“I always knew there was something sad in your past, but I never pressed you to tell me.”
“Why, Manus?”
“I’ve hardly been a brave man, Deirdre,” he said.
There was a long silence.
“A letter came yesterday for you from my mother.” He took it out of his pocket. “Do you want to read it?”
I shook my head. “No, Manus.”
He looked at the sealed envelope, turning it over in his hand, then threw it suddenly into the fire.
“She has no rights over this baby,” I said.
“No.”
“You’ll have to tell her,” I said.
He was silent a while and looked troubled, as if imagining the confrontation.
“Yes,” he said. He watched the flames blacken the envelope until it curled. “I’ll have to tell her.”
That same night Mrs. Donovan brought our tea to the room on trays. She took the glass globe off the lamp and lit the wick, then left us to our meal.
When Manus put down his fork, he went and knelt before the fire, blowing at the turf with the bellows until the cinders glowed hot.
“Since Bairbre died,” he said, still on his knees, “I’ve been daydreaming a lot. Thinking about things I haven’t thought of since you and I were first married.”
He stared a while at the little flame coming up on one of the sods, before he stood and returned to his chair.
“I want to colonize the sky, Deirdre,” he said in a soft voice. “It’s always the skyline I look at in Dublin. I’m always staring at the spires and the towers. I want to build up there. With many of the architects I know, immensity is a dream. But for me it’s always been height.
“When I was little I used to climb trees, and being as high as I could go only made me hunger to go higher. It’s like a physical urge to rise up into the sky; to be nearer the clouds. And to make something beautiful. You know the green dome of the Four Courts, how it stands out on the skyline? I want to gild the tops of buildings…the pinnacles of them. To catch the light up high.
“Remember how I once thought I should have been born in an earlier century because of the principles of aesthetic beauty, which seem less important to architects now? I’ve come now to believe that I should have been born at a later time, when Ireland isn’t so polarized that it can’t move forward into the new century.”
That same night Manus, who ordinarily spent the night in a room down the hall, took off his shoes and lay down on the bed next to me.
“We should leave Merrion Square,” he said. He closed his eyes and fell asleep.
Manus was with me the night I went into labor. The midwife sent him into the adjoining room, and within three hours I gave birth to my boy, who seemed so tiny at five pounds, both his sisters having been more than eight pounds when they were born.
He was blonde and very pink, with graceful little hands. Manus was afraid to hold him, the memory of his first son’s death fresh this moment in his mind. But he came in close, and the baby studied his father’s face with half open eyes.
“I want to call him Liam,” I said to Manus, “after my father.”
When Liam was three days old, Manus went to Kenmare. He was back two hours later, sitting in the chair at my bedside, looking thoughtful.
“What happened?” I asked.
“It’s over,” he said vaguely.
“She’s going to keep after us,” I said.
“No,” he said. “I told her that we have a son and that he will not be sent to a seminary.”
“What did she say to that?”
“She argued, I hardly know what she was saying to me. On and on about how we are beholden to our pasts. I told her that the past she talks about is nothing more than an ancient grudge, heavy beyond all comprehension. She said that I was speaking too sharply to her. I got up to leave at one point and she threatened to stop sending money each month into the Dublin bank account. I told her that if she did send money I’d send it back. She came after me and said she was sorry for having said that and she started crying. She talked in a halting voice, repeating things she’d already said about responsibility and about ancestry. But when she was finally quiet, I told her that the ecclesiastical family had died with poor Bairbre.
“She didn’t move. And I left.”
It was not Mrs. O’Breen I thought of all that day, but the house at Kenmare. I imagined odd things: snow falling in the rooms; toad-stools growing in the cushions of the sofa. I imagined the statues stirring from their pedestals and wandering confused through the corridors.
Part Four
Aqua Mirifica
Miraculous water brings about the albedo, the white state of innocence, which, like the moon and the bride, awaits the bridegroom.
