Venetia Kelly's Traveling Show: A Novel of Ireland

by Frank Delaney

  The muzzle touched my eyeball—I swear that when I blinked, my eyelashes brushed the metal. Mrs. Haas’s scream rose higher and higher. I had the thought: Has she trained as a singer? She didn’t take a breath, and if you can imagine something between the howl of an aged wolf and the dragging of metal along a road, you’ll get close.

  The scream distracted everybody standing in the doorway, and then I heard the footsteps on the stairs. The gunman’s finger tightened on the trigger. I saw it and felt it, and the gun moved a fraction, touching my eye again—I pulled back my head and the muzzle followed me. The scream continued—it rose like a shriek in a nightmare of terrifying fogs and shapeless beasts.

  Somebody said, “Stop, stop.” Sarah’s calm voice, it transpired—and then Venetia’s, asking, “What is it?”

  She told me afterward that she’d heard her grandfather’s voice, then heard Mrs. Haas screaming, and thought me dead. As Venetia reached the bottom step of the staircase, Sarah moved to block her. But Venetia knew that her grandfather could be there—as she later said—“for no good reason.”

  By now the noise had grown huge, because a loud argument broke out between Sarah and Venetia. Sarah wanted to keep Venetia out of the kitchen, and Venetia had guessed that something wrong had come my way. And the man with the gun moved the black hole of the muzzle to my left temple, and King Kelly told me, “Stand up, boy.”

  When you look back on extreme circumstances in which you may ever have found yourself, try to remember what you did with your body. It’s illuminating and very instructive. That day, I stayed very still. The time was by now close to one o’clock in the afternoon and I held myself like a creature in a web. In fact, I rose to a half-crouch before I stood to my full height.

  Did I do this because I knew that the man with the gun was very much shorter than me, and that he might have to make a sudden—and therefore perhaps dangerous—movement to compensate? Who can say? I can’t; but nothing would surprise me.

  Now freeze this tableau for a moment: Stop all the movement. We have Mrs. Haas with her mouth open wide, and I can tell you that her teeth were pointed like a saw all the way around, the Sierra Haas. I’m standing nine tenths upright like a tall lobster, my hands on the edge of the table. The man with the dense dark hair, so oiled that I can see a yellow tidemark on his forehead, is holding a gun to his shoulder and sighting along the barrel as though he were lining up a target, which in fact he was.

  I see King Kelly: Again a contemptible brown suit, and a check waistcoat, and the nest of hair in his nose and ears—his mouth is open too, in mid-bark of an order. Behind him I see the back of Sarah’s head turned to her daughter—Sarah is wearing some peach-colored garment that falls in large soft rolls around her neck.

  And there is Venetia, suspended in mid-struggle to get into the kitchen; her hair is wet; she has a towel over her shoulder, she is now wearing the long white nightdress that she wore briefly last night.

  Action again—Venetia breaks through and the noise of her movement alerts the very jumpy man with the gun.

  Whatever you’ve read, whatever you’ve seen in films, nothing is ever what you expect when you’re faced with something like this. The hero is not free at a swift leap, nor is the villain vanquished. Nobody overpowers anybody else. That is how tragedy is born—expecting heroism where none is possible.

  Somehow I knew all this, and yet I was driven by my sense of responsibility, by my private, intimate connection, to protect this woman. So, I was the one who moved.

  Mrs. Haas is still screaming the longest screams that I or anybody else have ever heard—I bet she auditioned for Lucia di Lammermoor. The man with the gun jerks up the muzzle ever so slightly—a tiny movement with the menace of a shark.

  King Kelly says, “Make him march. Never to come back.”

  Sarah is saying, “Venetia!”—who is saying, “Let me in.”

  And I? I say nothing. Instead I step back from the gun. One step—the muzzle is now a foot away. A second step—another foot. The third step takes me a yard away, and I can see the puzzlement in the man’s eyes, dark eyes, dark as a Latin. Is he Irish? He could be from Galway, a descendant of the Spanish Armada.

