Venetia Kelly's Traveling Show Read online

  He began to fold the newspaper; then he turned to me. I hope he doesn’t cry again, was my thought.

  “Ben.” About to say something, he stopped himself. “I have to go now.” He touched my hand for a split second.

  I sat while he rose. From the bench I watched him as he made his way down the street and crossed to the house where he was staying, where I had stayed. There’s a lot you can tell about a man from his rear view, and my father that morning had as large a burden on his shoulders as I had ever seen him or anybody have to bear.

  Feeling that I’d see him again soon, I waited. Once again I was hit hard with the thought Nothing about this makes sense. Not at that moment in my life anyway, when I as yet had no knowledge of blinding passion, the kind that makes you feel as though you’ve gone red behind the eyes. No, it didn’t make sense because I’d observed my parents with the acute focus of an only child.

  Through all the phases of early childhood, puberty, and adolescence I’d watched them consciously and unconsciously. Since the Catastrophe, I’d been reviewing what I’d seen. And I knew—or thought I did—a great deal about their relationship, how fond they were of each other. No decent man speculates aloud on what happens in his parents’ marriage bed, so I shan’t. But their banter gave a clue as to their deep affection.

  As small children do, I asked my father one evening, “Did you propose to Mother?”

  “I did,” he said. “I went down on one knee so often that I have a bad leg.”

  Turning to her, I said, “And did you say yes immediately?”

  My father interrupted. “She did not. She turned me down like a bedspread.”

  Mother laughed, and I went away from the exchange so encouraged by my ability to please them both that I often asked thereafter about their early life and courtship.

  “Did you bring her flowers?”

  “Yes. Her father’s goat ate them.”

  More laughter from Mother.

  “Did you bring her chocolates?”

  “Yes,” he said, “and I was gentleman enough to point out that the hard ones were the ones with the teeth marks.”

  “Is that true, Mother?”

  She’d shake her head, still laughing, and say, “Not quite—but I always counted them when I opened the box.”

  As I sat there on that street bench, disturbed not so much by these memories as by the contrast with them that I had now been witnessing, I saw Mrs. Haas. She was walking backward out of a shop that was half bar and half grocery. A bald man in an apron walked out too. She was facing him and remonstrating; he was spreading his hands in helpless appeal, and she moved back in toward the door and stabbed him in the chest with her finger. I swear that I saw him wince.

  He went back inside, reappeared, and like a man with a peace offering handed Mrs. Haas a glass bowl of eggs. Mrs. Haas took them and flounced away back along the street toward the house to which my father had gone. Although she seemed agitated, she too looked as if she belonged here. I was the one who felt out of place.

  My father had a saying: “When you have nothing to do—do nothing. It’s often good for you.” That morning, I can’t say that I had nothing to do; in fact I had the biggest task of my life facing me. But I couldn’t do much, other than wait and watch.

  In the cold beginnings of 1932, sitting on a bench in the middle of a small town in Ireland felt like sitting and watching the surface of a pond. Interesting things were hinted at on the surface, but nothing much moved. Now and then a blurt of activity broke out—a woman emptying a bucket of water into the street, a man wearing a tweed cap cycling past.

  If this is humankind, what did the Creator have in mind? That this place too, these people, should have a reckoning on the Last Day? Very difficult, I often think, to reconcile a Grand Universal Plan with the almost imperceptible life of a small town in Ireland.

  Fifteen minutes or so after Mrs. Haas went into the house, a traveling-show truck appeared around from the lane beside the house, with my father alone at the wheel. I guessed that he’d enjoy that. He didn’t drive past me; he headed out of town, and I followed. It’s open countryside; some of the roads have hills; the trees were bare; I could easily keep track; and I stayed back as far as I could to avoid being detected by him.

  We reached the town of Croom without seeing another human being. I soon understood the reason. A crowd had gathered on the main street for an election rally. At this time of day? Rallies usually took place in the evening or on Sunday mornings outside church gates. I should have guessed; this was a Blarney rally.

