Venetia Kelly's Traveling Show: A Novel of Ireland

by Frank Delaney

  “They?”

  “Professor Fay’s doing the talking. They just marched in.”

  “How many people are up there?”

  “Ben, where am I going to live?”

  “Are you sure about all this? Where’s the deed, the mortgage?”

  “Mary Lewis has been told to come down twice a day with food.”

  No wonder Mother looked insensible. And I had no answers.

  “Do you want me to stay here?”

  “Can you get him to come back?”

  Maybe I haven’t been very firm in my various resolves across life. By returning that day I had just broken one promise to myself—for which I have forever been grateful; how would I have felt if I hadn’t come back for months and it would all have been too late?

  “It might be a couple of days,” I said. “But I’m bringing him back. Do nothing. Sit still.”

  I thought, As though you’re capable of anything else.

  Our government in Ireland (this isn’t a Digression) operates through introduction of legislation, followed by parliamentary debates, leading to the execution of statutes. The law can also be changed by court judgment, setting precedent. Many countries across the world operate similarly. Or say they do. To obtain the maximum debate, every such Parliament has its committee systems, to which a proposed law is referred, and where it is then debated—the “committee stage”—by a representative selection of all parties.

  Membership on such committees becomes a prized matter, because the selection indicates the standing in which the members are held by their parties and by others, their strategic importance as elected representatives, their personal acumen, their power. Members often bribe and graft their way onto such committees too. Thomas Aquinas Kelly, newly elected to the Irish Dáil as a member for the constituency of North Cork, was about to become an Opposition member of the Finance Committee. That was power. From there he could change Ireland.

  After seeing the disaster that Mother had become, I returned to Charleville, had some food from Mrs. Haas—Venetia and I sat at the kitchen table—and spoke little. A downpour had begun; the street outside the front door had become a small river; the town’s drainage needed improving.

  I looked up during eating and saw Mrs. Haas and Venetia exchange glances. Let me tell you now how Mrs. Haas loved Venetia. She had been there at the birth, had delivered her, had washed her. Unconditional love governed that relationship—both ways. When I began the first of my interviews with her—those awful, frightened exchanges—which would lead to the compiling of this story, I asked Mrs. Haas to tell me about her life with Venetia, not with Sarah, not with the Kelly ménage in general, not as the anchor to the show.

  “Ve vere all things as vomen to each other,” she said. “Do you understand me? She vas my daughter and my granddaughter, and my sister and my mother and my life. I stayed mit the Kellys not for Sarah, who, yes, I loved too, but for Wenetia. You may not think so now, but Wenetia was frail.”

  Mrs. Haas then began to weep. “And you so kind. And she so good. Do you know that she bought all my clothes for me? Since the age she was fifteen. A girl. She gave, gave. To everybody. But not to herself.”

  I have to tell you that I abandoned the interviews for some time after that, seeing the distress I was causing and being caused.

  Now back to that significant look. They saw that I caught the glance and both seemed awkward.

  Mrs. Haas said, “Wenetia, do it. Go get it ready. I tell Ben some things.”

  Venetia left the room, planting a slow kiss on top of my head as she left. Again, I reeled slightly under such unexpected and unprecedented attention. They had bathed my bruised face, put ointment on my gashed hands. When she had gone, Mrs. Haas cut a giant wedge of apple pie and said to me, “You must ask some questions. Wenetia—she is preparing the answers. You must not mind how she has the answers told to you.”

  “Things are very bad in some of my life,” I said.

  “I am trying to tell you, Ben. Ve know. Ve know that. But you vere sent as the champion. That is vhat I see. Now go to Wenetia. And take her in your arms.”

  She must have seen the awkwardness in my eyes.

  I said, “Fine, fine,” as though I were a mature gentleman, an officer perhaps, or a lawyer, a man dealing with a situation to which he was well accustomed.

  “She needs to be held and hugged, that girl. Do you know about holding and hugging?”

