Venetia Kelly's Traveling Show (23 page)

B
linking in the weak sunlight, I stumbled out into the street and found emotional refreshment. Against all this private drama of ours, the election campaign ran like a film sound track or an opera recitative. Every town had a rally, every village had posters. Through some parishes went men on bicycles, with crude bullhorns, and in Charleville that morning I saw again my favorite candidate.

I can’t give you his name, because he was—believe it or not—elected, and he went on to serve in Parliament for the rest of his life, and we have to respect the dead. He was my parents’ favorite candidate too, and he’d already given us great entertainment; we’d watched his career since we’d first seen him, at a rally in Cashel in the 1927 election.

Now, this morning, his face had grown redder, but he wore the same remarkable headgear; shaped like a flowerpot, it came straight from a nineteenth-century stage-Irish cartoon—it even had a buckle on the front like a leprechaun’s hat. He stood with a megaphone on a parked farmer’s cart, the horse swishing its tail now and then. He wore tall boots, tied at the top with harvesting twine. He had a medically compelling wealth of saliva. Here, roughly, is what I heard him say.

“Ladies and gentlemen, yes. I come before you, yes. To stand beside
you. And to stand behind you as you go forward, yes. And as we look ahead, we will have no turning back. This country is at a standstill, yes. Sideways at a crossroads, that’s where we are. Which road will you take? Ask yourself that, yes. That crossroads can have only the one road. Which road will I take, yes? Answer came there none. I’m here to guide you down that one road. ’tisn’t the road to rack and ruin. But you already know that; otherwise you wouldn’t be at a standstill, at the crossroads, not knowing which way to turn. And ’tisn’t the road to pestilence, famine, and decay. You know that for a fact. Every farmer should be getting a better price for your milk. Your local creamery should be paying you more money. I’m here to guide you down the crossroads.”

A heckler shouted, “Come down here and look at yourself up there,” and the dozen people listening laughed.

Perhaps he would be successful and get elected because nobody could make out a blind thing he was saying. And in that he wasn’t alone.

Our candidate’s confused oratory mimicked my thoughts. I came home from Charleville reeling and tumbling, my mind full of the wide, stylish house and all of that conflicting experience. And—I had done as I’d said I would; I had found him. As I drove I grappled with what to tell Mother, how much to divulge, and how to phrase it. How should I control the delight that I genuinely felt? Such a pleasure, seeing my father and speaking to him again.

Nor could I say how much I’d enjoyed the company of Sarah Kelly. I’d seen Venetia only twice, once to be introduced, and once fleetingly as she passed through the house; on neither occasion did she acknowledge me. As I neared home I understood that the good, positive news of having found my father would distract Mother sufficiently, and I’d never have to give my own reactions.

She’d heard the car, and she’d come to the back door to intercept me.

“Did you—?” She let the question hang.

“I found him. After much searching.” I was able to smile. “And I had two long talks with him.”

“When is he coming home?”

“One thing at a time.”

She caught my sleeve, a new habit. “How is he?”

“The best thing to do, Mother, is for us to sit down and I’ll tell you everything.”

Her eyes filled with tears. “Oh, thank God. Thank God.”

She walked with me into the house; I could see Large Lily peering at us through the window.

Mother said, “We’ll go upstairs,” meaning a private talk sitting on the couch in my parents’ bedroom.

“Now. Tell me everything.” She sat no more than two feet from me; her fingernails went to her mouth to be chewed.

“Well—”

Mother interrupted. “Did he ask for me?”

“I said that you were fine, but you miss him; he asked twice.”

“That I’m fine. But I miss him.” She often did this, repeated somebody’s words so that she could think aloud. “I’m not that fine, but I do miss him, so that bit is true. When is he coming home—did you ask him?”

“I’m working on a plan,” I said. “It’s based on what I saw.” I lied—or did I? Sometimes we know what we’re going to do before we know it.

“Oh!” She clapped her hands. “That means he’ll come home. Oh, good man, Ben. I knew I could depend on you. What did he say about the money, did you mention the money?”

I now had two dilemmas in one moment. How could I tell her that he seemed to have no intention of coming home? And that I’d had no discussion that could solve the money problem?

Luck helped me. Large Lily called up the stairs to say that we had a visitor.

“The professor, ma’am.”

Mother flung a casual preen at the mirror, and ran down.

As she left, I said, “Do I have to meet him?”

She didn’t answer, so I wandered along the landing to my own room and sat there on the window seat looking out. From the voices I knew that the professor had arrived alone; had Miss Fay been with him I would certainly have gone down to meet her.

The conversation lasted so long that I almost fell asleep. When eventually I heard the professor huff and puff his way out of the front door, I came downstairs. Mother greeted me.

“I have good news,” she said. “We have somebody who wants to stay in the cottage for a couple of months and he’s going to pay me in advance today. We’ll be meeting him later.”

Distracted, she dropped for the moment any further inquiries about my father, and I had a peaceful few hours.

A
t three o’clock Mother called me, told me to put on my coat and come with her. We walked in lemon sunshine down to the river and along to the cottage. A pony trap stood there, and some hubbub seemed under way. As we approached, a man in rough clothes came out, fetched a large valise, and hauled it into the cottage. He came out again and took another trunk.

“It looks as though our tenant means to stay for a while,” muttered Mother; she seemed excited and I felt grateful.

