Venetia Kelly's Traveling Show (27 page)

S
ynecdoche:
taking the part for the entire. I will now use synecdoche because I want you to know the kind of country, in particular the social culture of the Irish countryside, that came out to vote in that election. It was homogeneous and undramatic. Here I can kill a number of birds with one stone. That’s a dry epithet, you’ll see, because to describe the general I’m going to tell you about three women in particular: Mother’s friends Mollie May Holmes, Joan Hogan, and Kitty Cleary.

As well as typifying the population on whom our democracy was built, they were the kind of people Mother couldn’t face in this new shame. She couldn’t face their strength—which lay in their ordinariness. They all belonged to a world where this kind of thing didn’t happen.

Mollie May Holmes lived four miles away, also a farmer’s wife. She and Mother met every few months, usually after an exchange of letters through the post, blue envelopes with, in Mollie May’s case, even bluer ink.

In winter they met in town, a cup of tea and some seedcake, at Kiely’s bakery on a Friday afternoon. On summer Sunday afternoons, they met on the riverbank at a point two miles from Mollie May’s house and two
miles from ours. There, on the grass, they had a picnic and what they both called “a good old chat.”

They’d been to school together since the age of four; each held back only the secrets that would embarrass the other. They cooked for their families, they knitted, they darned socks and the elbows of sweaters; they looked after elderly parents, if need be, and never complained. Their husbands also knew each other, cordially but not well. My father liked Joe Holmes but never thought much about him.

Joan Hogan lived nearer and shared a birthday with Mother, not that birthdays received much attention. Mrs. Hogan wore “the worst clothes in the county,” according to Mother, but she “baked like an angel.” She also had a laugh that made all others laugh, a kind of helpless whoop that she couldn’t stop once it started.

Unlike Mollie May Holmes, Joan Hogan hadn’t been schooled beyond the age of fourteen. She always came to our house, Mother never went to hers, and so far as I know they never met in town. It strikes me now that Mother might have been ashamed to meet Joan Hogan in public, with her stringy hair, her thick glasses, and always a hem of slip or petticoat dragging and dipping below her skirt.

I liked best the third friend of Mother’s, the one my father called “the Cherub.” Her name was Kitty Cleary. From a family as poor as any we knew, she had a round, pretty face and a good heart, which took her up a significant notch socially—she married into a strong farm.

“Not, of course, as strong as ours,” Mother would say when telling the tale of Kitty’s courtship, “but a good deal better than what she came from.” Her clothes didn’t come from fashion plates either.

These three women came to know one another through having Mother in common. The mutual understanding of all four never had to be spoken, with their sensible shoes (on their farms they wore rubber boots most of the time), their undramatic (to put it kindly) dress sense, and their shared concerns—family, farmwork, placation and management of husband, and launching of children into the world as safely as possible.

Their responsibilities occupied their entire lives. They never spent time on themselves; they had little vanity and few cosmetics. For entertainment they had neighbors’ visits, to and fro, with perhaps once or twice a year a dance in the local hall or a picnic by the river.

Tragedy came by in its casual way. Joan Hogan and Kitty Cleary had both suffered stillborn infants, as did Mother; Mollie May Holmes’s mother-in-law, who lived with them, had been an interfering harridan. She then went mad overnight, but the son wouldn’t let his mother be taken into an institution, so Mollie May Holmes’s red hair turned an astonishing shade of white almost in a week from coping with the mad old woman.

Also, and so important, these women voted. They
were
the electorate.

James Clare had a friend, Patrick Kavanagh, a poet from County Monaghan, whose name is now famous. Kavanagh was about ten years older than me, and after a slow and disbelieved beginning he eventually acquired a fine reputation.

An awkward man, with a harsh voice and a dire lack of hygiene, he had a morose air. Since he was a consumptive, it was said that his days in a tuberculosis clinic had made him morbid. But I know the countryside up there in the north whence he hailed. He himself called it “stony, gray soil;” it’s a hard territory, poor land, that part of Monaghan, and a man who came from farming stock there was born into disappointment.

Behind that grumpy and unhygienic exterior hummed a soul as strong and sweet-sounding as a good engine. When I first met him, and for many years afterward, I assumed—and others made the same mistake—that Kavanagh was a “provincial,” that is to say, he was a regional poet, not much above the level of gravestone verse for local newspapers. What I didn’t yet know—being too callow then—was that his poetic spirit had the power of the ancients.

And here’s the point. Kavanagh became a voice for those who knew the essence of small things. One poem above all states his thesis. “I have lived,” he wrote, “in important places, times / When great events were decided.”

His “great events” had to do with quarrels over half-acres of land, quarrels that became fights, family feuds, tiny local wars over the ownership of “half a rood of rock, a no-man’s land.” He saw these men with their “pitchfork-armed claims” as Homeric, as great and tragic as the Greeks, and he described how Homer’s ghost whispered to him, and told him that Homer “made the
Iliad
from such a local row.”

Kavanagh called the poem, all fourteen lines of it, “Epic,” and once I had heard the sonnet from James Clare and then read it—and it was one
of those days when you remembered everything about the moment, where you were, who was nearby, what you were eating, what clothes you wore—I felt something powerful and relieving. In the small, the poem said, is also the great.

