Venetia Kelly's Traveling Show: A Novel of Ireland

  You can probably guess who the speaker was—but I hadn’t a hope of getting into the hall. It seemed as though de Valera’s entire audience had simply turned around and gone to hear Blarney.

  In front of the doors they milled about like bees at a hive. Many snuck down each side to see if they could get in at the back, but the single rear entrance had been firmly bolted. The big van and the two cars that the show used stood nearby, also locked and protected, with planks leaning against and all around them.

  Eventually, one of the wide front doors opened a crack, and a man I had never seen before slipped out and faced us. He closed the door behind him, stood with his back to it, and made an announcement in a strong English accent; he had long greasy hair tied in a ponytail.

  “Ladies and gentlemen. My name is Crawford.” Though he said Cwawfod. “I’m a member of the company and I want to help as many of you to see the show as we can fit into the hall. Now we’ve assessed the accommodation, and first of all we want you to form a nice orderly queue, two people side by side in a long line.”

  The people of County Limerick did as Cwawfod asked. It took perhaps five or six minutes, with much good-natured shoving and jostling, and then Cwawfod went down the line, counting. Nobody knew whether they’d get in—until he bisected the queue and said, “That’s as many as we can fit. I’m so sowwy, ladies and gentlemen.”

  Those for whom there hadn’t been enough room went away, somewhat reluctantly but in very good humor. They yelled slogans: “Vote for Blarney” and “Up Blarney.” The others waited until the doors opened, and Cwawfod started taking the money for the tickets. Cwawfod’s eyes, however, were bigger than his belly; many of us were left standing outside the open doors, looking in.

  Cwawfod’s face impressed me; he looked worn and tired, a lonely man. Or so I thought. Maybe through Cwawfod I’d get to my father—without telling him who I was.

  The rain had ceased; the bitter cold had gone from the night. As I looked in and watched the antics on the stage I could see matters a little more objectively. Without question, this traveling show, which was tawdry in many ways, and awkward and goofy, had some magic ingredient. Why else did the audience respond so wildly?

  Venetia Kelly was the magic. I know that now; I’ve known it for a long time. Her presence infused each show, she lifted it above what it seemed to be. That night, she was dressed neck to toe in a long crimson gown that folded about her as though she were a Roman empress. She again spoke a long passage of verse, not from The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, but from Tennyson’s poem about the death of King Arthur—also a school text.

  The silence indoors enfolded us outside; a cough would have echoed around the hills. My eyes never left her. I stood straighter as she came to the moment when the truth is told, when the knight of the Round Table, Sir Bedivere, hurls the sword out into the lake for the third time. He’s been cheating, hiding the sword, not doing as the dying king directed.

  Looking to the door, she spoke the line of the arm rising from the lake waters to grasp Excalibur as it whirls through the night sky, a woman’s arm, “Clothed in white samite, mystic, wonderful.”

  I shivered; people near me made small murmuring noises. Inside the hall, they closed their eyes in wonder and emotion. And I swear that none of us, inside or out, moved or breathed until she’d reached the fading words “And on the mere the wailing died away.”

  She was fourteen years older than me and from a different civilization, another world. My mind, my soul, left that drab patch of scrabby ground in front of the church hall and watched as the three “black-stoled, black-hooded” queens placed the dying King Arthur in the barge, “dark as a funeral scarf from stem to stern,” and took him off to the Heaven of Avalon. Glorious! But—I wanted to be the only one listening to her. With a reluctance that hurt, I began to understand my father’s actions, even if I was being demented by them.

  I wondered again that night who chose the order of the show’s program. Directly after the dramatic poem, we had more songs, more tumblings, more chasing of maidens (a barmaid this time), and the flockin’ tuba. And then came the top of the bill. This time he arrived onstage with Venetia Kelly; she pushed him in a perambulator, and then lifted him out and held him on her knee as she sat on a high stool.

  He told jokes again.

  “D’you want to hear about my friend MacInerney?”

