The Marriage Bed

by Regina McBride

  I had difficulty making myself leave this morning. I waited a while, staring up at the windows. When the girls were small, there had been days when I would look up for hours at the windows of their classrooms. I had been visited back then by a memory, one I could not place in time, in which I saw a woman in a wild helter-skelter run along a pier. As a boat retreated on the water, the woman flailed inconsolably and looked as if she might throw herself into the sea. Two men descended suddenly from the shadow of a hill, rushed her, and held her by the arms.

  “Panic” I called the lady in the memory, though I would not identify her. That is the lady who possessed me those early days when I was forced to break with my girls for long hours of the day.

  She was there again now, more real than the other things I saw around me.

  I closed my eyes. Why did Mrs. O’Breen want the girls at Enfant de Marie? She had no designs on making my daughters into nuns. Though she often sent them rosaries and chapel veils and little figurines of the saints, she had told me once that nuns meant little in the grand scheme of things. She had never hidden from me her single-minded desire that Manus and I have a son. The idea of working to inspire a vocation in either of my daughters was a distraction from her central purpose.

  We saw little of her while the girls were infants. When Maighread was six and Caitlin, five, we had visited Kenmare. She had watched them distantly, as if childhood were an inscrutable condition she did not quite know how to penetrate. It had felt horrible to me that she’d never tried to kiss or cuddle them. They’d felt her indifference and answered it back with the same.

  Mrs. O’Breen had watched, amazed, at how animated Manus had become in the presence of his daughters; at the pleasure he’d felt fetching them up in his arms and the patience with which he’d participated in their games, obeying their commands. One day they’d covered him in sand and surrounded him with bits of driftwood, decorating him with ribbons of kelp.

  During that same visit I’d looked through the window that faced the beach and had seen Mrs. O’Breen walking toward Manus, extending to him an Aran sweater as he’d stood on the foreshore in the wind.

  He’d smiled sheepishly at her as she’d helped him into it. She’d pressed a palm to his cheek and looked to be saying tender words to him, and he’d bowed his head slightly in a pleased and familiar surrender, his face lit up at her adulation. She felt such love for him, I’d thought. Why didn’t she feel it for his daughters?

  But the older the girls got, the more comfortable she became with them. She knew how to court them, giving them opulent gifts. But I could feel the suppressed chill in her, and the enduring disappointment that they had not been born boys.

  Why did she want them at Enfant de Marie? She wanted them far away from me and closer to her for some reason. What was she engineering?

  A girl from Maighread’s class looked out a third-floor window, and that broke my trance. I turned quickly and walked away, knowing the furious embarrassment Maighread would feel if the girl told her I was still there.

  It was Monday, the day of my life drawing class at the National Gallery, so I took the coach back along Nassau Street.

  There was no human model that day, just a carefully arranged still life: a teakettle, three oranges, a raveled brocade tablecloth. I worked distractedly at my easel, using rough charcoal and newsprint. I reminded myself that September was far off, and that things could still change.

  Afterward I went for coffee with Sarah Dooley, the mother of one of Maighread’s classmates.

  We had been out to coffee a few other times previously, and I wondered if I might try to talk to her about the girls’ going away; if I might trust her to be sympathetic, even though I’d heard her speak happily about her own daughter’s acceptance to St. Lucretia’s for September.

  But she had a lot to talk about herself, having just had a row that morning with her daughter. “She’s got a mouth on her like a fishwife! I don’t know where she’s learning it! Always looking for a way to insult me.” She took a sip of her coffee, then lifted her head dramatically and said, “From fear of being humiliated, deliver me!”

  “Oh!” I said. “I just let Maighread do that.”

  “What?” she asked, confused.

  “I let her humiliate me.”

  She looked at me hard, at first incredulously, then disapprovingly.

  I felt myself shrinking under the look.

  “You shouldn’t,” she said.

  “Well, I just don’t fight back when she tries to rile me up.”

  “Why not?” she asked.

  I shook my head, at a loss to explain it.

  “Maybe she needs a fight out of you. She doesn’t really want to humiliate you. It’s your job not to let her,” Sarah said.

