The Nature of Water and Air Page 7

  “Phoenix Park,” my mother said, stopping a few yards short of the first encampment. It was the horses that she focused on first before she raked the rows of caravans with her eyes. The harder she searched the more dismayed her expression grew. She placed her hand over her heart as if to still it, her face unevenly flushed.

  I squeezed the hem of her jacket in my fist and she waved her arm at me as one might dismiss a pesky dog. We proceeded to walk through the fair, searching every booth. Finally she stopped and murmured to the air, “Too late. Too late.”

  I touched her arm. “Mother.”

  Without looking at me she blinked her eyes, a vaguely cross expression wrinkling her brow. She walked toward the nearest caravan, where a table was set up with hats and scarves at its back doorway. She stopped there, examining a green hat with a limp brim.

  In the shadow of the caravan’s interior a small child, a girl, sat on a mat. She had a smudged, serious face. One of her legs lay out before her like something dead, and she wheezed as she drew breath and released it with a sound not unlike the bleat of a weakling lamb.

  My mother, holding the green hat in both hands, stopped at the sound. The girl drew air and wheezed again. My mother’s eyes flashed a moment on the child then moved back to the hat, which she now stared at with a vacant expression.

  “Do ye like it, Missus?” the woman asked.

  My mother pulled herself out of her stillness, making an effort to focus on the crushed green brim.

  “Do ye like it?”

  “Aye, I do,” my mother answered, picking up the pitch of the woman’s voice and her intonation.

  The child in the caravan drew in a hoarse breath and the noise began again. I gazed at her and she back at me before she picked her leg up like a bundle of clothes, then pulled herself along on her hip into the deeper shadows.

  “Fifty pence, please. I can give it ye for fifty pence.”

  My mother did not acknowledge the woman, but seemed to be fighting a stillness that was taking her. Her eyes dampened. I touched her arm but she withdrew it. The child’s uneasy breathing had misplaced the present with the past.

  “Thirty p. then.”

  My mother opened her bag and pulled out fifty pence, exchanging it for the hat. We wandered aimlessly away and farther in among the caravans, her eyes scanning the grounds. She stopped for a few moments then turned to me and said, “Wait here.”

  She went back to the caravan where she’d bought the hat and spoke to the woman. They leaned into each other as if sharing confidences, my mother showing the woman something in her hand. It flashed faintly in the daylight and I recognized the snuffbox. The woman shook her head and touched my mother’s arm sympathetically.

  When she came back, she stared ahead, leading me past the tables of tinware and crockery, and out of Phoenix Park.

  We walked through traffic and went into a tea shop at the station where we waited for the train back to Bray. It began to rain. My mother drank her tea, gazing at a high window of grayed opaque glass, watching the rain run in rivulets. She held the carefully wrapped parcel in her lap, a strand of her white-blond hair stuck in a piece of tape in the wrapping.

  I watched the rain on the window, too, thinking that my mother should not have gone back to the woman at the caravan. We had left, I thought, without stopping to see the crockery or to show our own, because of the disconsolate noise of the girl’s breathing.

  • • •

  For days she was strange, looking at herself in the full-length mirror.

  Once I came into the kitchen and found her, face rapt, mouth moving vaguely as if she were engaged in a conversation. She flushed and got angry when she saw me watching her.

  A few days later a box arrived filled with crockery, each piece wrapped in sponge, heavy white paper and more sponge. They were endless, and various.

  “Jelly molds,” she’d said, trembling.

  “Who are they from?”

  She hesitated and said, “I ordered them myself.”

  But later that night I overheard her say to Mrs. O’Dare, “They were a gift, Missus.”

  Mrs. O’Dare remained silent as if she did not need to ask who the giver was.

  “Nineteenth century, the note says, porcelain,” my mother told her. Many of them were cracked, discolored, and each was decoratively impressed with the forms of sea creatures, like crabs and starfish and herring. Deep and open as dishes, some fluted or rilled along the edges, odd uneven rounds and elongated ovals.

