Venetia Kelly's Traveling Show (24 page)

“Tell me about your father. Tell me everything.”

I said, “We talked for ages.”

“About coming home?”

“He’s looking well, Mother.”

“What about his clothes?”

“We met at a house in Charleville. He was indoors all the time, and he was eating well.”

I realized that since the moment of his departure we had discussed him as though he had gone off to war or had been sequestered in a clinic.

We reached the house and she headed for her most comfortable chair, by the fire in the parlor.

“Did he give you any money?”

As I answered her, she began to sit back; she closed her eyes. I thought that she looked defeated in every way; her collapse down to this level seemed to have come very fast.

Trying not to seem evasive, but not answering her questions too closely, I think I rendered as good an account of our Charleville meeting as I could manage. Mother never said a word. Maybe I was boring, maybe my voice droned, because quite soon I saw that she fell asleep. I never mentioned the Kelly actresses.

For some time I sat there, in case her sleep proved no more than a brief nodding-off. But she went deeper into it, so I fetched a rug from the back of the sofa, draped it carefully over her, added some wood to the fire, and tiptoed from the room. I looked in every fifteen minutes or so; four hours later, five hours and then six, she was still in a deep sleep.

Large Lily and I took it in turns to watch for Mother awakening.

“She didn’t sleep any night, no,” said Large Lily. “Not an eye shut. So we’ll let her sleep on—she’ll wake up out of her own accord. And when she does won’t she be fine?”

My father always said that Large Lily, every time she opened her mouth, spoke for two people—but he could never make out who the other person was.

I sat up until midnight, then I piled the fire with logs, arranged the fire screen carefully, and went to bed. When I rose at eight o’clock, Mother was still asleep, and by the time she finally awoke, she had slept twelve hours in that chair.

Even now, I think constantly of Mother as she was during all that time. This great blow fell upon her in the winter, bleak weather for a bleak time in her life. A hardy woman always, and often seen on the chilliest mornings fetching the cows from the lower fields with neither a coat nor a scarf, she now wrapped herself up as never before. As tall as my father, she’d always “borrowed” his shirts, as she well could; they shared the same major dimensions; she was one of the tallest women in the parish. Now she wore his coats and jackets in his absence.

If I look back through the years, I can see her now, walking up the lane to the house in the late afternoon. She’s been out somewhere, probably
in the woods. All through those gray days, when the fog seems never to quit the farm, she’s blanketed by her own mists too. She’s talking to herself even more than usual. She’s wrapped in one of my father’s old greatcoats and when I see how her shoulders sag I can’t tell whether it’s the weight of the coat or the weight of the grief.

No, I’m sure it was the grief. She changed her habits; she went to Mass on Sundays in different churches, farther and farther away. And she stopped doing her shopping in the village, and had Billy Moloney (when I was absent) drive her in the pony trap to places where she had a better chance of not being asked questions—no matter how innocent—about the boss.

On many days of that February, I came across her when I least expected to—sitting on a bench inside the kitchen garden, looking bleakly at the empty and cold ground. I also found her in the woods, on the walk up toward Mr. Treacy’s house, leaning against a tree that she loved, her shoulders squared back against the trunk. Once I found her with her face pressed to the bark, and it left a green mark on her cheek.

One day, when I came back to the house to get fresh clothes, I saw that she was wearing one of my father’s hats. I’d never seen her do that before; Mother, for all her insistence on practicality, had a wide feminine streak and would never dream of allowing herself to meet people without what she called “titivating” herself.

My father’s hat made her look like one of the squaws whose photographs I saw in
National Geographic
, from a North American tribe such as the Creek or the Apache; she lacked only the feather.

She must have known how little the hat became her—a battered old brown trilby, with a line of black sweat marks near the hatband. Indeed I’d often heard her chastise my father for wearing it, and he’d reply that he was so fond of it he was now going to wear it in bed.

I now see the hat for what it was—my quite austere Mother, wearing her grief as publicly as she could, and at the same time displaying her wish to remain as close as possible to her missing husband. The weather stayed dank and unremitting; we matched its gray mood. I assumed that she was sad—but I so often found her so fierce that it was difficult to imagine she could get back down to sadness within a short time, so high was the peak of her anger. Ireland being Ireland, balmy days began to replace the fog, and Mother went with the weather’s mood. She eased up;
she calmed down. The new rent income must have helped. She began to chat about her farm life and make plans, although I did once or twice find her in tears, again in remote places away from view.

But when she accepted the cottage’s new tenant, Mother didn’t know either the bargain or the devil with whom she’d struck it. At first sight you may think that Professor Fay and King Kelly sought to exploit a vulnerable woman. You’d be right, and you’d think, “That was bad,” because she gave King Kelly the cottage at a bargain rent. I wouldn’t have given a virus to that crook.

I need to think it all out before I can write it down for you. Also, my own part in it wasn’t too edifying—I can best describe myself as innocent to begin with, and then savage, and I’ll divulge that too; just give me a little time. Therefore, and while I remember it, here comes an Unimportant Digression, a brief dissertation on the word
blarney
.

