The Last Storyteller

  Now, a father striking a son carries no taboos, though you may contend that it should. A son striking a father, though, breaks many laws, unless there is a larger and more human law at work. The boy hit back—for his mother, for their life, for the household.

  A mighty battle broke out. They wrestled, they kicked, they gouged, they punched, and when the two bodies finally separated themselves, the boy was the one standing upright and, therefore, the winner.

  Now all had changed. His father slunk from the gilded tent, found the boy’s horse, and rode home to his wife and farm. The dancer took the boy’s hands and led him to a tent where she bathed his cuts and bruises. Then she sat him down and fed him—meat and fruit and glorious bread of yeast and flour and golden butter. And she never took her eyes off him.

  From that moment, the boy and his dancer saw little in the world except each other. They walked through meadows of tall grass and flowers, taking care not to step on the nests of larks. They watched fish swim in dappled pools, and nibbled at the trailing cress. They found berries where they hang richest, under the leaves of the bramble, and they fed each other until their lips and faces were stained black and red and blue, and they laughed at their reflections mirrored in the waters of the lake.

  And after many, many weeks of this joy and laughter, there came a wonderful day when the dancing queen flung her arms around the boy and told him that he was to become a father. They held each other tight and wept.

  The ancients, as you know, had gods for all purposes. And not all those gods had benign intent. One day, when the clouds came down on the mountain, the dancing queen vanished. Nobody knew where she’d gone. A girl said that she thought she’d seen her float away on a cloud. A young boy said that he thought he’d seen her ride a torrent down to the valley. The oldest man in the troupe, the chief juggler, said that he wondered if he’d seen her being plucked by the wind from the highest peak.

  If there was one thing this boy knew it was how to search. And now he searched, and he searched, and he searched. All the straight roads, and wide and narrow circles, and deep valleys, and high mountain ranges where he’d searched for his father—he visited them again. The questions he asked, the answers he received—for eleven years and eleven months and eleven weeks and eleven days and eleven hours and eleven minutes and eleven seconds he wandered the world looking for his love.

  He never found her. He never ceased to love her, either. He loved her more than he loved the sun or the cold moon or the bright salt grains of the stars, he loved her more than the first grass of summer or the first snow of winter.

  And when a day came when he knew that his search yielded no fruit, he ceased asking questions. He kept his promise to the old man, and he still wandered the earth, from house to house, from door to door, from hearth to hearth. But instead of plying people with questions about his missing dancer, he told them the story of his love and his life. And that, ladies and gentlemen, is how the first seanchai, the first traveling storyteller, was created.

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  It’s fair to say that the audience showed its appreciation. John Jacob applauded loudest of all, and he had that broad smile on his face that I now recognized as something I needed and sought. While the people filtered from the hall, and a few came and spoke to me, he waited in his hard chair as content as a pasha on a rich divan. Finally, he was the last one left. Up he rose, and held out his hand.

  “Was it all right?” I asked, torn apart by the emotion of the tale.

  He couldn’t stop smiling. “Good boy,” he said. “Good boy, good boy.”

  We began to walk from the hall. He took my arm. A few paces from the door, he relinquished his grip and said, “I’m going to leave you here. You’ll be in touch, I know.”

  Quick as a whippet he was gone, into the night.

  That hurts. Where’s he gone? Has he abandoned me? Why so abrupt? How is he getting home?

  We had no communal money in Ireland. You could never call that village hall, or any of the dozens like it, prepossessing. Shabby. Damp. Last year’s decorations. Flitters of old colored streamers. Low-wattage electric bulbs that might not be turned off until tomorrow morning unless I found the switch.

  Better turn off the lights. Where are the switches? Usually by the side door. No sign of them. The lobby, then. If I can’t find them, I’ll go. Why did he leave so fast?

  I picked up a chair that had fallen over and walked out. The lobby had no light—but in point of fact it had all the light in the world, and would have for me evermore.

