The Matchmaker of Kenmare (49 page)

Hand on heart, Bobby stood before me now, his other hand on my shoulder.

Sometimes—if not always—we have to depend on others to tell us the truth of ourselves. Bobby Bilbum, with his wobbling stomach and a jowl big as a briefcase, and his elegant, orotund speech, captured for me the essence of why I’d liked the road around Ireland. It had nothing to do with the outer world; it had to do with the landscapes within me, and my own mountains and rivers and lakes. No wonder I’ve so loved my Wandering Scholars. They understood the inner terrain that we all have—and the need to travel it.

I wrote down as much as I could remember of Bobby’s speech (it was much longer than I have quoted), and I relayed it to Kate.

“The Safety of Princes comes from Kings, Ben,” she said. And her reliance upon greeting-card sentiments told me how much pressure she felt at this brave new adventure. Nor did I understand at all what she meant.

I’d been watching her during that week of preparation, and I now didn’t like too much how she seemed in her spirit. Her grooming, her care of her clothes and hair—nothing wrong with any of that, but she seemed to speak to herself much oftener, muttering, arguing.

Though we lived in the same building as I had shared with her during our days at the waiting pen, she had taken an extra room next door, and I slept in there, on a makeshift bed of two armchairs. Twice in the first week I woke to hear noises from that room. The first night I heard Kate pacing, walking, and talking; if I hadn’t known better I’d have wondered if she had a visitor. On the second night the sounds had an upsetting
familiarity—the same kind of sobbing that I’d heard for the first time one night at Lamb’s Head.

Pennsylvania, Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Missouri, Kansas—that was the way that we went, as the song says. We took two days to pack, including a crate with a hinged door for Sydney, to which she took as to a luxury suite.

In our last act, before Bobby closed the doors of his house and locked the gates of his “estate,” as he called it, we walked Jerry into the wagon. He had plenty of room, and an ingenious structure of vertical curtain-rods enabled Bobby to make the roof of the cart a little higher every day as Jerry grew.

Bobby drove; Kate sat beside him; I beside Kate. The truck, though now painted a bright cherry, had done circus duty, and flakes of red and yellow road-show paint peeked through here and there. It had also been fitted for sleeping, and the bench seat on which we sat folded backward in sections. Once we had cleared New York, I took advantage of the comfort and slept.

That Bobby Bilbum had some kind of road plan in his head soon became apparent—even though he followed no map of any kind. When I later assembled the journey, I made the following list of major “destination points,” to use Bobby’s term, and they add up to as near a straight line westward as he could have followed; Newark, New Jersey; Harrisburg, Pennsylvania; Wheeling, Ohio; Richmond, Indiana; Hannibal, Missouri, and St. Joseph, Kansas. His driving system, if I may call it that, entailed getting the truck to a steady forty miles an hour and holding it there, no matter what happened all around him.

In New Jersey, he swung carefully off the road. He took the truck down a narrow road, which became a deserted lane by a lake, and in the lights I saw the flash of water.

“Here,” Bobby said, “our caravan will rest. Please stay with dear Kate while I address the creatures.”

Kate didn’t wake, and I opened the satchel that Bobby had given us. It contained a bottle of milk and two sandwiches; we would eat and drink nothing else on the road except milk and sandwiches; we bought the milk in little country stores miles from anywhere, and the bread and the meat for the sandwiches.

When I’d finished eating, I eased from the truck and went to find Bobby. He and Jerry were standing side by side while Jerry, front legs splayed wide as a door, drank from a creamery urn that came up to my waist. From the crate, Sydney began to grunt, and I reached in, put on her collar and leash, and took her out.

Though with no moon to help us, we had light enough to see, and I could tell that Nowhere, New Jersey, had some natural beauty. Heavy rocks behind me, the quiet gleam of water before me, and wooded heights across the way—all spoke of peace and quiet.

Have you ever been on a long journey that became a slow and delicious blur? I had great anxiety underpinning our travels—What would Lebanon, Kansas, have to offer in the long term? Would Captain Charles Miller get there?—yet, I have glorious memories of that trip. In the blur of farms and farmers and their amazement at Jerry, and the delight of the wives and children as they stroked his neck and he licked their hands, it’s the names that remain in my head.

