The Drowning Girl

by Caitlin R. Kiernan

  “It was then that a pitchy shape leapt up from the river. I know that is a vague description, but I can do no better. It was visible only for an instant, and it never coalesced into anything more distinct. Still, it left me with the disquieting impression that I’d beheld not any manner of fish, but possibly a great serpent, thick around as a telegraph pole and greater in size than any serpent I’d imagined lived anywhere outside the African or Amazonian tropics. Not a genuine serpent, but that’s the nearest comparison I can draw, if I attempt to fashion of it anything more substantial than the shadows beneath the maples.”

  The man who wrote Masters of Symbolism referred to Girl on a River as a “lost painting.” If it really was ever lost, then it was found three years ago, in the collection of the Hartnell College Gallery in Salinas, California. The author also notes that the painting was donated “by the estate of Theodore Angevine.” Father of Jacova. Prophet from Salinas. Her father taught comparative literature, and he wrote mystery novels that I don’t think were ever very popular.

  Also, when I wrote of the figure in The Drowning Girl, I wrote, “Her long hair is almost the same shade of green as the water.…” That’s not true. I knew it wasn’t, but I said it anyway. The woman’s hair is blonde. Yellow. Bright yellow, like sunflowers.

  I’m not going to say anything about this to Abalyn. Lost paintings, daughters of mystery, mysteries and the pieces aren’t ever going to stop falling into place. Or falling, anyway. One Eva, but two paintings.

  FEBRUARY 11, 2011

  FROM EDGAR ALLAN POE,

  “THE DOOMED CITY (THE CITY IN THE SEA),” 1831:

  Lo! Death hath rear’d HERself a throne

  In a strange city, all alone,

  Far down within the dim west—

  And the good, and the bad, and the worst, and the best,

  Have gone to their eternal rest.

  There, shrines, and palaces, and towers

  Are—not like anything of ours—

  O! no—O! no—ours never loom

  To heaven with that ungodly gloom!

  Time-eaten towers that tremble not!

  “In the mansions of Poseidon, She will prepare halls from coral and glass and the bones of whales. Palaces, shrines in a strange city. She will bring us home.”

  Jacova Angevine (1990)

  MARCH 8, 2011

  I saw Dr. Ogilvy today. She’s pleased with my progress. She smiles at me the way that I know she really means the smile, that it isn’t her “obligatory psychiatrist smile,” but sincere and genuine:

  “You know now that you’ll never be sure what happened?” she asked.

  “Yeah, I know now. I know that.”

  “And you can live with that.”

  I looked at a big sand dollar on one of her bookshelves, and then I said, “I can. I can live with that.”

  And that’s when she smiled for me.

  MARCH 18, 2011

  We weave necessary fictions, and sometimes they save us. Our minds, our bodies. The siren taught me to sing, but she was a deceitful, manipulative ____, and she saw that I all but helped held the knife as she slit her wrists. So, I told myself another story, a pretty one where I helped a lost wolf who was actually a girl find herself and so become a wolf again. I laid one over the other, and made of myself a hero and not a fool. But my brain jangled and clamored, and I should have known it would never work.

  APRIL 7, 2011

  By heaven, man, we are turned round and round in this world, like yonder windlass, and Fate is the handspike. And all the time, lo! that smiling sky, and this unsounded sea!

  Herman Melville, Moby-Dick (1851)

  APRIL 10, 2011

  I saw a red woman on the street today. She didn’t turn and look at me.

  APRIL 10, 2011

  It’s a dream-kill-dream world in here.

  APRIL 20, 2011

  Can one’s mind, as I shall call it, affect one’s body, as I shall call it? If so, that is personal witchcraft, or internal witchcraft. Can one’s mind affect the bodies of other persons and other things outside?

  If so, that is what I shall call external witchcraft.

  Charles Fort, Lo! (1931)

  Nothing about her is human except that she is not a wolf; it is as if the fur she thought she wore had melted into her skin and become part of it, although it does not exist.

