by Ann Claycomb
We had not expected that either. She swam through the gates without any of the usual hesitation and only stopped at the very entrance to our inner chambers, where she had to knock to be admitted. When we let her in and saw the fine mist of joy still covering her, like sea spray itself, beaded in her hair and over her breasts as though she’d only just been splashed with it, we were frightened for ourselves. That she could feel such joy while her lover lay dead Above by her own hand could only mean that she was mad. We circled her cautiously, herded her away from shelves of fragile, precious things, hid the fresh-picked pearls in a shadowy corner. She looked at us and laughed, a melody of not just joy but also triumph.
“You don’t know,” she said. And of course, we did not know.
When she told us how the knife had broken, how the curse had been lifted by a false murder, the knife spattered with illusory blood, we could scarcely believe her, though we saw that she spoke the truth. We retrieved the pearls, told her how they had been made. These should not be possible, not without real blood spilled on that blade.
She picked one up and rolled it in her hand. “The knife should not even have broken the way you say it did, though, should it? You underestimated Harry—and my father. You thought your kind of magic was the only way.”
We do not deny our own limitations.
She held out the pearl in her hand. “Can you make a chain for this? And will you give me this one to wear”—there was sorrow now in her face and in her voice—“as a souvenir?”
She asked for a gift, and she had chosen the largest and most beautiful of the whole crop of pearls. To simply agree, to pierce the pearl and thread it on a thin, strong chain and hand it back to her, is not our nature. We deal in bargains and trades, not in gifts. But we owed her much, much more. On a high shelf in another room was a jar filled with the burning embers of Ceara’s life.
We gave Kathleen the pearl and she slipped it around her neck.
“Thank you,” she said. “There is just one more thing. I came to tell you what had happened because Harry said I should. But I want to ask you to do something for me as well.”
We waited. She settled the pearl between her breasts, shook back her hair.
“I want Harry and Robin to know I am happy. Can you send them dreams of me?”
“It would be difficult.”
“But you could do it. Maybe just once a year? Enough so they wake up and remember again what they did for me.”
We waited. In a chest of a hundred locked drawers we keep the smaller things: the black weight of Fand’s regret, the shining bubble of Muirin’s fleeting joy, the lock of hair Caolinn was clutching when she drowned. We owed Kathleen the dreams she asked for. Still we waited to see what she would do. We deal in bargains, in magic bought and paid for. But we are also scavengers, and greedy. It is in our nature.
“I’ll pay you,” Kathleen said.
How will you pay?
“I’ll give you a song, of course,” she said. “I’ll give you the aria that set me free.”
Ah.
We had a bottle ready to catch the song. It had come from a shipwreck and it was the kind of bottle used by those Above to hold sparkling wine, but larger than any we’d ever seen.
Kathleen laughed and laughed when she saw it.
“A jeroboam,” she said, laughter and tears together in her voice as she pronounced the strange word. “Oh God, Harry would love it.”
We remembered the voices that had come before hers—from Fand’s to Moira’s, each different but all beautiful. We had chosen a vessel that would hold any of these. But when Kathleen began to sing, the bottle nearly shattered; we had to reinforce it magically, which left the bottom thickened and rounded so that it refuses to sit flat but sways like it is caught in a current, like the song inside it is always being sung. She sang a terrible song of grief and pain that shook the dead things in our chambers and reminded them that they were dead, that called for blood until the new red pearls fountained from their basket. It was a song from Above that should not have had power so far Below, but it swept around us like dry wind, impossible and undeniable, until it drained into the bottle and we lunged to put the stopper in.
Kathleen returned to herself, saw the disarray she had created and smiled again. She curled her hand around the pearl at her neck.
“You will send the dreams?”
We will send them. For as long as you live, for as long as they live.
“Good,” she said. “Thank you.”
Then she turned and swam away. We have not seen her again.
