The Drowning Girl

by Caitlin R. Kiernan

  “Gave you the willies?” she asked, smiling. “No one actually says that, you know.”

  “I do,” I replied, and flicked her lightly, playfully, on the left shoulder, as I was sitting on her left. She pretended that it had hurt and made faces. I continued, “They gave me the willies, and I went home and locked my doors and slept with all the lights burning that night. But I didn’t have bad dreams. I looked for them again the next night, and the night after that, but I haven’t ever seen them again.”

  “Were you homeschooled?” she asked me, which annoyed me since it had nothing to do with what I’d seen that night in the park.

  “Why?”

  “If you were, it might explain why you use old-fashioned words like fancied and willies.”

  “I wasn’t,” I said. “I went to public schools, here in Providence and in Cranston. I hated it, usually, and I wasn’t a very good student. I barely made it through my senior year, and it’s a miracle I graduated.”

  Abalyn said, “I hated high school, for reasons that ought to be obvious, but was a pretty good student. Had it not been for most of the other students, I might have loved it. But I did well. I aced my SATs, even got a partial scholarship to MIT.”

  “You went to MIT?”

  “No. I went to the University of Rhode Island, down in Kingston—”

  “I know where URI is.”

  “—because the scholarship was only a partial scholarship, and my folks didn’t have the rest of the money.”

  She shrugged again. It used to irritate me, the way Abalyn was always shrugging. Like she was indifferent, or stuff didn’t get to her, when I knew damned well it did. She’d wanted to attend MIT and study computer science and artificial intelligence, but instead she’d gone to URI and studied bioinformatics, which she explained was a new branch of information technology (she said “IT”) that tries to visually analyze very large sets of biological data—she gave DNA microarrays and sequences as examples. I was never any good with biology, but I looked this stuff up. Bioinformatics, I mean.

  I stared at the ground a moment, at my feet. “There must be good money in that,” I said. “But, instead, you write reviews of video games for not much money at all.”

  “I do something I’m passionate about, like you and painting. I was never passionate about bioinformatics. It was just something to do, so I could say I went to college. It meant a lot to me, and more to my parents, because neither of them had.”

  Katharine Hepburn said something like, “Do what interests you, and at least one person is happy.”

  There was a breeze then, a warm breeze that smelled like freshly mowed lawns and hot asphalt, and I suggested we should head back. Abalyn caught me peering at the place beneath the chestnuts and oaks where I’d seen the not-nuns, not-raven people, and she leaned over and kissed me on the right temple. It was confusing, because the kiss made me feel safe, but letting my eyes linger at the spot below the trees, that sent a shudder through me.

  “Hey, Imp,” she said. “Now I owe you one.”

  “How do you mean?” I said, standing, straightening my shirt, smoothing out the wrinkles. “What do you owe me?”

  “Tit for tat. You told me a creepy story, now I owe you one. Not right now, but later. I’ll tell you about the time me and some friends got stoned and broke into the old railroad tunnel beneath College Hill.”

  “You don’t have to do that. You don’t owe me anything. It was just a story I’ve never told anyone else.”

  “All the same,” she said, and then we walked back up Willow Street to the apartment. Just now, I almost typed “my apartment,” but it was fast becoming our apartment. While I made dinner in the comfort of the butter-yellow kitchen, she played something noisy with lots of gunfire and car crashes.

  If there are going to be chapters, this one ends here. I’ve been neglecting a painting, and I’ve got extra hours at work this week, so I may not get back to it—the ghost story—for a while, and the thought of leaving a chapter unfinished makes me uncomfortable.

  3

  Returning, briefly, to the subject of Phillip George Saltonstall and The Drowning Girl, before returning to Eva Canning and that maybe-night in July. I’ve written that I first saw the painting on the occasion of my eleventh birthday, which is both true and factual. I was born in 1986, and am now twenty-four years old, so that year was 1997. So, that August, the painting was ninety-nine years old. Which makes it 112 at the present, and means that it was 110 the summer I first met Eva Canning. It’s odd how numbers have always comforted me, despite my being terrible at mathematics. I’ve already filled these pages with a plethora of numbers (mostly dates): 1914, 1898, #316, 1874, 1900, 1907, 1894, 1886, & etc. Perhaps there’s some secret I’ve unconsciously hidden in all these numbers, but, if so, I’ve lost or never had the codex to riddle it out.

