The Marriage Bed

by Regina McBride

  “But you started to tell me about it once…and about your parents.”

  “Those were things my grandmother told me,” I said.

  I could sense his doubt in the darkness.

  “My parents were drowned when I was two. My grandmother raised me.”

  Why, I asked myself, wouldn’t I try to tell him.

  The truth did not feel compatible with the life we were attempting to lead in this house.

  I felt a sting of sadness over the loss of that deep connection we had shared, and the safety we had felt together in the hidden garden room.

  There had been times in those first three difficult months of Maighread’s infancy when I had gone to Manus, at the end of myself with exhaustion, and he had held me. But I’d felt my neediness wearing on him.

  During my pregnancy with Caitlin, Mrs. O’Breen was often around, and there was great pressure and expectation on the air that this baby would be a boy. In the throes of my labor, I saw Mrs. O’Breen and Manus standing in a shadow across the room. After the sex of the infant was announced, they both disappeared. In my own heart I succored a secret joy.

  While I relished the early, harmonious months with Caitlin, Manus grew more distant and anxious over his work than ever. I became used to his absence at dinner. There were still disagreements between himself and Duncan Brady, and he was bucking to leave his apprenticeship and begin his own career.

  And though he was preoccupied, I saw each tiny daughter steal her father’s heart. I would find myself moved by his soft manner with his children, the easy way they could melt him.

  Over the next few years after he left his apprenticeship, Manus took on the design of two wealthy homes, both in the smarter suburbs of Dublin.

  But after that, he accepted an offer to work again with Duncan Brady and the Dublin Building Association.

  I asked him about his choice, and he told me that he’d been haunted for years by things that he’d seen in the tenements. One memory in particular had stayed with him. In an unventilated, one-room flat where a family of eleven lived, he’d seen a little girl on the floor in a pile of clothes sleeping with a dead cat in her arms.

  It confused me when Manus befriended John McMartin, the red-haired man whom he’d had such vehement differences with. He knew how little I liked McMartin, so when the man began to come around often, Manus said to me, with a note of defensiveness in his voice, “I’ve a high opinion of McMartin. He’s a good judge of character and a reader of faces.”

  One night McMartin waited for Manus for an hour in his study. When Manus came in he was exhausted, his clothes covered in plaster and paint.

  “You’re the master, for God’s sake, O’Breen! What are you doing the donkey work for?” I heard McMartin ask.

  “I like to get my sweat and breath into the mortar,” Manus said in response.

  “Christ! Sweat and breath! You should have been a bloody poet!”

  It was in McMartin’s company that Manus began to drink heavily, and here I mark the deepest, most extreme change in him.

  I repeatedly asked Manus if we could move to a different house. He refused, but I fought with him over it. To placate me he said that he’d think about it. One day, walking a circuitous path home from the market, I discovered a large, empty flat near Fitzwilliam Square. Men were inside painting, and when I asked how I might contact the owner, I was given an address a few streets away. I spoke with the landlord, expressing interest, and he showed me the flat. For weeks I visited the site where the men were working, and Manus came with me once. But in the end he said it was not possible, that we did not have the money at present, that I didn’t understand how finances worked. They were asking too much.

  We were in this house for eight years when I gave birth to our third child, a boy. Manus sat in the room and watched me in agony as the infant was delivered of my body. He held the boy himself for the few minutes it lived, before expiring in his hands.

  The midwife had to give me sedative doses of belladonna to calm me and help me sleep. The second day after the baby’s death a neighboring woman with whom I had a congenial aquaintance, Colleen Bell, came by and sat with me and held me. She’d lost an infant five years before, and because of this, I found comfort in her arms and in her company.

  That night after Colleen had gone, I heard Manus railing and crying in the other room, and I knew that he was drinking.

  Still bleeding heavily the following night, I heard Manus calling out in the hallways, “Flowers for the forty hours adoration! Holy Mother of God!” The door flew open and he came in, closing it hard behind him.

