Venetia Kelly's Traveling Show: A Novel of Ireland

  “A man walked into a butcher’s shop.”

  “Yes, Blarney.”

  “Yes, what?”

  “Just—yes, Blarney.”

  He looked up at Venetia, looked at the audience, and shook his head in pity.

  “A man walked into a butcher’s shop.”

  This time she didn’t interrupt. Every time I looked at this doll, this wooden dummy, he seemed to be looking straight at me.

  “He said to the butcher, ‘By any chance do you have crubeens?’” By which he meant pig’s feet, a delicacy in the south of Ireland.

  “‘I do,’ says the butcher. ‘Tell me,’ says the man, d’you find it very hard to walk?’”

  They cheered and whistled, they laughed, they cheered again. Standing at the side, near the front, leaning against the wall, one man laughed louder than any other, a tall, heavy man in a brown suit and a check waistcoat. How I remember that sighting.

  When he—and the audience—had stopped laughing, Blarney said, quite tenderly, “Venetia?”

  “Yes, Blarney.”

  “You were lovely tonight. As Portia. That was a great performance.”

  The audience released a large “Awww!”

  “Thank you, Blarney. Would you like to be an actor?”

  Blarney grew coy. He tucked his head into Venetia Kelly’s upper arm. We waited.

  “Would you?” Her voice had grown soft but we could hear every word.

  Blarney, his head still hidden, nodded like a shy child.

  “Blarney, we can arrange that.”

  He shook his head, waited, slowly emerged, and looked up at her.

  “Blarney, I’m puzzled.”

  Blarney looked at the audience and held a silence.

  “Would you or wouldn’t you like to be an actor?”

  Swinging his head like a lamp to include all the audience, Blarney orated a little rhyme.

  “The House of Success is great and wide. Its rooms are always full. And some go in by the door marked ‘Push.’ And some by the door marked ‘Pull.’”

  The audience laughed again; everybody in that hall knew the value of “pull,” and many had almost certainly complained that they couldn’t get anywhere in life because they didn’t have enough of it. Indeed my father often groused, “Low influence in high places. That’s my problem.”

  And then Blarney delivered the coup that set the nation talking—and laughing.

  Venetia Kelly commented, “That was a nice little joke, Blarney, and it went down very well. But we were talking about you wanting to be an actor, weren’t we?”

  Blarney, top of the bill, sitting on his mistress’s knee, said, “Yes, Venetia. That’s what I’m talking about too.”

  “Good. This is exciting. What role do you want to play, Blarney?”

  “I want to be a candidate in this election. With all the other dummies.”

  We waited. After the applause had died down, and when all the audience had sloped out into the night, my father and I rose from our chairs, stiff as tired workmen. Outside, a few people chatted here and there, still laughing. My father strode away around the side of the building to the rear of the hall. I hung back, agitated and uncertain. Then I followed him, walking fast.

  What did I have in mind to do? I don’t know. Stop him, perhaps? I don’t think so; and nobody could have.

  By the time I rounded the corner of the building he was surging like a powerboat. Already dismayed, I stopped and watched him.

  For weeks afterward the first image in my head at each morning’s awakening remained the same; when I reach for it now, I feel its haunting mood. My father is striding away from me; he may as well be wearing a sign saying PURPOSE. He reaches the upright rectangle of a dimly lit open doorway. Now he is standing between two tall and elegant women who have come out to greet him. They draw him by the arms toward the door. He frees one hand to turn and half-wave at me, he surrenders that arm to them again. Then he turns and walks through the doorway with them. For a moment he looks back over his shoulder at me. The door is closed.

  Many years later I saw the play Oedipus at Colonus. At the moment when the blind king was flanked by his daughters as he was about to leave them and die, I alarmed myself by beginning to weep. Nothing could have been farther from my life than Sophocles and ancient Greece. Yet I wept, and my memory told me that those women, Sarah and Venetia Kelly, had been escorting my father into his next world.

