Venetia Kelly's Traveling Show (46 page)

He gave up drinking, and when eventually the show folded, he became a not inconsiderable minor character in films, and made money.

Ireland had always loved a traveling show. With so little transport available, the world had to come to the people, who repaid with attendance and appreciation. Strolling players had long been a part of countryside life and tradition. Venetia’s forerunners had brought to the villages the melodramas of the nineteenth century, and the classics, and the specially written local dramas, often based on famous tragedies or mysteries.

In the years after Venetia, other distinctive companies toured with troupes of experienced actors—and they also bred actors who went on to great fame. Harold Pinter, for instance, before he made his name writing plays, appeared with companies that toured Ireland.

As with Venetia, a basic economic principle underpinned them all—the opportunity for students to hear the play they were studying, and now, in her revamped repertoire, Venetia included longer and longer excerpts. It was her intention, I knew, to build up to entire plays.

The current season of engagements arranged from the Charleville base still had to be played out. Our life on the road became much more delightful—nothing nearly as grim as those weeks when I was pursuing my father.

Sarah and King Kelly, I was learning, had had strong fingers in the traveling-show pie. With them out of the way, Venetia also changed the way she conducted business.

The audiences for this more serious material grew larger than anything she had known. Priests and teachers began to approve, and in most towns she had to do two shows a day. In effect the income more than doubled, and she plowed it back into the show. She bought an extra car for the others; she hired carpenters and painters to make new scenery flats; she spent money on costumes.

The players responded by working harder than ever, and showing her an increasing devotion. On those occasions when we played a town for a week, Venetia found fresh flowers in her dressing room, such as it was, on opening night (I think the actors raided local gardens). They brought her
little gifts; they gave her performance notes; they found new material for her.

For instance, Peter and Graham persuaded her to perform the Tennyson poem “The Lady of Shalott;” it had also been on many curricula. They wrote an introductory script for her, in which she connected the poem and its origins in an Italian folktale with the legend of the River Shannon’s name, where the princess Shannon, also dead and in a white robe, flows mystically down the stream like Ophelia. Venetia brought the house down with the story and the poem.

Now and then events might have delayed a performance, such as the election rally in Kilmallock did, but being shrewd, she simply held back the opening of the show and attracted a huge overflow from the other event. The money poured in.

She looked after her company even better than before. Every player saw a doctor; if the town had a hotel, they stayed there, booked in advance by writing; all of these arrangements were looked after by silent Martha, who, by all accounts, wrote in a beautiful copperplate hand and an elegant letter.

Where a town had no hotels, advance research revealed good bed-and-breakfast places or pubs with rooms overhead, although Venetia favored those less than any kind of other accommodation. “We have enough problems with pubs,” was her dark reply when I asked.

And so we went from town to village to little crossroads hall. We were becoming celebrities. The local newspapers wrote anticipatory notices and gave us departing reviews—always praise, never a negative word. If those notices happened while there was still time for people to see the show, we had to put on extra performances.

None of this bothered Venetia; the more she performed, the more she bloomed. She even gave some free performances in schools, and from the faces of the teachers and the students, it looked as though a comet had decided to come to earth and light up their lives for that hour or so.

I watched everything she did; I was near her all the time; I saw every bit of material. There was a sense in which I was deliberately “learning” her—after all, I scarcely knew her, conventionally speaking. Nothing ever grew less; in everything we did, we increased and intensified.

The watching, the constant observation of her onstage, led me to analyze
her art, her skill, her craft—I still don’t know the appropriate word, perhaps all three. My abiding impression has to do with how little she did, not how much. Silence governed everything, stillness, often a motionlessness; time after time I watched her walk onstage and for an astonishing number of seconds do nothing. Maybe a small move of the head, maybe a folding of the hands—and then, before she spoke, a slight shift of posture, perhaps a foot forward, especially in the classical pieces.

Also, she carried that same holding mood into the delivery of the words. There’s an exercise I’d like you to think about. When next you hear a major singing star performing a song that you know and love, and have sung often in the bath or the shower, follow the words silently. See how the the singer holds back. Note how he delays the phrase. Observe how he waits to deliver the freight of the line.

That’s what Venetia did. She understood—and I think it was by instinct—how to keep an audience waiting without the audience knowing that it was waiting. And she understood that acting is mostly reacting. I used to watch her “reading” the audience, as she called it. She didn’t appear to be looking at them; it always seemed that she was not of them at all; for example, I never saw her making eye contact—or so it seemed.

But she saw them, all right—she told me so. She never referred to it as “the whites of their eyes”—she loved them too much to say that—but that’s what she was looking at.

And she reacted to what they loved. Not that she allowed herself to be steered by them—not at all; she just wanted to make sure that they were getting the full value of what she had to offer. When she had divined what they were enjoying, she gave them more—and more.

And every night, as I stood there in the wings and watched her, my pride grew. And every night she not only never disappointed me, she made me even more proud. And afterward I got to hold her in my arms, sometimes all night.

If I woke up and didn’t get back to sleep, I often tried to imagine what lay ahead. Would Venetia go back to the Abbey—or had King Kelly fouled the water in that well for all time? I wouldn’t have wanted her to, especially if Sarah intended to continue playing seasons there; mother was not good for daughter professionally, no matter how much they loved each other.

My belief now is that we would have gone on to do what she dearly
wished—establish a theater in a country town, and give it a touring company too. In between she’d play roles in the great theaters of the world—and we knew she would because scouts came to see her, and offers reached us all the time.

