The Nature of Water and Air Read online

  “They gather here this time of year,” she said, “to sell their things.”

  “I’d like to go to them. To see what they have.”

  “In this miserable weather?”

  “Please, Sister. Will you take me?”

  In the light from the window, downy white hair showed on her cheeks and on the soft folds of her chin. Cataracts made her eyes a dark, cloudy color, and I felt as if her focus was just past my shoulder.

  “All right, then,” she said. “Go get your boots and coat and we’ll walk into town.”

  • • •

  When we reached the gathering of caravans the rain had stopped. I saw him immediately under a makeshift awning that extended from his caravan, shielding his wares from the weather. He stood with his back against his caravan, his arms crossed at his chest, watching the passing people with a still face that expressed both disdain and resignation. Sister Mary did not notice him. She was drawn to a woman’s display of holy medals taped to a sheet of cardboard.

  “I’ll just look around a little,” I said, and she nodded. I moved slowly in the direction of the copper-haired man’s display where a man and woman were examining a tin pot with a decorative metal coil soldered to its rim.

  “Where’d you get this?” the dark-haired man asked. He was clearly a city man, well groomed, the collar of a gray tweed jacket showing from under his overcoat. The woman with him wore a smart-looking hat with a blue feather on it and a tailored raincoat.

  “I made that,” the tinker man’s voice came from the shadow under the tarp.

  “This looks old,” the well-groomed man said. “Iron Age. Like it was dug out of a bog.”

  “I made that,” the tinker man said again.

  As the couple swept past me I heard the man say under his breath, “He seems a relic of the Iron Age himself.” The woman’s red lips puckered, suppressing a laugh.

  Sensing their condescension, the copper-haired man also said something under his breath. I moved slowly to his table and stopped before it, my heart wild, and stared at the pieces on display: beaten tinware and a few pieces of crockery. The rain began again softly.

  I felt the man’s eyes on me but couldn’t bring myself to look at him. I kept my head lowered, watching drips fall from the ends of my hair. Someone approached, picked up one of the pots on the table and asked for a price. I moved woodenly away and back to Sister Mary’s side. When I’d regained my composure I turned toward him and met his eyes. There was no disdain in them now, but a thoughtfulness as if he sensed the hammering in my heart; as if he sensed how at sea I was in the world.

  “Sister,” I asked as we walked back to St. Brendan’s, “do you think Sister Bernetta has any sheet music from the Iron Age?”

  The old nun laughed. “Ah, Clodagh, that’s precious.”

  “When was the Iron Age?” I asked awkwardly.

  “Ancient times, Clodagh. I can’t even say myself. Ancient times.” And she laughed again and peered at me and through me with her cloudy eyes until I felt Mare twitching in my side.

  I returned to the fair the next two days, but the tinker man was gone.

  · 17 ·

  IN EARLY JANUARY, THE NOISY tyranny of the returning Girls sharing the events of their holiday with one another, showing off new sweaters or ribbons or books, was a relief to me.

  When I told Eileen that Mrs. O’Dare had not come for me, she asked, “So you did not see the boy?”

  “No,” I answered.

  “That was the Holy Mother intervening in a dangerous situation. Don’t you see how she preserved you?”

  She told me excitedly that her brother and his girlfriend had announced their engagement and they’d had a party with a lot of friends and relations. And on Christmas morning there had been a brief snow flurry that was miraculous proof, she said, of God’s love. Her parents had given her a copy of The Story of a Soul, Thérèse of Lisieux’s autobiography.

  “I’ve read it cover to cover,” she said. “And now I’m giving it to you to read, Clodagh.”

  I studied the sepia image of the sweet-faced Thérèse in her nun’s layers on the book’s cover. I leafed through and read randomly. I found passages marked and my name written near them in Eileen’s hand in the margins.

  One such passage read: “I feel that if, supposing the impossible, you could find a soul more weak than mine, you would delight in lavishing upon it far more graces still, so long as it abandoned itself with boundless confidence to your infinite mercy.”

