Venetia Kelly's Traveling Show: A Novel of Ireland Page 4

  It was only when I put together the many similarities between Miss Dora Fay and Mother that I grasped the cultural mixed-ness of my parents’ marriage. The Fays came from an Anglo-Irish family, meaning not Catholics, and had roots in a society that originated in England, although their ancestors had been in Ireland for hundreds of years. They worshipped at the Church of Ireland, known elsewhere as Anglican or Episcopalian—what we have always in Ireland called “Protestants,” even though the term properly refers to the Reform churches.

  My mother, of Welsh stock, had also been a “Protestant,” but converted to Catholicism in order to marry my father. His family can be traced back to the oldest of the Irish clans, and now I can survey where people might have seen certain differences between us and our farming neighbors.

  We had that slight Protestant tinge—“English,” if you will—that to some people seemed to set us apart. And to be apart is, if not dangerous, at least exotic. To my eyes, though, my parents never seemed different from anybody else’s. I suppose if you’ve always been wrapped in wool, you don’t know it’s wool.

  Mother had embraced Catholicism like a soldier takes orders—duty rather than passion, rote rather than inquiry. (My father once remarked to me, “She still has some of that Welsh Baptist wind in her pipes.”) She left my religious education to my teachers, and faith played no part in our conversation.

  In fact, other than the duty of Mass every Sunday, the only contact we had with the Catholic Church arose if Father Hogan asked my father to come with him when buying a horse; and sometimes they went to the races together.

  The next day Professor Fay and Miss Dora Fay came to our house for lunch. Such talk! And all about politics. Up to that moment I’d never heard anything like it. The four adults conversed in gales; the winds of their conversation blew up and down the long table and out into the sunny Sunday afternoon. My parents thrilled to Professor Fay, who had all the latest news from Dublin. Miss Fay, when she wanted to make a point, swept the table in front of her with one hand and then the other.

  That was June of 1922, the first summer of our new nation—which was why I’d never heard such talk. Intoxicating. Intoxicating even now to look back upon it, and I believe that’s when my interest in politics first took hold.

  A note here on Professor Fay: I didn’t like him from the first. Being a small boy, I didn’t quite know why I didn’t like him. He had eyes like a bad-tempered pig and it grieved me to think so, because I loved our pigs. But we’d once had a bad-tempered sow who had often tried to bite me. Her name was Rita, and Professor Fay’s little eyes reminded me of Rita’s—mean-spirited, glinty eyes, sulky with malice. As it turned out, I was so right not to like him.

  He also had an irritating habit of straightening his bow tie unreasonably often, and wetting his lips with his tongue, a darting little pink slink.

  I did, however, enjoy the respect that he paid my parents, and how he said repeatedly to my father, “I perfectly agree with you, Mr. MacCarthy, I perfectly agree with you.” But I adored Miss Fay, and I did indeed become her Mercury—letters to the postbox, the new milk from the cows every morning, butter when it was made, the hot soda bread, which she loved.

  “You’re always bringing me gifts,” she said over and over. “So I must bring you gifts.”

  Consequently, Miss Dora Fay showed me how to do crosswords. She taught me rock, paper, scissors. And she arrived one time from Dublin with a five-thousand-piece jigsaw puzzle of Moses Parts the Red Sea, which we built together all summer.

  “Let’s do the sky first,” she said. “The sky is always difficult.”

  She also gave me what is still my favorite possession—a red leather book named, in gold on the front cover, Shakespeare.

  Almost more important, she said, “Don’t feel that you have to know how to use it now,” but she read passages to me and explained what was going on. She took Macbeth as the principal first lesson because, she said, “Boys like blood and gore and there’s a lot of it in here.”

  Next summer she brought her own Shakespeare down from Dublin, the huge, new Yale edition, because her “happiest time,” she said, had been at Yale. She described the university with longing in her voice—“the ivy, the statues.” And she had me follow in my red leather book while she read Hamlet to me from her volume, and as we sat together she explained it as she went along. It remains my favorite play.

