Though with no moon to help us, we had light enough to see, and I could tell that Nowhere, New Jersey, had some natural beauty. Heavy rocks behind me, the quiet gleam of water before me, and wooded heights across the way—all spoke of peace and quiet.
Have you ever been on a long journey that became a slow and delicious blur? I had great anxiety underpinning our travels—What would Lebanon, Kansas, have to offer in the long term? Would Captain Charles Miller get there?—yet, I have glorious memories of that trip. In the blur of farms and farmers and their amazement at Jerry, and the delight of the wives and children as they stroked his neck and he licked their hands, it’s the names that remain in my head.
They’re the underlying music of America, they’re the piano player’s left hand, the marching band’s big cymbals. Every day, the name of a town or a county would cause me to reach for my notebook, and I floated across the continent of North America on a cloud of word tunes.
They come back to my mind now, like the lines of some great, geographical poem, and I almost recall them in the order in which I met them or saw their names. Birdsboro, Hopeland, Clay, and Brickerville; Highspire, Boiling Springs, Walnut Bottom, Pleasant Hall; Helixville, Husband, Seven Springs, Champion; Cadiz, Ohio, Deersville. Stillwater, Newcomerstown, a place named Warsaw, and another named Nellie.
Some towns offered to live up to their names. In Ragetown, Ohio, we had a moment of discomfort. We found a milk depot and refilled our creamery urn in the early morning. As the people, mostly farmers, gathered to admire Jerry (and ask if Sydney was to be our dinner), a reporter from the local newspaper came by on his bicycle. Bobby grew jumpy and annoyed, especially when the reporter hustled off to find his photographer. We left Ragetown, Ohio, faster than we’d arrived there.
“Maybe it was the name that provoked the mood,” Kate whispered as we clambered back on the truck.
Here are some more names; Magnetic Springs, East Liberty, Zanesfield, and De Graff; Quincy, Sidney (which, we all agreed, had been named after the porker asleep in the back), Willowdell, and Fort Recovery.
Dublin, Indiana, sparked a debate about the naming of American towns—the unexpected number of Native American words in all melodies, the number of European suffixes-burg and-ville, the Irish and English and Scottish names, the names of people and families. And the names of girls; if there could be towns such as Nellie and Anna surely we might find a Kate—to which Bobby, by now more than half in love with Kate, said, “It will have to be a beautiful metropolis.”
And so we traveled west, on a journey that soon became rhythmic, smooth, and grand. I, who lived on the road, found myself entering two new dimensions—altered space and altered time, the former causing the latter.
On foot in Ireland, as I’d spent so many years, thirty miles to the next town occasioned a day of walking at a stiff pace. Here, hundreds of miles opened up before us every morning. I amused myself by reckoning our averages; a speed of forty miles an hour gives a net thirty miles an hour; we drove twelve hours a day and that should have yielded three hundred and sixty miles, therefore a journey of four days.
Not at all. Bobby’s route took us into highways and byways, and we averaged no more than a hundred miles in any given twenty-four hours. So much for the new dimension of time in my life.
The skies took hold of my imagination—and my heart. In Ireland, we’re never too far from sea clouds. They seem high and they scud across the sky looking to join other cumuli. Out in the middle of America, those weren’t skies that I saw—that was the edge of space, with sometimes no hint or trace that a cloud had ever been there. A sense of freedom that I had never known came down to visit me, and at one daytime break, Kate said, “I feel that a weight has been lifted from me out here.”
I said, knowing what she meant, “It’s because the sky is so high.”
Bobby said, “And we’re in Cloud County, Kansas.”
The following day, raising dust on empty, long, unpaved roads, we reached Lebanon. Kate sat forward, completely focused.
“It’s Sunday morning,” she said. “Stop by the church with the tower.”
Bobby turned left, pulled the truck in, and we sat there. Half an hour later, much of the population of Lebanon began to pour from the solid, red church. With no hurry on them, they stopped and began to chat to neighbors. I felt Kate start, as she did with a sudden thought.