  I was moved that Eileen’s thoughts were so much with me but I felt far away from the words of the saint.

  I kept the book on top of the cupboard at the foot of my bed, but weeks passed and I did not touch it. She asked me repeatedly if I’d read the book and I grew tired of the deception.

  “Eileen,” I said one afternoon as we sat on our beds facing each other, “I don’t really think about being a nun.”

  She gazed at me, distressed.

  “I’m not good, Eileen. Not in the way that you are.” I said it pleadingly, wanting her to accept the truth of me. “I did want to be with that boy.”

  “Clodagh, Thérèse talks in this book about her own sinful, stubborn nature and all she had to overcome for Christ. It makes you no less beloved of God.”

  “I’m not beloved of God . . .” I said, letting out a little laugh at her innocence.

  “Oh, Clodagh! It can happen in an instant. Jesus can flood the darkness of your soul with torrents of light. You are His precious daughter,” she said, and touched my face.

  “No, Eileen. I want to be your friend but I don’t want to talk about Thérèse of Lisieux or Jesus flooding my soul with light,” I said, watching her face darken.

  Over the next weeks we grew more separate. I was granted more hours at the piano and while I spent most of my time in the practice room, Eileen was in the chapel. The nuns awakened her at four-thirty for nuns’ Mass. She offered little mortifications of the flesh, skipping meals, lying prone on the cold chapel floor for hours at a time.

  Still, we ate our meals together and sometimes walked on the grounds. One day when the weather was wet, we sat on the vestibule steps talking. “The day I am married to Christ, the world will look different to me, Clodagh,” she said. “He gives me little glimpses. . . .”

  “Christ does?” I asked.

  “Yes.” She leaned in close to me and shivered as she said, “Last night I woke up and saw the Holy Ghost suspended above my bed.”

  “Are you afraid?” I asked.

  “All brides are nervous,” she said.

  Moved, I squeezed her hand.

  That same day as we sat together she told me that many of the mortifications she endured she did in my name, to bring me closer to God.

  I felt nervous that when she saw her prayers coming to nothing, she’d stop confiding in me and eventually even stop sitting with me at meals.

  • • •

  One uncharacteristically sunny day in March I skipped the afternoon meal and went to the piano. Among the sheet music I found a Mozart piano concerto: the Andante from Elvira Madigan. As I struggled to play it, the sun came through the small window, lighting my hands, warming the keys to my touch. I lost track of the time, breathless over the beauty of the phrases.

  When I left the piano my Arithmetic class was half over, so I went to the sunlit dormitory. The cleaning nun had been in and the air smelled of pine and the windows were open.

  Hearing the Mozart within me, I lay on my bed with my blouse unbuttoned, caressing my breasts with the palms of my hands. I heard a voice across the room cry out, “Disgusting.” I had not noticed another girl lying ill in her bed at the far end of the dormitory.

  I pulled my blouse closed. She got up. “You ought to be afraid for your mortal soul, you filthy girl!” and she rushed off. I dressed myself, burning with shame. If I turned right at the dormitory door, I’d surely run into the nuns, so I went left toward the forbidden corridor and through the iron gate, which thoug
h normally locked was now ajar. I assumed that the cleaning nun had gone in and left it open.

  As soon as I was through the gate and safely out of sight, I heard nailed shoes distant, behind me. I walked faster deeper into the corridor until I came upon an open door and saw the back of the small nun hunched in her wheelchair. The air was thick and humid and smelled of eucalyptus, and something else, like rotting leaves, and little fumes of alcohol. At a table to her right a little tray of bottles and elixirs was set on a lace doily. She stiffened, sensing my presence, then turned, raising an arm to shield a crooked, deformed face, and I saw that her fingers were webbed.

  I stood very still and slowly she lowered her arm. Our eyes met. Hers were wet and I wondered if she’d been crying or if this was their usual condition. For a long moment neither of us breathed. I could hear someone moving about in the connecting room.

  “You have a beautiful voice,” I said. She watched me with a cautious silence.

  “I’m like you,” I said.

