She patted me on the arm. “We’ll fix that.”
Some recovery had begun.
Separately, we shopped in a single department store, and she made straight for the ladies’ underwear department.
Ha! said my silent mocker. Wish you could be with her?
I hadn’t heard from my inner gentleman in weeks. When I went looking for him in France and on the way home, I couldn’t hear him. I could only hear screams of fear from that quarter of my mind, and I preferred to ignore them in order to survive.
Now, though, he was back and with a subtle change—not so much mockery as challenge. Yes, he would continue to make sarcastic remarks when I felt under pressure, but thanks to his voice, that is the moment to which I date full acknowledgment that my feelings were, indeed, changing. It was as though I’d had too much respect for Captain Miller to let my thoughts roam.
Therefore, that is the moment when I ceased denying. That is the moment when my friendship with Kate Begley deepened and strengthened. And that is the moment I have had such cause to regret.
78
In the disjointed hours that followed, our emotions flailed all over the place, racing up and down different scales like the mercury in a demented thermometer.
Shopping done, we walked back to the hotel. As we climbed the stairs, Miss Begley said, in a voice that didn’t sound insincerely gay, “Would you like to see the clothes that I bought?”
In her room she staged a little fashion show for me. To do so she had, naturally, to remove her outer garments—which meant that much of the time she stood, or pranced, in her underwear.
She posed this way and that. She showed me dresses, shoes, a hat. She laughed, paraded—and burst into tears. With me holding her hands, she’d pull herself together and say, “Oh, I’ve got something else to show you,” and resume the mannequin act. She’d then weep again, as helplessly as any young widow.
I stayed and stayed—and stayed until she had cried herself out. Then I laid her down, as she was, in her new underwear, drew a sheet over her, and sent her to sleep. Tiptoeing around the room, I picked up the clothes where she’d dropped them, folded or hung them, set the room to rights, and sat to watch over her—all night, if need be.
Does great and savage experience eclipse previous emotions? In France’s war zones I had scarcely thought of Venetia. Now she came back to my mind with force.
Those days in the house down at Charleville—we called them our honeymoon, because they were. Our journeys into the countryside, incensed with fierce heat, bathing in cool lakes, walking in fields of deep grass, and the nights that became mornings, and the force and the flavor—we called that our new, true life.
And now, long bereft of that exquisite, incomparable bride, I found myself in a hotel room with a woman who had become, one way and another, almost my permanent companion, who was from moment to moment appearing in provocative clothing (she’d also modeled the underwear she’d bought), and whom I was helping through that most binding of experiences: dismayed bereavement.
No wonder I became confused. As ever, I reached for a practical thought, something that I could bite into in order to fight the pain, like the bullet they give a soldier during battlefield surgery. That night, I found my bullet; I decided that, no matter what happened, I would write Kate Begley’s “biography,” or at least get down on paper everything I could record of her. In a sense what I’m actually saying is: That was the night I first saw how entwined she and I had become.
79
Next day, Kate had recovered some more energy, sufficient to lead me by the nose and unprepared to the American embassy. I should have known that she was up to something—by the set of her jaw at breakfast; by the speed of her walk as we left the hotel; by the clown’s red spots of excitement on her cheeks; by the heightened agitation. She wouldn’t tell me where we were heading; I sighed with inevitability when I saw the building; and once we had been granted entry, she startled me again with her opening salvo.
“Where can I apply for compassionate overseas leave for my husband?”
The official to whom we were referred reacted with the tools used by all diplomats—a slow, carefully worded response, and a face without expression.
“Leave from where, ma’am?”
“Captain Miller,” she said. “He’s serving with the U.S. Army in France, and he’s not well.”
The official, seeking to kick away anything that came at him, as all bureaucrats are born to do, said, “There’ll be a lot of Millers in the U.S. forces, ma’am.”
“Charles. Sometimes called Chuck, which I’ve never liked,” said Miss Begley.
“The name Charles is often turned into Chuck in the United States, ma’am.”
“I still don’t like it,” she said.
“If I’m guessing right, you’re not a U.S. national, ma’am.”
“Irish.”
This looked like a different Miss Begley—crisp, no charm on show (as yet), and her technique sought to create entitlement. She wore one of the new dresses, the green with big yellow polka dots, and she gleamed like a sunburst—no trace of widow’s weeds there.
“Ma’am, do you know if your husband registered your marriage with us here in the embassy? He doesn’t need to, but some U.S. nationals have done so if they married Irish people, because it makes the later paperwork easier.” He was as patient as a gardener.
“We married in London. Here’s the certificate.”
The official took the paper and dipped into his toolbox for another distancing stratagem. He said, “I’ll just refer some of these papers to another department, if I may,” and disappeared.
Half an hour later, he came back and sat down, and as he opened his mouth to speak, Miss Begley said, “Well? Can I?”
“Can you what, ma’am?”
Poor fellow. He had no idea of the force confronting him.
She ignored his question. “And did you get the forms?” she said.
“Forms?” I saw the first variation of his repertoire—a frown. “What forms, ma’am?”