  Angela Carter, “Wolf-Alice” (1978)

  JUNE 2, 2011

  I went back to Moonstone Beach today. Abalyn went with me. I laid flowers on the water. I don’t know if Eva liked flowers, but I cast onto the waves a wreath of ferns and primroses I’d woven. In the flower language of the Victorians, primroses meant “eternal love,” though I know it’s inappropriate, because I know that she never loved any of them, any more than she loved me. I’ll say it’s irony.

  JUNE 4, 2011

  Abalyn finished reading this manuscript yesterday. Well, more last night than yesterday. Afterwards, she stared at it a long time, and then she silently stared at me until I asked her to stop because it was making me nervous.

  “It’s sort of an amazing thing,” she finally said.

  “I should have written more about my painting,” I replied, which made her stare at me again.

  “Imp, what do you think those two short stories are about?” she asked.

  “Oh,” I said (or I said something like “oh”). “I was starting to think maybe they aren’t actually part of the story. That maybe I ought take them out. The paintings, I mean.”

  Abalyn frowned. “You’re wrong,” she said. “If you tried, you couldn’t be more wrong.”

  JUNE 10, 2011

  One of Eva Canning’s cousins, whose name is Jack Bowler, agreed to meet with me at his home in Jamestown. It’s a dingy little sort of place, but he made me tea, and he was a pleasant man with too many cats. He’s in his forties, and all his hair was gray. He collects nautical memorabilia, and his tiny house is filled with lobster pots, odds and ends from boats, framed photographs and paintings (prints) of whaling ships. I told him up front I was crazy, because I thought I should be honest. He peered at me a moment, and then he laughed and said, “Oh, what the hell ever.” He smoked cigarette after cigarette, and didn’t ask me if I minded. I didn’t tell him that I did.

  We talked for more than an hour, and many things were said, consequential and inconsequential. But I’m only going to put one part of it down.

  I sipped my second cup of tea, and he said, “Yes, she was a child when her mother died. And she wasn’t ever right after that. Maybe she wasn’t ever right to start with. We weren’t close, but my grandmother being her grandmother’s sister, you hear things. She dropped out of school, finally, and wound up in the hospital twice.” (Rhode Island Hospital, where I see Dr. Ogilvy; not Butler Hospital.) “I think she was about twenty, twenty-one, when she changed her name. Did it legal and everything.”

  A marmalade tom jumped into my lap and squinted at me, the way cats squint at interlopers whom they expect to at least have the courtesy to pet them or scratch behind their ears, having interloped and all. I petted him and he purred.

  “She changed her name?”

  “Yes, she did. Legally. She wasn’t born Eva. That’s not what her mother named her. Her mother didn’t stick around long, but she was here long enough to name her. Child was christened Imogene down at the Central Baptist Church. Imogene May Canning. She changed it, like I said, not long after her mother died. She used to talk about going to California, to that place near Monterey where her mother and all those others died. But she never did.”

  I petted the marmalade tom in my lap, and didn’t interrupt. I don’t know what I would have said, anyway.

  “Last time they put her in the hospital, someone found her naked at the side of the road somewhere up in Massachusetts. She was taken to the police, and they called her grandmother and brought her back to the hospital in Providence. She was sick. I mean, she’d gotten sick swimming in a river that winter. Bad case of pneumonia. They k
ept her for a few months, then let her out again. After that, I didn’t hear much about her.”

  There was more talk, and more tea, and more cats.

  He showed me the tooth of a sperm whale with a woman’s portrait carved into it. He said he’d have more scrimshaw, only it’s so expensive. He showed me a lump of ambergris he found at Mackerel Cove. He showed me the skull of a seal.

  It was almost dark when I left, and I thanked him, and he said he wished he could have told me more. He asked if I wanted a cat, and I told him yes, but Abalyn’s allergic.

  JUNE 17, 2011

  Went in the shop today (they’re always glad to see me, even if I don’t work there anymore). Spoke with Annunziata, who was on her break, and we went into the stockroom, and sat and talked a while. Mostly about…just mostly talked. But as I was about to leave, because she had to get back out front, she said something.

  She said, “Strangest thing a couple of days ago. This lady came in, and, at first glance, she was a dead ringer for your old stalker.”

  I asked her what she meant by my “stalker.”

