Forbidden Fruit

by Annie Murphy

  That night, before he began his prayers up and down the corridor he came into my bedroom to say good night. He sat on the bed beside me and fondly pushed my hair out of my eyes.

  “God bless you, Annie.” As he said it, his eyes were shining, his hands and body trembling.

  I felt I had only to touch him or stroke him and he would be in bed with me. I was ready for it, but he, in spite of his obvious sexual excitement, was not.

  I kept to my plan. I felt for him this mysterious something that had no name but I was not sure if he felt the same toward me. If he did and if this feeling was to last, the first move would have to be his. I slipped further down under the covers to prove my good intentions.

  Without looking back, he left my room.

  Moments later I heard him walking up and down, praying. I would have given a lot to know what he was saying to his God—and what his God was saying to him.

  Next day, I did not see him till he returned very late at night. My turn to know what waiting feels like. Maybe this was his way of getting even.

  He had the problem, he said, of funding a parish in Africa. Irish missionary priests were keen to start a school for native children. He seemed much concerned for the poor, whom he called, Irish fashion, “green mouths,” because, I guess, they had nothing to eat but grass and nettles.

  By the fireside, after the usual talk about friends and family, he said, “Tell me more about yourself, Annie. For me.”

  I found that so touching, I could not hold back.

  As he encouraged me by stroking the back of my hand, I explained that after the baby was stillborn, I kept getting terrible headaches and my stomach seemed ready to blow up. My doctor said this was quite normal after a late miscarriage.

  Then, when my first period was due, I simply streamed with blood. It came flying out of me in great ugly clots. I felt I was dying. After all, how much blood can you lose?

  “My husband,” I told Eamonn, “took me to hospital. I was bleeding all over the place. It was winter and snowing, and as I walked, I dripped.”

  “Blood on snow.”

  I nodded.

  “The hospital was Kings County, a terrible place. No sick person ought to be allowed in there. The two interns who examined me hissed, ‘She’s had an abortion. She murdered her baby.’ They had a point. Perpetual mother, perpetual guilt, eh? But it was unfair of them to judge me. They didn’t know.”

  Eamonn stroked my burning cheek. “You never hurt anyone, Annie, and you never would.”

  “They put me in a room with a man in the next bed. A nurse came in screaming, ‘Get a tag for this guy’s toe.’ I thought they were talking about me. I wanted to tell them I was dying but I wasn’t fucking dead yet.”

  I looked up and said, “Sorry.” He patted my head for me to continue. I gathered his own language was not always monastic.

  “They wanted to put a tag on this corpse. As if without it no one would realize he was dead. He had fooled me because his eyes were open and he was looking straight at me.”

  Eamonn stroked my head strongly to intimate, I think, that I was not in the company of a corpse now.

  “My husband came in then. Seeing him, I thought his baby I had let die was getting back at me. He tugged my boots off and my toes were all black.”

  “Frostbite?”

  “No. I was losing a tremendous amount of blood prior to going into shock. I started to hyperventilate and had the first panic attack of my life. Everyone was running around, shouting and screaming, but nobody really cared.”

  “Oh, Annie,” Eamonn said, sympathetically.

  “A doctor was pressing down on my belly and great gouts of blood were spurting out. I wanted to run away. If I was going to die, I wanted out of that madhouse. I got up and ran for the exit. They grabbed me and ordered a big powerful nurse to wrestle me and stop me leaving.”

  I must have paused in my story, lost in memory, because I kind of came to with Eamonn asking, “What then, Annie, my poor, poor Annie?”

  Hey, I thought, stop that or I’ll cry.

  “What then? The bleeding slowed down. Not much left, I guess.” I said this with a wry smile. “I was transferred to Saint Vincent’s. But I was never to be the person I was before. I was now an agitated, panicky, useless human being.”

  “Don’t say that, Annie,” the great healer insisted. “Never say that.”

  “I called my husband and told him I wanted to come home. ‘Get yourself a cab,’ he said.”

