The Mermaid

CHAPTER 14

When Barnum had proposed the tour to Amelia, she’d gained the impression that it would be an exhibition of the “Feejee Mermaid” alone. In her mind, she’d imagined a traveling coach for herself and Levi and the two other wagons that carried the tank and barrels and tent, as well as a few men to fetch the water and perform other labor.

She soon discovered that she was wrong, and she realized she’d been a fool to even consider such a notion. Barnum didn’t know how to do a thing by halves, and of course in his eyes the more pomp and pageantry, the better.

Thus she and Levi found themselves in a parade of vehicles that carried not only the necessary accessories for the mermaid but also an artist who blew beautiful glass ornaments; a magician who performed ventriloquism and other tricks; Signor Veronia’s mechanical figures, which were said to “represent human life”; and a wide variety of birds and beasts, including a duck-billed platypus from a place called Australia and an orange orangutan with such sad eyes that Amelia could hardly bear the sight of her in the cage.

“She ought to be set free, Levi,” she told her husband after the evening of their first performance.

Amelia was the final act of the show, and so she had gone out to watch Mr. Wyman perform his magic tricks until it was time for her to get ready. The orangutan had been made to dance by her handler, and though the audience laughed at the miserable-looking creature, Amelia had left the tent with tears in her eyes.

“We can’t do that, Amelia,” Levi said. “She belongs to Barnum.”

“She’s a wild thing, Levi,” Amelia said. “Wild things ought to be free. They can’t belong to anybody, not really.”

It was hard not to think of Jack then, of how easily he’d loosed her once he looked into her eyes. The orangutan had eyes like a human’s, she thought. She might not speak their language, but she could see into the orangutan’s heart just as Jack had seen into hers.

“I don’t disagree with you,” Levi said soothingly, rubbing her shoulders. “But Barnum thinks a little differently about such things. And besides, the poor creature isn’t from this country. She’s from someplace hot and far away, and if we let her go, then she’ll only die here, or be taken by someone else.”

“Hot and far away,” Amelia said. “Like Fiji?”

Levi frowned. “You don’t belong to Barnum. And you’re not a performing animal.”

“Am I not?” she asked, and sat on the edge of the bed. She rubbed her forehead. “Sometimes I’m not so certain.”

“You chose this,” Levi said, but in a way that told her he wasn’t accusing her, just stating the facts. “You told me that so many times, that it was your choice. And if it’s your choice to stay, then it’s your choice to leave. If you don’t want to do this anymore, then we’ll go to Barnum, you and I, and tell him the traveling mermaid show is over.”

The only other occasion when she’d wanted so strongly to leave the show was the first night at the Concert Hall. Somehow seeing that ape turning in circles (just like you in the tank, swimming in circles for the waving crowd) had set off the urge to flee, to run until she found the ocean and disappeared into the sea.

But she couldn’t do that to Levi. And she couldn’t leave him for her own sake.

“No,” she said. “I made an agreement with Barnum, and I’ll keep it. But I wish we could help that orangutan. I wonder if we can find the place where she belongs—the place where she really comes from, I mean.”

“And what will you do then?” Levi asked. “Travel across the ocean with her in a rowboat?”

“Perhaps I shall,” Amelia said. “And make you do the rowing.”

“I wonder if there’s a library or a bookshop where we could find out more about orangutans,” Levi said.

Amelia frowned at him. “What good will that do?”

Levi shrugged. “If we know about her home, or what she likes to eat, or—I don’t know, Amelia, I thought we might be able to make her happier, even if she did have to dance in circles at the end of a rope.”

“A bird in a cage still knows it’s in a cage, even if the bars are made of gold,” Amelia said softly.

But it was a kind thought that he had. Levi was always kind. It was one of the reasons she loved him.

He sat down beside her. “Is that how you felt today? Like you were in a cage?”

“It’s not like the tank,” Amelia said. “In the tank there was glass on all sides. I could see everything around me and feel that I was a part of it. And there was room to move, much more room to move. In the wagon . . .”

She trailed off. She didn’t want Levi to worry about her.

“I’ll worry if you tell me or not,” he said.

Amelia leaned close to him and peered into his eyes. His eyes were very dark brown, so dark that the color blended into the pupil.

“What are you doing?” he said, laughing.