  A woman stood there, unrecognizable, until she took off the heavy glasses and head scarf. And shook out her hair and smiled. And came over and held out her arms.

  There my story ends. Truer statement: there I will end it. We sat on two of the hard chairs and talked until three in the morning. We made all kinds of rules, including no questions about or recriminations of the past. We found that deep down, where nothing true ever changes, nothing had changed.

  From that night on, Venetia and I never stayed more than a few yards apart. If I went for the newspapers, she came with me. If she went to the hairdresser, I drove her.

  Our lives returned, “at one bound,” as they say in the best stories, to the days and weeks when we first became a couple. And they never changed from that; they retained that precious and superb texture.

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  Louise and Ben, our beloved children—I will naturally draw a seemly veil over much of our existence, Venetia’s and mine, together. Let me close with two observations.

  The pair of you lit our lives like the moons light Jupiter. We took such pride in you, every minute of every day, and we spoke of you all the time. I proved insatiable for stories of you growing up as infants, as toddlers, as small children, and asked on and on, tell me more, more, and Venetia always obliged.

  Here’s my second observation. Do you recall something I wrote sometime ago? You can find it; I wish I could remember the page number, and I hope my handwriting has made all of this legible enough for you. This is what I wrote:

  For our winter fireplaces I will have a woodpile. And a workbench for fixing things. I will be impeccable in my hygiene and my manners. You will never see me looking as decrepit as I do now. I promise to shave every day. I will never leave the house with unpolished shoes. And never, never will I go out without telling you where I’m going. I will be so kind to you, tender beyond your most romantic dreams.

  How I will spoil you. Buy you things. Make you laugh, and never make you cry, unless through the telling of a touching story. I will come home to you with news of the outside world, and the strange things I hear in my daily work, and I will watch your eyes widen in wonder and delight and awe as I tell you. I will love you for being my finest audience, and for the talk we shall have, and the thoughts we shall share.

  This isn’t boasting; I did it all.

  PART EIGHT

  Epilogue

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  New York, Winter 2008

  We are the children of Ben MacCarthy and Venetia Kelly. We were born forty-five minutes apart, and have never been much farther than that from each other since. We live separately, in adjoining apartment buildings, 414 and 424 East Fifty-second Street. Although we have always done everything together, this is the first time we have written in collaboration. We are here to explain. Please bear in mind that we are lawyers, not writers, and excuse our prose style.

  Thirteen years ago, in the spring of 1995, our father, Ben, passed away at the age of eighty-one. We had grown very close to him; he was a wonderful man, capable of an unusual depth of kindness. He also entertained us with his stories, of which we never tired. We assisted him through his last illness, and we were able to tell him how much we loved him. And we forgave him his naïve side.

  On the day before he died, in his own home, he had enough strength to lie in the conservatory he had built. At the garden end he had included a raised sunroom, away from the plants, from where he could look out over the sea. We drew our chai
ses beside his, and we all three lay there together, him between the two of us, which he always loved, and he held our hands, and talked about our late mother, Venetia, who had died some years before.

  The next day, taking an afternoon nap, he died in his sleep, and we cried for days and weeks.

  When the Will was read, and we gained access to his house and papers, we found many astonishing things—not least an orderliness that we can’t yet match.

  As lawyers, we also appreciated the papers. Ben had set out the record of his life with impeccable care. (We never got around to calling him “Dad,” and sometimes we called him “Big Ben,” as distinct from “Little Ben,” who is also the same height and build.) Not only did he list every one of his considerable assets, and the few, tiny financial liabilities not worth mentioning, he gave the names, addresses, and telephone numbers of every functionary in his life, down to the contact person at the electricity board.

  He also left behind, in large notebooks the size of old cash ledgers, a handwritten record of the life he had lived, most of which had been dominated by his feelings for our mom, whom we adored too, but perhaps not as much as he did. His Will requested that we not open these papers until five years after his death and stated that we could, if we wished, publish his account of his life. When we opened and read them, we decided to shape his great record into manageably readable accounts, and to publish them in three volumes.

