He came back from the war and, like many other soldiers, had had enough of routine. Said the Accountant, “I've always found it useful to have somebody who can do the awkward chores.”
That was how the Accountant perceived and described Vincent Patrick Ryan— for it was he. The world would not have given a different rendition. Nor would, though more sadly, his adoptive parents; his life so far had a short and ultimately bitter summary.
However, the view from Vincent Ryan looked different. Nobody in the world could understand the gratitude he felt toward his new parents, as he had called them. Nor could anybody grasp why he kept so much to himself. Why didn't he take part in sports? To whom could he explain that reason?
He couldn't shower with the others, that was why. He couldn't explain the lines of thin red stripes that materialized on his buttocks and thighs from time to time, like ancient fiery cave drawings, and faded again.
They appeared at examination times and other moments of pressure. But who would understand that? Hysteria was something that women had, not men of six-foot-three.
Or who would understand that the sound of laughter carried a violent freight? It was always directed at him, he knew that for a fact. That was why he dressed so carefully— the shirts, the ascots, the beautiful fabrics and colors— to put himelf above criticism and give himself the comfort of beautiful things
But was it a crack-up? Had he had some kind of seizure on that day, the day he called in his own mind “The Moment of the Attack?” Yes— but not like people imagined. They all thought he had collapsed because he had done such a vicious thing. No, not at all. He had collapsed because he had discovered something— he had discovered what released him from his cage of a thousand bars. The war proved it. He could do as much damage as he liked; it was expected and he was even hailed for it.
But after the war— what then?
Ellie Kennedy, crisp as a crease, had no time for maunderings. She had sick patients to nurse, she had their families to cushion, and she had temperamental doctors to manage. Her attitudes, her daily grasp— these were defined by the demands of her work and the solitude of her home.
However, since the moment that she saw Captain Shannon in her kitchen, a part of her departed those shores. She didn't think about it; she wasn't that type of woman. This was a practical human being who, for all the comfort of her existence, had lost a lot of her own life in a short few years. She understood loss very clearly, and in the hospital she saw loss constantly.
If she'd ever stopped to describe her world she'd have said that she had to deal every day with life in difficult and sometimes extreme forms, so she just got on with it. Do it; don't think about it. And yet, from that July night, this organized, efficient woman knew she was going to be pressed into a new shape.
She intended— with all her ability— that Captain Shannon should continue under her roof for as long as life said he should. He would stay there and be fed and cared for. Get him to feel better. Look at nothing else for the moment—-just get him better. Take it a day at a time. Keep today quiet, simple, and nourishing.
After her long sojourn in the kitchen, Robert came downstairs. He seemed refreshed and easy. As he sat and ate she made no fuss— she simply watched. The silence felt a little strange, but she weathered it.
Time, she said to herself. Give him time.
After breakfast he began to speak. His first few sentences took several minutes to come out. He explained how he had entered her house by accident some days ago. This exhausted him, because now he had come to believe that it was no accident. “I'm certain that it was— it was instinct.”
And how did he know with no evidence, she asked quietly, whose house it was?
“But I must have known, mustn't I? Because I came rushing back to it.”
Ellie made no demands. She allowed him his halting talk— and, when he had talked, allowed him his exhaustion. She merely served. All that day she served and watched. That night he again slept the sleep of the innocent.
Within a week Robert had begun to speak with an easier flow. He said that the effort to come back and find her house, and then cope with the fact of having found her house— that had been exhausting. But he conceded that he had no idea why.
The change in him could be measured. On that first day he took many sleeping breaks. The next day he took one fewer and by the end of the first week he was down to a nap in the late morning and another in the late afternoon.
Ellie approved and endorsed this routine. “Nature's cure,” she said. “That's what we teach young nurses.”
As he slept less he began to interact more fully. They skirted the subject of the war and the marines and shell shock, but she received the undoubted impression that he wanted to discuss it, if only she could find the way in.
She observed him as closely as she could— she gave him all her attention. Effectively, that house and the established life within it took in this damaged man and surrounded him with care. Bit by bit she began to formulate an idea as to what might heal— in a major way— some of his inner scars. For the moment she was happy that the hours had become days, the days had become a week, and the week looked as though it would stretch to— who knew? But she would anticipate nothing and welcome everything.
She also had the common sense to acknowledge that from the moment of Robert's arrival everything had changed— her household and its atmosphere and her whole life. First there were the practical alterations— each day of the week, already strictly time-tabled between home and the hospital, got rescheduled.
More compellingly there was an emotional change. Everything Ellie did in the house had taken on a different meaning. It happened naturally— but she didn't register it and make it conscious for a few days. Then she came to realize that she knew, at each second of each hour, his location in the house. The heightening of emotion at his presence soon became the heightening of sensing his being. Is this what it's like to have a baby and raise it?
She listened for him at all times. She listened as sometimes he walked and walked, ghosting through the house as though afraid to make noise, staying on the landings and in the passageways, never entering the rooms. She heard every footfall no matter how light, as though he had a specific gravity to his body. She found that she wanted to cough to let him know where she was. She found that she wanted to see him every moment of every day.
