The Drowning Girl

The Mermaid of the Concrete Ocean by India Morgan Phelps

T he building’s elevator is busted, and so I have to drag my ass up twelve flights of stairs. Her apartment is smaller and more tawdry than I expected, but I’m not entirely sure I could say what I thought I’d find at the top of all those stairs. I don’t know this part of Manhattan very well, this ugly wedge of buildings one block over from South Street and Roosevelt Drive and the ferry terminal. She keeps reminding me that if I look out the window (there’s only one), I can see the Brooklyn Bridge. It seems a great source of pride, that she has a view of the bridge and the East River. The apartment is too hot, filled with soggy heat pouring off the radiators, and there are so many unpleasant odors competing for my attention that I’d be hard-pressed to assign any one of them priority over the rest. Mildew. Dust. Stale cigarette smoke. Better I say the apartment smells shut away, and leave it at that. The place is crammed wall to wall with threadbare, dust-skimmed antiques, the tattered refuse of Victorian and Edwardian bygones. I have trouble imagining how she navigates the clutter in her wheelchair, which is something of an antique itself. I compliment the Tiffany lamps, all of which appear not to be reproductions, and are in considerably better shape than most of the other furnishings. She smiles, revealing dentures stained by nicotine and neglect. At least, I assume they’re dentures. She switches on one of the table lamps, its shade a circlet of stained-glass dragonflies, and tells me it was a Christmas gift from a playwright. He’s dead now, she says. She tells me his name, but it’s no one I’ve ever heard of, and I admit this to her. Her yellow-brown smile doesn’t waver.

“Nobody remembers him. He was very avant-garde,” she says. “No one understood what he was trying to say. But obscurity was precious to him. It pained him terribly, that so few ever understood that about his work.”

I nod, once or twice or three times; I don’t know, and it hardly matters. Her thin fingers glide across the lampshade, leaving furrows in the accumulated dust, and now I can see that the dragonflies have wings the color of amber, and their abdomens and thoraces are a deep cobalt blue. They all have eyes like poisonous crimson berries. She asks me to please have a seat, and apologizes for not having offered one sooner. She motions to an armchair near the lamp, and also to a chaise lounge a few feet farther away. Both are upholstered with the same faded floral brocade. I choose the armchair, and am hardly surprised to discover that all the springs are shot. I sink several inches into the chair, and my knees jut upwards, towards the water-stained plaster ceiling.

“Will you mind if I tape our conversation?” I ask, opening my briefcase, and she stares at me for a moment, as though she hasn’t quite understood the question. By way of explanation, I remove the tiny Olympus digital recorder and hold it up for her to see. “Well, it doesn’t actually use audiotapes,” I add.

“I don’t mind,” she tells me. “It must be much simpler than having to write down everything you hear, everything someone says.”

“Much,” I say, and switch the recorder on. “We can shut it off anytime you like, of course. Just say the word.” I lay the recorder on the table, near the base of the dragonfly lamp.

“That’s very considerate,” she says. “That’s very kind of you.”

And it occurs to me how much she, like the apartment, differs from whatever I might have expected to find. This isn’t Sunset Boulevard, Norma Desmond and her shuffling cadre of “waxwork” acquaintances. There’s nothing of the grotesque or Gothic—even that Hollywood Gothic—about her. Despite the advance and ravages of ninety-four years, her green eyes are bright and clear. Neither her voice nor hands tremble, and only the old wheelchair stands as any indication of infirmity. She sits up very straight and, whenever she speaks, tends to move her hands about, as though possessed of more energy and excitement than words alone can convey. She’s wearing only a little makeup, some pale lipstick and a hint of rouge on her high cheekbones, and her long gray hair is pulled back in a single braid. There’s an easy grace about her. Watching by the light of the dragonfly lamp and the light coming in through the single window, it occurs to me that she is showing me her face, and not some mask of counterfeit youth. Only the stained teeth (or dentures) betray any hint of the decay I’d anticipated and steeled myself against. Indeed, if not for the rank smell of the apartment, and the oppressive heat, there would be nothing particularly unpleasant about being here with her.

