The Seduction of Water (Ballantine Reader's Circle) - Softcover

Goodman, Carol

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0345450914 ISBN 13: 9780345450913

Verlag: Random House Publishing Group, 2003

Inhaltsangabe

Iris Greenfeder, ABD (All But Dissertation), feels the “buts” are taking over her life: all but published, all but a professor, all but married. Yet the sudden impulse to write a story about her mother, Katherine Morrissey, leads to a shot at literary success. The piece recounts an eerie Irish fairy tale her mother used to tell her at bedtime—and nestled inside it is the sad story of her death. It captures the attention of her mother’s former literary agent, who is convinced that Katherine wrote one final manuscript before her strange, untimely end in a fire thirty years ago. So Iris goes back to the remote Hotel Equinox in the Catskills, the place where she grew up, to write her mother’s biography and search for the missing manuscript—and there she unravels a haunting mystery, one that holds more secrets than she ever expected. . . .

Über diesen Titel

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Carol Goodman is the author of The Lake of Dead Languages. Her work has appeared in such journals as The Greensboro Review, Literal Latté, The Midwest Quarterly, and Other Voices. After graduation from Vassar College, where she majored in Latin, she taught Latin for several years in Austin, Texas. She then received an M.F.A. in fiction from the New School University. Goodman currently teaches writing and works as a writer-in-residence for Teachers & Writers. She lives on Long Island.

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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. She’d say it in exactly the same tone of voice as when my father complimented her dress. Oh, this old thing, she’d say, her pale green eyes giving away her pleasure. “Wouldn’t you rather something new?” And she’d hold up a shiny book my aunt Sophie, my father’s 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 mother’s initial hesitation came to be part of the ritual—part 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 use—blankets 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. It’s where my mother had stayed when she’d come to the hotel to work as a maid. Even after she’d 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 peo- ple 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 seal’s 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 didn’t 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. That’s 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 mother’s 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 you’d hear in a theater or Carnegie Hall even . . .” Here, if I peeked, I’d see that my mother, her eyes still closed, wore the expression of someone listening to music. She’d be quiet for a moment and for once I wouldn’t 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 I’d 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 couldn’t stay in the water for long. Then he saw, out beyond the breakers, a sleek dark head appear. But she wasn’t 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 couldn’t forget the dark-haired girl and her beautiful voice.”

“No. He couldn’t. Could you?”

My mother always asked me the same question, but no matter how many times she asked it, I was always unprepared. Not that I doubted that I too, like the farmer, would have been smitten by the dark-haired singer; but there was something in the way my mother asked the question that made me think I should answer differently, that I should have been able to resist the selkie’s song. After all, look what happened to that poor farmer . . .

He was so lovesick for the selkie girl that he was unable to sleep and the sound of the ocean, which he’d heard since the day he was born, began to grate on his nerves. It seemed there was always sand in his bed no matter how many times he’d shake out his sheets and even with all the windows open he’d feel as if he were suffocating inside his cottage.

(I could always hear, in this part of the story, an edge in my...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Random House Publishing Group
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2003
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0345450914
• ISBN 13: 9780345450913
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 400
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: SC; https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/; ; CL MODESTO LAFUENTE 41; Madrid; Madrid; Spanien