  “We’re both musical,” she said. “You’re the girl who practices the piano. I’ve heard you as I passed that hall.”

  “Yes,” I paused. “But I’m like you.”

  “Are you?” she asked softly. Her wet eyes glinted so much I wanted to look away, but didn’t.

  “Yes.”

  A gentle smile altered her crooked face, causing one of her eyes to close partway and overflow.

  “Would you one day like to sing a cantata while I play?”

  Her smile faded and I had difficulty reading her expression.

  “Would you?” I asked again.

  Her eyes pierced mine and she was on the verge of answering when Philomena Leahy appeared holding a rumpled sheet.

  “Get out of here! You’re not allowed here.”

  She threw the sheet to the floor and took me by the arm. As she dragged me out to Sister Vincent, I remembered my mother holding a misshapen plate. “The imperfections in the firing reveal the soul of the thing,” she had said.

  When Sister Vincent asked me if the girl’s charges were true I thought of lying or somehow softening the truth, but I hadn’t the energy. I sighed and said, “Yes.”

  She winced. “What about modesty and decorum? What about chastity? And if you’ve so little shame for your sin, why did you run into the private corridor? Another disobedient act.”

  “I’m not without shame, Sister” was all I could think to say.

  As a punishment my piano lessons were suspended.

  Rumors quickly circulated. Girls deliberately bumped into me, then made the sign of the cross.

  • • •

  That night, hungry for company, I sat down next to Eileen at dinner.

  “God forgive you,” she whispered, not looking up at me.

  “Eileen,” I said, touching her hand.

  She stiffened. “You’re a girl full of secrets, Clodagh. Sometimes I watch you in class or in chapel and I see that you’re always thinking, but you never share your thoughts.”

  I gazed at her thin face, the shadows beneath her eyes. A metal crucifix like the ones the nuns wore at their waists hung from a chain around her neck.

  “I’m sorry, Eileen. I’ve always liked to be in your company and it doesn’t matter to me so much if we talk.”

  She looked at me. “It matters to me.”

  I felt heavy in my chair. “I told you I wasn’t good.”

  A distressed quiet passed between us. She raked her peas absently with her fork.

  “You really did do the awful things they say you did?”

  “Yes.”

  “You’re not supposed to ever be naked. Even when you’re having a wash. But the other thing . . .”

  For a moment I almost laughed at her, so ridiculous did it all seem. But in the silence now between us I sensed that she was giving up on me. I looked into her face and saw the fragility of her own piousness. I had crossed a line. Her association with me threatened the softness of the little system she was maintaining. I felt a twinge of affection and pity for her.

  I excused myself, leaving my peas and meat untouched, neglecting to return and stack the plate and cutlery. As I moved toward the door, the dining hall grew quiet, and I felt the eyes of the girls upon me.

  • • •

  The next evening the nuns gathered us in the chapel for Vespers. From the choir behind us we heard a pitch pipe tune the air. A choral of voices chanting in Latin floated down over us. As they faded, the voice of the misshapen nun pierced the air.

  “Ad te omnis caro veniet,” she sang. “All flesh shall come to Thee.” Her voice rose wildly up and down the scales. “Ad te omnis caro veniet,” she sang, the volume and vibrato barely containing her energy.

  Girls looked up at the choir trying to see which nun was singing but it was impossibly dim.

  A tear ran down my lowered face as I touched the back of the pew before me. A Latin phrase I’d been struggling to translate since I’d first heard the song suddenly became clear to me. “Fac eis Domine; de morte transire ad vitam . . .” “And let them, O Lord, Pass from death to life.”

  We both longed for other worlds. She was a refugee waiting to pass through a curtain into death where she imagined her true life awaited her.

  Her voice transported her so she could nearly touch her longed-for place. I shivered, feeling for her a kind of phantom pain as if she were as much a part of me as Mare or my mother.

