Shannon (34 page)

T
hey didn't touch; they didn't even shake hands. He stood by the door, steadying himself. She ushered him in ahead of her. Down the same passageway he went again with its mysterious doors. Into the circular lobby he stepped, with its dim disappearing corridors, and walked once more through that enchanted final doorway into the room with the red-brick herringbone floor.

Now he steadied himself by holding on to the back of the chair at the head of the table, the man's chair. She walked behind him and moved the chair so that he would sit down. At which point she walked across the kitchen and stood with her back to the fire, folding her arms across her bosom as though cold. It was almost nine o'clock in the evening, and darkness had begun to fall.

What do people say to each other in such charged reunions? How does the human spirit reach across such a divide and establish a working norm?

At last she managed to speak. “How are you, Captain?” But she said it in a way that didn't call for an essential or urgent answer. Her words didn't hurry him, didn't hustle him— just a soft slow, “How are you, Captain?” and then she waited.

If he hadn't answered that night, or the next day, or the next, she'd have continued to wait until he was ready.

He nodded his head, slowly, like an old man.

“I'm— better. I think.”

Hearing his words, and taking them as a reference to the world she had known with him, she did what she always did in any new challenge: She took practical control.

“Here. Give me your jacket.” She stood him up again, began to ease open the rucksack's straps, and then unbuttoned the jacket. Up to now on his journey Robert had fought off anybody who'd gone close to that rucksack, as though his whole life dwelt in there.

“That shirt is too thin, Captain,” she said. “Wait.”

She walked to a closet, took out a large woolen cardigan, and helped him into it. “This used to be my father's. He was about your build.” Clearing a pathway across the floor, she said, “Come over here by the fire,” and led him to one of the two large settles. “When did you eat?”

He sat down and looked at her, shrugged his shoulders, spread his hands, and smiled as he had not yet smiled on this journey, as he had not smiled since before he'd lost his soul at Belleau Wood. Then he closed his eyes. Nurse Elizabeth Kennedy, not often flustered, sat down with a bump.

In a moment she stood again, turned to a closet, pulled forth a white tablecloth, and began to set the table. At first she set it for one person, and then repeated everything. Thereafter, food and materials appeared.

A kettle was filled with water and hung over the fire to boil. Candles in brass candlesticks were lit and twinkled above the white tablecloth. Within minutes a full meal was ready: cold meats and cheese, a fresh comb of honey on a blue-rimmed plate, a hunk of soda bread that had been baked that afternoon, two jars of her own chutney— a feast.

All of this she achieved with swiftness and quiet, because she had looked across and seen that Captain Shannon had fallen asleep by the fire.

She walked quietly to the large settle opposite him and sat down, intending to wait for as long as it took, but he awoke almost immediately, so she gestured to the table. Before they sat, she led him to the rear hallway and into a small bathroom, where she tipped cold water from a pitcher into a basin. She stood by with a towel, and when he was ready she patted his face and dried his hands, finger by finger.

As yet he had spoken only those few words: “I'm—better. I think.”

At her direction, Robert sat in the chair that had been her father's. She made a pot of tea and settled down at his right hand. He took possession of his place by moving cup, plate, and cutlery just a little. She served him food from the platters of meat and bread. They began to eat. Although she had dined earlier, she ate a second meal. Seen from a distance and high above, they looked like two people for whom this had long been a nightly circumstance.

Since boyhood, eating had always improved Robert Shannon's mood— unlike his mother, who always became slightly melancholy after a meal. Now, tonight, in the warm kitchen of the Irish nurse, he might have been a beast that had returned to its cave, its fire, and its food. When he finished, he smiled and sat back carefully.

“You asked how I am,” he said. “I believe I'm improving.”

She said, “The beard?”

He said, “I've been hiking.”

She said, “When did you come to Ireland?”

“I'm not sure.”

“Is this about your family name?”

He said, “Yes. How did you know?”

“You told me. In France.”

The reminder moved him to silence. He looked into the distance, at nothing. Again, she never hustled him, never pushed, just waited.

“They've been trying to make me better.”

She said, “How is it working?”

“I think I can get better. There are times when— when it's bad.”

“I can see that your appetite is all right. Do you sleep well?”

“I sleep often. Very often. I'm sleepy much of the time.”

“But you can't sleep while you're hiking— and you chose to hike. So you intend to get better.”

He nodded, looking at her now, seeing her.

She said, “If you intend to get better, you'll recover everything—” She paused, interrupted by the knowledge she had acquired in the meantime about the great number of shell-shock victims who had taken their own lives.

“Will you help me?”

She said, “Of course I'll help you, Captain.”

“Robert.”

“All right. Robert. Not Captain. Father, maybe?”

He shook his head.

She said, “You'll want to sleep again.”

Taking a candlestick, she led him through the house, showing him every room. Next to the kitchen she opened the door to her pantry— a long narrow room with jars of jams and jellies, tall buckets of preserved eggs, a brace of pheasants yet to be plucked, several deep boxes of hay to store apples, half a dozen cubes of honey.

Homemade brooms stood against the wall; an assortment of aprons and overalls hung from wooden pegs. This room had served many generations.

After these comforting sights, she showed Robert a drawing room with deeply stuffed armchairs and lace antimacassars, a piano, red flock wallpaper, and oval portraits. Tall flurries of dried grasses stood in high vases.

The dining room's long austere table had not been used since her father's funeral. Likewise the breakfast room, where a round table, capable of no more than two people, sat behind shutters that opened out onto a garden terrace. Next to the little bathroom she opened a door, and across a stretch of garden stood the small outhouse.

