Sevovicz managed to retain Laurence long enough to ask one more question. “Did you have a young American visitor recently? Tall fellow, handsome?”
Laurence physically recoiled. “Oh, God,” he said. “Oh, God!”—and he walked briskly from the yard, back into the house, and closed the door.
After writing his memoir, Robert seemed to leap forward— freer in himself, less jagged in his walk, easier in his talk. Memories began to flood back, and he recounted them to Ellie as soon as they surfaced. He told stories of childhood, of school, of the house in Sharon with its scallop-shell cartouche at the door— but almost never a memory or mention of war.
A fresh energy and force came to him. He took a new interest in his own appearance; he responded faster to everything around him. Sometimes it seemed almost as if he were seeing the house and its furnishings for the first time; he'd touch a chair's fabric or scrutinize a painting; he returned again and again to The Falls of Doonass by Currier and Ives.
If he lapsed, it only lasted a short time, and he never seemed to go so far away as he used to and not for as long. One day he came downstairs from one of his absences, as Ellie privately called them, and apologized.
“I wish I could stop this— this—”
She waited. Nothing came. “This what?” she asked.
“This— vanishing,” he said.
“Is that what it feels like?”
“Yes.”
She said, “It'll stop. Now I want you to whip some cream. Here.” She handed him the whisk. “You can lick the whisk when you're finished.”
Their riverside strolls became livelier every day. He asked questions about who owned the fields, what breed of cattle were grazing, was that tree a beech or an oak? His sense of humor began to return; he laughed at her conversation, her copious wit.
Remembering his enjoyment of the Shannon Pot trip and Dominic's legend— of which Robert spoke almost every day— Ellie planned another outing, this time north along the river.
Once more they set out early. On the way she briefed Robert by singing—”Oh, say can you see?”—but he didn't join in.
“I know why you're not singing with me,” Ellie said. “Because I have a voice that'd crack an egg.”
Robert laughed and laughed. “What has ‘The Star-Spangled Banner’ to do with where we're going?”
“We're going to visit the grave of the man who wrote it.”
He struggled. “Francis … Francis … “
She waited; she waited for some minutes.
“Scott Key,” he said. “Francis Scott Key.”
Ellie said, “He wrote the words. My fellow who's buried up here— he wrote the music.”
She knew her countryside well and contrived to keep Robert as close to the river as possible. Within her amateur grasp of psychiatry, she hoped that seeing again the places he had already visited would further help his memory.
The grass in the old graveyard came up almost to their waists.
“Who was he?” said Robert.
“A journeyman harper,” Ellie said. “He used to go from house to house, playing his harp and entertaining people. In some houses he used to sleep with his harp, so that it wouldn't go out of tune in the damp rooms. Maybe that's why he never got a wife.”
They trudged around, peering at gravestones, rubbing inscriptions with moss to make the names discernible.
“D'you know what any great Irishman once considered the height of life?” Ellie said conversationally. “A strong chair, a good wife, and a sweet harp.”
“I don't know whether it would be safe for me to sleep with a harp,” he said. “I toss and turn.”
“Carolan was this harper's name,” she said. “Turlough or Turlock. Carolan or O'Carolan.” She added after a pause, “You enjoy sitting in my father's chair.”
“My father has a chair like it,” Robert said.
“Carolan was blind,” said Ellie. “He rode a white horse, and it led him across the countryside. They said he could compose a concerto in a minute.”
Robert grabbed a handful of tall grasses and tried to pull them away from a gravestone.
“So,” said Ellie, in a summarizing voice, “we don't want the harp and we're happy with the chair.”
“What was the third?” Robert grunted at the sturdy grasses of County Roscommon.
Ellie said, “Think back. See if you can remember it.”
Robert thought aloud. “A sweet harp. A strong chair.” He chuckled. “A good wife.”
“But you're a priest,” Ellie said.
He, thinking aloud, said, “Am I still a priest?”
