The Marriage Bed

by Regina McBride

  “That first spring they were married all the eggs the hen lay in the straw had chicks in them, and Molleen remarked that the cock had been busy, and I said then that every cock in this house was busy, and Molleen had narrowed her eyes at me but Liam had smiled, not a bit of a blush on him. I thought he’d made things right for her, and it should have been so. But it hurt to look at her, the way she loved him, every sinew of her straining toward him. I tried to tell her he was hers, what more was she wanting when she had him so in her bed as her husband. The love she had with him, rousing a kind of devil in her. She mistrusted happiness. That’s what it was,” my grandmother said, sucking at her pipe and sending up a cloud of smoke. “Afraid of happiness, she was. Blind as a herring leaping in the bay, inviting sorrow into her life, so. God forgive me for saying it, though I love him with my heart, I wish Liam Baun had not come to us. When we were at peace in our boredom and me railing at Molleen to get up off the pallet and make herself useful.

  “If he’d be gone a few hours she’d go demented and be off after him. There was a terrible uneasiness on her over him, like she thought the sea would take him from her like it had taken Macdarragh and her own da.”

  But when my grandmother started in about the unhappiness that the two had wrought between themselves, how my mother had taunted my father with her love for the dead Macdarragh, and I heard mention of the Skellig isles, the birds screeching and circling, I turned away from her and wound the music box I’d brought with me from the island, my parents’ music box, a wedding gift bought in a Dingle shop, from my grandmother to the two of them. The melody added to the romance of who they’d been, so as I listened, I kept them splendid and mythic in my thoughts.

  I woke to hear my grandmother weeping one night and saw my great-aunt getting up, starting a rush light from a glowing cinder in the hearth. My grandmother said she had seen the two of them, Liam and Molleen in the darkness, Liam throwing a brace of birds down before her and asking her to cook them and eat them, because the food of the dead had a lovely, unearthly taste.

  “’Twas a dream only, Peig!” my great-aunt cried, and she brought the fire up with a bellows and the two huddled in close to it.

  I pretended to be asleep still, and I heard that night my grandmother confide to her sister that she could not keep me. I was the relic of Molleen and Liam’s sadness, she said. I would always drag them after me. If she kept to me, she said, she’d have no peace the short time she had left before she was herself under the sod.

  And it was that same night in Ballyferriter, after making certain to her satisfaction that I was asleep, that my grandmother told my great-aunt about the dreadful thing I’d done myself. The thing that had made it unbearable for us to remain on the island. The thing that made her worry that I was stone mad and that I’d go on to break her heart as they had. The dreadful thing I did, which would draw prayers and astonished noises from my great-aunt.

  But that I remembered. That I remembered as clear as I heard the flames lapping in the old woman’s hearth.

  It was after the explosion, the death. The fracture in the two sides of the world. I’d followed my friend Eileen to visit another friend, Sean, who was working alone in his father’s field. I sat on the stone wall listening to the talk between the two of them, watching the cat looks she gave him. He dropped his hoe at something she said and chased her, and they fell and rolled together in the grass, and I saw his hand roaming under her skirt and her laughing and throwing open her legs. And the laughter and rolling came to a halt, things having grown suddenly serious and them holding tight onto each other for a moment or two before she struggled up, jumping to her feet breathless and running off, leaping over the wall like a goat and disappearing down the road.

  Eileen and I had been vying for Sean’s affection before the blast, and now it was clear enough who he preferred. That agonized me and I felt a kind of fierceness that he not be distant with me. I sat on the wall shaking over it, panting, wild for the touch of him. Pulling my skirt up over my knees, I opened my legs and held his eyes and him now with his eye on me and such a look in it.

  A shiver went the length of me. “Come down off the wall, Deirdre,” he said. I stared at him with a little surge of fear.

  “Come here to me, Deirdre,” he said again, and that was the first time I felt the thrill in the soft places of my body, a kind of revelation. He came closer and closer to me, his eyes holding mine and the feel of his rough hand running up the length of my thigh and grazing at its destination. “Jayzus, you’re a ready one, aren’t you?” He’d brought me down off the wall and was pulling loose the buttons of his pants when the voice of his father pierced the air.

  “The Devil take him,” Sean muttered. “Come back to me here tomorrow,” he said. Before leaving he put his hand between my thighs again and gave me a tickle, sending me into a paroxysm of excited confusion. My curiosity was so tortured that I couldn’t wait for the sun to set and rise again. I would have dispensed with my maidenhead with little thought, nothing seeming of much value to me those days.

  All night I lay in a state, remembering each detail of his presence, his self-assured roguery; his wide shoulders and strong arms. The magnetic pull between male and female seemed the only mystery worth attending. I breathed softly and sighed, my loneliness transformed into heightened sensation, located now in my body. But the next morning was as dim as late afternoon, the sky like gray green linen, soft and heavy, light permeating from behind its layers so things took on an exalted look, like candles burning behind curtains.