We send the dreams every year. Robin and Harry wake from them with tears of joy and sorrow on their cheeks. They believe that Kathleen sends them the dreams, and indeed, she paid well for them.
But they themselves also paid us well, though they will never know this. The song that swirls in its strangely named bottle is more than Kathleen’s voice. It is a latticework such as we have never seen and could never hope to weave, words and music as warp and weft. Through their lattice, Kathleen’s voice surges and eddies, back and forth, never losing its power, nor its beauty.
It is a song, nothing more, but it is also very much like the sea itself.
The Mermaid at the Opera
A Short Story
The manuscript was gone—pages stacked and bound in twine, then sealed inside an oiled envelope and sent, at considerable expense, on to Denmark. Andersen hurried through the darkening streets of Naples, feeling empty. The Improvisatore—it was a good title for a good tale, based on his own vivid experiences of Italy, which had struck his inclination to asceticism and self-abnegation like a blow. But now the book was gone and he faced white paper again, a nearly new bottle of ink, and months left of his planned stay in Naples, without work to give shape and meaning to his days.
Back in his lodgings, he rang for hot water, threw off his cloak, and began to dress for the opera. Even this treat, which he could only just afford, felt flat when Andersen considered that he would return from the Teatro di San Carlo to rooms that were no longer the site of his work. When the maid brought a pitcher, he poured it in the basin and shaved quickly, then dampened his thick hair and patted clove oil onto his jaw, hissing at the sting. He squinted despairingly at the mirror, seeing no great literary figure launched into the world but only a gangling man, narrow in the shoulders and chest but with a great beaky nose and big-knuckled hands, raw from constant scrubbing to get the ink off them. What he needed, Andersen thought as he pulled his cloak back on and settled his hat on his head, was a muse. But while Italy offered muses aplenty—from laughing black-eyed girls to Madonnas whose lips gleamed red under their veils—none of them seemed likely to choose an ugly Dane upon whom to bestow their favors.
THE OPERA HOUSE was sold out, for tonight the great voice herself, Maria Malibran, would sing the lead in Vincenzo Bellini’s Norma. Andersen’s seat was not good, but that hardly mattered when he ducked past the curtains into the box. The opera house fell away before him in glittering waves of velvet and lacquer. Andersen looked so greedily and for so long that he grew dizzy. He no longer worried that this evening would fall flat, nor paid anything but passing attention to the people taking their seats around him. Even before the overture began, the box was full, save for the seat to his right, which had an even more obstructed view of the stage. Then just as the orchestra began to play, a woman slipped into that last chair, her skirts brushing Andersen’s arm as she swept them aside to sit down. Andersen turned his head.
He intended to spare her only a glance, but the first glance demanded another, and then, incredulously, he dared not look at her again. She was small and slender, dressed in the unrelieved black of widowhood and heavily veiled. And yet he knew that she was beautiful, the same way that he had known that the sea would be cold when first he saw it. The second glance had gone through him like a sharp pain, for she’d been in the act of adjusting her long glove, exposing a white arm of impossible delicacy. Andersen stared straight ahead at th
e stage and imagined the sight and feel of her hand in his, palm touching palm, fingers entwined. The overture went on, but he had been abandoned by the music, consumed instead by his awareness of the body beside him. She could not possibly leave the veils on for the performance. They would muffle the sound of the music, make it difficult for her to breathe in the close, perfumed air, obscure the stage in a sooty blur. She would remove the veils and he would see her face. He had to see her face.
A company of druids appeared on the stage in white cambric shirts and linen togas, wreaths in their hair. The leader moved downstage, the top of his head gleaming, his big belly swelling even bigger as he took breath to sing. Andersen closed his eyes. Beside him, he heard the whispering sound of cloth against cloth, and then his nose was abruptly filled with the smell of salt water.
