Venetia Kelly's Traveling Show (8 page)

“I had enough of that at home,” she said, “and I didn’t need more of it. Also, I had Mr. Anderson’s heart, and I simply loved my work. I got plenty of both and I had my lovely baby daughter.”

Whatever Mr. Anderson’s role, her world turned around Venetia and the theater, the theater and Venetia. With Mrs. Haas in attendance, she conducted her household quietly and with efficiency. And she steadied her life—helped considerably, she acknowledged, by the guiding (but not touching) hand of the tall, nasal Mr. Anderson.

It was a good existence. Society accepted her because of her talent. In this, she said, she was lucky.

“Try to imagine,” she remarked to me, “what New York in those days was like for us. We were Irish-Americans with the look of money, and therefore considered somewhat vulgar. It was assumed that we were Catholics, and so we were still reviled by the ruling classes of New York. If we’d been poor we’d have been a lot farther down the social ladder. A lot closer to the bottom-of-the-heap Irish coming in off Ellis Island.”

The idea of socially acceptable Irish in nineteenth-century New York—call that an oxymoron. No matter their wealth, the new Irish-Americans had a tough haul. Any status they achieved came mostly through politics—where they weren’t trusted anyway. Or the Church, still tarred as “Papist.”

I was to learn that Sarah didn’t play that “bottom-of-the-heap Irish” harp too loudly. But she did inherit—and passed on to her daughter—ferocious ambition to succeed.

B
y now I’ve made clear that I’m assembling this material—from notebooks, jotters, backs of envelopes—so that I can survey and judge—so forgive me if I sometimes come across as jumpy. And I also want to grasp and analyze what I myself did in those crucial times. I know that, at the end of it all, I did some remarkable things, far beyond the reach of a man of my age. We’ve all heard stories of great sportsmen or performers who, in one moment above all, reached the sublime—and then couldn’t say whether they knew beforehand that they could do it. They just hoped that they could do it again. That somewhat defines my position, though only in part; so I’m also writing all this down to see whether I can find in me the qualities I exhibited at that time—power, love, care, daring—because I need them all the time.

But I’ve learned much else—in particular how to read signs. You see, I realize now that I could and should have anticipated some of the unpredictable fires that broke loose and almost burnt the house down. After all I was a secret witness to what I call the Prizefight. Mother never knew about it, and only at a sharp moment in our relationship did I tell my father that I’d been there.

The Prizefight took place on a Good Friday. When you grow up alone you learn how to acquire knowledge secretly. If you’re an only child, you think that most of the whispered conversations between your parents are about you. Or so you have to believe in order to survive.

Thus, at an early age I learned to hide in order to listen. I knew how to skulk around the property, pretending to play my wild and solitary games, but in essence watching everything. The ancient structure of the house, with its nooks and crannies, gave substantial cover. So did the trees and the gardens, and I could spy on people indoors and out, and I did all the time. This continued into my early teens. You learn a great deal about people when you can observe them from hiding. The first thing you learn is that they behave differently when they’re alone and think nobody’s looking.

Spring had come. We had a late Easter that year and the air had begun to hum and sing. At the top of one section in the home garden, rows of currant bushes, dense as a little green city, ran along the brick walls. When I came into the garden through the gray wooden gate, I saw my father and Ned Ryan, our yard worker, in conversation with another man. As I watched, a rough argument broke out, unusual to see in my life.

I recognized the other man; he scared me. His name was Thomas Kane—the principal in the next village’s school. A tall, burly man, he’d been a gunman out in the fields during the War of Independence, and had laid some claim to being called a hero. I’ve since learned that he was also considered a bully, and I think I must have known it at the time because I was afraid for my father. Mr. Kane’s pretty wife, a small, brown-eyed woman whom he married some years later, became one of Mother’s “warm acquaintances,” as she called those who hadn’t quite made it into the inner ring of friendship.

As little Ned Ryan bounced up and down between them trying to make peace, Mr. Kane poked his finger into my father’s chest. Then he rapped his knuckles hard on my father’s head.

Brushing the hand away, my father whipped off his jacket, a rust-colored Harris Tweed of which I was fond. Ned Ryan took the jacket—and next accepted Mr. Kane’s coat, who then squared off toward my father. And he shouted something that I couldn’t quite hear, though it smacked, I felt, of Billy Moloney’s “flockin’” lingo.

My father stripped naked to the waist; Mr. Kane didn’t. The two men walked to a small patch of clear and level ground. Ned Ryan followed, fussy as a hen.

Now my father held up his fists like a pugilist of old, and said something—to which Mr. Kane replied with a punch. It seemed to me that my father allowed the punch to hit him—on the side of the head—and then the fight began in earnest.

My feelings, I remember, twisted my heart like twine. On the one hand I felt afraid that my father might get hurt; on the other hand I was watching a trial of strength and ferocity between two men of the parish. I didn’t seriously think that my father might lose—or was that just hope?

The punches flew. Mr. Kane had a longer reach and he jarred my father several times, set him back on his heels. All the birds stopped singing. The dogs lay in the grass, noses down, eyes narrowed, uncomfortable, whining. And the fight swung back and forth along a wide grass path between the vegetable beds.

I see it all so clearly, still: two big men in their thirties, my father’s torso whiter than dough, and now reddening here and there as punches landed. Mr. Kane had black hair, and eyebrows that met in the middle; the sun caught my father’s wavy red hair.

