The Merrow’s Moon
Erica-Lynn Huberty
Then I become aware of Julian Blaine, in a way I had not before. Occasionally, on the path that runs from campus into town, I sensed him behind me, heard his footstep. We barely know each other except for a polite, passing nod, usually from a fair distance. Who am I to wish for unexpected romance and everlasting love, to wish for that which is reserved for movie stars and people like Cate and Ford? Silly, we all think such things. The reality of love can be finer than that if we'd only stop trying to make it happen all over the place.
Henry circles the cavernous art studio with its moveable partitions, looking for signs of genius, confusion, or lethargy. He stops at Ford, leans over his shoulder as a gob of glaze drips off Ford’s brush and misses his lopsided slab urn. Henry’s mouth curls upward. Next, he stops at Cate, points to something and gives a three-word suggestion. Her face alights with recognition. Then he moves across the room to Julian, lingers, makes him put his brush down, moves his hands in a spiral motion in front of a panel he’s painting, stays to watch what Julian does next, and taps his arm again to convey another thought.
My pen, resting on the notebook, has bled a hole through the paper. I lift it, move the tip over an inch, and resume…
~~~
A man stood on the shore one fine summer’s morning, the sun just rising above the horizon.
Looking towards the distant ocean, he sighed. Then he spoke to himself and God, lamenting, "What a pretty morning it is, with the sun rising as a ball of flame, and the lilac sky. How lonesome to be talking to one's self and not to have another soul to answer!"
Presently, he heard a delicate splash, a lap of wave against the rocks. Turning to the sound, he saw a beautiful woman reclining on one of the large, black boulders: a merrow, a kind of mermaid who lived in the other world from his.
With her cap lying beside her, she combed her long, black hair, the seawater dripping from her palms, her hair appearing almost as the kelp in the sea. Unlike the males, female merrows were uncommonly beautiful, so human and yet so otherworldly.
In a moment of desperation and daring, the man crept closer, reached the rock, and took the cap.
The merrow began to cry a low mournful sound like a child injured, her fishbone comb slipping from her fingers into the water.
"Man, will you devour me?" she sobbed.
He answered, "No."
“Then why have you stolen my cap? I cannot return to my world without it.”
“I do not know,” answered the man, who was just as stunned at his own actions. “I’m alone in my world, and you’re so beautiful.”
"What will you do with me then?" she asked.
"I’ll make you my wife.”
She looked down into the water, and then behind her at the misty vale that hid her world. “All right,” she said. “I’m ready and willing to be your wife.” And she dove off the rock into the water, swam forward, and walked up onto the strand.
Against all odds and differences, they married. Everything prospered with them. They loved each other, and she had a child.
One day, when the man went out hunting, she found the cap—the cohullen druith—he had taken from her. That night, remembering her life, and the self she had left below the sea, she kissed the sleeping man and child a tearful good-bye and swam away, promising them she would come back.
But she never did.
~~~
A whiskey bottle is what comes to mind when I think of an object that denotes that night. Middling at best, but there you have it: a bottle of whiskey and, also, the moon.
The evening began in pitch, the moon low in the sky and the ground paved with leaves. Leaves fell in the night like thrown confetti, shocking us in the morning with gold and umber carpets on the walkways. In daylight, the white of the arches and pillars of the Georgian Agatha Halls emerged ghostly against the vivid autumnal color on the ground.
"You missed tea. I should’ve come to get you, don’t you know," Cate said. She was sitting on her floor going through a box of tiny old silver prints she had found at an estate sale in Enniscorthy. “You’re always forgetting if I’m not reminding you. What to do with these? Do not say découpage,” she muttered, her eyes still on the photos.
In the lamplight, I could see that her hair was lightened to a stark platinum, not the strawberry blond it was earlier that morning. Sometime between welding, our class on Greek Poetics, and supper, she’d dyed her hair. She smiled through a mass of blood-red lipstick. I had the same shade, but it never looked half as striking on me as it did on Cate.
