Forbidden Fruit (6 page)

They were so relaxed you got the impression they had nowhere of importance to go to. Even the postman, with a packed bag on
his shoulder, gazed in every shop window as if he were out on a stroll to see his pals and had arrived two hours early. He
stopped on the bridge to see if the trout were biting that day or were just up for air and wanting a chat.

We went into the butcher’s shop. He was a big man with a red face and a bent knee of a nose with nostrils like a horse. All
the time he was laughing and gesturing and wielding a bloody cleaver as though he were Oliver Cromwell.

He followed Mary out to the car and heaved in, off a bloodied shoulder, what looked like half a cow. He threw it in the backseat,
without any wrapping, touched his forelock, laughed raucously again, and, brushing his meaty hands, went back to his shop.
Used as I was to the neat expensive packaging of New York, this was quite an experience.

Killorglin, Mary told me, was a “pagan place.” They held a three-day Puck Fair there every summer. The maidens of the town,
and there were still some in Ireland in those days, competed for the affections of the Goat, a monstrous horned creature.
The luckiest of them became his August bride.

In midafternoon Mary dropped me off on Inch strand, while she took the meat to the Palace in Killarney where she kept a couple
of freezers full of food for when Eamonn entertained. The beach was deserted. It suited me to walk, squired by the sun, alone
and not alone, along the frothy edge of the sea or to lie in the sand dunes.

When you are happy you don’t mind being solitary. I was happy, though with what justification I could not be sure.

Eamonn came home earlier than Mary had predicted. I knew he would. This is why I had deliberately delayed so as not to be
there when he arrived. Let Eamonn wait on me.

I finally walked the couple of miles or so up from the shore, past the Strand Hotel, along a stony and pitted path, to find
him eagerly looking out for me at the door.

Did anyone ever welcome anyone as he welcomed me? My heart raced out to meet this man with the sunflower smile.

Taking both my hands in his, he said, “Yesterday, your face was a snowflake, Annie, and now your cheeks are red as votive
lamps.”

He pointed to where the spring sun, descending, was reddening the distant mountains. He noticed me shudder and those questioning
eyes demanded to know what was wrong.

“It’s just… it reminds me of blood on snow.”

He sensitively did not ask why that unsettled me.

That night, by the hearth, I was reluctant to reveal myself further. After a long chat about friends and world events and
Irish politics and even some Irish history, I clammed up. This was to be my Silent Night.

I was not consciously playing hard to get. I was simply not prepared to do what he wanted when he wanted it, as if all he
had to do, so to speak, was ring the Angelus bell.

“Problems like yours, Annie,” he said, “don’t go away. Unless you talk them out, they’ll follow you all your life. One day,
when you’re least expecting it, they pop up and”—he gestured eloquently to his own throat—“strangle you.”

My continuing silence meant that from his point of view, it was a wasted day. But I felt it was good to reinforce the fact
that I was a real person and not just an American cousin with a problem awaiting the touch of his healing hand.

Maybe he knew that already, but maybe not, and I was not prepared to take a chance. Not till I had lowered the odds.

That night, before he began his prayers up and down the corridor he came into my bedroom to say good night. He sat on the
bed beside me and fondly pushed my hair out of my eyes.

“God bless you, Annie.” As he said it, his eyes were shining, his hands and body trembling.

I felt I had only to touch him or stroke him and he would be in bed with me. I was ready for it, but he, in spite of his obvious
sexual excitement, was not.

I kept to my plan. I felt for him this mysterious something that had no name but I was not sure if he felt the same toward
me. If he did and if this feeling was to last, the first move would have to be his. I slipped further down under the covers
to prove my good intentions.

Without looking back, he left my room.

Moments later I heard him walking up and down, praying. I would have given a lot to know what he was saying to his God—and
what his God was saying to him.

Next day, I did not see him till he returned very late at night. My turn to know what waiting feels like. Maybe this was his
way of getting even.

He had the problem, he said, of funding a parish in Africa. Irish missionary priests were keen to start a school for native
children. He seemed much concerned for the poor, whom he called, Irish fashion, “green mouths,” because, I guess, they had
nothing to eat but grass and nettles.

