Venetia Kelly's Traveling Show: A Novel of Ireland

by Frank Delaney

  Was it Fascism? Hitler with his Brownshirts, Mussolini and Mosley with their Blackshirts: I suppose in Ireland we should have had green.

  It’s important to me that I now write down as many details of that week as I can bear. Mrs. Haas knew of King Kelly resigning—Mrs. Haas knew everything—and in a whisper, she suggested not telling Venetia. I didn’t. We spent five more days in each other’s company, to the exclusion of almost the entire universe. From time to time Mrs. Haas entered our lives, always with comfort, usually with ever more wonderful food. We met other people too—gardeners and waiters and people we stopped to talk to, or who wanted to admire the car. Other than that, we lived in the same shell of life, turning always and only to each other. They say that perfection between two people is impossible, the philosopher’s ideal. The “they” who say this are wrong.

  We rode a train, from Limerick to Cork and back again, just for the joy of it. We climbed a mountain, Galtymore, and looked down on the wonderful plains. We drank water from fresh streams. We walked for miles on deserted roads, and by rivers and into bog lands. We lay in the green aftergrass of meadows from which the hay had but recently been harvested.

  Plans—that’s what we talked about, plans and children. We agreed to put aside time the following week for discussing problems, for facing matters that would then need attention—such as whether and how many of the company to keep on. Such as telling my parents that we had married. Such as facing Sarah when she came back at the end of the year to a show that had been completely altered. Nominally she had a director’s role; in practice she had forced, cajoled, or persuaded Venetia to put and keep together the program that I had first seen.

  When I first began to tell you Venetia’s story, you’ll recall that Sarah had been effusive to me about her love of her daughter, the auspicious birth, unicorns, and so forth. From that you might have assumed a deep, close bond between the two women. Sarah, when I interviewed her down through the years, continued to give that impression.

  I, rather cruelly perhaps, allowed her to go on doing so—not least because I wanted to hear Venetia praised. And because I wanted to confirm over and over Sarah’s duplicitousness. The truth from Venetia’s side had long been known to me—everything she told me about Sarah’s demeanor toward her suggested a deep and rivalrous envy.

  Still, I might never have met Venetia had it not been for Sarah’s competitiveness. Venetia had so begun to top the Abbey Theatre bill in Dublin that Sarah engineered a row over earnings—by the simple expedient of asking King Kelly to negotiate for Venetia. He generated a mighty fracas with Yeats—persisted in calling him “Yeets”—and Venetia was forced out.

  That’s how she came to have a traveling show. Sarah encouraged her, put up the money. It took Venetia off the Abbey stage, out of Dublin, where she’d also starred in society, and away from the public eye.

  “Tell me about Sarah, about the family. I mean, in New York. Who were the Kellys?”

  She said, “My grandfather’s mother went to New York from County Cork and I know this story.”

  Venetia told me, with all the drama and the accents, a story that encapsulated the Irish experience, the journey from desperateness to the first good plateau—and a story that would have a terrible reverberation.

  Her mother, Sarah, knew a Dutch family who lived down the street. Bankers and cloth merchants, they had wealth and comfort. They owned warehouses on the Hudson River in New York City, and into the basements they crammed Irish immigrants off the ships.

  Why Irish? Because, said these practical Dutch people, the Irish were so desperate that they would take on any kind of work, live in any kind of room.

  And so this Dutch family got all its workers from these arriving immigrants, whom they “stored.” The men worked upstairs in the warehouses or on the farms up along the river, and for a pittance of wages. Their women also worked in the warehouses for an even smaller pittance or in domestic service, like so many arriving Irish women and girls.

  In fact, so prevalent was the Irish female in American domestic service that in some cities a maid was known as a “Bridget” or a “Bridie.” A “Bridget” was fresh-faced and innocent, straight off the green fields of Ireland; whereas a “Bridie,” also Irish, had been in the United States for some time and been hammered into a tougher woman. And now the focus of the story narrowed.