They’re the underlying music of America, they’re the piano player’s left hand, the marching band’s big cymbals. Every day, the name of a town or a county would cause me to reach for my notebook, and I floated across the continent of North America on a cloud of word tunes.

They come back to my mind now, like the lines of some great, geographical poem, and I almost recall them in the order in which I met them or saw their names. Birdsboro, Hopeland, Clay, and Brickerville; Highspire, Boiling Springs, Walnut Bottom, Pleasant Hall; Helixville, Husband, Seven Springs, Champion; Cadiz, Ohio, Deersville. Stillwater, Newcomerstown, a place named Warsaw, and another named Nellie.

Some towns offered to live up to their names. In Ragetown, Ohio, we had a moment of discomfort. We found a milk depot and refilled our creamery urn in the early morning. As the people, mostly farmers, gathered to admire Jerry (and ask if Sydney was to be our dinner), a reporter from the local newspaper came by on his bicycle. Bobby grew jumpy and
annoyed, especially when the reporter hustled off to find his photographer. We left Ragetown, Ohio, faster than we’d arrived there.

“Maybe it was the name that provoked the mood,” Kate whispered as we clambered back on the truck.

Here are some more names; Magnetic Springs, East Liberty, Zanesfield, and De Graff; Quincy, Sidney (which, we all agreed, had been named after the porker asleep in the back), Willowdell, and Fort Recovery.

Dublin, Indiana, sparked a debate about the naming of American towns—the unexpected number of Native American words in all melodies, the number of European suffixes-burg and-ville, the Irish and English and Scottish names, the names of people and families. And the names of girls; if there could be towns such as Nellie and Anna surely we might find a Kate—to which Bobby, by now more than half in love with Kate, said, “It will have to be a beautiful metropolis.”

And so we traveled west, on a journey that soon became rhythmic, smooth, and grand. I, who lived on the road, found myself entering two new dimensions—altered space and altered time, the former causing the latter.

On foot in Ireland, as I’d spent so many years, thirty miles to the next town occasioned a day of walking at a stiff pace. Here, hundreds of miles opened up before us every morning. I amused myself by reckoning our averages; a speed of forty miles an hour gives a net thirty miles an hour; we drove twelve hours a day and that should have yielded three hundred and sixty miles, therefore a journey of four days.

Not at all. Bobby’s route took us into highways and byways, and we averaged no more than a hundred miles in any given twenty-four hours. So much for the new dimension of time in my life.

The skies took hold of my imagination—and my heart. In Ireland, we’re never too far from sea clouds. They seem high and they scud across the sky looking to join other cumuli. Out in the middle of America, those weren’t skies that I saw—that was the edge of space, with sometimes no hint or trace that a cloud had ever been there. A sense of freedom that I had never known came down to visit me, and at one daytime break, Kate said, “I feel that a weight has been lifted from me out here.”

I said, knowing what she meant, “It’s because the sky is so high.”

Bobby said, “And we’re in Cloud County, Kansas.”

The following day, raising dust on empty, long, unpaved roads, we reached Lebanon. Kate sat forward, completely focused.

“It’s Sunday morning,” she said. “Stop by the church with the tower.”

Bobby turned left, pulled the truck in, and we sat there. Half an hour later, much of the population of Lebanon began to pour from the solid, red church. With no hurry on them, they stopped and began to chat to neighbors. I felt Kate start, as she did with a sudden thought.

“Quick. Get Jerry out.”

Within minutes, the little town of Lebanon had something new and wonderful to talk about.

“I thought I was drunk,” said one man.

“Does he have a name?” asked a lady.

The children said, “May we hug him?”

And when Jerry batted those eyelashes, and looped that tongue around the cherries in a lady’s hat, I understood Kate Begley’s shrewdness. Later, when the town came to know her story, and when she opened her matchmaking business, she became their beloved star.

I stayed for some weeks and helped; Bobby wondered if he might “linger forever and a day.” We found a house for rent on the edge of town, just below the church, a farm where the husband had died; the lone son had been killed in the war and the wife had lost her spirit, as she put it. I take the credit for seeing it first—on account of the high barn at the rear, and when we knocked on the door, we found that the lady who answered had been the one who’d almost lost her hat to Jerry outside the church.

