The Nature of Water and Air Page 22
“I’m not a child, Angus,” I said in a voice that sounded wan.
“You are a child,” he said into the pillow. “And so am I.”
I fell asleep to the noise of the rain and dreamt I was an infant lying on a white cloth. I heard my mother’s voice but could not see her, just a shadow moving past a glare. She said to Mrs. O’Dare, “Put Mary Margaret back inside me, Missus. I want her back in.” I was waiting for her to say the same thing about me, waiting, crying. But she didn’t and in the dream I was desperate, afraid that she never would.
Half awake, I had difficulty returning from the dream, thinking I was still in the buried bedroom, smelling the air for my mother, my heart quick with anticipation, waiting to feel her hair sweep my skin as she leaned past me to listen to Mare’s heart.
Slowly, breathing in the dimness, tracing with my eyes the line of Angus’s sleeping form, I came back to where I was. If I’d awaken Angus, it would be Mare’s name that he’d call me.
How terrible it was that I had not, five years before, told him another name. Ann or Eileen or Agnes. Jane or Lucy. I said the names into the dark. In the irrationality of half sleep I believed that if I had only given him another name my history might disappear. And that it was the lie I’d told Angus that was to blame for his unhappiness and his distance from me. Even still, I longed for the agony of him whispering my sister’s name into my ear.
How far off childhood had drifted, yet I was no different now than I’d been then. To me every dim room on the periphery of sleep was the buried bedroom.
• • •
I got up and walked through the rainy woods to the beach, uncertain what would become of me. I gazed into the glittering onrush of the sea. The surf boomed on the rocks and the wind went wild against me, distressing my hair, my clothes.
I approached the tide and it rushed me with an unexpected force, pulling me under, turning me over in the water until my head knocked against a rock. The water retreated and I sat up on the wet sand panting, drops of blood from the ends of my hair smattering my blouse. I touched my temple and my hand was covered with blood.
Disoriented, I did not move quickly enough and the rushing surf took me again. I surprised myself by relaxing as I went under. I thought of my mother giving herself to the sea and I wondered whether the force of it had battered her or broken her bones.
When the tide retreated I got up and ran out of its range, shivering with the cold. Walking to Drumcoyne House my head ached. Still I thrilled as I watched the incoming waves grow progressively more violent.
• • •
I startled Aunt Lily, appearing at the door wounded and soaked by the sea.
“You’ve blood all over you!” she cried.
On my way home I’d pressed my hair into the wound to stop the bleeding. But when I saw myself in the front mirror there were dried drips along the side of my face and down my neck.
Lily and Mrs. Dowling cleaned me up and tended the wound. I went upstairs and took a bath. About to descend the stairs, I stopped on the landing when I heard Aunt Kitty say in a voice still weak with illness: “Just like Agatha.”
“Remember, Kitty, she’s Frank’s daughter, too.”
“She’s not like Frank,” Kitty said slowly. “She’s got the vagrant ways of her mother. Going for wild swims on dangerous beaches.” She spoke quietly, yet her resolve against me was clear.
I pressed my hand against a bit of light reflected on the cool green wallpaper.
“Yes,” I heard Lily assent. I rubbed my finger against the raised, velvety fleur-de-lis design.
“I can’t see Frank in her at all,” Kitty sighed. There was silence. “Remember how we had to scrub Agatha for a week when she first came here to get all the bugs and muck off of her?”
“Yes,” Lily said in a low voice. “She was filthy.”
“I’ll still never know why Frank wanted her instead of that Dudley woman.”
“The Dudley woman only wanted his money, Kitty. You’re the one who always told me that,” Lily said impatiently.
“She’d have been a better wife to him than that wild little Agatha. This one’s brought the smell of her back into this house!”
Lily said nothing. I leaned back against the cool wall looking at the shrine on the landing. The sun through the fanlight window reflected on the votive cups and on the gilded stars around the Virgin’s head.
