“Maybe my mother really was a selkie,” I say, watching her eyes. “Maybe Angus lied.”
“Ah, love. You don’t believe such stories.”
“A part of me wishes to believe it.”
“They’re stories is all, lass. You know it as well as I. People make such magical stories to soften the hardness of the world.”
Her words cause my eyes to fill. “How do you explain all that’s happened? Wouldn’t you call it unearthly?”
She looks into my face with earnestness and pity. “It’s none of it outside the realm of human beings, Clodagh,” she says and grasps my hand.
• • •
Mrs. Cleary sends me off for fresh air, tells me to take a walk along the strand. But I stay on the headland, sitting on a promontory looking to the west. The sea below makes me uneasy; its ancient filmy skirts bouldering forth then flattening and retreating.
I feel raw to the world. Even the daylight hurts my eyes. But I breathe it in. Not another soul in sight. Maybe a fishing boat far out in the distance. The movement of the seals in the sea.
When the milk soaks my dress I know Finvarra is crying for me and I am drawn irrevocably back. If he sleeps too long my breasts ache. There’s relief in the fierceness of his suck. I tell Mrs. Cleary that my breasts have ears.
In the quiet hours that I hold him, joy simmers in my chest. Even with all the loss. All the uncertainty. My hair grazes his brow and I whisper, “My lamb. My lamb.”
• • •
One day we hear funeral bells from the Star of the Sea Chapel.
“I wonder who it is that’s died,” I say, thinking of Kitty Sheehy.
Mrs. Cleary goes off into Dunshee to sell some needles and threads and when she comes back in the evening she makes a fire and while the infant sleeps we sit together near the flames and have a cup of tea.
She seems pensive and keeps refilling my cup; I feel her hesitating, holding something back. “Keep that wee one suckling a long time and you’ll not soon get coltish.”
“I know, Missus,” I say. I can hear a guilty timbre in her voice and I realize when she cannot hold my eyes that she is trying to make advice a parting gift to me. She plans to be off somewhere.
‘What will I do if you go, Missus?” I ask.
She laughs. “You see clearly enough, don’t ye, Clodagh? The bells were for Kitty Sheehy.”
“Oh,” I say. “Well, it’s been a long time coming.”
“I spoke to Lily Sheehy, Clodagh. I said to her, ‘I can take Clodagh and the wee boy with me, Miss Sheehy. But it’s a harder life they’d both have ahead of them. And yourself all alone in a great house.’ ”
My jaw tightens and I look away from her.
“I asked her couldn’t she find in her heart a place for the two of you. ‘Clodagh made a mistake and isn’t it like the young to do so, for isn’t it how they learn to live in the world, Miss Sheehy?’ I asked her. ‘And Clodagh’s beside herself over the loss of you.’ ”
“How could you, Mrs. Cleary?” I ask.
“Stop it now. You can’t afford to be proud. You’ve got Finvarra to think about and it’s a shakier life circling the roads and byways of Ireland when he could live in a great plush castle and eat all the trifle and cream he can fill his gullet with. She’s afraid to be alone. It’s written on her face.”
“I’m not really related to her,” I say.
“She knows you’re not Frank’s child.”
“How?”
“She’s always suspected it. But you confirmed it yourself, that last day you were there.”
I said nothing.
“She knows everything, Clodagh. Still she wants you there. Her brother loved your mother. You’re the closest thing left to a relative in this world for her.”
“How can I face her, Missus?”
“Buadhann an thoighde ar an gcinneamhain,” the old woman says softly.
“What does it mean?”
“Patience conquers destiny, my girl.”
• • •
The last evening with Mrs. Cleary, I hear seals barking out on the cliffs. I watch them sun themselves in last light and think of Angus forging a sealskin into a dress.
I remember the weighty silk of it and its unsettling fragrance. I imagine throwing it into the sea, watching it catch in the rocks, twisting back and forth with the rushing of water before a tide washes over and lifts it. I imagine it riding out, water filling its contours, arms opening wide as it descends.