  And she stared at me a moment, first a blank expression, then confused; then she smiled and laughed.

  “Blonde woman, right? Always wore sunglasses? Used to always ask about you when you weren’t here?”

  And I didn’t miss a beat. I laughed. No, I pretended to laugh. I pretended to know what she was talking about.

  “Wasn’t her,” Annunziata says. “Figured that out pretty quickly. But at first glance, you know.”

  I remember her now, from before Eva. My stalker.

  Three questions, then:

  How long was Eva Canning watching me? And why don’t I remember her coming into the shop, when Annunziata insists we used to laugh about it, make jokes about my “stalker”?

  And did Eva somehow know about my late-night drives?

  No, four questions. Was any of it happenstance?

  I think Annunziata saw that I was shaken, and when she rang me up she gave me her employee’s discount, though she’s not supposed to do that.

  Jack Bowler said, “I mean, she’d gotten sick swimming in a river that winter.”

  “You know now that you’ll never be sure what happened?” Dr. Ogilvy asked me.

  “Yeah, I know now,” I told her. “I know that.”

  I know that.

  JUNE 21, 2011

  Another pernicious meme, or only an urban legend dressed up to look like a haunting. Either way, I wish I’d known about it when I was writing about Aokigahara Jukai, and Seichoˉ Matsumoto, and his novel.

  In 1933, a Hungarian pianist, Rezso˝ Seress, wrote a song he titled “Vége a világnak,” which can be translated into English as “End of the World.” A second set of lyrics was written by a Hungarian poet named László Jávor, and the song became known as “Szomorú vasárnap,” or “Sad Sunday.” The original lyrics mourn the destruction of Europe by World War II, and the second mourns the loss of a lover and makes a pledge to commit suicide, in hopes of a reunion in the afterlife. At least, I think that’s how it all happened.

  In 1941, retitled “Gloomy Sunday,” the song became a hit for Billie Holiday. Holiday was nicknamed “Lady Day,” though I don’t know why. For many Christians, Lady Day is the Feast of the Annunciation of the Blessed Virgin, and I don’t know why that would be Billie Holiday’s nickname, right? Anyway, the song was a hit for her. But it all becomes very complicated, what happened with the song. With this maybe haunting. Online, I’ve found pages and pages devoted to “Gloomy Sunday,” and I won’t bother putting it all down here, just a few points.

  By 1936, the song had become known as the “Hungarian Suicide Song,” after it was blamed for a number of suicides (some say seventeen, but the number varies wildly). There are reports the song was banned in Hungary, but I can’t find any evidence this really happened. There are claims that many more people committed suicide in America upon hearing the Billie Holiday version, maybe as many as two hundred. There are sources that claim the recording was banned from U.S. radio, but the claims are unsubstantiated. I read accounts of suicides found with the sheet music in pockets or gripped in dead hands or playing on gramophones.

  Some sources claim Jávor’s version was inspired by his real-life love for a former girlfriend, and that, after hearing the song, she took her life and left behind a two-word suicide note: “Gloomy Sunday.” Again, this only seems to be a rumor. But it is a fact that Rezso´´ Seress took his own life in 1968 by jumping from a building in Budapest; the fall didn’t kill him, but in the hospital he was able to strangle himself with a piece of wire. I can’t help but think of Rosemary Anne, restrained at 345 Blackstone Boulevard, but…

  According to Michael Brooks’ liner notes for Lady Day—the Complete Billie Holiday on Columbia, 1933–1944, “‘Gloomy Sunday’ reached America in 1936 and, thanks to a brilliant publicity campaign, became known as ‘The Hungarian Suicide Song.’ Supposedly after hearing it, distraught lovers were hypnotized into heading straight out of the nearest open window, in much the same fashion as investors after October 1929; both stories are largely urban myths.”

  I cannot say what’s true here, and what isn’t. I can only note the similarity to Japan’s “Suicide Forest,” following the publication of a novel. I can only reiterate what I’ve said about hauntings being especially pernicious thought contagions.