“Quick. Get Jerry out.”
Within minutes, the little town of Lebanon had something new and wonderful to talk about.
“I thought I was drunk,” said one man.
“Does he have a name?” asked a lady.
The children said, “May we hug him?”
And when Jerry batted those eyelashes, and looped that tongue around the cherries in a lady’s hat, I understood Kate Begley’s shrewdness. Later, when the town came to know her story, and when she opened her matchmaking business, she became their beloved star.
I stayed for some weeks and helped; Bobby wondered if he might “linger forever and a day.” We found a house for rent on the edge of town, just below the church, a farm where the husband had died; the lone son had been killed in the war and the wife had lost her spirit, as she put it. I take the credit for seeing it first—on account of the high barn at the rear, and when we knocked on the door, we found that the lady who answered had been the one who’d almost lost her hat to Jerry outside the church.
At the side, a separate building had once housed seasonal laborers, and on the wall of this bunkhouse Kate Begley put up a sign that said, MARRIAGES MADE HERE, and beside fashioned another sign—a large pink heart. Six months later, when the owner died, and her sister sold the place to Kate and allowed her to buy it by installment, Kate put out a board with a name: She called the house “Kenmare.”
She still had that same blind faith.
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I came back to Ireland and resumed my life as a collector of folklore, this time an easier career on account of the car. My journeys took less time, my stays could be longer, and I had no need of worry lest I didn’t get in off the road before dark—because I could always sleep in the car even if I came to a town that had no room at the inn.
As I traveled, I mused so often on the life that I’d seen out on the plains of Kansas. Setting up the new Kenmare had been a delightful exercise, but where was I in all this? I had needed to come back home, and I felt, in doing so, that Kate now had a measure of safety and comfort—a new life and a resumed career.
In some ways, it mirrored what she’d had at Lamb’s Head—becoming a matchmaker while waiting for her parents to return from the dead. This time, she had the additional reality of Bobby Bilbum living in the barn, with Jerry now close to fully grown, and the old grain barn being high enough for him; and Sydney having plenty of room to run around and get her little snout into squealing and happy things.
Kate wrote often to me—long letters in that careful, “best girl in the class” handwriting, and always with a little flourish of homily at the end, or a piece of advice, or—something on which she was very keen—a useful tip. Three examples:
“In Love, as in Life, Courage comes from the Heart, not the Head.”
“Always polish your boots last thing at night, because their shine will brighten your Life next morning and make you feel prepared for the day.”
“Now that you have a car, always carry a bottle of vinegar with you—it’s useful for all kinds of cleaning and it gets rid of smells.”
She often asked about my life and my work, but never about Venetia. In Kansas one night I’d told her what had happened on the beach that awful day. Kate looked shattered.
“Did I make a terrible mistake?” I asked.
She stood up and ruffled my hair, her way of showing maximum affection.
“There’s no way of telling what will happen,” she said, but she remained muted for a long time afterward and never mentioned Venetia again.
By then, no matter what we’d been through, my dominant feelings toward K
ate could have been defined as “grateful”—not least because our exploits together had given me a new sense of proportion. I can’t say that I didn’t think of Venetia as often as I used to—but I moped less about her. In fact I moped not at all. I gnashed my teeth, yes, and I swore—but largely at my own stupidity.
And that awful, weakening pain of loss—that had gone; I assumed that it had been erased by the fact that she hadn’t died.
As to my future, I put everything on hold until I could measure myself against what I knew, my own country, my own work, my own normal life. Soon, I told myself, I would know what I wanted.
Thus I went about Ireland in the year or so from September 1946, relatively calm, celibate, absorbed in my work, and able to pay increasing attention to my parents, to James and Miss Fay, and to my work. I finished the basic interviewing for my report on matchmaking in rural Ireland, and got on with writing it up—the little segment from our fraught and bombed German village piqued my interest all over again.
