The Nature of Water and Air Page 11
At tea after a long silence she told us that there was a similar wall in an upstairs room in Drumcoyne House and that the aunts kept vast tapestries hanging over the figures. She told us that some perverse ancestor of mine, a famous Dublin stuccodore, was responsible for the designs.
• • •
Mrs. O’Dare took the parlor for her room and helped me set up a bedroom for myself in a corner of the blue room. With the distance from the parlor, Letty and I, when she spent the night, were free to stay up late, smoke the cigarettes that she’d brought and drink an occasional bottle of smuggled stout.
She had already been a year at convent school, St. Brendan’s, fifteen miles to the east, where I would be going in September. She’d boarded there during the week and had taken the bus home on the weekends. She had attended one of the summer dances held at St. Malachy’s, the boys’ school, where she’d danced with Finian Bourke, the boy she’d wanted to see at the cinema the day my mother had died. He was the newsagent’s son, a tall, sandy-haired boy who we’d both seen in his father’s shop and in town all our lives. They’d necked in the back of his father’s car.
Finian was the focal point of our conversations. Letty talked about him and I sighed and exclaimed with peripheral passion. “Perhaps you’ll marry him,” I said to her, to please her; to keep the conversation kindling. What I did not tell her was that I too felt powerfully for Finian.
One rainy dismal day a few weeks after my mother had died I had gone with Mrs. O’Dare to the newsagent’s and had seen him working there. He had grown suddenly larger than I’d remembered him being the month or two before, and his voice had deepened but was strained with the old higher pitch. He’d said, “Good morning, Mrs. O’Dare,” and when he’d said “Dare” his voice had broken. He blushed and his eyes flashed to me and away again. A moment later two women walked into the shop. One of them made the sign of the cross when she saw me and whispered to her friend, “Agatha Sheehy’s girl.”
I turned away, feeling my face heat. I stood beside Mrs. O’Dare, who handed Finian money for the Irish Press, while the women went to the back of the shop muttering to each other. I met Finian’s eyes and read in them that he had heard it, too, his own shame over his voice still pink on his skin. He extended his hand to me, offering me a piece of chocolate, which I accepted.
I recorded his breaking voice in my memory and would hear it in my thoughts as the petrels cried in the background, Mrs. O’Dare and I walking home across the field. I dwelled on his kindness and fed myself with the memory of his own transparency; those private exposed moments between us.
I thought constantly of Finian after that day. The summer air grew warmer, more lucent, and I shivered with the exhilaration of the world. I felt light, buoyant; in love with the new potential of my body, feeling as if I were about to discover that I possessed gills or wings.
• • •
Every Saturday Letty and I went into town and walked past the newsagent’s window to look in at him.
Finian brought a date to the next dance Letty went to and she’d come over the next day crushed. He’d nodded to her but had danced each dance with the red-haired girl whose name, Letty found out, was Mary Morrissey.
We wrote a nasty charm against the girl: “Mary Morrissey, Mary Morrissey! Legions of the damned, take Mary Morrissey!”
The next week Letty obtained a school photograph of the girl, and we burned holes in it with a cigarette. We wandered all the way up to the third floor, thinking that we might find a frightening place to put the defaced photograph. We threw it into a rusted lavatory basin and ran in circles singing “Legions of the damned, take Mary Morrissey!”
“Let’s sing the song in front of that devil in that room,” Letty said, referring to the satyr.
We went to the obscene room, uneasily approaching the mythic tableau, the satyr’s graphically depicted organ rising from a bed of thick curls that covered his legs down to his cloven hooves like a pair of woolly pants. He wore an evil-looking smile and out of his head rose a pair of spiraling horns, elaborate as the headgear of a ram. The two nymphs flanking the creature seemed to be trying to rush away, as if flustered by his presence. One had a hand on her forehead, the other on her heart, yet they both wore little smiles.
“Jayzus,” said Letty, gazing at the central figure.
