The Nature of Water and Air Page 10

  My mother’d not speak of sex, like she’d not speak of her past. She pretended to be shocked at the mention of it. But she lived it. She reeked of it, preserving her secrets like jewels.

  Finding the dress seemed a necessary aggression against her. What she withheld I felt driven to take. It was my rightful legacy, I told myself. With it I might, like the selkie, hear the lowing of the bull seal rocking in his boat over the bedroom in the night sea.

  • • •

  It was in the spring that same year, a month or two after my thirteenth birthday, that my mother and I saw a tinker woman moving in our direction as we crossed the field past the train tracks. Mrs. O’Dare was in Dublin visiting her sister and we were on our way into Bray to buy food.

  A few feet from us the woman stopped and held my mother’s eyes with her own, which squinted and glittered in her leathery face. Neither moved. Time stopped without breath or heartbeat.

  “Who is that?” I asked my mother.

  A breeze came up and lifted a frazzled tuft of the woman’s hair. She took a step toward us.

  “Hello, love,” she said to my mother. “A fine lady like yerself . . . must have a few pence for a poor unfortunate soul like me.”

  My mother drew in a shaking breath. The woman came slowly closer, looking me over once as she approached.

  “A few pounds, love,” the woman said.

  My mother handed her the purse she carried and the woman looked impatiently through its contents, taking out the notes and coins and throwing the empty bag on the grass. She started away and my mother followed her, calling out softly, “Wait. Wait.”

  “Ye ought to be on your way now, love,” the woman called out.

  Still my mother followed, not taking her eyes off the woman.

  “Off with ye now,” the woman cried, fixing her with a cruel, rheumy eye.

  My mother stopped short and drew air as if out of breath.

  “Come,” I said, but she waited until the woman disappeared past the train yard.

  As we walked back to the house I asked again, “Who was that woman?”

  She stared blindly ahead, pausing before she answered in a thin, high-pitched voice, “Me own mother.”

  • • •

  The next morning she filled a pillowcase with baubles and keepsakes from her little chest and walked to the field where we’d seen the woman. She stood in the same place until evening. She did the same thing the next day and the next. On the evening of the third day I watched her standing in the field, her chest caved. She saw me but looked away. It didn’t seem to matter that I was watching her; it only mattered that I was not the one she was looking for.

  She had a mother. Any trace of belief left in me that she was a selkie was utterly gone now. Without that mystery it hurt me to look at her, the wind playing randomly at her hair like it might play at the mane of a horse.

  She was waiting for something that would not happen; for that uncanny vagabond of a woman to return and accept her gift of little porcelain curiosities. When the sky began to darken she left the full pillowcase in a clump of grass and walked home slowly through the fields, her face reddened by the wind, tear streaked.

  The next morning she did not get out of bed. I brought her a plate of eggs, which she left to dry. “Why don’t you get up?” I asked impatiently, careful not to let any softer feelings register in my voice. She stared at me as if she could not quite take in my question. I made a frustrated noise and she looked pained by her own bewilderment.

  That afternoon she came out to me where I sat on the porch and looked toward the sea with her arms crossed, distracted by the passage of clouds, the sudden inland noise of the surf.

  Later I found her in the kitchen standing near the oven. The kettle was boiling so hard it seemed to be trying to inch its way off the flame. But she would not turn it off. She seemed fascinated by the sputter and panic of the thing.

  “Turn it off!” I said from the doorway and she looked at me as if what I said made no sense to her.

  I pushed past her and turned it off. She withdrew, ashamed, the steam having made her face damp.

  • • •

  The next morning I walked into the kitchen and found it dark. A tea towel had been tacked over the one small window and smoke from a turf fire clouded the air. I could hear my mother breathing in her sleep, long drawn exhalations trailed by faint sighs.

  “What are you doing in here?” I cried, but she did not stir.