She enumerated. “You don't say Mass. You don't hear confessions.”
“The word vocation keeps ringing through my head.”
“They tell us that nursing is a vocation,” said Ellie.
“I met a nun,” said Robert, “and she made butter as though it were the most important thing in the world.”
“To her it was.”
“I met a man who loves trees, even though he cuts them down. And a man who made boats,” he said. “He stroked the wood of the boat the way I imagine a man must stroke the hair of the woman he loves.”
Ellie's heart leaped. “Well, there you are. Vocation. My mother always said that marriage is a vocation— and she was married to a man with a vocation, a doctor.”
They fell silent for a time but continued to harass every bit of greenery in Kilronan graveyard. Ellie descended on ancient headstones, ripping out long grasses by the sheaf.
“I think this is it,” she announced, finding a suitably aged stone that had listed forward. “He died in the seventeen hundreds, so it'll be an old tomb.”
They could not decipher a single word of the inscription and went to sit on the graveyard wall. Ellie swung her legs like a child.
“You didn't answer my question—” she began, but he jumped her.
“I've been thinking about it since you asked.” Robert chewed a stalk of grass. “Here's my answer. From the age of ten, I never thought about anything other than being a priest. Imagine, ten years old. And now? Well, now what?” He paused.
She didn't look at him.
Not faltering from the steady flow of words that he had been using he said, “I have no understanding of anything else. I've loved being a priest. But it has confined me. I mean— I know nothing else. I have no idea of how a man marries. Of what he does, how he behaves within marriage. Of what marriage, as a man practices it, must mean to his wife.”
“You could always guess,” she said, wondering how to keep down the noise in her head and her chest, the noise of excitement, the noise of fear that this might not be true, the noise of hope. “And I could always correct you— if you asked me.”
“Well … “ He paused, and it became the longest pause of her life. “Well,” he repeated, “if I'm to ask anybody, don't you think I would have to ask you?”
Only a very few close friends knew that Ellie Kennedy swore like a longshoreman. That night, lying in bed, she swore over and over to herself. Through the adverbs and adjectives the questions stuck out: What did he mean? What could he have meant?
She parsed the crucial sentence: If I'm to ask anybody, don't you think I would have to ask you? Was he being genuine, meaning that he doesn't know? If I'm to ask. Did he mean ask about marriage? Or did he mean, ask me to marry him? Or is he being a typical man, hedging his bets, sitting on the fence, stringing me along? No, that can't be right; why would he string me along when there's not even a string yet? Oh, God, should I have just put my arms around him? Has he forgotten how to be a priest? But if he has, what else died inside him?
And then she swore off a silent volley.
While they were away for the day in Kilronan, a man bicycled along the shores of Lough Ree. He rode very steadily and with little exertion. Everything about him exuded determination and confidence.
For his journey on this warm day Mr. Vincent wore an expensive blue cotton shirt with short sleeves, under which his biceps bulge
d. His beige slacks, of light gabardine, had been secured by bicycle clips around his argyle socks. He wore strong outdoor shoes, the cleats of which helped to grip the pedals of the bicycle.
Nobody blocked his path that day— because nobody else happened to be using it. One man stood looking at the lake and smoking a big pipe, a personable man who nodded in a friendly way. Mr. Vincent looked at him, thought about making an inquiry, but rode by; at that moment he had no wish to chatter.
Mr. Vincent noted the lake and the sailboat or two on it, and when his mood changed he stopped to make— again fruitless— inquiries of fishermen and men in the fields. With some contempt he rode by houses not worth looking at, too common and low for him now, and traveled on toward the town of Lanesborough, where he planned to stay for the night in, he hoped, a hotel better than the one in Athlone where the hall porter was drunk.
To Ellie, the tension seemed to grow— largely because she had no idea of what might lie ahead. Some nights they lay down and slept all night together, chaste as siblings. On other nights Robert went to bed early in his own room and closed the door.