  Like a photograph, I still see that moment whenever I reach for it, or when it comes back unbidden. But to the day she died I never told Mother, never described that incident to her. For one thing it seemed to say that my father was indeed being taken away by forces too powerful for us to counter.

  For another, I sensed a possessiveness that offended me, even if I couldn’t have put that into such words at the time. And I reasoned that if it offended me, it would have seared her.

  So I stood there, watching. My breath offered a small cloud up to the night. The door closed and now everybody had gone and I was alone. Soon, they must come out of that hall and I would know what to do next. They didn’t come out and I didn’t know what to do. The few lights of the town dimmed and began to die as people went to bed.

  At two o’clock in the morning I was still there, afflicted. More than once I went over to the closed door but I never knocked on it. I slunk along the walls under the windows of the hall; from inside I heard laughter and loud convivial noise, so at odds with how I was feeling.

  My father’s voice rose and fell and I knew that he was regaling them with his delightful stories. At the sound of his voice so merry I could also hear the pieces breaking off my heart, like bits of a cliff falling into the sea. I made the hard decision and turned for home.

  No matter what I’ve told you so far, I can’t overstate it. I can’t exaggerate the gulf between the life my father had been living and the world into which he now threw himself. The strangeness of it all, the unlikeliness—could it have been any more extreme? When things went boxy for any of us, or for the world at large—a typhoon, an earthquake, a shipwreck—my father had a saying, “Ah, it could happen to a bishop.”

  In this case I doubt it. My father’s voice wasn’t rough, but it never pealed like bells. The collars of his working shirts got no ironing; they crumpled like wings. He didn’t use the word “manicure;” how could he when at any moment he might be forking out manure alongside “Flockin’ Billy Flock,” as he often called him?

  And here he was now, about to travel with people whose voices rang like chimes, who probably ironed their clothes day and night, who certainly spent hours of each morning attending to their intense faces and hands.

  Did I know all that when he turned to me and made his announcement? Maybe not in detail, but I knew that he had leapt across a ravine and hadn’t once looked at the rocks and waters below.

  If we had regulations governing licenses for cars or drivers in 1932, I don’t recall them. Most of my driving had taken place around the farm, and when my father and I went on the public roads I often took the wheel; he was prepared to say that he was teaching me. In short, I’d had plenty of experience.

  How was the night? Fine for a time. Sometimes chaos is followed by a hiatus, which brings a respite, a little protective quiet.

  That twisting, winding road from Cashel to our house—I knew it so well, the steep hills and sharp dips. My mind checked off the names of the houses—Murnane, Ryan, Baragry, Carroll, Magner, Mahony, Gleeson.

  The headlights poked yellow tubes into the night, dark and still. I had a moment of fright; the acid greenish-yellowish eyes of a goat caught me from his grazing post at the roadside. Otherwise I had the cold and clammy world to myself.

  No lights shone in our house, not a candle, not a lamp. I put the car in the barn—same as my father did when he came home late. In the dark yard I stood and listened to the silence. I remember the thought Well, this is the time for spells. Has someone cast a spell on us? On this place?

  In the ki
tchen I organized some bread and marmalade, and a glass of milk, and tiptoed up the back stairs to my room. The wood-smoke aroma from the living room still floated through the house. Mother must have been sitting up late: It was now three o’clock in the morning.

  My room was as cold as my spirit; I listened like a thief, but I heard not a sound. Nor did I sleep, not at all. When five o’clock came, I lit my little oil lamp and began to read. Futile; I couldn’t concentrate because I was waiting for Mother, for her footstep, her voice. But I must have fallen asleep, because at half past eight I woke with a start at morning’s mighty noise from Large Lily rattling about in the kitchen below, a slow train with a vast, clanking engine.

  I blinked my eyes, sore from that image of my father, and his two women, and the dimly lit open door like a cave, and I rose, washed, dressed, and went down.

  How do you tell a woman that her husband has left her? And if the woman is your mother?

  We had a breakfast room in that house, with, seasonally, a fire. The round table accommodated four; usually we were three. That morning we were two—and terribly so.

