The Butterfly Cabinet (16 page)

I remember that I did not humor her with an answer.
What one sees of a butterfly in the meadow is a pretty blur, incomparable to what one sees in the cabinet. The colors, the markings, the scales on the wing, each one different, each one unique: the wonder of nature transfixed. To really appreciate the mastery of patterning and shading, the triumph of camouflaged loveliness that it is, that can only be done up close, when the wings are displayed open, when it has stopped altogether. It is a piece of earth made heaven-bound. To look at a butterfly is to remind us of what we are and of what we will be again. To some, the relation between the two seems impossible: the hard-headed grub and the delicate airborne beauty; that such random glamour should emerge from a creature that crawls on its belly seems ludicrous. They are honest insects, butterflies. They may get one’s attention with spots and swirls, great flourishes of color, displays of dazzling brilliance. One does not have to look all that closely, however, to see how fragile that beauty is, how it is held together by the worm that it once was, and will be again.

There are collectors who claim that butterflies can taste with their feet, smell with their antennae, have ears on their wings, see using their reproductive parts. It is entertaining to talk this way, to describe the differences in behavior of insects or animals in human terms, to translate it using the only language we have. None of this makes any difference to a butterfly. It simply carries on doing what it has been doing for centuries, unobserved, unrecorded, uninterpreted. They are not apologists for themselves.

That day at the museum, I offered Edward my hand on parting. He took it in his, raised it to his mouth, brushed it with his lips. I prepared to draw away, say something fitting, thank him for his company. My mouth had already begun to form the words, but a small pressure, his thumb above my fingernail, made me hesitate, and then I felt it, a tooth on the knuckle of my ring finger. A shiver went up my spine. He bowed, let go of my hand and took his leave as if nothing had happened, and I stood there,
gazing after him, in no doubt as to the covert messages he was sending out.

I began to see that marriage might not be a bind, but in fact a way to be free. Mother was more shocked than appeased by the proposal, but I remembered something she used to say: that there is a time for a girl to marry, and if she misses it, through indolence, or idleness, or inattention (Mother’s words), then the chance is gone forever. I knew that Edward was my chance and that I might not get another. I had been counting time. Perhaps if I had seen him on another night, he would have made no impact; perhaps the change was all in me. I think I thought myself ready to marry. I had some vague idea of children: that they would come, one or two perhaps, that Edward would be pleased, that I would love them, naturally, that I would hand them over to a nurse, that they would thrive. I was not in any way prepared for the impact of them, for the exhaustion, the impingement on liberty, their number, their variety, their demands. I have been publicly declared to be an unfit mother and perhaps they are right; it would be easy if it were as simple as that. It would be a relief, in fact.

Have I been a good wife to him? Who can tell? I have produced heirs in abundance, far more than were required; I have managed the house and staff competently enough, if without enthusiasm, for I am not a homemaker. My interest does not lie in handiwork, in arranging ferns in fireplaces or scrapbook keeping, or, God spare me, devising means whereby drafts are to be kept from under doors. The indoors gives me headaches. I would far rather be off, galloping over the whins at Dunseverick, than sit over a piece of beading. Does that make me a bad wife? I think if I had been forced to stay indoors I would have been a worse one. Confinement does not suit me. Edward never wished to be troubled with domestic worries and I never brought any to him that I could resolve myself. I dare say other women in other homes deal differently with these matters. I can only do what I can do.
What I know now is that I have lost him, and it is not because of Charlotte, although her loss has made his irretrievable. I lost him years ago.

What was it Peig said to me that day when she came in the room and found me sewing, my back to the lamp? “You’re in your own light, madam.” I asked her to explain the strange expression. “You’re in the way of yourself,” she said, “working in your own shadow.” My whole life spent in the way of myself: working in my own shade, not able to crawl out from underneath it, obliterating with my own being what I have been striving so hard to try to achieve.

