The Nature of Water and Air Read online

  A few men and women had come out of their caravans to listen.

  I turned and walked off across the field, the woman shouting after me: “I hope you didn’t take down your knickers for him. He’ll not be near these Wicklow Mountains till three seasons have come and passed.”

  There was a scattering of laughter. I felt my eyes tearing up. A surge of hurt and disappointment drove me to run, and I thought, “They’d not be so cruel to me if they knew I was one of them.”

  • • •

  I wrote to my aunts in the west and asked if I could come and visit, and Aunt Lily wrote back saying that it was not a good time. Aunt Kitty’s nerves were worse than ever. She asked if we could try for Christmas again this year. She was hopeful that by then Kitty would be better. She told me to telephone her before my winter break at St. Brendan’s and we could plan it.

  But I didn’t wait, telephoning a few days after I received her note.

  “Oh, please, Aunt Lily, please. I’ll not disturb Aunt Kitty. I’m dreadfully bored here,” I said to her. The plea made her coldly quiet and she ended the conversation by saying, “Write to me in December. Perhaps then.” But I doubted that Angus Kilheen would be there in December since he’d told me that the autumn and spring were the times he’d spend there.

  When I wasn’t practicing the piano, I walked restlessly in the Wicklow Mountains, my eyes raking the landscape, as if he might reappear magically.

  The woman’s chiding had made me shy of the tinkers and I did not visit the hillside where they’d camped until they were gone. I took off my shoes and walked in the ruts left by Angus Kilheen’s caravan wheels. I built a little monument of stones around the site of our fire. It rained one day and left a pool in the caved-in bed of ash. I stared at my face in the reflection. The westward-moving clouds in the blue sky behind me were much clearer than the shadows of my face. It was Mare I saw there. Quiet. Inconsolable. I reached into the pool and stirred the soft, silty earth.

  I visited the library and read about the islands to the north where Angus had seen the red sun. I looked for maps and photographs of Galway in the west of Ireland where Dunshee was located. I found pictures of the Aran Islands and the Bens in Connemara, and the Cliffs of Moher in County Clare.

  When Finian was back he called on me a few times but I didn’t answer the door, watching from the third-floor window while he waited around in front of the house or stood out on the beach.

  • • •

  Anger and frustration fueled my progress at the piano, and Miss Flint was often left dumbfounded by my determination. She made what I’m sure she came to feel was a mistake, by giving me, at my second-to-the-last lesson before summer’s end, a certain furious Beethoven piece.

  I practiced it strenuously all week and when, at my final lesson, I played it for her, I did so without inhibition, hopping from the bench with the raging leaps and plunges of the music; jerking my head and gritting my teeth as I pounded the keys.

  When it was over she was dead still, leaning back in her chair as if she’d been slapped. I put the three pound notes on the hot piano keys, and left that mutton-smelling room forever.

  • • •

  I ran back across the field to Mercymount Strand, laughing until my eyes were damp. When I got home I still felt wild, defiant. I openly lit one of Mrs. O’Dare’s cigarettes in the kitchen.

  “I’ll not have a fifteen-year-old girl smoking!” she cried.

  I took the whole package and threw it into the dishwater.

  “Christ give me patience,” she said. “You’re like your own wild mother!”

  “Well then,” I said, “you won’t be shocked to learn that I plan to travel with the tinkers one day to see Ireland.”

  “Clodagh!” she cried. “There are better ways to see Ireland than with the tinkers. They’re a destitute people, love,” she said pleadingly.

  “And so am I,” I said.

  “I’ll not have ye mixed up with tinkers!” she cried out, flecks of moisture appearing on her red face. “It’s a heartbreaking life, Clodagh, and you have the chance for other things.”

  I glared at her defiantly, and thought I might laugh. I understood the urge my mother had felt to taunt her.

  “Don’t break my old heart!”

  All that evening she was distracted. “I’m going to speak to Letty,” she said to me at tea. “I’ll tell her that she must come and the two of you must get over this row with one another. God knows a girl your age should be doing things other than daydreaming in empty rooms and running around in the fields.”

