The Marriage Bed

by Regina McBride

  “You’re making this very difficult for me. I’m trying to go into my vocation with my heart open to God. You’re making it impossible for me!”

  I stumbled off, went outside into a wet frost, and contracted a fever. I lay on my pallet, Sister Vivian tending to me with hot drinks and extra blankets. Eventually she brought me into the little infirmary, where I could barely be induced to sit up long enough to take a cupful of broth.

  I felt heavy. Giving up on Bairbre, a terrible lethargy overtook me. I lay unmoving in the infirmary at night, the wind beating and whistling in the fractures of the wall.

  Lying long hours in my sickbed, the prayers we’d been for so long repeating played and replayed themselves within my mind; refrains and ejaculations speaking themselves automatically and against my own will. If I could not address the words to Bairbre and the O’Breens, they were rendered meaningless.

  Bairbre had seen through me. I had no vocation. But did she know that not once in all those months had I sensed God there? I struggled to articulate to myself exactly what it was I believed in. I had never been able to resolve myself with God as I was taught to think of him: the bearded presence in the granite chair. What I believed in instead was sky filled with luminaries; air flooding with wind and light. A tremendous energetic vibration infrahuman and indifferent; neither punishing nor compassionate. It was not a thinking entity that I sensed but something more diffuse. Not one face but millions of them as numerous as stars and planets.

  I suddenly pitied the nuns, bent and vehement with prayer. It did no good to plead with the indifferent sky.

  Two weeks passed before I got up one morning, dressed, and walked shakily into the chapel, where the sisters were engaged in Lauds. Bairbre had returned to her old place in the pew in front of the one I used to sit in. But afraid to intrude upon her, I sat far to the back. She turned, feeling the sense of me on the air. She stood and recited slowly, distinctly, “My voice shalt thou hear in the morning. I prepare a prayer for you and watch and wait for you to speak to my heart.”

  I lifted my head slowly, understanding that her words were for me. Each morning that week she recited the same words, and each time she did I felt my heart begin to fill again with hope.

  One day I answered her softly, “You cause my lamp to be lighted and shine.”

  Winter drabness began to trail away, and I could feel the coming spring.

  It was March. A lightness filled me, and knowing the prayers inside out so I did not have to concentrate, the incantation of familiar phrases produced a kind of liquiddy emotion in me. Looking up at Bairbre in her place, her face at its usual oblique angle to me, I saw a misty replica of her between us, facing me, holding her hand out to me. And I thought, I can do this. I can be a nun if that extension of her will remain reaching toward me. The air was our conspirator, carrying our messages between us.

  That Saturday we had free hours in the afternoon. I went out in the sunlight and saw Bairbre facing me as if she were waiting for me. I followed at a distance as she turned and walked slowly ahead, the bracken beginning to green with buds.

  Soon she stopped and went very still, facing away from me. I approached and stood nervously before her, but she kept her eyes averted from mine.

  “When you were ill…I realized how terrible it would be if you were not here,” she said.

  It was her face but with other shadows playing on it. Her eyes but not the holy eyes I was used to seeing. It struck me like a blow that the pious face she usually wore was studied. She had, as I’d witnessed the day I’d seen her weeping in the chapel, cast off the graceful, controlled demeanor as if she were tired of upholding it. Her true face, the one I was seeing now, was more fragile, strange and exposed.

  She struggled with her words, trying to explain. “When you were gone…the air was different in the chapel. It was dead air. You are what made those long hours alive. This is so hard,” she said. “This life. I don’t know that I could bear it without you here.”

  We walked together, and I asked her if she had really had white horses and lived in a great house and did she miss those things.

  “I don’t miss those things.”

  “Why not?”

  She shook her head, looking thoughtful, but would not answer the question.

  She kept looking at me, so I felt her agitation over something. We stopped near the wall at the very edge of the garden and stood in the shelter of a pear tree, still naked from winter. And I sensed, as I had months back when we’d spoken about her missing book, the palpable gust of vulnerability; something warm rushing forth from her.