  “But your daughter continues to try to humiliate you, even though you fight with her.”

  “It doesn’t matter,” Sarah snapped, irritated by my challenge. “She’s better off because I stand up to her. She respects me for it.”

  Sarah changed the subject, talking about the class we’d just come from, complaining that there’d been no live model; that we’d paid to draw live models, and that the instructor himself should have taken off his clothes and let us draw him. She looked for a laugh from me, but I could only muster a smile, and a belated one at that. I had the distinct feeling that she did not like me.

  When we parted that day on Westmoreland Street I walked in the opposite direction from home, where the buildings were tall and cobbled and gray. The air was damp, the skies pewtered, and soon snow began to fall. I kept thinking I should turn back, but I moved farther and farther away from Merrion Square, gazing absently into the windows of unassuming shops as I passed them. I stopped before a window, stunned to see words in Irish floating on the glass: RÉIDH LE CAITHEAMH. Ready to wear. The Irish belonged to the old and abandoned world. What was it doing here?

  I peered into the dark interior of the shop and saw a rack of coats in a shadow, and deeper inside, a headless figure in a plain-cut dress.

  On two different occasions over the past months, while walking on a crowded Dublin street, I had heard phrases spoken in Irish. The first time had been at the Baggot Street Market.

  “Má tá sé I do bhríste.” If you’ve got the guts. A challenge issued in a soft, bawdy female voice.

  I had stopped dead still, then turned slowly, searching for the woman who had spoken, but no one had stood out to me in the various groups of people. I’d heard the words again in my mind and imagined a young island woman wearing battered woolens and an apron.

  A few weeks later I had just gotten off the tram at Inchicore. The streets had been crowded as I’d walked south toward Stephen’s Green. A man’s voice in close proximity behind me had said softly, “Cén t-ainm atá ort?” What’s your name?

  Turning to look, I’d been jostled by the crowd. I’d peered into each male face that had come close, but all had seemed confused or irritated by my staring. I’d told myself that it had to have been asked of someone else, not of me, though the gentle, confidential tone was an intimate voice that I trusted and longed to answer.

  After these two incidents, I braced myself each time I walked on the streets, anticipating the sound of spoken Irish, longing for it and fearing it at once.

  But now, here I stood staring at an inscription in gold on the window. I touched the painted words with my fingertip.

  The letters dissolved before me, and I heard Maighread’s voice echoing in my mind. “It’s you who will be unmoored in the world.”

  A man’s face came suddenly into the light within the shop, peering out at me with a smile and beckoning me in. I stepped back, startled, then continued on.

  Approaching the quays, the air grew rife with the river’s smoky, well-traveled odor. The gulls, usually wheeling over the water, huddled in subdued clumps on the bridgepier.

  By the time I reached Essex Quay, the snow was gathering in drifts. Dublin had become mystically quiet. Every sound cast an ech
o: my own footsteps in the soft snow, the creak of a shop door, the muffled cough of a pedestrian across the road.

  Under the pristine whiteness, the sooty gables and dormers of the taller houses appeared charred. My hems were sodden, and the dampness came through my boots. I turned suddenly south away from the river into a narrow, winding lane that descended in a curve, spectral-looking houses leaning over the cinder paths that ran before them.

  There were no other pedestrians in this narrow lane. A bird flew close above me, and I crouched, holding my hand up over my brow. I looked up when it was clear of me, white wings in a flutter rising up and landing at a dovecote near a green eave. The dove stepped back and forth, softly warbling on the ledge of a dormer window with a dim light within. Beside the lit window a sky blue plaque—ANTIQUARIAN BOOKS—was carved in gold lettering.

  I felt the cold now and smelled a coal fire. I opened the door at street level and ascended a narrow flight of creaking stairs. When I reached the floor where the bookstore was located, I saw another sign. This one read, THE ALCHEMISTS DEN. My heart sped up as I opened the door to the shop. The rooms within looked more like a library than a bookshop. Tall, heavy oak cases filled with cloth and leather volumes were illuminated by oil lamps. A heavyset man wearing round glasses met my eyes from his chair behind a desk. He nodded at me, his face betraying no feeling.

