Shannon (16 page)

“Indeed, Eminence.”

“Yeah, Rome is like that.”

As Anthony remembered his brief— finances, priestly behavior, unseemly style— the cardinal murmured as though to himself, “They knew I wanted somebody special.” In a single move he had made it seem as though he himself had sent for help and asked for the best.

That was the first time Sevovicz met Cardinal O'Connell— and he met him only once more. The occasion still rang with alarm, not least because the cardinal came without warning to the house where Sevovicz and Father Shannon lived. They saw the car arrive— and they saw the big man climb out of the backseat, accompanied by Bishop Nilan.

“Oh, my God!” murmured Sevovicz, and went down the stairs to the hall.

The greetings over, His Eminence spoke. “Now, where's our young hero?”

A soft call up the stairs brought Robert into view; he came down, dropped to one knee, and kissed the cardinal's ring.

Sevovicz had never seen Robert with His Eminence— with Bishop Nilan, yes, many times and always with ease and comfort.

“Father Shannon, let me see you,” said the cardinal, who had donned the full red of his formal robes.

The eyes narrowed, the dark jowl tightened as he peered this way and that.

To Sevovicz's surprise, Father Shannon stepped back and made gestures of wishing to be excused. The cardinal showed a touch of annoyance but then raised his hand in blessing, and Robert left the room.

“You seem to be doing a good job, Anthony.”

“Thank you, Eminence.”

Bishop Nilan, flushed with importance, said pleasantly, “It has been an exercise in diligence, Eminence. And it has been my pleasure to observe it.”

The cardinal said to Bishop Nilan, “A room to sit for a moment?”

The fretting bishop hurried. All three men, led by the cardinal, sat at the dining table with the door firmly shut. Nilan opened his mouth to offer food and drink but the cardinal took control.

“How is he, Anthony?”

“I would say still fragile, Eminence.”

“Fragile? Hmmmm. How is his memory?”

Nilan looked down at the table; Sevovicz never flinched, even though he knew that the word
memory
in this context carried as much freight as a ten-ton truck.

“He is more— shall we say, settled, Eminence.”

Anthony Sevovicz had not become an archbishop by accident. He possessed that greatest of corporate political skills, the sense to give the perfect answer. In a body as political as the Catholic Church, that meant always knowing what the questioner was seeking. The cardinal sought reassurance, and now Sevovicz knew for certain why he had been given this job.

“Settled? Calmer, is that it? Would you say, Anthony— would you say that he had been delusional?”

“It's part of the condition, is it not, Eminence?”

“Does a man like that— I mean, a sufferer— does he forget the things he said when he was delusional?”

“He has asked me, Eminence, that he might make his confession. You know that we have not permitted him to make a confession while he has been recovering. But we are ready to take down his words.”

“Um. Not yet, I think. And then perhaps I should make myself available to hear his confession— let him feel my blessing.”

Bishop Nilan said, “Very generous of you, Eminence, very generous.”

Cardinal O'Connell asked again, “And he's not making wild delusional statements anymore?”

“I make sure, Eminence,” said Sevovicz, “that he spends all his waking hours in my company— and only in my company.”

Codes lay thick on the ground. The cardinal had called on Sevovicz to check up. This young priest, who had once worked in the archdiocesan chancery, might still be shouting things.

After the earlier incidents, nobody had had the courage to repeat Father Shannon's exact words, but everything the young priest had been ranting meant discredit and outright shame. Every allegation suggested impropriety— on many and varied levels. Sevovicz had not heard any of this in person; by the time he took Robert in his care the young man had withdrawn. Prompting would make him worse— but if he recovered he might tell the truth.

Several months later, when Robert had begun to get a firm hold on life, Sevovicz received a directive: Bring Father Shannon to Boston. Their reception had a formal and distant tone, and O'Connell never appeared. After an hour the monsignor told them, “His Eminence will hear Father Shannon's confession now.”

Sevovicz waited and grew anxious. This confession should have taken no more than minutes; the priest could hardly have been expected to recall his sins before his traumatization. When Robert emerged, he seemed to have regressed by several months. The zombie walk had returned, as had the old chalk pallor, and he had been weeping.

“His Eminence will write to you,” the monsignor said to Sevovicz.

“Are you all right, Robert?” Sevovicz asked, outside the door.

The priest shook his head, and his collar worked loose. Closely, side by side, almost as though clinging to each other, both men walked away from the gate. That night, back in Hartford, Sevovicz sat by Robert's bed until dawn, soothing his distress.

The river pathway had broken in places, damaged in winter floods. Robert saw no other walker—not a fisherman, not a traveler— just a lone boatman in a small flat-bottomed craft who seemed to be navigating downriver by sitting as lightly as possible on the bouncing waters. He held only one oar and, with it, pushed himself off this rock and then that one and then another. The falls captivated Robert; he was beginning to realize that fountains gave him peace, as did tumbling waters of any kind.

And then, after several minutes of looking and enjoying, a sudden excitement hit him:
Are these the Falls of Doonass?
The mind labored, the heart lent its help, the memory, the picture, almost arrived.

A cloud across the sun changed the mood. Robert walked upstream toward the crumbling ruin of a castle.
That also looks familiar.

He stared and stared— and finally walked on.

