Forbidden Fruit (47 page)

“He is
not
my son.” Eamonn insisted the child could be anyone’s. Annie was a wild young woman without religion, living in Dublin at
the time.

“I’ve lived with her for years, she’s just not like that.”

To which Eamonn responded, “People change.”

“But,” Arthur said, “you made payments over the years.”

“Prove it,” Eamonn said.

Arthur knew the routine. He could prove nothing. In despair at the brilliance of the Bishop’s defenses, he said, “A court
could order a blood test.”

Eamonn laughed at so preposterous a suggestion. “Let’s face it,” he said. “You have her word against mine and I’m an Irish
bishop. If you make a public fuss, I will deny all connection between me and her. Moreover, tell her I would resign rather
than have anything to do with that boy of hers. Now, would you like a cup of tea and a sandwich?”

Fearing he might hit him or hold him hostage and call the press, Arthur left and drove straight back to Shannon where he reported
to me.

I have only Arthur’s account of this meeting. I believe it is basically correct. But it sounded to me like a confrontation
between two jealous men. The mere fact that I was living with Arthur must have persuaded Eamonn that I really was a whore.
Had I been decent, would I not have remained faithful to him till death?

Peter, of course, wanted to know where Arthur had been. How excited he was when he heard. “Did Eamonn admit he was my father
or did he say I was the son of a milkman? Tell me.”

I said, “He admitted nothing.”

“I can just see him.” Peter was deeply hurt. “He’s a real rat.”

“Please don’t say that,” I pleaded, though he expressed my sentiments precisely.

To my utter surprise, Peter said, “He is totally corrupt.”

I lifted my hand to slap his face but he did not flinch. “Didn’t you ever hear, Mom, that all power tends to corrupt and absolute
power corrupts absolutely? Well, that’s him.”

He went outside, mumbling, “He won’t even talk to me.” Seconds later, through the open window, I saw him raise his hands to
the sky like Eamonn and let out a long unearthly scream. It was animal, primeval, and it scraped my heart.

When I went to kiss him good night, he enfolded me in his strong arms and said, ominously: “I’m warning you, Mom, that guy
is not safe from me, not anymore. I’ve a score to settle with him.”

Peter’s bitterness, his sense of being abandoned, affected me. I had seldom called Eamonn and never asked for much. I had
never betrayed him because I loved him. Yet he had told Arthur that he would have no hesitation in betraying me—and, worse,
Peter, too—if he had to.

I was madder than I had ever been in my life.

As far as I was concerned, Eamonn was no longer protected. It was open season.

H
AD I REPRIMANDED ARTHUR, he would have gone straight back to Edinburgh. I was lonely and Peter, too, needed him.

Arthur decided that if we were to sell the house we would have to rebuild it. The new planning permission was for one of 7,000
square feet, which, in my view, would cost us an extra $100,000. Pointing to the garden, I said to Arthur, “That hole out
there, we might just as well jump into it,” and Peter suggested we turn it into a swimming pool.

I had made the mistake of buying into Arthur’s dream. The debts started to rise; our resources dwindled. My panic attacks
returned. It is probably impossible to convey to people who do not suffer from them just how distressing they are. Fear has
specific causes and distinct objects. You might be afraid of mice or fast cars or being trapped in a blazing house. But panic
has no object, and its causes are difficult to fathom. I have checked medical encyclopedias in which panic attacks are not
even mentioned. Those that do mention it tend to refer to it as a mystery illness with no one cause and no one remedy.

Nights terrified me most. I woke up regularly at 2:00
A.M.
and instantly took flight. My soul wanted to escape from whatever treacherous thing was troubling it. Once I jumped out of
bed and ran out of the house into the road, where I narrowly missed being hit by a truck. Sometimes, I ran into the woods,
where it took Arthur and the cops hours to find me. At times like these, only Eamonn could possibly have calmed me.

When Arthur woke in the night and found me missing, he called 911 and told the friendly neighborhood cops, “She’s gone again.”
They knew who he was and what he meant. The cops picked me up and either let me stay at the station to calm down or took me
to the hospital. One Irish patrolman named Collins was really scared to see me shaking as if I had DTs with my pulse up to
160–180.

“If you were a dog, lady,” he said, “I’d shoot you.”

