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  After that incident girls whispered “Heretic” as they passed me in the hallways. And one day a girl whispered “Daughter of the damned.” I wanted to vanish off the face of the earth. My life had become unbearable.

  • • •

  At night when all the girls were settled into their cots, I imagined the copper-haired man holding me naked against him, making the soft uneasy sounds my mother’s lover, William Connelly, had made with her. He would love my desire for him, I told myself. He would not be afraid of it like Finian was. Pleasure had a calming effect. Impure thought, word and deed. The things we were constantly warned against were the things that helped me go on.

  It was at this difficult time while I kept myself in the throes of sexual dreaming that I discovered among Sister Bernetta’s sheet music Debussy’s “Reverie.” A tender, glorious piece. Sensual and romantic.

  • • •

  The two final classes of each day, Arithmetic and Religion, were painful to me, my allotted practice hour following immediately after. While Sister Amelia moved in great sweeps and arcs along the blackboard, littering it with numbers and symbols, chalk dust flying, staining her hands and veil, I heard the “Reverie” in my thoughts, my heart beating high in my chest. I could hardly wait to feel the keys under my fingers; to feel the music enfold me and alter the climate of the air.

  In Religion class Sister Fatima said in her soft, reticent voice, “What is natural is weak and unformed. Adam’s recognition of his nakedness in the Garden of Eden is a moment of humiliation. The right instinct is to cover one’s self. To be human is not to be naked but to be clothed. We are not born complete. We must put on God. We must have something added to us in order to be ourselves. ‘Put on the Lord Jesus Christ,’ Paul says, ‘and make no provisions for the lusts of the flesh.’ ”

  I’d walk quickly from Religion class to the piano room. The first moments before I touched the keys, all the heat inside me rushed to my hands. The keys warmed to my fingers, the music all tension and response. When I’d captured a cohesiveness in the piece, it built and ignited to a delicate crescendo and fell again with a sigh, so I could not stop playing it. Each time I played I conjured the copper-haired man more fully, my body thrumming as his mouth touched my temples, my eyes, my lips, until the end of the hour when the timer went off and my heart sank, finding myself in the bright, cold cubicle, smelling the cooking from the dining hall. As I got up and closed the piano, I steadied my breathing, afraid the damp between my legs had soaked through the heavy wool of my uniform skirt.

  • • •

  One night I heard the small dark-haired girl whose cot was next to mine crying. “Eileen,” I whispered across the darkness, “what’s wrong?” She told me that she’d received a letter that day from her mother that her dog had died. His name had been Murphy and he was sixteen years old. “Older than me,” she said.

  “I’m sorry for your loss,” I whispered, and we sat up in the dark on the edge of our beds facing each other.

  “He was a lovely, sweet dog. I had hoped that he’d never die.”

  “That’s sad.”

  “It sounds funny, but I can feel him here right now.”

  “I can, too,” I said. Her eyes fixed mine with the bit of starlight through the windows and she reached over and took my hand.

  “Can you really?” Her voice was warm and full of yearning.

  “Yes.”

  “How is it where you are, poor old Murphy?” she asked the air above us. “Is it so terrible to be invisible?” The sloughing noise of a girl stirring in her bed startled Eileen. She started to cry again, and neither of us spoke for a while before she whispered, “He was ill. He suffered in the end.”

  Like me, Eileen was often alone in the dining hall or when other girls gathered in groups. She seemed baffled by the other girls, afraid of their brusqueness. She was truly an innocent, pious, chaste by nature. I could not imagine her thinking an impure thought, and that drew me to her; that and her genuineness.

  I was moved by an urge to comfort her. “He’s out of his misery,” I said. “It’s better to be dead than to be suffering. He’s at peace. I feel it.”

  “Ah, but Clodagh, we’re talking silly. It can’t be, can it?”

  “Why not, Eileen? His soul is free now,” I said.

