Forbidden Fruit (22 page)

I was embarrassed because this was too much like double-dating, which I had never liked. And yet, secretly, I rejoiced because
if Eamonn and I were ever to go away together, he would need, if not the approbation of people like Joan Browne, at least
the understanding of colleagues and priest friends.

We dropped off Pat and Father O’Keeffe in Killarney and on the drive back to Inch, I asked Eamonn why he had been so open
in front of them. He shrugged it off. “They didn’t think anything of it.”

“You gave us away.”

He told me not even to think about it. At that moment, I felt that kissing in the back of an official car was more significant
in terms of the future than sleeping in the Bishop’s bed in Killarney. If he was brave or foolish enough to advertise our
relationship, he might be brave or foolish enough to come away with me.

As soon as we reached home, I went straight to my room, changed, and got into bed.

“Please,” I begged him, “get me one of Mary’s Valium.”

With it, he brought back something even better, a glass of milk. I smelled it suspiciously but he made me drink it. We talked
and I laughed foolishly for about ten minutes until the mix of Valium, cough medicine, and the unknown liquor in the milk
knocked me out.

I awoke fourteen hours later. It was evening. He heard me moving around and came to my room. “How’s your cough?”

I tested my throat and said, “Seems to have gone.”

He laughed. “I should have been a doctor.” He had laced the milk with poteen.

“You could have killed me,” I said.

“Killed you, Annie? But I am a healer, remember?”

S
UDDENLY, Inch was full of Eamonn’s relatives and their friends from Dublin and Limerick. One afternoon, eight of them, all
in their twenties, came hurtling up the drive, making it plain by their shrieks of laughter that they were out for a good
time. The weather was warm and the setting idyllic.

Bob Clooney, Eamonn’s nephew, had brought along Sinead, his girlfriend. One of his nieces, Shelagh, a quiet pretty girl, was
with her husband. Charlie had no job. Well dressed, with blond hair and fine pink skin, he ate and drank everything in sight.
Eamonn’s generosity toward his visitors was astonishing. The kitchen was piled high with thick T-bone steaks, chickens, hams,
gâteaux, and liquor of all kinds.

Things began quietly. Eamonn was extremely careful. Highly sexed young people would find him out soonest of all. He came to
my bedroom only once, locking the door behind him and staying at most for three hours.

When he left on a four-day business trip to London, the house turned wild. We had bathing jaunts on the beach, parties on
the lawn, and loud, boozy sing-alongs every night.

Mary resented the visitors, Charlie in particular. He smoked the Bishop’s cigars and drank his best liquors. I was no paragon.
One evening, I invited the crowd down to the local pub. I was in the car with Bob Clooney and Sinead. We had our heads through
the roof and the strong wind affected us like wine. We screamed like crazy going down the hill and a few hours drinking with
the locals did not improve us. All I remember of that night was a loud argument about birth control. Charlie said, “You were
married and had no kids, who are you to talk?” and I said, “Who’s talking?” as I threw my beer in his face.

Next morning, he said I had disgraced them. “How can I atone?” I said. “Cook you another three thick steaks? Put three more
of Eamonn’s cigars in your fat lips?”

The crowd gathered around us.

“Take a look at yourself, you shitty American.”

I said, “I don’t smoke Eamonn’s five-dollar cigars from the time my eyes open in the afternoon.”

Bob Clooney took me aside. “Not for his sake, Annie, but for yours, let’s have peace, eh?”

“Sure,” I said, “peace to all present,” and I walked out, slamming the door after me.

I had had to vacate my room. At night, as I lay on a mattress next to Mary’s bed, I could feel her antagonism building up.
She was having to clean up their messes. On the third morning, I woke to find her packing. “Someone’s ill in my family,” she
lied.

What most stuck in her throat was that Bob spent hours behind closed doors with Sinead.

“I found them together in…” Her voice trailed off.

“For God’s sake, complete your —”

“The Bishop’s bed.”

Within an hour of her departure, the couple were back in the Bishop’s room.

When Eamonn returned from London, he called Inch from Killarney asking us all to drive over to meet him.

