Venetia Kelly's Traveling Show (58 page)

I have to say that Sarah took my breath away. The newspapers had been reporting her “magnificence,” her “stupendous performance.” When she uttered the famous line “They’re all gone now and there isn’t anything more the sea can do to me,” I thought that the audience would break out into a wail. I certainly wailed, inside me. Was I looking at Venetia?

I didn’t know how—or whether—Sarah would receive me. But I should have known—Sarah “Incorrigible” Kelly, serene as linen, posed by her mirror, one hand on the rail of her gilt chair.

“Ben! My beautiful boy—no, not boy anymore—my beautiful man. Look at you!”

At first we talked more easily than I’d expected. Does it say something poor about my character that I liked her so much? Not only did we talk, we made arrangements for lunch. But—she controlled me. Again.

“God, I miss Venetia,” I blurted.

She burst into a weeping so powerful that I had no recourse. Waving a hand, deep in her grief, she gestured for me to go. As I stood, and her sobs came under control, she began her deflections—come to the house, you must meet Mr. Anderson, and so on. It took some months before I found the courage.

We sat in the garden; it was the first time I visited her house, and the first time I met Mr. Anderson.

“Sarah,” I said. A child would have known that I was desperate. “What happened to Venetia?”

Again, she burst into tears and Mr. Anderson asked me to leave, and please not come back if I meant to upset his wife.

I didn’t, not for months—but when I did, we had an amiable conversation, all three of us, about the Waldorf-Astoria and the New York stage and all of that.

And then I heard, as I was leaving, what I thought was a noise of scratching.

I stalked the place—and two days later I ambushed Mrs. Haas when she was shopping. She nearly died of fright; we had to hide down a lane lest she be seen. How she had aged—almost unrecognizably. She told me as much as she knew. We met again and again.

“Her father, Mr. Kelly—he sent Sarah, the mother, the cable—‘Come back. Urgent.’ She come back and they had the big conference. And my Wenetia, she scream and scream and I’m told to go avay and not to listen at the door. But I heard. The mother, Sarah, she told Wenetia, You must go, or they kill Ben.”

“What?!”

“Ben, do not tell that you’ve met me, not even to say that you know Wenetia is alive.”

“Where is she? Where is she?”

“I do not know. Sarah, the mother, she goes away somevhere, tvice a year.”

“Is there a child?”

“They tell me nothing, Ben.”

“Do you think they meant to kill me?”

“Ja. The gunman in the kitchen, the old Mr. Kelly’s attitude. Ja, they vould kill you. Think. He, the old man—the lake, Gur, his young vife, all that.”

“You know about that?”

“I tell Wenetia. The shop man—he bought eggs from Mr. Nagle’s daughter. Wenetia tell Blarney. Poor Blarney.”

King Kelly promised Venetia that if she went away for a while they wouldn’t harm me—which he and Cody meant to do. Then they found that they daren’t—on account of the police investigation. With the dragging of the lake and all that, I was prominently linked in police thinking to King Kelly and it would have looked too obvious. Some months later, Sarah told Venetia that I was dead, killed in an accident.

“Ben, is the vord—
implore?
I implore you. Do not tell you met me.”

“Can I find Venetia?”

At our last meeting, Mrs. Haas ran away, and I didn’t stop her. Couldn’t. I didn’t want to endanger her. I didn’t want anyone hurt on my behalf ever again.

The members of the company had limits to what they knew—or know—but they confirmed sufficient details for me. Their best information had to do with the closing of the show.

“That bloke Cody,” said neckless Graham. “He was at the root of it.
Money, I’d say. But he did tell us the jig was up. We didn’t know what the jig was.”

Martha said, “I don’t believe them. I think they killed her. They’re only telling you she’s alive so’s you won’t go looking for a body again. ’Cause if you find one—well, they’re murderers, aren’t they?”

Peter wept. “My poor Venetia, my light, my shining angel.”

I believe that Venetia is alive—or was taken away alive. In time, King Kelly more or less told me so; that’s why I went to see him so often, because I suspected that he’d relish the opportunity to torture me. And I believed that Sarah confirmed it—Sarah, turning her figure this way and that, with alluring smiles; and Mr. Anderson, wintry Mr. Anderson, in his black suit and his shirt of unreal white, smiling his thin smile at her. They held me captive, and still do.

It’s a simple story. King Kelly wanted land, but for very little money. He’d worked the mortgage stunt once or twice; he’d learned it in Montana on the land rushes—and he was always looking for vulnerable targets, widows, innocent people, those in distress.

Afraid to risk his political future, he wanted nonetheless to own someplace near his future (as he hoped) parliamentary constituency. Professor Fay shared the same Fascist persuasion—let’s call it what it was, Fascism, aimed at right-wing dictatorship—and they’d met at a political gathering in Dublin.

Fascists destabilize—that’s what they do, in order to gain power. When my father showed such an interest in Venetia, King Kelly tracked his identity, and found that Professor Fay knew him. They began an elaborate scheme of further destabilization. I was, to them, collateral damage.

Strange how pieces fall into place.

“Look at you,” said King Kelly to me more than once, “look at you.”

