Shannon (14 page)

Away from the barricades they found calm among old streets and rough cobbles. Robert had a running commentary from the tireless woman at his side.

“God Almighty, that was terrible. Firing loose shots like that. Who do these bloody people think they are?” Past the jail: “Most of the people in there will never get out. And they shouldn't.” Next: “That's the asylum, so we'll always have a place we can call home.” She pointed out the Markets Field up ahead. “When my father was a boy there was a scaffold up there; they were always hanging people. We could do with it now.”

When they reached the butcher's shop, Sheila Neary pointed out the name
SHANNON
over the door. Robert stood, admired, and almost smiled. The sight of his name did much to bring back some balance.

The butcher looked like a medieval villain: big raddled nose, black wavy hair, pockmarked skin. He said, “Yeh, Shannon. Well, it'd be a name around here, like, if ‘twas anywhere.”

Robert said, “Do you know anything about the family?”

“My own father was a Galway man.”

“And are there Shannons in Galway?”

“Well, there might be, and again there mightn't.” Robert looked perplexed, and the butcher continued. “The thing is, Galway is the City of the Tribes. But you can never tell which tribe you're dealing with. And most of ‘em is lunatics.”

He wore an apron with more blood on it than a massacre; he kept sticking the point of his knife into the surface of his block and drawing it back out like a little Excalibur.

“I'll tell you now. There's a woman over in Parteen, a Mrs. O'Meara, her husband is a Cork man; they're always ordering pork chops, they eat nearly a pig a year. And before she married him, she was courting a fella, and I'd swear his name was Shannon. Miles Shannon. He was from Claregalway” He looked to Sheila. “Mrs. Neary you'd know her.”

Sheila Neary made an irritated cluck. “No-no. His name was Fallon, Miles Fallon, I knew him; he married a girl from Knocklong.”

“Was she Dalton herself?”

“Who, the O'Meara woman?”

“No, the Knocklong woman.”

Robert looked from one to the other in this bewildering tennis match. Then he asked mildly, “Where was your grandfather born?”

Before the Chopper could answer, the cashier poked her head out of the tall glass booth, where she sat among her ledgers.

“He wasn't born. I mean, not here. He was from Ballymurray up in Roscommon.”

“Nancy knows everything,” said the Chopper.

“But his name wasn't Shannon,” said a woman customer, who was waiting patiently for the Chopper to begin cutting a roast of beef for her.

Nancy called out, “That's why I said he wasn't born.”

“This is Father Shannon from America,” said Sheila Neary.

“No, that isn't his name,” said Nancy. “He was named Moylan himself, and he came down here as an apprentice to the man who owned this place, a bachelor called Tom Shannon, and Tom Shannon left the shop to Tony's grandfather here, on condition that he changed his name to the same name as there was over the door.”

“Who was this man Tom Shannon? Where was he born?” Robert asked.

“Ah, sure, nobody knows that,” said Nancy. “There was bad times in them days. People didn't want you to know they was born at all.”

The trail grown cold, Robert stood by. He listened to beef being discussed, followed by a long conversation with Sheila Neary about who had the best pigs in the county for pork.

The Chopper asked her, “D'you want anything for yourself and Father here?”

“I can't afford you,” she said.

Archbishop Sevovicz received one final instruction from Cardinal O'Connell: “Get there just before dinner,” said His Eminence with a smile.

“There” proved, to begin with, cold and unwelcoming— the house of John J. Nilan, Bishop of Hartford, Connecticut, in the Archdiocese of Boston. Sevovicz had left much of his own clerical garb behind in Rome (his departure had been hasty), and he looked no more than an ordinary priest. With no flicker of archbishop's purple, no hint of his senior place in the Church, he was left waiting in the dim hall.

For half an hour he sat. No maid returned, no voice called, no leather shoe creaked across the floor. Eventually he went looking. He pushed open a door and saw a man at a dining table, eating and reading. Sevovicz knocked on the open door.

“No, thank you, Gabriela, not yet.”

Sevovicz waited a moment and said, “Regrettably, I am not Gabriela.”

He knew that he looked disheveled, but he also knew that his voice and his accent and his perfect if old-fashioned English would at least make Nilan look up.

