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,
This grand, interesting and very cheap Exhibition, at Masonic Hall, embracing the most wonderful curiosity in the world, the MERMAID, and the ORNITHORYNOUS, OURANG OUTANG, & c., with FANCY GLASS BLOWING, by a most excellent ARTIST; together with a unique and astonishing entertainment on the stage, at 7 ½ clock P.M., consisting of Signor Veronia’s inimitable MECHANICAL FIGURES, representing human life; and VENTRILOQUISM and MAGIC by Mr. Wyman, who has scarce an equal in the world in his line. Admission to the whole, only 50 cents, children under 12 half-price.
“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.”