“Just like me with my father and mother,” she said. “We all need bodies. You can’t mourn nothing.”
I wanted to change the subject. “How many marriages have you made?”
“There’s one couple that has stopped speaking to me.”
“Why haven’t you yourself married?”
She said, “A surgeon doesn’t operate on himself.”
“Are you saying you’ll never marry?”
Miss Begley put down her knife and fork and gave me her full attention.
“I meet all these men, and you’ll see some of them tonight at the dance. But I haven’t met one that would be right for me.”
“How do you know?”
“My grandmother is keeping an eye out for me. But the male customers—they’re usually older. And they’ve usually lost the marriage race. We get the washed-up ones, both sides.”
“But you’re sure they want to marry?” I said.
“I have questions that I ask. To gauge how desperate they are.”
“You asked me if I’d marry a girl with one leg.”
“That’s my grandmother’s first question to a man. And if you’d been looking to become a client she’d have asked you four more questions.”
“To measure desperation?”
“Loneliness. That’s what cripples people.”
I remarked, “As if I didn’t know.”
Miss Begley said, “Stop turning everything toward yourself.”
“What are the other questions?”
She counted them on her fingers. “If I told you there was a little insanity in the family, would you still want her? How do you feel about a woman who never stops talking? Supposing ’tis a girl with a blemish, say a port-wine birthmark on her face, but a very nice nature? And the final question is: Will you settle for someone as flat as a boy or do you want a woman with a bosom?”
“And if a man answers ‘Fine’ to all five questions?”
She said, “Well, he’s a desperate man.”
I looked at her with an amazement that I later reflected in my notebook.
Their (extraordinarily basic) matchmaking questions for men are: One leg; flat-chested; facial disfigurement; madness somewhere in her blood; a chatterbox.
“Do you have questions that you ask your female clients?”
Miss Begley laughed. “Oh, God, yes.”
“Are they very different?”
“They also establish levels of need.” She counted them on her fingers. “A drinker or a sober man?” And of course she looked at me with a wicked eye. “Quiet or bad-tempered? Teeth or none? Though I try to fix that if I can. Fit or lame? Illiterate or not?”
Now I used my fingers to make a list: “So, if a woman will settle for a bad-tempered, toothless, lame heavy drinker who can’t read or write …”
Miss Begley cut in. “—That’s a lonely woman. Or a very hurt one. Or one who’s desperate to change her circumstances. Or all three.”
“What about hair? Baldness?”
“A detail,” she said. “Like teeth.”
“What will you accept? For yourself?”
“We’re not talking about me,” she said.
And I said, “But you’re afraid of the question?”
She took her time, then gave an answer that, I guessed, had been worked out a long time earlier.
“It’ll be immediate,” she said. “I’ll know the minute I see him.”
“And what if he’s a rogue? Or not available?”
She looked at me as though I had hawked and spat.
“Ben, don’t ever trample on people’s dreams.”
When we stood up, she waited for me to move the table out of her way. I followed her out of the restaurant and fell in step beside her.
She said, curt as a teacher, “You’re walking on the wrong side. Walk outside me please.”
And I did—and for many years.
10
We had time and plenty of it to get to the Farmers’ Dance. As we walked, she kept looking at me out of the corner of her eye, assessing me, sizing me up.
“Look how easily we fit together,” she said. “We could easily marry each other.”
This jarred me. I first knew that Venetia and I suited each other because of how we’d walked side by side. For the next few minutes Miss Begley and I walked in silence.
“Look, Ben,” she next said. “Change the way you go about your life. Go on searching by all means, but try to do less moping. It puts people off. Put some chop into things, some energy. And I’ll never stop telling you to slow down on the drink.”
Uneasy, my head hurting, I began to feel criticized, and though not enough to protest it, I yet saw a surly mood coming toward me like an angry dog. My inner guards had gone to sleep—exhausted, I supposed.
“What’s going to happen here?” I asked as we drew near the dance hall.
