The Marriage Bed

by Regina McBride

  If I’d have pressed him about one thing or another, I think he would have undertaken it. But I liked the walls and floors stripped down. There was a look to it, an earthiness that put me in mind of the more elemental habitats of the Blasket: stone and sand and raw faded wood. When I came across a painting I liked in one of the shops, I put it up myself directly on the roughened wall. I placed rugs on the unfinished floors.

  Twenty-one

  Since we’d moved, Manus had neglected all the bills and papers, and while he was spending long hours working in his study, I decided to undertake them myself: balancing the accounts, updating ledgers, my mind absorbed by the challenges of the ordinary.

  The house on Merrion Square was in Mrs. O’Breen’s name, so Manus had dealt with her solicitor when we’d vacated it. A good portion of what Manus had saved over the years went to the purchase of the house on Merchant’s Quay. We certainly would not starve, but I could see by looking through ledgers from years gone by that our circumstances were greatly reduced from what they once had been.

  I’d intrude upon Manus in his study to open a window or fill a lamp. Once when he was not there, I read through the writings he’d left on his desk.

  Transforming nature is nothing but driving the elements around in a circle.

  And on a separate page:

  The goal is to make a house with a mineral life; a meteorological life…a house that lets in the universe.

  I asked him once what it all meant, and he said that they were musings related to something he wanted to build; something that still existed in the realm of dreams.

  For months, again and again, I read his scribblings to himself. Eventually thoughts and questions gave way to drawings, the beginnings of a sketch of a building, and in the margins various notes and questions to himself.

  What is the tension between the visible and the invisible?

  Ether, charged by fire and water, has the power to suspend matter on air. How much fire? How much water? In what measurements of each might fire and water support each other?

  Questions reminiscent of the ones he’d pondered long ago in the hidden garden room; his father’s notes related to the Celestial Mansion.

  One night he did not come up to bed. In the morning I found him asleep in his study. On his table, a completed drawing of a house, delicate and intricately detailed with turrets and towers, floating above the earth. In the margin he had written:

  Angels? Might angels be the lambent servants of air…bear the Celestial Mansion above? Three orders of angels: Purifying order. Illuminating order; Perfecting order.

  The naive purity of his quest troubled me, as it had in the hidden garden room.

  He awakened and found me looking at the drawing.

  “It sounds like a faery-tale house,” I said.

  “What is it for? I ask myself,” he said. “What purpose could such a building have? I can feel it there, but it seems impossible. How can one build something that has such an amorphous nature?”

  For months he remained obsessed with the shifting, evolving idea of the Celestial Mansion, struggling to give it form. He drew details, corners, and cross sections. But mostly he resorted to ideas.

  The lower world is cut off from the divine world of love and light. How does one bring the glowing air down to the coarse matter of the world.

  The stone must pass from one nature into another. Mercury must come down and charge it with divinity.

  He seemed possessed by a medieval way of thinking, like an alchemist in his den, intent on making gold.

  To achieve the suspension of great weight on air, one must study the four compass points and the winds.

  Near each wind he had drawn a small face blowing blustery gusts of air through its lips, images done in soft, smudged pencil.

  The rough North wind is cold and brings snow. Supplements of this wind are called “circius,” which brings snow and hail, and “aquilo boreas,” which is frosty and dry.

  The East wind is moderate. To its left blows the drying “vulturnus.” “Eurus” on the right waters the clouds.

  The South wind, Auster, a symbol also of the holy spirit, brings heavy clouds and light showers and encourages the growth of plants. “Euroauster” on its right is warm. Austroafricanus on the left is warm and mild.

  The Western wind, Zephyrus, is the gentlest wind. It blows away the cold of winter. Africus to its right brings heavy storms. Coros on the left brings clouds to the east.

  He found me in his study one day pondering his notes. I read aloud to him: “ ‘The house that shimmers above on air like a thought.’ ”

  He held my eyes.

  “This is poetry, Manus,” I said.

  “It isn’t meant to be,” he said. “It’s meant to help me with what I want to do. I want to build something beautiful.”

  “But stone is heavy, Manus. It cannot float.”

  “I know…,” he said distractedly. “I know.”

  The more he suffered over the unreality of his idea for a Celestial Mansion, the more fantastical his drawings became, and more seemingly impossible to realize. In one, the building was depicted carried on the back of a giant gull, in another, it housed an aqueduct, labyrinths of water running through the rooms.

  He was working on a rich parchment paper different than the thin, crisp sheets he had used before, and using a pencil that made ghostly blue lines.

  He would not come to bed but sat up all night struggling, afflicted with the dream. He left Masonic texts open on the floor, the sofa, the desk; pages were marked with feathers, with handkerchiefs. I opened a large volume, which seemed to exhale each time I turned a page. What was he searching for, I wondered. Everything I read struck me as indecipherable until I stopped on a drawing of a wheel.

  “Turn the wheel, make the effort, until the heavenly mixes with the earthly.” It was the image of the wheel that made me suddenly understand. He did not trust that he could bridge his passion with his craft, having always been engaged in a duller, more utilitarian kind of architecture. He was stuck, unable to make the wheel turn, to move from one place to the next. He was lost in dreaming.