“God, who are you?” Bishop Nilan twisted in his chair.

“That is— or should be— our central inquiry,” said Sevovicz with some gaiety. “God, who are You? I am not God, I am Anthony Sevovicz, your new coadjutor.”

“I have a new coadjutor, I have Father Murray coming in.” Bishop Nilan turned away.

Sevovicz said, as he always did, and proudly, “I am Polish. I come from Elk.”

Ever afterward, Nilan referred to him as “the Elk,” not least because of the Pole's long-shaped head and big nostrils. For the moment Nilan continued reading.

Sevovicz stepped into the room and stood like a soldier. “Has His Eminence not called?”

Sevovicz guessed that Nilan had enough common sense not to shoot the messenger. So he waited, while Nilan still read— a good trick; churchmen are permitted to go on reading their Holy Office until a suitable break comes in the text.

At last Nilan put down the breviary and said, “His Eminence? Well, that's a powerful name to speak. But how do I know you're not any old panhandler looking for a handout?”

“Do you have a telephone? Have you received a letter?”

Nilan yielded, the men held out handshakes, and their little crisis passed.

Gabriela brought food; Nilan offered wine; Sevovicz chose beer.

“If you're a full coadjutor,” Nilan said, “Rome must know about you.”

“I come from the Vatican.”

“And how're they all over there?” said Nilan.

“My task is to assist. I'm here to help.”

“I don't need any help. I have help galloping around the yard, coming in the back door, climbing up the stairs. Why would I need help?”

“I think I'm probably more of a resident in your house. I'm here principally to help His Eminence.”

“We're a long way down from Boston,” said Nilan.

“His Eminence has interests everywhere in his archdiocese. Wherever his flock suffers and has need—”

“Yeah, yeah, I know that. That's not specific enough. What has he said to you about me?”

“His Eminence said— he said we would like each other.”

“Ah. Is that what His Eminence said?” And Nilan smiled.

Sevovicz's food arrived and he now saw Nilan bring into play the skill that had made him a bishop; Nilan switched on the warmth.

“I doubt you've enough food there on your plate, a big man like you. Let me ring for Gabriela or you'll think us cheapskates down here in Connecticut.”

Gabriela duly did new honors, and Nilan said, “The room you'll be in tonight— that's just temporary. I have an outside house here, the house next door, and tomorrow we'll start fixing things.”

Sevovicz not so much ate his food as assaulted it; he always worked a table as though he were a famine victim. He believed now that he had taken the measure of the occasion.
This Nilan, he's saying to himself, “Why was he was sent here? What were the words he used, ‘needs and suffers— ah, yes! That shell-shocked young priest. I bet he's here to control him, to keep his mouth shut. “ Nilan's no fool. I want him on my side. But I have to keep in mind that he'll never be on anybody's side but his own.

Had it not been for the civil war, Robert might have stayed a month. Limerick offered much to see, interesting places to search. But, conferring with friends, Sheila Neary said, “We'd better get him out of the city for his own safety.”

She and her friends agreed that the higher up the Shannon he went, the cooler the flames of the fighting. They would not, though, let him go without a send-off party.

To Robert she downplayed it. She told him, “There's a bit of a singsong.” He rested, then groomed and dressed. Sheila met him outside his door; in his hand he carried the Sevovicz letter.

He said, “I never really introduced myself.”

“But you don't need to.”

Robert handed her the letter. She had been longing to read it ever since they met the men with the guns. She read— and read again. She turned away so he couldn't see the shine in her eyes.

“My glasses are downstairs.”

Halfway down the stairs, letter in hand, she called back, “Father Robert, why don't you sit and rest until the guests arrive.”

Robert didn't question her; he returned to his room and sat looking out on the square. The city had fallen quiet. A few children still played in the park, running ahead of the keeper, who was trying to lock the gates.

From downstairs, over the next hour, he heard voices, some laughter, greetings. Then came a heavy fast tread on the stairs, a hard knock on his door, and Maeve MacNulty called, “Come on out, Handsome!”

This evening she had dressed entirely in pink, from the skin out. Robert emerged in clothes of the deceased Mr. Neary.

“They're all dying to meet you,” she said, and galloped back down.