  They were more like seashells than crockery; white and cream colored, opaque but almost transparent with the light behind them, tinged beige or pink like they had once been the living cases of mollusk-like creatures, now perished or evacuated. I imagined the naked inhabitants come loose of their shells, freefalling along the water curtain.

  My mother was overcome by this gift, and after Mrs. O’Dare left that night she held one shaped like a scallop shell in both hands and kissed it; then pressed its cool edge to the hot pink of her cheek.

  · 10 ·

  I WOKE ONE NIGHT NEAR the end of summer with My mother missing from bed. We’d fallen asleep earlier with the window open and now a breeze blew the curtain forward into the room. I saw the flash of a lamp in the field that led to the sea. I stared out until the light moved and washed up over my mother’s figure.

  The walls and boards of the upper house shifted and there was a muted thud of footsteps. Outside my mother moved toward the sea, the light from her lamp partly hidden by her body, except for once when it swept across the horizon like a diluted searchlight. The noises increased in the upper house, then stopped abruptly. Looking out the window I saw a figure emerge from the shadows and run across the field toward the sea, but because it had no lamp, I could not see its true form. I waited awhile but could see nothing else. I opened the curtains all the way and sat down on the bed.

  It must have been hours before I heard her tread softly into the room, my heart writhing with anger and relief, her hair and nightgown bright with the moonlight through the open curtain. She stopped moving, spotting me sitting up on the bed watching her. The silence deepened, and as if my gaze alone sustained her there she seemed unable to move.

  A moment passed and she came farther into the room, holding her forearm over her face, uncomfortable with the incandescence from the moon. She circled around the foot of the bed to close the curtain.

  When she got into bed beside me she brought with her the night air and the smell of the tide. Heated and disheveled and full of secrets, she stirred a moment under the blanket then grew still.

  I wondered over the footsteps, the heaviness of the ghost; how he’d made the house creak. How he existed so solidly in this world while Mare was invisible, no longer engaged in matter. But the curtain between the two worlds was flimsy, transparent. Ancient and as easily broken as old lace. Didn’t the air that blew the curtains of the rooms shift and whisper with the susurrations of the dead?

  “I saw you with a lamp outside,” I said. “I saw someone follow you.”

  “Nightmare, Clodagh. Just a nightmare,” she said, turning under the blanket, issuing the smell of horses and fire.

  My heart raced with awe and fury. Alone in the dark, I had been practicing asking the question: What does it mean, Mother, to consort with the dead? But now that she was back, I was afraid of turning her against me. I left the words to burn in my throat.

  I fell asleep soon after with the word “nightmare” on my lips, thinking of horses; thinking of my sister; of things half there and half not.

  • • •

  Two nights later I stood at the window of the piano room watching my mother moving afield in the rain looking toward the lights of Bray. She was grasping a pewter heart that hung at her breast on a chain, something I’d never seen before.

  The door creaked open and Letty Grogan, who’d been helping Mrs. O’Dare wax the floors in the foyer and the parlor, came in.

  “Look,” she said. “You can see the fires th
e tinkers have built in the fields near the town.” Little tufts of smoke hung heavily on the air.

  “Your mother is a right odd one,” Letty said.

  “What do you mean?” I asked cautiously.

  “Wearin’ those long, lacy dresses. Walking the old Dublin Road with a twinkle in her eye.”

  I peered out at my mother’s white-clad figure navigating the field in the direction of the smoke, her hem dragging after her on the sodden grass.

  “How did your father die?” Letty asked suddenly.

  It took me a while to answer her. My father had always been dead. It was, to me, his nature to be dead. “His heart,” I said.

  She nodded her head. “He probably died planting the seed of you and your sister,” she whispered. “Your father had to be an insatiable man to beget two children at once. It must have killed him.” She peered into my face, her large eyes watching mine closely.

  “In-satia-bull . . .”

