The Matchmaker of Kenmare Read online

  The men usually answer no to the first question, and to the second they might say, “Well, a girl who likes a laugh,” or “A sturdy girl, she won’t object to hard work,” or “A girl steady in herself”; or, if they were fishermen, “A girl who knows the sea, can work the nets.” Miss Begley remarked, “At this point I might say that I know just the person.” And she added, “Whether I do or not.”

  The cottage hovers in a pocket above the ocean; there are no other houses on Lamb’s Head. From the red door you can see for miles across open water. Stone grows everywhere—all around, up the hill, down to the water, where rocks litter the foreshore, their white patches like medals in the sun.

  By land she can hear people coming up the battered lane. If they arrive by sea she can look down on their heads as they moor at the little jetty. Miss Begley says that since she was a very young child she has watched for the boats, and to this day she runs back to the house to tell her grandmother how many men have made the journey. They commonly arrive on a Sunday, she says, striding up from the sea through the high, scrabby grass, quiet men, she says, “shy and big-boned.”

  One of the first things they see is a photograph on the mantelpiece, of a little girl with a ribbon in her hair and a middle-aged woman dressed in black. Dated 1923, it was posed some twenty years ago in a studio in Kenmare, the nearest town. Both are looking at the camera; the grandmother, Mrs. Holst, a widow, purses her severe lips; the girl is a little overfed and has a cautious smile; a potted palm sits on a column in the vague “Egyptian” background. There’s no doubt that it’s grandmother and granddaughter; she says that visitors comment upon the resemblance.

  For as long as Miss Begley can remember, the grandmother, before she undertakes to make any introductions, delivers a lecture—which Miss Begley has adopted: “Marriage is very important. Marrying a girl is the most important thing a man can do. Never mind business or politics or sport or any of that, there’s nothing so vital to the world as a man marrying a woman. That’s where we get our children from, that’s how the human race goes forward. And if it’s too late for children, there’s the companionship of a safe and trusted person.”

  Miss Begley says that she has listened to those fireside words of her grandmother all her life, a speech that ends on a declaration: “Marriage is the gold standard of all relationships. It’s the currency by which everything else is valued.”

  I asked, What do the visiting men think of all this? She told me, “Very often the father speaks for the son, who is usually asked to leave for a little while, and he’ll wander out of the cottage and look at the sea.” Then the father describes the son’s work as, say, a fisherman on the Atlantic—the small boats, the freezing winds, the catch that might drag you overboard; and the absences lasting all night and perhaps several days if they were following herring shoals, or a field of cod far out. “A woman,” he’ll announce, “would have to put up with that. And the living is hard, no doubt there. When the ice gets onto your hands, it doubles the size of your knuckles.”

  Next come some more questions: Is there any insanity in your family? Would your wife say that you yourself were a generous man or a mean-spirited man? Is your son a decent man? Can he be depended upon not to strike a woman? That’s a very cowardly thing to do, to strike a woman, who hasn’t the same strength as a man.

  If the father looks uncomfortable she’ll ask him, “Did you ever strike a woman yourself? Did you ever hit your wife?” If he says, however sheepish and apologetic, that yes, he did, the grandmother—or Miss Begley—will rise and say, “Well, sir, I’m afraid—‘like father like son’. That’s what we believe in this house. And we can’t do business with you. What I mean is—we won’t do business with you. So go on your way.”

  Their visitors showed up, Miss Begley said, “throughout the whole year, except in the time of the gales, March or September, or the worst of the cold rain in January and February.” Sometimes, as many as four and five seekers of marriage came to that house on a Sunday, in boats tied up below the headland, or by road in hackney cars from Kenmare.

  “And by the time they left,” she said, “we had shaped the rest of their lives.”

  3

  On that first visit, I had taken care to introduce myself, lest they mistake me for a suitor.

  “God save all here. My name is Ben MacCarthy, and I work for the Folklore Commission. May I come in and speak with you for a while?”

  Miss Begley was on her knees in her doorway. Without looking up, she continued to draw a fat line of white chalk around the doormat.

