The Mermaid's Daughter

by Ann Claycomb

  “SO,” TOM SAYS, “Harry tells me not, on pain of death or dismemberment, to ask about your trip to Ireland. But how was the rest of your summer?”

  We are having dinner at a tiny French restaurant so layered in toile—curtains, tablecloths, overlays on top of tablecloths, napkins on top of overlays—that I feel irresistible giggles rising, the kind of delicious silliness I haven’t felt capable of in months. I lean over the table and whisper conspiratorially, so that Tom has to lean in to hear me.

  “I’ll tell you about my summer if you answer one really important question for me,” I say.

  “What?”

  “Is the food here toile too?”

  The waiter chooses that moment to slip the bread basket onto the table, covered in a toile napkin of course. We hold out until he’s gone and then cackle with laughter.

  “You’re terrible,” Tom says finally, taking a drink of his water. “God, I missed you this summer. There were some talented singers, great connections and all that, but they were all so deadly dull.”

  “All of them?” I ask, arching a brow at him. “How was the bass-baritone contingent?”

  Tom does his best impression of blasé. The deeper the man’s voice, the harder Tom falls for him, with a hairy barrel chest a highly desirable secondary allure.

  “Well, we were in rep with Boris Gudenov,” he says, “but Boris was ancient, of course.”

  “And this stopped you?”

  Tom considers this. “I never said that.” And then, as I dissolve into giggles again, “Shall we get a bottle or go by the glass?”

  I shake my head regretfully. “I’m off wine, I’m afraid.”

  “Harry’s orders?” Tom asks.

  “No! It just—it’s not agreeing with me lately.”

  “Neither is food, apparently,” he says. “You are planning to eat, I hope? After all that about how I had to buy tonight, I’d feel stupid if I ended up only paying for one meal.”

  “I’m planning to eat,” I say. “It’s just—it was a long summer.”

  “You’re killing me,” Tom says. “Honest to God, Kathleen, between Harry using her ‘this is serious, Tom’ voice and you looking, frankly, like shit—beautiful as ever, don’t get me wrong, but still like shit—I’m dying to know what the hell is going on.” He picks up his glass of water, puts it down without drinking anything. “Don’t look at me like that,” he says, and suddenly, alarmingly, he is serious, his eyes softening under the silky blond bangs that fall so artfully over his forehead.

  “You don’t have to tell me,” he says. “Make something up. Harry’s having an identity crisis, wants to grow her hair out and start singing Wagner in a breastplate and horned helmet. Something like that.”

  Even as I laugh, choking on a bite of bread, my throat tightens on the awareness that Tom loves me, that I love him, that he’ll be another casualty of this story before it’s over, one way or another. How much do I want him to know?

  “Harry hasn’t gone over to Wagner,” I say. “She’s writing a libretto with my father, did she tell you that?”

  Tom nods, cautiously intrigued again. “She wants me to sing the male lead, which I have absolutely no time for this year, not if I’m going to graduate in May, but I said I’d come by later this week and run through a few of the arias with them.”

  “You’ll be singing the prince, then. You’ll be very good.”

  “Kath, I’m not doing it, I told you, there’s no way in hell I can take on a lead role in a student production on top of everything else. Harry just needs to hear the part sung to get a sense of how it’s working, that’s all.” He cocks his head. “Are you singing in it?”

  The waiter comes to take our order, so I’m saved for a moment. I ask for sea scallops and another glass of water. When I turn back to Tom, he’s still waiting for me to answer.

  “I don’t know,” I say. “I—They haven’t asked me to yet. It’s complicated. I-I think I’m going to have to but—”

  “You’re going to have to? Why? Because it’s Harry’s project? Or your father’s?”

  “No, silly. Because they’re writing it for me.”

  Tom contemplates me a long moment. “So you’re the Little Mermaid,” he says, so matter-of-factly that I start visibly, feel the pulse beating in my throat. But of course, he didn’t mean it like that.

  “Harry told me what the story was,” he says, “how they’re retelling ‘The Little Mermaid.’ What’s the catch at the end, that the mermaid can either kill the prince and be a mermaid again or let him live and then she dies?”