Upstairs, she showed him a large bathroom and explained that she brought up hot water in kettles for a bath. The other five doors led to bedrooms— including the room where he was to sleep. He did not yet know that she led him to the largest bedroom in the house. Anybody sitting on its bow window seat looked out on the garden and onto the river at the bottom of the slope.

She took care to show him the door to her room, said, “If you need anything during the night,” and pointed to a small bell on a table on the landing. “Once a nurse”— she smiled—”always a nurse.”

Within minutes Robert Shannon had climbed into bed; soon he would fall into a deep and long sleep. Not so Ellie Kennedy, who lay awake for most of the night.

During her second voyage of July 1922, RMS
Celtic
enjoyed the calmest seas of the year so far, which was just as well— she had sailed close to full.

On most of these great liners, the first-class passengers took care when dressing for each meal. Every day before lunch, the baskers and saunterers quit the decks to dress in their cabins. One particular noontide, a day and a half out of New York, with the sun at its highest point in the sky, only two people remained out of doors. In a little pocket of her aft sun-deck, a young man looked down at the ship's extravagant wake. With some effort he had contrived to remain alone since New York. People did observe him, though— he had distinction.

More than six feet tall, he was thirty years old and handsome as a lord. In baggy cream linen trousers, he wore today an exquisite cream shirt with a green-and-mauve ascot under the striped blazer of a rich sportsman. Beneath his gaze, the ocean's foam boiled from the two biggest propeller screws in the world.

On the opposite side of the deck, another young man, not at all a dandy, saw his chance and sauntered over.

“Great ship, old man, right?”

The big dandy glanced around at this approach and looked the newcomer up and down. Then he went back to viewing the ship's wake. But the second young man pressed forward.

“I've been watching you. Since we left home. I think I know about you.” He moved in until they stood close together at the side rail. “I'm traveling alone too. And I also have my reasons.”

The big man looked harder at him, then surveyed the deck behind them. Seeing it deserted, he whipped up his elbow. A bone cracked in the jaw of the second young man and dazed him. The big dandy grabbed collar and belt and heaved the second young man over the rail; the body fell like a large doll down the high steep side of the superstructure. Some minutes later, red flecks appeared in the ship's magnificent wake.

It was 18 July, the day Robert Shannon knocked for the second time on Nurse Kennedy's yellow door.

In her life since the war, in the almost four years since she'd come back to Ireland, Elizabeth Josephine Kennedy had often asked herself,
Why didn't I write to his parents? Why? But how do you tell devoted parents of such distress in their only child? He's probably the light of their lives.

Nevertheless she accused herself of cowardice. Later she called her
own actions compassionate. Later still, she justified herself further— and more accurately—by thinking,
This war's giving me my own troubles.

If, in February 1917, you had been in the town of Amiens, seventy or so miles north of Paris, around ten o'clock one morning, you might have seen Nurse Kennedy. She was the crisp young woman in a new coat, gloves, and a hat with a veil, who walked determinedly along the boulevard Carnot to the train station.

When a train arrived, a young man stepped from it. He and Nurse Kennedy embraced and walked across the railway line. Such scenes have been played ever since on millions of flickering screens; in that war this tragic cliché was born.

The man, straw-haired and tanned, in Australian uniform, looked so striking, so handsome, that even the men of Amiens stared at him in the bright cold morning. When the couple entered the cathedral, she steered him to a side aisle, then down past scores of dim pews to a door on which she knocked. They entered a small vestry room, where a detailed conversation in French took place between “Mees Kenn-e-dee” and a warmhearted priest who had a face as flat and shiny as a platter.

The priest soothed her. He told her that everything was
—Oui! Oui!—
in order, shook hands warmly with the uniformed young man, and said passionate words to him, which Ellie translated. “He says, Thank you, thank you from his heart, for all you are doing for his beloved beautiful France. And he says that our papers are perfect and he expects his mother and his housekeeper at any moment to witness.”

Within moments the door opened again, and two women came in, both matronly, both wearing hats. The priest introduced them; as the young Australian said later, it was difficult to say which was the housekeeper and which the mother. Both ladies dropped a slight curtsy of awe to the big blond officer.

His name was Michael Joyce, of the Australian 48th Regiment. Months earlier, in Washington, D.C., he saw this Irish nurse write her name in a visitor's book as they entered a party in the Military General Hospital.

“E-L-L-I-E,” he spelled. “Rhymes with
belly.”

She looked at his name. “Well. Michael … Joyce. Are you a boy or a girl?”

Love latches on to such silly banter. She arranged all the marriage papers
and even found an Irish friend who knew the bishop of Amiens— which is why she chose the cathedral, to be near the source of power in case anything went wrong.

A little procession formed, led by the priest in his white surplice, long black cassock, and purple stole. One matron took Ellie's arm, the other took Michael's, and they walked slowly from the vestry room to the high altar. All through the ceremony, tears flowed in sheets of shining water down the faces of the two witnesses.

At the end, the priest congratulated the couple— congratulated everyone— and led them down the long nave to the front door, walking on the brilliant lines of the labyrinth's black floor graphics. He led them as he might have led a king and queen.

Nobody else saw them, and outside the cathedral, France's tallest church, only the sun greeted them. Everybody shook hands, the matrons insisted
— insisted—
on kissing the young Australian, and everybody kissed Ellie on both cheeks. Priest and matrons stood and watched as the young couple walked away arm in arm down the street.

On the rue Lamartine they sat in a café. Neither spoke for a moment.