  “This is to keep out the ants,” she said. “Ants hate chalk. It makes them vomit.”

  The grandmother rose from a chair at the table, came rustling in long black skirts to the door, peered at me, and seemed disappointed.

  I tried again. “My job is to gather traditions that have lasted. And I’m particularly interested in matchmaking.”

  Miss Begley, on her knees, replied, “Good.”

  I looked down at her. She finished framing the doormat with her chalk line and raised her head. Hands on hips, she looked up at me, her eyes searching every inch of my face.

  “Here,” she said, and held up a chalky hand for me to raise her to her feet. “Did you bring this glorious weather with you?”

  Within sight of the ocean, we sat on a bench outside. I prepared my pen and record book, and she adjusted the pace of her words to my note-taking. That’s when I took down the note you’ve just read—about questioning men who sought wives. Later, I made an unofficial entry in my private journal:

  She has unblinking eye contact. When she’s asking a question, one eyebrow rises at an angle like a shrewd lawyer’s. She seems to have as much energy as the wind. I wish I’d taken a photograph of her. She also has the gift of affection: From time to time, she reached out and touched me on the forearm, as though to draw me closer to her. I find it very moving—Venetia used to do it.

  Miss Begley grew up speaking the Irish language; it was the family and neighborhood tongue. The local school in Caherdaniel educated her to the age of eleven and balanced her Gaelic speaking with an excellent schooling in English. From there she boarded with the nuns in Killarney until the age of eighteen. With a better-than-good basic education—excellent French, a strong modicum of German, comprehensive Latin—she came home and stayed home. Her grandmother began to fail a little in health for a time, and Miss Begley took over their world.

  They lived—and lived well—on the grandmother’s three incomes. Childless, now long widowed, formerly a nurse in Chicago, Mrs. Holst had a social welfare pension from the United States. On top of that, small investments and a pension from the long-dead Mr. Holst, a bank employee, had delivered beyond expectations. And she also made money from arranging marriages—to which skill she had apprenticed her granddaughter.

  I asked, “Is it an art, a craft, a profession?”

  “It’s a life,” said Miss Begley.

  “It’s a business,” said the grandmother.

  A serious business too: In a time of difficult economics, marriage often laid down the path to survival. Ireland, a nation barely twenty years old in the 1940s, had little social help to offer any of its people. Poverty was the national quicksand; widespread and easy to step on, it sucked people down rapidly. But a practical woman could help a man to build up a farm or a business. She could cook and bake, make clothes for the family, plant a kitchen garden, tend animals and account books, help with harvests—many a husband boasted that his wife equaled two men.

  “There’s another thing,” said Miss Begley. “A single girl with a job but who still lives at home has no money for herself.”

  “Doesn’t she work for a wage?” I asked.

  “Yes. But she has to throw it into the family pot. They keep nothing for themselves. Very bad for their morale.”

  They found their clients by different routes. While Mrs. Holst stayed at home and waited for clients to come to her by word of mouth, Miss Begley went out and s
earched for anybody who wanted a spouse.

  She said, “I have an easier task with the girls because most Irishwomen want a man of their own. They want children. And it isn’t just for practical reasons, it’s romantic too. Most of the men, on the other hand—they don’t really know they want a wife. Until we tell them.”

  4

  An expanded version of those first notes from Lamb’s Head can be found in my report, Matchmaking in Rural Ireland 1949, complete with social information. I didn’t use the Ediphone; I wish I had, because we’d now have a record of Miss Begley’s voice, but I was clumsy with the device—I broke too many of the cylinders or jammed the machine. So I noted down such interviews in my own kind of shorthand and at night wrote them out in full. Where possible I read my notes back to the interviewee and rarely found inaccuracies; on that count I praise myself.

  For the report, I interviewed more than twenty matchmakers all over the country, and one in London, an upper-class woman named Claudia—of whom more later. A man in County Mayo, a portly fellow named Stephen O’Leary, called himself a “marriage broker.” One lady in the midlands near Roscommon parlayed her experience into a newspaper advice column for the lovelorn and called herself “Sue the Soother.”

