Here’s the lesson: We’re born—forgive me for stating the obvious—of birth parents, our blood, our kin. By the act of bringing us into the world they’re charged—or are supposed to be charged—with the task of steering us across our early lives so that we, like them, can go and do likewise, bring children into the world and perpetuate our species.
By and large our blood parents do that, or at least they did so in the society into which I was born. True, we were having at that time a massive aberration in our family, and it was having a great and difficult bearing on the bringing up of me; that is also self-evident from all you’ve learned so far.
In Fermoy that Monday, I learned that “other” parents exist. The world knows that they exist too, but it doesn’t often acknowledge them. It makes a halfhearted effort to do so by, in some societies, giving us godparents. But those sponsors at the baptismal font amount to no more than a nod in the direction of which I speak.
The alternative parents whom I have in mind come from the spirit world. “Extra,” or “additional” parents, whatever you like to call them, they’re often preferable to your birth parents. And, whatever their spiritual origins, they can be practical and very present if you allow them to be.
If we find and identify them, they guide us, they tell us things that no other parent would dream of telling us—because they know things about us that no blood parent can ever know. How do they do it, how do they know? That is part of the mystery—they know it instinctively.
I found my new parents that day. They parented me for years and years, for as long as they lived. Their presence inside me parents me to this day, no matter what my age as I tell you this. In fact I’ve decided not to disclose to you the age I am as I write this down. It’s irrelevant, because I’m using their energy, the force they gave me, to tell this tale. Therefore my calendrical age doesn’t matter.
You can probably guess who they are—well, one of them anyway; the other had been offering herself as such for some time. In my general agitation I’d forgotten to mention to James Clare the name of Miss Dora Fay, who had often said how much she wanted me to meet him.
They were lovers at the deepest level you’ll find on this earth, in that they cared for each other more than they cared for anything else—except for the work they gave to the world, and that was a kind of loving anyway.
I almost fell down when I saw them together. In those days, a kind of tearoom existed in Fermoy. It is long gone. The woman who owned it ran away one day in 1935 with a sailor who swaggered in, took a look at her, and said, “Will you come with me to the coast of Africa?” And she did, a woman with straight hair and curly teeth, and she closed the door and never came back.
I met her that day—she was named Molly Barrett and I look at her in my mind’s eye and wonder where such a plain and ordinary woman hid her dreams of romance, the dreams that took her to the coast of Africa. (See? Another Digression; I can’t seem to break the habit.)
So, I parted from my father and Venetia (as I looked after them I saw Blarney hoisted high, looking back at me and waving, and I know that my father never saw Blarney doing that). The morning—it wasn’t eleven o’clock yet—had me ravenously hungry, as all emotional perturbation still does.
I asked a man at a street corner, an old soldier in his army tunic, ragged pants, and broken shoes, where I could get a cup of tea, and he said nothing, just looked into a distance that would never be available to him. He was like all those old soldiers who stood on those street corners, shell-shocked from the World War, and would remain so all his life. A woman overhearing my question pointed me to Molly Barrett’s tea shop.
The door had a bell that jangled—and so did I. At a table by the wall sat James Clare and Miss Dora Fay—my new parents, according to the mystic and mysterious systems of the world. Though deep in conversation, they turned their heads as one person. As one person they held their hands out to me. And as one person they smiled.
That is why I believe in a life beneath our lives, a system below our consciousness, a world of half-thoughts and memories of times in which we’ve never lived. Never in my life up to that moment had I needed help so much, never had I needed somebody to slow me down and make sense of all that had been happening.
Indeed, my intention had been to sit in the tearoom and list out and look at all that had already happened. A formidable list, you’ll agree, and changing all the time; my father gone from home, and now beyond recovery; the woman who was the object of his affections attaching herself to me; her grandfather associating with sinister men, and having sinister intent; Mother holding herself up in the world after a collapse so steep that John Milton couldn’t have written it. If ever a paradise had been lost, Mother’s was.
And me, myself—torn in all directions at once—ringing, ringing, ringing with the moods and feelings induced by Sarah’s embrace and Venetia’s kisses, and not having the beginnings of a notion as to how to handle all this; and worried sick about Mother and faced with the prospect of endless weeks and months, maybe years on the road, and no solution of any kind in sight anywhere.
I had a lot to think about. When I sat down, I knew I was close to tears and unable to look at either adult. Miss Fay shook my hand—and held it for just a moment. So did James Clare.
He said, “I didn’t know until this morning that you’re the young man my friend Dora told me about so long ago. How are you?”
Naturally, I told them. Everything. They listened in silence; that’s one of the great gifts that alternative parents can give—they listen without comment and never make judgments. I expected them to home in on my worries regarding Mother and money and everything of that nature. Instead they became greatly excited about the relationship—so far—that promised to arise with Venetia.
They kept on exchanging what are called “significant glances.” If my parents did that as I was telling them something, it always bothered me, made me anxious. Here, though, I took it as a sign that they were on my side and were thinking between them as to how they might help.
