Shannon

  “Do you fellas have wives?” Maeve MacNulty said. “Women love a uniform.”

  The officers laughed. Neither man looked at Robert; they included him in the permission they gave her to pass, and waved her on. Robert tried to quell his shivers.

  Minutes later she drove into a square as lean and ordered as elegance itself. Over the front door of each tall house arched a pretty fanlight; long windows caught the sun.

  They climbed high steps and knocked on one of the beautiful doors.

  “Sheila Neary's the best cook in the city,” Miss Maeve MacNulty said as the door opened. A woman appeared; her thin mouth drew a crooked line like a gash. “Sheila, I brought a man for you. He has lovely manners.”

  Sheila Neary wore a heliotrope scarf at the neck of a black dress.

  “We were at school together,” said Maeve MacNulty to Robert. “I was the wild one, so you're safe here.”

  Sheila Neary of the thin mouth looked Robert up and down, not unpleasantly.

  “Sheila's husband ran off and left her, and then he died of yellow fever, didn't he, Sheila?”

  “He died too quickly,” said Sheila.

  “Yes, he should have had a lingering death,” said Maeve.

  “In pain,” said Sheila.

  “In bad pain,” said Maeve.

  Standing on the ornate tiled floor in the hallway beside the tall green plant in the jade pot, Maeve MacNulty looked at Sheila Neary with a conspirator's understanding.

  “I think this man'll be glad to sit down for a while.” Then she said, “Sheila, I have to go. I have a fellow waiting for me in William Street.”

  “We can't all say that,” said Sheila Neary.

  When the door closed, a housekeeper appeared. “Will I make tea, ma'am?”

  Sheila nodded and led Robert in. A tall drawing room glowed with portraits and lace. She walked him around; she walked and talked slowly and kept her tone quiet. This ancestor had made millions, that one had sailed a famous yacht; judging from the portraits alone, the Nearys had had wealth and clout. Her parents had owned a large farm on the outskirts of the city in Dooradoyle, which supplied the city's milk. Sheila Neary eyed Robert all the time; when she could do so without his noticing, she looked him up, down, and sideways, assessing him.

  The housekeeper came back with tea.

  “Do you take sugar, Father?” Sheila asked.

  “Please call me Robert.”

  “I'll compromise: Father Robert. And, Father Robert, I'll be the only person you'll meet in Ireland who has no family connections at all in America.”

  He nodded.

  “My mother has two cousins in Phoenix, but I've no relations there myself.”

  Robert blinked, because she spoke without irony. In the past he would have laughed and asked the obvious question, but laughter had not yet come to stay. All the medical evidence suggested that it would be the last faculty to return.

  “And, Father Robert, is it your name that brings you to the river?” she asked.

  He nodded again.

  “I can understand that,” she said. “And isn't the Shannon a great river? Where would we be without it?”

  In the spring of 1918, Father Robert Shannon shook “Uncle Sam's right hand”—he volunteered for chaplaincy of forces and joined the United States Marines in France. As Captain Shannon he met them ten miles west of the Marne River valley. These thousands of men had been waiting long weeks for action, any action. He sat with them, he marched with them, he hung around and talked, waiting for orders and transport.

  Other than at a ball game he had never seen so many men in one place— rows and rows of fit shining troops, all in their twenties or so. He never deviated from the first thought that came to him as he looked at them: This doesn't make sense. They should be at work, at school, at their benches and desks.

  A chaplain's rank gave him no power. He listened when officers spoke; he answered when asked a question. He met General Harbord briefly. He shook hands with Major Wise. Spiritual care— that was his job, that and, as he would discover, leading the management of the dead. As he moved east with the lines he spoke to as many men as he could. With informed attention he identified the medics; they would be his vital colleagues.

  The woman they called the Irish nurse, Ellie Kennedy, led him into that world. She, a Catholic, knew the link between wounded and priest. He met her first one night of fog, in a field hospital west of Bouresches. Some troops had already been there for more than ten days, and others were drifting in. She was busy but not crucially so— and everybody wanted her near.