  In the very early 1800s, a girl, from the wide fields of Cork, went to work for the ancestors of this Dutch family. On the day she started there, she said to her sister—whom they also hired as a servant—“This is what we’ll do. We’ll work like fire. And we’ll watch everything. And wherever we get the chance we’ll teach them something they don’t know—so’s they’ll take more notice of us. And no matter what they say to us, we’ll be as nice as pie to them all the time, and we’ll make them laugh.”

  The girl’s name wasn’t Bridie or Bridget—she was Nora Tobin and her sister was Eileen, and they made themselves so amenable, so indispensable, to the Dutch family that they changed how that Dutch family perceived the Irish immigrants.

  Then Nora showed her astuteness. She watched how the rich Protestants believed that from great wealth must come great charity. And she observed how the head of the house, the Meister, supported churches and other Protestant organizations in Manhattan.

  One Sunday morning, after he’d had a good breakfast and had been to a rousing service, Nora went to the Meister in his study. He was sitting there reading his newspaper and smoking one of his long, dark cheroots. Ash had fallen on the carpet and Nora swept it up, tut-tutting at him quite bossily, an attitude that he liked—as she had noticed.

  The Meister laughed and said, “Nora, you are like a headmistress”—which he often said to her.

  She, expecting that he would say that, replied, “Well, Meister, now that you say it—”

  And she asked him there and then for money to start a school for immigrants.

  The Meister laughed, but was arrested by the thought.

  Nora said, “Do you find me and my sister clever?”

  He thought about it and said, “Well, yes, I do.”

  “And does your wife?”

  “Now that I think of it, she often says so.”

  “Well.” Nora stood with her hands on her hips and said to him, “And we’re not the cleverest of us Irish, not at all. If you helped me to open a school, I’d secure for you the best clerks for your bank.”

  The Tobin sisters went on to open a school, and indeed did give the Dutchman brilliant employees for his bank—but they and many other Irish teachers also gave New York the clerks and civil servants that ran the courts, organized the city’s systems such as transit and roads, and provided the civilians and the uniformed men in the police and fire departments.

  In this fashion, the Irish population in New York began to raise itself out of the hovels to which it had been consigned when it landed. It would take many years; the stigma clung.

  Like Nora Tobin had done, the Irishwomen looked around them, saw their incumbent predecessors—the Germans, the English, and especially the Dutch—observed the fine houses, the starched linens, the children at excellent schools, and by a combination of literacy and religion, went after the same for themselves and their families.

  So earnestly did they pursue this collective ideal that by the time Sarah was born in the late 1870s, the legions of Irish-American women who formed societies and clubs in New York and elsewhere across the continent didn’t refer to themselves as “women”—they called themselves “ladies.”

  Venetia finished her story—but I could see that there was more.

  I applauded and said, with a grin, “Go on.”

  She said, “My mother left out some details when she first told me.”

  I waited.

  “She left out the fact that Nora Tobin was my grandfather’s mother. And guess where Nora Tobin came from?” Venetia pointed down to the ground at her feet. “Here.”

  In other words, Sarah had desce
nded from the poorest of the poor—her grandmother was an Irish maid plucked from a rat-infested cellar on the dockyards of New York. That was why King Kelly could run for office in North Cork—he had been born here. And he had also lived here—which led to the sinister part.

  Venetia had a deep-grained obedience in her; I recognized it—it’s not uncommon in an only child. After the fracas at the Abbey Theatre, in which she had been an innocent, she’d done as she’d been told—just as I had eventually obeyed Mother when she sent me after my father. Venetia formed the traveling company and bowed to Sarah’s experience in choosing road and repertory material. Now Sarah had gone away, creating a long breathing space, and the company, for the moment, had come off the road.

  Given all that, you can understand why we wished to delay any discussion of the problems King Kelly might pose.

  The glorious weather continued and King Kelly didn’t appear. In fact we had idyllic privacy. I knew a lake in the mountains where we could swim unseen; Venetia took off her clothes and floated. “I’m the Lady of Shalott,” she called. A garden near Adare had a lily pond; we placed coins on the lily pads for luck. We befriended some horses, took them apples, and got drool on our sleeves.

