The Nature of Water and Air Page 6

  “That Kitty Sheehy,” Mrs. O’Dare had said to me in private. “A voice of violets and a heart of briars.”

  Still I tried to make her like me, feeling my mother’s disapproval once when she walked into the parlor and found me on Kitty’s lap, my arms around her neck.

  • • •

  The aunts stood together in the kitchen going through the cabinets and cupboards, commenting to each other under their breath. Upon opening my mother’s china closet and examining the great cache of chipped, discolored and unmatching crockery, and a few broken ones that my mother’d left there with the intention of repairing, Aunt Lily shook her head and said to Aunt Kitty, “It’s what she comes from.” I thought of the wild girl living in the cove. The girl who preferred to urinate in the grass. Did my aunts know if she was a selkie?

  They sent Mrs. O’Dare to the shops for mutton and vegetables and ingredients for a gravy and a fruit compote. They oversaw her cooking all afternoon, Kitty Sheehy giving nervous instructions, undertaking the chopping of the apples into cubes, getting exasperated from time to time with the poor overwhelmed Mrs. O’Dare, who had grown unused to such demands.

  A table was set with a cloth. Two forks and two glasses at each place. Candles were lit and Mrs. O’Dare was instructed to refill the water glasses whenever they were down to half. Aunt Kitty served a wobbling blancmange with silver implements that none of us had seen before and decided later that she must have brought with her.

  • • •

  I felt ashamed of my curiosity. But I could not stifle it. I approached my aunts while they sat alone in the foyer chairs drinking tea.

  “Where did my mother live when she was a little girl?” I addressed the question to Aunt Lily. She fixed my eyes as I spoke to her, her nostrils flaring slightly as if I were asking something distasteful.

  They exchanged looks and during their silence I felt my face going warm.

  Aunt Kitty’s eyes darted back and forth.

  “Is Dunshee the place she’s from?” I asked.

  “Yes!” Aunt Kitty said, smiling. “And that’s where our dear brother, your father, met her.” Her head bobbed slightly when she spoke. She seemed anxious that our interaction be lighthearted. “Dunshee is a beautiful place. A rocky landscape and a crashing sea.” She waved her arm dramatically.

  I peered at her and held my breath.

  “It’s a legendary place,” she went on, sensing my anticipation. “Not far from Drumcoyne House. They say it’s enchanted, the meeting place between the dead and the living.”

  I wanted to ask what she meant by the “meeting place between the dead and the living,” but Mrs. O’Dare came in with the teapot to refill their cups and the three of them became engaged in a conversation about a particular beech tree that looked diseased and what should be done about it. The conversation went on and on. Who might be called. Mrs. O’Dare mentioned the brother of a friend, Mr. O’Halloran, who had experience with trees. She’d ring her friend and ask.

  I sat there waiting for them to finish, but as the tea things were cleared away they were taken up with other questions regarding the yards and the plumbing and some talk about the door being removed from the second-floor landing.

  “How late does the girl stay up?” Kitty Sheehy asked Mrs. O’Dare in a soft voice as if I could not hear her. She eyed me over her glasses that she’d put on to make notations.

  “Clodagh, love,” Mrs. O’Dare said, “It’s ten o’clock. Off to bed with you.”

  I was ready to challenge her but the aunts were off ahead of us, disappearing around the turn in the hallway.

  When I awoke the next morning they had gone back to the west.

  · 9 ·

  MARE HAD, AFTER THE FIRST year of her death, taken refuge in me less and less often. When she had come in the second and third years it was in a flash of sadness or a metallic taste in my mouth; flashes that felt sometimes like kisses, sometimes like assaults.

  By the time I was eight years old I rarely sensed her near except once in Mass when a woman visiting from Dublin played the usually silent pipe organ. The eerie joyousness of the music aroused rapture in me, the light and temperature of the air seeming to change, carrying an atmospheric smell like damp shoregrass.