  “Yes, Blarney.”

  “My friend MacInerney—he had a dog that everyone in the pub knew. For years and years, here comes MacInerney, here comes the dog. Then one day MacInerney arrives into the pub by himself. Alone.

  “‘Hah, where’s the dog?’ says the barman.

  “‘Ah, sure I had to put him down,’ says MacInerney.

  “‘You had to put him down? Was he mad?’

  “‘Well,’ says MacInerney, ‘I can’t say he was too pleased.’”

  I recognized it—one of my father’s favorite jokes. Had he provided it? Was he now finding his feet in the land he’d always longed to travel?

  Then came the politics. At first the audience seemed unsure; many of them had just heard similar words from Mr. de Valera. As Blarney warmed, however, they tasted the satire and went with it.

  “We’re a great country,” he declared. “We can do anything. We can drink all day and sleep all night. We can go to Mass every Sunday, and on Monday morning backbite our next-door neighbor.”

  The audience went, “Ooooooooooh!”

  He looked at them, this little wooden doll dressed now in a dark suit and a shirt and tie, he looked all around the hall at them, and I could have sworn that his eye had grown malevolent, and his mouth mean.

  “And look at how great we are at having children. Put your hands up any man here who has fathered more than six children.”

  A small forest of hands rose.

  “You see! And we love our children, we love them so much we send them off to England and America. Vote for me and I’ll send them off younger, take ’em off your hands.”

  The edge didn’t bother the audience; Blarney brought the house down. When he waved good-bye, he said, “I have to go now—there’s a dirty old donkey waiting for me outside, and a widow with a harmonica, and two fellas with flashlamps to guide me.”

  People streamed away, animated, satisfied. I waited, reasoning that somebody would have to close the doors of the hall. As I hoped, it was Cwawfod.

  “Yeh?”

  “I enjoyed the performance,” I said.

  He looked at me suspiciously. “It’s only a woadshow.”

  “I like watching acting,” I said.

  He softened. “Ahhh,” he said, wistful as a girl. “You stagestwuck?”

  “Would you like a drink?” I asked, almost saying “dwink.”

  We walked together like old friends to the first pub we could find. He wore pants so tight I could see the muscles in his legs. The success of the evening had tinged him—he glowed a rose color.

  “It’s wonderful being part of a box-office success,” he said. Two vans, some curtains, a singing acrobat, a tuba player with asthma, and a wooden dummy—and Cwawfod said fondly, “Bwoadway’s where you find it.”

  The pub proved as thronged as the show. We forced a way in; Cwawfod was recognized from his performance with the tickets at the door, and they hailed him as a star. I bought him no drink, never got the chance; the adherents of Kilmallock buried him in liquor—pints, short whiskies, rum, gin—and Cwawfod downed them all like a drinking machine.

  A moment came when I could ask him a question.

  “Where’s everybody else?”

  “You gonna follow us? You can come with me in the wagon.”

  “Do you get new people often? I mean, could I join the show?”

  “Oho, that could be twouble, mate. Geezer just joined us, ’arry’s his name, and now he’s gone, vanished.”

  “What did he do, get tired and go home?”

  “No, mate, vewy mystewious. He’s gone. Into thin air. Disappeared. We’r
e askin’ no questions.”

  Before I could press him, and as a cold tide flowed down my spine, some farmer grabbed him, and soon Cwawfod was telling them about his “gweat woles” in the West End of London.

  Cwawfod dismissed me—simple as that. He next found a lady, began to chat to her, and waved me off. Her name was Philomena and he exulted (mystifying to me in those days), “Oh, I’m going to have my Phil.”

  The chill of it, the bewildering confusion. What had he told me—that my father had disappeared? Disappeared? In obviously strange circumstances? Should I go to the police?

  There’s a noise I make to myself, a sort of “nnnngg” sound, when I’m frightened, and I heard it now. In that crowded pub I began to make that sound—so I fled to the street, the wet, shining street, and heard myself in the night go on and on in that whimpering sound.

