The Matchmaker of Kenmare

by Frank Delaney

  These are terrible times. We have heard awful things. I have listened to many tales of what has happened to people in this war, and I do not know how they have survived. In Le Crotoy, the sadness that hangs over people must, I think, be the same that hangs over all of the countries where people have been dying—and that’s most of Europe. We’re lucky to have been neutral, and so are Spain and Portugal and Switzerland.

  And I am lucky to have Ben with me. What if I had met him when he was in better condition, as he is now? Would I have fallen for him as I did for Charles? Who can tell? I know that he thinks me irresponsible to have come here, but it says a lot about him that even though he is afraid (and I can see it), he came here with me, to help and protect me. When I have found Charles then I will devote all my energy to finding Ben’s missing wife. Or her mortal remains. Ben is so often sad. I see him when he isn’t aware that I am watching, and he stands as though completely alone.

  Nana still doesn’t like him. Before we began our search for Charles she tried again to warn me. She said I shouldn’t let him go with me, that he’s dangerous, and God knows what he’ll do under pressure, that he might turn on me. But I don’t think so (at least I hope not!), and anyway I have to be practical: How can I search for Charles alone?

  I carry in my bag a little square of calico, from a shop in Kenmare. It’s green and white check and when I saw it, I thought it might make a nice summer dress, so I brought the sample to show it to Charles. If he likes it I will make the dress.

  Her second entry disturbed me less in one way and more in another. Less because it contained no criticisms of me; more because I hadn’t known how the evidence of war had so disturbed Miss Begley.

  Today (again I don’t know the exact date), we found ourselves right in the middle of the war. I feel so ill, I feel worse than I have done at any time in my life. Today I suffered insult to all my five senses; seeing—I saw the works of Satan, with bodies torn apart as though he had ravaged them at the gates of Hell; hearing—I heard the screams of people in pain at their loss; smelling—I smelled the sulfur of a thousand infernos; tasting—tasted the dust of war, the filth of carnage on dust borne by the wind; and as for touch—I stepped on something, a woman’s corpse, barely recognizable. Terrible, the squelching sound my foot made.

  My stomach is in turmoil, I can retain no food, I have severe pain in my back, and my head is splitting with headaches. But I must let nobody see any of this; as Nana always taught me, I must show no weakness. I know what’s causing the pains—I’m thinking of Charles and I can’t help worrying about him. That gash on his neck and throat was awful, and he wouldn’t explain to me how he got it. It looked to me like a knife wound, but I know nothing of what a soldier has to do; it definitely wasn’t a bullet wound, and I thought they only fought with guns. I’m thinking of going back to praying, to see if it will do any good, if it will bring him back to me.

  As she experienced physical pain and discomfort, so did I—a permanent headache for months if not years. More revealingly, she focused on the injury to Captain Miller’s neck. I understood that kind of focus. When the initial search for Venetia yielded no fruit, I began to envisage how they might have killed her. I saw bullet holes and stab wounds and decapitations. Miss Begley’s pain seemed to gush from a similar fountain.

  When I came back from my mystifying walk on the little white tundra of the wolf, none of war’s mighty sounds boomed or thumped, though strange odors floated everywhere.

  I heard laughter as I walked through the door of the American billet. It came from the kitchen, where I found a rejuvenated Miss Begley holding court among the two women who had taken care of her the previous night, and several men. I listened outside the open door for some minutes, as she told stories of marriages that she had made or attempted to clinch.

  “We had one man my grandmother wouldn’t handle at all. She gave him over to me, and I said, ‘Oh, thanks very much, Nana’—because although he had plenty of money and insisted on paying us a fee every time we met him, he was impossible. And d’you know why he was impossible? He wouldn’t speak. Instead of opening his mouth and saying something, he winked.”

  One of the women asked, “Winked?”

  Miss Begley gave a cartoon wink, head ducking to one side.