  I looked alarmed. “Oh, certainly, yes.”

  Mrs. Haas nodded so hard that her head might have fallen off. “Doing it is all you need to know.”

  Venetia stood by the window, looking down on the flooded street—such rain we’d had. She had arranged a table near her and, to my surprise, on the table sat Blarney. When she came offstage at the end of a performance, Blarney went into that special suitcase that she’d had made for him. I’d seen her do it—packing him in, arranging his floppy arms and legs, and talking to him when she did this, shushing him, saying, “Not another word. You were wonderful, Blarney, you slew them. Now get some sleep,” and with her soft fingers closing his eyes.

  I walked across the room to her and held out my arms. We stood toe-to-toe for long ages, the difference between that and our first embrace being that I was the one in charge. When we separated, she indicated that I sit on the sofa while she picked up Blarney and went to a chair opposite me that she had prepared.

  Blarney spoke first—in fact Venetia never spoke, not until my conversation with Blarney had ended, and she and I lay side by side again.

  “Ben?” Quite rough, though not so raucous as onstage.

  It had always been ridiculously difficult for me to associate Blarney with Venetia. A tribute to her skill? I suppose so. My failure of perception? Definitely—or else from the first time I saw her I rejected any possibility that she might have been giving voice to what he was saying.

  “Ben?” Blarney said again, and this time in a tender voice.

  “Ye-es,” I said.

  “‘Yes,’ what, Ben?” By now I almost didn’t recognize the voice.

  “I—I don’t know what.”

  “‘Yes, Blarney,’” said the doll, his eyes giving a little hopeless look to Heaven.

  “Yes, Blarney,” I said, trying to get a conversational tone.

  “Ben, it’s very nice to see you. Venetia thinks such a lot of you.”

  “I think a lot of her too.”

  “Do you, Ben?”

  “I do, Blarney.”

  “Good.” He paused and cast his eyes down.

  “Ben?” He looked at me again.

  “Yes, Blarney.” I was finding it easier.

  “Do you love Venetia?”

  “I—I haven’t ever kissed anybody before.”

  “Tell me what it’s like, kissing Venetia. Because I like it too.”

  “I get very excited, Blarney.”

  “Does it make you feel that you’d do anything for her, Ben?”

  “It does, Blarney.”

  “And Ben—when you’re lying down with her, and you’re each kissing and touching each other’s skin, what’s that like, Ben?”

  By now I had engaged and had no way back.

  “Blarney, I want nothing else for the rest of my life.”

  Blarney paused, looked down, swiveled his head, and looked up at Venetia.

  “Ben?”

  “Yes, Blarney.”

  “I asked Venetia the same question and she said the same nearly as you.”

  “Did she?”

  “Yes, Ben, she said that she’d been looking for years to know what to do with her life. Now she knows. She knows she wants to spend it with you.”

  I didn’t glance at Venetia through all this, and I could tell that she looked mainly at Blarney.

  “Blarney, I’m very pleased.”

  “Good. I’ll tell Venetia that. Do you know why Venetia wants to spend her life with you, Ben?”

  “No, Blarney.”

  “Ben, Venetia find
s that you balance her. You’re steady on the ground. She spends a lot of time flying through the air—and she knows that you know what I mean. You’re strong; she’s different from anybody she knows, and she finds that very hard to cope with. And you don’t seem to mind that she’s different.”

  “Blarney, I think she’s the best.”

  “Now, Ben, I’ve been asking all the questions. I bet you have many questions—about all sorts of things.”

  When I look back on it now, the ploy appears obvious. Venetia, with the collusion of Mrs. Haas, had been watching everything King Kelly was plotting and saying nothing. Both women had grown desperate to try to tell me, yet felt that it belonged outside their concern. Or feared Sarah and King Kelly so much that they dared not say anything.

  And I can presume that Venetia wanted me to know that she had had nothing to do with it. We’d never talked about the farm, the mortgage, and all of that. I sat back. Where to begin?

