Maighread took in her breath. “What did it feel like?”
“Um…like an eel in warm water.”
They both laughed, but I sensed the strain in Maighread’s laugh and Caitlin’s awareness of it.
I was about to slip off when Caitlin asked, “Did you tell Mam yet? About that school in Paris?”
Maighread sighed and rolled her head. “No. I don’t look forward to that…. I’m still not sure anyhow.”
I sat on an embankment of rock while the girls walked along the strand, holding hands, Liam between them. I was tormented by the thought of Maighread going so far away alone, and into such a strange and worldly culture.
Caitlin left the two of them near the water, turned, and made her way to me, joining me.
“Thomas has asked that we stop in Kenmare before going back to Dublin. He’s asked me to stay on for a week with his family. Would it be all right with you, Mammy?”
“Yes, Love,” I said, though I felt a pang that she would be taken from me again so soon. “Go ahead if you like.”
“He asked that you and Maighread stay as well, but Maighread says she wants to go back to Dublin. But maybe the two of you could spend one night?”
“I think so.”
A mist was up on the tide, and the farther Maighread and Liam walked, the less distinctive they appeared, the waves coming in an uncanny white.
“I want to tell you something,” Caitlin said. “I wanted to tell you sooner, but we didn’t have many moments alone.”
“What is it, Love?” I asked.
“Thomas wants to meet Daddy. He wants to ask for my hand in marriage,” she said.
“Oh,” I started, but before I could say another word, she interrupted me.
“We wouldn’t marry this year. Next year after I finish at Enfant de Marie.”
I tried to read through the blankness of her expression. “Are you happy about it? Do you want to?”
“Yes,” she said.
“You don’t seem happy.”
She shook her head. “It isn’t that.”
“What is it?”
She looked at the air beyond me, struggling to articulate something. “I never looked…I wasn’t thinking of finding a beau. Most of the other girls talk about it, but it hadn’t been on my mind so much. But he came one day with his sister. A lot of girls were interested in him. But he just focused on me.”
“Well, you’re a lovely girl,” I said.
She shook off the compliment as if it irritated her.
“You don’t have to marry him…,” I said softly.
“You don’t understand what I’m saying!” Her eyes spilled over with quick tears. “I want to marry him! I will marry him!”
“What’s making you sad?” I asked.
“I don’t know.”
I put my arms around her and she looked up at me, something ancient passing between us. I understood then that she was beginning to discern the shape her life would take. She could see the shadow of it coming toward her.
“I miss my father,” she said.
“Ah, Love,” I said, pressing her close. “I know.”
After a few moments in my arms she sighed and sat back from me.
“Things change, Love,” I said. “They’re meant to. And it’s all right.”
“Don’t tell Maighread what I told you,” she said. “Not yet.”
“I won’t.”
“You know she is in love.”
“Is she? I thought something. She seems pensive,” I said.
“A boy named Aidan Callahan, but he fancies someone else.”
“I heard the two of you talking…something about Maighread going to Paris?”
She looked at me hesitantly. “You’ll have to speak to her about that, Mammy.”
“Does this boy have something to do with why she wants to go to Paris?”
Caitlin screwed up her face. “No, I don’t think so. If it were that, she’d have told me. It’s a school for young ladies, anyhow.”
“Well, maybe he also plans to go to Paris,” I said, anxious for information.
She thought for a moment, then snorted ironically. “I don’t imagine Aidan Callahan on the Continent. Frankly, Mammy, I don’t know what she sees in him.”
Thomas met us at the Kenmare station in a big black-and-silver automobile that shook and rumbled in place as he stored our bags in the trunk.
“This is a great lark!” Maighread laughed, delighted.
Thomas stood with his hands on his waist, arms akimbo, smiling widely as the girls admired the vehicle. His eyes kept darting to mine and away again, and I sensed his nervousness that I like him.
“I’ve never ridden in one of these yokes!” Caitlin cried.
