The Marriage Bed

by Regina McBride

  I studied each of them fiercely, but my eyes always came back to the boy. His features retained an adolescent softness, but he was already taller than his mother and stood on the precipice of manhood.

  After Mass, with all my senses still tolling, I followed them at a distance and saw the woman talking to the Reverend Mother, handing her an envelope, which the nun, nodding her head enthusiastically, hid immediately under a layer of her habit. The three went out and took a turn in the courtyard, a gentle animation between the girl and her mother. The boy was reserved, almost sullen.

  Later I would hear about them in the dormitory. The O’Breens were a wealthy family of stonemasons. The father had died, leaving them with a big house on Kenmare Bay, where white horses roamed the acres along the sea. The mother was a great benefactress to the nuns. And the girl, it was said, would be coming to Enfant de Marie as a postulant.

  “They are an ecclesiastical family,” I heard one girl say. I longed to ask her what that meant. How mysterious, I thought! How could a family be ecclesiastical?

  I could not understand why, with such a family, the young woman wanted to be a nun. The orphans in the school, in particular, were urged to sign on as postulants. I had listened often uneasily to these talks, no other future in sight for me. It was terribly difficult, we were told, for orphans to find places in the world.

  “As a nun you have a family of sisters. You have safety and shelter, and you are espoused to Christ Himself,” Sister Carmel had explained.

  The O’Breens peopled my daydreams, and restlessly I imagined them, romantic figures ascending and descending staircases, riding horses over rolling green property.

  Three weeks would pass before I saw any of them again, and then it was only the mother and the girl, but the memory of her brother’s face was present in the girl’s. And there being so much time between, all the feelings the three had once roused in me, and the ones her brother had especially excited, I read now in her. She was taller than I remembered, and without him present I was aware of a note of masculinity to her features. She was for me both the brother and the sister, as if she had absorbed him into her own nature.

  Once Bairbre O’Breen had donned the veil of a postulant, I sought her out, though I never spoke directly to her. I breathed her in deeply. She did not smell like her brother but rather like some exotic spice, an eastern wood, which wore away the longer she was there, replaced by the odor of the coarse soap the nuns used, which dried and reddened their skin.

  Every Sunday Mrs. O’Breen attended service, her face hidden behind the dark green veil, an edge of animal fur on the collar of her jacket. During the Agnus Dei she always cried, and with ritualistic grace she’d take a linen handkerchief from her bag and part the dark green curtain before her face before applying it to her eyes.

  Perhaps, I thought, the term ecclesiastical family meant that they were consecrated somehow in the eyes of the church.

  I imagined an elevated love and understanding between this mother and daughter, and I felt outside of their secret. Desirous of it, I was also hungry for the intelligence they seemed to represent; the order.

  Bairbre gazed to the altar during Mass. When I saw her in the corridors, she wore a mild, pious expression, a circle of inward focus around her, which I struggled to emulate.

  She taught lacemaking and her pieces were displayed, pinned to dark velvet and preserved behind glass frames in the corridors outside the nuns’ antechambers, so that we saw them each time we passed into and out of the dining hall. She was not so very much older than the rest of us, only two years, but her expression afforded her the authority of an old soul. She taught the girls to make chapel veils, geometrically divided into sections of flower and snowflake.

  I was all thumbs at it though, and was allowed to sit at a separate table and draw. Still I watched, struggling to fathom her. She being of her brother’s blood and of his coloring, I swooned faintly in her presence, a prickling sensation running up my spine. When I was alone I sketched her face. I drew her with her mother’s face and her brother’s always there behind her; sometimes as moons, sometimes as planets, inseparable as they were from one another in my thoughts. It was Manus O’Breen at the forefront of my thoughts, and his mother; but poor Bairbre, who seemed the least defined, was my close link to the other two. I thought of them as a Trinity. The Mother, the Son, and Bairbre, the Holy Ghost. She bore the natures of the other two within herself, and in her presence I felt the mystery of all three.

  In my less mystical contemplations of her, I was faced with the confusing paradox of a girl who had everything, leaving all of it behind her.

  One Saturday afternoon I followed from a distance as she walked into the empty chapel. She knelt, thinking she was alone. Exhaling deeply, she crossed her arms over the railing before laying her head upon them. A quiver ran through the middle of her body, and I found myself shocked by her awkward and vulnerable posture, out of character with the graceful young woman I had been watching so closely. I knew from the undulations through her back and waist that she was weeping, though she restrained all sound of it, except for the occasional winded and uneven draw for air. When at last she lifted her head from her arms and sat back in the pew wiping her eyes, I withdrew from the chapel.

  After Mass the following day, Bairbre went off as usual to walk in the courtyard with her mother. I followed them and saw the mother take a package out of her bag and give it to Bairbre, and, after the two exchanged affectionate looks, Bairbre peeled the gold paper away and gasped, a small white book revealed. The two stood together, heads bowed over it, studying it, then embraced. Bairbre’s face, pressed between her mother’s neck and shoulders, looked ecstatic, her half-open eyes lit with tears.

