The Nature of Water and Air

by Regina McBride

  I was surprised by her reaction, wondering why my leaving might cause her pain. It seemed impossible to me that she might genuinely care for me. It had to be only because she believed I was Frank’s daughter.

  “You aren’t sorry for your predicament. You aren’t changed by your troubles,” she said, struggling to contain her fury, and left the room.

  I did not come down for dinner that evening. When I rang, Mrs. Dowling brought a tray to my room.

  • • •

  That night in my dream I found myself in bed with Angus. I heard someone else in the room, looked up and saw a separate Angus, a replica of the one in my arms. The standing one was weeping. “My father,” I kept thinking. “My father.” I felt that he should not have been witnessing what I was doing. He should not have been seeing me that way. The sexual feelings dissolved in the face of the pervasive agony I felt over the father. I disentangled myself from the lover, pushing him away.

  I woke up panting and full of dread, longing for Angus the father. He’d been so clear in the dream, so separate from the lover.

  I sat up in bed, looking around me. A dull light issued from the gilt fixture on the wall. Beneath it a porcelain figure of an angel stared at nothing. I had a piercing, almost panicked feeling in that moment that, again in my life, I was in the wrong place. I belonged with my father. Not breathing the dormant air of this mausoleum of a house. This place I had no claim to.

  • • •

  A few days later I received a letter from Angus.

  “Are you all right? Are they caring for you? You’re in my every thought.” I read and reread it, trembling. He’d sent a Donegal address where I could write him for the next three weeks.

  I wrote immediately. “Angus, I’m desperately unhappy here. Please come. I need to talk to you. Your daughter, Clodagh.”

  • • •

  I honored Lily’s wish that I not go outside. I took up a needle and thread, remembering how my mother had done chaotic little embroideries to fill long hours. Dragging thread through cloth, I stitched long chains of color around the sleeves of an old blouse, finishing one strand of thread and beginning another immediately after, my fingers aching, little smears of blood on the fabric from the pokes of my misdirected needle.

  The baby kicked me gently and tears came to my eyes.

  I bowed over the blouse, piercing the cloth again and again.

  • • •

  In December, long curtains of rain fell over the sea. When the skies cleared a soft incandescence bled from the clouds. My heart quickened when I heard the floor creak in the hallway outside my room. I rushed out with the wild notion that Angus had slipped secretly into the house.

  But no one was there and the disappointment caused me to sway.

  I opened the door to the nursery. The dark glow from the Atlantic cast shadows from the crib and a small table, throwing the things into radiant relief. There was a din on the air, a kind of memory of noise like the sea recorded in the contours of a shell. I hardly breathed, feeling a presence; my eyes raked the light, certain that the apparition I’d once seen in my room was about to emerge from it. I caught a hint of movement from the corner of my eye in the alcove where my mother’s seashells were arranged. The fear flooded me. A rictus of six or seven long hairs glowed and trembled among the shells. I took a step closer to make sure I really saw them. Blond hairs. White blond. They must have always been there but the light had not come in on them in the way it came in at that moment. The room felt airless and cold and it hurt to breathe.

  These are the things my mother’s left me, I thought: her hair caught in these shells. This nursery.

  • • •

  Mrs. Dowling awakened me one morning.

  “A man is here to see you, Miss,” she said with a clipped formality. “He’s waiting in the red drawing room.”

  I dressed myself breathlessly, shivering as I splashed my face with water from the ewer on the dressing table.

  When I appeared at the drawing room door he startled and stood. In spite of his efforts at presentation, a dark blue shirt and tweedy-looking jacket, his hair cut and combed and his beard shaven, he looked like a strong but terrified animal, wildly out of place.

  I closed the door and faced him. He winced as he gazed at my swollen belly. His eyes squeezed shut as if of their own volition. He lowered his face and stood there shaking with silent tears.

  “Angus,” I said, going to him.

  He covered his face with his hands, convulsing like the weeping father in my dream.

