Here’s another—in the circumstances, very significant—fact about my family. My father, in his mid-teens, made a journey to visit an uncle in the west of Ireland, and found himself being invited with said uncle to Coole Park, the home of Ireland’s most famous widow, Lady Augusta Gregory.
Whenever my father spoke of education he expressed his disappointment at how he had been denied. “A lost opportunity,” he’d say, “is like uneaten fruit. It rots.” I never quite got what he meant; I do now. But in Coole Park, under the famous copper beech tree, he had sat on the grass, at a picnic, and heard Lady Gregory, this cultural powerhouse, in her widow’s weeds, discussing the setting-up of a national Irish theater. Her partner, not present, would be her “dear friend” the poet Mr. Yeats. Yeats had said to her, “As with the voice the spirit,” suggesting that “only an Irish actor can convey the Irish spirit, since words are the clothing of the soul.”
My father came away from that meeting quivering with thrills. He told me of it over and over again. They’d talked all day about acting. Someone did an illustration, a character sketch from Shakespeare—the moment when King Richard III wakes from his dream and faces his conscience: “The lights burn blue. It was now dead midnight.”
“You-you-you could see it,” said my father. “You could see the anguish in this actor’s face. He was the murdering king, he-he-he was shifty and regretful and everything.”
On the way home from Coole Park, his heart had “caught fire,” he said, at the notion of “being” another person as an actor must be, of “writing” with his own face and voice and body and actions the story of a completely other person.
My father told me that ever after that picnic, when he was out in the yard, or the fields, climbing the stairs to bed at night, aching in every bone after hours of labor, or bounding down the stairs next morning, the thought never left him—and he said that he studied people thereafter as though he were compiling an album. “All-all-all their shapes. And-and-and their actions and voices.”
Indeed he became and remained a good mimic; for a man with a mild stammer, he was amazing with nuance and shade.
“I missed my vocation,” he once said to me. “I should have been an actor.”
Which was, after all, the life of Sarah Kelly. She took role after role by storm, and all the early playwrights of that period, including Mr. Yeats himself, insisted that she appear in their works.
Sarah sailed into Dublin society as a lovely ship glides into home port. Thereafter—and for the rest of her days—she lived in some style. In the beginning, she was aided by an aunt, King Kelly’s sister, Gretta. Though her married name was Monahan, Gretta was never called anything but “Miss Kelly.” Mr. Monahan had quit the scene after two years of marriage, departing with some suddenness; he crashed headfirst from his horse into a stone wall during a foxhunt.
His widow said, “He was on a big gray horse and three quarters of a bottle of port.”
In this merry widow’s household now dwelt this glamorous single mother from New York, already a bright light on Broadway, a new star in the motion pictures, and about to become one of the great figures of the Abbey Theatre—and her daughter, Venetia, a winsome and lively child. Plus Mrs. Haas.
For Aunt Kelly, Heaven had come to earth. She set up a social round for her beautiful niece. Every Sunday she held what she called her “Dublin lunch,” a salon, in effect, and she invited the great and famous—“the cream of the city,” she said, “rich and thick.”
Now the cast is more or less assembled—the main characters in this, my story. My life was irretrievably and fundamentally altered and shaped by them: by my dear father, an ordinary Irish farmer who worked harder than any man he hired; by Mother, a farmer’s wife, with recipes, account books, cows to be milked, chickens to be fed; by King Kelly, a bruiser dripping with charms; by his daughter, Sarah Kelly, and above all by her daughter, Venetia, whose life, whatever it was, has defined mine.
Other characters will come, go, or stay, as players must do: Mrs. Haas; Billy Flock and his wife, Large Lily, our housekeeper; and hosts of others—acrobats, egotists, storytellers, politicians, actors.
And Blarney, the ventriloquist’s doll, who mesmerized an entire country; Professor Fay, who believed that he knew everything; and his sister, the adorable Dora. Through her, one other—and major—character walked onstage.