  Those were the Fays, and throughout this story of the Kellys and my family, you’ll meet them now and again. And they were there at the resolution—he disgraceful, she supreme.

  Of the principal characters in this drama, I alone remain alive. In this I hope to be proven wrong—a factor that will become plain later on; and as to the issues, I believe that I’ve resolved all but one. Along the way, I’ve learned so much. For instance, whatever pain I’ve suffered, I’ve learned how to avoid disturbance. Nor will I ever again let people with power manipulate me as they did back then, and that’s another reason for setting it all down: so that I can look at how they did it. And therefore I must begin with a good inspection of the sources whence came the trouble.

  At the time of the romance that conceived her daughter, Venetia, Sarah Kelly, the Irish-American actress, strode New York like a child of the gods. She was twenty-two years old, and Mr. Anderson, the father, was in his late forties. Mother would have muttered, “There’s no fool like an old fool.”

  Along with the house on Park Avenue, Mr. Anderson had inherited his father and uncle’s law practice, specializing in shipping. He ran it very successfully, expanded the practice by opening offices in multiple ports, and elevated its reputation. At the peak of his success he also founded an insurance company. A dry man with a quick, disapproving glance, he said to me once, “You have an air of injury about you that I find weak;” then he turned his head away and didn’t amplify. He had the habit of a wet sniffle.

  But he possessed good judgment, it was said, when it came to hiring people—and indeed, whatever my own private reservations, when it came to choosing a mistress. I also came to learn that he washed his hands very frequently, and was at times white-faced and speechless in his passion for Sarah.

  Their affair in its first, red-hot phase lasted two years—two idyllic years for them both, insofar as guilt would allow Mr. Anderson to relax. They met each week, often for lunch, in the Waldorf-Astoria hotel. I’ve been there to look—they had a bright set of private rooms, with a peaceful atmosphere and an aura expensive enough to make anybody feel good about himself.

  Mr. Anderson had already been aware of her because he’d seen her in the theater. She was playing Rosalind in a new production of As You Like It, and when she first walked on he reacted so strongly that “I closed my eyes in some confusion,” and he grew “so agitated” (Sarah added) that he feared his wife sitting beside him might notice.

  It took him “several minutes,” he then said, “to calm down.” To his wife’s surprise he broke a personal rule by leaving his seat at the interval. He didn’t go to the restrooms as he had advertised; in his slow, nasal voice, he said, “I stepped out onto Forty-sixth Street and let the night air cool my face.”

  When I asked her why she thought Mr. Anderson had been particularly smitten by her, Sarah said that she’d been in four previous productions of the play, and because she knew the part so well, she felt completely relaxed. No nerves, no worries about forgetting lines; she could give all her attention, as she said, to “exuding. And I was lovely in those days. Very beautiful.”

  Then she told me how she had first noticed him—on Park Avenue. A blond woman, a well-groomed and rather beautiful New York lady, was walking a sleek bird dog on a leash. The dog suddenly leapt into the air and snaffled a low-flying pigeon. The owner seemed deeply embarrassed, and she began to admonish the dog, and to deal with its mouthful of feathers.

  Mr. Anderson saw the incident. He walked over, began to pat the animal on the head and praise it. Then he took the bird gently from the hound’s soft mouth, rele
ased the undamaged pigeon into the sky like, as Sarah remarked, “a priest releasing a soul to God,” and said to the owner, “That’s a wonderful dog, to stay true to its nature so far removed from its hunting grounds.”

  Sarah was walking nearby and, with her love of drama, had stopped to watch this freakish little event. Mr. Anderson raised his hat to the blond lady and walked on. At the next intersection Sarah caught up with him, and she commended his action. Mr. Anderson turned to look at her.

  “It was as if,” she said, “I had never before been looked at by a man.”

  He recognized her at once and raised his hat again; he said that he had been to see her on the stage. They parted and he almost went into shock. He walked to his office, booked a suite at the Waldorf-Astoria, wrote a note to Sarah, walked to the theater, and left the note at the stage door. The note suggested they meet at the hotel.

