Shannon (35 page)

“How do you feel?” she asked.

He shook his head and shook his head again, in wonder and in wonder again. Yet he ate breakfast, a huge meal; she took coffee, nothing else. A question hung over them: Was it too early in the day? She had stayed in a carefully chosen hotel the previous night, on the porte d'Amont, overlooking the parc de Beauville; he had been billeted with the Australians at Crécy and had two days of leave. He ate on and on; she never took her eyes off him.

Breakfast over, they walked to the park and strolled all around it, stopping now and then along the lakeside. They rarely spoke. She began to weep and could say nothing, but she pulled back her shoulders, squared up, and guided them to the hotel. They went upstairs to their room and clung to each other for several minutes of powerful silence.

That afternoon, they were supposed to attend the Hôtel de Ville for the mandatory civil ceremony, but they never showed up. For two whole days they stayed in bed, skin to skin, each a teacher, each a student, each increasingly passionate, sometimes almost savage. Emotion upon emotion overcame them, from the highest courage, when they spoke
with hope, plans, and daring, to the deepest fears, which they never expressed— they and thousands like them.

As they parted on the final morning, they could scarcely breathe or look at each other for sheer pain. He returned to Crécy and she went to Laon, where she picked up an army transport to Paris and then a train to Le Havre, where she joined a ship to New York— on leave.

Ellie Kennedy, the determined fiancée, the pretty and sweet and adoring bride, never heard from her new husband again. Michael Joyce, as handsome as sunshine, bled to death on the snow during an ordinary Wednesday morning, 11 April 1917, at Bullecourt, near the Belgian border, when the Australians became the meat in a German sandwich.

And so was the knot tied on their particular small legend: a story of wartime love, a two-night honeymoon, a two-month marriage, and violent death. How many thousand times did such a story occur in that shattered Europe? And, although it wasn't supposed to, it would happen all over again in the next generation.

A year later, the young widow, already enlisted as a U.S. Army nurse under her maiden name of Kennedy, went back to France, this time with the marines— to Château-Thierry a few miles from the village named Bouresches and the battlefield named Belleau Wood. Her mother in Ireland said to her father, “I hope she's not trying to die too.”

But she had too much life force for that, and life force became the reason that she connected with the chaplain, Captain Shannon: The energy he had, the pace, the warmth! Long experience among senior officers, coupled with the respect for the priesthood inherent in her Irish Catholic background, enabled her to strike a perfect balance with this vivid man.

When the war ended and all the patients, including Captain Shannon, went home, she resigned her place as an army nurse and returned to Ireland. Her mother died in late 1919 of cancer, and her father, a retired doctor, expired in the summer of 1920 of a broken heart; Ellie was an only child. She had some money, and now she owned the family home; she soon landed on her feet in a senior nursing post at a local hospital. They called themselves lucky to have her.

It proved impossible to keep up with all her old contacts in the army. One or two replied, then never wrote again. People move house all the time. Some died in the war. When her day's work ended, she went home
to her house overlooking the river and, trying to rid herself of her deep bereavement, cried with rage and loneliness each night for a year. Among her tempers and tears flowed memories of the destruction, as she had witnessed it, of Captain Robert Shannon. That night, lying awake, she replayed it for the thousandth time.

He had exploded on the day of his wound. She, dressing it, could not keep his hand from trembling. He couldn't tell her how he had received the wound— but one of the other marines had been there.

The padre, he said, was half carrying one of the men who had fallen, and he was holding an arm out wide to balance himself. This took place a few feet away from the witness, who said he heard a single crack and saw the padre wince and pull his hand in, as though stung badly.

The wounded marine whom Captain Shannon had been carrying was taken away to the field hospital. She looked at the chaplain. Why was he standing there with his mouth gaping open like a witless man? He was holding up a bleeding hand like a dog with an injured paw. And he bled as though he had been reefed with a sharp knife.

Nurse Kennedy grabbed him and sat him down; he stood up again, bolt upright, very hard and fast.

“Sit down, Captain!”

He didn't hear, didn't sit.

“Captain, let me see.”

She had to grapple for his hand. When she cleaned it she believed she knew what had happened: An enemy sniper's bullet had cut a deep furrow across the knuckles of the captain's hand, outstretched for balance; in fact his other thumb had been hit as well. How the bullet had not entered his body was something she couldn't understand. She understood it even less when she gouged some lead fragments from the damaged thumb of the other hand.

Next morning, she saw him in the medical tent. He still had the dressing on one hand, the heavy bandage on the other. But he was standing rigid as a statue and looking off toward the distant battlefield, wincing at the bursts of gunfire. Systematically, in robot steps, he set out toward the firing, then— still within the tent— he turned in a circle and began to spin and shake.

Nurse Kennedy knew instantly that the chaplain's war was over. She called an orderly who rushed to help. Captain Shannon kept twisting and turning on his feet until the orderly all but tripped him up; he fell awkwardly like a big child, into the orderly's arms.

Then began the trembling. He shook from head to foot. They heard his teeth rattle. He ripped a thin red slash along his chin with a fingernail as he clawed at his mouth. And he began to weep and moan and rant.

By now the medical corps had seen many men like this, but the chaplain's manifestation astonished them. More powerfully, it caused an easement in their attitude toward other shell-shock victims. If it could happen to such a man, should it not be looked at differently? One marine even had a death sentence commuted. He had been due to be shot at noon for deserting the battlefield. When the officers saw that Captain Robert Shannon, of all people, had now begun to suffer the same ailment, they rescinded their mistaken judgments.

“Even when shattered,” Nurse Kennedy remarked to the colonel, “Captain Shannon is saving lives.”

