Venetia Kelly's Traveling Show (36 page)

The moment when we do things that we shouldn’t is also the moment when we least and most see the truth about ourselves. That has been my experience; maybe it’s different for you. As I drove out through our gateway I thought,
I’m not carrying this burden anymore
. That was me seeing the least truth of myself. And the most truth at that moment? Simple. I had discovered kissing, and that was what I was going after.

Kissing, and some notes thereupon, as we take this now-familiar journey to the house in Charleville, on roads empty save for creamery wagons and an almond-eyed goat here and there.

Once again, go for the language: Here you’ll find a disappointment; I’ve been able to trace few linguistic roots for
kiss
. Mind you, there’s a limit to the number of people of whom one may inquire. In her later years, and when I was older too, I asked Miss Dora Fay.

“It’s onomatopoeic. Every culture had a ritual kissing gesture of some kind. And the lips when employed in kissing make a sucking and blowing sound.” And she smiled. “Terrific, isn’t it?”

One afternoon, not long before he died, I contrived to lead my father to the word.

“Osculation,”
he said immediately, and also quoted verbatim one of
his gods, the aforementioned Mr. Bierce; “‘A word invented by the poets as a rhyme for ‘bliss.’” He grew somber. “Don’t ever give in to a pity kiss.”

He never told me what he meant.

How surprising kissing felt. I didn’t know that excitement could have such a dry, cool feeling.

And—that kissing on Sunday, was that all there was to it? What do I do if saliva escapes?
When I’m excited I burble a little, some foam is loosed. “Say it, don’t spray it, MacCarthy,” Mr. O’Toole used to say to me when I was standing up in class.

I’ve mentioned eyes, haven’t I? Meaning, I didn’t know whether to keep them open or closed. My instinct had been to close them—to concentrate on the enjoyment. Yet I also wanted to see her eyes, guess what she was thinking.

And—what are we supposed to think about while kissing? I found myself thinking,
What about my nose—how do I keep it out of the way? And where do I put the rest of myself?
And
Is there anybody I can tell about this?

Breathing too—what to do about it? I didn’t want to blow a gale into the poor girl’s lungs; kissing wasn’t the artificial respiration they taught to lifeguards—at least I knew that much. But if I breathed through my nose wouldn’t she feel my nostrils dilating? And—wouldn’t it be only a matter of minutes before I was heaving like a dragon? Yes—there were things I needed to know here.

Tightness of embrace? Now we get into the difficult and confusing stuff. When kissing Venetia I felt certain softnesses that I knew to be bosoms.
Not bosoms like Aunt Anne’s rock-hard prow. Am I supposed to feel more of them with my chest? Am I supposed to stand back? Is there a recommended stance for all this?
I doubted it, because there was also lying down to be considered—eventually.

Y
ou can imagine, can’t you, the clashing sounds in my head as I slowed down the car in Charleville. At least I knew where to find everybody. The pickings had proven so rich in this part of Munster that the show decided to work every small town in the counties of Cork, Limerick, Tipperary, and Waterford. I was to learn that Sarah had decreed Clare too poor and Kerry too sharp-witted: “In the one there’s little financial reward, in the other there’s only emotional defeat.” Meaning that the Clare people wouldn’t or couldn’t spend the money, and the Kerry people knew every line of every Shakespeare play, and knew them better than anybody in the company, including herself and her daughter.

I hadn’t worked out a plan as to how I should address my father. Certainly I must tell him about the mortgage—or must I? Wouldn’t that only drag me back to the problem I was fleeing? He’d want me to deal with it. That was my guess.

He had found his bench again, across the street from the old Market House, and he had company—the neckless little actor. I strolled over, not as calm as I tried to appear, and the neckless one, whose name was Graham, first made room for me with a nervous smile, and then stood to
go.
Do these people know all about this situation?
The thought angered and embarrassed me.

“No-no-no need to go, Graham. Ben’s good company—” But Graham went. “They’ve started the prosecutions,” said my father as I sat down. “A fellow in Dublin got two months in jail. And there were twenty others who tried to vote early and often.”

I said nothing and he shook out the newspaper, went to another page.

“Happy-happy-happy Birthday this week to the Countess of Athlone.”

Again, I didn’t bite. He flipped another page and a new note came into his voice.

“Have you got any investments in British government securities? Everybody seems to think they’re doing well.”

Sarcasm. I didn’t hear it often from my father. He used it on the workmen: “Billy, did you leave the gate open to let air into the field?” And, as you know, he had used it on Missy Casey—but never on Mother or me.

My father, I think, sensed the pressure from me. He looked nervous. The rapid turning of the newspaper pages—that wasn’t typical; he usually read every page from stem to stern.

He stopped at a page. “‘For your throat’s sake smoke Craven A—the cigarette made specially to prevent sore throats.’”

“Stop,” I said. “Stop your nonsense now.”

He didn’t look at me. With great care he folded the newspaper, rose and walked away down the street; I watched him out of sight. Another unseasonable day of sunny warmth—and something was taking place, some kind of reckoning.

From inside the open front door of Sarah’s house, I heard a voice rising and falling, in recitation, not in song. I went indoors, treading heavily after my knock had gone unanswered. Nobody heard my step; I reached the kitchen unintercepted. As usual, clinical tidiness everywhere, with no sign of Mrs. Haas. Who was reciting and where?

