The Mermaid

by Christina Henry

  She had not told him of the child. Her belly did not yet indicate her daughter’s existence, and she wanted to keep the baby to herself for a while longer. It was selfish, but Amelia did not want to share her little mermaid with Levi just yet. Not when she’d dreamed so many secret dreams for so many years only to wake up barren.

  And, too, Amelia was afraid of what might happen if anyone else found out she was pregnant. The people who paid fifty cents to see her change from human to mermaid and then gaped at her in horror—what would they think if they knew the horror was breeding? Would they call for her extermination? Would they try to take her from Levi?

  No, it was safer for the time being to keep her child a secret, even from the child’s father.

  Whatever the reason for her anger and her restlessness and her general feeling of discontent, by the time they entered Charleston, Amelia was at the end of her endurance.

  Barnum had arranged for a man to go ahead of the wagon train and leave handbills advertising the program in every town and city. Charleston was large enough to justify an extended stay, and so Barnum booked several dates at the Masonic Hall. He wrote to Levi that he expected the crowds there to be numerous and regular, and that he was sending an indoor tank for Amelia (“at great expense,” Amelia noted) so they could duplicate their Concert Hall performance.

  The advertisement in the Charleston Courier showed a full-figured mermaid of the sort Barnum had told Amelia the public wanted. Amelia had been unable to convince Barnum that he should make the mermaids in his woodcuts more accurate—they still looked too human and not very much how she actually appeared.

  “The public isn’t interested in reality,” Barnum had said. “That’s not what we’re trying to sell them. If we were, you wouldn’t be the Feejee Mermaid.”

  Underneath the drawing was a paragraph that read,

  This grand, interesting and very cheap Exhibition, at Masonic Hall, embracing the most wonderful curiosity in the world, the MERMAID, and the ORNITHORYNOUS, OURANG OUTANG, &c., with FANCY GLASS BLOWING, by a most excellent ARTIST; together with a unique and astonishing entertainment on the stage, at 7 ½ clock P.M., consisting of Signor Veronia’s inimitable MECHANICAL FIGURES, representing human life; and VENTRILOQUISM and MAGIC by Mr. Wyman, who has scarce an equal in the world in his line. Admission to the whole, only 50 cents, children under 12 half-price.

  “Barnum has classified me with the animals again,” Amelia said after Levi read the advertisement aloud. It was no more than she expected. “It’s no wonder the audiences here treat me as they do.”

  She paced around the hotel room—another anonymous room, just like all the rooms she had been in all the other places—and felt like the tiger Barnum had once said she was. There was not enough space in a hotel for a wild thing. There was nothing like home anywhere. Levi’s apartment in New York, and their few days of happiness there, seemed so very far away.

  Levi put down the newspaper. She saw him gathering up his patience, the little lines of strain around his eyes. He’d felt the distance between them, too, and seemed just as incapable of bridging it. “Amelia. You are a performer. Frankly, performers aren’t accorded the same respect as ordinary women.”

  “And this means that I deserve their jeers and their derision?”

  “There are just as many folks who think you are a marvel,” he said. “It’s not all terrible, is it? Why would you do it otherwise?”

  “I hate it here,” she said, her misery bursting the dam of her silence. “I’ve had enough of traveling, enough of people reminding me that I am not the same as them. I’m tired of the way some of them treat me like the orangutan, too stupid to understand what they are saying. I’m tired of pretending I don’t have a voice. I want to go back to the sea, where I belong.”

  Levi stilled. “And what does that mean for me? What am I to do while my wife returns to the ocean?”

  Amelia stopped. She saw the hurt in his eyes, and she was sorry for that. She was sorry that there was so much distance between them that he thought she would leave him without a care. She was sorry that she wasn’t human enough to mend this.

  “I—” she began. She didn’t know what she would say, but she wanted to say something. She wanted them to be happy again. That happiness had been so fleeting.

