The Marriage Bed Read online

  As we passed her on the way to go upstairs, Mrs. O’Breen seemed to hardly contain a tide of rising hysteria.

  But when we got to the ancestral bedroom, he did not make love to me. A heavy exhaustion overcame Manus, and he plummeted into a depression for days and did not want to get out of bed. I kissed and fondled him and begged him to tell me what was wrong, but he was unresponsive.

  On the fourth day he got up and resumed work on the commission that was already in place for him in Dublin: an extension of offices for the Land League in one of the very old government buildings on Parliament Street. He worked with a ruler and protractor, a dry kind of work devoid of magic.

  For a while the echo of those perfect days and nights in the garden room resounded each time we were close to one another, so it seemed all right that his wonderment did not match that time and that his attention to me was not finely tuned, because I believed it would come again. How could it not?

  “Let’s go back,” I said to him once, but the spirited boy was not there in him. Mrs. O’Breen talked about the job he would be taking in Dublin. The demeanor he must put forth. Never did it occur to him that he might refuse her. He grew heavy when she spoke and he’d stare, his eyes fixed to a chair or a table as if there were some prophecy in it. And when she looked at me she said things like, “If Nature takes her proper course, Deirdre will soon be having a seamstress let out her dresses.”

  And though his spirits rose enough sometimes that he made a show of irreverence to her, taking little opportunities to hurt her, he could not quite navigate the heavy flood of her words, and sex felt obligatory most of the time, workmanlike as it had the first night in the ancestral bed. I felt sometimes like a small plot of earth he had purchased and was obliged to seed. And that was when I first knew there was a dungeon in Manus’s heart.

  Late in the afternoon on the last day we spent in Kenmare, I walked unnoticed into the front drawing room, where Manus and his mother sat together in silence. They were a few feet apart on the red brocade sofa, his right hand and her left clasped and resting on the cushion between them, Mrs. O’Breen’s eyes fixed to his face. Manus’s head was slightly bowed, and though he was not looking at her, the silence between them was rich and textured. He seemed to be breathing her adulation into his body.

  I did not move, as if I were witnessing something of a disturbing yet mystical nature, a membrane of light delicately encasing the two of them.

  Mrs. O’Breen became suddenly aware of me and I saw what I thought was a flash of gloating in her eyes, but that passed quickly. She held her head high and looked at me as if I were an outsider.

  I shrank from her look, wavering on my feet, and departed in silence.

  A month after our wedding, we traveled across Ireland to our new home, far away from his mother. I had thought our lives would be different. On the rainy Dublin evenings early in our marriage, I sensed him moving further away from me.

  Gazing at the shadows on the wall, I tried to ease myself to the noise of the Dublin streets, looking to find consolation in the distant voices and the clopping hooves, not yet suspecting that the days Manus and I had spent in the hidden garden room had been the last valiant days of a youthful rebellion.

  But there were still the moments during lovemaking when Manus was brought beyond thinking and his soul overtook him, and the sweet face flashed like lightning, glowing and dimming. And in the years to come it would be the occasional flash of that sweet face appearing in an unguarded moment that sustained me. I’d often remember that odd, early impression I’d had that there were two Manuses. How had I not realized the pure truth of that? Because I would live mostly without my Beloved, though I sensed him there like a revenant watching me, as if he bided in the walls or on the landing, or in some unseen, secret room of the house.

  We weren’t married two months when the doctor confirmed that I was pregnant. It could have been the very night of my deflowering that the Sun had succeeded in germinating the Moon.

  Part Three

  The Torment of Metals

  Fire is the preponderant human element. It reduces and transforms.

  Despise not the ash, for it is the diadem of thy heart.

  —MEDIEVAL ALCHEMICAL TEXT

  Twelve

  1910

  The third day my girls were gone, I sat in my little back room with pencil poised over paper, staring out at the rain. It was a position I took so I might appear not to be lost, although Manus was at work and Mrs. Daley would never come in here if the door was closed.

  It was only me and the sound of the rain, and the dimness it had brought with it.

  I had lived here now for fifteen years.

  The first time I had descended the coach in Dublin in front of this house on Merrion Square, clouds had raced across the late day sky, the dark just beginning to come from the east.

  Inside, the lit rooms had smelled of lavender and oiled furniture. Before Manus and I had been married, Mrs. O’Breen had come and furnished this house; a set upon which our lives were to be acted. The windows had been curtained in a russet silk that had matched the color in the upholstered chairs. Paintings had been hung in every room, some walls overcrowded with them: oils of men on horseback, platoons of soldiers. In the dining area, still lifes of fruit and flowers, the breakfront filled with blue willow pattern china. The rooms had given a surface impression of being lived in, of things aquired over time, yet upon close contemplation the objects had all issued a coldness and a lack of sentiment. I had walked into this unknown history and taken it on as my own. I had made myself instrumental in this family’s story.

  Particularly in the early years of my residence here, I had been reluctant to add anything of my own or make changes, for fear of disturbing some barely maintained balance; or of arousing some resentment in the very atmosphere.

