Shannon (19 page)

He had three objectives: He wanted to get to Portumna by nightfall, he wanted to savor the lakeshore as much as he could, and he wanted to ask ancestor questions along the way.

On his map he calculated that he would most likely spend the next two days meandering up the side of Lough Derg to Portumna. Folded into the map he had the names of four lakeside bed-and-breakfast places that had been given to him in Limerick.

His friends in the Church often asked, why wasn't Robert Shannon a Jesuit? He always laughed and gave the same answer: “Parish work.” Jesuits tended to concentrate on the academic world, and Robert wanted to work with people. The question had a good foundation, though; not many pastors had well-to-do parents. His fellow ordinands came from working-class backgrounds, in some cases from severe poverty, and a posh boy like Robert stuck out.

When he announced that he wanted to be a priest, Robert's parents had voiced surprise but no contest. They attempted neither diversion nor dissuasion. His mother, Julia, had almost died giving birth to him, and thereafter the traditional lines of who did what, so clear for friends and others of their class, blurred. Mom knew every aspect of her husband's work; Dad had household sense.

In 1891, when Robert was two years old, the family's position improved. His father had initiated and led a major decision for the company he directed, and from that moment on the firm boomed and became one of the biggest printing businesses in the United States. When the next year's profits came in, the directors found themselves rich— and stayed that way. With this new fortune, the Shannons built extra rooms on the pretty house in Sharon with the Carpenter Gothic detail, and they also bought the large vacant lot behind. They hired extra
housekeeping and general help— and in time they would buy the first Cadillac in Litchfield County.

In 1891 also, a new school opened near their town of Sharon, the Hotchkiss School. His mother, with a fine social history, visited, put Robert's name down, and secured, as she thought, the future standing of her descendants.

Her own family had expressed deeply felt grief when she married. They knew Shannon for an Irish name; meeting the swain had confirmed their chagrin. The Adams manners triumphed— Julia never told her husband-to-be of her family's extreme distress—but still, Bill Shannon sensed it. Every Irishman in New York knew his place: doorman, not husband, to the white Anglo-Saxon Protestants. But he said nothing, relying on his own considerable personality and immense ambition to retain his wife's heart and, when necessary, impress her family.

Her WASP mother, the daunting Alicia, ordered a small wedding— and held it far away, in the Vermont village of their summer home. No Adams went to the ceremony; they waited back at home, tables all laid and ready, for the Catholics in the wedding party to return from the Nuptial Mass.

The happy couple had conspired to work that gathering like a caucus, and by the time they took their honeymoon train to Maine they had charmed their own wedding party beyond reproach. On the train the bride decided not to repeat her mother's bitter last-night remark: “If he doesn't know who his ancestors are— my dear, he might as well be illegitimate.”

Was that the moment at which Robert Shannon's quest to trace his lineage was born? All through his childhood his father fed him legends of Ireland; he built for Robert a model Irish castle, complete with battlements; on the wall map, with his finger, the boy traced over and over the course of the river with his name.

Now, standing on its banks and shaking off the shame of his convent escape, Robert began to walk briskly once more. He knew— the surest knowledge that he carried with him— that walking was part of his cure.
The archbishop made me walk. He said, We walk. Now I walk.

Anthony Sevovicz loved congratulating himself. He believed in it. In his view, those who self-praised were made for success. When Robert Shannon
left Boston on Captain Aaronson's freighter, Sevovicz found a coffee stall and reflected on the departing ship.

“Three things.” He counted them on his large fingers. “I controlled. I cared. I cured.”

Sevovicz had left Poland under a cloud, his self-destruction already famous in the Polish Church. Neither a discreet nor a devout man, he had never attempted to hide what he wanted: worldly comfort. He ran his see like an executive suite— servants, cuisine, cigars.

Church duties wearied him, so he delegated freely. He liked preaching, but only after he became an archbishop— when he could speak like a politician. Even then he preached rarely; early in his parish career he had come to the realization that his sermons, often an hour long, put people to sleep.

