Forbidden Fruit

by Annie Murphy

  I had understood that for a long time. Oil and water would not mix even for Eamonn.

  “On the trip back from Dublin, Annie, I lost all control. I wasn’t a priest—more like an alley cat.”

  How sad. He saw what we did as evil, whereas for me our love was liberating and lovely.

  The incident in the car had opened his eyes to his own hypocrisy.

  I stopped in my tracks. “Your confessor is right. It’s got to end.”

  “But I will so miss you, Annie.”

  I sobbed. “It is heartbreaking to fall in love with someone you can never have.”

  He said, “If you go in anger, it will haunt me for the rest of my days.”

  Since he was in the middle of a crisis, this was now-or-never time. “If I stay, it’s as much for you as for me. If you keep turning your love into healing, forget it.”

  He held out his hand to me to join him from the water. I refused until he said humbly: “We need each other.”

  It was like a voice out of the clouds because he never spoke of needing anybody.

  I joyfully left the sea. Ours was a real, deep embrace, for, with his acknowledgment of need, I wanted his child more than ever. All I could think of was a baby boy with Eamonn’s features and Eamonn’s expression on his face.

  After hugging each other contentedly, we walked arm in arm, with the water lapping the cream-edged sand. This was another binding, heart-baring moment.

  “The pain,” he said, “is ripping me apart. This sexual thing is so much more powerful than I had imagined. And”—he touched my breasts—“you are so beautiful and intelligent and spicy and funny.”

  Never had I felt so much his equal. The healer had himself been hurt but, though he could not see this, the wound was healing him of his inhumanity.

  I was touched by his humility at revealing to me for the first time the terrible cost to him.

  Solid differences remained. His faith was in faith, whereas mine was in love.

  We went on walking for another half hour, saying little, leaving two sets of tracks in the sand.

  When he came to my room later, his brandy glass was full to the brim and he had tied a double-knot in the cord of his robe.

  “Sorry,” I said, “but just turn around and head for home.”

  He looked at me in his puzzled fashion.

  “Only men with single knots are allowed in my bedroom. That’s an insult.”

  “Insult?”

  “You expecting me to rape you?”

  “No, Annie.” He giggled, and took a huge swig of brandy.

  “Why didn’t you come in here wearing one of those old chastity belts out of a museum?”

  He approached and let me undo the first knot. “I’m not staying, Annie.”

  He bent down to kiss me and I smelled sea-salt and infinity on his cheek. That first gentle kiss led to a second, less gentle, until he was searching my mouth with his tongue. When he allowed me some air, I suggested he might find life easier on the horizontal.

  “Why not?”

  He lay down beside me and I untied the second knot. “That’ll do, Annie.”

  “Fine but stop kissing me.”

  “I’ll just hold you till you go to sleep.” Then the kissing began again and his hand came up under my nightdress. There followed a forty-five-minute strip, after which he put me on top of him and stayed in me a long time.

  We had a whole week of making love like this. At the end of it, I, usually so bad at verbalizing, said, “I really love you.”

  Taking my hands, he pressed them to the sides of his head.

  “ ’Tis very hard for me to say —”

  “I know the point you’re at, Eamonn; don’t say any more.”

  He put his fingers over my lips. “ ’Tis just that we never take precautions. I try to get out of you but —”

  “Listen,” I said. “If I had your child, it wouldn’t bother me if you married me or not.”

  “Where would be the healing in that for you, Annie?”

  “In having made the man I love immortal.”

  “Don’t tempt me with that,” he said.

  “But I don’t want death to rub you out entirely.”

  He found the idea of immortality in the flesh both damnable and alluring. His attempt to withdraw from my body at climax was now part of his fear that our love could not work. For someone like him, who thought withdrawal doubly wrong, it must have boded our final separation.

  He made me promise to tell him if my period was overdue. Once more, the chasm yawned between us. His disaster would be my triumph. What he most feared I most desired, for I had no wish to be sent away empty.

  An interlude was over. And, strangely, though we loved each other more than ever, we knew the end was near.

