The Nature of Water and Air Read online

  “She said terrible things about my mother and my father, and she said that twins like Mare and me were the work of the devil.”

  Mrs. O’Dare squeezed Letty’s shoulder. “You’ll beg Clodagh’s forgiveness.”

  I was surprised to see the power Mrs. O’Dare had over her. Her mouth trembled and her eyes filled.

  “ ’Tis a terrible thing to tattle on a soul,” Letty said to me in a wan voice.

  “ ’Tis a worse thing to be a cruel liar!” Mrs. O’Dare cried. “Apologize!”

  I was relieved to hear that Mrs. O’Dare thought it was a lie, and that such a thing about twins was not generally considered to be fact. It amazed me that Letty might concoct it simply to hurt me.

  She turned to me with an anguished face. “I’m sorry if I was cruel.”

  But I made a show of not forgiving, keeping my jaw set against her and fixing her with a cold eye. Later that same day I walked through a pile of dust as she was attempting to sweep it up.

  About a week after Mrs. O’Dare had admonished her, she approached me in the parlor and said nervously, “I want to ask you about something frightful in your kitchen.”

  I hesitated.

  “It’s that little door I found there while scrubbing the grime from one of the ovens.”

  I got up and followed her through the hallway into the kitchen and she pointed it out.

  “There,” she said. I had never noticed it before: a square about three feet high and wide, but camouflaged by the heavy cast-iron range that was never used.

  She reached back and pulled at a small indentation on the side and the door gave way with a huff, and a cold dank smell rose up into the air around us.

  “Where does it go?” she asked me.

  I paused, not wanting her to know that I had always been unaware of it.

  “I’ve heard that some big houses have these tunnels that lead to stairs to the upper floors,” she said. “The gentry didn’t like to see the faces of the servants in the old days if they could help it.”

  We looked at each other cautiously.

  The oven had been set in front of the door and the two of us with great effort moved it enough that I could fit inside. With the bit of light that followed me in from the kitchen, I could see boxes and a few pieces of dilapidated furniture.

  “Give me the box of matches on the stove,” I said.

  She handed them in to me and I crept all the way in and lit one, the walls issuing a black-smelling cold. Before me was an alcove where I saw the old makeshift bed I hadn’t seen since I was much smaller; the one that my mother had set up that night for her and the tinker man. A storm lantern hung on a nail above it, and the alcove turned into a kind of passageway.

  I went around two corners, lighting and relighting matches before I came upon a kind of window of thick warped glass through which I could see the kitchen and the wall I had come through, and Letty’s back as she squatted at the entrance near the oven and began to crawl into the darkness after me. It had to be, I figured, the square of glass under the stuccowork face that I was looking through. It struck me as awful that someone hidden within the walls could see into the kitchen through that glass.

  I heard Letty moving toward me in the dark, drawn to my lit match. She followed me into a final passage where we came upon a flight of stairs lit by a spray of daylight filtered dim and greenish by the upstairs walls. She followed me up the creaking stairs and we stood tremulously on the landing looking down a hallway. The air was cold and rang with a blurred, high-pitched echo.

  “It’s like the bleedin’ walls are crying!” Letty gasped, grabbing one of my hands in hers. “Let’s go back down!”

  “All right,” I said calmly. “But you’ll have to let go of my hand so that I can light the matches.” She clutched the sleeve of my cardigan.

  I stopped a moment before the doorway to that upstairs hall. It was flanked by the heads and trunks of two armless stucco women, each about eighteen inches high. Like the figureheads of ships they emerged from the plaster itself, their hips, thighs, and legs stuck within the wall.

  The figures thrilled me with their smooth, snow-white curves and their lovely breasts. Each one’s eyes were half closed and her head tilted. Each wore an expression that could have been rapture or suffering.

  I shivered with illicit joy as we made our way back down in the blackness and followed the dim shaft of light to the doorway behind the oven.

  When we emerged we pressed the door closed and moved the oven in front of it.

  “Our secret,” I said to her.

