Venetia Kelly's Traveling Show (56 page)

H
ere now is an account of how I lived the next several years. I spent most of the first year in Dublin, hiding in Miss Fay’s house. I had failed at something deep and ageless—I had failed to guarantee the safety and comfort of my wife. I failed, therefore I hid.

It opened the healing process, though. Under that roof, the first new skin, not much, began to form around the wound. It began slowly. I mean—I did things so basic, so childish; for instance, I drew pen-and-ink pictures of every mathematical and engineering instrument in that room. Miss Fay’s idea—line drawings of attempted precision for precision artifacts; I saw the self-control that she wanted me to acquire, and I went along with it.

Each morning, therefore, I had a task facing me. Miss Fay said that she wished to give the instruments to the National Museum and needed to have a record of them; I became her recorder. Barely sentient, or so it felt, I drew all day.

She left the house each morning just before nine o’clock, and came home each evening at just after half past six; she was, herself, a precision instrument. Over dinner she told me about her day, her academic work, her meetings, her colleagues. After a week or so, she brought home a
newspaper, and that’s how I got through the nights. I can almost quote to you from
The Irish Times
for the second half of 1932 and the first half of 1933.

Fortunately for my healing process, Mr. de Valera did indeed call an election, for January 1933. With bitter sighs I recalled how Blarney had predicted it. And Mr. de Valera at last got the majority he wanted.

Actually, not quite; he got exactly half the number of seats in Parliament, an increase of four, tying the vote, but the convention is that the Speaker votes with the government, so he was clear.

Miss Fay and I lived like that, uninterrupted for a number of weeks, an aunt with a brokenhearted nephew—indeed, a mother with a destroyed son. I came to know her very well. Grief, and in this case, frightened bemusement and a terrible sense of failure—these can, in time, heighten powers of observation.

She was a thoroughly decent woman. I never heard her raise her voice; she allowed no drama into her life; everything remained on a steady keel. How perfect an atmosphere for a recovery such as mine.

It also worked because, for all her seeming diffidence and spinsterhood, she understood emotion. To grasp that, you needed only to see her with James Clare. He was, in fact, our only interruption, if you could call it that.

On a day that he was due to arrive, she came home early, cheeks alight. Her step quickened, she laughed louder—this woman, so level, so seemingly dry and academic, this shy woman, became excited.

As did he when he saw her. She always took part of the next day off after his arrival, and breakfast lasted until noon.

Then I had him to myself. He made me talk and talk. He asked me over and over what I needed. He made me say words such as “funeral” and “mourning” and “loss.”

In the eleven months that I was there, James came to stay four or five times, sometimes for a weekend, sometimes for a week. He too had business in the city; he had to go to his employers, the Folklore Commission, and hand in his most recent notes and collections, and discuss his next—self-made—assignment.

During one visit, he and Miss Fay stayed up especially late, and talked into the night. Next day at breakfast—this was now late June or early
July, and we had the windows to the garden open wide, and everywhere I looked I saw Venetia’s face and the flowers in her hair the day we married—James, with Miss Fay’s round eyes watching, aired, as he called it, “a notion.” His sister, who was married to a farmer in south Donegal, needed a “civilized” man to run the place because her husband had to have a surgical operation.

H
ealing stage two: In Donegal I became quieter than I’d ever been—call it morose. But I worked so hard, day and night, for this couple whose children had grown up and left home, gone to Scotland and Canada, a typical Irish tale. I had to do everything—cattle, sheep, pigs; I even did some building, and discovered that I had skills I never knew I possessed. All those years being everywhere with my father and Billy Moloney, and all the others who came and went—now I translated the deep-seated and well-remembered information into action.

I slept in a separate building, a room over a cowshed, and at night the warm smells and the warmer snufflings soothed me; Mother’s stories about her cows came back to my mind, and comforted me.

James Clare visited every few months. He had a circuit that took him all around the country in a most regular way, and he could always tell roughly where he’d be on any date of the calendar. In a man who had no constraints on his movements, I found this sense of organization impressive.

My grief notwithstanding, I was by now, and unknown to myself—certainly unnoticed in my state of mourning—learning how to live a life
out in the world. I had to get up at the same time every morning; others, including animals, depended on me.

Brutally, I had to look back on my time with Venetia as dreamlike, which, as you will recall, is how I described it. And I knew that I couldn’t stay suspended in this half-dream, whole tragedy. If I wanted to honor Venetia I had to become a functioning human being; the greater the functioning ability, the greater the honor.

Those were not my words or ideas; they came from James. On a late October evening of the third year that I’d been there, when the weather—as can happen on the west coast—had gone all Mediterranean for an entire week, he invited me to walk out to Kildoney Point.

He said, “I like looking at the ocean. It tells me what the human spirit can encompass.”

His sister’s husband, a pale and likable man, had now fully recovered, and although they wanted me to stay with them for the winter, they no longer needed the help.

“They’re very fond of you,” James said. “But they worry about you. You’re too quiet for your age.”

I said, “I suppose so.”

