Forbidden Fruit

by Annie Murphy

  He laughed again. “Of course not,” he said, just managing to compose himself before my parents appeared.

  By the time Eamonn came to Dublin ten days later, to keep myself occupied, I had a job at the switchboard in Jury’s Hotel.

  I had told Daddy I was working till nine that night, after which I was going for a drink with friends. I promised to be back by midnight. Eamonn picked me up at eight near the hotel, in the Lancia and, to my utter consternation, drove toward the gravel pit where Peter had been conceived.

  On the way, he stressed we had to be good. “I must not betray your father’s trust again, Annie.”

  “Certainly not,” I agreed.

  Words. He was as hungry for me as I had ever known him. And I? How good, how overwhelmingly good to feel his love for me made stronger by separation.

  Our doomed affair was not ended. Caught in a whirlwind of desire, we tempted fate, unable to help ourselves. If Eamonn had only wanted sex with me he could, I know, have shown restraint, but this was love, the love of two people who knew they were made for each other, now and forever.

  On the way back to the apartment, he asked me to hand him his items of clerical dress. The stern, almost sadistic way he did it—“Now my clerical collar, Annie. Now my cross”—conveyed the idea that he was first and foremost a bishop. He was intimating that any hopes I had of him leaving the ministry were groundless. Maybe there was even kindness in what seemed to be cruelty.

  After the third visit to the gravel pit with the same somber aftermath, I refused to go again.

  * * *

  From then on, he sometimes came to our apartment for a meal.

  On one occasion, Mommy picked Peter up and told Eamonn how much she loved her little grandson.

  “This child,” she said, “has made us a family again. He has made this a house of love.”

  Eamonn dutifully nodded.

  “Sometimes,” Mommy went on, “the unwanted child, if you can make a place for him, brings the greatest joy. So, Eamonn, on my own behalf, I thank you.” Eamonn took her hand and kissed it, but I doubted if these sentiments, however moving, really reached him.

  When my parents retired around nine, Eamonn whispered, removing his jacket, “Ready?” and we made furtive love on the couch in the living room like a couple of college students. As always, danger made sex so much more exciting. He had told me to wear zip-up clothes for easier access.

  By now, Eamonn had enough control to withdraw from me before climaxing but he distrusted the deep cushions of the couch in case he could not get out of me in time. My father was not exactly an orthodox Catholic, and Eamonn took seriously the threat of an abortion.

  In case my parents thought he was overdoing the late-night visits, Eamonn sometimes called me after nine when they had retired and I pretended it was a girlfriend from Jury’s. I let him in and we made love on the carpet, though he complained it hurt his knees. Afterward, when we held each other tight and in silence, we fused even more into one. Embracing when all physical desire had passed, leaving only the intense spiritual desire to be together, was the most convincing proof of love.

  Not that everything was smooth between us. Once I saw him on television talking about the problems of Northern Ireland and pleading for reunion. When next we met I told him that in my view the troubles were not all political, as he had maintained, but religious. Catholicism blighted the natural buoyancy of the Irish and made them moody. Protestants of the North, I said, sincerely believed that Home Rule was Rome Rule. They had legislated for divorce and contraception and they didn’t want the Pope and his bishops telling them what to do. Eamonn responded like a snapping turtle. Wasn’t I an utter ignoramus? Wasn’t I a terrible bossy woman?

  Harry Burke was not fond of Eamonn. One night, after they had joined my parents for dinner, Daddy told me how Harry had attacked Eamonn for spending vast sums on his Cathedral when there were so many poor in his diocese. One reason for Harry’s antipathy to Eamonn was that Harry was sympathetic to gays, and Catholicism was hard on homosexuals. Harry also thought that Eamonn was a hypocrite. He had tried to make me give up Peter at the time when he had spoken publicly in favor of Cherish, a group pledged to help single mothers who kept their babies. Eamonn had since become a patron of the society.

  Daddy, a sophisticated man, was never in favor of clerical celibacy, which he thought unnatural. In view of what had already happened between Eamonn and me, he must have suspected we were seeing each other. Maybe he considered it a necessary risk. At least it provided us with a chance to make up our minds whether we could make a life together.