“Never ridden in an automobile?” Thomas asked her. She shook her head, something passing between the two of them in the exchange of smiles.
I warmed to him immediately.
“I have,” Maighread said. “Lydia Doran’s father has one, but not so handsome as this one. He drove us into town one Saturday.”
“Can we go for a bit of a ride around?” Caitlin asked.
From the backseat with Liam on my lap, I studied Thomas as he drove us slowly out of the town of Kenmare and onto the winding country roads. Though he was tall, he seemed no more than a boy, auburn hair and a pinkness to his skin. In the sunlight through the windscreen, the scattered whiskers on his face glinted red.
“Are you comfortable, Mrs. O’Breen?” he asked, turning obliquely.
“I am,” I said.
“Don’t ask if I’m comfortable, Mr. O’Hare!” Maighread said from her place beside me, a sarcastic lilt to her voice.
“Are you comfortable, Miss O’Breen?” he asked playfully, drawing out the words.
“That’s the road that leads to my grandmother’s house,” Caitlin cried, pointing to a diverting road as we scaled a hill. Thomas halted the car, and we could see the distant turrets of the house through the trees.
“Your grandmother sold the house,” I said.
“What? Why didn’t you tell us?” Caitlin cried.
“Your father only told me days ago.”
Two years before, Caitlin had written to her grandmother and had received no answer. She’d tried again six months or so later and had gotten a cordial but somewhat cold reply. After that she’d been uninclined to write again. And Manus did not pursue correspondence with her.
“Are the new owners in the house yet?” Maighread asked.
“I’m not sure,” I said.
“Let’s drive up and have a look,” Caitlin said.
Thomas turned onto the road and drove to the front gates, parked, and we all got out. The gate was unlocked and the five of us wandered in. We found no one there at all. Not a groundsman or a servant. Even the gulls had abandoned the house.
Inside, windows had been left open, and drafts and light moved through the corridors. What appeared to be all the most valuable pieces of furniture had been gathered together in the main sitting room, all of an antiquated character, in the style of the armoire on Merrion Square, impervious and grotesquely elegant, festooned with cherubs and gargoyles, representing a past and darker age. Every other room was empty. Rugs had been rolled back and tapestries taken down, the place bereft of statues.
Inspired by the vastness, Liam screeched and stomped his feet. “Run after me!” he cried out to us all. Thomas engaged him in a game of chase, the two of them stirring up a riot of echoes.
We walked out onto the grounds, toppled branches and arbors thorny with undergrowth. In a clearing near the side gardens lay a vast pile of collapsed and hopelessly broken furniture, ready for burning.
“Someone broke all of this on purpose. Destroyed it,” Thomas said, poking through the pieces and lifting out the detached armrest of a chair with a worn velvet backing.
All around the pile in the grass sat pieces of furniture and objects still intact, though less elegant than the ones gathered inside in the main sitting room:
an open chifforobe with a water-decayed dress hanging in it, dining room chairs with faded, tapestried seats; crockery and paintings; an oval mirror on a stand tilted at an angle so it reflected the sea, whitecaps on distant waves.
“These things are likely consigned to the same fate,” Thomas said.
The sun was just beginning to go down when we heard the faint strains of a concertina from the road and saw a gypsy caravan approaching. When it stopped, a big, bearded man in a gold embroidered vest descended, then peered mistrustfully in at us all through the iron bars.
I walked toward him and opened the gate, inviting him in.
“I think they’re going to burn all of these things. You see, they’ve broken up so many of them already. But there’s still a lot that’s good, and you should take it.”
He remained motionless a moment, his pale eyes searching mine, then nodded at me and stepped in through the gate. A wife, three daughters, and a son crept stealthily after. At first they were restrained, speaking to one another in subdued voices, but eventually they grew comfortable enough to squeal and cry out to one another at their finds. The man moved feverishly through the ruins and the cantles of what was already piled for burning, to see if there was anything worth salvaging, and managed to get out from under a broken table a tarnished, robust samovar. One of the older girls was dispatched to bring the caravan in through the gates, and they proceeded to load it up with furniture and silver and paintings, while the woman sighed rhapsodically over the find of a green velvet curtain.
