Venetia Kelly's Traveling Show Read online

  The nurse with the great bonnet did me a kindness. I told her I was traveling through, that I’d heard a friend of my father’s was in a hospital in the area; where else might he be? She wrote a list of hospitals and I thanked her.

  As I walked away, she said, “And when you find your father, give him an earful for not telling you where he is.”

  I searched every hospital I could find. I met nuns and nurses and patients and porters. At last I took a nun into my confidence; she had an accent thick as a bog and the pointed face of a medieval aristocrat. She told me that they had strict rules about notifying next of kin. My father would have had to tell the hospital whom they should contact.

  But if he was unconscious?

  “Then we’d find out who he was, and we’d tell the guards and they’d tell the family.”

  By the time I had that conversation, at the end of my first day, I’d been to seven hospitals in all, some big, some small, all redeemingly calm. In the Glentworth Hotel, I ate a steak. That night I slept longer than an infant.

  I’d ascertained from Cwawfod that the show would play a series of different towns, some one-night stands, some two and some three nights, circling back finally to Cashel after the election. On the map, when you trace those weeks, their travels form two loose circles; I see them now as twin breast-shaped loops.

  Here’s another little calendar of events:

  Sunday night, 7 February (actually the small hours of Monday morning): I go home; Mother berates me even though she sees that I’m shivering and shaking—and very hungry. I tell her about the disappearance and she folds like a cloth.

  Monday, 8 February: I leave the house, mad with intent, I buy a map of Ireland, I stride those hospital corridors, and I’m like a ravening hound, I’m hell-bent on finding him.

  Tuesday, 9 February: Early, I arrive in Dromcolloher, find the hall, meet Cwawfod again, give him some food from home, and tack myself onto his coattails. Each night, Cwawfod tells me, they have a full house. On some days they’ve been giving two performances; in Buttevant, they’d given a third—they played it early in the day, because people were flocking to hear Blarney and his political speeches.

  They’d have played Dromcolloher three times, Cwawfod said, and packed the house every time, but the priest who controlled the hall hated all theatricals. When he heard of Blarney’s satire on Mr. de Valera’s speech, the priest came down to the hall next morning as they loaded and ranted at them.

  In Dromcolloher too, I get myself a room in a bed and breakfast. Cwawfod’s coy about the members of the cast and where they’re staying. I ask about “the man who vanished” and he shakes his head.

  That night I can’t bear to go to the show, but I hang around afterward and I see Venetia Kelly and her mother climb into a magnificent car—that’s the only word for it, magnificent—and drive away without a glance toward me. I think about following them but it’s night and they’ll see my lights, and instead I go to the door, but once again they close the door on me, and I hear it being bolted from the inside.

  I wait, hiding in a place where I can see what happens next. But nothing happens next; the company is obviously going to sleep in the hall, because at around one o’clock in the morning the last dim light of a candle, lamp, or flashlight goes out and I’m alone in the dark and cold—again. No sign of my father.

  Which is when the shadowing of the show began.

  Never too far away from me, and often within sight, seen in the distance at the top or bottom of some long hill out in the countryside—that’s how I saw the caravanserai, such as it was, whenever it set forth into the morning air. From town to village we went, the vans led by two cars, packed with people, and I in the distance, behind them.

  Slowly, I began to enforce a routine upon myself. I’d follow them to the hall, make sure I could find it again, and then establish a place to stay for the night. Then I’d hang around, peering here and there. Ask questions in the town as to where the people from the traveling show were staying. Inspect each house, each bed-and-breakfast place, and try to guess where my father might be making his bed for the night—that is, if he had come back and I hadn’t been told. You see? I was already suspicious that something was rotten in this particular little state.

  In the evening, I’d arrive at least an hour before they were due to begin their show. I’d buy my ticket and sit near the back, looking around me all the time in case my father came into the hall. Then I’d move out before the show ended, go around to the back of the hall, and wait until the performers came out.

