The Marriage Bed Page 13

  The nuns moved off to either side of her, and she stood alone at the altar, the priest approaching and placing upon her head an ill-fitting garland of blue and purple wildflowers.

  When the great doors were opened, one of the nuns swept the pile of dark hair out into the vestibule with a wide broom, where another nun waited to gather it.

  The priest placed into Bairbre’s arms a large wooden crucifix, which she held like an infant. Her eyes were dark, unseeing, the skin around them puffy as she walked slowly down the aisle and was led away by the nuns. For seven days she would meditate in a darkened room in intense isolation with Christ.

  After the service I walked with Mrs. O’Breen out onto the grounds, Manus wandering off ahead of us.

  “When I was a girl, this willow was only as tall as Manus is now,” she said, pointing to the summit of a massive tree. “I only narrowly escaped the ceremony Bairbre has just come through.”

  I struggled to hide the shock I felt at Mrs. O’Breen’s alacrity, yet I urgently maintained the pious, gentle face that I knew she wanted to see, my wish to please her as strong, it seemed, as Bairbre’s.

  Eleven

  After renouncing my vocation, I had nothing else to wear at Enfant de Marie but my nun’s robes, the old clothes I’d come there with four years before having long since turned to ash in the metal drum where the nuns burned garbage.

  Mrs. O’Breen greeted me at the carriage, then led me into the house and up the stairs, where the two aunts in their dark clothes attended my bridal dress, a white, less-substantial figure hanging on the wardrobe door, and shivering each time they touched it.

  Ethna fetched a dressing gown from the wardrobe. “Take off your things,” she said to me. I froze as the three stood expectantly waiting. Slowly I took off layer after layer. Moyna retreived everything from the floor, where I’d nervously discarded it. I stood before them in nothing but my undershift, but they demanded that too. Ethna scrutinized my naked flesh so I wanted to hide, then offered me a robe, helping me into the sleeves.

  It was Moyna Furey, the maiden aunt, who told me to sit before the dresser mirror. She labored at my hair, seeming aghast at the state of it, clucking her tongue and finally resorting to a nail scissors to cut off hopeless mats and tangles. She rubbed into it an oil that smelled of almonds so the wisps and kinks flowed together in conforming waves. The three talked around me as if I had no will or no voice, asking one another and never me if the set of a certain pin needed adjustment. And I kept my timorous silence, partly grateful that nothing was expected of me, and partly unnerved at being rendered so insignificant.

  It was Mrs. O’Breen who dressed me at last in the chaste-looking wedding dress, the high-necked and generously sleeved white linen. The only feature that distinguised it from nun’s garb was the organza veil, and even that was discreetly embroidered with tiny asters, which are said to be a nun’s flower.

  When at last I was fully dressed, I was led through the hallways and down a staircase into the chapel.

  I remember little about the ceremony itself, which was attended only by Mrs. O’Breen, her two sisters, a servant, and the officiating priest.

  Staring at a figure of Mary Magdalene grieving at the foot of the cross, I focused on the way the candles lit the drapes of her gown, and on the graceful bend of her hand, which covered her face in grief.

  Manus appeared suddenly beside me, a stiff, sepulchral figure. With a flash of the eyes, he acknowledged me.

  My voice creaked, breaking from a daydream as I said, “I do.” I felt the painful brush of Manus’s whiskers on my chin and his lips rub against my mouth, leaving a trace of dampness there. And the continuous ringing in my ears, and my heart, which jumped and paused. Jumped and paused, tired now over its exertions.

  After the ceremony, Manus disappeared again. There was no feast, no celebration. Mrs. O’Breen and her sisters transported me up the stairs, and through the trail of corridors that opened finally upon Manus’s room with the massive bed.

  The three women looked at me expectantly, thinking I had never been in this room before. “This matrimonial bed goes back two centuries,” Mrs. O’Breen said.

  I wondered if it was the bed in which Bishop Hugh O’Gara had consummated his union with the Portuguese duchess.