Maighread and Caitlin searched through the cabinets of some of the still standing pieces. In one of the drawers, Maighread found a little box, which she kept and, examining it, wandered off.
Caitlin, who had found a candelabra, placed it on a nightstand in the grass and lit the stubs of the candles. The low breezes stretched and stirred the flames but did not extinguish them.
Thomas asked her for the matches, and he and the gypsy man lit the bonfire. As the sky darkened and the clouds raced across the moon, the tinker man sang in a long tenor, Shall you come home again Michael O’Meara. Then he took up the concertina again and everyone sang “The Earl’s Chair” and “The Morning Dew.” The oldest tinker girls danced around the fire wrapped in shawls of Youghal lace and organza, while the youngest girl, ten or eleven years old, crawled around on all fours in the grass, letting Liam ride on her back.
Maighread stared into the flames, holding in her hands the little box she had found, while Caitlin looked pensively around her at the fallen grandeur.
Thomas came and took Caitlin’s hand and they walked off together, then stood in the shadow of a pink tree. A petal wandered down onto Caitlin’s shoulder and Thomas brushed it carefully away, then held her face in both hands as if it were made of something infinitely delicate and frangible.
Twenty-three
As Maighread, Liam, and I settle ourselves in the train car, I see that she has spotted someone she knows. A young man sitting across the way, engrossed in a book and oblivious of us. She looks flustered and I think this must be Aidan Callahan.
The train begins to move and he looks up and across at her and smiles. She introduces me to him, then, shifting slightly beside me, sits forward so her back is fully to me, creating the space of her own privacy. He is a handsome figure, and my heart drums with a premonition of dread. There is an edge to her earnestness. I lean my head against the window and see the two of them reflected there on the glass. He is leaning forward, smiling, with a look that says he knows how she feels about him. I close my eyes.
I hear, through the noise of the engines and the wind rushing past, strains of their conversation. They are talking about Pentecost and Haymaking, Michaelmas and Advent. Each feast still tinged with pagan connotations, suggestive of youth and coupling.
Her voice is higher pitched than usual and she is short of breath, and sensing the strain of wishing in her muscles, my head begins to ache.
“Mammy, I’m tired,” Liam says and pulls at me so I settle him in my arms. Jostled by the movement of the train, he falls quickly to sleep.
The train stops in Kilkenny and Aidan Callahan rises from his seat. He does not ask Maighread for her address, but nods and says good-bye, then leaves the train.
I feel the fire of hurt spread through her. He passes outside the window and she leans past me, her lips pressed together to see if he will look up and wave, but he doesn’t.
I feign oblivion to save her the pain of humiliation, but she is fierce right now against me, knowing me through. It is me she is angry with. And I allow it.
We ride the rest of the way to Dublin in silence. When I know Maighread is turned facing the other way, I steal a look at her. Droplets of sweat on her temple are as tiny as the heads of pins. She is fondling the little damascene box I’d seen her holding in Kenmare. Her fingers tighten around it and I wonder where she is, what she is imagining. I want to tell her not to think anymore of Aidan Callahan; that such passion invites tragedy. Yet how could I ever tell her such a thing?
It is later, when we get off the train and our minds are taken up with getting our bags and finding a coach, that I say to her suddenly, “You’re beautiful.” She hears the compassion in my voice, which she interprets as pity, and stiffens.
When we get out of the coach at Merchant’s Quay, we are both surprised to see Manus come out to greet us. His eyes light at the sight of Maighread, and he reaches for her and gives her a convulsive, unpracticed hug.
“Da,” she says sweetly and studies him to surmise his state of mind.