“I am trying to see if you can read my mind like one of Barnum’s fortune-tellers,” Amelia said. “I think that you can.”

“No, but I can read your face,” he said. “I’ve been studying it.”

He ran his fingers around the bone that circled her eye, down her cheek, under her chin, back up the other side. “I used to think you unreadable. As mysterious as the sea.”

“The sea is not as mysterious as you think,” Amelia said. “You only have to swim under the surface.”

“Yes, I’ve learned that,” he said, and kissed her, but in a gentle way that didn’t ask for more. “Tell me about the wagon.”

“It’s like being in a box,” she said, and sighed. “A very small and tight box. I am taller, longer, when I’m a mermaid, and my tail fin is very wide. I don’t think Barnum took that into account. I can’t swim, only float, and it’s nearly impossible to turn. So I’m stuck there, in whatever direction I’ve fallen in. And, Levi, the audience here is . . . different.”

“Yes,” Levi said.

She could tell by his grim tone that they were thinking of the same incident. When Amelia fell into the tank (and it was falling, really, there was hardly enough room to dive) a man in the audience had started hooting and shouting about the “naked lady.” He’d continued even after Amelia changed into her sea form, making ribald remarks about her fish tail and her bare chest. Several people had hushed him, and plenty were so mesmerized by Amelia’s appearance that they hadn’t noticed him at all.

But Amelia couldn’t help noticing him, and the wagon was so small and there was much less water in it, which meant it was easier to hear what he said. His words were so crude that she wanted to hide away, but there was no room to do so.

When the man wouldn’t cease, Levi had spoken to two of the traveling show laborers and they’d happily escorted the man out of the tent. Amelia didn’t know what happened to him after that, but the man had not returned.

“That never happened in New York,” she said. “Not once. Yes, there were the people who claimed I was immoral, but that’s not the same.”

“It is, er, much more rural here,” Levi said.

“I spent many years of my life in a rural place,” Amelia said. “I’ve heard Barnum refer to it as Middle of Nowhere, Maine, when he thought I wasn’t listening. But I promise you that no matter how countrified we were, no one would ever have had the bad manners to behave in such a way.”

“The man had too much whiskey,” Levi said. “I don’t believe you’ll need to worry about that happening at every performance.”

“And everyone else—the way they stared at me. It was different, Levi, different from how it was in New York,” Amelia said.

“I don’t think it was as different as you do,” Levi said. “The trouble is that in the wagon you don’t have any way to turn away from the way they stare.”

“And in the museum the crowd was constantly moving,” Amelia said. “They didn’t stay in place and point.”

“They did at the Concert Hall,” Levi pointed out.

“But I was on the stage then. I was above the crowd, not at their eye level,” Amelia said. She felt that she wasn’t explaining properly. He didn’t understand how much more exposed she felt in the wagon.

“I suppose if it makes you that uncomfortable we can find a way to raise the wagon. Put it on a little stage. We would have to build it at each stop on the tour, though,” Levi said.

She saw him calculating the cost, the trouble, and the need for explaining both of those things to Barnum.

“I can become accustomed to it,” she said. She didn’t really care about Barnum’s expenses or grievances, but she didn’t like Levi bearing the brunt of them. “It’s only that it’s new, I suppose.”

He took her in his arms then, and it was a long time before either of them thought of anything but each other.

“Let’s find a bookshop tomorrow, or a library,” Amelia said, her cheek pressed into Levi’s chest. She liked listening to his heart beat and hearing the deep rumble of his voice rising out of his lungs. “I want to know all about the orangutan and where it comes from. And all about Fiji, too.”

“Fiji?” Levi asked. “Why, after so many months?”

“I’d like to know more about where I am supposed to be from,” Amelia said. “But you’ll need to read it to me. I still can only read a little.”

Amelia had been trying to learn more, simply because there were words everywhere, and most folk relied on the newspaper. She felt she was at a disadvantage when everyone talked about things they read in the news.

“I can teach you anything you don’t know. Then you’ll be able to read it yourself,” Levi said.

They were not able to find a book that contained any information about orangutans, but Levi discovered a missionary’s journal from the South Pacific. This contained descriptions not only of Fiji but of many other islands where the missionary had traveled in hopes of spreading the word of God.

Amelia scowled at this bit when Levi read it aloud.

“What’s the matter?” he asked.

