Ireland

by Frank Delaney

  Kate said, “I feel I can’t deceive him any longer. And it’s quite urgent—because it’s getting in the way of my handling him well.” She hesitated. “Ronan lives here with me, but he never goes out. He sort of clings to me—he’s only got me and his studies—but I think I need to push him out into the world. And I know he won’t go—and I feel I can’t ask much of him, because I haven’t told him the truth of who he is.”

  “Just the two of you here?”

  Kate nodded. “It’s too close—too close for a boy his age.”

  “And you cook for him?” Kate nodded again, and the priest laughed. “I wouldn’t go out into the world either, were I in his shoes. But I agree with you. This is the time when he has to grow.”

  Kate rubbed her hands in agitation. The priest moved to another place within the subject.

  “Tell me—I’ve often wondered. What’s it like—having and raising a child?”

  She accepted the lifebelt. “It’s remarkable. No, it’s extraordinary. And obviously I’ve never felt able to talk about it. I often feel as if part of me has grown sideways and more—more…” She searched; he waited. “D’you know how a tree, a well-established tree, will sometimes grow a lovely branch that’s complete in itself? It’s a bit like that. Oh, God, this is trite, I’m not making myself clear.”

  Still he waited.

  “When he was born, I did all the usual things. You know—the sentimental-mother things. Counted his fingers and toes, helped him develop his first grip on my little finger, looked at his little red lips, felt the fuzz of his head. The smell of him, that combination of skin and milk. And the softness of the touch—makes velvet feel coarse.”

  “Seems pretty wonderful.”

  Kate had begun to relax a little; the powerful secret had been spoken.

  “It is. They’re feelings like I know I can never have for an adult. I remember thinking, Kate, you don’t need to do anything else with your life. It felt—sublime. God, I sound mushy.”

  “He’s somewhat older now?” The priest dangled the question.

  “I’m sure, Father, you’ve seen and heard so much that nothing shocks you. So—I know you’ll understand when I say—it’s like…”

  Kate ran out of words. She made a helpless, profound gesture, opening her hands out to the world.

  “Try. I promise not to run from the room.”

  They laughed.

  “Don’t get me wrong, Father. And I’m sure every woman who ever loved a son has had this thought. They want to hold that son, feel the strength they gave to his shoulders, run their hands around the head that contains his brain, the head they gave him, stroke the cheek he has just begun to shave. And then you look into the eyes, and you see the eagerness there. Life to be devoured and all that. Forgive me, I’ve never known anyone I could say all this to, and it’s just bursting to come out of me.”

  The priest waved a hand. “I love hearing it. And—you are so right.” He paused. “My own mother, she said to me about a year before she died, ‘I’d have married you if it wasn’t for incest.’” He laughed. “She meant it as a joke, of course, but I knew what she meant beneath the joke. And my mother was quite a reserved woman.”

  “The quick way it cuts into you,” said Kate. “The flash of anxiety if he’s minutes later than you expect. The irritation he causes when he does something clumsy or rebellious, and I could wring his neck—and the immediate regret for feeling that. The hoping each morning that nothing will hurt him today.”

  “And that’s your great fear—that if you tell him the truth of his birth, it may hurt him more than he can bear?”

  “Exactly.” Kate folded her hands. “That’s exactly it. And I don’t know what to do.”

  “Could I help? Is there a way I could…” He left the sentence unfinished.

  “I don’t know. I want him to go out and meet the world feeling as secure as he can. But I’m afraid the truth will undermine him dreadfully.”

  “Do you have room for another person here? A relative? A roommate?”

  “Yes. Why?”

  “He’s an only child, and I’d suggest he needs to feel some pressure in the nest.”

  “But the greater problem is—”

  He interrupted: “How to tell him—whether to tell him. I know.”

