A frost as stiff as this had fallen once before in our house, when my father was a day late coming home from the Galway races. No telegram, no message, and neighbors whom he’d met there had dropped by, asking if he was home yet.
This irked Mother, who then ripped into him when he did return, and the ice between them chilled everything for an unpleasant week. Since then all had been more or less sweet.
But this afternoon, he chatted to me more than usual, and in a louder voice. Mother read the newspaper, head down; she was hunched and a touch remote.
Except when he asked me, “Tonight’ll be great, won’t it?”
That’s when Mother looked up—at me. I answered her unspoken question.
“Venetia Kelly’s Traveling Show,” I said. “She’s coming to Cashel.”
Mother looked at my father; he avoided her eyes. Then she folded the newspaper very slowly and said, “I see.”
Rising from her chair, she walked from the room, passing behind his chair but not mine. Normally she patted his shoulder, or stroked his head, or mock-throttled him. That afternoon—nothing.
Walking very slowly, she reached the door, which she opened ceremoniously. She left the room like a queen—and then slammed the door so hard that the doorknob fell off. It had always been loose. My father rose, retrieved the white porcelain oval, and gingerly slid the knob back on again.
We reached the hall in Cashel an hour before the performance—my father had insisted. With nobody else there, we sat side by side in the empty, freezing place. I should have known, but then hindsight is despicable; it mainly tells us how stupid we’ve been. Father chattered like a monkey that night. I had rarely seen him so animated. His face had reddened slightly, as it did when we had company or he’d had a few swift whiskies. And he did this anxious thing with his hands, tenting and interlacing his fingers back and forth, over and over. He also shifted in his seat like a man with bad hemorrhoids.
I think we went in early because he’d hoped that we’d see some of the performers setting up the show. We didn’t—but we heard them. Behind the crooked hangings that passed for a stage curtain they shuffled and shoved, laughing and sending out little hollers to one another. At each sound my father put a hand to his ear like a hunter, and said, “Whisht!”—even if I hadn’t been speaking. From time to time he sat forward and clasped the back of the chair in front of him.
Time stays infamously slow in the countryside. The poster outside said 8:00 SHARP, but not until a quarter past did people drift in. By half past eight the hall had filled, but untidily so; men stood at the back and chatted; banter rattled back and forth; people left their seats to greet newcomers or to surprise a neighbor whom they had just seen three rows ahead, and so on. My father grew ever more impatient.
At twenty minutes before nine an imperfect drumroll came from behind the curtains. It started hard and high and stayed that way until the audience quieted, and then a man pranced out, a tall man, naked to the waist, thin as an orphan, torso white as a sick fish. He wore the skintight pants of a troubadour, wide red and yellow stripes, and he turned two somersaults in the narrow space between the curtains and the edge of the stage.
My father whispered to me, “He’s Michael. He’s one of the leading actors.”
Michael turned two more somersaults, took a bow, and disappeared behind the curtains. The drumroll began again, and a male voice called out, “Ladies and gentlemen, we present Miss Venetia Kelly in the famous Trial of Shylock by William Shakespeare.”
Part of the trick for this traveling company was to offer excerpts from plays in the school curriculum. This guaranteed attendance. Our teachers always said we missed a great deal by not seeing a performance of the play we were studying; that night, much of the audience consisted of boys and girls a little younger than me. In fact, The Merchant of Venice had formed part of my own English studies and I knew the play by heart.
The curtain drew open and revealed a row of chairs set up so that their backs formed a kind of hedge. This was evidently the front of the dock. On one chair knelt an elderly man facing the audience—clearly Antonio, because he looked so miserable. At the back of the stage, on a high stool, sat another old man, wearing a black robe and a judge’s long wig; he was the Duke.
The acrobat Michael reappeared. He now wore a short black velvet jacket, but his height meant that a gap of his flesh appeared between the hem of the jacket and the waistband of his striped pants. I could tell that he was playing Bassanio, because he walked up and down in a fret, and rubbed his hands together in an anguished way. Once or twice he gave us the benefit of a swift somersault. It had nothing to do with Shakespeare, but the audience loved it.