The realization of this extra watchfulness alarmed her. To justify it, she reached for a nursing principle— she told herself that she wanted only to help restore him to the man whom she had known in France, and that this and this alone motivated her every thought. But she was levelheaded and honest enough to know that her professional instincts— to care for him and oversee his continued recovery— had begun to blur.
Ireland had no psychiatrists, no psychologists; she could summon no help. Ellie had her instincts and nothing more. But, she told herself, she had the most powerful information of all— she had known what he had once been like.
And still, and still— no matter what she tried to tell herself about wishing to heal him— the evidence of her actions said that this was no ordinary visitor, no old friend merely passing through who needed help. She was scrutinizing him with more than a professional eye— and those feelings came from the deep background of great regard that she had formed when she worked alongside him in the most awful conditions in the world.
Consequently, she had formed an opinion of him that had taken her beyond the professional. Whether she liked it or not, she had moved into territory she couldn't look at— yet. She tried as best she could to keep herself on the practical road, but she wavered minute by minute.
Can I cope with this? Can I have both? What's “both”? Can I both care for him as he needs to be cared for and feel for him as I do? Or am I heading into something that will damage me; am I heading for another loss? If I ask him about the war, will he collapse? But if he does, at least I'll know what not to say. I'll know where not to probe.
&nbs
p; Early in the second week a kind of heat wave came into Ireland from the west, and from the window of his bedroom Robert spent hours and hours watching his beloved river. For long periods of the day, usually after a nap, he looked at little else. He still didn't explore the house; he never went into another room; he didn't examine anything in detail; he showed no curiosity— he ignored, for example, the Kennedy family scrapbook with all its old county whimsy.
Ellie observed this pattern and made no judgments, felt no criticism. Breakthroughs, were there to be any, would be slow, she knew, and piecemeal. Soon she was rewarded; some good signals began to appear. She had been fearing that Robert had taken the opportunity to relax in her house, and that he had perhaps, with less pressure, even fallen back a little from the recovery pattern he had begun to establish in his walk up the Shannon. Then one afernoon she concluded that he was indeed strengthening.
They had chosen to sit in the garden, in a corner of a tall arbor shaded from the hot sun.
Robert said, “This reminds me of France.”
Ellie's brain zeroed in on the word reminds.
“Which means that you have begun to recall— things?”
He heard the question clearly. “Yes. But only since I came here.”
“If I show you something we talked about, do you think you'd recall the conversation?”
“I don't know.”
She went into the house and came back out in seconds, carrying a picture.
“D'you recognize this?”
He looked. “Yes … maybe … I've been looking at it.”
“Do you recall telling me about it?”
“No, I don't think so … “ Then he brightened. “It's The Falls of Doonass. We had it hanging in our house.”
“Yes.” And then she lied. “We had one in our house too. I had forgotten.” A year or two earlier she had found the old print in a junk shop, bought it in his remembrance, and had it framed.
“I saw them,” he said. “The Falls of Doonass. Near Limerick.”
“If you can remember that,” she said, “don't you think you can remember anything you want?”
“But do I want to?”
She had no answer, so she returned the picture to the wall.
When she came back and sat down, he said, “I think now I know why— why I came back here. I did actually see your picture— that morning. But I didn't know what I had seen. Until now.”
“How much do you want to remember?” she said.
“I know that I should. And I know that I can't. And I think I know what I want.”
“What do the doctors say?”
“They want me to remember.”
“But”—now she entered dangerous waters—”you're afraid?”
Robert stood up, walked away, came back, and sat down again.
Very gently she said, “Which are you more afraid of, that it will all come back to stay? Or are you afraid that you'll remember it and it will all go away again and keep returning?”
“I know what you mean.”
“Why not— write it down? Write down what you can.”
He looked at her. “But wouldn't that make it worse?”
“Or would it,” she said, “bring it under control?”
Without saying anything more, Ellie set up a writing table in Robert's room: neat rows of pens, pencils, erasers, paper, and ink. She didn't nag him; she didn't ask; she didn't even suggest. Robert saw them, fingered them, considered them— he even sat down and measured himself in a writing position.
For days he ignored the desk and its invitation. Then one morning he sat there and doodled for a short time. Another afternoon, he played solitaire, watched by the pens and pencils. He came within the fateful last six cards of winning a game— but he wrote nothing on the pads on the desk.
There came a day when he managed to start: I, Robert Shannon, was with the U.S. Marines at Belleau Wood. There he stopped— and wrote nothing else.
When he came downstairs, he told her— he showed her. She studied the page as though looking at a Shakespeare First Folio. She also observed— without comment— that the handwriting was as shaky and tremulous as the signatures of the old men she had seen in her hospital wards.
Handing the paper back, she said, “I was there too, and I haven't yet had the courage to do that.”
He shrugged. “Is this all right?” He looked straight into her eyes.
“Much more than all right.”
