The Matchmaker of Kenmare (54 page)

He sat like a child. He sat still as a dog. As softly as my large hands would allow, I cleaned his face and his neck and his head, and his caked-with-dirt hands and wrists, and he sat there, tears in his eyes, not quite comprehending—and yet knowing something, because he said, “Thank you.”

I left him for a moment, saying, “Charles, sit here. I’ll be right back.” He nodded, like one of those missionary collection boxes where the saint’s head bobs when you drop in a coin.

Down the lane, I retrieved the car, backed it up to the front door, and installed him in the passenger’s seat. I locked the cottage and put the key under the geranium pot and we drove away from Lamb’s Head. The danger—my danger to him, my greater danger to myself—had passed. Did he ever return to Lamb’s Head? I do not know.

What to do now? Like hay on a pitchfork, my mind kept tossing up the word
understanding
. I stayed with it—and its different interpretations opened out until one dominated.

In Kenmare, I drove to the house of Hans-Dieter Seefeld and parked in his driveway, careful as a clerk in case I mowed down one of the many cats.

He came to the door, blinking like an owl.

“Ben!” He hugged me. “Come in, come in.”

“No. I can’t. But I need you.”

“For why?” It remains the only linguistic error that I ever heard Hans-Dieter Seefeld make in English.

“There is somebody in the car with me who needs help. You may not like this.”

He looked at me in the same slow way as one of his cats.

“I heard he was in the vicinity.”

“The war is over,” I said, registering too that Neddy’s hadn’t been the only sighting.

Here’s a fact: Some people make the effort, some don’t. Some can and will. Some can and won’t. Mr. Seefeld couldn’t—but did.

“He frightens me.”

“Not now he can’t.”

“I heard he’s like a ghost. But I’m still frightened.”

I said, “He probably saved your life.”

Slow as contemplation itself, Mr. Seefeld nodded his big head with its big brain. “How can I help?”

“That German doctor,” I said. “His English skills are as poor as my German.”

Charles Miller didn’t—or didn’t want to—recognize Mr. Seefeld, who tried to hide his distaste and huddled in the back, trying to shrink his large bulk into a corner. We drove to Castlemaine in silence. Charles—Chuck, as I now supposed he’d forever be—fell asleep, and I, who’d always set such store by the weather, looked out at the rain and felt the length and depth of my own gloom.

Dr. Kortig and his wife had aged more than I’d have expected. And they seemed to have withdrawn somewhat into themselves. They remembered me, and of course saw Mr. Seefeld often—with whom they now held a deep and whispered conversation on their own doorstep.

Mr. Seefeld walked back to where I stood by the open door of the car, with my passenger still inside, and said, “Yes, you guessed right. He was a doctor in the first war. And he has seen this condition.”

“What am I to do?”

“He doesn’t want you to think that he’s unwilling to help, but there is little he can do. He can observe, he says, and make recommendations. But if you will bring the American into the house, and agree to stay here with him for a few days, he will make every effort to find the right treatment.”

It rained for those four days. I never left the house. Mrs. Kortig and I played endless card games and board games with Charles Miller, and when he left off, or failed to start, or fell asleep, we accepted the doctor’s admonishments to “keep him in the game, keep his mind working.” Mr. Seefeld arranged to go back to Kenmare, and I thanked him, and agreed with him that the world was a very strange place.

And so it began, the rest of my life. Again, I will report, I will not interpret. Having accepted Dr. Kortig’s recommendations, and his letter of introduction, I drove Charles Miller to a nursing home in Killarney. The home was run by Mrs. Cooper’s cousin, and I got the best of attention—and took a bed there myself for a few days, though only as a next-of-kin resident.

The doctors who came reported that as far as they could tell, Captain Miller had survived many infections, and though poorly in terms of immediate vitality, showed no signs of anything but dementia and mental fatigue.

To pursue Dr. Kortig’s next recommendations, I went to the bank and found that I had just about enough money left to get us to the States in some comfort—and get me home again, if that’s what was needed.