  The story of his life can be found in those works. Over and above our family connection, we found them remarkable for the emotional history they contain. We can think of no man, especially in modern times, as courageous in his naked portrayal of himself, certainly no Irishman—and definitely no American male! Our purpose in writing this epilogue is simple: he left some gaps at the end, and in part of the tale as well, and we think that the story deserves closure.

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  To begin with, he never lied about the facts of his background. All his accounts and descriptions are true: we checked the details of his parents, Harry and Louise MacCarthy; the family farm, Goldenfields; our grandmother, Sarah Kelly; and our great-grandfather, King Kelly, and we interviewed many of the people mentioned, including Billy and Lily Moloney, the husband and wife who worked at Goldenfields and, later, at our grandparents’ home in Goold’s Cross. In Kansas we spent time with Mr. and Mrs. Charles Miller; she was the former Miss Begley, whom my father knew when she was a matchmaker in Kenmare, Ireland.

  It wasn’t that we doubted our father, no matter how often he described himself as an unreliable witness. Our pressure to check his facts came from disbelief that he had been capable of killing—twice.

  In the first case, we succeeded in tracking down the war records for the Malmedy district of Belgium and uncovered the accurate account, including the name of the soldier: Sebastian Volunder, infamous even in his own German ranks. For the second, a murder that he had commissioned, and that he also witnessed by overhearing, we were granted access to a police file in Dublin, in which he featured at length. Charges had not been pursued, because of lack of proof.

  We should say that we researched those two incidents first, because they so appalled us. But they did not change our opinion of Ben. The man we came to know better than we’ve ever known another human being had grown into a resolved and peaceful person who gave of himself in an almost miraculously generous way. Nobody we’ve ever known has had a deeper or more loving soul.

  And we believe that we know why. He said that he had held on to an early dream, and although in practical terms he had had that vision snatched from him for the greater part of his life, and not once but twice, he almost never ceased to believe.

  The word “almost” has an importance here. For a period of years in the late 1950s, he shuttered his life from his love. He turned away from all thoughts of Venetia.

  When she returned, however, his feelings for her came flooding back, as you have now read. He understates, though, how he conducted his final relationship with her, and we want to fill in some of those blanks, if only to see that he receives full honor for his nobility, and his immeasurable care.

  As we’ve said heretofore, he did indeed display a lovable nature, but the depth of our affection for him comes as much from watching the way in which he lived for her. Of Venetia we find ourselves more critical—but not crucially or, we hope, unpleasantly so. In part because of our insistence, she came to appreciate him, and in time did let him know.

  We have other spaces we’d like to fill, other gaps to plug, and in some cases we don’t know whether he knew what we discovered. In fact, we feel certain that he never inquired into one significant part of the puzzle. Mom told us the details, just once, and asked us never to tell him. Even then, she drew a veil over some of it, and although we both have our suspicions, we have no proof.

  It concerns the period after she ran away from Ben by the seashore north of Dublin. He had parked overnight at Rush, a wide, sandy beach resort for summer Dubliners. In the morning, when he couldn’t find her, Ben assumed that Jack Stirling, our late stepfather, had followed them and spirited Venetia away somewhere.

  Then Ben stalked Jack, tried to attack him, and was beaten away by Jack’s “associates,” as he liked to call them. Those two men, as we learned (though Ben never mentions it), had been in jail with Jack, crooks together. Ben then had Jack killed by two Irish republican mercenary hit men, and was himself brought low by remorse.

  He never knew that Jack had not “kidnapped” Venetia. Sometime during that night in the car, she woke up. With Ben still asleep, she took most of the substantial amount of cash he carried in his work case and hitched a ride from Rush into Dublin on an early morning delivery truck. Ben never mentions the disappeared money either, presumably because he didn’t want to suspect her or cast her in a poor light.