  A stench of urine suffused the air and I thought of the old woman, her own mother, that she’d given the money to. For a moment I wondered if she were here in the dark with my mother. I tore the tea towel from the window and saw my mother lying naked on a pile of clothes, curled into herself.

  • • •

  I telephoned Mrs. O’Dare, who had just returned from Dublin the night before. She came and washed my mother and put her to bed in the parlor. After she cleaned the kitchen, she said, “It was like the buried bedroom again.”

  I told her about the old tinker woman, my mother’s mother, and Mrs. O’Dare made the sign of the cross. “Jesus, Mary and Joseph,” she whispered, shaking her head.

  My mother slept for two days and on the third morning Mrs. O’Dare said to her, “Let’s go to Rafferty’s today and get you some new baubles.”

  “We’ll go one day, Missus, but not today,” my mother said.

  • • •

  For the next month or two, she spent the days gazing toward the sea wearing an almost imperceptible smile. In the evenings when the sun was going down, the riotous noise of the gulls made her eyes fill.

  On an afternoon near the end of May I saw her playing a game with the high tide, letting it knock her on her hip again and again. Each time she struggled to her feet she’d laugh slowly and look at the sky, then rush forth into the violence of it again.

  “Stop it!” I cried, running out to her across the field. “Stop it!”

  She walked toward me soaked and dreamy faced, then followed me up to the field like an admonished child.

  “Are ye my lamb, lass?” she called to me over the noise of the surf. I quickened my pace in front of her but did not respond.

  “Are ye my lamb, Clodagh?” she called out after me, this time with a trace of penitence in her voice.

  But still I would not answer.

  After she hung her wet clothes in the lavatory and towel dried her hair she put on a nightgown and sat in the parlor, one shoulder pressed to the window watching the moving clouds in the darkening sky. Oblivious to me in the doorway, she laughed and hid her face in her hands.

  • • •

  She forgot the tinker man. I knew by her complacency, the weight her body seemed to be to her.

  She was having a cigarette in the parlor, and through the smoke, which shifted and rose, hanging on the angled light like moving veils, she looked at me like she’d never seen me before. As if she was trying to surrender to the idea of me for the first time. As if I had been until now only a planet orbiting her.

  Her eyes were shiny and amazed. A vertigo took me and I could not tell where I ended and the air began. I moved out of her field of vision, rushing from the room and pacing in the dimness of the passage to the kitchen. Through the wet of my eyes I saw the vestibule window dislodge from its frame and float upward to the ceiling.

  I wished that she might ask me again if I was her lamb. I felt a terrible regret that I had not answered before; that she might not be so strange now if I’d only answered; if I’d told her that I was.

  • • •

  Two days later the air was pregnant with the coming summer. The tides were high, full of unexpected turns, roaring as they moved inland. An uncharacteristic warmth came in over the water and gathered in the rooms of the house.

  I could not find my mother. A jelly mold sat on the kitchen table emitting its own milky light. A gust of air coming through the little window smelled of loam and cool grass, and a cowbell rang out from some distant field.

/>   The shadows on the stuccowork face made it appear distressed so I turned on the overhead light and watched it calm. I saw my mother’s heart-shaped locket and chain hidden within the jelly mold on the table.

  The house was still and conscious, a disorienting atmosphere I attributed to the advent of early summer winds. Reaching into the jelly mold I took the locket in my hand; its warmth surprised me. I studied it with fascination, running my fingertip round its shape, excited, slightly ashamed, as if I were touching something sexual and forbidden.

  I heard a creak in the wall and understood all at once. The range was moved slightly forward at an angle. My mother was watching me from behind the wall, beneath the stuccowork face. For a moment I did not breathe, wondering if in the artificial light she was able to see the flush on my skin. I took great care that she not detect in any twitch of muscle that I knew she was there.

  I tried to open the locket but it was stuck. I fingered the latch, picking at it, but it would not give. I went to the drawer and got a vegetable knife, pried it sharply, angrily, bending a flap of metal, disengaging a small screw, until the two hemispheres separated.