  Areas of that particular music became caught in my memory, returning for months. I heard them as if someone was playing a piano in a room inside me, thinking and feeling her way through the notes and pauses, moving up to crescendos and lingering there, drawing out the tension as long as the integrity of the melody would allow, before descending and ebbing away.

  The music remained with me, ribboning out sometimes into mysterious variations of itself, so I’d sit unmoving, hardly breathing, feeling little stabs of joy and surprise.

  • • •

  The September I was eight years old I began school at Immaculate Conception, a rambling, decrepit brick building run by an order of strict, intensely devout nuns.

  I was terrified of the idea of being so many hours away from my mother each day; nervous that if I did not maintain my vigilance over her, I’d come home one day and find her gone.

  She came with me the first day of school, wearing a large hat with a satin ribbon that she’d spent the morning arranging and pinning in place.

  When we got out of the bus near the school, a tormenting wind pulled the hat partly loose and she’d had to hold it in place, introducing herself to Sister Lawrence, our teacher, and bending before the knuckles of the principal, who pulled her hand awkwardly away when my mother attempted to kiss it. Three girls who’d been walking by whispered and exchanged a laugh and my mother froze and looked at the ground. A feeling of shame rushed through me as she shuffled off with the great thing tipping to the side, but too elaborately pinned to her hair to remove. The three girls who’d laughed had stopped to watch her departure, whispering as I moved past them into the school.

  Our classroom was in the eastern wing and through the windows we could see the ocean. That first season the weather was always inclement, the windows mizzled with rain, the fog so oppressive I could not see the waves or the petrels, though I could hear them, and the occasional whistle of a steamer moving north to Dun Laoghaire Harbor.

  At Immaculate Conception I would study the map of Ireland, follow the blue lines of its rivers and learn of the wonders of the land: the Giant’s Causeway and the Cliffs of Moher. The Two Paps of Danaan. Dun Aengus. And concentrated sites of megalithic tombs and primeval ruins. I searched for Dunshee along the western coast but could not find it.

  The nuns pointed out beaches and bays where terrible slaughters had taken place at the hands of the English. Glorious near-victories that always, in the end, were lost by weakness or exhaustion or treachery. As if it were destiny; the very nature of the Irish to fall. This feeling of sad inevitability resonated for me in a painful way.

  The hours of our days were carefully divided among classes and prayers and chapel. Our afternoon meal was even monitored by the nuns and though many of the girls were resentful of the constant overseeing, I found myself relieved by it. I was intimidated by the boisterous behavior of the girls after school. They ran and gesticulated wildly as they were released through the gates. Some of them kicked and chased each other, screeching roughly like banshees.

  At the end of the school day, my anxiety to see my mother made me breathless. I sat alone on the school bus pretending to focus on my books, relieved as the bus slowly emptied and moved progressively north, leaving me, the last to be dropped off on the old Dublin Road.

  • • •

  The nun taught us that one could bear anything if one loved Christ; if we understood that our own wounds were nothing in comparison with those He had suffered to redeem us.

  I learned to venerate His Body, memorizing His wounds. The nun said we must imagine them as deeply as we could in order to appreciate what He suffered. I gazed at the pictures on the classroom walls of Christ on the road to Calvary, the fourteen Stations of the Cross.


  I stood before the statue of the tired crucified figure in the reception hall, His head resting on His shoulder, and found myself shamefully drawn, for didn’t He look like my own father, the man I’d seen my mother with in the dark turf-lit kitchen. I averted my eyes from His near nudity until I was certain no one could see my face and then I’d stare at the long, muscular limbs with legs demurely crossed at the shin, both feet impaled with one nail. Bits of paint peeled from His thighs and knees.

  At the hour of the school day when my anxiety was at a peak, I’d sigh and put down my pencil and whisper into my hands, “Dear Christ, please keep her here.” Sometimes I repeated His name in a low voice, waiting for Him to appear to me in His resurrected form wearing a glowing robe. And once, after rubbing my eyes a long time, I saw Him a moment in the corner of the school room before He dissolved.

