Country Girl: A Memoir (8 page)

As I went out to the fair of Athy

I saw an aul petticoat hangin’ to dry

I took off my drawers and hung them thereby

To keep that aul petticoat war-um.

The first book that I recall holding in my hand was a cloth book with pictures and a rhyme:

Hey diddle diddle

The cat and the fiddle,

The cow jumped over the moon,

The little dog laughed

To see such sport,

And the dish ran away with the spoon.

The letters, tall and painted, were like the painted pillars of a house that would never tumble.

Sitting on my mother’s lap, smelling her smell, feeling the itch from the wool of her cardigan, the particular heave of her chest, I studied every feature of her face, which was so beautiful to me, except for the forehead, a map of wrinkles, and on that map I wrote my first words, in praise of her.

Our house was full of prayer books and religious treasuries with soft, dimpled leather covers and gold edging to the pages that glittered when the sun broke through the tiny window in the pantry where they were stacked. There were ribbons of various colors so that one could open a page at random and read the Seven Dolors of the Blessed Virgins, prayers to Saint Peter of Antioch, Saint Bernardine of Siena, Saint Aelrod, Saint Cloud, Saint Colomba, and Saints Colman of Cloyne, of Dromore, of Kilmacduagh and, most wrenchingly of all, the prayers specially addressed to the stigmata of Saint Francis, that he may crucify the flesh from its vices.

These same prayer books are now on my bookshelves in London, and sometimes I take one down and realize how thoroughly they informed my thinking and even my dreams, as my mother and I, huddled close together in bed, recited the words over and over again:

May nothing in our minds excite

Vain dreams and phantoms of the night;

Keep off our enemies, that so

Our bodies no uncleanness know.

There were morning prayers, evening prayers, vespers, supplications, contritions, psalms, and versicals. There were exhortations about pride, vanity, filthy pleasures, the deformity of our sins being so very great they could not be fully comprehended by human understanding. The flames of Hell seemed as real as the turf burning in the fire. Sometimes, if a sod fell out, my mother would catch it with her bare hand to test her strength for the future and possible flames of eternity. Hell was far more real to us than Heaven. Heaven was golden and vaporish.

I would go alone to the chapel and “contritely say twenty Paters, Aves, and Glorias and contritely kiss the Crucifix.” Next it was a meditation, preceding the Stations of the Cross, the dwelling on the Five Holy Wounds, the wound of the left foot, the right foot, the left hand, the right hand, and the sacred side which the Roman soldiers had pierced with their swords, causing blood and water to gush forth. Everything about it was so immediate, as if the image on each gory Station had come alive, and I could almost touch the Crown of Thorns, or the purple garment that was rent, or the towel with which Veronica wiped the face of Jesus, and hear the taunts the soldiers threw at him as they spat in his face. I could almost taste the vinegar and gall that was on the sponge from which he was made to drink.

For home reading we had the Irish
Messenger,
an organ of the Apostleship of Prayer that came once a month and cost threepence.

On the rich, matte, dark red cover there was a picture of the Sacred Heart, arms outstretched, for sinners to crawl under the folds of the copious, dipping sleeves. Years later, my friend Luke Dodd told me that his mother and his aunts availed of this rich matte cover by wetting it with their fingers, as effective as any rouge.

The avowed aim of the magazine was to promote happiness in the home, repel the influx of “hot rhythm dance bands,” and avert the advance of communism, which had enslaved Russia, a country forty times the size of Ireland lost to “that red ruin.”

There were also tips on how to make a baby’s matinee coat with picot edging and how to cast on stitches on numbers nine, ten, and eleven knitting needles for that beautiful Fair Isle cardigan. In one column called “Your Question Answered” all sorts of worries were aired. One reader in great perplexity asked whether the frying of bread in dripping on a Friday constituted a sin, since meat was forbidden, and another wondered if it was indulgent to kiss too frequently the cross that she wore around her neck. The “thanksgiving” columns brimmed with gratitude:
Bleeding from nose stopped, Success of school in needlework examination, Removal of dangerous trees near house, Gangrene averted, Safe delivery of parcel, Good weather for hockey match, Father takes pledge, Money won in sweepstake.