I hadn’t dared to address the thought, but I was by no means certain how Kate would react when she saw that her man was not the man she’d married—or when she viewed him in comparison to me, in all my big, rude health and vigor.

We sailed from Cork, on a little tender out to the liner. I liked the irony that the SS
America
had just come from Bremerhaven. The suite that I’d booked had two bedrooms, and I’d paid for a nurse from the shipping line to give Charles extra attention. Buying clothes for and with him in Cork had been trying, but he looked better, to say the least. I kept aside the best outfit for his arrival in Lebanon.

During the voyage, I walked him up and down on deck at night. The word got around that an “unwell American war hero was traveling,” and people stopped us to pat him on the arm and shake his hand. And I fought off fantasies of having him fall overboard.

He began to eat well—“a good sign,” Dr. Kortig would have said. No wider or deeper lucidity did I see, until we sailed up the Hudson and he
applauded for a second or two, no more. By the time we caught a train to Chicago next day, he was again sleeping heavily.

From Chicago, I sent a telegram:
BOBBY: MEET THE TRAIN IN LEBANON, 10:30 TUESDAY. DON’T TELL KATE
. Bobby loved romantic conspiracies and I knew he’d agree.

On the train, Charles asked, “Are we going to Kenmare?”

I said, and it was true, “We are, Charles.”

He managed the sleeper bunk on the train better than I’d thought he might; he managed the bathroom too, for almost the first time. Progress, Dr. Kortig, progress.

Bobby brought Sydney on her leash. Bobby sat down on a bench with a dangerous
plop!
Bobby wiped his brow when he saw Charles.

“Oh, Jesus and Christ, dear boy. This is him, isn’t it, this is him. And I was just building a special bed,” and he dropped to a whisper, “for you and Kate, oh, Jesus and Christ.”

I picked up Sydney, and she kissed me. Many times. Charles put out his hand, and she kissed him, and then struggled from my arms toward him.

“Off with the old love, on with the new,” said Bobby Bilbum. “I dread to think what Jerry will do.”

We drove to the house. I reached back, tapped Charles’s knee, and pointed to the sign,
KENMARE
. My inner gentleman swore like a seafaring drunk.
The hearts and flowers won
, he said.
Cheap music is dangerous indeed. I told you but you wouldn’t listen
.

Had I anticipated the moment? Of course I had. But my mind always turned from it—in dread, in bitterness, and, it has to be said, in some pleasure for my dear friend, Kate.

Did it happen like Hollywood? No, children, that never happens, not in my experience, anyway. I’ve seen partings, I’ve seen reunions, I’ve even had them myself, and they’re never like the movies.

Bobby Bilbum, though, wanted a part in it. He leapt ahead of me and opened the back door into the kitchen.

“Dear Kate,” he called. “Look who’s here.”

She turned from her work—baking, I think. And then she turned back again, shaking her head. I walked around Bobby and Charles and crossed the floor to her.

“It’s all right,” I said. “But he’s not well, he needs looking after.”

She couldn’t move. Her arms didn’t work, her legs didn’t work. She did that hand-washing thing again, up and down her arms. She began to mutter.

“What?” I said.

She said it louder. “One must Drink as one Brews.”

“Come and sit down,” I said, and I led her to the table.

To you, my children, I repeat: I’m merely reporting.

Kate looked nowhere. I gestured to Bobby, who pulled out a chair for Charles and sat him down, and when he had done so, I led Bobby from the kitchen, in part because I could hear Sydney squealing where we’d left her in the truck. But I’m only human, and when I walked past the kitchen door on my way to see Jerry, I looked in, and Kate was standing with her arms around Charles’s head, and her cheek in his hair.

For the next half hour or so, I chatted to Jerry, received multiple and very wet kisses from Sydney, and then I said good-bye to them all, and Bobby took me to the train station, where I handed him Dr. Kortig’s letter to me, summarizing Charles’s condition and his recommendations that military doctors be consulted. I slept all the way to Chicago, and all the way to New York.

