Shannon (31 page)

“And everywhere that another animal saw Mr. Fairbrother's horse, that animal went mad too. The ducks in the lake started turning head over heels and quacking like engines. The cattle in the fields started dancing the sailor's hornpipe. And the mice in the chimney corner, they all started to swing and sway, and their mouths went foaming like mad things.

“Mr. Fairbrother, being a Quaker, soon understood that he had done wrong. So he stood on a pile of stones and declared in a loud voice that he would never again take a stone from Dermot's monastery. And he never did. And when he went to take stones from anywhere else on the island, the horse was fine, so long as Mr. Fairbrother called out with each stone that was dug up, ‘Thank you for the stones, Saint Dermot!’ “

That night, Robert slept in a little room under the sloping roof. Before he blew out his candle, a mouse ran across the floor. He saw its little pink
trumpet ears, and he did indeed look closely to see whether its mouth foamed.

At breakfast he thanked the forester's family and promised to send the twins postcards from America. He sat on the forester's cart, returned to the place where they had met the previous day, and there they parted like old friends.

“Where to now, Father?”

“I've been told there are Shannons in Roosky”

“There are, Father. But they're in the graveyard.”

Robert went back to his pathway on the river and walked a fine, fast step.

I
n the hours after Robert's departure, Anthony Sevovicz grew intensely depressed. Doubt ripped at him; fear rattled the windows of his mind.

He had watched the ship clear the harbor and then begun to put himself first again; he persuaded himself that he had nowhere to go. The house, so empty now, would be reclaimed by Bishop Nilan. He would do it subtly, probably by moving in the new coadjutor, Bishop John G. Murray. Already he could hear Nilan's voice, close to wheedling. “You don't mind, Tony do you? After all, we don't know when Father Shannon'll be back, do we?”

That was another thing worth hating about the Archdiocese of Boston and the Diocese of Hartford— being called Tony by Bishop Nilan.

Sevovicz sat on the high stool of the quayside coffee joint and watched two things, the departing freighter and his own reflection in a mirror. Did he still look imposing? He told himself that he did, especially in his black coat and homburg. At his throat, the hint of purple gleamed brightly enough for the owner to say, “No charge, Bishop,” when Sevovicz offered to pay for the coffee.

Outside, he walked; his best thoughts came to him on walks. His
main concern lay in the question, “What now?” By the end of his walk he had decided to go to the source of his coadjutorial appointment— the Vatican itself, in the shape of the Papal Nuncio to the United States. The pope's own legate, another archbishop, Giovanni Bonzano, had a reputation for adroitness.

Justifiably so: Bonzano proved so adroit that he refused to see Sevovicz. He left him in the care of a monsignor who advised that any fresh duties for Archbishop Sevovicz would, of course, be up to His Eminence Cardinal O'Connell. In the meantime, Archbishop Sevovicz should go back to Hartford, where doubtless Bishop Nilan would welcome his help.

As, indeed, Bishop Nilan did— up to a point. Over the long weeks of May and June he began to demean Sevovicz in ways that the big archbishop couldn't counter. A friend of Bishop Nilan's was coming to stay. Would it be all right, Tony to give him the spare room, now that it was empty? And there were duties, of the most menial kind: baptisms at inconvenient times; hours and hours of confessions in accents that Sevovicz could rarely understand. His housekeeper disappeared— and later surfaced in the home of the new coadjutor, Bishop Murray. Life moved from irksome to unendurable.

By now, Sevovicz was getting a clear view of the next move:
O'Connell will wear me down. Leave me in Hartford to languish. Some minor duties. Bishop Nilan will be whispering: “Supernumerary,” “Drain on diocesan funds,” “I need the house. “
Oh, yes.

His Eminence would then write a letter, send it in a sealed envelope to Sevovicz, and ask him to deliver it to Rome— by hand. And pay his travel fare, of course. The letter would say that, try as he did, the cardinal could find no work for Anthony Sevovicz— who had, he must note, done a splendid job of rehabilitating a young chaplain who had had some difficulties in the recent European war.

As the weeks dragged on, Sevovicz grew not only in frustration but unease. He began to take the Irish Project apart and put it together again to see whether he could build a different picture. One piece kept glowing red— the cardinal's eagerness for Robert to travel.
I didn't look at that closely enough,
Sevovicz told himself.

In the days and weeks after Robert's departure he had certainly felt uneasy, but he'd put it down to discomfort at the thought of Robert traveling
alone. Hartford and its bishop gave him no help. The pastoral duties bored him, and Nilan had now become so circumspect that he seemed to parse every “Good morning” that Sevovicz spoke.

Soon he had moved into complete unease. Something had gone amiss. He didn't know how he knew, and, with his behavioral record, he had no right to trust his judgment. This instinct, however, came from a different locus.

In this frame of mind Sevovicz had gone off to Chesapeake Bay on his walking holiday, had conveyed this thinking to his wise friend, and had heard of the possibility of homosexual scandal.

“Think as O'Connell might think,” the friend advised him. “What would he do if the positions were reversed?”

Sevovicz's first inner response was typical:
Why didn't I think of that?

By early July, when he came back, he had reached a solution; he would arm himself with as much information as he could find out about the Boston Archdiocese— with special reference to recent behavioral history and ongoing conduct.