“A lot of chat,” and she laughed. “Shyness in this place is always translated into jokes. You’ll not see my business being transacted, because I have to make sure that the women I approach don’t get jeered at by the men. Or worse, by the other girls.”
Here are some observations of that night, notes that I couldn’t have made without sharp attention—so I can’t have been too much the worse for drink.
She talks a great deal, even more than my father does. Has a habit of pursing her mouth when listening, and moving her lips in time to the other person’s words. Has another habit of “dramatizing” an account, meaning, if she’s reporting dialogue, she “plays” it. She’s very effective and authoritative. Slightly hooked nose—it quivers when she gives an order. Which is often. Beautiful, pointed shape to her bosom. She gives me the kindest smiles, even if she’s irked. If she wants something to work, no effort is too much. She controls her feelings, and won’t permit black moods. Eats huge amounts of food. When she laughs, everyone else laughs too.
11
How did a man so naturally ascetic, so given to reason and intellect, so comfortable with the austere and rigorous—how did such a man learn to drink so much? My long answer adds up to a complex of reasons: grief, occupational hazard, fear of self, fear of feelings. A shorter answer is: I fooled myself that I liked it.
I tried to idealize it, give it some style, pretend that I was a seasoned man of the world. Whiskey is my tipple, I’d say, all merry and lordly; Irish whiskey, I’d emphasize. Were it Scotch I’d have the spelling different—whisky. To compound the rakish image, I drank chasers, that is to say, when I drank a pint of stout, I made sure that I always had my little tumbler of golden liquid standing by the big, black glass like Mercury sits near the moon.
But whiskey drops a sourness on me—and not solely on the palate. And I took that sourness onto the dance floor in Killarney, among the men full of drink who eyed the women full of hope.
My head had cleared enough to study this social curio, this corner of existence. Judging from their hands and faces, most of the men worked the land. They wore boots mainly, and oiled hair—brilliantine, I believe it was, or Macassar, a sticky, honey-type hair oil that in warm rooms runs down collars and the sides of faces, leaving golden trails.
The women had made more of an effort. Hair stiff with fixtures, skirts that would swirl if danced fast, dresses as pretty as their world had for sale—in their lines, six girls deep, dwelt the night’s color. But I also saw, like glassy currents on the surface of the sea, their drifts of inferiority, embarrassment, shyness, as though they believed that they could never be attractive.
I had some inside knowledge of how women should rustle up confidence. My mother-in-law, Sarah Kelly, spoke of herself as a great beauty. She had taken Broadway, Hollywood, and the Abbey Theatre in Dublin “without firing a shot,” as she put it. Her daughter, the love of my life, had then excelled the mother—because Venetia had higher intelligence and purer, finer purpose than Sarah.
Those Killarney women—they could have done with Venetia’s guidance, her poise, her sense of her own good loo
ks. She’d never have stood mute, waiting for some boy to slouch across the floor and stammer his invitation to waltz.
How did folks ever get to know one another at these events? How did they overcome that ingrained diffidence that soused both sides? Yet Miss Begley told me that more than half of the marriages in the hinterland had come of people meeting one another at this annual thrash. She herself had made some successful “connections,” and she’d been there only three times.
Among my impressions of the night, here’s a note I made on the music:
Every year they choose the same band—an upright piano; a set of drums and cymbals; one clarinet, one trumpet, one trombone, one man on a bass fiddle, and a huge accordion played by a woman big as a church, who smiles like an optimist and keeps time with her foot. The singer is “John the Vocalist,” taller than a tent pole, face white as powder, hair black as tar.
They gave the dancers little time between numbers—“Hurrying along the romance,” as John the Vocalist put it, and the musicians surged behind him.
Somebody grabbed my arm from behind—Miss Begley was squeezing her way through her potential customers, the raw men of all ages who stood eight deep along the wall.
“Come on, show them,” she insisted.
“But I can’t dance.”
She said, “You will by the time I’ve trained you.”
