by Ann Claycomb
She starts paging through and while her head is down I stuff the plastic bag with the Dramamine box still in it into the pocket on the seat in front of me. The flight attendant checks our seat belts and I sit back and let my eyes close. Behind my eyelids is a buzzing darkness like my head is full of bees.
“Oh wow—look at this!” Harry elbows me and I open my eyes.
Come home, Kathleen. Come home.
And there it is in Harry’s lap. Home, impossibly so, but home all the same. The sea, dark green and impenetrable, seething at the foot of great gray cliffs. There’s sun on the water and the picture is taken from high up, from the top of the cliffs where green grass is growing thick and soft. But that water, hundreds of feet straight down and full of rocks in the shallows, the water frothing up pale and blue-green against them—I know that water. I feel myself free-falling over it. Any minute now I will hit the water and the waves will part for me. The water will be cold, rough at the surface, with a slow, dragging current beneath. I push myself upright but it’s too late, the sea has won out, the Dramamine is just another stupid useless pill that will make me feel woozy and awful for a few hours. If only I hadn’t seen this picture, at this moment, if I could have had an hour to forget . . .
“Isn’t that gorgeous?” Harry asks. “Look where it is, Kath. It’s there, in the caption.”
She slides the open magazine into my lap and leans against me to point at the page, her hair brushing my cheek. The pills start to take me under, too late, dammit, too late because now I don’t want to go, now I’m fighting it, longing to open my heavy eyes and see the picture again. I don’t need to read the caption. I know where it is, where it must be, the only possible place that could make the voices I’ve been hearing swell like the last mournful lament of an operatic chorus before the curtain falls.
“Ireland,” Harry says. “It’s the Cliffs of Moher in County Clare. Isn’t that near where you were born?”
Ceara, mother of Caolinn and grandmother of Deirdre, loved the Cliffs of Moher. There were those of us who murmured that she might one day choose to dive from those cliffs, might send her body arrowing into the sea, torn tufts of grass from the clifftop still clenched in her toes. We do not trust prolepsis, but we thought that such a dive might cleave through the uncertainty of things that have yet to come to pass. We sought to know Ceara’s end. We swept a table clear and cast across it the vertebrae of a shark—female works better, pregnant best—killed with a single spear thrust between the eyes. The tumbled pattern that emerged was of Ceara balanced between fire and water, dying from either one.
She did not dive from the cliffs, but she fled to them throughout her life, clambered across the dusty path to the grassy stretch at the top and sat there, feet dangling, feeling the distance between herself and the sea. As a child she picked the improbable flowers that grew in clumps near the cliff’s edge and took them back to her father. He worked in one of the great houses many miles inland, rode there and back every day and changed into a fine black suit in an empty stable stall, wiping his hands and face with lavender water to wash away the smell of horse. When Ceara brought him flowers, half-wilted already and shivering on their stems as if unsure how to stand straight without the wind to batter them, he smiled gently and stroked her hair.
Ceara had red, red hair that fell past her waist and against which sunlight splintered and dazzled, as it does off the waves of the sea. She was thin and taut, sharp-featured and sharp-tongued, with none of her father’s gentleness. When she learned what we had to tell her, she laughed and said that she was safe from love, at least, for who would ever fall in love with her? Who would dare?
She fought the man who did, fought him with the sharpest words she could hone and then fled from him to the cliffs, where she lay on her belly and crawled right up to the edge to curse at us, the words spattering into the water like hard-flung, stinging pebbles. She swore she did not love him and then with her next breath belied herself, swearing that she would never give in to him. When he followed her one day and dropped down into the grass beside her, we thought then to see her dive. But the fire that the bones had shown us was not merely the fire of her hair—it was the flame of the longing that licked at Ceara for this man, for the touch of his big hands, scarred with the marks of hooks and rope burns and the knives used to gut fish.
