Venetia Kelly's Traveling Show (10 page)

Nothing. Nothing at all. Each of them had lived among people whom their people had always known; other Irish farmers and their farm laborers and their countryside society never touched anything like the wilder lives I’m describing.

When Venetia Kelly was born, on the first day of the new century, Mother was eighteen—as was my father; they’d been born a few months apart in 1882. Harry MacCarthy, my compelling father, had finished school at seventeen, and was just about to read for a liberal arts degree in Dublin when a stroke killed his father. The farm at that time didn’t generate enough money to hire a manager, so Harry, bright, sparky, and keen to be a man of the world, had to stay at home and run the place for his mother, my grandmother.

As for Mother—she’d always wanted to be a farmer’s wife, which wasn’t what her family wanted at all. They’d hoped, given some of the Hopkins family connections, that she’d marry a public figure, such as a judge who came from a good family, or a young man who would inherit
commerce, shipping, or banking—because although she was shy, she certainly had enough by way of looks and quiet style to land such a catch.

Mother, however, showed little interest in much beyond her cows—and other animals, and harvests, and all farm and country things, and she went through her young life as shy as a maiden, unsocial and living at home, without as much as a suitor or a swain, until Harry, with the red hair, and the polka-dot pocket handkerchief, and the merry grin, and the slight speech hesitation and three hundred acres, dropped by in 1910, when she too was twenty-eight years old. Everything, it seems, happened in 1910. Until everything else happened in 1932.

H
ere’s another—in the circumstances, very significant—fact about my family. My father, in his mid-teens, made a journey to visit an uncle in the west of Ireland, and found himself being invited with said uncle to Coole Park, the home of Ireland’s most famous widow, Lady Augusta Gregory.

Whenever my father spoke of education he expressed his disappointment at how he had been denied. “A lost opportunity,” he’d say, “is like uneaten fruit. It rots.” I never quite got what he meant; I do now. But in Coole Park, under the famous copper beech tree, he had sat on the grass, at a picnic, and heard Lady Gregory, this cultural powerhouse, in her widow’s weeds, discussing the setting-up of a national Irish theater. Her partner, not present, would be her “dear friend” the poet Mr. Yeats. Yeats had said to her, “As with the voice the spirit,” suggesting that “only an Irish actor can convey the Irish spirit, since words are the clothing of the soul.”

My father came away from that meeting quivering with thrills. He told me of it over and over again. They’d talked all day about acting.
Someone did an illustration, a character sketch from Shakespeare—the moment when King Richard III wakes from his dream and faces his conscience: “The lights burn blue. It was now dead midnight.”

“You-you-you could see it,” said my father. “You could see the anguish in this actor’s face. He was the murdering king, he-he-he was shifty and regretful and everything.”

On the way home from Coole Park, his heart had “caught fire,” he said, at the notion of “being” another person as an actor must be, of “writing” with his own face and voice and body and actions the story of a completely other person.

My father told me that ever after that picnic, when he was out in the yard, or the fields, climbing the stairs to bed at night, aching in every bone after hours of labor, or bounding down the stairs next morning, the thought never left him—and he said that he studied people thereafter as though he were compiling an album. “All-all-all their shapes. And-and-and their actions and voices.”

Indeed he became and remained a good mimic; for a man with a mild stammer, he was amazing with nuance and shade.

“I missed my vocation,” he once said to me. “I should have been an actor.”

Which was, after all, the life of Sarah Kelly. She took role after role by storm, and all the early playwrights of that period, including Mr. Yeats himself, insisted that she appear in their works.

Sarah sailed into Dublin society as a lovely ship glides into home port. Thereafter—and for the rest of her days—she lived in some style. In the beginning, she was aided by an aunt, King Kelly’s sister, Gretta. Though her married name was Monahan, Gretta was never called anything but “Miss Kelly.” Mr. Monahan had quit the scene after two years of marriage, departing with some suddenness; he crashed headfirst from his horse into a stone wall during a foxhunt.

His widow said, “He was on a big gray horse and three quarters of a bottle of port.”

In this merry widow’s household now dwelt this glamorous single mother from New York, already a bright light on Broadway, a new star in the motion pictures, and about to become one of the great figures of the
Abbey Theatre—and her daughter, Venetia, a winsome and lively child. Plus Mrs. Haas.

For Aunt Kelly, Heaven had come to earth. She set up a social round for her beautiful niece. Every Sunday she held what she called her “Dublin lunch,” a salon, in effect, and she invited the great and famous—“the cream of the city,” she said, “rich and thick.”

N
ow the cast is more or less assembled—the main characters in this, my story. My life was irretrievably and fundamentally altered and shaped by them: by my dear father, an ordinary Irish farmer who worked harder than any man he hired; by Mother, a farmer’s wife, with recipes, account books, cows to be milked, chickens to be fed; by King Kelly, a bruiser dripping with charms; by his daughter, Sarah Kelly, and above all by her daughter, Venetia, whose life, whatever it was, has defined mine.

Other characters will come, go, or stay, as players must do: Mrs. Haas; Billy Flock and his wife, Large Lily, our housekeeper; and hosts of others—acrobats, egotists, storytellers, politicians, actors.

And Blarney, the ventriloquist’s doll, who mesmerized an entire country; Professor Fay, who believed that he knew everything; and his sister, the adorable Dora. Through her, one other—and major—character walked onstage.