I retrieve a stenographer’s pad from my briefcase, then close it and set it on the floor near my feet. I tell her that I haven’t written out a lot of questions, that I prefer to allow interviews to unfold more organically, like conversations, and this seems to please her.

“I don’t go in for the usual brand of interrogation,” I say. “Too forced. Too weighted by the journalist’s own agenda.”

“So, you think of yourself as a journalist?” she asks, and I tell her yes, usually.

“Well, I haven’t done this in such a very long time,” she replies, straightening her skirt. “I hope you’ll understand if I’m a little rusty. I don’t often talk about those days, or the pictures. It was all so very long ago.”

“Still,” I say, “you must have fond memories.”

“Must I, now?” she asks, and before I can think of an answer, she says, “There are only memories, young man, and, yes, most of them are not so bad, and some are even rather agreeable. But there are many things I’ve tried to forget. Every life must be like that, wouldn’t you say?”

“To some extent,” I reply.

She sighs, as if I haven’t understood at all, and her eyes wander up to a painting on the wall behind me. I hardly noticed it when I sat down, but now I turn my head for a better view.

When I ask, “Is that one of the originals?” she nods, her smile widening by almost imperceptible degrees, and she points at the painting of a mermaid.

“Yes,” she says. “The only one I have. Oh, I’ve got a few lithographs. I have prints or photographs of them all, but this is the only one of the genuine paintings I own.”

“It’s beautiful,” I say, and that isn’t idle flattery. The mermaid paintings are the reason that I’ve come to New York City and tracked her to the tawdry little hovel by the river. This isn’t the first time I’ve seen an original up close, but it is the first time outside a museum gallery. There’s one hanging in Newport, at the National Museum of American Illustration. I’ve seen it, and also the one at the Art Institute of Chicago, and one other, the mermaid in the permanent collection of the Society of Illustrators here in Manhattan. But there are more than thirty documented, and most of them I’ve only seen reproduced in books and folios. Frankly, I wonder if this painting’s existence is very widely known, and how long it’s been since anyone but the model, sitting here in her wheelchair, has admired it. I’ve read all the artist’s surviving journals and correspondence (including the letters to his model), and I know that there are at least ten mermaid paintings that remain unaccounted for. I assume this must be one of them.

“Wow,” I gasp, unable to look away from the painting. “I mean, it’s amazing.”

“It’s the very last one he did, you know,” she says. “He wanted me to have it. If someone offered me a million dollars, I still wouldn’t part with it.”

I glance at her, then back to the painting. “More likely, they’d offer you ten million,” I tell her, and she laughs. It might easily be mistaken for the laugh of a much younger woman.

“Wouldn’t make any difference if they did,” she says. “He gave it to me, and I’ll never part with it. Not ever. He named this one Regarding the Shore from Whale Reef, and that was my idea, the title. He often asked me to name them. At least half their titles, I thought up for him.” And I already know this; it’s in his letters.

The painting occupies a large, narrow canvas, easily four feet tall by two feet wide—somewhat too large for this wall, really—held inside an ornately carved frame. The frame has been stained dark as mahogany, though I’m sure it’s something far less costly; here and there, where the varnish has been scratched or chipped, I can see the blond wood showing through. But I don’t doubt that the painting is authentic, despite numerous compositional deviations, all of which are immediately apparent to anyone familiar with the mermaid series. For instance, in contravention to the artist’s usual approach, the siren has been placed in the foreground, and also somewhat to the right. And, more importantly, she’s facing away from the viewer. Buoyed by rough waves, she holds her arms outstretched to either side, as if to say, “Let me infold you,” her long hair floating around her like a dense tangle of kelp, and the mermaid gazes towards land and a whitewashed lighthouse perched on a granite promontory. The rocky coastline is familiar, some wild place he’d found in Massachusetts or Maine or Rhode Island. The viewer might be fooled into thinking this is only a painting of a woman swimming in the sea, as so little of her is showing above the waterline. She might be mistaken for a suicide, taking a final glimpse of the rugged strand before slipping below the surface. But, if one looks only a little closer, the patches of red-orange scales flecking her arms are unmistakable, and there are living creatures caught up in the snarls of her black hair: tiny crabs and brittle stars, the twisting shapes of strange oceanic worms and a gasping, wide-eyed fish of some sort, suffocating in the air.

