Venetia Kelly's Traveling Show: A Novel of Ireland

by Frank Delaney

  “When is he coming home?”

  “One thing at a time.”

  She caught my sleeve, a new habit. “How is he?”

  “The best thing to do, Mother, is for us to sit down and I’ll tell you everything.”

  Her eyes filled with tears. “Oh, thank God. Thank God.”

  She walked with me into the house; I could see Large Lily peering at us through the window.

  Mother said, “We’ll go upstairs,” meaning a private talk sitting on the couch in my parents’ bedroom.

  “Now. Tell me everything.” She sat no more than two feet from me; her fingernails went to her mouth to be chewed.

  “Well—”

  Mother interrupted. “Did he ask for me?”

  “I said that you were fine, but you miss him; he asked twice.”

  “That I’m fine. But I miss him.” She often did this, repeated somebody’s words so that she could think aloud. “I’m not that fine, but I do miss him, so that bit is true. When is he coming home—did you ask him?”

  “I’m working on a plan,” I said. “It’s based on what I saw.” I lied—or did I? Sometimes we know what we’re going to do before we know it.

  “Oh!” She clapped her hands. “That means he’ll come home. Oh, good man, Ben. I knew I could depend on you. What did he say about the money, did you mention the money?”

  I now had two dilemmas in one moment. How could I tell her that he seemed to have no intention of coming home? And that I’d had no discussion that could solve the money problem?

  Luck helped me. Large Lily called up the stairs to say that we had a visitor.

  “The professor, ma’am.”

  Mother flung a casual preen at the mirror, and ran down.

  As she left, I said, “Do I have to meet him?”

  She didn’t answer, so I wandered along the landing to my own room and sat there on the window seat looking out. From the voices I knew that the professor had arrived alone; had Miss Fay been with him I would certainly have gone down to meet her.

  The conversation lasted so long that I almost fell asleep. When eventually I heard the professor huff and puff his way out of the front door, I came downstairs. Mother greeted me.

  “I have good news,” she said. “We have somebody who wants to stay in the cottage for a couple of months and he’s going to pay me in advance today. We’ll be meeting him later.”

  Distracted, she dropped for the moment any further inquiries about my father, and I had a peaceful few hours.

  At three o’clock Mother called me, told me to put on my coat and come with her. We walked in lemon sunshine down to the river and along to the cottage. A pony trap stood there, and some hubbub seemed under way. As we approached, a man in rough clothes came out, fetched a large valise, and hauled it into the cottage. He came out again and took another trunk.

  “It looks as though our tenant means to stay for a while,” muttered Mother; she seemed excited and I felt grateful.

  The man in the rough clothes came out once more, walking half backward, and thanking an unseen person within. He clambered into the pony trap, hupped the horse, and clattered away. Mother knocked on the door and called out a demure “Hello?”

  A great voice hollered back: “Come in, come in.”

  I stayed behind, watching some waterfowl scurrying on the river and wondering why they seemed never to feel the cold, and speculating whether, if the river were ever to freeze, their legs would get caught in the ice.

  Voices came from the cottage—the large booming tone, now in conversation but scarcely less powerful, and then, to my delight, the sound of Mother laughing, something I hadn’t heard in the previous two weeks. Next, she appeared in the doorway and said over her shoulder to the—as yet unseen—gentleman inside, “And my son is here with me. Ben?”

  I remember him most by my first impression—the eyebrows. We have an insect we call a “Hairy Molly,” a kind of centipede; farmers anticipate the winter’s chills by the color of the fur. These eyebrows looked just like that—thick, waggling stripes of fur, brown principally, but with a bizarre tinge of a tan color here and there. The face had cheeks that reminded me of a pippin apple—red-veined and crackled, and then came the waistcoat, the yellow check vest, half-gambler, half-frog. And that was my first encounter with Thomas Aquinas Kelly, better known as King.