“Why does he want to go about interfering with other people?” Amelia said. “I’m sure the people on those islands were perfectly happy without missionaries.”

Levi shifted uncomfortably at this. Like almost every American he’d been raised with the Bible, and while he wasn’t as fervent as some, he still believed in the basic rightness of the Christian word. Amelia, having been raised in no such manner, did not think it good or right that Christians plowed over everyone who did not think as they did.

“Well, Amelia, they are savages,” Levi said.

“What’s a savage?” Amelia said. “Someone who doesn’t live as you do? Someone who doesn’t have gaslight and shoes and cobblestoned streets?”

Levi took a breath and tried again. “These are simple people who haven’t been exposed to—”

“And why is simple something that needs to be fixed? Why must all people everywhere be cast in the same mold?” Amelia said.

She felt unreasonably angry with Levi for not understanding the basic wrongness of this idea. These people had their own lives, their own gods, their own ways. A missionary traveled across the ocean and told them that everything they believed and lived by was incorrect. It was the same as if a human came to her people under the ocean and told them that they could no longer be merpeople.

Amelia was surprised, too, for Levi was always kind and it seemed out of character for him to think of himself as above anyone, especially an island dweller who lived thousands of miles away.

“Perhaps we shouldn’t read this book right now,” Levi said, closing it and putting it aside.

“No,” Amelia said, snatching it from his hand. “You’re not to do that. You’re not to treat me like a child because you don’t want to have a disagreement.”

“This is just something you don’t understand, Amelia,” Levi said, the first sparks of anger in his eyes. “Missionaries have a duty to save others from damnation.”

“That’s what Elijah Hunt thought he was doing when he shot me,” Amelia said. “I can’t believe you would think the same as someone like that.”

“It’s not the same thing,” Levi said, his face showing his exasperation. “Elijah Hunt had an extreme view.”

“A view that was shared with all those people who wrote to Barnum about me, and the crowds that demonstrated day after day outside the museum,” Amelia said. “How is Elijah Hunt different from a missionary? Their intention is salvation at any cost. Maybe it’s you who doesn’t understand.”

Levi didn’t say anything else. He quietly put on his coat and left their hotel room. This infuriated Amelia, who felt it deeply unfair that he was able to leave if he was angry and she was not (it being unsafe for her to walk about on her own—this was truer now than it had been in New York, since the crowds they’d encountered were more unpredictable). She was also angry that he would rather leave than listen to her.

She threw the stupid missionary book across the room. It was the first time they’d ever really disagreed, and since he wouldn’t stay and let her convince him she was right, she didn’t know what to do with herself except pace and argue with him in her head instead of in person.

She paced until she was exhausted, and then she lay on the bed and cried, because she had all this energy and nowhere to put it.

A while after that he returned bearing dinner on a tray and said he was sorry he’d left her. But he didn’t apologize for believing he was right, and Amelia didn’t apologize either, and they were very careful with each other for several days after.

And in the meantime, they went from town to town, moving ever farther south. It was terribly hot no matter where they went, and Amelia grew resentful of the humidity that sapped her energy and the mosquitoes that plagued them constantly and the eternal press of the sunlight.

She’d come from a cold clime, where the air was crisp nearly year-round and the ocean was even colder. The poor orangutan suffered, too, particularly since her handler didn’t see fit to give her water frequently enough.

One afternoon they stopped in a small town in North Carolina. As the men began to raise the large white tent Amelia caught sight of the orangutan’s handler, whose name was Stephen White, whipping the ape for moving too slowly out of her cage in the wagon to the ground.

She didn’t think. She left Levi, who’d been saying something about finding suitable lodging for the night, and crossed the grounds to White.

As White raised the whip to hit the cowering animal again, Amelia tore it from his hand. She nearly dropped it, for it was an ugly thing and it felt ugly and mean in her hand, but she was so very angry.

“What the—” he said.

As he turned toward her, Amelia lashed him across the face with the whip. White screamed, both hands coming up to cover his left cheek. A large welt raised there almost instantly, and it ran from his mouth to his ear.

“You goddamned bitch,” White snarled, stepping toward her.

Amelia raised the whip again. White paused, looking not at her but at the weapon in her hand. She felt that ugliness against her palm, the hate that White bore for anything he thought lesser than him, and how it had seeped into the whip. It made her want to throw it away and wash her hands until they were pink and clean and she was certain that none of his meanness had seeped inside and infected her.