  “Maybe the soul of a dog is as real a thing as a human soul,” she whispered, squeezing my hand. She was so strangely forthcoming, so pure in her grief. I felt my own heart burn with love for her.

  After that night if I woke uneasy I’d feel her there across the darkness. I worked to discern her breathing from the sounds of all the others and it was the steady purifying melancholy of that breathing that I took with me into sleep.

  I’d sit with her at meals and she would tell me about Murphy and about her father and mother and brother. And I was so grateful for the noise of her voice and for her crinkly black hair in its permanent state of disarray, numerous pins trying to tame it, and her wan figure and chapped lips, her naked, uncomplicated heart floating between us.

  Eileen wanted to be a nun. We walked together in the garden, which was now dead in the early November cold. We sat on a stone wall and she told me how she’d received her vocation.

  “I was planting flowers in my mother’s garden when I was seven years old. I saw the little statue of Christ move, the one my mother kept in a grotto to oversee the garden. He showed me his wounded palm, and that’s when I knew,” she said.

  “That’s amazing,” I said.

  She told me that she longed to one day make the pilgrimage to the convent in Lisieux where Saint Thérèse, the Little Flower of Jesus, had lived in silence and isolation. “You’re like me, somehow, Clodagh. I think you have Christ in your heart,” she said. “You remind me of Saint Thérèse of Lisieux.”

  “You can’t think I’m like Saint Thérèse!” I cried, surprised.

  “Therese had many imperfections, Clodagh. She was full of pride and selfish at times. She even told lies. But she still overcame her littleness and became a great saint. You have a greatness of heart in you, too.”

  I smiled inside, moved by her innocence, her readiness to see me in such a misguided way.

  “The ideal marriage is the marriage to Christ. Don’t you think so, Clodagh?” She looked so earnestly at me that I could not disappoint her.

  “Yes, Eileen,” I said. “It is the ideal marriage.”

  • • •

  I was stunned one day to receive a letter from Finian asking me to meet him during the Christmas holiday. He promised to call for me at Mercymount Strand. The letter was filled with small talk about his school, which I supposed he thought was obligatory. I skipped over that and read again and again his request to see me. I folded and unfolded it so many times that the paper began to soften and fray with the moisture of my fingers.

  I showed the letter to Eileen, unable to contain my exhilaration and impatience.

  “Are you in love with him?” she asked me.

  “No!” I cried.

  “You seem so anxious over him.”

  “I’m not,” I said.

  She asked me if I really believed that the ideal marriage was a marriage to Christ.

  I said yes, but she felt the falseness of my answer, and her look of disapproval weighed heavily in my body.

  At the evening meal she was distant. Nervous of losing her, I tried to engage her, asking her to tell me more about the sins and vocation of Thérèse of Lisieux. But she was distracted and after the meal parted with me in the gallery, saying that she needed to pray.

  · 16 ·

  MUCH TO MY DESPAIR I had to stay at St. Brendan’s for the Christmas holiday, Mrs. O’Dare having gone to her sister in Dublin. I was certain that ordinarily I would have been invited but I knew that Letty Grogan had had a hand in my being left out. Mrs. O’Dare sent me chocolates, a box of new stockings and knickers, and a new pair of shoes. In her letter she apologized and promised that she would telephone soon and we would make arran
gements for me to visit Mercymount Strand for a weekend soon. But I felt furious and abandoned.

  I wrote to Finian in care of his father’s shop and asked him to come to me at St. Brendan’s. I did not have a pound left to my name so I could not take a bus or a train anywhere, and the nuns would not have let me go if I had. I surmised that Mrs. O’Dare had sent me no money because she thought it safer that I be trapped in the convent than have means to go off somewhere. This thought doubled my fury and frustration.

  The weather was disastrous, freezing rain and dismal skies. The great empty rooms of St. Brendan’s were full of echoes and the walls issued odors of mildew. For days I waited for word, practicing the piano, struggling with a Bach Invention that Sister Bernetta had given me to challenge and occupy me over the lonely holiday. I found the sheet music to “Pavane for a Dead Princess,” but was afraid to try it, afraid to even remember the exquisite pain it aroused.

