An Arrangement of Skin

by Anna Journey

  A number of scholars and biographers have suggested that the nineteenth-century Danish author Hans Christian Andersen created an allegorical self-portrait of his bisexuality in the fairy tale “The Little Mermaid,” originally titled “The Daughters of the Air.” As early as 1907, Andersen’s biographer Hans Brix equated the Little Mermaid’s unrequited love for the prince with Andersen’s love for his male friend, Edvard Collin, who married a woman. Andersen wrote love poems to Collin and confessed, in a letter: “How I long for you, Edvard! I think the separation has turned my friendship into love.” Andrew Teverson suggests in Fairy Tale (2013) that “Andersen is the suffering half-half creature, unable to speak his love, but also unable to give it up.” Like the hybrid mermaid, who must choose between sea and land, body and spirit, Andersen must negotiate opposing geographic and existential realms: between the Odense of his childhood and the Copenhagen of his adult life, between erotic and literary fulfillment. Andersen, like his mermaid, strives to win the love of a man who can’t return his affections. According to Jackie Wullschlager’s biography, Hans Christian Andersen: The Life of a Storyteller (2000), Andersen couldn’t accept that the mermaid’s acquisition of an immortal soul depended on the reciprocal love of a man. He couldn’t bear to let her die and turn into nothingness—a layer of empty, golden foam floating on the surface of the sea. He revised his story so that even though the Little Mermaid doesn’t find happiness with her prince, she becomes one of the rare ethereal sprites called the “daughters of the air” who fly around doing good deeds for hundreds of years, eventually creating their own immortal souls. Wullschlager suggests that Andersen substituted his erotic desires with his literary ambition and longing for fame. Toward the end of his life, she notes, Andersen wrote to congratulate a young correspondent on his recent marriage, saying:

  “You have got yourself a home, a loving wife, and you are happy! God bless you and her! At one time I too dreamed of such happiness, but it was not to be granted to me. Happiness came to me in another form, came as my muse that gave me a wealth of adventure and songs.”

  What must’ve Andersen felt when Edvard Collin married Henriette Thyberg? He wrote to his friend: “My dear, dear Edvard—God bless and go with you!” He then evoked, in harrowing detail, the Little Mermaid’s anguish: every step she took on her new legs felt like “walking on knives.” Finally, Andersen rested beside his friend in death, when Collin granted the author’s wish: Collin, his wife, and Andersen were interred side by side, as a threesome. Years later, the bodies of the married couple were exhumed by relatives and buried in a family plot, leaving Andersen alone in the grave.

  “Never get sick on a Saturday,” my grandfather liked to say, “or a Sunday.” Holidays were out, too. Why, then, did he schedule his hernia operation for a weekend, when the regular full-time staff would be gone? He must’ve considered the surgery too routine to worry about. He didn’t know that the doctor would knick an artery; that the cavity of his chest would slowly fill with blood overnight; that by the time he rose in the dark, thinking the pressure in his gut meant he had to pee, he realized he was bleeding out. As he fell to the floor of his hospital bathroom he yanked the emergency lever.

  My grandfather died from the botched hernia operation when he was sixty-two, at least twenty years before he should have. He died when I was seven, when I was too young to know him. He should have lived into his eighties, like everyone else’s grandparents, Skyping with me from my dorm room and politely complimenting my maudlin early poems. He should have lived to see popular opinion about gay rights—and civil rights laws—change. I don’t know if the memories I have of him are actual ones or whether I remember the video footage of the taped Christmas visit I’ve watched dozens of times, the one in which my grandfather seems—to borrow my husband’s phrase—“elegant and kind.” There’s that mechanical Santa Claus he gave us who drives a red fire truck that blasts “Jingle Bells” as it crashes repeatedly into the bookcase. There’s our graceful, longhaired grey tabby—over twenty years gone—who stalks across the frame. There’s the slight West Texas drawl in the way he says my name. I’m afraid they may be memories of the video and not my own. I see myself—an impossible perspective—crouched under the green wire pine.

  Hans Christian Andersen was so phobic about being buried alive that he kept a note by his bedside: “I only appear to be dead.” This way, no one would stick him in a pine box and shovel six feet of dirt on him as he dozed. On his actual deathbed, at age seventy, he begged a close friend to do him a favor: after he died, please slash his veins, to make sure he wouldn’t wake up, alive, confined in a dark, airless coffin. Perhaps I visited the Museum of Death because of a similar sort of horror. Or maybe I remain furious at the museum’s subject. But what can I do with the severed head of the Bluebeard of Paris except stare? Or with lockets and pins stuffed with the hair of Victorians? What stories can these taxidermied albinos tell through their impossible tableau?

  Bluebeard’s wife Fatima remains silent after discovering his murderous secret. She says nothing at the party to her friends about what she’s seen in the forbidden chamber. Couldn’t someone have helped her? Why did she accept her fate and try to hide the key? My mother remained silent about her suspicions at the Christmas party she attended with her parents and my father in the early seventies. As she looked around the room, she realized every guest—save the ones in her party—was gay. She studied her father’s gestures as he stood next to Jim, Leslie playing piano, the many members of the local community theater group talking animatedly and clinking their drinks. Maybe he felt he didn’t need to say anything. Maybe he felt that cross the Ku Klux Klan once burned in his front yard in Jackson had said enough. Maybe he believed the truth would damage our family.

  I’m glad my mother shares with me her stories, especially the dark or surprising ones. They help me better understand my family, including the members whose lives overlapped only briefly—five years, seven years—with my own. I’m glad she was voted resident storyteller in her college social club. Since I can remember she’s been my resident storyteller, too. There isn’t an anecdote out there too terrifying or gruesome or scandalous. They’re our Tales of Mother Goose. There isn’t a forbidden door in the castle that she won’t unlock. Father Hanes’s Daughter. There’s a Bluebeard—or two—shifting shapes in the story, a grandfather who died, a tattoo artist hiding bodies in the secret chamber. Like the clever daughter in “Fitcher’s Bird,” I’d find those limbs, arrange them, and watch the fragments begin to resurrect and walk.