Carol Goodman - The Seduction of Water (Ballantine Readers Circle)

The Seduction of Water

CAROL GOODMAN

BALLANTINE BOOKS
NEW YORK

Table of Contents

For my daughter, Maggie
true princess of Tirra Glynn

Acknowledgments

I owe many thanks to my extraordinary agent, Loretta Barrett, whose faith and hard work have made writing this possible, and to my amazing editor, Linda Marrow, whose insight and humor have made writing it a pleasure. Thanks too to Nick Mullendore at Loretta Barrett Books for always explaining everything and to all the people at Ballantine who have made a home for me there: Gina Centrello, Kim Hovey, Gilly Hailparn, and Kathleen Spinelli.

Im lucky to have a circle of friends and family willing to read and comment on first drafts. Thanks to Barbara Barak, Laurie Bower, Gary Feinberg, Emily Frank, Wendy Rossi Gold, Marge Goodman, Robert Goodman, Lisa Levine-Bernstein, Mindy Ohringer, Scott Silverman, Nora Slonimsky, and Sondra Browning Witt.

Thanks to Mary Louise Morgan for showing me St. Vincents Home for Boys and to Ed Bernstein for rescuing the manuscript.

Most of all, thanks to my husband, Lee Slonimsky, for his constant encouragement, inspiration, and love. You are my muse.

PART I

The Broken Pearl

Chapter One

My favorite story when I was small, the one I begged for night after night, was The Selkie.

That old story, my mother would say. Shed say it in exactly the same tone of voice as when my father complimented her dress. Oh, this old thing, shed say, her pale green eyes giving away her pleasure. Wouldnt you rather something new? And shed hold up a shiny book my aunt Sophie, my fathers sister, had bought for me. The Bobbsey Twins or, when I was older, Nancy Drew. American stories with an improving message and plucky, intrepid heroines.

No, I want your story, I would say. It was her story because she knew it by heart, had heard it from her mother, who had heard it from hers... a line of mothers and daughters that I imagined like the images I had seen when I stood by her side in front of the mirrors in the lobby.

Well, if it will help you sleep...

And I would nod, burrowing deeper into the blankets. It was one of the few requests I stuck to, perhaps because my mothers initial hesitation came to be part of the ritualpart of the telling. A game we played because I knew she liked that I wanted her story, not some store-bought one. Even when she was dressed to go out and she had only come up to say a quick good night she would sit down on the edge of my bed and shrug her coat off her shoulders so that its black fur collar settled down around her waist and I would nestle into its dark, perfumed plush, and she, getting ready to tell her story, would touch the long strands of pearls at her neck, the beads making a soft clicking sound, and close her eyes. I imagined that she closed her eyes because the story was somewhere inside her, on an invisible scroll unfurling behind her eyelids from which she read night after night, every word the same as the night before.

In a time before the rivers were drowned by the sea, in a land between the sun and the moon...

Here she would open her eyes and touch the knobs of my headboard, which had been carved into the shapes of a crescent moon and a sun by Joseph, the hotel gardener, to replace its original broken knobs. We used the bedding and furniture too worn-out for guest useblankets with hems coming unstitched, dressers with rattling drawers, and tables with ring marks where careless city ladies had put down hot teacups without a saucer. The rooms we lived in were leftovers themselves, the attic rooms where the maids lived before the new servants quarters were built in the North Wing. Its where my mother had stayed when shed come to the hotel to work as a maid. Even after shed married my father, the hotel manager, she told him she liked being up high. From the attic rooms you had the best view of the river flowing south toward New York City and then to the sea.

In this land, where our people came from, the fishermen told a story about a man who fell in love with one of the seal women, selkies the people called them, seals that once a year could shed their skin and become women...

So were they women pretending to be seals or seals pretending to be women?

This interruption my mother would take in stride because I always asked the same question and she had incorporated the answer into the story.

... and no one ever knew which they had been first, seal or woman, which is part of their mystery. When you looked into the seals eyes you could see the human being looking out, but when you heard the woman singing you could hear the sound of the sea in her voice.

Still unsatisfied as to whether the selkies were mainly seal or human, I would indicate to my mother that I was ready for her to go on by burrowing deeper into the covers and closing my eyes. I knew my mother had someplace to be and the story could detain her only so long. If she didnt think I was falling asleep, I risked losing the story altogether.

... and so it happened that on that one day a farmer went down to the sea...

Did he go to collect seashells for his garden paths? I would ask. The way Joseph said they did in France. Joseph had worked at all the finest hotels in Europe after the war. On his right forearm, just visible when he rolled up the cuffs of his faded blue workshirts, were faint numbers, the same color as the shirts he wore.

Yes, a path of seashells sounds nice, she would say, smiling. She liked it when I thought up new details for her stories. He wanted the path to his house to glow in the moonlight like broken pearls. Thats what he was thinking about when he looked up and saw, sunning herself on a rock, a girl with skin like crushed pearls and hair as dark as coal.

Black hair. Like my mother. Like me. Recently, I found my mothers old book of Irish folktales that contained The Selkie. The selkie in it is blond. My mother must have decided to make the heroine of her story dark-haired like us.

The dark-haired girl with pearl skin sang like something you might hear in a dream, sweeter than anything youd hear in a theater or Carnegie Hall even... Here, if I peeked, Id see that my mother, her eyes still closed, wore the expression of someone listening to music. Shed be quiet for a moment and for once I wouldnt fill the silence with a question because, I thought, if I listened carefully enough I would hear what she heard too. All I did hear, though, were the muffled footsteps and hushed whispers of the night maids and the groan of the old elevator taking late diners back up to their rooms. If there was singing it would be one of the retired music teachers who rented attic rooms for the summer. As soon as my mother opened her eyes Id snap mine shut.

... and so the farmer fell in love with the dark-haired girl and decided he wanted her for a wife, but when he tried to get closer to the rock where she sat, she heard him and dived into the water. The farmer stood on the shore watching for the girl, sure that she couldnt stay in the water for long. Then he saw, out beyond the breakers, a sleek dark head appear. But she wasnt a girl anymore, she was a

Seal! I would say, forgetting in my excitement to make my voice sound sleepy.

Yes. The farmer stood for a long time looking at the ocean thinking over what he had seen, or what he thought he had seen, but at last he remembered he had cows to milk and chickens to feed and so he turned his back to the ocean and went on home.

But he couldnt forget the dark-haired girl and her beautiful voice.