Venetia Kelly's Traveling Show: A Novel of Ireland

by Frank Delaney

  My time with them varied; Mollie May Holmes had responsibilities. Her husband and their help had gone over to Callan to buy a wheel rake and they weren’t expected back until very late, so she had calves to feed and some cows to milk—not all had gone winter-dry. Joan Hogan seemed keenest to talk, but held back bravely the gossipy questions that I sensed she’d have liked to ask. The Cherub, Kitty Cleary, blushed when she looked at me (she always did that); she was the youngest of the three and the one who insisted that I eat something.

  All heard my story with respect. I told it plainly—that my father had suddenly left home, that he had run away with a road show of actors, that my mother’s state slipped lower and lower on a daily basis, and that I’d been sent to bring my father home and had had no success. Tomorrow, I told them, he would be at the school at around ten o’clock in the morning. If they were going to vote anyway, could they please vote around ten o’clock, be there when my father arrived, and see whether they could hold any sway over him?

  All agreed, even though all asked the same question: “Will your mother be there?” I told them that as yet I hadn’t decided to tell her and that I’d ask her to vote much later. All said, “Good.”

  One election looks and feels much like another—or so goes the assumption.

  Not in 1932. We knew we were in an election the way a dog knows he’s in a fight. The comings and goings in the schoolyard, the last-minute canvassing, the posters, the handbills, the handshakes. Inside the school, the air crackled around our heads. Excited about the event, but nervous as a kitten, afraid of what was about to happen, I sat there—but I did my job.

  I hadn’t slept well. My mind raced with a sense that I’d gone to her friends behind Mother’s back—and yet I felt that if she knew my father was coming into the village, there could be only two possibilities. Either she’d be there and confront him, and cause a scene that would later make her shrink into deeper embarrassment, or she wouldn’t come out to vote, and she’d seclude herself so far down in her “vale of melancholy” that it would take me days to dig her out.

  I knew that I was gambling—gambling that she wouldn’t hear that my father had come back to vote. There was no doubt in my mind that the parish knew the story by now and talked of little else. Someone might tell her—or might not.

  When I boiled it down in the small hours of the morning, my bigger fear, therefore, was the possibility of a scene—a scene with bystanders. And that was a chance I simply couldn’t take; I couldn’t risk exposing her—and, in truth, him—to any spontaneous histrionics.

  Plus, the Kelly women would be sitting there waiting for him in their elegant, shining car. This could explode.

  Always early for everything all my life, I reached the school at half past eight. I was as tense as a wire but luckily we had some setting up to do. The individual polling booths had arrived and needed to be arranged—six of them, on tables and large desks, tall, folding, oblong three-sided boxes, each with a cloth curtain. Voters would reach head and shoulders through this curtain and, thus shaded from view, fill in the ballot paper with the pencils we had chained to the booths.

  Our system was and remains a multi-seat constituency—every county elects a number of representatives to the Parliament in Dublin. Some counties, according to size, are classified as three-seaters, some four, some five; we were three.

  This voting, based on proportional representation, gave people a choice—one, two, and three, in the order of your choice. When the first candidate was elected, his remaining number-one votes were then distributed to the next most popular, and so on, until the seats were filled.

  To foreigners this has always seemed complicated. To a population accustomed to working out bets on horse and dog races—the complicated mathematics of doubles, cross trebles, bets, and accumulators—child’s play.

  For the first hour my heart filled my mouth. Then—and I should have known his promptness—my father arrived at precisely ten o’clock. I heard the car, which he must have loved; by now I knew the model—a Daimler, high as a church, smooth as a priest. From where I sat I could see through the porch window into the yard. And I could hear loud talk—some canvasser greeted him and got an equally hearty reply.

  He came to the door—and froze. When he saw me he put his hand to his mouth like a man about to swear but stopping himself, turned on his heel, and left. Mr. O’Dwyer saw it, grasped the oddity, looked at me inquiringly, and I blushed. I said nothing. What could I say? “Oh, my father’s embarrassed because he thinks I’ll try to persuade him to leave his actress and come home”? Or “Oh, my father’s embarrassed because he doesn’t want to talk to me on account of what I know about him and he thinks now that he can never get away from me”?

