Forbidden Fruit (21 page)

The bed was high, reminding me of the beds in Inafield when I was young. As soon as I undressed, I jumped on it and trampolined,
it was so bouncy. “If we have sex in this bed,” I said, “we’ll suffocate.”

As soon as he was stripped, he jumped in beside me and dipped his head under the covers. I immediately squeezed his neck between
my legs. “You’re strangling me,” he gasped. “You have terrible strong legs, Annie, skinny as they are.”

I marveled at his gift for making me laugh at myself. How could I thank him enough for taking away my shame? Laughter was
more cleansing than confession, more calming than Valium.

After I released him, he came up onto the pillow, puffing and blowing, just in time to see me leap naked out of bed. I was
so exhilarated by the evening’s company, the sense of being in a fairytale room, that I became a free spirit. I wanted to
dance.

Leaning on one arm, he followed me with his eyes. “Is it the bad in you coming out?”

I did not answer. I was in a kind of trance, weaving along the walls, high-kicking, twisting, bowing, writhing from the hips,
my hair cascading first down in front, then down my back.

After I had given a Salome-like performance, he beckoned me to join him in bed. Once I was there, his own sense of mischief
took over. The night was memorable. A bishop’s bed in the Bishop’s own Palace certainly beat the backseat of a car. I was
overwhelmed by his great tenderness.

It was my turn to be like an eel. As I went down under the covers to kiss him, I seemed to sink in the feather mattress. Then
it happened. I couldn’t breathe. In a muffled voice, I screamed, “Get me out of here.”

He didn’t take me seriously and started to laugh even louder. That made me panic all the more. Tiny feathers went into my
mouth, throat, eyes, up my nostrils. He finally hauled me up like a drowning cat.

When I had sneezed a few times and recovered my breath, I said, “In a mushy bed like this, there’s only one position for me.
On top.”

“If that is what you want.”

I climbed aboard and no sooner was he in me than I said solemnly: “I would like to have your child.”

His eyes ballooned to their limits. “You would
what
?”

Gazing at him from close range, so that the whole of me, body, mind, spirit, seemed to be inside the whole of him, I said,
“I want you to live forever.”

I could not think of a better place to declare my deepest longings for him. I was challenging the system that he represented.
I needed to tell him that I had no fears for the future.

“Eamonn,” I whispered, “I have never met anyone like you before and I never will again. Whatever happens to us, I would like
you to live on in our child.”

“But that would be a —”

I stopped the sin on his lips with a kiss. Then: “I will not lie to you about this.”

Though this frightened him, he clasped me even tighter. “Don’t you see,” he said, “how terrible that would be?”

“No, I do not.”

When, after he had climaxed, I finally released him, he had a worried look on his face. He got into his pajamas and the expensive
dressing gown with
EC
embroidered on it, which had been hanging on the back of the door.

“Where’re you going, Eamonn?” He left without answering and I heard him walking down the stairs. He returned in a couple of
minutes with a glass of brandy.

As he sat propped up in bed on the pillows, I got up and started to open up the curtains.

“What,” he asked dramatically, “are you doing? The convent is across the way.”

“I’m just going to wave to them.”

“Don’t, Annie, they will see you naked and me in bed behind you.”

He trusted no one. I said, “Will they be spying on you at two in the morning?”

“Annie,” he hissed, “they know I am here. They will have their binoculars trained on this room.” I could not believe my ears.
These sisters wouldn’t dare look at him during the day and they were spying on him during the night?

“I have been there. They keep binoculars by the window. They’d watch this room for hours till their legs turn blue.”

“You make them sound like a lynch mob.”

“Get… away… from… the… window.”

“If they’ve been up all night, they’re entitled to a little entertainment.”

“I am going to have a heart attack.”

That did it. I slipped behind the curtains and waved to the nonexistent prurient nuns.

Next thing, a rough hand was tearing me out and shoving me across the room toward the bed. His nails dug into my arms. “Don’t,”
he said, “ever do that again.”

Rubbing my sore arms, I said, “And don’t
you
ever do that again to
me
.”

