The Mermaids Singing

It is only at night now that she has the strength to wander. Rising quietly, so as not to disturb her lover, Grace pulls a sweater over her pajamas, slips her feet into running sneakers. Stephen had bought her the sneakers to wear in the hospital after she refused to put on the regulation blue foam slippers. She is not a runner but she likes the height of them, the curve of the soles which roll her forward like a boat lifted by waves. She wraps a scarf around her gruesome bald head.

She passes through the cottage quickly, without looking at the tacky furnitureâleftovers from someone else's life. Stephen had rented this place so Grace could be near the sea. Sometimes she calls it “the hospice,” in an attempt to be the blunt, witty sort of dying person she would like to be.

She goes first to the water, down the damp sand and over to the
barnacle rocks, which she climbs gingerly, still surprised by the weakness of her limbs. She wants to stand on the rocks, dive into the cold water and swim the pain away, but she can only sit, watching the moonshine catch the waves, feeling the salty damp seep into her clothing and skin, breathing it; it is thick and familiar in her damaged lungs.

The sea does not speak to her in the daytime. When Stephen manages to coerce her into a walk, the sunlight, harsh on her yellowed skin, distracts her. The beach feels dangerous with Stephen, because of the way he clings to her elbow, guiding her over shells and rocks, assuring that the foamy tide does not wash against her fragile ankles. On these walks she feels like a captive, like a creature held just out of reach of her watery home. She wants to shake him off, as passionately as she used to want to creep into his body because his hands on her skin were not enough. She hides the impulse to push him away, tells herself it is the cancer that makes her feel this repulsion. Though it is not the first time she has felt like a prisoner.

On the nights she escapes, the sea becomes hers again; the rhythm of the waves aligns itself with the thrust and ebb of her heart. She looks over the silver water and imagines another beach across the Atlantic, an Irish shore, the landscape a mirror reflection of this one. There, the wind in the coves was a chorus of the island mermaids, who moaned with the hopes of capturing a sympathetic man. She used to swim there, that moan in her blood, longing to leave. Now, though she has been gone from Ireland for twelve years, it is appearing to her, dropping in heavy folds, swallowing her present life. She thinks how odd it is, that the strongest convictions, like possessions, can lose all meaning when you are dying. Everything that she thought she was about has slipped from her, and the things she never wanted are clinging to her memory like the seaweed in the crevices at her feet.

Her mind is a collage of faces. She sees her mother, whose early wrinkles looked like crevices in rock, whose mouth was constantly clamped in a stern line, who always fought to keep her face
expressionless. Grace hated that blank face, she raged to get it to register somethingâeven angerâanything. Now she misses her mother, longs for her like a lonely child. But she escaped from that face and it's too late now, she believes, to ask for it back.

Another face her husband's, an Irish man. Though she has spent several years trying to erase him from her memory, his features come back to her in perfect detail; he glows like a stubborn ghost when she closes her eyes. She wonders why she ever left, why she can't remember what went wrong between them. He was kind, she knows. Had that not been enough? It means more to her now, kindness.

When she feels her body crawling toward sleep, far too soon, she goes back to the cottage, slips into its silence. She opens a bedroom door, checks on her daughterâa teenager who sleeps like a child, her limbs sprawled, mouth gaping, the sheets twisted like vines around her ankles. The glinting black curls on the pillow are her father's. At one time, Grace might have righted the bedding, smoothed the masses of hair away from her daughter's face. But tonight she only stands there, afraid of waking her. They avoid each other now, these two, as intensely as they once clung together.

She closes the door, walks across the dark living room. At a table in the corner she sits, switching on a miniature desk lamp. There is an old typewriter here, a stack of crisp white paper beside it. She winds a sheet through, and types out a note, flinching at the sound of keys, like gunshots in the night.

GrÃ¡inne
, she types.

Please pick up cereal and matches if you pass by the G. S. today. If you have any clothes that need washingâand you must by now, kiddo, unless you plan to keep wearing those stinking jeansâgive them to Stephen, he's going to the laundromat
.