  I saw and heard the car pull away. Within the space of minutes, and one by one, Mollie May Holmes, Kitty Cleary, and Joan Hogan walked through the door. The first two whispered to me, “Is he here?”

  I whispered back, “He came, didn’t vote, and left.”

  Joan Hogan had seen him and smiled. “’tis the car he’s after.” Which made me laugh—from relief, because a crisis had been averted.

  The 1932 general election made history. Mr. de Valera gained a substantial number of parliamentary seats on his main rivals, Mr. Cosgrave’s party, and became the biggest group in the house. Though five seats short of an overall majority, he had enough support from minor parties to declare that he’d govern. We didn’t know how the wind was blowing until the end of the week, and we had to wait until the Tuesday of the following week, the twenty-third, to read that the government had decided to go into opposition and give Mr. de Valera “a free hand,” as they put it.

  Our election day in the village turned out as expected. We had no trouble, as other polling stations did, no fistfights, no threats with guns, no assaults on election staff (for which I was grateful).

  My own high point came at four o’clock, when Mother arrived—accompanied by Joan Hogan, to whom Mr. O’Dwyer said, “Voting again, Joan?” and she replied (she wasn’t a petite lady), “A woman my size needs two votes.”

  Joan, I would learn, had behaved as though nothing had happened and had called upon Mother, who behaved impeccably and, I thought, with something of a flourish. She had dressed with great care and I hadn’t seen her look as well since the Catastrophe began. I asked for her name, and she addressed me as “sir”—which meant that some kind of energy had returned. Or that she was putting a brave face on things.

  She didn’t linger; she voted, pressed the paper through the slot in the old black tin box, and left with a smile to Mr. O’Dwyer and me. Was she acting? Who can say? I was by now so generally pressed that I hadn’t had the time or the energy to scrutinize her on my visits home; I was exhausted.

  And when I went home that evening I found a situation that puzzled me. Mother had a kind of acolyte, a girl from Kilross named Mary Lewis, whom I knew slightly, an insincere hanger-on, with a calf’s nature and—I have to say—pretty as a flower. Mother spoke of her with notable warmth, and Mary Lewis often hung around the house.

  When I came in from the yard, I found Mary Lewis sitting in the porch. She rose and stood in the doorway. Something about her bothered me; she had a listless nature, she half-sauntered, half-slouched, but once or twice, I had seen her when she thought nobody was observing her, and she had a much swifter, brisker demeanor.

  One morning in particular, when I was at my window—this was long before my father had left—I overheard her below talking to Large Lily, who told her that Mother was down in the garden. Mary Lewis said that she’d wait—but as I looked down she took a mirror from her purse, groomed her face and hair with a sharp purpose, and then walked more purposefully than I had ever seen her do.

  From my window I can see all the way down to the garden walls, although the hedges conceal anybody on that path from any other view. Mary Lewis walked like a soldier until within ten feet of the garden gate, when she slowed down and resumed her coy saunter.

&nbs
p; Billy Moloney hated her.

  “D’you know her crowd? Flockin’ liars, the whole flockin’ family. Her oul’ fella—he’d plámás the hind end off a flockin’ donkey.” (Plámás, the Irish word for “sweet-talk,” is pronounced plaw-maws.)

  “Don’t you like her, Billy?”

  “No, I don’t flockin’ like her. Nor her father—he has a filthy mouth on him. And I’ll tell you somethin’ else. Lily don’t flockin’ like her, and Lily knows flock-all.”

  He flung some more manure into the cart. My father said that for Christmas Billy gave Lily a perfume named “Dung.” And Mother said that Lily wore it.