  The Winds of Pentecost started blowing ungodly in the screes, bringing torrential waves so the tides ran up the cliffs and near the doors of the houses. The sea battered the rock face on the north and western heads, the spume flying so high into the air that it rained down on me.

  Still I ventured out, fighting the gale that screeched across the passes, the waves churning up the stones. My grandmother fetched me, pulling me home, the two of us almost blown to the rocks.

  The storm lasted four days.

  The crops from the previous year had been poor, and the storm swept away any nets put out for mackerel and bream. Before the storm we’d been subsisting on a seal clubbed to death in the cave; the flesh of those creatures would always turn my stomach and our cottages stank of it, the cresset lamps filled with the oil from their livers.

  My grandmother and I got so hungry those four days locked in the cottage that we took to sipping the oil from the lamps.

  The morning it cleared, the pebble dash houses were a brilliant, glittering white. There was a commotion on the cliff and I ran toward it; a broken ship was stuck in the rocks, the sea bobbing with all sorts of riches, barrels, and boxes. Swarms of men in curraghs struggled to collect them all and to bring them in at the quay. On the White Strand, men and women unpacked the barrels, marveling over sacks of grain and great wheels of cheese, jars of preserved fruits and bottles of clear alcohol. There was flour and lard, petrol and wax. The ship had been abandoned, not a soul on board, and it was generally agreed upon that when the hull had broken and the ship had threatened to go down, the crew had left on lifeboats.

  “God save their souls,” someone said.

  A man named Fearghall, who had lived seven years in Dublin, recognized the writing on the boxes as Danish and said the ship may have been headed to Iceland and could have been blown south off its course along the Greenland current. Cooking implements were brought out, waterlogged blankets and pillows. Mattresses dried on the rocks in the sun. A great service of delft crockery decorated with windmills was collected and divvied up among the families so every household ended up with a few plates and cups and saucers. For days, men gathered in groups on the rocks around the shipwreck, their heads bent over instruments of nautical brass: compasses and telescopes and mysterious wheels with moving arrows, strange ciphers that pulsed, sensitive to the warmth of a hand or a heated breath. The men sat on the sand, Sean among them, his head bent over a map, struggling to decipher the
symbols.

  That night when the water was low in the rocks around the wreck, the men broke the boards from its sides and burned them on the shore. People gathered to drink the sweet clear alcohol and eat the fruit and cheeses. Sean sat with his arm around Eileen. Once he met my eyes and quickly looked away. After that there was singing and dancing and I stood in plain sight of him, waiting for him to take me in a reel, but it was as if he didn’t see me there at all.

  The world of the dead seemed the better place, for it was unbearable to be left such an outcast in the world of the living. I hated Sean in my heart, yet I still would have let him sweep me off into a cave, the anger seeming only to add fodder to the fire burning in me. This struck me as a mysterious thing: I was suspicious even then that I had a strange nature.

  On the fourth day after the ship had come, I climbed down to investigate the ruin, which had been slowly dismantled over the days. The hull rested now at a slant in a peak of sand, and just before I reached the door, a slew of kittiwakes rushed out at me in a panic, taking to the air above my head. I stepped inside the frail interior of what remained, the metal-and-board skeleton creaking with my weight. Sand had gathered in storm water pooled on what was now the crooked floor. A point of light came through a crevice in the wall. I had heard that the men had been unable to get into the boiler room. They’d pried and wrenched at the door, but it had not given. I saw a small red button under a handle, walked up and touched it, and the door pushed out as if something were pressuring it from behind, the room exhaling a concentration of steam. I moved back, tripping on the uneven floor. The fog issuing out wet my skin and made it impossible to breathe, a strange smell carried on it like overripe fruit. After a few moments, a gust of wind blowing through the hull diluted the fog, and as it slowly cleared I saw a young man lying inside the boiler room on the floor. His head and neck and shoulders leaned against a pipe, raised higher than the rest of his body, giving the impression that he was struggling to get up from his prone position, the rest of him submerged in a pool of seawater. All around him mechanical structures gleamed a coppery color, some having gone faintly green.

  His open eyes shined. It occured to me that he was dead, yet his expression was alive and nothing like the looks on the faces of the dead that I’d seen before. There was nothing resigned about it. Yearning or hope held to his features and his eyes held to mine, at once seeing me and not seeing me. I stepped in, and in the dimmer light his look intensified.

  The pool of water that held him sloshed and stirred. His long, reddish hair moved like seaweed around his neck and shoulders. He kept peering at me, the weight of him shifting with the movement of the water as I knelt down beside him. At first I was ashamed to study him so closely, his eyes still gazing hard at mine. But soon, kneeling at his side in supplication, I reached into the water and touched the curved palm of one of his hands, which lay facing his thigh, and I clasped it with both of my hands.

  This close, he had about him an intensely sweet smell like the Easter lilies brought from Dingle that had rotted on my grandmother’s shrine to the Virgin. His smell, his eyes, full of the qualities of life, confused me, so in conflict were they with the stiffness of his form.