  “Such wealth!” said Moyna Furey, wrinkling her chin into a smile, the vacant eye looking meditatively over my head.

  I gazed at the carved faces on the headboard, staring, discontented-looking children.

  Ethna and Moyna moved about the room, closing curtains, lighting a lamp, while Mrs. O’Breen approached me, setting her eyes strangely on mine.

  As she removed the veil from my head, she said in a quiet, excited voice, slightly higher in pitch than usual, “It will be up to Manus if you remove your shift or not. You will leave everything up to him, and you must lie very quietly and with closed or averted eyes.”

  Sensing my unease, her voice softened and seemed to strain at gentleness, but she did not waver from her instructions. “You must wear a nun’s expression as if you are praying. And you must be compliant.”

  She leaned very close and whispered covertly, “Manus is a young-blood!” The color came up on her face. “He’s a bit of a swain.” She walked behind me, and as she undid the buttons of the dress she said, “God invests a man with a certain knowledge as to how he must act upon a woman’s body. Do what he needs you to do to enable him. If you remember always that the children you have out of these acts will be servants of God, then you do not have to compromise your purity by enduring this.”

  She helped me out of the dress, then, pressing it in against her chest, looked intently into my eyes. “Do you understand, Deirdre?”

  “Yes,” I said.

  Ethna and Moyna had finished their tasks and now stood a few feet away, listening.

  “You are very dear to me,” Mrs. O’Breen said to me. “Your story is so much like my own. You with your great passion for God. God has chosen you to have sons who will become priests. I wish that I’d had more children, but you, I am sure, will have sons. So through Manus, a priest will come.”

  She looked at her sisters. Moyna nodded and Ethna stared thoughtfully at the wall.

  I began to shiver with anticipation for Manus. I longed for the three of them to leave.

  “It’s up to Manus to bring in a new generation,” Moyna piped suddenly. “There are none left. And it’s through you that he will do that. Always remember, Deirdre, that a pious mother can influence a vocation in a child.”

  At Mrs. O’Breen’s ushering, I climbed up onto the huge bed. She covered me, then kissed my forehead.

  “Remember, Deirdre,” she whispered urgently, her face looming above mine, “cover your face with your hands if you must. Close your eyes or avert them. Your face is the last repository of your modesty.” She drew the curtains shut against the daylight, lit a lamp, keeping the flame down low, and the three left the room.

  My heart was racing when the door creaked open and Manus came in. From under the blanket where I hid, I heard him undressing, the layers of his clothes coming off, then his weight causing the bed to shift. In the low light his expression looked distressed, and I sensed his nervousness, smelled it even in the humidity issuing from his skin.

  I had imagined that when we were at last alone, he would be himself again, but he was detached of manner, gruff and smelling of liquor. He brushed his whiskers harshly to my face and neck, and then his weight on top of me, the old bed sinking beneath us, creaking, and his hands impatient with my shift, and I heard a sigh of irritation and knew it was meant for his mother, perhaps that she’d let me get into bed without being as naked as he was now.

  The entire thing was something to be endured, me wincing against the violence of his struggle while I let out little reluctant screams. After he’d torn into me, the pain was miraculously gone, but I could not breathe, the old bed giving little support to my back so Manus’s weight half smothered me. He paused from his thrustin
g a few times as if to collect himself, and I was aware of how silent the house was in those moments and I sensed his mother very close, the faces on the headboard her avatars, listening, watching to see that I was obedient to her instruction.

  As he recovered himself, he put his head gravely down against my shoulder, his eyes open, the tenderest moment between us since I’d come to marry him. There was only pain and wetness between my legs. My heart beat hard with disappointment and confusion.

  Manus let out a flutter of breath and a heavy sigh. In the dimness I saw his face contort as he turned on his side, facing away from me.

  “Manus,” I said.

  He remained stiff and did not reply.

  “Manus,” I said again, touching his shoulder.

  “I’m tired,” he said.