Like all those who take too much, one day he went too far. How had his brother, a poor man, suddenly bought a large farm? Did there just happen to be a similar amount missing from the archdiocesan funds? It was crude beyond measure, and Sevovicz knew he'd got it wrong— in fact, he had almost wrecked a life of brilliant management in the Church.

The Vatican took him in; in Rome he discovered that he was not the only rogue prelate. When he also learned to use the system, they had to find a job for him. Such is the way of the Vatican.

When he first took on O'Connell's brief—the care of Father Shannon—Sevovicz bridled at how he had been finessed by the cardinal. Then he converted his mind-set to “What's in this for me?” To give himself room to think it through, he made one condition: stringent privacy. The deal proved easy to close. O'Connell knew that Robert's blurtings would go no further. Sevovicz would learn crucial facts about O'Connell— and in the Church, information is power.

When he finally collected Robert from the hospital and took him to the residence in Hartford, Sevovicz told nobody what he was doing; he let them believe he was saving a life. But he had met the medical team; he had an up-to-date diagnosis. Their positive reports lifted his spirits. The young priest could recover.

Sevovicz rubbed his hands. His original charge remained intact: “Bring down O'Connell,” they said in Rome. “Get the evidence we
need.” Now he had, if anything, a better means of doing so. By all accounts this young man was too honorable not to talk.

Therefore, his secret mission was to heal Robert as totally as possible— and then get his testimony of O'Connell's misdeeds. By spending additional money on Dr. Greenberg, Sevovicz believed he could do this.

But along the way, after a few weeks of Robert's company, Sevovicz found himself ambushed. Unexpectedly he had found what he had always longed for, a worthy protégé. He knew he himself could never be the prince of the Church he had once hoped to be. But— oh, my God!— he could make this young man a king. He could bring back into intelligent and competent activity a priest who, before the war, had been known by all as a likely leader of the American Church.

Everybody said so, everywhere he went. Father Shannon had been “remarkable.” Father Shannon was “much loved.” Father Shannon was “the real deal.” Sevovicz intensified his efforts. He could now have it all, if only by proxy. All he had to do was deal with a slow-healing ailment.

And slow it proved. For months Robert had no direction. The firmness of which Sevovicz had heard, the sense of purpose, of will, of grasp— none of that had returned. Unless he was given a specific undemanding task and supervised while he did it, Robert still spent most of his time in aimless sitting.

Sevovicz came from the Eastern European cult of “clean body, clean mind”—the physique leads the brain. He aimed first for physical fitness. A vain man who liked to keep his own body trim, Sevovicz had for years walked briskly for at least forty-five minutes every day. Now he did so again and soon on these walks he was sometimes accompanied by his young ward.

In time, Sevovicz perceived in Robert a good response. At first he joined the archbishop's walks an average two days out of seven. When they returned from such an outing, the shell-shocked young man's sentences— if and when he spoke— grew longer. Gradually Robert became personally tidier, neater in his care of himself, and could be eased out of his adult diapers.

Encouraged, Sevovicz transformed the purpose of his own daily exercise.
Day after day, he now insisted that the young man accompany him. On the more reluctant days, the archbishop went so far as to fetch the young man's clothes and, with tender words, help him out of bed as though dealing with a child.

Soon, Robert began to slip into a rhythm and would wait in the hallway, sometimes for hours, until the archbishop was ready for their walk. As they struck out together each day, the older man knew his plan was working when Robert began to match any pace he set.

One day, Sevovicz attempted something new. On a pathway with a straight half mile ahead of them, he told the young priest that he wished to rest for a moment.

“You go ahead, Robert. I'll catch up presently.”

Robert resisted, but the archbishop insisted.

“See? I can watch every step you take.” And he sat on a tree stump and folded his arms.

After Sevovicz rebuffed a further attempt to resist, Robert set out. Every ten yards or so, like a child still connected to a parent, he turned back to look at the archbishop. Sevovicz let Robert walk no more than a hundred yards before he resumed his own walk, and soon the two tall men strode shoulder to shoulder again.

A few days later, Sevovicz took another rest, and this time he let Robert travel a hundred and fifty yards or so. He also observed that the younger man did not look around quite so often, though he still seemed very anxious about walking alone.