“Why,” I responded, “should dogs get all the breaks?”

Sometimes I called Collins on his own line and he would help me just by talking to me for ten minutes. Most attacks went on
for up to three hours. Each time the ambulance brought me back, Arthur turned the TV up so Peter would not know what was happening.

Only once, when he was thirteen, did Peter see me in the middle of an attack. I had been given strong drugs after surgery
on my nose. The phones were not working because of a storm. I woke at 2:30 with my diaphragm paralyzed; no air could get in
or out of my lungs. I could hardly talk. While Arthur went to wake Peter, I summoned up all my strength and ran out and banged
on a neighbor’s door, calling, “Help,” before I passed out.

The ambulance came. My blood pressure was 60 over 40. I was taken to St. Vincent’s Hospital in Bridgeport where the doctors
struggled to get my blood pressure up before they could do something for my panic attack.

Arthur brought Peter to see me. The boy was in the lobby watching the miniature Doctor Ruth, the sex specialist, on TV. When
he was allowed in to see me, he started imitating her. He sank on his knees to make himself tiny. “I am goin’ to talk to you,
voman, about six. You see, you haf thees leetle spot, a button, oh, so sensiteev, I can’t tell you.”

He so cheered me up, my breath began to come back and one of the nurses said to me, “You don’t need medication, that kid of
yours will make you better.”

With Eamonn’s contributions months in arrears and the house taking up all our funds, we gave up luxuries, then even a necessity,
the car. In spite of our efforts, we were soon facing foreclosure.

We refused to give in. Arthur worked as a house painter. Without a car and holding down two jobs far from home, I often had
to bed down where I could. We both went without to supply Peter’s needs. In spite of our best efforts, by the spring of 1900,
our financial situation had worsened.

I had no option but to give Peter absolute priority. I was haunted by that scream of his when he realized that his father
had denied him. Surely it was time for Eamonn to act as a father should when his son’s entire future is at stake. Peter was
a teenager with talent, but if I were bankrupt, how could I provide him with a roof over his head and the education he needed?

After years of struggle, I felt it was right to ask Eamonn to contribute more. If he refused to pay for Peter directly, I
would have to make a claim on my own behalf for damage done to my life.

On the recommendation of a friend, I went to see a New York attorney. Peter McKay was a burly, bushy-haired, handsome man
in his early forties.

He sat me down and let me speak without interruption for an hour about my relationship with Eamonn. McKay, gazing out the
window over Central Park, was, I could tell, skeptical of my claims at first. But after I finished my long monologue, he said
in his gravelly voice: “Your story is absolutely incredible. It must be true.”

“You mean I would need to be a genius to invent it?”

“Right. But tell me, Annie, how in the post-Watergate era has this story been kept under wraps for so long?”

“It happened in Ireland.”

That fitted, he said. He visited his mother in Ireland most years. It was probably the one country in the western world where
a scandal of this size could be covered up.

The lawyer in him demanded proofs. I gave him one: the biological. Father and son had exactly the same big birthmark in the
same place. The odds against that, apparently, are one in many millions.

“Tell me, Annie, what do you want me to do?”

I said I wanted to avoid at all costs the accusation of blackmailing Eamonn. I wanted no behind-the-scenes settlement, no
quick fix. “Go straight to the courts,” I said, “so we get a settlement that sticks.”

“Pardon me,” McKay said, “but if you go public right away, you will be immediately accused of trying to blackmail the Bishop.”

I really had not seen that. I thought that bringing the matter into the open would demonstrate my good faith.

“Has the Bishop a lawyer, Annie?”

I could answer that. When Mark Krieg left his law firm, the old system of payments broke down. Maybe Eamonn felt that, with
the passage of the years, he was safe. Lately, I had been paid by drafts of the Allied Irish Bank. These were sent at Eamonn’s
request by Robert Pierse, a Kerry lawyer from Listowel, who, doubtless, had no idea what the payment was for.

McKay advised, “Talk to Eamonn privately, Annie; tell him if he doesn’t help out, his son will end up in public housing, possibly
on welfare, with all the problems that go with it.”

“I’ve talked with him privately for years.”

