Venetia Kelly's Traveling Show by Frank Delaney

months old at the time.)
    As King Kelly, in his brown suit, backed out of the nursery, protesting that he only wanted to see his little granddaughter, his angel, his jewel, Sarah reached the top of the stairs. She had been out walking that day and hadn’t taken off her strong town shoes. When her father turned to greet her, she began to kick him. She landed her shoes on his shins, on his knees, every lower extremity within reach.
    He grabbed her and held her at a distance, too far for her boots to connect with him. Then he spun her around, bent her over like a jackknife, and larruped her three, four, five times on the behind. The whacks echoed through the house. He pushed her away from him, made it to his bedroom, and locked himself in, while Sarah—who had almost fallen over when he dropped her—stormed up and down outside, screaming at him and kicking his door. Eventually Mrs. Haas prevailed upon her to calm down so that the child might get some peace.
    Later that night, however, all through the card game, in which five of his cronies took part, Sarah sat right beside King Kelly, her thumb in her mouth, her head often leaning on his shoulder. During a break she sat on his knee, while he boasted about her to his pals: “My daughter, the great actress.”
    “I’ve never been conventional in my relationships,” she often told me.
    If I had known all those details, if I’d had any idea of what volatility they had survived between each other, I’d have understood better the bond between father and daughter, the seeming mismatch that so puzzled me later on.

H ere I feel that I must balance things a little by telling you how different my own mother’s life was in those days—such a contrast with the afternoon hours of Sarah Kelly in the Waldorf-Astoria hotel. Mother had been born a lean infant, wiry and long. By the time she was twelve she had acquired after-school and holiday work from a farmer who lived near her parents. When asked by the farmer what she’d like to do, Mother said, “The cows.” All through her teenage years, she fetched them in the morning and evening for milking—a tall, thin young drover, appreciated by all who knew her.
    “Handsome more than pretty,” she herself said she was—but memorable even at twelve. And passionate about what she did. “Cows will do anything for you,” she told me once, “if they like you. That’s a good lesson, isn’t it?”
    When I discovered—I was about eight years old—this feeling she had for cows, I begged her for her stories. She remembered individual cows, creatures who would allow her and her alone to milk them. “There was a Friesian called Lucy who kicked everybody else. And Flicker, because she always caught you in the face with a flick of her tail.”
    She remembered settling them in their winter stalls, squeezing herslim body between their adjacent flanks. She remembered inspecting each cow for any ailment or injury once a week in case the vet had to be called. “When I was a child,” she said, “I never got comfort. I was so bony. In the winter or when the east wind came in at the end of March, I felt the cold in every bone. The only place I ever felt really warm was with the cows.”
    She slept with cows about to calve—and she grieved if she lost either mother or calf. “A cow’s grief is a real thing,” she said to me once. “I’m not saying they cry salt tears—but you do weep if the calf comes out dead, and the mother can’t lick it into life, and she lowers her head and looks away.”
    Her love of cows endured all her life. She talked to them, she represented their interests. Drovers famously carry sticks, long ash batons to steer and drive cattle. One lunchtime, I saw Mother rush out into the yard, where a drover, who had bought two heifers from us, was hammering on their backs to get them up on his cart. She grabbed the ashplant out of the man’s hand and broke it across her knee.
    “’twould serve you right,” she