The Marriage Bed

by Regina McBride

  “Deirdre, are you all right?” Mrs. O’Breen asked.

  “A bit tired,” I answered.

  I fell into a heavy sleep and woke when the early afternoon air was tender and hushed.

  Downstairs they were praying. Mrs. O’Breen warbling about the purity of the saints and the two girls, her chorus, mewing in answer, their faces raised, their necks long. Being led like lambs.

  In that moment, fresh from dreamless sleep, I saw everything with a supernal clarity. I saw them distinct of her; their subtler selves facing away from her. Each had experienced the chill of her limitations.

  Everything bubbled up in Maighread when she saw me. I knew she was angry at me for sleeping so many hours. She was looking to stir me up. As we ascended the stairs she stopped on the landing and lingered before a tapestry of a nude, allegorical couple. She pointed at the man’s naked hips and giggled with a shrillness younger than her age.

  “You’re acting the fool,” I said. Caitlin and Mrs. O’Breen both looked at me, taken aback by my uncharacteristic manner. But my attention was on Maighread, the way she froze for the hair of a moment, the hesitation even in her step and her breath.

  I felt strangely sure of my authority.

  “You’ll not want to behave that way at Enfant de Marie,” I said calmly.

  She did not breathe a word.

  Later when we sat outside in the garden, I found her looking at me, her expression reassessing, surprised.

  It was only a shift, I thought. Just the shift in my understanding, and the air between us was changed.

  That evening after the girls were in bed, I took Bairbre’s gift to Mrs. O’Breen, where she sat alone in her parlor.

  “Bairbre left this for you,” I said, holding the parcel out to her.

  She hesitated to take it. “Do you know what it is?”

  “No. I assume it’s one of her lace works. It’s light in weight.”

  She took it from me, and without opening it, set it down on the table beside her.

  “Thank you,” she said, and her eyes dismissed me.

  In the morning the girls led me through hedgerows and field paths, wanting me to see what they’d found in the woods. The turf shed looked haunted, the door half off. The nearer we moved toward it, the more redolent the air was with rot.

  They’d found the rusted remains of a child’s wagon, two wheels missing. It had been under the loam and the leaves. A light rain began suddenly, and we sheltered under a canopy of the branches.

  “Look,” Caitlin said, pointing. It was the rain that illuminated a tiny porcelain hand near the shed, a little flexed hand, dirt in the fingernails, palm to the sky.

  “Someone played here once,” Maighread said. When the rain stopped, both girls went to it, squatting over the loam, moving leaves and earth aside, unburying a broken doll, cracked and disfigured, her chest cavity open and full of peat, one eye clouded over and the other wide open and blue, her perfect teeth along the porcelain gums edged with grime. The remains of her dress were decomposed, a silk that crumpled stiffly, mulching back along its edges into earth.

  I held the doll and saw that under the dirt there were rhinestones pinned to the soft canvas where the hair, entrenched and matted, was woven.

  “It must have been our aunt’s. The nun.”

  “Bairbre,” I said.

  “She looks like an old child,” Caitlin said, clearing earth from the doll’s face.

  “She looks like a tinker girl with jewels hidden in her hair,” Maighread said.

  “What kind of an infection did Sister Bairbre have?” Caitlin asked.

  “They’re very secretive, the nuns,” I said. “They don’t tell us everything.”

  “Nanny didn’t act like anyone had died,” Maighread said. Caitlin stared at the grass.

  “No, and she didn’t attend the funeral. Your father is very upset about that.”

  “Poor Daddy!” Caitlin said. They both resolved to write to him that evening.

  “Our poor aunt,” Caitlin said.

  I took off my shawl and wrapped the doll like a baby.

  “Let’s bury this poor doll,” Maighread said suddenly.

  In the shed the girls found a little spade, and together they dug a hole in which they placed the doll, and the three of us covered it over with earth and leaves, then we knelt gravely around the little mound.

  “Sanctus, Sanctus, Dominus, Sempiternam Requiem,” Caitlin uttered, making the sign of the cross.