  The next day while walking along Dawson Street, I found an odd little box composed of crystals and amber. There were five lids like small doors that opened into compartments. It was an elaborately imagined construction and reminded me of Manus’s drawings.

  I gave it to him at home, and he studied it a long time before he set it on the window ledge. Light refracted through the crystals, casting rainbows on the ceilings and walls, and white, incandescent specters that traveled with the movement of the sun, over the furniture and floor.

  He spent the next few days drawing the plans for a particular structure. The following week he met with the contractors who had been building a great museum in southeastern Dublin, and they awarded him an extraordinary commission.

  “A kind of pavilion,” he said. “On the roof of the museum. Something no one’s ever imagined before in Dublin, and they leave the entire design to me.”

  “A pavilion?” I asked.

  “I hardly know what to call it. An atrium, perhaps.”

  The next day he visited the quarry and the glassworks, and the wheel was set in motion, the dream brought forth out of ether.

  It was that September that I started teaching Irish at the Star of the Sea, and hired a kindly woman named Mrs. Flanagan, heavyset and red-faced, who panted as she climbed the stairs, to help me with Liam. That Christmas when the girls were home, the house was, much to their consternation, in the same state it had been in the previous summer.

  Maighread complained about the lack of electricity, that it was “positively medieval” with the gas lamps and the candles.

  “We can certainly afford electricity! Even the nuns use some electricity,” she said. It was a particularly cold winter, and wrapped in shawls and blankets, we kept close to the fire.

  Mrs. Flanagan cooked a goose on Christmas, and as we sat to eat, Caitlin begged Manus to take us
to the pavilion he was building.

  “I’m going to take you to it as soon as it’s finished, but not before.”

  “Please, Da!”

  “No, Love,” he said.

  He set his cup down and stared into the black pool of his tea.

  “Da, I was chosen to sing the ‘Salve Regina’ to Sister Frances’s piano accompaniment at the Christmas party the night before coming home,” Caitlin said.

  He struggled to focus on her but seemed unable to tear himself from some thought that occupied him. He nodded at her.

  I asked her to sing it for us, and while she did, in a tremulous and self-conscious vibrato, her eyes flit back and forth from the cut glass centerpiece on the table to her father’s face. At first his eyes brightened at the sound of her, but halfway into the song his gaze grew distant. He toyed with his spoon, touching the filigree of the handle. I saw Caitlin’s face fall and heard volume draining from her voice.

  Maighread and I clapped. Liam on my lap squealed and mimicked the clapping, crying out, “Caitlin! Caitlin!” That brought Manus back, but only for a moment.

  For the rest of the meal he remained far away, Caitlin’s eyes fixed to him.

  Manus said he had to go out to the site; that he’d not be long.

  As I helped Mrs. Flanagan clear the plates, I touched Caitlin gently on the shoulder.

  “He’s distracted lately,” I said. “I don’t think he hears half of anything I say to him.”

  “Da needs a haircut and a clean shirt,” Maighread said. “He has tea stains on his cuffs!”

  Later I found Caitlin in Manus’s study at his desk, rifling through his papers.

  “What is all of this?” she asked, taking out his drawing of the celestial house on the back of a cloud, carried by dozens of gulls.

  She read aloud, “ ‘Might angels be the lambent servants of air?’ What does all of this have to do with constructing a building?”

  Maighread came in behind me.

  “He was just musing…,” I said.

  Maighread looked at the page Caitlin held, then made a sound of incredulity. “I think you’re both mad, living in this house the way it is.”

  When I kissed the girls good-night, Manus still had not come home.

  “I’m going to wait for him,” Caitlin said.

  “Don’t, Love,” I said. “You’ll see him in the morning.”

  “All right,” she said, but kept her lamp burning.

  I awakened in the middle of the night and went down to look in on them. Maighread was asleep, but Caitlin was not in her bed. Downstairs the light was on in Manus’s study.

  Peering in from the doorway, I saw the two of them sitting on the sofa, his arm around her. Manus looked like he’d just come in, still wearing his heavy shoes and a sweater, his coat draped over the back of his desk chair, Caitlin in her nightgown resting her face on his chest and pressing a palm to one of his shoulders.

  There were times now I felt invisible to Manus. In my company he mused and whispered as if he were in dialogue with his pavilion, whose double I sensed at first, tingling above him, chandelier-like on the air. Now it had become a more carnal presence: sphinxlike. Chimerical. It had taken on a female quality.

  The claim it had on him hurt me. He was all devotion to it, inexhaustible, his passions for it surging and resurging.

  One winter morning I awakened to find that he had not come home at all. I waited distractedly for him until dusk, and when there was still no sign of him, I left Liam with Mrs. Flanagan and went out to find him. The museum was locked, and though I pounded on the doors, no one heard me. Faintly and from far above I heard noises of building; boards breaking, distant shouts.