  Dr. Ogilvy suspects that my fondness of dates may be an expression of arithmomania. And, in fairness to her, I should add that during my teens and early twenties, when my insanity included a great many symptoms attributable to obsessive-compulsive disorder, I had dozens upon dozens of elaborate counting rituals. I could not get through a day without keeping careful track of all my footsteps, or the number of times I chewed and swallowed. Often, it was necessary for me to dress and undress some precise number of times (the number was usually, but not always, thirty) before leaving the house. In order to take a shower, I would have to turn the water on and off seventeen times, step in and out of the tub or shower stall seventeen times, pick up the soap and put it down again seventeen times. And so forth. I did my best to keep these rituals a secret, and I was deeply, privately ashamed of them. I can’t say why, why I was ashamed, but I was afraid, and I lived in constant dread that Aunt Elaine or someone else would discover them. For that matter, if I had been asked at the time to explain why I found them necessary, I would’ve been hard-pressed to come up with an answer. I could only have said that I was convinced that unless I did these things, something truly horrible would happen.

  Always it has seemed to me that arithmomania is simply (no, not simply, but still) the normal human propensity for superstition to run amok in the mind. A phenomenon that might seem only backwards or silly when expressed at a social level becomes madness at the individual level. The Japanese fear of the number four, for example. Or the widespread belief that thirteen is unlucky, sinister, evil. Christians who find special significance in the number twelve, because there were twelve apostles. And so forth.

  On my eleventh birthday, the painting was ninety-nine years old, and I wouldn’t begin any serious research into it until I was sixteen, at which point it had aged to one hundred and four (11. 99. 16. 104). I’d hardly thought about The Drowning Girl in the years since I first set eyes on it. Hardly at all. And when it reentered my life, it did so—seemingly—by nothing more than happenstance. It seemed so then. I’m not sure if it seems so any longer. The arrival of Eva may have changed coincidence to something else. I begin to imagine orchestration where before I heard only the cacophony of randomness. Crazy people do that all the time, unless you buy into the notion that we have the ability to perceive order and connotation in ways closed off to the minds of “sane” people. I don’t. Subscribe to that notion, I mean. We are not gifted. We are not magical. We are slightly or profoundly broken. Of course, that’s not what Eva said.

  All my life, I have loved visiting the Athenaeum on Benefit Street. Rosemary and Caroline took me there more often than the central branch of the Providence Public Library downtown (150 Empire Street). The Athenaeum, like so much of Providence, exists out of time, preservationists having seen that it slipped through the cracks while progress steamrolled so much of the city into sleek modernity. Today, the Athenaeum isn’t so very different than in the days when Edgar Allan Poe and Sarah Helen Whitman courted among the stacks. Built in the manner of the Greek Revival, the library’s present edifice was finished in 1838 (sixty years before Saltonstall painted The Drowning Girl), though the Athenaeum
was founded in 1753. (Note the repetition of eight—at eighteen or twenty-two I would have been helpless to do otherwise—1 + 7 equaling 8; 5 + 3 equaling 8; 8 + 8 equaling 16, which divided by 2 equals 8; full circle.) I couldn’t begin to imagine how many hours I’ve spent wandering between those tall shelves and narrow aisles, or lost in some volume or another in the reading room on the lowermost floor. Housed there within its protective shell of pale stone, the library seems as precious and frail as a nonagenarian. Its smell is the musty commingling fragrance of yellowing pages and dust and ancient wood. To me, the smells of comfort and safety. It smells sacred.

