Though something of a bantam cock, and thus barely making the five feet nine inches, Sebastian met all the other requirements. And more: He had become a profound admirer of Adolf Hitler and the German High Command, and when drinking with his comrades or his father, he continued to weep for the humiliations of the previous war.
The other young man chosen with him to join the Hitler elite became more famous than Sebastian—infamous, rather—and he was the reason I went to Dachau. You’ll hear more of these two gentlemen later, because Sebastian Volunder was the German equivalent of Charles Miller, his actual opposite number. The first time I met him, Volunder reached up, caught my nose between thumb and forefinger, and tweaked until tears came to my eyes.
56
I wasn’t privy to the conversations that began when Captain Miller “debriefed,” as he called it, Mr. Seefeld. Miss Begley sat in, and indeed typed the notes, which then became classified as Top Secret. Day after day, they huddled in the small back study usually occupied by Mrs. Hortig, a renowned botanist specializing in ferns.
From my occasional glance as I walked by the window of their room, it seemed that Mr. Seefeld just talked and talked, for hours and hours—to Captain Miller’s delight, I assumed.
With nothing to do, I went away the next day. In Killarney, I retrieved my bicycle and stayed a couple of nights at Mrs. Cooper’s, so that I might gather myself and work out my immediate future. I had no idea what would happen next. As I was leaving, to be driven by Dr. Hortig, they all said good-bye to me. Mr. Seefeld told me that I must come and stay with him in Kenmare; and Captain Miller thanked me.
“When we’ve won this war, Ben,” he murmured, “I’ll see to it that your courage is acknowledged.”
Courage? I hadn’t even known what I’d been doing.
Miss Begley took my arm and walked me to the car.
“I’ll write to you at the post office in Tralee. Or is Limerick better?” And I said Limerick, because I wanted to visit my parents in Goldenfields, thirty miles from there.
And then Miss Begley tugged hard on my arm and hissed, in one of the fastest sentences I had yet heard her speak: “There wasn’t any sin, there was only comfort, body to body. Comfort and warmth. I did the same for you, remember.”
What could I say? What should I have said? My mind yelled, No, you didn’t do it for me—because, whatever she thought, that night in Saint-Omer when she slept in my bed had been for her and her alone.
During the time of the interrogation, Mr. Seefeld, furtive and anxious, looked to Miss Begley for more “comfort and warmth.” She, fearing that Captain Miller might see, kept his desire as surreptitious as a conspiracy.
With equal discretion, she now pursued her own interest in Captain Miller as though she were the man and he the girl. Her clincher, her closer of the deal, took the form of a letter that she wrote, on the Hortigs’ typewriter, one night late, many days into what Captain Miller called “the softest interrogation in the history of military intelligence.” I have the letter in my possession.
Dear Charles,
(I dislike “Chuck,” it reminds me of a tug on a rope.) This is the time to conclude the preliminaries between us, so that we can become husband and wife. In the next day or so I want you to write to your “girl back home” as you persist in calling her—I’ve drafted the letter for you: “Dearest” (or whatever pet name you use), “I fear I have disappointing information for you. Here in Europe, I have met another whom I love more than anything in the world, and we are to be wed imminently. This, I know, will come as a blow, but do not be too despondent—you have lost to a remarkable woman, and I hope that she will become your friend one day. Yours sincerely, Charles Miller, Capt.”
Make sure that you show me the letter. I will seal the envelope, and I will make sure that the letter gets sent to May or Ellie (I’ve forgotten her name). I will then make our arrangements; I have papers, etc., to get from the parish priest in Kenmare, and I know that the army will tell you that you’re free to marry. I have already checked with them.
This is the most wonderful moment of my life—because you are the most wonderful man. Even though I don’t know you very well, I recognized you the moment I saw you as the person with whom I want to spend all my days, and for whom I would give my own life if asked. Marry me at our first opportunity, win this war, and take me back to those thousands of acres that you told me about.
With love. Kate.
