Forbidden Fruit

by Annie Murphy

  Unfortunately, it soon became clear that the minimum cost of a decent house was £50,000, which was beyond our means. Moreover, in that part of Scotland, neither Arthur nor I had any job prospects.

  McKay had warned me that in my desire not to ask Eamonn for too much I had asked for too little.

  We swiftly toured Scotland, a kind of consolation prize to Peter. Then, not wanting to squander our money, we took the train to Holyhead in Wales, whence we caught the ferry to Ireland. Since Ireland was a poor country, the housing situation was bound to be better there.

  On the boat, Peter came down with food poisoning. He was so ill, I went up on deck and facing west cursed this bitch called Ireland that was once more blighting my hopes. Someone must have heard. Peter recovered after a couple of days in St. Michael’s Hospital, four blocks from the ferry. The nuns and doctors were the most caring people I had ever met.

  After trying several places on the east coast, we settled on the southern town of Kinsale, County Cork. It has a fine harbor on the Atlantic. But properties here were expensive, too. In the end, we paid £32,000 for a rather plain two-bedroom cottage a couple of miles out of town. It came with a nice piece of tree-lined land overlooking rolling hills and the wide Bandon River. There was plenty of scope for development.

  On the Friday morning, we enrolled Peter in the local Catholic school of Our Lady of the Rosary. We chose it because of its high academic standards. Peter was horrified at the thought of nuns, uniforms, church, but I told him he would have to put up with that if he wanted to go to the university. There was also something shrewd and honest about Sister Mary, the head of the school, that made me trust her instantly.

  That same afternoon, we rented a car, threw some luggage in the back, and headed for Kerry. How good it was to go back to Killarney. It had kept the flavor of a market town. As we approached the Great Southern Hotel, Arthur opted to stay there overnight. “No,” I said, “we’re driving to Inch,” and Peter backed me.

  Arthur suspected I was reliving my times with Eamonn. He did not want me retreating again into what he called a fantasy world. Yet he knew I had to return to Inch for the boy’s sake, to help him find out who he was and the strange circumstances that had brought him into being.

  On the way, I noticed many new whitewashed bungalows with red-tiled roofs. Intruders. Opening the car window, I smelled the sea of fifteen summers past. The hills rose to mountain heights and there—at last, at last—was the Inch strand jutting out into the gray Atlantic with its grass-covered dunes and ocean roar.

  I turned into the parking lot and braked. Without a word, without thinking, I leaped out of the car and ran.

  “Hey, Mom, where’re you —?”

  I did not stop running till I kicked my shoes off and ran, sparrow-splashing, into the surf and gazed toward the glistering west. I was hungry to be by myself. I wanted all to myself the waves, the blue-white sky, the purple-streaked sun setting in oranges and pinks.

  Peter was a stranger beside me, clutching my arm, saying, with wonder, “I never saw you move like that before, Mom. You looked on fire.”

  Arthur, the stranger’s friend, said, only half mockingly, “She thought Eamonn was calling her from the sea.”

  “Be quiet,” I said, “and look at the sea and the sky.” But I was really looking at yesterday.

  In a meltdown of the years, it all came back to me. How hand-in-hand, under a clean white moon, we walked these sands and listened to the precise slow rhyming of this sea. Nights I remembered, oh, such long sweet nights when we made love. Time had passed slowly since then, but my love had not waned; it had throbbed however painfully in the long dull hours between the seconds of my life.

  Arthur, trying gallantly to understand, said, “I’m really pleased you’re sharing with Peter the part of his life denied him till now.”

  “Thank you,” I murmured, still gazing out toward the sun-lipped sea in which Eamonn and I had bathed together.

  “I think,” he went on, “you were running to meet him.”

  I nodded.

  Slowly, achingly, he said: “I swear to God, Annie, if I had it in my power to make him appear this minute so all three of you could go down this beautiful beach together, I’d walk away without a sound.”

  I gripped his arm in gratitude.

  “But he’s not here, Annie. He hasn’t been around you for years. And I have.” Heart-cut, he released my arm as if to let me go.

  Poor Arthur. He did not seem to know that true love never dies, is never replaced by any other.