“You are not to use this on that creature again,” Amelia said, holding on to the whip. She had to hold on so he would know she was a threat. He was the kind of man who only understood violence. “You are not to hit her, or pull her on a rope, or let her go hours without water or food. If you do any of those things I will see to it that you are not paid for your services here.”

“Mr. Barnum hired me, not you,” White said. “You don’t get to tell me what to do. You’re not even human.”

“And I am grateful for that, if you’re an example of humanity,” Amelia said. “I’d rather be a mermaid, or even an orangutan, than one of your tribe.”

“I’ll do what I please,” White spat. “It’s nothing but a dumb animal, and so are you.”

“You’ll do what you please elsewhere,” Amelia said. She was not surprised to discover that White thought this way. She imagined that many of the other laborers did as well. Barnum had said there was no difference between her and a tiger in a cage, and Amelia knew that most people thought the same. They didn’t think of her as one of them. “Take your things and leave.”

“I signed an agreement with Mr. Barnum,” White said. “I told you, you don’t get to tell me what to do or where to go or end that agreement.”

“But I do. I am the executor of that agreement,” Levi said from behind Amelia. “Mr. Barnum invested his authority in me, and I say you are no longer employed by this institution.”

White looked astonished. He had expected, Amelia thought, that Levi would support him if it came down to it—perhaps because Levi was also a man and Amelia only a woman with no power. “Because I only treated a dumb beast as it deserved to be treated?”

Levi looked at the man steadily. “You insulted my wife.”

“Your wife,” White spat. “Does she wrap you in her tail at night? Does she sleep in a tank? What kind of babies are you going to have with a fish, Levi Lyman? Your wife is an abomination. I can’t insult an abomination. They’re supposed to be destroyed.”

“If you don’t leave now I’ll call the local police and have you jailed,” Levi said. He didn’t physically threaten White, or tighten his hands into fists, or do anything besides let the other man see in his eyes that he meant it.

“What about my pay?” White said. “I earned money on this venture, and I want it.”

Levi crossed his arms and stared at the animal handler.

White swore and stormed off. Amelia lowered the whip to the ground, dropping it. She rubbed her palm with her other hand, trying to take off the taint of the weapon.

The other workers had gathered around to watch the exchange. When White left the spell was broken, and they all hastily rushed to their tasks before they, too, were summarily dismissed without pay.

Amelia walked slowly to the orangutan’s side. Her legs were shaking, but she thought nobody had noticed and if she moved carefully they wouldn’t.

There were stripes across the creature’s neck and shoulders, and she lay on one side with her eyes closed. Levi called two of the other workers to carry her inside the tent and give her food and water.

Amelia started after them, but Levi put his hand on her shoulder. “Let them be,” he said. “I’ll make certain that the animal isn’t mistreated.”

“What you mean,” Amelia said bitterly, “is that they won’t listen if I tell them what to do. Just as Mr. White wouldn’t leave until you said so.”

“Men generally don’t recognize the authority of women,” Levi said very gently. “It’s the way of the world, Amelia. I’m sorry it distresses you.”

“The world,” Amelia said, “is wrong about so many things.”

She couldn’t miss the sideways glances many of the workers gave her for the rest of the day, and for many days after. White had only said aloud something many of them thought—that she was unnatural, that she should not be.

That was the look that was in the eyes of many of the people in the audience as well, the elusive thing she hadn’t been able to pin down. Some of them thought she was a miracle, but a great many of them seemed horrified by her existence.

It is not a comforting thing to realize that many people think the world a better place without you in it, Amelia thought.

With each passing day she felt more restless, and more angry. She couldn’t explain exactly what had put her in that state. There were so many slights and discontents that added up to more than the sum of the whole.

Maybe it was the feeling that there was a wall between her and Levi, that there were more subjects on which they disagreed rather than agreed. He still loved her, and she him, but they turned away from each other in frustration as often as they fell into each other’s arms.

She hadn’t forgotten the way he’d walked away from their first disagreement about the island people he called savages, and they returned to the subject time and again to the benefit of neither. They could not agree, but Amelia continued to try to convince him.

He would not be convinced. Amelia finally realized it was because he himself did not understand what it meant to be different and to have people expect you to change for their sake. She realized that no man could understand this, really, though they expected their wives to do so every day.