“To apply for compassionate leave. He was wounded. Here.” She reached across and tapped the diplomat on the neck, and he recoiled as though from a viper. “A long wound. I helped to dress it when he was last home.”
“So he’s already had some leave?” The diplomat clutched at the straw.
“But he went straight back on duty. That’s the kind of man my husband is. You should be proud of him.”
“Ma’am, we’re proud of all our soldiers.”
“He’s an officer. Doubly proud, I’d say.”
“Now where was he stationed?”
“I believe he was part of the Allied landings, or had a lot to do with them.”
“Ma’am, do you know how many men landed—”
She interrupted. “I know nothing. My husband would never betray a secret. He’s in military intelligence.”
The diplomat brightened. “In that case, ma’am, I can’t help you. Officially we don’t even know he exists, if you understand me.”
Miss Begley held out her hand. “But this is my wedding ring. And I was with him last month.”
“If he’s on active duty,” said the diplomat. He might have thought that he was getting free, but she interrupted again.
“He never wants to take leave. That’s why I thought that if I asked officially, the army would order him home.”
Which energy was going to win this battle? The official’s training or Miss Begley’s emotional strength?
She said, “I’m more than happy to go back to France and bring him home myself.”
“Ma’am, I don’t think the U.S. Army will want that. And the U.S. government can’t interfere—the army’s fighting a war.”
“I wish you’d seen it,” she said. “We actually watched, didn’t we, Ben? This is my cousin, Ben MacCarthy, he’s a war reporter—we actually saw the shells falling and exploding beside us.”
The term war reporter introduced the next facial e
xpression in the diplomat’s repertoire, and I’d have characterized it as a mixture of mild panic and great caution. Like a cloud’s shadow crossing a hillside I saw the resolve creep across his face—he’d decided that he’d try to close this down.
“Let me understand you, ma’am. You want the U.S. government, through this embassy, to ask the U.S. Army—right?”
Miss Begley nodded. “Very good so far.”
“To ask the U.S. Army to grant your husband—”
She interrupted again: “Captain Charles Miller. He’s from Kansas. They might know him as Chuck Miller. He was stationed in London for a while. And in the north of Ireland too.”
“To grant your husband compassionate leave on the basis of a wound that you have observed.”
“And dressed,” Miss Begley said, “but I’m not a nurse, of course.”
The diplomat sat back. “I just wanted to understand it, ma’am. But as you can imagine, in the war and all that, it may take some time.”
“Do you want me to sign something?” said Miss Begley.
“In due course you’ll definitely have to sign something,” the diplomat said.
“Shall I wait?” she asked.
“No, ma’am, but we’ll need your address.” The trained skill had trumped the emotional cunning. “Where was Captain Miller last seen on duty?” The diplomat flourished his pen above his pad; he was on the home straight now and he knew it.
“Near Dieppe in France,” said Miss Begley, who saw that she’d been outsmarted. She almost crumpled, caught herself just in time. Then, as I watched her face, I saw her decide to harness that emotion and show some of it to the diplomat.
Voice breaking a little, she said, “You have no idea what a fine man he is.”
She had such force—such compelling force.
“I’ll do all I can,” said the diplomat, and I think that he meant it. And I was left to speculate, How will he handle this when he discovers Captain Miller’s name on the dead-and-missing list out of France? Will he write her a tidy, compassionate letter? And get the ambassador to sign it?
We walked from the embassy, our heels ringing in the sunny, empty city, and I said, “What do we do now?”
She said, “It’s four o’clock and I want a cup of tea.”
In Bewley’s on Grafton Street, with the smell of the coffee making me wish that I were on the move again, I said, “We have some thinking to do.”
“Do you know what Charles and I talked about those nights he came to Lamb’s Head?”
I said, “Kate, we have to go deeper into things. This is getting very complicated.”
She took no notice. “We talked about being together. That’s all we talked about. Here’s what we agreed. If he can be sure of getting a letter to me, he’ll write and tell me where he is, and where he’s going next. Though it mightn’t get past the censor.”
Now my heart began to weigh heavier. She was never going to accept that he wasn’t coming back.
“And if the war starts cleaning up France and Belgium—it’ll be safe to meet him there. He was thrilled that I was prepared to go and see him, because he can’t always get to Kenmare. And you’ll come with me, Ben, won’t you?”
She had a shine to her as she said this, a glow not unlike somebody in a prayer ecstasy, and when she put it to me like that, I saw my own full picture—which told me that I’d have gone anywhere with her, done anything for her.
She had one last thing to say.
“And we agreed something wonderful, Charles and me. You saw how chaotic things can get. So, if by any chance the war cuts us off from each other, I’m to wait at home in Kenmare. Then, when the troops are returning to the United States, I’m to go and meet him at the boat. If I miss him there, it’ll probably be because he’s maybe wounded or tied up on official business or something. So I’m to find the very center of America, which is in the state of Kansas, and wait for him. He told me it’s a place named Lebanon. God fits the back for the Burden.”
