The Marriage Bed

by Regina McBride

  I came to a door festooned with decorative carvings, which I opened and went through, stunned to find myself on a balcony in near darkness, looking down into a chapel.

  As my eyes adjusted to the dimmer light, I could discern the ribbed vaulting of the ancient walls. On the altar, two candles were lit, signifying the presence of the Eucharist, one to either side of the velvet curtained chalice. A faint smell of frankincense held to the heavy air, along with smells of old stone and dampness. It struck me that the balcony I stood on had once been a choir.

  I was about to slip out and try to find my way downstairs again when I saw another door farther down along the balcony and slightly ajar. As I moved closer to it, I saw the quiver of candlelight on the wall within. I knocked softly, and the door creaked open wider. I waited a few moments longer before fully opening it. On a large black wood dresser with iron handles sat the curtained hat that Mrs. O’Breen had always worn to Mass at Enfant de Marie. A pair of her soft leather shoes with the buttons on the sides were set on the floor a few feet away from me. I stepped in further and saw an elegant bed under a wood canopy, the coverlet glinting with gold embroidery.

  The room was night dark except for dozens of candles flickering before three pictures that hung on one wall across from the bed. The central canvas, an oil painting, was the largest. I moved in close to study it. Set before a lugubrious backdrop of storm-distressed clouds was a young man whom I recognized immediately as Manus. His features were composed into a velvety calm, a gently penetrating expression shone in his eyes.

  The picture to the left of it was not a painting but a photograph. The young Mrs. O’Breen, I thought, her face coming delicately forward into light, a luminous oval and one white arm rising from shadow. Saint Lucy holding the saucer with two disembodied eyes on it, and seeming to offer them like delicacies to an abstract presence above.

  The photograph to the right of Manus’s portrait was of young Mrs. O’Breen as Saint Cecelia. In this one her statuesque body was apparent, the voluptuousness of it out of character with any other depiction of a saint I had ever seen. An underexposed angelic figure loomed behind her as she sat before a harpsichord, her fingers grazing the keys, her intent expression in the act of listening, not to the music under her fingers but as if she were sensing out the barely imposed angelic figure behind her. I was amazed by the artistry of the image and by the soft young girl with the receptive eyes, mouth slightly open, an expression somewhere between rapture and astonishment.

  I looked again at the portrait of Manus, confused and uneasy at the romantic expression on his face. I was embarrassed by the size of the portrait and its place of prominence here in his mother’s bed-chamber. A sudden prickly sensation moved over my scalp.

  I went back onto the balcony and exited through the door I had come through. I walked a while longer through the corridors when I found myself at a window that faced out over the sea. I watched the water for a few moments and was about to go when I saw a figure on horseback moving at a leisurely pace along the foreshore. I went close to the window glass, peering out.

  The moment I realized it was Manus, he looked directly up to the window where I was. He pulled the reins so the horse twisted its head and shifted direction, coming back to the house. My heart began going so hard it hurt. I remained where I stood, waiting, not knowing what to expect, and afraid that if I left this place, he might not find me. I heard his footsteps, saw his approaching shadow darken the doorway. When he was there at last beside me, tall, breathing heavily from his ride and from scaling the stairs, an earnest expression on his face, there was not a trace about him of the irreverence his mother seemed to enjoy.

  “How did you find your way to this part of the house?” he asked, and broke into a little winded smile.

  “I went through the wrong corridors. I was trying to find the staircase down.”

  He nodded.

  At a loss for words and looking for something to rescue us both from awkwardness, my eyes fixed themselves on a pin set into his lapel. A golden sun with a serious face, engraved inside a triangle.

  “What does that pin represent?” I asked.

  “It’s a Masonic symbol. My father was a Freemason,” he said.

  “Freemason?” I asked.

  “A secret society of craftsmen.”

  “How old were you when your father died?” I asked.

  His face darkened. “We don’t know for certain that my father died.”

  “You don’t?”

  “He went off on an expedition, a ship into the High Hebrides of Scotland, and never returned. The ship and no one on it was heard from again.”

  “How long ago was that?”

  “Fifteen years ago.”

  “So you were very small.”

  “I was two. He’d gone in search of something called fire marble. On one of the obscure islands in the North Sea there is supposed to be a big wall of this marble hidden in the rock cliffs.”

  “It must be extraordinary marble to have drawn him so far away after it.”

  I felt him quicken at my show of interest. He pointed down the hall. “Would you like to see what it looks like?” he asked.

  I nodded, and he pointed to a small, insignificant-looking door a few feet to my left. He drew a key from his pocket and slid it into the lock.

  Going through that door we left a corridor of well-lit, cream-colored walls and persian rugs, paintings of trees and lakes framed in gold ovals, for a corridor all rough stone and exposed brick, rampant with echoes. The windows, low to the ground and deeply recessed, had no glass in them, and the wind blew in. As we passed through, I saw three large, thatched nests occupying an alcove high up in one of the lintels.

  “Ravens,” Manus said, pointing at them. “You see, this house was very much a work in progress for my father.