  “What bloody difference does it make? The summer’s over now.”

  Deep in the night I woke, dreading going back to St. Brendan’s. I felt a pang of guilt for the way I’d treated Mrs. O’Dare, remembering the brokenhearted look on her face when I’d yelled at her. I went to her, standing at her bedside in the parlor. “I’m sorry,” I whispered.

  “Agatha!” she gasped as she had before, her head lifting from the pillow. When she realized it was me she lay back, whispering, “Saints preserve us!” I got into bed with her, huddling into the warmth of her body, her worn white nightgown damp with perspiration.

  “Promise me ye’ll not go off with the tinkers, love,” she whispered.

  I said nothing and she pleaded with me again. “Promise me!”

  I wanted to tell her about Angus Kilheen, and about the tinker woman’s cruel words to me, but there’d have been no comfort in it. “I can’t promise, Missus. I can’t.”

  She sighed so I felt her breath in my hair. “God save you, lass. God save you.”

  • • •

  On the last day of summer I walked outside in the field, the tradewinds wild in my hair and skirts, the sand stinging my calves. Finian, coming along the beach in the distance, started running and waving when he saw me.

  We walked for a while along the coast to the north and he told me about his time spent on the Isle of Wight. “Where’s Mrs. O’Dare?” he asked. “She’s at the house,” I told him, lying. But he was not discouraged, taking me to a sheltered area, a kind of cove under some overreaching dunes. I did not submit to him only out of an urge to be touched but out of some wish to go blank; to hear obliteration in the noise of the sea.

  I found myself desolate the entire time he was inside me; desolate because I missed Angus Kilheen; because I wondered if I’d ever see him again. I could not, no matter how I tried, pretend that Finian was the other man.

  Finian seemed oblivious to my sadness. The sea rushed closer and closer to us. “I’ll not get you with child,” he panted, then pulled out, spraying the sand before the edge of the tide rushed in and washed us cold.

  · 20 ·

  IN THE CONVENING YEARS I gave myself fully to the piano. I met Angus Kilheen on the shores of Debussy’s “Reverie” and the walls of St. Brendan’s dissolved around me. In the music I smelled coal fire, the mineral and iodine of waves. I felt wind on my skin.

  But always, in the end, the quiet of the room came back, and it was Angus Kilheen’s absence that remained; that followed me, so I fell in love with the steadfastness of that absence. Somewhere in Ireland, he existed in his hard, palpable separateness; not the ghost I conjured out of my own heat. But mysterious. Unknown to me.

  I watched the travelers from a distance, still wounded by the chiding of the tinker woman. She had been cruel, but she’d been right when she’d said that she saw things clearly. It had been thoughtless of me to try to move so carelessly into their world.

  And one temperate evening, home for the summer at Mercymount Strand, I saw a single fire burning in the field where I had first seen Angus. I went outside, with a feeling of presentiment that it was him, the winds gusting from the sea. I could not bring myself to go closer, to find out if it was him. It was his absence I trusted. His absence I had grown to sustain myself upon.

  • • •

  My third and fourth years at St. Brendan’s I played at every Sunday service and for Christmas and Easte
r recitals. A calm fierceness had come into my demeanor. I no longer cared what the other girls thought of me. They left me alone. I did not often meet their eyes and when I did, it surprised me to recognize looks of awe, or even of approbation. And the nuns left me alone if I practiced in the middle of the night.

  I rarely heard the misshapen nun singing; only a faint strain now and then from past the forbidden iron doors.

  And I no longer heard from Finian. I overheard Letty telling another girl at school that he was serious now with Mary Morrissey and that she kept her eye on him.

  • • •

  It was in my last year at St. Brendan’s that Sister Bernetta told me that she could no longer teach me; that I’d surpassed her. Two afternoons a week I took a bus east to St. Mathilde’s, a high-class women’s college with a strong focus on music, to study with an old Spanish nun named Sister Seraphina.