One could read of the adventures of Irish nuns and priests who roamed the world to reach unfortunate heathens desirous of baptism. There were pictures of nuns on rickshaws being ferried across the Han River in Hanyang and walking along a gangplank, with a skyline of Shanghai in the background. These were daughters of Erin, because “wherever a human need had declared itself, an Irish nun was there to meet it.”
Priests, like Christ to the centurions, traveled in blizzards or simmering heat to breach the backwoods of America, the Australian bush, the African veldt, the leper asylums, the cities of China, the Kachin Hills of Burma, the pottery village of Bhamo—places where natives had never seen a white man before, let alone a bearded priest arriving on a donkey or a bullock cart.

The preparations to celebrate Mass in these mission stations had the thrall and improvisation of traveling theater. A portable confessional would have been set up for penitents who longed for conversion, while the altar for Mass was a wooden press, above which hung a dark cloth suspended on a bamboo pole. Two little Hanyang altar boys in their white surplices completed the perfect picture, which was in some abandoned garden, among ancient ruins, overhanging temples, and pagodas, which were infinitely more beautiful than the wooden press, but our God, which was not their God, did not dwell in overhanging ornamental temples. Having celebrated Mass, the priest, using chopsticks, would eat a small bowl of rice, and then set out on his donkey or his bullock cart to spread the holy pasturage in the next distant outpost.

The
Messenger
also carried romantic stories, which were serialized and which invariably hinged on a crisis of conscience. Take young Blanche, “a personable matron of twenty-two,” to whom Aunt Louisa had willed the Honeysuckle Cottage in County Wicklow on condition that she would never marry. Blanche gives up her lowly job as secretary to a solicitor, moves to Wicklow, tends her rosebushes, her apple trees, occasionally inviting a few friends from Dublin to visit her on summer Sundays. She is the happiest Blanche alive, until one day a wandering artist knocks on her door, a man with flashing eyes, poor but proud, and fatally persuasive. “Oh, love, what an unreasoning creature it grew to be.” Unable to sleep, her hair slipping out
of its curling pins, Blanche paces and paces, dreading the bitter fate of life alone, because yield she mustn’t, as apart from Aunt Louisa’s stricture about wedlock, the wandering artist is not a Roman Catholic, whereas Blanche is endowed with an intense spiritual nature and the religious sentiment of her race. At the end of each episode, there would be the heading for the next thrilling installment—“Her Wild Blood” or “A Blighted Evening”—but I never got to the chapter “When the Curtain Fell,” as that edition never reached us, probably because of shortage of money. Threepence seems so little, but there were times when we did not have it. I recall with scalding shame having to ask at the gate lodge for a penny for my dancing class and therefore hating the dancing teacher, with her beautiful black suede court shoes and her calves so sleek and shapely in her navy silk stockings.