  This proved the most difficult part. I’m not good at lurking shadily, nor am I easy to hide. Furthermore, I looked very like my father. So there I’d stand, at the back door to some whitewashed, ratty old building, and hear the distant laughter of the audience, still delighted, always chattering, as they walked away. I’d feel lower and lower and then the light would begin to go dim inside the hall, as the company doused the lamps and candles, and turned off the rare electricity.

  Night after night I played that scene. And night after night it refused to develop as I wished. In fact, it always played out more or less in exactly the same way.

  First of all, the various company people appeared at the back door of the hall. They stood there and debated whether to load the truck that night or wait until the morning. If they were going to another town for accommodation, Cwawfod made them load there and then; if not they often came back in the morning. In either case they stood around, with me a little distance away in half-shadow but within earshot, and waited until “the ladies,” as they called them, appeared.

  Much later, I discovered that they’d been told to behave as though I were some strange sort of hanger-on, a pest, a kind of shy Stage-Door Johnnie. Some of them, especially Cwawfod, felt very bad about that when they eventually came to know me.

  And finally, the two ladies. Tall and mysterious, they climbed into the wonderful, ghostly car. The ghostly car that never seemed to park anywhere near the hall, the ghostly, ethereal limousine that I couldn’t find in any of those towns.

  It wasn’t going so well, was it? Two days trawling through hospitals, three days pursuing the show, not a trace of my father. He was, among many other things, a stubborn man; if he’d had a row, he could have walked out, and felt too proud to come home. In which case he’d have gone to a house that he knew and where he felt safe. When I thought about that, I knew another world in which to look for him, because my father and his friends had one abiding love in common—horses.

  Where I grew up, every pub knew when the local hunt met. In season, which included February, men and women went hunting, sometimes twice, three times a week. My father loved it. Even if we didn’t have a hunter that was ready or right, he borrowed a horse or followed in the car along the small roads.

  That week, if he’d gone to a friend’s house, he’d surely be attending a hunt meet in the village of Knockainey. The hunt alone didn’t dictate my choice; ten years earlier, I’d roamed Knockainey with my father. Few places in Ireland have more history. Even the goddess Anne lived there: “Knock” means a hill, and “ainey” means “of Anne.”

  We went there more than once—enchanting days, poking at the mounds and peering at the stones. He and I searched the long grass, trying to find the door to the Underworld, my father encouraging me to believe that one day we’d find gold. And we’d stop and stand still, listening for fairy music from beneath the ground. We never heard any—which simply meant, he said, that we hadn’t gone there on a good day for music.

  The Scarteens are one of the oldest foxhunts in the world, and my father had often ridden to them. Their history compelled him; the Ryans had owned this pack for centuries. He loved the family’s colorful nature, and told everybody the story of the Requiem Mass.

  It was being held for a member of the family lost in the Great War when a man burst into the church and interrupted the ceremony by shouting, “The master is saved, the master is saved!” A guard on the mail train pa
ssing nearby had sorted a postcard from a German officer, which said that “Mr. Ryan is taken prisoner but quite well—unwounded.” As the train spooled through countryside near the Ryan household, the guard wrote, The master is saved, on strips of paper, which he then threw out the window of the caboose.

  Seventy, maybe eighty people gathered that morning in Knockainey. Only a few wore the red coats, the “hunting pink.” My father never did, so I looked for a man in a tweed jacket and jodhpurs and found plenty, but he wasn’t one of them.

  Foxhounds stand tall; they’re friendly dogs. The Scarteen hounds are black and tan in color and it’s a tribute to the affection felt for the hunt that even though they’re known as the Scarteen Black and Tans, they never got confused with the British forces in Ireland during the War of Independence, in their hated black tunics and their khaki pants.

  I rode in the hunt that morning. As I stood caressing the hounds’ heads and talking to the whipper-in, and knowing from the way he asked about my family that he hadn’t seen my father and hadn’t heard of our scandal, another man walked over and said, “Aren’t you young MacCarthy?”

