Venetia Kelly's Traveling Show (50 page)

E
xhaustion swept in like the seventh wave, which, they say, is the biggest of the tide. I felt that I should leave Ennis as soon as possible and get to Venetia. A complicated journey—I had to take a train to Galway, and then to Sligo, and then a bus to Letterkenny—slow trains and bad roads. I stayed that night in Galway and reached Letterkenny late evening. To find a surprise—a closed and dark hall; no show was playing.

I knew where they were staying—and found nobody. The engagement had been canceled, the hotel told me, and Miss Kelly had changed all her plans. In those days we didn’t pay deposits in order to book some of the venues; touring companies kept to their agreements—otherwise they’d never work. They said that she’d gone back to Charleville. And the company? Nobody knew; nothing had been said. Had everything seemed all right? Oh, yes. The de Valera encounter had jangled me to the marrow. I told myself,
You’re worrying unduly
.

Nevertheless I set out next morning, urgent as a storm. In the hotel the previous night I spent an hour squeezing everything I could from the map. Buses, trains—yes; but if I had to, I’d walk. I made a hectic journey, in assorted ways. They included a ride in a hearse, a motorbike
pillion, a delightful pony trap, and, at the end, a drive in a constantly-breaking-down Morris car from Limerick.

No lights in the house; no open door; I had no key. I peppered the windows with pebbles from the gravel on the street; no answer. All along the route, my heart had beaten faster—and for no reason that I could discern. Sheer anxiety? Perhaps. Premonition? I thought so, particularly when nobody came to a window.

The house had a small garden; I’d walked out there on the night of the gunman. A wooden door led into it from a lane at the rear. Easy to climb and, as I’d hoped, yes, the kitchen door hadn’t been locked. I lit the lamp, found food—and an unsigned letter addressed to me. On official government writing paper, in a brawling scrawl, it said,
The damage you’ve done. And you’ve destroyed everybody’s chances
.

I knew who had written it; was he in the house?

Across the street, life continued in the public house. The summer night had led one or two people to drink outside. I opened the front door, lit the lamp in that hallway, and, seeing people fifty yards away, felt safer.

From above came sounds—feet on the floor. By now I recognized them. Yet I still thought my heart would stop when I saw her dear face peep around the edge of the baluster. She said nothing; she hurtled down without a care. I held her with the deepest sense of relief that I had yet known.

Venetia had been asleep; so had Mrs. Haas, who now appeared, beaming like a toothy sun. You’ll not be surprised to learn that she prepared food—her answer to everything. I used to think that if an earthquake opened a fissure in the ground, Mrs. Haas would throw food into it.

We sat, and I discovered the reason for the cancellation. For the past few days, fire officers had been closing shows after they began—“the crowds,” they said; “safety,” they said; “too many people,” they said. Not yet did I put together this development with my visit to King Kelly’s office.

However, I must have sensed something, because I chose that moment to show Venetia the unsigned letter.

“He spent the afternoon here.”

I recoiled. “What did he say?”

“Nothing. He left that letter on the kitchen table—and just sat there looking at it.”

“Do you want to know what’s happened?” I asked.

She shuddered, as if I’d flung a slew of cold water over her. “Not yet. And maybe not at all.”

I said, “Are you worried? About the show?”

“Not yet. We have plenty of money. And Cody’s coming here next week to show me everything. We have time to make plans.”

Regret touched me—I’d been so enjoying the shows. I much preferred the new seriousness; the disappearance of the bawdy and low-grade material had given every performance a better texture. Their original “lowest common denominator” policy had come from Sarah—urged on by King Kelly himself.

Until three o’clock in the morning we sat and talked; Mrs. Haas had long gone to bed. Venetia seemed exactly the same as when I’d last seen her. I told her about the fire, and Miss Fay and the train and Miss Fay’s house.

“Dare I ask about your parents?” she said.

“How much do you know?”

At that moment she hooded her eyes with one hand stretched flat—and reached for me with the other hand. An actor’s gesture, it also had huge trouble behind it.

“I don’t know what to do. My family—there are awful things. Can we ignore them for a while? Is it all right if I tell you when I’m ready to talk about them?” She smiled—the sun again. “I’ll be an honorable wife, I promise.”

We spent the rest of that week in loose bliss, sleeping late, staying up later. We explored what it was like to be silent in each other’s company. We played the games we had known since childhood—what she called tic-tac-toe, I knew as noughts and crosses; we both had rock, paper, scissors.

She wanted to see other gardens, so we went to Waterford. She wanted to buy jigsaws when she heard of mine, so we went to Cork. She wanted to find a good doctor—she had a midwife in Mrs. Haas—so we went to Limerick. We had picnics, and late-night suppers in the little garden of the house in Charleville—the weather had become hotter than
usual for Ireland—and during the day we found old public houses where the owner’s wife would make us a sandwich in the kitchen.

Venetia said she never read newspapers, didn’t like them, a habit born of disliking reviews. And so she missed, on the Tuesday of that week, the announcement—broad headline—that King Kelly had resigned his seat. He made the statement “from his constituency,” said the report, and “with great regret,” and “for health reasons.”

I took three things from the news—that Mr. de Valera had acted with fast brutality; that I now knew what the scrawled letter meant; and that King Kelly wasn’t far away.

The Blueshirts didn’t disappear at that moment—in fact they hadn’t yet appeared in public. De Valera might have spiked King Kelly’s guns, so to speak, but there was more than one forerunner. By then, the organization was taking firm shape. To give you an idea of what I had stumbled upon—or had thrust upon me—this is what had begun to happen.

Before the 1932 election, many people felt that if Dev came into power, he would use the Irish Republican Army, to which he had so long belonged, as his armed militia, and effectively declare a dictatorship. They still had caches of guns, they still carried out an armed attack here and there. Learned papers have been written, and were written at the time, discussing the suitability of Ireland for such a development—a banana republic without the bananas.