The city of Boston has always respected its clergymen. In 1922 a priest in a collar received respectful greetings when he moved about the streets. If he wore a little sting of ecclesiastical purple he was noticed even more, especially if he stood well over six feet and possessed a large presence (and a large nose).

Old saying: You can take the boy out of the country but you can't take the country out of the boy. Sevovicz had a farmer's habit of testing the ground beneath his feet. When word of a troubled parish reached him in Poland, he had gone there unannounced in mild disguise and walked the land, the streets, the villages. On the day he arrived in Rome, early and soiled from the trains and irked beyond words by his reduction in the Church, he walked the city and then the Vatican.

Now he went to Boston— just to walk. Everywhere he went, men doffed caps and women smiled.
This is no good. They know I'm an archbishop.

So he returned the following week, early one morning, in a gabardine raincoat, cap, and workman's clothes. He moved unnoticed; he slipped in and out of stores and diners; he roamed.

On his previous ramble he took in the fact that the Irish had given
Boston a strong pub culture, and this time he sampled it. He deliberately chose a place not far from the cardinal's residence. And he struck it lucky. He got a spike into the seam that he was mining.

To some degree, Sevovicz had the mentality of a criminal. He believed in shortcuts to power and riches. He believed in extreme measures to remove obstacles. He believed in status and its demonstration. So in the period that he had already spent in the Archdiocese of Boston, he had come to believe that he shared certain qualities of character with His Eminence. Trying to think like O'Connell, he hacked out a line of inquiry.

He had a head hard as a rock for drink, and he knew how to use it. In the pub, he was lucky enough to meet a Polish couple. Speaking in Polish made him their instant friend. Immune to eavesdroppers, they told him that they heard O'Connell was protected by a bunch of businessmen (which was true). The couple, ardent Catholics, spoke with outrage. Scandals in the cardinal's household. Property deals. Lawyers and accountants using the Sunday collection money. And worse. Priests who were married. And yet more, things of which they couldn't speak.

The Polish husband said, “Those two men must feel lucky to stay alive.”

“What?” Sevovicz asked.

The wife amplified. Some of the cardinal's friends— they'd heard this from a good source— were known to have wanted to get rid of the two scandalous priests. “They'd have accidents, of course. The cardinal would never know.”

But they couldn't do it— because one of the men was the cardinal's nephew.

“But this is like the Medicis!”

To which the Polish husband said, “They're Irish. What do you expect?”

When Sevovicz asked in pretended outrage, “But who are these men?” the couple shrugged and said, “Businessmen. They advise the archbishop. They raise money for him. They keep his accounts.”

The path to Roosky meandered. Now the river acquired a friend, a canal that disappeared quietly to the east. Ivied buildings suggested a strong commercial history.

By a lock a man painting a pillar explained that this was the Royal Canal. It had opened a hundred and five years ago and went straight to Dublin, so you could “get on a boat here and find yourself landing up in Brazil.” To Robert's inquiry about the journey ahead, he replied, “You can't miss Roosky unless you fall into the river.”

Past Lough Forbes, his journey almost slowed down because of the varied birds that caught his attention. They seemed— as before— to have little fear, waiting until the last moment before flying out of his path. Here and there, benches had been placed on the pathway.

On the road that ran parallel to the path stood two people, a woman and her small son.

“I'd say ‘twill be on in a minute,” said the woman— uninvited— to Robert. “And ‘twas on time last week.”

He guessed, and indeed a bus did arrive, cream with a green stripe along the side, bicycles and boxes higgledy-piggledy on the roof. It stopped for the woman and her boy and Robert climbed aboard too. No more than six people sat in the seats, and a conductor with a metal ticketing apparatus hanging on a strap around his neck stood talking to a couple at the rear. Before Robert could ask whether it had a destination of any value to him, the bus took off with a lurch.

Never reaching more than thirty miles an hour, it swayed alarmingly and belched smoke. He extracted money from his rucksack and sat with it in his hand, ready to pay his fare; nobody asked him for it. The conductor went on talking to his friends. Two of the passengers nearest him fell asleep; a hen clucked somewhere under a seat.

Several miles into the journey— Robert could still see the river— the bus halted abruptly and sagged to one side. The driver climbed down and went to look; the conductor opened a window.

“We've a broken spring,” said the driver.

“Have we?” said the conductor.

“We have,” said the driver.

For two hours they sat there. The conductor came by.

“How ya doin’ here?”

“What happens now?” asked Robert.

“Ah, we're waiting till somebody passes that'll go back and tell the garage.”

“Will that be long?” “Where are you headin’ for yourself?” Robert, hungry said, “Drum-something.”

“Well, if it was me,” said the conductor, “I'd walk, but I've only the one good leg, like.”

He showed Robert an immense left boot.

T
he Shannon can be exceptionally beautiful in its narrow northern reaches. Robert left the bus, found the path close by, and set out again. He saw few houses— and he didn't resist dawdling. More than once he walked to the river's edge, crouched, and let his hand trail in the water.

Other than the water and the trees on both banks, he saw little of note: a green boat moored on the far side; a large bird that might have been a goose; a number of blue-black waterfowl who seemed terribly official; an aristocratic swan. After an hour of meandering, he again picked up stride and settled into his usual good pace. Not another human being did he see; a horse in a field raised its head, but he saw nothing and nobody else.