by Annie Murphy
I hated this humiliation. I raised my head to give him a piece of my mind but the bed was empty. Slowly, his head appeared opposite mine and we laughed loudly together.
It was some minutes before he recovered his breath sufficiently to say, “My life was once so disciplined.”
“Stop blaming me.”
I fetched a bottle of Dettol disinfectant and began to clean the carpet. Lying on the bed, he said, “You have ruined the mood altogether.”
He went to his own bedroom and returned in a temper forty-five minutes later.
“My God, she is still scrubbing the floor.”
“When I’ve finished,” I said, “we’ll go to your room.”
“Mary’d smell the Dettol in both our rooms and put two and two together.”
When I ripped the sheets off the bed, he bundled them up, saying, “I’m hiding them from Mary.”
“Where?”
“In the boot of my car.”
“At two in the morning?”
“ ’Tis safest so. I might forget them when I go to work.”
“Are you going to throw them over the cliff?”
“No, take them to Killarney and mix them with the Palace laundry. The nuns will presume they were from visitors’ beds.”
Knowing his distrust of nuns, I said, mischievously, “They’re so clever they might trace them back to… us.”
After giving me a sour glance, he went for a duffel bag. He stuffed the sheets inside and crept out the front door. I heard his trunk quietly open and close. He returned with two sheets from the closet. As we remade the bed, his mind was still racing.
“If Mary sees that wet patch, she will ask herself why you couldn’t get out of bed in time.”
“It’s okay,” I said. “The truth is unimaginable.”
“No, she will know I was blocking your exit.”
I opened the windows for air and he got a thick towel from the bathroom to soak up the excess water on the carpet.
“What a way for a bishop to spend a night after a hard day’s work,” he said, oozing with self-pity. “But now we are free for us.”
“After,” I said, “I’ve taken a shower.”
“But —”
“You said I can’t come into your room smelling of Dettol.”
“True,” he conceded.
Later, in his warm room, he became instantly erotic.
“Please,” I said. “Spare me this.”
“But I’ve waited for over two wretched hours.”
“I’m exhausted.” I rolled over. “Good night.”
He rolled me gently back and touched my cheek.
“You have that little curl of mischief at the left corner of your mouth.”
“Eamonn. It’s late. What are you —? My God, you are worse than Larry. Do you have to —?”
He had to.
Before I left his room at seven, he told me he was staying home that day to prepare for an early departure for Dublin the next day. If I went with him, we would have to spend tonight in the Palace.
In midmorning, I packed my bags. I was really excited to be going on my first trip with the man I loved. Pat and Father O’Keeffe were also coming, but I liked them very much.
Eamonn came to say, “You might like to dress up a bit.”
“These jeans not good enough for you?”
“With your slim figure, you look grand in anything but you will be eating with me in a hotel.”
He pulled the hair off my face.
“That’s better. Clip it up like that with combs. Do not wear those jangly earrings which bit my bum in bed.” I had to look the secretary type like Pat.
All that day, one thought buzzed in my head. What had happened the night before was so like the breaking of the birth sac it made me feel that one day I would be a mother.
Eamonn was compiling reports. When he was working, he looked amazingly capable and handsome.
On the way to Killarney that evening, he talked a lot about the European Economic Community (EEC). He was proud to have attracted so much financial aid to the West of Ireland.
He also told me of a four-year-old Kerry girl who was lost in the woods near Kenmare. Everyone was afraid she would freeze to death or drown in a lake. Yet all the officials did was to send out search parties in cars or on foot. He made them call up a helicopter. If they didn’t and the child died, he warned them, he would tell the whole world. A chopper appeared as if by magic. Within hours, the girl was found safe and well. “I cut through the red tape,” he said. “Oh, I cannot stand the pettiness of officialdom.”
He explained that the reason he traveled a lot was because though he loved Ireland, he loathed its “backwardness.”
“You,” I said, “are backward yourself.”
“I knew I should have put glue on my lips. I am not discussing contraception, again.”
He could not see that he, too, was part of the Irish scene. The Pope himself was a Kerryman. They both bound themselves to rigid rules in the face of terrible crises.
In one respect at least Eamonn had disregarded the rules. I was a girl lost in a dangerous forest and he would feel guilty if he did not take extreme measures to rescue me.
To save my soul, he was willing, even in the Bishop’s Palace in Killarney, to cut through the red tape of the Ten Commandments.
Chapter Twenty
IN THE PALACE, Pat and I prepared a modest evening meal for ourselves, Eamonn, and John O’Keeffe. We ate in the kitchen.
Eamonn was in high spirits, telling jokes and stories about his parishioners, of whom he was evidently very fond. Much of it centered on the trickery of Irish farmers and their lust for livestock and land. There was about the people, besides the gaiety, he said, a morbidness and an abiding sense of guilt. This is why he liked to sit in the confessional and forgive them their sins, which were often not sins at all.
“Above all,” he emphasized, “the Kerry folk love taking the micky out of people.”
“Even a bishop?” I asked.
“Especially a bishop.”
