The Nature of Water and Air

by Regina McBride

  He got up abruptly, put on his pants and jacket, and went out, slamming the caravan door closed so hard it flew back open with the impact. Tears shot into my eyes. I lay there breathing hard, staring at the ceiling. If he had not torn himself away, I knew I’d not have stopped it. There must have been something monstrous in me, I thought, my body still pulsing from the touch of him.

  He’d been protecting me and caring for me. We had been managing as father and daughter. Grief filled me at how easily that was lost now.

  • • •

  That day as he was driving west toward Dunshee, Declan scaling the narrow passes, the occasional car maneuvering around us, I reminded Angus that I had no claims to Lily Sheehy since she was not really my aunt, and he told me that she didn’t know that and that I had to think of what was good for me and the child.

  “She may not take me in,” I said.

  “I’ll wait in the woods a few hours. In case she won’t.”

  “I’ll miss you too much,” I said.

  “We can’t make the rules ourselves,” he said sternly.

  “I’ll go mad if you disappear from my life, Angus.”

  “I won’t,” he said in an admonishing tone.

  “You’ll come if I want you, Angus! Won’t you?”

  “I will, though the devil may take us both.”

  “The devil’ll not take us,” I said softly.

  “Lily Sheehy has a piano, does she not, Clodagh?”

  “Yes.”

  “Another thing I could never give you,” he said.

  “Stop, Angus.”

  “You’ll have Lily Sheehy and the vast rooms and chandeliers of her house.”

  “I have no use for chandeliers. It isn’t Agatha you’re talking to,” I said. A detectable tremor passed through him at the words.

  But as the caravan rocked along in the October air, I was mostly quiet, struggling to set my mind to seeing Lily Sheehy; wondering what I might say to her. Thinking of it made me tired and I found myself remembering the comfort of the green bedroom and the fireplace with the screens and the great porcelain bath with the colored bottles of Lily Sheehy’s ablutions.

  • • •

  We reached Drumcoyne House by dark, the bracken and trees dimly lit, moths fluttering in the porchlight. We stood together outside the gate saying nothing.

  “You’ll write to me soon, Angus. Promise.”

  “Promise,” he said. He lifted his hand to my face, hesitating before he touched my cheek.

  I bowed my head and pressed it to his chest, feeling the force of his heart at my forehead. I turned from him suddenly and walked through the gate.

  · 31 ·

  LILY SHEEHY DID NOT RECOGNIZE me immediately there in the porchlight with moths fluttering above my head. But then her eyes went wide and she recoiled.

  “Holy Mother in Heaven,” she said. “Is it Clodagh?”

  “Yes, Aunt.”

  She opened the door for me and I stepped into the brightly lit vestibule. I saw someone move from the corner of my eye. It took me a moment to understand that it was my own reflection in the mirror, my hair matted with leaves and bits of wool from Angus’s fleece.

  She closed the door and we stood where we were.

  “Did someone hurt you, Clodagh?”

  “No, Aunt. Not in the way you mean. I went willingly where I went.”

  Across her mouth flashed the same look of disapproval I’d seen when I was small and had asked her to tell me about my mother’s past.

  “We were all desperate over you.” She sat down on a chair in the vestibule, her face blanched.

  On a little table surrounded by votive candles stood a framed photograph of me taken earlier in the spring in front of the house.

  “Who were you with, Clodagh?” she asked.

  “A man.” She turned her face from me and looked down. “I wouldn’t impose myself so upon you or ask your forgiveness if I were not carrying a child.”

  She made the sign of the cross and there was a terrible silence. The floor creaked under my feet. I had forgotten how such small sounds were amplified by the enclosure of solid walls. The silence had a smell of furniture oil and boiled potatoes. All odors complacent with no gust of air diluting them.

  “Kitty’s seriously ill,” she said with accusation.

  “I’m sorry to hear that, Aunt,” I said.

  She looked at me as if she hated me. “We thought you were dead. We suffered and grieved as if you were dead. Mrs. O’Dare was devastated.”

  “I’m so sorry,” I said.

