Shannon (39 page)

He also found that after a mere two days of writing— which did, and always would, leave him exhausted— he began to depend upon Nurse Kennedy more and more. The formality of their past began to fall away, and finally he began to use the name Ellie when he thought of her.

Soon, a third dimension swept in; he suspected that he was writing for her. Not just to please her, not simply to impress her; he was writing because he wanted her to know what his world had been in those June days in a French wheat field. She too had been part of this apocalypse; she too had been one of the war's playthings on those blood-sodden fields.

And as all these thoughts and emotions took hold, slowly, gradually, and notably at the beginning and end of each day, a new set of feelings surged into his spirit with irresistible force and surprise.

These had nothing to do with his history of shell shock, nothing to
do with his fragility, nothing to do with his slowly increasing grasp of his condition and his gradual emergence from it. The woman in whose house he now dwelt had begun to grow in importance. Her place on the earth began to have a significance to him that he had not observed in any other human being.

In his prewar days, he would have said, if asked, “Well, of course I love my parents,” and he would have meant it; he would have been describing accurate feelings. If pressed further he would have described an unerring and unjudgmental fondness for his mother, which he would speak of with a smile and an evident delight at being asked to think about it.

But if required to define his relationship with his father, if asked to reply candidly to the same question, he would have taken pause. And then he would have said, not with a smile but with a grave joy and a dignified thoughtfulness, “My father? Well, he's different.”

He would have been understating a love that he could not describe, a concern for every cell and blood vessel of his father, a need to know all— and more— about this man from whom he took every example for his life. By way of words he would have reached for
admiration,
and
respect,
and
a desire to embrace and be embraced.
With his mother he expected such connection; with his father it had remained more understood than practiced. And, partly because it was never given expression, it had grown massive.

Slowly, tentatively, this same flavor of near-worship now began to enter his consideration of Ellie Kennedy, as did the same reticence of expression. He looked on her with fond respect and admiration— but he could never say or do anything to convey it.

For her part, she watched him as though he were her infant. She looked at, scrutinized, and questioned every mood and every nuance of every mood. She developed not just a sixth sense, but a seventh, eighth, ninth— a hundredth sense, where he was concerned.

She became especially watchful during this period when he was writing. Often he fell asleep at the table, his head sprawled among the pens and the pages. She took care not to wake him up; she allowed him to discover his own condition. And she took the greatest care of all not to invade him. Though she found it more and more difficult, she kept her distance— apart from the rewarding touch on his arm every day.

One morning, after little more than two weeks of writing, Robert came down late. He looked ashen; he seemed almost as withdrawn as when he first arrived. Ellie said nothing, switched into nurse mode, and did the practical thing of arranging food that bridged breakfast to lunch: She took everything out to the garden, into which the sun had just strolled. They ate in silence. He seemed unendurably moved, sighing, blinking, morbidly quiet.

When he thawed he said, “I've written as much about Belleau Wood as I want to. Or ever can again.”

His delivery of this decision took place at a time (she had observed) when he seemed at his most delicate— early afternoon. She watched him extra closely. He sat sipping milk, and she cleared most of the dishes into the house. During the period of writing— after that rocky and often catatonic start— he had become more loquacious as the day wore on and more sensible, his thoughts more connected.

Now he sipped some more milk, frosting his upper lip. In this sunlight, it seemed that his looks had begun to return. The reducing weakness had gone from his chin and his mouth almost had a firm line again.

Ellie said, “There's no need to write any more if you don't want to.”

She wanted to ask him,
How has it left you feeling? What has it done to your emotions?
But she found that he answered the question without being asked.

“I thought I would be drained,” he said. “And in a way I am. But I have also been filled by it.”

When admitting a patient for the first time, if no doctor were present, she had been taught to ask,
What do you think this pain is? She
believed that, as did many of her contemporaries in medicine:
The patient always knows.

Now she asked, “What do you think caused the damage to you in France?”

He said nothing for three, maybe four minutes. By now she had learned to wait, sitting out the lurch of fear that she might have asked a question too far. When eventually he did reply, he said, “I know what caused the first damage.”

“The first?” She knew nothing as yet of his relapse.

“Belleau.”

Carefully she asked, “Does anything stand out above anything else?”

He wanted to talk; he became energized, if a little disjointed, in his speech.

“It was the moment when I began to understand that I could never in my life again see something I couldn't immediately identify— and— and not start to believe it was a human body. You know what I mean? If I walked down that road out there tomorrow, and I saw what looked like a small pile of garbage, I would ask myself, Is it a corpse?”

He sat up, his face screwing into different expressions as though he mustered force to find the right words and then push them out.

“Now, think of it. I'm ordained as a priest to revere life. I'm ordained to believe that each and every one of us is a miracle of creation. Then— to find this creation has been reduced to garbage? To find that a wonderful, strong, handsome boy has been reduced to a pile of flapping offal? And to get up on my knees and look across a field of wheat and see hundreds of these heaps—”

He stopped and took her hand as an adult would take a child's hand.

“The moment of destruction, the point at which my soul left my body— and I do believe it did— came when I returned to our lines one day and saw you.”

“Me?” She almost started back from him but disciplined herself; she did not wish to disturb him now with an excess of response. “What did I have to do with it?”

“I was helping a boy who was wounded. You saw me, didn't you? You saw me at the same time?”

“Yes,” she said. “You helped get him to where we were. In the tents. You were always doing that.”

“Did I seem normal, Ellie?”