There is nothing mysterious about the dress now. It’s a relic of Agatha and Angus, of their private story. The selkie had grown tired of being human and dreamed of a second chance at grace; “pushing at the seam between worlds, looking for the dark glimmer of an underwater room.”
After everything, it is not my story. I will go to Lily Sheehy, following my child back to the realm of air and civilization, “the sun igniting everything” in our path.
• • •
It is difficult at first, going back to Drumcoyne House with Lily knowing I am no one to her; with all her fears and suspicions justified about my mother’s nature and mine.
She has brought out a cradle with a lace skirt around it and has placed it thoughtfully next to the chair where I am to sit down to tea.
“That was Frank’s bed,” she says, looking at Finvarra as if it is him she has addressed.
She avoids my eyes as she passes me the cream. I lift the cup: green and pink filigree and delicate as eggshell. I take a sip. Lily’s mistrust colors the air of the room like fog.
• • •
I am given the last room I had in this house, across the hall from the nursery. But I keep Finvarra in bed with me.
Most of the night I do not sleep but listen to his breathing. He smells buttery and clean. When he wakes he presses a tiny hand to my face. He bleats at me like a lamb until I draw him to my breast.
• • •
When Lily holds Finvarra in the air before her, her eyes are strange and bright. Her voice climbs an octave, all inhibition gone from it. She speaks to him in a private language, bits of Irish strewn with English babble. “Wee babeen! My puck o’ the rushes! I smilis an rud an t-anam,” she says. And I have the sense that I don’t know her at all, the older, stiffer woman melted down to a girlish, animated creature.
One afternoon with Finvarra asleep in her arms she tells me that he brings Frank back to her. That Frank was like her own child when she was a girl of twelve. “And even though Kitty was fifteen and it would seem that she’d have been the one to mother him, it wasn’t that way. It was always me. I was his little mother and he was my beloved boy.
“I’ve loved no one else in my life as I’ve loved Frank, Clodagh,” she admits, and her face and the tops of her ears go pink. Lifting her free hand, she fingers the cluster of diamonds at her collar.
“They’re all gone now,” she says.
Finvarra stirs against her and opens his eyes. The pain goes out of Lily’s face and it floats as she looks at him.
It occurs to me that she thinks I might leave him with her; that I might be eager to be off again after Angus Kilheen, and the thought makes my muscles clench. I move between anger and pity that she could think such a thing. But why shouldn’t she think it? Like my mother I’ve been frightened by permanence.
She has no idea now that Finvarra is the very quick of me.
• • •
I remind Lily that Mrs. O’Dare knew Frank; that she’d been very fond of him. They’d be able to reminisce over him and wouldn’t that be a comfort to her?
“She’s old and hasn’t much money. She sleeps in the kitchen of her sister’s flat. Couldn’t she come here, Aunt?”
She agrees and telephones the old woman in Dublin and invites her to come to us.
• • •
What I marvel at when I think of my father is his capacity for adoration. His fidelity to my mother; to Sister Margaret Mooney. I remember the boyishness of his posture when he knelt before the Blessed
Mother with the broken hand and made the sign of the cross.
I wonder over the way we lose each other; how a new love only blurs the face of the first love; how in each other’s faces we look for our origins.
He recedes from me. On the verge of sleep my body remembers him as he originally was: the barge of shadow, smelling of horses and fire and night air.
• • •
For days I have found myself standing in the doorway of the parlor, looking at the piano. When Lily is out and Finvarra fast asleep, I go to it and slide my finger along middle C. The note plays faintly.
My hand runs up and down the keys. The piano is out of tune. It is true how quickly sea air seeps through wood, warps the tension in the hammers and strings. I look through a pile of sheet music I left in the piano bench, the more complex pieces I used to play, inscrutable to me now. I try a simple Bach exercise, but am immediately disturbed by the sadness the dissonance produces.
When she thought I was dead Lily bought a record of the piece I played for her and Kitty. I turn on the phonograph, place the needle on the turning record, and hear it crackle before the Debussy Prelude begins. Listening, I try to remember the girl, Clodagh, who had once come into that territory of herself.