  “How do I get our farm back?”

  “Talk to Sarah,” said Blarney. “That’s how you’ll get the farm back. It won’t be easy and she won’t give you any answers. But Sarah’s unhappy that you’ve arrived, and you’ll have to find a way to frighten her. So that she can then scare her father. And it’ll have to be a big scare.”

  “When should I do it, Blarney?”

  That I found none of this incongruous shows how desperate I must have been, how disturbed—despite my joy—how thrown from post to pillar, the post of misfortune and disgrace and sadness to the pillar of passion and confusion.

  “You’ll have to wait, because Sarah’s gone off to America to make a film.” He pronounced it in the Irish way, “fill-um.”

  “When will she be back?”

  “Months, Ben. You’ll have to hold the fort.”

  “But, Blarney, my mother won’t have anyplace to live.”

  “Explain, Ben.”

  I told him—about the farm, the cottage, the soldiers, and Mother’s desolation. He turned his head right away from me, unable to look at me, as it were. I added, to give him a jolt, “And she has no protection, Blarney.”

  He said, “And you can’t be there, Ben, because you now have to go on the road with Venetia.”

  I nodded, just an acceptance, no need to comment. And I looked at Venetia; she wouldn’t look at me.

  A silence fell; then Blarney spoke again.

  “Now, Ben, listen to this. I’ve been watching your father for the last few years on the nights he came to the show. And I’ve been in this room as he sits listening to Venetia. Sarah told Venetia to invite your father to join the show. And Sarah told Venetia that she was to entertain your father. That was easy for Venetia, because she’s very fond of your father. And you should know that Sarah was put up to all this by her father, Venetia’s grandfather—this was all thought up months ago, but Venetia didn’t know why. It was all about money and land. And it was Sarah who told Venetia to behave as though one day she and your father would be like you and Venetia. But that isn’t happening. And won’t happen. And never would.”

  Another pause: “So now, Ben, you know what to do. With your father. Don’t think about it; just go and do it tonight. After the show.”

  Venetia and I had some hours together before I faced up to what was now a difficult and melancholy task. Some hours in which the only talk was in whispers. Some hours in which we felt our first mutual sadness. Some hours in which we learned how to convert that sadness into calm and optimism. Blarney went back into his case, and we lay down. No more than that do you need to know.

  I paced outside the hall that night. Got my feet wet in the puddles. My shoes ruined in the mud. I paced and paced. Logistics for the time ahead: clothes; money; home; life. I decided to ignore them for the moment; I had my hands already full.

  As the last applause roared I went to the rear door of the hall, the smelly hall, where the paint peeled like scabs, the dowdy hall, with the broken chairs, the drab hall, still hung with flitters of colored streamers from some Christmas long ago.

  First I saw Cwawfod, who looked at me, I now realize, with a new and subdued respect. Then I saw Graham, who said, “Good evening, young squire.” I saw Venetia’s back and bare shoulders as she returned to the stage to take her bow. And then I saw my father. He saw me at the same time; the bruises on his face had become livid; mine had faded.

  I beckoned with the air of a man giving no choice, and I turned away. He followed; I knew that he followed, and I walked to the car. For a moment he hesitated, and I looked back at him.

  “This is serious,” I said.

  He climbed in and I drove. Not a word did we say to each other along those roads of puddles and pools. Not a glance did we cast at each other, along those lanes of high shrubs and bare hedges. We shivered, each of us, in the cold and the emotion.

  There is a lane that leads to the cottage without going near the house. No gate, just an opening, and that night mud, mud, and more mud. The high wheelbase of the Alvis helped. When it threatened worse we climbed out and walked the last hundred yards or so to the cottage, our way illuminated by the car’s headlights.

  No lights, no candles or lamps; Mother had gone to bed; the time was about one o’clock in the morning. She had locked the doors, back and front.

  I pounded. From inside I heard a door creak open and her voice inside the front door.

  “Who’s there?”

  I nudged my father, his face blue with cold.

