by Ann Claycomb
But I wouldn’t have kept her, he thought. I would have known better.
He’d drawn a long, curling tail in the margin of the pages. He made a move to strike through it, but instead flipped the pencil over and erased the image. I don’t have to believe any of it, he reminded himself. I just have to decide what to do. And really, what he was going to do was simple. He was not going to let his daughter die, whether that meant getting her psychiatric help or keeping her from giving in to despair because she couldn’t live underwater. Moira, though she’d tried, had never found joy in anything. Kathleen had—Kathleen did. She could laugh at things, even laugh at the ridiculousness of saying, out loud, “Actually, I’m a mermaid.” She had Harry, who knew everything and believed her, and she had him. She had friends, a career ahead of her, and her singing—no one could tell him that Kathleen didn’t find joy in her singing.
But is it enough?
“It can be,” he said aloud. “It has to be.”
A sound behind him of someone drawing in a startled breath. Robin turned and saw Harry in the doorway.
“Sorry!” she said. “I didn’t—I wasn’t trying to sneak up on you.”
She was in pajama bottoms and a T-shirt and she held a fat notebook against her chest. Robin thought of the night they’d had dinner in Boston, the fire in Harry’s face as she’d begged him to take Kathleen to Ireland. If she’d known Kathleen was a mermaid all along, she’d have loved her even more, he thought. She’s in the middle of one of her beloved stories now, half fairy tale, half operatic tragedy. Not kind of him, not at all, but he wasn’t feeling kind. He was tired and drained and he could tell from the way Harry was holding her notebook that she had something else to show him.
He put down his pencil and gestured her into the room. “Come, sit,” he said. “Do you want a drink?”
Harry shook her head. “I’m sorry to interrupt you,” she said. “But I want to show you something—it’s something I haven’t even shown Kathleen yet, something I’ve been working on to try to figure out”—she sank onto the sofa and balanced the book on her lap—“if there’s any way to use what we learned from the witches.”
“I don’t understand.”
“Well, it’s about the women, the ones who came before. I knew there had to be patterns and breaks in patterns so I wrote down everything we knew, everything I could remember from what the witches told us, and then I started trying to make dates match up, corroborate the details with the graveyard records and with internet research.”
She opened the book and leaned forward to show him, flipping pages as she talked. Robin saw the names flutter past again and again, sometimes in a single list and sometimes each with a page to herself: Deirdre, Caolinn, Ceara, Muirin . . . There were printouts folded and tucked into the pages: articles on Irish uprisings, Selkies, mermaid lore. But Harry flipped through quickly, all of this just evidence of the work she’d already done, he didn’t have to see it, certainly shouldn’t question it, the important thing was—here.
Halfway through the book Harry had constructed another timeline. But when Robin tried to read it—he needed to take the book from her to do so—she stopped him.
“Read this first.”
Another printout, a thick sheaf of pages, the top one a picture of a man dressed—and surely there was some irony here—rather like Nathaniel Hawthorne in the pictures Robin had seen of him, in black waistcoat and frock coat, high-collared white shirt and somber tie. But where Hawthorne was ruddy and handsome, this man was long-nosed and sunken-eyed. Robin turned to the next page and saw the title: “The Little Mermaid” and the first line: “Far out in the ocean, where the water is as blue as the prettiest cornflower, and as clear as crystal, it is very, very deep . . .”
“That’s Hans Christian Andersen,” Harry said, leaning in even more and tapping the picture. “I printed it out because of course she couldn’t love him—I mean, I’ve read a lot about him in the past couple of days and it all fits. He was terribly ugly and awkward, sexually repressed or confused or both. He was in love with Jenny Lind for years, just from hearing her sing. Imagine if he’d heard Kathleen!”
Robin was skimming the story. “Harry,” he said. “I don’t see what you’re getting at. Even if it is true, that Andersen met—what was her name?”
“Fand,” Harry said. “Well, according to the witches, first it was Maeve—that’s what the prince called her—but then after she left him she changed it. I looked up the origins for the name ‘Fand’ and the choice makes so much sense.” Her words tumbled over one another as she flipped through her notebook again. “Here it is. Fand was the ‘wife of Manannán Mac Lir, the king of the great sea.’ And she was both beautiful and powerful.”
“And you think this Fand—Kathleen’s ancestor—met Hans Christian Andersen and he wrote ‘The Little Mermaid’ about her.”
“Yes.” Harry nodded. “I could show you all the proof I found if you want. There are entries in Andersen’s journal about a woman whom biographers have never identified, and letters that were found in Andersen’s papers when he died that may have been from the same woman. But that’s not the point. The point is this!” She turned the notebook around, finally, so Robin could scan the timeline she’d sketched across two pages, this one neat and unmarked by cross-outs or notations, just the women’s names, birth and death dates—some with question marks by them—and the ages at which they died.
“What do you notice?” Harry asked. “Look at the ages. Do you see?”
He did see. “Fand was much older than any of the others when she died.”
