Venetia Kelly's Traveling Show (51 page)

She, expecting that he would say that, replied, “Well, Meister, now that you say it—”

And she asked him there and then for money to start a school for immigrants.

The Meister laughed, but was arrested by the thought.

Nora said, “Do you find me and my sister clever?”

He thought about it and said, “Well, yes, I do.”

“And does your wife?”

“Now that I think of it, she often says so.”

“Well.” Nora stood with her hands on her hips and said to him, “And we’re not the cleverest of us Irish, not at all. If you helped me to open a school, I’d secure for you the best clerks for your bank.”

The Tobin sisters went on to open a school, and indeed did give the Dutchman brilliant employees for his bank—but they and many other Irish teachers also gave New York the clerks and civil servants that ran the courts, organized the city’s systems such as transit and roads, and provided the civilians and the uniformed men in the police and fire departments.

In this fashion, the Irish population in New York began to raise itself out of the hovels to which it had been consigned when it landed. It would take many years; the stigma clung.

Like Nora Tobin had done, the Irishwomen looked around them, saw their incumbent predecessors—the Germans, the English, and especially the Dutch—observed the fine houses, the starched linens, the children at excellent schools, and by a combination of literacy and religion, went after the same for themselves and their families.

So earnestly did they pursue this collective ideal that by the time Sarah was born in the late 1870s, the legions of Irish-American women who formed societies and clubs in New York and elsewhere across the continent didn’t refer to themselves as “women”—they called themselves “ladies.”

Venetia finished her story—but I could see that there was more.

I applauded and said, with a grin, “Go on.”

She said, “My mother left out some details when she first told me.”

I waited.

“She left out the fact that Nora Tobin was my grandfather’s mother. And guess where Nora Tobin came from?” Venetia pointed down to the ground at her feet. “Here.”

In other words, Sarah had descended from the poorest of the poor—her grandmother was an Irish maid plucked from a rat-infested cellar on the dockyards of New York. That was why King Kelly could run for office in North Cork—he had been born here. And he had also lived here—which led to the sinister part.

V
enetia had a deep-grained obedience in her; I recognized it—it’s not uncommon in an only child. After the fracas at the Abbey Theatre, in which she had been an innocent, she’d done as she’d been told—just as I had eventually obeyed Mother when she sent me after my father. Venetia formed the traveling company and bowed to Sarah’s experience in choosing road and repertory material. Now Sarah had gone away, creating a long breathing space, and the company, for the moment, had come off the road.

Given all that, you can understand why we wished to delay any discussion of the problems King Kelly might pose.

The glorious weather continued and King Kelly didn’t appear. In fact we had idyllic privacy. I knew a lake in the mountains where we could swim unseen; Venetia took off her clothes and floated. “I’m the Lady of Shalott,” she called. A garden near Adare had a lily pond; we placed coins on the lily pads for luck. We befriended some horses, took them apples, and got drool on our sleeves.

On the Sunday afternoon, because it rained, we went to a film in Limerick; we saw Loretta Young in
Beau Ideal
—and I had read the book
by P. C. Wren, and its two companion volumes,
Beau Geste
and
Beau Sabreur
, and we talked over dinner afterward about the French Foreign Legion and being film stars.

We went home to Charleville in the dark, and found a note to say that Cody had arrived. Next day, when we went downstairs to the kitchen, Cody sat in the kitchen waiting for us—as did King Kelly.

Now we have our hands on the chain of events. Now I must handle the icy cold links, one by one, and follow them, fingering them and feeling their chill. Now I must force myself to bring everything to the eye, to redact as faithfully as I can everything I saw and heard over the week that followed.

No matter how objective I am, no matter how calmly I try to view, to assess what happened, I remain shocked, and that’s why I’ve waited so long to tell this tale. It’s true, I know it, that such things don’t easily take place in people’s lives, no matter what we read in the newspapers. It’s true, I can vouch for it, that treachery is indeed treacherous, that triumph is indeed triumphant, and finally that terribleness is indeed terrible.