  Chapter

  Twenty-Three

  IN THE LAST WEEK OF JULY, my father called to say he was coming to Ireland for three months and would Eamonn find him and Hannah a place to stay in Dublin. He admitted he was nervous about me because lately I had not been in contact.

  Eamonn handed me the phone. I assured Daddy I was having a good time and making progress in inner healing.

  The plan had been for me to stay in Ireland for six weeks and I had been there over twice that long. Daddy sensed something was happening to me that he ought to know about. His meddling made me furious. His life was tough, I knew. He couldn’t talk with Mommy, whose mind was wandering. Since Mary, too, was being difficult prior to her divorce, he felt the need to be near me.

  Eamonn called the visit a godsend. The length of my stay at Inch was becoming an embarrassment to him. If I got a job in Dublin, only three hours away, I would have a place of my own and could stay in Ireland as long as I liked.

  Being an active person, I looked forward to moving to Dublin and getting a job. He wrote me letters of recommendation to four hotels.

  Eamonn drove Pat and me to Dublin, where we arranged with a real estate agency, Lisneys, to lease in Eamonn’s name a two-bedroom apartment in a leafy suburb for $250 a month. It was in a one-story building on Leeson Park Avenue. It had high ceilings, thick-pile carpets, central heating, and it backed on the grounds of a hospital. We were less than a half mile south of Stephen’s Green and a five-minute walk from the Burlington Hotel.

  A few days before my parents’ arrival, Eamonn was due to leave for Australia, where his brother, Michael, worked as a priest. He needed a three-week break from Ireland, he said.

  I helped him pack. His wardrobe was from Harrods of London. He had brightly colored cotton shirts and linen pants, several pairs of hand-crafted shoes, and a tan safari suit.

  What, I wondered, would absence do to the fondness of his heart?

  He told me that when next we met he would be driving a new car. The Mercedes was a gas-guzzler. He needed something smaller, especially as he would have to make so many trips to Dublin.

  This desire for economy was out of character. Was he trying to see whether, if he left the priesthood, he could live a simpler life?

  The last few nights before he left he was especially passionate. We had had marvelous times in Inch. We both sensed they were coming to an end and would never return. We kissed good-bye next to the big-leafed summer-long geraniums. Around us the only sound was the soft fluting of the wind.

  The house seemed lonely when he left. When he returned, I hoped, he would come back tanned, refreshed, healthy-looking and find Inch filled with the emptiness of my departure.

  I went to Killarney to say farewell. Pat said, “Larry will miss you. Me, too. You brought a special openness into our lives.” And Father O’Keeffe: “You are more Irish, Annie, than the Irish.”

  I hugged them both with tears in my eyes.

  At Inch, I took a last long look-around. I walked the beach and wrote “I Love Inch” in the grainy sand before the tide washed it away. I climbed the hill behind the house and waved to mountains that shivered in the heat: Farewell, Brandon and Stradbally, and, you, most westerly, Mount Eagle.
I stroked the lawn on which we had lain side by side on the night of my panic attack. I said goodbye to my room, and to his, so full of memories, I knelt to kiss the rug in front of the hearth on which we had made love.

  I might return, of course, spend days or weeks as his guest, but Inch would never be our home again.

  I never knew how much my parents meant to me until they came through Customs at Dublin airport.

  I was first struck by the familiar—I mean, the contrast in size between my parents. My father, at six feet six inches, was always imposing but, with only one leg, he walked with the stiff dignified gait of a giraffe. Next to him, my mother, looking like the Duchess of Windsor, was, even in her high heels, twelve inches shorter.

  My mind flew back to the day Daddy came home complaining of a pain in his left foot. Spring at Inafield, least threatening of seasons. Forsythia blowing yellow clouds in the wind, lilacs budding, dogwood in bloom, fallen apple blossom lying like pink shadows under the trees on the driveway. Daddy propped his foot up on the old black kitchen chair for Mommy to remove his shoe and sock. After a five-minute examination: “For Christ’s sake, Hannah, tell me.” “A crack in that old corn of yours,” she said, “and a mean-looking inflammation around it.”