  They loved each other; have no doubt about that. He said as much many years later, when I interviewed him, and although I found him impatient and contemptuously wary of me, I respected the ardor with which he spoke of Sarah. By then his original wife had died, and perhaps he felt free to use terms that he must have found so extravagant.

  “It was like the Arabian Nights,” he said. “Sarah was Scheherazade.” At which remark she strolled down the long drawing room, stroked his pointy bald head, and pinched his cheek.

  He and she described their afternoons in that Waldorf suite. When she arrived, she’d close the door carefully behind her and secure the chain; the doorknob already wore its DO NOT DISTURB sign outside. Inside, Mr. Anderson would stand a little forward of the table, his hands clasped behind his back, stiff as a butler, his eyes locked on her. Then she’d turn and reveal herself, simply but dramatically, in the clothes she had worn to go there—almost certainly paid for by Mr. Anderson. He’d make a little bow to her, unclasp his hands, and stride forward to take her coat. She’d stand like the actress she was, head to one side, and wait. As he reached for the coat, she’d shrug out of it so that he could grasp it without touching her. He’d step aside and she’d walk forward to the chair, which he’d hold out for her. She would sit down and wait until he had hung her coat in the closet.

  Then—as he did when they were finally living together; I saw it with my own eyes—he’d attend to her every moment, her every need, her every breath. He was her dog, tense and devoted. He’d bend to whisper in her ear. He’d touch her shoulder or upper arm with the reverence of a monk. Then he’d serve her; tea included tiny sandwiches, then scones with strawberry preserve and clotted cream, followed by what she called “gaudy little pastries.” He had long-fingered, oblong hands the color of parchment, and a nervous, girlish smile, which I saw no more than twice in all the times I met him. Solicitous and intense, he’d ask, “Is your week being good to you, my dear?”

  And Sarah would then keep her side of the bargain—she’d regale him with every detail of what had happened, almost hour by hour, since their last tea.

  They may or may not have become lovers that first afternoon—but they soon did. When tea had ended, Sarah repaired to the drawing room of the suite and draped herself on the chaise. From there was the love affair conducted.

  Week in, week out, watching the seasons change, they lay in each other’s arms and gave to each other from their separate planets. Each devoured every word the other spoke as sunlight’s bars slanted down the walls and across the carpeted floor. He began to teach her what he knew—money, banking, and the management of one’s existence: “Practical Life” was, after all, the name of his insurance corporation.

  When Mr. Anderson had said his short piece for the day, Sarah, by now, of course, naked and self-possessed in her beauty, began to speak the great parts that she had played around the country—in Chicago, San Francisco, Boston, New York. She transported him to the Venice of Othello and Portia and Shylock; to the Verona of Romeo and Juliet; to Prospero’s “cloud-capp’d towers” and “gorgeous palaces.” His feet, she said, scarcely touched the ground; “I was fabulous for him, I was like a fabled creature.”

  Whatever the mythology Sarah later spun in her account of the romance, both people were altered by knowing each other. The contradictions in them grew more pronounced. Mr. Anderson became a kinder man in the world, if more devious at home. Sarah grew into a more responsible girl, who now handled money astutely. Most compelling of all, she believed that this new sense of responsibility made her amenable to pregnancy.

  “He was, believe it or not, my first gentleman,” she said, “and I was too wild to think of caution. Now I was safe.”

  Her behavior in the affair seems to have been impeccable—at least Anderson said so. She said so too, but I take him to be the more reliable judge. When she found herself pregnant she asked for no money or extra attention; she merely said that she would like to continue meeting as usual; she hoped, she said, to include him in the experience of carrying a child.

  She must indeed have been very beautiful. She was fifty-four when I first met her, and therefore ancient to my teenage eyes; I most remember her extraordinary poise. True to her profession, she possessed the ability to make herself look striking in any circumstance. When Anderson first brought her to the Waldorf in 1898 she was twenty—what else can she have been but gorgeous?