After that she stopped pressing him on the subject, but the kernel of her disappointment lay inside her and festered until it was an eternal ache at the bottom of her stomach.

Perhaps her anger and restlessness was because of the exhaustion of touring or the horrible wagon she was supposed to confine herself in night after night. Perhaps it was because she was tired of being a creature with no voice, who was supposed to pretend to be unable to speak, and thus was not able to defend herself from the men who leered at her through the glass.

Perhaps it was because the more she saw of humanity, the less she liked it. She realized that even though the people of her village hadn’t always been the kindest or most welcoming, they did at least leave well enough alone. She rarely saw outright cruelty, and once you belonged to them, they would defend you as if you were their own child. She’d felt this, especially after Jack’s death.

Everywhere she traveled in the south she saw what the evil men did, an evil that had simply not been present in her hometown. They passed field after field of black men and women in chains, toiling for white men in shaded hats who sat on horses and bore whips like the one Amelia had used on Stephen White.

She could feel the hate that radiated from these men, the contempt, the smug superiority, and she never passed by one without wishing to knock him from the back of the horse and hope the animal kicked him to death.

When they went by these places she felt, very profoundly, her helplessness, her inability to free the people from their pain, the need to fix this and knowing she could not. She had not even been able to fire an animal handler who abused his animal without the authority of her husband. None of these men on horses would listen to her. They’d probably tell Levi to take her back inside where she belonged. That was what that sort of man did.

And maybe it was because inside her there was a little mermaid growing (Amelia could feel her daughter swimming in her belly, like little bubbles swirling under her skin) and she wanted, very badly, to return to the sea where her child belonged. She wanted her daughter to know the ocean, to know its dangers and its beauties.

The ocean was a violent place, yes, but it was violence without malice. When a shark ate a sea lion, it did not hate the sea lion. It only wanted to live.

The human world was not so marvelous as it had seemed from the water. And her reasons for staying in New York, for going on this tour, for being a part of Barnum’s performance machine, now seemed both shallow and foolish. Money? She’d wanted money to travel and see all the wonders of man? What was there to see besides the misery people inflicted on one another?

The castles of Europe and the mountains of the west were nothing to her now. She wanted only the comfort of the ocean, to feel its embrace all around her and know that was her place. That was where she belonged. She did not belong in a tank with dead water around her, humans treating her like something that did tricks only for their amusement.

But she could not simply run to the water and leave as she might have months before. She couldn’t because she loved Levi, even with the space between them, and because she bore his child.

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,

“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.

That evening there was another performance at the Masonic Hall, and the next day another review of the show appeared. This time it was in the Charleston Mercury.

It was written by a man who called himself “the Rev. John Blackman” and it stated, in no uncertain terms, that the mermaid was a fraud perpetuated “by our Yankee neighbors.” The Reverend Blackman claimed to be an amateur naturalist and thus spoke with greater authority than the editor of the Courier.

“Did this man actually attend a performance?” Amelia asked.

Levi scanned the article. “He claims to have done so.”

“But it’s absurd,” she said. “If he saw me then he must know that I’m real.”

“He says that your very presence in the company of such tricks as ventriloquism prove that the mermaid is nothing more than a clever illusion,” Levi said. “I wouldn’t let it trouble you, Amelia. I don’t think that very many people will agree with his opinion, especially if they have attended the exhibition themselves.”

But in that Levi was wrong. Almost immediately letters began appearing in each publication both for and against the veracity of the mermaid. The Courier’s editor, Richard Yeadon, wrote daily pieces dismissing the claims of Reverend Blackman, and Blackman took up the opposite cause in the Mercury.

The crowds that attended each performance swelled. It seemed every person in Charleston wanted to see Amelia for himself and take a side in this very public disagreement.

“Barnum will be pleased, at least,” Levi said. “We are selling so many tickets that people have to be turned away each day.”

There was still no response from Barnum or Charity, a fact that Levi found ominous. He didn’t share his worries with Amelia, however. He still hoped to complete their run in Charleston without the sudden arrival of the showman.

The next night the exhibit went on as usual, at least at first. Levi watched Amelia from the wings of the stage as she climbed the ladder and dove into the tank that Barnum had sent especially for this exhibit.

