The Last Storyteller

  Marian continued, “If you’ve been unable to care for the people you love most, you need to be reminded what care feels like. And you have probably never been cared for like this in all those years.”

  I said, “There’s some truth in that.”

  “But I know,” she went on, “that you devoted several years of your life, back there during the war, to somebody.”

  “Her name was Kate Begley. She was a matchmaker.”

  “And from what I hear, you didn’t get much out of that.”

  “I learned a lot.”

  Marian said, “That’s generous of you.”

  I said, “It’s true.” Then I asked, “Is there more?”

  “That I want to say to you? Oh God, yes. But it will wait till the morning.”

  We went back to bed, leaving the kitchen immaculate again. I damped down the fire, did some small domestic chores. She watched me all the time.

  At breakfast she asked, “Now do you know why you came here?”

  “Instinct.”

  “Good.”

  “But this has been all about me.”

  “No, it hasn’t.”

  “What have you got out of it?”

  She said, “A lot. But I’ll be specific. I’ve just had the experience of losing my virginity to a wonderful man. Who will now do me a great favor.”

  “If I can.” Not for a second did I feel wary.

  “Keep Jimmy Bermingham away from me.”

  I said, “I can do that.”

  “And,” she said, and to my astonishment she became upset. It happened at the speed of light. She sat back, her face crumpled, and she covered her eyes with one hand.

  “And what?” I asked, as carefully as I could.

  Pulling herself back together, she said, “And I get to tell somebody a secret he will never tell. Because he’s that kind of man.”

  “I know many secrets,” I said.

  “James said you were the most trustworthy man he ever knew.” She stopped, reconsidered. “Ben, look at us, look at the two of us in this country that pretends hour by hour, day by day, not to be corrupt and it’s a cesspool of violence and hypocrisy. Somebody has to find a way forward,” she said, “and it has to be people like us.”

  I nodded. “I see it every day.” And I waited.

  “Here’s my secret,” she said. “I discovered when my parents died that they were not husband and wife but brother and sister. That’s probably why they fought so bitterly and took so much out on me. I can never marry, because I could breed idiots. In fact, I had my womb removed. I went to England, got it done there.”

  I rose from my chair, walked around to her side of the table, and held her head in my arms.

  To this day, I have difficulty reaching for the appropriate image to describe that extraordinary moment in my life. Years later she said to me, “You called me your tanker that lovely night. Do you remember?”

  “Tanker?”

  “You said that I refueled you.”

  “Well, you did.”

  It was the first time we had ever talked about that night. I asked her, “Did you think about it much?”

  “Every day. Still do.”

  “And what do you think?”

  “Not enough words in the dictionary,” she said. She smiled. “So it comes down to a single phrase: ‘My one and only.’ ”

  At that meeting, Marian Killeen also told me that she had known what would happen next.

  “I saw it in your face.”

  “I did it because of you,” I said.

  “No, Ben. You just needed someone who would know that you were doing the right thing.”

  75

  Sooner rather than later (as you’ll well recall), Gentleman Jack took over every bill on which he appeared. That was the kind of force he had. Pick-pocketing before the intermission, hypnotism in the second half, and he sold out every night. The next day I waited for hours to be the first in line.

  In an aisle seat, I sat through the disappearing neckties, wallets, shoelaces, belts, scarves, jackets. This time, with more presence of mind, I looked closer.

  He was not as tall as me; I already knew that. Much thinner, too; he had no flesh on him. He prowled like a cat, light on his feet in his shiny patent leather shoes. The black line of mustache curled when his lip did. He had a forced, insincere laugh. Unbiased of me, eh?

  When not picking a pocket, he held his hands out from his body. Like blades, ready and poised. Rarely motionless, he ran a ceaseless patter. His lean face showed no feeling.

  The act consisted of Jack and only Jack. Venetia had no task and a minimal presence; he had reduced to a cipher this talented woman who used to dominate every board she trod. She handed him things or, hands held high, walked around and led the applause for him.