  They had turned out in hundreds. All week the newspapers had been hailing him: DUMMY IS BEST CANDIDATE, SAY VOTERS, and WE’LL VOTE FOR THE DUMMY, and ELECT THE DUMMY—YOU WON’T NOTICE THE DIFFERENCE, and COSGRAVE, DE VALERA, BLARNEY—WHICH ONE’S THE DUMMY?

  Blarney himself reveled in it. He sat on Venetia’s knee and glittered at the crowd, his mouth a red slash in the sunlight, his hat askew, his eyes wicked. I pushed to the side of the gathering, as near as I could to the farm cart on which Venetia sat; no sign of my father.

  “Tell me now,” Blarney was saying. “Would you vote for a man as dull as Cosgrave? Or as tall as de Valera? I mean voting for a dull man could give you indigestion—he’d be hard and lumpy to swallow. Voting for a tall man is a bad thing. They’re only useful if you want something down off a high shelf. A tall man will always talk down to you. Which is worse—a dull man or a tall man?”

  They loved it; they lapped it up. Blarney’s head swiveled this way and that, smiling, smiling.

  A heckler spoke up. “Better than a dummy.”

  “Who said that?” said Blarney.

  I could see the heckler and I thought he’d made a mistake; never get smart with a comedian. The man had a large, bulbous nose, fodder for a cartoonist.

  “Well, now,” said Blarney to him, “aren’t you the smart man? Well, Mr. Smart Man, I’m going to give you a nickname that’ll stick to you for the rest of your life.”

  Nothing can be more enjoyable to an Irishman than the objective spectacle of malice; meaning, as long as we’re not the butt of it, we love it. The crowd murmured a collective gloat, and Blarney glittered at the unfortunate heckler.

  “What’s your real name?” Blarney asked. The man didn’t answer.

  Naturally, somebody answered for him; “He’s Mick O’Brien.”

  “Hey-ho, Mr. Mick O’Brien. I’m looking at your nose now—” And Blarney stared, then turned to the crowd and started to laugh. He laughed so infectiously that the entire crowd joined in. I watched Mr. O’Brien, and he didn’t laugh.

  “The nose!” said Blarney, wheezing through his helpless laughter. “The nose! Did you ever see anything like it?” He paused, collected himself, and said, “A nose like that didn’t come from a father. A nose like that didn’t come from a mother. A nose like that came from”—he paused—“a nose like that came from a distillery!”

  The crowd laughed and laughed.

  “And so, Mr. Smart Man Mick O’Brien, I here and now and hereby and thereby name you Bottle O’Brien.”

  As many as thirty years later, staying in Charleville one night, I heard that story retold in a public house. The name had lived as long as the man.

  For the moment, and in that election, that was the last I heard of Blarney’s campaigning. He made an appearance that night in Croom, and again, by all accounts, they packed the hall. I didn’t go there. That afternoon, I followed my father on foot to the show, and hung around waiting for him to come out. Venetia had disappeared in their car after Blarney’s “campaign rally,” and as I saw her go I fancied that this gave me a chance for some time alone with my father.

  He reappeared, and I walked to greet him. But as I did so he once again held both hands in front of him like a man fending off an attack and ran back into the hall. Chagrined beyond words, I retreated to the car.

  When I recovered, I made up my mind to get firmer about this entire matter. I drove back to Charleville and went straig
ht to the house where I’d stayed, where I’d met Sarah Kelly, where I’d breakfasted with my father. Now I would wait for him there and bring this matter to a head.

  Mrs. Haas answered the door and greeted me as though I were a man she hoped to marry. She didn’t know that I had questions to ask.

  “Come in! Come in! Ve’re all alone, they haff flown, they haff flown away to anywhere!”

  She led the way into the kitchen and began at once to prepare food.

  “You must be hungry; all big strong young men are hungry; if I had a son, he vould be as fat as the balloon.”

  For my first ten minutes there she talked all the time—the energy in her speech, the sheer vigor. I, however, felt a little apprehensive, as though I’d burgled somebody’s house—and I had no plans in place to explain myself should Sarah or Venetia return. My father, I figured, would stay in that hall until the show had performed, packed up, and moved on.

