Forbidden Fruit

by Annie Murphy

  “I was a thin child, Annie, with stomach problems, bronchitis, fevers. I loved sport but was too sickly for it so I made do with music.”

  He told me of his seminary days—“I never broke a rule, not one”—and of his first years as a curate in Limerick. In those days, in some pool halls, youngsters aged fifteen to nineteen were abusing kids of nine years and up. It took courage to confront them. He knew he could not stop homosexuality. But he could stop child sex-abuse.

  “I had a popcorn temper in those days, Annie, and got into a few fights. Twice I was hit with a billiard cue here”—I sighed as he touched the top of his head.

  I liked the fact that he had no physical fear. He gained the small boys’ confidence and together they unmasked the bullies to the authorities.

  “I could not sleep at nights, Annie, for my anguish at this slaughter of God’s little lambs.” He smiled painfully. “One night, a twenty-year-old came at me with a cue. I grabbed it from him and snapped it in two. Then I twisted his arm behind him and put his head down the toilet bowl and flushed it.”

  His frankness encouraged me to tell him how, until I was about twelve, I used to break into houses with my friend Corey. I could pick any lock, get through any window. I chose people I didn’t like and ate the food in their iceboxes. Once, I broke into the house of Mr. Thompson, who used to abuse children.

  “So,” I told Eamonn, “I put the plug in his bath and turned the faucets on. When he got home hours later, the whole place was ruined.”

  Eamonn was shocked. “You are a terrible case for a Novena.”

  I was no less shocked. He saw no parallel between his attack on perversion and mine. He had nearly drowned a human being whereas I had only ruined a few floors and carpets.

  I resolved to be more careful. Maybe Eamonn had double standards: one set for him and another for everyone else.

  As the night lengthened, as the same fire warmed us and welded us into one, we returned once more to my marriage. I do not think Eamonn ever doubted his magnetic power to draw the badness out of me.

  “Before we married…”

  He came very close, stroking my hair, sensing that I was about to open my heart to him. “Yes, Annie?”

  “He took precautions so we would not have a child.”

  “If you were not then married…”

  He seemed to think I was speaking of morals but I wasn’t.

  “One night,” I said, gulping, “Steven realized he was losing me. It had finally got to him that I feared something inside him that was wanting to corrode me.”

  “So?” Eamonn urged.

  “He came to me without a condom so I would conceive.”

  “You mean, so you would be forced to marry him?”

  I nodded, shaking all over at the memory of unimaginably bad things.

  “Anyway, Annie, I’m pleased he failed.”

  “But he didn’t.”

  He turned ashen. “You conceived?”

  “Yes. We married three months later.”

  “So there was a child?” His jazz hand was quite still on my head. “I never knew.”

  I could almost read his thoughts through his musical hand’s patting, resting on my hand and my hair.

  “What became of —?”

  “Because of me, it died.”

  He momentarily withdrew his hand in horror. Then the professional in him, I guess, made him put it back on my head.

  “You mean, you had an abortion. Did… he”—I liked that he could not bring himself to use the word husband—“did he know about this?”

  “It wasn’t an abortion.”

  His blink was another small victory for me.

  “No?”

  I shook my head. “Women can get rid of babies without having an abortion.”

  He was mystified by this. It was new for him to be so out of his depth. It made me interesting, a challenge, and he, a competitive man who always got his way, liked a challenge.

  “Was it a boy or a girl?”

  “I don’t know.”

  He was even more surprised. “How could you not know? Oh, I see. The baby was taken from you when it was born and adopted so you never knew whether it was —”

  “It was not adopted.”

  “No, of course not,” he said, soothingly, as if I were not quite sane. “You said you were somehow responsible for its dying. But surely”—this was the genuine plea of someone who cared—“you only mean that you gave him… Or her…” He shook his puzzled head. “But you said you did not give your baby for adoption.”

  He looked into the fire for a very long moment.

  “Annie, you’re not making any sense.”

  “Nothing in my life makes sense.”