Mr. de Valera, however, had as much to fear from his own armed republicans as from anybody else, and he also knew that their swaggering existence encouraged other would-be power brokers—such as King Kelly. Indeed, clashes had long been taking place between the republicans and the men who would later wear the blue shirts—who first appeared in public, in force, in 1933.

The white-haired man I had met at the cottage was the same O’Duffy who then became the leader of the Blueshirts when Mr. de Valera dismissed him as police chief in 1933. But O’Duffy had proven inept politically, unstable almost, and Mr. de Valera buried the movement within a year.

Was it Fascism? Hitler with his Brownshirts, Mussolini and Mosley with their Blackshirts: I suppose in Ireland we should have had green.

I
t’s important to me that I now write down as many details of that week as I can bear. Mrs. Haas knew of King Kelly resigning—Mrs. Haas knew everything—and in a whisper, she suggested not telling Venetia. I didn’t. We spent five more days in each other’s company, to the exclusion of almost the entire universe. From time to time Mrs. Haas entered our lives, always with comfort, usually with ever more wonderful food. We met other people too—gardeners and waiters and people we stopped to talk to, or who wanted to admire the car. Other than that, we lived in the same shell of life, turning always and only to each other. They say that perfection between two people is impossible, the philosopher’s ideal. The “they” who say this are wrong.

We rode a train, from Limerick to Cork and back again, just for the joy of it. We climbed a mountain, Galtymore, and looked down on the wonderful plains. We drank water from fresh streams. We walked for miles on deserted roads, and by rivers and into bog lands. We lay in the green aftergrass of meadows from which the hay had but recently been harvested.

Plans—that’s what we talked about, plans and children. We agreed to
put aside time the following week for discussing problems, for facing matters that would then need attention—such as whether and how many of the company to keep on. Such as telling my parents that we had married. Such as facing Sarah when she came back at the end of the year to a show that had been completely altered. Nominally she had a director’s role; in practice she had forced, cajoled, or persuaded Venetia to put and keep together the program that I had first seen.

When I first began to tell you Venetia’s story, you’ll recall that Sarah had been effusive to me about her love of her daughter, the auspicious birth, unicorns, and so forth. From that you might have assumed a deep, close bond between the two women. Sarah, when I interviewed her down through the years, continued to give that impression.

I, rather cruelly perhaps, allowed her to go on doing so—not least because I wanted to hear Venetia praised. And because I wanted to confirm over and over Sarah’s duplicitousness. The truth from Venetia’s side had long been known to me—everything she told me about Sarah’s demeanor toward her suggested a deep and rivalrous envy.

Still, I might never have met Venetia had it not been for Sarah’s competitiveness. Venetia had so begun to top the Abbey Theatre bill in Dublin that Sarah engineered a row over earnings—by the simple expedient of asking King Kelly to negotiate for Venetia. He generated a mighty fracas with Yeats—persisted in calling him “Yeets”—and Venetia was forced out.

That’s how she came to have a traveling show. Sarah encouraged her, put up the money. It took Venetia off the Abbey stage, out of Dublin, where she’d also starred in society, and away from the public eye.

“Tell me about Sarah, about the family. I mean, in New York. Who were the Kellys?”

She said, “My grandfather’s mother went to New York from County Cork and I know this story.”

Venetia told me, with all the drama and the accents, a story that encapsulated the Irish experience, the journey from desperateness to the first good plateau—and a story that would have a terrible reverberation.

Her mother, Sarah, knew a Dutch family who lived down the street. Bankers and cloth merchants, they had wealth and comfort. They owned
warehouses on the Hudson River in New York City, and into the basements they crammed Irish immigrants off the ships.

Why Irish? Because, said these practical Dutch people, the Irish were so desperate that they would take on any kind of work, live in any kind of room.

And so this Dutch family got all its workers from these arriving immigrants, whom they “stored.” The men worked upstairs in the warehouses or on the farms up along the river, and for a pittance of wages. Their women also worked in the warehouses for an even smaller pittance or in domestic service, like so many arriving Irish women and girls.

In fact, so prevalent was the Irish female in American domestic service that in some cities a maid was known as a “Bridget” or a “Bridie.” A “Bridget” was fresh-faced and innocent, straight off the green fields of Ireland; whereas a “Bridie,” also Irish, had been in the United States for some time and been hammered into a tougher woman. And now the focus of the story narrowed.

In the very early 1800s, a girl, from the wide fields of Cork, went to work for the ancestors of this Dutch family. On the day she started there, she said to her sister—whom they also hired as a servant—“This is what we’ll do. We’ll work like fire. And we’ll watch everything. And wherever we get the chance we’ll teach them something they don’t know—so’s they’ll take more notice of us. And no matter what they say to us, we’ll be as nice as pie to them all the time, and we’ll make them laugh.”

The girl’s name wasn’t Bridie or Bridget—she was Nora Tobin and her sister was Eileen, and they made themselves so amenable, so indispensable, to the Dutch family that they changed how that Dutch family perceived the Irish immigrants.

Then Nora showed her astuteness. She watched how the rich Protestants believed that from great wealth must come great charity. And she observed how the head of the house, the Meister, supported churches and other Protestant organizations in Manhattan.

One Sunday morning, after he’d had a good breakfast and had been to a rousing service, Nora went to the Meister in his study. He was sitting there reading his newspaper and smoking one of his long, dark cheroots. Ash had fallen on the carpet and Nora swept it up, tut-tutting at him quite bossily, an attitude that he liked—as she had noticed.

The Meister laughed and said, “Nora, you are like a headmistress”—which he often said to her.