The Mermaids Singing Read online

  The phone rang again, or maybe it had never stopped, and I went into my bedroom and closed the door. I would read some poetry from my notebooks and wait. The phone rang sixteen, twenty-two times. It rattled so loud in its stand that I could hear a faint vibrating hum from the piano. I lay down on my bed and felt paper crinkling beneath me. I turned on the light and pulled the page out from under my butt. It was clean white typing paper, four lines in faded ink down the middle.

  Go and leave me if you wish to,

  Never let me cross your mind.

  And if you think that I’ve proved unworthy,

  Go and leave me, I don’t mind.

  For a second I thought it had to be some sort of joke. It wasn’t a poem but a silly little song she used to sing whenever she’d broken up with a boyfriend. She’d always sing it loudly, gesticulating, trying to make me laugh. It usually worked. I had no idea why she’d left it for me now. Did she think this was funny? Was she pissed at me? I wasn’t the one going anywhere, for Christ’s sake. I squeezed and twisted the paper until no words were showing and dropped it on my bed. I left my room and walked toward the bathroom, past the phone that was still ringing—but softer, like it was losing its voice.

  In the bathroom, I opened the medicine cabinet and took out my mother’s bandage scissors. I used them to cut my hair, as close to my head as I could get it. Masses of it, like little black animals, skittered over the countertop. In some places, I ended up with uneven tufts, like the brittle hair that used to poke from my mother’s hat. When I was finished I washed my face, and then wrapped my shrunken chest in some gauze which I found under the sink.

  I went into my mother’s room and looked at myself in her full-length mirror. I put my face right up to the glass. “Gráinne,” I said, and I repeated it over and over until I did not know that voice, until even the eyes were unrecognizable. I went over to the closet and took out Stephen’s flannel shirt, my mother’s jeans, and her running sneakers, the soles of which were caked with sand. When Stephen had first moved in, I’d seen my mother sipping tea early in the morning, pulling the collar of his shirt over her nose and inhaling deeply. I did that now. It smelled of sea air, smoke, and sage. It smelled like my mother.

  I went out to the living room and sat down at the typewriter. I took a fresh sheet of paper that had been left there for me and wound it in the machine. I typed out a few lines and looked at them. I’d made some mistakes, so I typed them out again. Satisfied, I yanked the paper out and folded it, and put it in the shirt pocket.

  The phone started that ringing again. I went over to it, lifted it from its base, and set it on the floor. I took the little wooden stand it had been on and one of the dining chairs and hefted them behind the piano. I opened the sliding glass door and carried them outside, down the beach, stopping at a safe distance from the water. I dropped the furniture and stomped on it. The wood was old and the seams unstable, so it wasn’t hard for me to smash the table and chair into appropriate-sized pieces. I filled a trash bag with some firewood and kindling that was under the porch, took my notebooks from my bedroom and the folder of typed pages I’d collected from the refrigerator door all summer. I built the fire like a Lincoln Logs cabin, and when it was roaring, started to drop in pages, watching them liven then crinkle.

  There was a sound behind the fire, coming up to me in a rhythm like waves; a sound that went high and then low, like lonely laughter. I remembered another time I had heard it, on the beach with my mother when I was a little girl.

  The mermaids are singing, my mother had said. I must have been very young, because in the memory I try to repeat her, but the words do not come out right.

  By the time Stephen came home, I’d burned all the chairs, a wicker basket, the laundry drying rack, and a pile of wooden utensils from the kitchen. The fire was still going strong, licking at the dark air, its base a squealing lake of embers. Stephen came out the sliding door and walked down the steps slowly. I took the paper out of my pocket and read what I’d typed.

  Time held me green and dying

  Though I sang in my chains like the sea.

  I imagined this was the note my mother had left. That the hand holding the fluttering paper was my mother’s graceful one. That I was the one who was dying. I dropped the paper in the flames.

