The Marriage Bed; A Novel

by Regina McBride

• ISBN13: 9780743254977
• ISBN10: 074325497X
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2004-05-25
• Publisher: Touchstone

Summary

An exquisitely lush and lyrical story about marriage and motherhood, attachment and letting go, set in early twentieth century Dublin.

Hailed by critics for "connecting what's felt on the skin with what stirs the soul" (Elle) and for pr

Table of Contents

In Ancestral Sleep

Mysterium Amoris

The Torment of Metals

Aqua Mirifica

Table of Contents provided by Publisher. All Rights Reserved.

Excerpts

Chapter One 1910Merrion SquareDublinMy husband's mother had decorated the little room at the back of the house with me in mind. It was a room meant for solitude, for revery and prayer, because the face I had presented then, fifteen years before, had suggested a contemplative girl, a girl given to intercourse with the saints. To her I was an unassuming girl, a kind of empty vessel like the Virgin Mary, who would carry holiness in her womb. They were an ecclesiastical family; she wanted her son to father a priest.A fortnight or two after we were married, and before Manus and I left Kenmare in the west, Mrs. O'Breen came to Dublin on her own and furnished this old Georgian house for us. It was then that in a surge of generosity toward me she had the walls of this little room painted sea green and scallop shells impressed into fresh plasterwork. She said that she'd been concerned that I would miss the Atlantic. In fact, after having been cloistered at Enfant de Marie, so far inland, I had grown to find the smell and sound of the waves diminishing.But I never expressed such truths to Mrs. O'Breen. As I never expressed them to Manus.I was up at dawn this January morning, though it was a Sunday, attempting to draw a blue vase that I'd brought in with me from the dining room.The night before, Manus and our two daughters, Maighread, fourteen, and Caitlin, thirteen, were speaking in low voices at the dining room table. I'd come in and they'd gone quiet. When I asked them what they'd been speaking about, Manus evaded the question and began describing a horse he'd seen earlier that day on Grafton Street, decked out in ribbons and bells. There was a winter fair in Phoenix Park, and the city had been adrift with gypsies.I struggled now to draw the likeness of the vase, but my mind was not on it. I'd had it before me for over an hour, yet I had only drawn a few faint lines. I was fixed, instead, on the static representations of water along the wainscotting.Mrs. O'Breen saw decorative potential in all representations of the sea. Here they were, trimming the very room in controlled waves.In spite of the plasterwork, the room she had bequeathed me was stark. The barest in the house, furnished with only a dresser and a draftsman's table more suitable for a child than an adult. The table faced the dresser upon which I placed the objects of my still lifes: flowers, fruit, bottles, and jars. When I'd finish drawing them I always cleared away the objects and replaced them with those that Mrs. O'Breen kept there: a marble statue of praying hands, and to either side of it, two separate pairs of gloves, lying palm up. They were the white novice gloves that I had been wearing the day I'd come to marry Manus in the house in Kenmare-by-the-Sea and the nuns' black gloves I would have worn if I'd taken my vows as I had been close to doing before Manus's proposal. But this morning a rebellious humor flickered in me, and I toyed with the idea of rearranging everything, and relegating the gloves and praying hands to some dim cabinet.In the center of one bare wall hung a painting of the Annunciation in a heavy frame with fading gold leaf. There was nothing grand about this particular Annunciation. No lilies or terra-cotta floors. No sunlit cypress trees out the window. In this representation, only an empty, boggy field and an Irish sky with clouds inclined to thunder.The angel, human looking, wore gray, one muscular knee and calf apparent as he knelt. He was earthbound, without a trace of divinity about him, except perhaps for his wings, which, in the tension of the moment, appeared slightly flexed, and, though his upper body did not lean toward the Virgin in the manner of a Botticelli angel or di Paolo's, he appeared attentive of her.Over the years I had thought of asking Mrs. O'Breen about the painting, but in her presence my natural impulse was to be silent.As she had select