The Last Storyteller (52 page)

We have other spaces we’d like to fill, other gaps to plug, and in some cases we don’t know whether he knew what we discovered. In fact, we feel certain that he never inquired into one significant part of the puzzle. Mom told us the details, just once, and asked us never to tell him. Even then, she drew a veil over some of it, and although we both have our suspicions, we have no proof.

It concerns the period after she ran away from Ben by the seashore north of Dublin. He had parked overnight at Rush, a wide, sandy beach resort for summer Dubliners. In the morning, when he couldn’t find her, Ben assumed that Jack Stirling, our late stepfather, had followed them and spirited Venetia away somewhere.

Then Ben stalked Jack, tried to attack him, and was beaten away by Jack’s “associates,” as he liked to call them. Those two men, as we learned (though Ben never mentions it), had been in jail with Jack, crooks together. Ben then had Jack killed by two Irish republican mercenary hit men, and was himself brought low by remorse.

He never knew that Jack had not “kidnapped” Venetia. Sometime during that night in the car, she woke up. With Ben still asleep, she took most of the substantial amount of cash he carried in his work case and hitched a ride from Rush into Dublin on an early morning delivery truck. Ben never mentions the disappeared money either, presumably because he didn’t want to suspect her or cast her in a poor light.

From Dublin, Venetia, who had known the Irish countryside intimately since her road show touring days, caught a train to the town nearest Mr. O’Neill, the elderly storyteller whom Ben revered. Mr. O’Neill took her in, took care of her, and found her brief lodgings nearby. From there she got in touch with us. We came to fetch her, and all three of us returned to Florida together.

Venetia kept in touch with Mr. O’Neill and visited him frequently. She stayed there many times, and once or twice almost ran into Ben there—which she didn’t seek to do. We never asked her whether she had a love affair with Mr. O’Neill. Ben, so far as we know, had no awareness of that relationship. We do know from Mom that when Mr. O’Neill was invited to see Ben perform, he sent for her, and then insisted that she accompany him.

Mom always remained vague about her feelings for Ben during that second period of separation. We asked her more than once whether she ever supposed that they would be reunited one day, and she said that when she heard news of Jack’s death, she thought that a circle had been closed, and that all were intended to go their fated ways, and Jack’s way had been death. She said that Jack had died as he’d lived—in violence.

In her daily attitudes we often felt that Mom should have been more demonstrative to Ben, considering the attention he gave her. Eventually we said so, and her response startled us. She told us that we were completely right, that she had been unfair to Ben in many, many ways—but she said no more than that, and didn’t seem to change too much.

However, we found in her effects, after she died, a diary of sorts. Typical Mom, she kept it higgledy-piggledy; her lack of orderliness must have driven Ben crazy, but he never said. In one diary, for 1964, by which time they had been back together for some years, we found this entry; she was sixty-four, he fifty.

“Today I had a moment—another!—when it would have been fine to die, because I felt perfect emotion. He hurts my heart when I look at him. This is a Man.”

We would also like to say something about Jack and Mom. For the first twenty-four years of our lives, Jack was the male parent we knew. In this we suffered a duality—because we had another male parent, whom we had never met but of whom we heard all the time, and always in whispers. Mom spoke of Ben constantly, though never in Jack’s presence (she later told us that she was forbidden to do so), and in her words and feelings, Ben seemed everything that Jack could never be. That turned out to be true.

She never explained to us why Jack hadn’t shown the same brutality to us that he showed to her. We both asked many times, and never received a satisfactory reply. Once she hinted that she had made herself a lightning rod, that she taunted him to draw his fire away from us. On another occasion she suggested that Jack knew she would kill him, or have him killed, if he, as she put it, “laid a bad finger” on us. We asked if she would have been able to kill him, and she said that she probably could, but that she knew somebody who would, and we understood that she meant Ben.