  “I’m going to put another child in you,” he said.

  Weak with the belladonna, I rose unsteadily, trying to get away. He grabbed me by the hair and threw me back onto the bed.

  “Manus!” I cried. “For the love of God!”

  He climbed over me, pressing one hand to my mouth so I could not speak or move my head. I struggled but may as well have been a bird fluttering under his iron hold, the panting of his heart and his hoarse breathing amplified at my ear.

  As he pushed into me where I was raw and birth-ravaged, it felt as if I were being stabbed with a steel blade, each stroke keener than the one before it, like he would kill my sex if he could.

  “Bitch!” he snarled until a change went over his face, a stinging of tears in his eyes. “Bitch!” he cried and winced as if he were also causing himself physical pain, his head flashing up as he choked back a sob in his throat.

  Panting, he took his hand from my mouth, his eyes open but without focus. He rolled off me and fell into a drunken sleep.

  In the light of the next dawn it looked as if a murder had been committed in our bed, blood on every sheet and blanket. I lay exhausted and crying, agonized and unable to move, terrified that it would be one of the girls who would find us so. Fortunately Mrs. Daley arrived early that morning and found us. Manus was asleep on his side, blood on his naked skin and his face. Blood dried in his hair. Mrs. Daley contacted the doctor, who, after attending to me, took Manus aside and admonished him. Even with the injury he’d inflicted upon me, I gloated and cried with satisfaction at his terrible shame, red fury with him deepening my grief for my dead baby.

  He came to me that night and stood before me weeping. “Deirdre,” he cried. “Please forgive me, for the love of God. It was the drink.”

  I refused to speak, my jaw tight with hatred against him.

  Weeks passed, and even in my stillness as I struggled to heal I could not let go of my outrage.

  I had taken to the little bed in the spare room, a cold, drafty part of the house.

  When two months went by and I still refused to speak with Manus, the priest, Father Finbar, came to me and told me I must forgive him.

  “He is your husband,” the priest said.

  “He hurt me,” I answered.

  “It was his grief!”

  “What of my grief?” I cried.

  “It was a son. He’s been waiting for a son.”

  I said nothing, but moment by moment, Father Finbar was deepening my resolve against Manus. Every muscle in my body and mind felt in revolt of his authority, and of the other, more subterranean authority that directed our lives.

  It was a week or so after my words with Father Finbar that Colleen Bell visited. Mrs. Daley served us tea in the front sitting room.

  “I heard you were doing poorly for a while, Deirdre,” she said in a soft, empathetic voice.

  “Yes,” I said.

  She fixed her eyes very carefully upon me, and I saw that there was a purpose to her visit. “I hear that Manus is doing very poorly even now.”

  A tightness came into me. “Did Father Finbar dispatch you here to speak to me?”

  “He’s very concerned about Manus,” she said.

  I began to shake with anger and grief at what felt like a betrayal on her part. “I don’t know what Father Finbar said to you, but Manus brutalized me, Colleen.”

  She winced faint
ly.

  I began to shake with anger. “Colleen,” I said. “He raped me!”

  She froze at the word, silenced for a few moments by it. But watching her face I could see that she held hard to the mission the priest had entrusted her with. “He was drunk with his grief,” she ventured meekly.

  I stared at her. A spasm of nausea moved through me.

  “He’s stopped drinking,” she said.

  I was soaked with sweat, the room adrift with moving lights. “I think you should go,” I said.

  “Will you come and see me?” she asked as she stood.

  “No,” I said quietly.

  She hesitated, then before turning to the door, she said, “I’m sorry, Deirdre.”

  I shook my head, and when she stepped outside, I closed the door.

  Everything changed. If I had forgiven him as he had repeatedly begged me to those first months after it had happened, perhaps we would have gone on in the strained unhappiness we’d been living before that. But fury and outrage had changed me and given me a nervous determination.

