by Ann Claycomb
Tae nodded her head toward her bag.
“Is that—are you comfortable with that? It cut you.”
“I’ve no intention of even opening the case.”
“We could leave it in our room, even see if our building has a safe for guests to use. Don’t hotels and condos have that sort of thing sometimes?”
“I’m not sure that’s good enough for Harry,” Tae said. “I’m fine keeping it here.” She smiled. “We can call this my contribution to the opera.”
Robin opened his mouth, then shut it again as the lights went down for the second act. He couldn’t even picture the knife clearly, could only recall the shape and luster of the case and the shock he’d felt both times he’d opened it and identified its contents. First in Moira’s drawer, tucked behind her nightgowns, when he’d drawn it out and pressed the catch—not meaning to pry, just curious, nothing more—and recoiled from the knife inside. Then so many years later, when he had opened it again, willing it not to be what he knew it was. It had sat on a table in his studio the rest of the visit, while he and Harry plunged into the work on the opera. When they left, it hadn’t even occurred to him to check that the knife was still there, because why wouldn’t it be? Why would they want it with them in Boston? It was safer with him and Tae.
He remembered looking over one day, registering that the case wasn’t there and thinking—what?—nothing. Willfully, nothing. Feeling relief at its absence but deliberately not wondering where it could be. Robin thought of Kathleen unpacking, which for her involved throwing clothes from the suitcase haphazardly into drawers and closets, and uncovering the case. He shook his head sharply to dislodge the image. He had told Harry and Kathleen he believed them, not least because they’d had the knife as proof. But recognizing the knife wasn’t the same as believing in the knife. Even now, he felt a twisting unease knowing it was in Tae’s shoulder bag and couldn’t explain why. Was it the knowledge that the knife had been meant—made, even—to kill him, or to kill Moira’s poor father? That it was meant to kill Harry now? He believed that much. Yet the idea that the knife might have a say in its wielding, might will itself into action, tempt or taunt the woman it belonged to by refusing to be discarded or destroyed—did he believe that? Did he need to?
The knife appeared in the very first scene of Act 2—or rather, a stage prop version of it appeared, given to the mermaid’s sisters by the sea witches in exchange for their hair. The sisters took a proffered shell reverently, passed it from one to the next, then the oldest sister lifted the knife out and held it up so the audience could see it. It was much larger than the real knife, and far showier too, nearly a foot long and gleaming silver when the spotlight hit it. The sisters passed the knife back and forth, singing of its power. “So light a thing to bring our sister back to us, but its blade is sharp”—and here one sister holding it made a show of cutting herself on the blade and cradling her hand—“sharp as the betrayal of a feckless man.”
When the mermaid’s sisters passed the knife to her, she refused to open the case and at first attempted to give it back to them, pushing the shell away while her sisters juggled it between them, mimicking the bobbing movement of an object on the surface of the sea. The oldest sister finally caught it and thrust it into the mermaid’s lap, scolding her fiercely. “You say you love this man! He does not love you. You are a pet, a plaything, a pretty bauble to be tossed away.” The mermaid, frozen, clutched the knife case to her chest and shrank from her sister as the bitter aria cut off abruptly. Then the orchestra resumed, softly, as the sisters reminded the mermaid of the world she had left behind, its warm currents and deep-sea gardens, their father’s castle and the schools of bright fish that swept through the windows in the morning. The scene ended with them sinking back into the water—Robin noted admiringly that this was conveyed entirely by rising blue and green light on the backdrop—and the mermaid reaching out a desperate hand to them, before sinking back on her heels and slowly picking up the knife.
Robin leaned forward to watch Kathleen during the scene change. She rose easily to her feet and handed the knife and the shell it rested on off to a waiting tech. The fake knife, at least, seemed to hold no talismanic power over her.
“She looks fine,” he murmured.
“She does,” Tae agreed.
Robin reached for her hand. “Thank you for taking it,” he said. He jerked his head toward the bag at her feet.
“You’re welcome,” she said gravely.
“It doesn’t bother you?”