• • •
Finvarra awakens, cooing upstairs. I go up to him and see a woman standing over his cradle looking at him. It is, I think wildly, my mother. And then for the flash of a moment, my sister. But she is both of them. And neither. She is the sadness of the nursery room. As I come in closer, my heart pounding, she withdraws, leaving a greenish, ill-smelling light on the air after her.
I ask Lily Sheehy and Mrs. Dowling to make up another room for me; that I don’t like the feeling of that nursery room across the hall. They put me in another wing in a large room that gets a lot of afternoon light. I think of asking Mrs. Dowling for heavy curtains to make it dimmer, but I resist. It feels like an impulse to close out the world.
Rocking Finvarra’s cradle with my foot, I fall asleep and dream of a damp dress trailing from the door. I startle. I hear the creak of a floorboard, see a smear of light. My pulses riot. I blame myself for the ghost, believing it to be something wayward in me that draws her.
Afraid that I won’t be able to protect him, I feel my mother’s ache and panic of the world; of corridors and rooms unlived in. I want to keep Finvarra to me as my mother kept Mare to her. How desperate she must have been those early months, with two of us to care for, and one so sickly. My fierceness for her must have frightened and diminished her; I close my eyes and feel the loss of her like an excruciating emptiness in my chest. The tears run down my face. And isn’t it the turf fire from the buried bedroom that I smell, the reddish light twitching on the lids of my eyes, remembering itself in the heat and blur of all my gestures?
If the apparition comes again I’ll look into its face. I’ll breathe its ill-smelling aura. I will have to learn to soften to it, to live with it at my shoulder.
Finvarra stirs. His hands ball into fists and he kicks at the air. He screeches for me and I am breathless, taking him in my arms.
His eyes search the contours of the room, fix themselves to the headboard of the bed, the embroidery on the curtain. He struggles to make objects into landmarks.
But he tires of that and shifts his eyes to mine. I bow my head over him and together we hear the pulsing of my heart, something that keeps the time between us; a steady drum in water.
When he sucks, he dribbles pearls.
Acknowledgments
Gratitude and love to my editor, Doris Cooper, and to my agent, Regula Noetzli. Love and thanks to my best friend, Sarah Fleming, for encouragement, feedback, and ever-enduring friendship.
I am indebted also to Naomi Trubowitz for her intuitive insights, and to Tom Quinn and Louise DeSalvo for their generosity, Michael Roberts for musical advice, Nancy Graham for early enthusiastic feedback, Ciaran O’Reilly for generosity and friendship, and to Jason Price for copies!
Deepest, deepest love and thanks to my husband and daughter for incredible patience and support.
Much gratitude to the National Endowment for the Arts.
A SCRIBNER PAPERBACK FICTION READING GROUP GUIDE
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THE NATURE OF WATER AND AIR
DISCUSSION POINTS
1. McBride paints vivid portraits of two very different Irelands: one of mansions peopled by the privileged upper class, and another of roads and fields traveled by itinerant tinkers, people with no roots who are “suspicious of houses.” Discuss McBride’s evocation of both the tinker and “settled” lifestyles and how they relate to the themes of permanence and impermanence in the book.
2. Objects are imbued with symbolic meaning throughout the book. Why is Agatha so enamored of knickknacks, trinkets, and jewelry? What do her collections represent, and why is she so fiercely protective and possessive of them? Does Clodagh share her mother’s intrigue with the aura of special objects?
3. Clodagh is loyal to her mother despite Agatha’s often rough, dismissive treatment. Why is Agatha so critical and reproachful toward Clodagh? Why is Clodagh needy for Agatha’s attention, and fascinated by what she perceives as her mother’s “secret life”? In what ways are Clodagh and Agatha most similar? In what important ways are they different? Is their troubled relationship caused more by their similarities or their differences?
4. Angus says to Clodagh: “Fathers are inconsequential . . . . It’s a mother that matters to a child . . . . it’s the mother that counts.” Do the events and relationships depicted in the book support or refute this statement? What does the book suggest about the importance of mothers? Recall Angus’s adoration for Sister Margaret Mooney and Mrs. O’Dare’s protectiveness toward Clodagh and discuss the role of these “surrogate” mothers in the novel.