Robert perceived none of the pressure that she might be feeling. He hadn't come from a background of emotional trading with the opposite sex, and for him life just seemed to get better and better. Sometimes he put together a succession of two or three mornings when he woke up fully lucid and comprehending and with a great sense of his old life.
His daytime lapses of mood and memory grew fewer. He remedied most of them by walking with Ellie. If the bad emotions bit, they chewed him hard, and in the truly awful moments he went back to bed— alone. But those long daytime slumbers, those visits to the cellars far below the floor of his consciousness— they were shorter, these days, and safer.
Then the routine of their household changed. Unexpectedly, Ellie was called back to the hospital. In a house fire near Athlone the parents had died and five of the six small orphans received severe burns. The hospital sent a telegram; they needed— echo of war— Ellie's experience with burns.
In her absence, Robert, for the first time since the war, began to run his own life under a roof. As she left the house that morning, the car engine awakened him but he went back to sleep. When he did rise, he found under the tent of a starched tray cloth the breakfast that she had left for him, and he made tea for himself— a major achievement. Then he cleared everything away and ventured out.
He didn't travel far, just to the end of the garden, where he stood looking down at the river. Choosing a direction, he walked along the bank, found a little road and walked a mile, then turned back.
On the way home, he recognized that his curiosity seemed to increase in great leaps. He began to take stock of himself. My knuckles—they're fully healed. I can cope with hunger— not that I've been asked to. The weeping fits— they've stopped. Yes, Clonmacnoise brought tears, but I had hands at my throat and a gun to my head.
That first day Ellie came home late— to a clean kitchen and a smiling man.
On the final day of her hospital work, Robert set out again on yet another walk and found yet another little road. Once again the dog had declined an invitation to walk. The rain came in, and to shelter he stopped, midafternoon, in what seemed like a deserted pub. When he opened the door he found the place packed with drinkers; they lined the bar, they leaned against the walls.
“Soft enough day out there'n that, I'd say,” said the barman, who had an earlobe missing. “And ‘tisn't even a Saturday.”
In his preparations for Ireland, Robert hadn't considered a language barrier. So far he'd been lucky— but he was about to step into a morass, because he had entered a bar full of local reference. Everybody there knew what everybody else meant when they spoke. The barman meant, “The weather is mild outdoors and we might get some rain— which is not unusual here in my opinion— but it would be surprising to get it on a weekday, since most of the rain that we get seems to come at weekends.”
Robert nodded in vague agreement and sat on a stool.
“Any hammer yet?” said the man next to him.
Robert looked blank— and the man beyond the man next to him said, “Hammer away. They'll never get it.”
“And they shouldn't,” said the first man, with some vigor. “All the soup they took.”
“Sure, isn't that how they got there?” said a third man as vehemently. “Off our backs.”
Everybody in the pub knew the references. Some land, probably a farm, was being sold that day at auction: that is, under the auctioneer's hammer. The owners had set what was considered a high reserve price, beneath which they would not sell; the barflies believed it to be too high, no matter what the auctioneer's skills. The family had a bad reputation in the neighborhood because, in the famine of the previous century, they had accepted the life-preserving soup offered to Catholics who were prepared to ditch their religion in favor of the queen's Anglicanism. And later, because they had changed their religion to that of the Anglican monarch, they were allowed to buy land from which a Catholic family had been evicted.
Now came the crucial question to Robert.
“And yourself?”
Meaning, I hope you're not a returned Yank who's hoping to buy that land because, if you are, stay clear; one of our own is entitled to buy it, and if we had our way there would probably be no more than one bidder.
Robert said, “I'm trying to trace my ancestors.”
His quiet tone convinced them, and they immediately relaxed.
“Ah, weren't you at Mrs. Halpin's in River View a few weeks back?” And indeed the man who spoke had one white opaque eye. “God, you're making tracks. You musta had a boat.”
