The Seduction of Water

by Carol Goodman

  “After all,” she said, “I knew you when you were a baby.”

  When I finally locate the number it’s an industrial building, an old warehouse. I ring the buzzer and struggle with the heavy, steel door. I have to ring three times before I’m able to get it open.

  The bottom floor is unfinished industrial space—something you don’t see too much of anymore in the city. The ground floor of Jack’s loft looked like this ten years ago, but now it’s a South American furniture store. I notice in the dim recesses of this cavernous space a massive floor scale with an enormous grappling hook hanging above it. An image of the white carcasses I’d seen on the street comes briefly to mind, but of course the space is empty here. Instead of the smell of blood from the street there’s the faintest whiff of coffee beans. To the right a flight of stairs climbs steeply up to a steel door.

  I start up the stairs, which are corrugated iron, rusted in spots so that you can see through to the floor below. So far this isn’t at all what I thought the famous Hedda Wolfe’s home would look like. I’d expected something tweedy and book-lined—a town house in Chelsea with flower boxes and first editions in the built-in bookcases.

  I knock on the metal door and hear that instantly recognizable voice call “Come.” Like the captain of a ship, I think, turning the knob.

  The space I enter is somewhat shiplike. Maybe it’s the enormous floor-to-ceiling half-moon windows that give the impression that you’re standing on the deck of a luxury liner, or the shifting light that undulates along the pale green walls like the reflection of water in an underground cavern—only here the effect comes not from water but from branches moving outside the opaque window. A long low backless couch runs under the windows, a few feet out from the wall, like something you would perch on for a moment to admire the paintings—or in this case, the viewless windows.

  On the opposite wall there’s a row of straight-backed metal chairs. I imagine they’re pulled into a circle when she holds her workshop.

  At the far end of all this shifting light sits Hedda Wolfe behind a wide desk, an almost empty expanse of some kind of green-black stone beneath another half-moon window, this one glazed with clear glass instead of frosted. Only when I step forward does she stand and come out from behind the desk to greet me. I have a feeling she’s used to guests pausing, disoriented, on her threshold.

  I walk across the wide-planked floor, my hand out to shake hers, but remember, only when she lifts both her hands and lightly touches my arms just above the elbows with her fingertips, that I once heard that Hedda Wolfe has severe arthritis—so severe she can’t shake hands. Deprived of the conventional greeting I stand still as she studies me with her large, slightly hooded gray eyes.

  If I hadn’t heard her voice, I’d doubt this was the woman I spoke to on the phone. I’m not sure what I’ve been expecting. Talons, perhaps? Gloria Swanson in Sunset Boulevard? Certainly not this slight, elegant woman with chin-length silver hair, pale violet silk dress, and ladylike pearls at her throat and earlobes.

  “Yes,” she says, her soft, crumpled hands fluttering down from my arms. “I can see Kay in you, and Ben too. I was sorry,” she says, still holding my gaze, “to hear about your father last year. I wrote to Sophie and asked her to convey my sympathies to you. But perhaps . . . well, at any rate, I am sorry. He was a fine man, your father. A prince.”

  She holds my gaze another moment, long enough to see my eyes well up, and then gestures for me to be seated in one of the two armchairs in front of the desk while she takes the other one.

  “So tell me about this book. What made you decide to write it? Why now?”

  “I’m not sure,” I tell her honestly. “I started thinking about that story my mother used to tell me—the selkie story—and I used it for an assignment with my classes. I was surprised at how powerfully my students reacted to the idea of retelling the fairy tales they’d heard as children . . .” I pause for a moment, thinking of Gretchen Lu’s maimed hands, and realize I’m staring at Hedda’s hands, which lie, palms up, in her lap, curled in on themselves like a piece of knitting that’s been stitched too tightly. I quickly look up into Hedda’s face, surprising a look of impatience in her eyes.

  “So it’s not that you’ve found any new material? Letters . . . or a manuscript?” She leans toward me, her hands stirring in her lap as if grasping at something, but I remind myself that it’s only her arthritis that make them seem like a witch’s claws. I can see, though, why people are afraid of her. It occurs to me that she’s the last person I’d like to have read anything I’d written. That sudden conviction gives me the nerve to be honest.

  “To tell you the truth, I’m not sure I even want to write about my mother. Or that I can write about her. I don’t know that much about her. She never talked about her childhood, or family, or anything that happened to her before the day she showed up at the Hotel Equinox with her one suitcase . . .”

  “No,” Hedda says, leaning back, the expression on her face softening. “Kay would never talk about her life before she came to the hotel. Not to anyone.”

  I shrug. “Maybe there wasn’t much to tell. Maybe she had a boring life and that’s why she created a fantasy world. Tirra Glynn. A magical land populated by changelings and shape-shifters.”

  “Exactly.” Hedda Wolfe leans forward again in her chair, her eyes gleaming with interest. It’s almost thrilling to feel that intelligence trained on me and I imagine this must be the flip side to her harshness—to excite her approbation must feel like having the sun shine on you. She lifts her hands from her lap and tries to interlace her fingers, but they splay limply on the folds of her silk dress.