I returned to the hallway and heard the voice clearly. From upstairs, and with great power it came, and although I couldn’t hear the words I recognized the cadence.

With one foot on the lower step I waited, fully aware of what I
wanted to do. How long did I stand there like that? Perhaps two hours, perhaps a minute or so. Already it had become that kind of day.

I looked down at my excellently polished shoes and the home-knit yellow socks, and I still felt no pang of remorse about having abandoned Mother. My hand on the newel post felt strong and dry. With my foot firmly on the stair tread and my grip on the round cone of the newel, I had become a hero to myself once more.

The voice stopped. All sounds from the outside world ceased too. I heard only what echoed inside my head. A kind of bell, was it? Not necessarily a bell, but the same quality of sound, the clean peal of a clarion. I made ready to move and squared up my heart and mind to be as one.

Up the first step. And now the second. And next the third, to the little platform, the small, low landing from which the staircase turned left and climbed its full length upward. These were slow, heavyish, deliberate steps.

I looked up—to where I had previously seen the heads of daughter and mother, the younger above the older. Now I saw no head, and I heard no voice.

Then the voice began again, lower, still in a reciting lilt. If I climbed some more steps I might make out the words. I softened the weight of my footfall, not to creep or lurk, merely to dim the noise and hear the verse. The voice proved too soft.

I thought I detected the word “Netherby,” and my heart leapt. Young Lochinvar stands among my greatest heroes. He carried away—stirring verse—the bride of Netherby because she should have married him in the first place. I climbed on. “Halfway up the stairs is the stair where I sit,” but I didn’t sit.

The voice stopped and the door opened. She said that it wasn’t so much that she heard me as that she felt my presence. My presence? I didn’t even know what that was.

My presence. For months, for years, I hugged the words to myself. I hugged them when elated, when depressed. What’s the difference between those two states, elated and depressed? None. They’re both liars.

“Some people are like that,” said Venetia. “They have a force in their spirit that announces them.”

She stood aside to admit me to the same small sitting room. The colors
seemed brighter than before, probably because the sun had begun to stream in. She stepped in behind me and I walked straight to the window.

Not a soul to be seen down there in the cut-stone street. I saw a pony and cart with its silver churns. The pony looked listless, and I guessed that the owner had gone into a bar across the street. A small bird flew by, a sparrow. His movements were like my thoughts—small, but for him, huge, with much flickering and whurruping.

Venetia stayed where she’d entered, her back against the closed door. She said that she’d been rehearsing a poem she wanted to introduce into the show soon. And she said that I, in my being, had reminded her of the poem. It was “Lochinvar.”

I felt the compliment, I felt the thrill of it. And I felt the thump of it: Was this a manipulation? Was Venetia manipulating me? But I didn’t care; I took it for what it felt like, and now I was a giant again, now I was a hero. A tongue-tied hero, perhaps, and my legs were shaking a little.

Turning away from the window I looked at her. Definitely I can say that this was the first time I’d ever looked at a girl with such intensity. Not curiosity—I had done that; I had done that with the occasional girlfriends of Large Lily when they called to the house, girls who were wild and drab all at once. And I had looked—yech!—at simpering and false Mary Lewis. But I hadn’t truly known why I was looking at any of them at all.

I knew, though, why I was looking at Venetia Kelly now. It had nothing immediate to do with the fact that she was daughter of Sarah, the wicked queen, and granddaughter of the evil King.

Every time I feel heat from the sun on my shoulders it’s the sun that came through that window. Every time I look out of a window from an upper floor, I’m looking out of that window. I didn’t know then that I would go on to have so much of me formed by that moment. But if you’d been there and if you’d asked me, I might have sworn an oath that yes, I would remain like that all my life. And I have done—taking every reference point of serious awakening from those few seconds of sensation.

The curtains had a willow-branch pattern, long and climbing. I’ve ever since liked willow branches. On the sash bar sat a perfect little porcelain knob for opening the catch. My heart lifts if I find one in a
house or hotel today. The window had shutters too, folded back, just the same as in my room at home.

My coat had a herringbone pattern. I know because I now studied the sleeve as intently as an archaeologist looks at a shard. The air felt light. Perfume somewhere? Too early for flowers. My feet on the wooden floor felt solid and comforting.

Her voice was telling me that she knew I’d come back for her, and she even wondered whether that was the reason she had been rehearsing the poem. The sound in my head, the bell that wasn’t a bell, rang more beautifully now, and each stroke, each tolling ring, came from somewhere I’d never been.

You think I exaggerate? I do not. This was the beginning of the passion by which I now live, and by which I began to live that day. I knew it from the moment I turned around and saw her arms open wide toward me and heard her say the word “Welcome.”

Whatever tragedy followed has been of my doing.

W
e
didn’t embrace. Instead, she took my hands and looked me directly in the eye. She said that we should sit down, and she arranged us on the sofa. Directed by a gentle push from her, I sat back and she sat up, on the edge of the couch, where she could look at me. A blind spectator would have grasped the gravity between us.

“Why d’you think I haven’t married or settled down?” she said. “And I’m nearly past the age of what’s seen as marriageable. Ben, we could search the world. We might find partners with whom we could have good and even excellent lives. I don’t believe in that. For me it’s always been the idea of one and one only whom I’d recognize the moment I saw him.”