The Matchmaker of Kenmare (3 page)

“Here,” she said, and held up a chalky hand for me to raise her to her feet. “Did you bring this glorious weather with you?”

Within sight of the ocean, we sat on a bench outside. I prepared my pen and record book, and she adjusted the pace of her words to my note-taking. That’s when I took down the note you’ve just read—about questioning men who sought wives. Later, I made an unofficial entry in my private journal:

Miss Begley grew up speaking the Irish language; it was the family and neighborhood tongue. The local school in Caherdaniel educated her to the age of eleven and balanced her Gaelic speaking with an excellent schooling in English. From there she boarded with the nuns in Killarney until the age of eighteen. With a better-than-good basic education—excellent French, a strong modicum of German, comprehensive Latin—she came home and stayed home. Her grandmother began to fail a little in health for a time, and Miss Begley took over their world.

They lived—and lived well—on the grandmother’s three incomes. Childless, now long widowed, formerly a nurse in Chicago, Mrs. Holst had a social welfare pension from the United States. On top of that, small investments and a pension from the long-dead Mr. Holst, a bank employee, had delivered beyond expectations. And she also made money from arranging marriages—to which skill she had apprenticed her granddaughter.

I asked, “Is it an art, a craft, a profession?”

“It’s a life,” said Miss Begley.

“It’s a business,” said the grandmother.

A serious business too: In a time of difficult economics, marriage often laid down the path to survival. Ireland, a nation barely twenty years old in the 1940s, had little social help to offer any of its people. Poverty was the national quicksand; widespread and easy to step on, it sucked people down rapidly. But a practical woman could help a man to build
up a farm or a business. She could cook and bake, make clothes for the family, plant a kitchen garden, tend animals and account books, help with harvests—many a husband boasted that his wife equaled two men.

“There’s another thing,” said Miss Begley. “A single girl with a job but who still lives at home has no money for herself.”

“Doesn’t she work for a wage?” I asked.

“Yes. But she has to throw it into the family pot. They keep nothing for themselves. Very bad for their morale.”

They found their clients by different routes. While Mrs. Holst stayed at home and waited for clients to come to her by word of mouth, Miss Begley went out and searched for anybody who wanted a spouse.

She said, “I have an easier task with the girls because most Irishwomen want a man of their own. They want children. And it isn’t just for practical reasons, it’s romantic too. Most of the men, on the other hand—they don’t really know they want a wife. Until we tell them.”

An expanded version of those first notes from Lamb’s Head can be found in my report,
Matchmaking in Rural Ireland 1949
, complete with social information. I didn’t use the Ediphone; I wish I had, because we’d now have a record of Miss Begley’s voice, but I was clumsy with the device—I broke too many of the cylinders or jammed the machine. So I noted down such interviews in my own kind of shorthand and at night wrote them out in full. Where possible I read my notes back to the interviewee and rarely found inaccuracies; on that count I praise myself.

For the report, I interviewed more than twenty matchmakers all over the country, and one in London, an upper-class woman named Claudia—of whom more later. A man in County Mayo, a portly fellow named Stephen O’Leary, called himself a “marriage broker.” One lady in the midlands near Roscommon parlayed her experience into a newspaper advice column for the lovelorn and called herself “Sue the Soother.”

All of them, no matter how they did it, aimed at the same goal—to
bring together a pair of strangers who might make a successful life partnership, discover deep affections, and breed many children.

They saw no irony in viewing themselves as, in the words of one, “Assistants to Destiny.” Mr. O’Leary said to me, “We erase loneliness.”

None had the life force of Kate Begley. Of them all, she alone understood that matchmakers come from the foundations of the universe. She believed that the talent for arranging marriages has no boundaries and, as she said, “Unto those who hold that gift it gives extra power, if they but knew how to find it in themselves.”

From her I learned some of the traditions: that matchmaking was a priestly duty in more than one faith.

“A Catholic priest or a Jewish rabbi—they’re all at it one way and another. There’s matchmaking in all societies,” she said, “rich or poor.” The rich, she claimed, often pursued it most ardently of all, in order to protect their estates.