  With the noble grief of his words, the year turned to 1990. I looked landward. Above the path was the hotel, vacant, boarded up, its yellow-white paint peeling, half covered by time and drifting sand. There was a beach shop, deserted, on whose gabled end was a fading inscription: “Dear Inch, must I leave you? / I have promises to keep / Perhaps miles to go to my last sleep.”

  I waved to Eamonn’s retreating ghost, crying out, “Good-bye, good-bye,” and he, dancing, tripping over the sand, looked back at me over his broad shoulder, singing repeatedly and ever more faintly, “Good-bye, Annie.”

  “Let’s go,” I said heavily to my two men.

  My hands were so shaky, Arthur was behind the wheel as we drove up the road toward the house. At the exit to the driveway was green lettering on a brass plate: “Red Cliff House B&B.”

  “Stop,” I yelled, “you’ve got to stop. They do bed and breakfast. Peter has to see this.”

  Arthur carefully navigated the concealed graveled drive lined with rhododendrons, azaleas, and hydrangeas and drove under the twelve-foot-high hedge, a tunnel entry into a magic kingdom.

  There it was, preserved in sunset amber. The same Georgian one-story house in red sandstone with slate roof and french doors, the sea on one side, the mountain on the other. The same shimmering poplars. A thrush busy cracking a snail on a stone was probably descended from the thrush that once sang for me.

  Peter knocked on the front door. “They have two spare rooms.”

  It was little changed inside. The Stations of the Cross had been removed but on the ceiling I saw the ornate moldings and on the hallway floor the same gray-and-white tiles on which Eamonn walked when reciting his breviary. I peeped out of the small windows onto the changeless, ever-changing sea.

  In the living room, Eamonn’s piano was gone as were his candelabra and Waterford crystal. The rest was as it had always been. The same rugs and drapes and wallpaper, same tables, chairs, and sideboard. Was Eamonn’s ghost here, mocking me?

  Come out, Eamonn, I urged, come out from behind the drapes and show me the star-spangled view across Dingle Bay. Come, Eamonn, light the fire, warm two frozen selves, make me sit at your feet; and let us tell each other the stories of two lonely lives that might have merged—had I but had the wisdom and you the courage—into a single story wherein there was no loneliness.

  Arthur and I were given the bedroom that was once the sacristy. Again, the same furnishings, even to the broad dresser with low drawers in which Eamonn had kept his vestments. In the bottom drawer, I had once hidden his episcopal ring. That was when, yes, I remembered, I came back pregnant to Inch and Bridget had jokingly said, “Make sure you return to Dublin, Murphy, with a contribution from the Bishop.” So I grabbed his precious ring and put it on my finger, calling myself the fianc?of the Bishop of Kerry and, after a couple of drinks, I forgot where I had hidden it, and we searched the house for it for hours. We looked in the toilet bowls, down the sinks, in the flower beds with a flashlight. And all the time Eamonn was moaning, “If it doesn’t turn up we shall spend the rest of our lives paying for it.” And I remembered where it was only when he was inside me, but he told me puffily that I could not go after it at that inconvenient moment.

  Peter had installed himself in my old room, not knowing it was mine. It was uncanny. Nothing had changed, not the wallpaper, rugs, dresser, all were embalmed by memory. The bathroom where Eamonn hid in terror from his niece had the same old shower-stall
and yellow curtain, the same tarnished light. Most heart-tugging of all, the bed was my bed. We had first kissed and made love there. I, who was nothing, was made important there.

  I pulled back the bottom sheet and there was the same dark brown mattress of horsehair.

  “This place is spooky,” Peter said. “Like it was waiting for us to come back.”

  “Come back?” I repeated. “Oh, yes,” for Peter, too, had been there before, inside me.

  I went outside in the great hallowing of night and stood amid the bristling wind-stroked grass admiring majesty. I recalled so many things as I watched all that crystalline beauty under the climbing moon.

  It was altogether like a fairy tale in which sleepers awake in, or travelers return to, a treasured place after a thousand years and nothing has changed. Memory is a kind of private heaven in which things and people you love are kept safe beyond the touch of pain, grief, death. Change them? You would as soon alter the shape and incandescence of a star.