  “I always knew this might happen,” Levi said quietly. “Your eyes . . . your eyes told me from the beginning that you could never belong to me. Always a part of you belonged only to yourself, and to the sea, and no matter what I said or did or wanted I could never touch that bit of you. I thought I could make you happy, like Jack did, make you want to stay here on the shore with me.”

  “Jack never had that part of me, either. He didn’t try to. He knew that was for me and me alone,” Amelia said. “But he loved the ocean, the same as I did, and we made our home halfway between sea and shore. This life . . . I can’t be happy with this. I thought I could, for your sake, for the dream that I used to have. But I can’t go on with this.”

  “And yet you told me that it was your choice,” Levi said, and she was sure she had never seen him so sad.

  “And yet you told me I could make another choice,” Amelia said, and she was equally sure his sadness would weigh on her heart forever.

  She went to him then, and took his hands, and forced him to look at her. “I don’t believe that we can be happy with Barnum’s shadow over us. Even when he’s not here, it’s as if he is looming, telling us what to do and how to do it.”

  “He’s not a monster,” Levi said, pulling his hands away from her.

  “Isn’t he?” she asked. “He wants to own and profit by everyone and everything around him.”

  “And we can profit by it, too,” Levi said, his sadness shifting to that impatient way his anger manifested itself. “We already have. That’s why you made this choice, isn’t it? Because you wanted money?”

  He said it so scathingly, as if he thought less of her for wanting, even briefly, the thing that so many humans seemed to crave.

  “I dreamed not of money but of a future,” Amelia said. “I thought I could live with humans, be a part of them. That’s why I came to New York. And you’re not to pretend that money has no meaning for you, else you would have returned to Pennsylvania to practice law a long time ago.”

  “You agreed to be Barnum’s mermaid,” Levi said. He clung to this idea, his face set. “For a period of six months, and your agreement is not expired yet.”

  “And a woman died,” Amelia said. “I nearly did, too. I should have left him then, after Elijah Hunt shot me for his God, and told Barnum that his contract didn’t mean anything to me.”

  “Don’t human contracts mean something to you?” Levi asked.

  He wasn’t asking about her agreement with Barnum. Of course he wasn’t. He wanted to know if their marriage certificate was waterproof.

  “I love you, Levi,” she said. “I am happy to be your wife. But I can’t stay Barnum’s mermaid and your wife, too. I need for this tour, these performances, to be over. Whatever we were both looking for—it wasn’t really money. It was magic, the promise of a life washed clean of our past. Barnum can’t give us that, but maybe we can give it to each other.”

  “I don’t think you are happy with me,” he said. “I’ve watched you, you know. I’ve seen your face, that face I once thought as deep and dark and unfathomable as the ocean. You can’t hide the way you feel anymore, not from me. I’m not the man you wanted me to be.”

  “Levi, it’s only all this that’s making me unhappy,” Amelia cried. “It’s not you. It’s not.”

  “I’ll write to Barnum,” Levi said, as if he hadn’t heard her. His eyes had gone someplace cold and far away. “I’ll tell him that after Charleston you will leave the tour. Barnum will make such a fuss over the cost of the hall and the tank otherwise. If he wants to continue with a mermaid exhibition he can always send Moses�
��s mummy out. That was the idea in the first place. We never thought we’d come upon a real mermaid.”

  “And then?” Amelia asked.

  “And then you will be free—from Barnum, from me, from life as a human. You can be free to go to the ocean, where you will be happy,” he said. “I only ever wanted you to be happy.”

  Amelia couldn’t believe she was hearing this. Had he heard nothing she said? She didn’t want to leave him, only Barnum.

  “It will make me happy to stay with you,” she said, trying to show him with her eyes what was in her heart. “I have loved so many things about you—your kindness, the way you try so hard to make me laugh, the way I feel when you hold me. I love you and I have never lied to you. I’ve never lied to anyone, not even when I was the Feejee Mermaid, for I’ve never had to tell the lies Barnum spun. Why will you not listen to me when I speak? Why will you not understand?”

