The Marriage Bed

by Regina McBride

  “She didn’t tell you? There’s rooms throughout this house where she did stuccowork.”

  “She never told me,” I said, amazed.

  “After all,” he said, “she has the Masonic blood in her as well.”

  “Bairbre’s very sad,” I said.

  He froze, taken off guard by my words, and for a few moments, neither of us spoke.

  “I don’t blame her for being sad,” he said. “Now she makes lace. Can you imagine how hard that must be for her?” He looked abstracted, as he had in the carriage. “Reduced to fidgety repetitive movements of the hand, when once she stood on ladders and scaffolds to spread and sculpt plaster on high walls.”

  We left his father’s study and he led me back up the corridor and up the stone staircase until we reached yet another area of the house. He opened the door of a vast and empty dining hall. Drawing aside a heavy curtain, the room filled suddenly with light and an effusion of swirling white dust. The wall opposite the windows was covered with numerous sculpted rams’ heads, childlike in disproportion; the room was a kind of workshop, the walls having been used as canvas, the floors still speckled with dried spills of plaster. On another wall were studies of urns looped with laurel leaves; on another, a tableau of dogs overcame a stag.

  “Bairbre did this?” I asked, studying the snarling lips and sharp teeth of the dog.

  “Yes, and there are more rooms like this.”

  “Manus,” I said. “Bairbre has explained to me that yours is an ecclesiastical family—”

  “Yes.”

  “And that your older brother was going to take up the cloth….”

  He nodded.

  “Why was it, well, why was it that you weren’t sent into the seminary yourself, after your brother died?”

  “It was my superstitious aunts who decided it. My mother’s sisters. They were afraid that God had not yet forgiven my mother for abandoning her vocation. They’d read of a similar case in the family history. Generations ago, another young nun had left her vocation and was replaced by her sister. There were no repercussions. It seemed God had accepted the replacement. So they decided that rather than try to groom me as a priest, Bairbre should replace our mother as a nun and the family sin would be forgiven. And I would be left to bring in a new generation.”

  I felt stunned, filled with pity for Bairbre.

  “Out of the deep Dark Ages, isn’t it?” he asked.

  Peering at one of the stucco rams, I said, “Bairbre must be wondering where I am.”

  Manus led me back through the house and directed me to the staircase I had been searching for earlier.

  I found Bairbre in the dining room drinking a cup of tea.

  “Where were you?” she asked.

  “I was talking to your brother.”

  “What were you talking to him about?” she asked.

  “He showed me the back part of the house.” I paused. “And he told me that you wanted to be a stuccodore.”

  She lifted her cup to her lips.

  “You never really wanted to become a nun, did you?” I asked in a soft voice.

  “The ties of blood rule,” she said, looking at me.

  “What do you mean?”

  “I told you, it’s an ecclesiastical family.”

  “Your mother told me she was going to become a nun once.”

  “Yes. And she left her vocation, like my ancestor Hugh O’Gara, the one I told you about. She feels it even more incumbent upon herself that she pay God back for having left.”

  “Manus told me that your aunts said you must replace your mother as a nun.”

  She stared ahead of her silently for a moment, and then said, “It wasn’t my aunts that decided it. My mother says it was my aunts, and Manus believes her. My aunts wanted Manus to be a priest. It was my mother who found the story in the family history of one nun replacing another. She fought my aunts and convinced them that this was what was necessary.” She paused for another few moments. “It isn’t a sacrifice my mother would ever ask of Manus.”

  “She wouldn’t?” I asked.

  Bairbre was silent. I thought better than to press her on this painful matter.

  How could it be normal, I asked myself, to lay down one’s life for one’s mother? Perhaps this too was the way of the world, for what did I know of such things? Still, I could not help but ask, “Why, Bairbre? Why would you give up your own life…?”

  She set her lips and would not look at me. I moved closer to her, waiting for her answer. She pushed her cup and saucer away and stood, then walked woodenly from the room.

