Shannon (22 page)

After that first meeting with Dr. Greenberg, Sevovicz went back to Hartford and prepared the house. He had, Dr. Greenberg thought, a month before Robert would be reckoned fit to leave the hospital. Sevovicz hired workmen. They rejigged the upper floor, rearranging rooms to create, in practice, a suite for two. They installed a new bathroom connecting two bedrooms, with a living room and kitchen on the same level. Bishop Nilan didn't interfere.

Sevovicz had nothing to lose. He knew he had no real position in the Church. This task caught both his mind and his heart, and he decided to give it his best. If Robert Shannon were to recover, he would do so under his, Anthony Sevovicz's, excellent care. As he figured it, a reputation could be rebuilt in more ways than one— and this assignment contained an emotional reward in the bargain.

He hired a car and driver to fetch Robert; he went to the hospital himself.
Not only will this task be undertaken, it will be seen to be undertaken well and powerfully.

Robert sat in the back of the car beside Sevovicz. Dr. Greenberg had said, “Watch for increased curiosity. That's a sign of recovery.” On the way home, Sevovicz saw none.

For Robert's first hour in the house, Sevovicz taught him the geography of their suite. He walked him through it again and again. At one moment Robert seemed deeply catatonic; at the next he seemed almost brightly lucid. Nothing lasted very long before he settled back into the same benign torpor. Dr. Greenberg's advice had been, “We need to lengthen the periods between torpors.” Next day— and for many days afterward— Sevovicz again showed Robert around their four rooms and bath.

From that first week in the house until Robert left on the ship for Ireland,
Archbishop Sevovicz, with not a thought to any incongruity, with no sense of the unusual, served as mother and father, grandmother and grandfather, teacher and confessor. He drew on every memory of childhood care, received or witnessed, and practiced it with vigor.

Food became his main tool. He wrote lists of the most delicious meals he could imagine and hired local women in Hartford to cook them. He also believed in music; he hired excellent local musicians, who played from a repertoire he specified. He deployed company; Bishop Nilan, by nature a gentle and endearing man when comfortable, frequently came to dinner. Under Sevovicz's tutelage, Nilan behaved “normally”—as though Robert possessed all faculties and control. And, in a small but sincere and warm gesture, Nilan made a point of shaking hands with Robert every time he met him and again when they parted.

This regime began in late December of 1920 and did not much change until the late summer of 1921, when Sevovicz introduced the long walks. By then, good basics had been reached and Dr. Greenberg's route map of progress bristled with pleased upticks.

But Sevovicz— being Sevovicz— never lost sight of the politics. Through every phase he listened all the time, listened for anything Robert might say— anything, any useful scrap, that would tell Sevovicz what he wanted to hear. What had been so terrible in the cardinal's house in Boston? What had flipped Father Shannon into a state worse than before? Sevovicz's brief, after all, was to bring down O'Connell.

By and large, though, the better side of Sevovicz triumphed. Arching over and above the politics, shady dealings, and crass misjudgments, Sevovicz had retained a faith in sacred vocation. No matter how much the Church bored him, he believed that some men were naturally men of God.

He prided himself on being able to pick them out. In Poland he'd paid a great deal of attention to the seminaries under his control. On those visits, he liked nothing better than to talk to the students. He would bet with himself: Who would stay the course; who wouldn't? And among those whom he ordained, he was always looking for princes. He thought he might even find a king, the first Polish pope.

When he saw Robert Shannon for the first time, he exulted. Whatever damage the man had suffered, he might emerge a triumph. And that
judgment, as Sevovicz often reminded himself, had been made despite appalling conditions.
What an eye I have to be able to do this! I'm so very good at judging them!

His motivation swelled.
When can I get him ready for a great future? When will his mind come back?

He added the points again; the stakes were high.
If Robert recovers, he'll tell all; if O'Connell is toppled, the See of Boston will be vacant; they may ask me to run it, even if only for a time. And do I have here in Robert the makings of the first American pope?

