The Marriage Bed

by Regina McBride

  “Yes,” she said in a soft voice, and squeezed her lips as if she were moved. “If such a thing occurs, Deirdre, I’ll take the tenderest care of her. I may not be you, but I’ll be second best to you, I promise. But let me reassure you about both of them,” she said and went on about Caitlin’s kindness to her friends and that Maighread was admired for excellence in her schoolwork, and how each was popular in her own way among her peers.

  “Such fine girls could only be the results of a devoted mother,” she said to me. “Ah sure, girls like yours know they are loved!”

  I squeezed her hand, moved and amazed by her generosity.

  “I always remember you, Deirdre. The way you were so fervent. I used to wish I had your fire.”

  “Ah, no, Ann. You couldn’t have wished such a thing!” I said in wonderment. She smiled at me, and I tried to understand how I’d been so oblivious of her. What else in all the world was I so blind to?

  “Please don’t tell them that I was here. Maighread would be furious. She’d say I was weak as water and she’d be right.”

  “I’ll not tell them, Deirdre, but I’ll keep special watch over them.”

  When I returned to Kenmare, Mrs. O’Breen and her two sisters were sitting together at the dining table. “Behold!” cried Moyna Furey, rising to her feet. “The handmaid of the Lord!”

  Mrs. O’Breen pressed at her sister’s forearm, and Moyna sat again, looking away from me, then hid behind the lilies at the table, which leaned and seemed to peer like nuns from under their white hoods.

  At the meal, her eyes kept darting up to mine as she bent over her plate, furrows between her brows as she trimmed fat off her meat.

  “It was Deirdre’s idea to stay here,” Mrs. O’Breen said, “and now, well, I want to keep her here!” As always in her sisters’ company she was highly animated, though I had come to recognize the falseness of that ebullience.

  “What have you been doing with your days, Deirdre?” Ethna asked.

  “Walking,” I said. “In Kenmare.”

  “Have you walked yet up the Cashel Road? A mile and a quarter to the south. Saint John of the Cross, the seminary school.”

  “No, I haven’t.”

  “The grounds there are lovely! A little bit of woodlands surrounding it. And peaceful.”

  “I’ll have to go that way,” I said quietly and sipped my tea.

  A conversation ensued among the three of them, and as I had witnessed before, Ethna and Moyna were called by their Christian names, while Mrs. O’Breen was addressed as ‘Madam,’ though, as always, they made no deference in their behavior to her, and she seemed to be posturing for them, holding her head high and her face at an angle, displaying the stretch of her neck. I wondered why she always dressed up for them when they came. Why she took pains with her hair and painted her eyes.

  Blighted early on in the wish to call her “Mother,” I had never asked Manus what her Christian name was.

  That same night, sensing something afoot, I came out of my room and stood at the end of the corridor, looking toward the wing the aunts occupied when they visited, the same wing in which I knew Mrs. O’Breen’s room was located. I heard a clatter and low voices. One door was ajar, and I could see shadows moving within.

  I went back to my room and waited an hour or so before venturing out again and back to that wing. I opened the door where the shadows had been moving. Inside I found a kind of nursery filled with religious objects. A Sacred Heart lamp had been left burning before a statue of the Blessed Virgin Mary. Against one wall stood a rack of unlit votives. I approached the strange, dark cradle at the center of it all. It was oddly shaped, unlike any cradle I had ever seen, its black wood canopy elaborately carved in a kind of medieval-looking detail, and set with a band of discolored green velvet, overly embellished with pearls. The sight of it upset me. I touched it and it rocked with a dissonant squeak that made tears start from my eyes. The bolts issued an unsettling odor, as if made unctuous and bloated from overoiling.

  The next day at the afternoon meal, Mrs. O’Breen asked me if I wanted to accompany the three of them on a visit to the grounds of Saint John of the Cross.

  “It’s a wonderful school for boys who will eventually enter the Jesuit order,” Ethna said.

  When I remained silent, they all looked expectantly at me.