  However, the looks took second place (in my view) to the personality. Well, not so much the personality as the attitude. Sarah Kelly had as great a gift of welcome as I’ve ever known.

  By now in my life I’ve met many people in all sorts of conditions. Very often I meet them in what is potentially the place of their greatest welcome—their own homes. Most have shown enough warmth to make me want to stay. From the demeanor of some, you’d think they wanted me to come to live with them. That’s how sincerely they greet me, that’s how thoughtfully they care for me. But none of them has ever made me so regretful to part from them as Sarah Kelly.

  That, I think, was her great gift; she made one want to stay near her, forever if possible. When I finally saw her on the stage, I understood that her audiences responded to this gift; they wanted as much of her as they could get.

  And yet. And yet—her welcome was pallid compared to her daughter’s. Venetia made you know that it was you and only you she had always been waiting for, the person she had always wanted to see. And in so doing, she became the only person you always wanted to see. Ever.

  Before the birth, Sarah accepted Mr. Anderson’s offer that he would maintain the child for life. Which he did. After the birth, Sarah’s affair with Mr. Anderson began again, but not for some time, and it now took a very different form.

  When he came back to New York in those early days of January, Mr. Anderson sent flowers to Sarah.

  “A garden, my dear—he sent a garden. It was deep winter but he had his florist ransack the world. Jamaica, Uruguay, Borneo. We almost found hummingbirds in the blossoms.” With hands flowing, Sarah made the shapes of flowers as she told me this.

  She wrote to thank him, and asked when he wanted to see his daughter. To her wounded surprise, Mr. Anderson said he didn’t, and wouldn’t. She wrote again and expressed her hurt, and he said there was nothing he could do about it.

  Sarah pressed and pressed; he refused and refused. A long standoff followed. Then one day he had a letter delivered to her in which he said that if they could talk face-to-face he might feel able to explain. And so, once more, they began to meet at the Waldorf suite; he had retained the rental in hope.

  On the first afternoon they did not embrace; they sat to talk. Mr. Anderson seemed nervous and excited; he jumped up and down a lot, the long legs unfolding like a heron.

  “Attending to me again,” was how Sarah put it. “Tea, napery, milk, and sugar. Was my chair comfortable? How was my week? All of that.”

  She had considered surprising him by bringing the infant Venetia, but decided against it on account of the day’s bitter coldness, with a wind coming off the Hudson that would, she said, “take the skin off the child’s fa
ce.”

  Instead, she asked him directly and immediately, “Why won’t you come to see your daughter?”

  After a silence he said, “I’m unable. Incapable.” And he said no more, and since she could find no way through, around, or past those words, she just accepted them.

  They sat looking at each other. His passion for her seemed to have increased; he simply couldn’t see enough of her face. After many long moments of silence he spoke.

  “Shall we go on meeting again?”

  “Yes.”

  “When? And how?”

  “As often as you wish.”

  “Where?” he asked.

  “Here,” she said.

  Again he fell silent and she waited, knowing what was coming.

  “Shall we be—as before?”

  “Not in the same way,” she said. “Not until you bring your daughter into your life.”

  From that moment Sarah had eternal control over Mr. Anderson, and she used it. They began to meet in exactly the same way as they had done for the previous two years. She played Scheherazade again—with one exceptional difference: Sarah never allowed Mr. Anderson to touch her, not even a welcoming or parting embrace. Not until some months had passed after the birth (Sarah’s wish for perfect appearance dominated everything), did she again lie naked for Mr. Anderson’s endless admiration. Endless as it used to be, but now from a distance.

  His eyes, she said, “became round and bright as he gazed at me.” She enchanted him as before with her recitations. But as he sat there viewing that undraped body, with its breathtaking combination of lean and voluptuous, not once did she allow him to stroke her face or even to take her hand.

  In that fashion, alongside her single parenting of Venetia, assisted and encouraged by Mrs. Haas, the lovers embarked upon celibacy. All of this Sarah Kelly told me herself, her grave face breaking into one of her planned and perfect smiles.