I don’t know how I received that impression; I certainly didn’t imagine it, because that indeed is what they were doing—silently figuring out a way to help without actually intruding. And with the first words they spoke they showed me how much they were on my side.
“Ben,” said Miss Fay; she had that slightly lisping speech you find in all people with prominent front teeth. “You know, don’t you, that you’re caught up in very fantastic circumstances.”
(One of the things that I always liked about Miss Fay was the way she attached the word “very” to many of her terms, even to her superlatives. The milk I brought to the cottage was “very delicious.” A rainbow was “very wonderful.” Eggs were “very brilliantly nourishing.”)
James Clare added, “That’s a bit of what I was trying to say to you the other day.”
Miss Dora Fay said, “And you’ve probably been wondering whether you’re exaggerating the way you feel about it all.”
Again I nodded; there wasn’t a lot else I could say.
She patted my arm. “It’s very impossible to exaggerate it all. I’ve never heard of such a thing as you’re immersed in.”
James said, “And you’re wondering what you’re going to do? Well, the first thing you’re going to do is what you should always do—have a cup of tea and a bun.”
As I would discover, James’s solution to most difficulties was a cup of tea and a bun; it’s now my solution too.
They sat back in their chairs. Molly Barrett came over. She said to them, “And this is your son, I suppose?”
“In a way,” said Miss Dora Fay. “In a way.”
I was introduced to her; she came back with tea and a bun that had currants on it, and a cherry on top.
“Get yourself outside that,” said James.
As I ate my bun and drank my tea, Miss Dora Fay said to me, “Now, Ben. Let me guess which is the matter that most besets you.” She reflected for perhaps half a minute and s
aid, “The matter of your father’s young lady? Am I correct?”
I nodded; nodding was still a high priority with me, and anyway my mouth was full.
“Is she lovely?” said Miss Fay.
James blurted with crumbs, “Oh, Dora, wait ’til you see her. She’s like the moon—silver and mysterious.”
“And it seems,” said Miss Fay, like a scientist analyzing a problem, “that she’s choosing you.”
“Why shouldn’t she, why wouldn’t she?” said James.
“Then that’s what will be,” said Miss Dora Fay. “The world knows its own mind.”
“D’you remember what I said to you last week?” said James, his face alight. “Use your own power. Isn’t that what’s happening?”
Miss Fay, for all that she looked like an ostrich with glasses, possessed useful social gifts. She knew, for instance, when to bring a conversation to a close—as she did now.
“I’ve arranged to meet my wretched brother here in Fermoy,” she said. “What a lousy trial he is to me.”
James said, “Have you continued your story—I mean telling it to yourself?”
This time I didn’t nod. I shook my head; my range of nonverbal communication was evidently increasing.
He drained his teacup. “Now when will we three meet again?”
Miss Fay looked at me and said, “Remember?” and quoted, “‘In thunder, lightning, or in rain?’”
I smiled.
“It’s bad luck,” she said, “to quote from Macbeth. And good luck is what we need.”
Although no agreement had been reached, and no advice had been given, I parted from the two of them with a strong sense that they wanted me to go to Charleville, to the house, to Venetia.
I offered lifts in the car—to anywhere; they declined, and I looked back to see them standing side by side looking after me like real parents—or, rather, in the way that we hope real parents will look at us when we’re walking away from them; standing close together, smiling with warm pride, giving little waves, hoping that you’ll be safe, and longing for the day they’ll see you again.
Of course the trouble with additional parents—especially if they’re like Miss Dora Fay and James Clare—is no matter how good you believe your real parents are or have been, the new parents make you realize what you’ve missed.
The door to the house in Charleville stood open—mystifying, given how cold the house always seemed to be. I rang the bell and called but nobody answered. What must I do now? Stand and wait, ring the bell again.
A woman next door, wizened as a broom, said, “They’re not up yet, they don’t get up ’til ’tis late, they’re very like that.”
I was about to argue that I knew some of them were up, I’d already met them, when I heard the voices. So I followed them. I went into the house, along the passageway I’d first been drawn along by Sarah, and I heard the voices more loudly with each step—Venetia and her mother in an argument. Of my father’s voice, or any male voice, or even Mrs. Haas, I heard nothing.
At the foot of the stairs I stopped; that’s where the argument came from—the room directly above. No argument this, but an outright fight, with voices rising all the time. I still couldn’t hear what they were saying—and by now I didn’t want to, so I called, “Hallo? Hallo?”
The voices stopped. Sarah appeared and said, as though never in an argument in her life, “It’s Ben, dear Ben. Ben, come up, let’s see you.”
Venetia appeared, her head above her mother’s shoulder—and from the way she looked at me I knew that my new parents had judged everything right. This was the direction to follow.
I climbed the stairs. “Is, ah’m—”
“Is Harry here? No, Ben,” said Sarah, “but you are.”
When I reached the landing, both women took my hands, as I had seen them do with my father. This produced the eeriest possible feeling in me—and at that stage in my life I didn’t even know about Oedipus at Colonus, and the death of the king. They led me along the passageway, which was at least as long as the one downstairs, to a small and what Miss Fay would call a “very marvelous” sitting room.
