Shannon (9 page)

A tiny girl in a cream lace dress popped out from under the gateway tower. She looked at Robert with suspicion— and then beckoned to him and turned away. He stopped and looked after her; she turned and beckoned again, so Robert followed her across the grass margin of the road. She walked several yards farther, deep into the property, but Robert hesitated. Then, from behind him, he heard grunts of effort and looked over his shoulder. A man dripping wet, in a one-piece black bathing suit, climbed over the wall from the direction of the river. He stepped into the roadway and nodded to Robert.

“I rather like the water as cold as this. Good to be braced, eh? Oh, that's my daughter, Miranda.” One strap of the bathing suit had slipped off his shoulder. His skin glowed a gentle mauve, and some green weed decorated his bald patch. He held out a dripping hand and smiled; Robert shook the clammy fingers.

The wet man padded barefoot through the arched gateway and hobbled up the graveled driveway toward the castle, overtaking his small daughter, who had stopped. Miranda waited for Robert to catch up, and when he did she set off again.

Ahead of them, near the longer part of the building, the man who said he was her father stopped and peeled off his sodden bathing suit, threw it onto the grass, and walked naked into the house, his lank, sickly white buttocks swallowed by a closing door.

Miranda led Robert around the corner of the castle into a wide lawned garden with evergreen topiary. A row of cone-shaped shrubs stood on the grass like green servants; gravel paths stretched between them. Miranda spun left; Robert felt the rucksack swing across his shoulders as he turned sharply to follow her.

They passed from the castle's immediate vicinity and into wilder gardens. In the distance, Jersey cows, their tan-colored hides peacefully wrinkled, browsed in an open field.

The child climbed a stile in a stone wall, and when Robert followed he found himself on a farm lane rutted with tracks. They followed this for fifty yards or so, until they came to a fork. One branch of the lane led off toward sheds and farm buildings, and the other, now taken by Robert and Miranda, led into darkness at noon. The shade was caused by a garden of huge plants, greater and taller than anything Robert had ever before seen. These enormous gunneras— and the palm trees in the next field— received their license to grow wild from the balmy climate of the North Atlantic drift, the Gulf Stream licking Ireland's shores.

Miranda had skin like cream enamel, red spots on her cheeks like a painted doll, and hair shiny black as a crow's wing. She led Robert under the great tall leaves to a fallen tree trunk that had been set with cracked old china cups, plates, a teapot with no lid, and discarded cutlery, most of which had no handles. As a tablecloth she had spread one of the giant leaves. Robert fingered its velvety surface as he stood and looked at the table with its settings and at the tremendous foliage above his head blocking the day. The light darkened further and it began to rain; he felt no more than a drop or two but heard the heavy raindrops plodding down on the thick vegetation. Miranda hadn't spoken a word.

Robert had scant experience with small children. An only child with few— and older— cousins, he had no relations of his own age. And since he had spent most of his early life in boarding school, he had known little social time with anyone younger than himself. All he could do now was watch and be led.

Miranda looked at him from under her bangs of black hair and picked up one of the teacups. Silently she grasped the teapot and poured a cup of invisible tea. She lurched toward Robert, handed him the cup, and began to pour into another cup. She drank and Robert did the same, tipping his cup back to the last drop, as did Miranda, and she nodded her approval.

She took the empty cup from him and laid it on the table, put her thumb in her mouth, took his hand, and led him out of the greenery. The rain, sudden to start, had been sudden to stop. This time they walked in the opposite direction and soon emerged on a neater and more cultivated part of the estate.

An old farm building with graceful ruined walls stood beneath some trees. Silently she took him inside the ruin and pointed to a bench with old blankets, then made an elaborate gesture which he took to mean that she sometimes rested there. She also showed him a small wooden chest with, inside, two dolls asleep in a little bed.

Outside again, they walked on and reached the rear of the main building. Miranda, her bright hair gleaming beside Robert's elbow, opened a door. They stood on the large gray and black stone flags of the castle hallway. Sunlight polished the air, and Robert caught a seminary odor of beeswax. His eyes widened with delight. A mahogany table, dark and rich, stood against one wall. Carved swags of fruit dripped from beneath its edges; the top shoulder of each leg bore a confident sculpted face; each ball-and-claw foot dominated its sector of the floor. Sometime, somewhere, a god had feasted at this table.