  “It’s very wet out,” I said by way of apology for my sodden shoes. He waved his hand: my dampening his floor was of no consequence to him. As I moved softly in between a high row of books, I saw a woman sitting at a small table upon which four or five large vellum-bound volumes lay. I gave her a smile. She stood and took my arm. “Stand by the fire,” she said, “and get your blood moving again.” She fanned the embers until the coals went bright, lighting the grate and the edge of her dark dress.

  I stood warming my hands before the flames and noticed on the mantel an etching of an empty room, the bricks of the wall artfully detailed and shadowed. The words, scripted in italics beneath, imbued the image with meaning. Celluris Memorium. The room of memory, or perhaps more precisely, the storage room of memory.

  The woman returned to her volumes. I saw her dip her fingers into a tin of what looked like lard and begin to massage the leather spine of one of the tomes.

  I left the fire and faced a heavy shelf of books, looking directly at titles that rang with foreboding familiarity to me.

  Atalanta Fugiens, Aurora Consurgens, the Book of Lambspring. I had looked into each of these volumes in the library in the house in Kenmare early in my marriage. As my fingertips grazed the spine of a volume called Secretus Secretorum, I began to sweat with excitement and trepidation.

  Only two days married, Manus and I had hidden away together in a remote room of his mother’s house, where we’d lain naked on our bellies turning the pages of the Secretus Secretorum, which was rife with depictions of sexual intercourse, the metaphor for the alchemical process: the marriage of one metal to another. Manus had explained to me that the alchemists had struggled to produce superior metals by intermixing them.

  In this book we’d found The Courtship of Sol and Luna, a series of particularly graphic, step-by-step illustrations of the marriage of gold to silver, the sun being the man and representing gold, the moon being the woman and representing silver. In one picture we’d clearly seen the male genital entering the female.

  The discovery of this mystifying book had fused itself in our minds with the discovery of each other’s bodies. We had read phrases of the text to one another as we’d made love.

  “ ‘I will sow my gold,’ ” Manus had quoted to me once, the volume fading from his breath, “ ‘in your silvery earth.’ ”

  Once, still breathless after a feverish bout of sex, Manus had told me that he believed this book held the secrets of the universe, if only we could interpret them.

  But this book had also frightened me. Once, while Manus had been sleeping, I had leafed through the pages, encountering horrific, terrifying things: beheadings, a man swallowing a child, a creature half-cock half-toad exuding poisonous smoke and fire from its mouth. Two-headed dragons being disemboweled by monks. It was as if these were the serpents guarding the gates of Paradise. Out of lust, I’d managed my way through the random labyrinth of ugliness and sadness, arriving eventually, shaken, upon the sexually exquisite ones.

  My fingers moved across the titles, and I returned again to the Secretus Secretorum. It felt enormous and heavy. The man looked up at me over the round windows of his glasses as I carried it to a small table in the corner, where I sat down to look at it. Out of his view, I took a deep breath and found myself relieved that the image I’d opened randomly upon was not of a particularly horrifying nature. A man lying ill in a bed, a woman standing at his bedside gazing down at him. Out a window behind them, a black night sky filled with stars. Like many of the alchemical pictures, the image itself was framed by an elaborate mandala, at the corners of which were depictions of the four elements: billowing waves, flames, a tree growing from a plot of earth, a cloud. Fierce animal heads blew fire and swirls of wind from their mouths.

  I read the text beside the picture.

  The ores that are not gold are ill and require cleansing. Unless gold is acheived in the coupling of the metals, illness remains and the state of the world is such that the whole house and the generations that might follow are in the thrall of a great sickness.

  A wave of nausea moved over me. I stared at the text but could not read more. I sat back from the book, and my eyelids grew heavy. I remembered that it had been this way before with these books. I had never been able to take in more than a few phrases of the written text at a time.

  I could still hear the woman beyond the bookshelves at work rhythmically massaging the vellum. My eyes wandered around the room and then fell back on the text.

