The Matchmaker of Kenmare (50 page)

“It’s from your friend, Miss Begley.”

“Read it, Mother.” Why did my heart suddenly hammer?

“Nana getting married in Cork. Thursday, July 17. You’re invited. See you there Imperial Hotel. Love, Kate.”

Those were my opening notes, written that night. No more than twenty people attended, fewer at the church ceremony—which was held in the sacristy, not in the main church, because the bride and groom had both been widowed. The wedding “breakfast,” as we always called it, took place at two o’clock in the afternoon.

“Why gray? Why didn’t she wear white?” I asked Kate.

“Ben, don’t you know anything? Widows who marry again wear gray—out of respect to the dear departed. And white’s for virgins, you know that.”

“Then there’s a lot of fibbing that goes on in wedding dresses,” I said, and she punched me.

That was the old Kate, the Kate that I had first met. She radiated excitement and good humor, gave me a full briefing on Jerry and Sydney—and had found, or so she thought, a potential wife for Bobby Bilbum.

“Problem is—she’s as fat as he is and I don’t know what to do.”

“Leave them alone,” I said.

“But they want to have children—” and she began to laugh so much that we both ended up with streaming eyes.

Mrs. Holst bore down on us. Kate whispered, “And I have something marvelous happening which I’ll tell you later—because Nana wants to talk to you, I can tell from the way she’s walking toward us.”

“Oh, God,” I said. “Stay here.”

But Kate said, “No, I want to talk to the bridegroom,” and darted away.

Marvelous?
I thought,
What can that mean? Marvelous? Miller? No. She’d have told me
.

Mrs. Holst (as she always was and would be to me) sat in Kate’s chair.

“Now, young man.” Her eyes gleamed.

She’s had sherry and more
, said my inner voice.
Watch out
. I hadn’t seen or heard from her since that offensive letter she wrote after Belgium, more or less alleging that I had caused World War II in order to hurt Kate.

“Congratulations,” I said, in a voice stronger than I felt.

“I want to talk to you,” she said.

“Here I am.”

“Why don’t you go back to the States with Kate, marry her, make her sell that place, and come back here?”

I hadn’t been drinking, yet I almost fell over.

“Kate has her own plans for her life.”

Delia Holst grabbed my forearm. Jesus!
Was she once a wrestler?
asked my inner gent.

“Look. Mr. Miller hasn’t come. And he won’t.”

“You sound glad about that,” I said.

“That fellow worried me. There was danger in him.”

I recollected that she had said something similar about me—Kate had written it in her ledger.

“Well, there may have been danger in him, but she married him. And she’ll go on believing that one day he’ll turn up.”

Mrs. Holst grabbed my knee. “He won’t. He’s dead. I got the telegram. Missing in action. That means to all intents and purposes dead.”

I gasped. “And you didn’t tell her?”

“Why should I? Don’t you know anything? What do you think has been keeping her together? Now do as I say. Marry her. She trusts you.”

On several counts, including bewilderment, I shook my head—and came up with the right words. Or so I thought.

“But you don’t even like me.”

Mrs. Holst said, “What are you talking about?”

I said, “You’ve never shown me anything but a frown. Or a scowl.”

“God in Heaven,” she said. “You know nothing about women. If I were forty years younger I’d eat you. I’ve never been nice to men that I couldn’t have.”

She rose and walked away, saying over her shoulder, “Go on. Do what you’re told.”

I didn’t tell Kate her grandmother’s directive—not then, anyway. The encounter left me feeling shaken. What had all the hostility been about? And did she now want me to marry Kate to give everybody an easy mind? Where did I fit in?

As I tried to sleep, I began to calculate the possibility. I can’t say that the idea had never crossed my mind, and now the circumstances had offered level ground, so to speak—no Charles, no Venetia. Kate took another step in the direction her grandmother had suggested—by inviting me to come to Lebanon, Kansas, and observe the “something marvelous happening” that she had mentioned.

