Venetia Kelly's Traveling Show (11 page)

“That’s a terrible thing to say. That I’d send a Valentine card to myself. Ohhh!”

She rose from her chair and staggered from the table, reaching for the wall. Mother raised fierce eyebrows at my father, who nodded as though to say, “She did, she did.” He looked at me and winked again.

Mother followed Missy Casey, and that was the last we saw of her. Next we heard the pony trap rattle away, with Dinny the Madman screaming prayers at the horse.

When Mother came back in, she said to my father, “That was uncalled for.”

“She-she-she asked for it.”

“How so?”

“That remark about men—she’s always doing that. And anyway she did send the card to herself.”

Mother said, “And where’s the harm if she did?”

My father shook his head impatiently and I got Missy Casey’s untouched and spurned dessert.

But a chill had fallen between my parents, a rare occurrence in our house. Its very unusualness was the kind of thing I should more closely have observed.

A
fter lunch, to escape the house’s mood, I went outdoors. Fog had come in. From the yard I went on a long looping walk that I’d worked out since the first days I was allowed to roam the fields alone. I was six years old then, and imagine what the woods looked like. Thrilling—a mysterious forest, especially in fog, when all branches took on new shapes. I saw caves that didn’t exist, and the ghosts of animals long extinct—a fog in the woodlands is a work of ever-changing magic. Even now, though I was a dozen years older, and they seemed less populated by the supernatural, the woods served me well.

The well stands away from the woods, its mound like a green breast out in the fields. As you approach you hear the water burble faintly against the pleasant and orderly walls. Those stones have lined the well for centuries. This is the best, the freshest drink that you can have.

When I emerged from the trees, I saw an old woman by the well; she stood still, and she was looking toward me. Nothing unusual in that; the local people, from the cottages and from one or two of the smaller farms, drew buckets from here. Miss Fay often came with me as I fetched a pail
of water for them; going back to the cottage she always made the same joke about how we were Jack and Jill.

Still, I thought that I knew everybody who used this well, and I’d never seen this tall crone. Nor the garment she wore—except in paintings; she had an ankle-length black Kinsale cloak. As I drew closer I could see that it was lined with bright, shining green fabric, probably silk. The Kinsale cloak billows out into the world; it’s from another century; it has ruffles. You don’t see it much in the countryside, as it’s mainly worn by rich city women on classy occasions.

To add to the mystery, this creature also carried something I’d never seen except in storybooks—a wooden pail. All our buckets were enamel or galvanized metal.

I stopped and, unusually for me, I didn’t speak a greeting. The woman, much older than Mother or Missy Casey, beckoned me forward. She had an urgent air of command. I walked forward, picking my steps.

She waited, still beckoning. Beside the dark pool of the well the fog lay thickest, a gray blanket, swirling and dense. On and on she beckoned me until I stood no more than some feet from her. Now I could see that the cloak obscured the lower half of her face.

She felt strange in the way only a total stranger can. I knew I’d never seen her before—and I had been a boy who rode his bicycle like a hero all around these roads. She had a gray face, and her cloak’s hood also covered her head so that I couldn’t say what color hair she had—or indeed if she had any. Her high cheekbones—from what I could glimpse of them—suggested that once upon a time she might have been a beauty. Now she seemed tired, maybe exhausted.

I could have reached out and touched her face, as she could mine. Neither of us moved; I, frightened, held my hands by my sides. I felt the damp fog on my face, saw my breath on the air. She held the wooden pail in her hand. Her eyes searched me, every square inch, head to foot.

“Look at you,” she said.

A statement, one with no emotion in it, no kindness, no threat, no criticism, no praise. I kept my eyes down. Her creaking, slightly uncouth tones gave no identification. An Irish voice? Perhaps, but I couldn’t say whence.

“Look at you,” she said again.

Somewhere in the woods behind me a bird swore, harsh and high. The fog thickened.

“I’ve something to say to you, young lad,” she announced. “And you’ll remember it many times.”

Fear is what I remember. Of what, I didn’t know. Fear of having no control? Or fear that a stranger could presume to have an influence upon me, make an observation of me? As she now did, and this is what she said.

“You’re going to be given a shock, young lad.”

I found my voice. “Where are you from?”

She eyed me. “You’re thinking, ‘Is she real, or a witch or something?’ Aren’t you? And you’re thinking, ‘She looks like a witch, don’t she?’ That’s what you’re thinking.”

As indeed I was—those exact thoughts.

“I can tell a lot about you,” she said. “Just from looking at you, just from the light you give off. We all give off a light, and you’re thinking now, ‘If that’s the case, her light is gray.’ Isn’t that what you just thought?”

Again—exactly.

She said, “Now you know you can trust what I’m telling you. And I’ve one piece of advice that you’ll have to remember. You won’t know the truth about what came from the sea for many, many years, but keep away from it. Good-bye now.”

She turned her back, stooped to half-fill her wooden pail, and walked away into the fog. I thought,
She looks like something out of my book of
Grimm’s Fairy Tales. And then she called out over her shoulder, “Oh, I’m real enough, young lad.”

The truth about what came from the sea?
But what had come from the sea?

After a few minutes I followed the path that she’d taken, which leads to the road. Although she was a good deal older than me and carrying a pail of water, and I was young and a quick walker, I never saw her, never caught up with her.