  I fell in love with St. Mathilde’s. It could be seen in the distance from the Kildare Road, white and palatial with columns, like a modern-day Parthenon. It seemed to have been constructed for a sunnier, warmer clime with open-air walkways and arcades that led from classrooms and study halls and studios.

  The nuns wore white wimples and veils and layered crimson habits with little ceramic crucifixes on cloth ribbon around their necks.

  On mild days I’d wait for Sister Seraphina on a bench outside the music room, watching the nuns moving in silence along the arcades, robes and veils luffing in the breeze. I was on fire with the idea of going to college there, though places were difficult to obtain. I procured application papers, working and reworking my answers before writing them carefully on the forms.

  The first weeks with Sister Seraphina I struggled with a Chopin Nocturne. She smiled and nodded as I played. Softly, dramatically, she’d whisper in her strong Spanish accent, “Pianissimo!” her raised hand cupping the air.

  She pronounced the first syllable of my name with the long u sound. “Good, Clu-dah!” she cried after some of my attempts. But I felt her holding back, reserving comment. She made me play certain pieces over and over, squinting her eyes at the ceiling as she listened.

  At our fifth or sixth lesson, she asked me to play one of my favorites. I played the “Reverie,” giving myself fully to it, feeling Angus Kilheen’s breath on my neck. I returned from the piece breathing hard, hair in my eyes.

  “Cludagh,” she said. “Control! You go through the music like you go through a door. Stay in the music!” She squeezed my forearm, iron and certainty in her hand.

  I felt ashamed, exposed. I wondered if she knew what the music aroused in me.

  “What makes you say I go through it like a door?”

  “The music changes when you disappear. Reverberations. Notes mixing with notes. Give me clarity!”

  She made me play it again. “Don’t go through the door!” she cried once, sensing my temptation. She smiled at me with little glimmering eyes, pulling me toward exactitude. I resisted the music’s invitation to delirium, and that resistance infused the sound with a peculiar tension.

  “Nice!” she cried.

  I was stunned to find myself in her intuitive, demanding hands.

  I left that day, challenged, exhausted, but with sparks in my blood.

  • • •

  One afternoon as I worked on a new Chopin Nocturne, she stood suddenly. “Come with me,” she said, and I followed her through the library, the high white walls resounding with thoughtful silence. Heavy mahogany shelving issued a clean odor of trees.

  “This is your library now. You will be in school here next year. I’ve seen to it,” she said.

  She opened a heavy door and we entered the empty chapel, flooded with gold and green light from the high, leaded windows. She walked imperiously up the aisle to the harpsichord and sat down before it.

  “Sit!” she cried, pointing to a pew near her.

  She pulled her elaborate sleeves to the elbow and raised her hands in the air above the keys where they hovered a moment before she flew into a Bach Trio Sonata with a wild agility, rocking slightly side to side with the quick lightness of the notes, a concentrated smile on her mouth. Gooseflesh rose on my body, tears wetting my lashes at the force that drove the music. There was something at once wise and childlike about her; at once intimidating and funny.

  I was trembling when she finished and turned to me.

  “You will study harpsichord, Cludagh!”

  “Why?” I asked.

  “More formal. You can’t disappear so easy.”

  • • •

  I did not like the idea of dividing my time between the piano and a new instrument. There was a certain agony involved in submitting to this sweet, ferocious little nun.

  “Restraint!” she’d cry at every lesson.

  Once as she interrupted me with this cry, I asked her with irritation if this was her philosophy about music; if she demanded such restraint from all her pupils.

  “Oh no!” she cried, eyebrows raised in surprise. “I demand more emotion from them. Restraint from you only!”

  “All of them?” I asked.

  “All of them,” she said, and nodded her head once for emphasis.

  A second of quiet passed and she said again, “Restraint from you!”

  • • •

  A week before the graduation ceremonies were to take place at St. Brendan’s, we were awakened at 5 A.M., confused by the tolling of the church bell. It was a Thursday and not a holy day. We were summoned in our nightgowns into the gallery where a solemn Sister Vincent informed us that there had been a death among the nuns and that classes were canceled for the next two days. We were sent without breakfast to prepare ourselves for an early Mass.

