Forbidden Fruit Read online

  Copyright

  COPYRIGHT © 1993 BY FORTHRIGHT, LTD.

  ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. NO PART OF THIS BOOK MAY BE REPODUCED IN ANY FORM OR BY ANY ELECTRONIC OR MECHANICAL MEANS, INCLUDING INFORMATION STORAGE AND RETRIEVAL SYSTEMS, EXCEPT BY A REVIEWER WHO MAY QUOTE BRIEF PASSAGES IN A REVIEW.

  Hachette Book Group

  237 Park Avenue

  New York, NY 10017

  Visit our website at www.HachetteBookGroup.com

  www.twitter.com/littlebrown

  First eBook Edition: September 2009

  ISBN: 978-0-316-08416-1

  Contents

  Copyright

  Acknowledgments

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Chapter Thirty-One

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  Chapter Thirty-Five

  Chapter Thirty-Six

  Chapter Thirty-Seven

  Chapter Thirty-Eight

  Chapter Thirty-Nine

  Chapter Forty

  Chapter Forty-One

  Chapter Forty-Two

  Chapter Forty-Three

  Chapter Forty-Four

  Chapter Forty-Five

  Chapter Forty-Six

  Chapter Forty-Seven

  Chapter Forty-Eight

  Chapter Forty-Nine

  Chapter Fifty

  Chapter Fifty-One

  Epilogue

  THIS BOOK IS FOR PETER, MY SON

  The Bishop was a jazzman.

  As Annie stood beside him on the mountaintop,

  he seemed to her to be playing

  Dixieland jazz on a saxophone,

  fingers fast moving,

  body rhythmically swaying,

  so she had the weird impression

  that the music, his music,

  was creating the world around them,

  bringing to life sea, sky, stone,

  misty islands,

  and even the song of the birds.

  Acknowledgments

  I thank Fredrica Friedman, my editor at Little, Brown and Company; her enthusiasm for this project never wavered and her guidance throughout was invaluable. Thanks, too, to my attorney, Peter Albert McKay, for standing by me on some dark days; also to his colleagues, Alfred Hemlock and Bill Adler, for their generous support. Special thanks to Peter de Rosa, whose unique talent brought this work to light, and to his family for sharing with me a home full of good humor and compassion. Above all, I owe thanks to Arthur Pennell, who has been my support at so many critical moments, and to Peter, my son. Only he knows what this book has cost me; only he has made it worthwhile.

  Chapter One

  I FLEW FROM DARKNESS INTO LIGHT. Never before had I been inside a plane that sped toward the sun. On the night flight from New York, sleepless in my window seat, I felt the black waters of the Atlantic receding beneath me. I was leaving behind so many dead things. A dead childhood, a dead marriage, dead dreams, a dead me.

  Even before the sun rose I saw the miracle of morning, first a milky whiteness, then that whiteness turn to pink and gold before the entry of the dancing sun.

  I was inside a shell. This was spring, after all, this was mid-April 1973. I tapped the side of the plane, a nearly twenty-five-year-old unhatched chick wanting to be let out, to be born. When did I last sense joy awaiting me? Maybe never.

  My tall one-legged jazz-loving father told me before I boarded the plane that I would forget the bad things and find serenity in Ireland. His old friend and distant relative Eamonn Casey, the Bishop of Kerry, had promised him that.

  “Ireland’s the place,” the Bishop had said. “I will take care of her personally.” And peace was entering me already. Dear father with the sad, sad eyes, you, who guessed without being told all my former fears and my dread, were so right: I was headed for happiness.

  The descent began. To the left were the Aran Islands and Galway, to the right Dingle and Tralee Bay. The very names were magic to me. As the plane’s shadow traced the broad silver estuary of the Shannon, I could see snow-sprinkled mountains and quilts of tiny fields with white, thatched cottages from which blue smoke curled like ribbons. And everywhere green. I remember thinking, So that is what green looks like.

  Touchdown. Everyone clapped, and I, who had not spoken a word during the flight, so full was I of wonder, clapped loudest of all. I had come home to a place where I had never been.