You should find our well one day, you should go there, try to make it in winter, and stand there and try to imagine how eerie it felt. Had I been old I might have died of fright.

That path leads to the Fourpenny Road, but not a sign of her did I see
there. I halted in the gateway of Mr. Thompson’s house and looked up the driveway. On slightly higher ground now, the fog had thinned, and I could see right up to the front door—but not a person walked or stood anywhere. Except myself, puzzled and afraid in the fog and knowing somehow that I must tell nobody.

What was the truth of that encounter? Did I dream it? Or did I actually meet the old hag? Did I invent the story, my own mythology to prepare me for what was about to happen? Or to justify it?

I went home. In from the fog. I made myself some ham sandwiches. Mother appeared and had a cup of tea, and then Father arrived. We all sat at the kitchen table; she didn’t look at him. Missy Casey wasn’t mentioned—but she might have been in the room. I said nothing about the woman at the well.

A frost as stiff as this had fallen once before in our house, when my father was a day late coming home from the Galway races. No telegram, no message, and neighbors whom he’d met there had dropped by, asking if he was home yet.

This irked Mother, who then ripped into him when he did return, and the ice between them chilled everything for an unpleasant week. Since then all had been more or less sweet.

But this afternoon, he chatted to me more than usual, and in a louder voice. Mother read the newspaper, head down; she was hunched and a touch remote.

Except when he asked me, “Tonight’ll be great, won’t it?”

That’s when Mother looked up—at me. I answered her unspoken question.

“Venetia Kelly’s Traveling Show,” I said. “She’s coming to Cashel.”

Mother looked at my father; he avoided her eyes. Then she folded the newspaper very slowly and said, “I see.”

Rising from her chair, she walked from the room, passing behind his chair but not mine. Normally she patted his shoulder, or stroked his head, or mock-throttled him. That afternoon—nothing.

Walking very slowly, she reached the door, which she opened ceremoniously. She left the room like a queen—and then slammed the door so hard that the doorknob fell off. It had always been loose. My father rose, retrieved the white porcelain oval, and gingerly slid the knob back on again.

W
e reached the hall in Cashel an hour before the performance—my father had insisted. With nobody else there, we sat side by side in the empty, freezing place. I should have known, but then hindsight is despicable; it mainly tells us how stupid we’ve been. Father chattered like a monkey that night. I had rarely seen him so animated. His face had reddened slightly, as it did when we had company or he’d had a few swift whiskies. And he did this anxious thing with his hands, tenting and interlacing his fingers back and forth, over and over. He also shifted in his seat like a man with bad hemorrhoids.

I think we went in early because he’d hoped that we’d see some of the performers setting up the show. We didn’t—but we heard them. Behind the crooked hangings that passed for a stage curtain they shuffled and shoved, laughing and sending out little hollers to one another. At each sound my father put a hand to his ear like a hunter, and said, “Whisht!”—even if I hadn’t been speaking. From time to time he sat forward and clasped the back of the chair in front of him.

Time stays infamously slow in the countryside. The poster outside said
8:00 SHARP
, but not until a quarter past did people drift in. By half past eight the hall had filled, but untidily so; men stood at the back and
chatted; banter rattled back and forth; people left their seats to greet newcomers or to surprise a neighbor whom they had just seen three rows ahead, and so on. My father grew ever more impatient.

At twenty minutes before nine an imperfect drumroll came from behind the curtains. It started hard and high and stayed that way until the audience quieted, and then a man pranced out, a tall man, naked to the waist, thin as an orphan, torso white as a sick fish. He wore the skintight pants of a troubadour, wide red and yellow stripes, and he turned two somersaults in the narrow space between the curtains and the edge of the stage.

My father whispered to me, “He’s Michael. He’s one of the leading actors.”

Michael turned two more somersaults, took a bow, and disappeared behind the curtains. The drumroll began again, and a male voice called out, “Ladies and gentlemen, we present Miss Venetia Kelly in the famous Trial of Shylock by William Shakespeare.”

Part of the trick for this traveling company was to offer excerpts from plays in the school curriculum. This guaranteed attendance. Our teachers always said we missed a great deal by not seeing a performance of the play we were studying; that night, much of the audience consisted of boys and girls a little younger than me. In fact,
The Merchant of Venice
had formed part of my own English studies and I knew the play by heart.

The curtain drew open and revealed a row of chairs set up so that their backs formed a kind of hedge. This was evidently the front of the dock. On one chair knelt an elderly man facing the audience—clearly Antonio, because he looked so miserable. At the back of the stage, on a high stool, sat another old man, wearing a black robe and a judge’s long wig; he was the Duke.

The acrobat Michael reappeared. He now wore a short black velvet jacket, but his height meant that a gap of his flesh appeared between the hem of the jacket and the waistband of his striped pants. I could tell that he was playing Bassanio, because he walked up and down in a fret, and rubbed his hands together in an anguished way. Once or twice he gave us the benefit of a swift somersault. It had nothing to do with Shakespeare, but the audience loved it.

On a chair nearby, whetting an ugly knife on the sole of a shoe, sat
Shylock, a small, extremely fat man with no neck. His front teeth reminded me of a rabbit’s.

Somewhere offstage the drum rolled again. Michael, i.e., Bassanio, turned another swift somersault and got another cheer. As the drumroll stopped, everybody onstage stood up and stepped aside, making way.