Venetia Kelly's Traveling Show (2 page)

And I’ve longed for—I still long for—any clues of any kind to Venetia’s character, temperament, behavior, childhood, talent, anything. I want to know more and more and more about her; I never got enough of her.

Sarah didn’t help much in supplying any of what I wanted because Sarah couldn’t stop acting. After each and every meeting with her I spent so much time trying to determine how much was true, and how much performance. For example, as long as I knew her, she continued to give the impression of being airy, delicate, unknowing, and vague. She wasn’t; she was as sharp as a tack and as smart as green paint. The proof is that she ended up unscathed by the entire incident, unmoved. And she died very rich.

Those peculiar visits to Sarah brought mixed pleasures. To begin with, I always caught my breath when I saw her, because it was like looking at an older incarnation of Venetia. She’d stand at the fireplace, looking regal. Or under the huge tree in the garden, beckoning to me, and looking mysterious. Then the hand on my arm, the sigh as she looked at me and shook her head as she murmured: “Adonis, still an Adonis.”

Time was not the enemy of this beautiful woman; Sarah grew more beautiful. As she aged, she kept her figure splendidly, and—her actressy gifts—she constantly seemed to show it off to me, turning this way and that. Once or twice, I even thought she was giving me the old come-on. I never tested it, never did anything about it; I couldn’t. More to the point, I
wouldn’t
. But I often wonder if I should have; and then I think,
What if I had fallen for her?
I could have—the psychological conditions were in place. That was, of course, the trick; and she knew how to pull it off.

At the end of every visit, I came away cleft in twain by those mixed feelings: desire with distaste; liking with discomfort; warmth with repulsion. By the time of our last “appointment,” as she called our meetings, I’d learned enough not to succumb, knew that I had to handle myself carefully.

Over the years, then, gliding about in her ivy-covered house, or walking like a stork in the garden, Sarah, still the grande dame of the Abbey
Theatre, told me her version of what happened on the night of Venetia’s birth—how she turned up on her father’s doorstep, infant in her arms, like a character from a melodrama.

“I was like Mary without Joseph. But elated, my dear. It was the first day of the week, the month, the New Year, and the new century, and there was I with a new life in my arms. I was so proud, and I felt vindicated in having her, even if she was technically illegitimate.”

“Which is, I presume, why she bears the name Kelly and not Anderson?”

“I know, my dear Ben, that you have your own reservations about my father, the wonderful King. I understand. But that night—oh, my dear, he was supreme. He took his new granddaughter from my arms, carried her into the house, and sat by the fire, rocking her, crooning to her. He never reproached me, he never made a comment. Audrey was with me, and she adored my father.”

The idea of Sarah’s father being “supreme” is something you’ll come up against as you read on. And by “Audrey” she meant, as you’ll have gathered, Mrs. Haas, whose real name, Venetia told me, was not Audrey. She was Gretchen, Viennese-born. And she hated King Kelly—I mean true loathing.

Sarah called her Audrey after a character in
As You Like It
. Shakespeare gives the oaf, Touchstone, a girlfriend named Audrey, and she is described—by Touchstone—as “a foul slut.” Mrs. Haas, so far as I could tell, never found out.

And that gave me another side of Sarah, not at all her managed demeanor of sweetness and light. The “Audrey” thing was amusing and tart, yes, and witty—and even ironic, given Mrs. Haas’s efficiency and domestic flair. But it was bitchy and unjust, and it peels back a corner, just a tiny flap, of the other side of Sarah.

That sidelong detail gives me the appropriate moment to warn you of something. As I’ve already hinted, I’m prone to Digressions. Like my anger, it’s a matter of character with me—meaning I have difficulty controlling it. I digress when I’m in conversation, I digress when I’m teaching, I digress—dammit—when I’m eating. If you can accept that about me without too much harsh judgment, you might even find me entertaining.

So, throughout this story you can expect three kinds of sidestep: Important Digression, which will usually be something to do with factual history; Relatively Important Digression, where a clarification needs facts and I will ferry them in from a side road; and—my favorite—Unimportant Digression, which can be about anything.

I ask your forgiveness in advance. We Irish do this digression stunt. We’re so damn pleased with our ability to talk hind legs off donkeys, that we assume people like to listen.

And now, to drive home the point, here’s one of those Unimportant Digressions; it’s regarding Mrs. Haas and a peculiarity that puzzles me to this very day and for which I felt that I could never ask an explanation.

She was a lanky woman, and she wore “unusual” shoes—brightly colored, of shiny leather (I think she must have applied some kind of dye to them), and they always had high heels. The rest of her clothing leaned toward dull; I suppose that nobody in Sarah’s orbit dared to dress outstandingly.

Anyway, when sitting down, Mrs. Haas used to kick off her high-heeled shoes—and then, and instantly, begin to scratch her behind. She often went to great lengths to achieve this, shifting in her chair and twisting this way and that. Off would come the shoes and the scratching would begin. Nobody paid a blind bit of notice.