  • • •

  On a warm, brilliant March day, a month after my ninth birthday, my mother and I rushed together across the fields in the uncanny weather to Rafferty’s to sort through boxes of baubles. She’d promised that I could pick something out for myself.

  I had my eye on a hair comb decorated with green glass shapes.

  “Look, Clodagh,” she said, showing me a rhinestone pin in the shape of a butterfly. “Look closely at this. There’s the body of a tiny spider stuck inside the amber head. Isn’t that an odd thing?”

  But as I took it from her I noticed out of the corner of my eye a rough-looking snuffbox with the painting of a man’s bearded head on it. I was captivated by the masculine face. I opened it, pleased by the cool, woodsy-smelling air that it exhaled.

  “I want this,” I said.

  My mother looked startled by the box. She seemed not to breathe as she examined it, noticing some lines on the bottom that looked like crudely scratched letters. She opened and smelled it, growing glassy-eyed.

  I saw her extract a small folded piece of paper from inside the lid, closing her fingers around it.

  “What was that?” I asked.

  “What was what?”

  “That bit of paper.”

  “You’re seeing things, love,” she said, the color rising in her face.

  “I’m not!” I cried.

  She shook her head dismissively.

  “I’d rather have the box than the hair comb,” I said, reaching for it.

  “No, Clodagh,” she said.

  “Why not?”

  “This is not for a little girl, but for a man.”

  “It’s mine,” I said, the thing gleaming in my mother’s grasp, the man’s penetrating eyes peering up from between her fingers.

  “Let’s pin this butterfly to your collar, Clodagh. There now, look in the glass.”

  I stood stiffly before the glass watching my mother’s reflection behind me, a new pink in her cheeks as she squeezed the snuffbox in one hand at her side.

  I turned away from the mirror in quiet distress.

  “You’ll take the pin now as your gift,” she said, giving it to Mrs. Rafferty to wrap in paper.

  I stared at the floor a few feet in front of her and when I looked up I saw her slip the snuffbox to Mrs. Rafferty and whisper for her to wrap it separately. She told me to wait outside but I hid myself behind an old armoire near the door.

  “Is this from himself, Mrs. Rafferty?” she asked the shopkeeper in a covert voice.

  “Yes, Mrs. Sheehy. The tinker man,” the woman said with restraint. “Sold me all those cups and saucers and this little box.”

  Again there was an expectant quiet between them. “He was on his way to Dublin. Phoenix Park for the fair.”

  I peered in and saw my mother looking at the crockery, touching the rim of one of the cups.

  As we walked back toward the field I asked her why she’d taken the snuffbox from me.

  She laughed, a kind of forced laugh, and would not look at me. “It’s not a gift for a girl.”

  “I don’t care! I chose it!”

  She began navigating her way through the field and I followed close after.

  “It’s my little box! I don’t want the ugly butterfly pin!”

  She turned, using her hand as a visor against the sun. “I told you, Clodagh. It’s something a man would use, not a girl.”

  “Well then, why do you have it? You’re not a man.”

  She dropped her hand, the sun bright in her face, a few insects transversing the air around her. She shook her head as if she’d decided not to bother answering, then started off again toward home.

  “Can I look at it again?” I asked her, and she stopped.

  Her hand tightened around the little package before she unwrapped it, breathing swiftly through her nostrils, a certain humid heat emanating from her.

  I searched the thing uneasily. When I’d first seen the man’s face it had appeared stern. But under scrutiny it looked sad and reflective. I gave it back to her impatiently and loped ahead across the field.

  • • •

  She got up in the dark that night when she thought I was asleep and fumbled in her drawer where the box was wrapped in one of her silk slips. She stood there with her head lowered, faintly visible to me in the moonlight, squeezing the box in her hand.

  The noise of her breathing was exhilarated, full of uneasy expectation.

  The little box enchanted her.

  • • •

  In the morning, feverish about the eyes, she sat in the kitchen waiting for Mrs. O’Dare to arrive.