It became a brawl. The classy pugilism went out of it when Mr. Kane suddenly delivered a kick. Ned Ryan shouted, “Foul blow, foul blow.”

The kick was meant for my father’s groin, but he spun and took it on his thigh. He rocked right back at the force of the great boot. For a moment he dropped his fists and I almost rushed out of my hiding place. And then my father ignited: He said something. Again I didn’t hear the actual words, but it inflamed the other man, who drove forward.

They grappled and wrestled, untidy and roiling about. They fell to the ground, they rose again. Once more they grappled, looking for a grip here or there. My father grabbed Mr. Kane’s jacket and tried to swing him around; Mr. Kane took a fistful of my father’s hair and twisted; my father somehow wriggled away.

The fight ended at that moment. With one clean punch my father lowered him. I heard the crack and saw my father wince and pull back his hand as Mr. Kane staggered, half-slipped, and fell. I thought his head rolled a little.

He lay on the earthen seed drills; Ned Ryan came forward to inspect
my father’s hand. My father flapped the hand vigorously and nursed it; he bent at the waist, raised one knee in his wincing, and sucked at his knuckles. Soon, garment by garment, he began to take his clothes as Ned Ryan offered them.

By the time he had dressed again—undershirt, shirt, waistcoat, jacket—the man on the ground was sitting up. He looked at nobody and I felt half a pang of sorrow for him. I expected my father to reach down and offer him a helping hand but he did no such thing.

Turning his back, he beckoned Ned Ryan, who carefully laid Mr. Kane’s coat on the ground and followed my father out of the garden by the far gate. My father finished tucking in his shirttails as he walked, and he sucked his knuckles again. His force, so unexpected, so brutal, roasted me; even from that distance I felt my face burn.

Mr. Kane sat there for several minutes.
Will he catch cold
, I thought,
on the wet grass?
Then he clambered to his feet, spread his hands like a doctor all about his face, searched his head and torso, picked up his coat, and put it on. He stood for long moments, then walked straight toward where I hid. I watched from the bushes as he strode within a few feet of me, his face angry. He muttered under his breath. Then I heard his great boots crunch the gravel, and he had gone.

Sometimes when I try to understand what my father was truly like, I recall that day. I see him as a sturdy prizefighter, stripped to the waist, old-fashioned pose, arms out like big commas.

I see a ruthlessness too, in this man from whom I’d never received anything but tenderness and warmth. Of what was the ruthlessness born? What was it that he kept hidden for so much of his life? I suppose that he, more than anybody, had always known what might happen if he ever broke out of control.

A
t this point I want to share an old silent film with you—
The Courage of Esmeralda
. A lanky youth named Liam dug it up for me in a Dublin archive. He had no idea why I sat weeping after this seven minutes of crackling, hissing flicker.

Esmeralda, in a dress of many frills, is walking by the shining river gathering pretty flowers, when she hears a cry.

The word “Hark” appears on the screen, and we see Esmeralda halt her flower-gathering. She cups a tiny hand to her shell-like ear. Now the urgent white words prompt her to mouth, “Where, oh where can that voice be coming from?”

She looks all around—and then she sees. On the road that runs along by the river, a horse, pulling a cart, is rearing and bucking. A man and a boy sit on the cart; the man is trying in vain to halt the horse with the reins. Now it begins to gallop!

Esmeralda puts aside her posy of flowers—she rests them with delicate care on the little roadside stone wall, and she looks in fear and apprehension at the oncoming, galloping juggernaut.

“What am I to do? I am so small!”

The horse’s head is rearing, his nostrils flare, his eyes are wide. He
flings his head here and there. The reins fly from the man’s hands, and he cowers on the cart. He clutches to his chest the boy, the dark-eyed boy with the long eyelashes. Esmeralda holds a hand to her little breast in fear. She looks this way and that, hoping for help.

“Is there nobody near? Is there nobody to help me?”

Now Esmeralda’s eyelashes flutter—but there’s no help at hand.

Finally, she takes a deep breath and the screen says, “I must do it alone.”

Esmeralda steps out into the roadway and holds up a hand. Now the screen says, “Mr. Horse—stop. At once!”

The horse comes tearing on. Esmeralda holds up a hand again. The screen says, “Stop, I say, Mr. Horse. This instant!”

And the horse sees Esmeralda. He shakes his huge head like a mad beast. But he skids to a halt, and Esmeralda walks over to him. She pats his nose. The screen tells us what she says: “Nice Mr. Horse. Good Mr. Horse. Now have some grass.”

The grateful father and the adoring boy climb down. They walk over to Esmeralda.

“You saved our lives!” shouts the black screen in its white curly words. “How can we ever thank you enough?”

Through my tears I reflected that I could have told Esmeralda a thing or two about bolting horses.

Here’s the background. In August 1910, a gentleman named Sidney Olcott crossed the Atlantic by steamer and arrived in Cork. His employers had spun a globe of the world in front of him and asked where he’d next like to work. He chose Ireland, the land of his mother’s birth.

Sidney Olcott was a film director, one of the first, and one of the most famous of his day. Since infancy, and having listened to his Irish mother’s tales and reminiscences, he had revered Ireland, and the notion thereof. It’s a not uncommon malady.

The Kalem Company—“K” for George Kleine, “L” for Samuel Long, and “M” for Frank Marion—was founded in 1907, and generated myriad films in the United States. When he landed, Mr. Olcott took long reconnaissance tours all over his mother’s motherland and settled—unsurprisingly—in beautiful Killarney.