  I fell back on what I had learned from the nuns: that there was safety in subservience to the larger will.

  In a corridor that led back to the main entranceway of the house, I had been startled that first night by an ungainly piece of furniture; a vast armoire, a dresser with cabinetry and drawers. It had been similar to many I had seen in Kenmare, which had usually had mirrors on one or both doors. This one had had no mirrors, and though it had been heavily and recently polished, the surfaces had been marred in places. It had been the extreme oddness of the carved decorations that had made me recognize the piece as one I had seen at Kenmare when I’d trespassed, looking for Manus the second time I’d gone there: dragonflies with minutely detailed wings and the faces of children peering through vines. A certain abrasion on one of the doors had made me certain that it was the same piece. It had given me an uneasy shiver. Why had Mrs. O’Breen taken such pains to transport this monstrosity?

  I had moved farther through the house, on guard now, afraid I might run into one of Mrs. O’Breen’s more confrontational figurines, installed there like a sentry. I had ascended the stairs and perused the rooms, but there had appeared to be nothing else.

  That first night, Manus had remained in his study with the door closed. I knew now, fifteen years having passed, that he’d been in shock here that night as I had been. I had sat upstairs at the foot of our bed, expectant, waiting for him to come in; watching the faint green haze of the night sky, waiting for it to go full pitch, as if it might put some closure on my agitation. But two A.M. had come. And three. I had not known that nights in Dublin never go to full black. Now and then a lit coach had passed below. I could see over the trees of the park across the way, and through them distant, twinkling lights.

  When the clock had said half three I’d descended the stairs, the wicks in all the lamps gone low but still faintly illuminated.

  I’d approached the massive armoire. In the dark the carved faces had looked grotesque. I’d blamed the strangeness of the shadows on my exhaustion and the earliness of the hour. On an impulse, I’d pulled open a drawer and found it lined in delicate paper, a silvery fleur de lys design. I’d opened another
and found it without paper, inhabited by the dry husks of a few insects. A prickly sensation had moved over my scalp.

  In that hour, the surrounding Georgian elegance had struck me as deceptive. Dark, unlit corners had issued smells of damp earth. The air beneath the stairwell had had an untouchable stillness to it like the air within a cave, unaffected by an onrush of wind through a closely situated window.

  I’d heard Manus clear his throat and known he was wide awake behind the study door. Yes, we had both been immediately changed by this house and who we were each expected to be in it.

  Manus had thrown himself headlong into his work. He’d taken up each new challenge in his apprenticeship with excitement and agitation. He’d slept sporadically and I’d often awakened to find he was not beside me in bed but downstairs in his study, fretting over a blueprint or an idea.

  In the beginning there were still intimate moments between me and Manus. I recalled awakening from an afternoon nap, three or four months pregnant with Maighread and only a few weeks installed in the house and coming upon Manus on the landing: the flash of his handsome grin, his arms suddenly around me. The two of us giggling over something and him driving me back into our bedroom for an interlude of feverish sex. There were other tender moments I could conjure taking place in this house. A few times in the first month or two, he slept with his face pressed to my neck. We laughed when I told him I’d had dreams of loud gales of wind blowing near my ear, sending shivers down my spine.

  Once we’d been sitting to tea, and while Mrs. Daley had been serving us, Manus had slipped his shoe off under the table and lifted my dress with his bare foot, rubbing my calf, the two of us exchanging conspiratorial looks. Recalling this, my heart enlarged in my chest.

  When Mrs. Daley had left the room, Manus had leaned across the table. He’d wound around his finger a certain strand of my hair that always worked itself loose of the pins.

  “This one again,” he’d smiled.

  But such moments between us had grown progressively rare. Most of the time he’d been preoccupied with his work.

  It was not long before I discovered that Manus was frustrated by his apprenticeship; that he had strong differences with his mentor, the master builder Duncan Brady.

  Brady was a polite and pleasant-looking man with an ostentatious silver mustache. When he did visit the house I had little interaction with him. He usually sat with Manus in his study, drinking brandy and smoking cigars, discussing whatever project they were engaged in.

  One evening when my pregnancy was quite advanced, Duncan Brady and one of his other young apprentices, John McMartin, came to the house for dinner. I instantly disliked the handsome, red-haired McMartin, who blatantly ignored me.

  Duncan Brady had just taken a commission from the Dublin Building Association, whose mission was to provide improved structural arrangements for laborers. Brady, Manus, and McMartin were working together on the design of a block of working-class flats.

  They were discussing the fate of a huge old Georgian house on a street in North Dublin. McMartin favored knocking it down to erect a new building for housing. One hundred and ten rooms with plumbing and minor fittings, while Manus argued against knocking it down.

  I sat uncomfortably among them at the table as their discussion grew passionate.

  “Either we restore it and build around it, or we just find another site for the flats. You can’t destroy an old beauty of a house like that!” Manus insisted.

  “Christ!” McMartin said. “Ireland is leagues behind the rest of the civilized world! We’re still reeling from the famine and you’re worried about some old Georgian house?”