  Inside I found nothing but a piece of broken seashell lodged into half of the heart.

  With the thing dismantled in front of me I felt the irreparableness of my act. I played with the hinge of the locket. It would not close. I surveyed the damage a moment, the dent and the scratches, put it on the table and left the room.

  • • •

  I was supposed to meet Letty Grogan at the halfway point between our houses, on one of the dirt roads that led into Bray. She had heard that a boy she had a crush on was going to the cinema. She wanted me with her so that we might sit near him as if by coincidence. As I walked along the old Dublin Road the wind came up forcefully against me. It blew my dress up and threw me into disarray. Deciding it was too difficult to manage, I walked back to Mercymount Strand, pushed along by the force of it.

  As I approached the house I saw my mother moving toward the sea. When she reached the sand dune, she took off her shoes and put them in the grass, then stood poised to play her dangerous game with the surf.

  But everything seemed to distract her: the light changing suddenly; a man’s voice calling a name, “Ellen! Ellen Colgan!” and a woman’s voice answering and fading into distance.

  She picked up something: a shell or stone or some garbage from the sea, then dropped it. For a minute she stood still with her head lowered as if thinking, then touched the spot on her chest where the locket used to hang. She looked toward the house and saw me there in the distance. Neither of us moved for a few moments, the wind wild in our hair and clothes.

  She lifted her dress off over her head, billowing and twisting. It was carried off high on the wind. She had nothing on and, hit by the cold spray of the sea, doubled slightly into herself then moved toward the inland-rushing tide, which knocked her on her hip. She got up and followed the outward-moving water until she was waist deep.

  I squeezed my fists and started to cry. “Go! Go!” I chanted.

  Three times the water took her then dropped her. But she pursued it until she found herself carried along seaward. A wave lifted her dramatically, catching her off guard as if a man had lifted her suddenly into the air.

  She turned and looked at me sadly, relaxing as it pulled her under.

  • • •

  For a long time I did not move from the place where I stood, watching the sea crest and move.

  As dusk deepened the moon pierced the clouds and the sea grew calm and shimmered.

  I listened, hardly breathing, for the distant bark of seals.

  • • •

  I went inside and sat down on my bed watching dusk subsume the room.

  • • •

  The ringing telephone startled me from sleep. I got up with a pounding heart then navigated through the darkness until I found it and picked up the receiver.

  It was Letty Grogan.

  “Are you asleep, Clodagh? It’s not even eight o’clock, you fool!”

  “Oh. Is it only . . .?”

  “What’s wrong with you?”

  “Nothing.”

  “Why didn’t you meet me today? I couldn’t go alone to the cinema! You botched things up for me with Finian.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “Well, make up for it by meeting me tomorrow at half two on Carroll Street.”

  “All right.”

  “You better be there! Even if there’s a bloody hurricane.”

  · 13 ·

  WHEN I MET LETTY THE next day I struggled to behave as if nothing had happened. And later at home when Mrs. O’Dare asked me where my mother was I told her she’d gone after the tinkers.

  For days I thought of telling her the truth. But something made me hoard the memory. Every time I closed my eyes I felt myself rocked and lifted by the sea. Once while she prepared a meal I walked up behind her and touched her shoulder.

  “What is it, Clodagh?”

  But I was not able to tell her.

  “You’re so strange about the eyes,” she said.

  I wanted the words to come but I could not give up the mute closeness I shared now with my mother; the terrible secret no one owned but us.

  “What is it, lass?” the old woman asked again.

  But I just looked into her face. My head felt like it was glowing. I was an oracle that could not open its mouth.

  • • •

  Four days after my mother had gone into the sea the tinkers were in Killiney and men were sent there looking for her. That night from the north window of the blue room I saw a bonfire in the field along the Dublin Road, a figure crossing now and then in front of the flames.

  Three lakes were dragged north of Killiney before I unclenched my fists and told Mrs. O’Dare what I’d seen. I woke one night to the distant shouts and the lights of the men patrolling Mercymount Strand looking for my mother’s remains.

