Forbidden Fruit (20 page)

“Tell that to the woman with a string of kids and a cruel drunk for a husband.”

“Won’t you consider the Church’s position?”

“If I accepted it, I’d have to stop loving you.” That shook him. I don’t think it had entered his head that if he converted
me it was farewell to our love. My lack of conversion was the only justification for our relationship.

I went to the door. “I apologize,” I said. “I’m becoming a bully like you. It’s not for me to tell you what stand you should
be making.”

“Come back to me,” he said.

“I can hear you from here.”

“I just want you to appreciate the way I feel.”

“I do,” I conceded. I went over to him, hugged and kissed him. “I’d love you whatever you thought or did.”

“And I love you in spite of an awful lot that’s wrong with you, too.”

I went to the door again. “I know,” I said. “It’s not every Catholic who would go on loving a woman who sleeps every night
with a bishop.”

I
SPENT THE REST OF THAT DAY in Killarney. Wanting to get closer to Pat, I took her snarly black poodle for a walk. It was
funny seeing the apprehension on everybody’s face when this little dog appeared on the streets.

That afternoon, Eamonn had a titled visitor from England. He invited me into his study to meet Sir Gerald. For fun, I let
Larry in and he went straight as an arrow for the visitor’s leg.

Forgetting himself, Eamonn cried out, “Let go, you bastard,” and tried to grab Larry’s hindquarters.

Sir Gerald hardly opened his mouth except to say politely, “Be a good dog, old chap. You will get down? Please.”

I almost expected him to say, “Sherry, Larry?”

Eamonn was so angry I thought he might bite the dog.

Hearing the commotion, Pat ran in only to see her pet release the Englishman and make a jump at his old enemy.

“Oh, no, you don’t,” Eamonn cried, kicking out with all his might and scrambling up onto a chair next to the one on which
now stood his somewhat less distinguished visitor.

“What are you doing to my darling?” Pat said, and all Eamonn could do was point to the blood on the floor.

“It’s perfectly all right,” the Englishman said, as if this happened to him at least once a week.

Mary came to fetch me because Eamonn had a business meeting.

He came home late after drinking heavily. He came into my room, twirling the brown liquor round and round in his brandy glass.
“I don’t want to lose Pat,” he said, getting into bed, “but what am I going to do with that damned dog?”

“Arrange a party,” I said. “Give Pat a glass of poteen and I’ll give Larry a special cocktail of milk with Valium in it.”

“You’re mad, Annie.”

“It’d be a crib death. He sleeps next to Pat. Even a man could die sleeping next to someone with a forty-D bust.”

Eamonn gurgled on about Larry dying in comfort when I suddenly said, “Emergency.”

I was laughing so much, I was in danger of disgracing myself, and being on the wall side I was trapped.

“I’ve
got to get to the bathroom
or else Inch’ll become Tinkletown.” I tried to clamber over him but my feet snagged in the sheets. As he jerked to free me
I fell over backward into the gap between bed and wall, and the flood came.

I hated this humiliation. I raised my head to give him a piece of my mind but the bed was empty. Slowly, his head appeared
opposite mine and we laughed loudly together.

It was some minutes before he recovered his breath sufficiently to say, “My life was once so disciplined.”

“Stop blaming
me
.”

I fetched a bottle of Dettol disinfectant and began to clean the carpet. Lying on the bed, he said, “You have ruined the mood
altogether.”

He went to his own bedroom and returned in a temper forty-five minutes later.

“My God, she is still scrubbing the floor.”

“When I’ve finished,” I said, “we’ll go to your room.”

“Mary’d smell the Dettol in both our rooms and put two and two together.”

When I ripped the sheets off the bed, he bundled them up, saying, “I’m hiding them from Mary.”

“Where?”

“In the boot of my car.”

“At two in the morning?”

“ ’Tis safest so. I might forget them when I go to work.”

“Are you going to throw them over the cliff?”

“No, take them to Killarney and mix them with the Palace laundry. The nuns will presume they were from visitors’ beds.”

Knowing his distrust of nuns, I said, mischievously, “They’re so clever they might trace them back to…
us
.”

