Tipperary (14 page)

The girl leaned forward to claim his attention. “I believe, Mr. Wilde, that my grandmother was an actress who disappeared.”

That afternoon Oscar Wilde gave his last performance. Delivered in private, it changed two people's worlds forever, and the echoes have been resounding across my life for the decades since.

In 1900, Queen Victoria was still on the throne. The British Empire had redrawn the map of the world. And the name Oscar Wilde remained a synonym for disgrace. Other than the two agonized masterpieces inspired by prison,
De Profundis
and
The Ballad of Reading Gaol,
Wilde scarcely wrote again.

After his release, he became a lumbering, pained wanderer. He turned up in towns and villages across Europe, approaching people for free meals in return for telling them what he called “the extraordinary story of my life.” And he never condemned the man who brought him down, Lord Alfred Douglas, the dreadful Bosie, disliked by all who knew him— except, fatally, Oscar.

When Constance Wilde discovered that, after prison, Oscar had once again had a meeting with Bosie, she divorced him. She changed their children's surname to Holland—and she died, of spinal cancer, in 1898, a few months after Oscar was released.

Oscar fell like Lucifer tumbled out of Paradise. This was a man who had changed the meaning of the word “style.” He believed that creativity applies all across life. If one is artistic, he insisted, one should not be afraid to let the world see it—in dress, actions, household, presence. That was “style.” Now he lay in a room whose decor he famously disliked, desperately seeking any kind of help to stop his body from closing down, and having a last fillip of glory from nothing more than the memory of an actress he had once fleetingly met, and theatrical gossip he had once heard.

Oscar
gave
all the time—he gave in talk, in story, in money, in suffering. His impact on the theater and its practitioners was enormous, and continues. The world still flocks to
Lady Windermere's Fan,
to
An Ideal Husband,
and above all to
The Importance of Being Earnest.
Any English-speaking school that attempts drama has been bound to consider him in its repertoire. Many of his plays have had more than one production for the screen.

Those who knew him said that Wilde seemed incapable of being dull (which was, of course, his greatest fear). Before he died, distraught and reduced as he was, he could still have a profound effect on those around him. Charles O'Brien saw that, and said as much: Oscar's “last performance,” he observes, “changed two people's worlds forever.” To this day, Oscar Fingal O'Flahertie Wills Wilde affects all who consider him. Largely redeemed by history, and liberated in the huge advances of moral tolerance, he became even more influential after his death.

The great man became animated; he sat higher in his chair. Dr. Tucker smiled in approval at his young
protégée;
this was exactly what he had hoped she would do—cheer up the patient by listening to him, encourage him, attend him with her eyes and ears.

“Now I remember! Yes, April Burke, she had dark eyes like Constance. Constance was my wife. Dark eyes like you. Yes, oh, I recall it all now.”

April Burke said, “Please tell me about her.”

I felt myself tremble; a sweat began cooling my hot neck. Her face seemed to be alight. Without yet knowing that I had done so, I had determined that this was the woman who would make me safe, who would make me aspire to—and reach—greatness.

Taking his hands back from the young woman's, Mr. Wilde spread them in an Italian gesture and began.

“When I met her, she had come down from Belfast, part of a troupe that played the cities and big towns for most of the year. I was barely twenty-one; I had been visiting my mother in Dublin and had gone to Jammet's Restaurant with two friends to eat snails. She came in—no, she entered; yes, “entered” is the word. She had the true gift of drama, which is knowing how to gain immediate and universal attention.

“Of the people with her, I recognized a fellow called Fallon, who introduced me to your grandmother and said, ‘This is Mrs. Burke. She is greater than Sarah Bernhardt.’ And, my dear child, she was enchanting. We spoke only for a moment, and yet for days I continued to think about her; and even though I do not wish to dwell upon this, she had something of Miss Bernhardt's background, or so it was said.”

Now more comfortable, he warmed up his story. It appears that he had continued to make inquiries about the beautiful actress for many years—and needed to, because her story had such strangeness in it.

April Burke the First (as Mr. Wilde now called her) had been born in County Limerick, along the river Shannon's banks in a place called Parteen. In those days, and indeed even in 1900, actresses often ranked no higher than courtesans. It seems that, with very considerable bravery, April Burke the First took her beauty to the stage, where she sang and danced in all manner of companies. Here, I shall try to replicate the richness of Mr. Wilde's narration as he told the grandmother's story to the unknowing but glowing granddaughter.