  “The police were out searching for you in the ditches and fields of Ireland.”

  My throat constricted with guilt. What I had done seemed unforgivable. “Are you going to turn me out?”

  “You’re Frank’s child.” She lowered her head, tightening and untightening her lips. “Go upstairs now and have a wash,” she whispered heavily.

  On my way up I stopped on the landing to look at a memorial card set on a little table, a school photograph of me from St. Brendan’s, wreathed in lilies. Under the picture the words “Beloved daughter of Frank Sheehy” were engraved.

  I heard Lily’s footsteps below. “They’ve given your apprenticeship to another girl, of course.”

  My heart fell, but what had I expected? I walked heavily up the rest of the stairs.

  • • •

  I took a hot bath, washed and rinsed my hair, and broke the teeth of a comb trying to get it through.

  I stared at myself in the mirror. I had changed over the summer. In the artificial light my eyes were like broken gem beds, brilliant and unearthly, my skin the color of sand and freckled at the nose and cheeks. The bones of my face cast soft shadows and my neck looked longer and more graceful. I watched my chest rise and fall as I breathed.

  Mrs. Dowling put me into Kitty’s old room; the room she’d occupied years back before she’d been confined to a wheelchair. “It’s larger and airier than your old room. And two sets of stairs may get to be an indisposition for you,” Lily said with a dour mouth. “And there is a nursery across the hall. The one that your mother had prepared for you and your sister.”

  The bed was comfortable but dipped in the center where Kitty had once slept. The curtains as I drew them smelled of faded hyacinths and the bedstead of the shellac she had once used on her pincurls. I remembered at Mercymount Strand when I was small, one of her stiff pincurls grazing my cheek when she’d kissed me.

  On the dresser arranged around a framed photograph of Kitty as a young woman, a romantic enthusiasm in her posture and bright eyes, were cards and devotions that had been distributed at Masses said for me. Some were from the nuns at St. Mathilde’s, sentiments and prayers for a dead girl.

  Mrs. Dowling turned on the radiator, which banged and whistled and emitted a comforting warmth. I lay back in the bed and let out a deep sigh. Pressing my cheek to the flowery starched sheet, I cried myself to sleep, thinking of the nuns passing up and down the white arcade at St. Mathilde’s, their crimson skirts and veils blowing behind them. I saw Sister Seraphina’s old hands crawling sideways on the black and white keys, joy flickering across her face. I slept fitfully, the words from the parable streaming in and out of my dreams. “. . . doth he not leave the ninety and nine to go into the mountains to seeketh that which is gone astray?” I woke at odd hours uncertain of the time. A little clock on the nightstand read always a quarter past two, though sometimes I thought I heard it ticking.

  In daylight with the curtains open, dark clouds moving swiftly toward the sea sent distended shadows across the foot of my bed, and I had the eerie sense, as I had had before at Dunshee, of the hours passing too quickly, the course of my life already set, swept seaward. At odds with the clouds, shadows of birds moving east streaked across the afternoon light on the wall.

  My body in its stillness felt intensely active. On the edge of sleep I heard water rushing and swelling at the center of me. I relinquished myself to the powerful volition of my cells,
dividing, emitting light. I dreamt of strange multifaceted flowers, geometrical things duplicating and enlarging, out of control. Terrible dreams about the dummy doors at Mercymount Strand; a dummy child; an idiot child. A misshapen child. A girl with her head in a vige.

  Inside things were the secret beginnings of other things. The determination of the child in me made me sad. I wondered if it was human-looking yet. I remembered the picture I’d seen of a child in its mother’s womb with a large head and praying hands, and the thought of it gave me a chill. Still there was something about the child inside me that set me oddly at ease. I felt, in my repose, its quiet urgency for the world.

  Once I awakened with the sense that Lily Sheehy was standing in the doorway regarding me. I lifted my head and, for a split moment of vertigo, thought that I saw Mare. But the woman there did not look like us. She had long dark hair and I thought she was naked until I saw that she wore a thin pale pink dress that could have been a nightgown. She looked at me with a tilted head and a sad concerned expression.

