Read The Matchmaker of Kenmare Online
Authors: Frank Delaney
The Matchmaker of Kenmare (2 page)
I nodded, in confusion more than agreement.
“Do you have a strong imagination, Ben?”
“I do,” I said, “but I’m not sure that I trust it.”
“There are only two words,” she said, “in which I put my trust. Magic and Faith.”
Some of her grip on me came from the conflict of opposites. Whereas I had always leaned toward the scholarly, she belonged to the demotic. For every line of Horace and Virgil that I savored, she had a snatch of cant, and from the moment we met I began to note many of her sayings and old saws. They still addle my brain; this morning, as I sat down to work, I remembered a fragment from a spelling game that she’d learned as a child: “Mrs. D. Mrs. I. Mrs. F-F-I. Mrs. C. Mrs. U. Mrs. L-T-Y.”
“Patience,” she murmured another day, “is the Mother of Science.”
I would swear that she often spoke in uppercase letters.
Since she rarely left her stony Atlantic headland, her knowledge of the world must have come from some popular encyclopedia of arcane and unconnected facts. Giraffes, ostriches, and eggs—they formed no more than an introduction. She knew about the lives of ants; how to gut a fish using a sharp stick and your thumb; training a cat to play dead; the healing properties of sour milk; the fact that honey is the only food that never goes off; where to find a stone that retains heat for twelve hours; how cloves grow; the number of bones in an eagle’s wing; why a cow has four stomachs; how long to boil the tar for caulking the hull of a boat. She was a walking, talking library of vernacular knowledge.
She loved music, but she couldn’t carry a tune in a bucket. Her eye had the familiar speed of a child raised in the countryside—she could identify a bird thousands of yards away. She had a sense of color so strong that she could tell one shade of black from another. Her capacity to quote from Shakespeare suggested wide reading of him—even if some pages seemed to have been missing from her edition of the
Collected Works
.
Moreover, she had one specific gift that I still can’t fathom. It has
never ceased to puzzle me; she used it a number of times in my company, always with astonishing results, and if it can’t be called “magic,” well, nothing can: She could find people by looking at a map. And we shall come to those moments when I saw her pull this stunt, trick, sleight of mind, or whatever it should be called.
Although she spoke three and a half languages, she had never been abroad. And however delightful in its innocence, the part of her that remained in her own homestead also made me wince, with its homespun charm, its greeting-card sentiment.
“Ben, do you know what the difference is between Friendship and Love? Friendship is the photograph, Love is the oil painting.” And she uttered it in the declarative way she had of saying things that made me hesitate to contradict her.
Her words often sounded so shallow that I dismissed them, and later found to my displeasure that her mushy sentiments had lingered and were staggering around in my mind like a drunk at a wedding. In that sense, she possessed in trumps the strange potency of cheap music, and I know that I caught some of it from her.
However, from inside all that phrase-and-fable stuff, she served up a philosophy that had an alluring power. For example, she brought into my life a belief in something that she called “Referred Passion”; I even lived by it for a time.
“Do you know what I mean by ‘Referred Passion’?” she said one day about a year into our relationship. And, as usual, not waiting for my hopeless stab at a reply, she went on. “Do you know what a referred pain is?”
Is it when I feel so stupid that I could kick myself?
“I’ll explain it,” she said. “Your shoulder is injured, but you feel it in your chest. Or you’ve hurt your spine, but your hip is carrying the ache. That’s referred pain. Well, Referred Passion is when you’re in love with one person, but you fiercely embrace another. That’s us,” she said. “That’s me and you. Friendship is a choice,” she said. “Love isn’t.”
What else can I tell you about her? She had a phenomenal passion for handkerchiefs. She kept her hair tucked behind an ear like Rita Hayworth. She taught me the words of bawdy old country rhymes, most of them too salty to repeat here. Also, she had the most peculiar recipes for things.
“If you have the hiccups,” she told me one day, “bend down, put your hands on the floor, and look back between your legs at the sun.”
My inner voice said,
Is that all you’ll be able to see?
—but I asked her, “And what if it’s the middle of the night?”