  That evening just before vespers, I managed to sit behind Bairbre at an angle so I could see over her shoulder as she ran a fingertip along the white, finely tooled binding, then moved the book back and forth, letting the gold leaf on the edges of the pages catch the dim light of the candles. She leafed through, stopping at the brilliantly colored illustrations. In one, over which she seemed to linger the longest, a devil with all the characteristics of a human man, except for horns and beautiful green skin, whispered seductively at the ear of a daydreaming Christ in white and scarlet robes.

  When the priest arrived at the altar we all rose, and she left the book on the pew. In the hour of chanting that followed, I rarely removed my eyes from it. The book hummed, a pure citadel in itself. Once near the end of the hour, in Bairbre’s shifting from kneeling to standing, the folds of her white linen skirt knocked the book soundlessly to the floor. My heart raced. I wanted to touch her back and tell her, no one else seeming aware of it, but she was so engaged in the service that I did not dare.

  When everyone filed out at the end, she had forgotten it. I stayed on, pretending to pray. She stopped, standing for a moment in the aisle at the end of the pew, and looked at me. I met her eyes, and it went through my mind that I should tell her about the book, but something held me back. I put my face into my hands and squeezed my eyes shut. She disappeared with the rest out of the chapel, and I was able to confiscate the little book unnoticed and steal away with it back to my bed.

  Inside, below the title, The Passion of Christ, was an inscription: “For my beloved Bairbre on her engagement to Our Savior. With love from Mother.”

  I hid it inside the casing of my pillow, and when I went toward the dining hall for the evening meal I saw her with two postulants looking frantically around.

  She met my eyes.

  “What’s wrong?” I asked, addressing her for the first time.

  “We’re looking for a book,” she said, approaching me. “Have you seen a small white book with gold on the edges of the pages?”

  “No,” I said.

  “It was a present. I need to find it.”

  “Can I help you look for it?” I asked her.

  “Thank you.”

  I followed them about the convent in a daze, pretending to sear
ch until the falseness of my actions wore on me and I slipped away to my bed and lay on the pillow under which the little white book was hidden.

  I will never forget the day that followed that one: wild spring winds tormenting the lace curtains in the vestibules and corridors, and sporadic light; broken, westward-moving clouds; my heart beating deceptively as the search continued.

  Bairbre seemed set on me. She watched me, but I told myself she could not have known, because there was such regard in her face. I was convinced it was because of my concern the day before.

  Once I stood alone in a corridor looking out the window to the back of the nuns’ cloisters, where I saw the mysterious pieces of a postulant habit pegged to the line, drying in the wind.

  All the girls and nuns were engaged in the search. Girls were looking in the most unlikely places. In rooms that had been uninhabited for years. In the larders and the potato bins. Eventually everyone seemed to forget what it was they were looking for in the first place.

  Near the end of the day she approached me in the corridor.

  “Did you find your book?” I asked her.

  “No,” she said, looking into my face with a sad intensity. “I was careless with it. It was so beautiful.”

  Her eyes grew damp. We stood together in silence. She touched my hand and I felt intoxicated by her presence. But I did not once think of returning the book to her. Her loss bound us exquisitely.

  Bairbre’s grace was formidable; her presence at once soft and commanding; her height when I stood face-to-face with her, something almost imposing in its strangeness. This close, her white robe smelled like cut pine and unlit candles. It was in that moment that I began to imagine nunhood as a romantic state. It was the only answer. How else could Bairbre have left the white horses of her girlhood? I wondered if silences and demure behavior, like the voluminously layered robes, hid secrets.

  I found a place at the dining hall that night where I could watch her from across the room through the din and movement of the girls. In the course of the meal she looked up from her plate and found me set on her. I blinked when she smiled, tore my eyes from hers and looked back at my own plate. But I felt her there, aware of me, curious; watchful.

  That night I opened my eyes through half sleep and saw, with a thrill of terror, a glimmering on the corridor wall and heard faint, repressed noise, a shuffling and breathing. My heart went wild, and for a few minutes I sat rigid, hardly breathing, as the procession of soft noise and light advanced, brightening and growing louder. It passed the corridor door, what looked like a single elongated creature composed of shadow and shuddering flames. When it was gone, I slipped from bed to peer out after it. As it ascended the stairs I recognized three white veils and understood that it was a procession of postulants bearing candles. Leading them, a nun in a black veil bearing the heavy cross that ordinarily hung in the entrance hall.

  I followed once they’d ascended the stairs. The corridors up there were wider, and my eyes, having grown used to the dark, could discern each different postulant. It seemed to be part of the ritual to follow one another very closely and to remain in step. Bairbre was at the back of the line, her white veil wavering behind her. I restrained an overwhelming impulse to go to her; to stand close behind.

  I returned to bed with galloping pulses, amazed by the strange procession.

  I was trembling the next day when I stopped Bairbre in the corridor. She looked startled at what she saw in my face.

  “I want to be a nun,” I said.

  “Deirdre,” she said softly, “from the Blasket.” It stunned me that she called me so. She had clearly spoken to someone about me to learn that I was called this. My first reaction to the name was one of unease, to explain to her that there was a mistake, that I was not that girl.