By the fireside, after the usual talk about friends and family, he said, “Tell me more about yourself, Annie. For me.”

I found that so touching, I could not hold back.

As he encouraged me by stroking the back of my hand, I explained that after the baby was stillborn, I kept getting terrible
headaches and my stomach seemed ready to blow up. My doctor said this was quite normal after a late miscarriage.

Then, when my first period was due, I simply streamed with blood. It came flying out of me in great ugly clots. I felt I was
dying. After all, how much blood can you lose?

“My husband,” I told Eamonn, “took me to hospital. I was bleeding all over the place. It was winter and snowing, and as I
walked, I dripped.”

“Blood on snow.”

I nodded.

“The hospital was Kings County, a terrible place. No sick person ought to be allowed in there. The two interns who examined
me hissed, ‘She’s had an abortion. She murdered her baby.’ They had a point. Perpetual mother, perpetual guilt, eh? But it
was unfair of them to judge me. They didn’t know.”

Eamonn stroked my burning cheek. “You never hurt anyone, Annie, and you never would.”

“They put me in a room with a man in the next bed. A nurse came in screaming, ‘Get a tag for this guy’s toe.’ I thought they
were talking about me. I wanted to tell them I was dying but I wasn’t fucking dead yet.”

I looked up and said, “Sorry.” He patted my head for me to continue. I gathered his own language was not always monastic.

“They wanted to put a tag on this corpse. As if without it no one would realize he was dead. He had fooled me because his
eyes were open and he was looking straight at me.”

Eamonn stroked my head strongly to intimate, I think, that I was not in the company of a corpse now.

“My husband came in then. Seeing him, I thought his baby I had let die was getting back at me. He tugged my boots off and
my toes were all black.”

“Frostbite?”

“No. I was losing a tremendous amount of blood prior to going into shock. I started to hyperventilate and had the first panic
attack of my life. Everyone was running around, shouting and screaming, but nobody really cared.”

“Oh, Annie,” Eamonn said, sympathetically.

“A doctor was pressing down on my belly and great gouts of blood were spurting out. I wanted to run away. If I was going to
die, I wanted out of that madhouse. I got up and ran for the exit. They grabbed me and ordered a big powerful nurse to wrestle
me and stop me leaving.”

I must have paused in my story, lost in memory, because I kind of came to with Eamonn asking, “What then, Annie, my poor,
poor Annie?”

Hey
, I thought,
stop that or I’ll cry
.

“What then? The bleeding slowed down. Not much left, I guess.” I said this with a wry smile. “I was transferred to Saint Vincent’s.
But I was never to be the person I was before. I was now an agitated, panicky, useless human being.”

“Don’t say that, Annie,” the great healer insisted. “Never say that.”

“I called my husband and told him I wanted to come home. ‘Get yourself a cab,’ he said.”

“You had given birth to his child, you were sick in hospital, and he said that? How could he?”

“If you don’t love, you can do anything, Eamonn. Anyway, I was devastated. That was when my agoraphobia started.”

“Agoraphobia?”

“It stopped my first day here when I came down the mountain.”

“Really?” He shook his head in disbelief. “But what caused it?”

“I had to go find a cab on my own.”

“Animals,” he muttered.

“There were no showers, no one offered me a towel, and I was covered in blood.”

“But you were in a hospital.”

“Correction. A New York hospital. No one cared a damn. After all, I was only a human being.”

“Go on.”

“I had only a handkerchief to clean myself with. There was blood all over me, on my face, even in my hair. The cab driver
took one look at me and said, ‘Christ, lady, you been in an accident?’ I said, ‘That’s about it.’ I climbed in and he took
me home. After that, I never liked open spaces.”

Eamonn seemed satisfied that my story was complete, though there were dark things in my marriage, in me, that maybe I could
never tell him. He had his arms around my shoulder as if to enclose me and take away my fear forever.

For a long time, he stroked my hair and my hands, tender and silent, apart from an occasional long sigh. He seemed to be wrestling
with some problem that I could not fathom.

