Venetia Kelly's Traveling Show (14 page)

“Where is he?” she said.

I shook my head and began to stand up.

“Where is he?” Her tone of voice roamed between fear and menace.

“He said—he said—”

“What—” she snapped, and then almost wailed. “What did he say?”

I was slow, and she caught me.

“His exact words, please. Ben? His exact words.”

And still no sound got out of my mouth.

“Repeat what he said. No matter what it is. Quote him. Say what he said.”

Mother had now advanced into the room and, terrible-eyed, had come around the table to look me up close in the face.

“What were the words?”

I know that I lowered my head. Knives of feeling slashed at me. And then I wilted under a sense of protectiveness toward my father. And bent further under a dreadful, impossible desire to protect Mother. Too much, all this, too much for a schoolboy.

I remember thinking,
Get it all out in a rush, then it’ll be over. Like an excuse at school
.

“He said—he said he wasn’t coming home, that he was going to join Venetia Kelly’s Traveling Show.”

Mother sat down, heavy as a dropped rock; her chair almost cracked. The yellow cat, Miss Kennedy, jumped from the windowsill and ran out of the room. A bad sign; Miss Kennedy didn’t yield to anyone or anything.

“Go after him. Bring him back.”

“What?”

“Go now. Now. Eat your breakfast and go.”

She locked her hands behind her head and began to rock back and forth in her chair.

“Mother—what can I do?”

Do you know that feeling when alarm makes you suck in your breath? And a red color gets in behind your eyes?

“He’s your father. Go after him and bring him back.”

“He’s—he’s going on somewhere.”

“You drove the car home. At least I presume that was you driving it. It didn’t leave again. You can drive out now and bring him back.”

She’d heard me return and had lain awake listening for—she hoped—two pairs of footsteps.

“It was a desperately cold night.”

“Yes. That’s it. You go after him and bring him home. You know where he is. He’ll listen to you, Ben. You know full well that you’re the sun in his life.”

“Mother—”

“Yes, you are. Ben, you are.”

“Mother, I’m only eighteen.”

Did tears form in my eyes? I can’t remember.

“Yes. I know. This is man’s work, Ben. But you’re well on your way to being a man. Everybody calls you a young man.”

No. Not going to do it. Not going to tug my father’s sleeve outside some ramshackle village hall and beg him to come home with me. And yelp when he prizes my arm from his sleeve and walks away
.

“I can’t interfere, Mother. I’m not up to that.”

On fire now, she got up from her chair, went to the wall, and, trembling all over, leaned her forehead against it, her arms spread like a crucifix. She steadied and the trembling ceased; then she came over to me and leaned closer.

“I knew this was going to happen. He’s been after her for ages. But we need your father here. We can’t run this farm without him.”

“But Billy needs a hand today, and I said I’d help—”

“Buts are for goats”—a favorite saying of hers; at least some of her wit had begun to return.

I said, trying to be firm, “We’ll run the place fine. We’ve Ned. And Billy. And Lily. And me. And you’re great at things. We’ll run it ’til he comes home. And he will.”

She strengthened. “I need him. Is that clear? I need him. Go and get him for me. Bring him back here. That’s your job.”

“Maybe he’s only going for a few days—”

“He won’t come home. I know him. He won’t. Tell him I’ll be ruined without him, tell him I’ll have no one to talk to.”

Large Lily steamed into the room with her big tray and her broad tongue; “’tis that cold out there you’d need to grow fur.”

Mother preempted any nosy questions.

“Lily, the boss isn’t here for breakfast, he’s away for a day or two.” Her precise speech returned for just that moment. “Set the table for Ben and me.”

Large Lily spread her wares, turned like a marching soldier, and clattered back to the kitchen. My father said that Large Lily had a dispensation from the Pope to wear her legs upside down.

Mother left the room too; “I’ll be back,” she said.

Much as my father always did, I shook out the huge folds of the newspaper.
I thought,
My God, I’m already behaving like him
, and I wanted to drop the paper to the floor—notwithstanding the irresistible headlines:
ELECTION SPEECHES FROM PLATFORMS OF ALL PARTIES
.

That morning, the first of my life’s true struggles began. Mother advanced on me like an army. Her feelings tugged me this way, hauled me that way. She pleaded and she pressed and I knew she’d bring me grief. And in time she did.

While I ate breakfast, and before she came back, I began—my father’s great dictum—trying to “think rather than feel.”

“Use-use-use mental skill,” he used to say. “Think your way through it. Forget what you feel.” Over and over he’d say, “Skill, not emotion.” Hah! The irony!

Well, thinking about this business told me that it was, to say the least, a startling matter: I heard my mind say,
I mean, look at it. Your father has run away from home with an actress. How’s that for a ball of wax?

But my thought process collapsed at once, new feelings swept in, and I began to miss my father with actual pain, a pain in my heart, a pain in my stomach. I was so fond of him. From as early as I could remember I went everywhere with him—on his short errands to town, or into the village, or to spend time at the blacksmith’s. I’d had difficulty settling down in school because I was no longer free to be with my father about the place, and I was lonely for him every hour of the day.

And now what was to become of him? He couldn’t act, he couldn’t dance, he couldn’t sing. Perhaps, I consoled myself, he needed to get this thing out of his system. But my father didn’t have fads or passing fancies; he was a farmer, he was slow to take up things. Yet—and here was the warning shot—if he took them up he truly embraced them, and made them part of his life forever.

Then, on that bleak morning with my breakfast and my newspaper, in rode the most chilling reflection. I looked out at the wooden gray sky and said, “Golly O’Connor.”

Golly O’Connor, a mad, obsessive character, was my father’s favorite teacher. He’d been in the British army, and when something surprised him he said, “Golly!”