  And I began the most profound rebellion I could have made against the established order of the house. I made my room permanently on the third floor. I locked my door at night.

  This time was also marked by another important change. The girls were old enough now for school, so three months after the death of the infant boy, they began their studies. Though St. Alban’s was not very far from Merrion Square, I could not bring myself to go home after seeing them through the massive doors. At first I paced up and down Kildare Street, overcome with anxiety, rarely taking my eyes off the brown arches and iron gates of the school for the seven hours that the girls were stationed there. But as the weeks passed I began to wander further off, never discouraged by inclement weather.

  I dared myself into lanes and narrow streets, made curious by the facades of houses and buildings; by a half-drawn lace curtain or the broken glass of a porch lantern; sometimes drawn by the smell of burning turf in a city of coal fires. Discovering little refuges from the weather, I watched the gypsy women with their bands of children, barefoot in the cold, wandering the streets in search of a few pence. They managed, I thought. They managed in the unsafe world.

  There was something wildly liberating about wandering the city. Up until this time I had hardly veered from the roads that led to the market and to the church, cloistering my daughters and myself in the house on Merrion Square. Now I looked forward to losing myself in congested Dublin. There was an eerie privacy to moving among crowds.

  Walking downwind of the river I welcomed its charred and molten smell. I gravitated to the bridgepiers, where the gulls were fidgety and territorial, their white feathers made gray with soot. I spent hours sometimes watching the rowboats rock at anchor, or I’d watch the faces of passersby over Halfpenny Bridge, some careworn and unseeing; others with bold, unheeding stares.

  A year went by so, and I softened a bit toward Manus, exchanging cordial words with him regarding the affairs of the house or the children. One night I walked into the front parlor, where Maighread was writing her letters on a slate.

  “Look, Da!” she cried to Manus. “I’ve written my name.”

  He squatted next to her where she sat and held the slate, studying the spindly characters she’d drawn. I could see that she’d left out a letter, but Manus didn’t remark on it. He smiled. “You’re getting on like a house on fire!” he said with great animation, and she smiled with pleasure.

  A warmth flooded me for him. He turned and saw me there, registering the feeling in my face.

  That night, having turned the gas off at the main, I climbed the stairs to my own room on the third floor. Manus stepped out of a shadow on the landing, startling me.

  “Deirdre,” he said, and pressed me to him. He was not drunk, but I smelled whiskey on his breath. For a moment I did not move, but when his mouth hungrily found mine, revulsion filled me, everything in me seizing up against him.

  “No!” I cried and pushed him away.

  He stepped back from me. In the shadows I could barely see his face. He said nothing, but I could hear his troubled breathing as he made his way down the stairs.

  After that night he began again to drink heavily.

  He attached himself to McMartin, and I was stunned to see him pick up McMartin’s mannerisms and expressions. He grew a beard and, like McMartin, began smoking a pipe. I stared at him, which irritated him and caused him to blush with self-consciousness. Always sensitive to the expression in my eyes, he began to avoid looking into them. At night the two of them caroused.

  I was certain as time went on, and I would not open my bedroom door to Manus, that he went with McMartin to the prostitutes on Leeson Street.

  Once when it was very wet out I left my boots in the vestibule, and when he came in he kicked them aside with vehemence.

  And though I disliked the behavior intensely, I found myself paying close attention to him, trying to fathom him. I watched him when he was unaware of it.

  One night, two years after the infant’s death, I saw Manus sitting alone in his study, his door ajar, mouthing words and gesticulating with his arm as if McMartin were still there, then affecting a laugh, the color up in his face. Was he reimagining an interaction with his friend or practicing for a future one?

  He contorted his face at his invisible companion and smiled, shaking his head up and down. Speaking with McMartin’s cadence, he cried out to the air, “You guttersnipe!”

  He seemed to tire of the charade and sat forward, rubbing his face. He stared at the floor, disheartened.