  I sat up in bed and wept angry tears, waiting for some response from him, but none was forthcoming. When at length I stopped crying, I found myself listening to his distressed breathing.

  Through a small area of the curtain I could see that it was now dark outside. The silence of the house oppressed me.

  It occurred to me that Mrs. O’Breen was now a mother to me. That thought filled me with wonder. I had a vision of going to her, of weeping as she took me in her arms, of asking her why Manus had been so harsh with me in bed, so unmovable.

  I got up quietly and moved through the maze of halls, following a trail of dim lights left on, drawn irresistibly down, holding my breath at the strangeness of it all, at the eyes of the statues that watched me pass, until I found the staircase down into the main rooms.

  I startled when I saw Mrs. O’Breen and her sisters sitting in an embankment of shadows in the parlor, a thin, lugubrious light partially illuminating them. They could have been a trinity of statues; figures consigned to stillness. Mrs. O’Breen’s hand quivered, and light flashed on her crystal glass.

  I stepped in closer, and all three seemed to see me at once, like they were one entity, but they remained dull, unmoving in their chairs. It was only their eyes that had shifted to take me in. They seemed slowed down, given over to some collective weight.

  “Why have you left your husband’s side?” Ethna Furey O’Dowd asked.

  I did not know how to answer.

  Mrs. O’Breen lifted her glass and took a drink, and the taste of the alcohol influenced a kind of deepening of feeling in her eye, and for a moment I was hopeful. I stepped in closer, my eyes locking with hers.

  “What should I call you now?” I asked, my voice coming back to me with a high-pitched, childlike quality.

  There was no kindness in the look she gave me then, the reflected light made cold on her eyes. “You’ll call me Madam,” she said evenly.

  I nodded, and all three watched me retreat from the room.

  I dreamt Manus and I were standing together about to be married. An unnerving sputtering came from the chalice that sat on the altar behind the priest, the silver cup shivering and quaking, then going still again. My perspective shifted so I could see inside the chalice, as if I were floating over it. Submerged in the ambery water that filled it was an elaborate piece of jewelry shaped like a dragonfly. My perspective shifted again, so I could see it closely. It buzzed, attempting to climb up out of the cup. It was alive, a real insect but studded with jewels that weighted it too heavily so it could not affect flight. The jewels were embedded into its body under its very membranes, glistening protuberances. As it buzzed again I had a visceral sense of its agony and its helplessness.

  I awakened with a gasp and heard the sound of horses and voices below. Manus was not in bed. I stood and looked out the window and saw the two aunts departing in a carriage.

  The only clothes in the room were my nun’s garb, which lay folded on the dresser, so I slipped into them. If I could have found a comb I would not have put on my veil, but my hair, which had left an oily, almondy smelling halo on the pillow, was tangled and wild looking.

  Manus, who was sitting at the breakfast table, nodded and looked slightly ashamed when he saw me. His mother appeared and he stood up, gravely, imperiously, his shirt open, his chest hair showing. Embarrassment washed over Mrs. O’Breen’s face when he approached her, offering his wrists one at a time and she, like a lover, inset the cuff links. Her hand shook with a suppressed excitement. She seemed moved by him, nervous. A nausea filled me at my reluctant intimacy with her; at her strong participation in the mystery that had occurred the night before in the ancestral bed.

  As we sat to breakfast, servants came in and out with silver dishes.

  Manus ate distractedly, then threw his napkin down, pushing his chair out from the table.

  As he ascended the stairs, Mrs. O’Breen stared into her cup, restraining her upset. I imagined that she was enduring his gruff manners because in the end she would win and have the things that she wanted in place. When we could no longer hear his footsteps, she continued her meal, staring beyond me as if I weren’t there. We finished our breakfast in silence.

  She stood to leave and I asked, “Is there a comb I could have? And something else to wear?”

  She touched her chest with her hand. “I’m sorry, Deirdre!” she cried. “Forgive me. I forgot to tell you. I put some things out for you in the little room that adjoins yours.”

