Venetia Kelly's Traveling Show (37 page)

In my newfound sense of purpose, I went straight to the point I most needed to have answered.

“My father believes he’ll be with you for life.”

“I’ve already told you—he was the path to you.”

“But he lives with you?” No matter how I tried, I couldn’t get rid of the burning hurt that he didn’t live at home anymore.

“I’ve told you what goes on between your father and me.” She paused.

I thought,
I’ve never seen anybody I like as much. But I’ve never met an
actress before; I hope that’s not the only reason I like her
. That’s true to this day. Just “liked”—I liked her deep down the way I ordinarily liked my father, and I liked her the way I ordinarily liked Mother—that is to say, feelings of great warmth, together with a profound interest in their best well-being, and what I could contribute to it. The word
love
has had a bad time. I myself am not much good at defining it. But I think it begins with “like.”

The same impulses as I’d always had for my parents flooded all over me now. Were I wealthy beyond planets I’d spend it all on this girl’s safety and comfort.

Venetia went on. “I didn’t want your father to leave his home. And farm. And wife. And son. As you know, he’d been following the show for months. Each night he’d come around to the back, and we’d all go off and have something to eat and drink and he always paid. Not that we couldn’t afford to—we have plenty of money, especially when my mother’s traveling with us. Not to mention my grandfather. And we’ll come to him soon.”

I tried to enumerate the questions in my head. Immediately I had the fear that I’d never get to ask them all, would never get all the answers I needed. Yet Venetia, beside me, looking at me, had suddenly, at one stroke it seemed, become a permanent part of me. The importance of my questions was fading.

“When your father first declared himself, long before he began to travel with us, my mother and my grandfather urged me to accept him. He’s young enough, they said, the age gap, twenty years, that’s nothing. And he has money. Yes, there’s no divorce in Ireland, but there is in England and in the United States. He can get a divorce somewhere.”

“Divorce”? She might as well have said “murder.” Although I’d never heard of anybody in Ireland who was divorced, I knew that it had the worst associations, not just illegal but evil. I saw Mother shudder when she heard the word—which wasn’t often.

And I had my own shudder. Mother. Grandfather. Was a plot emerging? Worse—was she part of it, this girl to whom I had already committed myself, even though I had as yet no idea of such a concept, nor a language for expressing commitment?

There isn’t a term comprehensive enough for the kind of commitment I entered into that day. All I knew is that the world could now go
on safely about its business, because I could stop worrying about the rest of my life; I was feeling the safety that’s embodied in commitment, no matter how heartbreaking it may be.

The floor had a rug woven with the scarlet, orange, and gray mysteries of Afghanistan. It didn’t reach to each wall, and the boards in between had been painted gray-white.

“I like your father very much indeed. No, I should say I love him. I do. He’s a dear and wonderful man. And because he’s like that I’ve let him into my life. We aren’t lovers, if you know what that means.”

She looked at me and she knew I didn’t know, except perhaps by dim instinct.

“Never mind. We travel together to the towns where we have shows. He watches me. Did you know that he’s a wonderful critic?”

I said, “He reads a lot of Shakespeare.”

“And,” said Venetia, “he tells me that you’re better on Shakespeare than he is. Instinctively, he says.”

“That can’t be the case,” I said.

“He brings you into every conversation.”

“You told me that,” I said, and shook my head. I didn’t think that my father talked about me to anybody, but when she told me I believed her.

Venetia said, “It’s ‘Ben this’ and ‘Ben that’—and it’s not all easy either.”

I must have looked alarmed because she leaned forward and stroked my face.

“No, no, I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to upset you. What I wanted to say is this—he talks about the anguish of loving you. He says there’s no pain like the pain of a father for a son.”

On the wall hung a painting of an old stone bridge, with a high curved arch and black water tumbling beneath. And now I must have twitched, because she took my hands to her lips and kissed my knuckles.

“I know what you looked like as a baby. I know that you didn’t speak your first words until you were almost two, and that you then spoke perfectly. I know that all who meet you consider you strong and generous and funny. In return, I tell him about the loves I know—Shakespeare’s women, Lady Margaret and Cordelia and Ophelia and Juliet. When it ends, he kisses me on the cheek. That’s all.”

In the silence that followed, both of us heard a sound. I listened. From somewhere outside the room a little creature was sawing—a steady, rasping sound, quite faint but distinct in the still air of the day.

Venetia whispered, “Audrey’s room is across the way.”

Mrs. Haas had her shoes off.

W
e
stood up. Venetia told me that my father would soon return, that they had an “appointment”—to fill a number of hours free before she had to travel to that night’s show. I made no comment; my mind had ceased working.

She said, “Come back tomorrow. At two o’clock.”

I met my father on the staircase. He didn’t look alarmed or surprised, but he did look different. Had he changed? Oscar Wilde greeted somebody one day: “Oh, there you are—I didn’t recognize you because I’ve changed so much.” Had I changed so much? No. That’s fanciful, isn’t it? Or—is it? He definitely looked different.

I said, “I’ve had a long talk with Venetia.”

Maybe a shiftiness came into his eyes. Maybe he looked uncomfortable—but if he did, it was fleeting and minuscule.

“The-the-the new routine for Blarney is great,” he said.

“Do you know about Mother?”

Now little shadows did gather in his eyes.

“She didn’t write to me or anything.”

James Clare once told me that I have what he called a “burly” mind,
meaning that I too often attack problems with mental force, hammer rather than scalpel.

“Where would she write to you?”

“Is she all right?”

“Except for the mortgage.”

I heard my harshness and was dismayed by it. What had happened to me? My father heard it too.