  By now, I suspect, he did not know whether I was crazy, a monster, or a plain fantasist. Yet something told him I was telling the truth.

  For the first time, I reached out and held his hand.

  “In the fifth and a half month, Eamonn, the baby died.”

  “You said you didn’t—“

  “Didn’t take poisons or use a metal coat hanger.”

  I could sense the relief of this good man who valued infant life flooding through him.

  “So you didn’t kill… the baby.”

  It had struck him that the sex of a baby at five and a half months is plain and yet, for some reason, I had no idea whether my baby was a boy or a girl.

  “I told you I was responsible for it not living.”

  “But…” He needed both hands now to express his utter bewilderment.

  “Has it never occurred to you, Eamonn, that human beings die when they know they are not loved?”

  “Die?”

  “That’s why I’m dead.”

  He held his warm hand close to my warm cheek and, with an almost frightened laugh, said, “You are very much alive.”

  “Not inside me, Eamonn. Not where it matters.” I spoke the next words with as much passion as any woman ever mustered. “No one is alive who is not loved and I have never been loved.”

  “But —”

  Once more he seemed to me to convey his thoughts through the touch of his hand: But you are loved, Annie. I love you.

  If only I could be sure they were his thoughts.

  “You said, Annie, that no one is alive who is not loved?”

  I nodded, sensing that he was asking himself if God’s love were enough for happiness. What if he, a bishop, was thinking the most terrible thought of all: Could it be that I, Eamonn Casey, who believe myself to be so alive, am really dead, have always been dead, will remain dead forever and ever?

  For several minutes we peered together into the heart of the fire. Maybe the fire was telling us that we held the secret to one another’s lives. Maybe it was not merely the focus but the creator of a story, a new story, our story, that would outlast the lakes and snowcapped mountains of Kerry. If I loved Eamonn and he loved me, two long-dead people, a lonely man and a lonely woman, might rise from the dead, hand in hand.

  I suddenly launched into the story of my marriage.

  I had hoped against hope for happiness, and Steven and I had a lot of fun together. But when I sensed danger, when I came head-on against the destructive part of him, I wanted out. He desired me only because I no longer desired him. That was when he grabbed me and took me violently. “I won’t let you go,” he said. “You’ll never leave me.”

  That night I conceived.

  Almost immediately I became ill. It was not the usual morning sickness. On a Brooklyn street, as I was almost fainting, women shoppers said, “Get this girl to a hospital, she’s real bad.” My doctor said, “Lots of pregnant women are this way.” But I knew that something was wrong.

  Now I was talking to Eamonn. My story was, so to speak, entering history, no, making history.

  “Deep down, I wanted something to be wrong.”

  “Why?”

  “Because I was all wrong, don’t you see?”

  He nodded, though whether he yet under
stood how wrong I was I could not tell. I continued:

  “By the time I was five and a half months gone, I was sleeping all day and all night. No energy. Felt close to death. Then I started bleeding. I was taken to St. Vincent’s Hospital, down in the city, you know, in the Village. Someone examined me and I was put on a drip. A nurse said it was to induce labor. But I was months away, my mind, my body, not ready. I didn’t want that baby. Didn’t want to see it. Let it stay in the dark, I thought, the dark in which I shower, the dark where it belongs forever. Then a doctor came.

  “ ‘You have to let that baby out,’ the doctor said, and I said, ‘Why?’ ‘Because it’s dead and it’s poisoning you.’ I thought, ‘Dead? Then we’ve poisoned each other.’ “

  “No, Annie, no,” Eamonn said, reassuringly, his soothing hand pressed in a circling movement on my head.

  “The doc said, ‘If you don’t let it out we’ll have to cut you.’ So I let go. It was still, my God, painful. Went on for hours, through the night and next day. And finally the baby came out and they…”

  “Yes?”

  “They put it in a bedpan.”

  “Oh, Annie; poor Annie.”

