Shannon (10 page)

Now, in a strange château on the banks of the Shannon River
—his
river— Robert had been dreaming of the cardinal again, and of the archbishop too, and he heard the archbishop calling him, answered, “Yes, Your Grace!” and awoke with a jump— to a knock on the door.

Miranda marched in, leading a woman who carried a tray.

“Hallo, sir,” said the woman, the housekeeper, and inspected the stranger top to toe in a single glance. “You're very welcome here, sir. Bacon and cabbage, sir, for lunch today. And a glass of our own milk.”

Heavy footsteps lumbered along the corridor outside.

“Oh, here's the boss now,” said the woman.

The man of the bathing suit and subsequent nakedness had changed into a tweed jacket, check shirt, striped tie, and twill pants; he stood in the doorway and looked all around.

“Hah, you've met Mrs. Harty” he said. “She'll look after you, won't you, Mrs. Harty?” Turning to face Robert directly, he said, “So you're another of Miranda's pals. Don't do what the last one did.”

He winked, turned, and walked away.

“Drank all the boss's drink,” whispered Mrs. Harty. “A fella from Roscommon. A cattle dealer, he said he was.”

Miranda ran after her father and didn't come back for some moments. Mrs. Harty took the opportunity to come out with fast whispered words.

“Sir, the child. She's six years old, she don't talk since her mother drownded in the river. Out there in front of our faces, she went down like a stone and we all watching her. And the father. The poor man goes out every day of his life winter and summer to try and find her ‘cause they never found the body. And the child hasn't talked since that day ‘twas last summer. The poor woman was only thirty. And lovely too.”

Miranda came back and rearranged the items on Robert's tray.

“Now, sir, you're an American, are you?” said Mrs. Harty, louder again.

Robert nodded.

Miranda and Mrs. Harty stood there, hands folded, and stared while Robert ate lunch. He felt no distress at this— the archbishop did it all the time. Mrs. Harty took away the tray and Miranda took Robert by the hand again.

This odd pair, the tall silent man and the little silent girl, spent the rest of the day roaming the estate— but always as far away from the river as Miranda could get. Inside the back door of the house, she collected her pet crow, Henry, in his cage. After some minutes walking, she handed the cage to Robert— and Henry spent the afternoon trying to
reach out with his beak and peck Robert's hand through the bars of the cage. He had already pecked the edges of a postcard threaded between the bars a long time ago; the faded handwriting said
To Miranda—Happy Birthday from Mama.

They wandered all over the place. Robert had to inspect the new plow, he had to caress the ducklings, he had to stroke the foal. Then Miranda chose a place to rest, a strange little building out of sight of the house, down at the bottom of a steep field, a shed full of old benches. Henry cawed a lot and swayed to and fro on the carved silver fork that someone had stuck between the bars of his cage as a perch.

With elaborate selection, Miranda chose a bench for them. She sat with her short legs swinging; then she leaned against Robert, put her thumb in her mouth, and dozed. The rain came in from the west, and a few specks touched Robert's face through the broken walls. He put an arm around the child's shoulder.

After an hour or so, she walked him back to the house as the cows were being taken home for milking. In his room she made straight for his rucksack. He thought to stop her but held back. Miranda began to unpack the bag and arrange things in drawers and on shelves; it was clear that she wanted him to stay.

Robert sat in a chair and watched. She respected each item and handled everything with care. He carried little: four light changes of underwear, four pairs of socks, a spare pair of pants, and three extra shirts. Miranda took his toiletries into the bathroom, smelled the soap, hung the facecloth on a hook. She found his letter of introduction but proved unable to read it and restored it to its pocket, having first caressed what remained of the wax seal on the envelope. When the bag was empty, she stowed it in the closet, dusted off her hands with an air of accomplishment, and winked at Robert.

That evening, six people sat at the long dining table. One elderly man, never identified, kept falling asleep, to be awakened by the woman beside him— who might have been his daughter, judging by their matching mustaches. She wore a bright red and yellow bandanna around her head, with the ends trailing down her neck, and she hummed tunes under her breath. Now and then she raised a dizzy eyebrow and smiled at Robert.

The father sat at one end, looking ahead like the captain of a lonely ship; Miranda, at the other end, perched on cushions and wielded a silver spoon much too large for her tiny hands. Robert sat beside a smiling woman in a cream dress, who whispered, “Humor us. This is an eccentric table. So— complete silence, eh?”

A few minutes later she said, slightly louder than a whisper, “This house breaks my heart.”

The father coughed loudly, and Miranda put a shushing finger to her lips.

During dinner, two candles sputtered out, spraying flecks of blackened grease on the white lace tablecloth. Miranda's father reached forward and pinched the dead wicks. He sat peculiarly: head erect, looking into space.

Since he was a very tall man, his height and straight posture made the food's journey from his plate to his mouth dangerously long. And he was largely unsuccessful; at each spillage and splash, Mrs. Harty summoned with a small bell rung by Miranda, came in from the kitchen with a damp cloth and murmured, “There we are now, sir, there we are,” as she wiped each surface, from waistcoat to table.

Robert had not been in such unknown company since his last hospital stay. After he was discharged, he had lived in close domestic proximity only to Archbishop Sevovicz. His responses, therefore, had been coming from a more or less static vocabulary of emotions. Nor had he been seriously challenged in the O'Sullivans’ house. Their quietness and unfaltering amiability had bedded him down. As a first exposure, not only to Ireland but to the world at large, he could not have done better than the O'Sullivans for comfort and ease.

