Forbidden Fruit

by Annie Murphy

  “They like it. If not, I make them like it.”

  And he was off on a story that typified Killarney, where we were headed.

  “Only last week, Annie, I was standing in the street”—his left hand, off the wheel, was shaking in anticipation of what was to come—“when a horse-drawn cart stopped by me. And guess who was sitting in the backseat!”

  “The Pope.”

  “Something even more surprising. A corpse.” He roared with laughter. “Propped up like it was on an outing, with a hat on his head and a brier pipe in his mouth.”

  “Was the pipe alight?” I asked, lamely.

  “He was a farmer, y’see, and before taking him to the funeral parlor to coffin him up, his sons were giving him a last tour of the town.” Eamonn was alive electrically in his seat. “But I said to the boys, ‘God Almighty, the man is dead, have you no decency left that you treat him like a piece of furniture?’ ”

  Without meaning to, 1 mimicked his voice exactly, “God Almighty, the man is dead.”

  Eamonn stopped laughing. He recognized that I was so in tune with him I spoke with his voice.

  “That’s not bad at all.”

  For the moment, his face blanked out. Maybe he sensed danger.

  “I’ll give you a tour of the town first, Annie.”

  “Even though I’m not dead yet.”

  He said softly, “Even though you are very much alive.”

  Killarney was a meandering market town, small by American standards. Exotic colors clashed and not one building stood up straight. How unlike the tall, tiring symmetry of New York.

  I was impressed by the 285-foot-high Cathedral spire. Inside, my first impression of St. Mary’s was of soaring pillars, Giothic arches, and of white limestone, rough and bare as if the skin had been peeled off it. It was like seeing a clean white dawn spread over Lake Candlcwood in the New England of my childhood.

  For all its hush and beauty, something about the place alarmed me.

  Eamonn genuflected toward the striking crucifix over a main altar that was lit by three tall lancet windows. Then he went on his knees in a pew at the back. As I knelt beside him, he blessed himself, bowed his head, and prayed with eyes so tightly closed they looked screwed down.

  Which God was he praying to? Maybe a bishop has to have a special God. I suspected that on Day One of Creation, his God made not the heavens and the earth but the Rules.

  Here was the source of my disquiet. This was Eamonn’s real world. He was a cleric before he was a man. Inside him was a sanctuary where he walked godward, blind and deaf. In this moment, he was speaking with the God who, in an ascending order of dignity, made him a Christian, priest, and bishop, and, if his socks proved predictive, a cardinal. I had no right to intrude where he was happy.

  But was he? Buoyant, cheerful, dynamic, yes, but happy? It was my woman’s intuition that he was not. But even if he were not, was it in the power of any woman to make him so? Was he praying for my soul or my happiness? Maybe he made no distinction. But I was a woman, irreligious by his standards, and I did. I wanted happiness.

  So we knelt, he talking with his God who was nearer to him than my shoulder and I bemoaning the absence of Him whom I had worshiped in an uncomplicated way when I was a child.

  Suddenly, as if God had dismissed him with a bang on the head, his prayers were over. He leaped to his feet.

  “Come along, Annie,” and he was off like a March hare.

  As we toured the Cathedral, he kept receiving fawning bows and touching of the forelock from men, as well as little curtsies from women, and everyone murmured, “My Lord.”

  This set him apart from my world. But wasn’t this massive building a testimony to what he was? On the journey he had spoken of “my” Cathedral. On the sanctuary was a chair that proved he was Eamonn, by the Grace of God and appointment of the Pope, Bishop of Kerry. This was his cathedra, or seat, with his coat of arms and a Latin inscription that he told me meant “I Am As One Who Serves.”

  “ ’Tis made of Tasmanian oak.” His whisper could be heard in the back pew. To me the chair seemed hewn from the Rock of Ages. It spoke of loyalties that went back two thousand years to Jesus and Peter, James, and John.

  I did not like to be in thrall to the past. Since coming to Ireland—was it really only twenty-tour hours ago?—I wanted to live now.

  He was pointing to the pulpit. He seemed to like its elevation. He enjoyed the pomp, pageantry, and theatrics of religion, which, frankly, I thought of as pagan.