  The next morning after a congenial breakfast with Mrs. O’Breen and Manus, Bairbre and I boarded a coach and were on our way back to Enfant de Marie.

  When we were on the road and the house was no longer visible, Bairbre leaned back in her seat and sighed, then turned to face me, taking my hand, lacing her fingers through mine.

  “Thank God,” she said. “Thank God we’re going back.”

  A few moments of silence passed, and she said, “Deirdre, I see that you’re counting on Manus, but you shouldn’t.”

  My heart stopped, but I did not speak.

  “There’s a girl in Dublin I’ve heard him speaking of. He wanted my mother to meet her.” In a soft voice she added, “A girl from a good family.”

  The coach rocked gently from side to side. I could still hear the vague murmur of the ocean. Slowly I freed my hand from Bairbre’s and gazed silently out the window at the passing fields.

  Nine

  That September, cloistered in the ruined battlement, breathing again the chill of ancient air, we began our novitiate: a fragile community of seven girls and three officiating nuns who led us in shifts. Our days were given to the fevered enterprise of prayer: nightly matins, morning lauds, Vespers at twilight, and finally compline.

  We got up in predawn darkness and moved single file into our places in the ancient Ursuline chapel to plead with the Lord to show us His face. And though we still chanted the ecstatic language of the Psalms, and sang The Psalter of the Virgin, and the Magnificat, most of our time was given now to silent meditation.

  The nuns lit fewer candles in the chapel to encourage deeper thought. In such reclusive darkness, the damp arches and winding galleries around us were barely visible, and after a certain hour, no candles were lit at all. Often we crept through blackness. I smelled my way from one passage to another, sensing the closeness of a wall, or, from a shift on the air, the openness of a room before me.

  A somberness pervaded this time. Often in the blackness I heard weeping or whimpering. One evening, Sister Vivian addressed us, her voice quavering with compassion. She told us that she remembered this period of her own preparation as a nun as a difficult time because it required a new level of surrender and maturity.

  I could not completely extinguish the cinders of hope that still kindled in me for Manus. But as the weeks passed, and the months, they dimmed.

  I found myself prone to trances, often shaken out of them by Sister Vivian. “You mustn’t sleep when you pray,” the old nun whispered.

  I did not tell her that I wasn’t sleeping. It was in such a trance one day that I had first found myself in brilliant sunlight in a little boat crossing the bay from the Blasket to the Skellig. I was looking for the place where my father had moored his own boat in the rocks. This place which I had avoided, which I had tried to blot from memory because I knew it to be the place where I would find them, the place that held them. The unapproachable place. I stood thigh deep in water before the cave but would not enter it.

  I learned to remain a long time in a trance without being discovered. And attention was diverted from me by another novice, Ann Carey, who was given to weeping fits during meditation. I heard, through my trances, her sad voice, as if from very far away.

  I began to live an entire life around what was enshrined in the skellig cave, the little bay and the rock pools. Things began to happen there when I visited each day that had not actual
ly happened. The little boat that had brought me there sailed away from me as if someone were rowing it. I found objects in the water: Manus’s Masonic pin with the sun’s face, glinting up from between dulse and sea lettuce; fish sliding sideways above Mrs. O’Breen’s jeweled comb.

  Manus and his horse waded with me in the bay.

  “You know what’s in there,” he said, pointing to the cave.

  “Yes, I know what’s there.”

  “You know what you’ll see, so why don’t you go in?”

  “Yes, I know what I’ll see. But I won’t look.”

  “You think you cannot bear to look at it, but you are always seeing it,” he said. “You have never forgotten it. Even when you look into my face, you are seeing it.

  “I’m sending the horse in,” he said, “and if he returns, we’ll know it’s safe for you to go in and look.” The horse went in on his instruction, but it did not return.

  Sister Vivian shook me and my eyes opened, and I felt them roll. She shook me again. Mass was about to begin. Candles were lit on the altar.

  “The horse didn’t come back,” I thought.