  Captain Shannon introduced himself.

  “I heard you were arriving,” she said, “but I thought you'd be different.”

  “Different?”

  “Long and flowing,” she said.

  He looked puzzled.

  “We've a river named after you,” she said.

  Now he laughed. “Are you actually from Ireland?”

  “I was. Well, I suppose I still am. If you're a monkey you're always from a tree.”

  Captain Robert Shannon sat down and began to tell the Irish nurse of his childhood love for her country. He would have enthralled a stadium with his passion and his pride.

  “To you it's home, Nurse— but to me it's a place of dreams. I know all the old stories; I've heard of Finn MacCool and Deirdre of the Sorrows.”

  “We've a lot like her still,” said Nurse Kennedy. “And they're always willing to tell you their troubles.”

  He told her how, as a boy he read stories of Ireland more than he read about soldiers or cowboys. “I had pictures of old castles and scenes with boatmen. We used to have a picture of the river hanging in our hall. The Falls of Doonass, it was called. Where's Doonass, Nurse?”

  “I don't know. Somewhere on the Shannon.”

  “Hence the falls?”

  “You're quick, Captain.”

  “What's the river like?”

  She said, “I used to see it a lot. It's very often silver.”

  “Silver? But that's how I've always imagined it! And where it rises up in the north; what's it called? The Shannon Pot.”

  “Did you ever hear such a bad name for such a great place?” she said.

  “I used to dream of seeing it,” he said. “I still have dreams about Ireland.”

  “What d'you think Ireland's like, Captain? Is it full of little green men of mischief, or is it haunted and full of old ghosts, or is it very green and rainy?”

  He knew she was playing with him, but he still reflected. “All three, I hope. But I'll take very green and rainy. And when the sun comes out, the drops of rain look like diamonds on the leaves. And there are ghosts on the hills and little green men under the bushes.”

  Ellie Kennedy laughed. “It isvery green, Captain, but that's because it rains a lot. And it's not the ghosts on the hills that we worry about, it's the fellows coming down from the hills who'd steal the milk out of your tea and come back for the sugar.”

  He asked her whether she'd heard a lot of fairy tales. She said, “Yes, but not the kind you'd think.”

  When he seemed baffled, she explained.

  “My father's a very generous man. A big, big heart. People borrow money off him all the time and they have all kinds of excuses. One man told him he needed the hundred he was borrowing to buy his uncle a new wooden leg. My mother asked was the leg hollow for keeping drink in it. She calls these excuses the fairy tales of Ireland”

  Robert asked, “Did you hear many tales when you were growing up?”

  “No. Mostly jokes.”

  “Tell me a joke from Ireland.”

  Nurse Kennedy stopped and thought. “My father tells a story of two drunks going from Boyle to Carrick-on-Shannon one night and they're walking. They don't know how long it'll take them, and they stop somebody and ask, ‘How far is it to Carrick-on-Shannon?’ and they're told ‘Ten miles.’ And one says to the other, ‘Well, that's only five miles each.’ “

  Their next meetings had
no jokes, and not long after that he wouldn't have known a joke if she told one. But in her he had met his first living witness to the river of his dreams.

  Evening came to Limerick, and Sheila Neary quartered Robert well. His room had a desk and a great leather chair. Books lined the walls. An ancestor in an oval frame hung over the fireplace. Robert sat by fine long windows and looked out on a fine Georgian square. Shadows gathered in the park.

  The house had fallen still. As the last tremors of the military left him he calmed right down. Now and again he heard a distant clip-clop of some late hooves, a rhythm of further peace. And the silence of the child, Miranda— somehow it still reached him, and instead of disturbing him he felt a comradeship with it. He dozed, was awakened by the smell of cooking, and presently Sheila Neary knocked at his door.

