Alice At Heart (18 page)

“Mara’s patrons order her designs from all over the world,” Pearl said today. “She’s quite well connected and very well liked. You know, this family is quite lovable and honorable and . . . and kindly. We’ve never hurt anyone. Not deliberately.”

Pearl seems strangely intent on explaining life among the Bonavendiers to me. She and each of her sisters have duties, a vocation, a role to play. Pearl acts as social secretary, and judging by the mounds of correspondence in her exuberant, colorful office (jeweled porcelain butterflies dangle from the ceiling on gold wires, need I say more?), the sisters entertain a vast array of guests and old friends. I suspect they’ve put their social calendar on hold while I adjust. Or am adjusted.

Lilith is the writer and publisher. She compiles histories of the southern coast, botanical treatises, and stories of the oceans provided by god knows who among her far-flung associates. In an office as feminine as a boudoir straight from some Parisian villa, she has shown me little thank-you notes from her past or current collaborators.

“Jacques Cousteau,” I said on a short breath.

“Hmmm,” she acknowledged, as if the world-famous scientist was just her assistant. I began to realize that some of my favorite books include Lilith’s work, under pseudonyms.

“I have been reading her words, absorbing her spirit for years,” I said to Pearl.

Pearl stared at me. “Well, then, you’re ready to listen to the good stuff.” She pulled me to the beach.

Before I knew it, we were running like children, the wind tangling her long hair and ruffling my shorter locks. We raced along the island’s curving length until we came to a small gazebo mired in the dunes. We flung ourselves, drunk with the ocean scent, into two of the gazebo’s wind-weathered rocking chairs.

The bright sun poured under the gazebo’s eaves and cast us in golden shadows. Pearl wore a blue swimsuit with a diaphanous, flowered scarf tied around her waist. She threw her red hair—easily two yards long—over the back of the rocking chair and dug her webbed toes into mounds of sand the wind had pushed onto the gazebo’s slatted wooden floor. The pale cream of her skin glowed in the soft light.

Envy and deep yearnings rose inside me. I smoothed my hands over the flowing top and pants I wore, made of fine, antique-white silks that moved with me like the wind. I ruffled my growing hair and furtively tried to make the auburn lengths protrude just a little over my chair’s back. I tentatively slid my bare feet across the floor and let the soft sand caress the tender webbing.
Oh, Lilith, do our fantasies have to be built on the deepest pools of sorrow
?

Pearl must have caught the wisp of my thought. She wrung her hands and watched me worriedly. “Do you know what, Alice? What every one of us merfolk understands? That sorrows sink us but love keeps us afloat. Love is our breath beneath the waters.” Having delivered that philosophy, she nodded firmly. “Ask me your questions, Alice.”

I bowed my head.
Let me believe in love.
“You’ve been married to Barret a long time?”

“He’s not my husband.”

“Forgive me, I assumed—”

“We try not to draw attention to his circumstances. He’s not a citizen, you see.”

“When did you meet?”

“Oh, we’ve been together for nearly sixty years. I was five when we met. He was no more than sixteen. Of course, he was very brotherly until I grew up and we became lovers.”

I did some quick calculations and realized her numbers put their first encounter squarely in the early 1940s, during World War Two. “Did he escape the war in Europe by coming to America?” I thought perhaps he was a Jewish immigrant of German origin.

“Oh, no. He came here with the navy.”

I looked at her a long time. “Ours?”

She sighed. “Theirs.”

The hair rose on the back of my neck. “Pearl, are you saying—”

“There were German submarines everywhere along the eastern coasts, you know. We Bonavendiers were actively involved in spying on them. Father and Mother and Lilith—who was so young then but, oh, what a patriot she was!—they searched out at least a dozen, which Father reported to the authorities. Very discreetly, of course. We have our family traditions, Alice. We don’t show off. We don’t brag. We are merfolk and specially endowed. No need to gild the water lily.”

“There were German submarines,” I prodded. “Yes. Go on.”

“I was playing in a little bayside cove near the lighthouse one day, and one of them surfaced. I ducked down and watched as the crew climbed out the top and sunned on the deck. I watched this tall, beautiful young man edge away from the others. I sang to him, and he looked right toward me. He leapt into the water, Alice! Dived right in and began to swim for shore. I thought he was playing, but the yells of the others and the way he swam—he wasn’t playing, I realized; he was trying to get away.”

