Forbidden Fruit (16 page)

Our life appeared to be more than ever doomed. From then on, I resolved to remember everything—words, smells, birdsong,
feelings, facial expressions, the fall of petals, shadows on a wall—because in time I would be left with nothing else. I
might even end up remembering things I preferred to forget.

As the holy man leaned over to lift the edge of my frilly panties and intimately finger me, I gave him a fierce love-hate-bite
on the back of the neck only a fraction below his collar. My way of telling him that we were now on the margin of acceptable
behavior. My way of saying that beneath the clerical regalia and sanctimonious talk, he was out for himself.

“Stop it,” he said, digging his left hand into my softest part and driving around a treacherous bend on two wheels. “Do you
want to kill me?”

May be I did.

Back at Inch, Helena and I washed Mary and put her to bed.

When Jim’s back was turned, Eamonn signaled to me to come to his room when the house had settled down for the night.

For the first time I was reluctant to meet with him, but he greeted me very tenderly.

“What about Jim?” I said.

“He’s gone completely. Dinah had to drive him home.”

“He may be pretending.”

He stroked my arm.

“You’re sore at me, Annie. If only you knew what Mary has put me through over the years.”

“What if the pain was mutual?”

He pondered that. “Maybe so. I have always tried to include her in my dinners when most priests wouldn’t.”

There
was
, I knew, a special kind of magnanimity in Eamonn.

In spite of my anger, I let him have sex with me—to punish him. I had not suffered the unspeakable agonies of childhood
confession for nothing.

Next morning, Eamonn would have to say Sunday Mass in the house without a chance to confess. He had condemned Mary to heaven.
Why not give him a taste of hell?

He was so besotted with me that he did not heed the consequences till the deed was done. I thought more like a bishop than
he did. Or maybe drink had confused him so he forgot which day of the week it was.

He no sooner came out of me than: “My God, tomorrow I have to —”

In my head, I was saying,
Maybe it’s good for you also to die a little
. I actually said:

“Why not forgive yourself?”

“Even the Pope cannot do that.”

“Your real sin was to risk letting Mary die.”

“Stop it, Annie, what we just did was a mortal sin.”

“Speak for yourself.”

It struck me that there was something kinky in his attitude. How could this completely innocent man repeatedly commit grave
sin and just as often ask forgiveness for it in confession while fully intending to do the same again? Where was his purpose
of amendment? The little nun who instructed me when I was seven would have called that telling lies to the Holy Ghost.

“Eamonn,
I’ll
hear your confession, if you like.”

“Pet, pet, things are bad enough already.”

To prove they could get worse, I knelt at his feet, signed myself and said, “Bless me, Father, for I have sinned. A week since
my last confession. Since then, I screwed Annie Murphy at least ten times.”

He grabbed me by the shoulder and whipped me to my feet. “Can’t you see this is serious?”

I suddenly could, and my heart hurt for him. Letting Mary die was not serious but his conscience, wounded out of love for
me, was in agony. He hungered for a fellow priest to speak absolution over his unrepentant head.

Catholics, I told myself, can be such sad twisted people. Real wrongs are imaginary, imaginary wrongs are real.

That night, I slept on the couch in the living room. Fitfully, because I hopped up any number of times to check that Mary
was still breathing.

Next morning, I attended Mass at the back of the small congregation. This was the most sacred moment in Eamonn’s day. For
this he became a priest in the first place.

The Mass was the bluntest challenge to our love. He either danced in finery at the altar or he danced naked in bed on me.
If ever he came away and shared his life with me, he would have to give this up.

Sometime, somehow, he would have to face up to his hypocrisy of the double-dance and say a final yes or no to me.

Being a gambler, I gambled.

As he consumed the large Host at communion, the rest of the household knelt and bowed their heads. I stayed upright, looking
fixedly at him, suggesting, “This is a game, Eamonn. I know what these others don’t.”

In the melee after Mass I brushed past Eamonn as he was unvesting.

He glared at me as if I had trespassed on holy ground, which I knew I had.

He said, “Jim could have seen you leering at me.”

“Maybe he did.”

“He has eyes in the back of his head.”

“Then he certainly did.”