  I tried to sit up but felt heavy and slow and by the time I did, the woman was gone.

  Later when I asked Lily who the woman was who’d come to my room, she seemed surprised.

  “No one is here but you, Kitty and me. Mrs. Dowling isn’t even here today.”

  “I saw a woman in a thin dress looking at me like she was worried.”

  Lily’s face darkened. “It’s the light. Keep the curtains open during the day, and a lamp on at night.”

  • • •

  A week passed of baths and sleep and plentiful, delicious food. I went one day to Frank Sheehy’s library looking for something to preoccupy me, and found a heavy book about trees indigenous to Ireland, full of photographs. I sat in a velvet armchair and tried to read, but felt disturbed by a din on the air, emitted, it seemed, by the heirlooms and objects around me: a collection of old military medals displayed on wine-colored velvet; butterflies encased in glass boxes; a stuffed barn owl with polished eyes and beak.

  I left that room carrying the book with me through the halls, marble busts of unidentified gentlemen issuing imploded silence. The air throughout the house was heavy, unvigorous, given to exaggerated echo, so that my own footsteps seemed to follow me up the stairs.

  Approaching my room I noticed the door ajar to the old nursery room across from mine. It had been Frank Sheehy’s sickroom before he died, and afterward, when my mother revealed that she was pregnant, it had been converted into a nursery. I thought it strange that it was preserved this way; another relic of Frank Sheehy’s life. A room prepared over twenty years ago before the aunts had changed their minds and sent my mother and Mrs. O’Dare to the other side of Ireland. I went in.

  An antique crib stood in the corner, the edges of the ruffles on the bedding slightly yellowed. On the wall over the crib hung a framed illustration of a lamb wearing a ribbon around its neck, the image artificially washed with pinks and pale greens, and covered by a thick oval protrusion of glass.

  It was an oddly shaped, sparsely furnished room that smelled, in spite of the recent cleaning, of dust and dead flowers and time. One wall protruded out in a square with a door on it, giving the appearance of a closet. I opened the door, shocked to find that it was a dummy. A thin space descended and I could see the black of the inner house below, a draft rising and exhaling into the room. On a shelf of splintered wood before the window, a large conch shell sat arranged among many smaller shells of all kinds. Lily Sheehy had told me once that my mother had spent many hours walking along the sea after my father had died, collecting shells. I was certain as I stood there that these were my mother’s shells.

  I touched the yellow ivory inset of one of the crib bars. I thought of Mare in her little box of polished wood and felt a throbbing in my temples. I rubbed my eyes, afraid for the creature inside me, and thought of the terrible story of my mother’s infant sister and all the sadness that could befall a child. I swayed on my feet, grasping the bars of the crib. The air was stale with the feeling of things perished, of expectations left unfulfilled.

  • • •

  To get out of the house I took to walking on the windy beach or sitting on the rocks close to the water, the rocks where Angus had first seen my mother. Deafened by the power of the waves, I watched them batter themselves against the cliff walls. I was biding my time, waiting for a letter from Angus.

  • • •

  I wrote to Mrs. O’Dare, begging her to forgive me. I was sure that Lily Sheehy had relayed the information, so I did not mention my pregnancy; only that I missed her and had dreams about her steak and kidney pie.

  I heard back from her within a week and was relieved and a bit surprised that she did not admonish me. She said she was grateful to God that I was alive; that she had, in the depths of her heart, known it. She was living with her sister and her husband in Dublin since Mercymount Strand had been sold, but it was a small flat and an uncomfortable situation. She was hopeful about a kitchen position in Drogheda, where she would have her own room.

  I felt sad when I finished the letter. She was old now, past seventy. When I’d left Bray in the spring, her arthritis had been plaguing her. I wondered if anyone would really employ her. Things at her sister’s flat had to be desperate that she was looking for a new serving position.

  I mentioned this to Lily Sheehy, wondering if she needed someone. She looked at me as if I had a lot of nerve for even suggesting it. “Mrs. Dowling’s been with me many years, Clodagh,” she said.