  That night, with the scent of Old Spice in his nostrils, Arthur said, “I can’t sleep here. He’s in the room, in the bed with us.”

  Unable to sleep, we went for a walk up the winding dirt track at one in the morning but he soon gave up, saying, “You used to walk here with him, didn’t you?”

  Back in our bedroom, he looked out the window at the white, toppled moon-tower on the sea and forgave me. We snuggled up into one of two single beds to keep warm—oh, Ireland, in September—and finally drifted off to sleep.

  * * *

  We did our best to make a life that winter in Kinsale. In his thorough way, Arthur knocked down a wall to give more light to the living room and beamed it in pine, painted the place white, and put down beige carpeting.

  Yet, try as we would, we could not settle. Peter was missing his friends; the children around him did not speak the same language or enjoy the same games of baseball and American football. He was too relaxed and seemed unmotivated. Even the education suited neither his tastes nor his needs. He had already set his heart on studying law and how could he do that outside his homeland?

  More important still, though Eamonn lived only a few hours away, never once did he offer to meet Peter. Whenever I tried to contact him, I was told he was in El Salvador or Guatemala or Nicaragua or too busy making preparations for a tour or writing reports up afterward.

  He seemed to be keeping to his original intention. He would never acknowledge his son.

  Peter, often seeing on TV the great man that his father had become, was shaken and hurt anew to find he could not spare him a few minutes of his time.

  Knowing that the pressures on Peter were building up, we decided to move back to America.

  Chapter

  Forty-Eight

  LEAVING KINSALE ON JANUARY 13, 1991, we returned to Connecticut, where we found a small one-bedroom apartment in Ridgefield. Peter had to sleep on a divan bed in the living room. The rent was $800 a month. Eamonn’s contribution of $275 did not go far.

  In May, with our Irish cottage still unsold, I wrote to Eamonn. I sent him the Kinsale solicitor’s name and address, hoping he would know some retired Irish priests or nuns who might like to buy our place at the price we paid for it. I promised to use the money entirely for Peter’s education.

  I also said in my letter that the refusal of Peter’s father to speak with him was seriously undermining his confidence. “Can you imagine,” I asked, “such a two-footed cad walking your lovely Emerald Isle?”

  In a postscript, I spoke enviously of the Bishop living in Ireland during its most beautiful season, spring.

  His reply came within a couple of weeks. He said he would have called me but my number was not listed. Maybe he reckoned there was in my letter some underlying threat to him, but there was not. He said he was coming to the States on August 21. If I sent him my telephone number, he would call me and arrange for us to meet in New York. Meanwhile, he promised to inquire about the sale of the house.

  Once back in the States, Peter recovered all his drive and his ambition. Aged sixteen and a half and towering over Arthur and me, he had tremendous stamina. He worked weekends at Stop-and-Shop to earn money. After school, he was taking night classes in law with a view to making it his profession. Having a passion for helping people unjustly treated, he had set his heart on a job with Amnesty International.

  When he heard of Eamonn’s impending visit, he said, as if Eamonn himself were speaking: “This time, I’m going to get from him some proof that he’s my old man.”

  I smiled. “He’s pretty slithery, Peter.”

  “Then we’ll have to be slithery, too.”

  He was looking to his own future. He was not far from graduation, to be followed by college. He was farsighted enough to realize that one day he might want to enter public life, even politics. “Maybe when I’m thirty-five, Mom, I’m going to have to tell the world who my father is and he may be dead by then.”

  But how was he to get the proof he needed?

  Arthur, having watched too much TV, said, “When your mother meets him, she should be wearing an electronic device.”

  He investigated and found the best bug cost six hundred dollars. “You expect me to pay that,” I said, “when my car is practically falling apart?”

  Arthur bought a hundred-dollar bug and taped it to me. He tested it out in my car, in the street, in restaurants.

  “Too mushy, Annie,” he said. “For the kid’s sake we’ve got to invest in the expensive model.”

  Just then Peter rushed in. He had come from the home of my friend Jim Powers. Jim, a big heavy guy with red hair, had bought a camcorder.

