I hadn’t worked out a plan as to how I should address my father. Certainly I must tell him about the mortgage—or must I? Wouldn’t that only drag me back to the problem I was fleeing? He’d want me to deal with it. That was my guess.
He had found his bench again, across the street from the old Market House, and he had company—the neckless little actor. I strolled over, not as calm as I tried to appear, and the neckless one, whose name was Graham, first made room for me with a nervous smile, and then stood to go. Do these people know all about this situation? The thought angered and embarrassed me.
“No-no-no need to go, Graham. Ben’s good company—” But Graham went. “They’ve started the prosecutions,” said my father as I sat down. “A fellow in Dublin got two months in jail. And there were twenty others who tried to vote early and often.”
I said nothing and he shook out the newspaper, went to another page.
“Happy-happy-happy Birthday this week to the Countess of Athlone.”
Again, I didn’t bite. He flipped another page and a new note came into his voice.
“Have you got any investments in British government securities? Everybody seems to think they’re doing well.”
Sarcasm. I didn’t hear it often from my father. He used it on the workmen: “Billy, did you leave the gate open to let air into the field?” And, as you know, he had used it on Missy Casey—but never on Mother or me.
My father, I think, sensed the pressure from me. He looked nervous. The rapid turning of the newspaper pages—that wasn’t typical; he usually read every page from stem to stern.
He stopped at a page. “‘For your throat’s sake smoke Craven A—the cigarette made specially to prevent sore throats.’”
“Stop,” I said. “Stop your nonsense now.”
He didn’t look at me. With great care he folded the newspaper, rose and walked away down the street; I watched him out of sight. Another unseasonable day of sunny warmth—and something was taking place, some kind of reckoning.
From inside the open front door of Sarah’s house, I heard a voice rising and falling, in recitation, not in song. I went indoors, treading heavily after my knock had gone unanswered. Nobody heard my step; I reached the kitchen unintercepted. As usual, clinical tidiness everywhere, with no sign of Mrs. Haas. Who was reciting and where?
I returned to the hallway and heard the voice clearly. From upstairs, and with great power it came, and although I couldn’t hear the words I recognized the cadence.
With one foot on the lower step I waited, fully aware of what I wanted to do. How long did I stand there like that? Perhaps two hours, perhaps a minute or so. Already it had become that kind of day.
I looked down at my excellently polished shoes and the home-knit yellow socks, and I still felt no pang of remorse about having abandoned Mother. My hand on the newel post felt strong and dry. With my foot firmly on the stair tread and my grip on the round cone of the newel, I had become a hero to myself once more.
The voice stopped. All sounds from the outside world ceased too. I heard only what echoed inside my head. A kind of bell, was it? Not necessarily a bell, but the same quality of sound, the clean peal of a clarion. I made ready to move and squared up my heart and mind to be as one.
Up the first step. And now the second. And next the third, to the little platform, the small, low landing from which the staircase turned left and climbed its full length upward. These were slow, heavyish, deliberate steps.
I looked up—to where I had previously seen the heads of daughter and mother, the younger above the older. Now I saw no head, and I heard no voice.
Then the voice began again, lower, still in a reciting lilt. If I climbed some more steps I might make out the words. I softened the weight of my footfall, not to creep or lurk, merely to dim the noise and hear the verse. The voice proved too soft.
I thought I detected the word “Netherby,” and my heart leapt. Young Lochinvar stands among my greatest heroes. He carried away—stirring verse—the bride of Netherby because she should have married him in the first place. I climbed on. “Halfway up the stairs is the stair where I sit,” but I didn’t sit.
The voice stopped and the door opened. She said that it wasn’t so much that she heard me as that she felt my presence. My presence? I didn’t even know what that was.
My presence. For months, for years, I hugged the words to myself. I hugged them when elated, when depressed. What’s the difference between those two states, elated and depressed? None. They’re both liars.