  Mrs. Haas told me that Sarah and “Wenetia” loved each other “like the twins.” They wore each other’s clothes, they rehearsed each other’s lines. When one had a pain, the other had it too: “Miles apart they haff the pain, not that they are ever too many miles apart.” They ate the same food, used the same soap, disliked the same people. “Disliking is a better guide than liking,” said Mrs. Haas, as she cooked the best eggs that I’ve ever eaten. “Nutmeg,” she told me, “just a little; it fights with the salt of the ham in the mixedy-up eggs.”

  She brought the food to the table—the eggs, the long strips of fried potato, the hot apple bread, of which I ate so much that I felt disgraceful. Suddenly I was strengthened—less defeated, stronger than at any time in the wretched few weeks since this business had begun.

  “Is Mr. Kelly—King Kelly—is he the father of, is he the grandfather—”

  Before I could finish she turned on me. “No! Ve vill not talk about him. Not him.”

  And then, in one burst of speech, Mrs. Haas changed the subject—and at the same time energized me and altered my plan of the day.

  “Oh, tomorrow vill be such a furious day,” she said. “It vill begin furious, and go on furious, and end furious, they vill all be furious. The father, he must go to wote. And your own father, he must be taken to your place to wote. And my Sarah has to go to Dublin to wote and with her my Wenetia and that vill take many hours. I must make the food for the car.”

  Whew! I sat back. Point by point I walked her through it. Yes, it was Mr. Thomas A. Kelly, and yes, he had rented a cottage not too far away, and he is “Sarah’s father and little Wenetia’s grandfather,” and my father would be back in our village at ten o’clock in the morning, because the plan was to go to the polling booth at Charleville to see King Kelly vote, and to see Blarney there too, and urge people to vote for him, then drive my father to vote, and then go to Dublin in time to vote before the polls closed at nine o’clock in the evening.

  And yes, yes! Mr. Thomas A. Kelly was running against the ventriloquist’s doll Blarney. What on earth was going on in that family?

  As I was hearing all this information, I heard the noise, as of fingernails, rapidly on canvas. By now Mrs. Haas had finished cooking and had come to the table, where she sat opposite me. She kicked off her shoes and away she went, scratching like a truffle hound.

  Synecdoche: taking the part for the entire. I will now use synecdoche because I want you to know the kind of country, in particular the social culture of the Irish countryside, that came out to vote in that election. It was homogeneous and undramatic. Here I can kill a number of birds with one stone. That’s a dry epithet, you’ll see, because to describe the general I’m going to tell you about three women in particular: Mother’s friends Mollie May Holmes, Joan Hogan, and Kitty Cleary.

  As well as typifying the population on whom our democracy was built, they were the kind of people Mother couldn’t face in this new shame. She couldn’t face their strength—which lay in their ordinariness. They all belonged to a world where this kind of thing didn’t happen.

  Mollie May Holmes lived four miles away, also a farmer’s wife. She and Mother met every few months, usually after an exchange of letters through the post, blue envelopes with, in Mollie May’s case, even bluer ink.

  In winter they met in town, a cup of tea and some seedcake, at Kiely’s bakery on a Friday afternoon. On summer Sunday afternoons, they met on the riverbank at a point two miles from Mollie May’s house and two miles from ours. There, on the grass, they had a picnic and what they both called “a good old chat.”

  They’d been to school together since the age of four; each held back only the secrets that would embarrass the other. They cooked for their families, they knitted, they darned socks and the elbows of sweaters; they looked after elderly parents, if need be, and never complained. Their husbands also knew each other, cordially but not well. My father liked Joe Holmes but never thought much about him.

  Joan Hogan lived nearer and shared a birthday with Mother, not that birthdays received much attention. Mrs. Hogan wore “the worst clothes in the county,” according to Mother, but she “baked like an angel.” She also had a laugh that made all others laugh, a kind of helpless whoop that she couldn’t stop once it started.