It was larger than the small wagon that had served as performance space since they left New York, but Levi could tell that Amelia wished for the unfettered freedom of the ocean. There was nothing in her performance any more besides dull obligation.

Not that it mattered, Levi thought. People’s reactions were always the same whether Amelia swam in circles, waved to them, or simply floated in the tank with a blank expression on her face. First surprise, then disbelief, then dawning realization that what they saw was true.

A scuffle broke out at the back of the hall. Levi, fearing a repeat of the first night at the Concert Hall when the crowd rushed the stage, ran out of the wings to see what was happening.

There was a thud, the sound of flesh on flesh, and several people gasped. A small circle of people had gathered around two men who apparently had decided to disagree with their fists.

Levi gestured to two of the men stationed near the front of the stage to break up the fight. The laborers who worked in their wagon train were not as large or as intimidating as the guards Barnum hired in New York, but they were plenty able to disrupt a fight between two gentlemen.

The workers were nearly to the crowd when another fight broke out. This time Levi heard what they were saying.

“Use your eyes, man! How can she possibly be a fraud?” one man screamed at another, his eyes bulging.

“I for one am not about to be fooled by a pack of damn Yanks here to steal our money,” the second man said, shoving the first.

Several men shouted down the second man, while another chorus joined in favor of his argument. Women stumbled away from the suddenly jostling and dangerous group, several of them fleeing out the doors of the hall into the night.

Levi realized the crowd had turned ugly. He bent to another one of the workers and said, “Better go and get the local constable before this becomes dangerous.”

The man nodded and climbed the stage to stand next to Levi. “Best if I go out the back exit. Else I might get caught up in that mob.”

Levi nodded as the man disappeared backstage. Then he ran to the rope that controlled the curtains and pulled them shut. The noise seemed to grow louder once the crowd was out of sight.

It’s only your imagination, Levi told himself. Terrible things always seemed more terrible when you could not see them.

Amelia was already climbing out of the tank, her hand in the jar of sand on the platform. He scooped up her dress and carried it to her as she stepped quickly down the ladder.

“We have to leave,” Levi said.

“Of course we do,” Amelia said. “Even I can tell that lot will kill each other over their sense of injured honor, and if we’re still here they might decide to kill us, too, for fooling them in the first place.”

He took her hand, and they hurried to the backstage area. Just as they slipped out into the night they heard an angry cry.

“The mermaid’s gone!”

“They must have sneaked out the back!”

Levi pulled Amelia along, thinking only of getting her back to the hotel. They would be safe there, he thought. Once they were in their room and out of sight, the crowd would calm down. The constable might arrive soon, in any case, and disrupt the proceedings before they could go any further.

Amelia struggled along beside him, and Levi realized her feet were bare. He hadn’t thought of her shoes, only of covering her body and getting her away before someone tried to hurt her.

I’m not having another Elijah Hunt, he thought. It would kill him to see her hurt like that again, even if he did know the cure.

“I’m sorry,” he said, panting from the effort of hurrying. “Can you walk?”

“A rock cut my foot,” Amelia said. “It’s bleeding.”

Levi glanced behind them and saw, in the dim light, the dark track that Amelia left behind her. He also saw—and heard—three men searching for any sign of them behind the hall. Soon enough they would notice the blood trail and they would follow it.

He scooped up Amelia in his arms.

“You can’t walk very fast like this,” she said.

“Your foot is leaving a trail,” Levi said. “If those men notice it, they’ll follow us. And you can’t walk very fast with your injury in any case.”

They hurried along in the dark as fast as Levi could manage. Amelia weighed practically nothing, but it still wasn’t easy to carry her this way for very long, and soon he was sweating and breathless from the effort.

“You’d better put me down,” Amelia said.

“We’re almost to the hotel,” he said between his teeth.

But they rounded the corner of their building and Levi pulled up short. A surly crowd of twenty or so men had gathered outside on the porch, and the manager of the hotel stood in the doorway holding up placating hands to a red-faced man who pressed his nose very close to the manager’s.

“Oh, no,” Amelia said.

Levi disappeared back into the notch between the hotel and the building next door. He placed Amelia carefully on her feet and bent over his legs, panting.

“What should we do now?” Amelia asked.

It was strange, he thought, that the one time she seemed inclined to defer to him was the one time he had no answers.