  “You do know the things a man does to his wife in order to make her beget a child inside her, don’t you?”

  “No.”

  “I have read in my older sister’s catechism that when a man marries he must plow his wife like a field, working her like earth to plant her with children.” She spoke in a low, covert voice though Mrs. O’Dare could not have possibly heard us from the distant kitchen. “First he takes off all of her clothes, then he examines her relentlessly, then rolls over her and climbs on her and does all manner of alarming things to her. And then he puts the thing he pisses with between her legs and pumps her full of white milky seeds, which are the beginnings of children.”

  I tried to imagine my mother undergoing such an ordeal. If my father had planted two at once he had to have been a man that had known no moderation. My father had died with the great effort, and Mare had remained unfinished.

  I thought of what I had witnessed between my mother and the ghost of my father, but so much sadness had there been in the struggle between them, I was certain that this was not what Letty was describing.

  I felt a twinge of anger at her and had the urge to frighten her. “My dead father has visited this house,” I said.

  “Really?” Her eyes widened for a moment and she seemed to lose her composure.

  “Is he here now?”

  I hesitated. “No. But he could appear.”

  “Really?”

  “Yes.”

  “Does he come and go?”

  “Yes,” I said.

  “That dead father of yours has got to be what’s wrong with your house.”

  “What’s wrong with it?”

  “So creepy and full of echoes. These big old rooms . . .” She looked up at the stucco infants frozen in the ivy, the blue light of evening gathering in the room. “He must haunt this place out of anger at your mother.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Because of the tinker man, of course.”

  “What tinker man?”

  “Everyone’s seen your mother with the tall tinker man. Where do you think she’s off to now? He’s in the fields somewhere and she knows it. He leaves little presents and messages for her at Mrs. Rafferty’s.” Letty Grogan walked into the shadows toward the cold fireplace and ran her fingers along the marble rim of the mantel.

  I remembered Mrs. Rafferty mentioning a tinker, but she often dealt with the tinkers who brought her interesting pieces from estate sales in Antrim and Drogheda. And hadn’t my mother been looking for someone particular at Phoenix Park?

  I looked out the window and watched my mother slowly making her way across the distant field.

  “I’ve heard she’s besotted with him. Let’s pray none of it’s true. I’ve heard that tinkers do it in open daylight like rams and ewes.” She pinched the extended foot of a cherub.

  “Do what?”

  “The strenuous thing I told you about. The body plowing and planting of seeds.”

  “My mother would never do such a thing.” I felt agitated and ashamed. “My mother goes to the tinkers to buy from them.”

  She approached me again, standing at my shoulder and looking out the window at my mother. “Your mother’s a pretty woman and a tinker man’s not above plowing a good field and then bolting. Tinkers don’t wait around to see what they’ve planted.”

  I shot her a furious look, then looked at my mother, who had stopped in the middle of the distant field, her head thrown back in the rain.

  Letty Grogan laughed. “Look at her. She’s sniffin’ after it.”

  “Whisht your talk, Letty Grogan!” I cried. “It’s you who’s nasty and sniffin’ after it!”

  “Don’t get angry, Clodagh! I’m only telling you what I heard.”

  “Why are you saying these things to me?”

  “The girls at school don’t like you because your mother consorts with tinkers even as she puts on airs with her hats and jewels, parading around like she’s the Queen of England, above everyone else.”

  I stood stiffly at the window pressing at the casements with my knuckles, my heart in my throat. I wanted to cry. I wanted my mother near me and Letty Grogan gone. “Go away! Get out of my house,” I said.

  But Letty Grogan did not go. She stood quietly behind me and a few minutes passed in silence.

  Something occurred to me suddenly regarding what she’d said about my father. “You’re probably as wrong about my mother as you were when you called my father insatiable. He didn’t beget two children at once. My sister and I were identical twins. That means we were only one baby split into two.”

  “That’s worse. That’s the work of the devil or a mistake of nature. A mother can never love both of them at once.”