“That was the last one he did,” she says again.

It’s hard to take my eyes off the painting, and I’m already wondering if she will permit me to get a few shots of it before I leave.

“It’s not in any of the catalogs,” I say. “It’s not mentioned anywhere in his papers or the literature.”

“No, it wouldn’t be. It was our secret,” she replies. “After all those years working together, he wanted to give me something special, and so he did this last one, and never showed it to anyone else. I had it framed when I came back from Europe in ’forty-six, after the war. For years, it was rolled up in a cardboard tube, rolled up and swaddled in muslin, kept on the top shelf of a friend’s closet. A mutual friend, actually, who admired him greatly, though I never showed her this painting.”

I finally manage to look away from the canvas, turning back towards the woman sitting up straight in her wheelchair. She looks very pleased at my surprise, and I ask her the first question that comes to mind.

“Has anyone else ever seen it? I mean, besides the two of you, and besides me?”

“Certainly,” she says. “It’s been hanging right there for the past twenty years, and I do occasionally have visitors, every now and then. I’m not a complete recluse. Not quite yet.”

“I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to imply that you were.”

And she’s still staring up at the painting, and the impression I have is that she hasn’t paused to look at it closely for a long time. It’s as though she’s suddenly noticing it, and probably couldn’t recall the last time that she did. Sure, it’s a fact of her everyday landscape, another component of the crowded reliquary of her apartment. But, like the Tiffany dragonfly lamp given her by that forgotten playwright, I suspect she rarely ever pauses to consider it.

Watching her as she peers so intently at the painting looming up behind me and the threadbare brocade chair where I sit, I’m struck once more by those green eyes of hers. They’re the same green eyes the artist gave to every incarnation of his mermaid, and they seem to me even brighter than they did before, and not the least bit dimmed by age. They are like some subtle marriage of emerald and jade and shallow salt water, brought to life by unknown alchemies. They give me a greater appreciation of the painter, that he so perfectly conveyed her eyes, deftly communicating the complexities of iris and sclera, cornea and retina and pupil. That anyone could have the talent required to transfer these precise and complex hues into mere oils and acrylics.

“How did it begin?” I ask, predictably enough. Of course, the artist wrote repeatedly of the mermaids’ genesis. I even found a 1967 dissertation on the subject hidden away in the stacks at Harvard. But I’m pretty sure no one has ever bothered to ask the model. Gradually, and, I think, reluctantly, her green eyes drift away from the canvas and back to me.

“It’s not as if that’s a secret,” she says. “I believe he even told a couple of the magazine reporters about the dreams. One magazine in Paris, and maybe one here in New York, too. He often spoke with me about his dreams. They were always so vivid, and he wrote them down. He painted them, whenever he could. Like he painted the mermaids.”

I glance over at the recorder lying on the table, and wish that I’d waited until later on to ask that particular question. It should have been placed somewhere towards the end, not right at the front. I’m definitely off my game today, and it’s not only the heat from the radiators making me sweat. I’ve been disarmed, unbalanced, first by Regarding the Shore from Whale Reef, and then by having looked so deeply into her eyes. I clear my throat, and she asks if I’d like a glass of water or maybe a cold cream soda. I thank her, but shake my head no.

“I’m fine,” I say, “but thank you.”

“It can get awfully stuffy in here,” she says, and glances down at the dingy Persian rug that covers almost the entire floor. This is the first time since she let me through the door that I’ve seen her frown.

“Honestly, it’s not so bad,” I insist, failing to sound the least bit honest.

“Why, there are days,” she says, “it’s like being in a sauna. Or a damned tropical jungle, Tahiti or Brazil or someplace like that, and it’s a wonder I don’t start hearing parrots and monkeys. But it helps with the pain, usually more than the pills do.”