• • •
I went to Angus’s camp the next day to say good-bye. We went for a walk together along an old cliff road flanked by fuchsia hedges. I was lost in my thoughts, resigned to going back to Wicklow, when the sky opened into deluge and the rain blew over the tops of the hedges. He turned to me and took my hand then pressed me into a bed of earth under the bushes. My heart filled like a pool; the taste of his mouth exquisite, as if tasted for the first time. Tears shot into my eyes as he lifted my skirt and I felt him like a flame inside me.
The rain got in at us through the hedges and pelted at us from the sides, the earth under me turning to mud.
• • •
When the rain stopped, we walked, letting the wind dry the mud on our clothes and hair. Everywhere men were plowing the wet clods of their fields.
We wandered along rugged tongues of land reaching into the Atlantic, then climbed up a hilly coastline to a straight fall of hundreds of feet to the sea. Gulls shrieked below us, floating on swells of air.
I pointed at a clump of beach grass and said, “Look! The Sacred Laurel!” and he laughed and tickled me.
It was still damp by afternoon and we shivered, our arms around each other as we walked back to the caravan. I could smell heather and bracken and rushes, the coming summer on the air.
“Come with me south, love. Along the western coast,” he said.
• • •
I told myself that I had reasons not to go with Angus Kilheen. I had Sister Seraphina at St. Mathilde’s to return to. I had Bach cantatas and Chopin pieces to learn. I thought of how proudly Mrs. O’Dare had listened to my clumsy early practicing. At Dunshee I had found affection from Aunt Lily and the possibility of a friendship with her, in spite of what I’d overheard. And there were the carefully preserved relics of a father.
I was driven to my father’s rooms that I might try and find something of him left there for me. I touched the edges of his books. Architecture. Botany. The History of the Holy Roman Empire. Old books whose pages he’d once touched now smelled of absence and compressed time.
I lifted a blue knit man’s cardigan that hung on the back of his desk chair. The shoulders jutted out at two points, the impression a skeleton might have left. He had been a small man. Neat, organized; enabled by his sisters and his wealth in the pursuit of his own hobbies, and in the acquisition of my mother.
I opened the top drawer of the desk and found a black comb with white flecks in its teeth, and two wedding photographs. In one my mother, a girl all in white, looked off to the side, her face blurred, while my father’s and my aunts’ images were distinct. My father smiled crookedly, leaning onto a cane, his cheeks hollowed, his eyes dark, the fine clothes hanging on him. Kitty and Lily stood a step behind and to either side of them, with poised, self-conscious smiles.
Someone had taken the other photograph from above, perhaps from the steps in front of a house or building. In it my mother and father walked along the road, my mother looking suspiciously into the lens, her lips pursed, the wind blowing a strand of hair across her face. With one arm she linked my father’s, while the other hung at her side, the hand in a fist against her thigh.
I sat down in the chair and stared at my mother’s expression. She was such a child. If I had not known that she was fifteen at the time I might have thought her thirteen or even twelve. With a jolt of vertigo I understood the alienation she must have felt; the confusion of finding herself with Frank Sheehy and his sisters. And then to find herself sent away across the country with Mrs. O’Dare to give birth to her daughters. And as I gazed at her lost face I t
hought of her love for the tinker man, William Connelly. Her wild, secret life with him.
The sense of my father, the man I had been struggling to know, shrank away from me into untenable distance. With desperation I moved through the rooms looking for ways to claim him. One of his starched shirts made a soft coughing noise as I shook it. I opened his cabinet of medicines, shaking and opening the bottles, smelling the reeking tinctures, violating Aunt Lily’s little mausoleum. The bedroom floor creaked as if he were there watching me through the doorway and I felt across that air, each of us looking in vain to recognize the other.
• • •
And then I went back to Angus Kilheen.
· 24 ·
THE FIRST NIGHTS TRAVELING WITH Angus I didn’t sleep at all. Enough moonlight came through the linoleum flap at the window to illuminate him as he slept, his expression elevated, agonized like the face of Saint Francis of Assisi from a painting I had always admired on the wall at St. Brendan’s. I was relieved when we lay side by side in the darkness; relieved that his eyes were closed and I could watch him, sensing a man even more fragile than the one I’d imagined.