  It began to rain, and I made my way home. I lit the fire in his study, searching through all of his papers, trying to penetrate this pavilion’s mysteries. But most all of the drawings with their lines and graphs and numbers were indecipherable to me. When every folder was opened and searched, I went to my knees on the floor, pages spread out everywhere.

  Gazing benevolently down at me from the mantel was the photograph of Manus’s father; the man who had sailed so far north in search of fire marble that he’d dissolved into whiteness.

  Jealousy turned to worry. Afraid to leave the house again, I waited for his arrival or some message. I walked circles through the rooms, feverishly cursing him, begging him to come home, imagining all sorts of tragedy having befallen him.

  A few hours later he walked through the door.

  “Where were you?” I cried.

  “Working,” he said, surprised by the question.

  “You didn’t send a message to me!”

  “I’m sorry, Deirdre, I thought you’d just know.”

  “How could I have?”

  “I’ve worked through the night at job sites before,” he said. He touched my shoulder and I stiffened. My breaths came fast with emotion.

  “What’s wrong?” he asked in a quiet voice.

  “I’m tired of your not being here,” I said.

  “I’m sorry,” he said helplessly and sat down. He sighed and leaned his head back so he looked up at the ceiling. “I’m lost in this thing….”

  The night before Manus, Liam, and I were supposed to leave for the graduation ceremony in Kilorglin, Olga Leary finished the Arabian blue curtains for Maighread’s room and I hung them up.

  Manus surprised me in the corridor.

  “I got a letter. Actually, it’s been in my pocket for weeks, but I only opened it today. My mother is selling the house in Kenmare.”

  “Why?”

  “It’s too much for her to keep up. She’s moved to Dungarven with her sisters.”

  “Was the letter from her?”

  “No, it was from the solicitor. They’re auctioning off most of the furniture and things.”

  There’d been times in the recent years when Manus had thought about certain paintings or pieces of furniture at Kenmare, things he’d left there that he’d wished he could get again.

  “Were you thinking of going by there when we’re in the west?”

  He shook his head. “Ah, Deirdre. I’m not going to be able to go with you.”

  I stared into his face.

  “I’m literally days away from completing the pavilion.”

  “You choose this thing you’re building over your own children,” I said quietly, stifling my fury.

  “No!” His eyes were so set upon me, so vividly blue in that moment, that it startled and unnerved me.

  “You’re a bastard,” I said softly as I turned. I scaled the stairs to my bedroom, then closed the door, unpacking his things roughly and tossing them onto his dresser.

  That night after I’d gotten Liam to sleep, Manus came and stood in the upstairs doorway, watching me comb out my hair.

  “Deirdre,” he said tentatively. I looked away from him, but he remained in the doorway, and when I glanced again at him he gave me a nighttime look that sent a shiver of nervous excitement through me. I felt in that moment how deeply I missed him.

  He approached, and the sensation of his fingers on my hair caused me to sigh. I closed my eyes, my reserve breaking down.

  He brought me to my feet, but as he pressed a kiss to my temple, I saw my daughters faces in my mind as I explained to them that their father could not come. The disappointment I knew they would feel, flooded me, and I recoiled from Manus.

  “I want to be on my own,” I said.

  In the middle of the night I got up and opened the window, thinking that a draft of cold air might help me sleep. I was surprised to see Manus below, standing at the river wall, looking at starlight shivering on the Liffey.

  Twenty-two

  After the commencement ceremony, I took Liam and the girls to the Elen hotel, and they gave me all their news.

  Moira O’Hare, a classmate from Enfant de Marie whose family lived in Kenmare, had introduced Caitlin to her brother Thomas. They’d been friendly for a year now, and he called around for Caitlin at t
he convent on Saturdays and they’d go into town with a group of others or remain behind and walk on the lanes and the paths.

  Throughout the meal the first night at the Elen, Caitlin talked incessantly about Thomas.

  In a moment when I was alone with Maighread, she rolled her eyes and whispered, “I suppose we’ll be having Thomas for breakfast, dinner, and supper!”

  We were dressing in our room the next morning when Caitlin told us that she wanted to share something funny with us about Thomas. She wrinkled her mouth and looked at us with wide, excited eyes.

  “I was throwing these little berries at him from off the tree and he was chasing me. I hid from him behind the giant willow and was sure he didn’t know where I was! Then he came up from behind and grabbed me. He had gotten hold of me so hard and I fought him and I elbowed him.” Caitlin’s eyes grew wider, and her voice, quieter. “He looked very serious and hurt and he said, ‘It’s only poor Thomas, who’d never do you harm.’ ”

  Both girls looked at each other and burst out laughing.

  “Cripes!” Maighread said. “The fool!”

  At this Caitlin’s face fell. She colored.

  “No,” she said softly. “Not the fool.”

  Maighread tried again to engage her in conversation, but Caitlin would not speak. And I sensed very faintly the satisfaction Maighread had gotten from saying it. But she looked away, trying to dispel the moment, any satisfaction mixed with guilt that she’d hurt her sister.

  But later I saw them in the hotel parlor downstairs, sitting close together on the couch, not having heard me come in behind them.

  “He put his tongue in my mouth,” Caitlin whispered.