âLove, Mom

She props the note on the refrigerator with a lobster-shaped magnet. She doesn't know why she continues to compose these strange
communications, why she cannot say anything she really feels. She wants to ask her daughter if she's all right, wants to know what she does all day and half the night when she's away from the cottage. But Grace has lost the ability to ask anything. Once, she had prided herself on speaking bluntly, honestly to her daughter. Only recently has she admitted that she's been lying all along. She lied by never telling GrÃ¡inne about the people she had left behind them: GrÃ¡inne's grandmother, her father, her family. Grace used to think that she was all that GrÃ¡inne needed. Now she feels guilty, inadequate, resentful. She is dying, her daughter is living on, and they hate each other for it. They cannot figure out what to say. So they leave notesâhanging them on the refrigerator like sheets of hieroglyphics that neither one of them knows how to translate.

With barely any energy left, her body disintegrating into exhaustion, she sets a place at the dining table. Plate, salad plate, napkin, two forks, two knives, a spoon at the top. A water glass glinting in the moonlight from the window. She has made too much noise, because Stephen opens the bedroom door and calls to her. He thinks that she lays this place for him or for GrÃ¡inne, for breakfast, but it's for neither. It is the extra place she always set as a child, a tradition she copied from a book about an old Irish castle, a book she found in her mother's drawer. At the castle, an extra table setting was always laid for the Gaelic queen Granuaile, even if she wasn't expected. A pirate and a warrior, Granuaile was known to appear without warning at the gates with her crew of hungry sailors, assuming she'd be welcomed. Long after Granuaile had died, the castle staff continued to leave a place for her, not wanting to offend the spirit of such a woman.

Grace hasn't thought to set Granuaile's place in years. Once, she did so with a childish hope that she would be able to sail off with the queen after dinner. Then she grew up, and grew to believe that only she could save herself. She performs the ritual again nowâthe instinct, long dormant, has risen with an ease that frightens her. She no longer believes in pirate queens, in safety. But she can think of
nothing else, save those useless little notes, to leave behind her in the night.

She follows the sound of Stephen's voice, returns to the warmth of the bed, the resented comfort of sleep. As she drifts off, Stephen's solid body pressed against her bony back, she listens to the waves, eternally crashing on the beach, hushing, calling, their currents drawing her body away and pulling her mind backward.

CHAPTER
2
ClÃona

On the Aer Lingus ticket, someone has spelled my name
ClÃodhna
. At the departures desk in Shannon, I consider correcting it with the available pen, but I don't, for fear it will get me in some fix with the authorities. What their rules are, I am not certainâit's been so long since I've even left Irelandâand I don't want to cause myself any more trouble. It is to my daughter Grace's funeral I am going on this airplane. Nothing like my last trip to America, by ship passage, when I was young and had life rather than death waiting on the shore for me.

ClÃona is my name. I was baptized ClÃodhna but I dropped the silent consonants when I entered primary school. (My mother accused me of breaking the Fourth Commandmentâ
Honor thy father and thy mother
âheightening my fear of hellfire, but this could not compare to my dread of ridicule.) You can find both spellings in those wee dictionaries of Irish names; they're the rage in all the shops
now on account of the fashion of naming children in Gaelic rather than English. In my day, on the island where I grew up, my name was right strange. All of my friends were called Mary, Margaret, or Joyce. When I had my daughter in America, I baptized her Grace, with the hope that a normal name would help her fit in. Of course, she grew up despising me for it, for giving her such a diminished, compromising name, as she called it. I suppose it wasn't the name that bothered her so much as my intentions, you know the sort of way. She called her own daughter GrÃ¡inne, after the pirate queen of Connaught. I often wonder if the girl hates her for it, if the cycle has come round again, as it tends to do in families.

You can read in these name books the story of ClÃodhna, who eloped against her parents' will and sailed off in a curragh with her lover. He left her alone in the boat while he went hunting, and a great wave came roaring in and drowned the poor woman. From then on she was said to be the fairy of the sea. A guardian, of sorts, who existed to save others from similar tragedy. When Grace was a teenager, and at her most vocal in her hatred of me, she used to say that the name ClÃodhna suited me perfectly. She believed my life was defined by a pitiful and unimaginative subjection to others. She never understood me. But I am as much to blame as anyone for that.