IN THE YEARS since his voice had changed and he had been forced to give up singing, Andersen had discovered a curious paradox within himself. He experienced certain moments with electric intensity, so much so that he made others uncomfortable. Yet he could never claim to be as suffused with feeling as he appeared, because there was always a dispassionate voice in his head observing both the event and his own reaction to it. The cool, sometimes ironic voice was antithetical to Andersen’s sense of himself as an artist; he came to see it as a growing interior consciousness that he was first and foremost a writer, an observer and recorder of human nature and human experience. But during the whole first act of the opera, the woman was there beside him, and as buffer against her he could find no cool, rational voice. She smelled of the sea, and Andersen, who had never liked the sea, found that the fragrance of her made him think not of chilly ocean voyages but of a dimly lit and curtained room, of a tub of steaming bathwater and her damp hair against his body.
He was terribly afraid that she knew his thoughts. He had not been so aroused since his early adolescence and he strove to hide it, to sit rigidly still, to not look at her again. The last glance, after the veils had come off, had been enough. He had never seen hair that color and he smiled bitterly in the darkness, for here was his ironic voice after all, coming not to his aid but to torment him. Hair like fire inside a piece of coal? Hair like the red-black heart of a late-blooming rose? What pretty compliments can you offer her that she will not have heard before, and from far more attractive admirers? His self-mocking voice went on: She was a widow. His very response to her violated the reserve and dignity of her state of mourning. And yet her black dress and veils also made an overture possible, did they not? She was a widow and alone. Her sorrowful state demanded the most attentive courtesy, permitted the crossing of certain delicate lines of conduct. The box was stifling, the opera itself wrenching. When the intermission came, might he not offer to fetch her a cup of lemonade?
But the widow vanished as soon as the intermission began, slipping out through the back of the box before Andersen had even risen from his seat. If his perceived attraction to her had driven her away—he cursed himself for succumbing to his basest sensibilities and punished himself by remaining hunched in his chair throughout the interlude. The opera resumed before she took her seat, but not until she was once again beside him and he heard the rustle of her veils could Andersen focus his attention on the stage. He did not steal another glance at the woman until the final scene of the opera, when Norma mounted the sacrificial pyre and Pollione, her unfaithful lover, rushed to be reunited with her in death. The young man was not equal to the role; he sprang up onto the pyre with unseemly athletic enthusiasm and Malibran’s voice was so far superior to his that it was like the beating wings of a swan alongside those of a common pigeon. Cast adrift from the story once more by his own critical voice, Andersen turned his head to watch the widow. She was intent on the scene, the fluid line of her profile from throat to jaw like a breaking wave. Above it, her lips were pressed together and the tears streamed unchecked down her cheeks.
Later, Andersen would wonder: If he had not been watching her at that moment, when Pollione sang his final lines, would they have ever encountered one another again? Would he have gotten the courage to speak to her or would she have darted away during the final ovations and left him lurching foolishly after her?
But he was watching the woman as Norma chided her lover in majestic tones: “Qual cor tradisti, qual cor perdesti, quest’ora orrenda ti manifesti!” The heart you betrayed, the heart you lost, see in this hour what a heart it was! And Pollione answered her, painfully, “Col mio rimorso è amor rinato, più disperato, furente egli è.” With my remorse, love is reborn, a madder, more desperate love.
Hearing these lines, the woman gasped as if she’d been struck. Her mouth opened, and Andersen, seeing what it revealed, made a choked sound of his own. The woman’s head snapped around, her hand coming up to cover her mouth and her eyes meeting his for the first time.
If she had not been so very beautiful, Andersen would have recoiled. But he took in the details of her beauty greedily, even after what he’d just seen. Her eyes were silver one moment and black the next, like the surface of the sea under an uncertain sun, and her face was exquisitely shaped, from the oval sweep of her forehead down to the delicate point of her chin. And as he lowered his gaze to her mouth when she dropped her hand, what he took in first was the fullness and flushed color of her lips and not what he’d glimpsed a moment ago.