McKay pointed out that legal costs can be prohibitive, especially if you lose. He encouraged me to write a long deposition
and give Eamonn a chance to answer it.

I agreed to do that.

“Do you have a figure in mind, Annie?”

I told him that a friendly attorney, Anthony Piazza, had said the claim was worth $100,000.

“Maybe too modest,” McKay said.

I stood by my calculation. It was against all my instincts as an independent person to ask for more than I needed to provide
for Peter.

In the end, I let McKay approach Eamonn privately. “But,” I concluded, “if Eamonn offers less than one hundred thousand dollars,
I’ll go public. He won’t leave me any choice.”

McKay wrote to Listowel on April 12, asking Robert Pierse for a response from his client, Dr. Casey, about “a sensitive matter”
between Ms. Anne Murphy and the Bishop. If Pierse had ceased representing the Bishop, he might like to forward his request
to Dr. Casey’s new counsel. He requested a reply by April 26.

Robert Pierse’s fax came on April 23: “I have been unable to contact the named person so far. I will endeavor to do so. He
appears to be away.”

Was Eamonn in hiding? McKay extended his deadline to Pierse to May 10. “I trust that we will be able to resolve this among
ourselves.”

Though Eamonn refused to communicate with McKay, he kept calling me. Astonishingly, when I heard his voice, the old feelings
returned. I had to steel myself against him. Our son’s future was at stake.

“You’re talking to the wrong person,” I said. “From now on you’ll be dealing with a lawyer named McKay.”

I advised him to act fast before disaster struck. “You have choices, Eamonn, I don’t. Please don’t call me again.”

Trembling, I hung up.

Time was running out for all of us, because in late April I had lost my best-paid job in a word-processing department. A lawyer
from Legal Aid managed to get our light and oil bills paid. This was the only time in my life I have had to suffer this humiliation.
With foreclosure looming, it looked as if we would have to go into public housing in South Norwalk. It had a reputation for
barred windows, handguns, and frequent murders. If that happened, I would have no compunction in publicly shaming Eamonn for
not helping his son. I prayed it would never come to that.

Sheriff’s notices were nailed to the doors of our home; court orders, injunctions, and demands for repayment of loans were
piled on our dining room table. The framing of the house, the french doors, over a hundred windows, the flooring, insulation,
and wiring were completed but funds had run out. Ten more days and we would lose everything.

On April 28, a firefighter who was building his own home came by. We had $22,000 worth of lumber stacked on the lawn amid
the fallen petals of apple, cherry, and dogwood blossom. It was meant for the large decks and the three-car garage with a
studio above it. He offered us $6,000 for the lot, which, since it was not nailed down, we were entitled to sell. It was the
best price we could get in the time available. Next day, he came with three trucks and, within hours, the lumber was gone.

Peter came home from Weston High School where he was so happy. He was astonished to learn that we were moving. How was he
to tell his friends Sean and Charlie? “Hey, Mom,” he said angrily, pushing his favorite Yankee cap to the back of his head,
“I’ve only a couple of months of this school year left. Didn’t Eamonn offer to help?”

I explained that if we did not leave soon, whatever money we might get from Eamonn would go to pay our outstanding debts.
Peter McKay had advised us to move out for another reason. Eamonn would not know our whereabouts, so he would be forced to
deal with my lawyer.

“Where will you be, Annie,” McKay asked, “when I want to contact you?”

I told him we were headed west. We hoped to find a less expensive place where Arthur and I could both get jobs and provide
Peter with good schooling. I promised to call him when we were settled.

We arranged to store our furniture for $100 a month and hired a truck from Ryder Rental for one day to help us move it. With
only twenty-four hours to wrap up our lives, Mary and her friend, Stan, came to help us pile everything into boxes and suitcases.
We crated the TV and radios, Peter’s toys, memorabilia from
Star Wars
, baseball cards, his boom box. Early on May 3, my forty-second birthday, we left the house that we had hoped would make us
a fortune. With only $6,000, Arthur and I had one final ambition: to give Peter a sense of the wider world outside our narrow
circle. We wanted him to see with his own eyes that the round earth is beautiful and to inspire him with new ambitions. He
had to learn to believe that things do change. My hope was that though we were powerless now, Peter might still acquire a
sense of the magic and challenge of life.