In particular, though, she so wanted to go on bringing these beautiful words, these time-honored emotions to the people in the countryside, who lived by “the rules of nature,” as she put it. She understood that they had grim lives, mostly—they did hard, scrabbling work with the rewards few.

T
he night after we heard the doctor’s good news we decided to tell nobody. Except Mrs. Haas. I had to establish the legal age for marrying, and the means of doing so. At the same time, we had a major distraction, a new member of the company; his name was Cody.

A smallish man with a hooked nose and a broad Irish accent with a slight whine, Cody walked into our lives one night as a performance ended. He seemed more than respectable, but his suit, when scrutinized, had shiny patches, and his shirt had been in a war or two.

Cody carried a briefcase, and he said that he’d worked in England for some theaters and traveling companies, and had what he called “tremendous experience” in managing the finances of people who worked on the stage.

He didn’t steal money; that may be your initial suspicion. Nor did he fracture the company’s economic structure. On the contrary, Cody helped us in many ways.

For instance, we had problems in the amount of cash we had to carry—all our takings from, often, three shows a day, at least two performances on most days—average fourteen shows a week. Cody set up a relationship
with a bank that enabled us to draw money in any decent-size town. A worry evaporated.

He also identified, for future purposes, the towns where our income had been greatest—on account of venue capacity and so forth. Not that we’d ever have abandoned the little places that only held fifty people, and another hundred and fifty peering in through the doors and windows, and on one occasion in Kilcallaghan, hanging from the roof beams.

In short, Cody eliminated the need for us to keep such a close eye on the financial end of things and allowed us to concentrate on the repertoire and the logistics.

Venetia checked Cody’s work with a rigor that surprised me. Every week she examined the books that he kept, and reconciled things with every bank we visited. What she couldn’t check was what we didn’t know—that Cody had no intention of hitting our pockets; his intent, a strategized effort, had much greater damage in mind.

We married in the depths of the summer. Venetia wore flowers in her hair. It wasn’t a conventional wedding but it was legal. We did it in Galway, which was my idea; I took a leaf from the book of Mr. de Valera’s life.

As we strolled the docks a ship sat at anchor about half a mile out. I asked a dockhand where she’d come from, and he told me New York. This happened before Cody had streamlined the cash and the banking arrangements, and we were carrying in her purse and my pockets a considerable amount of money.

I told Venetia my plan, she got some flowers, and I hired a boatman to take us out to the ship. We called up to a deckhand, who sent for the captain. They dropped a ladder, we climbed, and the captain (for a consideration) married us. He had to weigh anchor to do so, because the law required the ship to be under way. The persuasion eased when we told him of the expected baby—he had nine children at home in New Jersey.

Mrs. Haas wept, and baked a small wedding cake when we went back to Charleville at the weekend. We swore her to secrecy. By the time Venetia’s condition became obvious we would have worked out how to tell people. Mrs. Haas loved keeping the secret.

Only one other person knew about the pregnancy and the marriage—Cody. We had to tell him on account of banking papers and signing
authorities, and we swore him to secrecy too. We didn’t know that there were no conditions under which he could keep such a confidence; he was pulled by other, more powerful string masters. If ever I meet Cody again, I will end up in jail.

And so the year 1932 wound on. I never missed my daily ration of politics, and with this newfound maturity I began to see things in a much clearer light. I watched the posturing of our leaders; I watched how they arranged to be photographed with church dignitaries who came into Ireland for the giant Eucharistic Congress, an international Catholic Church assembly in Dublin to celebrate worship.

And I watched the rise of King Kelly too. He did indeed become a member of the powerful Finance Committee. And he did indeed sit in the Opposition Front Bench, as it’s called, where he was the shadow spokesman on finance—which meant that he shadowed the finance minister. Which meant that if Mr. Cosgrave ever got back into power, King Kelly would himself become the country’s finance minister, the second most powerful job in the land.

I made no contact with my parents. As James Clare had advised, I did nothing—not least because I still hadn’t unwrapped the meaning of his final remark to me: “Your strength is in the power of others.”

James had said, “Meet me in the west; I want to show you the ocean.” On the day after the wedding, I went to the post office to find a letter for me; James knew that in a matter of weeks we were coming to Sligo, and we’d meet there.

Knowing that James could keep a secret, I resolved to tell him that I’d seen the ocean, and tell him how and why—that Venetia and I had married onboard a ship. I longed to hear him tell the next chapter of the story.

You must visit Sligo one day, Yeats’s town—for me his shadow stalks the place. Here are his two magic mountains: The body of Queen Maeve, the most ancient and most famous of all Irishwomen and the most warlike and the most fearsome, lies in a stone cairn on Knocknarea’s peak. Across the country from her sits the magical table mountain of Ben Bulben, and the people of the netherworld fly between the two, but you have to be quick to see them and you have to be able to see in the dark.

I’m repeating more or less accurately James’s words to Venetia, as we walked around the town. She enchanted him, and he delighted her. He told her stories that made her clap her hands in amazement; he taught her scraps of ancient poems; he explained the structure of the old world to her—who the “Little People” were who lived beneath the ground of Ireland.

We came to rest on that first day in a public house in the outskirts of the town, where, James said, the landlady would make us a meal. He added that he had a surprise for me—and he had: Miss Dora Fay. She went to Sligo for a week every summer, and she and her old friend James tried to coincide there.