  “I am not from the Blasket,” I said. “I am from Ballyferriter.”

  “Oh,” she said, seeming disappointed. “I like the sound of it. Deirdre from the Blasket.”

  I wished in that moment that I could invent for her an entirely other childhood story, not the one that my grandmother and I had settled on telling, but one of lost privilege and luxury. Wouldn’t it have been better to have lost, through difficult circumstances, some fine and dignified place in the world? I wanted her to think I was worthy of her.

  “Can I still call you Deirdre from the Blasket?” she asked, the name that had once felt demeaning transformed to a term of affection by the softness of her voice.

  Emboldened by her sweetness, I touched her shoulder, and that gesture roused from her a response, so subtle, like a warm gust of weather. A little issue of vulnerability. She shifted slightly on her feet.

  “You’re my friend,” she said, then averted her eyes from mine and walked away.

  I went to Sister Hildegard, the prioress, and told her that I was ready to attempt the early trial period of Holy Instruction.

  A few days later I was transported, with the rest of the postulants, to the cloister in the old battlement behind the convent, where we were kept isolated from the others.

  Six

  In chapel, wearing the white robes and veil of a postulant, I sat in the pew behind Bairbre and off to her right so she remained always in my peripheral vision. At night in my cell, or when I walked alone through the corridor, I still saw her before me as if she were burned there, and I felt her presence everywhere, in the way, I imagine, I must have been expected to feel the presence of God.

  Sometimes in chapel I sensed her quieting her own voice that she might listen to mine, a delicate communication between us. Only once or twice a day the first week did we manage to find an unfettered moment to exchange a look, and always it was she who withdrew her eyes. That intensified my longing.

  Every day each postulant was allowed, if she wished, to choose a psalm to recite during the Divine Office. I saw the psalms as my opportunity to speak aloud to Bairbre and made my selections carefully.

  “I will worship toward and at your holy temple in reverant awe of you.”

  As I spoke these words, she listened with a heightened attention, unmoving. When I finished, she kept staring straight ahead, but I heard her exhale very faintly.

  And it felt to me that I had lived for that tiny exhalation, which, because it could barely be discerned, made it even more exquisite and true, and filled me with wondrous thoughts; that she understood my affection. In some mysterious way, she reciprocated it.

  During the hour of deep meditation the silence was so generous and immense that I could track a change in her breathing, and when she leaned forward over the rail, I could hear her heart beating like a very distant drum, and I followed the changes in its rhythm, wondering what her thoughts were when it quickened. When I was supposed to be pleading with Christ to clean iniquity from my soul, it was Bairbre’s presence that I pleaded with. And how could she have helped but feel my intensity? I longed for the boundaries to be lost between us; that we might become infused one with the other. Particles of her brother and her mother, particles of her dignified place in the world might enter into my being. Might closeness to her not elevate me?

  In the long hours I chanted inwardly to her, I worship you, repeating it so often that it seemed to become audible of its own accord, and I heard my thoughts as if spoken aloud. I worried and had to look at the nuns and other girls to be sure they had not heard.

  Each day came the chance to recite, my voice breaking onto air, bald with emotion, “You cause my lamp to be lighted and shine. You illuminate my darkness.”

  It was that pleading that wore her down, that drew at her so she’d turn her face that I could gaze at her profile, as if she could not, at times, resist my adulation.

  But it was that same pleading and repetition that began to intrude on her. My thoughts and intentions to become one with her so filled the air between us that I saw it physically weary her, so she had to hold on to the back of the bench in front of her and hang her head, unable to add her voice to the refrains.

  One day, a
month or so into our postulancy, Bairbre seemed particularly vulnerable to Sister Vivian’s instruction; Sister Vivian, who was more soft-spoken and intense than Sister Carmel. Old Sister Vivian with her benevolent face and peculiar way of opening her arms to us when she spoke, as if she were calling lambs in from a dark field.

  “Christ sees into our hearts. He knows our worldly passions. We must lay them at His feet. Unharness your hearts, my daughters, so they are clear and cool as glass.”

  Bairbre slumped as she listened, and later, when I passed her as I was returning from Communion, I saw a look of painful self-searching on her face.

  One day she devastated me by moving from her place before me to a distant corner. An hour or so into prayer she turned and found me facing her. I saw her read everything in my face at that moment. She knew I had no vocation, that I was there for her. She stiffened and gave me a harsh look in which I sensed a warning.

  She stood for Psalms and recited, “As for God, His way is perfect. The word of the Lord is tested and tried.”

  I felt myself falling from a great height. After she knelt, I stood and recited, “In dumb silence I hold my peace, so my agony is quickened and my heart burns within me.”

  She met my eyes and I grew hopeful that the words had served as an appeal to her.

  The next day I recited, “All night I soak my pillow with tears, I drench my couch with my weeping. My eye grows dim because of grief.”

  But she would not return to her place in the pew before me, and she did not meet my eyes without a harsh expression on her face.

  One day in mid February, I approached Bairbre in the corridor. I touched her arm, and she withdrew as if I’d hurt her.