What, therefore, would the poet Kavanagh have made of Mother’s friends? What would Shakespeare have made of them? Probably what Shakespeare made of similar country people in rural England.

Mrs. Haas’s information led me to a decision. I set out in the car after I had eaten. Before going home to prepare for my job next day as polling clerk, I called upon each of Mother’s friends.

“Delicate” is the word; that’s how they were with me. None broached the subject until I did—yet each began by asking, “And how’s your mother?” They knew—but they didn’t say so. Nobody spoke out of turn—by which I mean none of them criticized my father, or passed judgment. I’d been afraid—especially of Joan Hogan, who had a lacerating tongue; yet she proved almost the kindest.

My time with them varied; Mollie May Holmes had responsibilities. Her husband and their help had gone over to Callan to buy a wheel rake and they weren’t expected back until very late, so she had calves to feed and some cows to milk—not all had gone winter-dry. Joan Hogan seemed keenest to talk, but held back bravely the gossipy questions that I sensed she’d have liked to ask. The Cherub, Kitty Cleary, blushed when she looked at me (she always did that); she was the youngest of the three and the one who insisted that I eat something.

All heard my story with respect. I told it plainly—that my father had suddenly left home, that he had run away with a road show of actors, that my mother’s state slipped lower and lower on a daily basis, and that I’d been sent to bring my father home and had had no success. Tomorrow, I told them, he would be at the school at around ten o’clock in the morning. If they were going to vote anyway, could they please vote around ten o’clock, be there when my father arrived, and see whether they could hold any sway over him?

All agreed, even though all asked the same question: “Will your mother be there?” I told them that as yet I hadn’t decided to tell her and that I’d ask her to vote much later. All said, “Good.”

O
ne election looks and feels much like another—or so goes the assumption.

Not in 1932. We knew we were in an election the way a dog knows he’s in a fight. The comings and goings in the schoolyard, the last-minute canvassing, the posters, the handbills, the handshakes. Inside the school, the air crackled around our heads. Excited about the event, but nervous as a kitten, afraid of what was about to happen, I sat there—but I did my job.

I hadn’t slept well. My mind raced with a sense that I’d gone to her friends behind Mother’s back—and yet I felt that if she knew my father was coming into the village, there could be only two possibilities. Either she’d be there and confront him, and cause a scene that would later make her shrink into deeper embarrassment, or she wouldn’t come out to vote, and she’d seclude herself so far down in her “vale of melancholy” that it would take me days to dig her out.

I knew that I was gambling—gambling that she wouldn’t hear that my father had come back to vote. There was no doubt in my mind that the parish knew the story by now and talked of little else. Someone might tell her—or might not.

When I boiled it down in the small hours of the morning, my bigger fear, therefore, was the possibility of a scene—a scene with bystanders. And that was a chance I simply couldn’t take; I couldn’t risk exposing her—and, in truth, him—to any spontaneous histrionics.

Plus, the Kelly women would be sitting there waiting for him in their elegant, shining car. This could explode.

Always early for everything all my life, I reached the school at half past eight. I was as tense as a wire but luckily we had some setting up to do. The individual polling booths had arrived and needed to be arranged—six of them, on tables and large desks, tall, folding, oblong three-sided boxes, each with a cloth curtain. Voters would reach head and shoulders through this curtain and, thus shaded from view, fill in the ballot paper with the pencils we had chained to the booths.

Our system was and remains a multi-seat constituency—every county elects a number of representatives to the Parliament in Dublin. Some counties, according to size, are classified as three-seaters, some four, some five; we were three.

This voting, based on proportional representation, gave people a choice—one, two, and three, in the order of your choice. When the first candidate was elected, his remaining number-one votes were then distributed to the next most popular, and so on, until the seats were filled.

To foreigners this has always seemed complicated. To a population accustomed to working out bets on horse and dog races—the complicated mathematics of doubles, cross trebles, bets, and accumulators—child’s play.

For the first hour my heart filled my mouth. Then—and I should have known his promptness—my father arrived at precisely ten o’clock. I heard the car, which he must have loved; by now I knew the model—a Daimler, high as a church, smooth as a priest. From where I sat I could see through the porch window into the yard. And I could hear loud talk—some canvasser greeted him and got an equally hearty reply.

He came to the door—and froze. When he saw me he put his hand to his mouth like a man about to swear but stopping himself, turned on his heel, and left. Mr. O’Dwyer saw it, grasped the oddity, looked at me inquiringly, and I blushed. I said nothing. What could I say? “Oh, my father’s embarrassed because he thinks I’ll try to persuade him to leave his
actress and come home”? Or “Oh, my father’s embarrassed because he doesn’t want to talk to me on account of what I know about him and he thinks now that he can never get away from me”?

I saw and heard the car pull away. Within the space of minutes, and one by one, Mollie May Holmes, Kitty Cleary, and Joan Hogan walked through the door. The first two whispered to me, “Is he here?”

I whispered back, “He came, didn’t vote, and left.”

Joan Hogan had seen him and smiled. “’tis the car he’s after.” Which made me laugh—from relief, because a crisis had been averted.