The man in the rough clothes came out once more, walking half backward, and thanking an unseen person within. He clambered into the pony trap, hupped the horse, and clattered away. Mother knocked on the door and called out a demure “Hello?”

A great voice hollered back: “Come in, come in.”

I stayed behind, watching some waterfowl scurrying on the river and wondering why they seemed never to feel the cold, and speculating whether, if the river were ever to freeze, their legs would get caught in the ice.

Voices came from the cottage—the large booming tone, now in conversation but scarcely less powerful, and then, to my delight, the sound
of Mother laughing, something I hadn’t heard in the previous two weeks. Next, she appeared in the doorway and said over her shoulder to the—as yet unseen—gentleman inside, “And my son is here with me. Ben?”

I remember him most by my first impression—the eyebrows. We have an insect we call a “Hairy Molly,” a kind of centipede; farmers anticipate the winter’s chills by the color of the fur. These eyebrows looked just like that—thick, waggling stripes of fur, brown principally, but with a bizarre tinge of a tan color here and there. The face had cheeks that reminded me of a pippin apple—red-veined and crackled, and then came the waistcoat, the yellow check vest, half-gambler, half-frog. And that was my first encounter with Thomas Aquinas Kelly, better known as King.

Neither Mother nor I guessed the connection, nor would we know for some time. All we understood at first was that we had met a man by name Thomas A. Kelly; “a most distinguished businessman,” Professor Fay had said to Mother, “who made all his money in the States and is back home in the land he loves.” Professor Fay could and should have said “rogue” and “crook” and “Fascist,” but he didn’t.

Instead we saw this flashy man with heavy charm. Ponderous as a bull, he breathed as if he had asthma. He smiled a vast mouthful of teeth, he shook my hand like a returned emigrant—and we never heard the pillars of the temple cracking.

Had my father been there, he’d have said as he did about all dodgy characters: “Put a coat over that fellow’s head.”

But my father wasn’t there and I was the one who—in an entirely different context—recognized this Mr. Kelly; I was the one who got excited, and whispered, “Mother!” I’d heard the name and seen the photographs; he was running for the government in North Cork. Now Professor Fay appeared, peering over those heavy black spectacles.

“He needs a place away from the hurly-burly,” Professor Fay said.

We should have been more suspicious; King Kelly bent over Mother’s hand and kissed it. Then he stood in the doorway of the cottage with Professor Fay and made admiring comments.

“This is the best thatched house I’ve seen in a long while,” he said.

Mother said to him, “And Professor Fay tells me you’re from not far away.”

“The broad fields of North Cork,” he said. “But the wider world sent for me when I was young.”

Other than the help around the farm, Mother had avoided meeting anybody since my father’s departure. She wore a look of shame most of the time, and it pierced my heart when I saw her. And, in some respects, that hurting embarrassment was what pushed me as far as I eventually went.

That morning I could see how she struggled; I could see how she battled to keep the humiliation from her face.

“Terms?” asked King Kelly.

“Pardon me?” asked Mother, in her politest voice.

“Rent?”

Professor Fay said, “I’ve taken the liberty of telling Mr. Kelly the rent we pay. Is it acceptable if he pays the same amount? For every month, of course, and every portion of every month that he’s here in the cottage, not just a few months of the year. And he’ll pay in advance.”

“What about you and Miss Fay?” said Mother.

“I travel a great deal,” said Mr. Kelly. “And if I’m lucky I’ll be spending much of my time in Dublin. This will be a quiet base for me.”

“We’re very fond of Miss Fay,” said Mother, piping like a bird.

King Kelly rapped a wall. “Solid, these old walls. We know things, we Irish, don’t we, Cyril?”

“Vernacular building, vernacular building,” said Professor Fay, once more saying the same thing twice.

“We’ll knock twenty percent off the rent, won’t we?” said King Kelly to nobody.

I should have guessed then that he knew all about us and was taking advantage.

She agreed, weak as water. Then Mother insisted that she go off and organize a drink.

“Now, how old are you?” King Kelly asked me.

“Ben’s eighteen,” said Professor Fay who, as his sister said once, answered for everybody and to nobody.

“Perfect age,” said Mr. Kelly, and smiled at Professor Fay.

Mother returned with the tray. I can cut this part short; the conversation offered nothing strange or startling, other than a check handed by Mr. Kelly to Mother, who blushed like a bride.

“Isn’t he loud?” she said to me later.

As we left, with many farewells and mutual jabberings, King Kelly said to me, “Come down tomorrow morning for a cup of tea.”

Mother whispered, “Say yes.”

“Yes,” I said.

Would I have done anyway? I might have, because I was by now intrigued as to why he seemed familiar to me, why something about him rapped at my mind, but I couldn’t get the door open to let it in. Not yet did I place him as the man I’d seen laughing so hard at the show one night. Just as well. If I’d put that connection together earlier, I might have refused to go to see him; I might have avoided him altogether. And then I’d never have acquired the cruel knowledge that made the final difference.

W
hen we’d walked out of sight on our way back to the farm, Mother took my arm.

“We’ll go home and sit down,” she said. “I’m feathered out,” her term for emotionally fraught.

She looked tired beyond words. In two weeks several shades of gray had spread across her face. The furrows on her forehead had grown deeper and new lines had opened. Her hair no longer received the attention she’d always given it, and she was chewing her fingernails to the skin.