  The priest pointed at the crucifix. “It is the divine who undergo the divine punishment.”

  From the dim corners to either side of the choir, female martyrs stood in calm, exalted postures. Cool stone, white and resurrected.

  “Corpus Domini nostri,” the priest said from the altar, and we rose single file.

  I lifted my face, and the priest put the Host on my tongue. “In vitam eternam.”

  Bairbre was always present, watchful of me, smiling mildly when I met her eyes, taking my arm now and again, walking with me. Leaving little things on my cot. A holy medal. A bit of crochet work.

  She had grown even stealthier in the dark than I had, and once, making my way through a corridor, I walked directly into her arms. She held onto me and said my name barely audibly. I stayed in her embrace, allowing myself to take comfort for a while before blundering away from her.

  One night, several months into our novitiate, I couldn’t sleep and crept from my cot through the blackness until I found the door that opened into a roofless, eroding tower, the walls covered with creeper that had been green in the spring and clotted with blood-colored berries, withered now from the sharp autumn winds.

  I sat here on the broken stairs, shivering, looking up at the stars, leaning my face against the cold, ancient wall.

  I thought about how I’d come to be there: my grandmother speaking to the Reverend Mother, nervous to be lying to a nun, dabbing her forehead, which had glimmered with sweat. The nun’s eye suspicious on me. My grandmother blushing torridly, like a shamed child. My grandmother on her old legs running. Had she run? I don’t think she had, but it seemed real to me in my memory. Why did I remember her running? And then the boom of massive doors as she’d closed them.

  The door in the wall opened suddenly.

  “Deirdre,” Bairbre said. I knew she must have heard me leave my cell. She sat beside me on the broken step.

  “You’ve gone so quiet with me,” she said, hurt. Looking at her face illuminated by starlight, I saw how sincere her desire was to forge an intimacy with me.

  We sat a while in silence and she asked, “What is the thing at the heart of your life?”

  She’d always known I had a secret. I wondered if I could tell her about the memories that moved constantly through my mind, the bright interior sunlight that contrasted so sharply with the darkness of my exterior world. I wondered if I might try to articulate to her what I had never spoken aloud.

  But something in the beseeching expression on her face caught my attention. I smelled guilt on the cold, starlit air, and it occured to me suddenly that she may have lied about the girl she’d said Manus wanted to introduce to his mother? Before this instant I had not even considered that it might be a lie; but now it was as if I were breathing the truth of it into my body.

  I looked away from her, my pulses galloping at the idea of such a betrayal. Struggling to understand, I told myself that a heart that had been as blighted as hers was a desperate heart. Though Bairbre was capable of great compassion and I knew that she genuinely cared for me, I could never trust her fully. Desperation might drive her to tell my shameful secret if she needed to, in order to ensure that I never leave her.

  I looked up at the stars on the night sky and recalled the carriage ride back to the convent from Kenmare. My excitement over the interest from her brother and mother had been too painful for her. She had told me about the girl, then had added the words, “a girl from good family,” to deepen the blow.

  Feeling my retreat, she leaned toward me, trying to read my face.

  “What is it, Deirdre?”

  I shook my head. “I’m cold,” I said and stood. As I made my way back to my cell through the dark battlement, I sensed her behind me. When I was under my blanket again, I knew she was standing in the doorway of my room. Very softly, I heard her sigh before she left.

  As the winter months went on, Bairbre’s melancholy desire to be close to me grew. At all hours, her focus was upon me, and that intensity exhausted me, as my own toward her must have once exhausted her.

  It was weeks before, out of loneliness, I crept out onto the ruined stairs in the cold, where I knew she would follow me.

  She did not ask me again to tell her my secret, but instead, as if in a show of devotion, she laid herself open before me, telling me stories of her own childhood, which she knew would interest me.

  The first night we met, she told me about Tiernan.