D
ictionaries always call it “lying,” and “shameless flattery.” Oh, but it is much wider than that in its reach and warm embrace. First, there is an actual place, Blarney—I’ve been there many times—a small and sweet village not far from the city of Cork. They’ll tell you there that halfway up the tower of the old castle there’s a memorial triangle of cut stone inserted in a wall, with, if the light is good, an inscription visible. The words are
CORMAC MACCARTHY—FORTIS ME FIERI FECIT. AD
1446. This Latin idiom is a bit loopy, as though composed by a local poet or priest who wasn’t quite up to the job, but my translation works fine: “Cormac MacCarthy built me for strength”—meaning (I think) that Cormac MacCarthy set up this castle to be a fortress.

So far as I’ve been able to trace, we’re not descended from this branch of the MacCarthys. By the way, according to some experts, the name MacCarthy means “beloved”—an irony on which I’ve been impaled for a long time now.

The stone with the Latin inscription isn’t the one kissed by tourists seeking the gift of the gab, the Stone of Eloquence, as it used to be called. The locals chose another slab in the wall, one that’s just accessible enough; they figured that if they hung the seekers of eloquence (or
shameless flattery) upside down and held them by the ankles, they’d remember kissing the Blarney Stone. I like the available metaphor—eloquence turns everything on its head.

As to the original connection between blarney and eloquence, here are some versions, beginning with the oldest, which James Clare gave me.

Long, long ago, Blarney was a wild place, and it had a magical grove, atmospheric in mood, with haunting light, a place where Druids met at dawn on Midsummer Day. When the sun had cleared the horizon, it shone a finger of light into the heart of this grove. The ray came to rest on the ground in a golden triangle, from which a stone rose out of the earth, the same shape and color as the golden sunbeam.

Each Druid who stepped forward and kissed this stone found his eloquence increased. When the sunbeam retreated, the gold triangle of stone sank down into the earth again, and the Druids went off about their business, which was mostly talking.

One of the Druids was a MacCarthy, and one year he lied to the other Druids—he told them the solstice was a few days later that year. On the true morning, he stood there alone and when the golden triangle rose from the earth, he reached down, snatched it from the ground, and ran away home with it and became the chieftain of the tribe. That’s the stone on the wall of the castle, and that’s why everybody who kissed it grew eloquent. All this, you understand, is the gospel truth.

A later tale says that more recently a witch sauntered out of the mists one day and handed MacCarthy More, the Big MacCarthy, a heavy triangular stone.

“This,” she said, “will be the cornerstone of your family.” (They also say that she herself was a MacCarthy.)

They lived in wooden castles then, but obviously had the foresight to say, “Listen, boys, a day will come when we’ll build stone houses, so let’s hang on to this rock and use it later as a cornerstone.”

It took centuries more for the family to build stone walls, but the triangle was passed down the generations. When the time came to embed it in the wall of their castle, the famous Cormac decided that he’d trace the stone’s origins, and when he searched for the witch, he was told that she came from Tara, the province of the High King of Ireland, and that the slab was originally part of the Stone of Destiny that sat on Tara’s hill.

This stone formed a crucial part of prehistoric Ireland’s governance,
because it identified impostors and pretenders. Every would-be king had to sit on the Stone of Destiny. If he was a fraud, a silence would fall; but when a rightful heir to a throne sat on it, the stone shrieked like a wild thing with joy at the new monarch.

One day, when the true High King was found, a bolt of lightning accompanied the shriek; it broke off a corner of the stone, and that was the triangle given to the MacCarthys by the witch. All this, you understand, is also true.

As to the origin of the word
blarney
, taken to mean lies and shameless flattery, that came from Queen Elizabeth I of England. (Her sobriquet the “virgin” queen might itself belong in the realms of blarney, by all accounts.) She’d ordered her envoy—who was also her lover—to acquire the loyalty and the lands of the MacCarthys. Every time the good ambassador tried to negotiate with the MacCarthys, they flattered him with a banquet in his honor, where they sang his praises and talked him out of his plan. To explain himself, his reports to the queen were long and wordy, and she said, referring to the MacCarthys, “This is all Blarney”—which in a sense it was.

End of Digression; now back to my own story, which, as it developed, had more than its share of blarney—the flattery that kills.

L
ooking back, I now think that I grew up with the country. First, the rowdy infancy—we’d had a revolution in 1916, and a two-year guerrilla war that began in 1919. Then the age of reason, with agreements and treaties. Next, the first noisy childhood of the new state—and we certainly knew all about that. Then, the adolescent fights with parents and siblings—the Civil War.

When it ended, there was a sort of settling-down into a system, a maturing. In politics, as in life, those who want to be successful see the writing on the wall and, unless they want to be permanently unemployed and powerless, they get themselves organized.

Where democracy is an option, that pattern is familiar all over the world. Ireland still provides a tidy case history, because we modeled that pattern more or less exactly. Having at first thrown into turmoil the post-treaty debates about how we should govern ourselves, Mr. de Valera’s republicans strengthened and rallied voters behind them.

All through the 1920s, noisy and aggressive, they began to give the governing party of Mr. Cosgrave a run for its money—Dev even had fringe elements still threatening armed struggle. The government countered, shouting the word “sedition,” wondering aloud about an armed
coup, striking fear. Mr. de Valera grew stronger and stronger in parliamentary and local polling, and in late 1931, he seemed at his strongest. And here was I, also fledgling, trying to grow up very fast, too fast. That, you understand, is hindsight again.