  At the top of the stairs, I heard movement in one of the rooms and, glancing in, saw Manus looking at some of his papers, a blueprint spread out on the couch beside him. He glanced at me as I stopped at the door, then, with a formality that hurt me, nodded and turned away. My heart began to bang, and I could not swallow with the anger that filled me suddenly.

  “I want to go back to the convent,” I said, then stormed from the doorway to the bedroom, went in, and tried the adjoining door but found it locked. My heart beat hard with frustration. He had followed me and was standing in the doorway.

  “Where is the key?” I cried.

  He tried the door, then took a key out of a small drawer in one of the dressers, but it would not open the door.

  “She probably has the key,” he muttered.

  “Get it from her,” I cried. He gave me a dismissing look, then turned from me and began to leave the room.

  I was shaking now with anger.

  I picked up the bottle of attar of roses and smashed it to the floor. He turned, his eyes wide open and lit, a certain animation flooding his demeanor, as if the shattering glass had broken some monotonous strain that had held the air.

  I breathed hard, struggling to collect myself. The perfume rose in cloying vapors.

  “Why did you marry me?” I pleaded angrily. “Why did you bring me here?”

  A flush infused his face.

  “Why are you so different to me now?” I asked.

  He stood absolutely still a moment, looking into my face, and he seemed to be searching himself, as if he did not readily know the answer himself. He walked toward the bed and sat heavily on its edge, looking at the floor.

  “I heard you and your mother that night I came here with Bairbre. I heard you say you would rather marry a woman you had no feeling for. I want to know why you said that!”

  “The marriage was engineered. Very little was left up to me.”

  I struggled to quiet my breathing, my face and ears hot, as if the sun had burned them. “You didn’t want to marry me,” I said.

  He looked searchingly at me, the smell of the roses sweet and palpitating on the air around us.

  “I care about you,” he said.

  “Then why?”

  “I can hardly explain any of it,” he said and paused, looking down at the broken glass, the pool of aromatic liquid. “It’s my aunts. I told you before I can’t stand them being here, nosing into everything.”

  “I thought they’d left.”

  “They’ll likely be back.”

  “If it’s them you’re angry with, why are you mistreating me?”

  He sighed, his eyes meeting mine. “I’m sorry, Deirdre,” he said.

  For a few moments we sat
in silence before he repeated his apology. I felt myself softening to him.

  Manus, sensing that the storm had abated, got up and approached me, standing a foot behind me.

  “You and I have just been married. We should be alone with each other. We should be completely alone without any interference on the air. Come with me into my father’s side of the house,” he said, his voice lower and more resonant now; a voice I felt like velvet on the back of my neck.

  He led me up a hallway I had not gone through before, and it seemed we walked a long time before reaching a doorway guarded by a marble griffin with a baneful, miscreant stare.

  Passing through that door, we left his mother’s territory for the rougher passages and rooms of his father’s. Again we walked a while before descending a narrow, crumbling staircase, the air growing progressively cooler and greener as we did, an arborial smell to it, and found ourselves in a bedroom with worn, dark green rugs and curtains. I had the feeling of being in a forest and thought there might be dew on the wooden doors; their past lives as trees not completed, twigs and buds in the knotholes. He opened two wide doors and pointed outside at an overgrown garden. I had the sense that we were far away from the world of his mother.

  He smiled at me and the fury and despair of the past hours fell away.

  He drew open a wide wardrobe door in which hung numerous dresses and shirts and jackets.

  “My father found all of these old clothes in a trunk. He believed that they belonged to the Fitzpatricks who lived here in the last century. Bairbre and I used to play with these sometimes. Most of the things don’t fit me now. The Fitzpatrick men must have been of a shorter stature.” He unbuttoned his shirt. “Still…there’s one jacket.”

  As he stood exposed before me, a faint blush passed across his face. He picked out a cornflower blue jacket, gently crushed silk, and got into it without a shirt on. It shimmered, the light revealing its patina as it strained at his shoulders and back.