“Siddown, if you like. Or stand all day, see if I care." Cate pointed to her bed. Her hands were useful, sturdy and strong, but lovely. I envied her as I did most of my friends—with the same misplaced, worshipping quality we all had for each other. And I loved her room, her untidy nest of color and texture. Cate’s whole aesthetic was so unlike the suburban infrastructure of sameness I had been raised in.
Like cans of fruit, the houses where I grew up were lined up in rows, occasionally curving into nonsensical cul-de-sacs, and perfectly packaged: Craftsman or Mission were the choices, with the same two options in reverse across the street. Vinyl fences formed mazes so uniform it was not uncommon for children to walk into the wrong home after school, only to realize the stairwell was on the left instead of the right. There was an orderliness that both hid and mocked the complexities of everyday life—financial ills, addiction, divorce, cancer—and left little room to explain them. I think if you ask people they will tell you this sort of life suits no one. It is part of some broader scheme involving the illusion of safety, of home, of community; of communing with the outer world from a controlled, inner environment.
I do not mean that I wasn’t very fond of my family. I missed them, in fact. But I did not yearn for where they lived. And I was feared for them with every mudslide and forest fire, with every quake and ensuing flood. As a child, I became convinced that life lived elsewhere in vibrancy and, somewhere, in real time and place. Milton's sounds and seas with all their finny drove: The rushy-fringed bank, where grows the willow and the osier dank, that in the channel strays... I set my printless feet O'er the cowslip's velvet head, that bends not as I tread.... gentle swain, at thy request I am here!
Cate turned on another lamp and disappeared into her closet to change. A knock sounded just as she emerged, looking moody and fearless.
"It smells absolutely fantastic in here!" said a thick Chelsea lisp, then a button nose popping its way in and discerning that the scent seemed to emanate from me. It was Lottie, with her strong English jaw and bobbed, light brown hair. She had always been plainly pretty like a true English rose—like the fabled Princes Diana—long before she transitioned.
An uprising could be heard in the hall as Dan and Albert argued over a Miles Davis album "... he was down hill after the fifties, and you know it."
"Your understanding of his music is about as complex as a doornail," came Ford’s retort. “Agreed, Tambo?”
“I do not discuss music with Dan.” Albert suddenly thrust his head through the half-open door, nodding at me with eyes that laughed and glittered against his dark skin.
And I could feel, the way a bird's feathers ruffle with the coming of a storm, that the evening had begun. In it something lurked, waiting for the pounce.
I headed for Cate’s closet, letting myself fall into the draping mounds of clothing. Crowded together, the materials were like an impossible cloud of velvet and woodsy perfume, eras come and gone. I emerged in something glossy with a short hemline embroidered with sequins, tall, thick-heeled boots leaving a gap of skin above the knees.
"Drink up," ordered Lottie. We raised our glasses (this bird came equipped with tumblers from Harrod's, no jelly jars for us), and knocked them together. Now we were three: three witches drinking a toast, stirring the cauldron, casting our wishes into its frothy brew.
“May you live in the hollow beneath God’s hand,” said Cate. "Sláinte."
And we were off.
As we neared the entrance to the second-row carriage house, music could be heard, pounding as a sonic boom or exaggerated heartbeat. Once inside, we were engulfed by the crowd and became separated, and I had to climb over the bar to get back to them.
Doing so, using the keg as a step, would not have been a problem if Julian hadn't been blocking my way down. He looked up at me as I steadied myself on top of the bar. I crouched toward him, the two of us taking part in a silent Medieval ritual of chivalry, the hem of Cate’s dress grazing a puddle of ale, my cheeks growing hot. Fight or flight, or merely weak-kneed fainting, it is virtually impossible to tell the difference when it is happening to you. I reached for his shoulders. His hands pressed into my ribcage as he lifted me.
Over hours, the moon hovered, rising from the edge of one of the ivy-laden faculty houses to the tops of the enormous pine trees, lingering as though a swallow's nest, then gliding imperceptibly across the sky. Back in Catherine's room, it now appeared a glowing white sphere through the window: a spotlight shining through the pane.