  “Exactly what?” I whisper, more than a little horrified and ashamed. Those hands. It strikes me how awful it is that this woman who has spent her life nurturing writers probably can’t even hold a pen.

  “Changelings. Shape-shifters. I think Kay left behind a life when she arrived at the Hotel Equinox. It’s as if she sprang into existence there: twenty-five years old on a summer day in 1949. She made herself up like one of her own characters. But whatever she was fleeing from kept coming up in her books. That’s why she didn’t want the second one published.”

  “She didn’t want the second one published?” I repeat stupidly. The idea of anyone not wanting their book published is so foreign to me I know I must be gaping openmouthed.

  “Truthfully, she didn’t want the first one published either. Didn’t your father ever tell you?”

  I shake my head. After my mother left I tried not to bring her up in my father’s presence; it was too painful to see the look in his eyes at the mention of her name.

  “He’s the one who showed me her first book. I stayed at the hotel every summer with my grandmother and then in my twenties—when I had my first job at a literary agency—I’d still come up on weekends. Your mother always fascinated me. She was . . . so beautiful, even when she was still a maid, you’d come into your room and find her making your bed and you felt like you were the intruder. And when she married your father . . . well, even the guests—the regular ones who’d been coming for years—attended the ceremony in the rose garden. It was like a fairy tale, you knew she was someone special, and when I heard she spent the winters writing I just had to see what she wrote. I asked your father and he showed me the draft of her first book.”

  “Without telling her?”

  “Yes. I’m afraid I talked him into it. I told him she was probably just afraid it wasn’t any good and that no one would want to publish it. But that wasn’t it at all.”

  “But she had to agree to let it be published . . .”

  “Of course, but by the time she knew I’d gotten ahold of it I’d secured an offer from a publisher for what seemed like a lot of money back then. How could she turn it down? They needed the money . . .”

  “For me? Because she was going to have a baby?”

  Hedda Wolfe lifts one of her crumpled hands to her brow to shade her eyes from the sun and stare
s at me. “Darling, that was years before you were born. But yes, because she thought she was having a baby. That was the first miscarriage, I believe . . .”

  My mouth is suddenly dry. This is the first time I’ve ever heard of a miscarriage, but then, who would have told me?

  “The first?” I ask.

  “Didn’t you know? She had two before she had you. You have no idea how thrilled she was when you were born. We were all so happy for her.”

  “You mean you didn’t disapprove . . .”

  Hedda laughs, the first time I’ve heard her laugh, and the sound takes me by surprise, it’s so unexpectedly light. “Why in the world would I disapprove? I was thrilled for her and, frankly, from a selfish perspective, I thought it would keep her from flying off. You always had the feeling with Kay that she could be gone any second, like some shy woodland creature that was ready to bolt. I wanted her to stay put and write her books, which she did . . . at least for a while.”

  “But she wasn’t able to finish the third book.”

  “No? But she was still writing, wasn’t she?”

  I look out the window behind her desk where sycamore branches scrape the glass. That first tender green of spring is turning darker on the branches; a sparrow forages in the leaves for seeds. I remember the dream I had of my mother as a large bird tearing her own feathers out to feed into the cagelike typewriter, the tapping sound that followed me down the halls.

  “Yes, she still wrote in the guest rooms on the hotel stationery . . .” I notice that Hedda smiles at this, as if it’s an endearing trait she remembered. “. . . and I remember hearing her typing . . . but years went by and no book appeared.”

  “That doesn’t mean she didn’t write it. I have reason to think that she did finish the third book.”

  “But how would you know? I thought you and she had argued . . .” I hadn’t meant to bring up their argument, but I’m past thinking I can direct the course of this conversation. Clearly, Hedda Wolfe has held the reins all along.

  “Ben told me. We still talked. He was worried about her . . . she’d disappeared several times and seemed distracted. He said that she had finished the third book, but that she didn’t want to publish it. Of course she’d said that before and relented and she’d seemed more peaceful after each book came out. Ben thought that if I could convince her to publish the last book she might attain some sort of closure on whatever she was afraid of. He was able to convince Kay to speak with me on the phone. She told me I might not like the third book but she agreed that I could see it when she was done. She was going to bring it with her into the city when she went to that conference, only she never made it there.”

  “If she had it with her it would have burned in the fire. We’ll never know . . .”

  Hedda Wolfe shakes her head impatiently. “She always made a carbon copy. Ben said he couldn’t find it; I think she hid it before she left for the city.”

  “And you think it’s somewhere at the hotel.” I can’t hide the disappointment in my voice. This is what the great Hedda Wolfe wants with me: a finder for my mother’s lost manuscript. I should be excited, I suppose, over the idea that such a manuscript exists. Haven’t I spent my whole life poring over my mother’s two novels, trying to decipher from her mythic fantasy tale some message for me? And always I’d felt right on the brink, as if the winged men and half-aquatic women would suddenly spring off the page and tell me why my mother left me when I was ten years old to meet a strange man in a hotel and die there. But if the first two books have failed to answer this question, why should I believe that a third would?

