Venetia Kelly's Traveling Show: A Novel of Ireland

  I ate my breakfast, and then I went into the kitchen and retrieved my father’s breakfast and ate it too. When in doubt, eat. In my mind’s rampages did I come up with any cohesive, useful thoughts? I don’t remember, but I don’t think so. Except one—I wasn’t going to get in the car and go searching for Venetia Kelly’s Traveling Show or Blarney the parliamentary candidate or my father or anybody.

  Standing up in the kitchen, I devoured the food meant for my father, felt surprisingly good about doing it, and headed for the yard. All day I kept out of Mother’s way, because I knew that she was looking for me. I headed down the fields, I lingered in the woods, I came back and lurked about the yard—but it was winter and there wasn’t much to do. Ned Ryan had gone off somewhere, Billy Moloney was in one of his “flock off” moods, and eventually, caving in to hunger, I had to go back into the house.

  Mother stood in the hallway, leaning against the doorway into the porch. I saw her from behind—tall as a stake, but hunched and bunched. Her folded arms kept out the world and protected her bruised heart. As I watched from the kitchen door, she moved from one foot to the other and back again like a wounded stork.

  When she turned around and saw me, she began her next attack. And for two more days she gave me no peace. She assailed me in all sorts of ways, with pleadings and recriminations and, from time to time, utter charm. She woke me up in the morning, she came to my room last thing at night, she rose from the table at every meal and came around to where I sat and leaned in over me, she pulled a chair up beside mine. The Welsh, as a people, have determination when they need it, and if Mother wanted to make a point she knew how to do it.

  “He won’t listen to me, Ben. For reasons I’m not prepared to go into.”

  “Are you surprised, Mother?”

  “You could have him back here by midnight.”

  “Are you surprised that he did what he did?”

  “You went out with him. You should have seen to it that you came back with him.”

  All Monday, all Tuesday, I fought her off, still refusing this embarrassing, unseemly task. On Wednesday morning she came to the breakfast table with a face as gray as the fog outside, as bleak as the stone in the walls of the yard. In her arms she cradled like a baby the “Big Ledger”—the farm accounts.

  “Now you have to bring him home,” she said, and tears rolled down her face. “Ben? Ben?”

  Mother didn’t cry; she wasn’t that kind of woman. And I don’t think I’d ever had the thought of what she might look like if she wept. I know, however, that I wouldn’t have expected the sheets of water that I now saw, the helpless crumple.

  “We. Have. No. Money,” she said.

  “What?”

  “Gone,” she said.

  “Where?”

  “Hundreds. Over months and months. Hundreds—and thousands.”

  Like God handing Moses the Ten Commandments, she gave me the Big Ledger. For months, my father had been writing checks, all payable to “Cash,” and he—or somebody—had been drawing the money from the bank.

  “But you keep the accounts?” I said.

  “I only keep track of what we earn and sell; your father does the banking, he writes the checks—I have no permission.”

  And I knew this to be true; not for decades afterward were Irishwomen allowed bank accounts without the written permission of their husbands, and many, including Mother, didn’t bother.

  She sat now and said, “You have to bring him back. Ben, you have to.”

  It was—and remains so in my memory—an awful moment.

  She came to my room with me after breakfast and we planned my clothing. With a notebook and a pencil, making lists of things I’d need, she sat on the bed and fought with herself to give out an aura of calm. Never had I encountered such worry, and it cut into me. This, what an irony, needed my father—he alone could cope with her. She talked as though steam-driven.

  “Every time you see him—and there will be a number of times, because I don’t expect him to say yes immediately—I want you to look your best.”

  But I had my feelings too, and they burst out.

  “Mother, I’m too young for this.”

  “I wonder if I should give you some clothes for him. But of course he won’t need them if he comes home with you.”

  It’s so difficult for an only child to be his real age. My parents treated me as almost an equal. And I looked mature quite early; I’d grown fast and I had broad shoulders. Inside me, however, at that moment, I was no older than twelve.

