Page 1 of Persephone's Curse
I
Every family has their myths, their stories passed down from generation to generation, a game of telephone that subtly shifts from one mouth to another, from one mother to her daughter, until the message has changed almost entirely. It is hard to tell the truth of something, hard to tell what your aunt means when she whispers a favorite bedtime story into your ear:the Farthing girls are descended from Persephone, are the children of the in-between, one foot in this world and one foot in another…
It is hard to tell the truth of something, and yet… itfeelsreal, doesn’t it?
My mother has only seen the ghost once.
And that was fourteen years ago.
If we asked her about it now, she’d dismiss it as a labor-induced hallucination, the result of immense pain and no drugs, a home birth she’d decided to have for her fourth and final daughter, since she’d done the hospital three times before, considered herself something of a pro, wanted to try something different.
But we knew the truth.
Of course she’d seen the ghost.
We all had.
The night our youngest sister was born, we waited on the third floor with Aunt Bea. There were three of us then—Bernadette, six; Evelyn, four; me, two. Clara would make four. Four Farthing sisters, each two years apart.
The labor was happening on the fourth floor, which had once been the attic in our family’s Upper West Side brownstone but had been converted by our parents into two rather cramped bedrooms with a larger playroom attached. The birthing pool was set up in the playroom, and every now and then we heard a low, mournful wail drift down the stairs.
The fourth floor was where the ghost lived, in the smaller bedroom, which was now empty but, with the arrival of the baby, would soon be Evelyn’s room. She didn’t mind sharing a bedroom with a ghost. He’d always been nice to her, to all of us. He wasn’t a scary ghost at all. He was a largely shy, mostly quiet, very gentle ghost. If he thought he had spooked us accidentally, turning a corner in the middle of the night as we made our way to the bathroom or down to the kitchen for a glass of water, he grew agitated and insisted—oh, I didn’t do it on purpose!And we knew that. Of course we knew that.
While my mother gave birth to Clara upstairs, the three of us already-born Farthing sisters and Aunt Bea camped out in whatwas now Evelyn’s room but would soon be the new nursery. We all loved whenever Aunt Bea came to visit because she told the best stories and she always smelled like mint and vanilla and you could often find strange and wonderful things in the pockets of her linen skirts (a partial catalogue: matchbox cars, tiny notebooks, propelling pencils that opened with a tug, satchels of tea, pages torn from her favorite books, hard caramel candies, soft caramel candies).
“Did you girls know…” she’d begin, and we’d snuggle into her sides, all of us piled on the twin bed, running our hands through her hair, down her arms, pinching her knees and her elbows, squeezing as close to her as possible, “that us Farthing girls are descended from Persephone?”
Our mother hadn’t taken our father’s last name, so we were all Farthing girls, and so was she, and so was Aunt Bea, and so was little Esme, the sister they’d had who died when she was just a child.
“Is that true, Auntie?” Bernadette prompted, and the three of us held our breaths, desperate for her to continue.
“Yes,” she said, pausing to bop each of us gently on our perpetually sticky noses. “You girls are the great-great-great-great-great-great-grandchildren of Persephone. The children of the in-between, just like she was. Persephone, daughter of Zeus and Demeter, wife of Hades, mother of Melinoë and Zagreus.”
Melinoë, Persephone’s daughter, would always be our favorite.
She was the goddess of nightmares and madness, and in a houseful of women, there was plenty of that to go around.
Were wereallydescended from Persephone?
Did we believe it then, snuggled up together, the lilt of Aunt Bea’s voice putting us half to sleep, the lollipops our father had given us sticking to the sheets as we let them fall from our hands, distracted?
All I will say is this:
We believed everything Aunt Bea told us. Without reservation, without hesitation, without verification.
So, yes.
Even that, we believed.
“How do you feel?” Bernadette asked our mother, when we were allowed to see her. She held a naked, pink baby to her chest—the stranger Clara, who none of us really loved yet but would, quickly, because she was a bubbly, sweet baby with an easy laugh, unlike me, who, at two years old, still cried an awful lot.
“I feel wonderful,” my mother said.
“Did it hurt?” Evelyn asked.
“A bit.”
“Who that?” I asked, and pointed at the baby. Everyone laughed.