  On the Sunday afternoon, because it rained, we went to a film in Limerick; we saw Loretta Young in Beau Ideal—and I had read the book by P. C. Wren, and its two companion volumes, Beau Geste and Beau Sabreur, and we talked over dinner afterward about the French Foreign Legion and being film stars.

  We went home to Charleville in the dark, and found a note to say that Cody had arrived. Next day, when we went downstairs to the kitchen, Cody sat in the kitchen waiting for us—as did King Kelly.

  Now we have our hands on the chain of events. Now I must handle the icy cold links, one by one, and follow them, fingering them and feeling their chill. Now I must force myself to bring everything to the eye, to redact as faithfully as I can everything I saw and heard over the week that followed.

  No matter how objective I am, no matter how calmly I try to view, to assess what happened, I remain shocked, and that’s why I’ve waited so long to tell this tale. It’s true, I know it, that such things don’t easily take place in people’s lives, no matter what we read in the newspapers. It’s true, I can vouch for it, that treachery is indeed treacherous, that triumph is indeed triumphant, and finally that terribleness is indeed terrible.

  They sat in the kitchen, one tall and heavy, a slug with frightening eyes and a big cigar; the other, narrow and scrawny, a rat in a suit, with the cold, uncaring eyes of Death. Amiable conversation had been going back and forth between them; I later ascertained that.

  Venetia and I walked in, close to each other in height, an erogenous glow surrounding us like a benign fire. King Kelly’s hands lay on the table, two fat and hairy weapons; Cody sat in a slouch, his hands between his knees.

  “The honeymooners,” boomed King Kelly, and Mrs. Haas rebounded like someone hearing a sudden, loud noise. Cody stood up; King Kelly didn’t—but he held out his arms and said, “Have you a kiss for your grandfather?”

  “Hello, Grampa,” said Venetia, and went to him; he pulled her down onto his knee, put his hand around her hips, and flicked me a wink with more dirt in it than a slum.

  “I was there before him, wasn’t I, child?”—and he pulled her face down to kiss her cheek.

  Revolting; that’s how I recall it; that’s how it was—those monstrous paws, with dirty fingernails. He wore a canary-yellow bow tie. And he hadn’t taken off his brown hat.

  “How’s married life?” He leered like a bandit.

  “What are you doing here, Grampa?”

  “Cody, tell her what I’m doing here.”

  “Hello, Cody,” said Venetia; she had better manners almost than Mother.

  “I hope I’m not too early, Miss Kelly,” said Cody, who glanced at me as though the cat had dragged me in from the street.

  “So, are you happy now?” said King Kelly to me, a hand tightening on Venetia’s hip.

  “Ow, Grampa.”

  I said nothing, but I felt my body coil.

  “I have to talk to your bridegroom,” said King Kelly. “Cody, look after my granddaughter—not too tightly now, mind you.” All beasts have a natural habitat; King Kelly’s was the sewer. “You too, Shark-face,” he said to Mrs. Haas. “Out.”

  She averted her face from him as she walked past his chair.

  Everybody quit the kitchen; Venetia planted a kiss on my jaw as she went. King Kelly sat back until they’d gone. With the pleased face of a tourist, he looked all around—then swiveled back to me. It wasn’t a big room; twelve feet between us, perhaps. I stood with my back to the door.

  “Come closer,” he said. “I’m shortsighted and I want to see your eyes.”

  I stepped forward. He had a heavy walking cane, made, I think, of hickory, with a brass ferrule, and a brass dog’s head. It rested between his huge knees. He lifted it, hefted its weight, held it by the head, and wagged it at me.

  “I could crack your skull with this,” he said. “And maybe I should. You crooked, scheming little bastard. You and the Long Fellow. Happy now? Are you, are you?”

  He poked me in the chest with the stick. It hurt. I winced. He poked again.

  “Are you happy? I’ve lost my seat, thanks to you.” He poked again. “Well, I’ll make you happy, you wait and see.”

  The ferrule dug right into my sternum. If I spoke, my breath might sound caught—but I took the risk.

