I heard her weeping that night behind the yellow curtain and knew she was waiting for him. And in the middle of the night he came in and she took him, all vulnerable, into her arms and into her bed again.
I was afraid. He’d gone too far in courting her suffering. I heard them breathing together. No one should ever taunt that soft, hopeless place in her. Why did he not know that? I fretted in the dark over it. Fretted and shivered because he did not know.
I detached from the memory and struggled to move away from it. They had done such things one to the other, and it was part of the passion between them.
I stayed in the back room, unmoving, afraid to go to Manus; afraid if I opened the Secretus Secretorum it would be to the image of the dead couple, blackened by the flames of the alchemical oven.
It was dark when I heard Mrs. Daley leave. In the kitchen I found soup on the stove and a fresh loaf of soda bread on the board, now gone cool.
I heard Manus saying good-bye to McMartin at the door. I waited and listened. When McMartin was gone, I stepped out into the light and faced Manus.
He looked at me and then at the picture, which I had left, along with the shards of glass, on the marble side table. He weaved slightly on his feet, then turned and went back into his study, closing the door.
I went and gathered the shards and the picture, carrying it all carefully upstairs in search of a new frame.
Fourteen
I awakened in the morning when the downstairs bell rang. Reaching the stairhead, I saw Manus below, still wearing his clothes from the night before, his shirt untucked, receiving a letter.
My heart rushed. “Is it about the girls? Is anything wrong?”
He was standing quite still reading it, his brow furrowed. He shook his head vaguely.
“From St. Dominic’s,” he said. Bairbre had left Enfant de Marie seven years before to join a cloister of Poor Maries at a convent in Kilkenny.
Manus stared at the letter a while longer, then folded it.
“Bairbre’s dead,” he said.
In the coach on the ride from Merrion Square to Kilkenny, I could not keep it clear in my mind that Bairbre was dead. Manus’s face had taken on an urgent melancholy. I touched his arm, and though he did not move, I felt him start inwardly, a sensitive shiver. With the pull and jolt of the carriage hypnotizing me, I was thrown back in time to the coach ride with Bairbre and Manus from Enfant de Marie to Kenmare, when I’d experienced for the first time the silent, unfathomable history between the two of them. For a few intense moments, Bairbre’s soap and tallow smell filled the carriage with a stunning immediacy. I let myself go back to that time: the feeling of the veil oppressing my heavy hair, calluses on my knees from praying, the hunger from a perpetually empty stomach.
“I was thinking of her last night,” Manus said suddenly, breaking me from my daydream.
“You were?” I asked.
“I had an urge to see her.”
“How strange,” I said.
“No,” he answered, his eyes meeting mine for a moment. “I think of her often.”
“You do?”
He turned his face away from mine.
When Manus and I had been married for one year, I had written to Bairbre and had received word back from the Reverend Mother that she had chosen to be fully cloistered and had no correspondence with anyone but her mother. I had tried several other times over the years, but to no avail. Manus had little attended my upset over this at the time and had seemed to accept it silently.
“I didn’t know that you thought of her,” I said.
His eyes remained fixed at some point above the passing fields.
The convent was nothing like Enfant de Marie, but a much smaller stone building half covered with ivy.
Inside we were directed up a cobbled hallway, where we ascended a flight of rickety stairs. Cold air met us at the threshold of the dead room. We paused in unison, uncertain if we should proceed. Bairbre was laid out on a narrow bed, and another robed and veiled figure attended her, arranging a spray of violets between two of her fingers.
Once the nun had succeeded with her task, she moved suddenly away from Bairbre’s body. Manus grasped my hand in his, squeezing it so I thought he’d break it.
An old nun knelt at the foot of the bed, her head bent, eyes in a stupefied doze. The nun who had been attending Bairbre approached us and, looking up into Manus’s face, asked, “Are you Manus O’Breen?”
He gave a nod. She perused both of our faces. “We’ll leave you alone with her,” she said, then stirred the older nun out of meditation, and both left the room.
The figure lying on the bed looked only vaguely like Bairbre, a darker, thinner version, like a poorly replicated waxwork. It was the hands that I kept looking at, familiar to me, having retained a girlish grace. I remembered her fingers delicately working the threads and pins of her laces, but each time I looked at the face, a cold sensation of shock moved through me, distancing me from the reality of the situation. Manus went to his knees and began to weep. I knelt beside him, but, unable to take in the gravity of the moment, the tears in my eyes were more in response to Manus’s sobbing than to the loss of Bairbre.
We remained a long time in the room. I was pensive, distracted by details, wondering about the funeral and about when Mrs. O’Breen might arrive. I debated with myself whether she would bring Maighread and Caitlin with her. I thought it most likely that she wouldn’t, and I felt both disappointment and relief at the thought.
