Venetia Kelly's Traveling Show (43 page)

And had I not been so caught up in my own drama, I should have been enjoying this ongoing tumult every day. Had my father and I been at home, living a normal life as once we had been, the comments would have been stimulating and often funny. Instead, my home now had its interior doors locked against me; Mother had gone away; the life of the farm seemed near imminent collapse; and I had brawled with my father in an unseemly fistfight. Had all this turbulence stemmed from the tumult in the countryside? It’s tempting to look for blame elsewhere—but it doesn’t work for me.

James Clare and I stood there for some time, mostly not talking. How shocked I felt, how dismayed. It seemed a very bad development indeed. He, getting the full story out of me, took a different position—a view that something major had taken place in my life and the life of my family, something fundamental and brave. I couldn’t reach that conclusion with him, so I let it sit in a realm of respect. We made an appointment to meet some weeks thence, and parted company. I kept that appointment and so did he, and by then everything had changed again, this time cataclysmically so.

No sign of my father; I looked far and wide; I drove down lanes and up side roads; he had vanished.
How is he going to get back to the show, still in Abbeyfeale? Has he disappeared again?

When I gave up looking for him I took a new decision. Perhaps conflicted on account of my state of shock, I needed a feeling of home. It’s perhaps also true that, with my blood still on fire or at least smoldering, I wanted to see whether I could get to the bottom of what had happened in the house.

And my abandonment of Mother now began to kick in. With my father “defeated,” or “dethroned,” or whatever epic word James would someday come up with, somebody had to look after her. And I was no more than twenty miles away.

The gate was locked—by which I mean not shut, which it rarely was when we lived there; it had a padlock on it. Not a huge padlock—in fact small enough to tempt me. But the car contained heavy tools for wheels and suchlike, and I broke the padlock so hard the flying metal almost hit
my eye; that would have been all I needed. I pushed the gate back and replaced the heavy stone that propped it open.

As I rounded the bend in the driveway, I had to stop. Ahead marched twin lines of about twenty men, parading, shouldering weapons, presenting arms, all wearing blue shirts. They halted when they saw me, and their officer, as he turned out to be, made his way to the car. I’d never seen any of these people before.

“Who are you?”

I got out of the car and said, “I live here.” “With Mr. Kelly?”

“Is he here?” From where was I acquiring this cunning?

“He had to go to Dublin. As you know, he’s been elected.”

“I had the pleasure of congratulating him.” My goodness, I had grown up fast! “I need to get some things.”

The officer divided the men and I drove through. As I walked to our—open—front door, Mary Lewis came out and looked at me in some alarm.

“What, Ben?”

“Where’s my mother?”

“They’ll go mad if they see you here.”

“Who’s in the house?”

“Mr. Kelly’s gone—”

“Yes. To Dublin. Who’s in my room?”

“They locked all the doors, Ben. I didn’t do it. Honest, I didn’t.”

“When you tell me who you mean by ‘they,’ I might believe you.”

She turned away and tried to close the door. I stuck my foot in it and she backed off, then ran toward the kitchen.

The hallway, so carefully ordered by Mother, had been changed. My ancestor’s portrait (nobody knew anything about him except that his name was Hopkins) had been taken down and replaced with a framed election poster blaring the name Thomas Aquinas Kelly. Blank rectangles showed where other pictures were missing. The small chaise longue that Mother loved had pairs of army boots piled on it. Several rifles leaned against the wall, in groups here and there. Two of the floor tiles had been broken as though something heavy had fallen on them.

When I went to the kitchen door, Mary Lewis had locked herself in—no chance of forcing any doors in that old house. I went to the back stairs
and found that door locked too; and when I finally got to the two upstairs landings, my parents’ bedroom door was now locked. Inside my own house, where I’d roamed free as a young bear since I could crawl, I now couldn’t move.

Think, don’t feel. Cunning, not emotion.

Look—I have no cunning. One day I hope you’ll find that out about me. In fact, I dislike it as a quality, even though I acknowledge its necessity at certain times and in certain situations. But I find it hard to quarry from within myself, and I found it hard to uncover then. Whatever I found in me, cunning or instinct, I went to the cottage, and there I found the truth beginning to unfold.

Mother sat there, alone, in the cold, like a woman stunned. From time to time, I’ve visited old people in hospitals up and down the country, old people who’ve sent for me because they have a story to tell. As I walk through the hospital wards and corridors I glance through doors and I see people in different states of emotional condition. Some are lively, some recovering, some engaged with the nurses or their visitors, and some look into the distance, knowing that they have nothing to see.

That’s how I found Mother. She still wore her coat as though she had been somewhere—I learned that she’d returned some hours earlier from her sister’s. And she hadn’t taken off her gloves.

In those few weeks when I had come home she’d always looked up at me with immediate hope. That day she didn’t; she stared at me, said nothing, and her dull, hopeless expression didn’t change.

The cottage seemed clean and neat, more than I could say for the house. I did what she always did in a crisis—made a pot of tea. Said nothing. Moved normally. Made, yes, a large pot of tea. When I had poured her a cup, and one for myself, I sat down in front of her and said, “All right. Tell me.”

“We’ve lost the farm. And the house. They’re allowing me to live in the cottage. Until I find somewhere.”

“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
.

O
ur 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.