  One more step takes me much farther away in the sense that I have now stepped around the corner of the table—and my plate of lovely food lies there beneath my eye. If this is to be mended it’s not going to be by anything I say. Another irrelevant question rolls loosely about my reeling brain. Is there a past tense of “mended”? Could it be “ment”?

  I step farther and farther back, and now the man with the gun adjusts his aim—we’re still talking about a distance of less than ten feet, about the maximum distance for accuracy in an old and beautiful gun such as this one was.

  It ended. Venetia came through, and at the sound of her voice the gunman, on a tap on the shoulder from King Kelly, lowered the gun.

  “I’m trying,” King Kelly said, jovial as a clown, “to turn this young man”—he pointed to me—“into a soldier who’ll fight for his country.”

  Now, of course, I sagged. Would they have killed me? I don’t doubt it—given what I now know. They certainly meant to frighten me and ideally to run me out of town; King Kelly’s time in the American West had shown him things.

  It hadn’t worked, and now it was never going to work. With not a word to anybody, King Kelly and the gunman, whose name was Alec (and he was from Galway, but I didn’t discover that for years), turned away and quit the house through the open front door without a word to Sarah, who stood by, overwrought.

  Mrs. Haas grabbed the edge of the table and took many deep breaths. Venetia looked at me, held up five fingers, and then pointed upward (she was a wonder at signs and gestures), and steered her mother to the staircase. I closed my eyes and began to sway. Mrs. Haas grabbed me and opened the back door of the house, which led into a little garden. Outside she put her hand on my waist and bent me double several times.

  If she intended that I throw up, she made a mistake. In my life I can never remember vomiting—food is much too important to waste like that. I did accept her glass of water—and then I came back indoors, sat down, and finished eating the second plate of food. To give you an idea of how long the incident lasted, the food hadn’t cooled at all.

  Mrs. Haas began to mutter: “Dreadful man. Dreadful man.” Looking askance at me, as though unable to face me full on, she said in the same low mutter, “You don’t know what’s going on, you don’t know what’s going on.” And in her concluding remark before she rose and left the kitchen, she said, “Be brave, oh, be brave.”

  I finished eating all the food, and went back upstairs to the little sitting room. There sat Sarah and Venetia. When I went in, Sarah reached out a hand to me and held it.

  She said, “I’m so sorry. And you were so cool, Ben. I can’t believe that you’re so young.”

  “Have they gone?” I asked.

  Venetia said, “I’ve told Sarah that you’re now part of the company.”

  Sarah looked into a distance that didn’t exist in that small room. Venetia rose and said, “I have to dry my hair,” and she beckoned to me with her head.

  I followed her into the room in which we had slept, and as she closed the door behind us I heard Sarah outside sigh, rise, and go away.

  And so, at gunpoint so to speak, I became a member of the company of Venetia Kelly’s Traveling Show. That very day, I took to the road. Even though I only carried spears or led a wooden horse or cow onstage, I became a traveling actor, part of a great tradition—the strolling player, descended straight from the troubadour, the minstrel, who wandered Europe singing roundelays beneath the windows of beautiful ladies. Shakespeare belonged to traveling companies. And perhaps I was descended from an even more wonderful figure: the strolling bard, the storyteller who came to the castle gates and that night, after the feast, entertained the King and his family and his nobles and his warriors with long and absorbing tales.

  I have to say that Venetia Kelly�
�s Traveling Show may have been a little different. I was introduced to them all, and they were more numerous than I had expected—she had a company of more than a dozen, yet it seemed to me that I’d seen only a total of perhaps six. There was Cwawfod, and he hadn’t appeared onstage; Graham, the neckless one; the old man who played the tuba—his name was Derek, and he had a staggeringly posh English accent that got ever more exaggerated when he drank, meaning that it got very grand indeed. You’ve already met Michael, who played Bassanio, with many tumbles, in that “loose interpretation” so beloved of Miss Fay.