  Unlike Mollie May Holmes, Joan Hogan hadn’t been schooled beyond the age of fourteen. She always came to our house, Mother never went to hers, and so far as I know they never met in town. It strikes me now that Mother might have been ashamed to meet Joan Hogan in public, with her stringy hair, her thick glasses, and always a hem of slip or petticoat dragging and dipping below her skirt.

  I liked best the third friend of Mother’s, the one my father called “the Cherub.” Her name was Kitty Cleary. From a family as poor as any we knew, she had a round, pretty face and a good heart, which took her up a significant notch socially—she married into a strong farm.

  “Not, of course, as strong as ours,” Mother would say when telling the tale of Kitty’s courtship, “but a good deal better than what she came from.” Her clothes didn’t come from fashion plates either.

  These three women came to know one another through having Mother in common. The mutual understanding of all four never had to be spoken, with their sensible shoes (on their farms they wore rubber boots most of the time), their undramatic (to put it kindly) dress sense, and their shared concerns—family, farmwork, placation and management of husband, and launching of children into the world as safely as possible.

  Their responsibilities occupied their entire lives. They never spent time on themselves; they had little vanity and few cosmetics. For entertainment they had neighbors’ visits, to and fro, with perhaps once or twice a year a dance in the local hall or a picnic by the river.

  Tragedy came by in its casual way. Joan Hogan and Kitty Cleary had both suffered stillborn infants, as did Mother; Mollie May Holmes’s mother-in-law, who lived with them, had been an interfering harridan. She then went mad overnight, but the son wouldn’t let his mother be taken into an institution, so Mollie May Holmes’s red hair turned an astonishing shade of white almost in a week from coping with the mad old woman.

  Also, and so important, these women voted. They were the electorate.

  James Clare had a friend, Patrick Kavanagh, a poet from County Monaghan, whose name is now famous. Kavanagh was about ten years older than me, and after a slow and disbelieved beginning he eventually acquired a fine reputation.

  An awkward man, with a harsh voice and a dire lack of hygiene, he had a morose air. Since he was a consumptive, it was said that his days in a tuberculosis clinic had made him morbid. But I know the countryside up there in the north whence he hailed. He himself called it “stony, gray soil;” it’s a hard territory, poor land, that part of Monaghan, and a man who came from farming stock there was born into disappointment.

  Behind that grumpy and unhygienic exterior hummed a soul as strong and sweet-sounding as a good engine. When I first met him, and for many years afterward, I assumed—and others made the same mistake—that Kavanagh was a “p
rovincial,” that is to say, he was a regional poet, not much above the level of gravestone verse for local newspapers. What I didn’t yet know—being too callow then—was that his poetic spirit had the power of the ancients.

  And here’s the point. Kavanagh became a voice for those who knew the essence of small things. One poem above all states his thesis. “I have lived,” he wrote, “in important places, times / When great events were decided.”

  His “great events” had to do with quarrels over half-acres of land, quarrels that became fights, family feuds, tiny local wars over the ownership of “half a rood of rock, a no-man’s land.” He saw these men with their “pitchfork-armed claims” as Homeric, as great and tragic as the Greeks, and he described how Homer’s ghost whispered to him, and told him that Homer “made the Iliad from such a local row.”

  Kavanagh called the poem, all fourteen lines of it, “Epic,” and once I had heard the sonnet from James Clare and then read it—and it was one of those days when you remembered everything about the moment, where you were, who was nearby, what you were eating, what clothes you wore—I felt something powerful and relieving. In the small, the poem said, is also the great.

  What, therefore, would the poet Kavanagh have made of Mother’s friends? What would Shakespeare have made of them? Probably what Shakespeare made of similar country people in rural England.

  Mrs. Haas’s information led me to a decision. I set out in the car after I had eaten. Before going home to prepare for my job next day as polling clerk, I called upon each of Mother’s friends.

  “Delicate” is the word; that’s how they were with me. None broached the subject until I did—yet each began by asking, “And how’s your mother?” They knew—but they didn’t say so. Nobody spoke out of turn—by which I mean none of them criticized my father, or passed judgment. I’d been afraid—especially of Joan Hogan, who had a lacerating tongue; yet she proved almost the kindest.