“Don’t flocking ask me,” I said, not knowing that I was yelling. “Just flocking don’t. Don’t flocking order me, just flock off and leave me flocking alone.”
“Hey, hey,” said the senior officer, who had slightly bulging eyes. “Nobody’s threatening you.”
Was he the kindest man I’ve ever known? Perhaps. And he knew how to handle men; he stood close to me, put his hands on my shoulders, and said, “You’re okay. Take it easy, take it easy. What have you been up to?”
I told him—about the woods, the hiding place, the Messerschmitt and its trigger-happy pilot, the German camp, and he said, staggered by my story, “You need more coffee, sir.” I didn’t tell him about the killing.
The “sir” did it. I started to weep and couldn’t stop. He never let go of my shoulders and he just looked at me and said, “It’s okay, it’s okay.”
The beetle-browed young man fetched a second chair and more coffee, and this senior officer and I sat down. We drained our tin mugs, not at all battered, shiny new in fact. And we looked down at the muddy ground.
“I met a fellow called Peiper,” I said. “He has American troops.”
“Peiper’s a tough egg. Him and his gang—ravenous.”
My mood frightful, my spirits destroyed, my intellect a sputtering candle, I nonetheless noted the word. Ravenous. A ravening wolf. If nothing else works in the world—legend does. It steadies us, it restores us, it tells us who we are and what we do. That was James Clare’s thesis. He would have latched on to the word ravenous. And I, his earnest student in legend and life, took comfort from the fact that the word had been used, and I had noted it.
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Kate went back to Lamb’s Head, and I home to Goldenfields. Before that, we had been debriefed at the embassy in Dublin. They didn’t try to tell her that her husband was dead; they saw her passion; nobody could stand close to that fire. It will take a long time, they said, to “sift the results of the war.”
Such diplomatic language—but it was good enough for her. She asked them to tell her when the soldiers were going home from Europe; by now we knew who was going to win the war.
And by then we looked like refugees; each of us had lost a great deal of weight; I could afford it, she couldn’t. And yet she put out so much energy at the embassy that they all but summoned the ambassador himself. She paced up and down, she spread her hands in powerful gestures; she spoke in emphasis strong as a preacher.
“When you know something—when you know that you know it. Deep in here”—she stabbed a finger into her chest—“you have to believe it. Life is a River with Stepping-stones of Belief.”
Those officials, those decent men—I knew they’d never seen anybody like Kate. They couldn’t calm her because she wasn’t hysterical. They couldn’t deflect her because she was so focused. They couldn’t deny her because she wouldn’t allow it. Her pact with Miller was as powerful as any fuel the world has ever found.
“What will you say to me,” she asked them, “when he comes home from the war and I’m waiting for him?”
They had no answer. Neither did I.
Whatever her show of bravery, she still trembled; on the train south, she failed to keep her hands from shaking; she spilled tea. I had offered—indeed, tried to insist—that I go to Kenmare with her, but she refused, so I climbed from the train at Dundrum and, to my profound astonishment, found Mother and my father waiting. I had sent them a telegram: IS IT ALL RIGHT IF I COME HOME TOMORROW? They’d seen that it came from Dublin the previous day, and they had gone to meet both trains.
No embrace; neither took my arm. I had no luggage, just my battered, shattered journal, my Wandering Scholars, and my long black coat, and I was still wearing the clothes that I’d found in that cellar in the forest. We walked together, three abreast, each of them close by me, down the platform to the car.
As we sat inside, Mother reached a hand back and patted my knee, and my father said, “You-you-you’re all right now. All right.” How did they know what I’d been through? His little stammer used to irritate and embarrass me; not then, not ever again. We drove home in silence. My irrepressible father broke the silence just once.
“John-John-John Casey’s wife makes him sleep with the horses these days, since he’s so fond of them, she says.”
In the house, Mother beckoned me upstairs. Without a word she showed me the new bathroom, and in moments the steam rose.
