The Nature of Water and Air Page 5

  • • •

  I fashioned early memory for myself out of the details Mrs. O’Dare had already supplied. My mother hovering over me in the reddish light of the turf fire, fiercely tender. The reedy high-pitched noise of her voice as she sang to me. The bumping of her heart as I suckled her breast.

  My greed for her coursed through me each time I closed my eyes and conjured that moment. The sweetness of her filled my mouth. A taste I now associate with impermanence.

  And if I made the moment real enough in my mind, if I searched the air of the memory strenuously enough, I could feel her greed for me.

  · 8 ·

  MORE THAN SIX WEEKS HAD passed since Mare’s death.

  Mrs. O’Dare said my mother was tired. For five years she’d hardly slept, senses kept awake for Mare. Now with Mare gone she could sleep.

  And she did. Long meandering sleeps that frightened me, so heavy and dead did they sometimes seem. I’d press my ear to her back and listen for her heart. With Mare gone, what would keep her here?

  We were awakened one morning by wild barking from the sea. I followed my mother out across the field and stood on the grass at the edge of the sand, a strong wind tormenting our hair and nightgowns. She pointed at a group of seals appearing and disappearing like black dots on the crests of waves.

  I followed her north along the strand where she’d spotted a few seals basking on a jutting rock. They perked their heads up, watching us approach.

  “Sweet girls,” my mother said, slowing her pace and stopping a few yards from the rock, my heart quickening at the tender familiarity in her voice. Their faces were earnest, darkly human. Their nostrils moved as they breathed.

  Leaning forward from the waist and extending her arm, my mother cried out to them again in a soft, high-pitched voice, “Lovely girls.”

  One seal twitched, a shiver running the length of its body as if in response. It blinked its eyes.

  The wind grew suddenly stronger as a tall wave came in, hitting the rock, a curve of spume rising on the air and spattering down on the seals. They undulated and barked, pulling themselves to the rock’s edge. The one that had twitched looked again at my mother before it slid into the sea.

  We stayed where we were, watching them ride the swells.

  “The seals make me yearn after the west,” my mother said.

  “The beach at Dunshee?”

  “Yes.” The word escaped on a breath.

  Seabirds keened over the noise of the surf. She let go a sigh and stared off at the horizon, complacent, heavy from so much sleep.

  I reached for her hand and she took mine, the mild sunlight causing us both to squint as we moved slowly back to the house.

  • • •

  The next morning she was not in bed when I woke. I went outside and saw her in the distance standing near the jutting rock. As I ran along the sand toward her, she turned and held her hand up as if in warning. That’s when I spotted the seal near her on the rock, becoming uneasy at my approach. Before it slipped on its side back into the sea my mother grazed its pelt with her hand.

  “You frightened her!” she cried out to me over the noise of the surf.

  I moved slowly toward her. “I’m sorry,” I said, afraid she’d remain angry with me, but she just shook her head and gazed after the seal on the waves.

  • • •

  I sat at the kitchen table drawing pictures of seals, showing them to my mother who sat near me drinking a cup of tea. Mrs. O’Dare stood at the sink doing the washing up from breakfast.

  “Are seals as smart as people?” I asked.

  “Some in the west say they are,” Mrs. O’Dare said. “There’s a tale about seals.”

  “Tell me,” I said.

  “What are those creatures called, Agatha?”

  “Selkies,” my mother said quietly.

  “Tell me the tale,” I said.

  “Something, I think, about a woman who became a seal . . .” Mrs. O’Dare said.

  “No,” my mother said. “Wait.” She got up and went to the parlor, then returned with a small book I’d never seen before, in glossy, pale blue binding.

  “Read this to us, Missus,” she said to the old woman.

