The Nature of Water and Air Page 12
“That’s it, then.”
We got off the bus in a village just north of Bray and went for a sandwich in a shop. After eating we walked along the beach toward Mercymount Strand where from a low cliff we could see a small herd of seal cows on the rocks below. We sat down in the mild sunlight, the grass beneath us still a bit damp, and Finian talked about his father’s business and how it would one day be his. He spoke with a practiced formality that made me want to laugh at him, but made me pity him as well. He was more interesting to me when he was blushing, at a loss for words, or roguish as Letty Grogan had reported him to be.
The shore was raucous with the barking of the cows and the noise of the petrels riding in over each heavy swell.
A bull seal had come up onto the stones, his deep, rakish bark causing my insides to soften. Finian stopped midsentence and we both watched the massive creature roll onto its side. It was awful, I thought, how heavy and amorphous the bull was, how crippled on land. The cows dove into the water in a flurry and swam away, all but one, her sleek head breaking the skin of the water as she regarded him.
The bull’s sex emerged suddenly from under his fur. Long and pointed like a horn and bright red as something bleeding. Finian let out an embarrassed laugh and looked at me to see my reaction. “Late in the year for seals to be mating,” he said.
But I could not take my eyes from the bull. It slid on its side into the sea, skimming the surface after the cow. They flew together in the water, two graceful weightless shadows, twisting.
The cow threw herself up onto the rocks and he hoisted himself up after her, imposing his great weight upon her. She shifted and tried to turn, armless, wiggling, her head arching away from her body. Her resistance seemed to increase his resolve and I remembered my mother’s soft protestations against her tinker man.
In a moment they were in the water again, all dark grace under the surface, the surf in their wake lapping and foaming at the rocks.
When I turned toward him, Finian’s face was flushed and uneasy. He pushed me back onto the damp grass, his mouth coming down on mine, one hand rushing up under my blouse to cup my breast. Once it was there he seemed not to know what to do, startled that I did not fight him.
From below us came the bull’s wet, aching bark. I slid my tongue into Finian’s mouth and he froze.
He jumped to his feet, offering me his hand and pulling me up. We walked together to Mercymount Strand, his cool, damp fingers nervously clutching mine.
• • •
At home I sat before the piano playing “Clair de Lune,” my fingers moving carefully over the keys. The breeze shifted in the curtain and I thought of Finian, trying to imagine the act itself; restless, ponderous to discover it. But I was haunted by the handsome, uneasy face of the copper-haired man from the bus. The mustache around his lips had made me think of the hair around my sex. Each note I played of the melody felt like an exhilarated cry.
I practiced for hours that afternoon until I could play the piece in its entirety.
• • •
In July Finian went for a month to see cousins on the Isle of Wight. During those days a strange gravity came over me and Letty. We both grew sad, nostalgic, as if we had lost something. Late in the afternoons I met her in the top of the house and we’d sit in the deep-shelved sill of the long window, the sea air coming in at us through the screen, the sun some evenings angling, changing the color of her face, causing her to squint, her worn shoes on the floor, her bare legs pulled up to her body, her arms embracing them as she told me about Finian. Before he’d left she’d had another half-drunken encounter with him in his father’s car.
She went on about his wet kisses and his probing tongue and how he’d tried to grab her breast suddenly as if it were a defensive move. He’d pressed himself against her and she’d felt it there, swollen hard, straining insistently at the soft corduroy of his pants. I felt jealous. Her readiness to fight him had aroused him more than my willingness to comply.
“It seems to have a life of its own. And the size of it, Clodagh! I’ve heard tales of boy’s things and this one breaks all the records for size. And they say that once the thing has broken into you, torn away the little tissue, that it hurts no more and that such a size increases the pleasure, touching every cell of you.”
Letty talked and sighed and grew dreamy eyed and I listened, my body stirring like something being pulled this way and that by the tides. And I’d close my eyes and wish that she’d leave just at that moment, that I might lay down in the last long square of daylight, my arms around myself, rocking to-and-fro.