The walls of the hallway wore the color of mushroom; tall mirrors glittered on some, and on one wall hung the painting of a woman in an ornate yellow gown; she had chosen not to smile for the artist. In a corner stood a marble statue on a pedestal, a draped lady, cool and reserved, wishing to be alone. On the floor by each of the six doors stood jade vases mad with dragons, and serene porcelain urns. Other pottery and china sat in random little sets around the hall, on tables and on windowsills.

From where he stood, Robert could glimpse distant rooms. As alluring as jeweled caves, they had brilliant glass jars, long tapestries, chairs of velvet and chintz. He began to move in their direction, but Miranda commandeered his hand again. She led him firmly up a staircase and
along a creaking passageway. Here the walls carried maps of riverside lands and boating charts; they might have been drawn by orderly spiders whose legs had been dipped in brown ink.

Miranda pointed to a yellow door and then to herself and made the same sleep indication that he had seen in the ruined building outside: hands under her cheek, head to one side, eyes closed. Then she pointed to Robert and, still using the same gesture, showed him a green door, as much as to say,
And you will sleep in here.

She led Robert through the green door into a room of green walls, where curtains fell from the ceiling to the floor in great swags of green and yellow, partly obscuring the windows. Pointing to the bed, she walked backward to the door, waved her fingers, and disappeared, closing the door. Robert would not have been surprised to hear a bolt slam home.

He hauled the rocky haversack off his back and sat in a deep armchair. Too tired for the moment to address the puzzle of this establishment, he looked all around the room and then gazed out on the river. The place had a draping peace— and yet the child had seemed disturbed. A clock somewhere chimed noon. He leaned back in the chair and fell immediately into a deep sleep.

Did he dream? Since being in France, Robert Shannon had dreamed almost every time he'd fallen asleep. When he had first come to the O'Sullivans’ house, he'd hoped in vain that the dreams might stop, to give him ease from their fractured sights. Over the days and nights, though, they grew somewhat lighter. True, he still saw the fangs of war, but he also had mornings when he awoke more calmly, throbbing to softer melodies.

Had he been more aware, more astute about his own emotions, he would have identified the fact that the quality of his dreams had a connection to his level of exhaustion. Now, in this white castle by the river, tired but not fatigued, he dreamed safer dreams, brief and with pleasant comfort.

In one fragment, his father sat at the table in Sharon, reading a newspaper— that was all. In another, a horse seemed to clomp along somewhere, a tawny docile animal. He dreamed something about the nurse at Belleau Wood, Nurse Kennedy; she had tied back her hair and
he was asking her about it. In the same fragment, Robert sat in a deep peaceful armchair, safe and thoughtful, while Nurse Kennedy stood quiet and watchful nearby. And he dreamed about the archbishop; he often dreamed about the archbishop.

Few of his own priests back in Poland liked Archbishop Anthony Sevovicz. They thought him too political, too self-seeking, too shrewd for the open face of priesthood. Also, they felt uncomfortable in his presence; at six feet five, he loomed over most of them, and they knew he used his physical size to intimidate them.

More than that, he kept them at a distance. He never made confidants of his clergy; he shared no diocesan or other church secrets with them; for his own confession he went outside his own archdiocese to Lublin.

Sevovicz had come to the United States in the summer of 1920 because Cardinal William “Bill” O'Connell, the controversial Archbishop of Boston, had his hand forced by the Vatican. Rome wanted an extra pair of eyes in the archdiocese, and they sent in Sevovicz as a coadjutor bishop. “This crazy Pole,” as O'Connell called him, spoke excellent English. He had been sold to the cardinal by Vatican contacts as an excellent fixer, a man who could troubleshoot all problems of a personal nature.