I inhaled sharply. “Barret was that crewman on a Nazi submarine?”

“Oh, Alice,
yes
, but he was just a boy who’d been scooped up for the service, along with thousands of others. A homesick boy who loved the sea. He hated the Nazis. He hated the war.” She paused and looked at me with trust as light as a butterfly’s wing. “His great-grandfather was one of our kind, you see. Barret heard me singing in the surf. He knew what that meant. He knew where he belonged.”

I spent some time bending and unbending a dried stalk of the sea oats that grew up between the gazebo’s floorboards. Gathering my thoughts. Indulging, expanding, resisting. “Barret’s great-grandfather was a merman?”

“Mmmm. A Nordic charmer, Barret says.”

“Then Barret is also a—”

“A merman?” she finished solemnly. “I suppose. He doesn’t have any obvious traits, but then there are many degrees of merfolk. Lilith believes practically everyone has a drop or two of us in them. But very watered down, of course.”

“Of course.”

Her face grew solemn. “He swam faster than anyone could imagine, but the crew of his submarine still managed to shoot him.”

“
His own crewmates shot him
?”

She nodded. “They shot him in the back as he swam. He was hit twice. That’s why he limps. Why he can’t swim now. He was crippled.”

“Oh, Pearl.”

Tears filled her eyes. “He sank, drowning and bleeding. I dived down and caught him by the arm. I was just a tiny girl, but I managed to tug him to the banks. It’s very wooded there, and there was some brush hanging over the sides. I got his head propped above water and hid him beneath the brush until the others left. Then I swam as fast as I could to the cove, screaming for help. Father and Mother came and got him, and then we kept him.”

“The family hid him and nursed him back to health?”

“Yes. And we’ve been together ever since.” Her smile trembled a little. “He would have been deported or imprisoned if the government had known about him in those early years. Now, well, no one remembers, and no one cares enough to ask. But during all those years he was in hiding—had become a man without a country—I made my decision to never leave him. We are soulmates, Alice. We made our peace with the forces that brought us together, and we wanted so badly to have children.” She looked out at the ocean and added very quietly, “When we couldn’t, he tried to make me give him up because of that. He said it was his fault somehow. But I refused to listen. The ocean gave us to each other. We have been blessed enough.”

I sat in silence, reached over and touched her shoulder, and she took my hand and kissed it before she let it go. I was finally beginning to piece my sisters’ youthful lives into the patterns they fit now, and my heart ached for them. “Tell me about Mara, please,” I said finally.

Pearl told me about Mara and C.A. Randolph’s turbulent love affair, how cruelly she treated him. She broke his heart, then went to New York to work—and married a new lover within weeks. “She married one of our own kind, very handsome, very rich, and devoted to her,” Pearl explained. “But she could never quite love him the way she loved C.A. Of course, she was horrified to discover that fact—that even a merman couldn’t win her heart away from C.A.”

“Why did she reject him so foolishly to begin with?”

“Prejudice. Arrogance and prejudice. Poor C.A. was only a college boy then. She took revenge on him, but ultimately her revenge hurt many lives.”

Mara’s husband had taken to flying a small plane over the waters of their coastal New York home. “Merfolk don’t fly well,” Pearl said somberly. “We grow air sick at all but very low altitudes, and we envy the ordinary folk for their ability to take to the sky like birds. Perhaps Mara’s husband felt he could best her memory of C.A. Randolph if he mastered something so difficult.” She hesitated, then looked at me with misery. “But, Alice, he couldn’t win. He crashed the plane one day with their two children aboard.”

I looked at Pearl quietly. I feared the worst. “Does Lilith have an equally tragic story?”

She nodded and her eyes filled with tears. “His name was Riyad. He’s a Muslim, and a prince. In his country, the families arrange the marriages. When he was a boy, he was promised in marriage to a princess.”

“He and his people were all . . . our kind?”

“Oh, yes. Of the highest order, like us. He had the loveliest webbing. The color of dark tea.”

I sat there thinking, r
oyal, muslim, merman.
“How did he and Lilith meet?”

