89
As I traveled the countryside, I’d always had a significant advantage: extra money. I’d never had to depend on the government salary. Just as well; my life would have been much more miserable. It’s easy to see why James had needed to gamble.
My financial independence began the night they kidnapped Venetia. They left behind a suitcase of her cash, probably in some half-baked attempt to appease me. Or, more likely, they meant to come back for it. With this money Venetia and I had intended to form our new, more powerful, much classier touring show. I hid the cash and then invested it.
Later, when my life settled and I took to the road as a collector, I used my investment as the compensation it felt like. It afforded me access to every hotel in the country, in case I hit nightfall with no bed for the night. I’d had enough of the barns, the sheds, the damp itinerant-workers’ mattresses that I’d known in those self-imposed bad years of my twenties.
With Jimmy Bermingham gone, we went to Cruise’s Hotel in Limerick. I knew it well. So many Irish hostelries had twilight lives—wee-small-hours drinkers, all-night card games, nervy local whores. Cruise’s had none of that, but it did have tourists coming in off late flights into Rineanna (now Shannon) and, therefore, night porters. All of whom I knew. We got a room without difficulty.
Two quiet, awkward days we stayed there, leavened only by the fact that Venetia’s appetite for food hadn’t diminished, and that she felt easy enough for me to take her shopping.
Of the more relaxed woman in the car on the drive down—no trace. We did talk, though. We had difficult talks that followed a distressing pattern. Here’s a sample:
“Ben, when you didn’t come to look for me—that was irresponsible. Uncaring.”
“Venetia, I thought you were dead.”
“How could you think I was dead? I sent you five telegrams. And letters and cards.”
“I never got them.”
True; and when eventually, one day, I asked my parents, Mother quit the room without a word.
And so, round and round and round Venetia and I went, in the same circle of accusation and defense.
“But I would have walked away from that beach in Florida that day with you—I’d long planned it; I’d have managed to get the twins later—that’s what I had always hoped for.”
“Venetia, I was too immature.”
90
Children, here’s an official statement—from your father, Ben MacCarthy. Looking Back on His Life. I was now sick of myself and my past. All that moping, all that self-pity, that hesitancy, that indecisiveness, that talent for being led around the world by the nose, that failure—no, that refusal; call it what it is—to stand up for myself, that moral and emotional cowardice: how I must have bored the world to tears. And by now I’ve probably bored you with it, too. I doubt that there could have been a more unattractive or stupidly pitiable man on the planet earth.
There are times when, in all the English language, the word I most appreciate is “but.” Here it comes: But—I was improving. And I knew it. I ran through my mind a quick list of my “accomplishments.”
Worked at a job I loved; survived a war’s deep horrors; and in the deep snow of that war killed a man trying to kill me and the person I was protecting; found a matchmaker her dear match; and, most recently, saw my beloved friend, James Clare, into his Valhalla—wherever it was—with no panic or collapse from me. Plus: saved a dubious friend from drowning. (Well, anyone would save anybody else, wouldn’t they?) And then essentially kidnapped, rescued from her cruel world, the love of my life. All that must count for something. So I said to Venetia, “From now on it will get better. Watch. And believe.”
“How?” she asked, sad, afraid, and acerbic.
I said, “We’re going to see a truly wonderful man.”
91
Unlike most people—put off from the medium by the fear of bad news—John Jacob O’Neill liked to receive telegrams.
“I enjoy their vitality,” he told me. “It would be a poor world if we shunned urgency.”
And so, when I wished to visit him, I usually sent a telegram, a day or two in advance. Our relationship had become relaxed. If I called and he didn’t answer the door and couldn’t be seen in the garden or strolling his lane, which he so loved—he called it his “entry point into the wide world”—I came back later. Or the next day. Or dropped a note through the neat brass slot in his door, saying I’d be back soon.
Now, from the Limerick post office, I telegraphed, “Would Thursday suit? May I bring my wife?”
Although I loved using the term, it still felt hollow—a shallow ownership, something to which I was holding on for grim life. Indeed, it had crossed my mind that, when matters had settled, Venetia and I should undertake a new marriage ceremony to give ourselves fresh emotional muscle. We could do so in a Catholic church, since her divorce from me in Reno and her marriage to Jack Stirling, in an American registry office, would not be recognized as legal in Ireland. Technically, the church saw her as never having been married to him.
In the hours that I lay awake beside her (she, miraculously to me, slept soundly every night), I planned every mile of the journey to John Jacob’s strong farmer’s house. In Limerick, we were within twenty miles or so of Charleville, the town where we’d met, and whose surrounding woodland and countryside I had searched with spade and shovel for years.
Though it was still a place of great pain for me, might I not now anneal that anguish? After all, she and I had spent formative days and weeks in that area, talking to horses across fences, dawdling on the banks of small rivers, gathering armfuls of meadow flowers in those idyllic married months of 1932.
What were the risks? She had been taken from there with force—she hadn’t yet given me the details—but we’d had such glorious days in that peerless land of milk and honey. All her troubles had begun and congealed there; but she’d conceived you, her twins, there and had been loved, according to her own admission, as she’d always hoped to be.