Golly loved the classics, and spat Greek and Latin quotations like other men did tobacco.

“Remember Heraclitus, boys,” he used to cry. “Character is destiny.”

That was my father’s most beloved remark—“Character is destiny.” Thinking of it, I felt less hopeful and very unsure.

When I look back now and see myself there, that Monday morning, I see the early fogs of 1932 boiling soft and slow, mists of damp, gray wool muffling the hill field. Through the other window, I look into the gray stone yard, and there’s a horse dipping and swooping its great head as it’s being marched in from a gallop. That’s Bobbie Boy, a young hunter that my father bought up the country last year, and loved so much he’d never let anyone else touch him.
When will Bobbie Boy begin to miss him? When will the yard begin to know that the boss isn’t going to be here anymore? When will Bobbie Boy rear up and kick somebody?
I’m certain I began to talk out loud to myself; that’s one of the things I do under severe duress.

Which brings me to Mother’s pressure upon me. When she returned to breakfast she rapped a knuckle on the table.

“Ben, listen to me. Let me put this as clearly as I can. I want you to get in the car, go out and find your father, and bring him home. For me.”

She didn’t say, “Bring him back,” she said, “Bring him home.” And she didn’t wrap it in some vague domestic reason—she said, “For me.” Plain as day. And there, plain as an egg on a slate, sat the challenge. And my mind translated her words:
I’m your mother. Go out and bring back the man I love. My husband. Your father. Restore him to my life, to our ordinary life
.

Then she attacked harder: “After all, you were with him when he ran off. You could have stopped him.” As though it had been my fault.

I ate my breakfast, and then I went into the kitchen and retrieved my father’s breakfast and ate it too. When in doubt, eat. In my mind’s rampages did I come up with any cohesive, useful thoughts? I don’t remember, but I don’t think so. Except one—I wasn’t going to get in the car and go searching for Venetia Kelly’s Traveling Show or Blarney the parliamentary candidate or my father or anybody.

Standing up in the kitchen, I devoured the food meant for my father, felt surprisingly good about doing it, and headed for the yard. All day I kept out of Mother’s way, because I knew that she was looking for me. I headed down the fields, I lingered in the woods, I came back and lurked about the yard—but it was winter and there wasn’t much to do. Ned
Ryan had gone off somewhere, Billy Moloney was in one of his “flock off” moods, and eventually, caving in to hunger, I had to go back into the house.

Mother stood in the hallway, leaning against the doorway into the porch. I saw her from behind—tall as a stake, but hunched and bunched. Her folded arms kept out the world and protected her bruised heart. As I watched from the kitchen door, she moved from one foot to the other and back again like a wounded stork.

When she turned around and saw me, she began her next attack. And for two more days she gave me no peace. She assailed me in all sorts of ways, with pleadings and recriminations and, from time to time, utter charm. She woke me up in the morning, she came to my room last thing at night, she rose from the table at every meal and came around to where I sat and leaned in over me, she pulled a chair up beside mine. The Welsh, as a people, have determination when they need it, and if Mother wanted to make a point she knew how to do it.

“He won’t listen to me, Ben. For reasons I’m not prepared to go into.”

“Are you surprised, Mother?”

“You could have him back here by midnight.”

“Are you surprised that he did what he did?”

“You went out with him. You should have seen to it that you came back with him.”

All Monday, all Tuesday, I fought her off, still refusing this embarrassing, unseemly task. On Wednesday morning she came to the breakfast table with a face as gray as the fog outside, as bleak as the stone in the walls of the yard. In her arms she cradled like a baby the “Big Ledger”—the farm accounts.

“Now you have to bring him home,” she said, and tears rolled down her face. “Ben? Ben?”

Mother didn’t cry; she wasn’t that kind of woman. And I don’t think I’d ever had the thought of what she might look like if she wept. I know, however, that I wouldn’t have expected the sheets of water that I now saw, the helpless crumple.

“We. Have. No. Money,” she said.

“What?”

“Gone,” she said.

“Where?”

“Hundreds. Over months and months. Hundreds—and thousands.”

Like God handing Moses the Ten Commandments, she gave me the Big Ledger. For months, my father had been writing checks, all payable to “Cash,” and he—or somebody—had been drawing the money from the bank.

“But you keep the accounts?” I said.

“I only keep track of what we earn and sell; your father does the banking, he writes the checks—I have no permission.”

And I knew this to be true; not for decades afterward were Irishwomen allowed bank accounts without the written permission of their husbands, and many, including Mother, didn’t bother.

She sat now and said, “You have to bring him back. Ben, you have to.”

It was—and remains so in my memory—an awful moment.

S
he came to my room with me after breakfast and we planned my clothing. With a notebook and a pencil, making lists of things I’d need, she sat on the bed and fought with herself to give out an aura of calm. Never had I encountered such worry, and it cut into me. This, what an irony, needed my father—he alone could cope with her. She talked as though steam-driven.

“Every time you see him—and there will be a number of times, because I don’t expect him to say yes immediately—I want you to look your best.”

But I had my feelings too, and they burst out.

“Mother, I’m too young for this.”

“I wonder if I should give you some clothes for him. But of course he won’t need them if he comes home with you.”

It’s so difficult for an only child to be his real age. My parents treated me as almost an equal. And I looked mature quite early; I’d grown fast and I had broad shoulders. Inside me, however, at that moment, I was no older than twelve.

“What is your job?” Mother asked me.

She’d coached me, and I had to say, “I am in search. Of my father. To bring him home.”

“What is your job?” Mother asked me again.

And I had to repeat it. “I’m in search of my father and I have to bring him home.”

At ten o’clock in the morning I drove out through our gates. She said that she would expect me that night or the following night, but certainly no later than Friday, “with your father in tow,” as she put it.