  Soon I came to dislike Mary Lewis too. Late one beautiful summer morning, I’d heard her argue with Mother in the orchard. The ground wore a carpet of blossom and I could still see the cobwebs of the night reaching in jeweled swags from branch to branch. Mother had gone down to tell the bees that Matty, the aged dog, had at last died. (We kept three beehives and we observed the ancient tradition of telling the bees everything that went on in the family. I never found out whether she told them of my father’s antics. Billy Moloney was barred from going near the hives because bees dislike bad language.)

  From where the pear trees bunch too closely, I heard voices. One was Mother’s: “Mary, I gave you a lot of money last week. Now where did that go? H’m?” And the “h’m,” with its rising inflection, told me of Mother’s annoyance.

  I went cautiously forward and saw them. Doe-eyed, fluttering, voluptuous Mary Lewis had her arms around Mother’s neck. Mother seemed awkward but not as awkward as I wanted her to be. I stepped back several feet and called. By the time I reached them, the two women stood well apart and Mary Lewis simpered at me again, as she did all the time.

  Now, as I greeted her in our porch, Mother overheard and emerged from somewhere.

  “Mary’s going to work for that Mr. Kelly down in the cottage,” she said.

  I didn’t like that at all.

  That encounter took place, as I say, on election night. I didn’t stay to talk; after some food I went to bed and slept until nine o’clock next day. I didn’t ask if Mary Lewis had stayed the night—I didn’t have to; Large Lily told me.

  “That one is gone,” she said, as she slammed down my breakfast. “Good riddance to bad rubbish. Her and her face. You’d think butter wouldn’t melt in her mouth. Nor anywhere else on her and she a walking strap.”

  Here’s the translation: “Her and her face” means “She thinks she’s so pretty.” The butter reference signifies pretended innocence, and in this case, morality. A “walking strap” is a prostitute; Lily didn’t like Mary Lewis either.

  During the voting I had taken the occasional idle few minutes to map out the rest of my week. Nobody expected a conclusive result soon, but some constituencies put on more vote counters than others. North Cork, in which Mr. Kelly and Blarney were candidates, expected to declare early.

  I resolved to be there, assuming that my father would put in an appearance. With the usual frantic exhortations coming from Mother, I packed my suitcase and would have felt much wearier had I not been so interested in the election.

  And I wanted to find out more about Mr. Kelly. Think of the circumstances; here he was, now living on our land, and my father had run off with the man’s granddaughter. All kinds of alarm bells were ringing in my head; and when I added Mary Lewis to the picture I began to feel that we had opened our doors—in my father’s absence—to people who shouldn’t be trusted.

  That was Wednesday, the day after voting; the headlines said, QUIETEST ELECTION DAY ON RECORD followed by REMARKABLE RUSH TO THE BOOTHS. By “quietest” they meant “most decorous,” because, as they went on to suggest, this was the largest turnout in history—they estimated a 90 percent poll. The newspaper believed that “the mood of the people was in keeping with the glorious weather conditions that prevailed.”

  They were counting the votes for Mr. Kelly and Blarney in the town of Fermoy, on the lovely river Blackwater. The Daimler told me where the count was going on; I saw it outside an official-looking building, the only car in town until I arrived.

  I parked the Alvis out of sight, several hundred yards away, and walked back to the town hall. Inside the door I met my father; he sat on a table, with a suitcase beside him. I knew what I was looking at—he was in charge of the dummy.

  I’ve never liked clowns; they trouble me, and they’re not funny. And I used to dislike ventriloquism dolls, found them unsettling too. Nor did I find it very dignified that my father, my well-respected father, to whom so many farmers came for technical advice on grain crops, on which he was thought something of an expert, and who was known nationally when it came to caring for dairy cows, should be sitting here in a small town forty miles from home looking after a wooden dummy.

  When I see a ventriloquist at work today, or when I speak to people about the phenomenon, I often uncover fear.

  Is it the highly painted face or the hinged mouth or the leering eye or the smart-aleck demeanor—or the combination of them all? I think that it also has something to do with this grotesque object being given our gifts and then looking superior to us.