In some countries, she told me, those seeking to marry would make offerings to a matchmaking god, and that same god was often the Man in the Moon. Or the reflection of the moon in the river or a lake or the sea. Or a fixed star in the south of the sky.

Magic, she claimed, also plays a large part.

“Well, it must be magic!” she said to me with that indignant shake of the head. “If two complete strangers have trusted the power of a stranger to bring them together—what else is that but magic?”

To reinforce the point, she told me that she also doubled as a fortuneteller.

“It’s a very useful thing to be able to see into the future of the people you’re introducing to each other. I read a palm once of a girl from County Limerick, and I saw in her hand, clear as day, the face of a fellow from down the road here, in Templenoe. They have eight children now.”

The more I pressed her, the more I learned about her view of her power and its place in the world.

“There’s a tribe in Africa,” she said, “and they have a matchmaking feast every seven years. They call on the matchmaking gods to find husbands for the seven most marriageable young ladies at that feast. And lo and behold! At noon next day without fail, from all points of the compass, seven tall, handsome young warriors stroll into that village.”

“How do you know this?” I asked.

“Nana told me. Every matchmaker worth their salt knows that story.”

All that first afternoon, I sat and listened to her. Matchmaking, to her, was part of the machinery that drives the universe, and she captured my heart with one detail.

“There’s a legend,” she said, “and I’m one of the very few who know it—that says all couples who are meant to marry are connected by an invisible silver cord. The matchmaking gods tie that cord around their ankles at birth, and in time the gods pull those cords tighter and tighter. Slowly, slowly, over the next twenty or thirty or forty years, they draw the couple toward each other until they meet.”

Now let me tell you how I found Miss Begley—and let me tell you too that the man who first told me of her existence, a decent fellow, was the same man who would one day wreck my life.

Our nation has a gift for the bizarre, and I’d gone to see a gentleman in Limerick who advertised dentures for hire. I wanted to collect stories of the occasions—weddings, funerals, and so on—for which people hired false teeth. A potential customer crashed into me as we both tried to step through a narrow doorway. As I write this now, I can see that Miss Begley would call it Fate. With the uppercase
F
.

His name was Neddy; he had a deep, thick accent and empty gums; we stepped together inside the dark, wooden rooms of
MR. MACMANUS—OCCASION MERCHANT
, as the sign on the wall said. When his bell jangled, the said merchant walked from the rooms at the rear of the premises.

Neddy—full name, Edward Joseph Hannitty—pointed to his mouth, and Mr. MacManus beamed.

“Oh, I’ve plenty of teeth. I could play a tune for you.”

Which was Mr. MacManus’s joke; he ran his finger across his own top row alternating black and white, and they did indeed look like piano keys.

“But you want a few teeth for yourself?”

“I do, sir.” Neddy nodded.

I can tell you that he didn’t look like somebody who would one day change three lives profoundly and forever.

“Is it for a wedding? We do a lot of weddings. I’d a man in here last month,” said Mr. MacManus. “He was looking for a parrot to take to a wedding, the bird had learned to say ‘Shut up, you hoor,’ and he thought it’d be a great joke to bring it to the wedding, and I never got the bird back, the bride’s father killed it, so they didn’t get the joke I suppose.”

Neddy said, “There’s a woman, down in Kenmare, like. She’s a matchmaker, and she told me if I had any teeth she’d get me my choice of select ladies.”

Now began a search of the premises, and to my delight Mr. MacManus invited me to help him. Behind the storefront stretched long, slender rooms with narrow bays containing myriad articles. I read the broad, coiling handwritten legends on the boxes. “Secondhand Ladies’ Corsets,” said one box. At the edge of another shelf sat “Implements for Removing Thorns from Flesh (Human)” while next to it sat a bigger box of “Implements for Removing Thorns from Flesh (Animal).”

He had thousands of crutches, including a tiny pair.

“For a child?” I asked, charmed in this cave of treasures, and he said, “No, actually. For a midget. I had a little customer who lost a leg in the last war.”

“They had dwarves in the war?”

“Running messages in the trenches. They were below the parapets, the snipers couldn’t get them.”