Two weeks later, I traveled with Kate Begley for the last time. Our final journey together. We, who had been such intrepid traveling companions, would never do it again. This time, we did it with greater flair—on the SS
Ansonia
, as exquisite a liner as ever sailed the sea. We took a suite, all velvet and leather; Kate paid, because her grandmother had given her a gift of cash, she didn’t say how much. In New York, we stayed one night, then I rented a convertible car, and with the roof down we drove to Lebanon, Kansas. Wide skies. Open roads. Wonderful.

The bunkhouse had expanded into a much stronger building with a
porch and two waiting rooms, one for the men and one for the women. Somebody, perhaps Bobby, had improved upon the great pink heart—it seemed less vulgar, more alluring. The crude
KENMARE
sign had been replaced with a swinging board and delicate sign-writing.
MARRIAGES MADE
was new too, with delicate scrolling and ladylike borders. If Kate had done all of this in little more than a year, business must have been fine.

Which of them gave me the warmest reception—Bobby, Jerry, or Sydney? It has to be Sydney, who refused to leave my arms all evening. Jerry was cooler about these things, and by now had become a giant; yet, how he fluttered those eyelashes when he saw me. Bobby wept, and produced a hug close to suffocation; it felt like having a tent fall on me.

“Have you told him our marvelous news?” he asked Kate.

“Yes,” she said.

“Wait until you meet her, dear boy, you will be so jealous. Ethel—isn’t that a glorious name?”

“And,” said Kate, recovering fast, “he also knows about the ball.”

She hadn’t told me until aboard ship—“to keep up the suspense,” she said.

Her “customers,” as she called them, knew her story—of her “waiting for Captain Miller.” Many of them, from all over that part of the state, had formed a little committee, and they’d begun a search. Kate understood the kindness of their motives, and no matter how it hurt her soul, she humored them by going along with it.

Now they had raised funds to bring every Charles Miller they could find to empty, lonely, little Lebanon, Kansas, in the wild but kind and deep hope that somehow the gods who manage these things would find her Charles Miller and bring him along too.

She saw it for what it was—a cockeyed idea, with its roots in great kindness. I wondered whether they had another motive—that in their searching they had established the truth from the U.S. military and were in fact saying to Kate, “Give up—there are other fish in the sea.”

I’d asked her on board ship whether she’d ever heard from the embassy in Dublin.

“No. Which supports me, Ben, doesn’t it?”

I said, “I see your point,” and didn’t say a word about her grandmother.

“How actively have you been searching?” I asked her.

“I’ve left it to Destiny now,” she said. “I’ve done all I can,” and she closed down the conversation in her usual style. “Fate is kind, Ben, as often as it’s cruel.”

And we sailed on—two people who, as she might have put it, had bobbed about like corks on the Sea of Fate. Or, as I preferred, had been subject to the same vagaries of life as one of my beloved scholars;
Carminis hic fienem lacrimis faciemus
—“Let us now put an end to songs of grief, but not an end to love.”

To say it another way, her grandmother’s exhortation to me had begun to make a lot of sense. Kate might well have been thinking so too, and given our open affection toward each other, anybody who had seen us as we’d traveled to and through America, and now in Lebanon, Kansas, would have assumed married love.

With new power in my heart, and a feeling that many things of the worst kind in my life had come to an end, I set myself to observe Kate. I wanted to see how she had taken to life on the prairie. If the matchmaking business had become a success—and signs of prosperity abounded—how was she doing it? Was her approach here any different from how she operated in Ireland? Whence came her customers?

From what I could see, Lebanon sat in the heart of farming country, and the little interaction I’d had with local people when we first came here suggested decent, straightforward folk who worked hard. I didn’t yet know, though, some of the relevant social factors, such as the general level of financial comfort, the ratio of single women to single men, the popularity of marriage.

Perhaps the most likely noticeable difference would be in the practice of religion—or so I thought. In the Ireland that Kate had known, close to 100 percent of the rural population attended Mass on a Sunday; here I didn’t know how many denominations existed or the depth and zeal of observance. The plains hold many worshippers.

All things considered, I could scarcely have been more interested in anything in the world when, on that first morning, I sat in the back room of her “office,” as she liked to call it, and listened through the open door to the first marriage candidate of the day.

