The Last Storyteller

  “What she likes, Ben, is a tongue sandwich.” He came close to embarrassing me with his roughness. “D’you know what, Ben? I’m always wanting to feel her.”

  His cackle defined the word “lewd.”

  We met inside the General Post Office on O’Connell Street, the iconic locus of the 1916 rebellion. He wore a brand-new coat, identical to the one wrecked by Elma Sloane’s father, including the brown velvet collar tabs. Hopped up with excitement, he said to me, “Any minute now, Ben. Any shaggin’ minute.” He waxed dramatic. “She’s going to walk through that door, and she’ll have a basket on her arm, and it’ll be full of letters.”

  “What’s her name?”

  “She’s a Killeen, Ben, from Mayo. ‘Mayo, God help us’—isn’t that the old saying?”

  We stood there, looking all around for a girl with a basket. We saw girls with handbags. We saw girls with parcels. We saw girls with dogs on leashes. My guess is that we stood there for at least an hour.

  “Maybe,” I suggested, “she’s coming on another day. Or maybe she’s gone to a different post office.”

  My patience drifted—and then Jimmy jerked his head.

  “Hey, Ben, look.”

  A tall girl, with, indeed, a basket of letters, walked to a window and spoke to the person behind the brass grille. “Dirty” Marian? No. Not in any way. Nothing low-grade or lewd here. Graciousness, yes, and reserve. A swan’s neck. An aloof head. A walk so poised that she might have trained as a dancer.

  “Go over and say hello.”

  Jimmy said, “No, no, we mustn’t do that, Ben, that’s the last thing we must do.” He saw me puzzle at this. “Give it a minute, Ben; we’ll see what she does.” He began to babble. “I don’t want to interrupt her, like, when she’s in the middle of her tasks. She’s very efficient, and she doesn’t appreciate it if you don’t let her do things the way she wants to.”

  I watched her transact her basket of mail. Handed a form to sign, she took off her right glove and reached into her purse for a green fountain pen. When she had signed, she restored the glove.

  “Listen.” I grabbed Jimmy Bermingham’s arm and gripped. “You have to tell me now, Jimmy, this instant. Why do you call her ‘Dirty’ Marian?”

  “Kind of a joke, Ben.”

  “But it misrepresents her completely.”

  “Isn’t that the joke?”

  I asked, “And she’s in on this joke?”

  “Jesus, no. She’d kill me if she knew.”

  “Then stop using that name to describe her.”

  Marian Killeen. Actually, Marian Bernadette Killeen. How important she would become to me. We watched her at the window. She unloaded her basket, piece by steady piece. When I changed positions to view the clerk behind the brass grille, I saw the deference in his face.

  Marian Killeen turned away from the window and headed for one of the main doors. Jimmy darted after her; I followed.

  “Hello, Marian,” Jimmy said, full of hope and charm. “This is my great friend, Ben, who works for the Folklore Commission. Howya doin’, Marian?”

  She paused, and looked at us as at drunks or beggars. But she had good manners and gave me the respect due to a stranger. With a gloved hand extended to me, she said, “How are you, I’m Marian Killeen.” She had an unlined face, a complexion of cream linen. Eyes clear as day.

  “Would you like a bit of lunch, Marian?” Jimmy’s voice had gone higher. He was perspiring, his eyebrows angled high in anxiety.

  Ice seeped into her eyes. “I have to go shopping.”

  “But sure we’ll help you,” said Jimmy.

  “There’s really no need.”

  “It’ll be no bother.”

  Marian Killeen said, “Actually, I have to do some personal shopping, and I like to do that alone.”

  She nodded at me and said, “Nice to meet you, Ben.” Are her eyes saying, What are you doing with this worm?

  “So it’ll be all right if we follow you?” Jimmy had descended to pleading.

  Speaking as though to a disliked child, Marian Killeen said, “I can’t stop you, of course.” Her eyes registered my embarrassment; I knew it.

  During this exchange, I had become aware of a tall man, thin as a flagpole. He stood by, ten feet away, watching and waiting; I’d seen him come into the post office behind us.

  “Off you go so, Marian,” said Jimmy. “We’ll be right behind you to carry the parcels.”