  “What is your job?” Mother asked me.

  She’d coached me, and I had to say, “I am in search. Of my father. To bring him home.”

  “What is your job?” Mother asked me again.

  And I had to repeat it. “I’m in search of my father and I have to bring him home.”

  At ten o’clock in the morning I drove out through our gates. She said that she would expect me that night or the following night, but certainly no later than Friday, “with your father in tow,” as she put it.

  This gave me a picture of walking into our house, holding my father’s hand, dragging him along behind me. Yes, very likely, I thought.

  My first destination had to be Cashel, to ask where the traveling show had gone since Sunday. It took me three hours to find anybody connected to the hall, and the man with no teeth who had been on the door on Sunday night told me that the show had gone to Mitchelstown for two nights. Then he told me that it was coming back to Cashel “in a few weeks.”

  This delighted me and I drove the few miles home again to tell Mother.

  “Now,” I said, “we can wait. And we’ll both go and talk to him.”

  “No,” she said. “No.”

  Off I went again.

  At five o’clock in the afternoon, the sky over Mitchelstown had begun to darken. On wet roads, the brakes slipped a little down the hills. Obeying Mother’s orders, I found a bed-and-breakfast place, and a woman with warts on her hands asked whether my parents would be staying too.

  It occurred to me to inquire whether other people had booked in; a cattleman from up north was staying, she said, and a couple back from England visiting the wife’s family. But no traveling actors.

  “We’d never let them in,” said the woman. “They’re rakes, they’ve no morals, and they run off without paying.”

  She might as well have pinched my skin. Was this what my father had joined?

  I paid in advance, she said no more, and I went to the room. It felt strange and not at all as good as home; I had never stayed away by myself before.

  The show didn’t even have a curtain in Mitchelstown; while setting up for the performance they blocked off the audience’s view with a pile of chairs.

  As to the acts they presented, nothing much had changed since Cashel on Sunday night. We still had Michael and his somersaults; we still had The Merchant of Venice. I trembled as I sat there, afraid that my father would somehow appear onstage. That, to use a well-plied word of Mother’s, would have been “mortifying.” But he didn’t.

  One thing had changed—Blarney, Venetia Kelly’s ventriloquism doll, had a new script. Tonight he made what he called “a political speech.”

  “Ladies and gentlemen and citizens of Mitchelstown.” He paused. “D’you get that? Ladies. And gentlemen. And citizens of Mitchelstown.”

  The audience laughed obediently at the insult.

  “You’ll all be voting for blarney, won’t you? Oh, you will. You’ll be voting for all kinds of blarney. Isn’t that what you voted for before? For the last four elections you voted for blarney. And you got it. But I’m giving you a chance to vote for the real thing—the real Blarney. And I’ll be elected. And do you know why I’ll be elected? Because I’m very promising. Blarney’s the name, Blarney’s the game.”

  The audience lapped it up. I laughed too—but he made me shudder, with his carved cheeks and the lewd red scar of his wooden mouth, and most of all the way he sat on Venetia Kelly’s knee,
leered up at her, and then leered out at the audience.

  Not yet did I begin to think of her as the voice behind Blarney; not yet did I begin to discern the layers of cleverness and quiet rebellion and truth-telling that lay beneath her ventriloquism. For the moment I took Blarney almost as a real living person. And so, it seemed, did everybody else.

  After the show—and this had also happened in Cashel—the audience left the hall slowly. They chatted to one another in the rows of chairs; they sauntered out, sure sign of a good experience. I dawdled, putting off the difficult hour. The night air hit me like a wet sheet; my heart climbed up my body and into my mouth.

  Again the tall rectangle of light from an open door; again the flashed image of the two women from some nights ago.

  Men stood in that doorway; Michael, the semi-naked acrobat, leaned there, smoking a cigarette, which he held between his ring finger and his pinkie. He looked at me as a cat looks at a dog, wary and yet dismissive. The man with no neck peered ’round Michael, looked me up and down, gave a little whistle, and saluted me as though I were a soldier. They both stepped back into the hall, and one of them closed the door.