  “Gráinne?” Stephen said, his voice thick like he’d been crying. I watched the orange snapping, the sparks like fireworks disappearing in midair. Stephen moved closer, looking at my head in the firelight.

  “God, Gráinne, what did you do to yourself?” he whispered.

  “Shhh,” I said, listening to the fire. It groaned and whimpered like a wounded animal. He looked at it briefly, maybe hoping he’d see something more.

  “I tried to call you,” he said, and his voice broke.

  I turned to him and put my hands around the back of his neck, pulling his head toward me. He grabbed me fiercely by the waist and cried into my naked neck, kneading and clasping my back through the flannel shirt. I started to kiss him. On his earlobe, his cheek, his soaking eyelashes. He stopped breathing. I could feel heat glowing from his mouth, and when I pressed my lips against it, he was shaking.

  It only lasted an instant, there was the faintest promising pressure as he moved in toward me, and then it was gone, his hands were on my shoulders, holding me away.

  “Don’t, Gráinne,” he said. “God.” And his face changed, as though it had just occurred to him that what we’d done was disgusting.

  So I stood there, suspended in the air around the fire, feeling nothing but his cold palms against the bones of my shoulders, wanting to run but not able to back away, listening to the sounds from the sea which rolled and crashed and built up like a familiar anticipation in my throat.

  CHAPTER 7

  Clíona

  A strange session, my daughter’s funeral is. Men everywhere. All former boyfriends, from what I can gather. It is clear that Grace’s popularity with the lads never waned.

  It’s a Catholic ceremony, at least. I’m relieved that Grace has kept up some connection with the Church. Though it puzzles me, for religion was one of the things she always rebelled against.

  At the grave’s edge, I dedicate my rosary to the Sorrowful Mysteries and begin the prayers. Between each decade I recite the Fatima Ejaculation: “O, Jesus, forgive us our sins, save us from the fires of Hell, and lead all souls to Heaven, especially those who are most in need of your mercy.” I recite the prayers mechanically, my fingers moving over the beads like those of a blind woman reading braille. It’s a long time since I’ve felt anything when I pray.

  Gráinne is glaring at me. She has the same vicious look her mother had. And God only knows what she has done to her hair—chicken-scratch, what’s left of it, though you can still see that it’s violet-black the way mine once was. She’s so thin she looks like a picture of a famine victim or one of those diseased girls there is talk of nowadays: anorexics. I long to feed her potatoes, rashers, butter, cream.

  She certainly has not received me with any affection. She seems suspicious of me, like I’m an impostor, but I suppose it’s only natural since Grace kept me from her, in memory as well as presence. It’s quite obvious from the way she spoke to me yesterday that Gráinne does not remember anything about her first three years, which she spent in Ireland with me. Sure, everything will come out in its own time.

  Hard to understand, this granddaughter of mine. Not as brash as her mother, a little frightened really, but there is some toughness, a resilience underneath. It’s there in the way she says her name, when shaking the hands of the mourners she’s never met before, Graw-nya. Perfect Irish pronunciation. She says it boldly, with a certain pride, rather than flattening it or making it sound American, as I did with my name when I first moved to Boston.

  I try nodding at her, but she shifts her eyes and seems to focus within, as if she is refusing to see what is before her. This girl wears an armor which won’t be easily breached. Her mother had that absent look on
ce—it came from keeping to herself too much. Stephen tells me Gráinne and Grace were the best of friends, but this girl looks as though she hasn’t had a friend for some time.

  The service has ended. We walk back toward the cars, my heels plunging into the soil, making my progress precarious. Gráinne and Stephen walk just ahead of me; he is holding her by the arm, though she seems perfectly composed and able to walk on her own. There is something inappropriate between these two. Nothing scandalous, maybe, but Gráinne definitely has an infatuation with him. Grace felt similarly about a man that I was once involved with, not Marcus of course, but before him, an American man.