  · 18 ·

  MRS. O’DARE HAD WRITTEN ME several letters that I had not answered, and had even telephoned once, though I refused to take the call in spite of Sister Vincent’s admonitions. She retrieved me from St. Brendan’s in May, and as she drove me back to Bray tried to engage me in conversation, giving me news of her sister, and chattering on about the people in Bray. I remained quiet. Once she touched my arm but I stiffened, pulling it away.

  Rolled into a tube, secured with rubber bands and hidden among my clothes, was the “Pavane for a Dead Princess” that Sister Bernetta had allowed me to borrow from her collection. Half an hour into the ride I told Mrs. O’Dare I wanted piano lessons. Could she help me to find someone to teach me?

  “Of course, love. I think there’s a woman a few doors down from Mrs. Rafferty’s shop who gives lessons. I’ll arrange it for you.” She shook her head. “Yes,” she kept saying, “I’ll arrange it,” anxious over an opportunity to do something for me.

  I was sure Sister Vincent had told her about my transgression but the old woman did not bring it up, walking on eggshells as she was, as if she was afraid I might explode.

  Mrs. O’Dare took a nervous breath and said, “Clodagh, love. It was wrong of me to leave you at St. Brendan’s over Christmas. I’m sorry.”

  She waited for a response but I looked away from her, out the window, watching the passing trees in the wind.

  A few minutes later I glanced at her, the wind through the car window runneling through her disheveled gray hair as if it were dry grass. Her eyes were damp behind her glasses as she gazed at the road, her mouth pursed with regret.

  “It was because of Letty,” I said. “Wasn’t it?”

  Her silence answered my question.

  “That bloody little bitch,” I said calmly.

  “Clodagh!” the old woman gasped. Her shocked expression made me burst into laughter. I kept laughing and her confusion made me laugh more. Soon I forgot why I was laughing. It was the relief; the freeing sense of relief that she felt pain for me, that she was steady and unchanging, that made me laugh. That there was history that lived between us.

  When I got back to Mercymount Strand I was so grateful to be free I was ready to burst. I walked long miles along the coast, mad for the new warm breezes and the noise of the sea, hoping for an early arrival of the tinkers to the north field.

  • • •

  The first evening back at the house I sat with Mrs. O’Dare in the kitchen drinking tea and eating a bit of cold roast beef. “There’s a nun at St. Brendan’s who’s all misshapen,”
I told her.

  “Bless the poor creature,” the old woman said, stopping her fork.

  “She’s short and hunched and has webbed fingers.”

  “God give her peace.”

  The beef on the plate was a bit too red and I pushed it to the side, then tore at a piece of bread. Mrs. O’Dare left a respectful pause before she cut her meat and quietly chewed.

  “Why was she born that way?” I asked her.

  She shook her head and stared at the steam rising from her teacup.

  Birth, I thought, was as dangerous a crossing place as death. “Abandoned by God,” I said, watching her eyes.

  “Don’t breathe such words,” she whispered, as if there were someone nearby who may have heard. Her face shook faintly as she looked at me.

  “You believe it, too,” I said. “You’re just not as honest as I am.”

  “God is merciful, Clodagh. It’s not for us to understand such things.”

  “But why do such things happen? If God is so very merciful?”

  She stiffened at my tone, her eyes darting back and forth as if it were incumbent upon her to defend God. “It’s the parents. Often such children are born to parents who are cousins one to the other, or other times, God forgive them,” she made the sign of the cross, “to even closer unions. Bloodlines too close.”

  “That’s no answer,” I said, pushing my chair noisily from the table and getting up, leaving my dishes for her to clear.

  • • •

  That night I woke and for a moment could not figure out where I was. The blue room was vast and shadowy. Amid my own thoughts I heard the nun’s voice, quavering with isolation.

  I rushed out through the dark hallways and into the parlor. The moon through the open curtain cast a whitish aura over the edges of things. As I climbed into bed beside her Mrs. O’Dare woke with a start.

  “Agatha!” she gasped.

  “It’s Clodagh,” I said.

  “Oh.” She put her hand to her heart, then lowered her face. “You remind me of your mother, coming to me like this.” The moonlight lit a tear beginning in her eye. “You’re like her in this light.”