  “I just think we ought to be cautious of knocking away at the old. We should preserve beauty. We can find another site for the housing,” Manus said.

  “That house is a derelict, O’Breen!” McMartin cried.

  “It should be restored and not replaced,” Manus said.

  “Restored for who?” McMartin asked.

  Manus remained silent.

  “Why are you so set on clinging to Georgian ideals, which are nothing more than symbols of English Protestant exploitation!” McMartin said.

  “I’m not devoted to Georgian ideals!” Manus cried out. “But the house itself has great integrity and shouldn’t be destroyed!”

  “I never expected you to be so conventional at heart,” McMartin said.

  “For Christ’s sake, McMartin! You know that what’s conventional makes me bristle!”

  “O’Breen,” McMartin said, lighting a cigar and exhaling a cloud of smoke, his eyes perusing the room. “Your house is a perfect example of all that is conventionally Georgian.”

  Manus stiffened and went crimson.

  “A mollusk exudes its own shell,” McMartin said quietly, lifting his snifter.

  “I’m not a mollusk,” Manus said.

  “We’re getting away from the point of things here,” Duncan Brady intervened. “The financing from the Iveagh Trust provides for blocks of working-class flats, not for restoring a stately old house.”

  “Then let’s build the flats on Meath Street and leave the house alone.”

  “The site of that old house is the best for what we need,” Brady said.

  “And the front windows face east,” interjected McMartin. “The first rays of sunlight will remind the laboring man of his duties of the day.” He sat back, drawing arrogantly at his cigar.

  After a tense silence, Manus said, “I resent the things you’ve said to me tonight, McMartin. And let me tell you something you should already know. Irish Georgian is not English Georgian. The Irish do Georgian better than the English. It’s less pretentious, better built, with more fidelity to the classical Greek.”

  McMartin snorted. “Georgian is too associated with Irish degradation.”

  “All history is full of slaughter and degradation, McMartin. You’re forgetting that that house is also a symbol of Irish enterprise and innovation.”

  “I understand what you’re saying, Manus,” Duncan Brady interjected, “but I’m afraid I’m in agreement with McMartin on this.”

  Manus sighed and was silent for a few moments before saying, “Why, Duncan, if you have so many bones to pick with my ideas, did you invite me to work with you?”

  The older man paused. “I’m glad you’re working with me, Manus,” he said in a kind voice. “You’re a very imaginative man, but for now you’ve elected to do some work of a less imaginative nature. Compromises have to be made.”

  When they left, Manus sat again at the table, and covering his face with one hand, said, “For God’s sake, when I think about that beautiful staircase gallery and the columned arcade…”

  A few days later Manus and I were crossing the bridge along Wellington Quay when we saw a gypsy woman in a tattered purple dress with two small children huddled near the river wall. She held her hand out to us.

  “Give her something,” I said to Manus.

  He reached into his pocket and drew out a few coins, which she took gratefully. We started on our way and she said, “Wait!” her eyes on my pregnant belly. She took off a necklace from around her neck, a worn, filthy piece of string with a medal attached, then held it a few inches from my stomach.

  “Ah,” she said. “You see how it moves from left to right…left to right? You’ve a girl in there.”

  Manus stiffened. “That’s the way the wind is blowing, missus,” he said with a bark.

  She focused on him, creases deepening on her forehead. She shook her head with certainty. “No wind today.”

  Manus took my arm and steered me forward.

  That evening I found him standing at the bedroom window, staring out in a kind of a daydream. At that moment the baby began to move. “Manus,” I said and he jumped, having been unaware of my presence.

  I approached and took his hand, pressing it to my belly. He went stiff and my heart quickened. I sensed he wanted to move away, but I kept a defiant hold of his hand and he gave in slightly and let
himself feel the ripple of the moving infant.

  “Your child,” I said.

  He pulled away and my heart dropped. I stood back from him.

  A change came slowly into his face. He sat on the foot of the bed and sighed, as if he were exhausted.

  “What’s wrong?” I asked.

  “I’ve been working too hard,” he said.

  I knew this wasn’t it. I shook my head. “We haven’t been happy here,” I said.

  He looked at me, considering my words, though they surprised him.

  “I don’t like this house,” I said.

  Without moving his head, his eyes raked the room.

  “You will come to like it,” he said, but there was no conviction in his voice.

  At this late stage of pregnancy, I often had difficulty getting comfortable in bed. Manus usually slept through all my shifting of positions and adjusting of pillows.

  But this night he lay sleepless beside me.

  I had finally settled myself on my side with my back to him and had begun to drift toward sleep, when he asked, “What was it like to live on the Great Blasket Island?”

  The question sent a soft shock through me. For a few moments I said nothing, my nerves on edge. I felt him waiting for a response.

  I’d heard an openness in his voice as he’d asked, and sensed his desire to be closer to me.

  Yet what I had once yearned for him to know in the hidden garden room, I felt relieved now that I had never tried to utter. It was the story that I had concocted with my grandmother, that I found myself taking refuge behind now.

  “I don’t much remember the Great Blasket Island, Manus,” I said. “I was small when I left there.”