Forbidden Fruit

by Annie Murphy

  If he felt a failure for not making me more religious, I felt equally a failure for not weaning him from his barbaric, punitive God.

  “Annie,” he said, at length, “you can’t go on working in Dublin. You must take good care of yourself.”

  So it was that I reluctantly gave up my job and my freedom. He drove me under cover of darkness to Inch.

  At eleven o’clock, when we were a few miles from the house, the Mercedes suddenly stopped. He had run out of gas.

  He banged the steering wheel.

  “This has never happened to me before, Annie.”

  His religion made it necessary for him to blame somebody even for accidents and his own mistakes.

  “I apologize,” I said. “I should have checked the oil and the tires.”

  “Take those big earrings off,” he barked. “And why wear a skimpy pink dress that barely covers your knees?”

  The dress had simply risen up my bulging belly.

  “I’ve got to get petrol, got to.”

  He was going as crazy as in the gravel pit when the cops were around. He hated the idea of a breakdown while he had a pregnant young woman in his official car.

  “You want me to get in the trunk?”

  “Not in your condition.”

  The look on his face made me laugh.

  “You have no idea, Annie, how very, very serious this is.” Cold rain was falling, and he turned to the backseat, only to find he had forgotten to bring his mackintosh.

  “Flag a car down,” I said.

  He pushed his head up close to mine and hissed, “No cars around. Even if there were, the Bishop of Kerry cannot thumb a lift for himself and a pregnant woman on a dark night.”

  “It’ll be worse if you wait for the light of day.”

  “ ’Tis true. The two of us will be one dead frozen lump.”

  “The three of us,” I reminded him.

  About fifty yards ahead there was a light in the porch of a house. He jumped out and started trotting toward it.

  I shouted after him, “I hope they don’t have a couple of Dobermans.”

  In the car’s headlights, I saw him raise his fists to heaven.

  Seconds later, he was tapping on the window of the house and calling out, “Hello, hello, hello.”

  A minute later, he was back complaining that they hadn’t answered because they were Protestants.

  “Protestants? Just because they don’t answer you?”

  “I know them.”

  “Okay, I’ll go.”

  “God Almighty, no,” he squawked. “The curtain in an upstairs room moved. They recognized me.”

  He returned down the road, tapping and then banging fiercely on the door. “Please,” he kept calling out, like a dog whining for a bone. “Plea-ease.”

  After fully ten minutes, an outside light went on.

  I cordially thanked Eamonn’s God. Pathos had paid off.

  A minute later, the light went out. Eamonn came back to the car, chicken-shaking the rain off his shoulders and muttering hysterically, “Didn’t I tell you those Protestants knew it was me, me, me? And they have the fecking nerve to call themselves Christians!”

  “Please, plea-ease,” I whined, mimicking him, which only offended him more.

  “I am not giving up,” he said, grittily. “I swear to God I’d sooner knock that door down.”

  With a snort, he went back and the resulting knocks were thunderous in the quiet country air.

  Someone came from around the back of the house shining a torch. I heard Eamonn asking for petrol as an emergency. Whenever he wanted anything, it was an emergency.

  He came back with a can of petrol.

  “There,” I said, “those Protestants are Christians, after all.”

  “That was Paddy, their only Catholic hand.”

  We both laughed and were still laughing when we arrived at Inch only five minutes later. He ran at once for his brandy and came to my room. He was stroking the glass and, in his mind, maybe—no, certainly—me.

  April’s end. I watch and wait without envy. Most calming, hopeful, delicate of days. Mountains try to levitate. The swallow arrives, not yet the rose. Life-burst of budding and beading, lambing and sparrow-cheeping. Everything trickling and softening; everywhere, out of mold and bark and fiber, the scents of spring. In air liquefied by a still apprenticed sun, forsythias have yellowed again, trees are retenanted with feathery leaves and leaf-like feathers. Old twigs into new nests, a yeasty year-round life-lasting spring since I came to Ireland. I had loved Eamonn for a whole opulent unforgettable year.

