Forbidden Fruit (3 page)

He seemed to speak with the whole of his body. Perhaps that is why he made so powerful an impression on me.

“I did have therapy before I came.”

He tutted his disagreement. “There are many ways to healing. But therapy seldom works. The soul itself needs healing.”

I said nothing. It was true I had reached a plateau in my life. I was not going anywhere.

I appreciated his concern but he was unwise, I felt, to dive into my soul as though it were a gentle lake when it was a deep
and dangerous place. In my heart, I said,
Eamonn, beware, you do not know me yet
.

“How do you feel inside yourself?”

I waited a long while. I was thinking of the time eighteen months into my marriage when, late one night, I called my father.
He himself had been brutally beaten by his mother as a child, which was why he had never laid a finger on me in anger. I was
in Brooklyn and he was a half hour’s drive away in New York around 23rd Street. Almost ready to fall apart, I had wanted to
tell him I was being severely damaged by and suffering in my marriage. No, I didn’t call him to say anything, I wanted just
to feel his loving presence. And he said, hearing me sob, without me even speaking my name, “You don’t have to tell me, Annie.
I
know
.”

Now as the minutes ticked by, misty-eyed, I had no answer for Eamonn but to shake my head.

“What is going on behind those pretty blue eyes?”

I managed to get out, “I suppose I do feel… damaged.”

As I got up from the floor and sat in a chair next to his, he reached for my hand and stroked the back of it. He was so fearless
and I so fearful, the attraction between us was enormous.

“Chicky Licky,” he said, able to scowl and smile at the same time.

“You mean Chicken Licken.”

He said, “That’s what I said,” and I realized he spoke it so fast it came out as Chicky Licky.

Therapy had taught me that we are responsible for our own actions. Eamonn had done me good already. But I could do him harm.
It is hard to share pain without showing love. Harder still to accept another’s pain without becoming vulnerable.

That was why I pulled back—I needed to be more sure of myself.

He did not readily accept my reluctance to open out. I would have to be patient for both of us.

He told me a long story about a beautiful young woman, Siobhan, married to and beaten by an alcoholic husband, Jim. She had
had a nervous breakdown and attempted suicide.

He showed me her picture, and she was what I was not: Beauty Queen material. Many men had told me I was beautiful but it was
not of this competition-winning sort.

Siobhan was tall, with the slim and agile grace of a dancer. She had yellow hair and blue eyes. She might have been a Viking.
I was far more of a colleen.

It took Eamonn two hours to tell me how he had overseen Siobhan’s therapy, found her a job as a governess abroad, and recovered
Jim from alcoholism. Finally, as though he were a god, he had put the marriage together again. He must have thought he could
do the same for me.

“She also stayed in this house,” he said.

The more he talked the closer we moved together. Eventually, he not only held my hand but gently stroked my hair. I enjoyed
the intimacy and thrilled in every pore. It was as if the whole of my self, body and spirit, even parts of me I never knew
existed, came alive at his touch.

This was not sex but something far deeper for which I had no name, something never before experienced. Part of what I felt
was his ability to give me a sense of the goodness of myself till then denied me and, through my self-appreciation, a sense
of the worth of everything that exists.

Never till those precious hours had I felt that someone, a friend, a fellow human being, was addressing
me
, my true self, a self that even I had never known until he spoke to it directly and it answered him. A new being, a new voice.
It was like being present, consciously and wonderingly, at my own birth.

But as he told his story, through the swift blinking of his eyes and the trembling of his sensitive hands, I got the distinct
impression that the beautiful Siobhan had aroused feelings in him that he had not owned up to, even to himself.

What he may not have realized was that I was far more of a danger to him. I was unattached and becoming ever more attracted.
Not unexpectedly in view of the life he led, he was, I could tell, sexually very repressed. He was like a ripe tomato on a
vine; I had only to give a tiny tug and, pop, he would be in my hand. I did not want that. Apart from anything else, the woman
in me wanted something that would last.

As the hours flew by me, he often got up to stoke the fire, the poker sending sparks up the chimney. The jazzman could even
create the stars.

It was not until 1:30, with the fire burning low, that he walked me to my room past Stations of the Cross that now, for some
reason, made me feel like a temptress.