  I walked slowly past a small group of girls who were whispering in the hallway, trying to guess which nun it could be and what might have happened to her.

  “Perhaps one of the old nuns. Sister Rosalita.”

  “Or the one with the cane,” whispered another.

  After a long Mass in which we were given no clue as to who had died, Sister Vincent led us into one of the study halls. She folded her hands over her heart and looked at us gravely. “There was a young nun who lived here whom none of you met. She lived in the north wing to which none of you had admittance. Sister Clarissa, who suffered from terrible afflictions of the body.” She could not stifle her tears, and having no handkerchief, wiped them on her sleeve. “It was her memorable voice that you heard at Vespers sometimes.”

  The hall was filled with reticent silence.

  “What did Sister Clarissa suffer from?” one of the girls gently inquired.

  “Deformities, and many maladies of the heart and lungs that come to the misshapen. It astounded us that she could sing at all, but so gloriously . . .” She wept again. “So dear is such a misshapen creature to God.”

  “Sister, why is a misshapen creature dear to God?” I asked, wanting to understand.

  “All unfortunates are special to God,” she said. One of the girls handed her a handkerchief and she pressed it to her eyes. “All who suffer in this world are closer to God.”

  For the rest of the day, in an atmosphere of melancholy reflection that prevailed among even the fiercest girls, I pondered Sister Vincent’s words.

  At Vespers we were each given a holy card with an image of a lovely, sad-faced Virgin on it, two fingers pointing to her small ignited heart. On the back it read: “Sister Clarissa: Daughter and Beloved Wife of Our Lord.”

  Phrases from Sister Vincent’s reading from Isaiah caught in my memory: “The Lord called me from the womb . . . from the body of my mother He said my name.”

  She was leaving her misbegotten body; leaving what did not fit her or serve her. Sister Vincent spoke about suffering and redemption; that at the end of darkness there is light.

  • • •

  As we filed into the dining hall for the evening meal, the sky, unnaturally dark for the hour, broke into intermittent rumbling.

  That night it rained a
deluge, and there weren’t enough buckets to catch all the leaks. Girls were forced to camp out in the chapel on the pews. No one slept, while the nuns prayed in Latin all night in Sister Clarissa’s name.

  The next morning we discovered that the classrooms were flooded. We walked around in coats and mufflers with dripping noses and terrible bronchial coughs. The nuns wore softly agonized faces, sloshing through the rooms, dragging their heavy skirts, seeming to sleepwalk. Some gathered wistfully at the windows, trembling with the cold, watching the rain spatter the puddles. Sister Vincent sat among us in the dining hall. No evening meal had been prepared. Packages of white sliced bread and plates of oily, slightly rancid-smelling butter were set out on one of the tables. We ate the bread and drank numerous cups of tepid tea. I remember little else being eaten those three or four days except a meal of boiled cabbage and bacon that was brought in by an aunt of Sister Clarissa’s, who, after an interview with Sister Vincent, made herself scarce.

  “When Sister Clarissa resurrects, will her earthly body be returned to her?” asked one of the girls.

  “Yes,” Sister Vincent said, “but without its imperfections. She’ll go to Christ in great beauty.”

  Late at night while the nuns were engaged in soft, sustained chanting at the front of the chapel, many of us lay wrapped in blankets on the back pews. The girls guessed at Sister Clarissa’s deformities. “Perhaps she had no hands. I knew a girl who had a sister with no hands. But I was never allowed to see her.”

  “Maybe she had a head too big for her body,” said another. Others chimed in, sharing stories of unfortunates with maladies that they’d seen and had been haunted by.

  “It’s wrong to be unkind to such people,” someone said, and there were murmurs of assent.

  A girl who’d been very quiet said she saw Sister Clarissa once, but she could not see her face because she was hunched in her chair looking down and to the side. “She had . . . strange fingers.”