—AURORA CONSURGENS
Twenty
1914
Dublin
Merchant’s Quay
Three days of the week I taught Irish to a group of fifty girls at the Star of the Sea Convent on Dollymount Strand.
It was the last Friday afternoon before summer break and they’d all gone sleepy with the repetitions: “Seacht a chlog ar maidin; Ocht a chlog ar maidin…Tagan se ar an Luan; Tagan se ar an Mairt…”
Shoals of girls faced me in the afternoon light, their faces lifted, peering up from a sea of tremulous blue uniforms.
Nuns in the back listened, staring beyond the horizons of the room, the old ones uneasy at the language’s resurgence, like Sister Dymphna at Enfant de Marie, who could not disassociate it from agonies of the past.
The sun set in the western sky as I took the tram back toward the quays, passing lines of dark stone houses, three and four floors high, some with water towers, the nicer ones with terraced doorways, and set back behind iron fencing. The church spires of north Dublin were slowly becoming silhouettes beyond, the city at that hour still shivering with life, coaches galloping past, harnesses jingling; the scorched smell of grain from the Guinness factory permeating the air. I got out of the tram and walked along the river wall looking into the Liffey.
Clouds moved in, dimness coming on suddenly like a thousand candles snuffed out in the sky, a penetrating smell of rain. I was anxious to get home to three-year-old Liam, but I had to stop first to see the local seamstress. As a gift for Maighread’s upcoming graduation from Enfant de Marie, I had commissioned new bed curtains for her room. I moved toward Merchant’s Quay, past the haberdasher’s and the pawnshop and the wine and spirit merchant’s until I reached the silk mercer’s. The proprietress’s name, Olga Leary, was stenciled in small gold letters on her shop door. Two signs were displayed in the lower corners of her window: ALL FABRICS WASHED IN RAIN WATER and IRELAND—A FREE NATION UNTO HERSELF.
I knocked but there was no answer from within; then I tried the door and found it locked. I was about to go when I heard thuds on the stairs. It was Eoin Flaherty descending, the big man from Achill who drove the coach for the bottleworks, with its crates of chiming glass. He lowered his head when he saw me through the window, a blush on him, supressing a little smile at the corners of his mouth. He opened the door, brushed past me, and crossed out to his delivery wagon, adjusting the harness on his horse.
Olga Leary appeared on the stairs, a curl of hair stuck to the dampness at her forehead. She was older than the big man out the door, and voluptuous, giving the impression that she was about to spill forth from the stays of her dress.
Her mother had been an actress, she’d told me, and had received her greatest praise for playing the role of Olga in The Three Sisters, thus her Russian name. “But I’m as Irish as you are, Mrs. O’Breen,” she had said to me before we’d been on a first-name basis, as if it were important to her that this fact be known.
Feeling in her pocket for her hairpins and not finding them, she made a face, trying to think where she might have put them. In the wake of the man who had just left her, she was all scatterbrained softness.
“Deirdre,” she said. “You’ve come about the crepe de chine.”
“Yes,” I said. “It’s about to deluge.”
I followed her up four flights of stairs and out onto her roof, a black, lesser-known city up there: charred spires and towers, ascending plumes of smoke from distant chimneys.
“Rain adds a certain texture to silk,” she had explained to me in the past. Now she showed me the five yards of crepe de chine I had chosen pegged to clotheslines, spread in a sheet facing the sky. Lightning rent the clouds, the thunder following close after, a comforting rumble, presaging soft rain. From the awning of the door we watched as the sky opened, pelting the fabric, saturating it.
“Something in rain not found in terrestrial water,” she explained to me again, as she had before. “A purity in it. Encourages lustrousness and resilience. The cloth less likely to devour itself over the years as fabric is wont to do.”
This new silk was twilight color, “Arabian blue,” Olga called it, and beautifully detailed with flowers and leaves in fine silver thread. I hoped to have the curtains ready and hanging for Maighread by the time we returned from the west after the upcoming ceremony.