I went first into his study. “I heard you were in the pub completely blotto.”

“What is this,” I said, “the third degree?”

“Mary found Bob and Sinead sleeping in
my
bed.”

“What’s the big deal? They’re getting married soon.”

He said, huffily, “I want no advice from you about right and wrong.”

I was astonished. It was as if it had never occurred to him before that such things happened in his house. Also, I didn’t
like his attitude of “Don’t do as I do, do as I say.” He walked one way, his shadow walked another.

“But, Famonn, think what
you
do under your own roof.”

“Guests should know better than to sin in my bed.”

He spoke to Bob privately and the lad apologized. We were all going that night to Tralee but, Bob assured him, they would
leave next day.

When Eamonn met up with us in a bar in the center of Tralee, he was subdued. I felt he was seeing the world through different
glasses. If he was horrified at an engaged couple sleeping together, what would people think if they knew that he, a bishop,
slept nightly with me?

Charlie said something particularly nasty to me. Maybe it was the strain of the last few days, but I ran out crying. Bob came
bounding after me but I turned on him unkindly and yelled, “Stay away from me.”

Eamonn came after me in his car. He found me on my way to the beach. Whenever I panicked, I went like a fish in search of
water and he knew that.

“Annie,” he pleaded through the car window, “you cannot scream like that when you belong to the Bishop’s party.” As always,
for Eamonn appearances were reality; things were what they seemed.

“I’m sick and tired of belonging to the Bishop’s party,” I told him. “I don’t want to be inhibited like you Irish.”

“
Annie
, I had an awful meeting in England and my stomach is killing me.”

“Blackmail.”

“Not true. Now my house is a mess. And I thought so highly of Sinead.”

“Are you telling me she’s trash?”

“I was going to marry them.”

“And now?”

“With her in white, it’d embarrass them, knowing that I know.”

“Know
what
, that they love each other? What’s the matter with you, where’s the spirit of Christian forgiveness?” Religious people hate
having religion thrown at
them
.

“You sure,” he said, “you didn’t whip this up?”

“That is despicable,” I shouted. “Whatever they did in your house they’ve been doing for a while.”

“Maybe.”

I left him abruptly, heading for the beach, and he drove alongside me:

“Annie, please.”

I walked on without turning my head.

“Pet, I am in a very strange place in my life.”

“Explain.”

“Look at me on the way back from Dublin. If I didn’t know you better, I’d have said you pretended to be ill so I —”

“
Pretended
?”

When I faced him, my anger suddenly dissolved. He was suffering so badly from his colitis. He halted and I jumped in the rear
seat.

He looked at me through his rearview mirror with distrust. It was as if I were incorrigible, and the bad in me was getting
worse, corrupting people dear to him.

The shift in his attitude sent a shiver through me. We had reached the summit of our relationship and from now there was nowhere
to go but down.

In a subdued mood, the young people left Inch early the next morning. Within the hour, Eamonn came home.

I led him into the dining room and flipped open his cigar box. Empty. I held up my arms. “I didn’t smoke them, honest.”

I threw open his gutted cocktail cabinet.

Faced with desolation. “But —”

“I spent hours cleaning this house. On my own.”

I followed him into his bedroom. “I’m certainly not sleeping on these sheets,” he said, whipping them off his bed.

Mary returned an hour after Eamonn, and a coldness seemed to grip all three of us.

It came as no surprise to me that he came into my bedroom that night with the plain intention of not sleeping with me. When
he tried to kiss me good night, I said: “No thanks.” I did not want him off-loading his guilt on me. “You live your own life.”

Next morning, after breakfast, he came into my room. “Annie,” he sighed, “I’m lost. Many EEC grants have fallen through. Maybe
I was wrapped up in you and got careless.”

“Thanks,” I said, sharply.

“I’m blaming
me
, Annie.”

I said I knew his work came first, which was why I was going home to America.

“Not yet,” he begged.

That night, when Eamonn came home from Killarney, he tried to enter my room and found it locked.

This was talking-through-doors time. I said: “I’m packing.”