  “It was not a pretty sight. A big head, natural, I guess, for its stage of development. Then a beeper went. Emergency. The nurses rushed off, leaving me. And there was a dead kitten of a baby sitting in a bedpan next to my bed. And I said to this little stranger, over and over, ‘I let you die, little one, oh, I wish I could be sorry, I really wish that.’ “

  “You did not let it die.”

  “I did,” I responded heatedly, “I did, I did. It was so fragile looking, with blood all over it. I could see how it was formed—muscles, bones, sinews, veins like in an autumn leaf—all this I saw through the transparent skin. And I was responsible for its dying because I hadn’t loved it. Because I couldn’t. Because babies should only come from love and this baby was my husband’s doing and I hated him for making me so hate myself.”

  Even as I took a big gulp, a gulp that pained me, I was theatrical, too. I mean I wanted to make an impression on Eamonn.

  “So,” I continued, “I was responsible, you see.”

  This time Eamonn wisely did not attempt to speak.

  “I kept ringing the bell, Eamonn. Kept hollering, ‘For God’s sake, somebody come and take it away.’ Everyone was too busy. I was left wishing desperately that somehow, somewhere, inside me I would find the love to love it.”

  His hand stopped for a few seconds stroking my hair, then continued.

  “I don’t believe in God, only in the hell He created.”

  “God loves you, Annie,” he said, his eyes misting up.

  “No, He’s dead. Maybe He died because no one loved Him.”

  Eamonn, dear Eamonn, let the blasphemy pass. I never told him that I became virtually a vegetarian, not from principle but necessity, the moment I saw that baby lying dead in the pan.

  “I was a doctor’s daughter. From age five I peeped into my father’s medical books. I told myself that this covering”—I plucked at my cheek—“the skin, was not real; the real me was underneath, invisible. That’s what I still feel. No one will ever see the real me.”

  “No one?”

  “No one,” I repeated, challenging him. “The only real self I ever saw was my husband’s baby, the baby in the bedpan, which ripped me apart. I saw into it, saw what it was made of.”

  “Which was?”

  “Death. I wanted it dead. That’s why it died.”

  “Annie, Annie, are you listening to me?” He pressed my hand vigorously. “Good. There was probably a simple explanation —”

  “The doctor said later there was absolutely nothing wrong with it. It simply died. And I was responsible.”

  Eamonn, man of the world, one who had seen everything, knew everything, was stunned. “You looked at it for how long?”

  “A half hour, maybe. I couldn’t tell its sex because its little legs were crossed and I couldn’t have got out of bed to look if I had wanted to.”

  “And you never asked? No.”

  By now, I felt as tired as the day of my miscarriage. The fire in me, like the one in the hearth, was low.

  “Enough, Annie. It’s past two o’clock.” He drew me to my feet. “Time for you to hit the hay.”

  At my door, he said, looking pleased with me, with himself:

  “Thank you for opening your heart to me. That took courage.”

  I went to bed, but my mind was racing so I could not sleep.

  What was he thinking? He looked on himself as a great healer, and what healer could ever resist the temptation to raise the dead? I did so need his healing hand.

  I heard him as before saying his breviary, walking up and down, past the Stations of the Cross. He reminded me of the tide ebbing and flowing.

  Forty or so minutes later, he must have seen my light was still on—the lamp deliberately directed to the door—for he knocked gently, put his head inside, saw me sitting up in bed in my nightdress.

  “Good night, Annie, and God bless you.”

  He said it so kindly, with such generosity, that the whole of me felt humbled and warmed.

  Chapter Five

  NEXT MORNING, I AWOKE LATE. I showered. A woman showered. I dressed. A woman alive for the first time to feelings of hope, dressed. I put on my face. To the mirror: Hello, stranger.

  Mary heard me moving about my room. She had my breakfast prepared. The Bishop, she said, had gone off to Killarney as usual. Mary, it was plain, never spoke about the Bishop’s private matters. She was completely loyal.

  Or was she?

  It struck me that Eamonn had not waked me because he did not want me around. He needed time and leisure to ponder what I had told him the night before. I hoped so.

