Shannon (28 page)

Perhaps there was the faint rustle of a leaf— but he couldn't hear it. Perhaps a maggot wriggled somewhere, opaque and haphazard in the life of the deep leaf mold— but the sound had no muscle for travel. Perhaps a creature's young ones wriggled in a nest somewhere— but if so, they snored discreetly.

He began to relish this wood. The black shapes of the trees, the fractured and rotting branches beneath them— these were not fallen comrades. No enemies lurked among these phantom shapes. That deafening truckload of bullets had long gone— and even if the men whom the soldiers had been seeking were his threateners from Clonmacnoise, those two now knew who he was and he had no need to fear them.

Few conditions prove so extreme as to lack all benefits; even shell shock had one or two advantages, and they stemmed from the human instinct for survival. In one such manifestation, victims achieve the capacity to remain still, not for minutes at a time but for hours on end. When observed closely, Robert proved able to sit— or stand— without movement for long periods. Food roused him benignly; sudden noise too, but disturbingly so.

With no food and with tranquil silence in that wood somewhere in Ireland's deepest midlands, he stood leaning against his tree for hours— until a kindly branch somewhere above him shifted with a little crack, and his reverie ended.

In matters of great secrecy there are no secrets. Most cloak-and-dagger people end up as no more than furtive— little cloak and not much dagger. Furtiveness is not secrecy. To be successful, secrecy must become profound and systematic; it must be established with a view to not being uncovered—ever.

And true secrecy must be held rigidly among a few. A husband and his wife and child may guard a family secret, such as incest. Government says it keeps secrets—but eventually it releases them, officially or unofficially.
A friend may keep a secret from his or her closest friend— but once that information becomes a power source, a means of establishing who's first among equals, the secrecy ends. In Cardinal O'Connell's time, the secrets in the Archdiocese of Boston were like open graves.

Out of the American South in the early twentieth century came a newspaper called
The Menace.
It attacked the Catholic Church every week, and it had a circulation of a million and a half. Many of the stories subsisted on sensation: priests drunk on altar wine, young women seduced in Confession, orgies in convents with nuns.

Not much of the lurid rhetoric had changed since the immigrating English had brought their folk-tale attacks on Catholicism to the New World, and their condemnations had descended straight from Henry VIII and the Puritans. Few Catholics found themselves significantly upset at the content of
The Menace—
except when the newspaper got hold of something big.

In 1913,
The Menace
had more than a dozen reporters and many more stringers operating in those big American cities that had the largest Catholic populations. When
The Boston Globe
carried a story buried far from the main pages in a morass of legal notices at the back, the men from
The Menace
had, at last, some facts to report. A David Toomey was sued for breach of promise to marry by an Alice Leary for the unusually large sum of $20,000, a millionaire standard of damages in those days.

Miss Leary won her case— not in court but through the offices of the archbishop where Toomey worked. He was, to give him his full title, Father David J. Toomey, chaplain to the cardinal and editor of the arch-diocesan newspaper,
The Pilot.
The size of the damages sought— and won— indicated certain power. The jilter and his advisers knew this case must never be allowed to go to court. Miss Leary clearly understood the power that she had; she asked for a packet of money and she got it.

The lawsuit gave the tiniest peephole into a wild life. At the core of Cardinal William O'Connell's regime stood yet another lurid individual, Father Toomey's close friend and colleague, Monsignor James P. E. O'Connell. Beloved nephew of His Eminence, he was no less than the chancellor of the archdiocese. And he shared, even exceeded, his friend Father Toomey's taste for the kind of existence supposedly denied to celibates.

Both James and David caroused intensively and ran up impressive bills in restaurants and hotels. In time, as wild young men do, they settled down (so to speak) and married. This could be thought unusual, considering that they still maintained their lives as ordained priests in the Archdiocese of Boston with vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience.

Monsignor O'Connell married a Mrs. Frankie Wort. He so enchanted her on their first few meetings that she raced off to South Dakota, declared residence there for six months, and got a divorce of convenience from Mr. Wort.