When news reached us of Jack’s death, Mom didn’t grieve. She said
that all bereavements are composed of grief and relief in different proportions, and she felt ninety-five percent relief, if not more. She added that with Ben it would be “one hundred thousand percent grief.”

One of Ben’s accounts describes their meeting in Jacksonville. That day had lived in our minds as a puzzle. We came home from school in the afternoon and found Mom alone and weeping. Jack had a gig in one of the hotels down the coast that night, and had long gone. Mom flung herself around the house in a state and condition such as we had never before seen. She couldn’t speak and then retreated completely into herself and didn’t come out for weeks.

Neither of us had ever even glimpsed that side of her. The good and normal Venetia came across as Ben describes her—sunny and humorous, always pleased with an opportunity to perform. The Venetia he tells about on the night they stayed with Mr. O’Neill—that was the Mom we knew when nobody else was around.

We can, however, confirm everything he says about her moody behavior in the days—and it was only days—they spent together after he snatched her from the stage of the Olympia Theatre. She did have a tendency to retreat into herself; we knew her capable of that. We’d seen it more and more as we grew older, and went to school and college. This infuriated Jack, and we had gone to Ireland with them to protect Mom from his rage.

She hated being part of the show, felt it beneath her, and he knew it. He had always hit her, but never so often as in their last year. In his sadism, he never damaged her face, and he told her that the blows hurt more when people couldn’t see where they’d landed.

We don’t believe that Mom knew who killed Jack, or any of Ben’s part in it. Venetia never commented on the manner of Jack’s dying, and we never elaborated. We didn’t let her see the Florida newspapers, either; we just said that he got caught up in something bad, and she said, “Well, that’s Jack.”

Our life with Mom and Jack could have been a great deal worse. He traveled, and all through school she stayed home with us. If he returned sober, everything remained fine; if not, he baited and abused her, and she had no fight-back mechanism, no inner army. We stopped much of it when we reached our late teens, but we had no idea how badly he behaved when we weren’t there, and Mom didn’t say.

Once we asked her why she had remained with him, and she said that children in the United States needed a man to protect them.

She had, we believe, the best years of her life—of anybody’s life—in the years that she and Ben finally lived as a couple. With nobody harassing them, they made it work in a way that set an ideal. They put together their road show, with Mom on Shakespeare and Dad playing the storyteller, and they packed in the crowds.

Sensibly—his idea—they toured for only a number of months every year and spent the rest of the time at his house, Goldenhill, which he had restored, and which we now own and visit several times a year. When we asked him once how life was, just a light throwaway question, he said, “Idyllic. But I always knew it would be.”

They gave the impression that from that single moment when she removed the glasses and head scarf, in the lobby of the hall, everything was as it had first been—a true love match.

If all this sounds romantic, we apologize, but that is how it was, how they were. A psychologist told us one night at dinner that our father’s single-mindedness and his refusal to let go of that obsession stemmed from his upbringing as an only child. He’d had a rich fantasy life, as imaginative sole children do, and he had also, of his own admission, wished to take care of his parents from an early age.

To detach from them he had to find another love object. It could have been a career, or a horse; it happened to be Mom, and he didn’t know it until she ignited it. By wanting him, and saying so, she made it all right for him to be with her.

He seems always to have had the gifts by which we still identify him. Miss Killeen, who came to see him frequently after Venetia died, proved the most knowledgeable. Although we went to see Mom in Miss Killeen’s house, and met Ben there for the first time, we didn’t know of the night they had spent together until we read what Ben wrote. When asking about him, we didn’t divulge the secret he’d recorded, and indeed we had to delay this publication until after her death, a year ago. (Mom didn’t like Miss Killeen, and didn’t meet her often.)

She longed to talk about him, and we encouraged her. Of all the people she had ever known, she said, Ben had the greatest gift of loving. He gave the impression of being self-important, moody and aloof, and sometimes boring, but he was nothing of the sort.

