And what of Kate in all of this? She had never impressed me more. With all the rights in the world to fall apart, she stood there as composed as a queen, smiling, shaking hands, sharing a brief joke with each Chuck Miller who came along. Every man among them responded to her. Many said, “I wish it had been me. He’s a lucky guy, the real Chuck.”
And if the men showed their appreciation in smiles, laughs, and little smatterings of solitary applause, the women loved her even more. Each wife stepped up on the bandstand and hugged her and wished her luck.
After the wives, all of the men who now came in wore uniforms—army, navy, air force. The intervals between their appearances grew longer and longer—and the men began to look more and more likely. I moved forward a little, to stand right behind Kate in case Charles appeared—or didn’t.
From the pace and tension of the parade, it was clear that the organizers thought they had found at least a replacement—and in fact the last man through the door looked, in the distance and at first glance, not unlike “the real Chuck,” as Bobby had begun to say.
Big, fair-haired, and in an impeccable army uniform festooned with decorations, he stood for a half-second framed in the doorway and there was a flash, a lightning flare in that half-second when I said to myself, “Jesus God!” I know that Kate had the same thought because her body leaned forward in that direction and her hands flew to her mouth. She sagged when she saw him clearer.
He halted before her, saluted, and said, “Ma’am, I’m Lieutenant Chuck Miller, from the town of Fontana, in the County of San Bernardino, in the great state of California.”
She said, “And you’ve come all this way?”
He said, “Ma’am, in a cause such as this, in the name of a fellow officer, it was a short journey.”
He snapped off another salute, turned with robot steps, and marched the few feet to join the others.
I whispered, “Are you all right?” and she reached a hand back for me to take, and she held on and held on.
——
They all stood there in a group and applauded her—it seemed they might never stop. When, eventually, they responded to her gestures, Kate took a deep breath and spoke.
“Thank you—thank you all for coming here. And thank you too, the organizers who dreamed up this lovely plan. I’ve never known such kindness, and even though you must have all known that none of you was ever married to me—at least I hope you’d have remembered if you had been—it was kind beyond measure of you to come here, and many of you from so far away. If my Chuck Miller were here, he’d be in tears, I know it. For all his bravery as a soldier, he was a very tender man. And he’d now tell me something—he’d give me an order. Well, he was an officer, wasn’t he? He’d order me to dance with every Chuck Miller here tonight.”
And she did. She stepped from the little makeshift stage—hand-hewn by Bobby Bilbum—and, with the grace of Heaven itself, approached sixty-year-old Chuck Miller from Jacksonburg, “just up the road a ways,” and spun him through the barn.
I’m guessing that Lebanon’s population in the late 1940s came to about two hundred voters and their children. They ate dinner early out there; they lived their lives in an admirably calm way, regulated, undramatic people, good neighbors, and better friends, who all went to bed early, rose at the same time, and worked hard.
The Chuck Miller Party dented all that for a night—the last person left the barn around half past two in the morning, and even then the fiddler, a man named Rufus Quisenberry, whose fingers I could scarcely see on the neck of the fiddle so fast did he play, didn’t want to stop. And was it my imagination, or did Jerry the Giraffe actually sway in time to Rufus’s fiddle?
Kate stood at the door and said good night to every person.
“Good night, Margie, you should always wear your hair up like that—now we can see your lovely neck.”
“Eddie, nobody told me you were such a good dancer.”
“Girls, I know why you’re giggling, I saw you with the boys.”
Her warmth, her laughing good humor, her compliments to men, women, and children—no wonder the little town of Lebanon loved her. She kissed every Chuck Miller on the cheek, and she teased their wives about the trials of being married to a man of that name, and when it was all over she stood in the barn doorway and whispered, “Ben, I need you, I need you, I need you.”
Some men are good at being needed, some not—I didn’t know either way until that night. Or perhaps it’s more accurate to say that I’d never stopped to think about it. When my father left home, Mother said to me, “I need you to go after him and bring him back. For me.” That had been my only encounter with the word need. Venetia had never used it—and Venetia certainly didn’t need me now. I shied away from that bitter arena as from a cloud of poison gas.
We went into the house, leaving Bobby and Ethel to tend Jerry, who was wide awake, as he was most of the time.
“He needs one hour of sleep in twenty-four,” Kate told me, and I never saw Jerry sleeping—which he did, they told me, by sitting down and resting his head on his haunches for a few minutes at a time.
Sydney was sprawled flat out; she had licked the bowl clean and looked as pink, fat, and debauched as Nero. A little whistling snore came from her as we stepped over on our way to the staircase.
I had been sleeping in a small room with a deep mansard; it looked out onto the wide, wide fields of Kansas with not an object in sight, not even a tree; Kate’s room, in front, overlooked the street. Moonlight gave me all the light I needed and, too hot to wear anything, I stripped and climbed into bed.
A moment later, I heard a knock on my open door, and Kate said, “It’s your turn tonight. Last time I went to your room.”
“Kate, I’m wearing nothing.”