In a switch of mood, he told of a local scandal involving one of his aides, a woman with two children. In a pub, her lazy husband had passed his hat around for money to send her to England for an abortion. This got back to Eamonn just before his aide came to him asking for a four-week advance on salary for her vacation.
He told her he knew what the money was for. She said either she had an abortion or her marriage would fold. If she had to give up her job, her husband would go to England to look for work and never come back. Eamonn promised to help her financially and emotionally. He would see to it she was separated from her husband for a while so they both could be counseled. He would also leave her job open for her until she was able to return.
I said, “You doing your big magician’s act.”
“I gave her no money,” he said coldly. “I refused to share in a murder.”
“You told her she was a murderer?”
Eamonn nodded. “If she went ahead, yes.”
“Must have done wonders for her morale.”
The woman, he went on, found the money somehow and went ahead with the abortion. He felt he had to get rid of her.
I did not know the lady in question so I was in no position to judge her but I said: “Why’d you fire her?”
“I had no choice.”
“Only cowards say that. We always have a choice.”
“Not someone in my position.”
“Does someone in your position have to be a coward?”
“I am not a coward if I do what I think is right.”
“But, Eamonn, she was already down—did you have to kick her?”
Famonn looked at Pat and Father O’Keeffe for support but they shrugged as if to say this was his scrap.
I went on, “Didn’t Jesus put up with disapproval when he kept fallen women in his company?”
“They had repented.”
“Did you ask this lady afterward if she had repented?”
“You don’t seem to understand, Annie,” he said. “I have to put my personal feelings aside.”
“What feelings?”
He ignored the insult. “As a representative, I have to think of the whole community. This was an open scandal.”
I wondered if he would feel compelled to fire a priest or, come to that, a bishop, if he were known to have cheated on his vows? I settled for saying: “If Justin was imprisoned for stealing would you have to fire him? Why victimize a desperate woman?”
“If I hadn’t fired her, Annie, what sort of message would have gone out to my diocese?”
“Maybe that you were a Christian.”
“You think I am not?”
“A Catholic first, a Christian second.”
He eyed me sharply. “Explain.”
“Catholics look first to the Pope, Christians look only to Jesus.”
Eamonn sighed heavily, “Oh, dear God.”
“You could have said to her, ‘What you did was wrong but it would be an added wrong for me to fire you when you have problems enough.’ Irish people would have understood that.”
Once again, it struck me how concerned Eamonn was with his reputation. In his view, in spite of Jesus’ treatment of Mary Magdalene, some things were unforgivable. “I know I’m an ignorant American,” I said, “but I would have gone further and given her the money.”
Eamonn covered his face with his hands, muttering, “Oh God, oh God,” before turning—significantly—to Father O’Keeffe as if to say, “You see the problem I have on my hands?”
I said, “I’d have told her to follow her own conscience.”
“Follow her own conscience,” he repeated, with an almost pitying sigh that made me see red.
“Yes, hers and not yours. You’d have given her everything she asked if she had followed yours.”
“ ‘Tis not my conscience, you fool,” he responded heatedly.
“Oh, I beg your pardon,” I said. “You are God’s spokesman. I nearly forgot.”
“God Almighty, Annie, I’m fond of the woman, I really am, but what she did was wicked.”
“She didn’t think so. Besides, bishops may be exceptions, but the rest of us poor mortals all do wicked things from time to time.”
After the meal, we all had drinks and played poker.
“Hold your hand up,” Eamonn kept saying to me, “you have no guile, girl.”
“Stop looking over my shoulder,” I said, angrily.
Having someone look at your cards was unnerving. It was like someone looking inside your brain. After poker, the three of them took turns at playing the piano and singing. They were talented and trusting of each other.
We retired just before midnight. Pat went home and Father O’Keeffe had a room on the ground floor. Eamonn and I virtually had the upstairs to ourselves. In that quiet old house, we climbed the majestic sweeping staircase with landings decorated with chandeliers and old pastoral prints. When he showed me my bedroom, it took my breath away.
“A shame,” he said, “you are not sleeping here.”
“Where, then?”
He winked and gestured me to follow him. His bedroom, two doors along, had a high-beamed ceiling, tall windows with burgundy drapes, and thick-pile blue carpets edged by polished pine. The big bed was of heavy brass. The eiderdown was a feminine salmon pink with exquisite Belgian lace and matching feather pillows.
The bed was high, reminding me of the beds in Inafield when I was young. As soon as I undressed, I jumped on it and trampolined, it was so bouncy. “If we have sex in this bed,” I said, “we’ll suffocate.”
As soon as he was stripped, he jumped in beside me and dipped his head under the covers. I immediately squeezed his neck between my legs. “You’re strangling me,” he gasped. “You have terrible strong legs, Annie, skinny as they are.”
I marveled at his gift for making me laugh at myself. How could I thank him enough for taking away my shame? Laughter was more cleansing than confession, more calming than Valium.
After I released him, he came up onto the pillow, puffing and blowing, just in time to see me leap naked out of bed. I was so exhilarated by the evening’s company, the sense of being in a fairytale room, that I became a free spirit. I wanted to dance.
