The Marriage Bed Read online

  I left the window open and sat before my drawing pad. The gust caused a loose strand of my hair to graze against the nape of my neck. I fancied that Caitlin had come into the room and was touching me with the tips of her fingers. I pressed the point of my pencil to the paper, afraid to turn and look. Instead I looked at the angel in the painting, coming suddenly upon the Virgin when she was alone; how the Virgin must have heard the angel first or sensed it there before she’d turned to see it. How she must have been afraid. Did she sense the Holy Ghost above her? Did it change the smell of the air? The temperature of it? Did it send the errant hairs grazing at her temples and neck?

  I had a sudden intense desire to have a child inside me; a child not of Manus’s body but only of mine. A child between me and this wind; a crumb of fecund fire blown to me on its back.

  I thought of my daughters and closed my eyes, picturing the quiet estuaries of selfhood in their eyes, intense privacies that excluded me. And I knew then that I could not have borne to have such intimacy again and to lose it.

  From the beginning it had been difficult with Maighread. On the third day when my milk had come in she’d sucked a bellyful, then begun to shriek, turning her head side to side, then spit it all up.

  “Some babbees cannot drink mother’s milk,” Mrs. Grey, the midwife, had said to me. But I had refused to believe and had tried again to the same result. The third time I’d offered Maighread my breast she’d refused it, red and shaking, understanding my milk to be poisonous to her; the shrillness of her screams, outcries against me.

  It would be weeks before we found the right formula for her. She could not take cow’s milk, and we came at last upon the milk of a certain kind of goat that she could stomach. It had to be brought in special for her from Drogheda.

  Maighread cried when I held her, vexed and impatient, her arms trembling, and one afternoon, beside myself with grief, I called Mrs. Grey close and asked her in a fervent whisper if she would keep Maighread and care for her.

  She did not understand, and she admonished me in a harsh whisper. “Some babbees have fierce constitutions, but they are as soft and helpless as any infant.”

  After Maighread’s birth, the pious contemplative face I had shown Mrs. O’Breen was shattered. Maighread had exposed the weakness of my nature. I almost didn’t rise to the challenge of her.

  I remembered a babbee I’d seen dead on the Blasket, put to rest in a little wooden box after having suffered with a terrible illness. I remembered my grandmother’s words, “Ah, sure. Nothing can hurt that child now.” I had thought of how safe it was under the ground in quiet, perpetual sleep. I wished Maighread dead sometimes that her suffering might stop.

  In her third month she evened out, and I breathed a deep sigh, the difficulty riding away like the tides of a storm. But that beginning and my fear that I was wrong for her would always live between us. And it would always be there in the air between Mrs. Grey and me, that I had offered her my girl. And it would always be in my own thoughts that I’d wished my girl the peace of the grave.

  Caitlin came a year later, mewing like a lamb, a soft, temperate cry. She nuzzled up to my breast within an hour of her birth. For weeks I’d lie easy with her, startled from dreams, confused as to whether she was inside or outside me, so woven together were we two. She was a pet, smaller than Maighread had been and marbled red with tufts of fair hair and a tiny pink mouth that puckered to a star shape when she sucked. She could not get enough of the milk from my body. She loved to be in my arms, yet there was a strength to Caitlin. She had more resources in herself. It confused me, and it took me years to understand that Maighread, the one most vexed with me, needed me the most. She had nightmares, and in the throes of half sleep clung to me with desperation that moved me like nothing else ever had, the darkness between us filled with a kind of passion.

  But children grow out of love with you. Slowly, their growing is a process of cleaving away. It was meant to be this way, Sarah Dooley once told me. They wanted the far reaches of the day and the night.

  Once my children had not seen me as separate from themselves, invoking me constantly. But now, like their grandmother and their father, they saw the truth of me.

  The memory of infant Caitlin at my breast seized me with a sudden visceral power, and a flux of dampness soaked through my dress at both breasts. I could feel again the strength of her suck, and I could hear Maighread’s little suffering cry and smell her newborn skin, like dark, warm honey.

