The Matchmaker of Kenmare Read online

  When I read that sentence I became a Wandering Scholar; I began to see myself as a latter-day member of that band of men who wandered through twelfth-century Europe, sprinkling their Latin verses on the ground and watching them grow into culture. Was I not learning everywhere I went? And by sharing what I learned from the people of the countryside, was I not teaching? And isn’t that the true definition of a scholar?

  “Mustn’t a young man make of himself what he can?” Miss Fay had asked, and this Wandering Scholar image is what I chose—the river, I told myself, had now flowed down as far as me. But I kept it secret; I felt it was too fragile to put on show.

  I came to enjoy this new view of myself very much, and I believe you would have liked me in that mode. And indeed it was only when I dropped it, or became detached from it, that I drank too much and got into trouble. When I sobered up, and when the remorse kicked in, books became again my main recourse, and through which I again built up my picture of myself as a learned and learning young man, wandering from town to village, finding out what people had to tell me and offering them my own gifts in return.

  As this person, I often forgot my own misery. Sometimes, and for weeks at a time, I began to cease thinking about Venetia, and about death, and the day it would come to me, and I began to look in other directions for fresh things, a new life. But I couldn’t sustain it for long. The pattern, from the height of medieval dreaming to the depth of drunkenness, and back up again to a calm and respectful view of myself—that usually had a rhythm of about six to eight weeks.

  Soon, though, I began to identify it, and sometimes nipped it in the bud. But being able to avert the plunge depended upon the location in which the bad mood set in—and in some places I never got it under control.

  Consider Galway, because I had married there, young and full of hard-earned hope. How could my heart not crash there?

  Our momentum now increases, as Galway provides the next and very revealing stage in the story of Miss Begley—because from Galway we went onward with no way of stopping her.

  22

  They call it the City of the Tribes, because the de Burgos from Normandy—today’s Burkes—conquered it, and invited in thirteen other families, Blakes, Joyces, Kirwans, Lynches, and others, who ruled the place for centuries like European fief lords. There’s a moment as you enter Galway when the city seems to float on the water, like Venice or Oslo, as the River Corrib mates with the sea.

  I went back there every year at the time of Venetia’s disappearance, to see whether such things as ghosts exist—or, indeed, miracles. My routine didn’t vary—a walk along the quays, inspecting every ship tied up at the dock; a searching look into every dinghy and longboat from the vessels that stood moored out there in the offing. I stopped people, showed them the photograph; I asked the same question, always the same: “Have you seen this lady?”

  By now, I was receiving the answer, “Didn’t you ask me that last year?” Or the year before? Or the year before? And yet I trudged on, not knowing whether I had hope or not.

  That year, though, I added something to my Galway inquiries; now I asked the question that had come to me out of the blue outside the dance hall in Killarney when I was fired up with aggression: Do you know a man name of Raymond Cody?

  In Galway, I had no takers. Nobody knew this Cody, this slimy monster, this slug-white thug.

  Depressed, my mind’s voice a wooden bell, I walked around the city center, until a woman’s call, from a distance, roused me: “Ben! Hoi!”

  She had written to me at the post office in Dingle, “Meet me in Galway”—not a coincidence; she remembered my itinerary. And how precise she was with time and place; as she said in her note, “Twelve noon outside the main post office.”

  Not many women in Ireland wore hats, except on a Sunday going to Mass, and they certainly didn’t wear great straw creations big as a wheel, with false cherries bobbing at the brim. Miss Begley did, on a midweek afternoon, with ribbons flapping out behind her head like red and blue tails.

  “What are you doing here?”

  She said, “I’m expanding my business,” and when I looked puzzled she added, “The Galway Races. Isn’t that why you’re here?”

  I said, “Which race are you in?”

  “The human race. You should try it sometime,” she said.

  “That was low,” I said.

  “So’s your mood.”

  She put her arm in mine, and we swung along the street like honeymooners. “Come on, Ben. Chin up.”

  “You’re not here for the races,” I said.

  “Maybe I’ll marry a jockey.”

  You have the height for it.

  I wanted to ask her what she was planning now. Even on our short acquaintance I’d sensed that this girl always had something going on—a scheme, a stratagem different from her declared intent, and the moment I saw her in the big wide hat I said to myself, Now what is she up to?

  Asking her would yield no fruit. She only replied to questions that she wanted to answer. I had learned to wait.

  “I met a man who knew your father,” I said. “A Mr. Buckley.”

  And she said, “I know,” but didn’t elaborate.

  She led me to a stone wall overlooking the water.

  “I have things to say to you,” she said. Hiking herself up on the wall, she arranged her skirts, holding her hat at the same time. “And I have questions to ask you.”

  Did I quail? I did, but could do nothing about it—because I had already let her in, something I hadn’t allowed with anybody, not even James or Miss Fay. With them, the exchanges had remained brief and delicate, as though they feared to tread on the eggshells of my sorrow. That cover was now broken; this woman was able to raid me.

  “First of all. Your parents. You don’t talk about them.”

