The Marriage Bed Read online

  For years the neutral waters of repetition and routine, the rhythms of everydayness, had kept me afloat: moving from one simple task to the next, I had acheived a hypnotic steadiness, a kind of half sleep to stave off any outbreaks of emotion. Before I’d received the letter from Mrs. O’Breen, I had usually spent the early hours after the girls had gone to school making their beds and straightening their room, attending to their clothes; sewing and darning stockings, presiding jealously over these tasks, having forbidden Mrs. Daley to undertake them herself. To keep some semblance of power over Mrs. Daley, I had made lists for her. Chores less related to the girls.

  I had no inclination to make her a list this day, and I realized, when she did not come asking for one, that it had been a dummy show on my part. Perhaps all these years she had merely folded it and put it into her apron, not even giving it a glance. I felt ashamed, adrift as I was now in my own house. I hid from Mrs. Daley.

  Moving back and forth in the girls’ room between their unmade beds, I realized that it would be the last time for a long time that I would make them. I put it off and looked out the window, the chimes ringing in the wind, the branches of the tree waving in the morning sunlight. Two months would have to pass before I’d see them again. How would I bear it? And then I’d be with them only a brief time before they’d be gone again.

  Cold air wafted from the ruffled drapes. I gazed at the small white porcelain figures of nuns their grandmother had given them. “Caitlin’s the nun, but Maighread still might surprise us,” Mrs. O’Breen had once said offhandedly.

  My heart beat hard at a clatter of hooves from the street. For a moment, I entertained the magical thought that they had come back, and when the hooves passed, going south, I sank down onto Maighread’s bed, sitting forward with my elbows on my knees, my face in my hands.

  Enfant de Marie. Caitlin might manage, I thought, but how would Maighread? Manus had gone on about how girls with money had a completely different experience there than the orphans. The rooms were nice and kept well warmed. It was a sought-after place, he’d insisted. His mother had gone there before me, for God’s sake, and would she want her granddaughters there if it were not a quality place?

  I remembered how it had been for me, new to the convent Enfant de Marie. In a dark chapel while we’d waited outside the nuns’ office, my grandmother had said to me in a low voice, “Never speak of what happened with your mother and father, Deirdre. You’ve only a hope left in this world if you never breathe a word of it.”

  She’d looked at me with her old, wet eyes, and though she did not repeat those words, I heard them again and again on the heavy chapel air, building in urgency each time so my heart began to race.

  We had already agreed upon a story that she’d tell the nun: After my parents died crossing the bay in a storm, she had raised me herself in Ballyferriter but was now too old to keep me.

  She’d squeezed her eyes shut and shaken her head. “I never thought I’d live to the day where I would tell a bold-faced lie to a holy nun!”

  We’d had to wait a long time for the nun, so we’d knelt at a shrine to Our Lady where the flames of the candles had pulsed and leaned toward us, giving off a warm, pacifying smell of butterfat.

  When we’d been admitted to the Reverend Mother’s office, my grandmother had spoken to her in English, and though I had not been able to translate all of what she’d been saying, I’d seen apprehension on her face. She’d colored like a girl in front of the nun and stuttered, so the nun had looked at me sidelong with a suspicious flash in her eye.

  After the interview my grandmother and I had said good-bye to each other, and she’d left me alone in providential night.

  It was in my early days at Enfant de Marie that I saw it all again: the memory that had been buried under whiteness. It came in flashes at odd moments when I was set on some small chore or another, or struggling to write an English word on my slate. The hot glimmer of sunlight on water, a rare scalding sun that burned my scalp; the little empty boat moored by rocks, its underside a wet sheen of sealskin.

  And when I’d be thinking on it, it was like the outside world and the inner world mixed. The streams of girls around me moved and eddied like water. I stayed in the sunlight, thigh high in the tidepools. “Da!” I cried out once, so a girl said, “You’re da’s not here!” and a group of girls laughed.