After giving me a sour glance, he went for a duffel bag. He stuffed the sheets inside and crept out the front door. I heard
his trunk quietly open and close. He returned with two sheets from the closet. As we remade the bed, his mind was still racing.

“If Mary sees that wet patch, she will ask herself why you couldn’t get out of bed in time.”

“It’s okay,” I said. “The truth is unimaginable.”

“No, she will know I was blocking your exit.”

I opened the windows for air and he got a thick towel from the bathroom to soak up the excess water on the carpet.

“What a way for a bishop to spend a night after a hard day’s work,” he said, oozing with self-pity. “But now we are free for
us.”

“After,” I said, “I’ve taken a shower.”

“But —”

“You said I can’t come into your room smelling of Dettol.”

“True,” he conceded.

Later, in his warm room, he became instantly erotic.

“Please,” I said. “Spare me this.”

“But I’ve waited for over two wretched hours.”

“I’m exhausted.” I rolled over. “Good night.”

He rolled me gently back and touched my cheek.

“You have that little curl of mischief at the left corner of your mouth.”

“Eamonn. It’s late. What are you —? My God, you are
worse
than Larry. Do you have to —?”

He had to.

Before I left his room at seven, he told me he was staying home that day to prepare for an early departure for Dublin the
next day. If I went with him, we would have to spend tonight in the Palace.

In midmorning, I packed my bags. I was really excited to be going on my first trip with the man I loved. Pat and Father O’Keeffe
were also coming, but I liked them very much.

Eamonn came to say, “You might like to dress up a bit.”

“These jeans not good enough for you?”

“With your slim figure, you look grand in anything but you will be eating with me in a hotel.”

He pulled the hair off my face.

“That’s better. Clip it up like that with combs. Do not wear those jangly earrings which bit my bum in bed.” I had to look
the secretary type like Pat.

All that day, one thought buzzed in my head. What had happened the night before was so like the breaking of the birth sac
it made me feel that one day I would be a mother.

Eamonn was compiling reports. When he was working, he looked amazingly capable and handsome.

On the way to Killarney that evening, he talked a lot about the European Economic Community (EEC). He was proud to have attracted
so much financial aid to the West of Ireland.

He also told me of a four-year-old Kerry girl who was lost in the woods near Kenmare. Everyone was afraid she would freeze
to death or drown in a lake. Yet all the officials did was to send out search parties in cars or on foot. He made them call
up a helicopter. If they didn’t and the child died, he warned them, he would tell the whole world. A chopper appeared as if
by magic. Within hours, the girl was found safe and well. “I cut through the red tape,” he said. “Oh, I cannot stand the pettiness
of officialdom.”

He explained that the reason he traveled a lot was because though he loved Ireland, he loathed its “backwardness.”

“You,” I said, “are backward yourself.”

“I knew I should have put glue on my lips. I am
not
discussing contraception, again.”

He could not see that he, too, was part of the Irish scene. The Pope himself was a Kerryman. They both bound themselves to
rigid rules in the face of terrible crises.

In one respect at least Eamonn had disregarded the rules. I was a girl lost in a dangerous forest and he would feel guilty
if he did not take extreme measures to rescue me.

To save my soul, he was willing, even in the Bishop’s Palace in Killarney, to cut through the red tape of the Ten Commandments.

I
N THE PALACE, Pat and I prepared a modest evening meal for ourselves, Eamonn, and John O’Keeffe. We ate in the kitchen.

Eamonn was in high spirits, telling jokes and stories about his parishioners, of whom he was evidently very fond. Much of
it centered on the trickery of Irish farmers and their lust for livestock and land. There was about the people, besides the
gaiety, he said, a morbidness and an abiding sense of guilt. This is why he liked to sit in the confessional and forgive them
their sins, which were often not sins at all.

“Above all,” he emphasized, “the Kerry folk love taking the micky out of people.”

“Even a bishop?” I asked.

“
Especially
a bishop.”

In a switch of mood, he told of a local scandal involving one of his aides, a woman with two children. In a pub, her lazy
husband had passed his hat around for money to send her to England for an abortion. This got back to Eamonn just before his
aide came to him asking for a four-week advance on salary for her vacation.