“That,” he snorted, poltergeists playing under his facial skin, “was the wickedest thing done to me in my life.”

“Wickeder than your sleeping with me?”

“Much.”

With his homemade rules of right and wrong, he had no idea of what real wickedness was.

“I’m beginning to think,” I said, “you’re a bad hat.”

“If so, you are a black bowler to match.”

I joined Helena in the kitchen, aware that things at Inch were turning treacherous.

T
HE GUESTS DEPARTED, leaving just the three of us in the house.

One morning, Eamonn set off very early. He drove off faster than ever before, returning late and utterly exhausted.

“Why’d you leave so early?” I asked.

He indulged in magpie chatter before saying, “Today, I had the first of my annual confirmations.”

“I didn’t know kids scared you.”

“Well,” he retorted, “they damn well do.” After a pause: “I had to make doubly sure I went to confession first.”

The children’s innocence was bringing him face to face with the contradictions in his own life.

In the living room after dinner—no fire, for it was June—he asked me, “Were you ever confirmed?”

I nodded. “It did me no good.”

I was twelve. For weeks, the sisters had said nothing but “The Bishop is coming,” as if he were an archangel at least.

“So you looked forward to it, Annie.”

“The hell I did.” The day itself was hot and sweltering. The Bishop turned out to be a huge, fat, ugly old man.

Eamonn chipped in with, “Not at all like me.”

“Wrinkly skin dripped off him and he was dressed like a Hollywood actress fifty years past her prime. Our spiritual leader
looked as if he had done nothing all his life except be chauffeured from one meal to the next.”

When it came to it, he pressed his hands down so hard he demolished my headdress with lilies of the valley.

“I hope
you
aren’t that rough,” I said.

Eamonn held up his hands. “Gentle.”

I acknowledged it with a smile.

“Could it be, Annie, the reason you dislike religion is that you’ve always been lawless?”

Wasn’t
be
? But he may have thought that he at least acknowledged laws existed, even if he broke one of them nightly, whereas I didn’t
even know what sin was.

From my point of view, what we did was not a sin but the most natural thing in the world. I was the best judge of that because
of the unnatural things that other men had done to me.

He read my thoughts.

“If you were to tell me everything that men did to you, I’d pass out.”

He collapsed onto the floor and lay prone as if I had told him everything. I fainted on top of him. Seconds later, we were
quaking with laughter in one another’s arms.

But, as we got up, I realized that a serious point had been made. His great heart had got him to a place from which his head
would have excluded him. For his head still believed that his love for me was a sin because of who he was. That is why he
kept needing to beat his breast at the most splendid thing in his whole life.

“Tell me, Annie, why did you give up your religion?”

I stayed silent. The truth would have wounded him too much. At the age of seventeen, I did things the Church forbade, saying
nothing about them in confession and then receiving communion in what priests, not I, called sin.

“All right, Annie, what about
after
you gave up religion?”

“You’d only collapse again on the carpet.”

He closed his eyes and took a deep breath. “Fire away.”

I shook my head. But I remembered.

We were living in Texas at the time, land of guns, snakes, and tornadoes, because my father was employed there in a veterans
hospital. Mom was always saying, “No one ever gets out of Texas except in a Cadillac or an electric chair.”

My boyfriend, Jeff Fox, who had replaced Don who tried to rape me, was a Baptist. He was my first sexual partner.

Jeff was always poking fun at Catholic rules. He only did this so he could lay me without me feeling guilty. I didn’t mind
because I, too, thought rules, made by guys like that overfed Bishop, were crazy. So we had a good time.

He used to say, in the usual imitation of John Wayne, “I know what you’re thinking, Annie bunch. Your dirty-minded God’s followin’
us every inch of the way so He can hit you with a bolt of lightnin’ before you have a coupla seconds to repent.”

The landscape of the lake where he took me once scared me. Trees leafless as skeletons against a red Texas sky. From everywhere
came a threatening locust-throb and there was oil-still water around. I knew there were rattlesnakes in the vicinity and water
moccasins whose poisonous saliva was thick as a ball of cotton and tarantulas at twilight and red scorpions that roamed the
bare rocks with their tails poised to strike.