“What's the name anyway?” asked somebody else.
“Loby what's wrong with your hand?” said yet another to the barman. Meaning, You, barman, nicknamed Loby on account of your one earlobe, why aren't you pouring a drink for this visitor?
“A short?” said Loby, reaching for a whiskey bottle.
“My great-great-grandfather was a man named Shannon— that's all I know,” Robert said. And, to the offer of liquor, “No, no. No, thank you.”
“Something softer, Loby” said somebody else. “The Yanks don't have the stomach.” And Loby the barman began to pull a pint of Guinness.
“There's a fella up the road, he'll know,” said the pearl-eyed man.
“Is his name Shannon?” said Robert hesitantly, in hope.
“No. But he's dead anyway,” said someone else.
Since nobody attempted to bridge this seeming chasm of logic, Robert said nothing. He reached in his pocket for the Mass offerings money, and a man at the far end of the bar, a man as fat as a barrel whose pants were hoisted up to his rib cage and held there by hairy honey-colored twine that made the lip of his stomach pout as hugely as a whale, called out, “Are ye all savages down there or what?” By which he meant, It would be an act of barbarous inhospitality for the men at Robert's end of the bar to let a visitor pay for his own drink.
“Keep your hand where ‘tis,” said the man next to Robert, who immediately froze his hand in his pocket; it crossed his mind that they thought he carried a gun. “Are you far from Kankakee, yourself? There's a fellow from here in a job out there; he lives with his sister, like.”
“Didn't she marry or something?” another joined in.
“No, no, she left the convent,” said someone else.
If Irish code breakers traveled with Robert, they would have whispered in his ear to point out that this question constituted an attempt to find out whence he hailed. He answered it anyway.
“I come from New England.”
“Badly needed,” called somebody, and many cackled, realizing he meant that the world needs a “new” England since the “old” England has so much wrong with it.
“Are we far from Auburn?” Robert asked, thinking fondly again of Francis Carberry
“ ‘The loveliest village of the plain.’ Go back down the river.”
“And Glassan???
? Robert asked.
“Spit,” said a man, “and there you have it; that's Glassan.” Meaning that it could hardly be nearer.
One man at the bar asked, “Did you hit it yet?” He held out his hands. “They're that big this week,” he said. “You'll do great. Mind the teeth, like.” Meaning, Have you fished on the river yet? This is an excellent locality for pike fishing, and pike have very sharp teeth.
Loby the barman reached over to plant a pint of black stout porter in front of Robert.
“Hairs on your chest,” said his neighbor and, as Robert went to lift the glass, added, “Hold on, hold on. You can't rush it.”
“No,” said another, “a good pint needs to wait.”
Robert lifted his glass and inspected it.
“D'you know anything about that glass?” asked his neighbor.
Robert clearly didn't.
“The priest's collar.” His neighbor reached out a long unwashed hand and delineated on the glass the depth of the cream head on the black drink. “That has to be the same depth when you're finished.”
“There you are now,” said the man next to his neighbor. Robert didn't know and would probably never learn that There you are now had absolutely no meaning.
The bar fell silent and every eye covetously watched that black pint of stout porter. After many, many minutes, a voice from somewhere called, “Go ahead, now, go for the drought,” meaning, Pick up your glass and quench your thirst.
Robert raised the glass with both hands and tasted the pint; he didn't like the taste and his face squirmed.
“What did I say?” called the man who had vouchsafed his opinion that visiting Americans might find Irish drinks not to their taste. “He'll be billess”—meaning bilious.
“No harm done,” said his neighbor. “Would you like something else? Loby, give the man a mineral.”
Someone down the counter said, “Go on, Bobby, help the man out.”
Robert slipped his scarcely touched pint away from him along the bar to his neighbor, who moved an elbow the merest fraction, no more than the few inches necessary to establish ownership of the great black-and-cream glass.