  There were moments when guilt got to me. It was not my love for Eamonn that caused this but the fact that for a second time we were betraying Daddy’s trust. Worse, we were doing it in his own home, a few yards from where he was sleeping. Eamonn still did not use condoms, and I had no diaphragm. We already had one child; if I became pregnant and needed an abortion to save my life, that would crucify us both.

  Around May, a minor miracle happened. Eamonn began to fall in love with his son. When my parents joined Harry Burke at Howth for the day, Eamonn paid us a visit. With joy in my heart I watched him play hide-and-go-seek with Peter among the Danish furniture. Peter, competitive even then, crawled like the wind to keep in front. Eamonn crept on the floor after him and pretended to bang his head on the refrigerator to make him laugh.

  On another visit, he chased Peter on all fours out the door and along the corridor toward the elevator. An elderly couple got out and I heard the woman say, “Isn’t that Bishop Casey? How sweet.”

  Till then, Eamonn had not bonded with him, but that changed now. It thrilled him that when he spoke the boy tried to imitate his words and facial expressions and, most wonderfully, smiled at him. Once, I found him holding Peter by the shoulders with his feet touching the ground. “C’mon, Petey-boy, dance for me.”

  When I smiled, he said: “When I was a kid, I wanted to go to Hollywood and study tap-dancing under Fred Astaire. I would have made it to the top, too. I can do anything I set my heart on.”

  On these happy family occasions, Eamonn helped me bathe Peter and put him to bed. Before we left the room, Eamonn blessed him. I prayed—futilely, I knew—that Eamonn would see that Peter had a right to a father and that his future lay with us.

  To be fair to Eamonn: just as I had never hid from him my desire to bear his child, he had never once hinted that he would give up his ministry to marry me. I think he would like to have married me if it were possible, but he was like a grown man with a mother fixation. His mother was the Church; he let Mother Church do all his important thinking for him and he never acted without her approval. If only he had been able to make his own decisions, our love would have succeeded, but he was not capable of that kind of freedom.

  Meanwhile, he grew so fond of Peter that his first instinct when he came into the apartment was to run and kiss him. The kiss was a real kiss. The boy was delighted to see him, and they laughed and played together.

  This made the final blow that much harder when it fell.

  On a warm day in May, Daddy said, “It’s not going to work out, Annie. He’ll never marry you. Time for us to go.”

  Lately, I had told myself over and over the self-same thing, but I argued with him that there was still a chance. “No, sweetheart,” he said. “I’ve watched him on TV and read his articles in the papers. He’s as narrow as you are liberal.”

  Daddy was also convinced that Eamonn’s ambition was to be Pope of the Third World. He was chairman of the society called Trocaire, Irish for “compassion,” which collects money for the poor in disadvantaged lands. This post gave him power and prestige. “He’s not likely to give that up in a hurry, Annie. And you wouldn’t want him to, would you?”

  I sadly shook my head. I felt the two men must have talked at some length. The conversation had convinced Daddy that Eamonn wanted the best of both worlds.

  “Peter,” I said brokenly, “is used to him now and maybe —”


  “No. You’ll be nothing but a kept woman. For year after year. Until he tires of you.”

  “He won’t.”

  He stroked my hand. “As a doctor, I’ve seen it time after time. He’ll ignore you, love the kid, and shatter your soul.” He looked out the window as if surveying the long hard years ahead. “The day will come when you’ll want to leave and be unable to because it’ll break Peter’s heart.”

  However true, it was a terrible wrench to leave Ireland again, especially as Eamonn would this time lose two people whom he loved.

  Daddy said, “Your divorce is through, Annie; you have to get away from here if you’re ever to marry again.”

  “Marry again,” I said heatedly, “when I can never give a man children?”

  “Okay,” he conceded. “I’m going back to the States to find us a place to live. Eamonn likes the boy, he’s bound to look after him financially. After all, he’s a big spender.”

