Venetia Kelly's Traveling Show by Frank Delaney

everything else happened in 1932.

H ere’s another—in the circumstances, very significant—fact about my family. My father, in his mid-teens, made a journey to visit an uncle in the west of Ireland, and found himself being invited with said uncle to Coole Park, the home of Ireland’s most famous widow, Lady Augusta Gregory.
    Whenever my father spoke of education he expressed his disappointment at how he had been denied. “A lost opportunity,” he’d say, “is like uneaten fruit. It rots.” I never quite got what he meant; I do now. But in Coole Park, under the famous copper beech tree, he had sat on the grass, at a picnic, and heard Lady Gregory, this cultural powerhouse, in her widow’s weeds, discussing the setting-up of a national Irish theater. Her partner, not present, would be her “dear friend” the poet Mr. Yeats. Yeats had said to her, “As with the voice the spirit,” suggesting that “only an Irish actor can convey the Irish spirit, since words are the clothing of the soul.”
    My father came away from that meeting quivering with thrills. He told me of it over and over again. They’d talked all day about acting.Someone did an illustration, a character sketch from Shakespeare—the moment when King Richard III wakes from his dream and faces his conscience: “The lights burn blue. It was now dead midnight.”
    “You-you-you could see it,” said my father. “You could see the anguish in this actor’s face. He was the murdering king, he-he-he was shifty and regretful and everything.”
    On the way home from Coole Park, his heart had “caught fire,” he said, at the notion of “being” another person as an actor must be, of “writing” with his own face and voice and body and actions the story of a completely other person.
    My father told me that ever after that picnic, when he was out in the yard, or the fields, climbing the stairs to bed at night, aching in every bone after hours of labor, or bounding down the stairs next morning, the thought never left him—and he said that he studied people thereafter as though he were compiling an album. “All-all-all their shapes. And-and-and their actions and voices.”
    Indeed he became and remained a good mimic; for a man with a mild stammer, he was amazing with nuance and shade.
    “I missed my vocation,” he once said to me. “I should have been an actor.”
    Which was, after all, the life of Sarah Kelly. She took role after role by storm, and all the early playwrights of that period, including Mr. Yeats himself, insisted that she appear in their works.
    Sarah sailed into Dublin society as a lovely ship glides into home port. Thereafter—and for the rest of her days—she lived in some style. In the beginning, she was aided by an aunt, King Kelly’s sister, Gretta. Though her married name was Monahan, Gretta was never called anything but “Miss Kelly.” Mr. Monahan had quit the scene after two years of marriage, departing with some suddenness; he crashed headfirst from his horse into a stone wall during a foxhunt.
    His widow said, “He was on a big gray horse and three quarters of a bottle of port.”
    In this merry widow’s household now dwelt this glamorous single mother from New York, already a bright light on Broadway, a new star in the motion pictures, and about to become one of the great figures of theAbbey Theatre—and her daughter, Venetia, a winsome and lively child. Plus Mrs. Haas.
    For Aunt Kelly, Heaven had come to earth. She set up a social round for her beautiful niece. Every Sunday she held what she called her “Dublin lunch,” a salon, in effect, and she invited the great and famous—“the cream of the city,” she said, “rich and thick.”

N ow the cast is more or less assembled—the main characters in this, my story. My life was irretrievably and fundamentally altered and shaped by them: by my dear father, an ordinary Irish farmer who worked harder than any man he hired; by Mother, a farmer’s wife, with