The Matchmaker of Kenmare

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by Frank Delaney




  ALSO BY FRANK DELANEY

  FICTION

  Venetia Kelly’s Traveling Show

  Shannon

  Tipperary

  Ireland

  NONFICTION

  Simple Courage

  The Matchmaker of Kenmare is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © 2011 by Frank Delaney, L.L.C.

  All rights reserved.

  Published in the United States by Random House, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.

  RANDOM HOUSE and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

  Delaney, Frank

  The matchmaker of Kenmare: a novel of Ireland / Frank Delaney.

  p. cm.

  eISBN: 978-0-679-60433-4

  1. Irish Folklore Commission—Fiction. 2. Missing persons—Ireland—Fiction.

  3. Man-woman relationships—Ireland—Fiction. 4. Self-realization—Fiction.

  5. Ireland—History—20th century—Fiction. I. Title.

  PR6054.E396M38 2011 823′.914—dc22 2010035301

  www.atrandom.com

  Jacket design: Thomas Beck Stvan

  Jacket illustration: Robert Gantt Steele

  v3.1

  To the Goodwin brothers,

  David and Ben

  Contents

  Cover

  Other Books by This Author

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Author’s Note

  Part One - The Strange Potency of Cheap Music

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Part Two - The Swing of the Pendulum

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46

  Chapter 47

  Chapter 48

  Chapter 49

  Chapter 50

  Chapter 51

  Chapter 52

  Chapter 53

  Chapter 54

  Chapter 55

  Chapter 56

  Chapter 57

  Chapter 58

  Chapter 59

  Chapter 60

  Part Three - The Brave and the Fair

  Chapter 61

  Chapter 62

  Chapter 63

  Chapter 64

  Chapter 65

  Chapter 66

  Chapter 67

  Chapter 68

  Chapter 69

  Chapter 70

  Chapter 71

  Chapter 72

  Chapter 73

  Chapter 74

  Chapter 75

  Chapter 76

  Chapter 77

  Chapter 78

  Chapter 79

  Chapter 80

  Chapter 81

  Chapter 82

  Chapter 83

  Chapter 84

  Chapter 85

  Chapter 86

  Chapter 87

  Chapter 88

  Chapter 89

  Chapter 90

  Part Four - A Time of Wolves

  Chapter 91

  Chapter 92

  Chapter 93

  Chapter 94

  Chapter 95

  Chapter 96

  Chapter 97

  Chapter 98

  Chapter 99

  Chapter 100

  Chapter 101

  Chapter 102

  Chapter 103

  Chapter 104

  Chapter 105

  Chapter 106

  Chapter 107

  Chapter 108

  Chapter 109

  Chapter 110

  Chapter 111

  Chapter 112

  Chapter 113

  Chapter 114

  Chapter 115

  Chapter 116

  Chapter 117

  Chapter 118

  Chapter 119

  Chapter 120

  Part Five - Travels with a Giraffe

  Chapter 121

  Chapter 122

  Chapter 123

  Chapter 124

  Chapter 125

  Chapter 126

  Chapter 127

  Chapter 128

  Chapter 129

  Chapter 130

  Chapter 131

  Chapter 132

  Chapter 133

  Chapter 134

  Chapter 135

  Chapter 136

  Chapter 137

  Chapter 138

  Chapter 139

  Chapter 140

  Chapter 141

  Chapter 142

  Chapter 143

  Chapter 144

  Chapter 145

  Chapter 146

  Chapter 147

  Chapter 148

  Chapter 149

  Chapter 150

  Postscript

  About the Author

  Author’s Note

  The word neutral, from neuter, originally meant “neither masculine nor feminine.” Time and its upheavals created a new and political meaning: neutral meant staying out of a war.

  In 1939, Ireland, a small island with a diminutive military capacity, declared itself neutral between Britain and Germany. The Irish felt in danger from both sides—with good reason. Winston Churchill wanted to shelter his warships in Irish ports (some feared he would do so by force), thereby inviting German bombing; Adolf Hitler was known to view Ireland as a possible base from which to attack England.

  The arguments raged inside and outside the country and continued for many years after the war ended. How could a defenseless island make a difference one way or another in such a huge military theater and thus invite ruin? The opposing point of view insisted that there can be no such thing in life as a neutral position; faced with uncalled-for aggression, everyone must take sides.

  This debate echoes a smaller, more intimate, and much older conundrum, closer to the origin of the word: Can a man and a woman ever be “neutral” toward each other? Can they achieve a deep friendship that remains platonic, or will one or the other want to move it along to a livelier or more committed state?