When in his sleep he’d turn from me onto his side, his body in that bit of moonlight looked like a mass of land, the tall uneven cliffs along the Atlantic. A shoulder, a hip, a leg of earth. As the night progressed and his sleep deepened, he grew solid, still, while I fluctuated in the darkness as if composed of black, always faintly moving water.
I lay trying to read the dim outlines of objects. A fender and iron, perhaps, or a coal scuttle.
• • •
Our first day together after leaving Dunshee, we’d stopped at a traveler fair in Ballyvaughan. He’d parked the caravan and set up a table at the back on which he displayed crockery and tin pots. He’d traded four cups and saucers for a hammer and when the man he’d dealt with was gone he whispered and spat over the hammer, then waved the air in front of it with his fingers.
“Saining,” he’d called it. “Driving out the demons lurking in an object. Things are full of the secret lives of the people who own them. Flecks of their soul get into the object.”
That evening I saw him sain his own blackened skillet before he cooked sausages in it. “The air is full of itinerant souls looking for something to contain them,” he’d said. “If something sits too long in darkness, you’ve got to drive away the legions of the damned.” He’d pinked faintly, watching my eyes.
Later when I wanted to revive the fire in the coals I’d asked him if I should sain the flint. “You never sain the flint,” he said. “It’s the sadness in that object makes the fire come up.”
It intrigued me to think that sorrow and memory could be contained in matter; that an object could bear the internal life of a person, as if people could not bear to be the keepers of their own souls. I felt a strange pity for the stillness, the steadfastness of objects.
In the deep shadows of the caravan at night, the coal scuttle appeared to be the armless bust of a very old man, and if I moved my head up in a certain position I could see his haggard profile. Itinerant souls hummed in the tin and metal scraps, echoing in the irons, a homeless shuddering chorus.
• • •
Angus and I had contrived a simple plan. I would say good-bye to Lily Sheehy, who Angus thought was only an aquaintance, at the Galway station and get on the Dublin train. Angus would meet me at Athenry, the first stop going east, and we would travel south hugging the western coast.
I had written to Mrs. O’Dare and told her that I’d be staying on a bit longer at Dunshee. I hoped that at least a week or so might pass before she’d speak to my aunt and the two would compare notes. My plan was to write to them both saying that I met a girl I’d known from St. Brendan’s on the train who’d invited me to travel with her for the summer. I decided I’d send them cards of all the places I’d visit that summer with my fictional friend.
It was always part of Angus Kilheen’s plan that I’d arrive back in Wicklow in enough time to prepare for the fall at St. Mathilde’s. But with the passing of each day my previous life felt more remote.
I was an imposter in two worlds.
• • •
I asked Angus one night who the woman was that he’d wept over in the woods at Dunshee.
He hesitated before he reminded me that he was thirty-nine and surely I had to understand that there had been women in his past.
“But it’s someone you miss,” I said.
He thought a moment before he said, “It’s no more, lass. ’Twas only the drink getting the better of me.”
Those early days together, Angus sensed the anxiousness and uncertainty in me. He was watchful of my moods. He often reached over and squeezed my hand or my forearm as he drove, while I stared off distractedly into the fields. Or he’d pull the reins and the horse would halt. He’d kiss the side of my face. “It’s all right now,” he’d say, and in the very tenderness of his voice I’d sense his fear that I might bolt.
One night he called out when he was inside me, “Mare! Mare!” as if he were trying to find me through darkness or rain. It hurt that he called me by my sister’s name. It felt dangerous. I tried not to hear it; to listen only to the wind stirring the linoleum flap.
I was afraid to open my eyes; afraid I’d find Mare standing at the foot of the bed watching us. I tortured myself, imagining that, like me, she had inherited from our mother a backward nature, wild and wanton. And in some moments when I was farthest from myself, when I hadn’t slept or was thinking hard about Sister Seraphina and St. Mathilde’s and feeling like I had gotten lost, I was certain that it was Mare that Angus loved. She was the beloved one. She was the one with the soul. And that it was Angus and Mare together traveling the west of Ireland, and that Clodagh had disappeared.