And it was noisy scratching, as though she wore canvas underwear. When, with her feet, she fumbled her shoes back on, the hands would come out from under the backside and rest in her lap again. And she did it when alone. Standing by the kitchen table (as I watched secretly from a corridor), off came the shoes, down went the hands to the land of canvas, and scratch-scratch-scratch, all over her rear.

What was it? A reflex action of some kind? Or was there a relationship, an unseen nervous connection, between her shoes and her aft epidermis? I’ve never known, and because I never asked, I never found out.

How she didn’t break her fingernails I’ll never know—and I glanced at her hands whenever I could. She kept those nails as level as a hedge; obviously strong, they were like a good set of teeth on her fingertips; that woman had a gift of calcium. Perhaps the calcium had something to do with the scratching.

See? A Digression.

Back to Venetia’s birth: Here are the true facts of that New Year’s night, 1900. When Sarah arrived with her bundle in her arms, and Mrs. Haas panting behind her like a big, long dog, Sarah’s father, baby or no baby, tried to slam the door in their faces.

But Sarah guessed that his poker game was up and running (she was right) and she told him that if he didn’t let her in (in her shy way she said something like “If you don’t take your daughter and your heiress in from the storm”), she’d tell the men there that her father had made love to most of their wives—which he had.

That version was given to me by Sarah’s father, and I then challenged Sarah herself with the truth of it. She caved in—and added a little bonus.

“Yes, I did threaten him with that. I knew all their wives, and he had indeed connected with them. Except Dave Challoner’s—but nobody had ever made love to Betty Challoner,” Sarah said, “because Betty wouldn’t have allowed them to.” She paused. “Not even her own husband.”

Sarah filled all her conversation with such asides, usually about people whose names meant nothing to me. Now and then a nugget like that flashed in the dirt from her life’s riverbed; she could tell scandals of crimson. It was part of why I loved her company.

Of course, Sarah had her own personal mythology, so Venetia told me. She had lived with Mrs. Haas since infancy; Sarah’s mother had disappeared when her child was no more than a few weeks old. Growing up, little Sarah had been told of her mother’s tragic and dramatic death trying to rescue a puppy from a lake called Lough Gur in County Limerick. So, when it came to her turn to be a mother, Sarah held on to her own infant with what became her life’s great passion, the drama that was her daughter.

Until I came along.

L
et me tell you something now from the end of the story—to be more precise, from the beginning of the end. It’s not one of my Digressions; I just want you to get a feeling of some of the forces that were ranged against me in that long-ago intrigue.

One day, I was asked in a serious and important way to go home to my parents’ house. I agreed, and gave an indication of when I would arrive. When I got there, in the middle of the afternoon—I’m giving only the barest sketch here—I saw my father, my dear, maddening father, standing in the doorway of the cottage that we owned down by the river. He looked as though he was watching out for me. Close beside him stood a man whom I’d never seen before.

As I approached, the man ushered my father indoors. When I followed through the open door, an unseen person behind me wrapped an arm like a tentacle around my throat. I could smell the cigarette smoke on the sleeve. Straight ahead, in the middle of the room, my parents were sitting in chairs side by side. Above them stood two men pointing guns at my parents’ heads. The year was 1932, and this was Ireland, this wasn’t
Chicago. I managed to stay calm, or at least to appear so; I wet my pants, but only I knew.

After a moment the forearm at my throat relaxed. It became plain that neither parent was allowed to speak to me. I saw heartbreaking appeal in their eyes, but when my father began to say, “We had no way of warning you,” one of the sentries clouted him across the head with a gun butt, and blood spurted from my father’s ear.

Through the panic of my mind I thought,
This too is politics
. In the 1930s there was Fascism all over Europe; why should Ireland be any different? And all politics is local.

The situation shocked me all the more because at that moment I was living in a fairy tale, a wonderland of kindness and excitement and performance and beautiful language.

I’m locating this incident here, now, because I want you to understand the swing of the thing. Like the fastest and most exotic pendulum you’ve ever heard of, my life at that time swayed between magic and danger, between enchantment and death itself. And yes, that was the beginning of the end.

L
et’s stay for a moment in 1932, because that is the year central to all this, a Year of Destiny, it was called, and so it became for me. The incident in the cottage happened because in February we had a general election. Truly epoch-making, it altered the course of Irish history. What I want to say is this: The private events that so formed and perhaps distorted me occurred against a remarkable background.

Everything that year rang of passion. Where there’s passion, deceit soon follows, and the major issue of the day, the general election, backdrop to my own drama, was, like all politics, characterized by passion and deceit. The entire country, including my parents—and myself—discussed politics more fervently than monks prayed. These events of ours were played out against that national fever. When I look back now, I think that everything must have been unstable, but we didn’t know it.