  Naturally, these issues have never been resolved, globally or personally. Nor are they likely to—which is to the benefit of drama and story-telling, because the word neutrality has many shades. For example, official papers, released long after 1945, show that Ireland did, in fact, exploit the war politically and contributed many actions to the Allied cause. As to affairs of the heart, who would ever dare to define where frie
ndship should end and passion begin?

  1

  The Matchmaker of Kenmare taught me much of what I know.

  “If a giraffe isn’t weaned right,” she said once, “you’ll have to provide twenty gallons of fresh milk for it every day.”

  Another morning she told me, “If you’re going out in the rain, always butter your boots. It makes them waterproof.”

  She knew a terrific card trick, but she refused to teach it to me. “Big hands are for power,” she said, “not trickery.”

  At our very first meeting she asked, “How can you tell whether an egg is fresh?”

  If it doesn’t bounce when you drop it? In those days, I had a sardonic inner voice, my only defense mechanism.

  She said, “Put it in a pan of cold water with salt, and if the egg rises to the surface it’s bad.”

  You must have seen a lot of bad eggs, said my secret voice. I think I was afraid of her then.

  She went on, “If you’re hard-boiling an egg, a pinch of salt in the water will stop it cracking.”

  A pinch of salt, indeed.

  “If you ever want to catch a bird,” she said, “just sprinkle salt on its tail.”

  How useful. You just have to get close enough.

  “Not too much salt,” she added.

  Does it depend on the size of the bird?

  Could she hear what I was thinking? “But don’t do it,” she said, “with an ostrich. Ostriches hate salt.”

  Hoping to sound tactful, I asked, “Are there ostriches here in Kerry?”

  “Ah, use your imagination,” she said. “They’re around here all right. But you have to know where to look for them.”

  I nodded, in confusion more than agreement.

  “Do you have a strong imagination, Ben?”

  “I do,” I said, “but I’m not sure that I trust it.”

  “There are only two words,” she said, “in which I put my trust. Magic and Faith.”

  Some of her grip on me came from the conflict of opposites. Whereas I had always leaned toward the scholarly, she belonged to the demotic. For every line of Horace and Virgil that I savored, she had a snatch of cant, and from the moment we met I began to note many of her sayings and old saws. They still addle my brain; this morning, as I sat down to work, I remembered a fragment from a spelling game that she’d learned as a child: “Mrs. D. Mrs. I. Mrs. F-F-I. Mrs. C. Mrs. U. Mrs. L-T-Y.”

  “Patience,” she murmured another day, “is the Mother of Science.”

  I would swear that she often spoke in uppercase letters.

  Since she rarely left her stony Atlantic headland, her knowledge of the world must have come from some popular encyclopedia of arcane and unconnected facts. Giraffes, ostriches, and eggs—they formed no more than an introduction. She knew about the lives of ants; how to gut a fish using a sharp stick and your thumb; training a cat to play dead; the healing properties of sour milk; the fact that honey is the only food that never goes off; where to find a stone that retains heat for twelve hours; how cloves grow; the number of bones in an eagle’s wing; why a cow has four stomachs; how long to boil the tar for caulking the hull of a boat. She was a walking, talking library of vernacular knowledge.

  She loved music, but she couldn’t carry a tune in a bucket. Her eye had the familiar speed of a child raised in the countryside—she could identify a bird thousands of yards away. She had a sense of color so strong that she could tell one shade of black from another. Her capacity to quote from Shakespeare suggested wide reading of him—even if some pages seemed to have been missing from her edition of the Collected Works.

  Moreover, she had one specific gift that I still can’t fathom. It has never ceased to puzzle me; she used it a number of times in my company, always with astonishing results, and if it can’t be called “magic,” well, nothing can: She could find people by looking at a map. And we shall come to those moments when I saw her pull this stunt, trick, sleight of mind, or whatever it should be called.

  Although she spoke three and a half languages, she had never been abroad. And however delightful in its innocence, the part of her that remained in her own homestead also made me wince, with its homespun charm, its greeting-card sentiment.

  “Ben, do you know what the difference is between Friendship and Love? Friendship is the photograph, Love is the oil painting.” And she uttered it in the declarative way she had of saying things that made me hesitate to contradict her.

  Her words often sounded so shallow that I dismissed them, and later found to my displeasure that her mushy sentiments had lingered and were staggering around in my mind like a drunk at a wedding. In that sense, she possessed in trumps the strange potency of cheap music, and I know that I caught some of it from her.

  However, from inside all that phrase-and-fable stuff, she served up a philosophy that had an alluring power. For example, she brought into my life a belief in something that she called “Referred Passion”; I even lived by it for a time.

