Venetia Kelly's Traveling Show: A Novel of Ireland Read online

  By the time he had dressed again—undershirt, shirt, waistcoat, jacket—the man on the ground was sitting up. He looked at nobody and I felt half a pang of sorrow for him. I expected my father to reach down and offer him a helping hand but he did no such thing.

  Turning his back, he beckoned Ned Ryan, who carefully laid Mr. Kane’s coat on the ground and followed my father out of the garden by the far gate. My father finished tucking in his shirttails as he walked, and he sucked his knuckles again. His force, so unexpected, so brutal, roasted me; even from that distance I felt my face burn.

  Mr. Kane sat there for several minutes. Will he catch cold, I thought, on the wet grass? Then he clambered to his feet, spread his hands like a doctor all about his face, searched his head and torso, picked up his coat, and put it on. He stood for long moments, then walked straight toward where I hid. I watched from the bushes as he strode within a few feet of me, his face angry. He muttered under his breath. Then I heard his great boots crunch the gravel, and he had gone.

  Sometimes when I try to understand what my father was truly like, I recall that day. I see him as a sturdy prizefighter, stripped to the waist, old-fashioned pose, arms out like big commas.

  I see a ruthlessness too, in this man from whom I’d never received anything but tenderness and warmth. Of what was the ruthlessness born? What was it that he kept hidden for so much of his life? I suppose that he, more than anybody, had always known what might happen if he ever broke out of control.

  At this point I want to share an old silent film with you—The Courage of Esmeralda. A lanky youth named Liam dug it up for me in a Dublin archive. He had no idea why I sat weeping after this seven minutes of crackling, hissing flicker.

  Esmeralda, in a dress of many frills, is walking by the shining river gathering pretty flowers, when she hears a cry.

  The word “Hark” appears on the screen, and we see Esmeralda halt her flower-gathering. She cups a tiny hand to her shell-like ear. Now the urgent white words prompt her to mouth, “Where, oh where can that voice be coming from?”

  She looks all around—and then she sees. On the road that runs along by the river, a horse, pulling a cart, is rearing and bucking. A man and a boy sit on the cart; the man is trying in vain to halt the horse with the reins. Now it begins to gallop!

  Esmeralda puts aside her posy of flowers—she rests them with delicate care on the little roadside stone wall, and she looks in fear and apprehension at the oncoming, galloping juggernaut.

  “What am I to do? I am so small!”

  The horse’s head is rearing, his nostrils flare, his eyes are wide. He flings his head here and there. The reins fly from the man’s hands, and he cowers on the cart. He clutches to his chest the boy, the dark-eyed boy with the long eyelashes. Esmeralda holds a hand to her little breast in fear. She looks this way and that, hoping for help.

  “Is there nobody near? Is there nobody to help me?”

  Now Esmeralda’s eyelashes flutter—but there’s no help at hand.

  Finally, she takes a deep breath and the screen says, “I must do it alone.”

  Esmeralda steps out into the roadway and holds up a hand. Now the screen says, “Mr. Horse—stop. At once!”

  The horse comes tearing on. Esmeralda holds up a hand again. The screen says, “Stop, I say, Mr. Horse. This instant!”

  And the horse sees Esmeralda. He shakes his huge head like a mad beast. But he skids to a halt, and Esmeralda walks over to him. She pats his nose. The screen tells us what she says: “Nice Mr. Horse. Good Mr. Horse. Now have some grass.”

  The grateful father and the adoring boy climb down. They walk over to Esmeralda.

  “You saved our lives!” shouts the black screen in its white curly words. “How can we ever thank you enough?”

  Through my tears I reflected that I could have told Esmeralda a thing or two about bolting horses.

  Here’s the background. In August 1910, a gentleman named Sidney Olcott crossed the Atlantic by steamer and arrived in Cork. His employers had spun a globe of the world in front of him and asked where he’d next like to work. He chose Ireland, the land of his mother’s birth.

  Sidney Olcott was a film director, one of the first, and one of the most famous of his day. Since infancy, and having listened to his Irish mother’s tales and reminiscences, he had revered Ireland, and the notion thereof. It’s a not uncommon malady.