  “This child might not be a boy.”

  A collective cloud passed over the three of them.

  “But if it is, this particular school is best for him.”

  The oily smell of the damnable cradle came to mind, sending a wave of nausea through me. “If this child is a boy, he might not want to be a priest,” I said.

  Again there was a dark silence before Ethna said, “You must assign your child his destiny.”

  My heart battered at my chest. “I would never do that,” I said.

  “How will he know who he is if you don’t help him? You don’t come from a strong, established family. Your circumstances are cut off. But if you’d come from an established family, you’d have had your role in life directed for you.”

  “No,” I said. “I would not do that to my child.”

  The three exchanged looks.

  Ethna gazed at me almost placidly, though her cheeks were suffused. “Then you leave him adrift in the world. You fail him as a mother.”

  “You’re being harsh, Ethna,” Mrs. O’Breen said, but I had the sense that all of this had been discussed and that Mrs. O’Breen’s role was to modulate, to soften, to seem to take my side if I proved argumentative.

  Suddenly, as if she’d been containing a wild vehemence, Moyna cried, “One of your girls, Caitlin I think, surely could have been a nun!” Immediately she seemed startled by her own inappopriate ejaculation, sat back, and retreated against the silent tide of disapproval from her sisters.

  “Nuns are supposed to have vocations,” I said.

  “Did you have a vocation?” Ethna asked me.

  I looked away.

  “It’s painful not to know what one is supposed to do. It’s painful not to have direction,” Moyna said.

  “My children should have choices. I had nowhere else to go but to the religious life. But my children have both their parents living, and there is money.” There was a long silence in which no one much stirred. A penumbra grew on the air, effacing the room of its opulence.

  Moyna’s voice broke the silence. With a more controlled impatience, she said, “You behave as if you think there is something terrible about what we want for the child. As if there’s something wrong with encouraging a vocation, as if it isn’t a wonderful thing!”

  My skin burned. The food on my plate looked gray in the ill-colored light.

  “I’m tired,” I said and stood, leaving the table.

  “Deirdre,” Ethna said, and I turned to face her. “You shouldn’t be contrarian. You knew what was expected of you when you married into this family.”

  That night I came out of my room looking for them so I might listen to what they were saying. I heard them in Mrs. O’Breen’s parlor. Though I kept hidden and at a distance, their voices were not subdued.

  “It’s all taking too long!” Moyna said.

  “The child in her will be a boy,” Mrs. O’Breen said with a faint note of hysteria in her voice. “I know it!”

  “What control have you over her? Very little, it would appear,” Ethna said.

  “A thousand things could go wrong.”

  “I know it will be all right,” Mrs. O’Breen said.

  “As you’ve known everything else, Madam…,” Moyna said resentfully.

  I thought of leaving, of going to Dublin, but something polarized me; an odd conviction that I was safer in Kenmare, as if I were in the very eye of a storm and moving away from its center I might get lost again in its force, swept away. And I felt my resolve deepening against Mrs. O’Breen and her sisters, as if observing them helped me build strength against them.

  It wasn’t much longer until the girls’ Octob
er break. I knew I would not bring them back here. I counted the days until I could see them. I remembered Sarah Dooley telling me about a little hotel on Inch Strand, the Elen, westerly along the Dingle Peninsula, not at all far from Kilorglin. She’d taken her children there on holiday a few years back; a simple place but comfortable, away from everything. The next day I went to town and posted a letter to the Elen, making arrangements, and then I wrote to Manus asking him to meet us there.

  A few nights later, joining me at the dining table, Mrs. O’Breen looked a little unsteady, struggling for poise, and I suspected that she had been drinking since her sisters had left earlier in the afternoon.

  In the middle of the main course, I asked her suddenly, “What is your Christian name?”

  She looked up from her plate, surprised. She blinked, and in a gossamer voice, answered, “Esmerelda.”

  “Why don’t your sisters call you by your name?”