Why she chose the difficult quickstep rather than the relatively easier waltz puzzled me, and she answered, “Start with the difficult and when it gets easy, everything else is easier.”
I soon understood that she was, in effect, saying to the men, Look—if this dirty big fellow can do it and he’s half drunk, so can you. Give it a try like he’s doing.
We wheeled and spun. Sometimes we were awkward. Once or twice we danced lovely steps. The fellows with the hair oil looked on and whistled. Wild and salty, they catcalled, “Cycle into her!” Good-natured, they shouted, “How’s she cuttin’?”
And then the trouble began.
I knew these men. They lived in the houses that I visited. Their grandparents sang me the country’s songs and told me its lore at their firesides. Night after night, I wrote down the story of their ancient soul.
None lived in wealthy circumstances. A “strong” farmer supported the family entirely from his land. In a poor fisher cottage, a sack on a clothesline divided the entire dwelling. A few had held on to some form of farm wealth down centuries of oppression. Others, primitive and withdrawn, echoed Europe’s Stone Age.
So I was completely on their side at that dance. I felt for them, identified with them. Traveling the country brought me closer to them. I saw them as warriors. Of impoverished agriculture, of poor land. Generally unmalicious. Shy and contained men who would do any kind deed for a neighbor or a stranger. But not for a government official. Or a policeman.
In their houses I drank tea. I drank whiskey. I talked with their parents. And with their siblings—who included the girls on the other side of the ballroom.
Yet I lost my control among them, these men whom I loved. Because some fool skated across the floor and wrenched Miss Begley away. He was bigger than I. His friends shouted him on. He grabbed her too tight. He held her too close. He all but trampled on her feet.
I stood there as she wriggled. Then I stalked them across the dance floor. I watched as she tried to push him back. He grinned and ignored her.
“Go back a bit,” she said to him.
He grabbed tighter.
Another oaf joined in. From the edge of the deep throng he threw an empty bottle. Intended for me, it hit Miss Begley on the shoulder. Not, thank God, on the head. In fact it did no damage—except to my temper.
She knew too late what I would do. She could see me around the shoulder of her new dance partner. She made the big fellow halt. But she couldn’t stop me.
The men parted like a little Red Sea. I ran at the grinning idiot who’d launched the bottle. He held out his hands and smirked. And I hit him; I hit him hard.
Do you know what it feels like to land a punch? Hard bone or soft squelch—it might be addictive. I knew it well. There had been incidents, I don’t deny it. A kick here. An argument there. I have red hair, I flare. I’d never, though, taken on a man among his friends. Big mistake. As I hit him again, in the face this time, they landed on me. Including the big dancer.
You don’t feel their punches. Not until later. In the first brawl of my life, a stand-up fistfight with my father, I took some heavy blows. I didn’t know their true force until that night. And some of that was emotional pain anyway. These fellows, though, hauled and kicked and hammered. Boots stomped on me. Fists pounded on my head. A hand tried for my throat.
Then the scream rang out. And everything stopped. Miss Begley was standing some feet away, could see only my legs, and guessed that these men wouldn’t be able to cope with a woman screaming. Her shriek pierced even the music, which ground to a sluggish halt, and when some women from across the floor began screaming too, the banshees took over the world.
The men stopped their kicking and punching and stepped away from me. Now a new standoff developed. Somebody hauled me upright by my hair. He bent me back like a bow. The bottle thrower stepped in front of me. He landed a punch deep to the stomach, but the force of my recoil dislodged the grip on my hair.
The fellow had no experience. He could have sent me into kingdom come. He could have knocked me out with an uppercut, chopped me on the throat—he could have killed me. So I took control.
You can do anything to a man once you’ve got him by the hair. If he has a lot of hair, you hold tight and twist. The pain is savage. So I grabbed his head and twisted like a lunatic. I ran this fellow out onto the dance floor. I turned him around and around, hauling on his hair. I dared any of his friends to come after me: “Come on! Watch him lose an eye! Or an ear!” I confess that I’ve cleaned up what I yelled.