  “Do you know what I mean by ‘Referred Passion’?” she said one day about a year into our relationship. And, as usual, not waiting for my hopeless stab at a reply, she went on. “Do you know what a referred pain is?”

  Is it when I feel so stupid that I could kick myself?

  “I’ll explain it,” she said. “Your shoulder is injured, but you feel it in your chest. Or you’ve hurt your spine, but your hip is carrying the ache. That’s referred pain. Well, Referred Passion is when you’re in love with one person, but you fiercely embrace another. That’s us,” she said. “That’s me and you. Friendship is a choice,” she said. “Love isn’t.”

  What else can I tell you about her? She had a phenomenal passion for handkerchiefs. She kept her hair tucked behind an ear like Rita Hayworth. She taught me the words of bawdy old country rhymes, most of them too salty to repeat here. Also, she had the most peculiar recipes for things.

  “If you have the hiccups,” she told me one day, “bend down, put your hands on the floor, and look back between your legs at the sun.”

  My inner voice said, Is that all you’ll be able to see?—but I asked her, “And what if it’s the middle of the night?”

  She said, “Then you’re in worse trouble.”

  And I was—but I never picked up the warnings.

  As I sat down to write this memoir, I had an opening paragraph in mind; here it is:

  I wish I could tell you about the greatest friendship of my life; I wish I could tell you how it developed beyond friendship into something for which I have no definition, no terminology. But the moment I begin to tell it (and I must: I’m mortally committed to telling this tale before I die), I know that I’ll enter what I call the “Regret Cycle,” and the “What If Cycle,” and the “If Only Cycle,” and I’ll end up nowhere again.

  As you can see, I abandoned those opening sentences, and the direction they proposed—yet I’m nevertheless going to write it all down for you. I’m old enough now to deal with the regrets, the what-ifs, and if-onlys, and whatever the subjective faults you may find in this remembrance, at least I can describe how I, who knew little about anything beyond my own narrow concerns, learned to become a true and deep friend to someone. It may prove important to you one day. To the both of you.

  She, of course, was the one who taught me this magnificent skill—as she taught me something else extraordinary, the greatest single lesson of my life: She taught me what blind faith looks like. And blind faith is why I’m writing this account of her life, and how it affected me.

  Kate Begley was her name, and she was known as the Matchmaker of Kenmare long before I met her. She and her grandmother shared the title, and Kate was as pretty as a pinup. I was twenty-nine, she was twenty-five when I met her, and she had a grin like a boy’s.

  See? See what’s happening to me? Pretty as a pinup; and a grin like a boy’s—the moment I begin to describe her, all these decades later, I become sentimental about her, and I fall into language that I would never use in my ordinary life.
/>   I who for years wrote uncluttered and austere reports of ancient countryside traditions, I who studied with joy the most powerful scholars of old Europe, I who pride myself on my unadorned simplicity of purpose—here I am, forced back into her way of thinking. And I squirm, because at these moments her greeting-card remarks will flood through me again like a maudlin old song. I’ve just heard one of those corny echoes: “You have to believe me, Ben,” she said. “Love is not a decision. But Friendship is.”

  Why am I telling you all this? You’ll see why. You’ll see how she affected my life, and you’ll grasp the implications of that effect upon all of us whom this memoir concerns. You’ll see how she was the one who made the determinations; where we would go, no matter how dangerous; what we might attempt, no matter how bizarre; and yes, she decided too the balance of love and friendship between us.

  I followed, and she led me into trouble so deep that my own father wouldn’t have found me. Older than she in years but younger by centuries, I’d never intended to be so commanded, but some people snag you on their spikes, and you hang there, flapping helplessly, and—I admit it—fascinated.

  When I met Kate Begley, the Second World War had been under way for four years. In Ireland, we called it by a wonderful, ameliorating euphemism—“The Emergency.” We were one of the very few countries in Europe immune from the conflict, because we had taken up a position of neutrality. Controversial among our geographical neighbors, and sometimes even among ourselves, I agreed with it. Its moral simplicity suited what I like in life.

  I also liked its military practicality; who were we, on our tiny island, to fight among such vast regiments? We hadn’t even replenished our slaughtered breadwinners from the previous war, in which we’d lost tens of thousands of men. Thus, we had learned to stay out of such things, or so I believed.

  And yet, because I took Kate Begley at her word, because I surrendered myself to her philosophy of friendship, that is to say, Referred Passion, the war sucked me in. When it swept her from that brilliant Atlantic headland where she lived, and from her generally innocent life, it took me with her.

  2

  July 1943

  Here is my note of our first meeting:

  She always serves tea to her callers—to break the ice and soften the difficult opening questions: “Did you ever court a girl?” And, “What kind of girl would you like?”

 

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