“Good night, Chicky Licky, and God bless.”

I was delighted. He already had a pet name for me.

I put on my nightdress and went to bed. Never had I known such a day. It had lasted a lifetime but was over in a flash. Every
experience in it was new and at the same time older than I was. Time was so overturned I felt I had been handed a perfect
and unfading flower plucked in a century yet to come.

I could not sleep for the tumult within me and the heavy hammer of my heart as I heard him walking up and down the corridor,
reciting his breviary. I so wanted him to come in and talk with me, as my father used to do when I was a girl. Since I met
Eamonn at the airport, even more so after we descended the mountain, I wanted him never to leave my side.

After forty-five minutes, he, too, went to bed, in the room next to mine. It could not have been better if it had been planned.
Had it been? Surely not. He was expecting little Annie. Not planned, then, but providential?

To my surprise, once more I slept and would not have awakened but for someone calling me by name.

“Annie. Wake up, Annie.”

I opened my eyes. I usually hated mornings. Not today, the anniversary of yesterday. For perched on the end of my bed, crooning
my name, with a mischievous loving smile on his open face, was my newest, oldest, dearest friend, Eamonn.

E
IGHT O’CLOCK, SLEEPYHEAD. How’d you like to come with me to Killarney?”

“Oh,
yes
,” I said.

I was usually rocky and half blind in the gum-eyed dawn, but as soon as Eamonn left I jumped out of bed.

Though I still showered in the dark, I was aware that I was a woman, that this smooth flesh of mine was made not to be abused
but loved.

I soaped myself luxuriously, tracing the curves of legs and thighs and breasts with the flat of my hands.

I toweled, put on my face, finished dressing in a rush, and went to the dining room, where Mary brought me breakfast. The
bread deliciously filled my mouth and the water from the well enabled me actually to taste tea for the first time in my life.
All my senses were awakened, my fears gone.

Within minutes, Eamonn was ushering me out the front door.

“Come along now, Annie, it’ll soon be night.”

It was a glorious sunny day, full of budding and birdsong. I inhaled the fresh-from-the-oven smells of morning. Primroses
and violets, azaleas and cowslips dotted the flower beds while ferns and dock leaves were green tongues unfolding in the sun.
A butterfly, lovely as a peacock, clapped silently on a purple pansy. A wood pigeon called throatily from a poplar tree and
I inhaled the fragrance of lilac and honeysuckle vine.

Not far from three nibbling rabbits was a ragged yellow-looking sheep come down from the hill to graze on the dew-rinsed lawn.
As Eamonn shooed it away, the rabbits scampered off, ears pinned back, white tails showing. Yes, in a setting like this it
was possible to wipe out reality.

He did not drive as madly as the day before. Maybe he wanted to talk and required, like God, complete attention. I sat quietly,
a wren next to a falcon.

He spoke of his diocese, with its fifty-three parishes, 130 priests and 125,000 layfolk. He was especially proud of his work
in the Cathedral at Killarney, which means “Church of the Sloe Tree.” Designed by Pugin, the Cathedral had been consecrated
in 1855. When Eamonn was made bishop, he moved to restore it. The Victorian plasterwork had been ruined by decades of damp.
He had decided to strip it off entirely so as to reveal, through bare stone, Pugin’s original design.

“I ran into mighty opposition for that, Annie. Pious people have the sharpest teeth. But you’ll soon be telling me who was
right.”

We passed a field with newborn lambs in it. The friskiest of them ran like crazy, kicked its hind legs in the air, and ran
back again to its ewe. I laughed aloud.

“What’s the matter?”

“Oh,” I said, “it reminded me of someone.”

He cored me with a look and said, with mock severity, “I’m a shepherd not a sheep, I’d have you know.”

I crossed my heart on the wrong side. “I’ll remember.”

“Guess how much the Cathedral cost to renovate?” He translated for my benefit into U.S. currency. “Well over half a million
dollars.”

“Who’ll pay?”

“The good people.”

“Whether they like it or not.”

“They like it. If not, I make them like it.”

And he was off on a story that typified Killarney, where we were headed.