She made Miller read it while she stood there. She made him handwrite the letter to the “girl back home.” She sent it to the U.S.A. herself.
In some bizarre corner of my mind where warnings hang like shrouds, I think I knew that her pledge to him would be tested to the hilt. I think I knew that she was entering a risk of which she understood nothing. And I think I grasped that she would have to pay some price for commandeering his life in such a ruthless fashion—but I could never have guessed at how much she’d have to pay.
57
Let me tell you about my parents, your grandparents. In the decade after Venetia’s disappearance I rarely went to see them. Cruel of me, I know, their only child, but I included them in the wide spread of my blame. I knew too that my father harbored a jealousy against me. To put it simply, when he ran away with Venetia, he jeopardizing my mother’s life unthinkably, and even though he had come back to Goldenfields and become even more attentive to her than before, he never forgave me for shattering his dream.
And that’s what I did. I went after him and brought him home, as Mother had implored me to do. Falling in love with Venetia had not been in my plan, nor had anybody anticipated that she would cleave so passionately to me and not my father.
Every visit to them had this cloud hanging over it. I’d never told them that Venetia and I had married, and they only learned of her disappearance from the newspaper reports of the police inquiries. When I did manage to go back for the first time, I found my spirit freaked with the black jet of bitterness, and I left earlier than I had intended. Subsequent visits dimmed this resentment only a little; at any moment I felt likely to lash out.
Now, though, and it must have been Kate Begley’s influence, or perhaps the bizarre Seefeld experience, I found myself mellower toward them. For the first time, I even brought them gifts.
My father had sprained his ankle and was walking with a stick. I’d sent a telegram, they’d been expecting me, and he was leaning on the gate. After a flicker of initial awkwardness, he took my arm. We paced in step along the avenue, across the gravel, and into the porch.
I asked myself, Is he older? He didn’t seem to be aging, and yet I could see that he wasn’t as young as in the days when I’d followed him from venue to venue across the countryside and he’d been so embarrassed to see me.
The colors thrown on the floor by the stained-glass panels in the porch brighten my day often. I can enumerate many of my childhood’s light patterns: the shadows of clouds on sunny mountains; that sudden candid gleam of a far-off lake; the dappling of leaves on my mother’s face under the big beech tree when I was little and looking up at her; the evening sun turning all our western windows into flat panels of opaque gold; the yellow of the flames in our parlor when the fire has been lit but no lights have yet been turned on.
“Louise,” my father called, effusive as ever, “come-come-come out and look at us. Harry MacCarthy and Ben MacCarthy. Get outa the way, Bing Crosby and Bob Hope.”
He began to croon, “Toor-aloora-loora, that’s an Irish lullaby,” and since he had the worst voice in the Western Hemisphere, a larynx like a cracked plate, Mother came running.
“Anything to stop that noise,” she said. “Oh, Ben. Look at you.”
She took my hand. Her hair, never longer than a boy’s, had more gray in it; the eyes had never lost that watchfulness that hadn’t been there before what she used to call the Catastrophe. I loved, though, that she’d never lost her austerity, her lean efficiency, her reserve.
This time, I stayed two days and watched how
they were in their lives about the place, toward each other, and toward me. Mother told me the stories she knew would entertain, such as the latest high jinks by our farmhand, Billy Moloney.
“He came into the yard,” she said, “one day last week, back from the creamery, with a wheel on the cart leaning like the Tower of Pisa.”
We had long referred to him as Billy Flock, because we couldn’t quote him without using some form of euphemism, so profane was his language.
“So I see him coming, and out I go and I say to him, ‘What happened, Billy?’ and he said [Mother began to laugh, and almost couldn’t finish]—he said, ‘Ma’am, the flockin’ flocker’s flocked.’ And I had to leave the yard and find your father.”
I found them less tentative with me than before because, of course, I was less tentative with them. My father, as ever, wanted to talk politics and the war. I longed to tell him of the exploits in France, but knew I couldn’t—I might as well have put it in the papers. I could see the headlines: HARRY MACCARTHY’S SON IS SPY HERO.