  “There’s another reason why I need guidance. We went down home at the weekend. It turned out to be extremely painful. His father told me that—”

  Kate stopped—because Ronan raced up the stairs, calling out, as he always did, and burst into the room. Full as ever of news to recount, he recoiled when he saw the priest; he took the introduction coolly, then focused on Kate.

  “How was your lecture?”

  “Lively.”

  Father Mansfield said, “Lively? And I gather you’re reading history? You can only mean Professor Ryle.”

  Ronan laughed.

  “Yes, Father.”

  The priest beamed at Ronan and Kate.

  “He uses wonderful language. Do you like him? Tell me you do!”

  “I do, Father,” said Ronan, warming to this man.

  “He’s very entertaining. But he’s also very civilized. And he’s a good friend of mine. You’ll learn a lot from him.”

  Ronan’s next piece of learning came not from Professor Ryle but by post; a college secretary handed him a letter sent two days earlier, postmarked “Ballinamore.” He fingered the bulky, rain-stained package; blue paper again; the stamp had been placed with old exactness; and there was the same mannered, breathtaking handwriting. Inside—no introduction, no address.

  A JOURNEYMAN’S TRADE

  ASTORY HAS ONLY ONE MASTER—ITS NARRATOR; he decides what he wants his story to do. I know, I have always known, what I want my stories to achieve—I want to make people believe. Believe what I tell. Believe in it. Believe me. Belief is the one effect I’m always looking for, and I apply every device, every pause, every gesture, every verbal nuance and twirl, to that end. To achieve it, I myself have to believe; if I don’t, who will? I must believe ancient Ireland was as I describe it. The swords really did ring loudly off the shields. And the armor surely gleamed in the sun.

  In fact, I want my listeners to believe so deeply that I almost have them saying to themselves, “No, he couldn’t have been there, that’s impossible!” In order to get them close to that point, I make a great effort to close a specific gap—the gap that separates the historical fact from the invented tale. And if they are—or could be—one and the same thing, that’s what I call “the magic of the past,” and that’s what I deal in: the magic of the past.

  I know that if my listeners, with their round eyes and rapt faces—if they believe that what they’re hearing actually happened, they’ll remember it forever, especially if the facts are lit in bright lights. That’s why I try and make every tale I tell seem like a film made centuries ago.

  The need for belief also accounts for the reason why I tell such different stories. Some are history, reported by those who were there, and reembroidered by me. Others are myth, from deep in our souls, handed down by word of mouth, and I am the latest narrator. And I make up yet others—because I like the power and the fun of creating worlds.

  When it’s running well, the effects of a story will last as long as I remain in the presence of my audience. Then, when they shake themselves back into the present day, and by the time they cross the dark night on their way home, they know and see my sleight of hand. And I hope they talk and laugh about the evening, as they would have after watching a magician. I don’t even mind if they work out how I did the trick.

  In order to do my job well, to capture their hearts and spirits and minds, I have to know my audience; I have to know a great deal about them. Every day I learn something new about the Irish and about our island. Over the years this has built up into a body of knowledge that gives me a good and permanent picture of what we’re like as a people.

  I know all kinds of things. For example, I know that we like to
fill empty spaces with words. Sometimes the words don’t mean a thing; my father used to murmur every so often, “Up she flew, and the cock flattened her.” Out of the blue he’d say it, no context whatever, a meaningless utterance, spoken to no one. I have no idea why he did it; and I think he merely liked to roll a lively and cryptic phrase in his mouth, to taste it like a bright fruit.

  And I also know that, as a people, we generally cohere, that we’re a nation of human beings with much in common. North, south, east, and west, we eat the same foods, feel the same weather, dance the same steps, die of the same diseases.

  These common factors make my job easier because I always know to whom I’m speaking. All through the thirty-two counties of Ireland, most of the adults who have listened to my tales have quit school at the legal age of fourteen. That is our national pattern since the beginning of the twentieth century. Even now, I have met very few in the countryside who went to any secondary school, or who then climbed to university level and beyond. If they have done, it’s always been a happenstance of their parents’ view and position, rather than a general norm.