  The shock of him settled in me, and I felt a thrill as I peered at him. My grandmother had said once that the dead were very close to us; closer even than the living. How old was he? I wondered. Maybe sixteen or seventeen. He looked the same age as Sean, and there was a roughness of whiskers on his chin and above his lips. I ran my fingers through the hair near his neck and it felt like any living person’s hair in water, and I closed my eyes and sang to him.

  In the full dark the starlight leaked in. When the tide was high it came up the beach and rocked the hull. He stirred when it thundered, and I hoped the tide might lift the hull and carry us off. I watched the starlight on his eyes. In the middle of the night the sky must have clouded, because the light grew creamy and diffused and it began to rain in the hull outside the boiler room.

  I lay beside him in the pool, my arm around him, and I think I slept, because I startled up once shivering with the cold, my teeth chattering.

  And as I remember it now, deeper into the night there were candles, myriads of them around us, though I cannot say where they came from. I held my face in his two hands. Now and then a flame would extinguish itself and make a sound, like a human sigh. Its smoke would unravel, and it would fall into the pool we lay in. Another would light mysteriously.

  “Is braithim as titim an saol…,” I whispered to him. The world is falling away.

  I have broken memories of the morning; of the men prying me from him. I fought them bitterly and wept, my head on fire, my body racked with cold.

  I had been making the death passage but was cruelly interrupted. My grandmother said later that she’d done everything to keep me in this world, rather than let me pass into the other. She did not understand why I’d railed against her after that day and hated her for keeping me back.

  ’Twas after this incident that an even greater shame came down on my grandmother and me. I took to my parents’ bed behind the yellow curtain, and when my grandmother found me there she went mad, accusing me of desecrating a shrine. But every chance I had I returned to that bed, though the covers were rough and cold and the straw it was stuffed with was rife with insects. This was the end for her. She said she was too old and tired now to keep such a creature as me. She was finished too with the harsh weather and the uncertainties of island life. She had her mind set on the mainland and was making ready to leave the Great Blasket for good.

  I decorated the iron curves of the headboard with strands of seaweed, and lying there, I knew when the tide was high because I could feel the ring in the hollows of the iron, tuned as it was to the temperamental vibrations of the sea.

  In my wakeful hours behind the yellow curtain, I wound the music box and listened to the dinny melody of Donal na Grainne.

  Four

  Throughout March and April, I heard very little talk about Enfant de Marie from the girls, and I imagined, against my better judgment, that it had passed from their minds like a fancy. I went secretly to the prioress at St. Alban’s and told her that the girls would be back. She said I needed to sign a promissory note in order to hold their places, so with a shaking hand, I did so.

  Near the end of April, a letter came from Mrs. O’Breen addressed to me.

  Dear Deirdre,

  I hope you are well.

  I’m so pleased that you have made such a wise decision in relation to your daughters. The environment at Enfant de Marie, as you well know yourself, builds strong character.

  By way of further aiding the girls in the transition, it might be to their benefit to come to me here in Kenmare on their own early in the summer to stay, perhaps for June and July and you could join us in August and spend the rest of the time until we see them settled in rooms at Enfant de Marie. I think it will be good for them to get used to being away from you while they still have all the ease and comforts of home at hand.

  Again, I am extremely proud of you for your thoughtful concern over your daughters’ development.

  With love,

  Mother

  I handed the letter to Manus. He read it, then met my eyes. Neither of us spoke, and he was placing the letter in his own pocket when I reached my hand out for it.

  “It’s mine,” I said.

  “Oh,” he said, taken aback. He handed it to me, and I walked up the stairs with it. I sat in the girls’ room with the door closed.

  In the hours that followed, I thought I might fight it somehow, but the more I read and reread, the more overcome I was; the more defenseless I felt at the force of it.

  The morning they left for Kenmare, I stood in the vestibule looking out at the waiting carriage. Maighread moved past me, giving me a quick kiss on the cheek. I thought Caitlin might look sad, reluctant to go, but she met my eyes with a kind of ease, brushing her lips across my chin and following Maighread down the steps and t
hrough the gate.

  When they were gone, I faced Manus, who was standing behind me in the vestibule. His eyes wandered immediately from mine. He colored faintly, then walked toward his study. Before he closed the door, he turned to me.

  “You’ll see them in two months, for God’s sake,” he said with irritation, then closed the door.

  So I was left alone in the big Georgian house on Merrion Square. Alone with the ministrations of Mrs. Daley as she cleaned and put things right downstairs. Alone with Manus, who would come in later from work at half five, maybe with McMartin, his business partner, to sit in the study and smoke and go over his papers and his blueprints.

  Manus, who had long since become a creature of habit, lived a separate life behind the eyes, kept his own counsel. The rift between us hardened with time. He had grown short and disapproving with me. But I had seen, in unguarded moments, his face so different with the clench gone from his jaw. From under the armature of manly bones, the Beloved peered out from one eye now and again like a boy trapped in a tower. But such appearances were fleeting. Gruffness had become his way of managing.

  The perfect scripted habits of Manus’s life, unchanged by the girls’ going, threw into terrible relief the sudden emptiness of my own.