  “I’d say to him, ‘Now I have a very nice girl for you to meet.’ He’d wink. ‘She has her own hairdressing business over in Killarney.’ Wink. ‘And her mother is dead so there’d be no mother-in-law to deal with, and there’d be a second income. Would you like to meet her?’ And he’d produce an almighty wink.”

  Her listeners laughed. I laughed.

  “And after the wink,” she said, “he’d slide this envelope full of money across the table at me. And he’d wink again.”

  “What did the wink mean?” asked one of the men.

  “I never found out,” said Miss Begley, and everybody laughed.

  A footstep clattered beside me on the tiled floor and I started. Sudden noise, sudden movements: I thought their power would have diminished in a war. An older man in uniform came and stood beside me, looking in.

  “Hi,” he murmured to me, looking in at her. “You’re the two Irish folk?”

  I said, “Yes.”

  “Crazy guys, right?”

  I smiled my wryest.

  Inside the kitchen, Miss Begley said, “And that was bad enough but I did get him a date with a girl. A nice girl. She was thirty-five, all her own teeth. Understood about corsets—you know, an intelligent girl. And her father died and left her a small farm of land. She walked out with my Wink, and then she reported back to me. ‘Oh, my God, Kate Begley,’ she said. ‘What kind of men do you know?’ And I asked her why, and she said, ‘I asked him would he like to go for a walk and he winked at me. I asked him would he like to sit down, and he winked at me. I told him I had go to the toilet and he winked at me. I said to him that we should have a drink and he winked at me. And the more he drank the more he winked, until his eyelid was flapping up and down like a signaling lamp.’ ”

  They roared with laughter, and one of the women asked, “Will you come out to the States and get husbands for us?”

  Miss Begley said, “Indeed, I may be going to the States anyway because I’m married to one of your comrades.”

  They chorused the question, “Who?”

  The officer at my elbow eyebrowed an inquiry at me. I nodded and whispered, “Listen.”

  “I’m sure many of you know him,” said Miss Begley. “He’s a captain. His name is Charles Miller. I came out here to be with him.”

  In the kitchen (and I hadn’t yet shown my face) they looked at one another but shook their heads.

  Miss Begley said, “He’s in something called Special Operations.”

  One of the men said, “We never get to know those guys.”

  And one of the women said, “Where did you meet? Was it very romantic?”

  As Miss Begley launched into the epic of her romance, the officer beside me stepped away and beckoned me to follow.

  Outside, he asked, “Is that true?”

  I said, “Every word.”

  “How did you get here?”

  I told him the story in brief. He walked me back across the street, saying, “There’s something off the rails here.”

  We walked into a building and down a corridor.

  “How well did you know Miller?” he asked.

  I said, “I like him. A lot.”

  We reached a small room, where two uniformed men sorted papers that looked like official documents.

  “Guys, get me everything you can on where Miller is.” Then he turned to me and said, “He was here two days ago. With two French guys and an Englishman—they met here.”

  When the men left the room, he said, “I know Miller.” He took a pause. “Killer Miller.”

  I must have looked shocked, because he said, “It’s okay—he’s on our side. What’s your name, by the way?” and when I told him he said, “I’m Mike Morrigan
.” And we shook hands. “Grandfather was Irish.”

  “Probably County Mayo,” I said, “with a name like that. How long have you known Captain Miller?”

  He took this in and lit a cigarette.

  “First time I saw Killer Miller,” he resumed, “we were all in this hangar for a lecture on Special Ops. Or as much as they wanted to tell us about it. Long bitch of a place with the wind coming through. Scraping the faces off us. Doors are open wide, there isn’t a thing to be seen, we’re near Tacoma, out in the country. Empty building, bigger’n a football field. We’re sitting there, looking out across the open sky, not a house in sight, we’re called together for a briefing, a whole bunch of us, and waiting and getting raucous. This was a place they built aircraft, and it had long, wide-open spaces.”

  He stopped and looked at me. “Are you the one I should be telling this to?”

  “Look,” I said. “I think Miller is one of the best fellows I ever met.”