  When I wasn’t at the piano I was lying on my cot in the empty dormitory watching the rain beat at the window, or in the vacant classrooms watching the bit of road I could see through the trees below, praying that any distant male figure was Finian’s.

  Two days before Christmas I despaired of hearing from him. Sister Vincent gave me permission to telephone my aunts in the west to ask if I might visit. The request took Aunt Lily very much off guard. She said she’d speak to Aunt Kitty, who had not been well, and that she’d telephone Sister Vincent with an answer.

  • • •

  On Christmas Eve an area of sky brightened strangely and the nuns gathered on the stone steps in front of the school looking expectantly into the light as if they were about to witness some proof of their faith. When that area of sky closed, their dark figures drifted off in different directions.

  My heart stopped when I saw a wolfhound sniffing the dead grass outside the iron gate. I pressed my hands and face to the creaky glass of the window, fogging it so I had to move to see. There on the road, under the dead and dripping trees, one of the old domestic nuns, Sister Mary, stood talking to the copper-haired man. The caravan, on the roadside behind him, wobbled on its hinges as the horse shifted its haunches. The man was wearing a pale leather coat worn at the seams and faded blue jeans. A wind came up and his disheveled hair blew all about his face. Sister Mary drew her heavy black cardigan close around herself.

  The man handed her a large tin pot, which she examined while he spoke emphatically to her, pointing at its various features, then running her hand over it. She set it down and reached deeply into the pocket of her apron, drawing out a few coins that she counted before giving them to him.

  I rushed down the staircase and out the front door. She was locking the gate in the cold wind, robes and veil flying, the tin pot on the ground near her feet.

  “Sister, can you open the gate, please?” I asked her. I could see the back of the caravan moving up the road and hear the horse’s feet clopping on the tarmac. I had no idea what I might say to the man, yet I felt desperate to go after him.

  “You need Sister Vincent’s permission,” she said, startled by my urgency. “Do you have Sister Vincent’s permission to go out?” she asked.

  My mistake was that I hesitated before saying yes, and she refused to unlock the gate for me.

  “Let’s just go speak to Sister Vincent,” she said.

  “Please, Sister!” I cried.

  “I’ll be happy to open the gate for you, dear, once we’ve spoken to Sister Vincent.”

  I rushed into the school ahead of her looking for Sister Vincent, up and down the corridors, breathless. “She allows me to go out,” I screeched, angry tears in my voice. “She allows me to browse in shops!”

  I intruded into the nuns’ quarters, throwing doors open onto private cells; each one a sparse little room with only a cot and a crucifix. Sister Mary could not keep up and had stopped running after me, remaining at the foot of the hall.

  Through a window at the end of the corridor I could see the brown-and-white horse pulling the man’s caravan at a steady jog along the two-way northbound road, cars racing past.

  Sister Vincent appeared but I had stopped now, already despairing. I did not know what I would have said to the man, yet I imagined that such a chance might never come again.

  From where I was panting at the window, I could discern their whispers through my panting.

  “She’s all alone this Christmas . . . . She’s waiting on a telephone call from her aunts.”

  I heard the firm, clunking echoes of Sister Vincent’s nailed shoes as she approached me. “Clodagh, I have not yet heard from your aunts. Shall we ring them again this evening?”

  “No,” I said. “Don’t ring them.”

  I walked with her slowly out of the nuns’ quarters. Sister Mary, clutching the copper-haired man’s pot, gave me a pitying smile.

  • • •

  In the middle of the night I fled from the dormitory to the kitchens of the domestic nuns, who were awake at all hours baking. I wanted to be near Sister Mary, who had touched the copper-haired man’s hand. I wanted to hold the pot she had bought from him. Since the incident in the afternoon, Sister Mary had grown important in my thoughts because of her contact with the tinker man. Through a maze of forbidden corridors I followed the smell of stale cake and baking flour and the faint noises of faucets running and spoons hitting against metal bowls.