  At Inch, a new cycle was about to begin, but how different from the first.

  Eamonn was excited; he seemed proud of my condition. The first three weeks that we were alone were bliss. When the weather allowed, we trod the blustery beach at night. Afterward, we had sex but I, still ripening, had overcome the need to climax. I rested, relaxed and rosy-cheeked, in voracious arms, feeling to the full his vagabonding hands.

  But once when we walked on the sands he alarmed me. “Annie, that Arab who bit your ear —”

  “He never came near me, Eamonn. No one did.”

  “You are sure?” No apology, only a repeat of the question. My God, I thought, be is beginning to believe his own lies, the ones he tells people like Pat and Father O’Keeffe. To salve bis conscience he makes me out to be a whore.

  I swallowed the insult like dirt. Why was he asking me this? Was it because, his gelding’s luck having held for six months, he thought he never would sire a colt? Or did he feel that a bishop was entitled to special treatment from his God?

  His distrust of me on such a basic thing did not bode well for the future. Yet did I not have the same distrust of him? Was I not still haunted by the thought that little Johnny, whose picture he kept at Inch, was his son?

  I said, “Think what you like. If the baby’s black with curly hair, you’ll know, won’t you? But if he comes out with a bump on his lip and a gold cross on his chest —”

  “A-nnie!” A moonbeam lit up his face at that moment and I could see a startling thought flash through his mind: What if that baby looks exactly like me?

  I had made a fatal mistake. Johnny did look very like him. Maybe I transferred this thought to Eamonn because he instantly returned to the story of the unwed woman in London who had wanted to keep her baby but in the end had to have him adopted.

  Now I realized why he wanted me at Inch. Not to stop me working, but to keep me far away from untrustworthy Sister Eileen and Bridget, who had told him she was keeping her baby.

  Two deep moon shadows stretched before us like our own separate graves. “I will help you, too, Annie,” he concluded, treacherously, “if only you trust me.”

  From that night on began my descent into hell.

  Chapter Thirty

  EACH DAY, Eamonn came home happy from Killarney. His colleagues seemed to have bought his story about my unfortunate affair with a Dublin hotelier. He was labeling me “the young American girl in trouble.”

  Each night when he came to my room, I put aside my book, Nicholas and Alexandra, to greet him.

  After we had hugged each other and he was sexually satisfied, to ease his conscience he read to me with gusto from his prayer book. When, finally, I had to tell him how much I hated it, a blackness came over him. Only his success in converting me could justify his sleeping with me.

  “Annie,” he implored, “cannot you see that without God you will never be able to do what is good for this baby?” I believed no one should tell anyone what to do; he believed someone, himself, should tell everybody.

  I said, “I know what is good for my baby.”

  In a dubious tone: “Do you, Annie?”

  Oh, I do, I thought. This baby has completed your work in me, given me an appreciation of myself and the beauty of my body that I never bad before.

  “God,” he preached at me, “wants you to give it up in sacrifice. ’Tis the only way you can atone.”

  S
in needed a victim: me. I touched his surprised cheek. “I’m sorry, Eamonn, but you are upsetting me.”

  “Be detached, suffer in order to be reborn.” He had no real sense of guilt, no feeling that this child was his.

  He told me Helena was coming with her children for three weeks. She would explain to me how hard it was for a single mother to cope.

  “Why don’t you talk to her about fatherhood, Eamonn?” and I tugged his hair.

  He jumped out of bed, saying, “Stop it, Annie, stop it.”

  “Wait a minute,” I said. “I want my child to have nice thoughts, not the nastiest.”

  “No, no, no.”

  “Yes, yes, yes. Your prayers would put the most terrible fear of abandonment in him before he’s even born.”

  He got into his clothes and went to the door.

  “I may have to give him up,” I sobbed, “but I don’t even want to think of it while he’s still part of me.”

  But he was gone without a word.