“Do you want to borrow a nightdress?” And she laughed. “Come on, Ben, you can’t be shy of me, can you?”
I took no care to hide myself or be modest, nor did she react in anything but an ordinary way. We didn’t sleep until dawn. For hours we talked, revisiting every phase of our lives in each other’s company.
After a period of prolonged kissing, I said, “You chided me once for not being bolder with you.”
Kate raised herself on an elbow. “I wouldn’t chide you now. But I want to wait.”
I said nothing, merely waited.
“Aren’t you going to ask me, ‘Wait for what’?”
I said, “Wait for what?”
“Guess.”
“Guess what?”
“Ben, what is it women want to wait for?”
What could I reply, other than, “So we’re to be married, is that it?” She said not another word, but rolled closer to me and soon fell asleep on my chest.
And I? I judge my mood by the words that cross the screen of my mind, and now I saw rhapsody, and companionship, and natural, and, yes, love. In truth, the word matchmaking crossed my mind too. I had joined the ranks of Neddy the Drover and Miss Mangan from the bakery, and the men who came up from the sea.
143
December 1947
We had arrangements to make, and we made them with quiet and firm pleasure. Our first agreement came mutually—to tell nobody until we had married, which would happen quietly in a few months, once all the paperwork had been arranged. As she was now resident in the United States, she could acquire, in my name, the Venetia divorce papers from Reno, Nevada. I said not a word about the documentation that she would need—too painful for her. I was to go back to Ireland for a month or so, to close Lamb’s Head and make it weatherproof. Her grandmother had gone to live in Cork and Kate now owned the cottage; we agreed that we would always keep it as a home in Ireland should we ever wish to return.
I had many questions that I wanted to ask. Had she been officially informed of Charles’s death? His family—had she been in touch with them? And—of great personal interest to me—did we know how he had died? I should very much have liked to establish that Volunder had killed him; and Peiper’s case
still dragged on as Willis Everett fought and fought—such an unpopular cause—to get the death sentence commuted.
My questions remained in my locker, so to speak; I never asked them, because, as ever, Kate set the ground rules.
“I sense,” she said, “that the Venetia business has left you in pain. So why don’t I promise that I’ll never talk about her, and you’ll never ask about Charles?”
Even if I hadn’t consented—and I didn’t entirely wish to—I knew that nothing would be gained by disagreeing. Kate had decided on her method of dealing with the past; on a topic so delicate and fraught, I could never change her mind—nor could anyone else.
A week later, I kissed Sydney good-bye, and kissed Jerry good-bye, and kissed Kate good-bye, and took the train to Chicago, another to New York, and the steamer home to Cork.
Let me reflect for a moment on what I recall of those months. Last week I had the fiftieth anniversary of meeting Kate, and I know that I’ve done the right thing by recording her life as I knew it—or at least that period of her life that I’ve shown you. I also believe that by leaving behind for you these memoirs, reminiscences, chronicles—call them what you wish—you’ll come to understand your father better, but by the unorthodox route he has chosen.
After all, I haven’t hidden any of my emotions in anything I’ve written, and by now I’ve made it clear, even in my digressions, how I conducted my life—and my heart. It’s possible that at this moment you may feel some pain on behalf of your mother, and the way things were as we left them on that beach, and I would certainly understand that. And it’s possible too that you’ll feel critical of me, find me at least careless, at most reprehensible. But I hope you’ll believe that I tried to act in a responsible way—most of the time.
144
January 1948
You’ll recall, I’m sure, my obsession with wolves. Therefore you’ll know that I had unfinished business, in which James Clare expected to play a part—namely, the collection of a famous but as yet untold story in County Donegal. As I crossed the Atlantic once more, I made another good decision; not only would I accompany James to the storyteller’s house, I would ask him to help me wrap this past segment of my life, Venetia included, into a package I could carry without pain.
I sent him a cable from New York, told him that I’d be at my parents’ house, and gave the dates. If he would let me know when to meet him in Donegal, we could try to collect the wolf story. As ever, the arrangements with James worked smooth as butter, and I met him in the town of Glenties in the middle of August.
He looked as healthy as a dog, though still with the long black coat that he wore winter and summer. The story, he said, existed in a place out on the shoreline; a man by name of Peter Magee had it, who, according to James, “definitely wanted money.”
I asked, “How will you handle that?” We operated under strict “never pay” directives.
“He’ll tell us the story, we won’t note it down, but if it’s good enough I’ll find a way of compensating him.”
“Will he trust us not to go away and write it?”
James said, “He has to. Otherwise how can we trust him that the story is genuinely old?”
The storyteller lived alone. He described himself as “a retired jobbing fisherman”—that is, he used to work on trawlers for anyone who would give him a day’s work. He also said that he was “a quiet man” and “a listener, not a talker.” Never married, he lived in a new house provided by the Donegal County Council, because his old house had begun to fall down around his ears.
At James’s prompting, he said that he had many stories, but he never told them.
“Who’d want to listen to me?” he said over and over.
“I’ve met few men whom I’d rather listen to,” said James, who had brought him gifts of food.