  “I understand better than you think,” Levi said.

  “No, your pride is hurt,” Amelia said. “And because your pride is hurt you’ve decided what’s best, and what’s best is for me to leave so that you stop hurting.”

  “I’ll write to Barnum,” he said, and left the room.

  She followed him out. He heard her footsteps in the hall behind him and turned back.

  “Go back inside,” he said.

  “No,” she said.

  “Shhh. Someone might hear you,” he said, taking her by the wrist.

  She wrenched away from him. “I don’t care. This fiction of my being unable to speak is ridiculous. If you leave I will follow you. I will shout and scream and cause a scene until you come back inside this room and understand what you mean to me.”

  His face reddened as he realized she was in earnest. He was imagining the fuss, the scene, the people staring at him. “I’ll come back inside, and we will speak quietly about this.”

  “If I want to speak loudly I will,” Amelia said. “You can’t stop me.”

  “No,” he said, his façade of calm breaking. He slammed the door shut behind them. “I can’t stop you from doing anything you don’t want to. Barnum always said it, and I thought it was funny when it was him you had twisting.”

  “I don’t belong to you,” Amelia said. “You thought if I married you that I would, but I don’t. I don’t belong to any man—not to Jack, not to Barnum, not to you. I only belong to myself. But belonging to myself doesn’t mean I don’t love you or that I don’t want to stand beside you.”

  “You don’t understand human marriages,” Levi said. “A woman is supposed to cleave to her husband, to trust him to make the best decisions for her.”

  Amelia took a deep breath. “You’re right. If that’s the way you want us to live then I should leave. But if you don’t—if you can see things my way—then I want to stay with you. I want to be your partner, not your possession.”

  His face contracted, and she saw so many emotions pass there for an instant and then disappear—anger, and pride, and confusion, and longing. Finally it settled into a deep, deep sadness.

  “I don’t want to live without you,” he said.

  It cost him something to admit it, she could tell. He was giving up some wrongheaded notion he’d had of her, some human idea of a woman that had lodged in his brain.

  “I was dazzled by you the first time I saw you on that cliff, dazzled by your difference, the way you were unlike anyone I’d ever seen. I have loved everything in you, everything that made you not human—the way you never back away from an argument, the way you look so clearly into my eyes and expect me to meet you there. I didn’t marry a human woman. I forgot that, for a little while.”

  “Then isn’t our love more important than your pride?” she asked, and she felt something in her pleading for him to say yes. “Isn’t it? We can be happy. I know we can.”

  “I don’t know if we can,” Levi said. “But I want to try.”

  She went to him then, and the space between them dissolved, and though there wasn’t any joy yet, she thought there could be. They had only to seek it together.

  “I’ll write to Barnum,” Levi said. “After Charleston it will all be over.”

  CHAPTER 15

  The first sign of trouble was the editorial in the Charleston Courier. It didn’t seem a portent at the time, Levi thought later, for the review of the exhibit was primarily positive.

  “‘The natural curiosities too are well worth a visit from the curious and scientific—and most curious among them is the Fee-jee beauty—the mermaid, hitherto believed to be of fabulous existence,’” Levi read aloud. “He called you a beauty.”

  Amelia shrugged. “I’m sure his opinion isn’t widely shared, but Barnum will be happy if it brings more people to the exhibit.”

  Levi continued. “‘We, of course, cannot undertake to say whether this seeming wonder of nature be real or not, it not being in our power to apply to it any scientific test of truth; but this we deem it but just to say, that we were permitted to handle and examine it as closely as could be effected by touch and sight, and that if there be any deception, it is beyond the discovery of both those senses.’”

  Amelia frowned. “He’s lying. He never touched me, nor would he be allowed to. No one is even permitted to approach the tank.”

  “I believe he’s trying to convince anyone who doubts you exist to come and see the exhibit,” Levi said. “And he’s trying to establish at least some degree of scientific credibility, and perhaps an impression that as the editor of this newspaper he is afforded special privileges.”

