Who Does Little but Listen

Abstract

My father was a storyteller, famous within his circle of family and friends, and I grew up hearing, now and again over the years, about the night he nearly killed Eugene O’Neill. The tales with which Father entertained us usually had to do with the passage of one Maloney or another from Irish immigrant to New England mill foreman to (in his father’s case) Dartmoutheducated statesman. He would also go on about his own childhood in Chelsea, Massachusetts, and his life in the theater in the early years of the twentieth century. A proverbial black sheep, Father gave up on formal education halfway through high school. Dropping his surname, so as not to be confused with his lawyer/legislator father, he became, in a daring act of selfinvention, David Keating, actor. It was during a season of summer stock on Nantucket that he had his encounter with O’Neill.1 The year was 1925. After performing in Shaw’s Candida with the Nantucket Players, he had partied with fellow cast members (including Burgess Meredith, who was playing Marchbanks) and was heading home to Siasconset, at the east end of the island. He was driving a Ford “New Model” Tudor sedan belonging to Mrs. Clarissa Rood Moran, at whose cottage in ’Sconset he was staying. The night was dark, the road was rutted, and in the light from the headlamps the fog was like a white wall just inches from the automobile’s front bumper. Suddenly, the figure of a man appeared in front of the car. Simultaneously hitting the horn and the brakes, Father turned the steering wheel hard to the left as the shadowy figure, crying out, fell to the right. Stopping the car in a ditch, Father got out and crossed to the ditch on the other side of the road. There lay the man who obviously had, as had my father, “drink taken.” Despite that fact, or perhaps because of it, neither man was hurt. The young actor David Keating helped the older man to his feet, introduced himself, then gave the playwright Eugene O’Neill