  On a rainy day in the eighth month of 2002, on the twenty-eighth day of August, I pulled from the shelves in the Athenaeum a book published in 1958, written by an art historian named Dolores Evelyn Smithfield—A Concise History of New England Painters and Illustrators (1958 + a name with eight syllables + I was 16 = 2 × 8). Somehow, I’d never before noticed the book. I took it back to one of the long tables, and was only flipping casually through the pages when I happened across eight paragraphs about Saltonstall and a black-and-white reproduction of The Drowning Girl. I sat and stared at it for a very long time, listening to the rain against the roof and windows, to thunder far away, the footsteps overhead. I noted that the painting appeared on page 88. I used to carry loose-leaf notebooks with me everywhere I went, and an assortment of pens and pencils in a pink plastic box, and that afternoon I wrote down everything Smithfield had written about The Drowning Girl. It doesn’t amount to much. Here’s the most interesting part:

  Though best remembered, when he is remembered at all, for his landscapes, one of Saltonstall’s best-known works is The Drowning Girl (1898), which may have been inspired by a certain piece of folklore encountered in northwestern Rhode Island and southern Massachusetts, along a short stretch of the Black Stone [sic] River. A common local yarn involves the murder of a mill owner’s daughter at the hands of a jealous fiancé, who then attempted to dispose of her body by tying stones about the corpse and sinking it in the narrow granite channel of the old Millville Lock. Some accounts have the murderer dropping the dead girl from the Triad Bridge, where the river is especially deep and wide. Tradition has it that the girl’s ghost haunts the river from Millville to Uxbridge, and possibly as far south as Woonsocket, Rhode Island. She is said to have been heard singing to herself along the banks and in the neighboring woods, and some claim she’s responsible for a number of drownings.

  We can be quite certain that the artist was well enough aware of the legend, as he notes in a letter to Mary Farnum, “Perhaps I will catch sight of her myself on some evening, as I sit sketching my studies. Sadly, I’ve not yet encountered anything more exciting than a deer and a blacksnake.” While this is hardly irrefutable evidence that he named his painting for the grisly tale, it appears too much to dismiss as coincidence. Could it be that Saltonstall meant to capture a careless swimmer moments before a fateful encounter with the ghost of “the drowning girl”? It seems a reasonable enough conclusion, and one that settles the question for this author.

  That same day…well, that night, I managed (much to my surprise!) to find the envelope that Rosemary Anne had made notes on all those years before, on my eleventh birthday, in the presence of the painting that had seemed like a window to me. The next day, I returned to the Athenaeum and prowled through volume after volume of Massachusetts and Rhode Island folklore, hoping to come across anything more about the story of “the drowning girl.” For hours, I found nothing at all, and was about to give up, when I finally discovered an account of the legend in A Treasury of New England Folklore by Benjamin A. Botkin (New York: Bonanza Books, 1965). Here is an excerpt, and an excerpt I found later, in another book:

  A far more malevolent spirit is said to haunt the Blackstone River near the village of Millville. Ask almost anyone in the area, and you may be regaled with the tragic story of a young woman saddled with the good Puritan name of Perishable Shippen. Murdered by her father and tossed into the river, the restless, vengeful ghost of Perishable is said to wander the riverbed, often seizing the feet and legs of unwary bathers and pulling them down to their doom in the murky green waters. Others claim that you can hear the ghost singing to herself on summer evenings, and that her voice is beautiful, but has been known to lure melancholic souls to commit suicide by jumping from railroad and highway bridges, or even flinging themselves from the steep walls of the gorge just upriver of Millville. The story appears to date back at least to the 1830s, a thriving “protoindustrial” time when Millville was the site of grist, fulling, corn, and sawmills, along with a scythe manufacturer. To this day, teenage boys looking to spook their girlfriends often visit the old railroad trestle over the river on the night of the full moon hoping to catch sight of the “Siren of Millville.”

  Also, I found:

  There’s a folk tradition among some residents of the towns along the Blackstone that many years ago, something from the sea became trapped in the river. The tale usually involves a hurricane and/or a flood, though the details often vary wildly from one teller to the next. Few seem to agree on which disaster was responsible, or how far in the past the event occurred. Variously, the tale invokes the Great Hurricane of 1938, the Saxby Gale of 1869, the Norfolk and Long Island Hurricane of 1821, flooding in February 1886, and again in 1955. But most followed more familiar folktale conventions and would only agree it happened many decades ago, or when they were young or before they were born, or when their great-grandparents were young.