Feeling her scrutiny, he pushes a lock of hair behind his ear and smiles sheepishly at her. He has shaved and dressed nicely and seems all bumbling willingness in her presence. He lifts Liam with one arm and, with the other, clutches the bag that the driver has placed near the gate.
He looks well slept, intensely present, all tension gone from his muscles.
Maighread suppresses a smile, her eyes darting to mine as if to say, “You see how much he loves me?”
I smile back in silent acknowledgment.
“Where’s Caitlin?” he asks me, a dark look coming into his eyes.
“She’s staying with her friend in Kenmare. She’ll come on the train in a few days.”
At tea, Mrs. Flanagan brings out a golden, oblong pie, and Maighread holds court. Manus listens to everything she says, the things I’ve heard already, about girls I’ve never met but have become familiar with through her stories. He makes himself her audience for these tales and those about the foibles and eccentricities of the nuns. There is something almost childlike about his availability to her. He looks enchanted.
“Now you tell me everything,” she says to him.
“I’ve finally finished what I’ve been building.”
“Now will you finally take us there?”
“I’ll take you all there as soon as Caitlin’s back,” he says.
“Take us tomorrow, Da!” Maighread cries. “You can give Caitlin her own private tour.”
“All right,” he says.
“What else is new?”
He shakes his head and then shrugs as if to say, “Nothing else.”
“You’ve hardly said a word,” she cries.
He looks chastised and searches himself. I sense a new struggle in him, a stronger fight to be present for her sake. He says earnestly and in a voice begging her understanding, “I spend all my time working, Love. I’ve forgotten how to have a conversation.”
The words fill her with disappointment.
Outside the back window, robins bicker in the larch tree, and Liam mimicks their bright jabber, his voice building suddenly in volume and vehemence. Maighread starts to laugh. Manus looks at Liam and then at Maighread, and the sun comes out again in his face.
That evening as I am about to put out the upstairs lamp, I hear Maighread crying in her room. Peering in her door, I see her sitting on the edge of her bed, her face hidden in the black drift of her loosened hair. The damascene box is open o
n her nightstand, and inside it I see a little ivory figurine: a naked woman holding her arms open, her face lifted as if she were looking into the face of a lover. It is a piece that has been broken from a larger sculpture; an area of one leg and arm is incomplete.
Has Aidan Callahan grown necessary to her? Has she built around him a tender system of dreams and hopes? It’s him, I know, that pulls at her, makes her hesitant about Paris.
She wipes her face and sighs softly. One hand lifts and brushes the silk of her new bed curtain.
The following afternoon, Manus, with Liam on his shoulders, Maighread, and I take a long walk up Baggot Street until we reach Waterloo Road, where Manus unlocks the door of the newly completed but still empty museum, set anachronistically among more residential-looking buildings.
We ascend seven flights of marble stairs until we reach the highest tier. “Come,” Manus says and leads us to a door, which he unlocks. It opens outside onto the roof, where a shimmering structure vaults up before us into the sky.
“A castle!” Liam cries as he covers his eyes with his hands, the sunlight almost blinding on the walls of cut crystal, glass, and bits of amber.
I walk around the pavilion, then step a few yards back, trying to get a full picture. From a little distance it looks like the ghost of a beautifully appointed house. But stepping closer again I am aware of the intricate dialogue between translucent rock and supporting bolts of white iron.
There is a great openness to the interior. Along one wall, an arcaded gallery, all of translucent rock, set with slim Doric columns. Throughout, seashells are glazed here and there into the walls.
A curved, flying staircase, also crafted completely of translucent stone, leads to a higher tier, a balcony and more windows.
Manus walks through, opening the many windows along the lower tier, which offer excellent views out over Dublin, and on the eastern wall, down at Kingstown Harbour. I notice now windows along the domed ceiling, connected to chains, one of which Manus reaches for and works like a pulley so the panel opens, letting in soft breaking sounds of wind and the distant screeching of seabirds.
The Marriage Bed Page 27