“Some people are like that,” said Venetia. “They have a force in their spirit that announces them.”
She stood aside to admit me to the same small sitting room. The colors seemed brighter than before, probably because the sun had begun to stream in. She stepped in behind me and I walked straight to the window.
Not a soul to be seen down there in the cut-stone street. I saw a pony and cart with its silver churns. The pony looked listless, and I guessed that the owner had gone into a bar across the street. A small bird flew by, a sparrow. His movements were like my thoughts—small, but for him, huge, with much flickering and whurruping.
Venetia stayed where she’d entered, her back against the closed door. She said that she’d been rehearsing a poem she wanted to introduce into the show soon. And she said that I, in my being, had reminded her of the poem. It was “Lochinvar.”
I felt the compliment, I felt the thrill of it. And I felt the thump of it: Was this a manipulation? Was Venetia manipulating me? But I didn’t care; I took it for what it felt like, and now I was a giant again, now I was a hero. A tongue-tied hero, perhaps, and my legs were shaking a little.
Turning away from the window I looked at her. Definitely I can say that this was the first time I’d ever looked at a girl with such intensity. Not curiosity—I had done that; I had done that with the occasional girlfriends of Large Lily when they called to the house, girls who were wild and drab all at once. And I had looked—yech!—at simpering and false Mary Lewis. But I hadn’t truly known why I was looking at any of them at all.
I knew, though, why I was looking at Venetia Kelly now. It had nothing immediate to do with the fact that she was daughter of Sarah, the wicked queen, and granddaughter of the evil King.
Every time I feel heat from the sun on my shoulders it’s the sun that came through that window. Every time I look out of a window from an upper floor, I’m looking out of that window. I didn’t know then that I would go on to have so much of me formed by that moment. But if you’d been there and if you’d asked me, I might have sworn an oath that yes, I would remain like that all my life. And I have done—taking every reference point of serious awakening from those few seconds of sensation.
The curtains had a willow-branch pattern, long and climbing. I’ve ever since liked willow branches. On the sash bar sat a perfect little porcelain knob for opening the catch. My heart lifts if I find one in a house or hotel today. The window had shutters too, folded back, just the same as in my room at home.
My coat had a herringbone pattern. I know because I now studied the sleeve as intently as an archaeologist looks at a shard. The air felt light. Perfume somewhere? Too early for flowers. My feet on the wooden floor felt solid and comforting.
Her voice was telling me that she knew I’d come back for her, and she even wondered whether that was the reason she had been rehearsing the poem. The sound in my head, the bell that wasn’t a bell, rang more beautifully now, and each stroke, each tolling ring, came from somewhere I’d never been.
You think I exaggerate? I do not. This was the beginning of the passion by which I now live, and by which I began to live that day. I knew it from the moment I turned around and saw her arms open wide toward me and heard her say the word “Welcome.”
Whatever tragedy followed has been of my doing.
We didn’t embrace. Instead, she took my hands and looked me directly in the eye. She said that we should sit down, and she arranged us on the sofa. Directed by a
gentle push from her, I sat back and she sat up, on the edge of the couch, where she could look at me. A blind spectator would have grasped the gravity between us.
“Why d’you think I haven’t married or settled down?” she said. “And I’m nearly past the age of what’s seen as marriageable. Ben, we could search the world. We might find partners with whom we could have good and even excellent lives. I don’t believe in that. For me it’s always been the idea of one and one only whom I’d recognize the moment I saw him.”
In my newfound sense of purpose, I went straight to the point I most needed to have answered.
“My father believes he’ll be with you for life.”
“I’ve already told you—he was the path to you.”
“But he lives with you?” No matter how I tried, I couldn’t get rid of the burning hurt that he didn’t live at home anymore.
“I’ve told you what goes on between your father and me.” She paused.