“That’s no way to talk about an act of decency.”

“How do you make that out?”

He said, “Mr. Kelly has his family’s interest at heart. In this case his granddaughter’s.”

“And the guns?”

I expect that you’ve never had the experience of looking into the eyes of an adult male to whom you have looked up all your life, whose welfare has been of the dearest concern to you, whose well-being you have plotted inside yourself insofar as you could, and suddenly seen something different there, a complete lack of competence, a crude ignorance.

What a chastening moment. Except—be careful here: This is all hindsight. I thought none of those things at that time. I do know this, however; I had enough presence of mind to be shocked at myself when I found my hands curling into tight fists ready to punch my father hard in each eye. Even more shocking—I knew it had little, or even nothing, to do with what he had put Mother and me through. That also was what James Clare meant by a “burly” mind.

If I’d known where to find him I’d have gone looking for James Clare. I needed to steady myself; such little self-knowledge as I had told me that much. My father continued upstairs and I heard him knock, then enter the room where I had been sitting with Venetia and close the door behind him.
He’ll now be sitting on a couch still warm from me
. The thought gave me a shiver.

I was ravenously hungry. My food savior appeared—Mrs. Haas, and I thought,
She’s going to make me one of those great sandwiches
. But she didn’t; instead, with a worried face, she made a shooing gesture, flicking the back of her hand at me, and mouthing the word “Go.”

How strange can all this get?
I thought. I wish I’d had a voice inside me saying,
You ain’t seen nothin’ yet
.

No James Clare, no Miss Fay, no food, no nothing, no nobody. I didn’t want to eat in the town—that is, if I could find somewhere to eat, which didn’t seem likely. Not thinking where I walked, I found myself beside the car, climbed in, and drove away.

I had no place to go. My father didn’t want me near him. Venetia did seem to want me near her—but not yet. Home offered no option; I had left there. The show had gone to Adare, one of the prettiest villages in Ireland. No harm in going there. And anyway my father had alerted me to a new routine by Blarney.

Minutes later, on the outskirts of Charleville, I passed a sports field; above the walls I could see the tall uprights of the goals. I also saw a number of bicycles leaning there, perhaps twenty in all.

A game of football was beginning, a pickup game, no formality, no jerseys or other kit, just a bunch of fellows and a leather football in the middle of the day.

Important Digression: Our “football” in Ireland refers to Gaelic football, a game that looks a little like soccer, and a little like rugby, and nothing like either. It is played with a round ball and fifteen men on a team, and a player is allowed to handle the ball but not throw it; bounce it, but not too often; run with it, flipping the ball from hand to toe (considered an exercise in great skill); field it—the higher the better; and kick it as far and as accurately as possible. End of Important Digression.

I played it in school, and (excuse the immodesty, but you need to know this) I was the star player and became the senior team captain, playing at midfield—which is where the traffic of the game gets controlled. These players, in their everyday clothes, seemed about my age, and I asked to join in.

For the next hour or so I had a good time. The confusion of encountering my father dissolved; the hero returned. It took me a few minutes to warm up, and I had to decide how much clothing to discard. Sunshine or no, the air still had a nip in it, which gave the exercise a sharp edge.

It’s a violent game. When you leap to field a ball coming from on high, you make yourself vulnerable from the fingertips down, leaving the length of your body open to attack by a shoulder-charging opponent
running at you. But when you’re up there, your feet three or four feet off the ground, in a leap that you’ve achieved by running into a takeoff, and you feel your fingertips touching and then closing on the leather of the ball—there’s no feeling like it. Also, it’s almost impossible not to do it elegantly.

How I played! I had joined an ordinary, casual game of football, dragged together by lads from the town and nearby countryside, all of whom no longer went to school—some were apprentices or clerks—and who played like this, weather permitting, every week.

Like a bird, or a salmon at the weir, I rose above the others, fielding impeccably. Nobody reached me up there, nobody rose as high, and when I came down to earth I strode among them like the giant I had become.

The ball went where I sent it—to the hands of a player on my team or between the goalposts. When I made a run, it came from my toe to my hand as though connected by elastic string. My shoulders went into challenges fearlessly. I ran as fast as I’d ever done.

Energy, energy—that’s all I was, a mass of energy, heat, and speed. And urgency—I wanted to spend energy, I wanted to put force about me, to send force from me out across the earth, to express strength, to see what power was. That afternoon I could have done anything I wanted.

At the end we took our farewells. The exercise had been exactly what I needed. They asked me back, they asked me where I lived and if I would play for their team. But I avoided disclosing whence I came.

The boys gathered around the car and for ten minutes or so I had to tell them all about it. Like monkeys, they poked here, picked there, sat in the driver’s seat, the passenger seat, the rear seats, touching it, stroking the leather, turning the wheel.

One boy, red-haired, asked me if I’d give him a lift home, that he’d love his father to see the car; he had been the other outstanding player in the field. He sat beside me, we drove away, and that’s how I came to eat my next meal.

They had a good farm, not as clean as ours, and not as modern. A horse and a pony did their work—the horse for the heavy fields, the pony for lighter jobs such as taking the churns to the creamery or the family to Mass on a Sunday morning.

Many children and their mother came out to see the car. When the husband and oldest son came in from the fields, they had to see it too. Inside the house, I was given full plates of food—and an unpleasant shock.

Having eaten, the children scattered. The father, when I told him, roughly, my address, asked me if I knew “that immoral fellow who was after running away with some dirty woman.”

I said I knew nothing of it; his wife spoke words like “scoundrel,” “scandal,” and “disgraceful.” As soon as I could, I left the house, trying not to look hasty—but hurt to the core.