How this man had ever worked a trawler I shall never know. He had a girl’s hands, and a dainty way about him in general. Apologetic for himself and his house, he had a hesitant air.
“Now, Peter,” said James. “Do you mind if Ben here takes notes as you speak?”
“I don’t mind at all,” said Peter Magee.
“And do you mind if we publish what you say in our annual journal?”
“Not a bother on me,” said Peter Magee.
“So,” said James. “Off you go, then, we’ll be listening like children.”
“And what’ll you be listening to?” said Peter Magee.
“To your famous story about the wolf,” said James.
“Well,” said Peter Magee, “you can listen from now ’til the middle of next week, but you’ll not hear that story.”
James said, “But I thought, Peter, that’s why we’re here.”
“I know you thought that,” said Peter Magee. “But a man may think what he likes.”
James and I looked at each other and all we could do was smile. He offered to put the storyteller’s name in the folklore archives, but Peter Magee, a gentle man, and so timid, refused, saying that he had no liking for being named in public.
“Besides which,” he said, “I had a gentleman come here from Los Angeles, and he’s paying me good money for my stories. And I have a lot of them.”
“Where and how did you hear them?” we asked.
“Nobody had any interest in anything I ever had to say,” he said. “So I listened. And I was always with old people. My great-grandfather lived to be a hundred and two, and I remember him saying that he got that wolf tale from his grandfather.”
As we said good-bye, promising to come back, he asked, “Now the two of you—are you father and son?”
James laughed and replied, “I’d like to think so.”
By now I had a roof rack on the car—one of the first in the country. With James’s bicycle still on top of it, we drove back into Glenties and found a place to eat and a place to stay the night. James drank whiskey and I lemonade, and we laughed many times over Peter Magee and his Hollywood friend, and how we’d been taken for a ride.
When the laughing was done, James asked the usual question: “Now, tell me about your own self.”
I had so much to tell him, and he sensed it.
Together we began to rehash all that had happened to me in my life. And yet, having described the Venetia meeting—and parting—and having told him how ship after ship after ship had arrived to the docks in New York with Kate looking so hopeful and then so forlorn, and having described what it was like to drive halfway across America with a pig and a giraffe, I chose not to tell him about my American plans and my forthcoming marriage. However shoddy and disloyal I felt about that, something held me back.
Knowledge of him had told me that James was about to make one of his epic comments—so I waited. “Did you do what I taught you?” James asked.
“Did I keep a record? As much as I could. It’s fragmentary. I salvaged her notes and mine such as they were.”
“How did you do that?”
I laughed. “In the lining of my coat.”
“That’s appropriate,” said James. “That’s how Marco Polo brought jewels back from the East.” He paused. “But I was asking you something else.”
I waited. He said nothing. I knew this game.
“Go on,” I said.
“Did you measure what’s happened to you on a legendary scale?” he asked.
I said, “I haven’t tried yet.”
James said, “Well, it’s all there waiting for you.”
Again I said, “Go on,” knowing that he needed only the prompting.
He sat back, a sense of relish about him. “You’re the scribe, aren’t you? You’re the Homer watching all this and reporting it.”
“Not Homer, James. Not at all.”
“Yes. And not only the scribe but the warrior, too. You know what I mean. First of all, you go out of your way to observe an age-old tradition—matchmaking. One of the most ancient customs in the world, a true life force. Then the warrior arrives from over the sea. Paris seeking hi
s Helen of Troy. He asks her to undertake a task to prove her worth. You go along—scribe, but also faithful companion. And by now you’ve surely crossed seven seas, haven’t you?”
“That’s certainly true.”
“And you’ve been a warrior in the forest, haven’t you? And the leader who led the princess to safety.”
I hadn’t told James that I’d killed a man, and I never told him.
He continued, “And by fair means or foul you discovered where your own heart’s desire was, and you went to see her.”
“Hold on,” I said. “Fair means or foul?”
He patted my arm. “People talk, Ben. Ireland’s a village. But ’tis all right. Ray Cody’s a dirty little scut, and everybody knows it.”
I must have looked stricken—I certainly felt that—because James piled on the reassurance.
“He won’t open his mouth again. Does he want to be charged with kidnapping?”
I shook my head. “Probably not.”
James said, “Now comes your only mistake. And it’s a big one. If you see your life as a legend, you have to listen to the words of the principal characters.”
“What do you mean?”
“If you can bear to,” he said, “listen again carefully to the words Venetia spoke. I don’t think you have.”
“James, you’re right in this respect—I can’t bear to. And that’s over. She married another. Is that legendary too?”
“Oh, Ben, you sound bitter,” said James.
“Maybe I am.”
Next morning, as I unloaded his bicycle from my roof rack, James told me that he was taking a year’s sabbatical; it would begin in two months, and he asked me to take over his duties. That was the moment to tell him—that I wouldn’t even be in the country, that I would have joined the ranks of exile and gone abroad to seek my fortune. But I didn’t—too cowardly. Instead, I thanked him for the compliment, and he thanked me for having always been so trustworthy.