"Has anyone seen Albert? I think we lost him," Julian said, his voice already a dream to me.
Ford took a joint from Lottie and entered the password to his tablet. Soon we could hear a recording of Albert's last concert. A pianist like no one I’d ever known personally, Albert studied Ellington and Bach with equal vigor. His timing was immaculate, organic, a joy to himself and those who listened. At times this joy seemed so fleeting, yet at other times it was elongated, finite and eternal at once, precious either way. A trumpet sang against Albert’s smacks and pops. Ford and Julian nodded at each other.
Dan mentioned transcendentalism for the third time in five minutes. “If he fails me on this, I’m fucked,” he announced.
“You’re rarely fucked, my boy,” said Ford with a smirk.
“That’s what you think,” Dan winked back, then nodded wearily as if all manner of fucking had exhausted him. “Transcendence,” he exclaimed loudly, demanding attention. “Anyone?”
"The Transcendental is the metaphysical boundary between time and space," said Ford.
"It's metaphysical? No, no. That’s New Age shit from like, the Twentieth Century. It was a religious doctrine," said Dan.
Wordlessly, Julian tossed Ford a fat, heavy hardcover volume which swooped too close to Cate's head, and may have very well knocked her unconscious had Ford not caught it deftly, and I began to wonder if I wasn't going to go unconscious myself as Ford read: "Transcendent: Exceeding usual limits; surpassing material existence; superlative, supreme, peerless, incomparable. Lying beyond the ordinary range of perception."
Dan was wrong. "Yes, you see? It’s a spiritual belief system," he said, rather deftly ignoring his own mistake through non-exacting language with Ford whom, we all knew, might well be planning to join the Oxford Philological Society after graduation.
"The concept is actually philosophical,” said Albert, suddenly appearing and taking a seat. “Transcendentalism is a philosophy emphasizing intuition as a means to knowledge; or, more simply, it is the importance of the search for the divine over the material and empirical. It began as a philosophical and social movement in North America in the early Nineteenth Century, in reaction to rationalism. Do you not know your own country’s history? Have you not read Emmerson?”
Well. That was that.
“Elinore, you may join us at any point, please,” Albert added.
“Blake is all I’ve got,” I said. “Man has no body distinct from his soul. You’ll get no help from me, tonight. Other than that.”
I made a weak effort to discern how everyone had been able to fit in Cate's room. Slowly, syrupy, I began to count. Cate, Lottie, Dan, Ford, Albert; one, two, three, four… And suddenly it did feel spiritual, but not because Dan was trying to make a religion out of trancendentalism, but because the idea could not be simplified in terms of words or places, or even by the simplicity of counting.
Because in this room were gathered my connections to that which is greater than ourselves: Safety. Love. Understanding.
And one more: Julian.
Out-numbered, I felt myself move forward.
~~~
"Is this your family?" Julian grazed a picture frame on my dresser with his finger.
"Yes. My mother and father."
"They seem..."
“I’m sorry, did you say seen?” I was rummaging through the drawers of the dresser, my head down.
“Seem. Real. Like a real family.”
We had stopped at my room so I could get a sweater, then continue on with the evening. It being only midnight, we were all to reconvene in the empty library, to which Ford had nicked a copy of the key.
Julian appeared slightly ridiculous standing next to me, examining the photos as though he was a gentleman caller making polite conversation.
“A real family. That’s an odd way of putting it,” I mused, feeling a bit wobbly. “Don’t you have a real family?”
"She looks like you," he said, pointing.
"My grandmother. She came from Kerry.”
In the photo of Fionnula, she is a tall, fit woman in her twenties with long, wavy black hair, like mine. She is wearing a mid-calf length tweed skirt and brown cardigan, the breeze pushing her hair across her eye, a close-lipped, serene smile on her face. Whenever my auburn-haired paternal grandmother Moira saw that picture, she would say to my mother, "She’s always with you, in Nell." Then she would pat my orphaned mother's hand, secure in the knowledge that I was raised, for the most part, far away from a wild and impoverished land where women worked too hard and brought too many children into their sad, tough world.