  By gesture in the dining room he apologized for the unsuitability of his clothing. She waved a dismissive hand and served lamb with mint sauce. Then she began to talk, and for the next two hours— as was her style— Sheila Neary spoke only of herself. He, in any case, had said fewer than a dozen words.

  She had changed her clothes; she wore a dinner dress of emerald green with deeper green beading at the modest neckline. Her right hand bore rings, not her left. When she saw Robert glancing at them, she explained.

  “I took off my wedding rings when my husband left me. And when he died, I put them back on. But I put them on my right hand, so that I was a kind of widow but not a widow.”

  She took the rings off her right hand and transferred them to her left. Head to one side she studied them, turning her hand to the light. She looked at the rings for a long time, then returned them to her right hand.

  “I don't see myself as a widow, I see myself as deserted, an abandoned woman.”

  Her voice hit a droning note.

  “I'm older than I look, and I have two grown children. They're married and I told them not to marry; they can expect no good of it. My husband abandoned me when they were small, and they're now in their twenties. They live near me, and every time I see them, I remind them what an awful man their father was. I made sure”—her voice reached for triumph—”that he never saw them again. He lived very near, but they never saw him. I wouldn't let them.”

  Despite the edge in her tone and her tale, the food touched Robert's mood; the meat was superbly fresh and the mint sauce piqued the back of his throat. Although he wished he had a wider choice of clothing, he felt better, more aware, than he had for some time. He looked carefully at Sheila Neary and tried to gather and keep every sentence she made.

  When she paused in her monologue of martyrdom, Robert asked, “When did your husband leave you?”

  “Twenty-four years, seven months, and twenty-two days ago.”

  Those who knew Robert Shannon before the war admired him for many things, one of which was a capacity to generate thought. He could stop an argument dead in its tracks; he could turn a debate around to face the way it had come. Now, some of that came back, and although the idea turned in his head as slowly as a ship turning in a bay, it had force. He looked at Sheila Neary and held eye contact.

  “Did your children— did they like their dad?”

  He did not say love, and the word like stopped her.

  She looked irked at first, and then the frown eased. “I don't know.”

  No more conversation took place regarding the departed Mr. Neary For dessert she served bread pudding with thick cream. Thereafter she talked without cease again— but it was neighbors, the strife on the streets, the Anglo-Irish Treaty, the land.

  At ten o'clock she said, “Father Robert, you must be tired.”

  She led him up the stairs. On the first landing she stopped. From a nook she groped down a key and opened a wide closet. The interior had been rendered with love: paneling on the walls, green felt on the shelves. A man's clothes filled the large space. Suits hung on excellent wooden clothes hangers, pants on an accordion rack. Men's shoes, highly polished, lined the floor pair by pair like happy twins; she opened drawers full of shirts.

  Standing there, she sifted through the jackets first and then the shirts. Her hands felt the fabric like a queen buying silk; her fingers dawdled here, lingered there; she inspected a collar, patted a cuff.

  Robert stood back; privacy needs space. She took down a tweed jacket, turned it this way and that.

  “He bought this for the Galway races,” she said. “We had a horse running there that year.”

  She began to groom her hair like a girl on a date. She took down a suit. She turned it back and forth and said, “This was for a law case, a full day in court. I bought him this. We won— and he always called this his law suit.”

  Then she stepped back and surveyed the closet. All had been beautifully preserved and maintained, more of a memorial than a wardrobe.

  “They get laundered every few months,” she said.

  She lingered, then made a decision.

  “My husband was a bit heavier than you, but better too big than too small.” She glanced back at Robert and chose shirts for him. “I always feel great when I change my clothes,” she said, as though apologizing for her reverie.

  Next morning, shaved and bathed and wearing a fresh shirt— not too large after all— Robert stood at his window. Down in the square the baker's horse van delivered loaves to every door. The housekeeper arrived, brisk and trim; her voice rose in argument with the van man over the bread. Two men checked the streetlamps, replaced some gas mantles. Slowly the square woke up and, since it faced east, Robert received a lemon-colored dawn. Trees shone in the park.