Yet Sevovicz also knew he had a deeper problem. In all his agitation, Robert had never once prayed. Nor, as he admitted, had he said a prayer of any personal value since the first shell shock in France. He'd had no awareness that he no longer prayed, had never registered the fact until Sevovicz had asked him about it.

“Not even when in pain, Robert?”

“No, Your Grace.”

And he did not, as Sevovicz observed, exhibit the slightest embarrassment or shame at not having prayed. He behaved as though prayer had never been a part of his life.

Sevovicz probed. “Sometimes, in extreme circumstances, and I think we have to agree that your circumstances in France were extreme”—the archbishop had once again launched into one of his railway-train sentences—”and indeed they have been extreme ever since— sometimes in these circumstances we blurt out prayers. Indeed, we can shout them should the occasion warrant, and they can be genuine prayers as well as imprecations uttered in good faith and with no disrespect. It is well known that all languages convert the names of their deities into swearwords. Did you never seek to express yourself thus, Robert?”

But Robert had once again fallen asleep.

C
lonmacnoise belongs to Offaly, a midland county in the flat peaty

plain at Ireland's heart. Offaly's name has no connection to the inner organs of beasts and fowls, to lamb's kidneys or chicken livers. It comes from the Irish kingship who once governed it, the O'Connor-Faly family. So Robert heard on the night that he arrived.

He heard further that the name of Clonmacnoise has two roots.
Clon
comes from
cluan,
the Gaelic word for
meadow; mac
means
son,
and there must have been a man called Nós who had a son who owned a meadow. Thus, the meadow of the son of Nós: Clon … mac … noise.

In Ireland, the man who gave Robert this linguistic information used to be called “a strong farmer,” meaning that he produced all his needs on his own farm. His name was Laurence Mullen, he had a wife named Lena, and they had seven children, four boys and three girls.

The Mullens belonged to the Sevovicz network, as had the old man and his boatmaking; the carter with the thatched head; Mr. Reddan and his calf by the fireside and his brother, Father Reddan, the priest in Lorrha; the nuns in Portroe; and the half-blind postman who'd lent Robert a bicycle. They were all watchers in that easy casual network, and all of them loved that they'd been charged with Robert's care.

In 1922, such connections could be made comfortably in Ireland. The contrary seemed the case: poor roads, no straightforward railway system, and little mass media other than the daily newspapers, not all of which reached all parts of the country all the time. But in Ireland word of mouth connects— the smoke signals of chatter, the drums of gossip. And they all told each other that they'd been asked to look out for this wandering Yank. Long before Robert got there, they felt they already knew him.

Laurence Mullen almost betrayed the network. As he greeted Robert he said, “We've been expect—” but his wife, Lena, cut in. “We're always expecting travelers to the abbey, Father. Especially this time of the year.”

Robert had landed in an uncommon household, an educated farm. Most Irish farmers of the time quit school at fourteen. The Mullens hadn't been farmers. They came from Dublin, where both had gone to secondary school and college. Both had then worked in the Civil Service, until Lena inherited this—very prosperous—farm from her unmarried uncle. They told all this to Robert as though he understood every nuance.

Thus far they loved every moment of farming— so they said. Both, though, confessed to missing what they called “informed conversation.” Consequently, they loved visitors. “Stay as long as you like,” they told Robert.

He didn't stay long. And they felt nothing but relief when he left— to their very considerable discredit. It measured Robert's progress that when he arrived in their house he knew he mightn't stay long, because he caught a slight whiff of— appropriate— fear.

Excited by their visitor, the war hero, the Mullens shone with bonhomie and goodwill. They brought him into the parlor, the best room in the house, and filled him with cold chicken and hot soda bread, ancient legends and lore.

Halfway through the meal, a child came into the parlor to whisper, “There's two fellows outside.” Almost as though the light had dimmed, the good mood changed. Lena raised a fierce eyebrow; Laurence left the room and didn't return. In his absence, Lena talked a little faster.