“Let’s talk.”

“In the living room after dinner.”

In the middle of our talk he suggested we drive down to the beach. He got into black slacks and a white shirt. On the moonlit
sands, he took my hand and we walked on the edge of the waves that sent up a fragrant cooling breeze. I rolled up the legs
of my jeans and took off my shoes, so I could walk by myself in the water. It was as if I were floating, leaving no more trace
behind me than the wind. I loved the silky feel of water, the broad white moon-path across the sea, the deep faraway swan-lake
of stars. In silvery light, under a haloed moon that presaged a sunny tomorrow, I had an elemental feeling that everything
was somehow connected with everything else. If only we could see these almost unimaginable wonders, see, if need be, through
pain, that there is hope and redemption through the communion of all created things.

Across the distance I had deliberately put between us to show we had choices, even the most terrible, Eamonn said: “But you’re
not ready to go yet.”

“You mean,
you’re
not ready to let me go.”

We walked in silver-shadowy silence before he responded, his arms sweeping the tremulous sea, his fingers going up-up-up to
the unshy moon. “You’re right. If you left now I would think I had failed you.” He beat his breast. “Whatever good I did you
was annulled by my concern for my image. Also, my life has gone topsyturvy.”

“Tell me how.”

Another painful silence before:

“I’ve broken all my vows. I run around in the mornings like a maniac to make my confession. Lately, I haven’t even bothered
to do that because my confessor keeps saying, ‘You’ve got to let her go.’ And… I can’t.”

I had understood that for a long time. Oil and water would not mix even for Eamonn.

“On the trip back from Dublin, Annie, I lost all control. I wasn’t a priest—more like an alley cat.”

How sad. He saw what we did as evil, whereas for me our love was liberating and lovely.

The incident in the car had opened his eyes to his own hypocrisy.

I stopped in my tracks. “Your confessor is right. It’s got to end.”

“But I will so miss you, Annie.”

I sobbed. “It
is
heartbreaking to fall in love with someone you can never have.”

He said, “If you go in anger, it will haunt me for the rest of my days.”

Since he was in the middle of a crisis, this was now-or-never time. “If I stay, it’s as much for you as for me. If you keep
turning your love into healing, forget it.”

He held out his hand to me to join him from the water. I refused until he said humbly: “We need each other.”

It was like a voice out of the clouds because he never spoke of needing anybody.

I joyfully left the sea. Ours was a real, deep embrace, for, with his acknowledgment of need, I wanted his child more than
ever. All I could think of was a baby boy with Eamonn’s features and Eamonn’s expression on his face.

After hugging each other contentedly, we walked arm in arm, with the water lapping the cream-edged sand. This was another
binding, heart-baring moment.

“The pain,” he said, “is ripping me apart. This sexual thing is so much more powerful than I had imagined. And”—he touched
my breasts—“you are so beautiful and intelligent and spicy and funny.”

Never had I felt so much his equal. The healer had himself been hurt but, though he could not see this, the wound was healing
him of his inhumanity.

I was touched by his humility at revealing to me for the first time the terrible cost to him.

Solid differences remained. His faith was in faith, whereas mine was in love.

We went on walking for another half hour, saying little, leaving two sets of tracks in the sand.

When he came to my room later, his brandy glass was full to the brim and he had tied a double-knot in the cord of his robe.

“Sorry,” I said, “but just turn around and head for home.”

He looked at me in his puzzled fashion.

“Only men with single knots are allowed in my bedroom. That’s an insult.”

“Insult?”

“You expecting me to rape you?”

“No, Annie.” He giggled, and took a huge swig of brandy.

“Why didn’t you come in here wearing one of those old chastity belts out of a museum?”

He approached and let me undo the first knot. “I’m not staying, Annie.”

He bent down to kiss me and I smelled sea-salt and infinity on his cheek. That first gentle kiss led to a second, less gentle,
until he was searching my mouth with his tongue. When he allowed me some air, I suggested he might find life easier on the
horizontal.

“Why not?”

He lay down beside me and I untied the second knot. “That’ll
do
, Annie.”