  “A great machine,” Peter said, breathlessly. “Eamonn’s never met Jim, so he can video you when you meet Eamonn.”

  The sound system on the camcorder plus the hundred-dollar recording device taped to me during the forthcoming meeting should provide Peter with the proof he wanted.

  “I want no part of it,” I said, horrified.

  Undeterred, Peter brought Jim over to our place. Peter pretended to be Eamonn while Jim practiced on the two of us in conversation.

  “It’ll never work,” Arthur said, glumly.

  Peter turned on him and, speaking ironically: “These are my parents. I can get them on tape. Mom and Dad. First time ever. For my family album.”

  I shook my head. “As I said, count me out.”

  Eamonn came, as planned, to New York in late August. Peter took his call at our home in Ridgefield and once more all Eamonn said to him was that he wanted to talk to Annie.

  This really stunned me and made me feel Peter’s pain more keenly than ever. Eamonn’s dogged refusal to speak with him finally persuaded me to go through with the crazy plot to entrap him. How could I go on defending Eamonn at his son’s expense?

  I had two jobs at this time to save for Peter’s college education. I worked as a Stamford secretary for a salary of over $20,000 a year but I was also employed nights from 5:30 to 9:00 at the Grand Hyatt Hotel on 42nd Street in New York, getting home around 10:00. That is why I arranged to meet Eamonn at the Hyatt. It had a huge lobby, which was vital if Jim was to elude security as he taped us.

  Early in the evening, Mary took me to her place and dressed me up in a smart suit. “This is for your son, Annie. You can’t meet your old flame looking like a bum.”

  From Greenwich, I went to Jim’s place to have the bugging device fitted under my blouse. Peter taped it inexpertly; it pinched my belly and kept slipping down.

  “If he puts his arm around me,” I said, “he’ll feel it.”

  Peter said, “If he lays one finger on you —”

  That evening, I walked hand-in-hand with Peter to the hotel entrance.

  Basically, I admit, I get a lot of fun out of trickery, but not this time. My emotions were mixed as never before in a life of considerable emotional turmoil.

  Everywhere I looked, there was treachery. I was setting out deliberately to betray the only man I ever wholly loved.


  I felt like Judas going into Gethsemane to plant a kiss on Jesus’ cheek. Why was I doing this appalling thing? Because for over seventeen years Eamonn had betrayed his and my son; he had steadfastly refused to give Peter the recognition he needed to be a whole person. He had refused even to speak with him.

  I kept telling myself, There must be some other way, some way less cruel. There must be.

  But there wasn’t.

  I had to choose between Peter and Eamonn, my child and his father, the two great and enduring loves of my life. This burden was intolerable. Had not Peter’s hand been firm in mine, I would have turned and run.

  “Where’s Jim?” I asked.

  “In position. I gave him Eamonn’s picture so he’ll recognize him.”

  Eamonn would be in the lobby already. With his suspicious nature, I never doubted he would arrive early and reconnoiter.

  It was, oh, no, not sixteen years since we had last met in Dublin when, after we made love, he had uttered words so terrible they had echoed in my mind ever since: “He is not my son.”

  Sixteen years. I was a young woman, full of hope and vitality, when last he set eyes on me. And now I was—oh God, I didn’t want to think of it. What did I look like? Would he think I’d aged? Would he notice I’d had surgery to the side of my nose? Had I applied my makeup well enough to hide it? If I perspired, would the scar appear? Was it already noticeable?

  I was so damned nervous.

  Peter let go of my hand, with “Good luck, Mom,” and suddenly I was alone, like a warrior going to do battle with… my dearest friend.

  The lobby light was dim. My breathing was heavy, almost out of control. My legs were ready to give way.

  Oh God, was that him? Could that be him? In New York? In 1991? This was surely a dream, you just don’t roll back the years like this.

  Then suddenly I knew, knew that between him and me there was no passage of the years. Time would rub out mountains but not us, not Eamonn and me. Time would leave us intact for each other; our story would live on as bright and new as when it was first told. Nothing in ourselves, we would always be everything in one another’s eyes.