  Some resistance must have lingered, or I was trying to take back lost ground, because I said, “I never had any, I come from a far distant star.”

  “How come you never mention them?”

  “They’re unmentionable,” I said.

  “I bet they’re not. Somebody brought you up well. I can see the traces. Brothers and sisters?”

  “I’m an only child.”

  “Like myself. One of God’s Special Angels, did you know that?”

  I said, “It’s not true. God told me ’twas a rumor.”

  She said, “Jesus was an only child.”

  “By Jesus, you’re right.”

  “All right, Ben. Stop being disgraceful. No more jokes and gibes, please. Do your parents know that you have a wife?”

  “Had.”

  “Right. So that’s how you want to play it,” she said.

  When Miss Begley folded her hands and her lips at the same time she meant business.

  “Tell me the truth. Did Venetia run away?”

  “Sort of. Her family intervened—”

  “Because they didn’t want her married to somebody who drank?”

  “I was eighteen,” I said. “I’d never tasted liquor.”

  “Is she, is losing her, the reason you drink?”

  I said, “What else is there?”

  She raised a mighty eyebrow at me. “That’s a shallow little pool of character.”

  I said, “You know nothing. You know nothing about searching. And I hope you never will.”

  (Hindsight, that mean-spirited spy, whispers to me now, Well, wasn’t that a neat irony in the making?)

  “And she left no trace?”

  I said, “A suitcase full of her money. And her account books. And her clothes.”

  “Her clothes?”

  I nodded.

  “That’s strange,” she said.

  Miss Begley had the habit of thinking openly—by which I mean that she took on the attitude of thought in a very deliberate way. If I tried to interrupt her, she’d flap a hand and say, “I’m thinking.” As she did that day, and for what seemed about three minutes, which is a long time of silence between two people.

&
nbsp; At last she said, “No woman walks away from all her clothes. Things have to be done.”

  That last was a phrase I came to recognize.

  “What does that mean?”

  She said, “It means that I intend to take action on your behalf.”

  I have no doubt that she intended it. Now I ask myself had she done it sooner, had she not put her own wants ahead of mine—would we, would I, have had to go through so much? I think not.

  “Remember what I said to you about a bargain?”

  “Yes.” I quoted her: “If I help you—you’ll help me.”

  “Where do you think your wife is?”

  I said, “I’ve searched all sorts of places. For somebody living or dead. And now I think—if I’m meant to find her, I’ll find her. Anyway, what’s this bargain?”

  The wind almost flipped her hat and she grabbed it.

  “I have the gifts to find your wife. But you have to help me in any way I want. You have to come and go everywhere I ask you to—right? And no questions—right?”

  I nodded.

  “One more question,” she said.

  I knew what it would be, yet I said, “Ask.”

  “What happened to the suitcase full of money?”

  I said, “There was a lot of it. I saved it and increased it with good investments. I more than trebled it. Now I have a good income from it—which I spend looking for her.”

  She looked at me. “Don’t tell any girl about that money. Ever.”

  A gust of wind snatched at her hat. She jumped from the wall and her skirts blew everywhere. I couldn’t avoid glimpsing more than she intended, and I feared that she might have been embarrassed. Instead she laughed and said, “You’re seeing my true colors,” and I was the one who blushed.

  23

  At breakfast next morning, I tried to divine what was going on behind her eyes. Excitement had welled up in her; she bubbled like a spring. Could it be the day ahead of us at the famous Galway Races? I felt it ran deeper than that, but I got no closer than her effervescence; I learned nothing beyond her intent to get to the racecourse early.

  And there, in the midst of the crowds, Kate Begley pulled her fortune-telling trick. I’d had the impression that she used it only for matchmaking, but not at all—she made money with it. No stall, no stand; she walked about and opened conversations, mostly with women, read their palms and told them that she did this for a living but had to be “very discreet, because the bishop doesn’t like it.”

  I stood nearby and watched. In her great hat with its fluttering ribbons, she caressed the ladies’ hands back and forth, murmuring words that I couldn’t quite hear from my distance. Farmers’ wives and daughters, shopgirls and spinsters of the parish, she told them their future and their eyes grew rounder; with trusting faces they extended both palms, and at the end, in discretion as deep as the confessional, money changed hands.

  When she wasn’t soothsaying, we rambled among the stalls of home baking and farm wives; we ate, we drank—tea, nothing else and nothing stronger. We went to a bookie’s stand four times, and each time she won money. Not by any arcane or challenging system; “I like the horse’s name,” she said; or, “The jockey is related to people I know in Derrynane.” Now and then she’d break off from this tourism, alight on some woman, and reduce her to wonder with a soft-spoken destiny.

  And all this time I felt—no, I knew—that something else was going on, something that had nothing to do with Galway or horses, something that Miss Begley had planned with care and depth, and she’d made me part of it.

  That night, I discovered what it was—but I didn’t have it confirmed until breakfast. In fact, I uncovered it from my own divinations and felt more than pleased with myself when proved right.