Ceara was drowned, so her grieving lover told her father, in a fishing boat during a storm. He returned home to their baby girl, Caolinn, and would speak of Ceara no more. Theirs was a passion stronger than either of them and it made sense of the pattern we had seen. Ceara believed that she was choosing water over fire, knowing one or the other would kill her. There was a storm, and there was a boat, and she wrenched herself from her true love’s arms and threw herself overboard just as they hit a swell. He called for her until he was hoarse, but she never surfaced. The ragged echoes of her name drifted around her as she sank, swift as an arrow after all.
She knew no moderation, that one, not in hatred nor in love. The fire was still in her eyes when we found her caught in an old shipwreck by a nail in the hem of her dress. We freed her to sink down into the black quiet of the old ship, but we took that fire, bottled it up securely. It burns even now with a clear red light like the sparks from a hearth fire flaring too hot.
Muirin, mother to Ceara and daughter of Victoria, was named in defiance, but her mother died long before she could instill in the little girl any of her own strength—of will or body. Muirin means “born of the sea” and Muirin could feel nothing all her life that was not dulled and blunted by that loss and her awareness of it.
She was thrice-exiled—from the sea, from Ireland, and from her own blood—for she was raised in England by her mother’s husband, who was not her father. She grew like certain small plants both Above and Below, thin and stunted and unbeautiful, bowed forever against wind or current and seeming to huddle close to the ground. Of all the women who have borne the curse, only Muirin and Victoria had brown hair. And while Victoria’s hair was glossy as a seal’s pelt, Muirin’s seemed to swallow the light. It made her white face seem whiter, her large eyes larger. She had extraordinary eyes, neither wholly blue nor green nor gold nor gray, but they were the eyes of an exile, dimmed and clouded by hopelessness.
Muirin fell in love with the servant of a man who wished to marry her for money. The would-be husband was English, red-faced and sweaty, with a falsely simpering voice that plucked at her until she had to clench her hands into fists to keep from covering her ears. When this man’s servant, who dressed him and knelt to polish his boots, found Muirin weeping in a hallway one day, he lifted her like a child and crooned to her in a tongue she had never heard before but which made her faint against him, gasping, as dizzy as though he had already kissed her. She had not known how she longed for the very cadence of Irish speech, almost as much as she longed for the rhythm of the surf in her ears. Muirin lifted her lovely eyes to the sound of that voice and the man holding her saw beneath the veil of her despair. He held her no less gently then, but also no longer as he might hold a child, for that one glimpse of her sea-colored eyes had been enough for him, as one murmured phrase in his voice had been enough for her.
But there are plants that know only how to cringe and refuse to bloom. We have kept such plants in our own garden and learned to coax them along carefully, but not to expect full flower. When they finally die, the stems and leaves can be hung a long while and brewed into a tea that numbs pain. So it was with Muirin who, when she fell in love and then bore her lover’s child, discovered only that she had been right to despair.
Muirin waited for the tide to find her in the shallow pool of a sea cave. She did not bind herself, as she might have done, or lull herself with drugs or weight her pockets with stones. She needed no artificial aids, for she was half-drowned in her own misery already. The weight of it in her lungs made her sink so fast that we could hardly keep up with her plummeting form. We took the shining moment of happiness she had felt when she fir
st knew herself capable of love—it is a fragile thing, like a bauble of silver filigree, best strung on a chain and worn close to the heart. When we let her body go, she sank so deep that we could not follow, nor indeed, even see where she lay.
ROBIN
Composer’s Notes
Robin Conarn had learned never to reveal the relief he felt when his phone blared the crashing chords of the “Ride of the Valkyries.” Instead, he pretended annoyance as he picked up.
“I have got to reprogram that ringtone.”
Kathleen laughed. “Maybe you can’t. Maybe I put a special fail-safe in your phone so that will always be my special ringtone.”
“You’re lucky you’re too old for an allowance,” Robin said, “or it would be officially revoked. Why aren’t you in bed?”
“It’s only eleven, Daddy,” she said. “Why aren’t you in bed?”
“I was working.”