  I don’t recall doing it, but I went to the car, started it, and drove out of that town. Nor did I recall parking it sometime later in a woodland lane, off the road and out of sight, and going to sleep. Yet somewhere along the road between Kilmallock and our home at Goldenfields, I went to sleep in the car. When I awoke I knew that I’d been dreaming of the strange hawklike face of Eamon de Valera, and of a white-sleeved arm reaching up from a dark lake. I believe that I slept for no more than an hour. I hadn’t eaten, and in the deeps of the night, panic dropped a rock on my chest and woke me up.

  Where—and how—do you begin to search for a missing parent? I huddled in the car, in my coat, not able to see a thing in the dark. The trees took their turn at raining; each drip from a bough hit the roof of the car like a hammer. It seems to me that I waited—for what, I can’t say. Perhaps for the morning light, because it certainly knocked some sense into me. Though now thoroughly frightened, I sat, and thought, and compiled in my head a little calendar of events. It’s how I regroup my life to this day.

  Friday, 29 January 1932: In Dublin, a hundred miles away, the Dáil (pronounced daw-il, it means “parliament” or “forum”) is dissolved.

  Saturday, 30 January: We hear the news and are delighted that a general election will be held; we hope the government will be thrown out of office. My father goes about the place chanting, “The conduct of public affairs for private advantage.”

  Sunday, 31 January: Missy Casey and her Valentine card to herself. Frost between my parents. My father and I discuss the election as we drive to see Venetia Kelly’s Traveling Show in Cashel. He decides he’s not coming home. I go back alone.

  Monday, 1 February: I break the news to Mother. She asks me to pursue my father and fetch him home. I refuse.

  Tuesday, 2 February: I refuse again.

  Wednesday, 3 February: I refuse a third time, until Mother discovers that all our money is missing. I set off to pick up the trail, discover they’re coming back to Cashel, and try to get out of it all that way. Mother dismisses my argument that we should wait and see.

  Thursday, 4 February: I go to Mitchelstown, see my father, but never get to have a word with him. I go back home and Mother shouts at me.

  Friday, 5 February: They play Doneraile; my father ignores and evades me.

  Saturday, 6 February: They play Buttevant; again, my father won’t speak to me.

  (Unimportant and Very Brief Digression: The first steeplechase in the world is alleged to have been run from the church steeple of Doneraile to the church steeple of Buttevant and back again in 1752; hence the term “point-to-point.”)

  Sunday, 7 February: Kilmallock and de Valera’s rally, and Cwawfod; I don’t see my father; he doesn’t come out of the hall. He has, I’m told, vanished into thin air.

  Afraid to go home empty-handed again, I sleep in the car, wake up lonely and cold, and find myself more or less in shock.

  Now I had to go home—what else could I do? The news not only shocked Mother, it reduced her. In front of my eyes she aged. She sat down and stared at me—just stared into my eyes, diminished in the space of minutes. Was it fear that had darkened her own eyes? Or, if the eyes are the windows of the soul, had her soul just left her body?

  I had to speak. “Mother, you don’t think he’s dead, do you?”

  “It’s worse than that.” Her voice had become as dull as a slack drum.

  “What should I do?”

  She didn’t answer.

  “Should we be making inquiries?”

  Not a word came back—nothing but defeated silence. I had the bizarre thought Is this how soldiers are when they lose a battle?

  “Mother, if … if there was something I knew to do …”

  I sat down beside her. The trap, as I could see, was constructed of discretion and scandal; whom could I ask at all?

  When a wind fills my sails, I go where it takes me—and often with some force. And I’ve been doing it since that morning. I eased myself from Mother’s beaten and mute presence and tore into the kitchen.

  Under Lily’s amazed eyes, I grabbed food of all kinds, slammed it into boxes and bags. Upstairs, I took extra clothes, spare boots and shoes. I raided my own cashbox; I rarely spent money and had several hundred stashed away. From the yard I hauled a five-gallon carboy to fill with gasoline and carry as a spare. Moving silently and with enraged speed, I stowed the car until I figured that I had enough provisions to last me weeks.