The opera was over. Around them rose the applause and cries of acclaim for the diva, “Malibran! Malibran!” Andersen and the woman faced each other and he spoke into a silence that seemed to run like a current between them under the swelling noise.
“Oh, my dear,” he said, “who did that to you? And why?”
But of course she couldn’t answer. She only shook her head and reached out one slender gloved hand for him to take and bring reverently to his lips. The protocols had been breached, Andersen realized giddily. He could indeed invite her to take supper with him now, offer to escort her home, ask to attend on her again. And she would accept, conveying her acceptance in her fashion, of course. Because he had not recoiled when he had seen, quite by accident, that inside her lovely mouth her tongue had been cut out, cleanly and deliberately, by what could only have been a very sharp knife.
IN POSSESSION OF both her hand and her secret that first night, Andersen forgot to be nervous. He took her to a small café near the opera house, ordered a pot of steamed chocolate and a tray of cakes without a stutter, then watched in bemusement as she produced a notebook and a little gold pencil and wrote out—in English, the only language she could write in, though she understood Italian well and French passably—her very first words to him.
You are a gentleman, sir.
He flushed, smiled, passed the paper back. “It is nothing,” he said. “I am honored that you would join me after the performance. It is difficult to go home alone after such a night of music.”
The moment the words were out he was aghast, but her head was bent over her pad already and she used three sheets of paper before she finished her response. When he took the pad back from her he saw that she had ignored or not noticed any innuendo in his words; she had written a brief but scathing review of the opera. She had nothing but disdain for the tenor—Why do they let little boys on the stage? Where are the men?—this last word underlined so hard that the pencil tip had broken off. And of Malibran she had written something so strange that at first he thought he was not reading the words correctly: she sings like a bird in a cage. He read them again and looked up to find her watching him avidly.
“Yes,” he said slowly, and heard in that moment a sound like the low notes of the orchestra opening a duet. “That is exactly right. Like a wild bird longing to be set free. I came to hear her sing, of course, didn’t we all? And still it was—startling.”
He handed back her pad, pages folded back to a fresh sheet, ready for her reply.
She hesitated only a moment, her eyes black in this light, but sparking with silver in the depths, before she put the pencil to the paper again. My God, Ander
sen thought helplessly, to kindle those eyes! He pictured her, fleetingly, lying beneath him, her eyes on fire and her breath coming fast. When he looked at her again, she was holding the notebook out.
I hope I do not presume too much, she had written, but when I saw your face in the opera box I trusted you. You looked as though you knew what it felt like to have known music and then lost it.
She cocked her head and Andersen nodded. So she could hear it too, the sound of harmony, the undercurrent of duet between them. They understood each other already. He need only control his own base longings.
The pot of chocolate arrived, steaming deliciously, and the woman waved the serving girl off when the girl would have poured for them both. There was something imperious in her gesture, Andersen noted with amusement as she filled his cup and handed it to him. She might have been a noblewoman in her own salon rather than a widow in a black dress that was revealed, in the bright light of the café, to be shiny with wear at the elbows and the edges of the sleeves. Inspired and touched by her desire to play hostess to him, Andersen told her the tale of how his sweet boyish voice had been captured—overnight, it seemed—by a mysterious bullfrog that sat in the back of his throat and croaked out its presence at unpredictable intervals. Watching her laugh, always with a careful hand to her mouth, Andersen thought, Ah, if only she could speak! I would have such a muse as any man might envy. And he realized suddenly that he did not even know her name.
FAND, SHE TOLD him, writing the letters out carefully. It was Irish, apparently, the blunt syllable foreign on his tongue and nothing like what he would have called her. But she gave him no other name to use.
In the months that followed their meeting, they had tea several times a week, dined out after the opera at least one additional night. He always made the suggestion, as was appropriate, and she assented, that tantalizing half-smile of hers dipping out of sight as she bent over her little notepad to scribble her response.