  I held my breath. I wondered if everyone could see this so clearly.

  She walked out of the room, the sound of her heels shuddering behind her.

  • • •

  That night I went into the parlor and switched on the overhead lamps. I opened my mother’s forbidden drawers and started taking things out. Tangled necklaces, beaded gloves, earrings and pins. Folded pound notes and fifty-pence pieces. I found an angel shell that I held up in the light. It glowed like a bright edge of moon. Once, earlier in the spring, my mother had sat at the foot of the bed holding it to her ear, eyes closed, head tilted. She seemed to be listening to the voice of the creature that had once lived within. I wondered how such an eyeless, mouthless creature, a slug or a mollusk or a scallop, breathed, being composed only of salt and mineral and muscle. It must have made an awkward, stifled noise, like the breathing of my sister when she was in pain. The memory made me feel wild and insufficient in myself. Mare was a part of me like my fingers, my teeth.

  I found the little watch with the garnet above the twelve that our mother had shown us one day not long before Mare had died. I squeezed it hard until I felt the thin metal bend. I let go of it, moving my hand carelessly through the mess of things, unraveling a small framed photograph from a scarf. It was of my father standing with my mother. He was frail, leaning on a cane, only as tall as she was. Letty Grogan was right. It had to have been the tinker man I’d seen my mother with years before in the kitchen. The tinker man was the barge of shadow that came and went at night. The one who brought in the night air, that left his smell of dark earth and horses on my mother’s skin.

  I remembered the little portrait of my father’s face that I had studied so carefully after Mare died. I had sensed even then that he hadn’t left a ghost. Not one that I could feel.

  I sat outside in the damp grass that night, watching the fires in the tinker camps and waiting for my mother to come home. I wanted her to find the mess I had left; all the forbidden drawers ransacked on the bed and the floor.

  From where I sat I could faintly make out silhouettes of figures passing back and forth in front of the flames and I wondered if my mother was among them, or if she was hidden in darkness, lying on the damp grass somewhere with the tinker man.

  • • •

  But she did not come home until the next d
ay, and by that time Mrs. O’Dare had straightened up the mess I’d created.

  · 11 ·

  LETTY GROGAN BECAME A FIXTURE around our house on weekends and summer afternoons. Mrs. O’Dare set her to various tasks and while she was doing them she sighed and whispered complaints. I hated her.

  When she’d been cruel to me she had most likely not counted on being thrown so often into my company. Or maybe she had been fooled by my quiet demeanor and had not counted on the steadfastness of my anger. She watched me uneasily from across a room as she swept a floor or dusted a lamp.

  One morning while I sat in the kitchen finishing my breakfast I heard Mrs. O’Dare in the hallway instructing Letty to collect and wash the breakfast dishes. Letty walked in slowly with her head held high, trying to hide her dismay at finding me there.

  “Here,” I said coldly, thrusting my oatmeal bowl toward her. She stared at it and didn’t breathe. She turned to leave the room, probably to ask her aunt if she might give her a different task, but stopped suddenly before a crumbled bit of stuccowork design: an isolated cherubic face, oddly placed there on the middle of one kitchen wall. Morning light hit it through the small window, making it appear vexed. Inset directly beneath the cherub was a thick niche of glass, like a dark, distorted window. Letty put her face to it, squinting and peering as if she might see something behind it. She stood back, shaking her head with disapproval and looked again at the face.

  “What an ugly, uninvited thing,” she said in a soft, passionate hiss.

  “You’re the ugly, uninvited thing!” I cried out loud.

  “Close your bloody trap!” she yelled.

  Mrs. O’Dare rushed into the room. “Such language, Letty!” she cried, grabbing her niece by the shoulder. “What happened here?”

  “I just said that this was ugly,” Letty said, pointing to the cherub.

  “It isn’t just that. It’s what you said before,” I said.

  “What did you say before?” Mrs. O’Dare insisted.

  Letty breathed hard, avoiding her aunt’s eyes.