  Mrs. O’Dare dried her hands on a tea towel, then sat down with us. My mother leaned back in her chair, crossing her arms, a soft seriousness on her face as she listened to the old woman read:

  “ ‘I am the Irish selkie who emerged full grown from my sealskin, licking a gluey membrane from my own body, and drying myself on the rocky crag, my skin folded carefully beside me like a glossy dress. It was the cries of a fisherman that lured me ashore, lowing like a bull seal, floating in a boat over my bedroom in the night sea. He took my sealskin from me and made me his, then brought me to his home. He married me and we had a child together.

  “ ‘My life was marked by my departure from the sea. I saw the seam between worlds and I thought I’d always be able to pass there. But that kind of grace comes along rarely in a lifetime.’ ”

  As the old woman read, my mother watched her eyes.

  “ ‘I could no longer bear the deception of my life, the dry vacancy of air, the sun lighting everything in my path. When the day came that I found my old sealskin in the floorboards where my husband had hidden it, I left my life ashore and my child, and walked back to the sea. It was, after so many years, strangely easy. I’d grown tired of being human and dreamed of a second chance at grace; pushing the seam between worlds, looking for the glimmer of an underwater room.’ ”

  I waited for something more but Mrs. O’Dare was quiet and closed the book. A soft panic made my heart quicken. “I don’t remember it being so dark a story,” the old woman said.

  “Why did the selkie leave her child?” I asked.

  “She was a seal,” my mother said softly. “She belonged in the sea.”

  “Why didn’t she take her child with her?”

  My mother peered at me but did not answer.

  “Why did she go away?”

  “Oh, Clodagh, love,” Mrs. O’Dare said. “It’s just an old folktale!”

  My mother lit a cigarette, drew at it and watched the smoke travel on her exhalation.

  My heart was in my throat. “Mother,” I said and touched her arm. “Tell me why the selkie went back to the sea.”

  My mother looked fully at me so I felt bright, transparent.

  “Don’t you remember what it said in the story? She was tired of being human.”

  My pulses clamored. I searched her eyes. “Did someone make her tired of being human?”

  She thought hard before she said, “It was her nature, Clodagh. You can not change a creature’s nature.”

  I picked up the little book from the table where Mrs. O’Dare had put it. Inside were three simple illustrations. The first was of a seal lying on a rock. The second of a blond woman climbing out of the sealskin. The third of the same woman standing naked beside the sealskin.

  I thought of my mother sitting alone at night in the kitchen with the sods burning and the little window open to the cold. She had once made a dim, buried cave of this room to suckle my sister and me.

  I was filled with an amorphous yearning for my mother and an uneasy curiosity that would grow in me like an affliction.

  • • •

  It was summer and warm air blew in from the sea. Mrs. O’Dare moved out of the house and in with her sister in Bray, who had sprained an ankle, but she came every morning to see to things, and left each night after the washing up.

  One evening near dark Mrs. O’Dare was baking a meat pie in the kitchen by the light of a paraffin lamp. The aroma of the food and the dim light traveled up the hall and to the vestibule where I stood watching my mother through the parlor door. She had opened the top drawer of her dresser and was stirring things about until she withdrew a jeweled comb that she pressed into her hair before the mirror. The top buttons of her dress were open and she ran her hand over her breastbone, then toyed with a bit of loo
sened ribbon. She leaned into the mirror, a strange excitement on her face as she whispered to herself so softly she barely moved her lips.

  The main door was open and on a gust of wind I smelled the summer fires of the tinkers newly camped in the north field.

  That night after the meal my mother did not come to bed but sat on the porch humming. She’d opened all the windows in the house and every few minutes the curtains would stir and once they flew almost horizontally into the room and somewhere from the back hall I heard a door slam.

  I was afraid to sleep with my mother so wistful. So easily could she have slipped like a shadow into the waves of the night sea.

  • • •

  The next morning she got up in the early dark. I followed her to the kitchen where she lit the kettle. I opened the little smoke window for her as she lay rashers in the pan, stirring them with the fork as they cooked, the smell of bacon passing across the expanse of rooms in the cross ventilation. After she removed the bacon she left the grease to sizzle, cracking three eggs into it where they bubbled and popped and fried up with ruffled edges.