  “You had given birth to his child, you were sick in hospital, and he said that? How could he?”

  “If you don’t love, you can do anything, Eamonn. Anyway, I was devastated. That was when my agoraphobia started.”

  “Agoraphobia?”

  “It stopped my first day here when I came down the mountain.”

  “Really?” He shook his head in disbelief. “But what caused it?”

  “I had to go find a cab on my own.”

  “Animals,” he muttered.

  “There were no showers, no one offered me a towel, and I was covered in blood.”

  “But you were in a hospital.”

  “Correction. A New York hospital. No one cared a damn. After all, I was only a human being.”

  “Go on.”

  “I had only a handkerchief to clean myself with. There was blood all over me, on my face, even in my hair. The cab driver took one look at me and said, ‘Christ, lady, you been in an accident?’ I said, ‘That’s about it.’ I climbed in and he took me home. After that, I never liked open spaces.”

  Eamonn seemed satisfied that my story was complete, though there were dark things in my marriage, in me, that maybe I could never tell him. He had his arms around my shoulder as if to enclose me and take away my fear forever.

  For a long time, he stroked my hair and my hands, tender and silent, apart from an occasional long sigh. He seemed to be wrestling with some problem that I could not fathom.

  When I glanced momentarily at him, I saw a sad, almost wistful expression on his face. He seemed to me then to be more vulnerable than either he or I had ever imagined.

  That night, I was lying in bed when, immediately after he had said his prayers, he slipped into my room. This time, he approached my bed and lifted me into his arms and, after pussy-catting my cheek, he kissed me passionately.

  This was a soul kiss. His tongue sharpened itself on my upper teeth before exploring the smooth warm cave of my mouth, as though he were desperate to find a refuge in me. Propped up on my pillow, I tried to move backward but he wouldn’t let me.

  What stunned me was the realization that he had done this before. No one could kiss like that without practice.

  My God, I thought, what if he isn’t the incorruptible man I imagined but the horned Goat of Puck Fair?

  But he was a goddamn bishop; where had he learned all this?

  I felt his whole body trembling and shuddering next to mine, but I could not respond adequately because he pinned me so tight and my mind was in a whirl. After a minimum of two minutes, he let me come up for air.

  In retrospect, my silence helped me. Saying yes or no would have put me in control by encouraging or denying him. My breathlessness told in my favor. He had no one to blame but himself. If he had broken a commandment, he had used his own hammer.

  Then, abruptly, without a word, without an explanation or an apology, he was gone.

  For a long time after, my mind was in turmoil. It struck me that my Eamonn found it hard to say sorry. I did not mind that, for he may have been suffering from embarrassment.

  I was relieved that he was not after all a sun, glowing and pure all round, but, like me, a moon with a dark side. The moon has always fascinated me because it is two-faced. If I’m ever reincarnated, I’ll come back as the moon.

  My body ached to follow Eamonn into his room, to introduce the black side of me to the black side of him. In other words, I wanted, as was natural, to say, “Where do we go from here?”

  But I d
idn’t want to blow it. Play this cool, Annie Murphy. He is far too precious to lose.

  I switched off my bedside lamp and both sides of me, black and white, went into a quiet, restful sleep.

  Chapter Six

  A FEW DAYS PASSED. I said nothing, intimated nothing about what had happened. He may have been testing me to see if I could keep a secret. I knew I could. As a doctor’s daughter, I was often the first to know and the last to tell of his patients’ ailments. But could Eamonn?

  One morning, while Mary was out shopping, I saw him off on a three-day trip abroad. I dusted a pollen-like trace of dandruff from his shoulders, complimented him on looking so smart. He kissed me at the front door but not passionately. More like a man going to the office.

  “Take care,” I said, though he was already out of earshot and, with a cheery wave, he drove off in a cloud of dust.