  Only now was it clear to me how lonely he was. He could not bear it that I would not forgive him. I felt moved but still conflicted. I wondered if we would ever be able to find our way back to each other.

  He stood and went to his desk, looking distractedly through his papers. I was about to go upstairs when I saw him pick up the picture he kept of me in a white china frame on his desk. I watched, reluctantly moved as he gazed at my image, a kind of wistful seriousness overcoming his weary features.

  Had I not known it always, I wondered, what I knew in this moment? That it had not been me he’d meant to injure that terrible night. It had not been me.

  Two or three nights later, I sat with the girls before bed, reading to them from an old book we’d taken out of the library, illustrated with black etchings. They’d chosen a story of a mermaid combing her hair. When they were both asleep I took the book with me to my room and found myself intrigued by an etching of what looked like a woman’s hands holding an infant in fire. The story was called “A Terrible Rite.”

  I sat in the chair in my room reading the tale, which was about a mother who held her child in fire every night for a few minutes so that he would learn to endure it.

  “Eventually,” the mother told her friend, “he will become a god.”

  After surviving each rite of fire, the infant felt cold and lay shivering in the corner while his mother went on with her business. I closed the book and kept trying to dispel the story from my thoughts, but having deeply unnerved me, it occupied my imagination.

  I tried to sleep but found myself starting suddenly with an irrational worry over Manus. I went downstairs and saw him in bed, asleep.

  Illuminated by the streetlight through the open curtains, he lay on his side, arms around the pillow, chin lifted. His expression open, the muscles soft across his brow. Sleep rendered him innocent. My heart quickened, and I sat in the chair and gazed at him.

  He was not gone, the Beloved one, Manus’s true self. Here he was, lying before me.

  Though I would not show it in my gestures for years to come, I was seized with tenderness for him, and visited by euphoric memories of the passion that had once been between us.

  For four more years life went on so for us, and there were times I wanted to go to him, to break through the revulsion that seized me when he touched me. But he grew more and more remote with alcohol and anger.

  And so
there were two of him, and it was the lost one who I was in an intrigue with; the one who was only visible to me when he slept.

  When the girls were in bed at night, Manus left the house and didn’t return until two or three in the morning. I slept fitfully in my room on the third floor, waking at the creaking of the stairs when he got home, and the noise of his footsteps on the second floor as he prepared for bed. I would wait a while until all was silence, then creep down into his room while he slept. If the curtain was closed I’d open it quietly that I might gaze at him in the light from the streetlamp below.

  Now my girls were fourteen and thirteen. They were off to Kenmare and soon to school.

  The fourth day they were gone, I wandered out toward the familiar landmark of the Customhouse, jostled once by two people avoiding an ambulance car that galloped past. As I approached O’Connell Bridge, the river carried with it an unnerving stench. I moved far away from the water, going south on Grafton Street and then to Stephen’s Green, where I sat on a bench in the park.

  It was the urchins with no shoes who drew my attention that day, selling the Dublin Penny Journal. Though they strutted and shouted, I felt afraid for them, small and motherless and half naked.

  When the afternoon grew dark with the promise of rain, I started home. Under an arch on Baggot Street I saw a man in fine Donegal tweeds and a ragged woman pressed together in a doorway outside O’Donoghue’s Public House, the woman panting with soft laughter. The spectacle of this upset me, and I rushed home, where loneliness issued from the walls.

  I could not bring myself to go out again the next day. I began to keep to my little study, afraid to move, autonomous existence a precarious and unbearable condition. Nothing weighted me or tied me to anything. All I could do was give myself to the quiet that opened the senses.

  If I stayed very still, remembering the days I’d spent with Manus in the hidden garden room, would lichen grow on the glass? Would the little draftsman’s table grow a branch, find roots in the wood of the floor? Would my Love return as he had been that final night of childhood, just before dawn; just before we went back into the house of his mother? In his ruffled cuffs, his torn, crushed silk jacket, its tatters flailing in the wind?