But on bright days with the air full of the promise of summer, Mare’s ghost felt faint, easy to dispel. And when I forgot her, she seemed to be nowhere.
• • •
We stopped in Doolin, the village just near the Cliffs of Moher in County Clare. While Angus shopped for provisions, I went alone to the post and wrote and posted cards to Sister Seraphina and Mrs. O’Dare.
The messages were identical:
“The cliffs are beautiful. They fall sheer hundreds of feet to the sea. My friend and I are staying at a bed and breakfast in Doolin. In a few days we’ll go south to Kerry. I’ll write again then. Love, Clodagh.”
• • •
The farther south we moved, the more the horizon to the east shrank, the clouds touching the edge of the land after a rain. But the west opened into light and I could see no end to things.
On our fourth day together we stopped and camped upfield from a group of squalid travelers in battered, discolored caravans. Children howled and squawked, filthy and half naked in the dampness. Dejected men stood around fires drinking and staring into flames.
Angus had told me that most of the tinkers lived hand-to-mouth. But we always had eggs, a quarter loaf or half a cabbage, and a few rashers. I’d never been hungry before but Angus had when he was small and his father drank. He told me he couldn’t bear to look at the poor wastrels with the drunken fathers, knowing they’d go to bed with the pain of the empty gut.
And as if I did not want to think about the sadness I saw in the faces of the children, I thought of the objects they owned, pitying the tea towel tied around a girl’s waist. A burlap doll bursting its seams. A dented metal cup sitting on a stone.
From this close the life of the traveler no longer seemed beautiful, yet it pulled at me. If felt closest to the truth of who I was. I found a certain solace in the wind and the dampness; in the ethereal, changing light of the Irish west.
• • •
One afternoon while we were camping among the tinkers, Angus went into the little village and I wandered off in the direction of the tinker camp, drawn by the frenetic reel of violins. Two old women sat in beat-up upholstered chairs on the dirt, clapping their hands in time.
Two
of the fiddlers were old men. The other was young. He sat on a bench as he played, leaning into the arm of a heavy, cow-eyed old woman.
The bows rose and fell like pistons and a few people danced. My heart pounded, stirred by the wild yearning in the music.
The young fiddler’s eyes darted up at me. I smiled and his mouth tensed painfully. He lost time with the music, his face gone red and shiny. He struggled, eyes fluttering, to rejoin the melody.
When the music stopped, the heavyset woman in the upholstered chair nearest me grabbed me by the skirt and said, “I think tha’ one fancies ye, Miss.” She pointed at the young fiddler, then sucked hard at a cigarette. “Tha’ one’s a bit touched, though. Soft in the head, though he plays the music with great spirit.”
The other seated woman, small and very straight-backed, said, “Ah, sure, his mother there with him, Miss, is a saint on earth. The way she gives her life to that boy.”
“She’s no saint!” the heavier woman cried as she blew out a lungful of smoke. “She’s got a stake in keepin’ that one to her. Something not right about it.” She held the arm of her battered chair as if it were a throne.
“Ye see the dark in all things, Anne,” said the other.
“I see the truth. Without him she’s a lonely old woman. Keepin’ her own demented son with her, so. And the two o’ them sleepin’ side by side in tha’ slim bit of a bed they share.”
The small woman clucked her tongue.
I was about to go when the heavier one grabbed my skirt again and pressed a damp, hot twenty-five-pence piece into my palm and said, “Run to the shops and get me ten Silk Cut. And a book o’ matches. Will ye, love?”
“I will, of course,” I answered, moved by her familiarity.
When I brought them to her the young fiddler watched me with a lowered head, a great oily strand of hair hanging before one eye.
I stayed awhile wandering through the camp, oddly at ease, receiving looks from the different people because I was unfamiliar, but not the mute stares I’d once received as a settled girl.
An old man selling used and battered shoes stopped me and asked, “Do you need shoes, love?”