In one of the multiple conversations about him—because that’s all she wanted to talk about—we asked her if she’d been in love with him. Without a minimal hesitation she said that she was, and had been since she’d first laid eyes on him, and was happy that she had met the one man who had made her think that human nature could be worthwhile. She hadn’t needed to do or say anything about it—that’s how content she felt with the knowledge of herself and her feelings.

Miss Killeen became one of the richest women in Ireland, and in her Will she left us, as Ben’s children, a sum of money that can only be called “enormous.” She also created a bursary to endow folklore studies, and every year the Ben MacCarthy Trust funds ten all-expenses-paid scholarships to students all over the world who wish to practice storytelling in the old fashion. “Ben MacCarthy” is the name by which the art is remembered.

In June 1978, Mom fell ill. She came home from a shore walk with Ben late one afternoon and felt out of breath when they reached the house; customarily the climb bothered neither of them. Ben, so alert to every moment in her life, called their doctor at once. That night, they moved her to a local hospital for observation, and the next day to one of the big Dublin hospitals, St. Vincent’s.

A lung had collapsed; she had caught some kind of respiratory infection. That afternoon her condition worsened, but by nightfall she had stabilized. They kept her in the hospital for three weeks, though when she came home she seemed greatly reduced. We flew over to see her, and her pallor alarmed us. She had all but lost her voice.

While we were there, he hovered day and night, praising her, encouraging her, lifting her spirits. But he couldn’t keep her alive, and when she began to decline fast he climbed into bed and held her until she died.

We had a rich time whenever we stayed with them. Both of us went—somewhat late—to law school at Yale, and we found our studies exhausting,
so we traveled to Ireland at every opportunity and drank in the atmosphere in that adorable, always exciting house.

More important, we watched our parents share in a philosophy they put into practice. They believed that Ireland, the country they knew so intimately, needed to have its story told to itself, so that it would have a bedrock on which to build a much-needed new spirit. A kind of reconstruction began while they were on the road. The late President Kennedy’s visit in 1963, alluded to briefly by Ben, who calls him “golden,” energized many young people and licensed the notion of charisma.

Ben and Venetia believed profoundly that, for the country to know where it should go, it needed to understand where it—and the world—had been. The content of their wonderful theatrical evenings, with Mom’s international cast of dramatic characters and Ben’s tales from all over the world, reflected that passion. Ben saw his life as his country’s life, and Venetia didn’t disagree.

We know from his writings that we met the full range of characters in Ben’s life. Miss Dora Fay’s patent dislike of Mom amused but never dismayed us. Miss Killeen came to stay with us in New York. We can both do passable imitations of Billy Moloney’s cursing. All of the people Ben mentions became familiar to us, either in fact or in conversation.

Except one. He never told us about John Jacob O’Neill. Mom did, but she said very little. We asked her once where Mr. O’Neill had lived, and she gave a vague answer. Mr. Bermingham didn’t know either, nor did his wife, nor did Randall Duff, the painter, whose works we collect.

One day we made discreet inquiries at the Irish Folklore Commission. A clerk assumed us to be Americans in search of legends and gave us an address. We walked down a lane that answered the given address and Ben’s description; we even smelled wood smoke; but no house could we find.

Louise MacCarthy

Ben MacCarthy

ALSO BY FRANK DELANEY

FICTION

The Matchmaker of Kenmare
Venetia Kelly’s Traveling Show
Shannon
Tipperary
Ireland

NONFICTION

Simple Courage

F
RANK
D
ELANEY
is the author of the
New York Times
bestselling novel
Ireland
, as well as
The Matchmaker of Kenmare
,
Venetia Kelly’s Traveling Show
,
Tipperary
,
Shannon
, and
Simple Courage: A True Story of Peril on the Sea
. A former judge for the Man Booker Prize, Delaney enjoyed a prominent career in BBC broadcasting before becoming a full-time writer. Born in Tipperary, Ireland, he now lives in New York City and Connecticut.