  Mary had set out my breakfast in the kitchen. Looking at the clock, she switched on an old radio. Out of it came nothing but the sound of many bongs. Bong-bong-bong. It was the Angelus. Mary made the sign of the cross and her lips moved in prayer.

  I came from a country where there was a strict separation of Church and State, and here was a national radio network putting out the prayer of a particular religion. It made the job of men like Eamonn that much easier. No wonder they were so powerful.

  After breakfast, Mary offered to take me with her to shop. She drove me in her tiny Volkswagen twenty miles to Killorglin. We first traveled east, past fields of golden gorse, with the Slieve Mish mountains on our left and Castlemaine Harbor on our right. Then we turned south on the Ring of Kerry, where giant rhododendron and fuchsia bushes were in bud.

  First I had tasted strange air, tea, bread, and now a strange town. Killorglin, on the River Laune, was set on a hill so steep you needed a ski lift to get up it. Everything and all the people in it seemed wild.

  They were so relaxed you got the impression they had nowhere of importance to go to. Even the postman, with a packed bag on his shoulder, gazed in every shop window as if he were out on a stroll to see his pals and had arrived two hours early. He stopped on the bridge to see if the trout were biting that day or were just up for air and wanting a chat.

  We went into the butcher’s shop. He was a big man with a red face and a bent knee of a nose with nostrils like a horse. All the time he was laughing and gesturing and wielding a bloody cleaver as though he were Oliver Cromwell.

  He followed Mary out to the car and heaved in, off a bloodied shoulder, what looked like half a cow. He threw it in the backseat, without any wrapping, touched his forelock, laughed raucously again, and, brushing his meaty hands, went back to his shop. Used as I was to the neat expensive packaging of New York, this was quite an experience.

  Killorglin, Mary told me, was a “pagan place.” They held a three-day Puck Fair there every summer. The maidens of the town, and there were still some in Ireland in those days, competed for the affections of the Goat, a monstrous horned creature. The luckiest of them became his August bride.

  In midafternoon Mary dropped me off on Inch
strand, while she took the meat to the Palace in Killarney where she kept a couple of freezers full of food for when Eamonn entertained. The beach was deserted. It suited me to walk, squired by the sun, alone and not alone, along the frothy edge of the sea or to lie in the sand dunes.

  When you are happy you don’t mind being solitary. I was happy, though with what justification I could not be sure.

  Eamonn came home earlier than Mary had predicted. I knew he would. This is why I had deliberately delayed so as not to be there when he arrived. Let Eamonn wait on me.

  I finally walked the couple of miles or so up from the shore, past the Strand Hotel, along a stony and pitted path, to find him eagerly looking out for me at the door.

  Did anyone ever welcome anyone as he welcomed me? My heart raced out to meet this man with the sunflower smile.

  Taking both my hands in his, he said, “Yesterday, your face was a snowflake, Annie, and now your cheeks are red as votive lamps.”

  He pointed to where the spring sun, descending, was reddening the distant mountains. He noticed me shudder and those questioning eyes demanded to know what was wrong.

  “It’s just… it reminds me of blood on snow.”

  He sensitively did not ask why that unsettled me.

  That night, by the hearth, I was reluctant to reveal myself further. After a long chat about friends and world events and Irish politics and even some Irish history, I clammed up. This was to be my Silent Night.

  I was not consciously playing hard to get. I was simply not prepared to do what he wanted when he wanted it, as if all he had to do, so to speak, was ring the Angelus bell.

  “Problems like yours, Annie,” he said, “don’t go away. Unless you talk them out, they’ll follow you all your life. One day, when you’re least expecting it, they pop up and”—he gestured eloquently to his own throat—“strangle you.”

  My continuing silence meant that from his point of view, it was a wasted day. But I felt it was good to reinforce the fact that I was a real person and not just an American cousin with a problem awaiting the touch of his healing hand.

  Maybe he knew that already, but maybe not, and I was not prepared to take a chance. Not till I had lowered the odds.