  “Kyrie eleison. Christie eleison,” Maighread whispered.

  We wandered further, daring each other forward like three wayward children into the embankments and the trees.

  We lay on the overgrowth.

  “We’ll get leaves in our hair,” Caitlin said.

  “I don’t care,” I said.

  “Are you really going to have a baby?” Caitlin asked. She listened at my belly.

  A quiet held the air, and I knew their thoughts were filled with their baby brother who had lived less than an hour. The night he was born and died the girls had been on the stairs peering down through the rails. “Like a puff of wind had put him out,” they’d heard the midwife say to Mrs. Daley as she’d left the birth room.

  “I know this is a girl,” Maighread said. “She should be named Bairbre.”

  She had collected daisies and sat up now, weaving them into a chain.

  A humid heat fell from the yew tree above us. Caitlin cut hazel sticks, and when we got up we hacked through the overgrowth and trespassed through high grass beyond a fence, where cattle stood watching us.

  A single cow approached us like a horse might and allowed Caitlin to pet her. Maighread hung her daisy chain around its neck. She was a sweet cow, her udders heavy and beautifully veined. I wondered when she’d last calved.

  It struck me suddenly that there might be some plan hatched to take the child from me. My heart racing at the thought, I walked ahead of the girls until I could collect myself. No, I said inwardly. Mrs. O’Breen did not do things that way. Yet the thought nagged at me. I felt the child asleep and present within me and knew in that moment that it was a boy, the little frond of him tucked close.

  Near evening, making our way home, I pretended not to see Mrs. O’Breen there watching our return from a high window, her face pale and only half visible, like a waning planet.

  At the meal I sensed a kind of weakness from her, her staunch excitement over the child within me less steady, the high curve of her chest now sunken. The gift from Bairbre must have affected her, I thought. For much of the time at table, her thoughts were far away. I was hopeful that at some point during the visit, I might see some display of grief from her over her daughter’s death.

  Once when Caitlin burst into laughter at something Maighread said, Mrs. O’Breen looked up from her plate, startled. She seemed confused by the affection among the three of us, the way we’d disappeared and returned with our dresses dirty, our hair undone; how we’d come in holding hands, and the wonder of it wounded her, threatened to dismantle her.

  “We found an old doll,” Caitlin said.

  “Yes. It must have been Bairbre’s,” I said and watched her. She looked down at her plate and seemed to be studying her food.

  “We gave it a proper burial,” Maighread said, a faint tone of admonishment present in her voice.

  In the quiet as we drank our tea, the lamps lit now around us, I imagined Mrs. O’Breen was watching me with one eye, like a blackbird.

  For the rest of that late summer my daughters and I spent our time together, restored to one another, walking the tide. Stormy sunsets we breasted the rain at the beach. On dry evenings we carried oil lamps out toward the tide, letting the water run over our ankles.

  Only at the ringing of the Angelus did Mrs. O’Breen preside, though we laughed behind our praying hands at the way she huffed when she fell to her knees, the dramatic way she held her arms open when she prayed.

  Some nights we stayed up late, Caitlin playing the piano, Maigh
read playing bells or singing. Or we read. The happier we were, the heavier Mrs. O’Breen, the earlier she withdrew to her parlor to begin her drinking.

  Mostly she stayed clear of us, and they were days of wonder. It was like exploring the grounds of a castle, whose watchful, discontented queen was temporarily usurped. The back of the house was a maze of neglected gardens partitioned with walls, some pristine, some ruined.

  One day we wandered through an unlatched door in a high garden wall and found a crowd of statues clothed in mist and up to their thighs in creeper. Some had fallen into thickets, harebells growing around them. All were women, similar of feature, heavy white stone, Greek looking. Many were broken or half destroyed, as if deliberate violence had been inflicted upon them.

  Clearing creeper from around the feet of one figure, Maighread cried out, “Look at this!”