  It confused me to hear the sweetness of the girls’ voices at vespers and morning prayer, in conflict with the laughter and whispers I knew were about me. I would not look at them. I hardly remember seeing them that first year except in peripheral. I looked past them or through them, because I was trudging in the water, a sheet of moss stretched out on the surface of a wave like fine green cloth, or gazing off in the other direction, south toward the skellig, the bay beyond as calm as new milk.

  The first thing I learned at Enfant de Marie was that it was safer to disappear into the background. If you were quiet and obedient, the nuns believed you were good. They did not suspect you of harboring a lie at the heart of yourself.

  My bed was separated from the other ten in the room, and faced out to the long stone corridor that culminated at the nuns’ kitchen, where a cast iron oven squatted on four crooked legs like some headless monstrosity. A pulse of blue light, which dwindled deep in its gut, reflected on the windows behind it.

  One evening after the meal, I went to those windows and looked out. On the cloudy glass, I discerned the ghost of a self reflected back, her eyes as intent on me as mine were on her. I was enthralled to see my own face. I had thought my face had changed after my grandmother had told the lie to the nun. There you are, I thought. It became my habit to stand at that window at that hour, but it drew attention to me, and one of the nuns detected what I was doing and ordered me to stop, admonishing me, dubbing it vain.

  The nuns did not allow us to keep mirrors. Girls were even discouraged from trying to gaze at themselves in the sides of the teakettle.

  It surprises me to recall that another girl who had a hunger to see her reflection, the girl I followed one day out beyond the yards past the nuns’ kitchen and behind a carpenter’s shed where we were forbidden to go, the girl who took me through boards and ruins of furniture to what once must have been a massive mirror, now scored with thousands of cracks, was a girl with a harelip.

  Her name was Bride, and she had hair the color of pewter. She showed me how to bend a small bit of the cracked mirror at a crease so that a piece could be broken off that could fit into the palm of a hand.

  We flashed our mirrors on the broken walls and at the stones.

  “Mirrors are magical things that reflect what’s often unseen,” she said to me. A girl who never spoke in class or in the dormitory. A girl who stared at things with an expression of mistrustful astonishment. Except those days when we’d gone trespassing. We sat outside in dead grass and flashed our mirrors at the sky.

  “The only way to see Pegasus moving across the sky,” she said in a slow, dramatic voice, “is with a mirror held at an angle to the clouds.

  “In some ways,” she said, leaning in close to me and piercing me with her eyes, “it was terrible for Pegasus. To be of both earth and air. The horse’s element is earth, but it had the wings of a bird!”

  Her voice grew quieter but increased in intesity so she spoke in a stage whisper, “Worse still is the chimera! An animal and a human confused into one. Mistakes of nature. Two natures in one body. But the Pegasus is a kind of beautiful mistake. There are beautiful mistakes and there are ugly ones.”

  Once, after examining her face in the mirror, she drew her scarf around her mouth and said, all the drama gone from her voice, “Look how beautiful I would be if I lived in Arabia!”

  Mostly we each lived our separate isolations, but now and then we spent a free hour together. One day we took a risk, running like mares into the dead yard, her braids flopping and slapping at her face, my gray skirts tripping me as I went.

  My windpipe ached as I ran, laughing an
d screaming her name. We were giddy that day with disobedience.

  But she was not there long, a few months at most before an aunt came and fetched her. I felt a certain jealousy watching from a second-floor window as Bride held her aunt’s hand, the two crossing the courtyard together. It did not matter that this aunt was not her mother. She was like a mother. She would keep Bride under her wing. The two, I imagined, would be a kind of team, each doing for the other.

  I did not take Bride’s departure well. I told the other girls that Bride was very ill and that the aunt had taken her home to die. I told them to make them suffer. I told them for retribution because they had been cruel to her about her lip.

  I fed the fire of their terror, telling them that I’d heard a finger scratching at the glass at night so that the others listened and were certain that they heard it too.

  They did not sleep well, and I had company in my night wakefulness. I sat up on my bed watching their silhouettes and listening to their uneasy, fervent prayers.