  “Since I was a child, they haven’t called me by my name. They always called me ‘Sister,’ because I was supposed to become a nun. Only my mother called me Esmerelda.”

  She continued eating for a few minutes. My question had made her thoughtful. She put her fork down and with a small, wistful smile, said, “My mother said it was a name for a beauty. You could never name a plain girl Esmerelda. My mother was interested in the effect of my physical beauty on the world. She brought suitors to the house for Ethna and Moyna, and I always felt their eyes on me. They often spoke to her about me, but she told them I was destined for the convent. And though I had to pray more than my sisters, she dressed me up, she cultivated my beauty. My sisters have never liked me, Deirdre. Not only was I our mother’s favorite, all their suitors fell in love with me. My mother liked that, that she could show me to them and then tell them that they couldn’t have me.”

  “Why?” I asked.

  “So God would know what an extraordinary offering I was,” she said as if I should have figured that out.

  “Our mother seemed to take pains to make my sisters less attractive. Ethna could have been a handsome woman.” She was quiet for a few moments, then looked directly at me. “You were a lovely offering to God, Deirdre. There have been times I’ve wondered if perhaps He’s angry at me for having taken you. I saw something in you all those years ago, Deirdre, in your veil in the choir loft, wearing the same white novice robes I’d worn at your age. ‘Be it done unto her according to Thy word,’ I’d whispered that day.” She took a sip from her glass, then said, “You offered such a malleable face. There wasn’t a spark of rebellion in you.”

  I waited for a few moments, my heart going hard at the insufficient, idealized way she’d once seen me.

  “You don’t look deeply enough at people, Madam,” I said.

  Her face froze.

  “You don’t bother to look into anyone’s heart but your own.”

  Color shot slowly into her skin.

  She put her napkin down and, without looking at me, got up and walked out of the room.

  That night as I was preparing for bed there was a knock on the door. I opened it to find Mrs. O’Breen standing there. She seemed sober as she said in a controlled voice, “You’re a part of this family. You don’t want to be responsible for its downfall. You’ve married into a kind of royalty, and the royal are responsible for those who came before them.”

  It was an odd, irrational thing to say; something she had once said to me before. How could anyone be responsible for those who’d come before them? What did that mean? Yet it rang a deep note in me, not in relation to her family but to my own, and I tried to fathom it.

  She must have seen the effect of her words on me, because when I looked at her again, she was searching my face.

  “You’ll see the sense of your child studying at the seminary,” she said softly. “You’ll come to know that it’s the right thing to do.”

  For the remaining days before I was to leave for Kilorglin, I avoided Mrs. O’Breen. I had my evening meals sent to my room on a tray.

  Some mornings I’d find things left for the baby on the shelf outside my bedroom door: soft blankets and little sweaters; children’s books illustrated with corpulent angels, a sweet-faced, haloed Christ shepherding lambs. I put them into the closet in my room, where they accrued.

  Often, awakening in the middle of the night, I sensed her somewhere in the house, listening for me.

  The night before I was to leave to get the girls, I went into one of the downstairs drawing rooms to return a book to the shelf where I’d found it. I opened a desk drawer in search of a piece of paper to make a list of things I wanted to get for the girls, when I saw the gauze bag I had delivered to Mrs. O’Breen for Bairbre.

  I hid it inside my robe, took it with me up to my room, and closed the door. Sitting on the edge of my bed, I slowly untied the cords and opened the cloth bag, then carefully unwound successive layers of cloth until what was revealed was hair, gathered like a loose stook of barley, tied like a broom lengthwise and bound in three or four places with coarse thread. The hair cut from Bairbre’s head the day she took her vows. The hair meant to be buried with a nun at the end of her life; the nun’s bridal gift to Christ.

  Stunned, I lifted it slowly and held it before me. A few loose strands, drawn to the wool of my robe, clung to my chest, softly crackling with electricity.

  “Bairbre,” I said softly, as if in response.

  I lay it across my lap and touched it with my fingertips. Tears stung my eyes.