80
That evening, over dinner, much of her vivacity had returned. She played with me, and grew serious with me, and played with me again.
I would like to argue that I saw desperation in this behavior, an artificial gaiety—but I can’t say that. By a swing of mood as wide as the sun’s crossing of the sky, she had become again the woman I’d first met on her knees keeping ants out of her kitchen. She didn’t look like somebody grappling with a dreadful loss. Nor had she let the glue of mourning cling to her. Above all, this did not look like a young widow who needed more bravery than she knew was to be had in the world.
Alone in my room later, I tried to make sense of it. If a colonel among our American custodians could insist—and from, it seemed, official knowledge—that Captain Miller had been assassinated by a German infiltrator in a sanitarium at—what was the town? Fauville?—how could that not be true? He’d been handed a report. He’d have seen lists. And he seemed to own the information, be convinced of it. Not only that, he knew Miller, disliked him even. “Killer Miller,” he’d called him. How could he, Colonel Mike Morrigan, have got it wrong?
Also, and this troubled me almost more, Morrigan questioned Miller’s origins. “He’s not from Kansas.” How much of Miller’s story, his identity even, might be false? I reasoned, He must have had to give his real name for the wedding ceremony, show some papers. Although in wartime anything goes, doesn’t it?
I came down to one conclusive thought: This is over. Miss Begley, when she’s been back at Lamb’s Head a few weeks, or maybe months, she’ll receive one of those awful telegrams. Or a letter from her new friend at the embassy. Can I be there to cushion her blow? I need advice.
81
James Clare, in his long black coat, had infinite wisdom and countrywide renown. His Folklore Commission reports became famous, a national treasure. He used a particular type of pen, the kind favored by nineteenth-century schoolmasters, and a black ink more commonly seen in music notation.
Every corner of the country, and each one of the islands, had seen James Clare, with his bicycle and his gleaming black leather document cases. In all weathers, he journeyed to all parishes, following a regimen as organized as a military campaign, yet seemingly as relaxed as a gentleman.
“I have only one clock,” he liked to say, “that smiling man up in the sky,” and indeed he lived by the sun—and the moon, and the stars, and the rotation of the earth, every tremor of which I’m certain he felt. His was the kind of character that I most admire; he was a generous and steady man.
He tried to make me steady too. Whatever his declared reliance on the orbits of the solar system (and I suspect that it was somewhat pretended, uttered more for the poetry than the veracity), he insisted that I note down my daily rising and retiring times. I also had to keep a record of the weather, the food I consumed, and the times of my meals, the mileage covered, the number of days spent in a neighborhood, the enthusiasm of the people for the tales they told me, their general health, the mood of the house, and the level of their comfort.
Not only did he instruct me in building the content of my daily record, he drilled into me the necessity of pristine form.
“You can always tell a good craftsman,” he used to say, “by the way he keeps his tools. They’ll be neat and clean and always near to hand. A drudgy fellow will scatter them all over the place.”
And he supervised me by inspecting my notebooks, my pens, my erasers. He taught me the system of taking down the original site notes in pencil, then transcribing and expanding them in ink. When I asked the obvious question, he answered, “Because you’ll have made a deliberate effort to establish something permanent.”
To hear James recount one of the thousands of stories he had collected amounted to a theatrical experience. He had a deep open voice, and the broad simple accent of west County Clare.
I asked him once, “James, what’s the shortest tale you ever collected?”
Not for a second did he have to pause.
&nbs
p; “A man in Clifden told me how dolphins came about. You know how sweet they are, with a kind nature and always ready to help or play. Well, this man’s great-great-great-great-granduncle, gentle of temperament and playful of nature, fell in love with a female seal back at Rosses Point. He’d go down to the water every day, and the girl seal would swim closer. One day she seemed very lonely, and when he spoke to her, he found that he could interpret her barks, and she was asking him, this young man, to come and live with her people.
“So he said good-bye to all his family—who had always considered him a bit strange—returned to the shore, and threw himself into the ocean. As he hit the water, hundreds of seals popped up their little heads, and with big smiles they surrounded him, and he swam with them out to sea and never came back. And when, some years later, people along that coast saw dolphins for the first time, they recognized this boy’s gentle smile, and they knew what had happened. He had married his seal and the dolphins were their children.”
I believed every word, as did anybody who listened to James.
He was a wonderful man. I could ask James any question, and I’d get a decent attempt at a useful answer.
James, I met a man in Ballinrobe, and I think he’s making up the stories he’s telling me.
And James said, “Record the tale anyway, but make a note that it might be an invention rather than an inheritance. In its own time it’ll belong to the literature of the country. Because that man had to get it from somewhere. Maybe the wind told it to him. Or he heard a whisper from the river.”
James, there’s a widow in County Monaghan who keeps asking me to come and stay in her house, and she wants to buy me clothes and give me money. What’ll I do?
And James said, “Treat her with the utmost kindness and the good manners of a gentleman, and that behavior will give you the distance you need to keep from her.”
James, do you think that Venetia—and you knew her, and you liked her so much, and you were so kind to her—do you think she’s still alive?