On the other wall of that same room hung a massive mirror in a gilt frame, the reflection interrupted in places by dark flecks. Through them, we watched ourselves gravely exit the room.
• • •
One day not long after, she came over bursting to talk to me, driving me almost backward into the parlor and away from Mrs. O’Dare.
“Last night I went to the dance and he asked me to dance three times, and then we went out to his car. He was hard the whole time, Clodagh! I could feel it pressing up to me.”
“Holy God!” I cried, imitating her inflection.
“He put his tongue in my mouth. Jayzus Christ, I thought he’d choke me with it, Clodagh. It was so lovely. What a way to go! Chokin’ on Finian Bourke’s tongue. And listen to this!” She bowed her head so that her chin touched her chest and put her hands over her eyes. “He asked me if I would take off my blouse and show him my breasts.”
“Holy Mother o’ God!” I cried. The revelation caused me pain and I felt my face go hot. But I was hungry for details.
“I wanted to, of course, but I didn’t,” she said. “And I was torn about it, so later when we got out of the car I deliberately rubbed my breast against his arm so he’d feel it.”
She said she was desperate for a cigarette, but we heard Mrs. O’Dare’s footsteps moving all about the house. “I know a certain room she’ll never go into,” Letty said. We snuck quietly up to the third floor where we sat before the massive mirror watching ourselves smoke, the mythic tableau reflected behind us.
When we finished the cigarette she got up and put it out in a dark crevice in the window casement, rubbed the ashes until they looked like smudges of dust, then hid the cigarette butt in her pocket. She looked at herself in the mirror and pulled her blouse off over her head, posturing and posing. I pretended to be Finian, crying out, “Lovely! Lovely!” until we both doubled over with laughter.
“Holy God, Clodagh. Last night was bloody brilliant,” she cried. We shared a second cigarette, red in our faces and damp-eyed with the exertion of our joy.
“Now it’s your turn,” she said.
“For what?”
“To show Finian your breasts.”
I lifted my blouse self-consciously, feeling her eyes examine me. I looked at the floor and held my breath, my face and the edges of my ears burning.
She turned from me suddenly then fussed with her hair in the mirror. “Let’s go see what’s in the kitchen,” she said. “I could eat the head off a bloody horse.”
• • •
It was dizzying, my closeness to Letty. When we stood side by side at the window of the blue room blowing smoke through the screen, I found myself remembering the comforting heat of Mare’s breath on my temple and the smell of her hair like dry shoregrass. I restrained an impulse to smell Letty’s hair. Sometimes I stopped listening to her words, letting myself dwell in the hum of her voice. I wondered what she would do if I embraced her.
One afternoon we sat on the porch with little to talk about. Letty had not managed to steal any cigarettes from her mother. “Bloody cow hid them in a new place,” she said.
It struck me that I might teach her the “Sea Turns.” “Come with me,” I said, leading her into the house to the piano room. “I’m going to teach you to play the piano.”
She laughed and said, “Oh! That’ll be great crack!”
She sat to my left and I struggled to teach her my old part on the low keys. She had little patience with herself but I was insistent and praised her each time she got something right. I was surprised at how effortlessly I remembered the notes, and even more surprised to find that I knew Mare’s part, which I had never pl
ayed before.
Synchronizing things with Letty was exhausting. She hadn’t a musical bone in her body. “Bollocks!” she kept shrieking, banging the keys in frustration. “I can’t bloody do this!” But I stayed on her and we managed our way through the piece, me squeezing her right hand with my left. The second time we managed through I leaned toward her and pressed the side of my face to hers. She started slightly but stayed where she was.
“Idiot!” she said softly.
• • •
After that day, Letty’d not play “Sea Turns” with me again, telling me that frustration was not her idea of fun. But I found myself driven to the piano again when I was alone, playing both parts of the “Sea Turns,” amazed at my instinct to lead; my right hand, my melody hand, as anxious as Mare’s. The flush of warm excitement I felt when I touched the keys overpowered any residual fear or uneasiness I had of the instrument. It seemed to respond so immediately to me as if it had been waiting for me.