“The only problem with giving in, Clodagh,” she said with a sigh in which I sensed relief, “is that that would leave a woman with nothing to hold over a man’s head; nothing to bribe him with.”
I wondered at Letty’s codes and rules; her ability to manipulate a situation. I had no use for such things. Perhaps it was missing in me, perhaps because of the animal nature I’d inherited from my mother.
We stood side by side before the massive mirror on the third floor and she unbuttoned her blouse.
“Well, go on,” she chided. “Your turn.”
I undid my buttons slowly, an uneasy seriousness in the air between us.
• • •
On the last afternoon of summer Letty and I met as usual to smoke in the upstairs room with the mirror. I sat on the floor facing the window, gazing after a passing cloud.
She stood in front of the mirror unbuttoning her blouse, examining her breasts. I knew she was waiting for me, but I stayed where I was.
A minute or two passed before she sat down next to me, breathing unevenly. “I wonder what it feels like to have your nipples sucked,” she said.
A bird crossed the sky.
“Clodagh.”
“What?”
“Would you?”
“What?”
“Would you . . . suck them?”
The shock of her words floated on the air above us, and then began to fade. She lay down on the floor beside me, her blouse open, her breasts pointing away from each other at gentle angles. She blinked and I heard her swallow. She fixed her eyes on the clouds.
The light crept over her skin, which appeared to wear a subtle powdery fur. I leaned over and took one of her nipples in my mouth.
I sucked gently, chastely, a calm, almost sought-after sadness taking me. A cloud passed over the sun and the room went dark. A warmth spread at the back of my head as if someone were holding it in place, though Letty’s arms were lying on the floor at her sides.
The tides on Mercymount Strand rushed upward in peaks, calling out in whispered choruses. My eyes dampened, waiting out each inward-coming rush.
I looked up at her. Her face was turned away from mine, her eyes and lips tightly closed, her hands in fists. Dismayed, I hovered over her in the near darkness. I touched the side of her face with my fingertips and she jumped up, buttoning her blouse as she walked out of the room and through the dark hall and down the stairs.
After that evening she would not look me in the eye again.
· 15 ·
A FEW DAYS LATER I was at St. Brendan’s following a nun through a narrow, forbidding hallway. In a long dormitory room, my bed was one among many facing a wall of windows and the last gray light of afternoon.
Girls stood solemnly at their appointed beds unpacking their things and placing them in the small cabinet that stood at each iron footboard. Sister Vincent, a tall, pleasant-faced nun with a low-pitched, mild-sounding voice, told me to be in the chapel for Vespers in half an hour and then to proceed to the dining hall.
The chapel was dark and the Virgin’s cheeks streaming with glass tears. I knew which girls were new because they stood, like me, looking around. My attention was drawn by the wistful isolation of a small, dark-haired girl gazing at the altar. She seemed to be listening closely to the chanting that descended upon us from the dim choir loft at the back of the chapel.
In the dining hall I lost sight
of the girl, but saw Letty Grogan, who flushed scarlet when she found me staring at her.
I turned away and closed my eyes. Her face blurred a moment with Mare’s and then with my mother’s.
Filing back to the rooms I saw her turn into another dormitory room and overheard a girl telling another that the hall I was in was for the first-year girls. I understood then the melancholy air of that room.
The small, dark-haired girl had a cot right next to mine. She undressed, hiding under the tent of her nightdress, maneuvering her clothes off onto the floor. A nun standing in the doorway commended her and told us that this was the modest and proper way for a young lady to dress and undress, and that it was convent rule that we hide under a nightshift whenever we changed. Most of the girls were quite adept at the practice.
I was the last to finish, stumbling my way through the process, all eyes on me. I kept my face down, burning to the roots of my hair as the nun led us in prayers. When she turned the light out we climbed under the dank blankets. My pillowcase was frayed at the edge and smelled of vinegar. I remembered Letty Grogan complaining to me once that the domestic nuns, the uneducated ones who did all the cleaning and cooking, washed the linens in white vinegar. They did this, she said, so that we’d fall asleep remembering that Christ had been given vinegar to drink before he was crucified.