Sarah went into the room first; Venetia squeezed my hand and I followed her. Given what I’ve so far told you, given the maelstrom of my life, why did I feel that I had come to some different but infinitely truer kind of home?
I sat with Sarah and Venetia. They were unquestionably the two most beautiful and exciting human beings that I had ever seen, and they made me feel that I was the center of their lives. But I reminded myself that it was my choice to feel so.
When I was about ten, I asked Mother if she’d ever heard anybody say anything about me. She said, yes, that her friends talked about me. Mollie May Holmes said that I was “as demure as a girl;” Kitty Cleary said that I was “a sweetheart.” When I protested these troubling observations, Mother turned them into compliments. I never saw it like that. What boy could, especially if he was saving the world?
In that very marvelous sitting room those descriptions came back to my mind. Is that how these people see me? Demure? A sweetheart? God, I hope not.
We talked—no, they talked, I listened. They told me about the house, about making films in Killarney—that’s when I first heard of Esmeralda—about the Abbey and Mr. Yeats and Mr. Synge. I don’t think the sun moved around the sky that afternoon; I believe it stood perfectly still high above me, as did time itself.
My idyll ended when my father came back. We heard him call from downstairs. The arch of Venetia’s eyebrows told me to go. On the staircase, he and I shook hands like friends, not father and son; I left the house edgy at my ousting.
Had I been less irked, I might not have exploded when I reached home. “Demure”? That vanished like the coward that it was. No sweetheart I—not at all. I, who had never raised my voice in anger, who wouldn’t say “Boo!” to a goose, screeched and screamed, rampaged and roared. I kicked the floor. Mother recoiled; her friendly dog had suddenly developed rabies.
“What, Mother?”
She waved a document. “It’s only a piece of paper.”
I now think there may also have been self-destruction and revenge in it. And a hastening of fate, as though sick of worrying as to how she could keep the farm going, she relinquished it.
“It’s a mortgage, Mother.”
When it came down to it, none of us had the power to digest what had happened. We had no preparation for such an event. We were emotionally quiet people. We had no training in relationship drama. How could we have? Our farm was like so many others. We had the usual scruffy backyard, never clean enough, with cows parading in and out twice a day, leaving their calling cards in great flat plashes a few feet from our back door.
We had a pigsty on the wrong side of the wind, so that winter and summer we had no choice but to be aware of what Mother called her “second family,” long, pinkish, snouted folk whose quick intelligence and easy responses delighted her. She was so fond of them that she scrubbed them with a yard brush. “The only woman in Ireland to wash pigs,” Large Lily said. “There’s people who don’t wash their children as often.”
And yes, we had a couple of good horses, and yes, an excellent motorcar, and a small truck, and yes, one of the first tractors in that part of the county—but that all came from management, not style.
But we had no “style” in the international-traveler, glossy-magazine sense of the word; we were what we seemed to be—an Irish farming family with no pretensions to glamour or sophistication.
Now, however, we were nothing, and I was the only one in the family who knew it—Mother certainly didn’t know.
“But mortgages are never cashed in.”
“Yes, they are.”
Now the screaming began. I’d had too much—too much for any grown man, let alone a boy fresh from school, waiting to go to college. I remember thinking, If only I could cry. And I remember thinking, Why do I know this is dangerous? Because it is. And I remember thinking, Where’s Billy Flockin’
Moloney when I need his language to describe this stupid woman, my mother?
She fetched the “piece of paper”—a Deed of Agreement nine pages long, every sentence a stick of dynamite, every page a minefield.
“Did you read this?”
“Mr. Horgan will read it”—Leonard Horgan, whose law firm had been our family solicitors for five generations.
“But you’ve signed it. It doesn’t matter who reads it.”
“I think it’s all right. Mr. Kelly is a very remarkable man.”
For what reason I don’t know—call it survival, call it instinct, call it James Clare and his talk of “power” and “story”—I ran to my room and came back with pen and paper.
“Now, Mother, tell me everything, and I’m going to write it down, what he said, what he offered, and what he said you were signing.”
For the next half hour, with me pushing her and pulling her, she told me the story of—call it by its right name—the confidence trick. Professor Fay was in on it, that little greased pig, and he in some ways did the most damage, because Mother had known him and had found him and his sister trustworthy in their dealings.
In essence, King Kelly had vaulted into Mother’s broken heart off Professor Fay’s shoulders. A low position to jump from, I know, but it didn’t need a big leap in those days to get into Mother’s heart.
My pen grew a blade. No sword was ever as mighty. The nib almost ripped the paper. Blobs of ink fell like buboes from the plague. I had fantasies as I wrote.
Had I known the word “scrotum” in those days, it would have joined “twist,” “shred,” and “wrench” in the language my mind was screaming. Had I been less “demure,” I would have written only four-letter words. Had I been less respectful as a son, I would have been screaming wild epithets with “stupidity” and “imbecility” in them.
The writing helped me to find the calm that lives in the heart of rage, and I got everything down, every sentence, every dripping cajole used by King Kelly. It filled six pages of my notebook.