  Though he itemized the cost of repairs—to the roof, organ, stonework, the big limestone baptismal bowl—I took little of it in. I was thinking, How much will you pay to fix the tiny chapel of my soul, to clean the old stone to the hone?

  The spire of my being did not rise up into a supernatural heaven; it was thrust upside down, like a spear, into the rich dark earth. Down here I wanted happiness.

  When I was eight years old, I took charge of my mother, Hannah, whom father called Wishie because she was always saying, “I wish this or that.” Booze was her family, flag, creed, God. Dear Wishie, with the face of a rose garden and the mouth of rotten apple. How often I had to fish her out of the empty bath when she missed the can. I hauled her out by her arms which were limp as overcooked noodles. When she went completely crazy, I took a knife and cut a crisscross on the palm of my left hand and held it up to her, yelling, “Stop it, stop it!” The sight of blood, danger, was the only thing that could bring her, a mother, to her senses.

  Could she drink! A thirsty camel at a water hole would have stopped to watch. It made your head spin just to breathe the air around her.

  When Jack, my father, was at medical conferences, I slept beside her. Soon as she woke, she grabbed a bottle as if it were the alarm clock. She drank to cure hangovers.

  I can see her standing, one hand on her hip for balance, the other with a bottle of Ballantine raised at the diagonal, “Shit on ‘em”—this to no one in particular—before trumpeting a blast of Ballantine. Once she grabbed a bottle in each fist, and played two trumpets at once, maybe to prove how good she was. Often she cooked in a green sweater and nothing else, and I mean nothing. She was bottomless save for a blackthorn bush under her navel. In her tough, West Side, drinking Irish talk, “I’m okay, Annie, for Chrissake, leave me be, willya?” as she aborted another bottle.

  My doctor father said I was born drunk. Instead of me, Mom should have given birth to a crate of Ballantine.

  Whenever she boiled an egg I reached for the fire extinguisher. Get in our old Cadillac with her behind the wheel, I used to say, and don’t kid yourself it isn’t suicide. Is there no penalty for being drunk in charge of a child?

  “Don’t tell ya father, it’d only upset him.” She made me promise, as she sank the pint of vodka she had just bought to replace the pint she drank the day before. She could find a needle in a haystack if it had a lick of vodka on it.

  So she wouldn’t get too drunk, I used to dilute the vodka with water before she did, but Daddy saw the motes in it, till I learned to put the water through fine muslin first.

  To save her, since I loved that nutty lady, I lied to her and I lied for her until lying was as easy as breathing. I enjoyed it. Like Mommy, I kept replacing the little sips taken from the bottle of truth with liquid from the faucet of my own imagining.

  I also made a frightening discovery that most people—not my father—like being lied to; it makes life more comfortable. Nobody wanted to know the truth about Mommy any more than she did. Lying became for me a form of Christian charity.

  What about you, Eamonn? Do you care for truth or do you, like the rest of us, demand that people tell you lies?

  We left St. Mary’s for his big stone Palace next door. The very word raised my hackles. Another barrier between him and me.

  Did he intend to show me once and for all that he was a princeling of the Church? Inside the Palace, backs straightened like candles and “Morning, my Lord,” “Yes, my Lord,” “No, my Lord,”
all spoken by men and women, some of whom knelt to kiss his ring. Was this, I thought naughtily, the clerical version of kissing ass?

  He introduced me to his lay secretary, Pat Gilbride, with, “This is my cousin, Annie Murphy, from America.”

  Pat was a big happy blonde in her late twenties with a Cheshire Cat smile and hooded eyes that looked right at you.

  When Eamonn got me to shake hands with Justin, the odd-job man, he relaxed. He slipped easily into his one-syllabled man-of-the-people talk. Justin had patches on knees and elbows, and a brogue that completely foxed me. In his presence, Eamonn, almost dancing a jig, was funny and tender, paternal and exigent at the same time.

  Afterward, Eamonn whispered, with twinkling eyes, “A grand Catholic is Justin. If he hanged himself he’d use a rosary.”

  He held up his own beads, with the crucifix on top, noosed his wrist and tugged upward in a vivid demonstration.