Since I had first come to Olga Leary for fabric to upholster a sofa, a vermillion jacquard silk mottled softly and textured by a winter’s rain, I had been drawn to her with her unorthodox ideas. She wore skirts of great amplitude, impractical in the sooty puddles of Dublin streets, her hems discolored and in flitters because of it. On every one of her window ledges, large-mouthed bottles caught precipitation. She kept and dated rainwater, making notes if it was a morning, afternoon, or evening shower. If it was light or heavy.
After a few minutes she put on an oilcloth coat and hood and fetched the fabric, rolling it up, bringing it in to her garret, where again it was stretched out and pegged to clotheslines.
“It’s better if we can air-dry it. Let’s hope for a clement day tomorrow,” she said, “and breakers of clean wind from the sea.”
She went to the window, her eyes raking the street below for Eoin Flaherty’s Bottleworks coach. It was nowhere to be seen, and she lifted her eyes to the sky.
“Te se dorca,” she said. It’s getting dark.
I smiled and gave her a nod.
Relatively early on in our acquaintance, Olga had asked me to teach her the Irish. “Every citizen’ll be speaking it soon enough,” she’d said. She belonged to a secret nationalist society, the name of which she would not tell me. “Suffice to say, Deirdre, we want nothing at all to do with Westminster. We want to take back what’s rightfully ours. And we will.”
It had been Olga who’d shown me the ads in the Evening Telegraph, two years before, wanting teachers of Irish.
The big man from Achill Island, most likely married, I thought but wouldn’t ask, was more handy with the Irish than the English. Since she’d been rendezvousing with him, the phrases she’d asked me to teach her had taken a turn for the amorous.
Standing at the window, her eyes on the street below, she asked, “How do you say…the little death?”
“An bás beag,” I answered.
“An bás beag,” she repeated.
When Liam was ten days old, we’d traveled back to Dublin. We were only a few days at Merrion Square when Manus came in to me early one morning and asked me to get dressed. There was a house he wanted to show me.
The coach took the three of us to Merchant’s Quay. “Four stories over a basement,” he explained, a curious excitement in his voice. “On one of the original streets of medieval Dublin.”
He’d procured the key from the owner, who had not bothered to sweep or to clear away the cobwebs, which hung from the fixtures and lintels like swathes of fine gray mesh.
I carried Liam in my arms, supporting him against me, cupping the back of his head with one hand, stroking lightly his fine blonde hair.
“Manus,” I said and laughed. “What is it about this house that you like?”
He led me up the stairs to the second floor. “Angled chimney breast,” he said excitedly, showing me the edifice around the mantel. He strode across the room to the window, beckoning me to follow, and pointing out the cross sections of the exposed wall. “Like looking at ancient layers of sediment,” he said.
“I’d like to do with this place what my father was trying to do with the back rooms in Kenmare. Strip it down of all the festering paper and plaster,” he said. “Tear away the extraneous and expose the medieval walls, study it, satisfy my curiosity. Then we could finish it anew, the way you would like it finished.”
Out the back door there was a garden, a quagmire of tangled briars; ivy tightly embracing a larch tree.
The stairway down to the kitchen, which was situated in the vaulted spaces of the basement, was all mustiness and rot.
“Christ, Manus!” I said. “It’s probably filled with ghosts.”
“If there are ghosts here, they’re neutral to us,” he muttered.
We spent an hour or more ascending and descending staircases, moving from room to room, sometimes together, sometimes separately.
I gravitated mostly to the third floor, easily imagining the rooms there for the girls. Liam had fallen asleep against me, his little head just beneath my neck. The sun shone suddenly and, shielding the baby’s face from it, I peered out at the brightening water of the Liffey, which was visible from the front windows of the second-, third-, and fourth-floor rooms. Manus joined me, and in the brightness I saw how his hair was streaked now, a tarnished silver.
He opened the window to the horn of a passing steamer; the bustle and commerce of Merchant’s Quay.