  “Christ on earth. What have I done to you?” he cried.

  “Sit down, sit down,” I said, taking his arm and guiding him to the sofa where I sat beside him. But his grief was pervasive and I was at a loss as to what to do.

  “I’m all right, Angus,” I kept whispering. “I’m all right.”

  There was a knock at the door. He quieted but did not raise his head or open his eyes. Mrs. Dowling swept in with a silver tea service, her eyes flashing expressionlessly to Angus and then to me. She put the tray on a side table, left and closed the door.

  We sat awhile, his tears stopped, his breathing broken now and again by faint tremors. When he opened his eyes he gazed at the riches around us. The heavy crimson curtains were closed and the ambery light of India lamps made all the gilded fixtures and statuary glow. Some Sheehy ancestress in a yellow dress watched us from her dark oil portrait on the wall.

  “Look at all of this,” he said.

  “I hate it,” I said.

  “You don’t.”

  “I bloody well do.”

  “You’re well cared for,” he said, nodding once, but not fully looking at me.

  “I’m oppressed by this place. It’s full of death . . . and I’m constantly reminded what a cross I am to bear.”

  He remained motionless, staring down at the pattern of crowns and Celtic motifs on the carpet. A painful quiet held the air between us. “I have something to give you,” he said slowly, without looking up. He waited before reaching into his jacket and taking out a piece of paper folded several times. It looked frayed, old. He handed it to me and I opened it. Written in his slanted, looping penmanship were two lines of poetry.

  O may she live like some green laurel

  Rooted in one dear perpetual place.

  —Yeats

  I gazed at the familiar spindly letters of my name printed in a different hand in faded pencil at the top of the paper, and my heart quickened.

  “That’s your mother’s printing,” he said.

  I stopped breathing a moment and looked warily at him.

  “The last time I saw Agatha, a few days before she died, she told me I’d read her a poem once. A poem from a father to a daughter. I knew the one. Yeats’ ‘A Prayer for My Daughter.’ She asked me to write down these lines; she wanted to give them to you.”

  He stared down at the carpet again, bemused. I read the words over, trying to understand.

  “But she never took it with her. She left it inside the book where I found it months later. I thought she had it with her when I watched her walk across the field back to the big house that night.” He paused. “There were signs of it in her that night, what she was planning for herself. She told me she’d seen her own mother. That she had looked for her again and had not been able to find her. She talked about the dead infant sister drowned in the sea and said that the child hadn’t suffered. That water was easy and carried you if you let it. There was a feverishness about her face. She moved awkwardly, whispering and laughing to herself, then looking at me, suppressing a smile as if I’d caught her at something. She mentioned you . . . several times. Saying she needed to give you the lines of poetry.”

  “But she forgot them, didn’t she?”

  “She wanted you to live settled.”

  “She didn’t want anything for me.”

  “She did, love.”

  “Then why didn’t she give it to me?”

  “I don’t know.”

>   “Maybe she really meant for you to read the lines of the poem,” I said.

  “What do you mean?”

  “To remind you . . . because she knew you wanted to be with your daughter. So she could always deprive us of each other. . . .” My voice was strained with resentment.

  “She thought she was doing the right thing, Clodagh.”

  “Why are you defending her?”

  “I must have also believed it was right that you live settled and have money or I would have claimed you.”

  I squeezed my fists in my lap and looked away from him.

  “She thought living settled was the right way to live. She was not really comfortable settled but she thought that was her own failing. She moved between worlds, no home in either. In the way that you’ve been doing yourself. But now you must make a home in the world of houses.”

  “Why? Because that’s what she wanted?”

  “Do that much for yourself, love.”

  “I can’t stay here!”

  “You’ll have a doctor to deliver the child here. I can’t give you that.”

  “We can find midwives.”

  “There’s more dangers that way.”

  “I’m young and strong.”

  He looked straight into my eyes. “The child may need special care, Clodagh,” he said.