  “Are there still people who don’t believe I’m a real mermaid?” Amelia asked, her voice full of surprise. “Anyone who has seen the exhibit has to believe at least that much. I can’t believe anyone thinks I’m a hoax.”

  “I’m not certain,” Levi said, frowning. “I didn’t think that doubt would be a concern at this late date. But perhaps the people of Charleston are more skeptical than their northern neighbors.”

  “I suppose I would rather have them doubt me than cast me as a woman of sin,” Amelia said. She sighed and took his hand. “I will be relieved when this fiction is over.”

  Levi had written to Barnum of their decision to leave the tour. Amelia had written—or rather, dictated to Levi what she wished to say—to Charity separately, for she felt that if Barnum made difficulties, Charity would smooth them over. There had been no reply from either; Levi had assured her that this was not unusual and that occasionally it did take quite a long time to receive mail and even longer to get some back.

  Privately he worried that Barnum would take the first available conveyance to Charleston and attempt to force Amelia to stay on the tour. This couldn’t have a good outcome for anyone, and Levi didn’t need Barnum wading into his marriage with Amelia and disrupting their fragile peace. They were both, he thought, trying so hard to mend what had been broken—to make an effort to meet each other halfway, to be patient even when they didn’t want to be, to show each other that they loved each other instead of just saying it.

  They spoke often of where they might go to live—a quiet place near the ocean, away from reporters and crowds and any pressure Barnum might be tempted to use to convince Amelia to come back.

  “What about Fiji?” Amelia asked.

  “That doesn’t seem wise,” Levi said. “If you disappear from Barnum’s show, the first place anyone will think to inquire of you is the place where you are supposed to be from.”

  “But I thought you said it’s far away,” Amelia said. “Very far away, and that it would take many, many months to get there by ship.”

  “It is,” Levi acknowledged. “That would make the trip difficult for me, if not for you. I don’t like boats.”

  “You don’t?” She looked startled.

  He laughed. “I never told you how awful it was for me to travel by boat to see you in Maine. The rocking of
the ocean made me sick nearly the whole time.”

  Amelia frowned. “I’ve never known anyone made sick by the ocean.”

  “You lived near a village of fishermen, love,” he said. “Anyone made ill by the sea would be unlikely to stay there.”

  “What about one of the other islands on the map near Fiji?” Amelia asked.

  “Why this sudden desire to go to an island?” Levi asked. “I thought perhaps we could live somewhere along the coast, in some place where I could be a country lawyer and you could visit the ocean as you did in Maine.”

  “I’m afraid to stay here,” Amelia said. “I’m afraid that a reporter will find me, or another madman like Elijah Hunt. If we live on an island far away it won’t matter that they all think I’m from Fiji. No one is likely to travel so far simply to find me again. Even madness has its limits.”

  Levi wasn’t so certain, but he had to acknowledge it was unlikely. Still, the idea of a months-long journey to an island in the Pacific did not appeal. Just the thought of that much time on a ship made him feel queasy. But he wasn’t inclined to argue with Amelia again, so he helped her look up the names of different islands and they read about them together and discussed their various merits.

  “Ra-ro-ton-ga,” Amelia pronounced carefully, as they studied a map of the Cook Islands. “I like the sound of that place. It sounds like music.”

  “It’s nearly as far away as Fiji,” Levi said.

  “No it’s not; it’s a whole thumb closer,” Amelia said, placing her digit between Fiji and Rarotonga. “Particularly if you go around South America.”

  Levi hoped that if they went so far they would go around South America rather than around Africa. He couldn’t imagine anything more terrible than having to cross the entirety of the Atlantic first, and then the Pacific, too.

  Secretly he still hoped to convince Amelia to stay somewhere in the United States, but he thought he would wait to mention this until after they had left the tour. She still seemed fragile, like she might bolt away at any moment.