  “Something like that.”

  “Only Harry’s changed the story—très, très operatic, from the sound of it. I mean, here the mermaid is like Medea or Salome or—who’s the one whose husband sacrifices their daughter to get good winds for sailing?”

  “Clytemnestra.”

  “Right. Lots of righteous, vengeful female power here.”

  I put my napkin in my lap, unfolding it carefully. She changed the story. Of course she did. But it had never occurred to me. “How did she—how is the story different, do you know?”

  Tom shakes his head at me. “You don’t know any of this already, seriously?”

  “Long summer, remember?”

  “Well, in Harry’s version—Harry and Robin’s version, I guess—the mermaid does kill the prince, lets his blood run all over her legs, sings this triumphant aria about returning to the sea, changes back into a mermaid and dives out the window, or maybe vice versa.” Tom makes a flipping motion with his hand, like a fish leaping up out of the water and then back in. “You know, maybe she dives out the window first then turns back into a mermaid. I don’t remember. But that’s how it ends. Poor prince—me, if I wanted it to be—dead on his wedding night and the mermaid back where she belongs.”

  I keep my hands in my lap so he won’t see them shaking. “So is that a happy ending or a tragic one?”

  He considers this. “Happier than the original, certainly. Much more surprising. And more satisfying too, don’t you think? I mean, I kind of like the idea of the girl who’s sacrificed everything for love finally taking it back, don’t you?”

  “You would,” I say, more snidely than I intend, but that’s because I’m deflecting madly here. I’m shaking everywhere, fine tremors running even along the soles of my feet. She’s changed the ending. So if I sing this role, I sing a different ending. I sing the ending that would circumvent the curse.

  “Kathleen?” Tom waves a hand before my face. “Earth to Kathleen? First you get snarky and then you go all vacant on me.”

  “Sorry,” I say. I focus on him again, his fine-boned face as familiar as Harry’s, his voice as lithe and glimmering as he is, whether he’s singing or tossing off sarcastic gibes. He won’t believe it, I know, but he won’t think I’m crazy either. He’ll cast what I tell him into a kind of net of the impossible, along with his own dreams of finding a man he desires who will love him back, nailing an audition at the Met, seeing his parents on their feet in the audience some night, clapping until their hands ache.

  The waiter sets down our plates, cautions Tom that the edge of his is still hot.

  “He’ll have a glass of wine,” I say. And when Tom raises an eyebrow, I nod, toss my hair back from my shoulders.

  “You’re going to need it,” I say as the waiter walks away. “And then maybe another one, after I tell you the whole story.”

  “Do we have to wait until the wine is actually in my hand before you start?”

  “Not unless you want to.”

  We smile at each other. Tom carves petals from a butter rosette and spreads them on his bread. I watch him. I don’t know how to begin.

  “Talk, Kathleen,” he says, “or so help me I’ll stab you with my butter knife.” He does an abbreviated fencing thrust across the table.

  “So,” I say, “I’m a mermaid.”

  Tom looks at me, down at his butter knife. He chews, swallows.

  “A mermaid,” he
says. “As in, fish tail, breathes water, sings sailors to their deaths?”

  “I don’t know about the last part.”

  “But the rest.”

  “Yes.”

  “And you know this how?”

  “Well,” I say, suddenly feeling bubbles of laughter rising again, a hilarity to the telling of the story. “A seal told me,” I say, “but I didn’t fully believe him. It was the sea witches who convinced me, and Harry.”

  “The sea witches.” Tom puts his knife down, just so, on the edge of his bread plate. “On second thought,” he says, “let me wait for my wine, okay?”

  SO I TELL him everything. He takes it all in so calmly that assuring him at the end—as I had planned to do—that he doesn’t have to believe me seems unnecessary. His only odd comment, as we are waiting for the waiter to bring Tom’s credit card back, is about the way that Harry and Robin have changed the ending of Fand’s story.

  “So in the opera they’re writing, you—if you agree to do it—would be playing the original mermaid, right? Only onstage you do it, you kill the prince.”