  Marian Killeen pushed through the heavy doors. The flagpole man approached us.

  “Jimmy, c’mere to me. How many?”

  “Oh, howya, Paddy?”

  “And where are they?”

  “Paddy, it’s a bit complicated.”

  “Have you them or haven’t you?” He had a rough voice, thin with edge.

  “Paddy, listen, I have to go. Why don’t I see you at Neary’s this evening?”

  “What’s wrong with now?”

  “Paddy, this is my friend Ben, and he’s the one in charge of them.”

  With a stride of rage, I headed for the doors. On the street outside, Jimmy Bermingham caught up to me and picked up on my anger.

  “What was that?” I demanded. “Was that about—?”

  “Shh, Ben, Jesus, don’t say anything out loud; you don’t know who’d be listening.” He changed tack. “Where is she—can you see her?” He pointed and said, “Quick. Cross over here. She’s heading for Clerys.”

  Yet again I failed to refuse him.

  We followed Marian Killeen into Clerys, one of Ireland’s few department stores. And then we followed her around. In today’s terms, we stalked her. Never once did she look up or back to see us; she didn’t care.

  “Where does she live?”

  Jimmy whispered back, “Rathmines. Eighteen Grove Road.”

  They’d known each other for several years. As a student, he’d worked in the grocery store around the corner. She lived alone, both parents dead.

  “Big house, Ben. She’s worth a stack.”

  Marian Killeen’s phrase “personal shopping” translated itself. She made ladies’ underwear her first port of call. Jimmy nudged me and cackled. In my annoyance, I came close to lifting him off the ground by his shiny black hair. She stayed fifteen minutes and more, sifting and handling. We lurked in the distance, behind a pillar.

  When she moved, we moved. In the name of God, how did it look? This respectable young woman striding from department to department and being stalked, several aisles away, by two fools who walked in her parallel. We stopped when she stopped. We waited as long as she waited. We moved again when she moved again.

  At any moment I expected the store detectives to intercept us. What a spectacle! This dapper, dark-eyed, dark-haired little chancer might have come from a card game. And this tall, awkward man in his forties, in his long black coat and big boots—mightn’t he have just walked in off the fields?

  Shoes, millinery, frocks—Marian Killeen stopped at every department. This is no love affair; this is the worst possible mismatch. Perfectly civil to me. But she thinks Jimmy’s a maggot.

  Since we learn fastest about people by the reactions of others to them, I studied those who served her. She made sure to thank each one, apologized if she didn’t make a purchase. They smiled back. They deferred to her. They tried to please her, give her every help she wanted. There’s no way Jimmy Bermingham can close this gap.

  For most of an hour we pursued her. We watched her down the gun barrel of every aisle. Never once did she look at us, whether with a smile or a frown.

  Her final stop took her to a florist’s booth. She bought assorted flowers, which the woman arranged into a pleasant bouquet. Marian Killeen babied it in her arms.

  I nudged Jimmy. “Go and pay for the flowers.”

  “With what?”

  In those early days, I handed over the money.

  He ran up that aisle. I followed, watching. She retreated, wished to refuse his offer. His words reached my ears:

  “Show me w
here it’s been recorded in history that a woman didn’t let a man buy her flowers.”

  Close to blushing, she looked at me. Behind Jimmy’s back, I nodded.

  “I accept,” she said. “And thank you.” As Jimmy settled with the florist (using my money), Marian Killeen stepped toward me.

  “This is your doing?” she asked.

  “He has to learn,” I said, low enough for Jimmy not to hear.

  “And you’ve given yourself the role of teacher?”

  “When the student is ready, the teacher appears.”

  “We don’t get many Buddhists in Dublin,” she said.

  I replied, “Oh, he’s just a handsome young tear-about.”

  She raised an eyebrow at me, then walked away. Jimmy turned and grabbed my arm.

  “Stop her, Ben. Will you?”

  I strode after her. “Listen.”

  She didn’t break stride, so I edged ahead and began to walk backward. At this she laughed—and stopped.

  “What is it?”

  “He’s very funny,” I said, “And he’s very good company. And—and—”

  “Next you’ll be telling me he’s a patriot.”