“If I could wave a magic wand, Ben, what would you want me to do?”

I thought for so long that he had to ask me again. Then I said, “In the legends that you love so much, what does a hero do if he’s lost somebody?”

James quoted first a snatch in Gaelic, and then the translation.

“He searches north and south and east and west, but they’re the north and south and east and west of his soul. He searches up and down and in and out, but they’re the up and down and in and out of his heart. He searches back and forth and hither and yon, but they’re the back and forth and hither and yon of his spirit. And then he finds what he seeks.”

“But,” I asked, “he only searches his heart and his soul and his spirit?”

“Take it as metaphorical. They’re the four corners of the earth. They’re the sun, moon, planets, and stars. They’re the four winds.”

“And,” I asked, “at the end—is he healed?”

“Always.”

James and I sat looking at the sea at Kildoney Point, and I knew that we would go on sitting there until I answered him and his magic wand.

“What I say might surprise you.”

He laughed. “A surprise is as good as a meal.”

I took a deep breath and said, “I think I’d like to be a spalpeen.”

He didn’t flinch. “All over the country?”

“The four corners.”

James said, “Wait ’til the fine weather comes in. And we’ll make sure we meet on our travels.”

I didn’t ask the terrible question “Does the hero find what he’s looking for?” because I had long known the sad answer.

Or thought I had.

We walked back from the point. As we reached the house James said, “May I ask you a favor?”

I looked at him. “If I can.”

“Try to stop drinking.”

I
hear you asking, “What’s a spalpeen?” Let me give you some context. Outside that farm in Donegal, that room above the cows, that house and those decent people, the world still turned. Looking back on it now with some (not much) objectivity, I was at least engaged by the politics. The new Parliament was up and running in Dublin because of Mr. de Valera’s talks with the members of smaller parties. His absorbing horse-trading had continued.

In Scotland they have a good word,
outwith
—meaning “all things considered,” or “notwithstanding.” Outwith the turbulence in my own life, I knew things had changed nationally—and everybody in the country knew, whether they liked to admit it. It continues to fascinate me that something that seems as megalithic and remote as government machinery can have so intimate a reverberation.

Though serene at the fact that he was back at home, I missed my father. With his gifts of explanation, and his instinct for involvement in momentous things, he could be at his best at a time like this. I needed somebody to explain to me why I felt that the entire country had changed; in other words, that it wasn’t just me.

People still walked about the streets. Farmers continued to take their
milk to the creamery. Housewives went on shaking the bread crumbs from their tablecloths out into the world. And yet—things were different.

Perhaps the newspapers had something to do with it. They were alive with politics. Every speech, every utterance of every tinker and tailor, every Tom, Dick, or Harriet who had any political thought in his or her head was reported. You may think that the endlessness of political comment today is new. Not at all. Page after page of the newspapers reported from every one of the country’s thirty constituencies and 153 seats.

What was it, that powerful interest in how we might govern ourselves? I’ve seen this country at ground level and I think I know, and it’s an inspiring story.

To begin with, a large percentage of the Parliament members now representing the people of the country had come from nothing. From less than nothing. Is there a word
abjectitude
—meaning a state of being permanently abject? If there isn’t, let’s make one:
abjectitude
.

Abjectitude in Ireland meant, not many generations ago, mud huts. Deep in fields, masked by mounds and hedgerows, people lived, raised families. They cut sods of turf from the ground and, the grass side turned out, built igloos for themselves. Inside—earth above them and earth below them, raw, brown soil, always damp and dank, always unhealthy.

On the level above these mud caves, some families lived in houses. But that’s all they did—“lived.” A wretched existence it was too; we had them in our village. In one family, the food, to use Mother’s word, “rotated”—that is to say, not everybody in the household ate every day of the week.

Clothing rotated too; when the children all stood within the age brackets that required them to go to school—from ages four to four-teen—not every child could emerge from the house every day, because such clothes as they had needed to circulate.

Dole. Social welfare. Child support. None of that existed or penetrated. The rural Ireland in which I grew up had permanent strata of poverty. If you looked you’d see it, the deep, wide band of gray-and-black grime just beneath the brighter surface of “normal” society. Except that there wasn’t a normal society. What’s “normal” when you have families who might eat a full meal on Friday or Sunday, or might it be Tuesday? With scraps in between.

They didn’t wash—no soap and no knowledge of how to wash. My father often told how, when Billy and Lily first came to the yard, Billy had to be shown how to wash his neck; he had never done so. When she saw on Mother’s dressing table that other shapes, scents, and varieties of soap existed, Lily began to cry. Such soap as she had seen came in thick yellow bricks, and always smelt of damp newspaper.

Nor did they know anything about forms of clothing. For years Mother badgered my father to tell Billy about underwear. My father went carefully on the subject—he knew that Billy, when he grasped the concept and the hygiene it implied, would blush red as a radish for days, and not speak to anybody, and swear even more than he usually did. Once, late in her life, I asked Mother about Lily and hygiene.

“Don’t,” she said, so pained and anxious that I never raised the subject again; I was interested from a folklore point of view.