On a chair nearby, whetting an ugly knife on the sole of a shoe, sat Shylock, a small, extremely fat man with no neck. His front teeth reminded me of a rabbit’s.
Somewhere offstage the drum rolled again. Michael, i.e., Bassanio, turned another swift somersault and got another cheer. As the drumroll stopped, everybody onstage stood up and stepped aside, making way.
That was the moment when I first saw Venetia Kelly. Even now, as I write it, all these years later, I need time to digest it.
Let me tell you instead that my father had been disappearing throughout the year. He went at random intervals, and in odd but always consistent ways. Midafternoon he’d leave the fields or the yard or wherever he was working, go into the house, change into his best clothes, and drive away. I often saw Mother frown as, half hidden, she watched from the porch or a window or behind a garden hedge.
His return always woke me up. Sometimes he got back before midnight, sometimes an hour later. Soon, from far away, came distant noises of argument in the suspended night.
What had he been doing? I suddenly knew. He had been making journeys of different lengths, to different towns, to see these traveling players. As the evening wore on I knew it more and more; he not only knew the name of every performer on the stage, he could murmur their ad-lib lines.
I too began to mouth lines as he did—Antonio’s “the weakest kind of fruit / Drops earliest to the ground.” They had taken some liberties with the text, and I soon understood why—the piece had been rearranged to create an entrance for Portia.
What is it about what we call today a star? What quality, what dimension? Is it an inner burn that transmits itself to us whether he or she knows about it or not? Venetia Kelly made no dramatic stride into the center of the stage; she didn’t leap or pounce. She kind of slouched on, a slow walk, shoulders taut, like somebody wondering whether to be wary. She looked all around the stage, taking in everything, and then came far enough downstage to be seen by the entire audience—which at once fell quiet.
Beside me, my father reacted so hard that he made the bones of his chair creak. He pulled back his hands, tightened them into fists, and held them in front of him like a man containing himself.
She wore, neck to foot, a black gown of a light velveteen material with a pattern like a faint Venetian brocade, and she wore small, pointed, black velvet shoes. No jewelry, no ornament shone anywhere. From my father’s throat came the noise of a small animal. I was barely able to take my eyes from this actress, and yet I had to look at him. Had I not known better I should have said he was in pain.
You could hear a feather drop in that shabby old hall. We weren’t in Cashel—we were in old Venice. A step at a time, Portia looked to right, to left, her head turning like a lamp. Maybe I imagined it, but it seemed to me that each actor quickened when she looked at him, then stood or sat at greater attention.
And still, as I tell you this, I marvel that she was, as yet, barely past thirty years old. And still I marvel, as I feel again the pain of the memory, that she was perfect. The first time I ever heard that voice, it was speaking a perfect rendition of Shakespeare’s iambic meter, five-notes-to-the-bar.
“Which is the merchant here, and which the Jew?”
Antonio and Shylock identified themselves to her. My father leaned forward, and leaned
back again. Then he bent down, bent double almost, as today’s aircraft passengers are instructed to do in a crash. He put his head in his hands. For a moment I thought that he’d been taken ill, and I turned to look at him. He had become inaccessible; no part of his face showed; I could see only his thick mane of bushy red hair.
“Are you all right?” I whispered.
He shook his head and came out of his dive, raising himself slowly. His eyes were still closed tight, and he bit so hard on his lip that I expected blood. He opened his eyes, turned them on me like lamps, and whispered these words:
“Ben, I’m not coming home with you tonight.”
“Why?” I whispered back.
When we ask the most important questions we already know the answer. How ill am I, Doctor? Is my business ruined? Am I as inadequate as I think I am? Do you love me?
Such was the case here.
My father said, “I’m going to join Venetia Kelly’s Traveling Show.”