  I felt sorry for Eamonn. His parents had guided him along a path which he was too young to know led to loneliness. Having given him life, they encouraged him to deny life to their grandchildren. And they did this to please the Creator who said, “Increase and multiply.” How was Eamonn to know he would grow into a very sexy man who could justify his loving of me only by denial? He had to deny he was a man, deny he was enjoying me for enjoyment’s sake. He even had to deny when he was inside me that he was disobeying his Church and his God.

  I showed him the path to freedom. My body healed him. I opened up new worlds of wonders to his sight, to his feelings. I taught him the magic of the flesh. The sad thing was, whereas I was grateful to him, he could credit me, according to his rules, with nothing but temptation.

  How different we were.

  His God was a God of rules, mine was the God of love.

  His God was determined to bring evil out of good, whereas mine wanted to kneel in awe of the good however and wherever it happened.

  Eamonn saw sin always in terms of disobedience; because we disobeyed, there was no possibility of love. I saw sin only as lovelessness; because we loved and hurt no one, there was no possibility of sin.

  Eamonn was keen to make me almost the worst thing I could imagine: a good Catholic. One night, after we made love, he said: “I’ve seen you walking around the Stations of the Cross, you like lighting candles and listening to Church music, you are very spiritual.”

  “I think so,” I murmured.

  “Without the faith, you will always be bitter and angry.”

  I already was bitter and angry because of what Catholicism had done to my family and to me personally.

  At my first confession, I couldn’t breathe because I was unable to tell the drink-sodden Father McCarthy what I had done wrong. Not to tell the truth in confession was considered an unforgivable lie to the Holy Ghost and the penalty for that was hell. A seven-year-old subjected to that sort of subtlety and moral terrorism will hardly grow up normal.

  One day, we were doing catechism when devout little Benji Christman of the porcupine hair stuck his sweaty hands down the back of my pants. I couldn’t confess that.

  Nor could I confess that I used to moon a lot in the choir loft. I put a stool at the front overlooking the sanctuary, stood on it backward, picked up my dress, pulled down my pants and shook my bare butt around at anyone who cared to look. I damn well nearly broke my back doing this trick. These things were fun. I didn’t know they were mortal sins till the sisters said so.

  Those nuns were foe posing as friend. I wondered why our parents didn’t see they were teaching us the worst possible lesson: that we were wicked and that almost everything we did was a sin. By making me feel wicked, they made me want to be wicked. And once you taste wickedness and can endure the shame, it’s like heroin.

  Catholics must be the worst sinners in the world because they have to be so brave. Other people do wrong although they fear the police or a punch on the nose. Catholics do it believing they will be sent to hell for all eternity.

  “You told me about your confirmation,” Eamonn said, coaxingly. “Have you no fond memories of your first communion?”

  “None.”

  I was in an expensive organdy bridal dress with a veil, and because I had lied to the Holy Ghost in confession, my throat was too dry to swallow the Host. I couldn’t chew it either, because the nuns said that was a sin. To get rid of it, I spat it out. The white Host, Christ, Savior of the World, landed on Father McCarthy’s shiny black patent-leather shoe.

  I swear to God, in that explosive moment, I realized that what the nuns had taught me wasn’t true. Christ could not be spat out so He ended up on a priest’s shoe.

  But Father McCarthy obviously believed, because he looked at me with real hate. I don’t blame him. This was his big day and he now had the job of scraping God’s Son off his shoe. I screamed in terror and my mother, smart in her Saks Fifth Avenue suit with alligator bag and shoes to match, pulled my ear and told me I had disgraced my family.

  All the way home Mommy was asking, “What didn’t you tell the priest?” and Johnny sang, “Annie lied in confession.”

  After that I went into the confessional each Friday and told Father McCarthy, “I swore, lied, and disobeyed.” That didn’t exactly please him. Like Eamonn, he felt he had the right to get inside me, but I told him, “Don’t be nosy, Father.”

  Now, when Eamonn, through his prayers, wanted to get inside me, I said in my mind, “Don’t be nosy, Eamonn.”