  “Yeah,” he said, doubt hanging from his tone. “We’ll talk about that. Anyway, I’m sitting there with all these other guys, some brass, some grunts—that’s officers and men. I’m looking out the wide-open, nonexistent doors, and way off in the distance I see this dot. It’s just a dot—but it’s a moving dot and it’s moving toward us. The word goes around, and suddenly we’re all staring at this goddamn dot. There’s chitchat and shouts, Hey Mack, it’s your missus, she’s found where you are, and Hey Bud, it’s your mother. And worse.”

  Mike Morrigan sat down at what I presumed to be his desk.

  “So we’re sitting there, and slowly we all get quiet. The place gets to be a mortuary, it’s so quiet. And all because of this dot, because we can tell that it’s coming straight at us, and by now we’ve figured that it’s a man. And we’ve also figured that he’s coming for us, in fact so determined is his walk he looks like he’s coming at us. As if he’s gonna take on the whole three hundred of us. I can’t take my eyes offa him. And he gets nearer and nearer, and goddamn it, this guy isn’t walking, he’s marching. He’s marching like he’s on a forced march, and by now the silence is really crazy, I mean crazy deep. We’re like mutes the way we sit there, and I don’t know about the others but my head has already cottoned on to the rhythm of his steps and they’re like a march tune in my brain, and I can tell that he’s marching fast. Now if you count the distance he was when he started from us, he must have marched a straight mile.”

  Morrigan stopped, looked away into the distance, and shook his large, shaved head. He took a long pause and wound himself up to finish his tale (which I, that same night, wrote down in another notebook—not my war journal, because Miss Begley sometimes read that).

  “Now he’s a hundred yards away and we can see him, and we can see that the uniform is perfect, the creases in the pants are like he was wearing swords inside them, the tunic is as fitted as a glove, the boots shine like lamps. And now he’s fifty yards from us, and my first sight of him is accompanied by the thought, ‘Does this son of a bitch ever sweat?’ Because his face is as dry as flour, and he must have been walking at twenty miles an hour. He comes closer and closer, and now he’s in the doorway, the wide-open space where a door should be, and we’re looking at him and still he’s coming at us, and at the middle chair of the top row he stops and says, in a voice cold as the friggin’ Arctic, ‘Stand up, gentlemen,’ and we stand up like we were shot in the ass. That’s how I first saw Miller. And he briefed us like we were donkeys. Like he was a genius and we were dumb-ass. That’s Killer Miller.”

  I’ve written that exactly as I heard it. Imagine, now, what it was like for me to try to digest it.

  “But where is he?” I asked.

  Morrigan shrugged and spread his hands.

  “That’s what I hope my guys will tell you. Word was that Hitler had a price on Miller’s head.”

  At that moment, one of the men returned with a note that he handed to Morrigan, who then dismissed him. When we were alone again, Morrigan said, “Well, we have your answer.”

  He looked at me, made his hand like a cleaver, and whipped it across his throat.

  I gasped. “What? Jesus!”

  “That’s the scuttlebutt.”

  “Are you certain?”

  He held up the piece of paper. “Why would you use the word certain in a war?”

  “Are we talking about Captain Charles Miller, an intelligence officer, who was based in London for a while and in Ireland, and then went into France? He’s from Kansas originally?”

  “Killer Miller. I told you. And he’s not from Kansas, he’s from Pennsylvania, and he could have been based in Kalama-freakin’-zoo, for all I know. But in my book there’s only one Captain Charles Miller. Or there was.”

  “When was he killed? And where?”

  Morrigan stretched like an athlete. “Christ, this war doesn’t half make you tense. Okay. Word is he was in a sanitarium near Fauville that got infiltrated.”

  “How do you mean?”

  “That’s the kick of the freakin’ thing. He was killed by some Nazi doing for them the kind of job Miller did for us.” He squinted. “Want me to put in an inquiry on behalf of the widow?”

  76

  In a clanking jeep, the Americans took us to Dieppe—or what was left of it. As though we were prisoners of war they handed us over to the Canadians, who had liberated the port. We had a rough crossing to England in a troopship. And how will they stop the torpedoes? I asked myself. From there we were escorted to a series of trains. Two armed soldiers sat with us all the way—and they finally supervised our embarkation on the Dublin boat at Liverpool.