  He liked Justin, I think, because Justin would never doubt that he was the greatest man alive after the Pope.

  One person I liked immediately was Eamonn’s priest-assistant. Tall, with a marvelously gentle sense of humor, Father John O’Keeffe was a blend of Jimmy Stewart and Sean Connery. He had heavy brows, soft eyes, and a fine ski nose. A laughing Kerryman, he was not in the least scared of Eamonn, who said to me, “Clever chap, he has three degrees.”

  In Eamonn’s study, dominated by a portrait of Pope Paul VI, the phones never stopped ringing. As he took the calls he thumbed through a pile of mail. He could do several things at once—talk down the phone to an Irish priest in South America promising funds for a village well, read a Latin document from a Vatican official, and, muffling the phone, explain to me what we might do for the rest of the day.

  Though this was routine for him, had he brought me there on my first morning to impress me with his power? Few women would object to that.

  At lunch, the only other guest was a Scot named Ian Simpson from the Scottish Finance Office. Eamonn sprinted through grace whether his guests approved or not.

  Mr. Simpson was a small, bald, soft-spoken man. “Come to Edinburgh, the Athens of the north, Miss Murphy.” He promised to show me Princes’ Street and the Castle.

  Even to be near Eamonn had its perks.

  The best food and French wines were served by soft-shoed nuns with humble demeanor and downturned gaze. Did these women have eyes at all? How could Eamonn tolerate such servility?

  The contrast between the two men was marked. Eamonn’s face seemed made of pieces of brightly colored glass; Ian’s was of a single grayish hue. Eamonn spoke in a rainbow stream of words, combined with broad heartfelt gestures; Ian’s utterances were spare and dry as desert sand and came from no further than his lips.

  Another thing: Whereas Eamonn addressed him as “Ian,” the Scot never dared call Eamonn anything but “My Lord.” No equality here. Ian was not descended from the Apostles.

  They spoke of financial help to the deprived areas of Kerry. Tens of thousands of pounds sterling were mentioned. Eamonn guaranteed everything. Occasionally, with his right index finger, he banged on the fingers of his left hand one by one with the force of a hammer to make his points.

  For a couple of hours after lunch I was left alone in his study. On his desk was a photograph album, surely for me to examine. It contained newspaper clippings and pictures of his ordination as a bishop in late 1969.

  One picture showed Eamonn with the Primate, Cardinal Conway, President de Valera, Cardinal Heenan of Westminster, and the papal Nuncio. Eamonn, looking truly magnificent in his episcopal robes, was referred to as, at age forty-two, the youngest member of the Irish hierarchy.

  Cardinal Heenan preached the sermon. “Bishop Eamonn is a friend and father of the poor, he sought shelter for the homeless.” There were pictures of Eamonn’s ring—a hundred years old—of Eamonn smiling under his tall miter, and standing on an open bus while waving to the crowds.

  Was Eamonn challenging me? Was he saying, “Here is a mountain, Annie. Do you have the strength and stamina to climb it?” Or —far more likely—was this all in my imagination?

  He liked the best, and how could I be described as good, let alone the best? Did I mistake a show of power for an invitation to love? To topple such a man would be like burning down a cathedral. I had no wish to do any such thing. Did I?

  Memories stirred in me. I was twelve years old when my elder brother, John, came rushing into our house in Redding, Connecticut. He was white with anger and my father asked him what was the matter. John blurted out that he had just caught a visiting monsignor from Toronto in the garage with his secretary from Montreal. “Doing what, for heaven’s sake?” my father asked. “He was… making love to her,” John said. Mommy stepped forward and struck him across the face. “Can’t you see Annie’s here?” she roared. I was stunned, but my elder sister, Mary, went into hysterics at the thought of a holy priest having sex. Such things did not happen in Connecticut. “Who,” she gasped, “is going to forgive him his sins?”

  Next, I was a teenage waitress at the Avon Inn in New Jersey. I often saw men who had checked in in priestly garb dressed as laymen and taking women out for the night—and taking them in. One priest in particular annoyed me because he was so preachy by day and so damned promiscuous by night. Heavens, I thought, and these pious hypocrites give us poor mortals such a hard time of it.