  “I’ll be happy when my parents get back what you stole from them.”

  He pulled back the stick to poke harder, as if to stab me, and I caught the stick and wrenched it from him. I broke it across my knee—it wasn’t easy, but I snapped it. It cracked into three pieces, one of which, no more than a shard, flew through the air and landed on the floor. Where I now threw the other two fragments.

  He half-rose. I held out a fist.

  “The last time we met in this house—you had a man hold a gun to my head. Move now and I’ll drop you. I flocking will.”

  Thank you, Billy Moloney! Though I didn’t use the euphemism, you understand.

  “Why are you persecuting me?” he said.

  I looked at him. The nerve!

  He pressed it. “Come on. What have you against me? I have to go back to Dublin now and answer impertinent questions. Because of you. You’ve destroyed my career. You and that Spanish crook.” I had never heard Mr. de Valera called that. “Why? Why are you doing it?”

  “Give my parents back our farm.”

  He twisted in his chair, exasperation his only tune.

  “I’ve resigned my seat because of your lies. You and yours will never live there again. If your stupid father came to me tomorrow with cash worth ten times that mortgage I wouldn’t let him redeem it. That’s done. That’s over.”

  King Kelly rose to go. He stopped, wary that I hadn’t moved.

  “What you gonna do now, slug me? Use force where you can’t persuade? Who’s the Fascist now?”

  I stood aside. He bent down to pick up the broken walking cane, decided against it. Just for mischief I made a small and sudden move as he walked past, and had the gratification of seeing him flinch.

  As he opened the door into the hall, I heard the footsteps scurry upstairs—Venetia. She must have heard everything at the slightly ajar Georgian door. Cody emerged from the little sitting room; sitting in the dimness, the room cool with drawn curtains, he too had been listening.

  One by one they came back to the kitchen—Cody first, Mrs. Haas second, Venetia a slow last. Nobody said anything; embarrassment hung everywhere, stale as the smoke from King Kelly’s cigar.

  “I’m hungry,” I said.

  “He is gone?” said Mrs. Haas.

  “When did you travel?” said Venetia to Cody. “Are the others here?”

  He didn’t answer her and I observed that fact; it was one of those moments when you know you’ve seen something without quite knowing what you’ve registe
red.

  We all sat around the table, including Mrs. Haas, who never sat down when we were eating. The room took on a subdued mood. I watched Cody. He separated his food ingredients from each other—the ham from the egg, the eggs from the sausage, the sausage from the mushrooms.

  I didn’t like the way he looked up using only his eyes. I didn’t like the way he held his knife and fork, like spikes he was driving into the plate. I didn’t like the way he sucked his teeth. I didn’t like him.

  When we had eaten, which helped us to recover, Cody, Venetia, and I went into the little sitting room. He had placed his bags there, and his accountancy books. Why did I so recoil from him?

  We sat down and he said to Venetia, “Now we can go over everything, I’ve spent the week extracting all the information.” He looked at me sidelong and added, “Is it all right if—” and he broke off, and looked at me again.

  “If Ben is here? Of course,” said Venetia. “It’s Ben’s business now too.”

  I took Cody’s snub for what it was. And I answered it by asking many, many questions. We had plenty of money, enough and more to pay everybody until Christmas, which would buy us time to find an existing theater or a premises.

  That night, Venetia told me the story of her life. She recalled the ship that brought her to Ireland; she even remembered, she said, being swung out of her cot by King Kelly and the bristles on his face. She told me the story of her grandfather giving her Blarney. And she told me the story of the boy and the talking animals.

  “I lived by that story when I was little. With no friends or playmates, there was always the chance that the cat would chat to me. And so I made friends with Blarney—who could and did.”

  I introduced the idea that I’d had on the train.

  “Why not turn Blarney into a storyteller?” I said, and I told her about the seanchaí, who still roamed the countryside telling stories.

  “What’s the word?” she said.

  “Shan-a-kee. It means ‘One who tells old tales.’ They’re still around. We had one at our house years ago. They still work in Kerry and West Cork and up in Donegal and in Scotland.”