  One day in June, soon after Daddy left for New York, Eamonn had Peter on his knees after a game of peekaboo, when I told him of Daddy’s decision. He was shocked. “It is cruel,” I admitted, “but it’s not my fault.”

  “Indeed ‘tis,” he retorted. “You want to take Peter away and have him entirely to yourself.”

  “What can I do?” I said. “Daddy knows you’re never going to leave the Church.”

  “No, no, no,” he said, emotionally, “this is your idea.”

  “If it were up to me, Eamonn, I’d buy a small place here, somewhere, so you could keep visiting Peter, but Daddy can’t bear lies. And he wants a better life for me.”

  I made to wipe his tears away.

  He knocked my hand aside. “Just leave me be.”

  He was still angry when, as Daddy had suggested, I brought up the question of providing for Peter. Eamonn seemed to think that since I alone had chosen to keep him, his own liabilities had ceased.

  “I will send you fifty dollars a month,” he said grudgingly. America, I told him, was far more expensive than Ireland and fifty dollars would not even provide Peter with food and clothes. But he would not relent.

  On our last few nights together, even our lovemaking changed. So aggressive was it that maybe, subconsciously, we wanted to manufacture another crisis to prolong our love affair.

  We talked money again and Eamonn said, pinch-lipped, “All right, I will give you seventy-five dollars a month.” At our final session, Eamonn said one hundred dollars and not a penny more. My lover had turned pawnbroker.

  I said, “That won’t provide your son with a roof over —”

  He almost shouted, “He is not my son.” As Peter started to whimper: “He’s entirely yours now, isn’t that what you want?”

  How could I tell him in this bitter mood that I wanted nothing less? Here we were reenacting our confrontation in St. Patrick’s. I picked Peter up, calmed him, and tried to put him in Eamonn’s arms with “Go to Daddy.”

  He turned his head away. There was something terribly final about that refusal.

  “Shall I put him to bed, Eamonn?”

  “Let him stay,” he said. “Maybe he’ll remember this.”

  I responded in kind with “And remember his father’s generosity.”

  “I will send you three hundred dollars every quarter.”

  I had been reading Morris West’s book The Shoes of the Fisherman, which told of a case like mine. “Listen, Eamonn,” I said, no less angry and frustrated. “I’ll give you forty-eight hours to think again. If you don’t raise your offer by then, I’ll take Peter to Rome.” “God Almighty, what for?”

  “I’ll bang on the door of the Vatican and demand that your son is made a ward of the Church.”

  “You would like nothing more than to betray me, isn’t that so?”

  At that, I started to cry. Peter looked up at me wonderingly before crying with me. Though Eamonn stomped out without saying good-bye to Peter or to me, I must have convinced him of my resolve because, next day, he called. “It’ll bankrupt me, but one hundred and seventy-five dollars a month,” and before I could answer, he slammed down the receiver.

  I listened incredulously for several minutes to the silence on the line. Such a long deep silence. And such a sad sad end to the happiest phase of my life.

  Chapter Forty

  THIS TIME when we flew into New York, Peter was beginning to talk and was interested in everything going on around him. He was pleased to see his grandpa again and liked the noise of honking taxis. He was an American.

  Daddy had found us a lovely apartment in Peter Cooper Village. It was a fine spot to bring up a child, with tree-filled parks and children’s swings and slides. The only trouble was, the apartment was on the fourteenth floor, which brought back my panic attacks. I kept having visions of Peter falling out the window while I was at work. I spent $500 for bars and safety catches to the windows, a sign, I guess, that for me the whole world was unsafe. My only source of security was Peter. I used to sing to him over and over, “You are my sun in the morning and my moon at night.”

  I began the habit of working at nights, until Peter was four. After giving him his dinner, I left at 5:30 and my parents looked after him while he slept. I arrived home at about 1:45 in the morning, slept until 8:00 and was then able to spend the day with him.

  My first job, for $150 a week, was as a switchboard operator at the Algonquin. I met many famous writers there, including Leon Uris who had written Trinity, a fine novel about Ireland.