  A lurch in my stomach at the thought, like opening-night nerves.

  “You know more than I do about the plot,” I remind him.

  “But what exactly is supposed to happen if it works? Will you suddenly not be in pain anymore?”

  I shake my head. “I don’t know.” I’ve never thought beyond the curse.

  “I wonder,” Tom says, “what Harry and Robin are hoping for.”

  I DO NOT ask Harry what she’s hoping for. I do not ask Robin, either, when he comes up a few weeks into September. It’s enough that I’m being stitched back into the world every day, waking up in our apartment, hearing the obnoxious morning radio show that’s the only thing that wakes me up, smelling the Turkish coffee that our upstairs neighbor brews, so strong it smells more like licorice than coffee. As I walk to class, people I know wave me down, tell me excitedly about their summer at Glimmerglass while I shift from one foot to the other and listen as hard as I can to block out the pain.

  I fall on my classes like I’ve been starving for music, which I have. I did less singing this summer than I think I’ve ever done in my life. For a moment at the start of each private lesson, I’m afraid I will open my mouth and nothing will come out, my voice severed by my new knowledge like Fand’s tongue by the witches’ blade. It never happens, but the fear never abates either.

  Tomorrow is Halloween. Robin is coming in again today and staying for a couple of weeks. Carianne is having a Halloween party, only scary costumes allowed. I have been threatening to go as Bella Menotti, my voice professor, who is glaring at me right now over the glasses that she deeply resents needing. She’s compensated for their diminishing effect on her persona by dying her hair jet-black and wearing it swept up in red jeweled combs on either side of her face. She looks like a drag queen doing Maria Callas doing Carmen, which makes me giggle.

  “Yes? Kathleen? This song is funny?”

  God, I hate her. I shouldn’t; she’s an amazing teacher. But she’s definitely of the tough-love school of coaching. I don’t know that I’ve ever heard her say anything purely complimentary to me. Harry thinks all voice teachers must hate their students, because if they’re training us then it means their own career is over or fading. And Bella had a brilliant career, cut short by nodules that wouldn’t go away. But the things she snarls at me for are so particular to me that it’s hard to imagine that she says them out of envy. Bella says my voice is too clear, too fluid, unmarred by roughness or a tremor or audible break. And apparently this makes me unfit for the great tragic roles, because it’s those breaks in the voice that the audience is really listening for, the moments when the singer stumbles that make her real and lovable to them.

  Ha. If only actual stumbling counted. Right now my feet burn so much I’m curling them up and trying to stand just on the sides of them.

  “Stand up straight!” Bella snaps. “Weight evenly on both feet, for God’s sake. You’d think no one had ever taught you anything. Now, milady”—she sweeps me a deep, ironic bow, red silk scarf trailing to the floor, from her seat at the piano—“whenever you’re ready.”

  So I sing a Handel aria that’s part of my repertoire and as I sing I sink back into myself. I feel the song in my belly and in my throat, in my ears and behind my eyes—and then Bella is smacking the top of the piano to get my attention.

  “Your voice has changed.” I didn’t think it was possible for her to glare at me any more fiercely. “Sing ‘the balmy ease of sleep’ again.”

  I do.

  “Again.”

  I know what she’s going to say before she says it, because by the third time I sing the line, I can hear the difference. It’s a delicate song, meant to be delivered with silvery clarity, which I have, and tremendous vocal control, which I have also always had. But now I sound like I’m reining it in. It has the effect of making the song sound not merely gentle but faded, as if the listener’s awareness of how much more my voice could be doing ruins the experience of what it is doing.

  Bella is frowning. “Your voice has opened up, gotten too big for anything so small as this. Can you feel it?”

  I nod.

  “I can feel your voice in the back of my head, in my neck muscles, when you are singing,” she says. “That’s how the listener can hear you holding back. It comes out, no matter how you try to hide it.”

  “Do you want me to try it again?”

  “No.” She shakes her head, still frowning, riffles through the music on the stand in front of her. Secretly, she is pleased by this development, because it means I need her more.