I had often heard her mention “a dear friend who knows everything in the world.” She kept saying that I must meet him one day. And I did meet him, as you soon will too. James Clare was his name, and he did know everything in the world. He wore black; he had a placid face with a nose like an owl’s; he taught me about time and self-respect, and the connection between the two.
Shall I count myself a player too? I must. The fact that I’m the storyteller here, that I’m the narrator, the observer of these people, should neither absolve nor exclude me. Whether I had an effect on them even remotely proportional to the way they influenced me—how can I tell? Can you see yourself accurately? Even when we look in the mirror, isn’t everything reversed?
Forgive me if I’ve taken too long to introduce them to you. I promise that it will all prove relevant. As people are, so shall they be, except for the fact that those few of us who were changed—well, we were truly changed.
And so we come to what Mother ever afterward referred to, in a whisper, as the “Catastrophe.” I should have been ready for it. Hindsight, I know, but I now understand that a mood of apprehension had fallen over me like an invisible net. As it turned out, I had good cause.
One Sunday in January 1932, we had a guest for lunch—“Missy Casey” she called herself, Julia Casey, from two farms away. Imagine a duck in a fitted tweed coat and laced brown shoes; that’s what she looked like.
Missy Casey was a neighbor who also insisted that she was “an intimate friend.” She demanded more attention than triplets, or so Mother said. Everything she did drew notice to herself; for instance, she sent Dinny, her frequently mad laborer, over that Sunday morning at seven o’clock to say that Missy Casey would be fifteen minutes late—for lunch six hours later. She hadn’t been to our house for two or three years, probably because she was so irritating.
When she arrived, she sat on the bench in the porch to get her breath back—though we saw no sign of panting. After all she’d arrived in a trap driven to our very door by Dinny the Madman. She fluttered her eyelashes—I mean a true flipping and fluttering—when my father appeared, and after several minutes in which Mother, my father, and I stood in a semicircle around her, she declared herself ready for lunch.
Which began badly. Missy Casey looked across the table at me as though she had never seen me before.
“Louise,” she said, her face reddening, “where have you been hiding him? Ben, stand up, let me look at you. My heaven”—as I stood—“you’re six feet three. Louise, lock him up.”
My father, sensing my loathing of such attention, said, “We-we-we feed him oats. He has his own nose bag.”
Missy Casey stared and stared at me, then looked down at her plate, shaking her head. “I wish I were twenty again,” she said.
Mother looked at my father and shook her head, a warning to say nothing. We all began to eat. Then came the next grenade: Missy Casey began a conversation about Saint Valentine.
“I’m so looking forward to his feast day,” she said. “It falls on a Sunday this year. D’you think Father Hogan will say anything about it at Mass? Wouldn’t you think he’d want to preach on someone as important as Saint Valentine?”
“Important?” said my father. “How so?”
This old trout had another technique for retaining attention. After making some opening statement, she’d take a mouthful of food, and then lay three demure fingers to her closed lips. We, of course, had to wait until she’d finished chewing, and I’ve seen cows quicker with cud; even mild Mother said Missy Casey was “an arch-ruminant.”
“Harry MacCarthy, you’re just like Father Hogan,” sai
d Missy Casey, after a swig of milk from her glass, which frosted her mustache. “Why did Father Hogan say nothing about Saint Valentine? I’ll tell you. He’s afraid of love. Like all men. He’s—simply—afraid—of love.” She looked at my mother. “Isn’t that true, Louise? Men are afraid of love, aren’t they?”
Mother said, without thinking, “That’s true indeed.”
I knew that Mother didn’t mean what she said. She was agreeing with this irritating dame for the sake of moving on to the next topic. But my father coughed in that hard way he had when he was irked. He took a drink of water and coughed again, and I saw him decide to say nothing.
“Maybe I’m being extreme,” said Missy Casey. “Maybe I am. Because—” And she took another mouthful of food. Again we waited. When she unfastened the clasp of her fingers from her lips she said, “Now where have I put my bag?”