And he would need to be all of these things, because nobody else in any American church of any denomination at that time wielded the power and influence of Bill O'Connell. A deal maker, a turner of the blind eye, a force of nature, he ran the Archdiocese of Boston with a rare and spectacular ruthlessness. He conducted his world like an emperor and wrapped his secular dealings, which were numerous and, to many, unbecoming, in the purple of the episcopacy.

His Eminence lived richly, with obviously expensive tastes. He built a lavish house— not for nothing was this prelate's residence called a palace. He was as tough as teak and his flock loved him; with them he was unassailable, because the Catholics of Boston had long needed a religious hero. They still suffered from the long whip of anti-Catholicism, endemic all across North America since the Pilgrims, but now they had a warlord who took on the Protestant Brahmins.

The Boston Catholics also loved O'Connell's force of personality.

They loved his style. How could they not chuckle with delight at the fact that their own man, their Cardinal Bill, had held up a pope's election until he was there to vote?

His clergy, however, saw him differently. Many condemned the way he managed his episcopacy. He made all his appointments with a view to total control. His bishops, administrators, diocesan committee members, senior clergy— they all knew they had been chosen for docility. Of the three holy vows that priests took, their archbishop most wanted obedience. As to poverty and chastity— those, he seemed to think, were their own business.

All across the American Catholic hierarchy, he had numerous detractors. Some spoke their ferocity in private; others stood up, loud and vocal. And still O'Connell sailed on, visible, hard-minded, and aware, being an archbishop with his right hand and a profiteering manipulator with his left, stirring up strong emotions all around him, from the intense love of his relatives, friends, and flock to the wild fury of his opponents in the Church.

He first came directly into Robert Shannon's life in 1914. In Boston on Pentecost Sunday, Robert had been one of the twelve young men in long white linen albs who prostrated themselves on the sanctuary floor of the cathedral for ordination to the priesthood. Their outstretched hands almost touched the two steps that led to the episcopal throne, where sat His Eminence in his scarlet and white.

That was the name by which the ordinands and the entire See of New England knew him: His Eminence. Throughout Robert's studenthood, His Eminence had been mentioned in the seminary every day, spoken of with fascination. And although they wished he would visit them, the students had been content to know that one day he would lay his hands upon them and make them priests. Until that moment, Robert, in common with the other eleven young men, had never seen him.

Among the pews cordoned off with purple ropes for the families, Robert's parents watched. Ordination Day crowned lives. Every Irish tribe in Boston wanted its own priest and revered him when he got there. Many boys used this as a pathway to the family's pride of place— or, often, to evade the attentions of a brutal father, whose behavior toward his son now had to change. No one dared strike a man of God.

Many who were less crucially invested still found the ordination ceremony
moving unto tears. All present thought it impressive; liturgy as theater hallmarks the Church.

After his ordination, the day when he first looked into the cardinal's eyes, Robert Shannon found His Eminence appearing in his dreams. They were not sweet dreams; they had shadows in them, and heavy footsteps. They had edge to them, and garish colors. They seethed with unease, and they took Robert to the edge of despair, with feelings that he couldn't explain when he woke up.

For long months at a time those dreams did not recur, and he went about his parish and community work. But then, when he had first come under the care of Anthony Sevovicz, he had begun to dream of the cardinal again. He told Archbishop Sevovicz so— told him hesitantly, with care. Sevovicz looked at him with astonishment.

“This is bad, very bad, too bad, because as Dr. Greenberg and I have both seen, Robert, you only dream about things that truly scare you. Guns. Shells exploding. Wounds— big, wide, red wounds. Pieces of bodies. And now His Eminence, the cardinal. We must not tell him. What do you dream of him?”

Robert could never coherently recall entire dreams; he could pluck an image here, repeat a scene there, a face from somewhere else.

“A very large automobile,” he had said. “He is sitting in the back.” Or, another time: “A feast. He is eating. At the head of the table.”

“Naturally,” Sevovicz had said. “Are there other people there, Robert?
Are you
there?”

Robert had nodded.

“And am I there?”

Robert had frowned and shaken his head, and Sevovicz had jumped up and swung his arms.

“Yes, yes, I can see that His Eminence might have a feast to which I might not be invited. You dream very truly, Robert, you dream very truly.”