  “Try something else,” she says. “Do the one I’m not supposed to know about, the one you’ve been working on for a year now.”

  “‘Suicidio!’? You said—”

  “I know what I said.” Bella waves a dismissive hand, erasing the past. “Find your music.”

  I find it, slightly crumpled from having spent months shoved into the back of my portfolio. I scan the pages as I spread them out in front of me—Piombo esausta fra le tenèbre!—and recall the cave where the witches met us, the darkness into which they spoke to us at first, then the lights coming up everywhere and nowhere, lights that illuminated nothing.

  “Well?” Bella is a study in impatience. I shift my stance—Weight evenly on both feet, for God’s sake!—and nod for her to play the opening bars. La Gioconda doesn’t have to want to kill herself, I realize suddenly. She can simply be contemplating it as a reasonable option, or an inevitable end. No one’s liked to hear me sing this aria because it’s always so bitter, so harsh. But if I sing the longing in it—the longing for darkness, the longing for release—even the word itself, suicidio, is a beautiful word if sung correctly, open-throated and with a caress of the soft c in the middle—if I sing it like that, like this . . .

  Yes. And the long i sound of the third syllable—most sopranos reach up for it, deliberately let us hear them reaching, to strike it desperately, strenuously, like ringing a bell. I drop down onto it from the c and let it unfurl like a wave cresting out of deep water. I do the same thing when I come to the mournful words lower in my register—Fra le tenèbre! Tocca alla mèta.—casting the consonant sounds out lightly, the way I laid my offerings on the surface of the water in the cave, and letting the vowel sounds carry them away.

  It is not the aria I remember. It is something else now. It is mine.

  WHEN I FINISH and dare to peek at Bella, her eye makeup is running. I don’t know what to do. We are both saved by the sound of someone clapping vigorously from the doorway. I spin around and see Tom.

  “Bravo,” he says gravely. “Bravo.”

  “Tom,” Bella says. She takes off her glasses and dabs her eyes. “You are interrupting a lesson, as you know perfectly well. What do you want?”

  “I need Kathleen,” he says. He could be all of about twelve talking to Bella, with his charm tamped down and his body language that of a suppli
cant. He’s practically bowing and scraping for God’s sake. “She’s late for an audition.”

  “An audition? For what?”

  I start to say I have no idea but Tom cuts his eyes at me and I close my mouth.

  “Student production,” he says, “and I wouldn’t pull her out of a lesson, but if she doesn’t come now the whole schedule’s thrown off and there are already thirty people sitting in the hallway, Professor Menotti. You know how these things go.”

  Bella sighs. “At least she’s warmed up.” I think she is relieved to see me go today.

  I gather up my music. I’m stupid, but not totally. My father got in today. I’m having dinner with him tonight. But I didn’t ask beyond that, so he could have been here all day, auditioning singers right down the hall from my practice room, and I wouldn’t have known it.

  “I didn’t even know they were finished with the opera.”

  “They’re not,” Tom says, practically dragging me down the hall. “But after what I just heard in there, I don’t feel even a little bit bad about stretching the truth. Since when is ‘Suicidio!’ so fucking beautiful, Kathleen? It’s supposed to sound torn and despairing, or haven’t you ever translated the lyrics? And did you notice you made Bella cry?”

  “I hardly had time to notice,” I snap back, “though I did notice you were clapping.”

  He stops abruptly and turns to face me. We’re of a height, since I always wear flat shoes, and I have the urge to brush his hair out of his eyes so I can see his expression more clearly.

  “I told you,” he says, “it was fucking beautiful. Let’s talk about something more important. Haven’t you noticed I’ve been avoiding you?”

  “You have?” Of course he has. I haven’t seen him or talked to him for more than a few minutes since we had dinner together back in September, since I told him the whole story.

  Tom stares at me in bemused frustration. “I can’t tell if that means I was doing a good or bad job of it,” he says, “if you didn’t even notice.”

  “Why were you avoiding me? Or are you still avoiding me?”

  “No,” he says, “and I should think you would have guessed by now.”