  “I thought you might have already found it,” Hedda says. “That’s why the title of your essay struck me so forcibly. It’s what your mother was calling the last book in her trilogy: The Selkie’s Daughter.”

  Chapter Ten

  I am too preoccupied thinking about all I learned in Hedda Wolfe’s office to teach that night, so I tell my Grace students to write a five-paragraph essay on “What the New Millennium Means to Me.” I know that later, when I have to add twenty new essays to my stack of ungraded papers, I’ll regret giving the assignment, but at least it buys me time to stare out the window at the stream of traffic inching toward the Lincoln Tunnel while I try to sort out what I’m feeling.

  I should be overjoyed. Not only have I signed my first contract with an agent—a renowned agent, no less—I’ve learned two pieces of information about my mother that should relieve at least some of the burden I’ve been laboring under all these years. The first bit of knowledge is that my mother was happy to have a child. I’d always imagined that she’d avoided having a child for as long as she did (how many women of her generation waited until they were thirty-eight to have their first child?) because she thought motherhood would interfere with her writing. But if what Hedda Wolfe told me is true and my mother had two miscarriages before giving birth to me, then she must have wanted a child all along.

  The second piece of information seems even more important: my mother finished the third book in the Tirra Glynn trilogy. I’ve always believed that my mother wasn’t able to finish her third book because of me. All those times I followed her down the hall, picking up the stray pages she would drop, and later, listening for the sound of typing so I could trace it to its source . . . I couldn’t leave her alone. I tracked her down wherever she was—no wonder she wrote in so many different rooms!—to demand a game, a story, her time, her attention. She would look up from the page or the typewriter and for a moment—just a moment—her eyes would be blank. As if she’d forgotten who I was. The next moment she would look sorry and give in to my demands—especially the ones for a story. She must have felt guilty for that initial lack of recognition—how could a mother forget her own child!—and I learned to take advantage of that guilt even though no amount of attention—and all the stories in the world—could ever completely make up for that moment when I didn’t exist in her eyes.

  I shiver and Mr. Nagamora offers to close the window. I look out at my class and notice that most of them have finished. Only Mrs. Rivera is still frantically scribbling into a spiral notebook.

  “You can go if you’re done,” I tell the class. “Don’t forget to finish Rodriguez’s The Hunger of Memory for next week.”

  I turn my back on the class to wrestle the window shut. I’m trying to discourage stragglers. I just don’t feel up to conversation tonight, the excuses for late papers from the poor students, the small talk and questions from the good ones. When I turn around, though, Mrs. Rivera is still there and when she looks up from her notebook I can see from her swollen and red-rimmed eyes that she’s been crying.

  “Mrs. Rivera,” I say, “what is it? What’s wrong.”

  Mrs. Rivera takes out a flowered handkerchief and blows her nose. “I’m sorry, Professor, I don’t mean to bring my troubles to you.”

  I come around my desk and sit in the chair next to Mrs. Rivera’s. I try to sit sideways so I can face her, but the attached desktop makes that impossible. I swivel the whole desk and chair around, feeling clumsy and loud, while Mrs. Rivera takes large gulps of air, struggling to control the tears.

  “It’s okay.” I fold her hand between mine. Although she’s about the same age as I am her hands feel leathery. I can feel the calluses and the roughness—the maids who worked in the laundry always had hands like this and I remember Mrs. Rivera saying she used to work in a hotel.

  “Is it the class, Mrs. Rivera? You’re doing fine, you know. Your last paper—the one on ‘Rapunzel’—showed a big improvement. Only two sentence fragments and one run-on. I’m sure you’ll pass the final.” I’m really not sure at all but I’m desperate to halt her tears before they get to me. Already I can feel a sympathetic tightening at the back of my throat.

  “No, it’s not the class, Professor Greenfeder”—she pronounces my name fedder so that it sounds like what it means in German: green feather—“your class is the only thing going right for me now. It’s all my fault. I was having su
ch a good time last week at the art show you took us all to—you know you’re the only teacher here who does those kind of things for us and really cares about us . . .”

  I wince, thinking of my own selfish motives for taking the class to the gallery last week.

  “. . . so it’s not your fault at all.”

  “What’s not my fault?”

  “Getting fired from my job. The Rosenbergs have let me go.”

  “Just for getting back late? That’s awful! Look, can I write them a note, or call them . . .”

  Mrs. Rivera shakes her head. “They said they smelled liquor on my breath—I only had one glass of wine, Professor, I swear it to you, I don’t even like to drink. They’ve already gotten a replacement and told the children. They won’t change their minds after they’ve told the children. They never go back on their word once they’ve told the children.”

  Every time she says the word children Mrs. Rivera’s chin wobbles and yet she seems to purposely repeat the word as if to inure herself to the memory of her former wards. She’s lost not only a job but her connection to children she’s taken care of for several years now. And at least partly because of me.

  “Let me at least try to talk to them—I mean, just because they’ve told the children one thing doesn’t mean they can’t change their minds.”

  “Oh no, they say going back on a decision would destroy their . . . how do you say . . . creer?”