  I heard her footsteps on the stairs. Mother was always of a quick, light step—but that morning she trod like a convict. When she reached the door of the breakfast room I turned, unable not to, and saw her as I had never seen her before.

  She hadn’t yet dressed in her day clothes; she wore a long gray cardigan wrapped as tightly around her nightdress as a shroud. Her hair, usually smooth and shiny as a blackbird, flew out in alarm from all sides of her head. Unprecedented. And her face, white as death, had two red holes—the rims of her eyes.

  “Where is he?” she said.

  I shook my head and began to stand up.

  “Where is he?” Her tone of voice roamed between fear and menace.

  “He said—he said—”

  “What—” she snapped, and then almost wailed. “What did he say?”

  I was slow, and she caught me.

  “His exact words, please. Ben? His exact words.”

  And still no sound got out of my mouth.

  “Repeat what he said. No matter what it is. Quote him. Say what he said.”

  Mother had now advanced into the room and, terrible-eyed, had come around the table to look me up close in the face.

  “What were the words?”

  I know that I lowered my head. Knives of feeling slashed at me. And then I wilted under a sense of protectiveness toward my father. And bent further under a dreadful, impossible desire to protect Mother. Too much, all this, too much for a schoolboy.

  I remember thinking, Get it all out in a rush, then it’ll be over. Like an excuse at school.

  “He said—he said he wasn’t coming home, that he was going to join Venetia Kelly’s Traveling Show.”

  Mother sat down, heavy as a dropped rock; her chair almost cracked. The yellow cat, Miss Kennedy, jumped from the windowsill and ran out of the room. A bad sign; Miss Kennedy didn’t yield to anyone or anything.

  “Go after him. Bring him back.”

  “What?”

  “Go now. Now. Eat your breakfast and go.”

  She locked her hands behind her head and began to rock back and forth in her chair.

  “Mother—what can I do?”

  Do you know that feeling when alarm makes you suck in your breath? And a red color gets in behind your eyes?

  “He’s your father. Go after him and bring him back.”

  “He’s—he’s going on somewhere.”

  “You drove the car home. At least I presume that was you driving it. It didn’t leave again. You can drive out now and bring him back.”

  She’d heard me return and had lain awake listening for—she hoped—two pairs of footsteps.

  “It was a desperately cold night.”

  “Yes. That’s it. You go after him and bring him home. You know where he is. He’ll listen to you, Ben. You know full well that you’re the sun in his life.”

  “Mother—”

  “Yes, you are. Ben, you are.”

  “Mother, I’m only eighteen.”

  Did tears form in my eyes? I can’t remember.

  “Yes. I know. This is man’s work, Ben. But you’re well on your way to being a man. Everybody calls you a young man.”

  No. Not going to do it. Not going to tug my father’s sleeve outside some ramshackle village hall and beg him to come home with me. And yelp when he prizes my arm from his sleeve and walks away.

  “I can’t interfere, Mother. I’m not up to that.”

  On fire now, she got up from her chair, went to the wall, and, trembling all over, leaned her forehead against it, her arms spread like a crucifix. She steadied and the trembling ceased; then she came over to me and leaned closer.

  “I knew this was going to happen. He’s been after her for ages. But we need your father here. We can’t run this farm without him.”

  “But Billy needs a hand today, and I said I’d help—”

  “Buts are for goats”—a favorite saying of hers; at least some of her wit had begun to return.

  I said, trying to be firm, “We’ll run the place fine. We’ve Ned. And Billy. And Lily. And me. And you’re great at things. We’ll run it ’til he comes home. And he will.”

  She strengthened. “I need him. Is that clear? I need him. Go and get him for me. Bring him back here. That’s your job.”

  “Maybe he’s only going for a few days—”

  “He won’t come home. I know him. He won’t. Tell him I’ll be ruined without him, tell him I’ll have no one to talk to.”

  Large Lily steamed into the room with her big tray and her broad tongue; “’tis that cold out there you’d need to grow fur.”