  I moved away and waited. Twenty yards from the hall I paced, back and forth, like an anxious young policeman, swinging my arms against the cold air; it was so dank.

  In about fifteen minutes my father came out alone. Straightaway, he saw me. I moved toward him and he froze. He held his palms out flat in front of him as a man might ward off a bear. I opened my mouth to speak—but no words did I have. With the backs of both hands, he flapped a gesture at me that said, “Go away, go away”—not a harsh dismissal, a frightened one, and he stepped backward.

  Michael the acrobat arrived, looked at the scene, and took my father’s arm. The two of them stepped a wide arc around me and walked down the street into a pub.

  I followed, my heart wincing. If I could have clutched his arm, his leg, his coat, hung on to him somehow—I would have done so. At the door of the pub I lost my nerve and the failure clashed with my concern for him. The concern won. I thought, Next time, I’ll bring some warm clothes for him, and his gloves. He looks as though he’s cold.

  Now—in order to rest from that painful moment, which still wounds me, here’s an Important, if Short, Digression. I’ve already made the point that there’s an argument linking the emotions in my parents to the hubbub and hurly-burly of the country. At this point in my story, it all becomes intertwined. So I need to step back a little, and give the context, a nutshell of Irish politics.

  Except for some lingering skirmishes, and some dreadful incidents, the Irish Civil War came to an end effectively in the summer of 1923. I, though still a child, knew enough to feel relief.

  For my family it had so often been local. In one incident, four anti-treaty men—“Irregulars” they were called—abducted a man from the village, a young soldier in the new, official army, and took him to a shed in our fields. They’d begun to torture him with razor blades when Billy Moloney heard the screams, ran out there, and stopped them. He brought the soldier up to the house, and my father took the man to the doctor to have the long slashes on his legs bandaged. I well recall the appalled look on Mother’s face.

  Politically, we’d all had almost a decade to settle down since the last shot was fired. After the treaty of 1921, the same two broad factions, divided and bitter, had remained: those conservatives who still favored the treaty, which partitioned the country, and the republicans, who wanted England’s boots off every scrap of Irish soil. To this day the ideological descendants of these opposing sides in the Civil War face each other in the Irish Parliament. Although much has mutated since then, bitter feelings continued for a long time.

  It’s not surprising that the divide continued; Irish memory is a long thing, as elaborate as a comet, and with as many tails and trails and glowing flares. What interests me, though, is how the politics of my time also identified, and indeed defined, a cultural divide.

  Those who wanted the treaty tended to come from merchant and urban societies, people with second- and third-level education, professionals, old money, of “good” families. In the 1922 general election, led by a gentleman named William Cosgrave, they’d gained the first power of the new Irish state. Mr. Cosgrave had fought in the Easter Rising of 1916, enabling him to say that he had as much right to be called “patriot” as any man. He and his colleagues had accepted the treaty because they felt that was the best they’d get, that England would never sell the million and more Protestants into a predominantly Catholic united Ireland. By 1932, they’d been the largest party in no fewer than four elections, and in order to govern they’d formed coalitions with smaller parties, and could also rely on some maverick independents.

  By law there has to be a general election in Ireland every five years, although an election can be called by the prime minister inside that period, or the government can fall at any moment if it can’t get the numbers to fight off a vote of “no confidence.” Our last election had been in 1927 and another had long been expected.

  The government’s opponents, the republicans, were led by a more famous 1916 warrior, Eamon de Valera, who, all his life, wanted Ireland united, and hated settling for anything short of that. His followers came mainly from the fields and the hills, farmers, farm laborers, men of the earth, and, unable for ten years to win enough votes to become the largest party, they sat on the back benches and smoldered.