“She died a long time ago. Cancer,” I explained. Fionnula had immigrated to America after the second World War; after her own parents and brothers had died from T.B. She was ten, and went to live with an American foster family who took in Catholic children. Later, she married a man from Ohio who suffered a fatal heart-attack when she was pregnant with my mother. There are no photos of him.
"And this?" Julian pointed.
"That's my other grandmother, Moira. My father's mother."
”Say that faster?”
We both burst into inapt laughter, like two children at a funeral.
“Let’s never smoke Ford’s grass again,” I suggested, leaning on the dresser top.
“All right,” he agreed, still laughing. Then he asked seriously, "Did you know her?"
"Moira? Yes. She died just before I left for Leighton." For some reason I remembered, perhaps oddly, the way our living room looked in December: my father's menorah on the dining table, and my mother's carved wood nativity scene on the sideboard; and the Christmas carol that Cate knew the instant I began to sing it for her. Then I thought of Moira’s lovely old bungalow on the cliff, not far from us but feeling like an entirely different world, the lights of San Francisco glittering across the bay, and of how her back deck had fallen into its depths during the last earthquake, its screened doors hanging off their hinges. I remembered rescuing Moira’s photo albums and art from a now damp wind-whipped interior that will never be safe enough to inhabit again.
"In my family," Julian said, "nobody stays around for long."
"I'm sorry.”
He shook his head. "It's nothing." A movement across his lips—a smirk?—signified untold horrors.
I thought of something I’d recently heard from Old Mary: a couple who kissed a Kissing Stone together would seal their love forever. Also: witches can make a potion for lovers by drying and grinding into powder the liver of a black cat. Mixed with tea, and poured from a black tea pot, it is infallible. There are many rumors of its success, but the spells must be continually renewed or all the love may turn to hate.
I sat on the edge of the bed, the sequins at the hemline of Cate's dress sticking to my wool blanket. I pulled the sweater on. Julian sat beside me and touched one of the sequins at my hip, fingering it, flicking the shiny disc back and forth so it glinted alternately bright and dull when it caught the light.
“I used to think I wouldn’t know the first thing about having a family,” he said quietly, perhaps not unconsciously placing the picture in my mind of an orphan. “But I think now it’s all I’ve ever wanted. Then again, if I were to have children.” He lifted his wrist, jiggled the metal bracelet.
“How does that work, exactly?”
“A fifty percent chance my daughter would be a carrier to her son.”
“If you had a daughter. If she had a son. You’re alright, anyway, it’s not the 19th century. Not like, say, the Czar’s son.”
Julian’s face tightened. “Maybe. Maybe it’s worse now.” He glanced out the window. “I mean, it is like the 19th century, again. They don’t keep stimate on-hand like they used to. It’s too expensive.”
“There are always blood-drives.”
“Exactly. Unscreened, unclean blood.”
“The children you teach… I think you are like a father to them.”
He smiled a little.
“A family lived next to a bog on a cliff above the sea,” I offered. “Their cabin was dull and dreary, but they were happy folk.”
“They usually are in these stories, aren’t they?” He leaned back on my bed, resting on his elbows, settling in.
“Not always. But this family was happy. Anyway, the father worked in the fields, and the mother—let’s call her Grace—made a bit of a living peddling remnants of cloth and wool from her basket.”
“Did she weave them herself?”
“No. Just bits and pieces she collected, just like you see people doing these days. So, being considered an honest woman and having many children all ages to infancy, she was frequently entrusted by her customers to transport things to the shops for them whilst doing her peddling. And they would give her extra bits for the kids: some eggs, butter, bread; because they knew she had mouths to feed and was such a reliable courier. But her thrifty, hard life came to an end.”
Julian raised his eyebrows.
“She died within hours of a sudden fever. English Summer Fever.”
“You’re making that up.”
“It doesn’t exist anymore, we’ve wiped it out. It’s true: Cromwell’s wife and two daughters died of it. The first Cromwell.”