“Come on down when you’re ready,” she said. Huge towels lay on shelves, and when I looked in the mirror I wondered whose face I saw.
Almost an hour later, I walked down the back stairs to the kitchen and found nobody there. I heard Mother call; they had a fire lighting in the parlor, the room where I had first sat and listened to Venetia as she told me the story of my father and herself, of their one-sided love affair. A tray sat there, of ham and onion sandwiches, my favorite food on this earth, and two large pots of tea, and an apple pie as big as a wheel.
“Sit-sit-sit down now,” said my father. He didn’t offer me a drink, he never offered me a drink, and when he died I asked Mother why not?
“He didn’t believe that a parent should encourage their children to drink,” she said.
That was my father in trumps, in all his uneven and cross-eyed philosophies. He thought it all right to down tools and quit his farm—forever, as he thought—to run away with an actress, imperiling everybody left behind, and the farm they lived on, their livelihood and their future, but he wouldn’t pour a glass of whiskey for his only child. I laughed. What else could I do?
“You-you-you’ve been through the mill,” he said. When I nodded, he continued, “You can tell us about it or not, as the case may be. Now or any time you like.”
I had a mouthful of food. When I’d chewed it, I said, “This isn’t irrelevant, but do you think the Policy of Neutrality has been the right thing?”
“Ah, the old fox,” he said, meaning our premier, Mr. de Valera, whom I had seen on the campaign trail, whom I had met, and whose politics I’d been watching every day of my life before Kate Begley blew me off course.
“He kept us safe,” said Mother. “He kept us out of the war. They can say what they like about him, but he kept us safe.”
“This-this-this is what he did,” said my father. “He played Churchill off against the Yanks, and against the Protestants in the North. He told Churchill to give us back the six counties in the North, and he could use our ports, and when Churchill threatened to invade us anyway, and take the ports by force, Dev welcomed the German ambassador to lunch, ’twas in all the papers. And the Protestants—they’re calling themselves ‘Northern Ireland’ now, by the way—when they heard the bargain that Churchill might make, there was blue murder. ‘Ulster will fight and Ulster will be right’—same old threat. They say it over and over.”
Naturally, I never told my parents the true reason for asking their opinion on neutrality. In Germany, and at Lamb’s Head, and in the forests of Belgium, in the little hotel at Saint-Omer, even in the white house of Max the architect, I had shared a bed with Kate Begley—and would soon do so again. Her presence, her arms, her sleepy warmth, I knew and loved and relished them all—but never her body in full. On the ship coming back from Europe to Liverpool, I pointed this out to her. She listened with that grave child’s face that so endeared her to me.
When I had finished she said, “Call it neutrality, Ben,” and she shrugged as she always did when she had no more to offer. In her exhaustion—and mine—I pressed no further.
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My parents told me next day that I fell asleep in mid-sentence. I had been asking for news of neighbors, of Billy Flock and his wife, Lily, of little Ned Ryan who helped look after our animals, whose son had enlisted in the British army and had been killed in the retreat from Dunkirk—and I simply stopped and fell asleep.
Mother said that she took the cup and saucer from my hand. They covered me with a blanket and left me there all night.
“Your father
went down three or four times to put logs on the fire,” she said next morning as I woke up. “He told me that he never saw anyone so deep asleep.”
I had nothing to say, and Mother, with whom I had been through so much when my father ran off with Venetia, looked at me, ran her hand across my hair, and said, “Ben, what desperate things you must have seen.”
In our language, words often had skewed and sometimes more effective uses. Desperate didn’t always mean “without hope” or “driven by the disappearance of hope”—it also meant “dreadful.” So I answered Mother.
“Desperate,” I said, “in every sense of the word.”
“Are you all right?”
I said, “I think I’m numb.”
“Numb is the best thing,” she said. “It’ll help you to hold on until you recover.” And then she delivered a chide that I never saw coming. “You should have come home here too when the other thing happened.”