  He couldn’t ride, he’d hurt his hip; he was a friend of my father’s. The man who was supposed to ride his horse hadn’t turned up, he said, and he wanted the horse to have a good outing before running him in a steeplechase the following week, and he wanted to know if I’d try on the pair of riding trousers he had in the car?

  I rode for four hours.

  Today, older and more thoughtful, I know why I did it: I was hunting for my father. In some mad fit I thought I might see him. I remember thinking, He might be out there, at the edge of some grove of trees, or standing on top of a hill, and he’ll wave to me as I ride by, and I’ll wheel around and ride back to him, and I’ll steady the horse while he swings up behind me.

  Have you ever hunted? On a horse, a big horse? Across fields and over ditches and stone walls? You should try it—not for the pursuit of the fox; I never liked that part, and I always reined back if a kill looked likely. I loved it for the sheer thrill of the ride. I’ll try to describe it to you, because it’ll tell you something about me that will explain—or help you to understand better—some of what’s to come, some of what I did, the nerve I showed.

  First of all, a high horse is a big horse. You climb up, and the ground is a long way down, especially if you’re tall. That morning I mounted an animal eighteen hands high, that’s six feet tall at the withers, where the front of the saddle sits, meaning my head was more than twelve feet off the ground. Second, a big horse is a wide horse, and since so much of your work involves talking to the horse with your knees, you have a job of work to do. Third, you don’t know until the horse moves off what kind of mover she is. Lady Limerick, gray and high, was seven years old and had more than a bit of a dancer in her.

  But, fourth and finally, wait until you’re flat out across a field. I could hardly hold her—it took a good ten minutes to get her under my hands; after that, Paradise. I had no hat that day, which is how I preferred to ride, and the wind touched every root of every hair on my head. Lady Limerick was so strong that I stood in the stirrups for a lot of the time, “listening” to my legs and holding her down as much as I could with my hands.

  In the etiquette of hunting, you mustn’t overtake the master. More than once I almost had to wheel her out of the pack. Eventually, I took her over to one side and rode on the fringes, ready to wheel away until I knew I had her under control. And when she knew I had taken full command, then she allowed me to ride her as I wanted.

  If you ever do ride, watch out for the moment when you take a wall or a ditch at full speed. The faint riders slow down; I, my father’s son in some respects, rode faster. When Lady Limerick lunged up into the sky at our first wall, I lay forward on her, feeling her huge shoulders under me, and excited enough for heart failure. And when she came down out of the sky and I hadn’t fallen, and I leaned back onto her, I almost laughed out loud.

  I didn’t see my father that day with that hunt. I saw many other things but not a red-haired man standing by some wall somewhere watching the rise and fall of the riders going over and being startled to see his son among them.

  I saw the wild surge of the hounds as they “found” a scent and took off with the sound of the huntsman’s heavenly choir, the baying of a pack, but I never saw a red-haired man leaning against a tree at the outer edge of a copse and holding out his arms in delight as the hunt streamed down the hill.

  And I saw the fox go to ground, into a covert on the side of a small hill, a den of furze and limestone and the hounds wheeling, jawing, and pawing outside, but I never saw a red-haired man on top of that hill looking down and nodding his agreement as the master and the whipper-in withdrew in the knowledge that the fox had won the day.

  “Hunting,” said my father, “was invented by-by-by the gods so that Man could feel what it’s like to be a god once in a while.”

  But the old gods of Knockainey didn’t give me my father when I hunted for him. That night, however, the show was to play a nearby town called Charleville—where, once again, everything changed.

  By now I knew that I wasn’t doing this solely for Mother. I missed my father. I missed him every moment of every day. When I awoke in the morning, my heart sank at the thought that once again he wouldn’t be at the breakfast table. And therefore couldn’t ask me, as he often did on some farm matter or other, “What-what-what would you advise?”