“No.” Tae shook her head. “No. You said it yourself. I’ve touched it, I know how sharp it is. I’m just keeping it safe, and away.”
“But you don’t really think—”
“I think it’s a distraction they don’t need on opening night,” Tae said. “Beyond that?” She shrugged and a ripple of discomfort crossed her face, like the passing reaction to an unpleasant odor or a grating sound. “Beyond that I don’t know what to think.”
ON OPENING NIGHT they went to dinner with Allan Charpentier and Jim and Lorraine Dolan. Jim was in high spirits and inclined to tweak Robin about the press he’d been reading.
“You’ll have our Scarlet Letter sold out too!” he crowed. “I don’t think there was a single interview where it wasn’t mentioned—but you’ve got to finish it now, Robin!” He waved a breadstick across the table. “No more side projects until that one’s done.”
“No indeed,” Lorraine put in, laughing. “You certainly weren’t excited about the Tam Lin idea the Globe article mentioned, were you, Jim?”
Jim laughed. “I think I jumped and spilled coffee across the table,” he said. “That’s why Lorraine remembers. Of course I think Tam Lin’s an exceptional idea too—but for the next one, please, not instead of the one that’s half in the bag!”
Robin smiled. “I think Tam Lin was Harry’s idea for a next project, not mine.”
Tae sighed. “He doesn’t read any of his own press, won’t even let me read it to him.”
Robin looked around the table. “What?”
“The Globe article, Rob,” Tae said. “It does quote Harry as saying that Tam Lin might be a good idea for a short opera, but then it describes the two of you exchanging a—what was the phrase?”
“A conspiratorial glance,” Allan joined in, “with the clear implication that the two of you are already thinking about how to write it together.”
“We made a good team,” Robin said mildly. “And Harry loves The Scarlet Letter—the book, I mean, she hasn’t heard any of the opera. But she’s got a real gift with a libretto. I might ask her to do some work on that one too.” He hadn’t thought of it before, for the obvious reason that they’d both been too consumed with The Little Mermaid, but it was a very good idea, actually. Harry might well know what to do with some of the passages and sections where Robin had found Hawthorne’s text difficult to work with.
“Aha,” Jim chuckled. “I bet that’s the very expression you got on your face during the Globe interview, Robin. Like you just left us all sitting here at the table and went back to your piano and picked up a pen.”
Robin grinned and didn’t argue, not even to say that he used pencil to compose, not pen.
WHEN THEY ARRIVED at the theater, Robin left the others to find their way to their seats and went backstage. Kathleen flung open the door at his knock and he jerked back at the sight of her before he realized that it was only the stage makeup being used to make her a mermaid. Her eyes were thickly elongated with dark blue on both top and bottom and lined on the insides of the lash lines in silver. They looked like a swan’s eyes, or a snake’s. Something had been done to the planes of her face too, bringing out long curving hollows along Kathleen’s cheeks and up the sides of her neck.
“Creepy, huh?” Kathleen said, grabbing his wrist and tugging him into the room. “Harry and I talked about it with Shan, the makeup artist, when we first got started. The whole thing is that the mermaid, when she’s a mermaid, maybe doesn’t even need t
o conform to our ideal of beauty. I mean, why would she? It’s a whole different world underwater. So we came up with this—Shan said it works really well on the shape of my face, actually, and then there’s a super-quick wipe-off and reapplication between scenes.”
“Before the prince finds you on the beach?” Robin asked. The weird angles and shadows did seem to fit her. On someone with a fuller face, rounder eyes, a shorter neck, the makeup would have been clownish.
“Exactly,” Kathleen said. She turned back to the mirror and sprayed her hair, pinned back with a thicket of bobby pins and then curled and rippling halfway down her back. “Harry was even more control-freaky about this makeup than she was about everything else,” she said. “I think she wanted me to look like I did in the cave where we talked to the witches. We had a flashlight, remember, that fell in the water? And there was this light that came up at one point, when Harry complained about not being able to see, but it was sort of bluish and hitting us from below. Not, I gather, very flattering.”