  “Yes,” she whispered, trembling.

  • • •

  I looked for Letty in the rooms at the back of the house and spotted her in the music room, humming some nondescript melody, moving lackadaisically as she dragged a dusting cloth over the piano.

  She saw me in the doorway and stiffened.

  I smiled at her and she smiled back uncertainly.

  “I want to ask you a question,” I said.

  “Yes . . .” she said.

  “You say you’ve seen my mother with the tinker man.”

  She paused. “Yes.”

  “What does he look like?”

  “He’s big,” she said. “In old clothes.”

  “What color is his hair?”

  She blinked her eyes and looked away from me and for a moment I mistrusted that she’d ever seen him. “Dark,” she said.

  “Have you really seen him?” I asked.

  “Yes!” she cried.

  “Where?”

  “On the Dublin Road. Talking to your mother . . .”

  “How do you know that he’s the one she loves?”

  “It was the way she was with him,” she said quietly and my heart began to drum. “She touched his arm in a certain way.” Letty touched her own arm and tilted her head.

  “His arm?” I asked doubtfully.

  “And I saw her kiss him!” she said.

  “On the Dublin Road?”

  “Don’t get angry at me for saying so, but if tinkers do the other thing in the bright of daylight, they’re not above kissing for the whole world to see!”

  Tension shivered in the air between us.

  “Will you point him out to me?” I asked.

  “If I see him. Yes.”

  • • •

  We walked into Bray that afternoon to an area at the end of Carroll Street, not far from Mrs. Rafferty’s, where tinkers went to sell their wares. A few caravans were parked at the roadside and Letty eyed the men. None was tall and dark haired.

  “I don’t see him now,” she said. “Maybe another day.” She shrugged and started back to the house on her own. We hadn’t told Mrs. O’Dare that we were leaving and Letty was feeling a bit nervous over it.

  A caravan rounded onto Carroll Street pulled by a big yellow horse with a dirty white mane and tail. The driver, a large man with a grizzled brown beard, parked it and got out, carrying a box into Mrs. Rafferty’s shop. I wandered into the shop after him, feigning interest in a Waterford vase displayed among other crystal glassware.

  “Mrs. Rafferty,” the big man said warmly in a voice that matched the timbre and quality of the voice I’d heard with my mother in the dark, “here is a service out of the Coughlan estate in Antrim. The plates are almost perfect, only one chipped. And that’s the lady herself, Hibernia, in the center among the shamrocks.” He smiled at her, holding one hand open in presentation.

  I watched obliquely while Mrs. Rafferty put on her glasses and examined the plates and cups. The man shifted his weight to one leg and put a hand on his waist.

  “These are fine, Mr. Connelly,” she said, squinting, holding a platter at an angle in the daylight. It gleamed, the color of cream, a frail burnish of gold along its edges. From where I stood I could just make out the central dark-haired figure sitting with her harp. “Isn’t she lovely?”

  “She is at that, Mrs. Rafferty,” the big man said reverently. He showed her a few other pieces he had
with him, including a jelly mold the shape of a slipper shell, one I had not seen in my mother’s collection.

  My heart raced. This was him, I thought.

  They bargained until they came upon a suitable price and the big man took his pound notes, folding and pocketing them as he passed me, and went out the door.

  A man outside yelled after him, “What did ye get from her, William?”

  Connelly smiled and shrugged in a gesture that seemed to suggest that it was innappropriate to yell such information across a busy road.

  As he stood talking to his friend, I ran after Letty, screaming to her to come back.

  “I think it’s him, Letty!” I cried. We ran back onto the tarmac road. “That’s him there, is it not, Letty?” I asked, breathless.

  “Yes,” she said, struggling to catch her breath. “That’s the one, all right.” She headed back into the field.

  William Connelly climbed onto his caravan, his weight causing the hinges to squeak and the whole carriage to wobble. He reigned the horse out, slapping it lightly on the backside with the straps, and it clopped off noisily around the turn in the road.