  What worries me is not the girl’s infatuation so much as that your man does not appear completely immune to it. He is younger than Grace by a few years; perhaps he has not gotten that boy-wildness out of his system. And again, there is the grief, and grief can do strange things to a man, just as drink can, and I’ve seen Stephen take a bit of that since I’ve been here as well. All things, I think these two would be better off with an ocean between them.

  Stephen, who is not lacking proper manners, opens the car door for me. As we drive off, I do not look back at the graveyard, but at the road ahead of me that leads out of it. Gráinne, I notice, does the same. Later, when I am alone in my daughter’s bedroom, or even when I get home to Ireland, I will let myself cry for Grace, I will release this grief which I fear is so much stronger than the grief I have felt for her all her life. But not now. Now I have other things to occupy me.

  This is how I win Gráinne over initially: with snaps. I have brought three albums with me. The first is full of old family pictures, the second of snaps from our home in America, the last from back in Ireland: Gráinne as a baby. I lay them out on my daughter’s sitting room table and leaf through them one at a time, while Gráinne storms the flat in her stocking feet. She is intrigued, I can tell, because she’s watching me; occasionally she walks behind the sofa to sneak a look over my shoulder.

  “Will you look on?” I say during her third lap around the room. She glances around the room and shrugs. Stephen has gone to the university, so there is no one to witness if she weakens. She sits at the far end of the couch and I move down, handing her first the album with the snaps of Grace as a child. “This is your mother,” I say, pointing to a thin, scowling Grace at eight years old, “when we lived here in Boston.” Gráinne looks at it skeptically.

  “Why is she wearing a wedding dress?” she says.

  “It was the day of her First Communion,” I say. “Did you not have one yourself?”

  “No,” Gráinne snorts. It’s as I feared: Grace has not raised her a Catholic. It was thanks to myself that Gráinne was even baptized.

  “Who are the other kids?” she says. Three blond children, a boy Grace’s age and twin baby girls in their pram, are beside her.

  “Those are the Willoughby children,” I say. “I was employed by the family and we boarded in the house until your mother was the age you are now.”

  “Like a servant,” Gráinne says. It’s cheeky she’s getting again, but I let it go, I don’t want to scare her off.

  “Ah, not a servant. I raised those children. We were a part of the family, your mother and I.” Still, she seems doubtful—her mother’s ideas of my position coming through, I see.

  “Where did you go after that?” she asks. “Did you get your own house?”

  “When Grace was fifteen years of age, we went home to Ireland. To Inis Murúch, the Island of the Mermaids, off the West, where I was born. It was then I married my husband, Marcus.”

  “What about my mother’s father?” Gráinne accuses. “Where was he?”

  “I was widowed when your mother was very young.” Gráinne folds her arms and shoots me an evil look from under a brow that frighteningly resembles her mother’s.

  “My Mom said you never married her father, that she was just some accident that happened when a man passed you in the night,” she said. This was becoming difficult, trying to bond with a child whom I just wanted to slap.

  “Think what you like. Your mother had a habit of reinventing the past to suit herself.” That shuts her up. She flips through the rest of the album, quickly, searching for something. I hand her another one. On the opening leaf: myself, Grace, and baby Gráinne. She squints at it.

  “That’s me?” she says, and I nod. “Where is this? Did we visit you in Ireland?”

  “You were born in Ireland, Gráinne. You lived there until you were three years of age.” Perhaps I should have put it more gently. She drops the album, stands up and backs away from me.

  “I don’t remember,” she says. She is frightened; I am sorry for her.

  “I know, it’s all right, child.”

  She walks quickly to her room, and I think she is going to lock herself in there again. But she returns with a framed snap in her hand. She gives it to me, but does not sit down.

  It is a close-up of her face, a toddler’s rounded face, violet-black ringlets hanging about her ears. She is laughing—pure delighted laughter—her eyes squeezed shut from the effort.

  “I remember this one, sure,” I say. “From my own camera, it is. Taken in my garden, just a few weeks before you left.” Gráinne shifts her weight from one foot to the other. She pulls at her short hair, brings her fingers around to gnaw at her nails. Her face is a battleground of expressions—she cannot decide between confusion, sorrow, and self-righteous anger.

