by Edna O'Brien
* * *
My parents were too shy and unsure to make the journey to the church on the quays in Dublin where we were to be married. Only a handful of guests—Cornelius’s friends, unshaven and rough from the previous night’s binge, who had not gone to bed at all, merely splashed water on themselves and fortified themselves with coffee and spirits. Cornelius met me at the altar because I had gone alone, since it was deemed unlucky for the groom to see the bride beforehand. I had not wanted a white wedding, it may be that I had not wanted a wedding at all, because in the nights previous I had written Gabriel’s full name again and again in the hot ashes with the legs of the tongs. My mother, seeing that I was in two minds, made speech after speech of famine times and times when our forebears were evicted. I had a plum suit and matching hat, the veiling dotted with little bruised berries that looked edible.
When the moment came for the ring to be put on there was a hitch, the stocky priest standing on the altar steps scanned the faces swiftly and with mounting irritation, his gills getting redder and redder, the three altar boys sniggering, knowing the eruption that was to follow. Frank, the best man, had mislaid the ring. He tried all his pockets, then retried them, and for a moment I believed that I was free, standing there in a rapt and joyous suspense, the men, especially Cornelius, bashful and confused until a sacristan emerged, wormy and thin in a long frock coat, and cocked his head toward a side altar, beckoning to the best man to follow him. A long casket beside a statue of St. Anthony was filled with keepsakes, gold chains, necklaces, rosary beads, springs of coral flower, and unlocking it, he picked out a wedding ring, then between them there followed a bit of whispering that no doubt was about money and my fate was sealed.
Opening my locked fingers for the ring to be put on, the thought came to me that it had belonged to someone who had died and who had possibly asked for it to be put in that casket for the repose of her soul. The vows were spoken at a gallop and by the time we filed out, the bell ringer was already at his task, the bells jubilant, and soon other bells, bells from all the steeples up along the quays, a convoy, their peals so clean and crystalline in that clean and crystalline air and when an altar boy threw a packet of rice over us, my husband and I exchanged our first married kiss in the view of the Liffey water, which was pewterish, with chunks of ice, some ungainly, others minute, rinsed and re-rinsed, scattering bursts of diamond light, like jewels, like so many rings, thousands of rings slicked in the water’s wetness.
Part III
Nolan
A MULTITUDE OF SMALL BELLS, followed by bigger bells, are ringing inside Dilly’s head, chimes half a century apart, bringing her gradually awake, her mind clogged with memories and with muddle. She sees a strapping young girl pushing a tea trolley with a flourish, coasting it down the ward as if she is in an open field, having a tournament, gouts of tea splashing from the spout of the metal urn, laughing as she throws a word to this patient or that.
“Mornin’ … mornin’, all … mornin’, all,” she says with a jocularity.
Then she is standing over Dilly, smiling broadly, her eyes flecked with amber motes, her hand with its puce tattoo thrust out to introduce herself—“I’m Nolan … I brought your break- fast”—and goes on to say how Sister Consolata left a note with strict instructions for there to be no milk, no butter, no boiled egg, just black tea with bread and jam.
“You’re a gas woman,” she says, though she cannot understand how a country woman used to hens and chickens and cows and calves could be so pernickety about her diet.
“Is Sister Consolata the nice nun I met at the top of the stairs?”
“The very one … a nice craytur, but off the wall … woman brings anemones in here for a patient and Consolata says the reason they’re red and purply is that they grew at the foot of the cross in Calvary and got splashed with the blood of Christ … woman can’t believe her ears … looks at me … thinks to herself am I in a regular hospital or am I in the John O’ Gods with the loonies and the alchies … still there’s no bad in Consolata … only daft … ready to float up at any minute to heaven … meet her boyfriend St. Augustine … ‘late have I loved thee, O beauty so ancient and so true’ … off the wall and that’s the holy alls of it.”
“I was drugged up with tablets,” Dilly says.
“Oh, the bitch, Flaherty,” Nolan answers, overfilling the teacup.