“The other thing.” Meaning the Disappearance of Venetia—Venetia whom I had wrested from my father, and whom I had married a matter of weeks later.
“Mother, how could I have come home then?” I said. “In all the circumstances.”
She said, “But where’s more flexible than your own home?”
So I stayed in that flexible home for many, many weeks. I had days in which I did nothing but sit and look into the fire. I had days when I walked—down through our woods, so benign and safe and gray after the black and terrifying Belgian trees. I had days when I read—every poem in Palgrave’s Golden Treasury, every stanza in Yeats’s version of The Oxford Book of English Verse—my father brought it back from Cork one day; I’d been wanting it for years.
Unable yet to revisit my beloved Wandering Scholars, because the landscapes of Europe still terrified me, I read the newspaper from cover to cover. And I had days when I wrote down as much as I could bear of the events and incidents that I’ve been describing here.
I also wrote letters—to Kate, to Miss Fay, and to James Clare. By way of response, Miss Fay and James arrived one Sunday and I’ll come to that in a moment. I didn’t hear from Kate—but her grandmother, Mrs. Holst, wrote me this single page.
Dear Ben,
Kate will not be replying to your letter. She is unwell and is in the hospital in Killarney, under observation for exhaustion, and perhaps rheumatic fever. Please do not try to contact her. What in the world did you put her through on your travels? A gentleman would at least have tried to look after her, and I’m sure her husband will have things to say to you when he comes home.
Yours in disappointment,
Delia Holst
Too much; too unjust; I didn’t have the energy to sum up a reply. One day I might, but I couldn’t do it at that moment—which is how I came to keep the letter and not throw it on the fire.
Miss Fay had purchased a car—an Austin Ten, with a tall shiny nose between two huge-bug headlamp eyes and two chrome wing-mirror ears.
My father, whom she adored, said to her, “Where-where-where in the name of God did you manage to buy a car in the middle of the Emergency?”
“Half-price,” she said. “The garage was going out of business”—as so many did during the war.
James described her as the best driver they’d seen on the road that day, and Miss Fay discounted the compliment, saying that they’d encountered only one other car during the three-hour journey from Dublin. “It was easy to avoid,” she said. “It was parked.”
Both fussed over me less than usual—tact in the presence of my parents. And both said that they longed to read my journals. Then James and I took a walk down to the river, and he told me to submit a report to the Folklore Commission.
“They’re expecting something from you,” he said.
“I have a lot of stuff from France. And Germany.”
“They’ll love you for that,” James said. “They’ll have their arms open for you.”
“I may not want to go back,” I said.
This stopped James in his tracks. “With your gift of listening?” he said.
“There’s unfinished business,” I said. “And I don’t know how long it will take.”
“Do you want to say what it is?” James asked.
How could I? How could I tell him that I had fallen under Kate Begley’s spell, that I was mesmerized by her gift of belief, and that the thing had to play itself out?
“Let me write up my report,” I said.
James, kinder than the best teacher in the world, said, “I’ll be waiting with delighted anticipation. And then, Ben—I’ll have a gift for you.”
He had such good timing. I knew what he meant.
I said, “Has he agreed?”
“We’ll go there together. He’ll talk to me, but you’ll write it down.”
“In France one night,” I said, “I think I saw a wolf.”
James looked at me, those shrewd eyes in a face made of old stone.
“Ben, I’d say you saw more than one wolf.”
Easter came, as early in April as it could be, with that cold east wind the Italians call the tramontana. When it blew, I dug out our big old atlas. There wasn’t much by way of shelter between us and the Ural Mountains. In Berlin, Hitler was feeling an even colder wind, as Stalin sent his millions down the wide avenues into the city; and Eisenhower delayed at the gates, not wanting his armies to lose too many men.