She said, “Then you’re in worse trouble.”
And I was—but I never picked up the warnings.
As I sat down to write this memoir, I had an opening paragraph in mind; here it is:
I wish I could tell you about the greatest friendship of my life; I wish I could tell you how it developed beyond friendship into something for which I have no definition, no terminology. But the moment I begin to tell it (and I must: I’m mortally committed to telling this tale before I die), I know that I’ll enter what I call the “Regret Cycle,” and the “What If Cycle,” and the “If Only Cycle,” and I’ll end up nowhere again
.
As you can see, I abandoned those opening sentences, and the direction they proposed—yet I’m nevertheless going to write it all down for you. I’m old enough now to deal with the regrets, the what-ifs, and if-onlys, and whatever the subjective faults you may find in this remembrance, at least I can describe how I, who knew little about anything beyond my own narrow concerns, learned to become a true and deep friend to someone. It may prove important to you one day. To the both of you.
She, of course, was the one who taught me this magnificent skill—as she taught me something else extraordinary, the greatest single lesson of my life: She taught me what blind faith looks like. And blind faith is why I’m writing this account of her life, and how it affected me.
Kate Begley was her name, and she was known as the Matchmaker of Kenmare long before I met her. She and her grandmother shared the title, and Kate was as pretty as a pinup. I was twenty-nine, she was twenty-five when I met her, and she had a grin like a boy’s.
See? See what’s happening to me?
Pretty as a pinup;
and
a grin like a boy’s
—the moment I begin to describe her, all these decades later, I become
sentimental about her, and I fall into language that I would never use in my ordinary life.
I who for years wrote uncluttered and austere reports of ancient countryside traditions, I who studied with joy the most powerful scholars of old Europe, I who pride myself on my unadorned simplicity of purpose—here I am, forced back into her way of thinking. And I squirm, because at these moments her greeting-card remarks will flood through me again like a maudlin old song. I’ve just heard one of those corny echoes: “You have to believe me, Ben,” she said. “Love is not a decision. But Friendship is.”
Why am I telling you all this? You’ll see why. You’ll see how she affected my life, and you’ll grasp the implications of that effect upon all of us whom this memoir concerns. You’ll see how she was the one who made the determinations; where we would go, no matter how dangerous; what we might attempt, no matter how bizarre; and yes, she decided too the balance of love and friendship between us.
I followed, and she led me into trouble so deep that my own father wouldn’t have found me. Older than she in years but younger by centuries, I’d never intended to be so commanded, but some people snag you on their spikes, and you hang there, flapping helplessly, and—I admit it—fascinated.
When I met Kate Begley, the Second World War had been under way for four years. In Ireland, we called it by a wonderful, ameliorating euphemism—“The Emergency.” We were one of the very few countries in Europe immune from the conflict, because we had taken up a position of neutrality. Controversial among our geographical neighbors, and sometimes even among ourselves, I agreed with it. Its moral simplicity suited what I like in life.
I also liked its military practicality; who were we, on our tiny island, to fight among such vast regiments? We hadn’t even replenished our slaughtered breadwinners from the previous war, in which we’d lost tens of thousands of men. Thus, we had learned to stay out of such things, or so I believed.
And yet, because I took Kate Begley at her word, because I surrendered myself to her philosophy of friendship, that is to say, Referred Passion,
the war sucked me in. When it swept her from that brilliant Atlantic headland where she lived, and from her generally innocent life, it took me with her.
July 1943
Here is my note of our first meeting:
She always serves tea to her callers—to break the ice and soften the difficult opening questions: “Did you ever court a girl?” And, “What kind of girl would you like?”
The men usually answer no to the first question, and to the second they might say, “Well, a girl who likes a laugh,” or “A sturdy girl, she won’t object to hard work,” or “A girl steady in herself”; or, if they were fishermen, “A girl who knows the sea, can work the nets.” Miss Begley remarked, “At this point I might say that I know just the person.” And she added, “Whether I do or not.”