All three of us, Mother, my father, and I, we rose from the table and began to look for the bag; Mother found it in the porch, where Missy Casey had recovered her breath.
“Because,” she continued, “I received this last year. In the post. Anonymously. I carry it around with me.”
This spinster, older than a stone, dry as a shrub, nostrils like gun barrels, drew out a large pink envelope and flourished it.
“See? See?”
Mother reached for it, took out the card within, and read the words aloud, “Be. My. Valentine.”
My father had said nothing since the remark about men and love. He reached for the card and the envelope. Missy Casey watched his scrutinies.
“Harry, don’t tell me,” she said, “you recognize the handwriting?”
“Can-can-can you do copperplate too?” he asked.
Mother saw the knife coming out of the sheath. She said, with her voice in a hurry, “D’you know, I never heard of Valentine cards down here in the country. We’re getting very modern altogether.”
My father handed the card and the envelope back to Missy Casey.
“Well, that’s-that’s-that’s a love you can be sure of,” he said. I knew he was angry. “You can tell a lot from handwriting.”
“Don’t tell me it’s yours?” she said like a girl.
He let a silence rise. Then he said, “I-I-I think it’s yours.”
Such an outburst as we then had.
“Ohhh!” Missy Casey grasped the edge of the table, dragging the cloth. “Ohhh!” she said again, a tortured wail.
My father looked at me and winked.
Bang! Bang! Bang! Missy Casey thumped the table, and crockery hopped, and cutlery rattled.
“That’s a terrible thing to say. That I’d send a Valentine card to myself. Ohhh!”
She rose from her chair and staggered from the table, reaching for the wall. Mother raised fierce eyebrows at my father, who nodded as though to say, “She did, she did.” He looked at me and winked again.
Mother followed Missy Casey, and that was the last we saw of her. Next we heard the pony trap rattle away, with Dinny the Madman screaming prayers at the horse.
When Mother came back in, she said to my father, “That was uncalled for.”
“She-she-she asked for it.”
“How so?”
“That remark about men—she’s always doing that. And anyway she did send the card to herself.”
Mother said, “And where’s the harm if she did?”
My father shook his head impatiently and I got Missy Casey’s untouched and spurned dessert.
But a chill had fallen between my parents, a rare occurrence in our house. Its very unusualness was the kind of thing I should more closely have observed.
After lunch, to escape the house’s mood, I went outdoors. Fog had come in. From the yard I went on a long looping walk that I’d worked out since the first days I was allowed to roam the fields alone. I was six years old then, and imagine what the woods looked like. Thrilling—a mysterious forest, especially in fog, when all branches took on new shapes. I saw caves that didn’t exist, and the ghosts of animals long extinct—a fog in the woodlands is a work of ever-changing magic. Even now, though I was a dozen years older, and they seemed less populated by the supernatural, the woods served me well.
The well stands away from the woods, its mound like a green breast out in the fields. As you approach you hear the water burble faintly against the pleasant and orderly walls. Those stones have lined the well for centuries. This is the best, the freshest drink that you can have.
When I emerged from the trees, I saw an old woman by the well; she stood still, and she was looking toward me. Nothing unusual in that; the local people, from the cottages and from one or two of the smaller farms, drew buckets from here. Miss Fay often came with me as I fetched a pail of water for them; going back to the cottage she always made the same joke about how we were Jack and Jill.
Still, I thought that I knew everybody who used this well, and I’d never seen this tall crone. Nor the garment she wore—except in paintings; she had an ankle-length black Kinsale cloak. As I drew closer I could see that it was lined with bright, shining green fabric, probably silk. The Kinsale cloak billows out into the world; it’s from another century; it has ruffles. You don’t see it much in the countryside, as it’s mainly worn by rich city women on classy occasions.