“They were diplomats together in Paris. When she was young, she worked for the embassy there. They fell desperately in love—and I do mean desperately—because our kind does not love lightly. He couldn’t bring himself to tell her about his betrothal, and when she found out, she said she could never forgive him. He was heartbroken—and ashamed of using deceit. He returned to his country.” Pearl paused, crying a little. “He did not know that Lilith was with child.”

I sat back in my chair. Lilith. A mother. And this Riyad, the unsuspecting father. No wonder she had sympathy for my mother. I thought of the water fountain outside the breakfast nook. Lilith’s love for that special place was poignant suddenly. “How could he not have sensed such new life?”

“Surely—as you’ve come to understand—we merfolk can be
quite
stubborn when we want to shut each other out of our songs. Lilith closed herself away from him—oh, such pride, such pain! So he left her, not knowing. She came home, here, and bore the child.” Pearl looked at me tearfully. “A tiny little boy. He died within the hour. She went mad with grief. We were afraid she’d die as well. She began to disappear into the ocean for days at a time. Our kind always turns to the water for comfort, Alice.”

“Because we’re descended from Melasine, who took her own comfort there.”

“Oh,
yes
. There is such
courage
in the Old Ones, such nobility. Lilith believes they understand the deepest love, the truest hope, and are an inspiration we must follow. After all, Melasine was willing to love a man even while knowing she’d outlive him and their children, and even their grandchildren and great-grandchildren and so forth. Knowing that she could never share his world fully, or he, hers. And that ultimately she would spend much of her life only remembering him and what they’d created together. Such is the curse of all the Old Ones who fall in love. And all the Water People must remember to love wisely, too. We’re too powerful for our own good.”

“I see.”

Pearl sighed. “Riyad has lived with his wife honorably, from all we’ve heard. She died last year.”

“Then he and Lilith are free to see each other.”

“Lilith has too much pride to sing to him. And she’s made Mara and me promise not to contact him.” Pearl paused, squinting at me, then gasped. “But
you’ve
made her no promise! You could sing to him!”

I stared at her. “What? No. No, really. I wouldn’t even know how to—”

“You’ll learn! It’s instinctive! Please, when you do understand, please try!” She rose in joy, clapping her hands and laughing. “Oh, how wonderful! You’ll call for Riyad! I knew you’d bring us good luck! We’ve found you, and now the pieces of our hearts are falling into place! And Riyad will reunite with Lilith!” She threw her arms around me as I sat there gaping at her. “Oh, thank you, dear little sister!”

She danced away on the beach, leaving me too stunned to speak, much less sing.

“What kind of crap is this?”
C.A. asked, sweat pouring from beneath his shaggy silver hair, his face furious. He paced the dock at Randolph Cottage, glaring at the hulking vessel Griffin had moored to it.

Griffin ignored him for a moment, letting the tension and the scene align themselves. The April air grew hotter every day, the ocean warmer. Great white clouds mounded in the blue sky over Sainte’s Point. Griffin had purchased a thirty-foot barge with a large cabin on the bow end and a heavy crane on the stern. Aboard it, Griffin had assembled diving gear, dredging equipment, and other tools of the salvage trade.

“What the hell are you doing?” C.A. said finally. “What is all this?”

“It’s a treasure-hunting rig,” Griffin replied.

“Goddammit, I know that.”

“Good.” Griffin limped around the barge’s deck, still unsteady but growing stronger. His scars were finer, now, and the work outdoors was reviving the color of his skin. But the rush of blood from his exertions turned the scars scarlet on his chest and back and gave the scar on his clean-shaven face the look of a purplish zipper. Sometimes he worked shirtless, and the men who delivered the gear he’d ordered tended to turn their eyes from him. He looked at himself wearily sometimes and realized he was still ugly.

C.A. lost all patience . “Goddammit, Griffin, I thought you were giving up your work as a treasure hunter!”

“I am. This gear is for one job only.” Griffin calmly straightened, the hot, spring wind ruffling an old chambray shirt he’d pulled on. In a pocket of his faded khaki trousers, he carried a ring of his father’s and a small pearl pendant of his mother’s. The dolphin sculpture sat atop a piling nearby. Talismans. “I’m going to bring up the
Calm Meridian
.”

C.A. paled, put a hand on a dock post, and leaned heavily. “That is the most morbid, useless, obsessive—”