  “That, too,” I said. “In fact—”

  “Don’t tell me,” she said, acid dripping from her voice. “Perhaps I already know.”

  I walked back to Jimmy, who stood there on that famed bridge between hope and despair. “No dice, Jimmy.”

  “Shag it,” he said, as profound in two words as Dante in thousands.

  “Try again.”

  “Yeh,” he said. “And I might hit her a belt or two if she’s still as cold as that.”

  “Not while I know you,” I said.

  He picked up my sudden force. “Ah, Ben. I mean—Jesus! Take a joke.”

  I watched him as he watched her walk away. He looked miserable. The façade seemed to work no more; the new coat looked cheap. His shoes scuffed, his tie shiny, he seemed like a man too young and too lowlife for the image he was building, and too far out of his depth to bring off such a face to the world.

  How did she perceive him? Her face said it: This scrawny, would-be-posh layabout with ambitions—what is he? A bookie’s runner? A failed gambler? A poolroom lizard?

  As we stood there, a sandwich man walked by. His boards, front and back, carried an advertisement for the Olympia Theatre: “ALL WEEK! THE SENSATIONAL GENTLEMAN JACK & HIS FRIEND. YOU WILL NOT BELIEVE YOUR EYES.”

  49

  My ticket, one of the few left, gave me a seat to the side of the stalls. I could see into the orchestra pit; I could see the faces of the performers; I could even see the stagehands in the wings. Best of all, I could look along the rows of spectators and observe their reactions.

  Most Irish theaters in the midfifties survived on a mixed diet. The Olympia in Dublin put on some Shakespeare, some international plays, and a few works, new and old, by Irish playwrights. When it could, it booked visiting stars from overseas, big marquee names who could carry an entire show.

  Often the management had a variety card, a mixed bag of all kinds of acts, with something of a sensational nature to top the bill. Such as Gentleman Jack and His Friend—“his friend” being Venetia Kelly, now Venetia Stirling. Jesus!

  In the mangy red plush of the seats, I sat patiently through the first few acts. Not fidgeting. Scarcely looking around. Deep in thought. What will I feel? Will it hurt? Should I go now? People drifted in, some merry with pretheater booze, and there sat I, dry as a bone with terror, torn open by homage to a long gone past.

  A comedian—though he laughed more at his jokes than the audience did—held the program together. He introduced an Irish tenor, nasal, sad, and often flat. A nun played a harp. Six girls in a troupe, their skirts armor-plated with medals, danced high Irish reels. The biggest of them, square, blond, and intent, had medals on her shirt, too. She looked like Göring.

  The comedian returned. “Lay-dees ’n’ genn’lmen, you will not believe your eyes. The management of the Olympia Theatre proudly presents to you. Ably aided and abetted by his lovely and mysterious assistant. See this miraculous, astounding, dazzling sleight of hand. Put your hands together, for the first time to the Olympia Theatre—Gentleman Jack and his friend!”

  The bastard doesn’t even allow her to have her name. Be fair. All you have against him is that he married Venetia. And raised my children. No! He hits her. But that’s gossip. Don’t listen to gossip. But gossip is what I listen to for a living. What else is legend but the gossip of the ages? Have I calmed down too much? Avoidance again?

  And so the curtain began to part, to a black stage and a drum roll.

  She wore blue shoes. Blue satin. With heels high as heaven. She wore a boudoir version of a swimsuit, all black and red lace and flesh colors. She wore fishnets on those endless legs. This isn’t my beautiful, modest Venetia. I didn’t see him for the first few minutes—in fact, I didn’t see much at all, because of the bulging tears in my eyes.

  So you were right, Ben. It wasn’t all a long time ago. No, it wasn’t long ago at all. Our little lives are rounded by a sleep. Well, then, in a little life it was only a moment ago. And James is dead, James, my teacher, my mentor, the man who could have told me how to handle this, the man who, unasked and uninvited but unstoppable, took responsibility for my growing up, for the half-healing of my heart—James is dead. The mythmaking of his life and mine—that’s over. You’re on your own, Ben, you have to make your own myths. Why not begin here and now?

  I knew I had a decision to make, but that night I didn’t have the stuff in me to make any decisions, and I knew it the moment I saw Venetia’s face.