  “Stay neutral,” cracked the corporal.

  Miss Begley didn’t speak once, not to me, not to anybody. She looked forty-five, not twenty-five, a face pitted with shock, the black light of despair in her eyes, hands listless as dead flowers in her lap. I’ve ransacked my memory for the truth of those two days (we had a night crossing to Dublin), and no matter what nets I trawl across my mind, I can’t haul in a single word that she spoke.

  And I? Remember that metabolic device that I mentioned, the control valve, which, over the years, I had attached to my emotions? It had kicked on some days earlier. It’s useful; it delays an impact until I can digest it, until I can release it slowly into my system, examine it, and cope with the feelings. Yes, it holds up the pleasure in good news, but it mostly stops bad news from ambushing me—unless I’ve been drinking, and thanks to Miss Begley’s eagle glare I hadn’t touched anything beyond a drop of wine in months.

  In Dublin, I took over the rest of the journey. I went to the bank, drew out enough money to book two adjoining hotel rooms, and sequestered Kate in deep comfort for four days and four nights. She ate not at all the first day—no breakfast, slept through lunch (I kept a duplicate key to her room), and refused dinner.

  On the second morning, she drank some tea. I sat by her bed, eating the breakfast that she hadn’t touched. She didn’t look at me, kept her head down, her unwashed hair falling in a lank mask over her face. She had slept in her clothes. I warmed a face towel in the bathroom and held it to her forehead, her cheeks, her neck. And I said not a word, just waited—and waited.

  An hour later, I rose to go, saying, “I’ll look in soon.”

  She blurted, “I don’t believe he’s dead.”

  “Shhh. Take it easy.”

  “He’s not dead.”

  “Kate, what are you saying?”

  She said, “I asked the Americans. At that place.”

  “Asked them what?”

  “I said, Do you know a Captain Miller, an intelligence officer?”

  “Kate, I heard you. I was listening at the door. But they didn’t seem to know.”

  She said, “Others came and told me. A senior officer.”

  I asked, “What did he look like? Was he as bald as an egg, was that the man?”

  “Yes, and he said Charles was dead.”

  “Sometimes they give details.”

  “
He said, in a hospital. It was bombed.”

  I said, “You can’t be sure of anything in a war.”

  She said, “Charles is very famous in the American army. Everybody knows his name.”

  “Why don’t you believe them?” I asked.

  Words burst out of her with a wail. “Because the force in that man would spin the world. He’s alive, Ben. I want to bring him back to Kenmare. I want to look after him.”

  “Get yourself up and about,” I said. “You’ll feel better.”

  “He’s. Not. Dead. I know these things,” she said.

  I walked away then, wanting so much to agree with her.

  77

  Back in my own room, I waited for her to knock on my door. Through the wall I could hear her running a bath and clattering about. Good! I thought. Energy is what we need in her. And then came the dry caution, What in God’s name will she do with new energy?

  I read my newspaper, keen to follow in print the events we had just survived. Even though Dieppe and Le Crotoy and Étretat received no mention—the Allies had, after all, pressed on by now—my heart still jumped. Reduced by the wartime paper shortages, the Irish Independent stretched to only four pages. Inside, under a heading, THE WAR PASSED THIS WAY, they ran a photograph captioned, “A general view of the devastation at Rouen. In the background can be seen the spire of Rouen Cathedral. The edifice escaped damage.”

  We’d been close to Rouen, I thought. And all over Ireland this morning they’ll be breathing the word miracle because the cathedral didn’t get hit. I laughed, almost out loud, when my inner voice said, They know nothing.

  It took Miss Begley two and a half hours, but when she knocked on my door she had pulled herself together.

  “I need some clothes,” she said.

  I replied, “So do I.”

  And she said, “You always need clothes, you just don’t buy any.”

  I said, “I buy them all right, but two days later they look old.”