Manus suddenly put his arms around me, buried his head in the hair at my neck, and began again to sob. When he withdrew, he stayed close to me, head bowed. I dabbed his eyes with my handkerchief, took his face in my hands and pressed my lips to his temple and forehead by turns. The purity of his grief inspired in me both a maternal solicitude and a wave of carnal feeling that confused me, and for which I admonished myself for having here in his sister’s dead room. Perhaps it was because Manus’s grief was so strong that I could not find my own. But the figure on the bed was not her. It felt as if Bairbre, as I’d known her, was alive and that she would reveal herself to us at any moment.
When the nuns turned on the gas downstairs, the sconces on the wall bloomed slowly with light. We got up then and left the dead room.
Manus spoke to a nun named Sister Clair. “My mother has definately been notified?” he asked.
“Yes,” Sister Clair answered.
“What illness did my sister have?” Manus asked.
The nun paused, then spoke hesitantly. “She was ill for a few months. It was a bronchial infection that she finally died of.”
Manus looked expectantly into the nun’s face, waiting for more from her, but she changed the subject, suggesting a rooming house down the road where we might stay.
It was a gaunt old building with feudal arches, and after we paid for a room for the night, we sat in a tea shop across the road from the convent, watching for Mrs. O’Breen to arrive. The tea shop closed at half eight and we remained standing outside the convent until half nine, no sight of Mrs. O’Breen.
That night in our room, Manus told me that once, after Tiernan’s death, he’d gone into Bairbre’s room and she had been staring out the window, looking up into the night sky. He had asked her what she was doing and she’d told him that she was holding up the stars, making certain that they did not fall.
“She said she had to do it because she was afraid everything in the universe might go wrong. With the magical way children believe, she stared vigilantly and with great concentration as if that might stop the stars from falling.
“I had begged her to let me do it too, and I managed it for maybe ten minutes before I asked her why there was all this milky light streaming around the stars and she told me that it was because I was tired that it looked that way.
“I had already closed my eyes when I heard her cry out because she had seen a star fall. I fell asleep, and when I woke hours later she was still staring out the window.
“B
efore Tiernan died, Bairbre was different. But after, she wasn’t like a child anymore. I remember missing her, like she was the one who had died, not Tiernan.”
The service had been set for 10 A.M. but Mrs. O’Breen still had not arrived by half twelve. Sister Clair approached us where we sat in the nuns’ reception room and said that we needed to go on with the burial.
“You’re certain that my mother was notified?” Manus asked.
“Yes, Mr. O’Breen,” she said slowly and took a seat beside him. “Even yesterday I was not altogether certain that your mother would come.”
“Why not?” Manus asked with quiet alarm.
“There was a break of some sort between Mrs. O’Breen and Sister Bairbre. It happened after your mother visited here. I’m not certain what was said between them, but Bairbre stopped writing to her, and no letters came from Mrs. O’Breen. Five months ago it was. Mrs. O’Breen stopped sending us her regular check. That made things very hard for us,” she said as an aside, her eyes meeting mine a moment. “It was about three months ago that Bairbre…well, she stopped leaving her cell.” The nun was silent but seemed to be trying to find a way to go on. Finally she said, “Bairbre mortified herself.”
Silence took possession of the little room.
“How did she do that?” Manus demanded.
“A nailed shirt, an infection she would not allow to heal.”
I had heard of such torture devices at Enfant de Marie.
“Is this a common practice here?” he asked.
“We try to encourage limitations on this, but it’s difficult. Nuns cannot be stopped from following the examples of the saints….” Her eyes grew large in her face, her pupils dilated. She was a strange, owl-like creature.
“You have no infirmaries?” he demanded and stood up.
“Yes,” she said, also rising, “and she was attended to there, but her wounds would have only begun to heal when she’d apply the shirt again.”
“Outrageous!” he cried.
“Let me assure you, Mr. O’Breen, this was Bairbre’s choice alone to mortify herself. No one told her to do this.”
Manus and the nun held each other’s eyes. Gradually the fierceness against her went out of him. He was perspiring heavily, and as his gaze fell to the tiles, his eyes began to lose focus.
“Manus!” I cried, guiding him to sit. The nun put a vial of spiritous ammonia to his nose, which made him start and sit forward.
We stood with eight or nine nuns in the churchyard, all holding their veils against a blistering wind, that knocked the heads off the morning glories so they swept in over the coffin.
After the service, the priest threw the first handful of dirt onto the lowered coffin, and a man in dark clothes came and shoveled in the sod. We were approached by Sister Clair, who reached under her bib, drawing out a letter. “Bairbre asked me to give this to you, Mr. O’Breen.” She held it toward him, but he only stared at it, so I took it for him. It was warm and sent a frisson of sadness through me.
“Mrs. O’Breen,” she said. “I wonder if you might deliver something to Bairbre’s mother when you see her next. I was meant to give it to her myself, but under the circumstances…”
I accepted from Sister Clair a bag stitched together with rough fabric. Whatever was in it weighed very little. I guessed that it was one of Bairbre’s lace workings.
We traveled back to Dublin that afternoon.
At home Manus put the letter in a drawer in his study and I placed the gauze bag meant for Mrs. O’Breen on Manus’s desk. We climbed the stairs together. He got into bed while I moved about putting things away, seeing to things, but, exhausted, I lay down next to him and fell asleep.