  Helena came and I had lived through all this before. Except now Eamonn treated me like a stranger. He spent most of his time with Helena. I was the whore, she the Virgin Mary.

  He asked me to make a pot of tea for himself and Helena; I was not invited to join them. He moved me into Mary’s room and gave mine to her children. After he had finished his breviary, he was now able to talk with Helena at all hours of the night without me overhearing a word.

  Helena it was who rescued me from oblivion. “I could have become pregnant,” she said, with unintended irony, “if Eamonn hadn’t been around to guard me.”

  June was passing, it was time for me to go. I called Sister Eileen at the Rotunda and begged her to find me a family to stay with. She promised to get back to me soon.

  One night around 2:30, I made sure Helena was asleep in bed and Eamonn had dropped off on the chaise longue in his pajamas and bathrobe. Clad only in my prettiest robe, I opened up her door. “Eamonn darling,” I whispered huskily, “I need you.”

  A light sleeper, he woke instantly with his fingers to his lips.

  “Go away,” he mouthed.

  “I’m not a dog, my darling.”

  He gritted his teeth and shook his head. To which I responded by opening up one side of my robe. Displaying an outsized breast, I beckoned him seductively.

  “No,” he said hoarsely.

  I opened up the other side of my robe and started to walk into the room, showing my recent marvelous tan. A heavy sigh of longing escaped him.

  I removed my robe just as he came at me and gathered it before it fell to the ground. I had guessed right. He enjoyed danger. As he ushered me out, he was doing his best not to laugh aloud.

  In my room, after spitting dryly on my hands, I took the cord of his pajamas and whipped him with it, then ripped his pajamas off, tearing them. For a couple of hours we were very sensuous. He found my big belly irresistible in Mary’s narrow, never-loved-in bed. And now well beyond the early fearful months of pregnancy, I, too, had no inhibitions, physical or verbal.

  Pay attention, Salome, watch this, Jezebel. I flaunted my considerable attractions. I took every jutting piece of him into my mouth from his ears to his toes. I used words and phrases I never knew I knew.

  Eamonn kept telling me unclerically how much he loved me and how impossible it was for him to live without me.

  At about 4:30, when we were both exhausted, without warning, I kicked him out of bed. He raised himself off the fl
oor. Pathetically: “You made me bang my head.”

  “This bed is too small for two, which is why you gave me it.”

  “Come into my bedroom, then?”

  “Forget it.” I deliberately spoke in an offhand, male kind of way. “I needed to act horny tonight but I’ve had enough to last me a lifetime.” My bitter message to him was: Remember this, Eamonn, remember my young warm soft impressionable flesh, remember it when you are saying Mass, remember it on your deathbed at eighty-five, remember forever and ever in hell, if you end up there as you deserve, remember what you threw away.

  “But —”

  “Grab your togs and switch off the light when you leave.”

  “Can’t you see kicking me out of bed is cruel, Annie?”

  “I sure can.” I turned to the wall. “Now you know how I felt when you kicked me out of mine.”

  But while I got my revenge, I was overwhelmed with sadness because I loved him so and because good-bye is good-bye.

  In the morning, Sister Eileen called to say she had found me a family to stay with in Clontarf, a suburb of Dublin.

  As soon as Eamonn came home from work he rushed into my room with a familiar glint in his eye, only to find my bags were packed. He held his hands up. Seldom can he have been so shaken.

  “How,” I said, “can I stay here with Helena’s kids when you want me to give up my own?”

  “So you are giving it up?”

  “That,” I said insincerely, “is probably for the best.”

  “I could send Helena away early.”

  “You couldn’t possibly do a cruel thing like that,” I said. “It’s so unlike you.”

  He shrugged. “Perhaps. You’ll be staying where?”

  “Sister Eileen’s found me a place in Dublin till the baby’s born.”

  “You will let me know where?” The same old Eamonn wanting to control me.

  “Do you think,” I said, “I would keep anything from you?” The same old me, delighting in tricking a trickster.