  She touched the side of my face and I moved back from her slightly, surprised. With a gust of audible breath, she took my chin between her thumb and forefinger and peered at me. It happened quickly, a moment of aggression, soft and convulsive. She brought my mouth to hers. A powerful curiosity made me open to the sensation of her kiss, amazed by the warm pressure of her mouth and the heat of breath through her nostrils. My heart jumped when her tongue moved into my mouth, yet I was half receptive to it, my entire body tolling with astonishment and arousal. She broke from me and, looking into my eyes, struggled to quiet her breathing. Then all at once, the confidence that had so animated her drained away.

  “What have you opened in me?” she asked, then turned and walked swiftly back up the path, her white veil rippling behind as she disappeared into the cloister.

  Even more shocking to me than what I had just experienced was the idea that I could affect anyone with such power. I had not meant to break her down so. I had only meant to rise up to her.

  Bairbre avoided my eyes for a few days, and when she began again to seek me out, it was always in the company of others. We ate our meals together and walked in the free hours when other girls peopled the courtyard. She indulged my curiosity about her house and horses. She told me that the house had so many rooms in it she had not been in all of them. I pressed her to describe them, the setting, to tell me the names of the horses, what they looked like, what they ate. I held back from asking about her brother and her mother, careful lest she learn that my fascination with her extended to them.

  “I heard once,” I said, “that you come from an ecclesiastical family.”

  “Yes,” she said quietly.

  “What does that mean?”

  She thought for a moment, but before she could answer, I asked, “Is that a kind of tradition?”

  “More than that,” she said. “A kind of necessity.”

  “What do you mean?”

  She did not answer and I withdrew from the topic, a stiffness come into her demeanor.

  But the next day, strolling in the courtyard, she said to me suddenly, “I have a brother who died.”

  “You do?”

  “Yes, his name was Tiernan.”

  “How old was he?”

  “Eighteen.” She stared off beyond the walls.

  “I’m sorry,” I said.

  I wondered if it had been this brother she had been crying for that day in the chapel. “How long ago did it happen?” I asked.

  “Ten years ago. I was eight.”

  A few moments passed before she said, “I saw him once. After.”

  “After?” I asked.

  “After he died. I saw him in one of the corridors of our house, staring out the window.” She did not look at me, but we continued to walk for a while before she stopped and faced me. “He studied almost his entire life to be a priest.”

  “How did he die?” I asked.

  “He’d had typhus the year before, and after that his health was fragile.” She stared off past the wall for a few moments and seemed to be undergoing a physical change, as if all her energy were abandoning her. When she spoke again there was a flatness to her voice. “He was prone to fevers.”

  A chill passed through me as I watched her walk slowly away.

  Because of Mrs. O’Breen’s patronage, the nuns tolerated Bairbre’s choice of poetry, which she read aloud to the girls du
ring the lacemaking. I sat drawing alone at the table in the corner, and a few times as she read I looked at her, and, when she sensed my eyes, her voice grew less steady and lost volume.

  Once she came and stood behind me and read over the noise of my pencil: “ ‘What times of sweetness this faire day fore-showes, / When as the Lily married the Rose.’ ”

  At night in the privacy of my cot, I opened the little stolen book and, pressing my face into it, relived the moment she had kissed me.

  One day, while sitting in the dining hall, having just finished a meal, she pressed me to tell her about the Great Blasket Island.

  “I told you, I don’t come from there,” I said.

  She held my eyes and I could see that she knew I was lying, though she could not have known why I did not want to claim the place. She knew there was something I was hiding.

  “I know you come from the Great Blasket, Deirdre,” she said.

  I felt myself crimson.

  “Why don’t you want people to know?” she asked.

  I moved as if to leave, but hidden by the table, she grabbed my forearm, squeezing it, holding me there. I met her eyes.