  How rarely she smiled. And then only a pasted-on stage smile. No more the warm, wide heart-stoppers. I’m sure you knew those smiles, children. First thing in the morning I saw them, or when she kissed me good night, or hugged somebody she loved, such as her nurse-housekeeper, Mrs. Haas, another casualty of those awful old family events.

  Yet, now and then I could see some of the Venetia I had known and remembered. A flick to the hair. A folding of the hands. A way of standing. When I saw such a moment, I could actually hear the crack spreading across my heart.

  The hypnotism began just after the intermission. Jack walked from the stage down the steps to the front row. One, three, five, seven, nine, eleven, thirteen—he asked every alternate person to stand. Before each one he paused for a moment and said, “Open your eyes wide and look at me.”

  Then he passed his fingers before their faces and said, “Now close your eyes, and you will feel a wonderful cloud descend on you.”

  They seem to have done exactly as he said—though from six rows behind I couldn’t see their faces. As he finished with each one he said, “You will now rock a little on your feet,” and each audience member did indeed rock a little, back and forth, and then stopped when he said, “Stop.”

  When he had assembled the five women and two men, and the last one had ceased rocking, he ran back up the little steps and commanded the front of the stage above the footlights. Lit from underneath, his face shone dark as a vampire’s.

  “When I snap my fingers,” he said, “all of you on your soft clouds will become my seven-piece band.” He moved to stand before the first person. “You,” he said, “will be the first violin.”

  He snapped his fingers. The woman, a frizzy blonde in a cheap lavender blouse, began to saw at an imaginary fiddle. The next, an older woman, began to play an imaginary trombone. Number three began to pound an imaginary piano. The fourth puffed his cheeks blue blowing a trumpet that didn’t exist. The fifth sawed at another invisible fiddle, the sixth, a shy and remarkably pretty girl, played a harp with dreamy hands, and the seventh hammered at the drums until his glasses almost fell from his face.

  The imaginary musicians reached full tilt. Gentleman Jack walked across the stage to the conductor of the real orchestra down in the pit and cued him. “Music, Maestro, please!”

  The conductor did his count: “A-one, a-two, a-three, a-four.” From the pit came a quickstep, a tempo to fit the hypnotized “musicians.”

  Gentleman Jack then walked across to Venetia, bowed deep, and said, “May I have the pleasure of this dance, my dear?” When he swung her into the quickstep, the audience cheered.

  He danced with her for perhaps thirty or forty seconds, then relinquished her. Abandoning Venetia center stage, he ran down the little steps again and along the hypnotized row. Each time he snapped his fingers next to someone, that person ceased playing their instrument and came back to life and, with a sheepish face, sat down beside their laughing friends.

  Jack climbed back onstage and took his bow, but he didn’t include Venetia. She stood alongside him, smiling a professional half smile. Tonight she wore ruby red with black fishnet tights, and high-heeled crimson shoes with gleaming buckles. I tried hard to ma
ke her glance at me, but Venetia was focusing nowhere.

  When the applause died down, Jack stepped forward to the footlights again. Shading his eyes with one hand, he peered dramatically into the audience.

  “I’m selecting volunteers,” he said. “If you refuse, I will compel you to come up here by mesmerizing you.”

  The audience laughed, a nervous and half-whooping sound, and then fuller cheers broke out as he chose his first “volunteer.” He pointed to her—an obesely large woman, probably in her fifties, but the wobbling red-blue jowls made her age difficult to assess. Her friends cheered as Jack walked down the steps to meet her and helped her onto the stage. Venetia wheeled forward a plush sofa and patted one cushion, inviting the woman to sit.

  Next, Jack went down into the audience and made hay of choosing a handsome young man with slicked hair. He delivered him onstage to Venetia, who took the young man’s hand and seated him on the sofa beside the oversized woman.

  Jack had one last choice to make: an elderly woman, chosen for her granny looks. He escorted her onstage arm in arm, handing her carefully up the steps, whence Venetia led her to a simple kitchen chair some distance behind the sofa.