  The girl who played the milkmaid and other saucy roles—she came from Dublin and had run away to escape a family that made her go to Mass every morning and, as she told me, “I’m a bit wilder than that, like, ya know, I like the romantic life. And yourself, are you romantic at all?”

  Some of them rarely appeared onstage. Nasal Cwawfod, for instance, had no more than a factotum role; he drove vehicles, put out chairs, helped with scenery, such as it was. Behind the scenes also worked a man and woman—a husband and wife, Venetia told me, Martin and Martha.

  They never spoke, at least not in my hearing—they never spoke to anybody, not even each other, that I ever saw or heard. They came from Belfast, one was Catholic, one Protestant, and they’d had to leave their homes because of their love affair and subsequent marriage. Long afterward, I found them—at least I found Martha, and discovered that both had been severe alcoholics.

  And then there was Peter, the temperamental one. At the time I joined the show I had never seen Peter onstage—because Peter, though a very experienced actor, rarely went onstage.

  “Temperament,” Venetia told me, smiling.

  Peter, it transpired, believed every role beneath him, apart from, say, Hamlet or King Lear or Prospero or Othello.

  “I simply cannot see the point of treading the boards in puny characterizations,” he would declare, when the company had assembled to put together the stage for a performance. By February 1932 he hadn’t made an appearance for more than six months.

  And we had Timmy, three or four years older than me, rescued from a life of habitual imprisonment, and a gifted magician. Timmy had a pickpocket act that audiences loved; “art imitating life,” Venetia called it with a dry grin. Timmy could remove a man’s wristwatch, necktie, or shoelaces without the man knowing. Ladies returned to their seats having been onstage, and as they sat down Timmy gave them back their necklaces. Timmy had a red face for one so young, and a ferocious body odor—to this day I have no idea how he achieved it; he must have built it up in layers, like shale.

  These “men and women merely players” were my new life.

  As I look back over this document I realize that I may not have given as clear a picture of Venetia as I have of Sarah. That hasn’t come from any wish of not wanting to portray her, no selfishness of holding her to myself—it comes from inability; I simply can’t. The subject is too embedded in my heart, and I don’t wish to chisel it out; not from any lack of generosity—I’m simply not objective about her, not even now, so many decades later.

  I can tell you—and already have to some degree—what she looked like, I can tell you how her skin felt, I can tell you how she walked, but I can’t describe her essence. I can tell you how she looked at me—as though I were the dearest person ever born, as she was to me.

  Perhaps she’ll appear clearer to you through the company’s reactions. I observed them all when I became part of that group, and I’ve since then searched for and found as many of them as I could. They helped me to deepen and copper-fasten the impressions of Venetia that I can convey. And they confirmed for me how unusual she was; “quirky,” some said; “lonely,” said another; “a gift for doing the unexpected,” said somebody else.

  They pointed to her diligence, the assiduous learning of her lines, her passion to please her audiences. For instance—and I later saw this myself—when playing a new venue, she’d walk through the town and pick out some detail about the place to include in the show that night. It could be a statue, a notice of an auction, a local band. Blarney might then have a reference in his act, or one of the others would mention it in a jokey exchange.

  I’ve assembled their impressions, and fed off them for years; here’s a sample. First, the men in the company. Now they were, in any language, misfitting and rough. None of them had gifts of hygiene or stability; they all stank to a greater or lesser degree, and they all had weeping fits or drinking jags or some other kind of outburst.

  If they had anything in common with Venetia, it must have been a deep love of performance, and a relish of fine language. I stood with them many a night in the wings, and watched the starry beginnings of tears in their eyes at a wonderful Shakespeare line. I heard them murmur phrases from “Lochinvar” or The Rime of the Ancient Mariner or “The Passing of Arthur” or whatever poem Venetia was using at the time to hold the show together—which is how she saw the function of that particular reading. It always came near the middle of the evening—this was a show without an interval—and it always proved a kind of emotional rallying point for both cast and audience.