  See also Death Cab for Cutie’s “I Will Follow You Into the Dark” (2006), which Abalyn played for me, and Blue Öyster Cult’s “(Don’t Fear) The Reaper” (1976; Rosemary had this album). Also, maybe, Roy Lichtenstein’s Drowning Girl (1963), though eyes, not ears.

  JUNE 29, 2011

  A college student from Kingston found Eva’s body, three days after she swam away from me. There wasn’t much left. There was an article in the Providence Journal. She was identified by dental records. By her teeth. Sharks had been at her, said the coroner. Sharks and fish and crabs. Like the girl who dies in the beginning of Jaws. But the sharks didn’t kill her, the coroner said. She drowned, and then sharks scavenged her body. A week later, a seven-foot shortfin mako shark (Isurus oxyrinchus) was caught down near Watch Hill. There was a woman’s hand in its belly, and shreds of a red silk dress.

  JULY 2, 2011

  “Whatever it was, or wasn’t, it’s done,” the girl named India Morgan Phelps typed, “and you’ve written it down. Your ghost story. Yes, you will always be haunted, but it’s done. Thank you. You can go now.”

  Good night, Rosemary Anne.

  Good night, Caroline.

  Good night, Eva.

  Abalyn says she’s here to stay. She said she loves me. When she said it, there were no crows or ravens.

  The End

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  Never has a novel come easily to me, but never before has one come with such profound difficulty as did The Drowning Girl: A Memoir. I was sitting in the South Kingston Public Library (Peace Dale, RI) on August 8, 2009, reading a book on the Black Dahlia murder, when the germ of the story first began to take shape in my mind. Over the subsequent twenty-seven months (to paraphrase Kelly Link’s marvelous observation), it shifted its shape many times. And it was not until the last day of October 2010, after numerous false starts and plotlines devised, then cast aside, that I found my way into the book. In the end, it was as simple as allowing Imp to speak in her own voice.

  There are a great number of sources of inspiration I feel I should acknowledge—because this is what we do, writers and madwomen, take apart things and then put them back together again in other ways. Some of these inspirations are quoted or alluded to in the text; others are only echoed, implied, or paid homage. They include (but are not limited to) Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865) and Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There (1871); the works of Charles Perrault, the Brothers Grimm, and Hans Christian Andersen; Radiohead’s “There there (The Boney King of Nowhere)” (from Hail to the Thief, 2003); Anne Sexton’s “With Mercy for the Greedy�
�� (from All My Pretty Ones, 1962); Robert Frost’s “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening” (from New Hampshire, 1923); Poe’s album Haunted (2000); Elia Kazan and William Inge’s Splendor in the Grass (1961), and, by extension, William Wordsworth’s poem “Ode: Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood” (Poems, in Two Volumes, 1807); David Tibet and Current 93’s Black Ships Ate the Sky (2006); a number of paintings—William Bradford’s Arctic Sunset (1874), Winslow Homer’s On a Lee Shore (1900), Martin Johnson Heade’s Brazilian Forest (1864) and Salt Marshes of Newburyport, Massachusetts (1875–1878), all from the collections of the Rhode Island School of Design; Dante Alighieri’s la Divina Commedia (1308–1321); Peter Straub’s Ghost Story (1979); Kelly Link’s “Pretty Monsters” (2008); Death Cab for Cutie’s “I Will Follow You Into the Dark” (from Plans, 2006); the music of R.E.M., especially “Find the River” (1992, which would have been quoted, herein, if lawyers didn’t suck); Matthew Arnold’s “Dover Beach” (from New Poems, 1867); Charles Wesley’s “Idumea” (1793); Seichoˉ Matsumoto’s Kuroi Jukai (1960); Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick (1851); Angela Carter’s “Wolf-Alice,” (1978); Charles Fort’s Lo! (1931); Henry Francis Cary’s translation of Dante’s la Divina Commedia (1805–1814); and Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Doomed City (The City in the Sea)” (1831, 1845). Also, various works by Virginia Woolf, Emily Dickinson, Joseph Conrad, T. S. Eliot, and Sir Ernest Henry Shackleton. As for the works and lives, the arts and letters, of Phillip George Saltonstall and Albert Perrault, those are entirely my own invention, with the help of Michael Zulli and Sonya Taaffe.