She had an elegance of movement; her walk was a glide. And being a gifted actress, she had the same elegance in her hands too, and her arms. She gestured much when she spoke, and her gestures added the commas and brackets to her physical conversation. I remember her eyes—so much like your eyes, child, that deep softness of brown velvet. She had a long nose, not so retroussé as yours, not so tip-tilted, and with not the same curve at the end of the nostrils. Her lips had some but not all of your voluptuousness. And she had your smile, a wonderful, curving slice of joy. Nothing pleases a man so much as a woman's smile, particularly if she wants something from him.

Next day, I wrote to this Mrs. Burke at the theater in which she was appearing. I had to leave for London, but my mail was being sent onward to me. For days, then weeks, I waited for the favor of a reply, but none came—an unthinkable matter in those days of good manners. My life naturally took me over, and even though I never forgot that luminescent encounter, I did not pursue her as actively as I wished I had done.

Some years later, I wrote a play in which she would have been perfectly suited—like you, child, she had the willowy height, the abundant hair, the force of presence. I made inquiries about this beautiful Mrs. Burke and found that, even though nobody could offer any proof of anything surrounding her, a tale had begun to grow up—a tale of passion and sorrow and lives interrupted and Life turned violently around.

It appears that her husband, Terence Burke, owned a large estate in Tipperary, a county with which, as with so many others, I am unfamiliar. Mr. Burke had fallen in love with his actress in a frightful village hall, where she performed extracts from Shakespeare. Smitten to his heart, Mr. Burke pursued her, taking his carriage across the country to see her every performance.

After many such journeys, over many months, she finally agreed to marry him—I am given to understand that the winning note was sounded when he promised to build a theater in his house for her. And he did—he built a fully equipped theater seating one hundred people. When the last nail had been hammered into place, Terence Burke made this beautiful woman his wife. Part of the marriage bargain was that she should return to the stage for some time.

But another part of her bargain with Mr. Burke said that after a number of years she would retire and have children. And she did retire, and I believe that a son was born—in the great house.

Now the story's thread begins to fray. As I have heard it, when Mrs. Burke concluded her confinement and when doctor and midwife pronounced her fit and well, her husband came to see her, to receive and admire his son and heir. She is said to have handed him the child in the confinement room, showed him also the nursery that had been prepared, and slipped quietly out of the room, never to return.

But I have also heard that before her husband came to see his son, Mrs. Burke had received, in conditions of great secrecy, another visitor. This person, a handsome lady, quite exotic, had bribed the midwife to permit her entry to the confinement room through the servants' quarters. And I have heard that, after exhibiting signs of great distress at this stranger's arrival, Mrs. Burke, the beautiful actress, crept away with this creature that night.

Mr. Burke, understandably distraught, arranged for a great hunt to be mounted. He called upon all his rich friends and they assembled militias of searchers, but the beautiful fugitive was never found. She had quite simply vanished.

Soon after, the unfortunate man, having lost his wife in the worst way of all—by which I mean, to circumstances that remained inexplicable— died of natural causes. He was found—I could not have written it better myself—on the stage of his own theater in his own castle; he had suffered an apoplexy. The child disappeared, and I have no knowledge of the estate's resolution; I heard that lawyers closed the house up after his death, and that it lies disused. I expect it has fallen into the hands of the probate courts. Which must be a shame—I recall hearing that the house may have been one of the most beautiful in Europe, and therefore in the world.

And that, child, is the story, as I know it, of the beautiful Mrs. Terence Burke. Indeed, I recalled the plight of her child when I was writing the character of Jack Worthing in
The Importance of Being Earnest—
Jack, you remember, was found in a handbag.

During this narrative the room had fallen still. Outside the window, the hooves of Paris clopped by; I could see a gaunt tree on which a few leaves continued to cling. My mind ricocheted between the young woman before me and the house whose enchanted turrets I had seen across the fields since my first awareness—a place that indeed lay disused and disputed. I longed to burst forward and tell how Tipperary Castle had been in my eyes since birth—but Mr. Wilde had grown tired. He sagged in his chair, and his hands dropped from the many operatic gestures which he had employed to tell the tale. His brain had not yet dulled, and he had one last—and, for me, consuming—thought to offer.