  “Who is my father?” she says, quietly. “You know him?”

  “I do. I know your father well.”

  “Is he in Ireland?”

  “He is.”

  “Near you?”

  “On Inis Murúch, yes.”

  “How come he didn’t marry my Mom?” she says. The anger is starting to win in her features.

  “He did, Gráinne. They were married before you were born.”

  “Why didn’t my Mom tell me any of this?”

  “Perhaps she wanted to forget it. She left Ireland; she did not look back.”

  “Why? Is it a horrible place or something?”

  “No, Gráinne, it’s a lovely place.”

  “Then why?”

  “I don’t know.” I look away from her. Not everything at once, God help me. I can’t go through all of it in an instant. We’re quiet for a moment, there is only our harried breathing, as if we’ve both been exercising. Gráinne takes her picture back from me.

  “I’m going to my room now,” she says, and it is just that little bit, that attempt on her part at manners, that lets me know I’ve gotten somewhere at last.

  CHAPTER 8

  Gráinne

  “I have a father,” I said to the thin reflection of my face in the mirror. I’d been in the bathroom for an hour, avoiding Mrs. O’Halloran and Stephen.

  I had an Irish father, grandmother, maybe even cousins. I hadn’t even known that my mother was Irish. My Gaelic name was from a book she’d liked. She had never told me where we came from, just that we would always be together.

  I remembered that when I was in the second grade, I was supposed to draw my family tree and trace my ethnic heritage.

  “What are we?” I had asked my mother. “Are we Jewish?” All my friends were Jewish and their families came from places like Russia, Poland, and Lithuania.

  “You’re whatever you want to be,” my mother had said. “It’s not important where you come from, Gráinne. What matters is where you take yourself.” She’d gotten the teacher to excuse me from the assignment. While the other students had stood in front of the class and explained the intricate trees they’d traced to manila paper, I had drawn a picture of two thin tree trunks entwined together, and told myself that no one else had a mother like mine. She was beautiful, she laughed all the time, she never nagged me, she asked my opinion on everything, and took it seriously, too. She was my best friend.

  She had lied to me. There were other people, besides us, people I had known until I was three. I had assumed that my father w
as a random boyfriend who’d left my mother when she got pregnant. I had never known that she’d married him. She had always told me that she was not the marrying type.

  From my hideout in the bathroom, I could hear Stephen and my grandmother conferring. They’ve already decided what to do with me, I thought. There are strangers in another country who want to be my family, and Stephen seems to have forgotten that he ever wanted me in the first place.

  “Why did you lie to me?” I said to the mirror. But there was no answer from my mother, only this new, mean face of mine, staring at me as if she didn’t know me at all.

  “I’m going,” I said to Stephen, at the end of that first week after my mother’s funeral. “I’m going back with my grandmother.”

  “Great!” he said quickly, then calmed down, like he was ashamed of his enthusiasm. “I’m glad for you, if that’s what you want to do.” We were sitting on the couch again in the dark living room. This was the only way I could talk to him now—in darkness.

  “Like I had much choice,” I said.

  “Oh, no, Gráinne. If you were set against going, I’d help you figure something out, you know I would.”

  “Yeah, all right,” I said. I wanted so much to believe him.

  “You feel better about her now—your grandmother, I mean?” I shrugged.

  “She’s not why I’m going. My father’s there.”

  “Your father? Oh.”

  “I guess you already knew that,” I said, as Stephen rubbed his eyelids roughly with his thumbs.

  “No.” He sighed. “No, I know nothing about your father.”

  “But you knew about her,” I said, gesturing toward the room where my grandmother was sleeping.

  “Your mother gave me a name and a phone number. She didn’t tell me anything, just to call when…well.”

  “When she was dead,” I said.

  Stephen ignored that. “Anyway, I knew nothing really, nothing,” he mumbled.