They sat in the kitchen, one tall and heavy, a slug with frightening eyes and a big cigar; the other, narrow and scrawny, a rat in a suit, with the cold, uncaring eyes of Death. Amiable conversation had been going back and forth between them; I later ascertained that.

Venetia and I walked in, close to each other in height, an erogenous glow surrounding us like a benign fire. King Kelly’s hands lay on the table, two fat and hairy weapons; Cody sat in a slouch, his hands between his knees.

“The honeymooners,” boomed King Kelly, and Mrs. Haas rebounded like someone hearing a sudden, loud noise. Cody stood up; King Kelly didn’t—but he held out his arms and said, “Have you a kiss for your grandfather?”

“Hello, Grampa,” said Venetia, and went to him; he pulled her down onto his knee, put his hand around her hips, and flicked me a wink with more dirt in it than a slum.

“I was there before him, wasn’t I, child?”—and he pulled her face down to kiss her cheek.

Revolting; that’s how I recall it; that’s how it was—those monstrous
paws, with dirty fingernails. He wore a canary-yellow bow tie. And he hadn’t taken off his brown hat.

“How’s married life?” He leered like a bandit.

“What are you doing here, Grampa?”

“Cody, tell her what I’m doing here.”

“Hello, Cody,” said Venetia; she had better manners almost than Mother.

“I hope I’m not too early, Miss Kelly,” said Cody, who glanced at me as though the cat had dragged me in from the street.

“So, are you happy now?” said King Kelly to me, a hand tightening on Venetia’s hip.

“Ow, Grampa.”

I said nothing, but I felt my body coil.

“I have to talk to your bridegroom,” said King Kelly. “Cody, look after my granddaughter—not too tightly now, mind you.” All beasts have a natural habitat; King Kelly’s was the sewer. “You too, Shark-face,” he said to Mrs. Haas. “Out.”

She averted her face from him as she walked past his chair.

Everybody quit the kitchen; Venetia planted a kiss on my jaw as she went. King Kelly sat back until they’d gone. With the pleased face of a tourist, he looked all around—then swiveled back to me. It wasn’t a big room; twelve feet between us, perhaps. I stood with my back to the door.

“Come closer,” he said. “I’m shortsighted and I want to see your eyes.”

I stepped forward. He had a heavy walking cane, made, I think, of hickory, with a brass ferrule, and a brass dog’s head. It rested between his huge knees. He lifted it, hefted its weight, held it by the head, and wagged it at me.

“I could crack your skull with this,” he said. “And maybe I should. You crooked, scheming little bastard. You and the Long Fellow. Happy now? Are you, are you?”

He poked me in the chest with the stick. It hurt. I winced. He poked again.

“Are you happy? I’ve lost my seat, thanks to you.” He poked again. “Well, I’ll make you happy, you wait and see.”

The ferrule dug right into my sternum. If I spoke, my breath might sound caught—but I took the risk.

“I’ll be happy when my parents get back what you stole from them.”

He pulled back the stick to poke harder, as if to stab me, and I caught the stick and wrenched it from him. I broke it across my knee—it wasn’t easy, but I snapped it. It cracked into three pieces, one of which, no more than a shard, flew through the air and landed on the floor. Where I now threw the other two fragments.

He half-rose. I held out a fist.

“The last time we met in this house—you had a man hold a gun to my head. Move now and I’ll drop you. I flocking will.”

Thank you, Billy Moloney! Though I didn’t use the euphemism, you understand.

“Why are you persecuting me?” he said.

I looked at him. The nerve!

He pressed it. “Come on. What have you against me? I have to go back to Dublin now and answer impertinent questions. Because of you. You’ve destroyed my career. You and that Spanish crook.” I had never heard Mr. de Valera called that. “Why? Why are you doing it?”

“Give my parents back our farm.”

He twisted in his chair, exasperation his only tune.