  Neither Mother nor I guessed the connection, nor would we know for some time. All we understood at first was that we had met a man by name Thomas A. Kelly; “a most distinguished businessman,” Professor Fay had said to Mother, “who made all his money in the States and is back home in the land he loves.” Professor Fay could and should have said “rogue” and “crook” and “Fascist,” but he didn’t.

  Instead we saw this flashy man with heavy charm. Ponderous as a bull, he breathed as if he had asthma. He smiled a vast mouthful of teeth, he shook my hand like a returned emigrant—and we never heard the pillars of the temple cracking.

  Had my father been there, he’d have said as he did about all dodgy characters: “Put a coat over that fellow’s head.”

  But my father wasn’t there and I was the one who—in an entirely different context—recognized this Mr. Kelly; I was the one who got excited, and whispered, “Mother!” I’d heard the name and seen the photographs; he was running for the government in North Cork. Now Professor Fay appeared, peering over those heavy black spectacles.

  “He needs a place away from the hurly-burly,” Professor Fay said.

  We should have been more suspicious; King Kelly bent over Mother’s hand and kissed it. Then he stood in the doorway of the cottage with Professor Fay and made admiring comments.

  “This is the best thatched house I’ve seen in a long while,” he said.

  Mother said to him, “And Professor Fay tells me you’re from not far away.”

  “The broad fields of North Cork,” he said. “But the wider world sent for me when I was young.”

  Other than the help around the farm, Mother had avoided meeting anybody since my father’s departure. She wore a look of shame most of the time, and it pierced my heart when I saw her. And, in some respects, that hurting embarrassment was what pushed me as far as I eventually went.

  That morning I could see how she struggled; I could see how she battled to keep the humiliation from her face.

  “Terms?” asked King Kelly.

  “Pardon me?” asked Mother, in her politest voice.

  “Rent?”

  Professor Fay said, “I’ve taken the liberty of telling Mr. Kelly the rent we pay. Is it acceptable if he pays the same amount? For every month, of course, and every portion of every month that he’s here in the cottage, not just a few months of the year. And he’ll pay in advance.”

  “What about you and Miss Fay?” said Mother.

  “I travel a great deal,” said Mr. Kelly. “And if I’m lucky I’ll be spending much of my time in Dublin. This will be a quiet base for me.”

  “We’re very fond of Miss Fay,” said Mother, piping like a bird.

  King Kelly rapped a wall. “Solid, these old walls. We know things, we Irish, don’t we, Cyril?”

  “Vernacular building, vernacular building,” said Professor Fay, once more saying the same thing twice.

  “We’ll knock twenty percent off the rent, won’t we?” said King Kelly to nobody.

  I should have guessed then that he knew all about us and was taking advantage.

  She agreed, weak as water. Then Mother insisted that she go off and organize a drink.

  “Now, how old are you?” King Kelly asked me.

  “Ben’s eighteen,” said Professor Fay who, as his sister said once, answered for everybody and to nobody.

  “Perfect age,” said Mr. Kelly, and smiled at Professor Fay.

  Mother returned with the tray. I can cut this part short; the conversation offered nothing strange or startling, other than a check handed by Mr. Kelly to Mother, who blushed like a bride.

  “Isn’t he loud?” s
he said to me later.

  As we left, with many farewells and mutual jabberings, King Kelly said to me, “Come down tomorrow morning for a cup of tea.”

  Mother whispered, “Say yes.”

  “Yes,” I said.

  Would I have done anyway? I might have, because I was by now intrigued as to why he seemed familiar to me, why something about him rapped at my mind, but I couldn’t get the door open to let it in. Not yet did I place him as the man I’d seen laughing so hard at the show one night. Just as well. If I’d put that connection together earlier, I might have refused to go to see him; I might have avoided him altogether. And then I’d never have acquired the cruel knowledge that made the final difference.

  When we’d walked out of sight on our way back to the farm, Mother took my arm.

  “We’ll go home and sit down,” she said. “I’m feathered out,” her term for emotionally fraught.