  He was the barge of shadow. The gentle giant in the dark with my mother. The one who’d left a secret message in the snuffbox.

  “Yes,” I thought, vacillating between pleasure at liking him and fury with my mother’s secrecy and withholding. “William Connelly.”

  • • •

  A few hours later, a lone fire burned in the north field and the smell of it set my mother on edge. I knew she was restless for night to come. I waited for her to leave the kitchen that I might attempt to go through the hidden door. I wasn’t sure that I could move the oven on my own but I was anxious to attempt it.

  But my mother would not budge from the kitchen table where she sat with the jelly molds set out all around her. She flushed when I came in and I felt her wishing me away.

  A flux of anger filled my chest. “Mother, what goes on between a man and a woman?”

  She stiffened and her face grew red.

  “Is it something horrible?”

  “Whisht your talk!” She looked at me warningly.

  “Do you miss my father, and the things that go on in bed between men and women?”

  “Such filth,” she whispered, her eyes narrowing upon me.

  I picked up one of the jelly molds, a deep one impressed with a decorative scaled herring. It was as if the fish had molded itself in silt and then departed, leaving a perfect impression. I held it up to the window and it appeared pinkish.

  “Who gave these to you, Mother?” I asked her. “Was it William Connelly?”

  She stood and began gathering the molds, her hand shaking as she wrapped each one in white paper and began to return them to their box.

  “Who, Mother?” I asked. “Was William Connelly the man who used to come in the dark of night?”

  “It was the ghost of your father, Clodagh,” she said.

  “No, Mother.”

  She looked at me steadily. “How do you know that, Clodagh?”

  “I’ve seen my father’s picture. He was only as tall as you are. The man I saw was tall. He was William Connelly.”

  She approached me suddenly and tried to take the jelly mold but I grasped it to my chest, confronting her with my eyes. “Please tell me!”

  She stood before me, her lips pressed gravely together. I wrapped my arms tightly around the mold and felt my heart beating against it.

  “Give that to me!” She pulled it away and the thing flew from her hand and crashed to the floor.

  For a moment she didn’t react. Then she squatted down over the shatters, touching them gently with her fingertips.

  A jolt of agonized guilt shot up from the base of my spine. I knelt down to help her gather the pieces.

  “Don’t touch them! They’re mine,” she cried, lifting her arm threateningly.

  • • •

  That night in bed she lay on her side, curled away from me. My heart was swollen in my chest, pulsing so hard I could feel the blood at my eardrums like waves rushing the sides of cliffs. When I heard her long, extended breaths and knew that she was asleep, my heart slowed.

  I woke later and found that she was not in bed. From the window I watched the field and the sea. There was no wind and the sea breathed like it was sleeping.

  The next day when Mrs. O’Dare came with Letty Grogan, I told them that my mother was gone. Mrs. O’Dare stared past me as if she was not surprised. “Well, now,” she said. “Have you had anything to eat?”

  I did not sleep that night, waiting vigil at the window and listening to the upper house, but there was only a sweeping feeling of vacancy. I thought of trying to move the oven to go upstairs but I was aching too much with guilt. Trespassing into my mother’s secrets cost too much.

  • • •

  Mrs. O’Dare woke me in the morning when it was still dark and insisted I give myself a wash over a basin of hot, soapy water, using towels she’d warmed before the turf fire in the kitchen hearth.

  She set the table with my mother’s white enamel dishes, the bowls filled with porridge, the pitcher with milk, and we said the Hail Mary to the white steam of tea and butter and oats.

  “When the hound is hungry she forgets her whelp,” she said under her breath, shaking her head, staring at the limited view of sky through the window. She made the sign of the cross. “Praise be to the Mother of God.”

  • • •

  That afternoon when I arrived home from school, Mrs. O’Dare was waiting at the door. “Ah, Clodagh!” she cried out as if she hadn’t seen me in weeks.

  “I’ll stay with you until your mother comes home,” she said. She wore a red scarf around her hair, her face shiny with sweat. A veritable great-ship of sheets and tablecloths and nightgowns blew on a makeshift clothesline that came out the parlor window and wound itself around two beech trees.