  The next few days I walked the white beach at Inch, watching the breakers and soaking up the May sunshine. I was more buoyant than I had ever been. Everything around me was precious. I could not bear to step on a crab or a sandfly for fear of hurting or killing it.

  For days, I had caught myself looking with amazement at the stars, sunrise, the sea, a poplar tree, an ant, and felt what the author of Genesis must have felt when he said simply in God’s name of everything freshly created, “It was good.”

  I had an awesome sensation that the relationship between Eamonn and me had been planned before time began. Is this what philosophers mean by eternity? Did this entrancing idea, more a feeling, originate in an overwhelming sense that something uniquely good in our lives was intended from the beginning? Yes, this communion between Eamonn and me was meant to be before the Creator said, “Let there be light.”

  Without searching for it and with the suddenness of forked lightning, I had a name for the nameless thing that had been slowly taking shape in me for days. It was a name so ordinary, so often used by me as well as by millions of others, I never realized I had not once appreciated it until I came to know Eamonn. It was love.

  Recognition took all the strength out of my legs. I just made it to the grassy dunes where I collapsed and lay out of the wind under a blue sky. I was exhausted in body yet filled with boundless spiritual strength.

  Love. So this, finally, was love. I laughed aloud at my long ignorance. Boyfriends, even my husband, from time to time had said to me, “I love you,” and I had responded with “And I love you.” I was now ashamed for having used this precious phrase so glibly, so mindlessly.

  Love was pure and everlasting, and it surely happened only once if at all in any lifetime. In my gratitude at having found it, at having begun to understand it, I outflew the birds. So effortless the soaring sea-gulling of the heart in love.

  But did Eamonn feel, as I did, that our meeting was part of a common destiny? And even if he did love me, would he ever feel free to express it?

  I do not mean by kissing me passionately. That had to be a mistake on his part, never to be repeated, but at least it proved the strength of his feelings for me. Still less did I mean it sexually—he was committed to living a celibate life. What I had in mind was, rather, a lifelong sharing of intimate thoughts, hopes, dreams that neither time nor distance could obliterate. In his absence abroad, I had absolute confidence in a oneness of the spirit, his and mine, that would overcome all obstacles.

  Calling to mind his sweet face, I realized that lately he had lost much of his former calm and self-assurance. Seeing him in a mirror when he thought I was not looking, I had caught him frowning uncharacteristically, as if he had a burden he would like to share. Often, while talking over the fire at night, this precise man had become entangled in a sentence that grew ever more complex until he had to stop and shake his head as if to clear it. He wanted to tell me something but either lacked the words or the courage to do so.

  Was he, too, stumbling toward the discovery of a path that led to the magic and eternity of love?

  I prayed that he would find some way of communicating with me, some way of opening his heart to me as I had begun to open myself to him. He would not find it easy, that was obvious. He knew more of charity than of love. He was expert at giving; receiving was far harder. He had schooled himself through years of service to offer sympathy, not to accept it. His vocation in life was to appear strong for the sake of others, not to show the weakness and need that accompany love among equals.

  That day and the days that followed were the first test for my new existence. Eamonn never left my mind nor did distance separate us. I no longer had the slightest doubt that he was the one person with whom I could share everything and be completely me, if only he would allow it.

  Something else was special about him. He was the one man whom I trusted physically. Others had abused me terribly. Eamonn never would. In this respect, his celibacy was a help, not a hindrance to our love.

  I was in such a peaceful frame of mind I was totally unprepared for the manner of his homecoming.

  Late in the evening, I heard his car on the drive, but so slow I realized something was wrong. I wanted to rush out of my room, fling open the front door, and embrace him, but it was Mary’s job to greet him, not mine.

  I sensed something terrible had happened. Maybe he had met up with a fellow bishop, made a confession of his sins and returned home determined to cast me out of his life forever.

  In fact, he was ill. I could tell that by his slow tread as he went via the hallway into the living room. He was ill enough to have gone straight to bed; he had chosen to go instead to a public place where I could tend him.