It only takes moments for them to be united in their grievance over Nurse Flaherty; Nolan deems her as only a step above buttermilk and kinda mad. Barely pausing for breath she raves on: “Frustrated bitch, right cow … not married … who’d have her … if there’s a plate missing she’s up to ninety … the likelihood of her hooking anyone is thin … don’t pay any heed to her … she’s off today … wishes she had a fella … good-looking young house-surgeon on his rounds and she tries to impress … ‘Shake that mat,’ she says to me. ‘Shake it yourself,’ says I back. She went every color. Red brown beetroot. Fit to kill me. ‘You do as I say. You do as I say.’ Shouting it. I stood my ground. I could see that she was effing and blinding inside but of course she couldn’t freak out altogether with him listening. Beads of sweat on her and the hairs on her chin like a man’s. She’ll have a beard, I’ll lay a bet on it. Them old maids always get beards. ‘You don’t expect the surgeon to walk on that mat,’ she says. He has to go out of the ward for laughing. I told her to go to Matron and report me. That shut her up. If you ask me people want to make life hell for others. It’s either that or the boasting. Some of them in here, big shots … the rose window at Chartres, life changing. Marcel Proust, whoever he is when he’s at home, life changing. Pure baloney. If you’ve got kids and no nappies nothing is life changing, only nappies. That’s how I feel. Who’s going to look after me and the kid, Larry I hope, unless he does a bunk. We’ve a lovely house an’ all … I got the money after this truck hit me … took ages to get it … my granny put it away for me and soon as she knew there was a baby coming she hands me over three thousand pounds and says, ‘You’ll need this, Nolan, for baby things.’ Straightaway Larry and me go down to the furniture mart in Castleknock … got a pine bed and a chest of drawers … people ask me what I see in him, I know what I see in him … when we’re alone together, we have a right laugh … he’s no car now … a lunatic wrote off his car on a roundabout on the Naas Road … we’re in no hurry marrying, we’re free-thinkers. My mother dying to make up, to get pally with me … jealous because I’m having the baby … dumped me and my sister … put us into foster homes … I wrote her poems … if you ask me poems are instead of going straight up to a person and having it out … didn’t give a damn for us … only worried about her figure … you see me now … you see the size of me … well my clothes would fall off my mother … she’s all on her ownio since she lost the looks … I hung up on her … my child won’t hang up on me because I’ll know how to mind it … I’ll know how to love it … we’re in no hurry marrying … it’s a mug’s game. The baby will be all right … I have this Sacred Heart lamp that’s always lit … day and night … that’ll do us” and for the first time she looks at the face on the pillow, wan and homesick.
“Could I have my cardigan?” Dilly asks.
Nolan takes the cardigan from the chair and eases the two arms through it, then buttons the lower buttons, her touch so soft and gentle in contrast with her tirade.
“Ah, missus, don’t mind me, I’m a blatherer,” she says and waits because Dilly has a question.
“What will happen to me?”
“What will happen to you is this … a nurse will wash you and then you’ll have a little stroll up and down the corridor … Mary’s Lane they call it … you’ll meet others … most of them dopes … the gamey fellas … sex mad … but before that you’ll receive Holy Communion … everyone does … a nun coming ahead of the priest with a candle and bell, her head bowed … all the heads bowed … the priest following with the chalice and you’ll close your eyes and say Ah-men.”
Sister Consolata
“IS IT THAT we’re both countrywomen and from the west?” Sister Consolata says, clapping her hands in jubilance, her eyes ink-dark and shining.
A friendship has sprung up between Dilly and herself. She has taken on the task of bathing her in the private bathroom, of seeing to it that the shingles are retreating, and, against hospital rules, applying a putty-colored ointment that Dilly had secured from some quack down at home. She has lent courage on the mornings that Dilly went for her tests, linking her, saying how they would spring-clean all the sluggish cells and make her like new again. Dilly believed it, yet as the rubber strap was put on her upper arm for a blood test, her fears returned and her own blood in the little glass vial looked treacherous to her.