“We’re in the heart of it all here,” I said uncertainly.
“Yes,” he said. After a pause he asked, “Do you think you might see your way clear to it, Deirdre?”
I laughed softly at the question. “I think I’ve already begun to claim the place,” I said.
He held my eyes.
“I don’t think you know…,” he said, “…how much your life reaches into mine.”
He pressed a kiss to the top of my head, then, without looking at me, turned and wandered into the corridor. I stayed where I was, unshed tears defracting the empty room into numberless rooms.
Over the next months Manus laid bare the walls, revealing a pastiche of color-washed shadows and petrified mildew, which he affectionately called “glacial fauna.”
We moved into the house, with its roughened walls and piercing drafts. Manus had tried on three occasions to wire some of the rooms for electricity, but the bulbs never worked, flashing with nervous indecision, a strain to the eyes.
“Do we really need it, anyway?” he asked.
“It’s too wet a country for electricity,” I had replied and he laughed.
“Yes,” he said. “It’s a miracle the modern-day Irish aren’t electrocuted by the hour.”
We burned coal in the fireplaces, kept gas in the wall sconces, and late every night I turned it off at the main.
Manus and I made our bedroom on the fourth floor, where the worst drafts rose up from the floorboards. Heavy curtains were required for around the bed to keep out the chill. I padded Liam’s cradle in fleece and swaddled him at night in thick layers of silk so he never felt the blasts of cold.
Bats lived in the rafters in the attic above us. From the window at dusk I showed Liam three or four of them slipping out and taking to the air, mewing like kittens and flying north across the river into the spires beyond, the smoke from a northside factory, a dark wash on the sky.
In the middle of the night Manus cursed when they woke us, bumping and settling themselves on their return. But I wouldn’t let him drive them out. Delicate winged mice, satiny soft, I have been told. Creatures poised between the terrestrial and the aerial.
Black cracks of thunder could send charges through the very groynes and pediments of the house, and the wind shook the windows in fits. Crows got into one of the lesser-used chimneys. Yet I felt safe here. It was ours, and, though shaky and old, and noisy with the commerce of Dublin leaking in the windows, it felt like a
shell in which it was safe to dream.
We’d brought very little with us from Merrion Square, only the things the girls were attached to. It was their rooms I labored over the most, worried that they would not like the house.
I pushed the pram through the winding cobbled streets of Temple Bar, looking in the shops, selecting an occasional piece of furniture or a lamp to be delivered to the house, or soothing myself by gathering little delicacies for the girls’ rooms: white eyelet runners for their dressers, porcelain ewers and basins, dried rose petals to put in bowls beside their beds, cream laid paper and peacock plumes for pens. And candles in parchment; pale yellow, poured by the nuns of Christchurch.
Manus plastered and painted their walls, and finished their floors in palid red marble stones and Turkish rugs, and I commissioned and hung bed curtains, double layered, from Olga Leary: the first layer heavy wool for warmth, the outer layers watered silks. And all of it ready in time for their return home at Easter break.
I was relieved that they liked their rooms, the house a kind of novelty for them then. They planted zinnias and marigolds in the back under the larch tree.
The day after the girls left to go back to school, I sat upstairs while the baby slept, listening to the rush of the wind and the steamers; a carriage galloping past, its driver blowing a whistle.
I saw each of my daughter’s faces in my mind, tracing back the events of the days that had just passed. The wind blew hard and the house moved in response, leaning slightly forth.
I had, in that moment, a strong impression of being home; that I had returned from a long and difficult journey; that I was as well traveled as the Liffey herself. This house was like a barge, docked at last at the quay.
And so it is in such moments, the way we remake ourselves in dreams.
We’d been moved in for six months or so when Manus began to disappear for long hours into his study. He seemed to have lost the urge to continue with renovations. Rooms and big areas of hallways were left in unfinished states. Something had taken his attention.
The Marriage Bed Page 25