  The Kalem Company—“K” for George Kleine, “L” for Samuel Long, and “M” for Frank Marion—was founded in 1907, and generated myriad films in the United States. When he landed, Mr. Olcott took long reconnaissance tours all over his mother’s motherland and settled—unsurprisingly—in beautiful Killarney.

  His first film there, A Lad from Old Ireland, packed theaters back in the United States, a box-office sensation, because every Irish immigrant, and all people of Irish descent, wanted and needed wonderful images of home.

  In 1911, riding the magic carpet of his success, Mr. Olcott came back and set up a permanent company in the village of Beaufort near Killarney. He invited leading male and female actors from all over the world to work with him there, in films such as Conway, the Kerry Dancer; The Colleen Bawn; Rory O’More; and dozens more. All told, the Kalem Company made more than a hundred films in Ireland back then, many in and around Killarney.

  Sarah Kelly had known Mr. Olcott slightly since New York days; he knew her work thoroughly; he sent out a call for her, and she answered.

  They sailed excellently, despite some choppy seas. Venetia remembered it well, and described it to me one afternoon twenty-one years later. She said that she couldn’t be torn away from the rail, where she wanted to stare at the ocean all day. They didn’t get seasick, and the ship also delighted Mrs. Haas. Always a bonus—the lifting of that frown.

  For Sarah, the voyage became a social whirl. Her fame had begun to cross the Atlantic with her; man after man pursued her.

  “My dear Ben, I dined at a different table every night,” she said to me.

  Of Mr. Anderson not a word was mentioned. Sarah hadn’t told him of her decision. On the day of sailing she simply failed to turn up at the Waldorf. He went there every afternoon for two weeks and waited for her. Eventually, when no reply came to his letters, he found a way to inquire discreetly, and that was the first Mr. Anderson knew of Sarah Kelly’s departure. She had turned her back on him—and his money. But she knew, she told me, that he’d follow her one day.

  Beaufort lies some miles from the town of Killarney. Once settled in the Great Southern Hotel, Sarah hired a sidecar with a driver, called a “jarvey.” They told her in Beaufort that Mr. Olcott had gone elsewhere with his actors to shoot some scenes for the production under way. Mr. Olcott’s chief assistant, “a girl named Mae,” said Sarah, “with blond bangs reaching down into her eyes, and lips tight and red as a new rose, wrote out very carefully, in very large handwriting, the directions.”

  Mr. Olcott was “most anxious,” Mae said, to meet his new leading lady.

  The jarvey didn’t even look at the piece of paper. “They’re out at Moll’s Gap,” he said, and cracked his long whip. The horse, he said, knew the way.

  Whatever the ancient feelings coursing through her, Sarah looked every inch an American: prosperous, helpful, charming. She enchanted all she met, including the jarvey.

  She asked him to repeat the names of the places through which they passed, and while telling me she rolled them on her tongue. Tullig; Kilgobnet; Suanavalla; Coolcummisk; Dunloe; and finally Gortacollopa, where they found Mr. Olcott. Wearing a white peaked cap and check knickerbockers, he was standing in the middle of the road beckoning to somebody. And then they saw two people, obviously his actors, walk swiftly across a field to a gate, which they climbed, and upon which they sat and batted heavy eyelids at each other.

  In the fashion that would become iconic, Mr. Olcott shouted, “Cut!” He turned to greet Sarah, kissed her hands, and offered her an engagement that would last, on and off, for as long as he stayed in Ir
eland.

  She went to work on the following Monday, in a film called Rosaleen’s Return, about an Irish emigrant girl who comes home to her birthplace and restores her family cottage. From a ruined hovel with the thatched roof falling in, she makes a white-painted haven with picket fence and rambling rose. A “sow’s ear to silk purse” plot—how could she lose?

  Sarah, with very few lines to mouth, gleamed and soared. The camera loved her, full-face and profiles, which Mr. Olcott pronounced “very unique.” Those eyelashes, that rosebud mouth, that sloping nose—he lost part of his heart to her, and then lost most of the rest to her daughter.