I was tired but the muffled sound of the dark-haired girl’s weeping kept me awhile from sleep.
• • •
I woke deep in the night. It was raining hard and the shadowy figures of two nuns had come in to place buckets under various leaks. When they left I got up and walked about in the corridor, which was dimly lit by weak bulbs in wall sconces. To the left, the hallway continued, but was blocked by a door constructed of iron bars, above which hung a sign: NO ADMITTANCE. The rain tapered off and I heard the faint sound of a woman singing from some far corridor behind the iron bars. I wondered if I was imagining it, so faint was the sound. But it swelled suddenly, melodious and distinctive in pitch. I thought it odd, knowing that the nuns’ cloister was in the other direction.
The eeriness of it sent me back to my bed. Somewhere in the darkness of the room another girl was crying softly. Listening to the rain hit the windows, I imagined Finian in the dormitory of his own school, sound asleep, oblivious to the weather. I imagined the copper-haired man, wherever he was, unable to sleep, lying on his back in the dark listening to the rain. I wondered if he was cold with only the walls of the caravan to protect him.
My third day at St. Brendan’s, I wandered the maze of hallways past the dining area, and through a narrow window saw a piano in a small room. I tried the door but it was locked. I went to the principal and asked if I might play it and she sent for a nun named Sister Bernetta who gave piano lessons.
When I played “Clair de Lune” for Sister Bernetta she complained about my posture before the instrument and my hand positioning. When I explained that I could not read music she said we would have to begin with a primer. She showed me how to practice the scales, then gave me a little metal key to the practice room, which I strung around a shoelace and wore around my neck under my clothes.
• • •
The following afternoon, after a long day of instruction, I walked into a garden on the grounds outside the nuns’ cloisters. Two girls that I’d seen Letty eating her afternoon meal with huddled under a walnut tree sharing a cigarette.
A group of wild geese flew across the sky and I pointed them out to the girls, who looked at me, then consulted each other in a whisper before one of them said, “There are nits and creepy crawlies in the first-year mattresses.”
I forced a laugh and one of the girls said, “But you ought to feel right at home among the nits since your mother was a tinker.”
My heart sank and as they stifled laughter I left the garden, walking along a pathway around to the front of the school, where, from a certain angle, the setting sun caused the windows to glow like sheets of fire. Through one I caught Letty Grogan watching me. When our eyes met she turned immediately away.
• • •
I’d believed something might soften again between Letty and me. But it sank in now that she despised me; that she resorted to saying the worst things possible about me. And it was on those September days that I felt myself falling, getting lost. I tortured myself over Mare, remembering how I’d abandoned her the night before she’d died, to look at the little glass dog with my mother. I was overcome by the pain that must have caused her, and the loss of her opened in me like a fresh wound.
• • •
I learned to read music quickly, almost eerily, I thought, the way the “Sea Turns” had come to me through Mare. Eager to share my excitement with someone, I telephoned Mrs. O’Dare and told her how well I was doing and she reminded me how much I’d struggled with it on my own in the summer. “You’re smart as a whip, Clodagh,” she said. “I’m not surprised you’re doing well.”
When I arrived at the threshold of the practice room for my next lesson the door was ajar. Unaware of my presence, Sister Bernetta played a soft piece of music, a melody resonant with both brightness and grief. I stood without breathing, the notes growing in volume, making small, passionate ascents. The little practice room seemed filled with an underwater light, the nun bowing over the keys, her copious sleeves undulating as she played.
I felt Mare pulsing in me, euphoric; wild in love with the melody that shifted, heightened into something searching, before the notes softened again and ebbed into silence. When it was over the nun sat quietly as if waiting for all traces of sound to disappear. She turned, sensing me there, now. I took a few steps toward her and looked at the sheet music: Maurice Ravel, “Pavane pour une infante défunte.”
“I would like to learn this, Sister,” I said softly.
“First the simple Bach pieces, Clodagh,” she said. Her voice had an echo to it in the sudden quiet; her words short and staccato sounding.
“Sister,” I whispered. “What does this mean . . . this title, in English?”