And here’s the one thing she was adamant that we not discuss, the childhood injury that left her crippled. She’s told me how she has always loathed writers and critics who tried to draw a parallel between the mermaids and her paralysis. “Don’t even bring it up,” she warned on the phone, almost a week ago, and I assured her that I wouldn’t. Only, now she’s brought it up. I sit very still in the broken-down armchair, there beneath the last painting, waiting to see what she’ll say next. I try hard to clear my head and focus, and to decide what question on the short list scribbled in my steno pad might steer the interview back on course.

“There was more than his dreams,” she admits, almost a full minute later. The statement has the slightly abashed quality of a confession. And I have no idea how to respond, so I don’t. She blinks, and looks up at me again, the pale ghost of that previous smile returning to her lips. “Would it bother you if I smoke?” she asks.

“No,” I reply. “Not at all. Please, whatever makes you comfortable.”

“These days, well, it bothers so many people. As though the pope had added smoking to the list of venial sins. I get the most awful glares, sometimes, so I thought I’d best ask first.”

“It’s your home,” I tell her, and she nods and reaches into a pocket of her skirt, retrieving a pack of Marlboro Reds and a disposable lighter.

“To some, that doesn’t seem to matter,” she says. “There’s a woman comes around twice a week to attend to the dusting and trash and whatnot, a Cuban woman, and if I smoke when she’s here, she always complains and tries to open the window, even though I’ve told her time and time again it’s been painted shut for ages. It’s not like I don’t pay her.”

Considering the thick and plainly undisturbed strata of dust, and the odors, I wonder if she’s making this up, or if perhaps the Cuban woman might have stopped coming around a long time ago.

“I promised him, when he told me, I would never tell anyone else this,” she says, and here she pauses to light her cigarette, then return the rest of the pack and her lighter to their place in her skirt pocket. She blows a gray cloud of smoke away from me. “Not another living soul. It was a sort of pact between us, you understand. But, lately, it’s been weighing on me. I wake up in the night, sometimes, and it’s like a stone around my neck. I don’t think it’s something I want to take with me to the grave. He told me the day we started work on the second painting.”

“That would have been in May 1939, yes?”

And here she laughs again and shakes her head. “Hell if I know. Maybe you have it written down somewhere in that pad of yours, but I don’t remember the date. Not anymore. But…I do know it was the same year the World’s Fair opened here in New York, and I know it was after Amelia Earhart disappeared. He knew her, Amelia Earhart. He knew so many interesting people. But I’m rambling, aren’t I?”

“I’m in no hurry,” I answer. “Take your time.” But she frowns again and stares at the smoldering tip of her cigarette for a moment.

“I like to think, sir, that I am a practical woman,” she says, looking directly at me and raising her chin an inch or so. “I have always wanted to be able to consider myself a practical woman. And now I’m very old. Very, very old, yes, and a practical woman must acknowledge the fact that women who are this old will not live much longer. I know I’ll die soon, and the truth about the mermaids, it isn’t something I want to take with me to my grave. So, I’ll tell you, and betray his confidence. If you’ll listen, of course.”

“Certainly,” I tell her, struggling not to let my excitement show through, but feeling like a vulture, anyway. “If you’d prefer, I can shut off the recorder,” I offer.

“No, no…I want you to put this in your article. I want them to print it in that magazine you write for, because it seems to me that people ought to know. If they’re still so infatuated with the mermaids after all this time, it doesn’t seem fitting that they don’t know. It seems almost indecent.”

I don’t remind her that I’m a freelance and the article’s being done on spec, so there’s no guarantee anyone’s going to buy it, or that it will ever be printed and read. And that feels indecent, too, but I keep my mouth shut and listen while she talks. I can always nurse my guilty conscience later on.

“The summer before I met him, before we started working together,” she begins, and then pauses to take another drag on her cigarette. Her eyes return to the painting behind me. “I suppose that would have been the summer of 1937. The Depression was still on, but his family, out on Long Island, they’d come through it better than most. He had money. Sometimes he’d take commissions from magazines, if the pay was decent. The New Yorker, that was one he did some work for, and Harper’s Bazaar, and Collier’s, but I guess you know this sort of thing, having done so much research on his life.”