Nobody expected what happened next. What happened next was Miss Begley. She strode forward and she slapped my face. Very hard. Twice. Slap-slap. And then twice more. She pulled my hand from the bottle thrower’s hair. She shoved him away, then turned him around. She took his fist and mine and made us shake hands.
“Pair of schoolboys,” she said. “Ridiculous.”
But we squared off again. I threw the first—and vicious—punch. Right into his stomach below the sternum. Would have killed an older man.
That was the moment at which two strangers walked into the dance hall—and that was the beginning of so many things, and the continuation of so many things, and the end of so many things.
12
If I’d seen as many films by then as I have since, I’d have laughed out loud—because they arrived like the cavalry. Except that they were infantry. Their names, not that it matters, were John and Hugh; one tall, one short. Clean as whistles, funny, relaxed, and curious, they wore the uniforms of American soldiers and said to us, “C’mon, guys. Cut it out.”
Typically in an Irish brawl, the antagonists will forget their differences, turn on the outsiders who try to stop the fight, and derive their enjoyment from kicking them. We didn’t. Perhaps it was the uniform; perhaps it was the American accent, reminding us of all those emigrant dollars that had kept our country alive for decades now; perhaps it was the clean authority that the two soldiers offered. Whatever the reason, my opponent and I looked at each other foolishly and shook hands.
Miss Begley said, “Go outside and cool down. Talk to each other,” and to me she hissed, “Don’t interfere with my work.”
One night, more than a year later, when she was in low straits, I reminded her of “the night of the fight in Killarney” and it made her laugh, but she didn’t find it amusing at the time.
Outside, my enemy told me his name—Sean Durkan, a young sheep farmer, and he’d had too much to drink, and I said, “I was drinking all day,” to which he said, “Where would we be without it?”
Loiter is a good word to describe how we stood. Dancers would keep arri
ving until long after midnight, as the dance didn’t end until four o’clock in the morning. We greeted people whom we knew or thought we knew, and then Sean Durkan threw up for a while, and then we loitered some more, smoking cigarettes, and making useless but pleasant conversation, mostly about farming, fiddle music, and drink.
The fight, though, must have stirred something in me, because after a lull, during which Sean Durkan had been chatting with some of his newly arrived friends, I heard myself say to this youth, “Did you ever meet a fellow by the name of Cody?”
I had never mentioned his name to anybody—except the police.
“Cody?”
“Raymond Cody. Ray Cody.”
He dragged on his cigarette. “What’s he like?”
“Did you ever see a water rat?”
Sean Durkan laughed. “There’s a lot of them around. It’ll be hard to spot him.”
But he’d picked up something in my voice, he’d detected a cold shift, because he recoiled a little and added, “Jesus boy, I don’t want to be there when you meet him.”
That was all. He knew nothing about Raymond Cody, he knew nothing about me, yet he felt the menace.
In time, the two American soldiers came out from the dance to see us and smoke a cigarette. They told us that they were stationed “in Londonderry,” which they described as “more than a hundred miles due north” from where we stood in the dark of the night, cigarettes glowing, distant music floating its way to us.
Their uniforms attracted passersby, curious and friendly. Every household in the country had relatives in the United States, and therefore people couldn’t have felt warmer. And those open-faced, calm young men made it easy for everyone, chatting, offering cigarettes, looking for beer, asking about the girls—the things soldiers do all over the world. As an encounter it seemed normal, pleasantly interesting, fine.
During this, and all through my alfresco conversation with Sean Durkan the sheep farmer, Miss Begley had been emerging now and then from the dance, and always with a lady in tow. That was more or less what I had expected to see. She kept these women out of earshot, but I could see from the heads bent toward each other, and the intense body attitudes, that she was conducting intimate and powerful conversations with them. At the end of each talk, she took from her small white clutch purse a notebook, and in it she wrote things, then handed the women pieces of paper—her name and address.