  The doll, you’ll note, always knows more than the master. Have you ever seen a ventriloquist whose dummy was, well, dumb? I haven’t, nor do I expect to, not that I seek out ventriloquists and their dummies—I am, in fact, finished with that sector of the world and hope never to be obliged to revisit it.

  But my acquaintance with Blarney sent me tracing his origins. Here’s another Very Brief Digression. Let’s call it Relatively Important.

  Ventriloquy has an ancient, shamanic root, and one of its most powerful exercises took place in Greece’s great pre-Christian shrine of Delphi. There, a priest ascended by a hidden stairway into a hollow statue of the god Apollo. In answer to the prayers of the multitudes, he spoke as though he were indeed the very voice of Apollo. In other words, the voice was used to trick people, to generate belief, to cow people into thinking that a god was speaking—in other words, trickery.

  I dug further and found out a great deal as to how “throwing the voice”—ventriloquy, speaking from the belly—was used in other religions. It even had a satanic connotation in the Middle Ages.

  All of this is knowledge that I acquired many years after the fact, essentially when I began to put this entire story together. Slowly but surely I came to understand how appropriate it was that a ventriloquist’s dummy should run for political office. And perform the other stunts that I saw from Blarney.

  My father looked embarrassed; he knew that I’d seen the suitcase, and he shifted to try to obscure it with his bulk.

  “Very-very-very exciting, isn’t it?” he said.

  “Have they started counting?”

  I’d begun to detect a change in myself—I was developing irritation with him, anger. Serious matters that have no reasons bring dismay, and I hadn’t yet found sufficient explanation for his behavior because I hadn’t yet spoken a word with the object of his madness.

  The door from the hall opened and Sarah appeared. She smiled when she saw me; she lit up like the sun coming out, stepped across the hallway, and took me into her arms.

  Boys of eighteen in the rural Ireland of those days didn’t get hugged by ladies. Not at all, not even by their mothers. Mother hadn’t embraced me since I was little—after puberty she certainly kept her distance. And I didn’t have any older sisters, among whose friends such huggings might have arisen.

  That morning I felt like a man who had fallen into a fabled pool. I’d never touched the bodies of others except in the contact sports of school and parish—our game of Gaelic football combines elements of rugby and soccer; our game of hurling looks as though it mixes hockey and homicide. My experience of the body of another had never been anything but hard and muscular; in fact, I had hugged more animals than humans.

  Every part of me that was touched by Sarah’s hug resonated. My cheek, where she’d pressed her face, glowed like a fire at
sea. Down the length of my frame, instant life sprang up, and new memory faculties came into play, to hold on to what had just happened. My body would retain forever, I believed, the sense of that tall softness pressing into me. And my nose would never be the same after that aroma of far-off lands.

  She stepped back and looked at me as a trainer looks at a racehorse. She wore a necklace of diamonds hard and bright as the Arctic.

  “Harry, he’s a beautiful young man,” she said to my father. I held her gaze—I don’t know how, but I did. The process, as I now know, had begun—of drawing me in, and then in further. It escalated within seconds—because next through the door came Professor Fay, small, fat, and sweating, even though it was still only the middle of February.

  “Professor, isn’t Ben beautiful?”

  By now Sarah, as she did when I first met her, had folded her hands over mine as though I were a saint and she a supplicant. To this day I relish that moment. Inconsistent of me, I know, but I loved every sensation of it then; I love it even more now.

  Sarah looked at my father again. “Harry, I suppose you have to stay here?”

  She turned back to me, and spoke a deal more respectfully than she’d spoken to my father.

  “The professor and I mean to have an early lunch. You’ll come with us, Ben?”

  They led me to a hotel just down the street; I didn’t have enough discrimination to say whether it was a good hotel. People thronged the bar and the hall. We sought a quieter place, so they took us to an upstairs lounge.

  I asked for steak; Sarah flattered me by saying, “That’s a good idea,” and ordered the same, as did Profesor Fay. He also ordered a cognac. For the waitress with the open mouth he had to yield and say, “Brandy.”