When I glanced momentarily at him, I saw a sad, almost wistful expression on his face. He seemed to me then to be more vulnerable
than either he or I had ever imagined.

That night, I was lying in bed when, immediately after he had said his prayers, he slipped into my room. This time, he approached
my bed and lifted me into his arms and, after pussy-catting my cheek, he kissed me passionately.

This was a soul kiss. His tongue sharpened itself on my upper teeth before exploring the smooth warm cave of my mouth, as
though he were desperate to find a refuge in me. Propped up on my pillow, I tried to move backward but he wouldn’t let me.

What stunned me was the realization that he had done this before. No one could kiss like that without practice.

My God
, I thought,
what if he isn’t the incorruptible man I imagined but the horned Goat of Puck Fair
?

But he was a goddamn bishop; where had he learned all this?

I felt his whole body trembling and shuddering next to mine, but I could not respond adequately because he pinned me so tight
and my mind was in a whirl. After a minimum of two minutes, he let me come up for air.

In retrospect, my silence helped me. Saying yes or no would have put me in control by encouraging or denying him. My breathlessness
told in my favor. He had no one to blame but himself. If he had broken a commandment, he had used his own hammer.

Then, abruptly, without a word, without an explanation or an apology, he was gone.

For a long time after, my mind was in turmoil. It struck me that my Eamonn found it hard to say sorry. I did not mind that,
for he may have been suffering from embarrassment.

I was relieved that he was not after all a sun, glowing and pure all round, but, like me, a moon with a dark side. The moon
has always fascinated me because it is two-faced. If I’m ever reincarnated, I’ll come back as the moon.

My body ached to follow Eamonn into his room, to introduce the black side of me to the black side of him. In other words,
I wanted, as was natural, to say, “Where do we go from here?”

But I didn’t want to blow it. Play this cool, Annie Murphy. He is far too precious to lose.

I switched off my bedside lamp and both sides of me, black and white, went into a quiet, restful sleep.

A
FEW DAYS PASSED. I said nothing, intimated nothing about what had happened. He may have been testing me to see if I could
keep a secret. I knew I could. As a doctor’s daughter, I was often the first to know and the last to tell of his patients’
ailments. But could Eamonn?

One morning, while Mary was out shopping, I saw him off on a three-day trip abroad. I dusted a pollen-like trace of dandruff
from his shoulders, complimented him on looking so smart. He kissed me at the front door but not passionately. More like a
man going to the office.

“Take care,” I said, though he was already out of earshot and, with a cheery wave, he drove off in a cloud of dust.

The next few days I walked the white beach at Inch, watching the breakers and soaking up the May sunshine. I was more buoyant
than I had ever been. Everything around me was precious. I could not bear to step on a crab or a sandfly for fear of hurting
or killing it.

For days, I had caught myself looking with amazement at the stars, sunrise, the sea, a poplar tree, an ant, and felt what
the author of Genesis must have felt when he said simply in God’s name of everything freshly created, “It was good.”

I had an awesome sensation that the relationship between Eamonn and me had been planned before time began. Is this what philosophers
mean by eternity? Did this entrancing idea, more a feeling, originate in an overwhelming sense that something uniquely good
in our lives was intended from the beginning? Yes, this communion between Eamonn and me was meant to be before the Creator
said, “Let there be light.”

Without searching for it and with the suddenness of forked lightning, I had a name for the nameless thing that had been slowly
taking shape in me for days. It was a name so ordinary, so often used by me as well as by millions of others, I never realized
I had not once appreciated it until I came to know Eamonn. It was love.

Recognition took all the strength out of my legs. I just made it to the grassy dunes where I collapsed and lay out of the
wind under a blue sky. I was exhausted in body yet filled with boundless spiritual strength.

Love. So this, finally, was love. I laughed aloud at my long ignorance. Boyfriends, even my husband, from time to time had
said to me, “I love you,” and I had responded with “And I love you.” I was now ashamed for having used this precious phrase
so glibly, so mindlessly.