Things had been going so well in my life. No complications yet—no girls, I didn’t smoke or drink, and I didn’t gamble. I didn’t even swear, not out loud. When I looked ahead, life promised well too; my achievements in school told me that next year I’d enjoy college; I liked our farm, the horses, the dog, the cat, my parents, the neighbors, the people who came and went.
My days were lovely—from the clatterings of the sparrows every morning, to the bats fooling around in the evening. I had known no threatening difficulties; I’d had a good ride of eighteen years. Now, though, somebody was creeping up behind me with a hammer, and that somebody was my own father.
How did I react when he made his announcement to me? I don’t fully recall. For certain I frowned, because that’s what I do when I’m hit by a thump I’m not expecting. Also, I waited, because I have a slow emotional metabolism and I always need to digest things in order to cope with them, especially if there are strong feelings attached. In my house there wasn’t much training in matters of emotion. So I’m surmising that I sat there, instantly woolly in my brain, with big lights flashing the thought What does he mean? What does he mean? What does he mean?
I do recall an immediate worry about driving the car at night because I’d never done that. And I do recall trying to figure whether there was a moon to help light the way. I remember also thinking, Oh, well, it has good headlamps. Other than that, I can’t bring any reaction back to mind.
Here are the words again—“I’m going to join Venetia Kelly’s Traveling Show.”
I hadn’t mistaken it; that’s what he said. He had the eyes of a child when he spoke; he was innocent, relying on me, and thinking only of the world to which he was going.
When Portia declaimed, “The quality of mercy is not strained,” the slight emphasis made my father shudder. “It droppeth as the gentle rain from heaven / Upon the place beneath”—and I could hear, like leaves rustling on a tree, the whisper of fifty teenage voices murmuring the words. “It is twice bless’d / It blesseth him that gives and him that takes: / ’tis mightiest in the mightiest.”
Now I too began to whisper—“it becomes / The throned monarch better than his crown”—and I felt a tight grip on my arm: my father’s hand. He seized me so hard that I looked at him and saw that he had closed his eyes; tears oozed down.
“Shhh,” he said gently.
I subsided, his grip eased, and I sat back to listen.
They had cut short or cut out almost every other part. Shylock got a few sentences to say; the Duke of Venice interjected only once. And when Portia had finished, Bassanio cheered and did another somersault. Many years later Miss Fay smiled at this detail.
“A loose interpretation,” she said.
Bassanio’s handstands gave the audience a cue. They yelled and applauded and Venetia Kelly withdrew from the stage as gracefully and silently as she had entered. My father sat up, whipped his red polka-dot handkerchief out from his breast pocket, and mopped his face and brow. The crowd cheered on. Portia, still gowned in black, came to the front of the curtain and took a bow. My father stood and whistled on his fingers. He was fifty-two years old.
The show continued as a series of sketches. Somebody from each wing got behind the curtain and dragged it toward the center to prepare the stage for the next act of the evening.
No more Shakespeare; Michael (not Bassanio now, but in the same costume) sang a mournful song about “How Can You Buy Killaaaaaarney.” The fat, neckless fellow who’d played Shylock and a girl we hadn’t previously seen came on as a lovelorn comedy duo—he a rustic swain, she a milkmaid with a wooden pail, a bantering and slightly blue act.
“Why are you holding my bottom in your hand, kind sir?”
“Oh, pretty miss, is it not a lovely and beautiful and useful thing to hold in my hand?”
“No, kind sir, not useful.”
“Not useful, pretty miss? What do you mean?”
“Well, kind sir, what use would it be in a fight?”
The crowd loved it.
Three men in white tie and tails (Michael was one of them) sang and danced—as they juggled. The old man, the judge, waddled on in a troubadour’s costume; he looked like the joker in a pack of cards, and he played an indiscernible tune on a tuba, and it made him red in the face.
