The Marriage Bed by Regina McBride

Author:Regina McBride
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Touchstone
Published: 2004-08-15T04:00:00+00:00

I awakened near evening with a gasp. I sat up in bed to discover that the blanket that covered us had grown a velvety green mold.

A dream residue had followed me out of sleep, a feeling of my father’s presence, a faint echo of his weeping, so it amazed me when Manus said, “Tell me about your own mother and father.”

I watched the shadow of leaves moving on the wall.

“My mother used to taunt my father by talking about a boy named Macdarragh who she’d once been in love with,” I whispered slowly. “A boy who died.”

“Why did she do that?” he asked me.

I sighed. “I think she wanted something from my father.”

“What?”

“She was restless. Dailiness wore on her.” It surprised me how clearly the answers came from my mouth; how transparent my mother’s motivations seemed to me at that moment. “They loved each other, but they wanted so much from each other. Neither believed enough in the other’s love. They flailed and fought…. It could be terrible between them, the way they hurt one another.”

Manus went up on his elbow and looked into my face. “Let’s never hurt one another,” he said.

He kissed my temple, and as he looked at me I remembered my father saying to my mother, “You’re leading me the life of the damned.” And she answering, “It’s you, Liam. You’d wear the heart out of a stone.”

In that moment I wished that Manus would ask me how my parents had died. I wanted to find words for it, to try to say it, so safe as I felt here in these hidden garden rooms; so removed from the unsympathetic laws of the external world. Manus would not have seen me or my parents as less than human; he would not have started from me in fear. He would have felt compassion. I believe he saw the expectation in my eyes, yet he did not ask, only drew me in against him, and I watched the shadows of gulls on the wall as they passed outside the room.

Over Manus’s shoulder I could see the book on the floor where it lay open, and I read the words:

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