Then at night, the ritual of their little “conflabs” as the Sister has called them, the curtain drawn around the bed and oftener than not a slice of cake or a bun from the nuns’ pantry. Sister regales her new friend with the stories that she has gleaned from history—Cuchulainn of the shining delg, fated to slay his own son whom he did not recognize because of a mist that lay in the willows, killing his own son, deranged from it, then at the very end strapping himself to a pillar in order to die standing; Cuchulainn opening his tunic to allow the otters to come and drink from the flow of that proud blood. And poor Grace Gifford, as Sister says, given ten minutes in the dead of night to say goodbye to Joseph Mary Plunkett, the man she had married only an hour previous, and writing some secret message on the timbers of his cell in Kilmainham jail. Joseph Mary with his paeans to Christ—“I see His blood upon the rose and in the stars the glory of His being”—poets and martyrs all. They are her friends she says, as are the saints, especially her pets, Anthony and Jude and Padre Pio, and other astonishing beings ripe for beatitude: Iron Curtain Paul who risked the wrath of the Communists to live underground and preach the faith to thirsty Russian souls; Therese Neumann, with the wounds of Christ all over her body, her clothing bloodstained, abstaining from food and drink for thirty years, receiving only the Host, but happy, happy as Sister says, her full-throated birds chorusing all around her.
As the days unfold the friendship deepens, the little secrets and the bigger secrets made known. Sister getting to know Dilly’s house, the setting, the two avenues, the old and the new, the two sets of gates, the marvelous trees, the palm tree that wasn’t a palm tree, then the inside, going from room to room, curtains with pictures of peacocks, big mirrors, the box room where Dilly kept apples and crab apples that when ripened gave off a cidery smell, the flowering plant on the tallboy that shed its little husks that dropped like hay onto the carpet, the little plant possibly dying of thirst since neither Con nor Crotty would remember to water it.
But for Dilly the crux of her thinking is her family, her children, disentangling the hurts they have caused her. Take Terence, her son, once her white-haired boy, until he came under the influence of a grasping wife and became as hard and as grasping as she.
“It was like this,” she says, her voice dropping as she recalls the night the treachery commenced. Terence arrived late, overwrought because his wife, Cindy, had left him, his darling wife had vanished without even a note, had not got in touch with her own family or her one friend, Alice, the dressmaker. Five days and five nights and for all Terence knew she could have gone to the cliffs, something she had previously threatened to do, the cliffs where unfortunate people, even young people, threw themselves off and Terence’s father sick of hearing this saga made some cutting remark about Cindy, a row ensuing, father and son almost coming to blows, Terence storming out, saying his own life was finished and he too would drive to the cliffs. Yet he returned in due course. His wife had got in touch with him from a hotel in Dublin and the couple were reconciled. But ever after, there were only flying visits from them and even at Christmastime his wife would not deign to spend a night under their roof. Eventually Terence broke it to them, that the reason for his wife’s unhappiness and her disappearance was on account of not being accepted with open arms by them, of being made to feel an outcast, and the only consolation would be for Rusheen and all the lands to be signed over to them. Eventually he wore them down. She describes the chicanery of his driving them to the solicitors, the stiffness in the office, a big desk laden with papers and ledgers, a canvas blind on which the firm’s name was indented in black lettering, her husband sitting next to her, her son and his wife on the seats behind, having to state her wishes, her enforced wishes, then the solicitor reading it back to her and even as she took up the pen to sign, regretting what she was doing and realizing that she had omitted her daughter completely, had not even willed her daughter the kitchen garden that she had been promised and that a surveyor had been enlisted to measure it up.
“And I’m still reeling from it,” she says tearfully, and Sister agrees that it was quite a hardhearted way to behave.