  “There are one hundred and twenty-one rooms, many of them altogether forgotten,” he said thoughtfully. After a pause, he said, “In fact when I was little and my father had been lost in the High Hebrides, I thought this part of the house was called The High Hebrides; that my father was lost in this part of the house and that one day he would find his way back.” He paused a moment, perusing the walls. “My mother won’t come to this part of the house.”

  “Why not?”

  “She hates the way he took things apart back here.”

  “Why doesn’t she have this area renovated?”

  “This house is too big. These rooms are not necessary to her. I’m glad she doesn’t touch them. This is where my father’s things are.”

  Dead leaves and flowers littered a wide staircase, which we descended onto a vast panoramic room below, what once must have been a great hall of some sort, roofless in one area now and covered in ivy. Broken, carved faces in niches high on the wall were discolored, exposed to the elements. Through a break in the stones I could see a wild orchard. A sudden wind sent pink branches straining, and a slew of blossoms came through the glassless windows.

  I followed Manus through corridors, passing rooms that contained great stores of rough-hewn stone, quarried slate, and marble.

  “My father believed that the old must always be resuscitated, grafted with the new. This abbey was sacked in Cromwellian times. A century later, a family of Irish Papists, the Fitzpatricks, moved in and built on the newer wings, but that family was dispossessed by English Protestant landlords. The house has been tenanted on and off over the centuries. It’s had a shaky history at best.” Now and again he’d stop to point out a faded inscription carved into a window recess, or the relief of a sculpted angel or a heraldic bird.

  We came at last to his father’s study, a room fully fortified and protected from the elements by reinforced doors and windows. The chimney breast was crumbled, and shelves were piled with books and papers. Against one wall a group of mysterious contraptions were displayed.

  “This is an alchemist’s laboratory,” he said.

  “Alchemists?…Didn’t they try to make gold?”

&nb
sp; “Yes, centuries ago.”

  My attention was drawn to an elaborate oven of some sort with knobs and various dials attached to it. “This,” he said, “is an athanor, a kind of furnace where metals were melted down.”

  He pointed out different objects set on a shelf behind the athanor: tongs and a bellows; various crucibles of earthenware and glass; a mortar and pestle.

  “You see, Freemasons used to study alchemy, searching for secret and sublime knowledge.” I felt him watchful of me now, trying to suss out my reaction to his words. “They study the elements; they believe that that’s how we’ll discover the true nature of the universe and thus of ourselves.”

  When he looked expectantly at me, I nodded.

  “I’m sure the nuns wouldn’t approve of you looking at these things.” He waited for a response, and when I didn’t know what to say, he went on.

  “Perhaps such things seem”—he hesitated, searching for a word—“godless to you.”

  “No!” I cried. “I’m intrigued.”

  He looked at me in earnest.

  “You don’t think it’s godless?” he asked again softly, looking sidelong at me.

  I took a breath, moved by his need for my reassurance. Emotion caught in my chest, a deep desire to reassure him, which became a desire to validate him. “The Church can be intolerant…and cruel. I don’t place much store in the beliefs of the Church,” I confessed. My face suddenly on fire, I lowered my head. I had never said such things aloud. A brightness issued suddenly from my nun’s clothes, but I did not sense his judgment on the air between us.

  He remained silent for a few moments, then said softly, “I try to explain to my mother that many Catholics are Freemasons. And that alchemy once flourished in the Franciscan and Dominican convents of Europe.” I looked up at him, and he smiled and said, “Of course I don’t tell her that the most passionate alchemists were condemned as heretics.”

  I smiled back, then averting my eyes from his, studied the alchemical laboratory.

  “How did the alchemists produce gold?” I asked.

  “Through great heat they transmuted one metal into another. And they used mercury, which they believed had magical properties and could inspire gold or silver out of a coarser metal.”

  “Inspire it?” I asked, amazed.

  “Yes, persuade it.”

  “As if,” I began, “coarser metals contain the potential for gold, or that the seeds of gold are present naturally within them.”

  He focused on me, his face lit at my excitement.

  “Yes,” he smiled. “To awaken the spirit in matter. My father was passionate about this idea. When he was younger he actually did experiments with these things. But as he got older he kept them really as museum pieces, collectables. He tried to take it literally when he was younger, but with maturity he became interested in alchemy for its metaphors. He wanted to understand nature, and he felt that modern science was cold; that there were secrets in the medieval science. He saw it as an esoteric science. And I can attest to the fact that the old books are confusing. I struggle to understand them. There were warnings in some of the texts that the uninitiated should not read them.”

  “Why not?”

  “It’s all so difficult to decipher. Alchemical texts are filled with strange imagery.”

  Manus opened a drawer and took out a little velvet bag. “Let me show you the fire marble,” he said, drawing out a streaked milky green stone and handing it to me.

  “Come to the window and you can see it better,” he said. We stood together side by side and I held the stone in the light, my blood rising at his proximity, my nerves taut as harp strings. The stone was scored with deeper greens, the smoothness broken by three veins of a clear reddish gold, a kind of hardened ambery syrup. “You’d think by its name it would be red,” he said. “But it’s not.”