  It still maintained the dark gloss and blue highlights I had once admired. I could hear again Sister Vivian’s shears sighing like a scythe, and see it falling to the altar floor in drifts.

  Seventeen

  I took the girls by train to the Elen hotel. The first day there it rained. The owner of the hotel, Mrs. Ross, was very friendly to the girls and gave them a box of chocolate. She helped us send a message to Manus in Dublin, reminding him that he should come and meet us here.

  We had tea brought to the room. Caitlin read to us, poems by Kipling about setting out to sea, and a poem about horses. “Where run your colts at pasture? / Where hide your mares to breed?” All morning we nibbled wedges of cold, buttered toast and ate from the box of chocolates.

  In the afternoon we stood outside under the awning, watching the rain on the sea, the sky to the west, broken with areas of brightness, evoking a misty incandescence. I felt as if I were breathing for the first time in ages.

  The second day when we came downstairs into the hotel lobby, Mrs. Ross presented us with a message from Manus:

  Impossible to come now. I am sorry. All love to my girls. I promise to make loads of time at Christmas.

  Both girls were disappointed. Caitlin started to cry, and Mrs. Ross, moved by Caitlin’s tears, rummaged through her desk, looking for something to give her to distract her, as if Caitlin were a small child.

  “Oh, Love! Oh, Love!” the old woman said softly and pleadingly, handing her a map of County Kerry. “Ye mustn’t cry on your holiday!”

  Caitlin thanked her, wiping her tears, and, as we climbed the stairs, both girls exchanged looks, suppressing their laughter over the old woman’s earnest manner.

  A serving woman came and stoked our fire while the three of us lounged on our unmade beds and ordered more tea. I soaked in their company, listened to the stories of their friends and of the nuns, struggling to rest and to forget Kenmare.

  I was waiting to feel the baby’s first movement. I had felt my other three babies move by four and a half months. It was coming on five now, and this delicate one would begin anytime.

  I told the girls I was going to nap and lay on my side on my bed facing away from them as they unfolded their map.

  “Seo é léarscáil,” I heard a familiar, girlish voice say, startling me as if from a dream.

  I sat up and looked. It had been Maighread speaking.

  “I think you said, ‘This is a map,’ ” Caitlin said.

  “Seo é léarscáil,” Maighread sa
id again. “Now you try it.”

  “Seo é léarscáil,” Caitlin repeated with less confidence.

  “You’re speaking Irish,” I said.

  “It’s compulsory now in school, Mammy,” Caitlin said.

  “It isn’t…,” I said.

  “It’s an ancient and beautiful language,” Maighread said defensively, interpreting my startled reaction as some form of disapproval. She shook her head dismissively, and the two continued unfolding the map of County Kerry.

  “Here’s where we are: Inch Strand,” Maighread said, her finger tracing the Dingle Peninsula.

  “Here’s the Great Blasket Island! An Blascoad Mor,” Caitlin said, and they bent their heads over the map.

  “Sister Elizabeth says that island Irish is the purest. The Blasket Island in particular. Preserved there. Medieval Irish, it is! Unruined by English invasion.”

  “An Blascoad Mor,” Caitlin repeated, struggling to make the syllables smooth in her mouth.

  “It’s where I was born,” I said.

  They both turned and looked at me.

  “And where I spent my childhood,” I said.

  “You’re from Ballyferriter,” Maighread protested.

  “No.”

  They both turned expectantly toward me.

  “I wasn’t allowed to speak the Irish when I first went to Enfant de Marie. I was made to be ashamed of it.”

  “But Sister Elizabeth says the Blasket Islanders speak it with great dignity. And that they all speak like poets!”

  “Well, the nuns are singing a different tune now than then. They thought islanders as common as ditchwater. There was one nun in particular hated the Irish language. Sister Dymphna.”

  “She’s still there, Mammy!” Caitlin cried.

  “Is she? She must be an old one now.”

  “Ah, that one! I know her,” Maighread said. “All withered up in her iron chair.”