To add to the mystery, this creature also carried something I’d never seen except in storybooks—a wooden pail. All our buckets were enamel or galvanized metal.
I stopped and, unusually for me, I didn’t speak a greeting. The woman, much older than Mother or Missy Casey, beckoned me forward. She had an urgent air of command. I walked forward, picking my steps.
She waited, still beckoning. Beside the dark pool of the well the fog lay thickest, a gray blanket, swirling and dense. On and on she beckoned me until I stood no more than some feet from her. Now I could see that the cloak obscured the lower half of her face.
She felt strange in the way only a total stranger can. I knew I’d never seen her before—and I had been a boy who rode his bicycle like a hero all around these roads. She had a gray face, and her cloak’s hood also covered her head so that I couldn’t say what color hair she had—or indeed if she had any. Her high cheekbones—from what I could glimpse of them—suggested that once upon a time she might have been a beauty. Now she seemed tired, maybe exhausted.
I could have reached out and touched her face, as she could mine. Neither of us moved; I, frightened, held my hands by my sides. I felt the damp fog on my face, saw my breath on the air. She held the wooden pail in her hand. Her eyes searched me, every square inch, head to foot.
“Look at you,” she said.
A statement, one with no emotion in it, no kindness, no threat, no criticism, no praise. I kept my eyes down. Her creaking, slightly uncouth tones gave no identification. An Irish voice? Perhaps, but I couldn’t say whence.
“Look at you,” she said again.
Somewhere in the woods behind me a bird swore, harsh and high. The fog thickened.
“I’ve something to say to you, young lad,” she announced. “And you’ll remember it many times.”
Fear is what I remember. Of what, I didn’t know. Fear of having no control? Or fear that a stranger could presume to have an influence upon me, make an observation of me? As she now did, and this is what she said.
“You’re going to be given a shock, young lad.”
I found my voice. “Where are you from?”
She eyed me. “You’re thinking, ‘Is she real, or a witch or something?’ Aren’t you? And you’re thinking, ‘She looks like a witch, don’t she?’ That’s what you’re thinking.”
As indeed I was—those exact thoughts.
“I can tell a lot about you,” she said. “Just from looking at you, just from the light you give off. We all give off a light, and you’re thinking now, ‘If that’s the case, her light is gray.’ Isn’t that what you just thought?”
Again—exactly.
She said, “Now you know you can trust what I’m telling yo
u. And I’ve one piece of advice that you’ll have to remember. You won’t know the truth about what came from the sea for many, many years, but keep away from it. Good-bye now.”
She turned her back, stooped to half-fill her wooden pail, and walked away into the fog. I thought, She looks like something out of my book of Grimm’s Fairy Tales. And then she called out over her shoulder, “Oh, I’m real enough, young lad.”
The truth about what came from the sea? But what had come from the sea?
After a few minutes I followed the path that she’d taken, which leads to the road. Although she was a good deal older than me and carrying a pail of water, and I was young and a quick walker, I never saw her, never caught up with her.
You should find our well one day, you should go there, try to make it in winter, and stand there and try to imagine how eerie it felt. Had I been old I might have died of fright.
That path leads to the Fourpenny Road, but not a sign of her did I see there. I halted in the gateway of Mr. Thompson’s house and looked up the driveway. On slightly higher ground now, the fog had thinned, and I could see right up to the front door—but not a person walked or stood anywhere. Except myself, puzzled and afraid in the fog and knowing somehow that I must tell nobody.
What was the truth of that encounter? Did I dream it? Or did I actually meet the old hag? Did I invent the story, my own mythology to prepare me for what was about to happen? Or to justify it?
I went home. In from the fog. I made myself some ham sandwiches. Mother appeared and had a cup of tea, and then Father arrived. We all sat at the kitchen table; she didn’t look at him. Missy Casey wasn’t mentioned—but she might have been in the room. I said nothing about the woman at the well.
Venetia Kelly's Traveling Show: A Novel of Ireland Page 7