  She seemed that morning full of a confused, well-meaning urgency, and she watched me eat as if she were trying to remember something, encouraging me to sop bits of bread into the dripping yolks.

  When Mrs. O’Dare came in she ate with her fingers until the old woman was on her to use cutlery. It was the first time since Mare had died I saw her looking to incite Mrs. O’Dare’s remonstrances. Everything that was left she ate with her fingers, including an egg gone cold in the pan, the fat around it whitened like pond ice.

  • • •

  But later in the day when the tinker fires began again her mind was elsewhere. She dressed herself and went out for a long walk toward the Wicklow Mountains.

  She came home late that night and made a show of undressing and coming to bed. Rain was hitting the window hard when I fell asleep.

  In the wee hours her place beside me was empty. I got up to go to the lavatory and noticed that she had a bit of a fire burning in the kitchen hearth, and set up before it was the old folding bed that she used sometimes if one of us was ill and needed the warmth of the turf fire.

  Returning to bed I felt a cold rush of air, a barge of shadow moving past me just outside the door to the parlor. I slipped behind the door, my heart pounding. I waited a few moments until I heard the faint sound of my mother’s laughter from the kitchen.

  The smell left in the wake of the shadow was somehow familiar to me. Dampness and horses and peat. It had come and gone before, I thought, though I could not have said when. A soft barrage of impressions that had the feel of dream residue.

  I had a sudden clear flash of memory: I must have been very small because I was in my mother’s arms, with just a bit of flickering red light illuminating her. I remembered her heart quickening at the approach of the smell and the shadow.

  My mother laughed softly again in the kitchen. Concealed in darkness I walked into the hallway. I saw the large shadow merge with hers. I heard my mother take in her breath.

  There was muffled laughter. “Stop,” she said softly “Stop.” The bedsprings complained as if under a great weight.

  “Sssshhh,” my mother said as if she were talking to the bed. The deep animal timbre of the other voice sounded muffled as if he were speaking into her neck or hair and the bedsprings began lapping like water at the wall as if the room had somehow been flooded.

  And then the soft cries began. The cries I could not understand, the two voices growing indistinguishable. It sounded as if they were caught in some mutual struggle, a sadness building between them. I felt then that what they were doing was terribly dangerous and I wanted to scream out and tell them to stop. But I was polarized, afraid that if I startled her my mother might slip away with him into his animal darkness and never return.

  And when I thought I could no longer bear it and that the world itself might end, everything stopped.

  The lowing animal voice said, “Bless us, Mother of God.”

  I peered into the room, and in the turf light saw a big man lying on his back in disheveled clothing, his shirt open. My mother lay with one side of her face pressed to his bare chest, one naked arm and leg draped across his body.

  For a brief moment he turned his face away from her so that his forehead and eyes were faintly illuminated, and from his expression it seemed the sadness of the world was upon him.

  • • •

  The next morning while she stood over the stove poking at the bacon as it fried, I said to her, “I saw the man.”

  “What, Clodagh?” she asked.

  “I saw the man who was here.”

  She stood without breathing a moment then crouched before me, holding my shoulders, her face shining with cooking. “The one you saw was the ghost of your father. Ghosts of men are noisy, clumsy things and they come and go in death the way they do in life.”

  I was moved by the proximity of her face to mine, and by her earnestness.

  “Just the ghost of your dead father, love.” Her voice warbled and she touched my temple with her fingertips. “Ye should not tell the old Missus. Ah, there’s a good girl. An old ghost gets lonely again for the world. Do ye hear me, love? It’s our secret about the ghost.”

  “What were you doing with the ghost?” I asked.

  She paused. “Comforting the poor creature,” she said.

  “He was very sad,” I said.

  “Yes, he was,” she said, taking me in her arms.

  At the threshold of tears, I asked her, “Are you going to go away with the ghost?”

  She held me at arm’s length and cried, “No, lass!”