Mother, for most of the time, confined her inquiries to my folklore work, asking for stories, whether I had called upon So-and-So or Such-and-Such, did I have any great new tunes in my head, how were James Clare and Miss Dora Fay?
I hadn’t been home in a year. By the fire one night as we sat talking, I reflected on these two people who had known such foolishly induced pain. In local gossip, he was still the farmer who had left his wife and run off with a young actress. That was how the world would always tell the story, an actress whose family had tried to swindle him, rob him of his farm, an actress whom Harry MacCarthy’s son, his only child, had then married at the age of eighteen, “ousting his father,” they said.
All that was over now, and would never rise again, and I felt proud of them for having recovered so well, but as usual I didn’t have the words to say it. Nor did they, nor could they, would they, ever refer to those events—too painful, too intimate, too sore, and too tragic for me.
Except: When I was leaving, Mother walked with me to the gate, and my father waved from the doorstep.
“He looks well,” I said, “apart from the sprain.”
She said, “He has great spirit, you should have heard the commotion he made about the sprain, he made me laugh until I was sick. Said he’d have the leg amputated and collect a war pension. And sell the toes as holy relics, say they were Saint Patrick’s toes.”
And then, before I mounted my bicycle, she said, “Ben, I never ask. But did you ever hear? I mean—a word?”
I shook my head, and she continued, very slowly as though prepared to interrupt herself if she was saying too much.
“They say. That, ah’m. That she’s in America. That the mother goes to see her. That, well, there’s, we have, I mean: Look. If there is, if there actually is—a grandchild—well, it would always be welcome here,” and she stopped, quavering a little, and asked, “What do you think, Ben? Do you think she’s alive? D’you think there’s a grandchild?”
If Mother knew how often I’d asked myself that question—every second of every minute of every hour of every day of every week of every month of every year. And therefore I felt able to say, “I think so. But I don’t know.”
And she said, as she did about many things, “Let Life fix it.” She patted my shoulder. “Ben, you’re so good, you’re such a good fellow.”
“How are you, yourself?” I asked.
“I’m fine,” she said. “Most of me.”
I couldn’t bear to look back at her because I knew that she’d be standing there, angular as a coat hanger, simple as prayer, watching me out of sight, and I knowing that a day would come when she wouldn’t be there to look at my back as I went away from her yet again.
58
May 1944
Two weeks later, after uneven times and mixed results in Kilkenny and Carlow (the west coast is still the richest in our lore), I took my bike on a train, went to the post office in Limerick, and opened a letter from Miss Begley: “Come down here and celebrate.”
Had she married already?
In the house at Lamb’s Head, I found all the excitement of a fable. The place teemed with women and girls—no marriage yet, but trousseau time, with plates of food and bells of laughter. When I loomed in the doorway, big as a black shadow, Miss Begley clapped her hands, ran to me, and said, “I clinched it.”
And from a chair near the window the grandmother said, “She clinched it.”
“Clinched what?”
“We have a date, for the wedding,” said the grandmother.
“If we had a tune to that, we could sing it,” said Miss Begley, “and from now on you have to call me ‘Kate,’ because I’m going to show you my trousseau, and therefore you’ll know a lot about me that most men never will or should.”
“Is he here?” I asked.
“Oh, good God, we’d have seven years of bad luck if he saw any of this! The wedding’s in London. And you’re coming.”
Like a servant in a play, I folded my hands in front of me and nodded my head.
I said, “I have to get something from my bike,” stepped out into that wild Atlantic wind, and tried to find a place where I could vomit without being seen. I didn’t in fact throw up, but I was sick to the core. My heart was now harassing me every day because I was having difficulty in maintaining to myself that Venetia was still my world. But I had articulated none of this to myself; now I know that my body was the messenger.
You can tell, can’t you, how it must have felt? I was betwixt and between, yet the loss of people past still lay coiled inside me like a snake, ever ready to hiss and strike.
