the cause of his great truancy. Remember, children, that in 1932, when he ran away from home to pursue your mother, travel with her road show, I followed. And that deep infatuation notwithstanding, he still showed endless love for his own wife, my mother.
Venetia also told me that when he was with her he talked principally about me, his only child. I was then eighteen. So, in his mad mistake, my father had discovered that he was a family man, not some gallant from a Byronic age. In fact, you may recall that Venetia found herself first attracted to me
in absentia
because of the bonfire of talk Harry had built in my honor.
Alongside this need for lightnings, the other main feature of my father’s life drove me craziest of all. Whenever I visited them, I never knew what life-changing scheme to expect. For example, he had put the farm up for sale at least five times, and then withdrawn it at the first offer. Or I’d discover that he’d been buying racehorses, one of life’s more efficient devices for losing money.
Another time he was asking for a government grant to raise a statue to a blind poet who had stayed in our house two centuries earlier. The government, naturally, told him to pay for it himself. That brought on two years of Harry’s vituperation, red-hot letters and white-hot telegrams proclaiming “You disgrace us, sir”—and he once delivered his practiced tirade in full stammering volume to a politician passing by.
He sounds dreadful at my hands—but he wasn’t. Maddening, yes, and unsteady, and impulsive, yet superbly intelligent, and endearing, and funny, and sometimes so aware of his own shortcomings that he could, as he said himself, “Make-make-make God laugh” with tales of his mistakes.
Louise Hopkins MacCarthy, his wife, your grandmother, my dear and beloved mother—as a younger woman she was long and lean, and as neat and tight as a braid, and she took Harry in her stride. It needed many years and many tears to get her past the hurt he’d caused her by running away. And she never again allowed him to be alone with another woman.
His foibles, though, his schemes and opinions, his imagination and his brilliance as a self-sustaining farmer—that was her Harry MacCarthy, and, as far as she was concerned, when that Harry was on parade, there could be no better place than at his side.
By now, long after they’ve gone from the planet, it’s clear to me how their relationship worked. Each thought the other the best person they’d ever met. Their intimacy, a serene and bottomless lake, sent out signals. Touches and glances at breakfast, or at dinner after their Sunday afternoon nap—those two people had a skin-to-skin closeness. Who loved whom the most? I used to think that my mother was the lover and my father the loved; now I’m not so sure.
Children, you knew your grandmother, you got to spend more time with her than with your grandfather. You may not have seen—you may not have been allowed to see—the iron in her. Yes, she felt shattered when her husband ran off. She had no warning—and no precedent, national, local, cultural, or personal. In hard terms, what in God’s name was a middle-aged, settled, respected farmer doing pursuing an itinerant actress from a road show?
Her steel, however, still chills me. And her ferocious instruction: “Go out and bring him back. For me.”
That same morning she fell into a despondence that changed her very appearance, but even as I looked at her face, gray, taut, and strained during those bad days, I also sensed that a river of fire flowed deep inside her. That’s what kept her ferocity intact.
For a time in that fracas they lost everything—their farm, their marriage, their place in the world. And yet she was the one who led their march back to normal life. She never discussed it with me, not in depth; nor did she denigrate him to me.
Nor did I see her make any savage assaults upon his heart; she never, so far as I could see, plucked the
Venetia also told me that when he was with her he talked principally about me, his only child. I was then eighteen. So, in his mad mistake, my father had discovered that he was a family man, not some gallant from a Byronic age. In fact, you may recall that Venetia found herself first attracted to me
in absentia
because of the bonfire of talk Harry had built in my honor.
Alongside this need for lightnings, the other main feature of my father’s life drove me craziest of all. Whenever I visited them, I never knew what life-changing scheme to expect. For example, he had put the farm up for sale at least five times, and then withdrawn it at the first offer. Or I’d discover that he’d been buying racehorses, one of life’s more efficient devices for losing money.
Another time he was asking for a government grant to raise a statue to a blind poet who had stayed in our house two centuries earlier. The government, naturally, told him to pay for it himself. That brought on two years of Harry’s vituperation, red-hot letters and white-hot telegrams proclaiming “You disgrace us, sir”—and he once delivered his practiced tirade in full stammering volume to a politician passing by.
He sounds dreadful at my hands—but he wasn’t. Maddening, yes, and unsteady, and impulsive, yet superbly intelligent, and endearing, and funny, and sometimes so aware of his own shortcomings that he could, as he said himself, “Make-make-make God laugh” with tales of his mistakes.
Louise Hopkins MacCarthy, his wife, your grandmother, my dear and beloved mother—as a younger woman she was long and lean, and as neat and tight as a braid, and she took Harry in her stride. It needed many years and many tears to get her past the hurt he’d caused her by running away. And she never again allowed him to be alone with another woman.
His foibles, though, his schemes and opinions, his imagination and his brilliance as a self-sustaining farmer—that was her Harry MacCarthy, and, as far as she was concerned, when that Harry was on parade, there could be no better place than at his side.
By now, long after they’ve gone from the planet, it’s clear to me how their relationship worked. Each thought the other the best person they’d ever met. Their intimacy, a serene and bottomless lake, sent out signals. Touches and glances at breakfast, or at dinner after their Sunday afternoon nap—those two people had a skin-to-skin closeness. Who loved whom the most? I used to think that my mother was the lover and my father the loved; now I’m not so sure.
Children, you knew your grandmother, you got to spend more time with her than with your grandfather. You may not have seen—you may not have been allowed to see—the iron in her. Yes, she felt shattered when her husband ran off. She had no warning—and no precedent, national, local, cultural, or personal. In hard terms, what in God’s name was a middle-aged, settled, respected farmer doing pursuing an itinerant actress from a road show?
Her steel, however, still chills me. And her ferocious instruction: “Go out and bring him back. For me.”
That same morning she fell into a despondence that changed her very appearance, but even as I looked at her face, gray, taut, and strained during those bad days, I also sensed that a river of fire flowed deep inside her. That’s what kept her ferocity intact.
For a time in that fracas they lost everything—their farm, their marriage, their place in the world. And yet she was the one who led their march back to normal life. She never discussed it with me, not in depth; nor did she denigrate him to me.
Nor did I see her make any savage assaults upon his heart; she never, so far as I could see, plucked the
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