  She looked tired beyond words. In two weeks several shades of gray had spread across her face. The furrows on her forehead had grown deeper and new lines had opened. Her hair no longer received the attention she’d always given it, and she was chewing her fingernails to the skin.

  “Tell me about your father. Tell me everything.”

  I said, “We talked for ages.”

  “About coming home?”

  “He’s looking well, Mother.”

  “What about his clothes?”

  “We met at a house in Charleville. He was indoors all the time, and he was eating well.”

  I realized that since the moment of his departure we had discussed him as though he had gone off to war or had been sequestered in a clinic.

  We reached the house and she headed for her most comfortable chair, by the fire in the parlor.

  “Did he give you any money?”

  As I answered her, she began to sit back; she closed her eyes. I thought that she looked defeated in every way; her collapse down to this level seemed to have come very fast.

  Trying not to seem evasive, but not answering her questions too closely, I think I rendered as good an account of our Charleville meeting as I could manage. Mother never said a word. Maybe I was boring, maybe my voice droned, because quite soon I saw that she fell asleep. I never mentioned the Kelly actresses.

  For some time I sat there, in case her sleep proved no more than a brief nodding-off. But she went deeper into it, so I fetched a rug from the back of the sofa, draped it carefully over her, added some wood to the fire, and tiptoed from the room. I looked in every fifteen minutes or so; four hours later, five hours and then six, she was still in a deep sleep.

  Large Lily and I took it in turns to watch for Mother awakening.

  “She didn’t sleep any night, no,” said Large Lily. “Not an eye shut. So we’ll let her sleep on—she’ll wake up out of her own accord. And when she does won’t she be fine?”

  My father always said that Large Lily, every time she opened her mouth, spoke for two people—but he could never make out who the other person was.

  I sat up until midnight, then I piled the fire with logs, arranged the fire screen carefully, and went to bed. When I rose at eight o’clock, Mother was still asleep, and by the time she finally awoke, she had slept twelve hours in that chair.

  Even now, I think constantly of Mother as she was during all that time. This great blow fell upon her in the winter, bleak weather for a bleak time in her life. A hardy woman always, and often seen on the chilliest mornings fetching the cows from the lower fields with neither a coat nor a scarf, she now wrapped herself up as never before. As tall as my father, she’d always “borrowed” his shirts, as she well could; they shared the same major dimensions; she was one of the tallest women in the parish. Now she wore his coats and jackets in his absence.

  If I look back through the years, I can see her now, walking up the lane to the house in the late afternoon. She’s been out somewhere, probably in the woods. All through those gray days, when the fog seems never to quit the farm, she’s blanketed by her own mists too. She’s talking to herself even more than usual. She’s wrapped in one of my father’s old greatcoats and when I see how her shoulders sag I can’t tell whether it’s the weight of the coat or the weight of the grief.

  No, I’m sure it was the grief. She changed her habits; she went to Mass on Sundays in different churches, farther and farther away. And she stopped doing her shopping in the village, and had Billy Moloney (when I was absent) drive her in the pony trap to places where she had a better chance of not being asked questions—no matter how innocent—about the boss.

  On many days of that February, I came across her when I least expected to—sitting on a bench inside the kitchen garden, looking bleakly at the empty and cold ground. I also found her in the woods, on the walk up toward Mr. Treacy’s house, leaning against a tree that she loved, her shoulders squared back against the trunk. Once I found her with her face pressed to the bark, and it left a green mark on her cheek.

  One day, when I came back to the house to get fresh clothes, I saw that she was wearing one of my father’s hats. I’d never seen her do that before; Mother, for all her insistence on practicality, had a wide feminine streak and would never dream of allowing herself to meet people without what she called “titivating” herself.

  My father’s hat made her look like one of the squaws whose photographs I saw in National Geographic, from a North American tribe such as the Creek or the Apache; she lacked only the feather.

  She must have known how little the hat became her—a battered old brown trilby, with a line of black sweat marks near the hatband. Indeed I’d often heard her chastise my father for wearing it, and he’d reply that he was so fond of it he was now going to wear it in bed.