  “What is your name?” said Mr. Olcott, to the child swinging her legs from the garden gate.

  “Venetia Kelly, and my profession is that of actor. And you, sir?”

  He professed himself “swoony for that kid” and that night wrote a film for her. He called it The Courage of Esmeralda.

  In Killarney the last bolt of this Kelly family preamble slides home—because a major character now appears, brought there in a cardboard box by King Kelly. A man who made every room turbulent upon his entrance, whenever King Kelly held out his arms, it became a race between Sarah and Venetia. That day Sarah won, as she would for the rest of her father’s life. Venetia wrapped her arms around his beef of a leg and held on, until he prized her away and lifted her up to be kissed.

  He had no luggage; he said it would arrive later, and that the railway company had lost it. Who could ever believe him? Sarah had to go out and buy him clothes. Out of his copious pockets, however, he began to pull things—sticks of barley sugar, a chocolate bear, a tiny bottle of scent, a lace handkerchief. On the floor beside him he had already deposited a large box.

  “Tell me a story, tell me a story,” Venetia cried, and King Kelly, with the child still in his arms, found the sofa and sat down.

  “What kind of a story would you like?” he said. “You know that for the whole year you’re eleven years old you can have any story in the world because eleven is a magic number.”

  “You said that too when I was ten,” said Venetia. “And when I was nine. And eight, and seven. What’s in the box? Is it for me?”

  “Venetia, honey,” said her mother, but the warning of good manners faded in the gale of laughter.

  “I’ll tell you the story first,” said King Kelly, “and then I’ll open the box and you’ll see why I told you the story.”

  With Venetia settled on the arm of the chair from where he could look straight into her face, he began to tell his tale. I’m repeating the story here as Venetia told it to me many years later, and I’m repeating it because it formed such a fundamental influence in the early making of Venetia Kelly’s Traveling Show—and in the management of Venetia’s life.

  There’s a man I know, and I know him well. He’s living up in the north of Ireland, and he’s a very unusual man—because he had a very unusual teacher. His teacher taught this man something that nobody else ever knew—how to talk to animals. He understands everything that animals say, even to one another. Because, as you know, animals and all creatures have their own language.

  If this man hears the crows out in the field and they’re cawing and jawing, he knows they’re discussing where the next best bit of food might be. And if he sees the cows coming in to be milked, he hears them saying to each other, I hope there isn’t anybody milking us tonight who has cold fingers. He told me that himself. And every time the dog barks or the cat meows, he knows perfectly well what they’re saying—because his teacher taught him every animal language he needed to know. When he was a young lad, he tried to tell his family but they laughed at him.

  One day, he was going off to his aunt’s house with his father and mother, and they were driving in a lovely painted pony trap drawn by their own horse on the farm, and the horse’s name was Myko.

  Now my friend had conducted many secret conversations with Myko the horse. As he had had many secret conversations with the dog, Ted, and with the two pigs, Betty and Buster, and the cat, Chester, posh cat it was, name like that. All these chats were secret, you understand, because the animals didn’t want to get my friend into trouble with his parents, and he certainly didn’t want to get them into trouble.

  Well, they were belting along with Myko in great rapid form, and the sun shining, and suddenly Myko gives a big whinnying neigh out of him and my friend jumps up off his nice leather seat and says, “Stop, stop.”

  His father looks at him and says, “I’ll do no such of a thing,” and my friend says, “Stop, you have to stop—one of the shafts is going to break.”

  Well, against his better judgment, his father looks out over the front of the trap and sure enough he sees that the shaft has a big crack in it, and he draws the reins slowly tight until Myko the horse comes to a gentle standstill. They all get down and inspect the damage and as they do so the shaft finally breaks off and falls down like a dying thing.

  If they’d all been still aboard when that happened, they’d be as dead as doornails. The father scratches his head in puzzlement, and the horse lets out another whinny.

  “Tell him you heard a crack,” says the horse to the boy. And the boy says, “I heard a crack.”

  “Back there on the bridge,” whinnies the horse.

  “Back there on the bridge,” says the boy.