Here, in this eccentric place, he faced a very different culture, beginning with the food. He looked down at his plate, course after course, and wondered if he had ever tasted anything so good. In fact he had, and quite recently—Sevovicz had the appetites of a bon vivant, and long before that Robert's own family household had always eaten well— but Robert's appetite had not then returned from the war. Indeed, for his first weeks with Sevovicz he came to almost no meals, and when dinner was served he was often to be found outside, jabbering to himself among the trees.

Now his palate woke up with a cheer. Dinner began with spicy potato
and parsnip soup, accompanied by soda bread hot from the oven. Next came lamb with thrilling flat beans and new potatoes glistening with butter. For dessert, Mrs. Harty served a broad deep wedge of apple pie, on which she poured half a pitcher of thick cream. Robert concentrated on his food like a scholar translating a text.

The room that evening heard little sound other than the smacked lips of eating. Miranda attacked her dessert more vigorously than she had approached the other food. The guests made appreciative gurgles, and the old man snored on. Miranda's father failed to bring a single spoonful intact to his lips. Mrs. Harty fetched yet another damp cloth and mopped him over and over.

When they finished dinner, the day had almost left the sky. Seen through the windows, the river's surface glowed like a sheet of light. Inside the room, silent except for Mrs. Harty's footsteps creaking across the floor, darkness fell to accompany the quiet. The old man with the mustache woke briefly, blinked many times, and again fell asleep.

As Robert ate his last mouthful, he sat back and bowed his head a little.

“Habit. Pure habit, grace at meals,” said Miranda's father, misinterpreting Robert's bowed head. “Unsavory stuff, prayer.”

Silence fell again.

By now in his life, Robert Shannon understood silence— it was perhaps his clearest understanding. He grasped that it had as much to do with hearing nothing as with saying nothing. Those who assessed him after his second collapse tested him with readings full of emotional content. They read him the most moving passages from Charles Dickens; they read him humor; they read him stirring poems by Longfellow and Tennyson; they read him Mark Twain. Others watched to see whether he responded.

They found him uneven at first; he never quite laughed, he never quite cried, but he did respond a little. As time passed these responses dwindled, and they concluded that he had begun to close down. Dr. Greenberg believed his lack of response would prove the harbinger to another great emotional upheaval, and he told his colleagues to anticipate a total speech loss— or, as he put it, speech denial. He told Archbishop Sevovicz that Father Shannon was probably refusing to speak.

“By which I do not mean, Your Grace, that he has
decided he
will not speak. His mind— you might call it his spirit— has said that he will not speak, and the man is simply following his own dark orders. Unusually so. Most catatonics that we've seen are in a stupor. No energy. No initiative. No action. Not with this man; this seems to be a conviction. But who can tell, since he won't? Perhaps the things he might wish to say would prove too terrible for him to utter.”

Now Robert found himself in the company of a child whose own speechless state came from a different root. He watched Miranda as often as he could and began to glimpse that he might be learning something. That insight, however, stayed in the nest, its wings not yet fledged.

Of a sudden at the head of the table, Miranda's father began to cough. The fit empurpled not only his face but the bald spot on his head. He waved away all efforts to help him and left the room, still coughing and holding on to pieces of furniture as he lurched his way out.

Miranda stood up and then sat down, and the old man with the mustache began a deep and bellowing snoring, of tectonic power. No legend could ever have held a creature large or dark enough to produce such a sound; it came from the bowels of the earth. The child flounced from the room as the old gentleman continued to rock the building, and his daughter sat humming some distant, lonely tune. Beside Robert, the sweet-faced lady whispered, “Every dinner here ends like this. You can smell the grief in this house.”

That night, Robert slept like a drunken man, and if he had dreams he didn't recall them. Having forgotten to close his curtains, he was called from the depths by the sun. He had fallen asleep in his clothes and shook his head in distaste. As he undressed and found towels for a bath, he glanced out the window. In the middle of the river, Miranda's father, in his black bathing togs, was diving again and again. He looked like a man bobbing for Halloween apples, but his dives lasted longer than that.

Down he went, up he came, down he went again. Eventually he came up one last time and with feeble and untutored strokes clambered and splashed his way— empty-handed—to the riverbank.

N
obody appeared at breakfast; from a sideboard Robert helped himself to oatmeal, soda bread, tea. As he sat at the empty table, Miranda's father appeared, wearing leather gauntlets.

“I have to go to Askeaton. I can take you that far. Have breakfast. Kiss Miranda goodbye. I shall be studying this machine of mine.”

Half an hour later, Robert waited in the hall, his rucksack packed. He had a vague and anxious idea that he should tell the child he would return. Miranda, though, never appeared. Mrs. Harty said she was in a deep sleep.

“But I'll say goodbye for you.” In a whisper she added, “God bless you, Father. I didn't say a word about who you are. They're Protestants here, and they'd be ruffled if they thought you were— you know.”

Robert had assumed that the leather gauntlets worn by Miranda's father betokened an automobile, though he had yet to see one in Ireland.

“Not everybody wants one,” Joe O'Sullivan had said. “People say they won't take on.”

These gauntlets, however, meant a motorbike. Robert sat on the pillion,
his arms around the waist of Miranda's father, who talked all the time. Not a word did Robert hear or say; it was not possible to do either against the roar of the rattling engine and the hiss of the flyblown slipstream.

As the morning breeze threatened rain, the river feathered high. After a hammering ride of too many miles for the spine, the bike squeezed to a daring, spinning halt.

Miranda's father climbed off and faced Robert. Rigid as an officer, he spoke as gruffly.

“Well, this is as far as we go. Can't help you anymore. Good luck. Watch out for the soldiers. Come back.” He turned away— and then turned back, and Robert knew enough about anguish to recognize it when he saw it. “Child almost spoke again. To you. She did. Yes. Well, she will if you come back. Yes.”

He turned away again, climbed back onto the bike, and rattled off down a side road with never a wave of his hand.