  When there was a knock I opened the door. Mrs. O’Dare had brought one of her nieces to help her carry bottles of milk and a sack of sugar, while she carried bacon and eggs and tea.

  After the girl delivered the provisions to the kitchen she returned to the entranceway and looked at me with a coldly inquisitive face. I had seen her before. She was one of the girls who had laughed at my mother the first day of school.

  “Hello,” I said.

  “Hello,” she answered, her eyes narrowing.

  A cautious silence followed. I kicked the banister softly with the side of my shoe and the girl gave me a disapproving look.

  “Your name is Clodagh,” she said.

  “Yes.”

  She lifted her head so that her chin pointed at me and said, “I’m Letty Grogan.” Mrs. O’Dare had mentioned her niece Letty to me before.

  She pondered the stuccowork friezes of swirling leaves on the vestibule walls as if they baffled her.

  “Look at this,” I said, opening the dummy closet door. She gasped and stepped back. I felt a little thrill of advantage over her, though I had not predicted it or sought it. “This is a real door, though,” I said by way of reassuring her and I swung open the other closet, showed her and closed it again.

  She followed me into the parlor and stood stiffly looking around, then up at the shadows of the beech trees filtering the sunlight, moving slowly over the high wall.

  “Would you like to see a great blue room?”

  “Yes,” she said, and I took her to the big room at the back of the house, opening the door and entering as if I were mistress of the place. She remained at the threshold while I sallied forth, feeling my figure ignite as it passed into great uneven sprays of sunlight swirling with particles of dust.

  I knew she was watching me though I could not see her. I waved my arms and turned on my heel. The buckles of my shoes glinted like they were on fire, throwing sparks with every noisy step.

  “Come into the light!” I cried.

  But she did not move so I stepped back into the shadows and pointed out the stucco herons near the ceiling. She stared at them inscrutably, then all around the room. We strolled back out quietly and I understood from the manner and rhythm of her breathing behind me that she was unused to such echoes and such cold, expansive rooms.

  I learned from her that she was ten years old, one year ahead of me at Immaculate Conception. She would be coming every weekend and sometimes after school to help her aunt, whose arthritis was giving her trouble.

  Mrs. O�
�Dare and my mother stood outside on the porch talking when we came back to the vestibule.

  “Can you stay with Clodagh a day or two, Missus?” my mother asked in a low voice.

  Mrs. O’Dare shook her head resolutely. “No, Agatha.”

  “Then I’ll have to take her with me.”

  She spotted Letty and me inside and lowered her voice. “Ye should not do that, Agatha. Come, Letty,” she called out to the girl. Before Letty left she opened the dummy door again, pressing her hand to the dead-ended wall, examining the texture of the stone.

  “What manner of madness is this?” she asked in a whisper to the air then walked off after Mrs. O’Dare without saying good-bye to me.

  “Or just until tomorrow evening, Missus,” my mother called after the old woman.

  “I’m sorry, love. But I’ll not do it.”

  • • •

  When they left, my mother went into her china cabinet taking out favorite pieces and setting them all about her on the floor, forgetting to give me dinner. I ate cold custard that had been left from the previous evening’s meal.

  All night my mother haunted the foyer, opening and closing the cabinets, wrapping and unwrapping different pieces of china, loading them into a box.

  In the morning she woke me early and we ran across the field and along the old Dublin Road to get the northbound train. We got off in downtown Dublin at a station near a cathedral blackened by exhaust fumes. The air was damp, oppressive, pervaded by a scorched smell that she told me was the smoke from grain cooking in the Guinness factory.

  We walked awhile up a crowded street until the space opened up and we reached a spread of land, well camped by caravans and ramshackle linoleum and tar-paper houses, figures huddled around little fires that sent up smoke into the gray air. Dogs barked and the voices of children and women called out to each other. A group of horses stood together at the far end of the encampments where some traveler caravans were parked. Now and then a breeze sent the odor of manure in our direction.