I thought, I’ve never seen anybody I like as much. But I’ve never met an actress before; I hope that’s not the only reason I like her. That’s true to this day. Just “liked”—I liked her deep down the way I ordinarily liked my father, and I liked her the way I ordinarily liked Mother—that is to say, feelings of great warmth, together with a profound interest in their best well-being, and what I could contribute to it. The word love has had a bad time. I myself am not much good at defining it. But I think it begins with “like.”
The same impulses as I’d always had for my parents flooded all over me now. Were I wealthy beyond planets I’d spend it all on this girl’s safety and comfort.
Venetia went on. “I didn’t want your father to leave his home. And farm. And wife. And son. As you know, he’d been following the show for months. Each night he’d come around to the back, and we’d all go off and have something to eat and drink and he always paid. Not that we couldn’t afford to—we have plenty of money, especially when my mother’s traveling with us. Not to mention my grandfather. And we’ll come to him soon.”
I tried to enumerate the questions in my head. Immediately I had the fear that I’d never get to ask them all, would never get all the answers I needed. Yet Venetia, beside me, looking at me, had suddenly, at one stroke it seemed, become a permanent part of me. The importance of my questions was fading.
“When your father first declared himself, long before he began to travel with us, my mother and my grandfather urged me to accept him. He’s young enough, they said, the age gap, twenty years, that’s nothing. And he has money. Yes, there’s no divorce in Ireland, but there is in England and in the United States. He can get a divorce somewhere.”
“Divorce”? She might as well have said “murder.” Although I’d never heard of anybody in Ireland who was divorced, I knew that it had the worst associations, not just illegal but evil. I saw Mother shudder when she heard the word—which wasn’t often.
And I had my own shudder. Mother. Grandfather. Was a plot emerging? Worse—was she part of it, this girl to whom I had already committed myself, even though I had as yet no idea of such a concept, nor a language for expressing commitment?
There isn’t a term comprehensive enough for the kind of commitment I entered into that day. All I knew is that the world could now go on safely about its business, because I could stop worrying about the rest of my life; I was feeling the safety that’s embodied in commitment, no matter how heartbreaking it may be.
The floor had a rug woven with the scarlet, orange, and gray mysteries of Afghanistan. It didn’t reach to each wall, and the boards in between had been painted gray-white.
“I like your father very much indeed. No, I should say I love him. I do. He’s a dear and wonderful man. And because he’s like that I’ve let him into my life. We aren’t lovers, if you know what that means.”
She looked at me and she knew I didn’t know, except perhaps by dim instinct.
“Never mind. We travel together to the towns where we have shows. He watches me. Did you know that he’s a wonderful critic?”
I said, “He reads a lot of Shakespeare.”
“And,” said Venetia, “he tells me that you’re better on Shakespeare than he is. Instinctively, he says.”
“That can’t be the case,” I said.
“He brings you into every conversation.”
“You told me that,” I said, and shook my head. I didn’t think that my father talked about me to anybody, but when she told me I believed her.
Venetia said, “It’s ‘Ben this’ and ‘Ben that’—and it’s not all easy either.”
I must have looked alarmed because she leaned forward and stroked my face.
“No, no, I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to upset you. What I wanted to say is this—he talks about the anguish of loving you. He says there’s no pain like the pain of a father for a son.”
On the wall hung a painting of an old stone bridge, with a high curved arch and black water tumbling beneath. And now I must have twitched, because she took my hands to her lips and kissed my knuckles.
“I know what you looked like as a baby. I know that you didn’t speak your first words until you were almost two, and that you then spoke perfectly. I know that all who meet you consider you strong and generous and funny. In return, I tell him about the loves I know—Shakespeare’s women, Lady Margaret and Cordelia and Ophelia and Juliet. When it ends, he kisses me on the cheek. That’s all.”
In the silence that followed, both of us heard a sound. I listened. From somewhere outside the room a little creature was sawing—a steady, rasping sound, quite faint but distinct in the still air of the day.
Venetia whispered, “Audrey’s room is across the way.”