“Look at you,” said Sarah, when I went to see her in her dressing room. And she said it the next time too. By now, she knew that I suspected the truth of things. “Look at you,” she said again.

I thought,
Where have I heard those words before?

In her mirror I saw something behind me and I turned around—a Kinsale cloak hung on the wall. By now I was challenging her openly.

She laughed and said, “It was foolish, it was stupid, but you have to admit—it was imaginative.”

“But it harmed me,” I said. “And it harmed your daughter.”

I went back to see King Kelly.

“I believe that I know the whole story.”

“Have you any land to sell?”

“Where is she?”

“You’ll never find out.”

“But—she is alive?”

“Go away. And stay away.”

I never did. Bit by bit, he told me more. Cody took Venetia away. The person who had seen Mrs. Haas on the docks at Cork—he had indeed seen her; she had put Venetia on the tender that took passengers out to ocean liners.

Bit by bit, I went back to Sarah too, and I added questions.

“Was a child born?”

Behind Sarah’s chair, Mrs. Haas nodded furiously. Sarah wept, and Mr. Anderson said, “I think we should close this conversation.”

M
y parents retired from farming in their late seventies. Few farmers took retirement, but I had no wish to take over. They fetched an excellent price, bought a house nearby with a spare bedroom, and when I wasn’t staying there, Miss Fay was—or so it often seemed. James Clare had taken to “living in Dora’s house,” as he put it—essentially they lived together. And I had the wonderful good fortune to see each of those four people safely into their next worlds.

The men went first, led by James. He couldn’t speak at the end, he so lacked breath. In his last weeks he wrote me little notes, in his small, neat hand, telling me where all his researches lay, his address books, his sources. I inherited all his papers, and, as I say, his position. In the end he stopped breathing, almost as a decision, and he left his life in the way he had occupied it—with grace, still inquisitive, and a thoughtful look on his face.

My father got a stroke, lived four days—long enough for me to get home—and got another stroke, which took him. Before he died, the side of his face had dropped; he could speak with difficulty.

“I’m all to one side,” he said, “like the village”—a taunt hurled at our
native heath by rival villagers. He died with Mother sitting on one side of the bed and me on the other.

She said later, “I think he looked at you more than at me.”

“No, Mother, he didn’t.”

She herself didn’t want, she said, “to make old bones.” I’ve always believed that she chose when to die—on what would have been my father’s eighty-fifth birthday. She went suddenly and without a word, clasping my hand as she sat up in bed to take a cup of tea from me.

And Miss Fay—cancer: a long, slow time.

“The dreadful thing is,” she said, “I enjoyed every little gasper”—her name for cigarettes.

These, my four parents, for all their faults and failings, garnished their lives so well that they afforded me the opportunity to be with them at the end. As you can see, we may be barbarous over in this part of the world, but we are caring people too.

I’m done now; the story as it stands is over, with all people reckoned for; Billy and Lily are still alive—they’re not much older than me. Sarah Kelly died in a Florida hospital; the Irish newspapers carried long obituaries. I don’t know what became of Mr. Anderson and I don’t much care—he colluded. Mrs. Haas died in a fall—or was she pushed? I’ve never known, and all I hope is that I didn’t contribute in some way to what happened.

And so, I’m left with only one person—the person for whom I wrote this account, the person I’ve been addressing all the way through—the “you” to whom I’ve been writing this very long letter.

Who are you? Are you a boy? A girl? Are there two of you, twins? In those days we had no means of knowing in advance.

I’ve tried every means I can think of to search for you. Not willing to afford a private detective to follow Sarah onto an ocean liner, I have found the trails necessarily short. (In essence, I want to keep the money that I have for you.)

I mean to go on searching. This narrative will poke out between the bars of my cage and somebody will read it, somebody who knows you—maybe you will read it yourself.

If you do, come to find me, in the care of the Irish Folklore Commission,
or ask for me at almost any house in the Irish countryside; they all know me.

Also know this, my son or daughter—although I have never met you, I can say without fear of being contradicted that you were born of something special. Few women have been loved as your mother was—fewer still by a father and son. My father may have done something unsteady and foolish, but he did it with a heart full of admiration for a most remarkable woman.

And if she’s still with us (I tremble in the hope that she might be), and she reads this document, then she’ll know that everybody in all of this is long forgiven—forgiven everything. I have largely forgiven myself too, and that has taken some doing.

Where are you, anyway? Under what kind of sky do you walk? What voice do you have? Is it a bell like your mother’s? Or something of a flat drum, like mine? Are you a brittle flower? Your mother had a broken petal or two—and therefore was all the more loved. I’m certain that you must be tall, like your parents.

If you find this, you’ll now know the story of your own life before your life began. In other words, you’ll have your very own legend. Not many of us have that; as James Clare taught me, we must often look to other stories in order to tell our own. But not you.

F
RANK
D
ELANEY
is the
New York Times
bestselling author of the novels
Ireland, Tipperary
, and
Shannon
, and his nonfiction work
Simple Courage: A True Story of Peril on the Sea
was selected as one of the American Library Association Books of the Year. Formerly a judge for the Booker Fiction Prize, he worked for many years as a broadcaster with the BBC in England, where he also wrote many fiction and nonfiction bestsellers. Born in Ireland, he now lives in the United States.