I had often heard her mention “a dear friend who knows everything in the world.” She kept saying that I must meet him one day. And I did meet him, as you soon will too. James Clare was his name, and he did know everything in the world. He wore black; he had a placid face with
a nose like an owl’s; he taught me about time and self-respect, and the connection between the two.

Shall I count myself a player too? I must. The fact that I’m the storyteller here, that I’m the narrator, the observer of these people, should neither absolve nor exclude me. Whether I had an effect on them even remotely proportional to the way they influenced me—how can I tell? Can you see yourself accurately? Even when we look in the mirror, isn’t everything reversed?

Forgive me if I’ve taken too long to introduce them to you. I promise that it will all prove relevant. As people are, so shall they be, except for the fact that those few of us who were changed—well, we were truly changed.

And so we come to what Mother ever afterward referred to, in a whisper, as the “Catastrophe.” I should have been ready for it. Hindsight, I know, but I now understand that a mood of apprehension had fallen over me like an invisible net. As it turned out, I had good cause.

One Sunday in January 1932, we had a guest for lunch—“Missy Casey” she called herself, Julia Casey, from two farms away. Imagine a duck in a fitted tweed coat and laced brown shoes; that’s what she looked like.

Missy Casey was a neighbor who also insisted that she was “an intimate friend.” She demanded more attention than triplets, or so Mother said. Everything she did drew notice to herself; for instance, she sent Dinny, her frequently mad laborer, over that Sunday morning at seven o’clock to say that Missy Casey would be fifteen minutes late—for lunch six hours later. She hadn’t been to our house for two or three years, probably because she was so irritating.

When she arrived, she sat on the bench in the porch to get her breath back—though we saw no sign of panting. After all she’d arrived in a trap driven to our very door by Dinny the Madman. She fluttered her eyelashes—I mean a true flipping and fluttering—when my father appeared, and after several minutes in which Mother, my father, and I stood in a semicircle around her, she declared herself ready for lunch.

Which began badly. Missy Casey looked across the table at me as though she had never seen me before.

“Louise,” she said, her face reddening, “where have you been hiding him? Ben, stand up, let me look at you. My heaven”—as I stood—“you’re six feet three. Louise, lock him up.”

My father, sensing my loathing of such attention, said, “We-we-we feed him oats. He has his own nose bag.”

Missy Casey stared and stared at me, then looked down at her plate, shaking her head. “I wish I were twenty again,” she said.

Mother looked at my father and shook her head, a warning to say nothing. We all began to eat. Then came the next grenade: Missy Casey began a conversation about Saint Valentine.

“I’m so looking forward to his feast day,” she said. “It falls on a Sunday this year. D’you think Father Hogan will say anything about it at Mass? Wouldn’t you think he’d want to preach on someone as important as Saint Valentine?”

“Important?” said my father. “How so?”

This old trout had another technique for retaining attention. After making some opening statement, she’d take a mouthful of food, and then lay three demure fingers to her closed lips. We, of course, had to wait until she’d finished chewing, and I’ve seen cows quicker with cud; even mild Mother said Missy Casey was “an arch-ruminant.”

“Harry MacCarthy, you’re just like Father Hogan,” said Missy Casey, after a swig of milk from her glass, which frosted her mustache. “Why did Father Hogan say nothing about Saint Valentine? I’ll tell you. He’s afraid of love. Like all men. He’s—simply—afraid—of love.” She looked at my mother. “Isn’t that true, Louise? Men are afraid of love, aren’t they?”

Mother said, without thinking, “That’s true indeed.”

I knew that Mother didn’t mean what she said. She was agreeing with this irritating dame for the sake of moving on to the next topic. But my father coughed in that hard way he had when he was irked. He took a drink of water and coughed again, and I saw him decide to say nothing.

“Maybe I’m being extreme,” said Missy Casey. “Maybe I am. Because—” And she took another mouthful of food. Again we waited. When she unfastened the clasp of her fingers from her lips she said, “Now where have I put my bag?”

All three of us, Mother, my father, and I, we rose from the table and began to look for the bag; Mother found it in the porch, where Missy Casey had recovered her breath.

“Because,” she continued, “I received this last year. In the post. Anonymously. I carry it around with me.”

This spinster, older than a stone, dry as a shrub, nostrils like gun barrels, drew out a large pink envelope and flourished it.

“See? See?”

Mother reached for it, took out the card within, and read the words aloud, “Be. My. Valentine.”

My father had said nothing since the remark about men and love. He reached for the card and the envelope. Missy Casey watched his scrutinies.

“Harry, don’t tell me,” she said, “you recognize the handwriting?”

“Can-can-can you do copperplate too?” he asked.

Mother saw the knife coming out of the sheath. She said, with her voice in a hurry, “D’you know, I never heard of Valentine cards down here in the country. We’re getting very modern altogether.”

My father handed the card and the envelope back to Missy Casey.

“Well, that’s-that’s-that’s a love you can be sure of,” he said. I knew he was angry. “You can tell a lot from handwriting.”

“Don’t tell me it’s yours?” she said like a girl.

He let a silence rise. Then he said, “I-I-I think it’s yours.”

Such an outburst as we then had.

“Ohhh!” Missy Casey grasped the edge of the table, dragging the cloth. “Ohhh!” she said again, a tortured wail.

My father looked at me and winked.

Bang! Bang! Bang!
Missy Casey thumped the table, and crockery hopped, and cutlery rattled.