Venetia Kelly's Traveling Show (5 page)

M
ost men have three lives, public, private, and secret. My father had four.

The world knew him as a successful general farmer who owned a horse or two. We had dairy, grain, and crops, held in place each season by this warm and well-liked man. When forking out a cowshed or clipping a hedge, he wore the big boots with the hobnails, and the “gaiters” made from the cutoff tops of Wellington rubber boots. He then wore tweed suits when he went to town, and red polka-dot pocket handkerchiefs, a man who was as comfortable with Billy flockin’ Moloney as he was with Professor Fay and his sister, Miss Dora Fay, who came down from Dublin on weekends to the cottage we rented out to them, on the river at the bottom of the farm.

As to his private life, my father exuded kindness and good humor in our house. He had chivalry, even an old-fashioned, mannerly gallantry. In this he wasn’t, I think, a typical Irish farmer—he had a sensibility that went beyond the ordinary male responses of his peers. I watched his care of Mother; I saw him waiting until she started to eat before he lifted his own knife and fork; I saw him racing to fetch things from upstairs that
she had forgotten; I saw him clipping articles from newspapers, and leaving them on the desk in her little workroom in the alcove of the window; I saw him handing her more money than she asked for whenever she needed cash; I saw the tiny, myriad ways he expressed his respect and affection for her. For instance, if near at hand, he never let her lift or carry.

Often I saw him come in from the yard in the afternoon just to make her a cup of tea. And I heard them laugh and laugh behind the door of their bedroom at night—after he had made sure in the winter that a fire blazed in the grate there, and in the summer that all the windows were open, with the curtains blowing out like huge white kisses.

Did she behave as caringly to him? I want to say that she did, but the evidence wasn’t abundant. Yet I have to bear in mind that she didn’t have his demonstrative nature. To put it more simply, she seemed more head than heart, and he more heart than head.

Does this explain his actions that notorious night? And the long, anguished weeks afterward? I don’t think so. It may mitigate some of his guilt in the matter, but it would be unfair to put that weight of blame on my mother’s ordinary diffidence. She was, I think, generally blameless.

Blame it, to begin with, on the third life, as fast-flowing, mysterious, and powerful as a subterranean river, a force of which he wasn’t completely in control.

He loved imagination. He loved possibility. He loved that the unexplained and the inexplicable could exist in the world and defy any reasoned argument. In this arena, he most loved human emotion and the means by which it got expressed.

I think now that he was a little ashamed of this part of himself and tried to hide it. But I always knew; I had seen what books he read; I knew that he loved the theater and acting, that his favorite play was that feast of rollicking possibility
A Midsummer Night’s Dream
—and you could scarcely get a greater work of the imagination than that, with its magic world, its sprites called Cobweb and Mustardseed, its weaver turned into a donkey, and so forth. I’d take a strong bet that not another farmer’s bedroom in the county had that—or much of anything else—as bedside reading.

Mother, from what I could see, didn’t raise much of a glass to this, shall we say,
romantic
side of my father. She did, however, blush at a compliment
from him, or grow tears in her eyes at a Christmas gift. There was a time when I thought this had caused the gulf between them—that he was too romantic and effusive, and she too practical and shy.

But no. That wasn’t it. Wrapped inside this third life of my father’s lay a fourth, the part of him that he couldn’t see. In there, the trouble lay like a bomb that we never heard ticking.

P
erhaps this is the moment to meet the Fays—Professor Cyril Fay and his sister, Miss Dora. Professor Fay was a historian who had a hunger for influence, and his sister a mathematician who loved words and language and stories. Acquainted with one of Mother’s sisters, they began to rent the cottage on our farm for weekends, and then for stretches of the year during the long university vacations.

Both played their parts in this story. But how differently they affected me—even though they were twins and did many things together, and often very similarly. In many ways, they defined the term “unidentical twins;” he small and with no neck, she gooselike, thin as a knitting needle, and a good deal taller (though that wouldn’t have been difficult). Only in one respect could a stranger tell that they were related—they walked identically. It was Mother who pointed it out—a fast pace, with a surge on every third step—
one-two-three, one-two-three
.

I can run my first memory of the Fays like a film. A Saturday afternoon in summer, I about eight years old; Mother and I walked down the fields to the river, and then along the riverbank path to the cottage; Mother carried a round Red Riding Hood wicker basket full of peas,
gooseberries, new potatoes, and Lily Moloney’s fresh soda bread hot from the oven. As we reached the cottage, Mother told me that we were going to meet “very clever people. It will do you well to know them. Very clever.”

Miss Fay wore round tortoiseshell spectacles that gave her a surprised look. She sat close to the river on a chair that she’d taken from the cottage, reading so intently that her body bent to the chair’s curve.

In the distance a man—“the professor,” Mother whispered—walked away from us in a straight line. As I watched, he turned back and walked toward us just as briskly—and ignored us. Then he turned and walked again in the opposite direction at the same brisk pace, one-two-
three
, and then turned again and came back. I saw that as he approached us he was looking down and to his right—he had, we discovered, marked out with wooden pegs a distance of 110 yards.

“Sixteen of these makes a mile,” he later told us.

Mother coughed, and the lady looked up from her book and blinked at the sun. Her warmth to Mother still comforts me.