  Now Jack took up his position—at an angle to all three “volunteers” but able to take in the audience, too.

  “This is our little play,” he announced. “Grandma here”—he walked over to her—“is the chaperone, the gooseberry, but she will fall asleep.” He went across to her, murmured something, passed his fingers before her eyes—and her chin fell onto her chest. “However,” Jack continued, “she might wake up. And if she does, she will be angry. Why? Because she will see the lovers here—I will call them Romeo and Juliet—making mad, passionate love.”

  The couple on the sofa giggled nervously. Jack addressed them from the side, standing where the audience could see his every move.

  “Romeo, when I snap my fingers, you will make very, very amorous advances to Juliet. And Juliet, when I snap my fingers, you will kiss Romeo as ardently as in your wildest dreams.”

  Bending to each, he murmured. He made passes with his fingers. When each seemed to have drifted into an altered state, he stepped back. Holding up one hand, he winked at the audience and gave a wide-eyed, eyebrows-raised leer, then snapped his fingers hard and fast, once, then again.

  On the first snap, Romeo lunged at Juliet, pawing her face and her stringy hair. On the second click, Juliet heaved herself across at Romeo and began to kiss his mouth. She overwhelmed him; it was a pillow covering a mouse. Half-lifting herself from the battered velvet, she launched herself at the boy, not so much kissing as eating, chewing.

  He fought back—insofar as he could. For one brief sally he managed to get his mouth onto her face, and he stuck there for a moment, like a limpet on a ship. It didn’t last. Juliet surged again, and eventually he disappeared under her bulk and we saw little more than his flailing young legs.

  Jack prowled during all of this and then, casting a leer as wide as a wall, snapped his fingers at Grandma and said to her, “My word! Aren’t you supposed to be chaperoning your pretty young daughter?”

  The old lady woke up—except that she didn’t. Gentleman Jack held his hand out to Venetia, who handed him a rolled umbrella, which he gave to the old lady. She rose from her chair and began to lay about the lovers on the couch. Before any damage could be done, Gentleman Jack woke all of them with the double snap of his fingers in their three faces. He raised their hands and presented them to the audience, joined in the applause, and then took his bow.

  They returned to their seats. With the applause subsiding, Jack began his next announcement.

  “Now, ladies and gentlemen, before I hypnotize all of you—and I do mean each and every one of you.” He pointed dramatically to individual members at random. “You. And you. And you. And you.”

  People went, “Oooooh!” in that pleased-to-be-scared way children have.

  “Before I put you all under my spell, I want you to see just how great are my powers. I want you to see what I can make somebody—anybody—do.”

  He strode upstage and held his hand out to Venetia. She laid her hand in his. Jack led her downstage, close to the footlights.

  “This lovely lady—she is as modest as she is beautiful. She is as shy as she is statuesque. This is no burlesque actress; this is a lady who wears a swimsuit taking a bath—that’s how respectable she is.”

  The seat around my body grew warm. I pressed my hands together, like a man in prayer.

  Gentleman Jack said, “But when I place her under my spell—” He paused, dropped Venetia’s hand, stepped forward a pace, and peered into the audience.

  “Are there any policemen here?”

  He waited; someone shouted, “No!”

  Jack replied, “Good. Then we can have some fun.”

  On the word “fun,” I slid from my seat. I sprinted the ten yards. Sprang up the little steps. I rushed the stage, grabbed Venetia by the hand, tugged her back down the steps, and raced her with me up the aisle.

  The audience gasped. They thought it all part of the act. I’d wagered on that in my planning. Jack convinced them when he shouted, “Stop them!”

  Nobody made a move. We burst out to the street.

  Raining. Again. In those days, nobody had any difficulty parking in Dublin. Around the nearest corner within seconds, Venetia and I climbed into the car, and I drove helter-skelter down a steep cobbled street with not a soul in sight.