  My heart stopped a moment. “You’ll not leave me here, Angus,” I said.

  He sighed. “This is for you,” he said, handing me an envelope with money in it.

  A storm of panic and fury broke in my body and the baby started kicking me. “I don’t want this!” I cried, throwing it to the floor, three ten-pound notes slipping loose. Angus bent down and gathered them again, then slid the envelope between the cushions of the sofa. “It’s here if you want it,” he said. “I’m going back to Donegal. Sister Margaret Mooney is ill.”

  “I want to meet her,” I said.

  He let his eyes settle fully on me and they began to glow again with tears. In a quiet, clear voice, he said, “No, lass.”

  A heavy, helpless feeling bled into my anger, overtaking it. I felt as if I were floating.

  “We were both looking for Agatha in each other, were we not, love?”

  “What?” I cried.

  “Like magnets we were because of it.”

  “No,” I said, the words threatening to dismantle everything between us. “It isn’t because of her. What’s between us has never been because of her.”

  “It always has, Clodagh. We’re a trinity.”

  “She kept you from me and now she’s taking you from me again!”

  “No, lass.”

  “I want my father. I deserve to live with my own father.”

  “Daughters leave their fathers at the age you are now.”

  “There’s no danger of the other . . . what was between us before . . .”

  “Clodagh, we could never get by what was between us before. It eclipses everything else. . . .”

  I said nothing, things floating in the light of my tears. I could not see him clearly. I remembered the heat of him, suddenly, reluctantly, the taste of his mouth.

  After a silence he stood. “Are you playing the piano again?”

  I shook my head. “No. I don’t even hear the music anymore. I’ll not touch the piano again,” I said. “Never again.” I sat stiffly with my head turned away from him, pressed to one shoulder. He was a shadow, a dark presence cutting the unnatural light of the India lamps.

  “You will,” he whispered. “A time will come when things settle and you’ll hunger again for the music.”

  “No. I’ll not.”

  For a long time he stood before me, waiting for me to look at him, but I wouldn’t. Finally he said, “I’ll write to you. I’m sorry, love. I’m sorry,” and moved from the room, a smear of dark. A sound of footsteps.

  • • •

  When I woke at twilight there was a spatter of blood on my sleeve. My throat ached and my head pounded. I remembered Mrs. Dowling and Lily Sheehy bringing me to my room. I remembered screaming, spitting up. I remembered hitting Lily with the back of my hand. Mrs. Dowling had restrained me but I had no sense of how long it had gone on and no idea what I was yelling at them.

  I had a vague feeling of presentiment as I stood, weaving my way to the window and opening it. When I smelled the smoke of a campfire in the oak trees, my heart began to clamor. He had not been able to leave me after all, I thought. I put some things into a bag and went down the stairs. I retrieved the envelope of money Angus had left between the cushions and went outside into the oaks, stopping every few yards to brace myself against a tree.

  Not Declan, but a gray-and-white horse stood in the clearing and an old woman in a red coat sat before the fire. The woman I’d seen my first day in Dunshee, who’d been gathering on the rock beach, searching among the garbage of the sea.

  I brought the heels of my fists to my face and began to cry.

  The old woman stood up and reached for me. “Come here to me, love,” she said. “What is it?”

  “Where’s Angus Kilheen?”

  “I’m all that’s here,” she said.

  “Do you know him, Missus?”

  “I don’t,” she said apologetically. “Come to the fire and have a cup of tea.” She reached her hand to me carefully as if she were attempting to lure a deer.

  “No. I can’t. I’ve got to find him. He’s got to be here.”

  “You need something to eat and a rest,” she said.

  “Are there any travelers camping north of here, Missus?”

  “Maybe on the road to Clarinbridge . . .”

  I handed her one of the ten-pound notes. “Will you take me there, please?”