  I walked nonchalantly out of my room and ran into Mary.

  “The Bishop’s ill, Annie. I’m making him a cup of tea.”

  I went into the living room and, in spite of the loving appeal in his eyes, I was shocked at his appearance.

  He held out his hand to me. I kissed it briefly and took his racing pulse. His pupils also told me something was badly wrong with him.

  “Eamonn, I’m going to ask Mary to call a doctor.”

  He shook his head. He said he had caught amoebic dysentery on a trip to Africa the year before and it kept recurring in the form of colitis. He had just had a bad bout of it in Germany and been hospitalized. He only needed rest.

  “No, no, no,” I said.

  With all that liquid gone from him and the loss of potassium salts, I feared he might go into shock. I raced to the kitchen and, while Mary called a doctor, I carried in the tray with the pot of tea. By the time the doctor arrived, Eamonn was in bed.

  Mary told me afterward that he had been given an injection and further medication. The doctor said that in two or three days he should be as right as rain.

  I thought of only him for forty-eight hours. I longed to go and sit by his bed. For two days, Mary said, he slept practically without waking. For a man who prided himself on making do with four or five hours a night, that was a new experience.

  I was in bed when a storm blew up. The sea dashed against the rocks. The trees in the garden creaked and the bushes brushed eerily against my window. The wild wind made all the indoor shutters bang and rattle in their boxes. I tried to free my shutters and draw them across, but they were nailed down. Then came rain, hissing against the glass.

  I switched on my bedside lamp and read a few pages from You Can’t Go Home Again, but my mind refused to focus. I switched off the light and went to sleep about one o’clock. But only for a few minutes, because I woke with a start to what I thought was my door banging closed in the wind.

  I turned over and tried to go back to sleep, but I was aware I was not alone in the room.

  I switched the light on and there he was.

  I was too shaken to utter a word.

  His clericals were smart and new, always the crease in the pants and polished black leather shoes. But his nightclothes were old and worn. Over his pajamas he had on a frayed blue bathrobe. His unshaven face was flushed from a long sleep, and his eyes were narrowed owing to drugs.

>   His presence at once took away my fear of the storm. I expected him to sit beside me or at the foot of my bed, but he stood shaky and in a kind of daze in the middle of the floor.

  Out of clerical garb, he was different, less in command.

  “Eamonn,” I squeezed out, “you shouldn’t have got up.”

  His answer was to kick off his old brown flip-flop leather slippers, untie the cord round his robe, and slip it off his shoulders.

  I pitied him from my heart, he was so vulnerable. I did not want things to be like this. He was fragile. His glassy eyes suggested he did not fully know what he was doing.

  “You’re ill, Eamonn,” I whispered.

  “I know what I’m doing,” he muttered. “Know what I want. Know why I’m here.”

  “But the doctor —”

  He took off his faded blue pajama top with the white piping and let it fall behind his back. With fumbling fingers, he dropped and stepped shakily out of his pajama pants.

  There stood the Bishop, my love, without clerical collar or crucifix or ring, without covering of any kind. The great showman had unwrapped himself. Christmas of all Christmases.

  This was for me more of a wonder than all the mountains, lark-song, and heather-scents of Ireland. He stood before me, his only uniform the common flesh of humanity. There were black hairs on his lower arms and in a band across his chest. His legs were sturdy but shapely; on and around his left knee was a big faint birthmark like a coffee stain.

  He looked forlorn, almost like a child lost in a dark wood. I could see his love for me stirring, coming literally alive in that part of him till then unshown, the sacred part of him that could not lie about his feelings. I looked on mesmerized as he hardened below a black fringe of curls.

  Since I still did not make a move, was too terrified to, he shuffled over and almost fell across my bed. He whipped my nightdress over my head, neither gentle nor rough. Then he opened the covers and heaved his overheated body in beside me.

  Once he was lying down his thrashing matched the fierce disruptive rhythms of the storm.