  PART FOUR

  The Pursuit of the Past

  76

  We got clean away. Old joke about a dog chasing a car: What does he do with it when he catches it? How long has he been treating her like that? So lewd. Bastard. Ask her. The utter, utter bastard. First question.

  “Has he been doing that to you for years?”

  “I don’t know where to begin.”

  All the old power of her lovely voice had dwindled, faded even since I’d met her in Florida. Hands pressed between tightly closed knees, she began to shiver. I stopped on some empty street, climbed out, took off my coat, ran around to her side, and managed to get the coat wrapped around her shoulders. She began to cry, crumpled as a hurt child.

  As I climbed back in, she said something. I didn’t catch it and leaned over to hear; she repeated it.

  “All the years I’ve waited for this.”

  I grabbed her face and pulled it to mine. We sat clamped cheek to cheek.

  Which is the child, which the adult? Think, don’t feel. Logical next step? Safest move? We need to be where nobody can find her. Or me.

  The police knew that I stayed at Miss Fay’s; therefore, we couldn’t go there. Goldenfields was unoccupied—the new owners wouldn’t arrive for many weeks—but it was too far away, and too empty. No hotel would take us at that hour of the night—we looked suspect.

  James said to me once, “Often when only one remedy presents itself, it’s the best way. That’s why it seems the only one.” I knew what to do.

  77

  She hadn’t yet gone to bed. Had there been no light, would I have rung the bell? In my new frame of mind, yes. She opened the door in pajamas with little bears on them. At one glance she took it all in. She stepped back, beckoned us in, closed and bolted the door.

  “Good man!” she whispered to me. “Well done!” To Venetia she said, “Hello, I’m Marian—I’m delighted to meet you. Stay right where you are, and I’ll get you something warm.”

  She raced upstairs and returned with a tartan robe. In the hallway of 18 Grove Road, I slipped my coat from Venetia’s shoulders. She stood there for a moment in her ruby-red-and-black-lace, sleazy, décolleté stage costume, with the tawdry fishnet tights and the ribald garters, and we helped her into the robe.

  “Tea,” pronounced Marian Killeen, and we went into the kitchen. The fire hadn’t quite gone down. Marian’s eyes told me to load it up again. Within minutes, the coal and the kindling together gave us a flame.

  She didn’t fuss over your mother
. As I handled the fire, she sat Venetia at the kitchen table and began the arrangements for tea.

  “Toast, I think?” she said to me, in not much above a whisper, as Venetia sat there, huddled and still, her head lowered a little.

  Is my heart going to break? Did I cause all this? Sins of omission? This is agony.

  The fire billowed; the warmth would follow. I sat across the table from Venetia and took her hands.

  “Venetia. My love. Look at me. Are you all right?”

  She didn’t look at me. She didn’t answer my question. She had a question of her own.

  “Why didn’t you come sooner?” she asked.

  “Venetia, they’re all dead now,” I said. “Your grandfather. Your mother. My father has retired, and my mother has him under control. We’re safe.”

  She shook her head. “We’re not. Jack will kill you. Or his friends will.”

  “His friends?” Marian Killeen and I spoke together.

  “He gets his money from bad people. That’s how he has so many shows in big theaters.”

  “But not here in Ireland?” I asked.

  “We met some of them yesterday. From London. They’ll find us.”

  Oh, Jesus. How many ways are there to feel fear? Make it numb. Don’t listen to it. Eyes on the prize. Sitting in front of you. Keep with it.

  Venetia nibbled at the toast and drank the tea. Marian whispered to me, “I’ll fill the bathtub, and I’ll leave out some things. We’ll get clothes fixed tomorrow.”

  She could have shouted at the top of her voice and I don’t think Venetia would have registered it. I wondered whether she had made a decision to collapse.

  Upstairs, Venetia, silent throughout, offered each arm and each leg. As a child does when being undressed. But she stumbled like an old lady as she tried to climb into the high-sided old tub. I lifted her off the ground, placed her feet in the water. Then helped her to lie back. When I had raised her hair out of the way and placed a towel cushion under her head, she seemed to relax.