  All of them, no matter how they did it, aimed at the same goal—to bring together a pair of strangers who might make a successful life partnership, discover deep affections, and breed many children.

  They saw no irony in viewing themselves as, in the words of one, “Assistants to Destiny.” Mr. O’Leary said to me, “We erase loneliness.”

  None had the life force of Kate Begley. Of them all, she alone understood that matchmakers come from the foundations of the universe. She believed that the talent for arranging marriages has no boundaries and, as she said, “Unto those who hold that gift it gives extra power, if they but knew how to find it in themselves.”

  From her I learned some of the traditions: that matchmaking was a priestly duty in more than one faith.

  “A Catholic priest or a Jewish rabbi—they’re all at it one way and another. There’s matchmaking in all societies,” she said, “rich or poor.” The rich, she claimed, often pursued it most ardently of all, in order to protect their estates.

  In some countries, she told me, those seeking to marry would make offerings to a matchmaking god, and that same god was often the Man in the Moon. Or the reflection of the moon in the river or a lake or the sea. Or a fixed star in the south of the sky.

  Magic, she claimed, also plays a large part.

  “Well, it must be magic!” she said to me with that indignant shake of the head. “If two complete strangers have trusted the power of a stranger to bring them together—what else is that but magic?”

  To reinforce the point, she told me that she also doubled as a fortuneteller.

  “It’s a very useful thing to be able to see into the future of the people you’re introducing to each other. I read a palm once of a girl from County Limerick, and I saw in her hand, clear as day, the face of a fellow from down the road here, in Templenoe. They have eight children now.”

  The more I pressed her, the more I learned about her view of her power and its place in the world.

  “There’s a tribe in Africa,” she said, “and they have a matchmaking feast every seven years. They call on the matchmaking gods to find husbands for the seven most marriageable young ladies at that feast. And lo and behold! At noon next day without fail, from all points of the compass, seven tall, handsome young warriors stroll into that village.”

  “How do you know this?” I asked.

  “Nana told me. Every matchmaker worth their salt knows that story.”

  All that first afternoon, I sat and listened to her. Matchmaking, to her, was part of the machinery that drives the universe, and she captured my heart with one detail.

  “There’s a legend,” she said, “and I’m one of the very few who know it—that says all couples who are meant to marry are connected by an invisible silver cord. The matchmaking gods tie that cord around their ankles at birth, and in time the gods pull those cords tighter and tighter. Slowly, slowly, over the next twenty or thirty or forty years, they draw the couple toward each other until they meet.”

  5

  Now let me tell you how I found Miss Begley—and let me tell you too that the man who first told me of her existence, a decent fellow, was the same man who would one day wreck my life.

  Our nation has a gift for the bizarre, and I’d gone to see a gentleman in Limerick who advertised dentures for hire. I wanted to collect stories of the occasions—weddings, funerals, and so on—for which people hired false teeth. A potential customer crashed into me as we both tried to step through a narrow doorway. As I write this now, I can see that Miss Begley would call it Fate. With the uppercase F.

  His name was Neddy; he had a deep, thick accent and empty gums; we stepped together inside the dark, wooden rooms of MR. MACMANUS—OCCASION MERCHANT, as the sign on the wall said. When his bell jangled, the said merchant walked from the rooms at the rear of the premises.

  Neddy—full name, Edward Joseph Hannitty—pointed to his mouth, and Mr. MacManus beamed.

  “Oh, I’ve plenty of teeth. I could play a tune for you.”

  Which was Mr. MacManus’s joke; he ran his finger across his own top row alternating black and white, and they did indeed look like piano keys.

  “But you want a few teeth for yourself?”

  “I do, sir.” Neddy nodded.

  I can tell you that he didn’t look like somebody who would one day change three lives profoundly and forever.

