Forbidden Fruit
Authors: Annie Murphy,Peter de Rosa
COPYRIGHT © 1993 BY FORTHRIGHT, LTD.
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. NO PART OF THIS BOOK MAY BE REPODUCED IN ANY FORM OR BY ANY ELECTRONIC OR MECHANICAL MEANS, INCLUDING INFORMATION STORAGE AND RETRIEVAL SYSTEMS, EXCEPT BY A REVIEWER WHO MAY QUOTE BRIEF PASSAGES IN A REVIEW.
Hachette Book Group
237 Park Avenue
New York, NY 10017
Visit our website at
www.HachetteBookGroup.com
First eBook Edition: September 2009
ISBN: 978-0-316-08416-1
Contents
THIS BOOK IS FOR PETER, MY SON
The Bishop was a jazzman.
As Annie stood beside him on the mountaintop,
he seemed to her to be playing
Dixieland jazz on a saxophone,
fingers fast moving,
body rhythmically swaying,
so she had the weird impression
that the music, his music,
was creating the world around them,
bringing to life sea, sky, stone,
misty islands,
and even the song of the birds.
I thank Fredrica Friedman, my editor at Little, Brown and Company; her enthusiasm for this project never wavered and her guidance
throughout was invaluable. Thanks, too, to my attorney, Peter Albert McKay, for standing by me on some dark days; also to
his colleagues, Alfred Hemlock and Bill Adler, for their generous support. Special thanks to Peter de Rosa, whose unique talent
brought this work to light, and to his family for sharing with me a home full of good humor and compassion. Above all, I owe
thanks to Arthur Pennell, who has been my support at so many critical moments, and to Peter, my son. Only he knows what this
book has cost me; only he has made it worthwhile.
I
FLEW FROM DARKNESS INTO LIGHT. Never before had I been inside a plane that sped toward the sun. On the night flight from
New York, sleepless in my window seat, I felt the black waters of the Atlantic receding beneath me. I was leaving behind so
many dead things. A dead childhood, a dead marriage, dead dreams, a dead me.
Even before the sun rose I saw the miracle of morning, first a milky whiteness, then that whiteness turn to pink and gold
before the entry of the dancing sun.
I was inside a shell. This was spring, after all, this was mid-April 1973. I tapped the side of the plane, a nearly twenty-five-year-old
unhatched chick wanting to be let out, to be born. When did I last sense joy awaiting me? Maybe never.
My tall one-legged jazz-loving father told me before I boarded the plane that I would forget the bad things and find serenity
in Ireland. His old friend and distant relative Eamonn Casey, the Bishop of Kerry, had promised him that.
“Ireland’s the place,” the Bishop had said. “I will take care of her personally.” And peace was entering me already. Dear
father with the sad, sad eyes, you, who guessed without being told all my former fears and my dread, were so right: I was
headed for happiness.
The descent began. To the left were the Aran Islands and Galway, to the right Dingle and Tralee Bay. The very names were magic
to me. As the plane’s shadow traced the broad silver estuary of the Shannon, I could see snow-sprinkled mountains and quilts
of tiny fields with white, thatched cottages from which blue smoke curled like ribbons. And everywhere green. I remember thinking,
So that is what
green
looks like
.
Touchdown. Everyone clapped, and I, who had not spoken a word during the flight, so full was I of wonder, clapped loudest
of all. I had come home to a place where I had never been.
Eamonn, I had been told, would be waiting for me. I had met him once in New York when I was seven. Already a priest aged twenty-nine,
he had come to Manhattan to take care of his widowed sister who had fallen on hard times. “Who are you?” I asked him, and,
still looking out the window, he said, “Father Eamonn.” Strange that I should remember only his big sad eyes. I, a little
girl, sympathized with him. I had wanted to take him aside into a quiet room and tell him, “Eamonn, it’s going to be all right.
It’s going to be all right.”
There was a big crowd in the arrivals hall at Shannon. My fellow passengers pressed forward with the urgency of people who
have not seen loved ones for a long time. Young couples with babies were enveloped by those waiting to see them. The middle-aged
and silver-haired in the crowd rushed forward, grabbing and smothering with kisses their grandchildren seen for the first
time. And in that flood of emotion, that avalanche of laughter and unmelancholy tears, who was waiting for
me
, who would greet
me
?
I picked him out at once in his black suit and clerical collar. His round happy face with his forehead—higher than I remembered
it—was peering now through the trellis of people, now over their heads. He was in movement like a dancer, and his flashing
eyes were not sad at all but creased with smiles.
It struck me that he was not merely open-faced and handsome but something else: elemental. He was full of light and energy,
like the dancing sun.
He knew me instantly, though he had a puzzled look as if he had expected a child and met a woman. Or maybe he thought, as
a result of my father’s letter, he would be meeting someone gaunt and haggard. Instead, there was this relaxed slim young
lady of 110 pounds in suede high heels and a flattering mauve dress with small polka-dots. He glanced at my long blunt-cut
golden brown hair and my face with a little blush on it, not too much lipstick because I didn’t need it. I think he even noticed
the title of the book under my arm, the only one I had brought with me, Thomas Wolfe’s
You Can’t Go Home Again
.