He threw me in the bed roughly, which I liked because it was good to experience all his emotions. He tossed my nightgown after
me.

“Put it
on
. Those nuns may have taken your picture.”

“In the dark?”

“They might have a special camera.”

He peered behind the curtains for a few seconds. “I think we might have been lucky.”

Heavens
, I thought,
I have never met a more suspicious man. And I want to have his child? I must be mad
. Then I looked at him, at his beautiful friendly face, and everything changed.

“This is bound to bring on my colitis,” he moaned, “and all day tomorrow I have important meetings in Dublin.”

I stroked his forehead. “I do apologize.”

“I am never bringing you to sleep here again.”

I snuggled up to him, started to kiss him, but he pushed me away. “I am beginning to sympathize with that husband of yours.
I never felt so much boiling rage in my life.”

“It was spicy, Eamonn, admit it.”

“All right, if you say so, I admit it. We’ll all go to hell together.”

On that comradely note, we settled down to sleep.

I
AWOKE IN THE MORNING with an allergic reaction to the feathers in the bed. Choking was often the trigger to a panic attack.
I was in my room dressing when I heard Pat come in the front door. I stumbled downstairs and explained my problem.

She went to the pharmacist’s for some liquid medicine. She also brought me a Valium tablet from the room Mary used when she
stayed at the Palace. “Drink plenty of tea, Annie,” she said. “And I’ll make a Thermos for the trip to Dublin.”

Eamonn drove fast on straight but narrow roads while dictating to Pat. The faster he dictated, the faster he drove. I was
in the back with Father O’Keeffe, nervous and coughing, and he was patting my hand to comfort me. From time to time, he poured
me tea from the Thermos and gave me cough drops for the tickle in my throat.

Eamonn showed no sympathy. “It sounds, John,” he said, “as if you have an old consumptive back there.”

I tugged his hair in retaliation. “Stop it, please, you arc making me worse.”

He turned to Pat. “Did you bring her any Valium? No? Annie used to take ten a day, didn’t you, Annie?”

When my marriage had been at its worst, I had been on Valium. But Eamonn only said this for Father O’Keeffe’s benefit. If
he had had doubts about my needing a cure, my present looks would have dispelled them. Eamonn, the great healer, was dealing,
in however unorthodox a way, with a sick young lady.

“She was a Valium addict, John, like Siobhan.”

Father O’Keeffe obviously knew what had been done for Siobhan, and Eamonn was intimating that I, too, was on the path to recovery.
He may even have been pleased that Dubliners would assume that I was an American girl with a health problem and not a source
of temptation to a middle-aged bishop.

“You are doing over a hundred, Eamonn,” Father O’Keeffe called out. “Slow down, you are making Annie worse.”

I had somewhat improved by the time we reached the Burlington Hotel on the southern edge of Dublin. Eamonn was well known
there but he did not make a big thing of it. He carried his own bags upstairs. Our double-bedded rooms were together. Eamonn’s
and mine were next to one another, while I had Pat on my other side and he had Father O’Keeffe.

I spent a while in Pat’s room because she wanted to make sure I was better. Then we all went down to the lounge where Eamonn
was given a quiet table in the back. We had drinks and a bar lunch of soup and sandwiches.

Afterward, while the men went off on business, Pat and I took a cab to Stephen’s Green, a kind of oasis in the middle of town.
There we fed the ducks for an hour or so. Pat, a country girl from Sligo, guessed, rightly, that this would calm me. It was
blustery for a July day but the trees were fully leafed and the grass shiny green.

From the Green we walked north, past the ancient university of Trinity College, turned west, and crossed the disappointingly
narrow River Liffey by the Halfpenny Bridge. We took a cab to the key tourist sights of Dublin, including O’Connell Street
with Daniel O’Connell’s big black statue. Also the General Post Office, which, Pat said, was the chief stronghold of the Irish
during the Easter Rising of 1916. After an hour, we taxied back to north O’Connell Street, where, in the Gresham Hotel, we
had old-style tea.