“The wagon train is on the outskirts,” he said. “If we can get there we can take one of the wagons and leave.”

Amelia shook her head. “That will be the next place they go if they can’t find us at the hotel. Besides, what about everyone else—the workmen, Mr. Wyman, Mr. Veronia? The mob might go after them instead.”

“I don’t think they will,” Levi said. “They just want you. They want to prove you’re not real, or that you are, whichever it is that they believe more.”

“I think the ones in front of the hotel want to prove I’m only human,” Amelia said grimly. “They want a lynching.”

“The only way to keep you from them is for you to leave,” Levi said slowly. There was only one possible solution—the one that he wanted the least, the one that he’d known somehow would always be the only answer. Where did a sea creature belong except the sea? “They won’t care about the others once you’re gone. Amelia, you have to go to the ocean.”

She stared at him. “You mean leave you? Leave forever?”

“Yes,” he said, and grabbed her hand. Charleston was flush up against the sea. They only had to reach it in time. “It’s the only way.”

“Levi, I’m not going to leave you here,” she said. “You’re my husband, and I love you.”

“And I love you, more than I can say, and I won’t watch you be hanged by that lot,” he said.

He didn’t think that throwing her in the ocean would fix a hanging the way it had undone her bullet wound. Everything inside him was breaking apart at the thought of her leaving, and all their arguments seemed foolish beyond reason. Did any disagreement matter more than the one you loved? But he would give her up to the ocean, and gladly, if it meant she would live. If it meant that one day he might see her again.

“Please, Amelia, if you love me you’ll go. The only possible way for you to be safe is if you are in the ocean.”

Amelia put her hand over her belly, “Levi. I’m going to have your child.”

He felt as though he’d been sideswiped. He stumbled, his breath hitched, and then he stopped to look at her. “Truly?”

“Yes,” she said, and kissed him. “Truly.”

His child. His child inside the body of his wife, and an angry mob wanted to tear her body apart.

“If they kill you, they’ll kill the baby, too,” Levi said. A baby. His baby.

It was then he saw the realization in her eyes, and the resolution. “I’ll go,” Amelia said. “I’ll go to Rarotonga, far away, and I will raise our daughter there. But, Levi, you have to come to us. You must.”

“I will,” he promised. “No matter how long it takes, I will find you there.”

They went on in silence then, staying to the shadows, avoiding anyone who strayed near them in the night.

Levi remembered that night for many months after—the only sound their breath and their soft footfalls as they made for the salvation of the sea.

He remembered her kiss, and the way her hands clung to his arms, and the way his own arms didn’t want to let her go. He remembered how she tore her dress away and ran toward the breaking waves as if she were afraid he might try to change her mind.

He remembered how he scooped up her dress and breathed in the smell of her, and for a long time afterward he slept with it curled around his pillow so that he would not forget, and sometimes he could almost imagine she was there.

He remembered the silhouette of her tail against the horizon, and how it disappeared under the water, and how it did not reappear no matter how long he watched or hoped for it.

Amelia swam, swam away from Levi standing alone on the shore, and she felt like she did on that day long, long ago when Jack caught her in his net and then let her go. She’d felt tethered to him then, tethered by his loneliness, and it had made a long cord that bound them and brought her back to him.

The cord between her and Levi was less perfect, less idealized, but it was no less strong. She loved him, and she loved the baby he had given her, and that love would remain sure and strong and true. She had seen into his heart, the way that women do, and she knew his love would be the same. She would wait for him on a sandy shore on a faraway island, her eyes always watching the sea for some sign of him. She would wait.

Until then, she was swimming fast and free in the ocean, and the ocean welcomed her home.

Well, Barnum reflected, the mermaid show was good while it lasted. He’d had an idea that he might be able to change the girl’s mind and make her stay longer, but after the debacle in Charleston, it probably couldn’t have been salvaged even if she hadn’t disappeared into the sea.

Poor Levi had been mooning around the museum since he got back. Barnum had given the boy the notebook with Amelia’s sketch in it and Barnum had been genuinely afraid Levi would burst into tears when he saw it. The boy had managed to restrain himself, though.

Barnum was on his way back from a business trip to Albany that hadn’t borne the fruit he’d hoped. Because the river was frozen, he’d been forced to take the train; the only consolation was that it stopped in Bridgeport. His half brother Philo had a hotel there, and so Barnum thought it right to spend the night.