  The word Valor was carved into the stone below its feet. They were allegorical figures. Reason and Justice were both tumbled, broken from the knees down and tangled in the thicket.

  Chastity was shattered at the breast and thighs, as if beaten with a hammer or some kind of mallet. Justice had no arms, a crumbled waist and shoulders. Forgiveness’s face was all but gone.

  “It must have been a group of boys who did this! Only boys would do this sort of thing!” Caitlin said.

  “There might be a girl who would do such a thing,” Maighread said with a defiance as if called upon to defend the potential for fierceness in her sex. But her comment faded into the background.

  Whoever had done it, had done it long ago, the breaks overgrown with lichen and stained brown where rain had run in rivulets, streaks running from eyes or the curves of hair, the wells of collarbones.

  “Look at all the damage,” Caitlin said.

  Death and Despair were the two figures that remained untouched; Despair with lowered head, one large, graceful hand covering her face. Death looked upward, emotionless, staring into the light of the heavy afternoon.

  Late in August we brought Mrs. O’Breen’s victrola out on the grass. I clapped as the girls danced a ceilidh. The late-day sun suffused every flower and leaf, and ignited the blue in Maighread’s hair, the copper in Caitlin’s.

  A deep vernal smell on the wind reminded me that summer was coming to an end. I closed my eyes and heard my mother weeping, a memory from early in my life. Something that I had not remembered until this moment. I was sitting on my father’s knee, and him saying to me, “Your mother loves you so much that she’s afraid the faeries will take you.” And my mother looking at me in the light of the embers, her face and eyes bright with tears. “She’s afraid to take her eyes off ye, for fear of losing ye.”

  It stunned me to recall this, for that fear in her had passed as I’d gotten older. But it was the same raw pain I felt for my girls now.

  I opened my eyes and watched them dance, memorizing the graceful jump and turn of their limbs, their laughter and high, pealing voices. “How fragile,” I thought, my heart beating swift and soft. “How fragile the connections between all of us.”

  Manus was supposed to come to Kenmare to help me see the girls to Enfant de Marie, but on the appointed day a message arrived that he could not leave the job site at present but that he’d arrange a special trip down soon just to see the girls at school. They’d been disappointed but too excited to dwell on it, with all the preparation and packing; with all the anticipation of what their new lives would be like.

  I had the sense that Manus was avoiding his mother. He was still stunned by Bairbre’s death and her letter, and was escaping through work.

  The last night before they were to leave for Enfant de Marie, Maighread flailed in her sleep and let out an uneasy cry.

  I turned the flame up in the lamp and tried to wake her, moved and guilty, thinking somehow that it was my own upset that she was attuned to and that possessed her. I gently shook her.

  She sat, wide-eyed and blinking, unable to remember her dream. I gave her water and sat with her.

  “Will you be all right at Enfant de Marie?” I asked.

  “Yes!” she said impatiently.

  “But when you have those dreams?”

  She squeezed her mouth tight. “It’s worse for you than it is for me!”

  I sat in wonder over her words.

  “If I wake up, the dream is gone! It isn’t so bad! Stop making it worse than it is!” She seemed determined to move into the next stage of her life.

  I sat quietly for a moment, searching her face. Her anger was right this time, her defiance. I nodded my head slowly.

  “All right, Love,” I whispered and kissed her softly on the temple, leaving her to herself.

  Sixteen

  Hide the unborn child in the womb of the North Wind.

  —FROM ATALANTA FUGIENS

  With the girls settled into Enfant de Marie, I felt again as if I were floating, nothing weighting me to the ground. Distressed at the idea of being so far away from them, I could not bring myself to go back to Dublin. I told Mrs. O’Breen about the weeklong break the girls had coming at the end of October, and that I was already thinking ahead to that day.

  She seemed to vacillate between discomfort at the idea of my staying and a kind of purposeful excitement that she could keep an eye on my developing pregnancy. My condition elevated me. My wishes had to be honored now. Her authority over me had thinned since midsummer, and she seemed a little afraid of me in my insistence and looked at me as if I were sacrosanct.