“Yes. Like always.”

“And then what happened?”

“You went— well, you went wild. We had to hold you down. Do you remember that?”

He said, “Vaguely. I think I remember it.”

“Yes,” she said, “and then you started running around, almost in a circle.”

“Did I say anything?”

“No. A kind of senseless yelling, that was all. Do you remember that?”

He said, “You were the last thing I remember. I saw you when I came into the tent with the wounded boy. You know that all the officers thought you lovely. When I came in, I looked across and saw you— in dreadful surroundings, pressed and clean in your uniform, busy and composed and organized, the picture of what a woman should look like. I reckon the contrast with what I had just come from— it must have been too much for me. I had come from seeing Death to seeing Life. That's what I remember thinking. Probably the last thought I had.”

“Robert, I haven't the words for this. I'm only a nurse.”

“Do you feel that what I'm saying— do you think it's truthful?” he said.

“I was there. That's what I know is truthful. I'm not talking about the facts of the battle, the day, the guns, the transports, all that. I'm talking about— I don't know. I suppose the being there, just— the being there.”

“Why should any human being ever have had to go through that?” he said. “I don't want to be trite— but what kind of God could allow that? They were
boys,
Ellie. They were boys. Yes: keen, fierce, trained. But you saw them. With their bad jokes. Flirting with you. Or awkward. Shy. All that pride. You saw them: boys.”

At the little stone jetty where Captain Aaronson had put Robert ashore in Ireland, two men on bicycles looked at the same green weeds that Robert had seen. One was dressed exquisitely for a country day: tweed knickerbockers, striped tie, Norfolk jacket. Big and hefty, he had hands that had once ripped the jaw off a grown man. The other was a small, nippy little crook and looked it.

No old black freighter appeared on the river that morning, nothing but cormorants and wheeling gulls. The two bicyclists turned away and, as Robert had done, ascended the slope into the village of Tarbert.

In a village shop they were told that, yes, other Americans often came through looking for their family roots, and indeed a Yank had been staying around here, but he was gone. Willingly the woman in the shop identified the house where, she was certain, he had stayed for two or three weeks.

The big man and his squirty sidekick rode their bicycles along the same little road that Robert had taken from the village. Past the same big beech tree they went, and at the gate to the small house they dismounted. The big man smiled to himself; he enjoyed the art of persuasion— or in his hands was it a science?

Shep, the mutt, the mongrel, saw the pair clamber down from their bicycles, but he didn't dash out. The big man held up a hand directing Squirt to stay out on the road. Shep kept back, pacing anxiously; a growl would have formed in his throat had he not been such a show-off sissy of a dog.

Through her window, Molly O'Sullivan had seen the two men but hadn't allowed them to see her. At the second knock she trembled at the force with which the door shook— and at the third she emerged. Mr. Vincent stepped right into her kitchen, uninvited. He took off his cap, as a gentleman should. For this particular inquiry he had decided on a change of strategy. He would abandon the general “roots” line and home in tighter.

“Pardon me, ma'am, I've come from Boston in the United States, and I'm trying to find my poor cousin. He may have been through here some weeks ago.”

“Now what was his name, sir?” said Molly.

“Robert Shannon.”

“And what would he be doing here?”

“He hasn't been well, ma'am. His mind was injured in the war in Europe. I was there too, and I know how he suffered.”

“Oh.”

“I'm afraid, ma'am, that some foolish people thought a journey alone would be good for him. Did you by any chance see him?”

Molly said, “Would that be about the middle week in June?”

Mr. Vincent, eager and charming, said, “Yes, ma'am.”

Molly, with a thoughtful face, said, “I saw a youngish man, definitely a Yank, walking the road one day here.”

“Do you happen to know where he went?”

Molly pointed out the direction that Robert had eventually taken.

Mr. Vincent raised his cap again, such a gentleman, and said, “Thank you, ma'am.”

He stepped out of the house.

Memories attacked him— of a similar long narrow house that had only had a few rooms and didn't even have a stone floor. The old voices began to scream through the caves of his mind; when younger he had actually put his hands over his ears to shut them out. Behind him, Molly began to close the door, having ensured that Shep had come in.

But Mr. Vincent turned— no, he swiveled— and walked back to the door. He opened it rudely and strode in, slamming the door behind him. Molly pressed herself back against the picture of Joseph Sarto, Pope Pius X, good friend to Cardinal O'Connell— and Mr. Vincent, not raising his cap, said, “Ma'am?”

This time, he didn't have to explain himself. He reached out a huge hand and held it inches from her chin. The fingers curled in imitation of a strangler's grip and she knew he could have lifted her off the ground. But he didn't touch her. No assault took place.

Molly, stricken with fear, said, “Go and ask my husband. He talked to him.” She thumbed east. “He's out there behind the house with my brothers. Joe!” she called.

Mr. Vincent, not wishing to engage at this stage with a group of men, left the house with swift grace. Molly, beautiful Molly with her high cheekbones, all but collapsed. When she looked out and saw that the two cyclists had traveled on, she ran through the back door and hurried a mile across the fields to the farm where Joe was working.

Mr. Vincent and Squirt rode away fast. Next they reached the iced-cake castle where, on summer days, Miranda lay in wait for passing strangers. When she heard approaching travelers, she would peer through a screen of trees and assess the oncomer. Then she would pounce— or not. Lately she had begun to fret regarding the unstoppability of motorcars and motorcycles; this morning the voices of the two cyclists alerted her.