I can remember her as a child, eating her supper at the polished wooden table in the Willoughbys' kitchen in Boston, where I was employed. She always refused to eat unless I sat at the table with her. She laid an extra place setting beside hers, even though I never had time for my tea until later on.

“Don't stand above me, Mom,” she'd say, “I hate that. I hate it!” Sure, I was too busy to sit idle, but I humored her; I'd always humored her, that ridiculous little temper. She was a scowling, moody child, but gorgeous, with her thick ginger hair and sea-green eyes. She would grow to be so much more stunning than I ever was.

In one particular memory, Mrs. Willoughby comes into the kitchen. I stand and ask her if everything is all right and she waves her graceful fingers.

“Sit, please, ClÃona.” (
Cleeoona
, she calls me, and I've never bothered to correct her.) “Don't let me disturb you.”

I sit back down across from Grace, who'd automatically stopped eating while I was standing, but resumes again when my bottom touches the chair.

“Just when you get a chance, ClÃona, could you fetch us a hot plate? It seems there is one missing from the dining room table.” She swings back out the door.

My daughter freezes as I rise to take a trivet from the cupboard and bring it to their table. Mrs. Willoughby takes the gravy pitcher off its saucer and places it on the trivet. I have learned not to question her American sense of table manners. When I rejoin my daughter in the kitchen, she does not resume eating.

“Work away, now,” I say, but she stares at her plate, at the potato jackets and meat buried in gravy, her brow crouching like an animal over her eyes.

“Why do you let her talk to you like that?” she says to me.

“Like what?” I say. Sure, even at eight years of age, her voice carries so much more weight than mine.

“Like that, like that!” She waves her fork in the direction of the swinging door. “Like she does all the time. Like you're not good as her or something.”

“Hesh up, now, and finish your supper,” I say. “Selfish child. You'll learn to show some respect before I'm through with you.” She looks at me as if she loathes me.

I hadn't meant to sound so cruel. But it was my daughter who was acting high and mighty, who thought she was better than those around her. The Willoughbys weren't perfect, sure, but they'd given me job and my daughter a home, and I was grateful for that much. I didn't expect to be coddled. But Grace, well, there was rarely a human being, myself included, who could meet her standards.

My daughter is dead now. It was a man named Stephen who rang me to say so. Her lover, I suppose, but I do not judge.

“Was there an accident?” I said to him, hearing the echo of my voice in the bad overseas connection. “Sudden, was it?”

The man paused. “No,” he said. “She'd been sick for a while.”

“I see,” I said. That was how it would be, so. My daughter denying me her death as she'd denied me her life. I was not surprised.

Sure, with all that's passed, I did not have to board this plane to Boston. I could have thanked your man for giving me the news, and gone back to the life I've had without Grace for years now. But there was the child to consider. GrÃ¡inne. And her only fifteen. Though this Stephen assured me that there were many friends of Grace's who would be glad to take her in, I knew that was not a proper solution. No grandchild of mine will be farmed out to some American family. And of course there was that image that flashed across my mind of a dark-haired girl who curled in my lap and slept there, trusting that I would not move away. My little GrÃ¡inne, still tugging at my heart after all these years.

I decided so. I boarded Eamon's ferry, which I take every week to the mainland shops. I watched my island grow smaller and saw how a foreigner might think it ugly on first sightâthe rusted quay, the treeless, rocky landscape that from a distance appears diminished under heavy power lines. From this angle, a foreigner would not see the spectacular black-and-green cliffs on the west end, or the white expanse of Mermaid Beach where seals bask at dawn. A new visitor might find the smell of Inis MurÃºchâa blend of netted fish and turf fire which hangs thickly in the damp airâhard to stomach. Or the complex accent of the islanders frustrating. My daughter had found MurÃºch so. This had been a mystery to me, after all my years in America, where I had longed for the scent and music of my home.

I bought this ticket to Boston. It's a ticket I've thought about purchasing for years, hoping to find my daughter again. I tell myself, as the plane flies over the Atlantic, that though it is too late to change some things, there is always the chance of beginning others. I am all GrÃ¡inne has left in the world. And, as far as any connection with my daughter, GrÃ¡inne is all I have left as well.

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