My house on this hillside gets two-thirds of the sun’s daily circuit. I had it built this way, and on the terrace just outside my door I grow geraniums in clay pots that I used to make; my hands aren’t up to throwing pots anymore. When I think back on what happened to me in my twenties and thirties, I appreciate all the more this place and its peace, and my long life. Others of my age didn’t fare as well.

Joachim or Jochen Peiper, Prisoner Forty-two, spent many years in jail, under sentence of death. His military defender, that ascetic-faced man I saw at Dachau, Willis Everett, fought and fought—not out of compassion for Peiper, but out of a belief that Peiper’s legal rights had been breached by the way he and the other captured German officers had been abused in custody.

Everett kept this case between his teeth for a decade. He risked everything, he forced a U.S. congressional hearing, and he got the death sentence commuted.

Peiper became an executive with a major European sports car manufacturer, but those who pursued war criminals soon uncovered him, and he was forced out of that job. He went to live in a small French town not far from the German border, where he was known only to a few of his former comrades, who also lived nearby. Just before 14 July 1976, he sent his wife back to Germany in a packed car, and on Bastille Day itself, the attack that he had long expected came.

From inside the house, lying on the floor, with his weapons beside him, he defended himself against the wild gunfire—but the fireball they
launched got him. Had the French Communists, who had just recently “outed” him—had they known that he was nicknamed “Blowtorch”? The flames shrank his body to a third of its natural size—the firemen thought that a child had died.

Charles Miller was close to me in age too—and for years my greatest act of willpower lay in not inquiring what became of him.

Kate wrote many letters to me at my parents’ house, and Delia Holst wrote too. I never read them. In time, they stopped writing, and my interest in what became of them faded to an occasional idle: “I wonder …” What would my life have been like had I married Kate? Excellent, I think. We understood each other so well. Or, if I’m as truthful as ice, I understood her, and she liked me. I knew that I didn’t ignite her. The barb still lay embedded in me, though, as I drove around Ireland. But that wound healed too, and I can tell you now that it’s only the self-inflicted injuries that are unlikely to mend.

Which, of course, as I hear you thinking, brings me to Venetia.

My willingness to be advised by James Clare was always both a strength and a weakness. I believed so much in what he said that I tended to follow it blindly. Miss Fay even pointed that out to me once.

“My lovely James is not infallible,” she said. And then she wrecked her own argument by saying, “But he’s always right.”

James had said to me, remember, that I should have listened to Venetia’s words. In time, I summoned up the courage to play them back—and then I put them on a loop of tape in my head. Her words tormented me. Do you recall them? I’ll play the “tape” for you—after all, you are her children. Ours.

The road can be the best life—and sometimes the worst, especially if you have an inner voice as scalding as mine can be. My inner adviser made me play those words over and over—he gave me no quarter, no letup. In some ways he proved fiercer on me with those words than with
“torturer” or “killer”:
Ben, I sent you a telegram … I sent you five telegrams … Ben … I always hoped …

You see, he truly loved Venetia, that inner man of mine. How do I know? I’ll tell you how I know—because one day, in the early 1950s, long after all these events, as I was driving through the city of Wexford, my inner voice began to laugh, and when you hear your inner voice laughing like a maniac, be sure, my children, that mischief lies ahead.

Sure enough, I saw the cause—a sign that said,
COMING SOON: DRAMA! EXCITEMENT! YOU WON’T BELIEVE YOUR EYES! BOOK NOW FOR THE SENSATIONAL GENTLEMAN JACK AND HIS FRIEND
.

F
RANK
D
ELANEY
is the
New York Times
bestselling author of the novels
Venetia Kelly’s Traveling Show, Shannon, Ireland
, and
Tipperary
, and his nonfiction work,
Simple Courage: A True Story of Peril on the Sea
, was selected as one of the American Library Association Books of the Year. Formerly a judge for the Booker Fiction Prize, he worked for many years as a broadcaster with the BBC in England, where he also wrote many fiction and nonfiction bestsellers. Born in Ireland, he now lives in the United States.