Robin ran his finger down the pages and despite himself felt some of Harry’s desperate hope infecting him. That discrepancy couldn’t be just a coincidence. They had all died before they were twenty-five, all but Fand. Fand had been forty. Not exactly old, Robin thought, feeling a twinge of wry amusement at Harry’s—and his own—excitement that someone should have lived to be forty! And yet . . .
“I see it,” he said. “But I don’t see why. Harry, we know almost nothing about these women’s lives. We can do nothing but speculate about why Fand lived so long. Maybe—and I hope this is true—she was just strong, she found some joys in her life. Kathleen can do that, especially with our help.”
“Yes.” Harry nodded. “Yes, that’s true. I agree with you. But I have a theory about why Fand lived so long—” She drew in a deep breath, taking the plunge. “It means doing something for Kathleen, you doing something for her, but it’s nothing bad or weird and it can’t hurt anything. It can’t hurt to try it.”
Robin gave in to his amusement. “It’s like trying to say no to a puppy,” he said. He laughed when she flushed. “Go ahead. Tell me your ‘theory.’”
“I think it was the story that kept her alive,” Harry said. “If you consider the dates: she met Andersen when she was twenty-two—that’s the winter he spent in Naples, going to the opera. He must have met her there. Then he writes this story and publishes it when she’s twenty-three. It’s a huge success right away, makes him famous, is read all over, translated into other languages. Everyone loves it. Not only children read his fairy tales, adults did too, and loved them. They called him a genius. And it was her story, Fand’s story, that did it.”
“And you think,” Robin said, “that being a muse, of sorts, kept Fand going, kept her alive.”
“I do,” Harry said. “I think it’s the only explanation. Like I said, I can show you other things I found that support it—and then she would have finally killed herself when Victoria, that’s her daughter, was born.”
“When she realized she’d passed the curse on,” Robin said. He felt the sureness of this knowledge like swallowing a stone. He knew this truth in a way Harry could not. If Fand had not known—what if she hadn’t known that her daughter would suffer the curse?—and then the baby wailed when she had to learn to walk . . .
“Yes,” he said. “I can see why she might have killed herself then.”
“Anyway,”
Harry said impatiently, “the point now, for us, is that being a muse, like you said, kept Fand going. Well, Kath can do more than that. She can sing her own story. And you can write it for her.”
Robin opened his mouth to protest and couldn’t, remembering suddenly the note he’d made this morning for the next song for Kathleen: Women’s voices, perhaps discordant or atonal?
The sea witches, of course. And you’d stage them loosely encircling her, with some in the balcony seats as well, so that they wove their voices around her like a net she had to sing through. As for the other songs he’d written already, the songs that had emerged almost against his will, there were the three for Kathleen alone, in which she sang of pain and longing for the sea; there was the duet with the tenor who longed to possess her, the prince, of course; and the duet with the mezzo who loved and missed her, her sister mermaid.
“It doesn’t hold up to a full five-act treatment,” he said thoughtfully.
“What?”
“It might be just two acts.” Robin got his own notebook from the piano and jotted down the titles of the songs he already had. “I think we can figure out structure later, actually.”
“Wait.” Harry looked bemused. “Does this mean you think it’s a good idea?”
Robin stopped writing. “What you mean is ‘Is it going to help Kathleen?’” he said, “and that I don’t know. I understand why you think it might. She loves singing almost as much as she loves the sea—needs it almost as much. But whether singing an opera version of her story will literally save her life?” He shook his head. “I think that’s one thing I’ve heard tonight that I wish I did believe, Harry.”
“But you’re making notes already.”
“I’m making notes because I’ve already been writing songs for Kathleen,” Robin said, “and you’re right about us needing to do something to help her, something that—as you say—can’t hurt. We need to do it for ourselves, so that we know we are doing something, no matter what we believe.”
“You’ve been writing songs for her?” Harry asked. She cocked her head to one side. “Can I see one?”
She was suddenly a singer and not a desperate lover. Then Robin thought of something else and burst out laughing in earnest.
“You don’t know what you’ve gotten yourself into, Harry,” he said. “Because I’m a terrible librettist. So if I’m going to do this—if we’re going to do this—that’s your job.” He took the pages of “The Little Mermaid” that he had set aside on the piano bench and handed them back to her.
“There,” he said. “Work from that. If it’s any help, with The Scarlet Letter I started by just highlighting the lines in the original text that I wanted to keep.”
KATHLEEN
Aria for Soprano with Tenor Intrusion
I suppose time just flies when you’re writing an opera. You’re inspired, you’re excited, you’re doing something creative and productive and working with this wonderful, talented collaborator . . . you stay up far too late working on it, you mutter to yourself about “balancing lyricism with clarity” or “letting the dissonance prevail in this passage,” you pick up conversations from the day before exactly where you left off and expect everyone else around you to understand what the hell you’re talking about. You ignore your girlfriend. Or your daughter.
In Robin’s case, as I point out to Tae, he’s been doing both. But Tae’s no help. She shakes her head, says he’s always like this when he’s composing and he’s always composing. Because, you know, he’s a composer, Kathleen. This is his job. And she gives me a look that makes me wonder what things would have been like if she’d started dating my father when I was still a teenager. As in, how much of my shit would this woman have put up with?