  As to what entered the river and remains there to this day, accounts can be divided into the prosaic and the fantastic. The former category includes a shark or several sharks, a sea turtle, a seal, a giant squid, a huge eel, and a dolphin. The latter includes a mermaid, the ghost of a woman (usually a suicide) who drowned in Narragansett Bay, a sea serpent, and, in one instance, a wayward selkie whose sealskin was stolen by a whaler. Yet all agree on two points: the creature or being has caused injury, mishap, and death, and that it originated in the sea. The man who insisted the imprisoned thing was a conger eel claimed that it had been caught and killed when he was a child. He consistently mispronounced conger as conjure.

  (from Weird Massachusetts by William Linblad

  [Worcester: Grey Gull Press, 1986])

  As with my file on “Little Red Riding Hood,” I have a thick file on the haunting of the Blackstone River containing almost everything I’ve been able to learn about it over the last eight years. Before and after I met Eva Canning—both times, if, indeed, there were two meetings. The file tab was originally labeled “Perishable Shippen,” though Botkin’s is the only account of the legend that grants the murdered woman that name. I’ve never shown the file to Abalyn, though I think now that I should have. That’s one more mistake I made, keeping that history to myself (though, of course, Abalyn believed she’d uncovered her own “history” of Eva). I could make a lengthy roster of those mistakes, things I did that only drove us farther apart. I will say, “If I’d have done this or that differently, we might still be together.” That’s another, more insidious sort of fairy tale. That’s another facet to my haunting—having driven her away—another vicious wrinkle in the meme.

  I’ll come back to my file and its contents, after I force myself to spit up one version of the truth.

  “A woman in a field—something grabbed her.”

  A line from Charles Fort’s Lo! (1931) that I’ve been carrying around in my head for days. It was incorporated into one of Albert Perrault’s paintings. I wanted to get it down here so that I wouldn’t forget it. All the same, this is not where it belongs, not in the first version of the coming of Eva Canning, but in the second. But now I won’t forget it.

  July, two years and three months ago and the spare change of a few days (one way or the other). That night alone on the highway in Massachusetts, passing by the river. That night I left Providence alone, but didn’t return alone. I think maybe now I’m ready to try to write it out in some semblanc
e of a story, what I recall of the first version of my meeting with Eva. A story is, by necessity, a sort of necessary fiction, right? If it’s meant to be a true story, then it becomes a synoptic history. I read that phrase someplace, but I can’t for the life of me recall when or where. But I mean, a “true” story, or what we call history, can only ever bear a passing resemblance to the facts, as history is far too complex to ever reduce to anything as clear-cut as a conventional narrative. My history, the history of a city or a nation, the history of a planet or the universe. We can only approximate. So, now that’s what I’ll do. I’ll write an approximation of that night, July 8, the most straightforward I can manage.

  But I’ll also keep in mind that history is a slave to reductionism.

  Telling this story, I diminish it. I reduce it. I make of it a synodic history.

  I render it. That night. This night.

  Begin here:

  I work until ten o’clock, so I’ve driven the Honda because I dislike walking home from the bus stop after dark. The Armory is a much tamer neighborhood than it used to be, but better safe than sorry, et cetera. I drive home to Willow Street, and Abalyn is sitting on the sofa with her laptop, writing. I go to the kitchen and pour myself a glass of milk and make a fluffernutter sandwich, plenty enough dinner. I rarely eat very much at a time. I snack, I suppose. I bring the milk and my saucer with the sandwich back to the parlor and sit down on the sofa with Abalyn.

  “It’s a beautiful night,” I say. “We should go for a drive. It’s a beautiful night for a drive.”

  “Is it?” Abalyn asks, briefly glancing up from the screen of the laptop. “I haven’t been outside today.”

  “You shouldn’t do that,” I reply. “You shouldn’t stay cooped up in here all day.” I take another bite and watch her while I chew. After I swallow, and have a sip of milk, I ask her what she’s writing.