Venetia Kelly reappeared and once again the hall grew so quiet that a passerby would have thought it empty. Wearing a long white opaque shift, she stood on the edge of the stage and spoke. “‘I fear thee, ancient Mariner! / I fear thy skinny hand! / And thou art long, and lank, and brown, / As is the ribbed sea-sand.’”
My father now sat out on the edge of his chair, so far forward that his breath must have hawed on the neck of the man in front of him. I sat transfixed, as this woman burned herself into us.
“Oh, God,” whispered my father. “Oh, Jesus God.”
I can remember every detail of that show, but I choose not to bother with its mishmash now: the long passage from The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, with the line that the audience was waiting for—“As idle as a painted ship / Upon a painted ocean;” some more songs; a “funny” recitation about brown bread and onions by the old tuba player; handstands, somersaults, and juggling tricks from Michael and the others. They were all, each act, less distinguished by a good margin than Venetia, who performed like an actress from the classics; but the unevenness didn’t matter to that audience, which was standing room only.
And then came the finale.
The curtains drew back some of the way to reveal tall black screens, making a small three-sided space. On strolled Venetia Kelly, calm as a stork. She wore a lady’s cream blouse with a cameo brooch at the high, maidenly throat. Over lilac tights she wore a purple froufrou skirt, bigger than a huge tutu; she wore a wig of bobbed yellow hair and had round splotches of red on her cheekbones like a rouged clown-ette: Had this been Portia?
She folded her hands, primped her froufrous, and cleared her throat with a little cough. Looking up at the audience, she prepared to speak, but an indignant and hurt voice rang out offstage.
“You forgot me!”
From the wings an unseen hand thrust forward a ventriloquist’s dummy.
Venetia Kelly said, “I’m sorry, Blarney,” took the dummy into her embrace, and began to console it. Blarney wore dungarees, a little tweed vest, and a farmer’s shirt with no collar. He had sticking-up hair and thick, worried eyebrows.
“You should be sorry,” he said, “and the price of eggs.”
He sat in her lap and the routine began.
“How are you, Blarney?”
“Fine.”
“Is that all you have to say, Blarney?”
“That depends on you.”
This drew a huge laugh from the audience—and my father. He whispered to me, “This fellow’s great!”
“What have you been doing, Blarney?” She behaved cautiously with him, as with a volatile lover.
“Not enough.”
“Oh? Why not?”
“Your fault.”
“My fault?”
“Yes.”
Every time he spoke he turned his head, with its glittering blue eyes, to the audience, and then twisted back again to hear her next question. He disturbed me.
“Why is it my fault?” she said.
“Because I can’t get rid of you.” And Blarney swiveled his head. The audience roared again.
“Well, what would you like to do?”
“I’ll tell you.”
“Tell me, Blarney.”
“I’ll tell you.”
“Tell me.”
“I said—I’ll tell you.”
Silence. Then Venetia Kelly said, “I’m waiting.”
“For what?”
“For you to tell me.”
“Tell you what?” He had a mouth as red as scandal, and his squared-off cheekbones were born of a carpenter’s knife.
Venetia said, “You told me that you’d tell me—”
“D’you want to hear a joke?” Blarney interrupted.
“Yes, Blarney.”
“A man went into a shop and he said to the shopkeeper, ‘Do you keep shovels?’ And the shopkeeper said, ‘I certainly do.’ And the man said, ‘Why don’t you sell them instead of keeping them? You’ll never make money that way.’”
My father laughed at this joke, laughed and laughed, almost into hernia country. Blarney watched with his glittering blue eyes as the crowd’s laughter subsided.
“D’you want to hear another joke?”
She—and we—waited.
As did Blarney. Then he swiveled his head at her. “Do you?”
Venetia Kelly started and said, “Yes, yes of course.” She looked at the audience and raised her eyebrows at his cantankerousness.
Blarney said, “A horse walked into a bar and the barman said, ‘Why the long face?’”
I had always known that my father had a sense of humor, but I’d never seen him guffaw like this. Again, Blarney waited; he knew about timing.
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