  “You are from there, aren’t you?” she asked in a low voice filled with certainty. I did not reject her question. I waited a moment, two moments, three, the seduction deepening.

  “I am,” I said softly, and she loosened her grip.

  That night I wished that she would find that strength that was so attractive in her and trespass into my little cell. I touched myself restlessly but stopped short of rapture, afraid to reach the little death alone.

  Seven

  From high in the choir loft in Mass on a March morning, where I sat with some of the novices, I watched the celebrants filling the pews. Mrs. O’Breen came in with Manus. In the initial seconds that I fixed my eyes to him, my heart leaped. He was more formidable than when I’d last seen him, tall and wide in the shoulders, a mustache over his upper lip.

  Two years before, he’d been boyish, yet on the verge of transformation, and that more youthful other had imprinted itself on my memory. He seemed now almost a new self; enhanced, come into profound focus.

  He sensed my attention on him and looked directly up at me, his eyes the very salt of Bairbre’s, but without their concentrated stillness; a more tumultuous sea. A thrill shot through me, blushes rising under my clothes. I tried not to look at him for the rest of the Mass but could not stop myself, and each time my eyes settled on him he sensed it and looked back. Mrs. O’Breen glanced at Manus and then at me, and I registered a trace of a smile on her face.

  Bairbre shifted her attention from the crucifix to her mother, then to her brother, whose eyes in that moment were on me. When Bairbre’s eyes met mine, I averted my own. After an interval, I stole a look at her. She had stiffened, and her focus was again given to the crucifix. The priest read from Teresa of Avila, about the soul in its terrible isolation.

  As the Mass progressed, Manus fumbled with his watch, tapped on the back of the pew before him, then caught himself, struggling at formality. A man with the suppressed irreverence and impatience of a lad. All the original curiosity and fascination coursed through me, a physicality that could not be diverted. I closed my eyes and heard the wild beating of gulls over Beginish. I tried to banish the sounds, the burden of their cries threatening diminishment.

  When the Mass was over I watched him leave, the tallest figure there. I remained alone in the choir loft until the rioting of my blood quieted, then went out to the vestibule, where Mrs. O’Breen stood with Bairbre, speaking in hushed tones. I passed through, pretending not to notice them.

  “Who is this girl?” Mrs. O’Breen asked.

  “Deirdre,” Bairbre said.

  I stopped, bowing my head. My eyes went directly to her face before lowering again.

  “This is my mother, Mrs. O’Breen,” Bairbre said.

  I held my breath, then lifted my eyes to meet hers.

  “Hello, Deirdre,” Mrs. O’Breen said.

  “Hello,” I answered and nodded. This was the first time I had the chance to gaze into Mrs. O’Breen’s eyes, which were clear and beautifully gray. She smelled of rare flowers. A finely wrought beadwork enhanced the lapels of her jacket, and when she breathed, the beads shimmered.

  At that moment, Manus appeared under the arch. The burn of a flush moved like a force upward from my heart, and I felt myself shrink. His footsteps as he crossed into the room were loud and unapologetic, echoing, as if he were leaving broken masonry in his wake.

  It was like being approached by a creature of another species; a tall, bold animal, who’d brought in with him the air of another, richer, more foliated wood. With him present, even the walls of Enfant de Marie felt female, marled with pink.

  “Deirdre, this is my son, Manus.”

  He held his coat toreador fashion over his shoulder, his chest high, and I would have thought him unapproachable but for something soft and half disclosed in his features; a flush of sensibility on his cheek, a tiny spasm of uncertainty that crossed his upper lip. “Hello, Deirdre,” he said, the depths of his voice strummed with softness.

  I nodded, unable to find my own voice.

  When I bid them good day and moved off into the corridor, I stopped and listened.

  “What a remarkable girl,” Mrs. O’Breen said.

  Bairbre hesitated, then said, “She is my favorite.”

  “She’s the one who likes to draw your laces?” Mrs. O’Breen asked.

  “Yes. Deirdre from the Blasket.”