I awakened to the sound of Manus softly repeating my name. Grief had brought his pure self back to him, had driven off the harsher other. I turned and put my arms around him and we lay entwined. He fell asleep in this position, and I drifted between sleep and waking, every subtle modulation in his breathing sending washes of feeling through me. It was in these hours that I shed my first tears for Bairbre, the reality of her death slowly dawning upon me. Gusts of air coming through the window smelled of a coming storm.
When I awakened again, it was after six in the evening. I whispered to Manus that I would go down and see to supper.
I gave Mrs. Daley instructions and sat without helping as she methodically placed the napkins and cutlery on the table. The early evening light was deep through the shutters and spattered the tablecloth. Rain had come and gone while we’d been sleeping.
As I heard Manus coming down the stairs, a front of shadow overtook the late Dublin afternoon, subsuming the room all at once, the dressers with the dinner plates going crimson and amber. The quality of the air in the room changed, growing cooler and damper.
Manus came in, and Mrs. Daley set the whiskey and a glass down near him. He eyed it, then looked at his plate. I did not breathe. My heart beat in jaunts.
Mrs. Daley moved past us to leave, turning the flame up in a small lamp on her way, which did little to cut the strangeness of the light. It seemed to me that she was moving very slowly toward the hall, echoes rising from her footsteps. My own chair sent a vibration into my body, the entire room in a tumult of vibrations. I touched my fork, and removing my fingers from it could still feel the buzz of it, and every cell of me starting to open like I was being dissolved into a wet mist. My love hung his head and did not move as the shudders and the faint hysteria of the room gradually quieted, and I could hear my own breathing and his. I stood and went to him, kissing his face, his neck. I sat back on the floor and reached for him and he came down to me, embracing me, moving with me, our breathing growing heated and insistent. When he lifted my dress and pushed into me, I saw, in my peripheral vision, the glass of the window spontaneously shatter, a tumult of silent glitter.
I held his hair, kept his face above mine, the moon peering at the sun.
We moved together with waves of a slow, aching pleasure. The light in the room went gradually purple, and the descending sun glinted on the cutlery and ignited the gilded edges of the dinnerware; everything metal and gold in the room bright as the bars of a furnace.
Afterward, we remained there on the floor. The window resumed its unbroken state. When we stood, it looked as if there were dew on the dinner plates, beads of humidity having gathered on the water glasses. There were conditions to this enchantment, and we were cautious.
We held hands and walked through the hall, past the armoire and up the darkened stairs, dampness on the railings. The house like a dangerous woods, night leaking in everywhere through windows left open.
I lit candles and watched him sleep.
His own childhood was as unapproachable to him as mine was to me. I had never understood this because we lived in proximity to Manus’s childhood. So much heritage and legacy present; so much that directed our lives, allotted our roles.
Gazing at my sleeping husband, I remembered my mother’s vigils for my father, and I felt her panic and expectation of loss; afraid he would drift from me, afraid he might return to the mundane world. I watched over him, guarding him against the deadening air of the house, thinking that if his soul fled from him I might see some sign, and that I might deter it, open a fuller dialogue with it.
I had fallen asleep during my vigil and awakened that night to find Manus was not in bed. The clock said half past nine. I went downstairs and saw the light coming from under the door of his study. I knocked softly, but he did not answer.
“Manus,” I said and opened the door.
He was sitting forward on the leather sofa with his head down, the opened envelope on the cushion beside him, the letter hanging from one hand.
I moved into the room and stood before him.
“What does it say?” I asked.
He waited a while, then finally looked up at me and asked, “Do you remember the story of the Three Fates from Greek mythology?”
“Vaguely,” I answered.
“After Tie
rnan’s death, when I was six and Bairbre was eight, my aunt Ethna told us the story. She said, ‘There is Clotho, she who spins the thread of life, and there is Lachesis, she who assigns each child a destiny. And the other one.’ She quieted and said, ‘The one we won’t speak of now. The one whose attention you don’t want to draw to you.’ She pressed a finger to her lips and said, ‘Ssssshhh.’ ”
“ ‘Who is she? Who is she?’ ” I had begged.
“ ‘Atropos. She who cannot be turned. She with the abhorred shears, who cuts the thread of life.’ ”
“Bairbre and I didn’t sleep that night.
“From doorways we watched my mother and her sisters moving restlessly about. The three all wore the same kind of heavy nightgown. Their faces looked stern. Looking at them that night,” he said and winced, “I was confused as to which one was my mother.
“We heard the word intercessor again and again. The hiss of that word, ricocheting along the walls.
“ ‘What is an intercessor?’ I had asked Bairbre. And she had told me that it was a ‘go-between’ for someone with God. There were arguments among them. I heard my name and Bairbre’s volleyed back and forth. But it was my name whispered in the worst heat between them.
“The next night they lit a fire outside and they told us our fates. Bairbre was given a linen veil to play with. She would be a nun. I would grow up to marry, have a career and many sons.
The Marriage Bed Page 18