope, like the little fish that live in perpetual darknes
s and so must make their own light.

  “What will happen to her when he weds another?” they asked, and we answered them as we had answered her.

  “Nothing. She will stay as she is, fish out of water, with her pain and her silence and her broken heart.”

  “And her children, should she have children?”

  It was the youngest who asked this, the youngest of all but for the Little Mermaid up Above. Her sisters turned their faces away, but she put out her chin and asked the question again.

  “She goes to his bed every night,” she said, “every day. She may already be with child.”

  “She is not.”

  “But even afterward, if he leaves her and she finds another lover or if she is taken . . .”

  “Then her child enters the world Above, breathing air, walking on two legs, whole and healthy or not, as chance may have it.”

  “And the child will not suffer?” the princess asked. “Not as our sister does?”

  A sidelong glance, a shifting, a flick of the fingers from one of us, though we spoke not at all, and the princess cried, “How could you cast a spell like this and not tell her? That it might go on and on, that any child she bears—up there—will suffer this agony, that she will have no choice herself but to die to end her pain!”

  “What she did not wish to know, we did not tell her.”

  The princess cursed us, weeping, her tears turning to black pearls as they slid off her cheeks. They landed softly in the sands of the chamber and we gathered them later: tears of rage, of hatred, powerful poisons when dissolved in fresh water.

  Then the sisters closed in around the youngest among them, touched their tails to hers, forgave her the horror of the questions she had asked.

  “Our littlest sister,” they said. “Save her. We will give you anything you ask.”