  “I suppose,” says the father, with a snigger as big as a curse, “the horse told you.”

  The boy said nothing. And now he felt worse than ever, because the animals were talking to him in their language and they didn’t know any of his language. So he decided to teach them. That night, when they were all home safely, Ted the dog came up into his bedroom as he always did and snuck into the bed with him. He said to my fiend, “Myko told me about today and the broken shaft.”

  My friend said, “Ted, I feel awful bad. Because I know how to speak in dog and horse and cat and pig, and you don’t know any of my language.”

  Ted the dog said to him, “Why don’t you teach us?”

  And so my friend started off teaching the dog to say “Hello” and “How are you” and “Please” and “Thank you.”

  In no time, all the animals in the farmyard were speaking the boy’s language. And then they hit a snag—and it could have had very bad repercussions.

  One day, the boy and his father were mucking out the pigsty and the father said to the boy, “These two will soon be ready for the table.”

  The boy said, “What does that mean?”

  The father said, “It means the same as it always meant. We’re going to kill them and eat them.”

  Now Betty and Buster understood exactly what he’d said, because of course they now spoke English, and Buster said out loud, “Oh, no, I don’t want to be killed.”

  “Who said that?” said the father, turning around in great surprise.

  “I did,” said my friend, quick as a wink, and he went over to Buster, squatted down beside him, whispered, “Say it again,” and when Buster said it again the boy moved his lips.

  “How did you do that?” said the father, amazed out of his head.

  “I read about it,” said my friend. “They call it throwing your voice. Vent—something.”

  And thereafter, if one of the animals spoke in English, the boy pretended it was him, and he had them all warned not to say a word in English unless he was nearby.

  “Did they kill the pigs?” Venetia asked.

  “No, that’s the thing,” said King Kelly. “The father was so amazed that he invited people over, and he made bets with them that the pigs could talk. And he won all his bets.”

  Venetia remembered how the room exhaled when the story ended. Then she made King Kelly reach for the box. He opened it and took out a big doll.

  “Now,” he said to Venetia, “I’m going to show you how to teach this doll to talk.”

  He had brought her a gift almost as big as herself, a ventriloquist’s doll or dummy, and it wore dungarees and a plaid shirt. It looked like an Iri
sh farmer—to be more accurate, it looked like the American doll manufacturer’s impression of an Irish farmer.

  “We have to give the doll a name; he can’t go ’round the place without a name,” said King Kelly. “What’ll we call him?”

  Quick as a flash, tongue sharpened to a point, Venetia said, “There’s only one name for him.”

  They all looked at her, and she said, “Blarney.”

  And what of my own parents at this time? While the Kellys were climbing into their firmament, where did my family stand in the world? What comparison could I make that would connect us?

  Nothing. Nothing at all. Each of them had lived among people whom their people had always known; other Irish farmers and their farm laborers and their countryside society never touched anything like the wilder lives I’m describing.

  When Venetia Kelly was born, on the first day of the new century, Mother was eighteen—as was my father; they’d been born a few months apart in 1882. Harry MacCarthy, my compelling father, had finished school at seventeen, and was just about to read for a liberal arts degree in Dublin when a stroke killed his father. The farm at that time didn’t generate enough money to hire a manager, so Harry, bright, sparky, and keen to be a man of the world, had to stay at home and run the place for his mother, my grandmother.

  As for Mother—she’d always wanted to be a farmer’s wife, which wasn’t what her family wanted at all. They’d hoped, given some of the Hopkins family connections, that she’d marry a public figure, such as a judge who came from a good family, or a young man who would inherit commerce, shipping, or banking—because although she was shy, she certainly had enough by way of looks and quiet style to land such a catch.

  Mother, however, showed little interest in much beyond her cows—and other animals, and harvests, and all farm and country things, and she went through her young life as shy as a maiden, unsocial and living at home, without as much as a suitor or a swain, until Harry, with the red hair, and the polka-dot pocket handkerchief, and the merry grin, and the slight speech hesitation and three hundred acres, dropped by in 1910, when she too was twenty-eight years old. Everything, it seems, happened in 1910. Until everything else happened in 1932.