One day, I telephoned home. (By now Mother had trained Lily the housekeeper to understand that we didn’t have to wait for the phone to ring before we could use it.) My father told me that a telegram had arrived for me.
I said, “Open it.”
“I-I-I don’t like doing that, Ben.”
I said, “But it never stopped you before,” and he dropped the phone. That was the only mention I ever made of the Venetia telegrams, and he proved the truth of it.
I never raised that fact with my parents, never discussed with them the notion that my father—and I suspect that my mother never knew—willfully and deliberately kept me from reuniting with Venetia. And he knew of my grief, I know he knew it.
Mother took over the conversation.
“What did you say to your father, Ben?” She sounded too agitated to open the wound.
“I believe there’s a telegram for me, Mother.” I’d already told her quietly one day that I’d “met Venetia and she’s fine, there are twin grandchildren and she may be coming back to Ireland, but she’s married again,” and I hadn’t allowed the conversation to develop beyond that. Nor had she.
“It’s from your friend, Miss Begley.”
“Read it, Mother.” Why did my heart suddenly hammer?
“Nana getting married in Cork. Thursday, July 17. You’re invited. See you there Imperial Hotel. Love, Kate.”
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A small wedding: The bridegroom looked like a retired general: Mrs. Holst bridal. Kate shining.
Those were my opening notes, written that night. No more than twenty people attended, fewer at the church ceremony—which was held in the sacristy, not in the main church, because the bride and groom had both been widowed. The wedding “breakfast,” as we always called it, took place at two o’clock in the afternoon.
“Why gray? Why didn’t she wear white?” I asked Kate.
“Ben, don’t you know anything? Widows who marry again wear gray—out of respect to the dear departed. And white’s for virgins, you know that.”
“Then there’s a lot of fibbing that goes on in wedding dresses,” I said, and she punched me.
That was the old Kate, the Kate that I had first met. She radiated excitement and good humor, gave me a full briefing on Jerry and Sydney—and had found, or so she thought, a potential wife for Bobby Bilbum.
“Problem is—she’s as fat as he is and I don’t know what to do.”
“Leave them alone,” I said.
“But they want to have children—” and she began to laugh so much that we both ended up with streaming eyes.
Mrs. Holst bore down on us. Kate whispered, “And I have something marvelous happening which I’ll tell you later—because Nana wants to talk to you, I can tell from the way she’s walking toward us.”
“Oh, God,” I said. “Stay here.”
But Kate said, “No, I want to talk to the bridegroom,” and darted away.
Marvelous? I thought, What can that mean? Marvelous? Miller? No. She’d have told me.
Mrs. Holst (as she always was and would be to me) sat in Kate’s chair.
“Now, young man.” Her eyes gleamed.
She’s had sherry and more, said my inner voice. Watch out. I hadn’t seen or heard from her since that offensive letter she wrote after Belgium, more or less alleging that I had caused World War II in order to hurt Kate.
“Congratulations,” I said, in a voice stronger than I felt.
“I want to talk to you,” she said.
“Here I am.”
“Why don’t you go back to the States with Kate, marry her, make her sell that place, and come back here?”
I hadn’t been drinking, yet I almost fell over.
“Kate has her own plans for her life.”
Delia Holst grabbed my forearm. Jesus! Was she once a wrestler? asked my inner gent.
“Look. Mr. Miller hasn’t come. And he won’t.”
“You sound glad about that,” I said.
“That fellow worried me. There was danger in him.”
I recollected that she had said something similar about me—Kate had written it in her ledger.
“Well, there may have been danger in him, but she married him. And she’ll go on believing that one day he’ll turn up.”
Mrs. Holst grabbed my knee. “He won’t. He’s dead. I got the telegram. Missing in action. That means to all intents and purposes dead.”
I gasped. “And you didn’t tell her?”
“Why should I? Don’t you know anything? What do you think has been keeping her together? Now do as I say. Marry her. She trusts you.”