I lost myself in the rush and ebb, the music quickening my heart and warming my skin. I let all the longing and exhilaration of that summer flood the music and ignite the walls of the room.
A few days after I’d started playing the piano again, I turned once and saw Mrs. O’Dare standing in the doorway with her arms crossed, listening.
“It’s so lovely, Clodagh,” she said, and wiped a tear with the back of her hand. She went out to the shops and when she returned she had a pile of old sheet music, mostly complex classical arrangements and a few Irish folk songs that she’d picked up for me at Mrs. Rafferty’s.
I leafed through the crinkled pages, studying the barred lines and symbols. “But, Missus,” I said. “I don’t know how to read music.”
“Oh,” the old woman said. “Of course, love. Should I return these?”
“No,” I said, taking the pile in my arms.
Among the pages was the music to “Clair de Lune,” the melody which the old woman had taught Mare and me. I enlisted her help in deciphering the notations. She had some very basic knowledge that she struggled to remember and to impart to me. By playing the melody and studying the notations, I began to unravel the codes. Lines and flecks and ovals carefully charted. Maps to mysterious territories of feeling.
• • •
Letty telephoned me on a Saturday morning. Mrs. O’Dare was going to drive her to the Dublin bus in a few minutes. She wanted me to meet them and to take the bus into Dublin with her. She was bursting to talk but she didn’t sound happy. Something about Finian. “We could talk all the way there, Clodagh,” she said. “I’ll burst if I can’t tell you. Then you can take the bus back on your own.”
And so I met them. It had been raining since the previous night and the sheep in the fields were sodden. Dirt roadways rushed with water.
We had taken seats farthest in the back, isolated from the other passengers, and when the bus was moving at a steady pace she began anxiously telling her tale.
“Well, you know how he locks his father’s shop up at eight o’clock on Friday evenings . . . so I got there just at that time. It smelled of rain but I left my umbrella home deliberately. He was lockin’ up just as I got there and I said innocently, ‘But I’ve got to get the Irish Times for me old da.’ So he opened up again and I got the Times. Some of his friends came and we all walked off together up Carroll Road and he started up with showin’ off in front of his friends, smiling at me like a rogue, giving me a bit o’ the blarney, tellin’ me I had a lovely face on me, the two boys listenin’ and laughin’ and he was givin’ me a kiss when the rain came peltin’ out of the heavens and soaked us to the skin. The lads left and we ran off back to the shop holding hands.”
She paused, pressing her lips together.
“What happened then, Letty?”
“And then we see this figure under an umbrella comin’ up the road. Of all souls, Clodagh, who do you think it is but that ma-faced bitch Mary Morrissey. And of all things what does Finian do but wrestle his hand loose o’ mine. Well, I didn’t let him. I grabbed it, squeezin’ the bloody life out of it, makin’ sure that witch saw.”
She sighed. “He said a quick good-bye, jerkin’ his hand free. Off he went, Clodagh, huddled under the umbrella with his arms all around her. I walked home alone and got drenched entirely.”
“That bastard,” I said.
I put my arm around her. She told the story again and again in relentless detail, tears streaming down her face, and we resolved that we’d work another charm against the red-haired girl.
• • •
I got out at the station with her in Dublin where we had chocolate biscuits and tea in a shop, then walked a little while on O’Connell Street looking in shops and at posters in front of a cinema. Letty’s aunt and cousin picked us up in front of the General Post Office then drove me back to the station where I got on a southbound bus. The trip back would take longer by half an hour, this time the bus driving through some of the narrower village roads. The rain had stopped and the air was saturated and overcast, yet there was a clarity to everything: the grass, the trees, the sheep emitted an odd incandescence as if from within.