Finally, we took a cab to Grafton Street, the most fashionable shopping center. I bought a blouse and Pat bought a dress.
I had my hair cut and while Pat was having hers done, I went into Switzers store pretending to look at duvets. In fact, I
bought something which I carefully rolled up and put at the bottom of my bag.

We met the two men for dinner around 9:00. They mostly talked business and we retired at 11:30.

Pat said, “If you get nervous, Annie, call me.”

I had no idea if Eamonn wanted us to get together, especially as he had told me to be on my best behavior in Dublin. After
midnight, he put his head round my door. “Come and see me in twenty minutes?”

We were within earshot of Eamonn’s two closest aides. What if either of them found us in bed together? Knowing how Eamonn
had treated the lady who had an abortion, they would have been obliged to quit and I did not want that.

I waited until Pat’s room fell completely silent. Then I lazily showered and dried my hair, put on makeup, perfume, and pearl
earrings. Finally, I slipped on my new purchases from Switzers: a pale nightdress with slits up the sides, covered with a
bathrobe of pale pink with roses.

I had ordered a sherry from room service for my sore throat. From time to time, I eyed the femme fatale in the mirror and
we winked at each other. Behind the play-acting, I wanted Eamonn to see what life would be like with me not in the quiet of
Inch but in the busy world. He had connections at the highest levels in Germany, France, and Britain. Maybe he could get a
job in the European Community. We both liked travel. He had choices.

It was a whole hour before I joined him. Never had I seen him so impatient, as he twirled his brandy. There was very little
talk between us, apart from a huskily whispered “That’s the sexiest thing I’ve seen you in. Where’d you get it?”

“In the States. I wasn’t going to waste it on just any night.”

“You’re lying, as usual. But ‘tis wonderful, Annie. Take the outside bit off. Fine. Why, in that negligee, you’re more alluring
than when you’re naked.”

He made me walk around in it. For a few seconds. His undressing of me was a work of art.

That was an exciting night. We were in a hotel together, like man and wife. The international setting, the lateness of the
hour, a capital city full of bustle, noise, and winking lights, it all seemed to make this man, who loved danger, even more
tempestuous.

We stood beside a full-length mirror. I was naked and he had his shirt open; and I saw him looking at us in one another’s
embrace. He was a voyeur of his own sexuality, which he had denied himself for so long. He saw himself kiss me all over and
he delighted in his own expertise. He saw himself bring me to orgasm, filming everything in his head, as it were, for the
years to come.

Throughout that night, all the psychological barriers that prevented us from expressing our deepest desires dissolved. It
was no longer Bishop Casey and Annie Murphy. We were one animal, one being. Our individual selves had ceased to exist. We
were not even playing anymore, nor wanting to talk anymore. There was no guilt, no recrimination. This was our right. This
was self-ceasing, self-forgetting. This was pure woman and pure man. It was real, and forever.

I returned to my room about five in the morning and rose late. All through our relationship, in spite of the torrid nights,
I was sleeping better in his arms than I had done in years because I no longer feared to see monsters in my sleep or when
I awoke. He made sleep sweet to me as it had not been since I was a child.

Pat must have looked in on me because she left a message saying we had to vacate the rooms at midday. Having showered and
dressed, I went out for lunch all by myself. It was nice to be on my own among so many people. To be alone when you are not
lonely is the greatest luxury.

I met up with Pat at about three and we shopped before going to Jury’s Hotel. We all four had a bite to eat before we set
off for Kerry at around nine. Halfway home, I started coughing violently. My breathing became so labored, the others were
worried.

Eamonn stopped the car. He told Father O’Keeffe I was having something like an asthma attack and asked him to drive. Eamonn
joined me in the back, but none of the medicines worked. He took advantage of the dwindling light and my condition to hold
me tight.

“You’re crazy,” I whispered.

We spent the last hour of that journey locked together like a couple of teenagers. He kept kissing me even though Father O’Keeffe,
from time to time, glanced at us in his rearview mirror when Eamonn was umistakably making out with me.

My mind was in a whirl. When we slept together in the Palace, he was so concerned not to give the least hint of our relationship
to the nuns, yet here he was revealing his hand to his closest aides. This was suicide. Did he want to tell them without telling
them?