  And these men, these rough men, outcasts from their previous lives—they always stood up when Venetia walked in. They deferred to her; they fetched a chair for her; they poured her some of their truly awful tea—they themselves called it “the urine”—they’d say after some exertion or other, “A dose of the urine is needed.” And then, as she sat and sipped the tea, they stood around her like a ramshackle household guard, listening to every word she said as though she were their empress, which she was.

  Many, many years after it all came to an end, with the show long folded, I found Peter, the temperamental one. He lived in a convent home run for indigents outside Waterford; when I met him he’d become immobile, but his personality remained intact.

  He recognized me the moment I walked in—and he began to cry. Which took me aback, until he said: “I’d always hoped to hear from darling Venetia. Is she with you?”

  I tried to explain, saw that he couldn’t cope with such a difficult burden, and instead asked him for his impressions of her.

  “She took me in as though I were the brightest star in the theatrical firmament. I was on the heap, old boy. Rubbish. Useless. Over. On the skids. Every opportunity I had—and I knew the greats—I pissed away. I offended every manager who hired me, I was too grand, they were beneath me, I was too temperamental to act. I was an Actor.”

  As I recalled it, he hadn’t done much acting for Venetia’s company either, and I put that to him gently. By now I was maturer and better able to couch things.

  “No, old boy. And she knew why. She knew I was afraid, too worthless. So she gave me the job of being her Shakespeare coach. And I often chose the repertoire with her. I would never have had a life without her.”

  Now the women. Mrs. Haas adored her, no need to remind you of that. Sarah, as you know, considered her daughter mythical. From the company, Martha, when I met her, told me that she herself had had two miscarriages on the road. All the medical arrangements—made by Venetia. The doctors—paid by Venetia. The emotional aftercare—Venetia.

  “Before the house that you knew in Charleville, she had another house. She sent me to that house to recover, and she gave me a housekeeper to look after me. D’you remember her? That Mrs. Hiss? Terrible bitch, she treated me like I was a fool or a convict or both. And then Venetia’d come over to see me and everything’d be fine again. Did you know that the mother was dead jealous of her? She was an actress too, the mother.”

  For a woman who never spoke when in the company of the show, Martha made up for lost time. I asked her whether, as a woman, she had liked Venetia. Martha thought, frowned, took her time, spoke slowly.

  “She was two people, like. There was the warm side to her, that we all saw, I mean, friendly-like. And there was another side, distant-like, I don’t mean cold, no, she wasn’t cold. But she was away out of things, like. Yeh, distant-like. Yeh, cold, maybe
. But we’d’a done anything for her.” She paused. “That distant thing. I think she was lonely-like.”

  That day, as she dried her hair, Venetia and I shook our heads in horror over the gun incident. She thought it no more than what she called “a stupid jape” by her grandfather. I believed that he meant something else and something stronger—but I hadn’t formulated my thoughts. Vaguely I felt that it had something to do with Mother and the farm, but I’d resolved not to discuss the matter of my own family’s problems with Venetia; I didn’t want to trouble her with them, and I’d decided to wait until I could talk to Sarah.

  Drying her hair, preparing her face, getting dressed—that day I witnessed a sight to which I became addicted. In galleries around Europe, where any such painting exists, I look for portraits of ladies at their toilette. What is its enchantment? The absorption? The concentration? With Venetia I didn’t speak—I watched.

  Part of my silence—our silence—may have been recovery from the fracas downstairs, that combination of menace and bullying that so came to identify King Kelly for me. Part too, however, came from Venetia’s simple wish to complete her preparations, and my simple wish to watch.

  Mrs. Haas arrived with a sandwich for Venetia. We learned that Sarah had disappeared with King Kelly and the hair-oiled man. I now had so many things whizzing around in my head that I needed help, and I asked the simple question of Venetia and Mrs. Haas, “What’s going on?”

  “Not yet to tell,” said Mrs. Haas.

  “We’re not quite sure,” said Venetia.

  “His father,” said Mrs. Haas, pointing to me. “He knows.”

  Now, at last, the real world came in. Venetia knew it too, and stood up.

  “Then we need—I need—to do something.”

  I said, “I’m about to take him to a funeral.”