  “I wasn’t suggesting that you sack her,” I said.

  “I only need Mrs. Dowling,” she said.

  • • •

  Some days Kitty didn’t wake up. When she did I visited her, sitting on her bed, holding her icy hand in mine as she gazed with a vacant face toward the window. In the evenings she’d weep bitterly for hours before she’d fall again into unmitigated slumber.

  The priest, Father Galley, came every week to try and administer Communion to her. And every week if she could not be awakened when he came, he gave her the last rites, and Lily waited outside the room.

  I had been there a little more than a month when one day, Father Galley waited in the living room to hear my confession. “He’ll administer the Host to you after you give him your confession,” Lily had said before he’d come. I knew that what was expected of me was contrition for sins of the flesh.

  I gazed past him at an oil painting, a dim still life of fruit. “I am sorry for having hurt other people,” I said, and went quiet.

  His eyes widened, rimmed with pink. “You should make a formal confession.”

  He waited expectantly, his mouth tense and disapproving. “Well?” he said. “Make the sign of the cross.”

  But I refused, vacillating between anger and shame. I stared at the chalice that held the Blessed Sacrament. “Libera, Domine,” I said finally, at a loss.

  He mumbled that someone was a child of Satan, and I didn’t know if it was me he meant or the child inside me.

  I climbed the stairs while Lily went in to him and closed the door. I put my fingers in the soil of the geranium on the windowsill at the landing and leaned my face into the leaves, which felt like chilled skin.

  I heard them talking below but couldn’t tell what they were saying. There was an angry and halting rhythm to the priest’s words and what sounded like single syllables of assent from Lily.

  Breathing the smell of the geranium earth I closed my eyes and whispered to Angus, “Come take me from this place, for the love of God.”

  • • •

  When the priest was gone I went downstairs. Lily stood as if frozen in the vestibule, her head lowered. The floor creaked under my feet and she gasped as she turned.

  “Aunt,” I said.

  Her jaw stiffened and a tear moved down her cheek. “I’ve asked Father Galley to keep our secret,” she said.

  “Secret . . .?”

  “Yes! Secret!” she cried impatiently.

  I said nothing. />
  “I want this kept secret!” She assumed an imperious stance, her mouth tightening. “I don’t want you to tell anyone.”

  “Who are you afraid of me telling?” I asked.

  “I saw Joan, Denis Lanagan’s cousin, in Dunshee yesterday. Someone told her they saw you walking on the beach. I told her there had been a mistake, that you had written more letters in the summer that never reached me. I told her you were well but she wanted to know why you weren’t at St. Mathilde’s. I told her your apprenticeship had been postponed.” She fumbled with an ornate citrine pin at her throat. “I’m upset that I was driven to that lie so I confessed it to Father Galley.”

  “And now he’s going to go along with the lie, too?”

  She went rigid. “When your condition begins to show you can’t go outside anymore.”

  “I’ll not stay inside, Aunt,” I said quietly.

  “You will.”

  “I don’t care if people know.”

  “I care! I care, Clodagh! Did you think of that? Clearly not. No. You’re the only one that matters!”

  “No,” I uttered. “No.”

  A fraught silence held the air between us.

  “You’re half Sheehy, Clodagh,” she said, I was sure, to remind herself.

  “Aunt,” I said, wishing I could tell her the truth. I peered into her face and saw her eyes retreat from mine. “I’m . . . more tinker than you know.”

  The quiet in the room rang in my ears and I felt on it Lily’s devotion to Frank. What would she do if I revealed such deception against his memory? Her face strained and her eyes darted. She was tied to him in ways that I did not understand. I often heard her haunting his rooms. She had to have suspected my mother but she did not want to know. I sighed, exhausted by the convolutions of the lie.

  “I’m sorry,” I said, “for all the pain I cause you.” I felt an intense ache for Angus. “Wouldn’t you be relieved, Aunt, if you did not have me in this house?”

  She looked accusingly at me. “You’d like to go again, wouldn’t you?”