  I hunched forward and wept.

  I did not feel the hours pass, though I remember the dark deepening in the room, and for a while my pencil cast an elongated shadow over the paper where it lay. Mrs. Daley found me sitting in the dark, my head at my chest. She called Manus in, and he led me out and up to my bed.

  I fell ill that night. For three days I dreamt about empty rooms, my sickbed in the drafts of Celluris Memorium, a dove coming in the window circling me, a panic of wings.

  Three

  At fourteen years old, my parents’ deaths were an explosion to my senses, the singular blast that unsettled the particles of the world.

  My grandmother refused to dismantle their great bed with the iron headboard but kept it as a monument to the two of them, the curtain always drawn around it. “So they’ll have their privacy,” she used to say, as if their return was expected, even after they were under the sod.

  The cottage we lived in was a single room and the yellow curtain around the bed they slept in the only partition. I recall hearing one night, the wind charming the latches to sing and the soft shuffle of their steps coming into the room. The embers deepened suddenly, and the smell like the smell after a storm, cold and sweet and gusty, filled the house. “Aaaahhh…” the whole room seemed to say, faintly like a chorus of children’s voices, pulling me back from the threshold of sleep and the straw shifting behind the curtain. I lay in a paralysis without breathing, every nerve at attention, the curtain moving almost indetectably. And I do not know if I really heard her saying it or if I was just anticipating it so intensely, the thing my mother used to say to my father in a breathless moment of tenderness: “Is braithim as titim an saol.” The world is falling away.

  Why, I had always wondered, and would continue to wonder all my life, had she said such a thing in joy?

  There was something stunning and misbegotten about what had happened to my mother and father. And the shame of it had been great. A priest brought in from Ventry refused to bless their bodies and said they must not be transported across the sea for a Christian funeral but buried in the island graveyard, a place for vagabonds, nameless sailors, and unbaptized babies.

  I’d been the one who’d found them, and it was whispered among the islanders that no one, child or adult, should have witnessed what I had.

  If my grandmother spoke I cringed from her, and it took a few moments before the sense of her words became clear to me, my hearing deranged after the death, all sound coming to me a few beats after the visual in the way thunder always follows after lightning. Somewhere within myself, I had decided I could not live close to that memory. I would always be putting something between myself and it. I watched the moods of my grandmother’s grief with terrific caution. A flicker of nerves in her face warned me that she might grow convulsive with tears.

  In the place where the memory should have resided, what I saw was whiteness, a kind of celestial blizzard, streaming over landscape and sea. Their passing caused remarkable changes in the laws of the natural world. I took to wandering outside to escape the vagarious moods of my grandmother’s sorrow, and sitting on the rocks, marveled that I could not hear the sea, though it exploded before me and I felt the shiver and rush of it in my bones.

  People seemed afraid to touch me. They squinted in my direction and turned their faces obliquely as if they, too, saw the blizzard within me, horrible and too bright to look at. From their doorways, they watched me pass. I had become something both less and more than human, a strange, isolated being that had,
because of some fateful mistake, remained on the wrong side of death.

  A month or two after the tragedy, my grandmother and I left the island for good and went to stay in Ballyferriter, with her sister, my great-aunt.

  Now and then at that time, I was overtaken with flashes of one or the other of my parents’ faces. I had come to feel their death as a singular one. They had succeeded in becoming one abstract idea; one shadowy, faceless creature. But the startling appearances of their faces reminded me that they were differentiated beings. Whichever one I saw before me in a particular moment shimmered there, piercing me, so I felt the loss to the very quick of myself, and grew breathless with sadness. After it dissolved I could not recall it. Even still, for a day or two after I’d seen the face, I felt the presence of that parent, sharply real to me, more real than the stones and the walls, the spoon and the porcelain bowl, things I could not always feel when I touched them. But mostly my parents remained dark, difficult to concentrate on.

