Venetia Kelly's Traveling Show (34 page)

“I’ve arranged to meet my wretched brother here in Fermoy,” she said. “What a lousy trial he is to me.”

James said, “Have you continued your story—I mean telling it to yourself?”

This time I didn’t nod. I shook my head; my range of nonverbal communication was evidently increasing.

He drained his teacup. “Now when will we three meet again?”

Miss Fay looked at me and said, “Remember?” and quoted, “‘In thunder, lightning, or in rain?’”

I smiled.

“It’s bad luck,” she said, “to quote from
Macbeth
. And good luck is what we need.”

Although no agreement had been reached, and no advice had been given, I parted from the two of them with a strong sense that they wanted me to go to Charleville, to the house, to Venetia.

I offered lifts in the car—to anywhere; they declined, and I looked
back to see them standing side by side looking after me like real parents—or, rather, in the way that we hope real parents will look at us when we’re walking away from them; standing close together, smiling with warm pride, giving little waves, hoping that you’ll be safe, and longing for the day they’ll see you again.

Of course the trouble with additional parents—especially if they’re like Miss Dora Fay and James Clare—is no matter how good you believe your real parents are or have been, the new parents make you realize what you’ve missed.

T
he door to the house in Charleville stood open—mystifying, given how cold the house always seemed to be. I rang the bell and called but nobody answered. What must I do now? Stand and wait, ring the bell again.

A woman next door, wizened as a broom, said, “They’re not up yet, they don’t get up ’til ’tis late, they’re very like that.”

I was about to argue that I knew some of them were up, I’d already met them, when I heard the voices. So I followed them. I went into the house, along the passageway I’d first been drawn along by Sarah, and I heard the voices more loudly with each step—Venetia and her mother in an argument. Of my father’s voice, or any male voice, or even Mrs. Haas, I heard nothing.

At the foot of the stairs I stopped; that’s where the argument came from—the room directly above. No argument this, but an outright fight, with voices rising all the time. I still couldn’t hear what they were saying—and by now I didn’t want to, so I called, “Hallo? Hallo?”

The voices stopped. Sarah appeared and said, as though never in an argument in her life, “It’s Ben, dear Ben. Ben, come up, let’s see you.”

Venetia appeared, her head above her mother’s shoulder—and from
the way she looked at me I knew that my new parents had judged everything right. This was the direction to follow.

I climbed the stairs. “Is, ah’m—”

“Is Harry here? No, Ben,” said Sarah, “but you are.”

When I reached the landing, both women took my hands, as I had seen them do with my father. This produced the eeriest possible feeling in me—and at that stage in my life I didn’t even know about
Oedipus at Colonus
, and the death of the king. They led me along the passageway, which was at least as long as the one downstairs, to a small and what Miss Fay would call a “very marvelous” sitting room.

Sarah went into the room first; Venetia squeezed my hand and I followed her. Given what I’ve so far told you, given the maelstrom of my life, why did I feel that I had come to some different but infinitely truer kind of home?

I sat with Sarah and Venetia. They were unquestionably the two most beautiful and exciting human beings that I had ever seen, and they made me feel that I was the center of their lives. But I reminded myself that it was my choice to feel so.

When I was about ten, I asked Mother if she’d ever heard anybody say anything about me. She said, yes, that her friends talked about me. Mollie May Holmes said that I was “as demure as a girl;” Kitty Cleary said that I was “a sweetheart.” When I protested these troubling observations, Mother turned them into compliments. I never saw it like that. What boy could, especially if he was saving the world?

In that very marvelous sitting room those descriptions came back to my mind.
Is that how these people see me? Demure? A sweetheart? God, I hope not
.

We talked—no, they talked, I listened. They told me about the house, about making films in Killarney—that’s when I first heard of Esmeralda—about the Abbey and Mr. Yeats and Mr. Synge. I don’t think the sun moved around the sky that afternoon; I believe it stood perfectly still high above me, as did time itself.

My idyll ended when my father came back. We heard him call from downstairs. The arch of Venetia’s eyebrows told me to go. On the staircase, he and I shook hands like friends, not father and son; I left the house edgy at my ousting.

Had I been less irked, I might not have exploded when I reached
home. “Demure”? That vanished like the coward that it was. No sweetheart I—not at all. I, who had never raised my voice in anger, who wouldn’t say “Boo!” to a goose, screeched and screamed, rampaged and roared. I kicked the floor. Mother recoiled; her friendly dog had suddenly developed rabies.

“What
, Mother?”

She waved a document. “It’s only a piece of paper.”

I now think there may also have been self-destruction and revenge in it. And a hastening of fate, as though sick of worrying as to how she could keep the farm going, she relinquished it.

“It’s a mortgage, Mother.”

W
hen it came down to it, none of us had the power to digest what had happened. We had no preparation for such an event. We were emotionally quiet people. We had no training in relationship drama. How could we have? Our farm was like so many others. We had the usual scruffy backyard, never clean enough, with cows parading in and out twice a day, leaving their calling cards in great flat plashes a few feet from our back door.