The ash on her Marlboro is growing perilously long, though she seems not to have noticed. I glance about and spot an empty ashtray, heavy lead glass, perched on the edge of a nearby coffee table. It doesn’t look as though it’s been emptied in days or weeks, another argument against the reality of the Cuban maid. My armchair squeaks and pops angrily when I lean forward to retrieve it. I offer it to her, and she takes her eyes off the painting just long enough to accept it and to thank me.

“Anyway,” she continues, “mostly he was able to paint what he wanted. That was a freedom that he never took for granted. He was staying in Atlantic City that summer, because he said he liked watching the people on the boardwalk. Sometimes, he’d sit and sketch them for hours, in charcoal and pastels. He showed quite a lot of the boardwalk sketches to me, and I think he always meant to do paintings from them, but, to my knowledge, he never did.

“That summer, he was staying at the Traymore, which I never saw, but he said was wonderful. Many of his friends and acquaintances would go to Atlantic City in the summer, so he never lacked for company if he wanted it. There were the most wonderful parties, he told me. Sometimes, in the evenings, he’d go down onto the beach alone, onto the sand, I mean, because he said the waves and the gulls and the smell of the sea comforted him. In his studio, the one he kept on the Upper West Side, there was a quart mayonnaise jar filled with seashells and sand dollars and the like. He’d picked them all up at Atlantic City, over the years. Some of them we used as props in the paintings, and he also had a cabinet with shells from Florida and Nassau and the Cape and I don’t know where else. He showed me conchs and starfish from the Mediterranean and Japan, I remember. Seashells from all over the world, easily. He loved them, and driftwood, too.”

She taps her cigarette against the rim of the ashtray and stares at the painting of the mermaid and the lighthouse, and I have the distinct feeling that she’s drawing some sort of courage from it, the requisite courage needed to break a promise she’s kept for seventy years. A promise she made three decades before my own birth. And I know now how to sum up the smell of her apartment. It smells like time.

“It was late July, and the sun was setting,” she says, speaking very slowly now, as though every word is being chosen with great and deliberate care. “And he told me that he was in a foul temper that evening, having fared poorly at a poker game the night before. He played cards. He said it was one of his only weaknesses.

“At any rate, he went down onto the sand, and he was barefoot, he said. I remember that, him telling me he wasn’t wearing shoes.” And it occurs to me then that possibly none of what I’m hearing is the truth, that she’s spinning a fanciful yarn so I won’t be disappointed, lying for my benefit, or because her days are so filled with monotony and she is determined this unusual guest will be entertained. I push the thoughts away. There’s no evidence of deceit in her voice. Art journalism hasn’t made me rich or well-known, but I have gotten pretty good at knowing a lie when I hear one.

“He said to me, ‘The sand was so cool beneath my feet.’ He walked for a while, and then, just before dark, came across a group of young boys, eight or nine years old, and they were crowded around something that had washed up on the beach. The tide was going out, and what the boys had found, it had been stranded by the retreating tide. He recalled thinking it odd that they were all out so late, the boys, that they were not at dinner with their families. The lights were coming on along the boardwalk.”

Now she suddenly averts her eyes from the painting on the wall of her apartment, Regarding the Shore from Whale Reef, as though she’s taken what she needs and it has nothing left to offer. She crushes her cigarette out in the ashtray, and doesn’t look at me. She chews at her lower lip, chewing away some of the lipstick. The old woman in the wheelchair does not appear sad, or wistful. I think it’s anger, that expression, and I want to ask her why she’s angry. Instead, I ask what it was the boys found on the beach, what the artist saw that evening. She doesn’t answer right away, but closes her eyes and takes a deep breath, exhaling slowly, raggedly.

“I’m sorry,” I say. “I didn’t mean to press you. If you want to stop—”

“I do not want to stop,” she says, opening her eyes again. “I have not come this far, and said this much, only to stop. It was a woman, a very young woman. He said that she couldn’t have been much more than nineteen or twenty. One of the boys was poking at her with a stick, and he took the stick and shooed them all away.”

“She was drowned?” I ask.