“It’s astounding,” she’d said to me once, “that a boy of eighteen who has never had a girlfriend, never even kissed a girl, could arrive as so complete a lover.”
I’d joked about reincarnation, and she’d agreed.
When I surveyed and balanced every thought, I came down on the side of touring the old haunts. I could always quit them in a hurry should their memories prove too stressful, and then I could take some time to calm Venetia again.
92
We left Limerick in midmorning, and the hope in my heart shone as bright as the sun. She saw the road signs and made no comment, and I felt that she sat up a little straighter in the seat beside me. At breakfast she’d again had little to say, had made almost no response to my various attempts at conversation. One piece of communication worked: when I pressed a hand to her cheek, she caught my hand and held it there.
We drove past a sign for the road to Lough Gur, and to my astonishment, she looked across at me, sharp and expectant.
“Don’t you want to take me down there?”
I shook my head. “But how do you know about it?”
She took a moment before replying, then said, “It was part of my imprisonment.”
It was my turn to look at her in anticipation. “Now, that is something you’ll have to explain.”
Again she unfolded at her own slow pace. “Sarah told me a story. About her father, my grandfather. I’m sure you remember him.”
I nodded. Who could forget him?
“He was once suspected of killing somebody. Of course he denied it, but Sarah said it was true, and he had dumped her body in that lake and moved it later. If I came back to Ireland, I’d have been in danger of a police investigation. They’d have interrogated me if they thought I knew about it.”
This is not the moment to tell her that the murderee was Venetia’s own grandmother, little Sarah’s frail mother. And that I had sat there and watched the police drag the lake for, possibly, Venetia’s own body. That, in
part, was the official response to my reporting her as a missing person.
I said, “Nobody would have asked you any such questions. That was a bit far-fetched.”
“Not if you were afraid of your own shadow.”
Ha! A twitch of the veil, a glimpse into what her life then had been like. Fear all the way.
“Was that how it was?” I asked.
She didn’t answer; she took a pace back into her shell.
How can I keep her from retreating, how can I keep her out and bright? If Jack Stirling didn’t exist any longer, would her life be better?
Some minutes later, I turned off the Charleville road, and then turned again, down a lane that became a cart track that became a field.
Under a great tree, I stopped and looked at her.
“You fell asleep here,” I said, and climbed out of the car. She followed me and we walked to the tree, not yet in leaf, and stood looking up at it.
“Do you remember?” I wanted to gauge how much she—and her memory of me—had been damaged.
She thought about it. “You told me that it was an old copper beech. That it had been an ornamental tree in a great estate. And when the new Irish government came in and the old estates were broken up and the land divided, this was the only part of the estate left intact. I remember everything about it.” She’d become animated, full of her old self. “It’s like Russia, it’s like Chekhov—wasn’t there a great house here somewhere?”
“And not a trace of it left,” I said. “I’ve seen the sepia photographs. It was magnificent.”
She looked up at the heavy branches, some low enough for grasping and swinging. “But the tree is still here. And, look—the buds will soon swell.” She walked all around it, circled to where I stood, and leaned back against the tree trunk. “And I can tell you something about this tree that you don’t know. When I woke up here that afternoon,” she said, “I guessed that I was pregnant. I remember the feeling so well. Slightly dizzy in my head, my eyes full of magic dust, and I could just sense the beginnings of a feeling of warmth, and delight and safety. You had a striped shirt, green and white stripes. And white pants. You had taken off your shoes to go barefoot on the grass.”
Too cold that morning to stand for long in the shade; but we did linger in the car. Venetia huddled deep into her coat—a heavy navy tweed we had just purchased for her in Limerick. She pulled a scarf around her neck, reached for my hand, and pressed it to her cheek.
“We both went through bad times,” she said.
“I didn’t know how to handle it,” I said, and I thought, You have a better chance now; you know more, you’re more mature. So take your own advice. Don’t rush it. Take it easy. Give her her own time. Don’t make the mistake of driving a conversation about the future. Let her wounds cool. Let John Jacob heal her.
93
Such healing. Such balm. I want to tell you now the story of our day and our night with John Jacob, because for a time, for a crucial, magical few hours, your mother became once more the complete Venetia.
We came away from the great copper beech more relaxed than at any time since the night we ran from the Olympia Theatre. In Charleville, Venetia said, “Stop the car. I want to see the house.” We stood on the high sidewalk across the street. Did somebody live there now?
For twenty-five years I had avoided this stretch of the town, unable to look. Shall I point out to her where I found the head of Blarney, her ventriloquy doll? Over there, in front of the little gate. On the cobbles. Midnight. The witching hour. I kicked his head. By accident. Shall I tell her how I found that front door open, how I ran screaming around the house, up and down the stairs several times? Looking for her. But knowing she was gone.
I said nothing. Nothing about my wild panic. My fierce certainty. Something awful had happened. Nothing about my dread to look to the floor lest I see bloodstains. It all came back—and I said nothing.
Perhaps I should have spoken and let her know my truth. But I didn’t, and now I’m telling you, her children. Not for the first time, as you know, but, I hope, for the last.