  “It was my mother’s checks to the seminary that kept the priests tolerating him at all. From the time he was fourteen, he was in revolt, drinking and failing his studies. He was ten years older than me, twelve years older than Manus, so neither of us knew him well. When he was home, there was such a strain on the air. My mother was doing everything she could to persuade him of the importance of his role in the family. He never openly defied her, but reports of his behavior at school were always coming in. He acted as if he were listening to what she said, and that gave her hope. Hope that was always being dashed.

  “When he was sixteen, he was almost expelled. He’d gotten drunk and thrown a rock through the stained glass window in the chapel. My mother persuaded the priests not to expel him, and disciplinary measures were being considered. At that time, Tiernan contracted typhus. He was in a sanitarium for a month, and sent home afterward to fully recover. His health remained fragile. Every time he got better and was preparing to return to the seminary, he would get ill. Because of the inherent weakness left from the typhus, simple influenza could make him bedridden. And he was prone to fevers. It was in the throes of one of those fevers that he died.”

  She spoke again of Tiernan the next night, rambling on about him, often repeating details she’d already revealed, and I sensed how unresolved his death was for her, how it gnawed at her.

  “Mostly I was furious with him. I don’t feel I ever knew him, and he had no time for me.

  “When I was little I used to hide because I felt as if the entire house were suffering around us. I felt like the world was going to end. My mother was so unhappy because of him.”

  I ached to talk about Manus, and one night I said to her, “I had the feeling, when I spoke to him, that Manus loves you very much.”

  She stiffened slightly, then turned and faced me. “What makes you say that?” she asked.

  “The way he talked about you.”

  “What did he say?”

  “He was filled with admiration for your gifts as a stuccodore. He feels badly that you don’t get to practice your craft.”

  She remained quiet for a few moments, then blurted out, “Manus is an innocent! He’s never grown up because he’s never been required to.”

  With these words she seemed to be dismissing him. I was afraid she would try to speak of something else, so I made something up. “He said that you were close when you were little.”

  She c
onsidered this. “We were. He followed me around. He wanted to play with me all the time. We had our games, as siblings do. Our secret hiding places.” She paused for a few moments recalling that past time. “I didn’t blame him then that my mother loved him so much. He was the baby of the family. Yes, mostly we were harmonious playmates. If anything, I dominated the games. He wanted to please me. It always mattered to him so much that I approved.”

  She stumbled upon a memory. “There was a maid, a parlor maid, who used to tell me how much Manus adored me. ‘Don’t ever ask Manus to jump out a window, Bairbre,’ that maid said to me once, ‘because for you he’d do it! For you and no one else!’ ” She shook her head and laughed, amazed to recall it. “I think that woman felt sorry for me, because she was always saying such things to me.”

  There was one particular day Bairbre would tell me about many times. She was eight years old and it had been decided that she would be a nun. I came to know many of the details of this particular day: that her mother had worn a green dress and a scarf, and Bairbre had worn a black-and-white dress; that the brisk, windy weather in the morning had changed by afternoon to mild and sunny.

  “That day that she took my hand and we walked far into the field, I was so fully in her graces.” Mrs. O’Breen had taken the scarf off from around her own neck and placed it over Bairbre’s head like a veil. She’d looked into Bairbre’s eyes and cried and touched her cheek. She’d kissed her temples and called her her “Soul’s Saviour.” They had wandered together, fasting all day, kneeling and praying in the field. They had lain that night on the chapel floor together and slept.

  “It was this day that my mother explained to me the necessity of the ecclesiastical family. She told me how she had been filled with terrible weaknesses as a young woman. How when she’d received letters from my father who she’d never met, but who had seen her photographs in Dublin, she agreed to meet him secretly one day in the dolman field outside the grounds. She said she met him twice, then told him they should never meet again. She tried to resist him but he was persistent. Though he was older than her, he was handsome and worldly. He wasn’t a religious man, and she admitted to me that there was a perverse relief she felt over this fact at the time. She pleaded the folly of youth…and, as I said, weaknesses of character.