One Sunday I came upon a book in a trunk in a neighbor’s attic room. How it got there, I will never know. It was a secondhand book which had been presented to a Mary McDonald as a reward for regular attendance and industry, from the Edinburgh School Board, in 1907. The cover was also a rich dark red, like the
Messenger,
but instead of the Sacred Heart a piquant young woman held her arms out, and in the folds of her red cloak were two blank pages, suggesting the drama of her wayward life. It was called
East Lynne.
It was tastefully illustrated, depicting happy families, father in coattails and mother in long gown with leg-of-mutton sleeves, the blond child the very epitome of happiness. There were 548 pages of it, crammed with love, intrigue, faithlessness, cotton handkerchiefs soaked in eau-de-cologne, distressing dreams, secrets in sachets, and a deathbed scene in which an errant mother, who has returned disguised as a governess to her own children, equivocates whether she should disclose to her little dying son, Willy, her ghastly secret. This errant mother, the Lady Isabel, of fair damask
cheek and luxurious falling hair, was daughter of a profligate earl, who died leaving her destitute and therefore in need of marriage. Mr. Carlyle, who lived in West Lynne, though reticent and mindful of the age difference, loses his heart to her, and Isabel, while not being wholeheartedly in love, esteems him and hopes that love will ripen with the years. As she walks up the aisle of the little country church, in a thin black gauze dress because of being in mourning for her father, she little knows the sickening jealousy of Barbara Hare, who had set her cap at Mr. Carlyle. Two women then cast a shadow on that otherwise happy union: Barbara, with poison in her heart, and the imperiously willed Miss Corny, sister of Mr. Carlyle, who takes up residence with them and begrudges Isabel her happiness and her lovely black dresses, beaded with jet. The couple settle into married life, stroll in the grounds in the evenings, and Isabel sits at the piano and sweetly sings verses from
The Bohemian Girl,
as, unable to restrain himself, Mr. Carlyle then holds the dear face to him, “taking from it impassioned kisses.” Yet shadows loom. Isabel overhears servants talking of Barbara Hare and her former friendship with Mr. Carlyle, and jealousy, like an incubus, takes hold of the young bride. Yes, years pass. There are full moons and half moons, three children are born, and yet Isabel cannot cure herself of the affliction now gnawing at her heart. She falls ill, goes into decline, whereupon a change of air is recommended, and so, alone in Boulogne-sur-Mer, she re-encounters the dashing Captain Levinson, whom she was once madly in love with. As she sits on the sands to enjoy the sea air each morning, Captain Levinson accompanies her, pretending to serve as the anxious brother in the absence of Mr. Carlyle. Soon she is affected by the intoxicating breezes of his attentions, and the symptoms of clandestine happiness are taking root. Her heart beats with rapture, the skies are bluer, the waving trees have an emerald brightness, and she finds herself
increasingly reluctant to separate herself from this dangerous foe. One morning, “taking terrible possession of her arm,” he tells her that if ever two human beings were formed to love one another, it is they. She flees Boulogne and his dangerous sophistries; she puts the sea between them, only to find that he follows, ingratiates himself with her husband, and one midnight—it had to be midnight—a chaise and four is tearing through the English countryside, leaving a household in disarray, servants fainting, motherless children, a baffled husband reading a farewell letter, the handwriting swimming before his eyes, and the inevitable fact that Isabel had
flown
. Here the author, Mrs. Henry Wood, painted the frightful colors and blackness of guilt, addressing her readers, presumably all female:

Lady, wife, mother, should you ever be tempted to abandon your home so will you awake… whatever trials may be the lot of your married life, though they may magnify themselves to your crushed spirit as beyond your endurance of woman to bear, resolve to bear them, bear unto death rather than forfeit your fair name and your good conscience, for be assured that the alternative, if you rush unto it, will be far worse than death.

Isabel is soon plunged into an abyss of horror; the faithless Captain Levinson is in Paris oftener than not, while she languishes, shivering with cold, hunger, and loneliness in a barn in Grenoble. Completely abandoned, she suffers a railway accident in which she is not only disfigured but lamed in one leg. It serves as a blessing and allows her to come back in disguise to East Lynne as governess to her own children, having assumed the name Madame Vine. Clad completely in black, black crepe swathing throat and chin, thick spectacles, and a pronounced French accent, she has to endure the caresses between Mr. Carlyle and his new wife, Barbara Hare, caresses that were once hers. A solitary candle beams its cold rays in a sickroom where
her little boy is dying, while down on her knees, her face buried in the counterpane, a corner of it stuffed in her mouth, the disconsolate mother weeps and weeps, and her former husband, restrained and heroic, remains ignorant of her true identity.

Conveniently, his new wife, Barbara, is thirty miles away at a watering place, and no sooner has the funeral taken place than Isabel herself is struck down, just as her little boy was, and rapidly, helplessly, she deteriorates. Shall she tell him of that which she had never meant to? Throwing out her poor, hot hands, she reveals all and begs his forgiveness. After much deliberation, Mr. Carlyle raises his noble form, pushes her hair from her brow, wipes the death dew from her forehead, and “suffered his lips to rest upon hers.”

That same death dew and foolish intoxication I would find again in the pages of Tolstoy, as Anna Karenina, with her black gown, her rounded arms, her bracelets, her string of pearls, her unruly curls, her veiled eyes, also succumbed to the diabolical and enchanting lures of illicit love. But whereas Anna’s story stayed with me all my life, poor Isabel’s faded. The pent-up scenarios, the cheap thrills, and the manipulation of emotions palled. Anna, at the railway station, about to throw herself under a train, both to punish Vronsky and to escape the malice of others, gets down close to the tracks, looks at the bolts, the chains, the tall iron wheels of the first carriage that is moving up, in order to measure the point midway between the front and back wheels of the second carriage, so as to gauge her exact moment to jump. Poor Isabel, by comparison, is whisked off in a chaise and four in full operatic moonlight.