  At breakfast, Sheila Neary looked radiant. She had taken great care with her appearance: an oatmeal-colored sweater and a string of pearls assisted by a cream tweed suit. Just inside one of the lace-curtained long windows, a table had been set for two. In this favorite corner Sheila could chat with her guest— and see into the square without being seen.

  The housekeeper came by, and came by again, heaping food onto Robert's plate. He launched himself at this breakfast, a Limerick staple meal. Ham, sausage, steak, and eggs led the way; the housekeeper came back with fried bread and tiles of fried potato. As a coup de grâce she delivered thick slabs of toast, dripping with butter, on which she plastered homemade marmalade, thick with rinds of gold.

  Robert ate like a soldier. His hostess applauded and offered more; he demurred and sat back.

  Suddenly they heard gunfire. Both turned their heads in the direction whence it had come. More shots echoed; impossible to say how close to the house. Then the gunfire stopped. They waited, looked at each other in careful alarm— and heard no more.

  Robert sat easily by a woman's side and had always been comfortable there. Misogyny never touched him, from his own attitudes or anyone else's. Other than awkward snickers, he'd known no bad talk about women; the students and priests spoke lovingly of their mothers, sisters, and aunts. Women deserved respect, so the teachings said; the Blessed Virgin Mary exemplified all of her sex.

  And then came the Woman in the Chancery.

  One day in the seminary, Robert happened to eavesdrop by an open door. A senior priest, visiting from New York, was speaking to one of the seminary professors.

  “She appears with him. In the open. In public. I saw them at the opera. I saw them in a restaurant. He looks away, he affects not to see me. But what can I do? And her rouged face, and her hat, and her lipstick, and the tight clothes? I blame her, I blame her for it. No excuses.”

  As the professor murmured concurrences, the speaker ran off at the mouth again.

  “What kind of woman is that? You have to say she must be some kind of filthy bitch. Because if you don't say that, you have to draw the conclusion that he is the initiator.”

  Robert had never heard a woman denigrated thus. In his family circle, his mother and her sisters held a constant sway, neither pampered nor dismissed. One aunt's bossy nature occasioned jokes; the melancholy of another aunt raised eyebrows. Beyond that, balance existed;
his father and mother worked on such a level of equality that arguments never broke out.

  “And the latest thing I heard is, she was in the chancery with him. Inside the house. I mean— what do we do?”

  Robert repeated the story in Confession. With no names asked, Father Viniak put close questions. He then cautioned Robert, “Tell nobody. Woe to the scandal-giver.” Finally he said, “Be prepared— in the years ahead—to forgive and forgive and forgive. This matter,” he said, “will not evaporate. All touched by it may suffer.”

  Limerick City is one of Ireland's most distinctive places. It has a fierce and interesting personality, born of long and fractious times. In 1922, when Robert Shannon first passed through, it had begun its newest incarnation, as a post-garrison town of the dented British Empire. Several of its other distinctions were already in place: the prettiest girls in Ireland, the best meat in the world, gossip as sharp as teeth; they had made uniforms here for the American Civil War.

  And always, always, there was the river. Ever since the Vikings built citadels on this luimneach, this “bald marsh,” ever since the unstable English King John set a round powerful castle on the very tide, the Shannon has defined the city.

  So has the love of God; few other populations in the country have ever shown such zeal. Every week for years, thousands of men gathered in the famous Catholic confraternities of Limerick. As powerful and congealing as the deepest freemasonry, they had sprung up as perhaps a counterweight to empire. On one level they heard firebrand sermons on temperance and the evils of the flesh; on another, they controlled the city's jobs and the levers of power. And their influence had a raw side; Limerick also bred bigotry and ran pogroms against the Jews.