I
n 1813, in Roxbury, Massachusetts, was born a child named Nathaniel Currier. In 1824, in New York City, was born a child named James Merritt Ives. Currier trained as a printer in Boston and Ives as a bookkeeper; when they became brothers-in-law they joined forces and made their fortunes.

With widespread literacy so new, much of America had not yet received its own literature of itself. Currier and Ives set up teams of illustrators who painted “American scenes”:
Autumn in the Adirondacks; The Old Mill in Summer; Winter on the Hudson.

In the eventual industry— they produced more than eight thousand original titles— nothing was ruled out: battles of the Civil War, Mississippi paddle steamers, Washington at Princeton. Great stories from the news also made it into color within days of their breaking: shipwrecks, train crashes, prizefights.

But it was Christmas that nailed the market— calendars showed the way. This was a public that wanted to feel things; nostalgia rang bells at the till; the fledgling nation needed its past.

In this New World, the immigrant races were thriving one by one;
few of these emergent Americans had such sentimental luggage as the Irish. Forced to leave, they wanted home. They knew they couldn't have it, so they settled for the intimations. Currier and Ives, sniffing the wind, sent a team to the Old Country. They came back with
The Falls of Doonass
plus hundreds more; their Irish catalog made a mint. And sank a root; henceforth the love of the land that was lost would prove balm to the souls of millions. In due course, some of them, the new Irish-American rich, set off in search of their roots and asked along the way. It became— and remained— a tourist industry for the Irish at home.

By the early 1920s, although the searchers had their Currier and Ives illustrations, their own songs, and soon their own movies, they did not yet have formal genealogists. To fill the gap, some amateurs— teachers or lawyers in small towns, men with an interest in their own country anyway—helped by providing a sort of service. In Limerick they had told Robert Shannon that if there was one man who could dig up anyone's family roots, it would be Michael “the Lion” Tierney in Castleconnell.

On the edge of the village, not far from the Falls of Doonass, a stone lion sat sideways on a gatepost. Neither grand nor imposing, it looked Robert in the eye and he patted its little head. Since another lion's head soon appeared, in the form of a door knocker, Robert assumed that he had found the right house. And he assumed, also reasonably, that this leonine fondness gave the man his sobriquet.

Not at all. When the door opened the man who stood there had a mane of sandy hair and a deep fringe of dense whiskers all around his face. This, without any possible shadow of doubt, was Michael the Lion— a kindly beast too—who said, “Are you looking for long-lost cousins?”

Robert's surprised expression brought forth an explanation.

“You're a Yank, unless I'm greatly mistaken.” And when Robert nodded the Lion continued. “Ah, I get a lot of Yanks. Folk in Limerick tell them I know everything, and these poor people come here and find I only know half of everything. Will you have a drop of something? Herself isn't here, but she'll be back in a minute and she'll make you a cup of tea. Come in, come in.”

Impossible to tell his age— forty, fifty, sixty— in a shattered tweed suit, the pockets bulging like pelicans’ beaks. He wore six pens at his
breast like a general wears decorations, and all of them had leaked ink down the tweed.

“Sit, sit, what's the name itself?”

“Robert Shannon.”

“Well, you're not a butcher, I can tell that straightaway. I s'pose you met the Chopper?”

Robert nodded.

The Lion laughed. He had unexpectedly perfect teeth, as neat as a trimmed white hedge. Robert almost felt disappointed that the Lion showed no fangs.

“That fella, that butcher, now he's three hundred percent illiterate. My sister tried to teach him at school, and he resisted all who approached his mind. He can't read or write or make his mark, as they say. And he'll tell you to your face, ‘I won't read and I don't write,’ that's his way of covering it up. But at Limerick Agricultural Show every year for the past ten years, he's the man who wins the Guess the Bull's Weight competition, and he's always accurate to two pounds. We all have to be good at something. You're a priest, am I right, Father?”

Robert said, “Yes.”

The Lion looked at him as the Chopper Shannon must have looked at a Guess-the-Weight bull. “D'you know a Father Donegan at all in America?”

Robert shook his head, and the Lion said, “Fair enough, I was only asking. I s'pose you're wondering how I knew you were a priest?”

Robert smiled and said, “I'm getting used to it.”

“Ah, it's easy enough to understand,” said the Lion. “Priests have a steady cut to their jib.” He stroked his whiskers. “What happened your hand, if you don't mind my asking?”

Instinctively Robert hid the scarred knuckles.

“You weren't a chaplain, were you?” said the Lion. “My brother came back minus a leg. And d'you know, I can never remember which leg.” The Lion shook his head; light flashed from his mane. “What can I do for you at all, Father? Name it. Name it.”

Robert began to ease. “The Shannon family?”

“Well, I'll tell you now,” said the Lion in his practiced speech, “If you asked me about Hallorans or Hoolihans or Hannigans or Hartigans, if
you asked me about Dooleys or Dolans or Dalys or Donnellys, I'd have the answer pat for you. But the Shannons I was never asked about— for the very good reason that I know nothing about them. Apart from the river herself, the Chopper is the only Shannon I ever came across until you walked in here. What do you know about them yourself?”

Robert said, “They lived somewhere on the banks of the river. They were evicted.”

“Any idea when? Or what county?”

“Early in the seventeen hundreds, but I don't know the county.”

“And so you're traveling the river. The right thing to do. They were Catholics, were they?”

Robert jerked in surprise. “Might they not have been?”