  Daddy’s short, thickset Irish partner, Dr. Dolorhey, was summoned and, looking through his tortoiseshell spectacles: “Nasty, Jack. The dye from your sock may have infected it. Could go haywire with that diabetes of yours.”

  Nightly soakings, salvings, and bandagings did no good. Daddy went back to work; his sugar count rose and pus appeared on the foot. The Doctors’ Hospital advised rest, medication, and Jacuzzi baths. Then Mommy spotted a red streak moving toward the toes, two of which were bloated and blackened, and the doctor said the dreaded word: “Gangrene.”

  First the toes went, but the foot still swelled and gave off an odor. Finally, he was rushed to the New York Hospital, where his left leg was amputated four inches above the knee.

  When Mommy visited him, she could hear his screams from the end of the corridor. She heard them in her dreams and it worked better than AA; she stopped drinking for a while.

  Now my parents were visiting me in my new homeland. Daddy was in an executive hat, beige trench coat, navy blue pinstriped suit, and paisley tie. He carried his usual glossy black cane. Mom, my pale, blue-eyed Mom, was in a six-hundred-dollar Sybil Connolly hunter green suit, and she had a turban on her head. They brought with them from America my home at Inafield and my childhood, my brothers and my sister, the sad times and the happy times. I felt proud of them. And I needed them.

  I reached up to my father and he reached down and we kissed and hugged somewhere in between. He saw—instant relief—I was not chewed up but tanned and relaxed.

  When I embraced my mother, I picked up the smell of liquor, taken because of her fear of flying.

  My father adored the apartment. While Mommy was unpacking he looked out the window to the back and sighed, “Everything I dreamed of. Thanks, sweetheart.”

  His simple gratitude touched my heart.

  “You’ll never know,” he whispered, “how trying your mother can be. It’s not her fault but —”

  “She’s still drinking?”

  He nodded. “You seem contented, Annie.”

  “I’m fine,” I said noncommittally.

  “And Eamonn, he took good care of you?”

  “Couldn’t have been nicer.”

  Four days later, Mary flew in with her four-year-old son, Bobby, for a two-week visit.

  It was quite a family reunion.

  I had written Mary asking her to bring me over a few condoms. Maybe this was my way of confiding in one member of my family.

  The first quiet moment we had together, Mary came out firing from the hip. “What d’you want with those rubbers?”

  “You brought them with you?”

  “I forgot.”

  “Then I won’t be doing anything with them.”

  “If you get pregnant you’ll blame me, is that it?”

  She ran her fingers through her beautiful long blond hair. And breathlessly: “You don’t write Daddy but you write me long letters about this white-hat Bishop you’re staying with. What’s between you? Don’t lie to me.”

  1 laughed. “Can’t I even make one call to my lawyer?”

  Out of her exquisite cat-like mouth came a tirade. “I’m not the cops, Annie, I’m your goddamn sister. I can tell you are screwing that Bishop, who just happens to be Mommy’s second cousin. And you have no pills, no rubbers, how the hell do you think this is going to end?” She rubbed the pouches under her eyes. “Christ, am I jet-lagged. You said rubbers are illegal in this country, even doctors get locked up for giving samples. So you wanted me to risk importing them. Jesus God, are only bishops allowed to use condoms here? So, I forgot. Have you thought of a diaphragm like Mommy used to wear? You surely can’t want to have a bishop’s brat. I mean, I must be having a heart attack, you surely aren’t such a fucking idiot you want God to make lightning specially for little Annie Murphy of Connecticut?” She groaned. “Oh, shit, why’re we whispering, let’s get out of this dump.”

  We found a bar in King Street, not far from Stephen’s Green. In an empty booth at the back, she ordered, “Give me a cold beer and one for my crazy sister.”

  When the bartender was out of earshot: “This is Ireland, Annie. Land of saints and scholars, and they crucify sinners like you to prove it.”

  “Guilty till proved innocent, that it?”