“Ford told you that—only he would know such fine points.”
At this, I laughed. “True. At any rate, the man buried his beloved Grace in the best manner he could afford. The night after the funeral, the fire still in the hearth and the youngest babe in the crib next to his bed, the man saw his departed wife appear. She crossed the room and bent over the cradle. Terrified, the man began to pray, taking cover under the blankets. Next night, he took the babe into bed with him, shaking with fear and hoping the ghostly visitor would not appear. Presently, she did appear in the room. ‘Woman, what is it brings you back? What do you want with us?’ her husband nearly shouted.”
“Jesus.” Julian’s eyes widened.
“ ‘Don’t be foolish,’ said the ghost. ‘Put my babe back in her cradle and go fetch my sister, since you’re so afraid.’ Fearing he had done his wife wrong in some way during her life, or that the priest had not said the proper benediction to speed her peace in the afterlife, he did as she said. He fetched his sister-in-law, and the two came running back from her cottage.”
“Let me guess: she wanted to catch them both together to punish them for some transgression.”
I held up a finger to quiet him. “The ghost, seeing her sister, spoke calmly: ‘Sister, dearest, my mind’s been uneasy about them red and green shawls in the basket what came from the shops in town. Mrs. Hunter paid me for them and yesterday was four days gone not delivered. Give her the shawls tomorrow. And old Mr. McCorkell’s wool hat I made from the grey yarn. He’ll be surely needing that with winter coming. And now, farewell. I can get to rest.’ And thus she hastened away.”
He looked at me for a moment in silence, waiting or just gazing I didn’t know.
“You see?” I said. “It’s not always as bleak as it seems.”
Julian’s mouth began to curl upward. He burst into a heartfelt laugh, falling back onto the bed. "Let's go," he said to the ceiling. "Let's go for a walk."
The ferry had stopped running across Passage East from Arthurstown to Waterford, the crystal factory closed and quiet, and the harbor would be deathly still, and beautiful. Perhaps I was already changing my ways, shifting rituals to accommodate. Perhaps I’d been waiting all along for him to ask.
The moist earth under our feet dipped a little with each step, the leaves rustling like tissue paper enclosing a gift, as we walked out across the dark lawn. Without conferring, we headed toward the End of the World. I noticed everything as if it was a stage set, as if my surroundings were strangely secondary to the man walking beside me. I could feel his body radiating, the heat reaching me across the cold, though our arms were several inches apart.
We sat on the stone wall in silence, looking down on the harbor, a few lights left twinkling in the houses across the passage on the Waterford shore. The moon shone down on the currents below, beneath which were all the unknown places we do not tread. And the moon shone on two people alone on a low wall, sitting together: arms grazing accidentally, then touching purposefully, asking permission by aching insinuation. The terror of anticipation rushing through me, a voice saying, will it happen now? And my body saying, please, because there is a new dizziness overtaking me in the clarity of air. His hand moving closer, his finger interlacing with one of mine, stroking, entwining. Then his lips close to the side of my face, my neck, the view of the harbor dimming.
His hands held my waist, reached under my sweater for my breasts, his mouth still at my neck, nuzzling, afraid to kiss. The skin on his palms and fingertips were callused. The kiss, eventually, was painfully cautious, then just the opposite …and how he kissed me under the Moorish wall and I thought well as well him as another and then I asked him with my eyes to ask again yes… My legs under Cate’s dress were bare and numb with cold as they wrapped around his hips. The grass under us was damp and smelled raw …and his heart was going like mad and yes I said yes I will. Yes.
The next day, Ford and Albert found me sleeping in his bed without him. I did not feel strange or unnerved. I felt as if his bed was now mine. Ours.
I must have looked down though, not out of shame, but in a bit of confusion and a sudden awareness of the whiskey bottle that lay on the floor. Capsized, there was still about two shots left. That seemed good enough for Ford, so he bent over and scooped it up quickly, tipping an imaginary hat to me—thanks, honey, see you later—and led Albert out of the room.
Excerpt from the forthcoming novel A Place Beneath