31 OCTOBER 1968

Anna, is everything all right? Are you sure, daughter? You’d tell me if there was anything amiss with the baby? Who was it you saw? Oh, Dr. Shaw is a saint. I’d trust him with my life. And he said it was all fine? Sit down now and rest yourself. Can I? Are you sure? But my hands are cold. Look at you, your belly as round and ripe as a plum and my old hand on it like a diseased branch. Oh, Anna, I can feel it, a little bursting bubble of life moving around inside you. God willing, I’ll be spared to see your baby, lay my eyes and my hand on it for real. God bless you, Anna, and Conor and your child, and keep you safe always.

I saw Conor, when he brought the letter. Oh, he’s a fine-looking fella, Anna, he is. And getting on great at the university, he tells me. Lecturer in education, isn’t it wonderful? Owen would be that proud if he was here. And Peig. She’d be strutting about like a peacock at news the like of that. Sure, he’ll be a professor in no time. Oh, he was always clever. And interested in all sorts of things. I remember him as a wee lad gathering seaweed on the big strand and able to tell me all the different kinds and their Latin names, and what was the word he said to me one day, and him only a young pup? “Algae.” That was it. “Algae,” if you don’t mind!
Oh, sharp as a billhook, he was, like his father and his grandfather before him.

I was told by a fortune-teller I’d have a long life. Me and Bella went to her one day on the Parade for a joke. She had a wee wooden hut near the rocks, down by the Carrig-na-Cule, and a beaded curtain in the doorway. I always remember the sound of it when you walked through, the way the beads all knocked together, the way you felt like you were passing through a solid waterfall from one kind of living into another. It was dark inside; you could barely see her face under the old black shawl she wore. Dark lines ran from her ears to the corners of her mouth and she’d a voice like the whisper of a wave breaking. The whole place smelled salty and high from the seaweed that washed in and got trapped under the hut. Her hands were cold, I remember, and her nails were as thick and tough as horn. She told me I would never marry, for there was a lie in my life. Imagine telling that to a person, Anna. Not a mistake, or a regret, mind, but a lie. Is a lie always something you’ve said that’s not the truth, or can it be something you’ve never said? Can a lie be a truth you’ve never told, not to anyone? Not in the confessional, and not in the witness box? Is it any defense to say you were never asked? I don’t know, but I think there’s a time for telling it all the same, and that time’s not far off.

Well, she was right about the marrying, and the long life. Hallows’ Eve today, Anna, the eve of All Saints. My first Hallows’ Eve away from home, Peig baked charms into the apple cake and the barnbrack, and Madge got the ring and I got the thimble. I pretended not to care but I was annoyed. Peig teased me and said there was no danger of me being a spinster, not the way the boys looked at me, but I would never take the barnbrack on Hallows’ Eve after that and it was right enough in the end, for Madge married a couple of years after, and I never did.

The mummers came, I remember that. The master and
mistress were out somewhere, and the mummers appeared and Madge let them in the yard door and on into the kitchen. Peig wasn’t happy, but she said that since they were in, they might as well get the children down to watch the proceedings, and their eyes were like saucers. First came Rim Rhyme, with his hat all covered in ribbons and a sash and a sword, and then Prince George. The two of them fell to a sword fight that took them all round the table, with the weans squealing and Peig shouting at them not to knock down the coppers. Then the prince got an injury, so in came the doctor, in his tail coat and top hat, to sort him out, and he was a cheeky rascal and had made up some rhyme of his own that went, “I have in the waistband of my breeches a cure for anything that itches.” Paudie gave a big snort out of him and gave Feeley a dig in the ribs, and Feeley was raging, so we can only guess what that was about. Then in came Slick Slack with the fiddle and the griddle, and Beelzebub with his face all blackened with ashes, and Joe the Butcher with a carving knife, and the Wren with his clothes all stuck over with turkey feathers, and last of all poor old Tom Fool with bells on his cap and a bladder on a stick that he gave all the other mummers a good whack with. Then up struck Slick Slack on the fiddle, and such a bit of leppin’ and jumpin’ as there was round the kitchen, legs and arms flying, weans and all, and up on top of the table Paudie put Charlotte and she laughed and danced the whole length of it till the music stopped and the porter came out and they all got supped. What a bit of entertainment we had that night. I didn’t recognize any of their faces, the way they were all got up, but when the doctor started rhyming I knew his voice. I’d have known it anywhere: Peig’s man, Alphie McGlinchy. And Charlotte knew him too, for he was her favorite among the men. She begged to stay up and hear the music. And when Slick Slack started up the fiddle, Alphie took my two hands in his and whirled me round the kitchen, round and round till the whole room swam.