The next exploration brought us to a room of stuffed creatures.

“I bet the teeth are in here,” he said, and as I was about to ask, this heavy-breathing man with the pleasant and willing air explained his method of filing his inventory.

“Now, you’re saying to yourself, ‘What in the name of God is he doing keeping false teeth with stuffed animals?’ and ’tis a valid question enough. Well, some of the teeth have to have repairs, like, and I don’t ever get any tooth on its own, so there’s times when I take a tooth, like, from a stuffed animal and glue it to a denture plate and it works fine. There’s a man here in the city and he has five teeth from a young wolf in his mouth. He’s so thrilled with ’em he gave himself his own nickname—‘Wolf’ O’Brien.”

Among stuffed foxes, badgers, ferrets, and a squirrel, Mr. MacManus climbed on a ladder and began to take out a large drawer from a high cabinet. I feared that the weight might topple him, but he cheered with success.

“I have ’em,” he said, “the buggers,” and he came back down the ladder holding a cardboard shoe box. “And there’s teeth in here should be the right age for him.”

At Mr. MacManus’s directive, Neddy sat in a chair and leaned back. Both sizes, the too-large and the too-small, had their problems. For the large, Neddy’s helpfulness led him to make wide, face-threatening contortions; the smaller sets ran the danger of being swallowed whole or in part.

Lanky as a goose, shy as an owl, embarrassed to be alive
—those were the terms I was enlisting for my notebook to describe Neddy Hannitty with his mouth open in hope.

“Don’t we all have to help a man who’s looking to get married?” said Mr. MacManus as he sifted the pink devices. “Ah, God is good!” he then exclaimed. “I knew it’d be this pair.”

He wiped a set of tombstone dentures on his sleeve and began to fit them to the willing drover. After some jiggling and juggling, and a gentle amount of drool from Neddy, a triumphant Mr. MacManus held up a mirror.

“You’re fixed,” he said. “Smile.”

Neddy smiled—but, force of habit, smiled with his hand almost covering his mouth.

“I’ll hire them out to you for six months,” said Mr. MacManus.

Then he stood at his door and waved us off, proud as a parent.

On the street I asked Neddy, “How did you fall into the hands of a matchmaker?”

“I’m forty-five,” he said, “I’m a cattle drover to every farmer in the south of Ireland, and there isn’t a hill I haven’t climbed over, and I never thought of marrying, but I noticed that if I saw a good pair of legs I always felt the day was improving.”

Enter Miss Begley. One wet morning, Neddy had been driving cattle from the village of Sneem to the town of Kenmare. I’m familiar with that Atlantic rain; it seeps into every pore, drenches every follicle, drips cold
down your neck. When the rain got so heavy that he’d had to take shelter, a woman got off her bicycle, ran through the puddles to the same tree, and complained about the weather.

From a capacious bag she pulled a flask of tea and shared it with Neddy the Drover while the cattle grazed the margins of the road. She began to chat to him—where he came from, where he was going, asked him his destination, where he called home, his age, and so forth. Within minutes she had him talking about himself as never before.

“And you’ve no wife,” she said.

Neddy harruped a little cough, to overcome his embarrassment.

“And then she says to me, ‘D’you know what, Neddy? You’re a damn nice fella as it is, but if you had a few teeth, sure you’d dazzle us all.’ ”

I’d been heading southwest anyway, and two days later, I paid my first visit to Lamb’s Head. Now, as I sit here, looking back, I have the thought:
What unfriendly god, what cosmic system, sent this man into my life, this simple cattle drover who’s as honest as a horse, this dear fellow with his rented teeth?

At that time, July 1943, I viewed myself as a man alone and grieving, with those night soldiers, doubt and fear, hammering always at my door. I believed that my constant pain didn’t show in my face, yet when I’d finished my note-taking and was making ready to leave, Miss Begley said, “Tell me about yourself. You look a bit lonely. Might you be looking for somebody yourself?”

I nodded, mute as a leaf. My internal gentleman, for once, said nothing. She pressed, an eyebrow raised like a semaphore.