  From Dublin, Venetia, who had known the Irish countryside intimately since her road show touring days, caught a train to the town nearest Mr. O’Neill, the elderly storyteller whom Ben revered. Mr. O’Neill took her in, took care of her, and found her brief lodgings nearby. From there she got in touch with us. We came to fetch her, and all three of us returned to Florida together.

  Venetia kept in touch with Mr. O’Neill and visited him frequently. She stayed there many times, and once or twice almost ran into Ben there—which she didn’t seek to do. We never asked her whether she had a love affair with Mr. O’Neill. Ben, so far as we know, had no awareness of that relationship. We do know from Mom that when Mr. O’Neill was invited to see Ben perform, he sent for her, and then insisted that she accompany him.

  Mom always remained vague about her feelings for Ben during that second period of separation. We asked her more than once whether she ever supposed that they would be reunited one day, and she said that when she heard news of Jack’s death, she thought that a circle had been closed, and that all were intended to go their fated ways, and Jack’s way had been death. She said that Jack had died as he’d lived—in violence.

  In her daily attitudes we often felt that Mom should have been more demonstrative to Ben, considering the attention he gave her. Eventually we said so, and her response startled us. She told us that we were completely right, that she had been unfair to Ben in many, many ways—but she said no more than that, and didn’t seem to change too much.

  However, we found in her effects, after she died, a diary of sorts. Typical Mom, she kept it higgledy-piggledy; her lack of orderliness must have driven Ben crazy, but he never said. In one diary, for 1964, by which time they had been back together for some years, we found this entry; she was sixty-four, he fifty.

  “Today I had a moment—another!—when it would have been fine to die, because I felt perfect emotion. He hurts my heart when I look at him. This is a Man.”

  We would also like to say something about Jack and Mom. For the first twenty-four years of our lives, Jack was the male parent we knew. In this we suffered a duality—because we had another male parent, whom we had never met but of whom we heard all the time,
and always in whispers. Mom spoke of Ben constantly, though never in Jack’s presence (she later told us that she was forbidden to do so), and in her words and feelings, Ben seemed everything that Jack could never be. That turned out to be true.

  She never explained to us why Jack hadn’t shown the same brutality to us that he showed to her. We both asked many times, and never received a satisfactory reply. Once she hinted that she had made herself a lightning rod, that she taunted him to draw his fire away from us. On another occasion she suggested that Jack knew she would kill him, or have him killed, if he, as she put it, “laid a bad finger” on us. We asked if she would have been able to kill him, and she said that she probably could, but that she knew somebody who would, and we understood that she meant Ben.

  When news reached us of Jack’s death, Mom didn’t grieve. She said that all bereavements are composed of grief and relief in different proportions, and she felt ninety-five percent relief, if not more. She added that with Ben it would be “one hundred thousand percent grief.”

  One of Ben’s accounts describes their meeting in Jacksonville. That day had lived in our minds as a puzzle. We came home from school in the afternoon and found Mom alone and weeping. Jack had a gig in one of the hotels down the coast that night, and had long gone. Mom flung herself around the house in a state and condition such as we had never before seen. She couldn’t speak and then retreated completely into herself and didn’t come out for weeks.

  Neither of us had ever even glimpsed that side of her. The good and normal Venetia came across as Ben describes her—sunny and humorous, always pleased with an opportunity to perform. The Venetia he tells about on the night they stayed with Mr. O’Neill—that was the Mom we knew when nobody else was around.

  We can, however, confirm everything he says about her moody behavior in the days—and it was only days—they spent together after he snatched her from the stage of the Olympia Theatre. She did have a tendency to retreat into herself; we knew her capable of that. We’d seen it more and more as we grew older, and went to school and college. This infuriated Jack, and we had gone to Ireland with them to protect Mom from his rage.