The light had turned pewter across the bay, as a small rainstorm swept in, but the squall touched Lamb’s Head not at all and the sun lit the sea between the rain and me. Taking great care, I edged down the steep path that leads to the jetty, which I had never seen. Awkward as a hobbled goat, I kept my body low to the ground, ready for a fall at any time. Until it breaks away to the left and onto a little plateau, any drop from the path will pitch a body straight down into the waves. I made it to the safe level and walked the rest.
Unseen from above, the jetty had substance. An oblong of rocks, selected for their natural fit to one another, had been cemented together. Over the years, seaweed, kelp, barnacles, and other shore growth had added to the welding, and the gray-blackened stones looked as firm as a harbor wall. Not more than ten feet long, the pier had iron rings embedded on both sides; from one hoop waved strands of an old rope like a lock of hair.
I looked up behind me but could only see the chimney and part of the roof on the Begley house. And I imagined the men who came here, with their rough faces and rougher hands, and, perhaps roughest of all, their manners, but maybe with yearning in their hearts for a fireside companion.
Such thoughts led me straight to melancholy and could produce a mood that would last for weeks, ever sinking, ever worse. I fought with it by looking around, by dipping my fingers into the wonders of a rock pool, where a tiny crab scuttled away from the shadow of my hand. Periwinkles cropped everywhere, and I began to gather them, to boil them later and winkle out the meat with a pin.
And then I saw the plaque in the wall.
A flat stone had been inserted high on the pier, out nearest the harshest drag of the ocean. Every wave must pound that stone, every lip of a tide must suck at it. Yet the inscription, the deeply incised words, had held fast:
FOR JOAN AND FLORENCE BEGLEY
MAMA AND PAPA
THIS IS YOUR HOME
KATE
The sentiment should have felt crass and mushy; it didn’t. I’d known of similar little monuments on the coast of Portugal—they’re designed to beckon home the lost mariner—but I’d never seen it in Ireland, and I’ve never seen another. The sea washed in; I had to jump to keep my feet dry; the pewter light out in the bay began to spread in my direction.
I never viewed the trousseau—too many girls and women, too much squealing and ri
baldry. That suited me fine, and I sat with the baleful grandmother, and I ate every bite of food that was offered to me—which is what I do under stress.
However, in my personal journal I have a sensational entry, made next day. Though I didn’t want to, I stayed at Lamb’s Head, and, late in the blue and smoky evening Miss Begley came to my room. Here’s the note I made.
Last night, I was lying in the dark, fully clothed, trying not to think. My mind refused to let me plan my next journeys. I wanted to go to Donegal in search of wolves, I needed to go to Monaghan. My brain lacked the strength for sequential thought. I heard a scratching noise—the gentle screech of the uneven door as it scraped across the stone flags. Kate B. came in, a finger to her lips. My candle fluttered; I stood. She reached up, unbuttoned and removed my waistcoat, then did likewise with her cardigan. Next she indicated that I must take off my shirt, and she took off her blouse. Garment by garment, and like puppets whose strings she held, we took off our clothes and stood naked face-to-face. Led by her, lit by the candlelight we ran our hands all over each other. Her hands guided mine. When we lay down on the bed, everything became soothing, as I think and hope it was meant to be. We seemed to have nothing but thoughtfulness for each other, nothing but a wish to be calm and warm, nothing but a yearning to give comfort. And she seemed to need it as much as I did, although we didn’t talk about it. I’m not saying that I didn’t want more, oh my God, I did. But I buried my head between her breasts, and we left it at that. We fell asleep. In the morning she had gone, and I was tempted to think it all a dream.
It wasn’t a dream. Next day, she raised the event with me. We were sitting on the long train from Killarney to Dublin. I had put my bicycle in the luggage van; on the racks above us sat her suitcases and her trunk; Miss Kate Begley was about to become a bride, and she had packed for it like a duchess.
The Matchmaker of Kenmare Page 16