He told her he knew what the money was for. She said either she had an abortion or her marriage would fold. If she had to
give up her job, her husband would go to England to look for work and never come back. Eamonn promised to help her financially
and emotionally. He would see to it she was separated from her husband for a while so they both could be counseled. He would
also leave her job open for her until she was able to return.

I said, “You doing your big magician’s act.”

“I gave her no money,” he said coldly. “I refused to share in a murder.”

“You told her she was a murderer?”

Eamonn nodded. “If she went ahead, yes.”

“Must have done wonders for her morale.”

The woman, he went on, found the money somehow and went ahead with the abortion. He felt he had to get rid of her.

I did not know the lady in question so I was in no position to judge her but I said: “Why’d you fire her?”

“I had no choice.”

“Only cowards say that. We always have a choice.”

“Not someone in my position.”

“Does someone in your position have to be a coward?”

“I am not a coward if I do what I think is right.”

“But, Eamonn, she was already down—did you have to kick her?”

Famonn looked at Pat and Father O’Keeffe for support but they shrugged as if to say this was his scrap.

I went on, “Didn’t Jesus put up with disapproval when he kept fallen women in his company?”

“They had repented.”

“Did you ask this lady afterward if she had repented?”

“You don’t seem to understand, Annie,” he said. “I have to put my personal feelings aside.”

“What feelings?”

He ignored the insult. “As a representative, I have to think of the whole community. This was an open scandal.”

I wondered if he would feel compelled to fire a priest or, come to that, a bishop, if he were known to have cheated on his
vows? I settled for saying: “If Justin was imprisoned for stealing would you have to fire him? Why victimize a desperate woman?”

“If I hadn’t fired her, Annie, what sort of message would have gone out to my diocese?”

“Maybe that you were a Christian.”

“You think I am not?”

“A Catholic first, a Christian second.”

He eyed me sharply. “Explain.”

“Catholics look first to the Pope, Christians look only to Jesus.”

Eamonn sighed heavily, “Oh, dear God.”

“You could have said to her, ‘What you did was wrong but it would be an added wrong for me to fire you when you have problems
enough.’ Irish people would have understood that.”

Once again, it struck me how concerned Eamonn was with his reputation. In his view, in spite of Jesus’ treatment of Mary Magdalene,
some things were unforgivable. “I know I’m an ignorant American,” I said, “but I would have gone further and given her the
money.”

Eamonn covered his face with his hands, muttering, “Oh God, oh God,” before turning—significantly—to Father O’Keeffe as
if to say, “You see the problem I have on my hands?”

I said, “I’d have told her to follow her own conscience.”

“Follow her own conscience,” he repeated, with an almost pitying sigh that made me see red.

“Yes, hers and not yours. You’d have given her everything she asked if she had followed yours.”

“ ‘Tis not
my
conscience, you fool,” he responded heatedly.

“Oh, I beg your pardon,” I said. “You are God’s spokesman. I nearly forgot.”

“God Almighty, Annie, I’m fond of the woman, I really am, but what she did was wicked.”

“
She
didn’t think so. Besides, bishops may be exceptions, but the rest of us poor mortals all do wicked things from time to time.”

After the meal, we all had drinks and played poker.

“Hold your hand up,” Eamonn kept saying to me, “you have no guile, girl.”

“Stop looking over my shoulder,” I said, angrily.

Having someone look at your cards was unnerving. It was like someone looking inside your brain. After poker, the three of
them took turns at playing the piano and singing. They were talented and trusting of each other.

We retired just before midnight. Pat went home and Father O’Keeffe had a room on the ground floor. Eamonn and I virtually
had the upstairs to ourselves. In that quiet old house, we climbed the majestic sweeping staircase with landings decorated
with chandeliers and old pastoral prints. When he showed me my bedroom, it took my breath away.

“A shame,” he said, “you are not sleeping here.”

“Where, then?”

He winked and gestured me to follow him. His bedroom, two doors along, had a high-beamed ceiling, tall windows with burgundy
drapes, and thick-pile blue carpets edged by polished pine. The big bed was of heavy brass. The eiderdown was a feminine salmon
pink with exquisite Belgian lace and matching feather pillows.