We had a pigsty on the wrong side of the wind, so that winter and summer we had no choice but to be aware of what Mother called her “second family,” long, pinkish, snouted folk whose quick intelligence and easy responses delighted her. She was so fond of them that she scrubbed them with a yard brush. “The only woman in Ireland to wash pigs,” Large Lily said. “There’s people who don’t wash their children as often.”

And yes, we had a couple of good horses, and yes, an excellent motorcar, and a small truck, and yes, one of the first tractors in that part of the county—but that all came from management, not style.

But we had no “style” in the international-traveler, glossy-magazine
sense of the word; we were what we seemed to be—an Irish farming family with no pretensions to glamour or sophistication.

Now, however, we were nothing, and I was the only one in the family who knew it—Mother certainly didn’t know.

“But mortgages are never cashed in.”

“Yes, they are.”

Now the screaming began. I’d had too much—too much for any grown man, let alone a boy fresh from school, waiting to go to college. I remember thinking,
If only I could cry
. And I remember thinking,
Why do I know this is dangerous? Because it is
. And I remember thinking,
Where’s Billy Flockin’ Moloney when I need his language to describe this stupid woman, my mother?

She fetched the “piece of paper”—a Deed of Agreement nine pages long, every sentence a stick of dynamite, every page a minefield.

“Did you read this?”

“Mr. Horgan will read it”—Leonard Horgan, whose law firm had been our family solicitors for five generations.

“But you’ve signed it. It doesn’t matter who reads it.”

“I think it’s all right. Mr. Kelly is a very remarkable man.”

For what reason I don’t know—call it survival, call it instinct, call it James Clare and his talk of “power” and “story”—I ran to my room and came back with pen and paper.

“Now, Mother, tell me everything, and I’m going to write it down, what he said, what he offered, and what he said you were signing.”

For the next half hour, with me pushing her and pulling her, she told me the story of—call it by its right name—the confidence trick. Professor Fay was in on it, that little greased pig, and he in some ways did the most damage, because Mother had known him and had found him and his sister trustworthy in their dealings.

In essence, King Kelly had vaulted into Mother’s broken heart off Professor Fay’s shoulders. A low position to jump from, I know, but it didn’t need a big leap in those days to get into Mother’s heart.

My pen grew a blade. No sword was ever as mighty. The nib almost ripped the paper. Blobs of ink fell like buboes from the plague. I had fantasies as I wrote.

Had I known the word “scrotum” in those days, it would have joined “twist,” “shred,” and “wrench” in the language my mind was screaming.
Had I been less “demure,” I would have written only four-letter words. Had I been less respectful as a son, I would have been screaming wild epithets with “stupidity” and “imbecility” in them.

The writing helped me to find the calm that lives in the heart of rage, and I got everything down, every sentence, every dripping cajole used by King Kelly. It filled six pages of my notebook.

“Read it, Mother.”

Mute as stone, she took it from my hand.

“Is it a true and accurate record?”

She nodded, afraid of me.

“Then write the words. ‘A true and accurate record,’ sign it underneath, and put in today’s date,” and I called, “Lily!”

The floor shook as Large Lily thundered in.

How did I know to do it? How did I understand that it needed a witness to Mother’s signature? How did I make sense of it all? I have no idea. Sometimes my mind leaks like a colander, sometimes it fills with sand, a silt piling up, and I have to tilt forward to get a clear view of my own floor. But sometimes, like a silver javelin coming at me, I see the truth, I see the right thing to do. I wish I could see that javelin more often—thick, shiny, sharp-pointed, and rotating slowly in the air as it aims at me; I still look for it.

“Mother. Listen to me.”

“Yes, Ben. I’ll listen carefully.” She had lately taken to saying this. She said it, I felt, out of defeat, as though by listening to me she could persuade the world to revive her and stand her on her feet again. She looked at me with the sad eyes of an ill-used dog.

“Understand this. Mr. Kelly has taken a mortgage over our property. It means that at the end of the month, if you haven’t paid him back all the two thousand he has loaned you, plus the interest he has declared, then he can evict you and move in here.”

“But the interest rate is very, very decent.”

“Nothing to do with it, Mother. How much of the money have you still got?”

“Well, Ben, I had bills to pay. I had to pay Billy and Lily.”

I sat back and so did she, and we both knew what had happened.

“Can you do something about it, Ben?”

There are some looks you never forget. Passion. Slyness. The sudden
giveaway downward glance of somebody who’s manipulating you. Entreaty—that appeal that asks, “Can you do something, because I can’t?” Which was what I now saw in Mother, added to the chagrin, the “I’m so stupid” look, and in her case, the “My husband has left me” look.

So that you know—that was the moment when “demure” no longer applied. Timidity vamoosed, to use my father’s word. I can call up that “entreaty” look of Mother’s any time. For the purposes of telling you this story, I’ve just gone to a mirror and called it up, and I saw it reflected in my own eyes. I hope I never have to recall it again.