Robert stayed the night, unknowing, uneasy, vaguely alert. By now he had developed a better grasp of the world. He was asking admittedly basic questions about where he was and what lay ahead. That was how he learned the derivation of the name Offaly and about the monastic ruins.

Laurence quoted: “In a quiet watered land, a land of roses. Stands Saint Kieran's city fair.”

Lena said, “It was a huge place. All those abbeys were like small towns.”

They told him the history. It was founded by a Roscommon man, Kieran, whose name means son of a carpenter. Kieran became a priest and went on a pilgrimage out to the west to the famous monk Enda.

“While he was there,” said Lena, “Saint Enda and Saint Kieran had the same identical dream.”

Laurence said, “In the dream they both saw a big tree with tons of fruit. It grew right in the heart of Ireland, beside a wide river, and its branches spread out over the whole country.”

Lena chimed in: “And they dreamed that birds came and took the fruit, and they flew with it all over the world.”

Laurence's turn: “When Kieran and Enda compared dreams, Enda said, ‘Kieran, you're the tree, and the fruit is the word of God.’ “

Lena added, “And Enda said to him, ‘You've to find the right place, on the bank of a great river— you'll know it when you see it— and you have to build a monastery there where you can teach and ordain priests who'll spread the word of God across the world.’ Kieran left Enda and traveled back to the mainland here.”

And Laurence said, “He came in at Loop Head in Clare, and he stopped first at Scattery Island, which you must have seen, Robert, when you came in; it's a big island in the mouth of the Shannon. Another famous monk, Saint Senan, who lived there, showed Kieran how to build a monastery. After that, Kieran traveled on up the Shannon, much as you're doing, Robert, until he found this place and started his abbey. Who knows? Maybe you'll go back to America and do the same.”

Then came the knock on the door, the child's whispered message, and the chill wind blowing through the room.

Next morning Robert ate something he had never seen before. Amid the gleaming ham and eggs lay “black pudding,” a dense, spicy blood sausage as thick as his wrist. The younger children sat and watched every bite go into his mouth. When he looked at any of them, they giggled.

In the yard after breakfast all seven children waited for him. As
though he were the Pied Piper, they walked and danced down to the ruins with him. They showed him the two great crosses, north and south; they pointed out the graves of kings. The stone arch, they said, brought luck to any boy and girl who kissed beneath it— huge giggles. And here was the cathedral—”Wrecked by the English; they wrecked everything”—at which Robert smiled.

The oldest of the children, Raymond, a boy of seventeen, said it was wrecked long before that. He showed Robert the place on the river's bank where the Viking landed in their longboats “and attacked the monks with big shiny hatchets. And if it wasn't them attacking, it was the local chieftains rustling the monastery cattle.”

“And anyway,” said one of his sisters, “they all had the plague.”

“Their skin went yellow,” said another child.

The younger ones ran shrieking, playing hide-and-seek. Robert gave himself up to the power of the children, sat on a ruined wall, and watched them play The rain that everybody had warned against stayed away.

Back in the farmhouse, Lena announced that, after all, they would be “at the hay” later in the day, when the ground had dried out a bit under the sun. After lunch—another huge meal, pork and cabbage and potatoes— Robert murmured that he'd like to rest. In the quiet afternoon he had the soundest, healthiest sleep that he'd known since the exhaustion of France. The Mullens had given him a room in the new part of the house, the building of which had yet to be completed. Raymond, the oldest boy also slept there. A third room seemed empty.

Robert awoke refreshed and sharp. Not a sound could be heard, not a bird, not a breeze. Downstairs he almost knocked over a motorbike he hadn't seen before. Nobody answered when he called through the front door, no dogs came wagging out to meet him; when he saw nobody he assumed they were all in the hayfield. Not knowing where to find them, he walked down to the abbey.