“I’ve resigned my seat because of your lies. You and yours will never live there again. If your stupid father came to me tomorrow with cash worth ten times that mortgage I wouldn’t let him redeem it. That’s done. That’s over.”

King Kelly rose to go. He stopped, wary that I hadn’t moved.

“What you gonna do now, slug me? Use force where you can’t persuade? Who’s the Fascist now?”

I stood aside. He bent down to pick up the broken walking cane, decided against it. Just for mischief I made a small and sudden move as he walked past, and had the gratification of seeing him flinch.

As he opened the door into the hall, I heard the footsteps scurry upstairs—Venetia. She must have heard everything at the slightly ajar Georgian door. Cody emerged from the little sitting room; sitting in the dimness, the room cool with drawn curtains, he too had been listening.

One by one they came back to the kitchen—Cody first, Mrs. Haas second, Venetia a slow last. Nobody said anything; embarrassment hung everywhere, stale as the smoke from King Kelly’s cigar.

“I’m hungry,” I said.

“He is gone?” said Mrs. Haas.

“When did you travel?” said Venetia to Cody. “Are the others here?”

He didn’t answer her and I observed that fact; it was one of those moments when you know you’ve seen something without quite knowing what you’ve registered.

We all sat around the table, including Mrs. Haas, who never sat down when we were eating. The room took on a subdued mood. I watched Cody. He separated his food ingredients from each other—the ham from the egg, the eggs from the sausage, the sausage from the mushrooms.

I didn’t like the way he looked up using only his eyes. I didn’t like the way he held his knife and fork, like spikes he was driving into the plate. I didn’t like the way he sucked his teeth. I didn’t like him.

When we had eaten, which helped us to recover, Cody, Venetia, and I went into the little sitting room. He had placed his bags there, and his accountancy books. Why did I so recoil from him?

We sat down and he said to Venetia, “Now we can go over everything, I’ve spent the week extracting all the information.” He looked at me sidelong and added, “Is it all right if—” and he broke off, and looked at me again.

“If Ben is here? Of course,” said Venetia. “It’s Ben’s business now too.”

I took Cody’s snub for what it was. And I answered it by asking many, many questions. We had plenty of money, enough and more to pay everybody until Christmas, which would buy us time to find an existing theater or a premises.

That night, Venetia told me the story of her life. She recalled the ship that brought her to Ireland; she even remembered, she said, being swung out of her cot by King Kelly and the bristles on his face. She told me the story of her grandfather giving her Blarney. And she told me the story of the boy and the talking animals.

“I lived by that story when I was little. With no friends or playmates, there was always the chance that the cat would chat to me. And so I made friends with Blarney—who could and did.”

I introduced the idea that I’d had on the train.

“Why not turn Blarney into a storyteller?” I said, and I told her about the seanchaí, who still roamed the countryside telling stories.

“What’s the word?” she said.

“Shan-a-kee. It means ‘One who tells old tales.’ They’re still around. We had one at our house years ago. They still work in Kerry and West Cork and up in Donegal and in Scotland.”

She grew excited and I expanded—how the storyteller would arrive in the evening, be given a meal and a drink, and afterward take pride of place at the fireside. There, for the evening, sometimes into the small hours of the morning, he would tell a tale of long ago, and the flickering of the flames lit the stage of his face.

We planned—we would have James come and stay, and he would instruct her.

“Can’t you do it, Ben?”

“I have no talent,” I said.

“Oh, but you have. You just haven’t gone looking for it yet. Or you haven’t been forced to find it. Do you know any stories? James told me some.”

Although I’d been bold with her in love, now my shyness was visible matter—and she had the sensitivity not to press me; she knew I couldn’t do it. Not then, anyway.

We spent the next day making notes, calculating distances in Ireland, guessing at the sizes of towns, figuring out where we might find or open a theater. As a team, she and I scarcely needed to speak aloud—over and over, each of us interrupted the other with the same thought. Again, we had a perfect day, and I thought that we’d shrugged off the shadows that hung over us.