Mrs. Haas had her shoes off.
We stood up. Venetia told me that my father would soon return, that they had an “appointment”—to fill a number of hours free before she had to travel to that night’s show. I made no comment; my mind had ceased working.
She said, “Come back tomorrow. At two o’clock.”
I met my father on the staircase. He didn’t look alarmed or surprised, but he did look different. Had he changed? Oscar Wilde greeted somebody one day: “Oh, there you are—I didn’t recognize you because I’ve changed so much.” Had I changed so much? No. That’s fanciful, isn’t it? Or—is it? He definitely looked different.
I said, “I’ve had a long talk with Venetia.”
Maybe a shiftiness came into his eyes. Maybe he looked uncomfortable—but if he did, it was fleeting and minuscule.
“The-the-the new routine for Blarney is great,” he said.
“Do you know about Mother?”
Now little shadows did gather in his eyes.
“She didn’t write to me or anything.”
James Clare once told me that I have what he called a “burly” mind, meaning that I too often attack problems with mental force, hammer rather than scalpel.
“Where would she write to you?”
“Is she all right?”
“Except for the mortgage.”
I heard my harshness and was dismayed by it. What had happened to me? My father heard it too.
“That’s no way to talk about an act of decency.”
“How do you make that out?”
He said, “Mr. Kelly has his family’s interest at heart. In this case his granddaughter’s.”
“And the guns?”
I expect that you’ve never had the experience of looking into the eyes of an adult male to whom you have looked up all your life, whose welfare has been of the dearest concern to you, whose well-being you have plotted inside yourself insofar as you could, and suddenly seen something different there, a complete lack of competence, a crude ignorance.
What a chastening moment. Except—be careful here: This is all hindsight. I thought none of those things at that time. I do know this, however; I had enough presence of mind to be shocked at myself when I found my hands curling into tight fists ready to punch my father hard in each eye. Even more
shocking—I knew it had little, or even nothing, to do with what he had put Mother and me through. That also was what James Clare meant by a “burly” mind.
If I’d known where to find him I’d have gone looking for James Clare. I needed to steady myself; such little self-knowledge as I had told me that much. My father continued upstairs and I heard him knock, then enter the room where I had been sitting with Venetia and close the door behind him. He’ll now be sitting on a couch still warm from me. The thought gave me a shiver.
I was ravenously hungry. My food savior appeared—Mrs. Haas, and I thought, She’s going to make me one of those great sandwiches. But she didn’t; instead, with a worried face, she made a shooing gesture, flicking the back of her hand at me, and mouthing the word “Go.”
How strange can all this get? I thought. I wish I’d had a voice inside me saying, You ain’t seen nothin’ yet.
No James Clare, no Miss Fay, no food, no nothing, no nobody. I didn’t want to eat in the town—that is, if I could find somewhere to eat, which didn’t seem likely. Not thinking where I walked, I found myself beside the car, climbed in, and drove away.
I had no place to go. My father didn’t want me near him. Venetia did seem to want me near her—but not yet. Home offered no option; I had left there. The show had gone to Adare, one of the prettiest villages in Ireland. No harm in going there. And anyway my father had alerted me to a new routine by Blarney.
Minutes later, on the outskirts of Charleville, I passed a sports field; above the walls I could see the tall uprights of the goals. I also saw a number of bicycles leaning there, perhaps twenty in all.
A game of football was beginning, a pickup game, no formality, no jerseys or other kit, just a bunch of fellows and a leather football in the middle of the day.
Important Digression: Our “football” in Ireland refers to Gaelic football, a game that looks a little like soccer, and a little like rugby, and nothing like either. It is played with a round ball and fifteen men on a team, and a player is allowed to handle the ball but not throw it; bounce it, but not too often; run with it, flipping the ball from hand to toe (considered an exercise in great skill); field it—the higher the better; and kick it as far and as accurately as possible. End of Important Digression.
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