The bus moved along, rocking slightly to the side as we reached the narrow, winding hill roads near Howth. I saw a tinker man coming toward the bus wearing an oil-cloth tarp, followed by a gray woolly animal that I thought was a small horse, then recognized to be a wolfhound. A caravan attached to a big brown-and-white horse facing north, which I took to belong to the man, was stuck in the muddy ruts on the roadside.
The bus driver stopped the bus and opened the door. The tall, broad-shouldered tinker man stepped on and stood at the front. He looked suspiciously at the passengers then turned to look out the window. The driver was of a friendly disposition and engaged the tinker man in talk as he drove, asking about the conditions of certains fields and roads.
“The roads further south are all mud from the deluge.” The tinker man’s voice, though reticent, was deep, resounding through the bus, causing a shiver at the base of my spine. He pronounced “roads” roods and he drew out the u in “deluge.” His consonants rolled at the back of his throat. He ran one hand repeatedly along one side of his head as if to smooth the long damp waves of his hair, the gesture striking me as nervous. Two or three times he shot uncomfortable looks at the passengers closest to him, but quickly averted his eyes, leaning his body away and facing out the front window.
He emitted a dark grace: his whole figure projecting a fierceness. Now and then he’d turn to the side window to spot the wolfhound who was running along the side of the bus. The man was a giant of deep grace and feeling like my mother’s William Connelly, but with a dark edge to him and younger, I thought, though I could not tell what age he was.
I stared at his profile; his prominent jaw stippled with two or three days of growth; his skin red and weather bronzed. Once he turned suddenly, his blue eyes sweeping the bus and stopping a moment on me, and I saw in the directness of his look an earnestness. I warmed to the roots of my hair, but the driver asked him something about the roads just in that moment and he turned quickly to answer, something about flooded fields in Delgany. He pronounced the place-name musically, holding the first syllable and saying the second two quickly.
I found myself thinking of my mother. All summer I’d managed to let her memory retreat, but the man’s strange beauty aroused in me an uneasy, palpitating grief. I was intent on him, hardly breathing, my stomach pressing against my heart. He lowered the hood of his tarp and water dripped slowly from one long curl of hair hanging over his collar. I was certain it was from him that a smell of burned, wet trees traveling through the bus issued.
At Killiney a group of people boarded and the tinker man got off. He reunited with his dog, patting the beast on its side. In the daylight his hair had a coppery gleam. As I watched him walking down the road, I suppressed an urge to go after him. Wild unsettled feelings were aroused in me. I attributed to him a natural connection to me; I imagined that if I could be in h
is company, he’d recognize something essential about who I was and that I might see it reflected back at me in his burning eyes.
I could not catch my breath as the bus drove on, gaining speed along a smooth tarred road. When I lost sight of the tinker man I closed my eyes, and realized that my skin was drenched cold with perspiration. I heard a loud noise and felt a shooting pain on one side of my head. Voices called out around me but I could not understand what was being said.
I felt the motion of the bus stop.
“She must have fainted,” I heard the woman in the seat behind me say.
“Are you all right, dear?” a man asked. I opened my eyes and found myself lying on the seat, my head pressed to the metal wall under the window.
“Clodagh! Clodagh, is it?” sounded a familiar male voice.
It took me a moment or two before I recognized Finian, who had probably gotten on in Killiney.
“I know her. She lives in Bray near me. I’ll see her home.”
He sat down next to me and the bus proceeded.
By this time I was able to sit up.
“Are you all right, Clodagh?” he asked me.
I nodded faintly, confused, holding my hand to my head. But as the bus moved, Finian’s arm and shoulder pressing into mine, a strange calmness came over me. I looked at him closely, his eyes, his lips. His skin was pale, vaguely freckled, his eyes gray-blue. He was nothing like the wild copper-haired tinker who had aroused such a reckless yearning in me. I breathed him in, the warm easiness of him, his smell vaguely sweet like dry oats.
“Are you all right now?”
“Yes.”
“What was wrong?”
I didn’t know what to say. “I couldn’t breathe.”
“Did you eat today?”
“No,” I lied.