  This was a major reason for my leaving the Church, that and the feeling that Catholics put a sin-tag on every thought, word, deed, and omission. I didn’t want to reduce my Eamonn to the level of clerics who lead double lives. There was surely no danger of that since it was his strength not his frailty that overwhelmed me. With great generosity, his one thought was to resurrect a girl whom my father had told him was dead and buried.

  It was this generosity that attracted me to him and made me want to get as close to him as I dared.

  Chapter Four

  HE DROVE ME HOME THAT AFTERNOON in a quiet mood. He had a kind of puzzled look on his face as if he were grappling with a problem with which he could not cope.

  I had seen enough to know that this masterful man hated to be led. He had so much more to lose than I: honor, prestige, power. What could I offer him in recompense?

  Nothing, unless there was deep inside him a torrent of need still to be revealed. I could lead only by following. I could attract only by not attracting. On my part, there was no guilt or guile in this. It was instinctive. It expressed the intent of a woman who had come out of darkness for the first time in her life and felt she was owed happiness.

  But how could Eamonn bestow happiness on me, and what form would that happiness take? I had no clear idea as yet. I only knew that I wanted to be worthy of someone so good and so considerate.

  The second night, we edged ever closer as we sat and talked by the fire.

  “I can do more for you, Annie,” he said, neither humbly nor proudly, “than any psychiatrist.”

  I did not doubt it. If only I could find a way to open my heart to him. Yet if I succeeded, it might lead to his ultimate failure. So deep now was my respect for him I did not want him to fail. He was bigger than I was, bigger even than any possible love between us. How could I want to corrupt a man whom I loved because he was incorruptible?

  His personality so overpowered me, maybe I believed that this wizard and this magical land could accomplish the impossible. I blocked my ears to the drums of doom.

  He stretched out and stroked the back of my hand. “Care to tell me about your marriage?”

  “It was a disaster.”

  “Your husband was a Catholic?”

  My father had told him otherwise, but Steven’s religion was not the reason why our marriage failed.

  “He was a Jew. I was married in front of a rabbi.”

  “ ‘Twasn’t a real marriage, then.” Eamonn said it with a certain amount of satisfaction. “The Church does not recognize the marriage of a Catholic in such circumstances.”

  “I had ceased to think
of myself as a Catholic then.”

  He reflected for a moment. “That was your trouble, Annie.”

  I let it pass. I was still feeling the pain of a marriage that I had never been able to speak of to anyone.

  Tears must have rainbowed in my eyes as I silently recalled all this, for Eamonn said, ‘Ready to talk?’

  As I shook my head, a sharp chill come over me.

  “You are free in the eyes of God, Annie,” he said, stroking my hand fondly, “to marry again.”

  “No.”

  “To love again.”

  “To love.” I omitted the word again. “Perhaps.” The expressive motion of his hand on mine told me he liked both distinctions.

  What is it about firelight that brings out deep things in the mind and heart? Especially this sort of fire made of peat, dug from the very land on which people walk and live and love. I had read that the great old Irish storytellers liked nothing more than to tell their stories by a big turf fire which, at the day’s end, was never put out but simply covered over. Fires would thus go on for generations, until perhaps the house was demolished. A sign, this, that people’s stories, like the land itself, its rivers, fields, and hills, would never end. Stories outlive mountains.

  So we contented ourselves with telling stories—carving the past in fabled stone—of our families, of mutual relatives, laughing and sobbing, and hardly knowing the difference.

  He told me he was the sixth of “a pewful of children,” ten in all. They lived in a yellow Georgian house at Adare in the County Limerick, with white and pink roses round the door.

  John, his father, was manager of two dairies. He rose at 4:30 every morning and came home late at night but he always squeezed in Mass during the day.

  His mother, Helena, dead now for over ten years, was a perfectionist. Good clothes for the children, finest food served at table with lace and silver, fresh flowers, and best china. She never complained, though her health was always bad. She was a brilliant pianist—Eamonn pointed to her piano by the wall. All the children took music and dancing lessons and Eamonn won many prizes in Irish dancing.