“Maybe. Maybe she drowned first. But she was bitten in half. There was nothing much left of her below the rib cage. Just bone and meat and a big hollowed-out place where all her organs had been, her stomach and lungs and everything. Still, there was no blood anywhere. It was like she’d never had a single drop of blood in her. He told me, ‘I never saw anything else even half that horrible.’ And, you know, that wasn’t so long after he’d come back to the States from the war in Spain, fighting against the fascists, the Francoists. He was at the Siege of Madrid, and saw awful, awful things there. He said to me, ‘I saw atrocities, but this was worse.…’ ”

And then she trails off and glares down at the ashtray in her lap, at a curl of smoke rising lazily from her cigarette butt.

“You don’t have to go on,” I say, almost whispering. “I’ll understand—”

“Oh hell,” she says, and shrugs her frail shoulders. “There isn’t that much left to tell. He figured that a shark did it, maybe one big shark or several smaller ones. He took her by the arms and he hauled what was left of her up onto the dry sand, up towards the boardwalk, so she wouldn’t be swept back out to sea. He sat down beside the body, because at first he didn’t know what to do, and he said he didn’t want to leave her alone. She was dead, but he didn’t want to leave her alone. I don’t know how long he sat there, but he said it was dark when he finally went to find a policeman.

“The body was still there when they got back. No one had disturbed it. The boys had not returned. But he said the whole thing was hushed up, because the chamber of commerce was afraid that a shark scare would frighten away the tourists and ruin the rest of the season. It had happened before. He said he went straight back to the Traymore and packed his bags, got a ticket on the next train to Manhattan. And he never visited Atlantic City ever again, but he started painting the mermaids, the very next year, right after he found me. Sometimes,” she says, “I think maybe I should have taken it as an insult. But I didn’t, and I still don’t.”

And then she falls silent, the way a storyteller falls silent when a tale is done. She takes another deep breath, rolls her wheelchair back about a foot or so, until it bumps hard against one end of the chaise lounge. She laughs nervously and lights another cigarette. And I ask her other questions, but they have nothing whatsoever to do with Atlantic City or the dead woman. We talk about other painters she’s known, and jazz musicians, and writers, and she talks about how much New York’s changed, how much the whole world has changed around her. As she speaks, I have the peculiar, disquieting sensation that, somehow, she passed the weight of that seventy-year-old secret on to me, and I think even if the article sells (and now I don’t doubt that it will) and a million people read it, a hundred million people, the weight will not be diminished.

This is what it’s like to be haunted, I think, and then I try to dismiss the thought as melodramatic, or absurd, or childish. But her jade-and-surf-green eyes, the mermaids’ eyes, are there to assure me otherwise.

It’s almost dusk before we’re done. She asks me to stay for dinner, but I make excuses about needing to be back in Boston. I promise to mail her a copy of the article when I’ve finished, and she tells me she’ll watch for it. She tells me how she doesn’t get much mail anymore, a few bills and ads, but nothing she ever wants to read.

“I am so very pleased that you contacted me,” she says, as I slip the recorder and my steno pad back into the briefcase and snap it shut.

“It was gracious of you to talk so candidly with me,” I reply, and she smiles.

I only glance at the painting once more, just before I leave. Earlier, I thought I might call someone I know, an ex who owns a gallery in the East Village. I owe him a favor, and the tip would surely square us. But standing there, looking at the pale, scale-dappled form of a woman bobbing in the frothing waves, her wet black hair tangled with wriggling crabs and fish, and nothing at all but a hint of shadow visible beneath the wreath of her floating hair, seeing it as I’ve never before seen any of the mermaids, I know I won’t make the call. Maybe I’ll mention the painting in the article I write, and maybe I won’t.

She follows me to the door, and we each say our good-byes. I kiss her hand when she offers it to me. I don’t believe I’ve ever kissed a woman’s hand, not until this moment. She locks the door behind me, two dead bolts and a chain, and then I stand in the hallway. It’s much cooler here than it was in her apartment, here in the shadows that have gathered despite the windows at either end of the corridor. There are people arguing loudly somewhere in the building below me, and a dog barking. By the time I descend the stairs and reach the sidewalk, the streetlamps are winking on.