We stood side by side, not touching. This was the house where I’d first met Venetia. Where we’d shared a bed so often, so thrillingly. I think it must have been Charleville’s weekly half-day holiday, because not a soul did we see. We climbed back into the car.
Venetia’s mood subsided again, but not in that same shocking fashion. However, the moment we reached the top of John Jacob’s lane, she emerged from her hiding place, looked all around, at the dense and benign trees, and the high, grassy bank of the lane ahead of us, and said, “Stop the car!”
She jumped out and walked ahead of where I’d parked, her arms out-flung, her head thrown back. I walked after her, and when she heard my footsteps she spun around.
“This is a fairy-tale place,” she said. “Look!” She pointed to the plume of smoke from the chimney.
I said, “It’ll be wood smoke.”
“Can we walk down? Will the car be in anybody’s way if you leave it here?”
She took my arm and set the pace, strolling with slow, thoughtful steps, marveling all the way.
“Oh! Can you imagine what these hedges will be like in spring and summer?!” And “Look! Are those wild apple trees?” And “We have to come back for midsummer’s day.” She began to recite: “I know a bank whereon the wild thyme blows, / Where oxlips and the nodding violet grows, / Quite over-canopied with luscious woodbine, / With sweet musk-roses, and with eglantine.”
She clapped her hands and spun ahead of me, once again the girl I’d first seen onstage, in that damp, raggedy hall in Cashel, with my father close to swooning beside me.
These changes in her, these highs and lows of moods, these sudden “appearances” and then cold “disappearances”—is that a sign of damage?
I halted us, wrinkled my nose. “Sniff,” I said. “Can you get it?”
She made herself look like a dog, a setter’s nose to the blue, cold air.
“I’ll never forget this.” She returned to the canine pose, comically this time, and raised a hand like a pointer’s paw. “What wood is it?”
“I’ll let him tell you.”
When we reached his gate she said, “Let’s stop for a moment. I want my eyes to photograph this.”
We didn’t stop for long, because John Jacob O’Neill opened his front door and stepped out to meet us. In Ireland, we didn’t hug when we met; we didn’t demonstrate affection. Unlike the two of you, Ben and Louise: I’m so grateful for your embraces, with which you are both so generous to me.
And men of John Jacob’s age—for whom reticence was a way of life—they, especially, didn’t show affection in public. But he had traveled the world and had learned other ways, and so he walked across to us, and held his arms out to Venetia as though she were his long-lost daughter.
“How are you, girl?” he said. “A lot of good people have been waiting for you.”
94
Venetia fell into his arms. Like father and daughter, they stood for a moment as she admired the house, the neatness of the garden. Proud as a parent, he showed her the apple trees, the garden bench he’d made with his own hands, the thickness of the walls, told her about the cherry wood on the fire. Inside he gave her the same tour he had given me. I followed, keeping a short distance away; I wanted her to have the same full experience of his welcome I’d had.
John Jacob must have thought me out of earshot, because he began to speak of me.
“This man of yours,” he said. “He’s a remarkable fellow.” I couldn’t see them, but she must have been listening attentively, because he continued: “Some people I know—or, I should say, knew; his late boss was my dear friend—they thought the world of him. And from everything I’ve seen, he’s a steady and loving fellow. If he has a fault, it’s that he’s a bit too conscientious. But if you were looking for a man with whom to grow old, and who will look after you—that’s Ben.”
Venetia said something I couldn’t he
ar, and John Jacob replied, “Let life do it. We’re always pushing rivers, and it doesn’t make them flow faster or better.”
They emerged from the rooms at the back, hand in hand. When they came toward me, John Jacob said, “I’m keeping her here forever. Is that all right?”
To which Venetia said, “And I’m staying. I’m never ever going anywhere else.”
95
Naturally, John Jacob made tea—it’s impossible to sit and talk in an Irish countryside house without tea. He produced a pie he had made, telling us, “I store my own apples in hay. It keeps them very fresh. I picked these back in September, and so I always have an apple something-or-other for Christmas Day. Maybe applesauce with goose.”
When he’d finished his pottering and served us, and while Venetia ate her way through most of the apple pie, he plied her with questions about the stage.
“How much do you have to project your voice?”
“Is there a trick to projecting it?”
“How do you project without your voice going harsh?”
“What’s the best register, do you find, for projecting? Is it soprano or contralto? I’d say contralto wouldn’t be as hard on the voice, although people complain that my voice is sometimes too deep for them to hear everything.”
I watched her, while pretending otherwise. She answered every question with a smile. By the time she’d mopped up her giant segments of pie, she’d engaged as much as I’d ever seen her.
“There are tricks,” she said, “techniques. I’m sure you have them, too, Mr. O’Neill. Inflection. Timing your breathing. I used to take singing lessons.”
“Oh, I took singing lessons from a lady in Valparaiso,” he said, excited by the memory.
“Valparaiso?” Her enchantment with him grew—and he was off.
“I was walking down Serrano Street one morning, I was going out to visit friends in Viña del Mar, I was wearing a white suit, and I heard this wonderful man singing from a window above my head. I looked up, and there he was in full voice, glorious. He had a fat belly, a white shirt, and red suspenders.