  “You are having an affair with the most famous bishop in the Emerald Isle. You could be shot.”

  “Shot?”

  “Pious Catholics would do that just for the Indulgence. Don’t you realize, Annie, that ‘most every Catholic in Ireland has a gun? I read about it. You want to leave this country in a coffin?”

  “Let’s talk about your marriage.”

  “Don’t talk about the dead.” Sharp change of mood, conspiratorial wink. “C’mon, Annie, what’s the guy like?”

  I winked back, told her the way Eamonn made fun of everything and everyone, especially himself, and how he suffered from colitis, even milking that for laughs, and how he drove so fast that if St. Christopher were aboard, he’d die of fright.

  The more we talked the more we laughed. But eventually she said, “This thing with the Bishop inside that love nest is a catastrophe and you don’t even recognize it.”

  “Recognize what?”

  “The sin, stupid. I can feel the wickedness.”

  Her reaction horrified and astonished me. She was getting a divorce, which the Church says is a sin, but she, like Eamonn, was far more concerned with my wrongdoing.

  After two weeks, Mary left me in tears at the airport to return home. “Be good, Annie,” she said; “don’t let that Bishop give you anything but his blessing.”

  Chapter

  Twenty-Four

  WITH MY FOND MEMORIES of the Burlington Hotel I phoned its personnel manager for a job. He offered me an interview.

  I entered the big glitzy lobby and gave my name at the porter’s desk. A minute later, a thirty-year-old woman in a white blouse and military-blue uniform came toward me with a very arrogant walk. She had pitch-black hair pulled back in a neat bun and the biggest green eyes I ever saw. Even those eyes did not soften her chiseled handsome features.

  “Murphy?” Her smiled was made all the more treacherous by a mouthful of capped white teeth. “Are you Murphy?”

  Irish-looking, she spoke with a pucker English accent.

  “I am, Miss —?”

  Before I could read “Randall” on her identity brooch: “You’re hired.”

  “To do what?”

  “We need someone who understands the whims of Americans who make up most of our clientele.” Her toothy smile seemed altogether less threatening.

  “Aren’t you going to interview me?”

  “I just did.”

  “I admire your judgment,” I said.

  “That’
s two of us.”

  She shook my hand and said, “Call me Randall. Bridget to my enemies.”

  She took me to see the personnel manager. Mr. Rice was low-key and he looked like Woody Allen. “You’ll be useful,” he said, “in information, as a telephonist, and as a guide.”

  I hadn’t realized I was so highly qualified.

  Afterward, Bridget said, “The pay’s a princely twenty-five pounds a week.”

  It had all been so easy I wondered if Eamonn had had a word with the manager. If so, I wasn’t complaining.

  Randall supervised the telephonists. She showed me around the harsh-lighted exchange. When she introduced me to the four girls, their hands going like pistons, I turned an instant yellow.

  “Never mind, Murphy.” Randall slapped a girl on the back. “Show her how it’s done, O’Toole.”

  O’Toole, with a mouthpiece strapped to her face and five cord plugs over her shoulder, gave me a swift garbled commentary while she pulled cords in and out with lightning speed. One of them hit me in the eye. “See,” she said, “nothing to it. You do it.”

  With my eye watering, I tried and got into an awful mess.

  My turn to have Bridget noisily slap my back. “Murphy, you are slicker than I thought. Any questions?”

  “One.”

  “Ask.”

  “Why’d you hire me?”

  “Because I can’t stomach any more fucking Irish. They should all go home to England or America.”

  I now understood my primary qualification for the job. I also knew that Randall, in addition to a basically kind nature, had a tongue on her that could cut to the bone.

  Within a few days I was slinging the connecting cords in and out as fast as the best of them.

  In my free time, Bridget introduced me to raw Dublin life while my parents took me out at nights for dinner in hotels like the Hibernian and the classy Shelbourne on the north side of Stephen’s Green. One evening, Daddy called up a doctor friend, Harry Burke. He lived in Howth, a suburb on the northern arm of Dublin Bay. He came over and took us to his beautiful house for a meal.