  “An orphan?”

  “Yes.”

  “The pet.”

  “Yes.”

  “And pretty as well,” Mrs. O’Breen said. “Do you think so, Manus?”

  “I do,” he said.

  I was transported by their approval of me, and about to rush off lest I become detected listening, when I heard Mrs. O’Breen ask, “So she has no one to visit of a weekend now and again?”

  There was silence before Bairbre said, “No, I suppose not.”

  “You’ll both come to Kenmare together Saturday next, Bairbre,” Mrs. O’Breen said.

  Again there was hesitation from Bairbre before she said, “Yes, I’ll invite her.”

  That evening at the meal, Bairbre was silent and far away while I waited for her to ask me to come to Kenmare. When she finished eating, still not having spoken, she got up abruptly, and I followed her.

  “What’s wrong, Bairbre?” I asked.

  “I’m not feeling well,” she answered.

  She sat on a bench in the corridor and I sat beside her. The bell for Vespers rang, but neither of us obeyed its call.

  A long silence passed and I began to despair that she would do her mother’s bidding and invite me.

  Unable to hold back, I asked, “Will you ever go to visit your family in Kenmare?”

  She stiffened slightly. “I don’t know.”

  I waited. “I wish I could go with you some time. I don’t think I could bear it if I never left Enfant de Marie again!”

  “I don’t like going there,” Bairbre said.

  “Why?”

  I thought of her dead brother’s ghost but suspected that her anxiety was related more to the living than to the dead. I was afraid to say more, for fear of upsetting her. After a few moments’ silence she sighed and said in a soft, patient voice, “You asked me once about my ecclesiastical family.” She faced me. “It goes back two centuries. I had an ancestor who was a bishop in Donegal, an important political voice among the clergy. Apparently he was very handsome and worldly. Bishop Hugh O’Gara. He created a scandal when he left his vocation to marry a wealthy woman of royal blood. She was a Portuguese duchess, a descendant of Philip II of Spain. And she was a Protestant. Bishop O’Gara was threatened with excommunication, but before his wedding he made a pact with the cardinal. He was so charismatic that he convinced the other clergy that God had spoken to him and that he must father sons who would be priests and that all his children
who married would produce children to carry on the tradition of a great ecclesiastical family. The papers they drew up were complicated documents. His wife would be converted to Catholicism. Fortunately he fathered ten children, two of the sons became priests, and three of the daughters, nuns. And he was allowed to keep a place among the clergy. It was consecrated in Ireland, though kept secret from Rome.

  “But over time the tradition has died out. Branches of the family have dissolved, plagued with daughters, many of whom did not marry, or those who did did not produce children who would take up the religious life. Many emigrated to America. But my mother’s branch of the family has remained loyal to this heritage.” She went quiet, her hands fidgeting softly on her lap. I wondered why she was telling me this now, and how it related to her not wanting to go home.

  “My mother was devastated when Tiernan died,” she said suddenly. “So much rode on his becoming a priest.”

  I was curious why Manus had not been sent into the priesthood after Tiernan’s death but trusted an intuition that I should not press her, especially after she witnessed his attentions to me earlier in the day.

  When we parted that night, nothing still had been said of my visiting Kenmare. I did not sleep, agitated that my chance might not materialize.

  The days passed and still Bairbre said nothing. But as if Mrs. O’Breen knew that this might happen, she issued a letter to Sister Carmel saying that plans had been made for the two of us to come to Kenmare the following Saturday.

  Eight

  The morning Bairbre and I walked outside the convent gates, birds twittered and a dampness held to the bright air. Manus, who stood near the waiting carriage talking to the groom, turned and smiled when we approached, sweeping aside a strand of loose hair from in front of one eye. He opened the carriage door, giving us each an arm in. Bairbre and I sat side by side and Manus across from us. As we moved into the wide vista of the landscape, it impressed me what a great chasm separated the medieval city of Enfant de Marie from the open world.