But her daughter, as she says, is trapped in a life of vice, beyond in England, her young sons in a Quaker school that Dilly was not consulted about, and her books that have scandalized the country, though as Sister is quick to say and a priest remarked to her, the nature sections so beautiful, so radiant, if only she had excised the flagrant bits. Yes, Eleanora in peril, evidence of which she, Dilly, had on her one visit smelled a rat, as she put it, when Eleanora gave a party in her honor, though she did not know a single guest, wines and spirits galore, oysters, prawns, wild salmon, and a married man, her paramour, taking the pendant that had slipped inside her see-through blouse, lifting it out to kiss it, saying, “I’ve wanted to do this since I got here.” Dilly recounts the ingratitudes regarding gifts that she had sent over the years, the bawneen cushion covers that she had embroidered so painstakingly with ancient motifs that she found in a press, the mauve and indigo dyes having run into the white material, where they had been washed and only half dried, stuffed in there, not good enough for the illustrious guests and the married men. Holding the metal crucifix between them, Sister says they will pray, they will storm heaven, and just as hares become white by eating snow, so do the souls of humans by availing of the spiritual food meted out to them.
Later, Sister recalls having read about Eleanora, seen photographs of her, an unhappy divorce, and a husband most handsome but much older than she.
Dilly writhes at the mere mention of him, a man so odd, so godless, an autocrat, a man who to her knowledge never sat down to dinner with his own family and from whom his wife, her unfortunate daughter, had to borrow her own earnings back from him to buy shoes and clothing for her children.
“Why, oh why, oh why,” she asks, still angry, still grieving, still flabbergasted that such a marriage should ever have taken place.
Part IV
SCENES FROM A MARRIAGE
Scene One
ELEANORA’S HUSBAND, HERMANN, would always contend that she had married him under the guise of love to better her ambitions. Her mother believed that by choosing this madman, this infidel, her daughter had wanted to drive a last nail in her mother’s coffin. Eleanora herself thought that perhaps literature had had its vertiginous effect upon her. Literature was either a route out of life or into life and she could never be certain which, except that she had succumbed to it. There was Samuel Richardson’s Clarissa, with fastenings on doors and windows to bar the ruffiany Mr. Lovelace, who said he did not know whether her frost be real frost but who succeeded, much to her downfall, in making Clarissa yield and pass as his wife. Then there was Jane Eyre, in thrall to the inscrutable Mr. Rochester, and Jane Eyre’s creator, Charlotte Brontë, falling in love with Monsieur Heger, a married man, the iniquity discovered and she and her sister Emily dispatched from Brussels back to the moors, later on, their forlorn lives transmuted into visions of shattered love.
Then there was Charlotte’s unchristened daughter, who had died in her mother’s womb and whom Eleanora believed as haunting those selfsame moors, wailing her circumstances, neither fully dead nor fully alive, perpetually waiting to be.
She thought as well and
often of John Clare in a lunatic asylum in Northampton, looking at the vowels and consonants that he was convinced the authorities had filched out of his head and consequently the poem he had written about a Daisy was not to his liking. His last couplet on the inadequacy of the word to pierce the hidden soul of love filled her with both exultation and terror.
How could her future husband, Hermann, have guessed at such irrational ruminations, no more than her mother could or would. Her mother, abjuring the seaminess of the written word and once, in an outburst, declaring that “paper never refused ink.” Yet she was in bondage to both, doing her best to please both, dreading their strictures but smarting under them, an impostor carrying on her secret subversive life.
There was her night self who would come to sin with him, her morning self who would atone for it, her evening self when she laid the table, lit candles, the little geisha as he called her, and the child self, not fully dead, not fully alive, waiting, through the alchemy of words, to crystallize into life.
The first journey to his house had in it a host of enchantments. An avenue, the lines of beech trees, a rusted green wrought-iron gate, and daffodils, daffodils around the roots of the trees, stray ones forking out from the grayish boucléd barks, huddles of them in the grassy glades, their brazen yellow muted by the high damp green grass and sheep that to his chagrin had broken in, rising clumsily, then thumping their haunches against the loose stone wall, being too hefty to scale it.