Nothing in Kate’s practice of matchmaking had changed. Had we been in Borneo, she would have said the same things—or so I felt. Here,
though, in Kansas, something unusual did happen—the first man to arrive brought his mother.

He had the same shyness, the same awkwardness as Neddy the Drover. His name was Jubal Johnson—had Kate not asked him to spell it I should never have known how, and however deeply American his accent, he spoke so slowly that I had no difficulty in understanding every word.

Not that he said much at all; his mother did most of the talking. Jubal sat there as if he were mute; his ears, thinned by the weather, looked like wide, semi-transparent leaves. Mrs. Johnson said that she wanted him to find a wife; she was getting old; the farm was now too big; he needed help; and he needed to have children, and stop being a child himself. Those were his mother’s words.

Kate said, “Let me talk to your son alone, right, Mrs. Johnson?”

She had to ask twice. First, the mother said, “He don’t talk for himself.” And then she said, “No secret questions, now.”

Kate said, “I’m sure you have no secrets, Mrs. Johnson.”

Jubal relaxed—that was Kate’s gift. He’d have told her anything, and he did say that the reason he hadn’t married was because he wouldn’t put any woman he liked under the same roof as his mother. Kate told me afterward that she had difficulty in not laughing out loud.

“How do you handle something like that?” I asked her.

Kate said, “A girl came to see me a few weeks ago looking for a husband. She said that most men are frightened of her. She’s six feet tall, built like a small castle, and although she has a kind heart it’s well hidden and she shows to the world an eye so cold I needed a fur coat. That’s the girl for Jubal Johnson.”

Next came the weekend, busy beyond endurance. They came from all over the state to see her, and from northern Missouri, and from southern Nebraska, and from northwestern Colorado—and one youngish woman had come all the way up from the north of Arkansas. On Sunday afternoon, Bobby Bilbum sold hot dogs and ice cream, and encouraged people to hand fistfuls of grass and pieces of fruit to Jerry, who batted his eyelids at them all.

They came from farms and feed stores and grain mills and grocery stores, from church congregations and sporting clubs, from the plains and the prairies; she brought Catholics and Protestants and Shakers and Quakers and Lutherans and Baptists and Buddhists.

“Where are the Jews?” I asked.

“They have their own matchmakers,” said Kate, “and they came here to meet me. I learned so much from them.”

“How did you get so busy, so fast?”

She laughed. “Ben, d’you remember the look on your face when I first told you I was buying a giraffe?”

“I can never see the look on my own face, Kate.”

“Jerry packs them in,” she said. “About three weekends after you went back, people started arriving here at six o’clock on Sunday morning. The state police had to come and regulate the traffic, there must have been five hundred cars and trucks and tractors. In this dusty little place! Bobby thought that he’d died and gone to Heaven.”

Let me describe her to you, as she sat there that twilit evening, the last marriage seeker gone. The sun of the plains had ended her pallor and yet had given her white lines around her eyes from squinting against the glare. She still cared for her hands, which didn’t look like they belonged on the land. We sat on the porch, maybe two hundred yards from the nearest house in that small town, and yet she looked as though she’d come from a salon in New York. Her long skirt of charcoal gray barathea rustled every time she moved; and I tried not to look at the bosom beneath the embroidered cream blouse.

Her command impressed me more than anything—that calm, level air, changed only by a sudden thought, question, or laugh. Call me fickle, call me disloyal to my past life, but my heart turned over that evening. I could understand, and longed to replicate for her, every caring act my father had ever done for my mother. Even now, such a long time afterward, I wish I hadn’t.

I’d planned to stay two weeks—until the day after the ball. It would mark the end of the search—or so I learned, because as Kate and I stood on the porch of the house, and watched a group of happy men string a
banner that shouted
THE CHUCK MILLER BALL
, she said to me, “If this doesn’t do it—nothing will.”

“Meaning you’ve stopped searching?” I asked, as my mind said,
At long, bloody last
.

“Ben, you’ve been such a patient man.”

“The things that happened to us, Kate. The things that we did, Miss Begley.”