  Ireland, so many reminders. A phase of my life in lavender. In this downstream period of my life, I saw a poster advertising vacations in Ireland. A fat cow in a green field, broken clouds, a ruined abbey. It made me feel terribly homesick. In spite of the sourness of our good-bye, I missed Eamonn. I leaned against a building and burst into tears.

  When I soaped my body under the shower, his long sensitive hands glided over me. I put on an earring and it was the one that I had left behind once in his bed. I saw a fire in a hearth and we were sitting in the living room of a low Georgian house overlooking the sea, talking, storytelling. I never got into a car but he was driving me along narrow winding Kerry lanes or to the gravel pit where we made love.

  Oh God, a geranium, a poplar tree, a sunset had the power to remind me of him, and the least tangible things—smells, tastes, sounds—reminded me of him most. What hope for me when the smell of mown grass or the taste of my morning cup of tea wiped out weeks and months and the thousands of miles separating Eamonn and me?

  That was when I realized that, in spite of my efforts to forget, I would always miss him, and Peter, with Eamonn’s looks and temperament, was my fond daily reminder.

  Peter, my Columbus, who introduced me daily to new worlds, was two years old when, in 1976, Bridget invited me to stay with her for three weeks in London, England. She wanted to repay me for helping to save her little girl’s life.

  Bridget now had two children, the second, Justin, a year old. She had recently separated from Wentworth and was living with her mother in the noisy suburb of Edgware. With her contacts in the trade, she found me a job in the magnificent Grosvenor House Hotel where I had to look after Arabs and rich Americans.

  I called Eamonn to tell him where we were. I hoped that on his travels through London, he might find time to meet us. He called a few times but never visited us, though I deliberately extended my visit.

  Once he phoned to say he was going away on a six-week retreat to put his life in order. “If we ever meet again, Annie,” he confessed humbly, “we both know ‘twill start all over again. And this time it could get really scary.”

  He feared meeting Peter and having his heart broken again. By then, Peter was adorable and speaking really well, so Eamonn’s fears were justified.

  I used to go to newsstands and thumb through the Irish press for word of him. In the late summer, I opened up a paper and there was his lovely face. How, I thought, can he look so young and happy? He had been appointed Bishop of Galway. A long article spoke o
f him as the most dynamic and charismatic bishop in Ireland. It was strange reading an outsider’s view of the man I knew so intimately. The writer told how the Kerry people admired his warmth and good humor and were sorry to see him go. It detailed his fund-raising ventures and arduous trips to the Third World. He was fulfilling his ambition to be the Pope of the Poor.

  The article included extracts from Eamonn’s latest pastoral letter to the faithful in which he encouraged a more Christian attitude toward unmarried mothers. He appealed to parents to help any daughter who wished to keep her child. He said:

  We once allowed our justifiable attitude of disappointment and disapproval towards the circumstances in which new life was conceived to affect our attitude towards the mother and child, sometimes to the point of rejection…. Because of our natural concern for the right moral standards, we often have not cherished these children, and in so far as we did not we were wrong.

  One day, Peter was playing with a little girl who accidentally pushed him against a wall. He suffered a bad cut between his eyes. He had never been injured before and, seeing all the blood, I thought at first he had lost an eye. The hospital put in four stitches. There was no permanent damage, they said. A couple of weeks later, however, he lost his sense of balance and started falling. A neurologist tested him for a blood clot, and before the results came through, I called Eamonn at Inch.

  “The facilities in London,” he assured me, “are the best in the world.”

  I thought he might offer to come and see his son, but he didn’t. Was he serious about cherishing children born out of wedlock?

  Two weeks passed and he still did not call to ask about his son’s health. With Eamonn, words were still only words.

  I knew from the newspaper article that he was busy with preparations for his Enthronement on September 19, 1976, as Bishop of Galway. His acceptance of a new diocese and his disinterest in Peter were final proof that he had cut himself off from us forever.

  I was tempted to take Peter with his bandaged head to Galway and introduce him to the crowds who had come to witness their bishop’s investiture. I was in a black mood when, at about eight, the night before his Enthronement, from the house of Bridget’s mother, Mrs. Randall, I telephoned the Irish Times in Dublin.