Venetia Kelly's Traveling Show Read Online Free PDF Page B

from Dublin on weekends to the cottage we rented out to them, on the river at the bottom of the farm.
    As to his private life, my father exuded kindness and good humor in our house. He had chivalry, even an old-fashioned, mannerly gallantry. In this he wasn’t, I think, a typical Irish farmer—he had a sensibility that went beyond the ordinary male responses of his peers. I watched his care of Mother; I saw him waiting until she started to eat before he lifted his own knife and fork; I saw him racing to fetch things from upstairs thatshe had forgotten; I saw him clipping articles from newspapers, and leaving them on the desk in her little workroom in the alcove of the window; I saw him handing her more money than she asked for whenever she needed cash; I saw the tiny, myriad ways he expressed his respect and affection for her. For instance, if near at hand, he never let her lift or carry.
    Often I saw him come in from the yard in the afternoon just to make her a cup of tea. And I heard them laugh and laugh behind the door of their bedroom at night—after he had made sure in the winter that a fire blazed in the grate there, and in the summer that all the windows were open, with the curtains blowing out like huge white kisses.
    Did she behave as caringly to him? I want to say that she did, but the evidence wasn’t abundant. Yet I have to bear in mind that she didn’t have his demonstrative nature. To put it more simply, she seemed more head than heart, and he more heart than head.
    Does this explain his actions that notorious night? And the long, anguished weeks afterward? I don’t think so. It may mitigate some of his guilt in the matter, but it would be unfair to put that weight of blame on my mother’s ordinary diffidence. She was, I think, generally blameless.
    Blame it, to begin with, on the third life, as fast-flowing, mysterious, and powerful as a subterranean river, a force of which he wasn’t completely in control.
    He loved imagination. He loved possibility. He loved that the unexplained and the inexplicable could exist in the world and defy any reasoned argument. In this arena, he most loved human emotion and the means by which it got expressed.
    I think now that he was a little ashamed of this part of himself and tried to hide it. But I always knew; I had seen what books he read; I knew that he loved the theater and acting, that his favorite play was that feast of rollicking possibility
A Midsummer Night’s Dream
—and you could scarcely get a greater work of the imagination than that, with its magic world, its sprites called Cobweb and Mustardseed, its weaver turned into a donkey, and so forth. I’d take a strong bet that not another farmer’s bedroom in the county had that—or much of anything else—as bedside reading.
    Mother, from what I could see, didn’t raise much of a glass to this, shall we say,
romantic
side of my father. She did, however, blush at a complimentfrom him, or grow tears in her eyes at a Christmas gift. There was a time when I thought this had caused the gulf between them—that he was too romantic and effusive, and she too practical and shy.
    But no. That wasn’t it. Wrapped inside this third life of my father’s lay a fourth, the part of him that he couldn’t see. In there, the trouble lay like a bomb that we never heard ticking.

P erhaps this is the moment to meet the Fays—Professor Cyril Fay and his sister, Miss Dora. Professor Fay was a historian who had a hunger for influence, and his sister a mathematician who loved words and language and stories. Acquainted with one of Mother’s sisters, they began to rent the cottage on our farm for weekends, and then for stretches of the year during the long university vacations.
    Both played their parts in this story. But how differently they affected me—even though they were twins and did many things together, and often very similarly. In many ways, they defined the term “unidentical twins;” he small and with no neck, she