  Let me calm down.

  Gentleman Jack and His Friend. Note: the pronoun was also given a capital letter, yet he couldn’t give your mother her own lovely name. But that doesn’t surprise me—people by and large are what they do, and what did Gentleman Jack do? Gentleman Jack was a pickpocket and a mass hypnotist. He took things from people without them knowing it, and he mesmerized them into thinking they were what they could never be. As he did with your mother.

  Skill? He had it in abundance; those weren’t hands at the ends of his arms, those were dancers, and those weren’t fingers on his hands, they were sorcerers. In tall, tight black pants and a billowing white shirt and shiny patent leather shoes winking in the lights of the stage, he was Mephistopheles, and his pencil of a black mustache juiced up the impression.

  He began his act by calling attention to the body of his “friend.” He had festooned your mother: three necklaces of pearls, one a choker; a watch on one wrist, a tight bracelet on the other. Bangles climbed up her arms, colored and jangling, gaudy as a gypsy camp. Above one knee she wore a twinkling garter, and on each high-heeled blue satin shoe she wore a large bow.

  And yet, and yet—when I could bring myself to look closer, his vulgarization of her couldn’t take away her essential dignity, just as the violence I saw every day didn’t spoil the beauty of my landscapes. She was still Venetia. She was still the thirty-two-year-old woman who rose from a sea of cushions and silk bedspreads on her sultana’s couch in a little south of Ireland town in the summer of 1932 to hold in her arms that red-haired boy of eighteen. She was still the creature of the ocean whom I watched as she swam, whom I followed down that long, serene, and deserted Atlantic beach in Florida, and from whom I then retreated in dudgeon and pain. She was still everything I had held in my heart and my mind and my soul ever since, and I could see it now, here, in her eyes, and she wasn’t even looking at me. Ben, you were right all along.

  With flamboyant announcements to the audience, Gentleman Jack announced what he was going to do.

  “The quickness of the hand deceives the eye. My lovely friend here—she will be the first whom I bamboozle. You will not believe your eyes. Nor should you—because your eyes will have let you down. Your eyes will have failed to tell you what they are seeing—because your eyes will never be as quick as my fingers.”

  Venetia was now
standing center stage, arms by her sides. Gentleman Jack walked quickly around her and downstage, where he held up a hand like a victor. In it flashed the watch he had just taken from Venetia’s wrist, and he’d done it so quickly that I’d never spotted it. I, who was watching every fiber of her body, never saw her arm move, not a flinch, not a flicker.

  I have trained myself to control my reactions in general—and yet I couldn’t stop a gasp.

  Item by item, Gentleman Jack removed the festoonery from Venetia. He even took the two voluptuous bows from her high-heeled blue shoes, and I swear that I never even saw him stoop down to do so. Perhaps I was so mesmerized by looking at her.

  My rage simmered—had it begun to blind me? Like any vulgar performer, Gentleman Jack played to the lowest common denominator. As he removed yet another trinket from Venetia’s arm, he leered at the audience and winked. I know what you want us to think, you lout. I know you want us to ask ourselves, “What’s he going to strip off her next? Or what’ll be the last item he’ll remove?” I know how you’re using her, you bastard.

  “Well, lay-dees and genn’lmen, let me assure you I could remove everything—everything—without her—or you—even knowing it, even the small tattoo on her lovely bottom that says, ‘I love Gentleman Jack.’ The quickness of the hand deceives the eye.”

  He patted Venetia on the behind.

  After all these years, was my proprietariness also political? We Irish don’t let go. For centuries we wrote of our country as a woman who had been taken from us and whom we wanted back, whom we had never stopped loving. Too preposterous? Well, maybe not.

  When the last bangle and the last bow had been removed, Jack Stirling led Venetia forward to the footlights and asked her to take a bow.

  “Round of applause, please, lay-dees and genn’lmen, for my lovely friend.”

  Venetia, trouper that she always was, bowed low and smiled as sweet a smile as she had ever given me. Or—was there yearning in it now? She’d never been wistful, not even when playing Juliet, a role to which she’d brought more muscle than we usually see. Now, though—or was it my imagination?—her smile never reached the limits of its curve.