He left the house a little dizzy, walked down the garden to the point where the old wooden fence overhung a path down to the water, and stood there, looking at the river …
Day after day, for more than a week, he repeated his actions. He never wrote anything other than that same sentence: I, Robert Shannon, was with the U.S. Marines at Belleau Wood. Day after day he showed it to her. Day after day, she made some new encouraging comment: “You're doing the right thing” or “Whatever you write will be fine,” or “There's no hurry, there's no dog chasing you.” And day after day he walked down the garden to look at the river. She didn't follow him— but she still knew where he was at all times.
Robert kept all those single-sentence pages pinned together, and then one morning he took the previous day's page and beneath that lone sentence he wrote, As long as I live, I shall know for a certainty that I shall never again encounter anything as awful. If I ever again see anything so terrible, I will know that I have died without salvation and that I am in Hell. And that is the name— Hell— that we gave to Belleau Wood.
In the afternoon, he handed her the page and she read it immediately. Then she took the action that doctors believe is central to healing: She touched the patient, she laid a hand on his arm.
The men who came back to Boston from the war arrived by various means. Where the army had arranged it, dozens, if not hundreds, caught the same trains from New York where their troopships had docked. Some had been fortunate enough to sail right into Boston Harbor.
Rivers of tears flowed. Some of the greeters— and their soldiers— cried with relief. They were home and safe; there was no injury. Some wept much more bitterly, for the loss of an eye, a limb, a spirit. One way and another, they all left the railway platform or dockside with their lives changed forever and shaped up to face the uncertain world ahead.
Vincent Patrick Ryan did not appear in such a crowd. He docked in New York and, with nobody to meet him, slipped away into the streets and ended up in Central Park. There he sat on a bench, ignoring the curious and admiring looks of passing strangers who wanted to thank this fine young man in his uniform for what he had done for the world.
He sat there all afternoon, and in the evening he refused to leave when an attendant told him the park was closing and he must leave. Vincent looked at the man carefully. The attendant thought better of renewing the challenge and Vincent stayed all night— he had no place to go.
During the war he had decided never to see his adoptive parents again. He couldn't manage the gratitude he felt because he couldn't express it. Nor could he manage the chagrin he felt at having let them down by not having become a priest.
Further, he knew that he wanted and needed to live a life that nobody saw, a life that would, from now on, contain, when he needed it, the splendid release of emotion that he had had confirmed in the war.
Back in Boston next day, he made one contact— his earlier mentor, the Accountant, who took him on, giving him ad hoc duties in an unspecified role. The office speculated that Mr. Vincent, as the Accountant named him, might be an illegitimate son; the men shared vague physical similarities. Whatever the truth, the office now knew it had an enforcer who collected debts, harried lawyers who performed too slowly, and went to the offices of problem clients.
Not long after Mr. Vincent's arrival, the Accountant began to prosper. He bought another practice and began to acquire more and more real estate. It was said that he had a magic touch when it came to closing a deal— which he typically did with Mr. Vincent standing beside him. As yet,
the Accountant knew only that the young ex-soldier had a presence that seemed to intimidate people— and a charm that made him acceptable in business situations.
After some months in which Mr. Vincent proved himself increasingly valuable, the Accountant took him from his discreet rooming house in the north of the city and set him up with cash and clothes in an apartment not far from Beacon Hill, near enough for Mr. Vincent to catch the whiff of the good life and the self-important mood it promoted. From the apartment, he walked to work every day; he returned each night to a discreet unseen existence. Double-locked indoors, he read voraciously; he became obsessed with clothes; he learned to cook.
His most visible external life took place at a target club. After a Sunday on the firing range he seemed less brooding for the first two days of the working week, a fact that began to draw the Accountant's thoughts together. Then a fracas occurred which said everything.
On the streets after a heated baseball game, a fight broke out and spilled dangerously toward the exiting Accountant and Mr. Vincent. Near the Accountant, one of the troublemakers pulled a knife— and Mr.
Vincent killed him. On the spot, on the street, he lowered the man with a chop to the throat. Everybody around heard the crack and the gurgle; nobody would forget it.
Far from being arrested and charged, Mr. Vincent was hailed by the police. The ex-soldier had done a civic duty; the riot had ended there and then. Mr. Vincent accepted the plaudits with agreeable modesty.
But the Accountant had observed that in the minutes after the killing— and there was no doubt that the knife wielder was dead— a peace had descended over Vincent Patrick Ryan. His face lost its tension; it relaxed and became close to angelic.
The Accountant read widely but badly; he liked cheap literature about crime and fear. When he saw this psychological change, he recalled a story he had read of a man only at peace when killing. He began to keep a closer eye on Mr. Vincent— and one day he tested him.
An Irish builder in South Boston, a man of many bad aspects, had threatened to talk to the tax people. He needed to cut a break with the IRS and he was prepared to sacrifice the Accountant, of whose dealings he had much knowledge. Mr. Vincent visited the man late one afternoon on a building site when the others had gone home.