5. Should Clodagh have been told the truth about her real father? Do all children deserve to know their own histories? How damaging can family secrets be? When is it more harmful to withhold information than to divulge it? How likely is it that Clodagh will tell her own son the truth about his father? Do you think she should?
6. Recall how the mystery of Agatha’s past fueled her daughter’s curiosity and how uneasy it made Clodagh feel that her mother “seemed to have come from nowhere.” What does the book suggest about the importance of origins? Why do we have an instinctual need to know where we come from and where our parents come from?
7. Clodagh’s childhood is literally haunted: by secrets, ghosts, illness, death; by “things half there and half not.” Recall the visceral way in which Clodagh is often inhabited or visited by Mare and Agatha after their deaths. How else do the dead and the living commingle and interact throughout the book? Discuss McBride’s treatment of the spirit world and its relationship to childhood and imagination.
8. How does McBride personify the estate house on Mercymount Strand where Clodagh spends her girlhood? Recall, for instance, the stucco nymphs and satyrs in the hidden room Clodagh discovers with Letty and the secret passageways and hideaways where Agatha carries on her affair with Angus. How do the house’s own secrets heighten Agatha’s mysterious nature? And how does the room with the nymphs serve as a backdrop for Clodagh’s childish innocence and emerging womanhood?
9. Compare Clodagh’s early friendship with Letty Grogan to her later friendship with Eileen at St. Brendan’s. What does Clodagh seek in each girl? What needs do each fill in her life? How does each girl contribute to Clodagh’s maturation, sexual development, and view of her place in the world? Why does each friendship come to an end?
10. Why is Clodagh so drawn to Sister Clarissa, the disfigured nun at St. Brendan’s? What does she mean when she says to the nun “I’m like you”?
11. Recall the pleasure Clodagh derives from her mastery of the piano. How would you describe the role of music in Clodagh’s life? In what way does Clodagh’s piano-playing coincide with and contribute to her sexual awakening? Discuss the novel’s exploration of the interplay between music and
sensuality.
12. The myth of the selkie captures Clodagh’s imagination as a young girl and resonates throughout the story. Recall Clodagh’s alternating fear and hope that her mother is a selkie. How does Agatha’s life story both debunk and exemplify this myth? Why is Ireland a place known for myth-making? What role do mythology and folklore play in the book? Mrs. Cleary, the tinker woman who helps Clodagh give birth, says: “People make such magical stories to soften the hardness of the world.” Do myths make life’s truths and tragedies easier to bear? If so, how?
13. Should Angus have tried to contact Clodagh after Agatha’s suicide? When he learns of Clodagh’s pregnancy, is Angus right to encourage his daughter to “live settled” and offer her baby a comfortable life? Is it wise or cruel of him to distance himself from her? Would it have been possible for them to establish a normal father-daughter relationship considering the tragic outcome of their ill-fated affair?
14. At the end of the novel, Clodagh finds herself back in Drumcoyne House, nurturing her son in the same nursery where her mother was pregnant with her. How do Clodagh and Agatha’s lives mirror each other up to this point? How has Clodagh matured over the course of the book? How does becoming a mother change her? Will she be a better mother than Agatha? How do you believe their fates will differ?
HOW I CAME TO WRITE THE NATURE OF WATER AND AIR
I began this novel as a poem in which I intended to explore the mysterious history and internal life of a mother who chooses suicide. The selkie myth, which has always resonated powerfully for me, suggests a metaphor for suicide because it is about a mother who is drawn to a more aboriginal world, the darker world of the dead, over the world of the living that she shares with her daughter.
In the same way that the selkie is fated to leave her life on shore, the inevitability of Agatha’s departure enshrouds Clodagh. Even when she outgrows her literal belief that her mother is a selkie, Clodagh doesn’t entirely dismiss the lore as holding some key to her mother’s mystery. Agatha, embraced the story and ultimately, she slips herself into it, “returning,” like the selkie, to the sea.
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