  Dashing back into the kitchen, I wrote a note—Dear Mother, I’ll find him—and drove away faster than a rocket. I had a week and one day before my job in the village on polling day.

  Five miles along, the steam went out of me. I pulled the car over to the side of the road by an old stone quarry, and climbed out. I had no plan. Where in God’s name could I begin to look? Not the police. Nor did the show know where he was. And I didn’t want to ask them. Had he left the country? If he’d gone from the area, then there was no point in looking for him.

  We have limestone as our bedrock; it gives the horses good bones. Staring at the winter-gray striations and white rock faces in that old limestone quarry gave me nothing back but misery. Sometimes out of misery—because you have to climb out of it—ideas come.

  So I reckoned that since he’d run away to join the circus, he’d likely stay somewhere within the orbit of the circus. Why would he distance himself from the people he had just so passionately joined?

  Unless he’d had a row with one of them, which was the only reason I could think of for his disappearance. Cwawfod’s “mysterious” reference would suggest some difficulty, wouldn’t it? And if so, my father’s habit was to let things cool down and then reenter. That gave me the first idea of a plan.

  Second, I began to put together the things my father liked to do. He liked to socialize and had a lot of friends, including some who would probably ask no questions if he dropped in and asked for a bed for the night. At this thought, some comfort enrobed me—until the next consideration hit me like a chisel to the chest.

  What if he’d fallen ill? What if they’d taken him to some hospital, because they couldn’t cope with him on the road? And, not sure of their responsibility for him, had just left him there? I can tell you now, and it’s useful for you to know this—those were the moments when I learned how to keep panic at bay.

  I filled the next several days with extraordinary activity. I behaved like “a red-bottomed bee,” to quote Mother. I roamed all over, and as I did so, a kind of guidance began to emerge, like a finger pointing from the clouds.

  Get a map. You couldn’t buy a local map in those days; it had to be a map of the country. In any case maps don’t show which towns have hospitals and which don’t. But I need a map to follow the show. In other words, go looking for him loose and tight, search among hospitals and his friends, and shadow the show every alternate night.

  And so my thoughts went; and so my search began. I hopped back into the car and headed for the city of Limerick.

  More rain; I half-slipped on the wet steps of Barringtons Hospital. At the booth inside the door I made my inquiry.

  “We do,” said the porter. “We do hav
e him. He’s up in the General Ward. Go up the stairs and he’s down the corridor, second last door on the left.”

  I went back out and bought a bag of apples from the woman at the stall. She looked at me with pity.

  “If he’s dying, apples is no good to him.”

  Inside again, I established the “second last door on the left” by finding the last door on the left and turning back. A nurse with a great white bonnet like a sail said, “You don’t look sick at all.”

  “I’m looking for Mr. Harry MacCarthy.”

  “Thank God! Take him home with you, it’d give us peace and ease. He’s down there, that far bed.”

  The relief! The exhaled, gasping relief!

  “Is he all right?”

  “The leg’ll mend but he won’t.” She answered my puzzled expression by saying, “People are born that way.”

  And so he was—Harry MacCarthy, a man with a small face and a shock of vertical black hair. Isn’t there a religion somewhere in which the men grow a topknot so that God can lift them up to Heaven?

  “Who are you?” He took sourness to new heights.

  I said, “I have the wrong man.”

  “Do you smoke?”

  I shook my head.

  “What use are you, so?”

  That wasn’t all he said. If language makes kinship he was Billy Flock’s brother. I said, “What happened to you anyway?”

  “Flockin’ pony. Couldn’t jump the flockin’ wire.”

  I said, “They have to be trained to jump wire.”

  “How the flock would you know?”

  “Would you like an apple, Mr. MacCarthy?”

  “Ah, flock off with yourself.”

  Which I did, my nostrils filled with disinfectant, my heart with disappointment.