  She had put bulbs in all the lamps and fixtures and as the afternoon darkened, the house was so bright it seemed to float.

  We sat down together in the parlor and she kept her legs up. “One must pay old age its tithes,” she said with a sigh.

  The room smelled of pine cleanser and polish. Everything shined. My mother’s clothes were folded in neat piles on the bed.

  “Maybe she’ll not be back,” I said.

  “She will be,” the old woman said with a single nod of the head.

  “How do you know?”

  “She’s tied to this place, Clodagh. She’s still stunned by her luck. Your father marrying her, saving her from the wind and the rain and the empty stomach. She’ll not soon go back to such a hard life.”

  “Did she love my father?”

  “She did, Clodagh, and she’s still in wonder over his love for her.”

  “And what about her own mother, Missus? Why was she alone on the crags in the west?”

  “You know I don’t know the answer to that, love.”

  “But you do know about the tinker man,” I said.

  She fixed me with her eyes. How could she have expected me not to find out? As Letty Grogan had said, everyone knew. She reached into her apron pocket for a cigarette and lit it. She smoked quietly, looking at the window.

  “Does she love the tinker man?”

  “I don’t know, lass.”

  “You do know, Missus.”

  Her forehead grew fraught. “I don’t know much about what’s between them, love.” Her eyes moved unseeing about the room.

  “His name is William Connelly, am I right?”

  “I don’t know, lass.”

  “You hold out on me just like she does,” I said.

  She looked hurt, tightening her lips together and shaking her head faintly trying to think of something to say.

  “She’s with him now, is she not, Missus?”

  She shook her head again.

  “She misses the west.”

  The old woman reached for me, her eyes wide and damp. “She’ll not leave you, lov
e,” she said with too much effort at reassurance in her voice.

  Her pity bothered me. “I don’t care if she does.”

  “Clodagh!”

  “I don’t bloody care,” I said.

  • • •

  It was a smell that woke me. An animal smell, but not the smell of horses. An animal of the sea, a faint stink of kelp. I opened my eyes but did not move. It was my mother, I was sure. She was looking for something on the other side of the room but couldn’t find it. I remembered that Mrs. O’Dare had rearranged everything in the room when she’d cleaned. I heard my mother make a barely audible noise of exasperation.

  She came toward the bed, the smell deepening. I’d smelled it before, I thought. She passed through a slice of moonlight coming through the edge of the curtain and I was stunned to see the garment she wore. A dress of animal skin, silvery, speckled in places, fitted to her body. The hem was fraught with something that looked like fishing net, but thicker, like dark macramé riddled with small shells, which I could hear clicking against each other.

  My heart clamored at the strangeness of it. She squatted down right near the bed and was trying to open her chest of keepsakes without making any noise. On the floor behind her, the skirt of the dress lay in a clump away from her body. I reached down and touched it. Heavy silky fur so rich it left oil on my fingers.

  She struggled with the key. It glinted in the bit of moonlight as she turned it this way and that. I don’t know if she retrieved what she’d come for. I was lying there trying to decide if I should confront her, when she got up and rushed from the room.

  I waited a while before I got up and moved toward the kitchen following the smell of the dress. I heard sounds of shifting and creaking. My heart beat reckless and loud as I realized my mother and the tinker man were in the passage behind the kitchen wall. I pressed my ear to it, their voices all pitch and timbre, his the more driven of the two.

  It was the desperate breathing between them, the sorrowful mystery I’d witnessed as a small child.

  “Christ Almighty,” I heard him say. “Oh, Christ . . .” like a man who had been wounded. She made a low, keening noise broken by intakes of air that made me want to cry. I hated her in that moment. Resented her secrecy. The man, who I now felt sure was William Connelly, seemed overcome, at the end of himself. There was a soft bumping noise against the wall. She made the keening sound and gasped while he cried out to God. “He is the more human of the two of them,” I thought.