  “Is it for a wedding? We do a lot of weddings. I’d a man in here last month,” said Mr. MacManus. “He was looking for a parrot to take to a wedding, the bird had learned to say ‘Shut up, you hoor,’ and he thought it’d be a great joke to bring it to the wedding, and I never got the bird back, the bride’s father killed it, so they didn’t get the joke I suppose.”

  Neddy said, “There’s a woman, down in Kenmare, like. She’s a matchmaker, and she told me if I had any teeth she’d get me my choice of select ladies.”

  Now began a search of the premises, and to my delight Mr. MacManus invited me to help him. Behind the storefront stretched long, slender rooms with narrow bays containing myriad articles. I read the broad, coiling handwritten legends on the boxes. “Secondhand Ladies’ Corsets,” said one box. At the edge of another shelf sat “Implements for Removing Thorns from Flesh (Human)” while next to it sat a bigger box of “Implements for Removing Thorns from Flesh (Animal).”

  He had thousands of crutches, including a tiny pair.

  “For a child?” I asked, charmed in this cave of treasures, and he said, “No, actually. For a midget. I had a little customer who lost a leg in the last war.”

  “They had dwarves in the war?”

  “Running messages in the trenches. They were below the parapets, the snipers couldn’t get them.”

  The next exploration brought us to a room of stuffed creatures.

  “I bet the teeth are in here,” he said, and as I was about to ask, this heavy-breathing man with the pleasant and willing air explained his method of filing his inventory.

  “Now, you’re saying to yourself, ‘What in the name of God is he doing keeping false teeth with stuffed animals?’ and ’tis a valid question enough. Well, some of the teeth have to have repairs, like, and I don’t ever get any tooth on its own, so there’s times when I take a tooth, like, from a stuffed animal and glue it to a denture plate and it works fine. There’s a man here in the city and he has five teeth from a young wolf in his mouth. He’s so thrilled with ’em he gave himself his own nickname—‘Wolf’ O’Brien.”

  Among stuffed foxes, badgers, ferrets, and a squirrel, Mr. MacManus climbed on a ladder and began to take out a large drawer from a high cabinet. I feared that the weight might topple him, but he cheered with success.

  “I have ’em,” he said, “the buggers,” and he came back down the ladder hold
ing a cardboard shoe box. “And there’s teeth in here should be the right age for him.”

  At Mr. MacManus’s directive, Neddy sat in a chair and leaned back. Both sizes, the too-large and the too-small, had their problems. For the large, Neddy’s helpfulness led him to make wide, face-threatening contortions; the smaller sets ran the danger of being swallowed whole or in part.

  Lanky as a goose, shy as an owl, embarrassed to be alive—those were the terms I was enlisting for my notebook to describe Neddy Hannitty with his mouth open in hope.

  “Don’t we all have to help a man who’s looking to get married?” said Mr. MacManus as he sifted the pink devices. “Ah, God is good!” he then exclaimed. “I knew it’d be this pair.”

  He wiped a set of tombstone dentures on his sleeve and began to fit them to the willing drover. After some jiggling and juggling, and a gentle amount of drool from Neddy, a triumphant Mr. MacManus held up a mirror.

  “You’re fixed,” he said. “Smile.”

  Neddy smiled—but, force of habit, smiled with his hand almost covering his mouth.

  “I’ll hire them out to you for six months,” said Mr. MacManus.

  Then he stood at his door and waved us off, proud as a parent.

  On the street I asked Neddy, “How did you fall into the hands of a matchmaker?”

  “I’m forty-five,” he said, “I’m a cattle drover to every farmer in the south of Ireland, and there isn’t a hill I haven’t climbed over, and I never thought of marrying, but I noticed that if I saw a good pair of legs I always felt the day was improving.”

  Enter Miss Begley. One wet morning, Neddy had been driving cattle from the village of Sneem to the town of Kenmare. I’m familiar with that Atlantic rain; it seeps into every pore, drenches every follicle, drips cold down your neck. When the rain got so heavy that he’d had to take shelter, a woman got off her bicycle, ran through the puddles to the same tree, and complained about the weather.