He had been sitting at the piano in the big sunken living room that was also, by virtue of being the only room in the house big enough for the baby grand, his studio. He got up from the bench to stand before the wall of windows that framed a sheer drop down a wooded incline, with more forest beyond. This late at night, with light behind him, his own reflection stood between him and any clear view of the world outside.
“How was Sanibel?”
“Did you get the pictures I sent?”
“I got a lot of photos of you with seafood and what appeared to be alcoholic beverages in the background, yes.”
“Oh, those were all Shirley Temples,” Kathleen said. “I should have sent more pictures from outside, but I kept forgetting to take my phone to the beach with me. It was so beautiful. Harry said she felt like she’d never seen real flowers before. And the water is so clear, and the sand is white—well, you’ve been down there. You know what it looks like.”
Robin, listening with a composer’s ear for a note gone sharp, heard the insistence in her voice. Something was wrong.
“How is Boston then, after all that white sand and seafood?”
“Boston’s fine,” she said, “which is to say still cold and wet and miserable, as you can very well imagine. Daddy, I’m okay.”
“Glad to hear it,” he said lightly. “How many more weeks in the semester?”
“Eight,” she said. And then added, “Do you remember the Cliffs of Moher?”
The words came like a blow, the cliffs themselves conjured into the room with their naming. Looking out over darkness, he could almost feel the scouring wind at the top tearing at his hair, hear the keening of seagulls overhead.
“I saw a picture of the Cliffs of Moher on the plane,” Kathleen rushed on when Robin didn’t answer her, “and I realized that I can’t remember seeing pictures of them before. But they’re right there, aren’t they? Near where you and Moira grew up.”
“Yes.” Robin focused deliberately on his reflected image, saw a tall, lean, handsome man, his blond hair cut short, his gray eyes wary.
“It’s so beautiful,” Kathleen said. There was a plaintive, longing note to her voice. “More beautiful than Sanibel, even.”
Robin shut his eyes. “It is. There’s a beach too, though not at the base of the cliffs. Over in Doolin, in the cove. We used to play there all the time as kids. And we took you there when you were a baby.”
The memory was abruptly sharp and clear, of coming home one afternoon and finding the house empty, of pushing through the long grass that encroached on the path to the shore and finding Moira there, sitting on the sand with her back to him. When he’d first approached her he’d felt a spasm of fear—where was the baby? But Kathleen was sitting in the triangle Moira had made between her outstretched legs, chuckling and chuckling, shrieking with laughter when the water lapped over her little round feet, leaning forward to pat it and try to hold a handful before it slipped away.
“You were an astonishingly fat baby,” he said. “And so white-skinned, with a bunch of red hair that stuck straight up in the air. My mother used to say you looked like a scoop of ice cream with a cherry on top.”
“You never told me that!”
“Didn’t I?”
Robin could still see them, the quiet girl and the ecstatic baby she was sheltering—from what? Even then he’d wondered. He tried to see more of it but couldn’t shake the image of Moira and Kathleen and his own bare feet in the sand near Moira’s slender leg. He could smell it though. He let his voice go soft and his words rise and fall as though half-sung.
“Well, and sure, Kathleen, it’s greener there, God’s own green, you know. It’s because of all the rain, that washes color into everything, and freshness, so that even the sea and the sand of the shore smell more like new things growing than of fish or salt.”
Kathleen drew a sharp breath, as if his words had struck her as strongly as her abrupt question about the cliffs had struck him. “Why haven’t we ever gone back?” she burst out. “Why haven’t you ever wanted to go home?”
Another word, another blow.
“Home?” Robin said. “Kathleen, you had to learn to sing without a Boston accent.”
“I . . .” She faltered. “That’s not what I mean. Haven’t you ever missed it, or felt homesick for the cliffs and for the things you just said, the greenness and the freshness?”
“Of course,” he said, “but none of that makes it home, for either of us.”
“But you do miss it?”