We all gathered round the fire after that, when the children were put to bed, the men telling stories of meeting the dead, trying to scare the wits out of us. And Peig started to tell the story of oul’ Molly that walked the roads. Everybody knew Molly. In the winter, when the sea got rough and the water came scooting up out of the blowhole at the harbor, and the gulls flew inshore laughing and wheeling about above the Parade, the people would take pity on her and take her in to save her from a cold bath in the workhouse. She had a great hand for spinning flax and wool and she got enough that way to keep her going. When oul’ Molly was a girl, Peig said, she was full of spirits and up to all the rascalment of the day. She was courting a young fella, Seanie Hogan, and everyone said they’d be married, but an oul’ widow man, a neighbor of her father’s, had taken a wild notion of her, for she was a lovely girl, with a plait of yellow hair down her back, and he asked her father for a match. Of course, the widow man had a bit of land, and the father had his eye on it, and he tried to talk Molly into taking him, but Molly was having none of the shriveled oul’ goat, as she called him, and she wouldn’t humor them. Well, at the heel of the hunt, the oul’ widow man died—James Thinaker was his name—and that looked like the end of it. The father was sore and said, “Didn’t I tell you! You wouldn’t have had to put up with him for more than one winter and there he is away and you could have been a rich widda and married who you liked!” But sure there was no point in talking any more about it then.

Anyway, Hallows’ Eve came round, and all the young ones were up to their usual tricks and the girls went up to the standing stone and got up a game of the building of the house. They tied pairs of holly twigs together with pieces of hemp until they had twelve pairs around in a circle, and after a lot of giggling and getting on, they named the pairings after themselves and their sweethearts. Then Molly put down in the middle of the circle a glowing turf she’d taken from the fire, the idea being that
whichever of the holly “couples” caught fire first, they would be the first to be married. And when that happened, the girl had to call out in the name of the devil for her future husband to come and put out the flames. So when it came to Molly’s turn, she called out, believing, I suppose, that Seanie would appear. But who was it came out of the dark, only James Thinaker himself, still wrapped in his funeral shroud, and took Molly by the hand and led her away. The rest of the girls stood stock still, rooted to the ground in fear, and when they did manage to stir themselves, shrieking and crying, and went to look for her, they found her wandering around talking gibberish, not able to say where she’d been or what had happened to her but only that she was Molly Bradley no more. There’s them that says that one of the boys followed them up to the stone to play a trick on them, that it was Phonsie Clarke dressed like a dead man that led her away by the hand and did what he did to her. But if it was, he never owned up to it, and it was no joke for Molly. The fright of it nearly killed her. A bit of fun is all right, said Peig, but you don’t mess about with the devil or the dead; stay well away from games of that ilk on Hallows’ Eve night. Then she went out to the pump and filled a bowl of spring water and set it down on the table for the thirsty souls and said, “Away to bed with you all now and get your sleep.”

Who’s to say whether that really happened or not? There was always a point behind those stories we were told. Dark warnings as to what could happen to a girl who didn’t guard herself; keep your coat buttoned up tight; stay out of the dark of the hedges; don’t talk to the tinkers, they’ll turn your head; be wary of men. Staying warm tied in with staying safe without anyone ever saying anything outright. A kind of sorcery surrounded the business of what happened between men and women, a business that seemed very one-sided, that was all about what women must defend and men would steal given half a chance. It was meant to warn us off. It just made us more curious to know what it was all about.

Look at these hands now, Anna: parcels of skin and vein and bone. You can see where my life’s mapped out on them. They’re the oldest living things I know. But at twenty, at twenty they were soft and round. How can a person look at your hand when you’re a slip of a girl and say that your life is already known? How can that be, Anna? Have our hands been here before?