  Eventually, I invented faces for them. They were strongly boned, fierce and romantic looking, and edged with light. I saw their figures always leaning into gales of wind. Unbearable feelings gave way to a kind of ecstatic idea of who my mother and father had been.

  And that is when I began to listen to my grandmother talking to her sister, telling her the life story of Molleen Mohr, my mother. It felt safe to listen if I kept the face of the romantic figure in my mind.

  My grandmother went over certain details, as if she were struggling to put order to things; revising, organizing her memories in such a way that she could live with them.

  Molleen Mohr had adored her own father. After he drowned during the run for mackerel when she was six, she stopped speaking and gave herself over to daydreaming, lying on the pallet on the floor all day, staring up at the ceiling, captivated by what she saw moving across her field of vision.

  When my mother was fifteen a certain schoolmistress came to the island, a widow, Mrs. O’Hearne, and her son, the splendid young man named Macdarragh, who was a mute. They came in summer to settle themselves in preparation for the school year coming.

  Immediately Macdarragh was disliked by the island men, the way he left his mother to do her own fetching and carrying and getting settled into the cottage, not making himself useful in the usual ways of an island man.

  He had soulful eyes that looked deep into a person, and a strange self-containment. He seemed never to be thinking beyond the moment he was in and walked slowly, contemplating the flowers and the rocks and the sea. He preferred the soft company of women, who were, in turn, drawn to him.

  He was eighteen and fair and lovely of form. The men said he was too soft, that he thought himself a woman. But they were wrong about him. He posessed a manly grace not to be denied, a strong sexual undercurrent. Even one of the older island women, Kate Beg, in her fifties, pragmatic and careworn, took to wandering after him. And so the men hated him more because the women had gone dreamy since he’d come, pining for some unlived desire in themselves.

  From the first moment Molleen Mohr met Macdarragh face-to-face near the Way of the Dead, a pure recognition was evident between them. And if the constraints of society and propriety had not held, they might have conveyed themselves into each other’s arms like long-lost friends. So strong was the sympathy between the two that some even said that Molleen’s voluntary muteness at six anticipated Macdarragh’s coming. Other young women who’d had their eye on him may have felt a tremor of jealousy, but the power of the connection between Macdarragh and Molleen Mohr was not to be denied; the disappointed girls became her ladies-in-waiting.

  After that day my mother and Macdarragh were always together, and my grandmother did not worry about Molleen being compromised, though the two might wander off, because they were never completely alone, women and girls always following after, standing in the peripheral fields, enchanted.

  Macdarragh wore, under his jacket, a piece of armor, a knight’s tunic. And on mild summer nights he took off his overshirt, walking along the headlands in the heather, he and my mother holding hands and girls and women following easily after. The lowering sun glowed on the facets of the metal, igniting it, and the strangeness of such a thing was eclipsed by the very romance of it.

  Molleen began to speak, her voice at first creaky. She became Macdarragh’s mouthpiece. One day she explained, translating Macdarragh’s signs to the women, who sat in a circle all around him, why he wore the armor. Because of a certain affliction, he had fallen once and broken a rib.

  One day in the company of five women, including my mother, Macdarragh was seized by a fit and fell, beating the ground with his fists, a terrible thing to see him convulsing and drooling, making wild noises like some agonized animal, half-bird half-horse. The women encircled him, fretful, uncertain about what should be done.

  “We wait!” Molleen cried, shaking with emotion, having been given instruction by Macdarragh in case this should ever occur. “We watch that he doesn’t hurt himself and help him as best as we can. But we wait!”

  Eventually the convulsions slowed and his eyes were the only thing fluttering, and all the women around him stroking his wet temples, smoothing his hair, chanting. “Gra mo chroi.” Sweetheart.

  And rising up exhausted, it was as if he were returning from battle, a kind of hero, a resurrected look to him. Molleen, more alive than ever since her da’s passing, descended the hills supporting him in her arms.