We parked the car deep in the tall green reeds circling the lake and made love. Love in a car. Teenage stuff. Great. Pleasure
began at the base of my spine and lightning-flashed to every part of me.

Satisfied, I opened my window to let in a light breeze. Time stopped while I sat there, unthinking, uncaring.

Without warning, something landed on my bare back, its suckers extended over several inches. I buried my head in Jeff’s perspiring
chest.

“What is it?” I screamed.

“What d’you think, honey, the devil in the shape of a moccasin snake come to bite you ‘cause you just did somethin’ dirty?”

He guessed right.

“
What is it
?” I demanded.

“Just a big old grasshopper.”

I refused to make love there again that night.

Jeff was disgusted with me. “Don’t forget to tell what we just did to Father Brannigan, in confession.”

In spite of the gibes, I loved Jeff and trusted him.

As memories of those days came back, I began to cry.

“Don’t, Annie,” Eamonn said gently, rubbing his hand over my hair. “I’ll help you rebuild your faith.”

I was crying not because of my lost faith but because, in the end, Jeff betrayed me. And in the worst way a man can betray
the woman he loves.

It was a night of raw 107-degree heat and we were driving at sixty miles per hour with the top of the convertible down, toward
a mad painter’s sunset: impossible pinks, reds, oranges, blues. Jeff had booked us into the Ramada Inn. On the way, I fortified
myself with gin and tonic.

Inside our air-conditioned motel room, he stocked a makeshift bar from his cooler and played Sinatra from his tape deck. By
my second or third drink—who was counting?—we danced and stripped to the Big Bands sound, before making passionate love.
My whole body thrilled to his touch. Afterward, another drink.

I lay relaxed for a while on my back in bed in an ocean of pleasure.

He stood over me. “You really turn me on, baby. This next time is for me, right?”

I smiled at him as he turned me over on my belly and, lifting me up from behind, put his arms under me while his hands weighed
and caressed my dangling breasts.

This was security, bliss, the fulfillment of all I had ever hoped for in a man. Then he entered me cruelly just below my spine.
The violence and unexpectedness of his approach in the rear passage made me shudder and scream with pain.

Like an unbroken horse, I tried to throw him off, but he was too strong for me. The sense of betrayal hurt but even more painful
was the sense that I had brought this on myself by being so wicked.

Held in an iron vise, I could only listen to his wild cowboy yells of pleasure. I would never hear their like again. The flower
of me, the world that was me, withered with the withering of his flesh.

“You are mine forever now,” he cried, “body and soul,” while I felt I belonged not to him, to God, to the world, or even to
myself. I, Annie Murphy that was, had died in those moments of cruel penetration and frenzied orgasm.

Impervious to the physical pain, I got up and, late or soon, I found myself in the parking lot.

In the car, Jeff tried to tell me it was the gin that made him do it. I believed him because I had to believe in something.
Back home, having torn my dress off, I sat crouched in the corner of the shower in the dark, with cold water running over
me for a whole hour. Mom came into the bathroom and switched on the light. “Switch it off,” I screamed. She did, though she
sat down outside the shower door.

“If Jeff hurt you —”

“He didn’t.”

“Your new pink dress is all torn.”

“I caught it on some brambles.”

After a long pause: “I’m scared, Annie.”

“I’m
okay
, I tell you.”

“For
him
, Annie. You fought with me since you were a kid. If he oversteps the mark, you’ll kill him.”

I nearly did, too. For, in spite of his promise, he did the same accursed thing to me again.

Afterward, I pointed his gun at his sleeping head. He awoke to find the barrel right up to his open mouth. What saved him?
I wasn’t worth the expense of the state sending me to the electric chair. I fled from Texas, driving faster than Eamonn himself
ever drove even when, as this morning, the devil perched on his shoulder.

I joined my sister, Mary, in New Jersey by the sea. There I had a dream. I was seven years old and dressed for Mass—white
gloves, prayer book in my hand. Suddenly, the bright morning darkened. Through the window I saw a stranger with a huge head.
When he opened his eyes, they were blood red and he had a fierce tongue. This snake tried to smash the window to get at me.
It was as high as the house and it curled and filled the entire landscape of Inafield. Up and down it went, smashing the house
to bits. I ran away, but the space kept getting less and less.