  But hatred could never long occupy me. Anger in me has always been a hay fire that burns wild and bright and goes out quickly. It would not be the thing to save me.

  I was consumed with the memory of Bride, amazed by her. I came to believe that because she had looked deeply at the flaw in her own face, searching out its mystery, she had changed her dire circumstances. I trespassed alone into the yards, breaking odd pieces of mirror and hiding them in various places so I’d always have one.

  One day I sat in Sister Dymphna’s class, holding my little edge of mirror in my hand, angling it up from my lap to try to glimpse my face. But the more I searched the mirror, the more featureless I looked, until what I saw reflected back was the white flurry of weather that had blotted out the memory of my parents.

  “Deirdre from the Blasket!” Sister Dymphna cried. “What do you have there?”

  I did not move or speak, but I would not surrender the mirror. She tried to force it from me, prying my fingers apart, and I don’t know if all the blood between us was my own, or if she had cut herself too in the struggle. Eventually, she extracted the jagged glass from my hands.

  After that day I hid behind my unkept hair, wincing and weeping if the nuns tried to comb it or tie it back.

  This was the place, I thought with agitation, where my girls were going.

  Eventually it had been Manus who’d rescued me from Enfant de Marie. Manus who made me forget the hunger for mirrors and in whose eyes I would see myself reflected back. Where was that Manus now, I wondered? The beautiful boy I had married. Where was he? The boy with whom I had discovered the Secretus Secretorum.

  When Monday morning came I walked as usual to the National Gallery but could not bring myself to go inside. I continued on along the quays and found my way back to Antiquarian Books.

  Once inside I walked directly to the shelf where the Secretus Secretorum was kept. I took it to the corner table and opened it. Leafing through the decorative pages, I passed extraordinary images of night skies, bright with spheres and planets and stars.

  In one, a descending human figure moving through a zone of mist, and the words:

  The water that breaks at birth is symbolized by the white or lunar tincture that precedes the solar reddening.

  Though I could not grasp their meaning, I felt enamored of their poetry.

  I turned onto an etching of Hermes wading waist deep in ocean waves, the sun and moon presiding. I read:

  Mercurial water flowing down into the darkness of matter to awaken the dead bodies of the metals from slumber.

  Everything struck me as full of portent and resonance, but when I tried to clarify what things meant, I could not. The rational mind was not what the words and images engaged, yet I felt the shadow impression they made upon me. Language and configurations from a dream. I found myself swimming through the mistiness of it all, letting my eye stop where it was drawn, drinking in phrases.

  The deeper I went into the book, the stranger the images grew.

  An eagle chained to a toad on a hill overlooking a great city, the heavily robed alchemist walking beside them pointing at the clouds, the words “dissolution or bonding” written beneath.

  Turning the page I came to a picture that caused my heart to plummet. A naked woman, having torn her heart from her own body, offering it to her male counterpart as if she were offering him no more than a rose, the man himself gazing far past her, oblivious. I caught, floating in the midst of the text, the phrase, “the melancholy of human transactions.”

  Just as I thought of closing the volume, I turned unexpectedly upon The Courtship of the Sun and the Moon.

  The first image depicted the bride with the head of the moon, alone in her chamber, sitting at her vanity and gazing at herself in the mirror. The second depicted the bridegroom with the head of the sun, striding with muscular legs across landscapes. In the third image he had arrived at her window and was leaning in. She had seen him in her mirror and was turning to look at him.

  In the fourth picture she was standing facing him with an outstretched arm, and he was midclimb into her window, one leg in the room. This was the picture in which the dove appeared on the air between them. The dove that presages union.

  The pictures filled me with a keen loneliness. I remembered Manus stroking the curve between my waist and hip as we’d looked at the figures, his breath catching as he’d whispered, “Oh, Luna, about to be folded in my sweet embrace.”

  My heart drummed hard and I closed my eyes, remembering how being near him then, every cell in my body had shivered with electricity; how I had been unable to resist kissing his naked skin.