  For “ordinary” people, that is to say the people who work the land and the other people who form the parish, the tradition of education has not yet returned. The next few decades might restore it to Ireland; it was killed two hundred and fifty years ago by the English in one of their many attempts to eradicate us, and it needs to be brought back to life.

  By and large, we have no class structure in Ireland, except among the Protestants. Many of the Catholic Johnny-come-latelys would like to look down their noses; they’d love to be the haves lording it over the have-nots. But by dint of cheek and irreverence, and by dint of traditionally being in the same repressed, oppressed boat, Irish Jack is largely as good as his master.

  So when I’m addressing such mixed audiences, I have to accommodate a width of response that ranges from illiterate to doctorate. I live by a guiding principle that I learned in Rome (of which eternal city more another time); “Never underestimate their intelligence, always underestimate their knowledge.” And because I know my audience, my little extra details can send shivers through them, especially when I draw on things they know, that they’ve seen. If they understand that Irish people two thousand years ago lived similar lives, they grasp my story more powerfully, and they more willingly give themselves over to me.

  As you’ll have gathered by now, mine is mainly a rural audience. They think about cattle and meadows, saving hay and reaping corn, tanning hide and spinning wool. I can be deep in the west, in the snipe-grass smallholdings of poor Mayo, or I can be down south across the richness of Limerick and Tipperary, in what they call the Golden Vale, a seam of rich earth that carves its way across Europe from Hungary. Or I can be in a house in a town where the church clock chimes.

  Wherever I am, my listeners easily recognize from their own lives my descriptions of the ancient Irish—the farmers who worked the fields, whose wives baked bread for the midday meal, and whose comfortable farmyards housed fat pigs.

  Beneath its broad surface, storytelling should always work hard to say more than it seems to. When I told you the story of Newgrange, I made the Angry Woman’s daughter look like a child with red hair who was there that night. If I’m describing a beautiful princess, I’ll make sure nobody round that fireside matches her. The men love the account of the girl, and the women want news of her beautiful gown.

  Likewise, before I describe someone ugly, I’ll look carefully around the room in case I come out with an account that offends anyone. Folk are touchy; it would be easy for some man to feel that I mocked his blemish.

  I also do what old storytellers always did. People need to take a rest now and then, so I make sure that I use little phrases to ease them, to tell them—and me—we can relax for a few seconds. I have composed a wide repertoire.

  “And every year, they turned the soil, they sowed their seeds, they welcomed the rain, they hailed the sun, and they were happy.”

  “And so, things became plain to everyone.”

  “That is one of the ways of the world, and the ways of the world are many.”

  “While the ships sailed the seas and the clouds sailed the sky.”

  Homer the Greek had such tricks. When he said, “Dawn comes early, with rosy fingers,” and spoke repeatedly of “the wine-dark sea” and “Such were the words that passed between us,” his audience drew breath with him. If it was good enough for him twenty-seven centuries ago, it’s good enough for me. All of us storytellers, the world over, the last few of us still traveling—we play with such chosen phrases. They allow us to change gear, and we can also use them to tighten the screw as the story begins to climb.

  In some ways I’m very like an actor; this is a performance that I give, I can think of no other word for it. It takes place in a very intimate theater, with no stage and no proscenium arch and no curtains and an audience that is often only inches away. To address those circumstances, much of what I do has to be theatrical, and every actor in the world needs his props.

  My main prop is my pipe. First, I fill it with tobacco as carefully as a man counting his money. Next, I strike the match—I love how that little yellow flash surges. Then I suck the flame down into the bowl until the pipe has swallowed its light. I like to think it gives the impression that I’m inhaling the sorcery of fire. And I tamp down the hot tobacco with my fingertip; this looks fearless, and I want people to think, Here’s a man who can touch flames and never burn. Not a word do I say through all of this, and slowly the listeners fall silent as they wait for me to speak.