  He said, “Louise, it’s-it’s-it’s me. Open the door. It’s all right.”

  I left them to it. The moment demanded utter privacy. In the car, I had a brief and intense flash of curiosity, almost turned back, thought it unseemly, and drove on. I had no idea what transpired between them that night after I’d gone. Years later, I did find out, because I asked each of them. They told me different stories.

  Mother said that she thought a trick was being played on her. When she grasped that my father was real, and stood there, and looked as though he had indeed come home, she grew angry. For a moment she thought that she might hit him across the face; indeed she stepped back to stop herself from doing so. She led the way into the cottage, where a fire’s embers still glowed. He added some logs and they sat there until almost dawn, seven o’clock in the morning.

  “I never asked him if he had a mouth on him,” she said. “Maybe I’d so lost the habit of feeding him. How can you lose such a long habit in such a short time?”

  What did they talk about? Did she ask him any questions? How did he explain what he had done—if he explained it at all?

  “I told him what had happened, the mortgage and that. And I asked him about our money. I told him we were now poor, that we had nothing. He said it wasn’t right, it was criminal trickery, but he didn’t know what to do about it. And I said that neither did I.”

  His story differed. And possibly had more accuracy.

  “I-I-I said I was sorry. I’ve been saying it ever since. Neither of us heard the other that night.”

  I asked him what that meant. “Neither heard the other.” He hesitated, and then spoke like a man telling everything.

  “We-we-we cried a lot. The whole stupidity of it. And we cried because we didn’t know what was going to happen to us. We didn’t know then that we had a savior.”

  When the door had closed behind my father, I went to the car and turned off the headlamps. For long minutes I stood there, looking at the dark cottage with the glimmer of light from my mother’s candlestick.

  It could have been a scene from a legend—the little gate, the garden, the thatched roof so lovingly kept in repair. The stars gave out enough light to touch the thick white walls and the straw roof with a little silver glow.

  Was my job done? No—and I knew it. These people had been reduced to almost nothing; such diminishing had to be reversed. Did I think that they could do it, could take control? Not at all.

  I turned to the river and wondered how to get them back what they had lost—indeed whethe
r I could effect anything. The black, sleek waters slid by with a small gurgle, and at once I knew my pathway to the advice I needed—James Clare.

  First, though, I needed comforting. It strikes me now that knowing I needed comforting showed how much I’d grown up.

  Venetia lay awake. She heard me at the front door and I found her kneeling up in bed. I told her what I’d done.

  “Has anybody praised you?” she said.

  I had no sense of achievement that night until she told me. I had no understanding of the night’s significance until she pointed it out. I had no grasp of the night’s meaning until she underlined it.

  “You’ve reunited your parents. You’ve done your mother’s bidding. You’ve acted like a grown man.”

  She had a way of speaking to me that made me feel safe. With her by my side, no problem would have been too great. How I could have cared for her, would have cared for her. And did, as far as I could, in the months ahead, which were so often glorious.

  Next morning, lying in an afterglow, we made plans. She wanted to take the company away from Charleville.

  “Genuine touring—from town to village to hamlet. And get rid of the damn vaudeville. Ben, how much depth can country audiences take, do you think?”

  “We all did Shakespeare at school. And Milton. And Dryden.”

  “Benedict MacCarthy, I’m going to build a new show.”

  In the meantime, I told her, I had to find somebody—by whom I meant James Clare.

  He had told me how to go looking for him. When he traveled, he used the post office as his base—to cash his government paycheck, keep his savings, and set up forwarding addresses. If I needed to contact him, I was to hand in a letter addressed to him, and the post office knew the town he was visiting next. He would then reply to me via the post office through which the inquiry had been made. Everybody who wanted him came to use this method. Simple, yet clever and countrywide—just like James himself.

  It took me no more than three days to write and receive a reply. He hadn’t gone far—to the village of Hollyford, at the foot of the Silvermines Mountains. I got there in a morning.