  I now see the hat for what it was—my quite austere Mother, wearing her grief as publicly as she could, and at the same time displaying her wish to remain as close as possible to her missing husband. The weather stayed dank and unremitting; we matched its gray mood. I assumed that she was sad—but I so often found her so fierce that it was difficult to imagine she could get back down to sadness within a short time, so high was the peak of her anger. Ireland being Ireland, balmy days began to replace the fog, and Mother went with the weather’s mood. She eased up; she calmed down. The new rent income must have helped. She began to chat about her farm life and make plans, although I did once or twice find her in tears, again in remote places away from view.

  But when she accepted the cottage’s new tenant, Mother didn’t know either the bargain or the devil with whom she’d struck it. At first sight you may think that Professor Fay and King Kelly sought to exploit a vulnerable woman. You’d be right, and you’d think, “That was bad,” because she gave King Kelly the cottage at a bargain rent. I wouldn’t have given a virus to that crook.

  I need to think it all out before I can write it down for you. Also, my own part in it wasn’t too edifying—I can best describe myself as innocent to begin with, and then savage, and I’ll divulge that too; just give me a little time. Therefore, and while I remember it, here comes an Unimportant Digression, a brief dissertation on the word blarney.

  Dictionaries always call it “lying,” and “shameless flattery.” Oh, but it is much wider than that in its reach and warm embrace. First, there is an actual place, Blarney—I’ve been there many times—a small and sweet village not far from the city of Cork. They’ll tell you there that halfway up the tower of the old castle there’s a memorial triangle of cut stone inserted in a wall, with, if the light is good, an inscription visible. The words are CORMAC MACCARTHY—FORTIS ME FIERI FECIT. AD 1446. This Latin idiom is a bit loopy, as though composed by a local poet or priest who wasn’t quite up to the job, but my translation works fine: “Cormac MacCarthy built me for strength”—meaning (I think) that Cormac MacCarthy set up this castle to be a fortress.

  So far as I’ve been able to trace, we’re not descended from this branch of the MacCarthys. By the way, according to some experts, the name MacCarthy means “beloved�
�—an irony on which I’ve been impaled for a long time now.

  The stone with the Latin inscription isn’t the one kissed by tourists seeking the gift of the gab, the Stone of Eloquence, as it used to be called. The locals chose another slab in the wall, one that’s just accessible enough; they figured that if they hung the seekers of eloquence (or shameless flattery) upside down and held them by the ankles, they’d remember kissing the Blarney Stone. I like the available metaphor—eloquence turns everything on its head.

  As to the original connection between blarney and eloquence, here are some versions, beginning with the oldest, which James Clare gave me.

  Long, long ago, Blarney was a wild place, and it had a magical grove, atmospheric in mood, with haunting light, a place where Druids met at dawn on Midsummer Day. When the sun had cleared the horizon, it shone a finger of light into the heart of this grove. The ray came to rest on the ground in a golden triangle, from which a stone rose out of the earth, the same shape and color as the golden sunbeam.

  Each Druid who stepped forward and kissed this stone found his eloquence increased. When the sunbeam retreated, the gold triangle of stone sank down into the earth again, and the Druids went off about their business, which was mostly talking.

  One of the Druids was a MacCarthy, and one year he lied to the other Druids—he told them the solstice was a few days later that year. On the true morning, he stood there alone and when the golden triangle rose from the earth, he reached down, snatched it from the ground, and ran away home with it and became the chieftain of the tribe. That’s the stone on the wall of the castle, and that’s why everybody who kissed it grew eloquent. All this, you understand, is the gospel truth.

  A later tale says that more recently a witch sauntered out of the mists one day and handed MacCarthy More, the Big MacCarthy, a heavy triangular stone.

  “This,” she said, “will be the cornerstone of your family.” (They also say that she herself was a MacCarthy.)

  They lived in wooden castles then, but obviously had the foresight to say, “Listen, boys, a day will come when we’ll build stone houses, so let’s hang on to this rock and use it later as a cornerstone.”