She grinned at her reflection in the mirror, which was disconcerting. Her teeth gleamed white even against the matte pallor of her skin, and the exaggerated tilt of her eyes and brows made her smile feral.
There was a terrific pounding on the door and the shout, “Five minutes! Five minutes to curtain, people.” The voice didn’t pause for acknowledgment, but continued down the hallway.
“Abby?” Robin asked.
“Of course,” Kathleen said. “It’s her show now. We’re all just here to do her bidding.”
Robin realized that he had to leave and that he hadn’t reassured her, asked her how she was, wished her luck. It was hard to imagine this creature needing luck, though, or reassurance. He watched her slip into her green satin flats—her costume was nothing so obvious as a mermaid tail, thank God, but a flowing dress that was pale, pale green, almost silver, at her shoulders and then gradually darkened all the way to the floor, where it puddled around her feet in a color as much black as green.
“Are you warmed up?”
“Daddy,” Kathleen said, “go sit down. Watch the opera. I love you.”
“I love you too,” he said. He put out a hand and touched her hair lightly, feeling the hairspray crackling under his fingers.
“Don’t mess it up!” She flashed, but she stood still facing him. Head-on her eyes, at least, became her own again.
“You look—extraordinary,” he said. “And you’ll be extraordinary. You know that.”
She rushed him and hugged him swiftly, then stepped back before he could close his arms about her. He could smell the mingled scents of hairspray and stage makeup on her and something else, something almost unpleasant.
“Go on,” she said. “Go. It’s time.”
Robin was halfway down the hall before he identified the odd smell—the smell of the sea, of deep salt water, with a tang in it of vegetative rot almost, but not quite, like mulch. It’s because the plants are different down below, he thought. They grow without sunlight so of course they smell different. He kept walking, out the backstage door and around to the lobby, then down the aisle to his seat. The house lights were flashing and went down for good just as he sat down. Robin shut his eyes briefly as the overture began. A part of his brain saw him spin around and run back to Kathleen’s dressing room, grab hold of her and tell her not to go onstage, to stop, to wipe the makeup off and come back to herself, to send the sea away, not call it to her as she must have done.
Too late now. He opened his eyes as lights went up on the bottom of the ocean, green and blue and purple, and the mermaids appeared, all long white arms and sinuous movement. Robin drew in a deep breath. The sea was re-created in front of him, but the smell of it was gone.
IT WAS THE Little Mermaid’s sixteenth birthday, the occasion for her first trip to the surface of the water. In the Andersen story, the finery for this occasion included live oysters that gripped her tail, but onstage, the Little Mermaid’s sisters clipped shells into her hair and twined ropes of pearls around her arms from wrist to elbow. When they were done, they stepped away, giggling with the excitement of the celebratory ritual, while the Little Mermaid lifted her arms, shook her head to feel the shells clatter.
“So heavy,” she sang. “It hurts a bit. I feel like I’m wearing chains.”
“That’s the price of beauty, love,” her sisters sang back. “You want to catch the eye of a lover someday; you’ll need to bear a little pain.”
“Love won’t hurt me,” the Little Mermaid retorted. “Love isn’t chains. Love is like rising through the sea and breaking the surface for the very first time, feeling the air on your face, a caress you dreamed of but could never have imagined.”
As she sang these lines, all the sisters lifted their arms over their heads and the lights changed color slowly, growing paler and paler until the mermaids all burst into open air and the approximation of sunlight. Kathleen’s coloring was so startling in this moment that she hardly needed the spotlight on her. She spun around and around, eagerly taking in all the sights she’d never seen before while her sisters watched indulgently, until she caught sight of the prince on the deck of his ship. Tom was spot-lit too, and dressed like a Byronic hero in a white linen shirt, black pants, and a black velvet vest. His stark clothes cast the richness of his coloring into such relief that he really did appear to be a different species than the creatures who had appeared on stage so far. His hair was a warm gold unimaginable underwater, his skin tanned, his cheeks ruddy. When she saw him, the Little Mermaid broke off in a delighted catalog of new sights—“Oh, the sky! The sky! And those things in it that look so soft, like puffs of spilled wine, are those clouds?”—and then fell silent. She seemed even to fade a bit, to grow muted herself until the prince was the only bright spot on stage and the audience saw him through the mermaid’s eyes.