  “The ghost left muddy footprints in the vestibule,” Mrs. O’Dare said, having suddenly appeared from the hallway. She crossed her arms and looked indignantly at my mother, who faced her a moment before storming past.

  “What’s wrong, Missus?” I asked.

  “Nothing, lass. I’m just sorry to hear that your mother is consorting with the dead.”

  • • •

  It was that same day, with things uneasy between my mother and Mrs. O’Dare, that the old woman received a telephone call from Lily Sheehy in the west. We’d heard from the aunts once before Mare had died and after they’d gotten the first bill for the repairs on the house. Mrs. O’Dare had defended the expenses, describing the collapsing walls and unlivable conditions. “You told me, Miss Sheehy, to oversee things here. The conditions were dire. Dire!” Mrs. O’Dare had cried.

  Lily Sheehy had said then that they would come to see the house; that it had been too long anyway, and in a more apologetic tone said that they’d been meaning now for a very long time to meet Frank’s daughters.

  “I told them you were both the image of their dead brother, just to stick the knife in!” Mrs. O’Dare had told Mare and me at the time. “They don’t behave like family at all.” But the aunts never came.

  Now, Lily Sheehy called to let us know that their plans were definite, and they’d be here in two days.

  • • •

  Later I heard my mother arguing with Mrs. O’Dare in the kitchen. “This is my bleedin’ house, Missus, and it’s thanks to me alone that you have a roof o’ your own and praities enough to keep you fat.”

  “You’ll give up your bucking if you want to keep this great edifice over you,” Mrs. O’Dare said with gravity. “You better take care to keep your place here.”

  “Leave off on me, Missus.”

  “Don’t get careless, Agatha, now that your wee lass is gone. You’ve still got another to think about.”

  My mother stormed up the hall and slammed the parlor door behind her. A little while later she left the house with her jacket on and a basket on her arm.

  “Don’t be seen in the tinker camps!” Mrs. O’Dare cried.

  “I’m not going to the bleedin’ tinkers!” she cried out. “I’m goin’ to Mrs. Rafferty’s shop.”

  • • •

  She came home later t
hat day from Mrs. Rafferty’s with a blue platter, which she placed standing up against the shelfback in the linen closet.

  I heard her that night rearranging the cabinet. I got up once for a glass of water and saw her in candlelight, holding the blue platter in her hands, admiring it.

  • • •

  When my aunts came to Mercymount Strand, they were stunned by the lack of furniture, and my mother feebly explained that the house was too big for her. Mrs. O’Dare and I had moved the great couch from the parlor into the piano room, and dressed it in the nicest bedding we had, some green and beige striped Irish linens.

  When they asked for the key to the upper floors, my mother was resistant about giving it to them. She said that the repairs done up there were bare bones, only things absolutely necessary to save the main living area. There was nothing much to see but empty rooms in need of paint.

  But they insisted and Mrs. O’Dare took them up. I stood at the foot of the stairs, stale, forlorn air descending from the open door.

  • • •

  The first afternoon with the aunts there was awkward. I’d run into them in the hallway or the foyer, their expressions serious, appalled. The impression of them was everywhere, fierce shadowy archangels whose strain and disapproval wafted through the rooms of the house like sea air.

  I was afraid, in awe of my aunts, yet I wanted them to like me. Lily Sheehy, heavyset with light hair swept carefully over her ears like the feathers of a dead bird, seemed sterner than her nervous sister. Yet she treated me with a reserved kindness. I went up to her once and touched the gold crucifix she wore around her neck. I turned it in the light, a tender feeling passing between us.

  Kitty Sheehy, thin and with iron-gray pincurls framing her face, was overanimated around me. She’d brought me a puppet, a red velvety queen with a papier-mâché head, which she worked with her hand, opening and closing its arms with her fingers, speaking in a high-pitched, squeaky voice: “Isn’t Clodagh Sheehy a pretty girl?” “Little Clodagh Sheehy” this and that. Her face grew red with the exertion of her game. She’d stop suddenly to recover her breath, extricating the puppet from her hand.