In what seemed to me the first of the final cracks in the war, the Irish Independent reported,
No German is permitted to abandon his post or evacuate his home without express orders from Herr Hitler himself, according to a proclamation issued last night by the Chief of the National Socialist Party Central Office quoted by German radio. The proclamation said that after the collapse of 1918, “We dedicated our lives entirely to fight for the right to life of our people. Now the hour of the supreme test has come and the danger of a new slavery which is threatening our people demands our supreme exertion. From now on this is the order—the fight against the enemy who has penetrated into the Reich has to be waged everywhere and with the utmost determination and ruthlessness.”
For a moment I was back in Bremen, talking to the tall, passionate tobacconist who had lost a leg and his pride in the previous war.
My father developed a fresh bout of car fever. Miss Fay’s Austin Ten had ignited him and he began to scour the country for bargains. He found an Armstrong Siddeley and gave me the Morris Eight, which he’d had for six years and which I loved.
With limited fuel (siphoned in part from his tank), I began to take short trips here and there—old castles and abbeys, river walks, mountain views, childhood haunts. I avoided two places: Charleville, where I’d lived with Venetia and whence she had vanished, and Kenmare.
Which made no difference. On 10 May 1945, days after Victory Europe, I received a telegram.
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1945
Today, were I to go to New York, I could walk to the exact spot, the two square yards of concreted ground where I stood with Kate Begley for weeks, finally months. From May 1945 to April 1946, Kate and I lived in Manhattan.
Such a curious life: We had jobs of a kind; we shared a room, because people believed us a married couple, but we spent the bulk of our time standing in the same place many, many hours a day, watching ships dock and American soldiers disembark. Often in the lee of my big shoulders while a wind cut in from the Hudson River, she scanned every gray vessel, every face. As I had once promised, I again stood with her.
I helped her to write the innumerable letters to the military authorities, asking them for any trace of any kind of Captain Charles Miller. By now, she had acquired from the embassy in Dublin his serial number and the description of his most recent regimental attachment. They replied; they always replied; the reply was always the same, with variations. “Errors happen in war. Especially with commonplace names.”
And by now she had almost allowed herself to believe that Peiper had been telling her the truth. I know this because s
he asked me his name a number of times.
“Ben, that general we met, or was he a colonel or what? Can you remember his name?”
And I’d say, “Peiper. Joachim Peiper.”
She would take it in with a nod and say no more.
Yet, just as she had believed for many years that her parents would one day return from the waters of Ballinskelligs Bay, she also believed—whatever her saner moments of doubt and inquiry—that Captain Charles Miller, her bridegroom, with whom she had spent fewer than seven days of married life, would one day come home from the war. Holding two conflicting beliefs with equal strength of faith—I think only the Irish do that.
On my worst days, I feared for her sanity in the years up ahead; on my better days, I visualized marrying her, settling down with her, and in time healing the accident to her heart. During such moments, I scarcely thought of Venetia—and at other times, I missed Venetia with a pain deeper than ever, a sense of loss that cut me as never before.
I should have paid closer attention to those two feelings, especially as they were now so unprecedented in their acuteness and freshly identifiable in their poignancy.
From the room we rented, up the slopes from the river, we could hear the music of New York harbor. Some of the arriving troopships sounded their horns, a deep noise that to me will ever become associated with the word promise. Hearing this deep voice that boomed like a metal hippopotamus, Kate would turn her head, cock an ear, and say, “Another promise!”
By this she meant what she called “the promise of good things,” and now, if I’m in a port town anywhere, in Ireland or in Europe, and I hear this sound in the night, or in the dreaming swirls of a northern fog, I replay the moment in my head.
Within minutes of hearing the ship’s horn, we’d quit the room and walk at an athlete’s pace to the docks. As we rounded the corner of the block, depending on the time of day, on the incoming ship or ships, and on the expectations that had been raised by military information, we’d then join myriad other people walking fast. On our first day there, the lines and lines of war brides already stood by the water, as pretty and multicolored as an aviary.
The Matchmaker of Kenmare Page 33