“Only last week, Annie, I was standing in the street”—his left hand, off the wheel, was shaking in anticipation of what
was to come—“when a horse-drawn cart stopped by me. And guess who was sitting in the backseat!”

“The Pope.”

“Something even more surprising. A corpse.” He roared with laughter. “Propped up like it was on an outing, with a hat on his
head and a brier pipe in his mouth.”

“Was the pipe alight?” I asked, lamely.

“He was a farmer, y’see, and before taking him to the funeral parlor to coffin him up, his sons were giving him a last tour
of the town.” Eamonn was alive electrically in his seat. “But I said to the boys, ‘God Al
mighty
, the man is dead, have you no decency left that you treat him like a piece of furniture?’ ”

Without meaning to, 1 mimicked his voice exactly, “God Al
mighty
, the man is dead.”

Eamonn stopped laughing. He recognized that I was so in tune with him I spoke with his voice.

“That’s not bad at all.”

For the moment, his face blanked out. Maybe he sensed danger.

“I’ll give you a tour of the town first, Annie.”

“Even though I’m not dead yet.”

He said softly, “Even though you are very much alive.”

Killarney was a meandering market town, small by American standards. Exotic colors clashed and not one building stood up straight.
How unlike the tall, tiring symmetry of New York.

I was impressed by the 285-foot-high Cathedral spire. Inside, my first impression of St. Mary’s was of soaring pillars, Giothic
arches, and of white limestone, rough and bare as if the skin had been peeled off it. It was like seeing a clean white dawn
spread over Lake Candlcwood in the New England of my childhood.

For all its hush and beauty, something about the place alarmed me.

Eamonn genuflected toward the striking crucifix over a main altar that was lit by three tall lancet windows. Then he went
on his knees in a pew at the back. As I knelt beside him, he blessed himself, bowed his head, and prayed with eyes so tightly
closed they looked screwed down.

Which God was he praying to? Maybe a bishop has to have a special God. I suspected that on Day One of Creation, his God made
not the heavens and the earth but the Rules.

Here was the source of my disquiet. This was Eamonn’s real world. He was a cleric before he was a man. Inside him was a sanctuary
where he walked godward, blind and deaf. In this moment, he was speaking with the God who, in an ascending order of dignity,
made him a Christian, priest, and bishop, and, if his socks proved predictive, a cardinal. I had no right to intrude where
he was happy.

But was he? Buoyant, cheerful, dynamic, yes, but happy? It was my woman’s intuition that he was not. But even if he were not,
was it in the power of any woman to make him so? Was he praying for my soul or my happiness? Maybe he made no distinction.
But I was a woman, irreligious by his standards, and I did. I wanted happiness.

So we knelt, he talking with his God who was nearer to him than my shoulder and I bemoaning the absence of Him whom I had
worshiped in an uncomplicated way when I was a child.

Suddenly, as if God had dismissed him with a bang on the head, his prayers were over. He leaped to his feet.

“Come along, Annie,” and he was off like a March hare.

As we toured the Cathedral, he kept receiving fawning bows and touching of the forelock from men, as well as little curtsies
from women, and everyone murmured, “My Lord.”

This set him apart from my world. But wasn’t this massive building a testimony to what he was? On the journey he had spoken
of “my” Cathedral. On the sanctuary was a chair that proved he was Eamonn, by the Grace of God and appointment of the Pope,
Bishop of Kerry. This was his
cathedra
, or seat, with his coat of arms and a Latin inscription that he told me meant “I Am As One Who Serves.”

“ ’Tis made of Tasmanian oak.” His whisper could be heard in the back pew. To me the chair seemed hewn from the Rock of Ages.
It spoke of loyalties that went back two thousand years to Jesus and Peter, James, and John.

I did not like to be in thrall to the past. Since coming to Ireland—was it really only twenty-tour hours ago?—I wanted
to live
now
.

He was pointing to the pulpit. He seemed to like its elevation. He enjoyed the pomp, pageantry, and theatrics of religion,
which, frankly, I thought of as pagan.

Though he itemized the cost of repairs—to the roof, organ, stonework, the big limestone baptismal bowl—I took little of
it in. I was thinking,
How much will you pay to fix the tiny chapel of my soul, to clean the old stone to the hone?