  She was there, looking at me with dismay at first and I knew by the way that she gestured to the other nun and pointed at me that they were keeping a vow of silence while they worked.

  Sister Mary pointed at a chair and I sat with them. Under her silent instructions I placed cakes of yeast in tepid water and helped to knead dough. In the course of hours, lumps of dough rose in bowls under damp towels and were formed into loaves, then placed on pallets in a great system of ovens that looked like a blackened dresser of drawers.

  All the time I watched her and saw her softening toward me; curiosity and pity in her face.

  On the wall across from the ovens, enclosed in a wooden frame, was a picture of the Annunciation, bubbled and curled from years of oven heat and humidity. The glass of the frame was cloudy as if faintly layered with grease. The Virgin knelt at a podium turning away from an open book, hands and forearms lifted with surprise as she regarded the Holy Ghost at her shoulder, a white dove with a golden halo.

  While the nuns cut flour or swept it from boards or scrubbed bowls, or read their novenas, waiting for the baking bread, keeping the silence until 5 A.M. Mass, I contemplated the picture.

  If I moved my head at a certain angle, the bright overhead light pooled on the glass, obscuring the image from my view. I remembered Sister Fatima’s words about the Annunciation: “The Holy Ghost, in the form of the dove, impregnated the Virgin by entering through the ear. Thus she conceived of the Lord, remaining Virgo Purissima. Uncontaminated.”

  I tried to sleep in the chair, my head on my arm on the table. My eyes were almost closed so all I saw were the shadows of the nuns moving on the dull shine of the tiled floor. As I began to drift to sleep I saw, as if in a dream, the dove entering through the Virgin’s ear with a rustling of wings and a terrible struggle. The Virgin’s face grew agonized and a stream of blood fell from her ear.

  I sat up panting, feeling afraid for Mare; afraid of invisible things that drifted on air. The nuns stopped their cleaning up when they saw me crying. Sister Mary sat down with me and held my hand. There was no point, I thought, in trying to explain my tears. I leaned my head against her shoulder. Her habit smelled of cut pine, like it had been stored in a new cabinet.

  I followed her to Christmas Mass at 5 A.M. The chapel was lit only by the votives at the feet of the Virgin, and by the two heavy white altar candles on gold stands at either side of the Eucharist. A postulant swung the censer and the incense made my tired eyes tear. I copied Sister Mary’s gestures, beating my heart softly with my fist.

  As Sister Bernetta began to play the organ, a small nun was wheeled forward out o
f the shadows. From where I sat I couldn’t see her clearly, only that she was small and misshapen. Her voice was exquisite in the acoustics of the chapel: like one angelic voice with three dimmer replicas following after it. It was the voice I’d heard from behind the iron gate. It moved in registers with the fluidity of water, each wave of the vibrato almost languid. In the lower registers it was dark, dramatic; at moments almost guttural in its conviction. I closed my eyes, struggling to translate the Latin words, but understood only one full phrase: “Ad te omnis caro veniet.” “All flesh shall come to Thee.”

  I knew what animated this voice. I understood in my body that the small crippled figure was singing out of her own incompleteness.

  In early light, mist hung over the dead grass in the courtyard and I ascended the stairs to the dormitory where I fell into an exhausted sleep.

  • • •

  The next day I saw two caravans of tinkers pass in the rain. It was with a mysterious nostalgia, as if I had once lived their life, that I gazed at the men driving with lowered heads, the fierce patient faces of the women. I envied the young girls with their wet, tangled hair and mud-spattered dresses weathering the rain with the resignation of horses.

  Sister Mary came suddenly into the room to tell me that Sister Vincent had spoken to Lily Sheehy, who apologized, saying that her sister Kitty was too ill right now.

  I looked away from her and back at the tinkers passing up the road. “There’s a lot of tinkers around these past few days,” I said.