The cottage hovers in a pocket above the ocean; there are no other houses on Lamb’s Head. From the red door you can see for miles across open water. Stone grows everywhere—all around, up the hill, down to the water, where rocks litter the foreshore, their white patches like medals in the sun
.
By land she can hear people coming up the battered lane. If they arrive by sea she can look down on their heads as they moor at the little jetty. Miss Begley says that since she was a very young child she has watched for the boats, and to this day she runs back to the house to tell her grandmother how many men have made the journey. They commonly arrive on a Sunday, she says, striding up from the sea through the high, scrabby grass, quiet men, she says, “shy and big-boned.”
One of the first things they see is a photograph on the mantelpiece, of a little girl with a ribbon in her hair and a middle-aged woman dressed in black. Dated 1923, it was posed some twenty years ago in a
studio in Kenmare, the nearest town. Both are looking at the camera; the grandmother, Mrs. Holst, a widow, purses her severe lips; the girl is a little overfed and has a cautious smile; a potted palm sits on a column in the vague “Egyptian” background. There’s no doubt that it’s grandmother and granddaughter; she says that visitors comment upon the resemblance
.
For as long as Miss Begley can remember, the grandmother, before she undertakes to make any introductions, delivers a lecture—which Miss Begley has adopted: “Marriage is very important. Marrying a girl is the most important thing a man can do. Never mind business or politics or sport or any of that, there’s nothing so vital to the world as a man marrying a woman. That’s where we get our children from, that’s how the human race goes forward. And if it’s too late for children, there’s the companionship of a safe and trusted person.”
Miss Begley says that she has listened to those fireside words of her grandmother all her life, a speech that ends on a declaration: “Marriage is the gold standard of all relationships. It’s the currency by which everything else is valued.”
I asked, What do the visiting men think of all this? She told me, “Very often the father speaks for the son, who is usually asked to leave for a little while, and he’ll wander out of the cottage and look at the sea.” Then the father describes the son’s work as, say, a fisherman on the Atlantic—the small boats, the freezing winds, the catch that might drag you overboard; and the absences lasting all night and perhaps several days if they were following herring shoals, or a field of cod far out. “A woman,” he’ll announce, “would have to put up with that. And the living is hard, no doubt there. When the ice gets onto your hands, it doubles the size of your knuckles.”
Next come some more questions: Is there any insanity in your family? Would your wife say that you yourself were a generous man or a mean-spirited man? Is your son a decent man? Can he be depended upon not to strike a woman? That’s a very cowardly thing to do, to strike a woman, who hasn’t the same strength as a man
.
If the father looks uncomfortable she’ll ask him, “Did you ever strike a woman yourself? Did you ever hit your wife?” If he says, however sheepish and apologetic, that yes, he did, the grandmother—or Miss Begley—will rise and say, “Well, sir, I’m afraid—‘like father like
son’. That’s what we believe in this house. And we can’t do business with you. What I mean is—we won’t do business with you. So go on your way.”
Their visitors showed up, Miss Begley said, “throughout the whole year, except in the time of the gales, March or September, or the worst of the cold rain in January and February.” Sometimes, as many as four and five seekers of marriage came to that house on a Sunday, in boats tied up below the headland, or by road in hackney cars from Kenmare.
“And by the time they left,” she said, “we had shaped the rest of their lives.”
On that first visit, I had taken care to introduce myself, lest they mistake me for a suitor.
“God save all here. My name is Ben MacCarthy, and I work for the Folklore Commission. May I come in and speak with you for a while?”
Miss Begley was on her knees in her doorway. Without looking up, she continued to draw a fat line of white chalk around the doormat.
“This is to keep out the ants,” she said. “Ants hate chalk. It makes them vomit.”
The grandmother rose from a chair at the table, came rustling in long black skirts to the door, peered at me, and seemed disappointed.
I tried again. “My job is to gather traditions that have lasted. And I’m particularly interested in matchmaking.”
Miss Begley, on her knees, replied, “Good.”
I looked down at her. She finished framing the doormat with her chalk line and raised her head. Hands on hips, she looked up at me, her eyes searching every inch of my face.