  My aunts came from the west. A decision had to be made about me. They stayed with me and I felt it was a kind of testing, a trial period to see if they wanted to bring me back to Dunshee, to see if they wanted to alter their lives that profoundly.

  They sat me down to tea to try me at conversing and they drilled me with questions of manners and decorum. I gave the correct answers but without heart. They tried to teach me to play card games. They were overly attentive, nervous, and sat up talking together late into the night. In a few days they wearied and when I woke one morning they were gone, having left me and the house in Mrs. O’Dare’s care.

  And so things were meant to go on, it was decided, until I finished at Immaculate Conception. In the fall when I was ready to go away to convent school the house might again become uninhabited or Mrs. O’Dare might go on with its upkeep and perhaps my aunts would find tenants.

  Mrs. O’Dare’s sister, Sister Veronica, the nun who had helped deliver Mare and me, arranged for a service to be said for my mother. It took place in the nun’s chapel known as the Sepulchre of the Little Virgins, a chapel offshooting a long stone hallway connecting the convent with the school. The passage echoed with footsteps of students and nuns and the soft booms of numerous doors. The air was cold and smelled of sacramental oil.

  At the altar hung a life-size crucified Christ; not an Irish-looking Christ, but dark skinned, blood spattered, with deep shadows between his narrowed eyes. His head strained forward from the cross as if to get a closer look at me, his piercing eyes full of mercy and immeasurable sadness.

  • • •

  A nun moved through the chapel offering us each the slip of a card with my mother’s name on it and the words In Memoriam. The prayer inscribed beneath ended: “And I will dwell in the house of the Lord forever.”

  I looked up from the words to the statue of the Blessed Mother near the altar standing at a pinnacle of ascending votive candles, her arms open, one knee slightly forward under the hard drapery of her gown. Her face struck me as remote, while the many little flames surrou
nding her leaned and trembled with desperate zeal.

  The priest appeared on the altar and offered the Mass for the Dead, calling my mother a victim of drowning.

  • • •

  The wind blew hard that night. Mrs. O’Dare had neglected to bring in the washing, and through the parlor window I saw the empty effigies of my mother’s nightgowns waving on the clothesline.

  I felt afraid that the curtain between worlds was not sufficient. Air blew things in and away and water exiled its creatures onto dry land and rushed away from them. It seemed to be the nature of water and air, to be random, heartless.

  · 14 ·

  LIGHT INFILTRATED EVERYTHING THE SUMMER that followed my mother’s death, washing and warming the damp old stone of houses and buildings and causing the wildflowers to come up in profusion.

  I took to watching the tinkers; walking along the outskirts of their camps, looking at their wares. William Connelly was not among them and I was certain that it was because of my mother’s death. I felt a pang for him, little blooms of affection when I remembered the gentleness of his manner.

  Letty Grogan spent much of her time at the house, sometimes helping her aunt, but mostly spending time with me. The door to the upper house was unlocked and the rooms swept. The noise of doors whining and slamming in the drafts from open windows frightened me and I walked the corridors looking for my mother, wondering if something of her remained. But never had the house seemed less haunted than that summer after my mother died.

  Slowly, and finally, Mrs. O’Dare, Letty and I aquainted ourselves with the upper house. The stucco nymphs looked giddy, too bright to look at, bleached as they were by sunlight. Cracked paint hung in big peeling flakes from the ceilings, pieces floating down on us now and again.

  The third floor was badly in need of repair: the wallpaper decrepit, stained and bubbled, pipes broken within the walls. There was a fetid smell like dead mice. One day, Mrs. O’Dare, Letty and I discovered a large bedroom on the third floor with a single wall crowded from top to bottom with nymphs. These all had legs and arms and many were twisting at the waist, displaying their buttocks. In the center was a satyr with an erect phallus. Mrs. O’Dare made the sign of the cross and insisted we go back downstairs, closing the door behind us.