  I had come to sense in the last weeks that the ordered elegance of her carriage was not something she was able to sustain for long. Some days she dressed plainly and did not bother with her hair. She gave a scattered, vulnerable impression, and seemed to thrive on long hours of isolation.

  She usually left the house early to see to her various businesses and properties, and I was left to myself. I got up at dawn the first morning without the girls, and moving through the rooms at that early hour, everything seemed significant, a glow to the bric-a-brac, crimson and amber, reflecting on the vases and cut glass. A deepening other than a season’s change of light might effect.

  I had only inhabited one small area on the second floor in the west wing, but this morning the familiar corridors became complicated for me, a maze leading to dead ends. Taking a few turns in a passage to get to the descending staircase, I found myself back at the hallway outside my room, trying to trace the mistake I’d made.

  Not once while the girls had still been here had I gotten lost. I resisted a feeling of panic, the familiar walls emitting a suffocating anxiety.

  After making the same mistake a second and a third time, my heart was racing. I gave up easily that morning, unwilling to confront the house, half blaming my confusion on the vicissitudes of pregnancy, yet I had the uneasy feeling that the house itself was against me. By midmorning I was unable to keep my eyes open. I woke with the first shadow of late afternoon and the feeling that I should not have slept.

  When I awakened anxious again the next afternoon, I resolved that I needed to get out of the house in the morning each day, before sleep pulled me under. So I made it my routine to take air early after a light meal alone at the vast, polished table.

  I walked long distances, sometimes into town, drawn to the train station. Over the days the urge to go to the girls, to make sure of them, grew stronger. I resisted, knowing how much such a thing would anger Maighread. But I kept thinking about how she had needed me in the summer and I hadn’t come. I went back and forth, telling myself there were new tests I had to pass with her, pacts I had undertaken to keep. My deepening weakness was a disappointment to me, yet I found myself increasingly lost, and one day, not even a fortnight after they’d gone, I purchased a ticket to Kilorglin.

  I took a coach from the Kilorglin station to the outskirts of Enfant de Marie. The trees all around the cloister and the battlement were going yellow, an early leaf fall on the grounds. For an hour or so I walked near the back walls, hiding in the bracken, listening for voi
ces. When the Angelus bell sounded I said the prayer automatically to myself, and just as I finished, I heard girls laughing and chatting, coming out into the courtyard where I myself had once walked as a novice.

  I looked through a break in the stones of the wall, my eyes raking the little cliques of girls, some standing, others strolling. I saw Maighread in a group of four under a yew tree.

  I watched her intently, trying to read her gestures. It seemed a serious discussion, but one of the girls said something with great animation and all four laughed, Maighread nodding her head vigorously. A little later they drifted apart and Maighread walked alone to a bench, where she sat, crossing her arms and gazing off reflectively, until a red-haired girl joined her and the two exchanged friendly banter.

  In a few minutes another group of girls came out, Caitlin among them. It was like nourishment to me. I drank it all in, hardly breathing, full of joy to see them so easy with their friends. I heard a gate close but could not discern from which direction the sound had come. I rushed from my hiding place, thinking I might slip from the grounds unseen. As I circled the wall to the path that led down the hill, I saw a figure coming toward me, as surprised to see me as I was to see her.

  The creature I met with was a soft avalanche of a nun with a sloping bosom and a pink face. I was startled to recognize the face, though much changed. It was Ann Carey, who had been a novice in the battlement with Bairbre and me; someone I had taken little interest in at the time.

  “Is it Deirdre?” she asked.

  “It is,” I answered.

  She seemed happy to come upon me, smiling and praising my daughters, saying that I’d been very much on her mind since they’d come.

  This reception made me want to confide in her.

  “I’ve been worried about my daughters. I just had to make sure of them.”

  I explained that Maighread had nightmares from which she could not awaken, and that it was me who she called out for. It was a precarious thing for some to be alone, to be adrift and disconnected, I explained to Ann.