  When finally I look up from the pipe, I make my eyes rove through the audience, because I want to be sure that every person is ready to come happily into my grasp. A storyteller has to know how to get power over people.

  I also use my hat as a prop, my old hat that keeps out the rain and deflects the sun, on whose brim the dew settles like little pearls on a necklace. Once it was a homburg, but it has been long bruised by the world.

  Still, it is my good theatrical friend. I take it off when I want to build a pause or unwrap a detail. Sometimes I pass the brim through my hands as if attempting to shape it into a consistent straight line. Or I fiddle with the decrepit old ribbon, which slides easily around the crown, like a belt on a man grown thin. Or I punch it gently until the homburg shape becomes one large dome, like a comical hat.

  And then with the heel of my hand I restore the soft dent in the crown and return the hat to my head. More than one child has said to me that they think the hat somehow shelters my tales, whose colors would otherwise come bursting out of my cranium like the rays of rainbows.

  At the end of the story I follow a long-practiced routine. I lift my hat from my head and replace it, as a gentleman would to a lady; I take my dead pipe from my mouth; I lean down and tap it on the wide hearthstone. When the small gray powder falls out—I always smoke my pipe down to the last ash—I like to think it looks as though I wrested every last fiber from the tale.

  Then there is the language of the body to aid the delivery of the words. Musicians know how and when to arrange the spaces between their notes. So should storytellers. I pause and let the audience watch me, and I wait for their minds to come to me. Or I turn my head away from the room and gaze into the fire. Or I look around at the assembled listeners, almost as if seeking someone. And then I stare once more into the flames. When at last I turn to face the room fully, I know that my face seems to glow red and my eyes black with the fire I have absorbed.

  All I’m saying is, I use the techniques of an actor, with my body as my tool bench and my hands alternating between my pipe, my hat, and my gestures of expression. And I have one special gesture, which I use almost every night.

  As my arms open in wide movements, I make my eyes flash like a mesmerist. While my left hand grips the pipe bowl tight as desire, my right hand closes in a fist. Slowly, slowly, like the petals of some bony flower, my gnarled fingers begin to open, so that the hand become
s like a little bowl—and then the fingers flatten and extend to their lengths until the hand itself lies flat, upward and open in the air. I always make this gesture at the moment when I feel the audience most hushed.

  At that moment I would not be surprised to find sitting on my hand the population of the room, silent and enthralled—and all permanently half-smiling at me and my magical words. I want them there, I want them like that, I want them to say, “He held his audience in the palm of his hand”—and all my efforts, my gestures and expressions, are directed to that aim. When they are there—they believe.

  The letter ended abruptly; no signature, no trace. Ronan turned it over and over in his hand; he peered into the empty envelope—not a clue of any kind, other than the postmark from county Leitrim.

  He read it again—and he mimicked the hand gestures, opening his fingers slowly like a flower, resting the palm upward. One abiding thought took over: He said he’d teach me!

  Only when he saw other students peering at him did he put the letter away.

  T. Bartlett Ryle chose to include Ronan in those few students he tutored and hesitated not at all when pointing out the privilege of being the professor’s tutee, “…although some will tell you that you’re no more than the madam’s favorite jack. I prefer the sultan’s-wife simile myself. Which of you takes snuff?”

  Four other young men and Red Riding Hood had been called to the sanctum.

  “I don’t expect you do,” said the professor, “but you never know. My grandmother took snuff, and she raved like a dope. What’s your name?” He pinched tan powder from a small leather case, and his nostrils flared like gun barrels.

  Red Riding Hood said, “Rowena Hayes, sir.”

  “Sounds like a weather condition. Rowena? Rowena? A trifle Welsh for my taste. Do you know what it means, child?” The powder drifted to his white shirt collar.

  “It means fame and joy, sir.”