This pattern became the norm. Soon, Robert turned back scarcely at all— and, even more rewardingly for Sevovicz in this crude but shrewd manipulation, the young priest would make it to the end of the half mile and wait there for his mentor. One day, he even walked back a hundred yards or so to greet the oncoming Sevovicz. By then, walking had been firmly established as a means to his cure.

The eastern shore of Lough Derg has reeds tall enough to hide a regiment. By the water, many trees cower from winter storms that pitch high waves against them. But when the wind drops and the sun comes out, a calm like no other falls across the land.

Wide spaces have arresting silences. Famine places lose all sound; the birds depart, the animals have no food so they leave or die; the people are
too feeble to shout. Desert silence has a different echo: The sun makes the rocks crack, and suddenly a rogue wind will sweep across like a bandit. When the whistle of that wind has passed, the desert subsides, and when the noise of the sand falling and settling has faded, the silence returns and the sun makes the rocks crack once more.

On the shores of an Irish lake, the silence, soft as goosedown, touches the heart. Along Lough Derg, those high reeds cushion the land, sapping the wave power and swallowing the sound of the wind.

Mid-July, the time of Robert Shannon's meanderings, is the best time to walk. The bird population's young have emerged and, having yet no fear of humans, they fly close before alarm flutters them away. Thirsty farm animals come down to the lake's edge and stand in the water, sometimes shoulder high. The horses prance; the cattle stand around as moodily as wallflowers watching the girls who've been asked to dance.

If Robert had been lucky he'd have seen a fox— which he didn't. If very lucky he'd have seen an otter— which he did, and he stood mesmerized as, on a flat rock twenty feet out, the small intense whiskered creature systematically dismantled and then devoured a large pink-fleshed fish.

Robert ambled for several hours. The path became road, then path again, then lane, then path, then road. He stared at his map.

“Hallo there!” A shout— from where?

It came from a field— and a horse and cart appeared.

“How's she cuttin’?”

Robert saw a man with a huge head, dense fair hair thick as thatch, and a smile wide as a gate.

“Where are you going to at all?”

Robert walked over to the cart and showed the map.

“Well, you're in right luck, right luck. We'd a bit of rain here, and we're still delayed with crops and hay and that. I'm going to a place called Lorrha; that's most of the way to Portumna. Hop up,” and when Robert had climbed aboard, the carter said
hup!

The cart had a floor of straw; Robert sat not uncomfortably with his legs hanging from the rear.

He was to spend that night in mixed company— in Lorrha, near Portumna—in the house of a priest who kept two racing greyhounds, Dolly
Blue and Miss Mack, who ate at the priest's table, were included in his conversation, and slept in his bed.

The carter put Robert down outside the largest house in the village, outside of which a man in short sleeves was trimming a hedge.

“Father Reddan,” said the man with the thatch of fair hair. “This man has to get to Portumna.”

Father Reddan, red-nosed and jolly as Father Christmas, found himself “delighted with a bit of exotic company”—which gave Robert cause to smile. As the carter disappeared down the dusty road, the priest asked, “Did he tell you the name of his horse?”

Robert shook his head.

“His horse is called Horsey. I asked him why, one day, and he said, ‘Well, nobody came up with a better name.’ That's what he said.”

Robert showed Father Reddan the Sevovicz letter; the priest read it carefully and handed it back.

“Would you mind,” he said, “if we didn't talk about the war? I had a lot of friends in the Munster Fusiliers, and they had a terrible time. My great pal, Father Gleeson— did you know him by any chance?—he was their chaplain, and he's all right, but a bit shook up.” He looked at Robert. “Sort of like yourself, Father,” said the cheerful man with the red nose.

After a cup of tea, Father Reddan asked, “Would you take offense, Robert, if I said we might find the Shannons in the Protestant church?”

Robert shook his head, and they went for a walk. Father Reddan greeted people merrily, saying, “This is my great friend, Father Shannon, he's a Yank.” To Robert he said, “This is a busy place for churches; the Dominicans were here and all kinds of other fellows.”