  It was near September when the fit came again upon Macdarragh, and this time he fell and broke a leg. A storm started up suddenly as his mother and two island men were taking him across the bay to a Ventry doctor, and the boat went down.

  My mother took again to her pallet on the floor, squeezing in one hand a little brass figurine that Macdarragh had given her at the pier before his boat had departed; a little centaur, half-man half-horse, that she would treasure all her life.

  The dead were the longed-for ones. Death rendered Macdarragh more beloved than ever. Women gathered heather from the warrens and left it in clumps at the door, treating Molleen as if she’d been his wife. The island women had a great affection for dead men: husbands, brothers, sons. And the newly dead, especially. In Macdarragh’s death, he belonged to each of them.

  Three years would pass before Molleen would happen out of the house for a rare walk up the hill and come upon the man who would be my father, Liam O’Coigligh, who had left the island as a boy but was now returned. A man who kept mostly to himself, and who cut turf sometimes alone on the north face of the bog; a splendid, lonely figure of a man. Over six feet tall and as straight as a candle.

  He was famous for climbing in the crags and the screes, lifting thrushes from their nests, reaching into the crevices of the cliff rocks and capturing the whippeens and bringing them in by the bunches, twenty or thirty birds tied to the ropes around his body.

  That day she’d ventured out, Molleen saw him descending the hill with thirty dead birds tied around his body, a feathered, uncanny figure. She stared at him with her jaw dropped, and in response he raised his arms strangely and squawked. Molleen recoiled, terrified.

  “Ah, Love, no! I’m fiddling with ye only!” he said softly to her and then unraveled the rope from around his body to show her he was human. But she was not fully convinced; bloody feathers stuck to his flesh. She undertook to remove each one, carefully between her thumb and forefinger, a bold, intimate gesture for two people who did not know each other. He kissed her out near the screes, and she came home smeared with blood, the color up in her face. Liam O’Coigligh married her within the month, and to my grandmother’s joy, there was always a bird or two roasting in the house. Liam’s hands were often torn and streaming with blood from their bites and their claws, though he hardly noticed it. My grandmother clucked at him as she washed and tended his cuts.

  When they’d married and he’d moved into the cottage, he brought with him an iron washstand and the headboard, something an ancestor of his had dredged up from the shal
lows of the sea floor west of Woman’s Island. There’d been much speculation about the origin of the iron furniture. Maybe an Armada ship, maybe a Danish one. It was impossible to say. Over the centuries so many south-sailing vessels had wrecked in those precarious and unexpected rocks, so far out in the waters from the mainland.

  Liam’s great-grandmother had used the headboard to dry fish on, and his grandmother had used it as a trellis for viney flowers in her garden. In spite of its roughened black texture, the dovetailing curves of iron had always caught my father’s fancy. “The headboard of a bed for a king and his queen,” he told my mother, sanded it, and painted it the pale lilac color of her choosing.

  “Liam Baun, I called him,” my grandmother said. “Fair Liam. For wasn’t he the flower of men!”

  According to my grandmother, he couldn’t take a step to the right or the left unknown to my mother, for the shafts of Cupid had pierced her to the quick, and those days in Ballyferriter, I remember thinking, as my grandmother talked about him, that the same affliction was on herself.

  “But even after he’d roused her up from her daydreams, Molleen was never a help at cleaning the hearthstones or cooking the food, for she was off following him, climbing the screes in her purple dress. He made a hunter of her so. I was washing the blood out of her purple dress every night, the two of them on the cliffs of the island in all weather.

  “It was another sort of thing he woke in her. A thing of the body,” my grandmother whispered to my great-aunt, the two drinking together that night, the porter running as freely as my grandmother’s mouth. Lowering her voice, she said, “They had a way together behind the curtain with the breathing and the sighs. And wasn’t I after hearing every day from one soul or the other that they’d been seen sporting indecently in the heather, or washing one another in the rock pools in nothing but their skins. And even still I was praying the rosaries to myself one after the other with all the times they woke each other in the hours of one night.