Upon his marriage, Monsignor O'Connell also changed his name (perhaps in consideration for his uncle the cardinal). They became “Mr. and Mrs. Roe,” toured Europe on honeymoon (with Father Toomey as a traveling companion), and came back to settle in New York City.

On Mondays Mr. Roe boarded the train in civilian clothes and disembarked in Boston as Monsignor O'Connell, in clerical garb. He then went to work, running the finances, saying Mass, and dispensing his uncle's favors across the archdiocese. Every Thursday he reversed the procedure; he boarded the train in Boston as Monsignor O'Connell, got off in New York as Mr. Roe, and took his wife to dinner and the opera.

A year after the monsignor's marriage, Father Toomey followed his example; he married a twenty-one-year-old girl. Telling her he was a federal agent by the name of Fossa, he married her not once but twice. Their first marriage before a justice of the peace so afflicted the girl's Catholic conscience that she insisted on a church solemnization. Fossa had no appropriate papers, so he got baptized again in time for the wedding. (The false name he took had a certain mischievous compulsion to it: The Latin word
fossa
means a ditch, a grave, or in some ecclesiastical Latin a tomb—akin to
Toomey.)

From there on, and for most of a decade, the scandal concerning these two men began to spiral like a whirligig. Both began to help themselves ever more liberally to the cardinal's generosity. They embezzled mightily, and they slept in his bed with their wives while “Gangplank Bill” was away on one of his many luxury cruises.

Long before any outrage swelled across the American Church, every priest in the See of Boston knew of the two married men, the cardinal's nephew and his raunchy pal. Decades before priestly celibacy became a
prismatic issue in the Catholic world, the joke had been, “Oh, Boston already
has
a married clergy.”

Eventually, the Catholic bishops of the United States became satisfied that the rumors of these Boston shenanigans were true. Already, Cardinal O'Connell's size of frame, style, and spirit left few indifferent to him. His enemies roused themselves and began a concerted effort to dethrone His Eminence. A new opportunity was approaching. A hierarchy conference was to take place in September 1922.

Before that, while Robert Shannon was walking his Irish river, most of the American Catholic hierarchy went on vacation. Sevovicz himself had embarked upon a walking tour of Chesapeake Bay with an old Jesuit friend from New York. They stayed in inns and ate oysters and played poker after dinner each night. By day they discussed the likelihood of the North American bishops overthrowing Cardinal O'Connell and forcing Rome to sideline him.

His friend warned that His Eminence must not be underestimated. In March, a report had appeared in
The New York Times
of O'Connell's meeting with the new pope, Pius XI, for an hour of what was described as “intimate conversation.” The Holy Father was also quoted as singing his praises: “America is truly wonderful and full of hope and promise.” O'Connell, it emerged, spoke in English, Italian, and German, to which Sevovicz's friend concluded, “If it was an intimate conversation, a private audience, who released all this information?”

Sevovicz wondered— without saying so— whether he should get involved and, if so, how? He had been working on a theory: If, while he was waiting for Robert to recover, he could become a behind-the-scenes facilitator for both sides of the hierarchy dispute, he might be left holding a pretty ring. If a pact could be negotiated rather than enforced, both sides would trust him.

He could then tell Rome, with the confirmation of all parties, of his own effectiveness. He felt sure that crumbs would fall; indeed, he hoped for a substantial loaf.
Supposing O'Connell toppled, who would get the Archdiocese of Boston? It would have to be an archbishop, wouldn't it, at least for a while? As a caretaker?

He and his wise friend rehearsed the issue over and over again. How would O'Connell's enemies fare? Could Archbishop Walsh of St. Louis
bring down His Eminence? Both men agreed that O'Connell's combination of aggression and shrewd Irish politics would carry him through.

Sevovicz's friend enumerated the stratagems that O'Connell was known to have employed to acquire and then keep power. Much of it came from image making. Deep in his episcopacy for example, he wrote— and had leather-bound— a series of “thoughtful” letters that he predated by some thirty-five years. Written in 1914–15, they were dressed to look as though he had begun them as early as 1876. Thus he gave the impression that he had had mature insights when he was much younger.