  Mother preempted any nosy questions.

  “Lily, the boss isn’t here for breakfast, he’s away for a day or two.” Her precise speech returned for just that moment. “Set the table for Ben and me.”

  Large Lily spread her wares, turned like a marching soldier, and clattered back to the kitchen. My father said that Large Lily had a dispensation from the Pope to wear her legs upside down.

  Mother left the room too; “I’ll be back,” she said.

  Much as my father always did, I shook out the huge folds of the newspaper. I thought, My God, I’m already behaving like him, and I wanted to drop the paper to the floor—notwithstanding the irresistible headlines: ELECTION SPEECHES FROM PLATFORMS OF ALL PARTIES.

  That morning, the first of my life’s true struggles began. Mother advanced on me like an army. Her feelings tugged me this way, hauled me that way. She pleaded and she pressed and I knew she’d bring me grief. And in time she did.

  While I ate breakfast, and before she came back, I began—my father’s great dictum—trying to “think rather than feel.”

  “Use-use-use mental skill,” he used to say. “Think your way through it. Forget what you feel.” Over and over he’d say, “Skill, not emotion.” Hah! The irony!

  Well, thinking about this business told me that it was, to say the least, a startling matter: I heard my mind say, I mean, look at it. Your father has run away from home with an actress. How’s that for a ball of wax?

  But my thought process collapsed at once, new feelings swept in, and I began to miss my father with actual pain, a pain in my heart, a pain in my stomach. I was so fond of him. From as early as I could remember I went everywhere with him—on his short errands to town, or into the village, or to spend time at the blacksmith’s. I’d had difficulty settling down in school because I was no longer free to be with my father about the place, and I was lonely for him every hour of the day.

  And now what was to become of him? He couldn’t act, he couldn’t dance, he couldn’t sing. Perhaps, I consoled myself, he needed to get this thing out of his system. But my father didn’t have fads or passing fancies; he was a farmer, he was slow to take up things. Yet—and here was the warning shot—if he took them up he truly embraced them, and made them part of his life forever.

  Then, on
that bleak morning with my breakfast and my newspaper, in rode the most chilling reflection. I looked out at the wooden gray sky and said, “Golly O’Connor.”

  Golly O’Connor, a mad, obsessive character, was my father’s favorite teacher. He’d been in the British army, and when something surprised him he said, “Golly!”

  Golly loved the classics, and spat Greek and Latin quotations like other men did tobacco.

  “Remember Heraclitus, boys,” he used to cry. “Character is destiny.”

  That was my father’s most beloved remark—“Character is destiny.” Thinking of it, I felt less hopeful and very unsure.

  When I look back now and see myself there, that Monday morning, I see the early fogs of 1932 boiling soft and slow, mists of damp, gray wool muffling the hill field. Through the other window, I look into the gray stone yard, and there’s a horse dipping and swooping its great head as it’s being marched in from a gallop. That’s Bobbie Boy, a young hunter that my father bought up the country last year, and loved so much he’d never let anyone else touch him. When will Bobbie Boy begin to miss him? When will the yard begin to know that the boss isn’t going to be here anymore? When will Bobbie Boy rear up and kick somebody? I’m certain I began to talk out loud to myself; that’s one of the things I do under severe duress.

  Which brings me to Mother’s pressure upon me. When she returned to breakfast she rapped a knuckle on the table.

  “Ben, listen to me. Let me put this as clearly as I can. I want you to get in the car, go out and find your father, and bring him home. For me.”

  She didn’t say, “Bring him back,” she said, “Bring him home.” And she didn’t wrap it in some vague domestic reason—she said, “For me.” Plain as day. And there, plain as an egg on a slate, sat the challenge. And my mind translated her words: I’m your mother. Go out and bring back the man I love. My husband. Your father. Restore him to my life, to our ordinary life.

  Then she attacked harder: “After all, you were with him when he ran off. You could have stopped him.” As though it had been my fault.