  “Why was he after this?” I asked, keeping my focus on the stone to steady myself.

  “He must have wanted to build something with it,” he said softly.

  As he returned the stone to the drawer he said, “As a builder, he was a great idealist. He loved his work and spent much of his time in this part of the house and even kept a bedroom back here so when he worked deep into the night, he could sleep.”

  I let out a surprised laugh when we heard the beating of ravens’ wings in the hallway outside the room and their echoing, melancholy cries.

  Manus smiled, and an awkward silence ensued.

  I broke it by saying, “Your father sounds like a remarkable man.”

  “Come and look at this picture.” I followed him to one of the shelves, where he showed me a portrait of a man and a small child. “That’s me with my father,” he said. “I was twenty months old. He used to dandle me. Bairbre remembers it. She says I tried to eat the carnation in his lapel.”

  The man’s eyes were pale and blurred, as if they had shifted away from the lens in the precise moment the picture had been taken. The impression was of a man capable of great intensity, his big hand around his tiny boy’s arm and chest, a study in gentleness.

  “I know so little about him. His family in the north had made a fortune in flax but at the time he met my mother he was estranged from them. My father had been living in France for five years before he came back to Ireland. The story goes that he was studying dolmen stones in the field in Kilorglin when he saw my mother in her white novice robes.” He paused, his eyes quickly traversing my white habit from hem to neckline before returning with a faint smile to my face.

  “My mother says she was praying, that she’d wandered off the convent grounds in a holy revery.” He smiled ironically. “But that’s not the story my father told my brother. He says that they arranged a rendezvous.

  “Anyhow, my father bought this house for my mother. He was renovating it as they lived in it.”

  “Your father must have been very much in love with her.”

  Manus went thoughtful at this. “Yes, but my parents were different from one another. And because of that, this is a house with two faces. My mother loves the decorative, but my father had very different tastes. I don’t think he liked modernizing the house to the degree that pleased my mother. He had his own separate life back here, raven haunted and full of echoes. I think he liked that this was a lifetime project.”

  He drew in a deep breath and looked around the room. He seemed so animated talking about his father.

  “I want to show you a picture,” he said, but did not move. He extended his hand toward me, and after a moment, I gave him mine.

  He led me to a corner of the room, where, affixed to the wall with small nails, hung an etching on old parchment. Most of the picture depicted an earthly landscape intricately detailed with rocks and hills and overseen by a large, thoughtful-looking sun. The image was contained within a wash of blue, but to the left of it, in the corner of the picture, a gold and cloudy firmament filled with planets, mechanisms like wheels and sundials. A man in robes who was in the act of crawling on the land in the foreground on the earthly side of the image had just broken through with his head and one hand into the bright yellow world, peering up at the planets and the universal workings of the firmament. Engraved at the bottom of the etching were the words: One is the whole, and from this comes all, and in this is all, and if it does not contain the whole, the whole is nothing.

  “Do you really understand what these words mean?” I asked.

  “No,” he laughed. “I struggle with it. But I think it’s trying to say that heaven and earth are closer to one another than we think.”

  He gave me a warm smile, and I felt, as I had the first time I had seen him, a premonition of intimacy. He took a step closer to me, and as if he were bestowing a great confidence upon me, softly said, “The alchemists concerned themselves with the sky and the wind; the territory between the earth and the spheres. What I want to do as a builder is colonize the sky. Build in that in-between place.”

  It struck me as a magical thing to say and I smiled,
feeling myself color. I broke the look between us, turning away, feigning interest in the books on the shelves.

  “I’ve applied for an apprenticeship in Dublin. Most likely the work I’ll be doing for a few years will be basic, restructuring, renovating. Maybe government buildings. Nothing as interesting as my father’s work, but I’ll be learning. And there’s a Freemason lodge I hope to become a member of.” He paused, then said, “You’ll have taken your vows by then.” My heart fell. I had felt up to that moment that his confidences were admitting me somehow into his life. But he had the wide world before him. I had Enfant de Marie.

  “My father was more prone to go to the lodge of a Sunday than to Mass. I’ve promised her…my mother…I’ll always go to Mass. I will always,” he said as if it were important that I know this. “And that she can depend upon me. She’s lost my father. I’m the man of the family.”

  I wondered why he was telling me this. I continued to gaze at the books, at a loss for what I might say.

  “And what about your own family, Deirdre? We’ve talked so long of mine.”

  “I feel I’ve always been at Enfant de Marie. I hardly remember myself before that.”

  “Bairbre says you were born on the Great Blasket Island.”

  I did not respond.

  “You’ve a wild look to you.”

  I turned away from him, pained.

  “I like the wildness about you.”

  “I don’t want to be a wild girl. I want to be like you.”

  “Maybe you and I are a little alike.”

  “You’re free and unfettered. You don’t have to be quiet and contain things in yourself.”

  “I have things to contain…,” he said wistfully. I held his eyes. “Just as my sister has things to contain. Did you know that Bairbre wanted to be a stuccodore?”

  “No…I didn’t.”