Like Sevovicz, His Eminence enjoyed the trappings of power. He believed that a leader should be seen to live the life of a leader. To this end he traveled richly, widely, and often (hence the nickname “Gangplank Bill”) and entertained lavishly when at home, where he kept an excellent cellar and a superb humidor.

Then Sevovicz discovered something that he hadn't known. Of the marriage scandals he had heard every detail: the nephew, Monsignor O'Connell, and the administrator-priest, Father Toomey In fact he had heard so much about them he saw no reason to learn any more; Rome had found out that His Eminence had lied to Pope Benedict about the two men, but that pope was now dead.

“Of course, there's always scandal,” said Sevovicz's friend.

“That's all closed, surely?” queried Sevovicz.

“When God closes one door, He opens another,” said Sevovicz's friend, and chuckled at his own joke. He elaborated; O'Connell's own “intimate preferences,” as he called them, must surely come to the attention of Rome one day.

“Meaning?” asked Sevovicz, miffed at his own ignorance.

“He thinks himself a gentleman and he likes gentlemen.”

Sevovicz kicked at a stone on their rocky beach and swore. “Do you think—?”

He paused, and the friend supplied the rest. “Do I think he has made inappropriate approaches to that young friend and ward of yours?”

Sevovicz said, “Has he?”

To which the friend replied, “I don't know.”

Neither man used the word
homosexual
or any of its euphemisms.

Not that night, or for many nights after, did Sevovicz get to sleep easily, as he replayed over and over the life, as he had seen it, of Robert Shannon. In particular he replayed the day of the Confession: how shattered Robert had been and how all their good progress seemed to have been undone when Robert emerged from his cloister with the cardinal. And yet— and yet, for a reason he could not grasp, Sevovicz refused to accept what others might have thought obvious.
But at the same time, why did the cardinal send Robert to Ireland?

Robert felt no need to wait for the dawn's best light. He stepped out from his woodland sanctuary and resumed his riverside course. With the Shannon on his left, the friendly woods on the right gave way to farmland. On high ground a distant tree line ran along the crest of a field so cleanly that Robert thought of Abe Lincoln's beard— a tailored shape around a perimeter. Across the river, a ruined tower stood alone like a forgotten sentry with nothing to guard anymore.

Here the Shannon swirled fast and free, a current reaching fully to each bank; in high spate it would flood these fields. Not a cloud in the skies, not a breeze in the trees, not a beast in the fields; he stopped for a moment in the empty lands, fancying he could feel the planet turn beneath his feet.

He had forgotten to wind his watch; he reckoned the time at around six in the morning:
Should I go and ask for breakfast somewhere? Why do I feel so good? I am— not afraid. Am I afraid? No. But I slept in the wild. I slept in the open air. I slept rough! Am I all right? A little damp. And some bones ache. But I'm all right!

After some hundreds of yards, the path swung away from the river and he needed faith to stay with it. The land stayed flat until, up ahead, it climbed to a stand of trees. Near this grove stood a white house with a yellow door.

Robert stopped and looked at the house. The clouds raced across the sky, driven by a wind not felt on the ground. He stared harder at the house and waited as though he expected something to happen. Then he resumed his walk. But a hundred yards on, he stopped and turned back to look at the house again. He and he alone occupied the landscape. He heard no human voice, just the burbling and splashing of the river and sometimes the screech of a bird.

His mind raced but he knew not why. He watched the tall reeds fight back against the fast stream. Then he began to pace— forward and back, forward and back—along the path. His mood had begun to swing between strength and tears, and he knew his surges of energy needed to be controlled. Something— something unknown— had moved in on him.

So he paced again and again, back and forth on that lovely path, trying to grasp and control his feelings, trying to define them. The dawn began to open fully, streaking the eastern sky with blood.

Although the shadows remained, Robert made a decision. He left the pathway and walked east on a small road until he came to the avenue of the house with the yellow door. A dim light shone in an upstairs window. With a deep breath he entered the property. He would— at least— ask for breakfast.

It was clear that somebody tended this place carefully. Somebody efficient clipped the copper beech hedge and tamed the blurts of pampas grass and filled the white jardinières on either side of the front door. The same somebody probably kept the garden benches on the small lawn painted a pristine white; even in this cold wet atmosphere they looked smart.