“I know exactly who you are and I’m Miss Dora Fay and that’s my brother over there; he’s a big walker.” When she shook hands with me she said, “If I have letters to post, or need milk, will you be my Mercury?”

I, because I had been raised quietly, nodded and said nothing, but Miss Fay asked, “Let me see your ankles.”

She bent a little and peered—I was wearing sandals and no socks—and she straightened up, smiled, and said, “Yes, I can definitely see wings sprouting there.”

She had prominent front teeth, Miss Dora Fay. She could, as they say, eat a banana through a tennis racket, and she was, I now think, my first true love. As first loves are capable of doing, she later inspired me, and gave me shelter and comfort.

When she died, an old lady, I was with her. I wept salt tears, and helped to carry her coffin to her grave. She bequeathed me all her books, and from time to time I find her lovely wide handwriting in the margin of something, always a thoughtful note, always inquiring, always seeking to expand knowledge, never judgmental.

I also have certain scientific instruments that she gave me; they saved my life; I keep them in a bank vault box, and I look at them every year.

She called her brother to meet us, but he waved her away and continued his walking. Miss Fay raised an eyebrow to Mother that said, “You and I understand these things.”

It was only when I put together the many similarities between Miss Dora Fay and Mother that I grasped the cultural mixed-ness of my parents’ marriage. The Fays came from an Anglo-Irish family, meaning not Catholics, and had roots in a society that originated in England, although their ancestors had been in Ireland for hundreds of years. They worshipped at the Church of Ireland, known elsewhere as Anglican or Episcopalian—what we have always in Ireland called “Protestants,” even though the term properly refers to the Reform churches.

My mother, of Welsh stock, had also been a “Protestant,” but converted to Catholicism in order to marry my father. His family can be traced back to the oldest of the Irish clans, and now I can survey where people might have seen certain differences between us and our farming neighbors.

We had that slight Protestant tinge—“English,” if you will—that to some people seemed to set us apart. And to be apart is, if not dangerous, at least exotic. To my eyes, though, my parents never seemed different from anybody else’s. I suppose if you’ve always been wrapped in wool, you don’t know it’s wool.

Mother had embraced Catholicism like a soldier takes orders—duty rather than passion, rote rather than inquiry. (My father once remarked to me, “She still has some of that Welsh Baptist wind in her pipes.”) She left my religious education to my teachers, and faith played no part in our conversation.

In fact, other than the duty of Mass every Sunday, the only contact we had with the Catholic Church arose if Father Hogan asked my father to come with him when buying a horse; and sometimes they went to the races together.

The next day Professor Fay and Miss Dora Fay came to our house for lunch. Such talk! And all about politics. Up to that moment I’d never heard anything like it. The four adults conversed in gales; the winds of their conversation blew up and down the long table and out into the sunny Sunday afternoon. My parents thrilled to Professor Fay, who had all the latest news from Dublin. Miss Fay, when she wanted to make a point, swept the table in front of her with one hand and then the other.

That was June of 1922, the first summer of our new nation—which was why I’d never heard such talk. Intoxicating. Intoxicating even now to look back upon it, and I believe that’s when my interest in politics first took hold.

A note here on Professor Fay: I didn’t like him from the first. Being a small boy, I didn’t quite know why I didn’t like him. He had eyes like a bad-tempered pig and it grieved me to think so, because I loved our pigs. But we’d once had a bad-tempered sow who had often tried to bite me. Her name was Rita, and Professor Fay’s little eyes reminded me of Rita’s—mean-spirited, glinty eyes, sulky with malice. As it turned out, I was so right not to like him.

He also had an irritating habit of straightening his bow tie unreasonably often, and wetting his lips with his tongue, a darting little pink slink.

I did, however, enjoy the respect that he paid my parents, and how he said repeatedly to my father, “I perfectly agree with you, Mr. MacCarthy, I perfectly agree with you.” But I adored Miss Fay, and I did indeed become her Mercury—letters to the postbox, the new milk from the cows every morning, butter when it was made, the hot soda bread, which she loved.

“You’re always bringing me gifts,” she said over and over. “So I must bring you gifts.”

Consequently, Miss Dora Fay showed me how to do crosswords. She taught me rock, paper, scissors. And she arrived one time from Dublin with a five-thousand-piece jigsaw puzzle of
Moses Parts the Red Sea
, which we built together all summer.

“Let’s do the sky first,” she said. “The sky is always difficult.”

She also gave me what is still my favorite possession—a red leather book named, in gold on the front cover,
Shakespeare
.

Almost more important, she said, “Don’t feel that you have to know how to use it now,” but she read passages to me and explained what was going on. She took
Macbeth
as the principal first lesson because, she said, “Boys like blood and gore and there’s a lot of it in here.”

Next summer she brought her own Shakespeare down from Dublin, the huge, new Yale edition, because her “happiest time,” she said, had been at Yale. She described the university with longing in her voice—“the ivy, the statues.” And she had me follow in my red leather book
while she read
Hamlet
to me from her volume, and as we sat together she explained it as she went along. It remains my favorite play.

Those were the Fays, and throughout this story of the Kellys and my family, you’ll meet them now and again. And they were there at the resolution—he disgraceful, she supreme.