On several counts, including bewilderment, I shook my head—and came up with the right words. Or so I thought.
“But you don’t even like me.”
Mrs. Holst said, “What are you talking about?”
I said, “You’ve never shown me anything but a frown. Or a scowl.”
“God in Heaven,” she said. “You know nothing about women. If I were forty years younger I’d eat you. I’ve never been nice to men that I couldn’t have.”
She rose and walked away, saying over her shoulder, “Go on. Do what you’re told.”
I didn’t tell Kate her grandmother’s directive—not then, anyway. The encounter left me feeling shaken. What had all the hostility been about? And did she now want me to marry Kate to give everybody an easy mind? Where did I fit in?
As I tried to sleep, I began to calculate the possibility. I can’t say that the idea had never crossed my mind, and now the circumstances had offered level ground, so to speak—no Charles, no Venetia. Kate took another step in the direction her grandmother had suggested—by inviting me to come to Lebanon, Kansas, and observe the “something marvelous happening” that she had mentioned.
140
October 1947
Two weeks later, I traveled with Kate Begley for the last time. Our final journey together. We, who had been such intrepid traveling companions, would never do it again. This time, we did it with greater flair—on the SS Ansonia, as exquisite a liner as ever sailed the sea. We took a suite, all velvet and leather; Kate paid, because her grandmother had given her a gift of cash, she didn’t say how much. In New York, we stayed one night, then I rented a convertible car, and with the roof down we drove to Lebanon, Kansas. Wide skies. Open roads. Wonderful.
The bunkhouse had expanded into a much stronger building with a porch and two waiting rooms, one for the men and one for the women. Somebody, perhaps Bobby, had improved upon the great pink heart—it seemed less vulgar, more alluring. The crude KENMARE sign had been replaced with a swinging board and delicate sign-writing. MARRIAGES MADE was new too, with delicate scrolling and ladylike borders. If Kate had done all of this in little more than a year, business must have been fine.
Which of them gave me the warmest reception—Bobby, Jerry, or Sydney? It has to be Sydney, who refused to leave my arms all evening. Jerry was cooler about these things, and by now had become a giant; yet, how he fluttered those
eyelashes when he saw me. Bobby wept, and produced a hug close to suffocation; it felt like having a tent fall on me.
“Have you told him our marvelous news?” he asked Kate.
“Yes,” she said.
“Wait until you meet her, dear boy, you will be so jealous. Ethel—isn’t that a glorious name?”
“And,” said Kate, recovering fast, “he also knows about the ball.”
She hadn’t told me until aboard ship—“to keep up the suspense,” she said.
Her “customers,” as she called them, knew her story—of her “waiting for Captain Miller.” Many of them, from all over that part of the state, had formed a little committee, and they’d begun a search. Kate understood the kindness of their motives, and no matter how it hurt her soul, she humored them by going along with it.
Now they had raised funds to bring every Charles Miller they could find to empty, lonely, little Lebanon, Kansas, in the wild but kind and deep hope that somehow the gods who manage these things would find her Charles Miller and bring him along too.
She saw it for what it was—a cockeyed idea, with its roots in great kindness. I wondered whether they had another motive—that in their searching they had established the truth from the U.S. military and were in fact saying to Kate, “Give up—there are other fish in the sea.”
I’d asked her on board ship whether she’d ever heard from the embassy in Dublin.
“No. Which supports me, Ben, doesn’t it?”
I said, “I see your point,” and didn’t say a word about her grandmother.
“How actively have you been searching?” I asked her.
“I’ve left it to Destiny now,” she said. “I’ve done all I can,” and she closed down the conversation in her usual style. “Fate is kind, Ben, as often as it’s cruel.”
And we sailed on—two people who, as she might have put it, had bobbed about like corks on the Sea of Fate. Or, as I preferred, had been subject to the same vagaries of life as one of my beloved scholars; Carminis hic fienem lacrimis faciemus—“Let us now put an end to songs of grief, but not an end to love.”