Yes, he thought again as he ate his dinner in the hotel restaurant. He’d made a good dollar off the mermaid. It was really too bad it hadn’t lasted longer.

“Taylor,” Philo said, shaking Barnum out of his reverie. “There’s someone I’d like you to meet.”

Standing next to his brother was a little boy, so little that he was practically doll-sized. “This is Charles Stratton. Charles, this is my brother, Mr. P. T. Barnum.”

Barnum looked at the boy, who politely said, “How do you do.”

A doll-sized boy! Barnum thought. Barnum could put the little fellow up onstage, dress him in costumes, give him a name. Tom Thumb. He’s just like Tom Thumb from the stories.

A boy like this could make his fortune, Barnum thought. And there would be no disappearing into the ocean this time.

He smiled, a wide showman’s smile that showed all of his teeth.

“I am very pleased to meet you, Charles.”

FOUR YEARS LATER

Amelia watched over her daughter as she splashed in the shallow pool. They were in a little cove, protected by the shade of wide-leafed trees, and the water was not very deep. Despite this, Amelia had to keep a very sharp eye on Charity—the girl was likely to dart off into the deep water if Amelia looked away for a moment. Charity, like her mother once had, was always looking over the horizon for an adventure.

Amelia was grateful for the shade. While the waters of the South Pacific were blue and clear and beautiful, the island was far too warm for one long accustomed to the cold of the North Atlantic coast. Still, they were protected here—protected by the native people who kept them hidden from European colonists, so that word would not spread back to the mainland of a mermaid and her daughter.

Savages, the white men called them. But there was less savagery in them than ever she saw in a civilized country. They accepted Amelia and Charity, accepted what they were without judgment. The people here did not see the mermaids as a wonder, or a horror, or as animals, or as humans. The people saw them as mermaids and accepted them as part of the order of the world.

“Charity,” Amelia said warningly.

The little mermaid had seen a hermit crab carrying its shell across the shallow pool, and followed it closely. When Charity reached the edge of the shallow, the place where the sand dropped off into the deeper water, she glanced over her shoulder to see if her mother was watching.

Amelia shook her head. Charity’s small mouth twisted when she realized she could not explore past the edge of the pool.

Charity’s tail was red-gold and flapped in the water as she swam back to her mother. Amelia’s daughter looked more like Barnum’s woodcuts of a mermaid—her skin was still human above her fin and only changed to scales at her waist. She would, when she grew older, look exactly as so many sailors had dreamed—half human, half fish, a man’s dream of a mermaid.

The tiny mermaid touched the sand and turned completely into a human toddler, dark-haired and dark-eyed like her father and nut-brown from the sun.

“It’s time for dinner,” Amelia said, and took Charity’s plump little hand.

They strolled along the beach away from the cove. There was a little hut where they slept and ate a short distance from the shallow pool. Amelia had caught some fish earlier in the day, and they would roast these over a fire. Charity had very human tastes, preferring her food cooked instead of raw. Her teeth, even when she was a mermaid, were not sharp like Amelia’s but flat like a human’s.

She squeezed the hand of her daughter, the little miracle that she had wished for, for so long. Her daughter would grow up here, safe from eyes that stared and claimed and tried to make something of her that she was not. When she was older she would make her own choice—to stay here, or to return to Amelia’s people in the sea, or to live as a human in a land far away.

It was the fate of parents to have to let their children go, so they could make their own triumphs and their own mistakes. When Amelia thought of those days, she would, as now, pick up Charity and hold her tight and wish her daughter could stay in her arms forever.

Charity allowed the hug only briefly before squirming out of Amelia’s embrace. She ran a little ahead of her mother, then stopped and pointed.

“Mama,” she said, “who’s that?”

There was a man standing near their hut, a white man in a suit entirely impractical for the island. His hand shaded his eyes, and he stared out at the ocean, looking for someone.

Amelia’s heart leapt. She’d hardly allowed herself to think of him, to wonder if he would ever come, but she’d felt that cord that bound them always, and sometimes she would roll over in the night and reach for him and find he wasn’t there.

“Mama?” Charity asked as Amelia began to run.

“It’s your father,” Amelia said, picking up their daughter and running with her over the sand. “Charity, it’s your father.”