The Matchmaker of Kenmare (5 page)

I followed through with, “How can you buy Killaaaaaarney.”

She stamped her foot. That stopped me a little.

“How old are you?” she demanded.

Older than the hills and twice as bleak
. But to her I said, “Twenty-nine. And lookin’ good.” Another song welled up inside me. “When Oirish eyes are smilin’.”

“Stop this!” She stood back, looking shocked. “Twenty-nine? You look forty. And if you go on like this when you’re forty, you’ll look sixty.”

I am sixty. And I’m eighty. And a hundred. And you, little-Miss-Rita-Hayworth-look-alike, you are a child
.

I stumbled a little, recovered, and decided to sit on the ground. At least now I couldn’t fall. She stood in front of me, wagged a finger, and began to lecture me. I tuned in and out and in again, but my head was wavy and my eyes were tired. She didn’t care. This haranguing from her lasted an hour and included a walk to the cathedral and back again. I refused to go in, and soon she came out saying, “I lit a candle for you. Not that it will do much good unless you try to help yourself.”

Any moment now she’ll say, “Send forth a candle into a naughty world.” And I’ll say, “Stick a lighted candle up your backside to give yourself that inner glow.”

My guards were indeed on duty that day. And I had stopped singing.

We went to eat. “There’s no point in going to buy clothes with you sweating and shaking and stinking like this,” she said.

Horses sweat, and men perspire, but ladies merely glow. And sweating and shaking and stinking—can we have less of the alliteration, please, Miss B.?

She asked the restaurant for a pot of very strong tea, and she watched over me as I drank one, two, three, four cups of tea so strong a mouse could trot on it. Then she ordered my food—stew with a double helping of mashed potatoes. She sought, she said, “to soak up the poison” in my stomach. Next she made me drink pint after pint of water: “Wash everything out.”

Ah, yes, Miss Begley-of-the-bouncy-bosom, but have you ever washed your face in the morning dew? I have, and it’s one of the world’s healing miracles
.

We ate a long, slow meal, and by then I had recovered most of my faculties, with no lingering symptom worse than a strong headache.

She asked me as dinner ended, “Do you think you’ll ever get over your loss?” And when I shook my head, she said, “But isn’t it better to be cheerful?”

I said, “Either my wife is dead or my wife is alive. And which is worse? If I knew she was dead, I could mourn her. If I knew that she was alive, and living somewhere, and not coming to find me, that would hurt. But it wouldn’t hurt as much as not knowing what to believe.”

“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.

“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.

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.

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 looks. 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:

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.