At the door of the drawing room, Sheila Neary waited; behind her he could see a dozen or more people. She had wanted Robert out of the way so that she could read the Sevovicz letter to her guests—which she did, when everybody had arrived. And in this town that has always loved soldiers, and that lost so many men in the Great War, she read it to a hushed room.

Now she stood and beamed and held the door wide open. When Robert walked through, the room applauded.

And then, for the rest of the evening, they sang and they sang. Around the piano they stood, mouths open like baby chicks, and they sang their hearts out. Sandwiches came—”Isn't an egg sandwich great with whiskey?” somebody said— and they sang again.

Their repertoire came from their times: Victorian operettas, Gilbert and Sullivan, the music hall, the world. In Robert's honor, they offered an American medley: “Jeannie with the Light Brown Hair” and “My Old Kentucky Home” and “Camptown Races” and “My Darling Clementine” and “The Battle Hymn of the Republic.”

Among the lace-edged cushions and the overstuffed chairs, people sang solos: a man with a nasal edge that produced an occasional whistle; a woman with huge teeth who had to be coaxed and who called herself a coloratura but was closer to falsetto; a husband and wife who sang a pretty duet, during which he kept patting his wife's behind.

Sheila Neary and Maeve MacNulty sang “Three Little Maids from School Are We,” as they'd been doing since they appeared in their senior class
Mikado
production. Side by side they stood, “Pert as a schoolgirl well can be,” one round and pink and exuding, the other thin and green and withholding, “Filled to the brim with girlish glee”—and their enjoyment ran into every corner of the wallpaper's diagrams—”Three little ma-a-a-a-ids … from school!”

They never asked Robert to sing. Nor did they pressure him in any way; nobody monopolized him, nobody moved in on him. Had he been sharper, he might have guessed why: This town also knew about shell shock; it too had its “old soldiers,” as they called them, some of them still in their twenties, vacant-faced men who were never cured and never would be. Consequently, out of politeness and respect, nobody handed him a letter to deliver to a cousin in Arizona or an uncle in Brooklyn Heights.

But when the night came to an end, the guests, almost without thinking, stood in line to shake Robert's hand.

The first woman said, “I lost my husband and my brother in the war.”

A man behind her said, “We know what the Yanks did for us, Father, and we'll never forget it.”

And an older man, with a face as wrinkled as a Peruvian, said, “The Munster Fusiliers, our local regiment here, they took a hill in France one Sunday morning. But they lost so many men taking it that they couldn't keep it. And their chaplain, Father Gleeson—did you know him at all, Father? He was a hero too—d'you know what he did, Father? When he saw his officers killed, he tore off his chaplain's tabs and led his men. I lost three sons that week.” His eyes were like wet stars.

The last man said, “If you count the casualties, we in Ireland lost more in proportion to the size of our population than any other country in the war. We lost one out of every six breadwinning men.”

Robert stood mutely, accepting handshakes— and money: four envelopes. “A little Mass offering, Father,” they each said.

How could these votives know he might never say Mass again?

Late that night, when everybody had gone and the house had fallen asleep, Robert lay awake. At three in the morning, still unable to sleep, he rose and sat at the table playing solitaire— with the deck of cards that he took for the first time from his rucksack.

The card game played a major part in Robert's recovery. Dr. Green-berg had suggested it after a conversation with Mr. and Mrs. Shannon. He had asked them for details of Robert's mental games as a child, and they had told him of jigsaw and crossword puzzles— that he had continued as an adult— and endless games of solitaire on wet days. The psychiatrist had grabbed at this.

“Very good. Yes. We can use card games to measure his progress.” He instructed the daily-care doctors and nurses to make a deck of cards available. They should then observe whether Robert used them. At first Robert did pick them up; he even shuffled them and began to lay them out, but he lost his way. A nurse helped, spreading the cards in the Yukon formation— seven across—then starting the game for him, stacking where possible red upon black, and then turning every third card.

Day in, day out, whenever she came on duty, the same nurse did this— until the day when Robert stopped her and began to do it himself.

He made no progress for weeks, and then one morning he actually got as far as the four kings turned up and all aces out. There he stopped for several more weeks. He resumed in time, and slowly his interest grew, until not a day passed without several games.