They hauled him across the tent like a sack of grain and dumped him onto a field hospital bed; it was all they could manage. He had completely lost his senses. When the senior officers came to see him, the chaplain's derangement shocked them. He rolled his eyes without seeing. He clenched his fists so fiercely that he drew blood from his palms. He made noises with his mouth, sounds that could not be called language.

Two men and Nurse Kennedy held him down to control his thrashing body and limbs. In no way did this resemble the sane, quick, and stylish man known to them all. It was after that inspection that the officers took their decision to review all such erratic manifestations.

Casualties from Belleau Wood— and there were hundreds— left the American lines in trains of transports every day. Some went to Paris; a few officers and extreme cases went to Dieppe. The colonel ordered Nurse Kennedy to prepare Captain Shannon, and he wrote the necessary papers. From that moment she lost all contact with the chaplain.

Before she resigned from the army and returned to Ireland, Nurse Kennedy put an inquiry through military channels as to the chaplain's
progress. She never received a reply. Nor did she ever stow him away in an attic of her mind; he remained in the front room of her thoughts.

Of late, her life more settled, her griefs under control, she had been contemplating a visit back to the United States one day. Among other renewals of acquaintance she hoped to find “Captain Shannon,” as she still thought of him.

O
n his voyage to Ireland, nothing in the world came by to help Archbishop Sevovicz. Nothing sweetened his temper, nothing gentled his mood, not even the ocean's famed ability to promote better, deeper sleep. He remained twitchy and strained. Anxiety made him angry and worry made him rude; he snapped at waiters, pursers, and fellow passengers alike.

The voyage was slowed by two days owing to some exceptional iceberg activity. Captains in the North Atlantic had become as nervous as cats since the
Titanic
disaster a decade before. On the last night Sevovicz, by now prey to mounting horrors, drank a bingeful of Scotch in his cabin.

He disembarked at the southernmost Irish port of Queenstown, now being called Cobh—”Pronounce it
cove,”
they told him— and proceeded to the city of Cork. He took a suite at the Imperial Hotel.

A long way from his frail protégé, in a land of which he knew nothing, Sevovicz saw the irony.
I'm more adrift now than I was on that wretched boat.

Why had he not thought to board a ship that would have taken him close to the Shannon River? He could have gone into Limerick itself.

Nor had he given any thought at all as to how he would travel about the countryside trying to find Robert Shannon. Obviously he would seek to contact a useful priest or bishop, but this brought another problem: He foresaw interfering chatter; Cardinal O'Connell had many friends in the Irish Church.

And over and above all these thoughts stood the problem of Robert Shannon's safety. From time to time, day and night, Sevovicz became almost frantic with anxiety, but he quelled it and told himself,
I have a more serious task than I thought. Not only do I have to save his soul, I have to save his body— if he's still alive!

Sevovicz knew dangerous men when he saw them. Killers thrive on sentimentality and high notions. The Lizards showed a disturbing blend of sanctimoniousness coupled with ruthlessness; he had seen that combination often in the Vatican. These men transacted business with His Eminence; they didn't want that arrangement disrupted, no matter how pitiable the disrupter. Such thoughts filled Sevovicz's body with knives. His stomach took the stabbing blows; he had spent much of the time in his bathroom aboard ship.

Next morning in Cork, Sevovicz reverted to type and did what any country boy would do— he acquired local knowledge. In civilian clothes he walked around the city— or tried to; he was stopped at barricades everywhere, and that sent his heart racing again.

Inquiries confirmed his rising fear; he had indeed sent Robert into a hot and awful civil war.
Did O'Connell know about this strife when the trip was proposed? Was the haste with which His Eminence wanted Robert to go connected in any way to knowledge that O'Connell was getting from Ireland? God Almighty! He may not know of the assassination plot— but isn't this as bad?

Sevovicz bought a map, then had an early drink in a pub and found willing talkers. He told them he was a fisherman. They tried to send him to the Blackwater River, thirty miles north of the city, “famous for the salmon.” He insisted on the Shannon. They outlined his problems: transport and soldiers. About the soldiers he could do nothing, but he could get hold of a motor bicycle.

The shipping agency's representative in Cork arranged all the banking. Sevovicz's letter of credit purchased his transport, and he paid for
three riding and basic mechanical lessons. Then, leaving his luggage in the hotel, having repacked for pillion and panniers, he set off. With his frog's-eye goggles and his cap turned backward, his tweed coat, and his leather gauntlets, he looked like a creature from the old days of the moon.

Ellie Kennedy lived in the central part of Ireland's flat midlands. She had a good life there. Well known and well liked locally, she had inherited the respect given to her parents. Her father's profession had assured him and his family of comfortable acceptance among all creeds and classes. And her mother had been a loving and involved wife.

Growing up in that house, Ellie had lived in peace and ease. Since childhood she had wanted to take over her father's medical practice. Already cherished by her parents, she was given as good an education as she could get up to the age of eighteen. Thereafter, when she discovered that as a woman she couldn't gain admission to a medical school, she had opted for her mother's old profession, nursing.

Politics didn't touch her, nor religious prejudice, nor economic difficulty. When her parents died, the house— always beloved— became her compensation. She had the good fortune to own a large farm with it, one of the few local pockets of fertile ground, and she rented out most of the land, keeping only such garden as she needed. The farm income added to the parental inheritance and the salary from her nursing. By any standards she could call herself well off.

Three bereavements in four years had rocked her, shaken her to the core: dashing bridegroom, reliable mother, beloved father. She hurled herself into her practical life, remaking the house as she wanted it, setting up her hospital responsibilities as she knew they needed to be.