“I don’t think about it very often,” Robin said. He could hear his responses coming up dull and flat against her urgency. “Why all the questions about Ireland all of a sudden?”
“I told you,” she said, “I saw a picture of the Cliffs of Moher and . . . I felt homesick.”
“That’s proof you’re Irish then, if one picture can send you reeling.”
“Is that why we’ve never gone back? Because one picture can send you reeling?”
Robin laughed shortly. “I suppose that is why, or partly why.”
“And the rest is because of Moira?”
“Kathleen—” Robin began, but she cut him off.
“Oh no, Daddy, that’s my other line and I have to get it. I’ll call you later, okay?”
And she was gone, the phone abruptly quiet in Robin’s hand, while he wondered whether he was more alarmed at her obviously invented reason to end a conversation she had started in the first place or relieved that he hadn’t had to answer her question. Because of Moira?
YES, BECAUSE OF Moira. And because he couldn’t explain how thoroughly she haunted Ireland for him. Even when he tried to picture the cliffs or the sweep of the whole cove from the bluffs above it, or the narrow lane to their house edged on both sides by hedges that brushed the sides of the car as you drove past—even those images were disrupted by the curve of a freckled shoulder in one corner, or half-obscured by a curtain of curly red hair. It was as if Moira kept stepping accidentally into the frame of a photo he was taking and then refusing to move, Moira at every age: fifteen years old when he first kissed her, sixteen when they fumbled their way into the act that symbolized—for both of them—eternal love, eighteen when they were married, twenty when Kathleen was born. Twenty-one when she heaped rocks into the pockets of her dress and walked into the sea.
The more time passed, the more uncomfortable Robin was thinking about her. He could bring her image completely to life even after all these years, from the head-to-toe freckles that had so embarrassed her and so delighted him to the cloud of waist-length hair that had been her one unabashed vanity. But she remained eternally a girl in his mind, while he grew older, so that remembering her, caressing her mental image, had begun to feel almost impure. He’d outgrown her, literally, and the memory of that transcendent love felt like some lewd fantasy. Until he’d met Tae five years ago, Robin had maintained a casual dating life and his waking and sleeping sexual fantasies had always featured Moira. He could still bring the taste of her to his lips if he concentrated, a taste like fermented honey and salt water. But what woul
d she feel like now, slipping out of the darkness of the room behind him to wrap her arms around his waist? Would she have gained weight? Gone gray? Lost her hunger for him or her allure? But of course, if Moira were alive, would any of them ever have left Ireland at all? Would it still be home, as it had not been for him for so many years now, as he had never wanted it to be for Kathleen?
Damn Ireland, he thought wearily, retreating to the piano bench. Damn the rain that fell like a silver veil and landed on an upturned face like a benediction. Damn the green that was greener than anywhere else, tumbling at every turn right into the dark green, dangerous sea. He’d lived with its siren song all his life but he’d never thought to hear the longing for it in his daughter’s voice. He thought he’d taken her far enough away.
ROBIN HAD LEFT Ireland only months after Moira died. He was twenty years old and had a scholarship offer to study at the New England Conservatory, just as Kathleen was doing now. His memories of his decision-making process then—the determination to leave, to go all the way to the U.S. instead of just studying in Dublin or even London, to take his baby girl with him rather than leave her in a relative’s care—were clear and oddly uncolored by emotion. He supposed he had been fleeing. He’d lived in the same village all his life. Moira was everywhere: Moira as a child, Moira as a girl, as his lover, as his wife, Moira pregnant and pensive, singing softly as she walked along the shore, her hand on her belly. And Moira was in the water, the same water where, if he’d stayed—if they’d stayed—his daughter would have learned to swim and to fish.
Moira’s father was a fisherman, as half the village had once been. He received the news of his daughter’s suicide without any apparent surprise and only a shading of his eyes with his hand that might have indicated grief. Later, when Robin told his father-in-law that he was taking Kathleen across the Atlantic, the older man again seemed unsurprised. He was holding Kathleen, stroking her comical shock of red hair.