“Pavane for a dead princess,” she said.
“What is a pavane?” I asked.
She considered and said, “Music for a dance. A sort of stately dance.”
I played my faster-tempoed Bach piece poorly that day, haunted by the excruciating enchantments of the “Pavane for a Dead Princess.”
• • •
One Saturday afternoon I walked into the reception hall just as a postulant was receiving a plant from a postman. She thanked him officiously, placing it on the ground, then securing and locking the door as he left.
“What a lovely plant,” I said.
“A maidenhair fern,” she said proudly. This particular postulant, Philomena Leahy, was thin and odd-looking, with a long, heavily freckled face. I’d overheard girls jeering her as being wandering a bit in the mind. She’d been reprimanded once for attending Mass in only black stockings with no shoes and had once been seen near the incinerator in the yard behind the kitchens dancing in circles.
“A maidenhair fern?” I asked.
“Oh, yes. These grow rampant on the western isles where no trees grow at all. Every few months a particular nun here receives one through the post.” She lowered her voice covertly. “A particular nun who is from Inisheer in the western sea. She misses the rocky west something desperate, poor creature.”
“She gets one every few months?”
“They keep dying,” the postulant said.
“Why?”
“Out of their element here, I’d say,” and she whispered again, “just like the poor nun herself.”
“Which nun is it?” I asked.
The postulant’s eyes opened wide and she peered at me as if she were of a mind to share a confidence, but then pressed her lips tightly closed as if to tease me.
She puffed up proudly. “There are secrets among the nuns, my girl, which I am not at an advantage to share with you.” And she was off to deliver the plant.
I followed at a
distance and saw her unlock and go through the iron door from behind which I’d heard the melodious singing.
• • •
One early October evening I had to wait for the practice room. The other two girls who took lessons practiced one right after the other. I was anxious to get in, Sister Bernetta having given me a little Bach fugue to play. When I finally got in, I hadn’t been there fifteen minutes when the bell rang for evening prayer.
In the middle of the night I snuck through the hallways to the piano, determined to practice. I wasn’t working on the fugue more than ten minutes when Sister Vincent appeared at the door, reprimanding me and taking the key. She restricted my practice hours to one a day, instructing me to go the next day to the domestic nuns for a baking timer that would go off like a bell at the end of an hour.
Walking back to the dormitory that night I imagined I saw Mare’s shadow moving beside my own on the dark tiles of the hallway floor. I felt her sadness infiltrating my thoughts the way the damp cold of the evening infiltrated me and the voices and words of the girls.
When I was very tired she was the stronger part of me. As Sister Amelia taught the square roots of numbers it was all I could do to resist the urge to kick the desk in front of me or to throw my pencil or to scream an obscenity onto the air. Instead I chewed my fingernails, or twisted knots into the ends of my hair. Sometimes I would laugh quietly into my hands, hardly aware that I was doing it until I got a disapproving look from another girl or saw a few girls whispering, looking at me.
One day in Religion we read the Parable of the Lost Sheep: “How think ye? If a man have an hundred sheep, and one of them be gone astray, doth he not leave the ninety and nine, and goeth into the mountains, and seeketh that which is gone astray? And if so be that he find it, verily I say unto you, he rejoiceth more of that sheep, than of the ninety and nine which went not astray.”
Sister Fatima progressed to the story of the Laborers in the Vineyard, but I read and reread the words of the Parable of the Lost Sheep, feeling moved by it, gooseflesh rising on my neck and arms, uncertain if it was Mare or myself I imagined as the lost sheep. Who, I wondered, would be the one to find me; the one who would rejoiceth of me? I could think of no one, and grew impatient with the hope the parable inspired in me, a little flare of anger beginning in my stomach. I tore the tissue-thin page from the Gospel, then quietly ripped it into dozens of tiny pieces. When the door was opened suddenly from outside by a girl who’d gone to the lavatory, the pieces lifted onto the air and fluttered over my head like ashes. If it had not been gentle Sister Fatima presiding I would not have gotten off with only a reprimand as I did, but would have been sent to Sister Vincent and possibly expelled.