  Embers, if not doused, can catch fire again. And they did. In the rural parishes like ours, in the villages and country towns, with their pubs and chattering street corners, in the summer meadows by the riverbanks, on the mountainsides and along the lanes, at morning creameries with their lines of carts, during afternoon harvests, on long Sunday after-church talk with pipes and tobacco, republican passion, stoked by Mr. de Valera and a number of fiery henchmen, built and built. They called themselves the “Warriors of Destiny,” and by the winter of 1931, nobody, friend or foe, was immune to their fervor.

  That’s my nutshell—a nutshell that any day, we felt, could once more fill up with blood. Today, I liken the tension in the country at that time to those photographs of cities at night, when the camera’s flash turns the neon into streaks and colored streamers. No wonder we all went a little mad.

  On the night my father and I had gone to Cashel, Sunday, 31 January 1932, we discussed in the car how the Parliament had been dissolved the previous day. And on Monday morning, after he had gone, I sat at breakfast, as I’ve said, and opened his newspaper. The election campaign had well and truly begun.

  In those days, the front page never carried news, only advertisements and some legal and public notices. The thrust of the paper came inside, and that Monday morning the headlines on page eight shouted about Mr. Cosgrave’s “whirlwind tour,” and his “enthusiastic welcomes escorted by motors,” and his “big audiences.”

  We took the Irish Independent daily, largely because it had the biggest circulation and therefore the widest coverage, and—not insignificant—because it sided with the government, the pro-treaty faction. This gave my father reason to hate the newspaper, and disagree with everything it said, and though not a hate-filled man, nor disagreeable, he liked to have something to loathe.

  I remember hoping that he read a paper that morning. How he’d have bridled at Mr. Cosgrave saying, “We are against Russian methods here. We are against Communism. The State will not submit to either Russianism or Communism.”

  My father’s voice echoed across the breakfast table in my mind, “Nobody-nobody-nobody’s asking him to. Who ever remarked it but himself, the old goose?”

  I found no mention that day of Blarney’s entry into the election campaign; perhaps the news hadn’t yet traveled the hundred miles from Cashel to Dublin. Having looked for all the things my father would have read aloud to us—especially the weather forecast, with its anti-cyclones and “this-this-this is tricky; troughs of low pressure over Norway”—I did find a snippet on another page that gave me
an acute pang, because it was just the sort of item my father relished.

  The “Social and Personal” column reported that “King Boris the Third of Bulgaria is 38.” That would have sent my father off about the place singing in his cracked voice, “Happy birthday to you, Happy birthday to you, Happy birthday, dear King Boris the Third of Bulgaria, Happy birthday to you.”

  Election turmoil, then, was the background against which I had gone out into the Irish countryside to find my suddenly wayward father. The arguments wouldn’t change, with the Cosgrave government attempting to paint the de Valera people as gunmen and Communists, and the republicans retorting with their pressure, telling us to stop being puppets dangling from England’s strings.

  When my father walked away from me that night, I left Mitchelstown. Took my clothes from that flophouse and left. Deep hurt to confusion to anger—everybody knows that path. Against Mother’s wishes, I drove home. In the kitchen I broke a glass because I gripped it too hard; blood and milk everywhere.

  Mother had heard me arrive. Not expecting me, yet expecting me with terrifying hope, she assumed that if I’d come home, he had come too. When I walked into the kitchen and she saw that he wasn’t with me, her anticipation turned to rage. Two of us—enraged, on fire. She shouted at me, Mother who never raised her voice.

  “Oh, God, why can’t you do as I ask? Why? Why? Did you ask him? Did you ask him to come home? You didn’t, did you?”

  That’s when I squeezed the glass.

  “He waved me away.”

  “Did you talk to him, did you?”

  “There were people.”

  “You didn’t ask him, did you?”

  I dropped the broken glass and threw my arms up. Mother frenzied; she came around the table and caught my shoulder.

  “How was he looking? Was his shirt dirty?”

  “Mother, it was dark.”

  “But did he look as if he was all right?”