The sparse, light-dependent staging ensured that there were no fake rocks for the mermaid to recline on while she sang her first lovesick aria, chasing the prince’s ship through the water until it finally outpaced her. Instead she stayed where she was while the light flowed over and past her, suggesting her movement through the water. When the first staccato section of the aria was done, Robin heard Jim draw in his breath sharply. He resisted the urge to lean over and murmur, “That was nothing. Just wait.” Kathleen’s voice descended, her phrasing languorous as she sang of her deep-sea garden. Then she began the impossible climb, higher and higher, up and out, her hands in the folds of her skirts at first and then rising as she sang of climbing, surfacing, soaring. The aria ended with her arms flung out like wings and the final note shimmering, almost visible, in the air above her.
There was a moment of complete silence in the theater as the conductor held the musicians off for the applause that would otherwise drown out the segue into the shipwreck scene and the audience seemed to be holding a collective breath. Robin wondered if Jim had breathed at all for the whole second part of the aria. The conductor hesitated—perhaps there wasn’t going to be any applause after all?—and lifted his baton, and the audience erupted. Onstage, the mermaid lowered her arms and her head in one graceful gesture of submersion that encompassed the sketch of a bow, then lightning crackled, thunder answered, and a storm arose to destroy the prince’s ship.
WHEN THE LIGHTS came up for intermission, Robin and Tae stood up and stepped into the aisle to let the others out. Jim had his cell phone in his hand and was thumbing the screen to life as he walked. He stopped in front of Robin.
“Thank you,” he said.
Robin didn’t pretend to misunderstand. Jim’s expression was one of almost agonized excitement and Lorraine was mopping at her eyes. Allan had remained in his seat, his head down. He looked as if he was praying.
“Thank you,” Robin said. “You’re a part of this too, Jim, both of you. How many underwriters would have balked when the composer called and basically asked for a leave of absence from a commission, plus by the way more money to underwrite the thing that’s taking him a
way from that commission?”
“I’ll gladly take credit for being a part of this,” Jim said. “And I’ll even take credit for believing in you, Robin, before tonight. But Kathleen—” He shook his head as if to clear it. “Listen, I’m going out into the lobby,” he said. “I need some champagne—I think Allan may need something stronger—and I’d like to get in touch with a few people in case they hadn’t planned to come up for the opera. Are there still tickets left?”
“I think so,” Robin said.
“Not for long,” Jim said. “Come meet us out in the lobby and we’ll have a toast to that.”
“We’ll be along,” Robin said.
Tae touched his hand as Jim and Lorraine wended their way up the aisle. “She seemed fine,” she said. “By which I mean that she sounded astonishing and looked beautiful.”
“She was having trouble walking,” Robin said. “Did you notice? When she first had to get up after the prince found her on the beach she almost collapsed.”
“Was that Kathleen or the mermaid, though?” Tae asked.
“I don’t know.”
“They’d let us know if anything was wrong,” Tae said. “Harry would send someone out to get you.”
“I know.”
“Well, I’m going to join the line for the ladies’ room,” Tae said, “and then maybe join Jim and Lorraine in the lobby.” She hitched her shoulder bag up and slipped past him. Allan got up and followed her, shaking his head at Robin as he passed.
“Astonishing,” he said. “I—you know everything I want to say. Just—Jim’s right. I need that drink.”
Robin stepped back into the row to get out of the way of the people surging back and forth in the aisle. Harry’s parents, sitting on Allan’s other side, were still in their seats. Her father was intent on the program, sucking on the stem of his eyeglasses. He was compact and balding and didn’t resemble Harry at all, but the expression on his face was somehow precisely the same one Harry got while she wrote.