  When I opened my eyes again the afternoon light had deepened and was traveling slowly across Sol and Luna, their eyes locked one upon the other.

  I closed the book and stood. Then I purchased the Secretus Secretorum.

  As I walked home along the quays, embracing the book in both arms, the river was dark, reflecting a multitude of lights.

  When I arrived at Merrion Square, Mrs. Daley had made boiled beef and cabbage, but she said that Manus had not come. I ate a little and she asked about the girls’ unmade beds and I stiffened. “Leave them,” I said plainly. She said nothing, and I did not meet her eyes. I went upstairs to the girls’ room. Mrs. Daley left, and as night filled the house, my mind gave itself over to dark fancies. Alcoves and shelves in the deepening gloom looked like they tunneled into the walls.

  Maighread’s snow globe on the dresser cast an enlarged shadow on the wall behind it, and the snow flurried suddenly in the shadow. A doll on the shelf behind me began to breathe.

  It was after midnight when the door downstairs opened and closed hard and I heard Manus getting out of his coat, his footsteps sounding as he came up the stairs. He paused before the half-open bedroom door, having brought with him the mundane world, the smells of pipe smoke and alcohol; of rain and soot from the Dublin streets. A bit wobbly on his feet, he gave me a bemused look, then dismissed me and moved off to our bedroom. He coughed and cleared his throat, and I heard him take off his clothes and get into bed. Tightness left my chest. In spite of his drunken condition, tonight I felt grateful to have him home, his presence neutralizing the danger that darkness and an empty house had wrought. The house conformed again to daylight laws; the arcane passages dissolving, giving way to benign decorative architecture and white gloss walls. The doll, which I’d fancied breathing, put on an orderly face. The snow stopped moving in the globe. Manus exerted a force over chaos. Manus ordered things into their places.

  When I heard him snoring, I crept into our bedroom and sat down to watch him sleep. He was active in sleep, sweating, the antithesis of the harsh husband he had become. He moved and paused in postures of flight, the supple curve of his upper arm thrown over his head.

  In sleep, his true face returned to him, the past alive in the present. The Lost Manus. My Beloved.

  I could smell again the sweat of a horse that had just been galloping and the aroma of leat
her, hot and chafed.

  Part Two

  Mysterium Amoris

  It is said: Woman dissolves man and he makes her solid. That is, the spirit dissolves the body and makes it soft, and the body fixes the spirit.

  —AURORA CONSURGENS

  Five

  1895-1897

  West of Ireland

  When I first saw Manus in church at Enfant de Marie, we were sixteen. I was faceless then and squeezing a mirror in my palm, hiding behind a head of roughened hair.

  When he passed the aisle where I sat, he left behind the vital smell of horse sweat, a rousing aroma deeper than Christmas pine and myrrh smoke from the swinging censor. In empathic reaction, my own body broke into a gossamer sweat under my woolen clothes. I would learn later that he’d come directly from riding, but for a very long time I would not separate the smell of horse sweat from the idea of maleness. He was rather like a horse himself, with an equine face, beautifully boned, and dark-eyed with long eyelashes and a colt’s mane of windblown black hair. Besides the frail, bald priest, the sixteen-year-old boy I saw there that day was the only male I had ever seen in this chapel. This was a service attended only by nuns and convent girls.

  He was with a woman and a girl whom I assumed to be his mother and sister. He and the girl resembled each other remarkably, black-haired and cream-skinned, though she looked to be the elder of the two. She held herself demurely, keeping her eyes to the altar or cast down, while the boy’s eyes roamed the aisles of girls and nuns, or gazed negligently at the eaves of the church, studying its structure, ignoring the Mass. The mother stood between the two, wearing a dark hat with a veil that hid her face. Yet I could see her strong jaw and chin, and when she lifted her face to look at the crucifix, a flash of her plaintive mouth. Though I could not see her eyes, I read devotion in the steady movements of her lips as she prayed silently. The three were exquisitely dressed in dark woolen clothes, their stately bearing I imagined to be the result of some familial wisdom.