Leaning on one arm, he followed me with his eyes. “Is it the bad in you coming out?”
I did not answer. I was in a kind of trance, weaving along the walls, high-kicking, twisting, bowing, writhing from the hips, my hair cascading first down in front, then down my back.
After I had given a Salome-like performance, he beckoned me to join him in bed. Once I was there, his own sense of mischief took over. The night was memorable. A bishop’s bed in the Bishop’s own Palace certainly beat the backseat of a car. I was overwhelmed by his great tenderness.
It was my turn to be like an eel. As I went down under the covers to kiss him, I seemed to sink in the feather mattress. Then it happened. I couldn’t breathe. In a muffled voice, I screamed, “Get me out of here.”
He didn’t take me seriously and started to laugh even louder. That made me panic all the more. Tiny feathers went into my mouth, throat, eyes, up my nostrils. He finally hauled me up like a drowning cat.
When I had sneezed a few times and recovered my breath, I said, “In a mushy bed like this, there’s only one position for me. On top.”
“If that is what you want.”
I climbed aboard and no sooner was he in me than I said solemnly: “I would like to have your child.”
His eyes ballooned to their limits. “You would what?”
Gazing at him from close range, so that the whole of me, body, mind, spirit, seemed to be inside the whole of him, I said, “I want you to live forever.”
I could not think of a better place to declare my deepest longings for him. I was challenging the system that he represented. I needed to tell him that I had no fears for the future.
“Eamonn,” I whispered, “I have never met anyone like you before and I never will again. Whatever happens to us, I would like you to live on in our child.”
“But that would be a —”
I stopped the sin on his lips with a kiss. Then: “I will not lie to you about this.”
Though this frightened him, he clasped me even tighter. “Don’t you see,” he said, “how terrible that would be?”
“No, I do not.”
When, after he had climaxed, I finally released him, he had a worried look on his face. He got into his pajamas and the expensive dressing gown with EC embroidered on it, which had been hanging on the back of the door.
“Where’re you going, Eamonn?” He left without answering and I heard him walking down the stairs. He returned in a couple of minutes with a glass of brandy.
As he sat propped up in bed on the pillows, I got up and started to open up the curtains.
“What,” he asked dramatically, “are you doing? The convent is across the way.”
“I’m just going to wave to them.”
“Don’t, Annie, they will see you naked and me in bed behind you.”
He trusted no one. I said, “Will they be spying on you at two in the morning?”
“Annie,” he hissed, “they know I am here. They will have their binoculars trained on this room.” I could not believe my ears. These sisters wouldn’t dare look at him during the day and they were spying on him during the night?
“I have been there. They keep binoculars by the window. They’d watch this room for hours till their legs turn blue.”
“You make them sound like a lynch mob.”
“Get… away… from… the… window.”
“If they’ve been up all night, they’re entitled to a little entertainment.”
“I am going to have a heart attack.”
That did it. I slipped behind the curtains and waved to the nonexistent prurient nuns.
Next thing, a rough hand was tearing me out and shoving me across the room toward the bed. His nails dug into my arms.
“Don’t,” he said, “ever do that again.”
Rubbing my sore arms, I said, “And don’t you ever do that again to me.”
He threw me in the bed roughly, which I liked because it was good to experience all his emotions. He tossed my nightgown after me.
“Put it on. Those nuns may have taken your picture.”
“In the dark?”
“They might have a special camera.”
He peered behind the curtains for a few seconds. “I think we might have been lucky.”
Heavens, I thought, I have never met a more suspicious man. And I want to have his child? I must be mad. Then I looked at him, at his beautiful friendly face, and everything changed.
“This is bound to bring on my colitis,” he moaned, “and all day tomorrow I have important meetings in Dublin.”
I stroked his forehead. “I do apologize.”
“I am never bringing you to sleep here again.”
I snuggled up to him, started to kiss him, but he pushed me away. “I am beginning to sympathize with that husband of yours. I never felt so much boiling rage in my life.”
“It was spicy, Eamonn, admit it.”
“All right, if you say so, I admit it. We’ll all go to hell together.”
On that comradely note, we settled down to sleep.
Chapter
Twenty-One
I AWOKE IN THE MORNING with an allergic reaction to the feathers in the bed. Choking was often the trigger to a panic attack. I was in my room dressing when I heard Pat come in the front door. I stumbled downstairs and explained my problem.
She went to the pharmacist’s for some liquid medicine. She also brought me a Valium tablet from the room Mary used when she stayed at the Palace. “Drink plenty of tea, Annie,” she said. “And I’ll make a Thermos for the trip to Dublin.”
Eamonn drove fast on straight but narrow roads while dictating to Pat. The faster he dictated, the faster he drove. I was in the back with Father O’Keeffe, nervous and coughing, and he was patting my hand to comfort me. From time to time, he poured me tea from the Thermos and gave me cough drops for the tickle in my throat.
Eamonn showed no sympathy. “It sounds, John,” he said, “as if you have an old consumptive back there.”