  …houses in the thralls of terrible curses. As in the Greek houses, Atreus and Thyestes.

  My eyes fell on another phrase:

  It is an illness which separates body from soul.

  I heard the squeak of the woman’s chair and in my peripheral vision saw an approaching shadow.

  I heard her voice. “Are you all right?” She touched my shoulder. I started and looked up into her face.

  “Yes,” I said weakly. I closed the Secretus Secretorum and stood.

  The man was not at the front desk as I moved past to the door and descended the stairs.

  Outside, the wind was up, and the snow, stinging my face, revivified me, bringing me back to the world. The gutters had gone to slush, and I could hear horses clopping on the main road along the quays. I turned away from the traffic and moved deeper into the maze of streets. It stunned me to see that the clock on the wall inside a shop said half three. The afternoon light was failing and some businesses had already lit the gas. The clock over the Ballast Office had said eleven when I’d left Sarah Dooley on Westmoreland Street. Was it while I’d been walking that so much time had passed, or was it in the bookstore? How long had I gazed at the picture of the man lying ill in his bed, his wife standing beside him? I had invited something dangerous close to me.

  I could have asked someone for directions, but I felt fragile and shied from people’s faces. I kept wandering, remembering some ancient Greek story about a man killing his son and feeding him to his guests, the curse of that sin then to be borne by the generations that followed, and all the children to suffer with the sins of that parent, to be brought down with it into tragedy.

  I began to make note of the street names: Ross Road, Bride Road. Bull Alley. I heard the jingle of harnesses, and an ambulance car went rushing past. When I saw the Carmelite Church on Whitefriar Street, I knew again where I was and found my way back to Dame Street, where I saw a stalled tram car filling with snow.

  A woman shivered in the doorway of a vacant shop. “Two for a penny!” she cried out to me. I selected two banberry cakes from the wooden tray harnessed around her neck, then went on my way, but found I couldn’t st
omach them.

  It was late, almost six, when I finally reached Merrion Square, the arches flickering on the stately houses. The air smelled of burning coal, and plumes of smoke from the chimneys ascended high into the dark sky.

  When I came in, Manus, Maighread, and Caitlin were sitting to supper. Their eyes were large, surprised looking when they saw me. I sensed a din on the quiet, the ring of unfinished conversation. My clothes were deluged, but it was my face they all seemed fixed on. Moving into the hallway I saw in the mirror my florid, fevered color.

  Mrs. Daley peered at me from the doorway to the kitchen.

  “Would Madam like tea?” she asked dryly.

  “Yes, thank you,” I said.

  I did not go upstairs to change, and was shaking faintly when I sat to join them.

  I saw a Kilorglin postmark on a letter beside Manus’s plate. When he saw me looking at it, he pocketed it. I looked at Caitlin, but she would not hold my eyes. Mrs. Daley came in with my tea. I drained my cup and set it back on the saucer. I was dizzy and not inclined to speak to them or to ask about the letter. I stared at the silver tureen centerpiece and saw through it, and through the table beyond it. I focused on flecks of wetness on my nose and eyelashes, entranced by the way they glinted in the lamplight.

  After the meal I went into my little back room, not caring that the hem of my dress left a damp trail behind me.

  I stared at the vase that I’d left on the shelf. It was made of liquid, I thought. It had been poured. Viscous, dark blue liquid. It caught and made distortions of everything in the room. How, I asked myself, had I ever imagined I could draw such a thing?

  A gust of wind blew the shutter open suddenly, and a bit of powdery snow flew in through the screen. I went to the window and stood in the blast of it, a south-blowing wind. I could smell ice on it, just as I had been able to smell the glaciers on the Greenland current when I was a child living on the Blasket. That wind caused grain and grass to stream steadily in one direction. In spite of its coldness, it was a fertilizing wind that blew the spores of plants and trees on the island, displacing them, carrying them into unexpected places, so an ear of barley might appear close to the beach, or a lone potato plant on the windy summit, growing impossibly between stones. Thus was the strangeness such winds encouraged. Things growing in isolation, blown away from their like.