Squeezing my hand and kissing my cheek, so I smelled his Old Spice after-shave, he said in a kind of champagne fizz:
“Welcome to Ireland. Our little Annie’s grown up.”
“Little girls do,” I said, the mischief in me responding instantly to the mischief in him.
His smile was enchanting, the feel of his hand warm and gentle. This was for me the strangest thing in an already strange
existence. He, whom I had met only once and looked at with a child’s eyes, had been known to me all my life.
What sort of chemicals were in the air? Not for one second had I anticipated liking any man, not after what some men had done
to me, and here I was on Irish soil immediately being drawn to a
bishop
? Ever since I met one at my confirmation, bishops were not my favorite species.
Heavens, Annie Murphy
, I thought,
settle yourself. Don’t get carried away
.
He grabbed my two bags. As if he had already summed me up, he said, so breathlessly I could hardly hear, “Yes, little Annie’s
got blue eyes, thick curly hair and she’s beautiful.”
He certainly had charm!
He was off on twinkling toes, barging through the crowd. He was about five feet eight, a couple of inches taller than I, and
there were threads of gray in his dark hair.
I ran after him on stiff legs out into the parking lot. I noticed that he was wearing scarlet socks and that his big black
automatic Mercedes was taking up two parking spaces, probably because he had arrived in a hurry and just didn’t care.
“How did you feel coming into Ireland?” he said, as he opened the car door for me on the left-hand side.
“Like I was coming into a fairyland.”
“Good.” With an exciting rippling laugh, he slammed the door on me, just missing my fingers.
As he jumped in beside me, making the car shake, I said, “Why’re you wearing red socks?”
He paused for a moment to frown at me with fluid, penetrating eyes. “You
are
observant. I just like the color.”
“You should be wearing purple. Red’s for a cardinal. It must be a sign of your ambition.”
“You’d call it ambition, I suppose, if my nose were to bleed red instead of purple.”
His eyes sparked bright as he gunned the car and we shot off on what was like a ride on a bullet. I don’t like fast driving
unless I’m behind the wheel, but with him I felt safe. We tore through sleepy villages and towns. This man had a hurricane
inside him.
Hanging on for dear life, I said to Eamonn, “You’re driving at sixty-five miles an hour through a town full of people.”
“Ah,” he said, making things worse by lifting his hands off the wheel with a Lord-be-with-you motion, “there’s nobody here.
And if there were I’d give ‘em a miss.” With butterfly flutters of his gold-ringed hand he blessed the invisible people to
right and left as if his benediction alone would keep them from all harm. “God bless you and you and you,” ending with another
rippling laugh.
I couldn’t resist that. He was a fountain of laughter.
“You should be arrested,” I said.
“Whatever for, Annie?”
I liked the way he spoke my name in his soft voice. No longer little Annie.
“If you hit someone, it’ll be homicide.”
“And won’t I do them the honor of giving them the last rites of holy Mother Church? Imagine being sent to heaven courtesy
of a bishop.”
“You think you can get away with murder, Eamonn?”
I liked the sound of his name, too.
As he turned to me, I said, “Eye on the road,
please
. I’m not ready for heaven yet.”
The car hit a bump, and my head touched the roof. He lifted both hands off the wheel again and laughed all the louder. He
was theatrical without trying to be.
“Slow down,” I gasped.
“I’ve never been killed yet, as far as I know.”
I doubted it. I wondered if he were a wizard, like Merlin in the legends. Maybe Eamonn Casey was a warlock, a sorcerer. Maybe
he had lived many lives, had many adventures, surprised his enemies, fought and died in many wars and been reborn as often
as was necessary.
“I heard,” I said, when I got my breath back, “you were supposed to drive on the left over here, not down the middle.”
Not only were his hands now off the wheel, he was looking fixedly at me with eyes that flickered like distant lightning.
“You’re a crowing hen, Annie Murphy, d’you realize that? You make fun of my socks, accuse me of being ambitious, and now I
don’t know how to drive.”
“Look out,” I yelled, to stop him from going straight into the back of an old Ford van.
He swerved just in time onto the grass verge and on again without a change of pace.
“Annie,” he growled, “you are a positive menace on the road. For a split-second back there, I was close to growing grass instead
of whiskers on my chest.”
Heavens
, I thought,
he blames me for his own mistakes
.
A few times after that he beeped his horn just for the fun of it. I smiled at him. We both liked fun. The signs were we had
the same sense of humor.
Suddenly, coming toward us in the middle of the road was a big cow, ready for milking. We screeched to a halt, so the round-eyed
long-lashed black-and-white creature found herself looking straight at us, not a little startled, through the windshield.
A small bell around her neck rang tinnily.
“God Almighty,” Eamonn said, honking. “Get away with you, moo-moo-moo, ye silly woman, before I excommunicate you.”
Slowly, with swishing messy tail, the huge animal lurched by, brushing my door.