  It emerged spontaneously as I wrote my notes of the day. After a long account of the crowds, the jockeys in their gaudy yet grand racing silks, and the shiny horses and the stern winning-post, I ended with these remarks:

  Miss Begley wandered through the Galway Races today with no sign on her that she had come to match-make. Instead she seemed more intent on gathering money, which she did by betting on the horses, and telling people their fortunes. I believe that she collected a great deal of cash; she had four winners on the card, and she spoke to more than twenty women. Why does she want the cash? And, it seems, so urgently? She seems to have a prosperous and safe living with her grandmother.

  And then I wrote,

  Aha! I know! She’s not going directly back to Lamb’s Head—she’s going elsewhere.

  24

  In the morning, Miss Begley, in a blue-and-white-striped dress (and still that planet of a hat), seemed furtive. I decided to ambush her; and she gave me reason, because she said with a glittering eye, “Did you go drinking last night after you left me?”

  I said, “No, I went straight to bed, as I said I would.”

  “Are you sure?”

  I said, “I’m perfectly sure. I wrote up my notes and I went to bed.”

  She said, “What did you write in your notes?”

  “I wrote the word Aha!’ ”

  “That’s not a word, that’s an exclamation.”

  “Meaning?”

  She said, “What were you exclaiming?”

  I said, “You don’t exclaim things, you just exclaim.”

  “So?” She looked wary.

  I said, “I wrote it because I’d just realized where you’re going next.”

  When Miss Begley blushed, which wasn’t often, she looked disconcerted.

  “Why haven’t you used that gift of perception on yourself?” she said, in a kind of counterpunch.

  “But am I right?” When she nodded I felt angry—for no discernible reason.

  “So we’d better go, then?” she said.

  “We?”

  She looked a little frightened. “The bargain we made?”

  I said, “Do you know where to find him?”

  Blushing deeper, she said, “I had a letter.”

  “Inviting you?”

  “He thanked us. Nana and me.”

  “But did he invite you?”

  She rose with a flounce. I knew flounces, but although my wife and her mother were actresses, they couldn’t flounce like Miss Begley.

  25

  Traveling with somebody imposes intimacy; there’s little refuge and, on Irish buses and trains in the 1940s, no escape. Overcrowding had grown nationwide due to wartime fuel shortages, and we were like India—luggage and bicycles sprawling from the roof of the bus, or the train jammed with people, some of whom slept standing up.

  I’d never been north of the Irish border, where, by all accounts, they felt jumpy about folks from the South. Since its establishment in 1922, the North of Ireland, as we called it, or the Six Counties, had felt more and more like a huge ghetto, into which southerners like us weren’t welcomed.

  That impression prevailed from the moment of first contact. They stopped the train on the border, and hostile policemen in black uniforms squeezed along the packed corridors; they glared into every face at close quarters. I remember thinking, Of course they’re suspicious. Because they’re in the war, and we’re not. Because they’re under British rule, and we’re not.

  Miss Begley tried charm: “Hello. Are we in the North?”

  The man in the black uniform looked at her—as she said later, “The way a butcher looks at a pig”—and made no reply. She tried again: “Are we near Derry?”

  He snapped back. “The city’s name is Londonderry. Make sure you remember that. Londonderry.”

  Her eager smile died at his force.

  As I moved forward to challenge him, she put a hand on my arm. When he’d moved on she murmured, “What would you expect from a pig but a grunt?”

  Miss Begley used a lot of pig similes, probably on account of her liking for bacon and pork.

  Our boardinghouse proved friendlier; as the woman said, “We’re not heathens”—meaning not Protestants, meaning Catholics; the fault
lines of the city ran then, as now, between the two religions. Miss Begley and I ate a long and hearty dinner, but I couldn’t get her to discuss—or even confirm—her forthcoming meeting.

  Now I know that her diffidence represented fear—not that she might be rejected, not even that she might be used and discarded, but fear of the unknown, fear that her own gamble, the kind of risk to which she spent her life directing others, might backfire and not pay off. When I think back on it, I see her utter bravery. She had decided to break all the taboos that she knew and pursue a man for herself. Accustomed to doing it for other girls and women, when it came to her turn she had more nerves than a debutante.

  I did the unthinkable, couldn’t stop myself.

  “Shouldn’t he be the pursuer?” I asked.

  She said, “Next you’ll be telling me that I’ve hair on my head.”

  I asked, “What does that mean?”

  “To state the painfully obvious is a sign of low intelligence.” She forced a silence and left the dining room. When she came back she offered no eye contact.

  I pressed again. “Tradition is against you,” I said. “If this were a legend—isn’t he the warrior and shouldn’t you be the shy maiden?”

  With that powerful sniff of hers, she looked away.

  “Did you hear what I said?”

  “If a man is worth having, he’s worth chasing.”

  “Whoa-whoa,” I said. “Slow down, slow down.”

  She didn’t listen, and so the world threw its worst at her.

  When she quit the table to go to bed, I sat there. Does he know that she’s arriving? Has she set up an arrangement to see him? Unable to fall asleep, I made notes, including this one:

  No strong drink now for four days, and I must concede this: If one’s head is clear, it’s much easier to note down events and conversations.