  Although I know now that he was teaching me, training me, I didn’t feel that at the time. Instead I felt that I was part of the place and its systems, that I wasn’t there merely to eat, drink, go to school, come home, eat and drink again, and go to sleep—I felt useful. Now that he was gone, that was gone.

  And I missed the sound of his voice, and the way it filled the places he inhabited. By that, I don’t mean that he was loud and overbearing; it’s just that he seemed to be the natural sound for the places in which I saw him—as natural as a rushing noise from a river, a wind in the trees.

  I missed too his interplay with Mother, the responses she drew from him, his earnest intent to answer every question she asked, his desire to please her, his evident wish to give her credit for everything that happened every day, including the rising of the sun. Yes, I know that a coolness had seemed to exist between them now and then, but they were a natural couple, buck and doe.

  For instance, Mother had always lived in general from one lift of her spirits to the next. In between, she trod what my father called “the vale of melancholy,” often not raising her eyes for almost a full day.

  “Your mother’s in the vale of melancholy,” he’d say when I was a little boy. “We’ll leave her by herself for a bit and then we’ll go and cheer her up.”

  I had visions of some dark cleft in some high brooding mountains, like the engravings in the old books that we had. To be fair, she never ruled people with her moods; she tried to keep them to herself, but they leaked from her, leaked all over the household.

  My father was her elixir—he and he alone knew how to break such a run, how to race down into her glen of despair, grab her, and hustle her out of there and up into the sunshine. I couldn’t do it; as a boy I tried, with stories, with impersonations. Once or twice I shook her into laughter with a description of a neighbor or a reenacted scene from the forge or a fracas from one of the village shops, but only my father could make the restoration last.

  He did it by generating good news, usually with a compliment thrown in. In the evening he’d say, “You-you-you have an admirer.”

  Unable not to be curious, she’d raise her head from the sewing or darning and look at him, her eyes, but not her lips, speaking the question “Who?”

  My father would then mention the name of somebody they had met, some dashing man, married, or a bachelor known to be exciting, a rake, maybe, and Mother would say, “Oh?”

  To which my father would then say, “He-he-he needn’t go sloping around here, that’s for sure,
if he knows what’s good for him. And anyway I think he’s partly a lunatic. They-they-they say you can see him lurching up the hills and through the woods when there’s a full moon.”

  That always got her—the full moon; she’d go against her own mood and laugh. Now, of course, she realized that if my father truly had run away with this actress, he had taken her elixir with him and somebody else was drinking it.

  As for me—I missed above all the sudden little things that happened so often, that moment in which he would call or beckon and say, when I reached him, “I’ve-I’ve-I’ve something to show you.” And it would be a new and much lighter model of horseshoe that he’d picked up at the forge, or a quotation that he’d found in the newspaper or one of his books and had scribbled down on the back of an envelope.

  I didn’t know how much I loved these things until I no longer had them, which is an echo of a saying Mother now uttered every day: “You never miss the water ’til the well runs dry.”

  In Charleville, the town named for King Charles II, the well wasn’t dry—but it did feel fouled at first. Not because my father reappeared, which he did. Normal as the night, he stood at the door to the hall, taking the money and handing out the tickets—and a new pain began.

  I hung back, waiting until the last tickets were sold; then I could grab a word with him. As people approached the door and saw him, they nudged one another and pointed him out. I overheard their first remarks: “That’s the fella that ran away from his wife and farm;” and, “Him selling the tickets—is he the dirty oul’ fella ran off after the woman in the show?”

  My father had acquired a notoriety; my family was being marked as scandalous; perhaps audiences were larger because they wanted to see his paramour; this invoiced feelings of deep, deep shame.

  I stepped back farther into the shadows, so as not to be seen—and to watch more closely. Yes, the people of Charleville were indeed pointing him out, and yes, they were indeed sniggering. Under my clothes, I felt the slime of chagrin pour down my body, from my head and neck down my shoulders and rib cage, down my stomach and thighs.