Not a lot, is my guess. And now poor Tae is basically my keeper for the summer. She works, of course, but she keeps semi-regular hours, unlike Harry and Robin, who are now holed up in the studio for long stretches of the day writing. They check in on me, eat meals with me. (Well, they eat and I push things around, different piles every meal. Sometimes I color code, sometimes I do it by texture.) But they’re far too absorbed to pay me much attention. They don’t even notice the food pushing. Tae is the one who takes hold of my wrist one morning, circles it easily with her slim strong fingers. She catches me as I put my cereal bowl in the sink and we stand there a minute. I have the urge to fight her, but I don’t. Her hand is wet.
“If you don’t start eating soon,” she says, “you’ll have to go to the hospital.”
I shrug. See, I can be a sulky five-year-old in every way!
“Your father wanted to say something to you,” Tae goes on. “And Harry’s been fretting for days. She thinks if she says something it’ll only make things worse.”
This is probably true. I don’t say anything. “I don’t care if you don’t want to be in that studio with them, Kathleen,” Tae says, “but”—this is said very gently—“you’re not going to starve yourself in my house.”
“I could leave,” I say. “That would solve the problem for everyone.”
Harry would flare up here and I’d get a good fight; Robin would get very rigid and sarcastic and push me further. Tae doesn’t let go of my wrist, though she’s holding it so loosely her clasp is like a bangle bracelet I could easily shrug off.
“You could,” she says, “but I wish you wouldn’t. I’d miss your cheerful company.”
I laugh, which hurts because I’ve been holding myself so stiff for so long, stomach muscles in and diaphragm contracted, throat tight against the horrible things I want to say, fists clenched around the terrible things I want to do.
It is June. I’ve been a mermaid for a month, give or take a few days. Of course that’s not right—I’ve been a mermaid my whole life. But before I knew what I was, I only felt sick and strange and frightened a lot of the time. The rest of the time I was singing or in love with Harry or buying a pretty dress or saying outrageous things to make people laugh. Now I’m a mermaid and everything is wrong all the time. Food tastes funny, feels funny in my mouth; wine makes my head hurt and my stomach roil; clothes feel more abrasive than ever, every tag or rough seam dragging like teeth across my skin. The sun is too hot and too bright, the ground too hard and dry, and people, even the people I love, look as clumsy as clay figures if I stare at them too long.
Harry has this idea that “Art” with a capital A can save me. She thinks that my singing is at least as important to me as the water is and that if I can sing my story—or some version of a part of the first mermaid’s story—I’ll feel better. Live longer.
SHE TOLD ME this the day after we got here, while I was still waking up from a dream—one of my new recurring dreams of swimming underwater in which my movement through the water makes sense, in which I can almost catch a glimpse, when I turn my head, of something fanning out behind me. I kept my eyes shut while she talked; I was still trying to reconcile the physical sensations of my body in the dream with my body lying in the bed. I suppose I was not what anyone would call receptive to Harry’s proposal.
“Your father’s already written all these songs for you,” she said. “I think that’s what actually sold him on the idea, that he already had songs written, and they’re beautiful.”
“You’ve heard them?”
“Not all of them,” she said. “Just a snippet, late last night. But it’s beautiful. It’s—I can’t explain it. You need to hear it, Kath. And if we all work together—I’m going to work on the libretto and Robin just needs to find a musical through line for the pieces he’s already done—”
“So what do you need me for?”
“To sing, silly. To listen to it and offer suggestions. Kathleen, come on, get up.”
“No,” I said. I pulled the pillow over my head. “Wake me up when the opera’s done.”
SO I HAVE only myself to blame for being ignored now. I said I didn’t want any part of the opera. Well, I don’t. It’s stupid. And it’s not just that it’s a stupid idea that makes no se
nse. It’s also so transparent, on both their parts, that I feel this kind of molten rage whenever I see them working on it. I’m supposed to forgive them already, before they’ve failed, for trying to help, for putting their love and their talents into this desperate gesture. My father has postponed his commission for The Scarlet Letter to work on this instead, which is this great professional and personal sacrifice. Except it’s not. When he told his big donor about this new project, he apparently also played him some music from it, stuff he’d already written, and the guy liked it so much he’s underwriting this opera too. And Harry pulled out of her contract with Central City, which was supposed to take up most of her summer, then flew back up to Boston and met with her advisor, who got excited too, so now writing and directing this opera is going to be part of her senior performance thesis. She gets to write and do research, which she certainly loves at least as much as she loves singing, and they both—she and my father—are just doing it because they love me so much and they want to save me. Screw them. They can’t save me from this.
Some things I try, to save myself or not.
I TRY TO conquer the knife.
I do not take it out of the box, but I do everything else I can think to do. Just counting the layered striations on the box takes forever. I count them and lose count and start again. I open and shut the lid. I touch the handle with my fingertip, tilt the box up so I can see the angle and sharpness of the blade, the almost invisible serrations running down its inside edge. I imagine holding it, lifting it, plunging it—I put it away. I walk around the house, shaking all over, my feet throbbing.