  She would not take the money, but she packed up her things and we moved slowly north in near darkness. When we arrived I walked through the settlement with a lamp, touching the muzzles of the horses, looking for Declan. A few men sat drinking around a dying fire. They said they knew Angus, that he’d left earlier in the day for Donegal on his way to the shores of Lough Swilly, and unless he’d stopped he was surely in Castlebar by now.

  At first light we started back to the oak woods near Dunshee. I lay on her bed inside while she drove, the caravan lit up with lamps. In baskets on the floor were spools of thread, lace trims and packets of needles, the things she sold to earn her bread.

  When she asked me, I would not tell her where I’d come from, only that I had no place on earth to go.

  · 32 ·

  I’VE BEEN MORE THAN A month camping with Mrs. cleary when I wake her early one morning. My water has broken and has soaked the muslin nightgown she’s given me to wear. She tells me to be calm, it will be a while yet. She rubs my shoulders.

  It is the feast day of Saint Brigid, she tells me. The lactation time of the ewes. The beginning of light in the Irish year. If she had not told me this I would not know that it is the morning of my twenty-first birthday.

  • • •

  Between the pains, I’m praying. It is the Angelus mostly that comes to me. Be it done unto me according to Thy word. And sometimes words from the Act of Contrition: Through my fault, through my fault. Through my most grievous fault, my lips moving silently to the prayers in my thoughts. I hear Mare’s voice saying the words and sometimes Mrs. O’Dare’s.

  The prayers are second nature to me. I never knew, though I must have said them in my life thousands of times, I said them most often without zeal or intent. At the end of me there they are, streaming up to the surface like something held for years under a stone at the bottom of the sea.

  Air rushing toward air.

  Another pain rips me apart and she gives me a tea towel to bite. I tear it to shreds.

  When the pain subsides she asks, “Do you have a jacket or garment belonging to the baby’s father to wear while you lie in?”

  “Why?” I ask.

  “So he can bear some of the pain, the brute.”

  “No,” I say, panting. “I should have gotten
my mother’s dress from him.”

  “What, love? Your mother’s dress?”

  “Yes. He belonged to my mother first. He still belongs first to her.”

  “He did?”

  “Yes.”

  “And where is your mother now, lass?”

  “Dead. In the sea.”

  “And who is this man to you?” she asks softly.

  “He’s my own father.”

  She keeps her eyes to mine and makes the sign of the cross.

  • • •

  “Inne an vain, a chroi istig,” she says softly, but I cannot see her. My head is back. I am soaked and shivering.

  I hear the wild falsetto shriek of the baby. The old woman stands, cleaning the blood from it. “Bless us, Holy Mother in Heaven, he’s a perfect fat thing.” She places the infant on my damp chest.

  His hair looks fair though it’s wet and burnished with blood. His eyes are open and he’s struggling with the light.

  • • •

  The first week my heart races at every noise. Each time the wind creaks in the hinges I startle and my milk stops and the wee boy at my breast writhes and whines.

  “Angus,” I call out.

  The old woman tells me to calm down, it’s only the wind. But I keep clenching and straining to hear footsteps in the trees.

  “Ah, lass,” she says. “Let go, now. Let go. However high the tide, it ebbs away.”

  And I settle back again soft with disappointment, the tears running down my face, dropping on the infant’s velvety head like rain.

  “Such golden hair the child has,” Mrs. Cleary marvels. “Like the King of Fairies.”

  “Finvarra,” I say, thinking of Angus. “Yes, that suits him. After the Fairy King of Ulster.”

  When I call him by the name the child looks at me as if with curiosity.

  “He looks at me, Missus Cleary, as if he knows me.”

  “Of course he knows you, lass. A child gets its heart from its mother.”

  Maybe it’s these words that help me stop the waiting and wishing for Angus. Or maybe its whispering the name Finvarra to the child and seeing his eyes intent on my face.

  • • •

  There is a wonderful relief telling Mrs. Cleary about my childhood, about my mother’s death and about Angus Kilheen.