At the side, a separate building had once housed seasonal laborers, and on the wall of this bunkhouse Kate Begley put up a sign that said,
MARRIAGES MADE HERE
, and beside fashioned another sign—a large pink heart. Six months later, when the owner died, and her sister sold the place to Kate and allowed her to buy it by installment, Kate put out a board with a name: She called the house “Kenmare.”

She still had that same blind faith.

I came back to Ireland and resumed my life as a collector of folklore, this time an easier career on account of the car. My journeys took less time, my stays could be longer, and I had no need of worry lest I didn’t get in off the road before dark—because I could always sleep in the car even if I came to a town that had no room at the inn.

As I traveled, I mused so often on the life that I’d seen out on the plains of Kansas. Setting up the new Kenmare had been a delightful exercise, but where was I in all this? I had needed to come back home, and I felt, in doing so, that Kate now had a measure of safety and comfort—a new life and a resumed career.

In some ways, it mirrored what she’d had at Lamb’s Head—becoming a matchmaker while waiting for her parents to return from the dead. This time, she had the additional reality of Bobby Bilbum living in the barn, with Jerry now close to fully grown, and the old grain barn being high enough for him; and Sydney having plenty of room to run around and get her little snout into squealing and happy things.

Kate wrote often to me—long letters in that careful, “best girl in the class” handwriting, and always with a little flourish of homily at the end, or a piece of advice, or—something on which she was very keen—a useful tip. Three examples:

“In Love, as in Life, Courage comes from the Heart, not the Head.”

“Always polish your boots last thing at night, because their shine will brighten your Life next morning and make you feel prepared for the day.”

“Now that you have a car, always carry a bottle of vinegar with you—it’s useful for all kinds of cleaning and it gets rid of smells.”

She often asked about my life and my work, but never about Venetia. In Kansas one night I’d told her what had happened on the beach that awful day. Kate looked shattered.

“Did I make a terrible mistake?” I asked.

She stood up and ruffled my hair, her way of showing maximum affection.

“There’s no way of telling what will happen,” she said, but she remained muted for a long time afterward and never mentioned Venetia again.

By then, no matter what we’d been through, my dominant feelings toward Kate could have been defined as “grateful”—not least because our exploits together had given me a new sense of proportion. I can’t say that I didn’t think of Venetia as often as I used to—but I moped less about her. In fact I moped not at all. I gnashed my teeth, yes, and I swore—but largely at my own stupidity.

And that awful, weakening pain of loss—that had gone; I assumed that it had been erased by the fact that she hadn’t died.

As to my future, I put everything on hold until I could measure myself against what I knew, my own country, my own work, my own normal life. Soon, I told myself, I would know what I wanted.

Thus I went about Ireland in the year or so from September 1946, relatively calm, celibate, absorbed in my work, and able to pay increasing attention to my parents, to James and Miss Fay, and to my work. I finished the basic interviewing for my report on matchmaking in rural Ireland, and got on with writing it up—the little segment from our fraught and bombed German village piqued my interest all over again.

One day, I telephoned home. (By now Mother had trained Lily the housekeeper to understand that we didn’t have to wait for the phone to ring before we could use it.) My father told me that a telegram had arrived for me.

I said, “Open it.”

“I-I-I don’t like doing that, Ben.”

I said, “But it never stopped you before,” and he dropped the phone. That was the only mention I ever made of the Venetia telegrams, and he proved the truth of it.

I never raised that fact with my parents, never discussed with them the notion that my father—and I suspect that my mother never knew—willfully and deliberately kept me from reuniting with Venetia. And he knew of my grief, I know he knew it.

Mother took over the conversation.

“What did you say to your father, Ben?” She sounded too agitated to open the wound.

“I believe there’s a telegram for me, Mother.” I’d already told her quietly one day that I’d “met Venetia and she’s fine, there are twin grandchildren and she may be coming back to Ireland, but she’s married again,” and I hadn’t allowed the conversation to develop beyond that. Nor had she.