  Eamonn, I had been told, would be waiting for me. I had met him once in New York when I was seven. Already a priest aged twenty-nine, he had come to Manhattan to take care of his widowed sister who had fallen on hard times. “Who are you?” I asked him, and, still looking out the window, he said, “Father Eamonn.” Strange that I should remember only his big sad eyes. I, a little girl, sympathized with him. I had wanted to take him aside into a quiet room and tell him, “Eamonn, it’s going to be all right. It’s going to be all right.”

  There was a big crowd in the arrivals hall at Shannon. My fellow passengers pressed forward with the urgency of people who have not seen loved ones for a long time. Young couples with babies were enveloped by those waiting to see them. The middle-aged and silver-haired in the crowd rushed forward, grabbing and smothering with kisses their grandchildren seen for the first time. And in that flood of emotion, that avalanche of laughter and unmelancholy tears, who was waiting for me, who would greet me?

  I picked him out at once in his black suit and clerical collar. His round happy face with his forehead—higher than I remembered it—was peering now through the trellis of people, now over their heads. He was in movement like a dancer, and his flashing eyes were not sad at all but creased with smiles.

  It struck me that he was not merely open-faced and handsome but something else: elemental. He was full of light and energy, like the dancing sun.

  He knew me instantly, though he had a puzzled look as if he had expected a child and met a woman. Or maybe he thought, as a result of my father’s letter, he would be meeting someone gaunt and haggard. Instead, there was this relaxed slim young lady of 110 pounds in suede high heels and a flattering mauve dress with small polka-dots. He glanced at my long blunt-cut golden brown hair and my face with a little blush on it, not too much lipstick because I didn’t need it. I think he even noticed the title of the book under my arm, the only one I had brought with me, Thomas Wolfe’s You Can’t Go Home Again.

  Squeezing my hand and kissing my cheek, so I smelled his Old Spice after-shave, he said in a kind of champagne fizz:

  “Welcome to Ireland. Our little Annie’s grown up.”

  “Little girls do,” I said, the mischief in me responding instantly to the mischief in him.

  His smile was enchanting, the feel of his hand warm and gentle. This was for me the strangest thing in an already strange existence. He, whom
I had met only once and looked at with a child’s eyes, had been known to me all my life.

  What sort of chemicals were in the air? Not for one second had I anticipated liking any man, not after what some men had done to me, and here I was on Irish soil immediately being drawn to a bishop? Ever since I met one at my confirmation, bishops were not my favorite species.

  Heavens, Annie Murphy, I thought, settle yourself. Don’t get carried away.

  He grabbed my two bags. As if he had already summed me up, he said, so breathlessly I could hardly hear, “Yes, little Annie’s got blue eyes, thick curly hair and she’s beautiful.”

  He certainly had charm!

  He was off on twinkling toes, barging through the crowd. He was about five feet eight, a couple of inches taller than I, and there were threads of gray in his dark hair.

  I ran after him on stiff legs out into the parking lot. I noticed that he was wearing scarlet socks and that his big black automatic Mercedes was taking up two parking spaces, probably because he had arrived in a hurry and just didn’t care.

  “How did you feel coming into Ireland?” he said, as he opened the car door for me on the left-hand side.

  “Like I was coming into a fairyland.”

  “Good.” With an exciting rippling laugh, he slammed the door on me, just missing my fingers.

  As he jumped in beside me, making the car shake, I said, “Why’re you wearing red socks?”

  He paused for a moment to frown at me with fluid, penetrating eyes. “You are observant. I just like the color.”

  “You should be wearing purple. Red’s for a cardinal. It must be a sign of your ambition.”

  “You’d call it ambition, I suppose, if my nose were to bleed red instead of purple.”

  His eyes sparked bright as he gunned the car and we shot off on what was like a ride on a bullet. I don’t like fast driving unless I’m behind the wheel, but with him I felt safe. We tore through sleepy villages and towns. This man had a hurricane inside him.

  Hanging on for dear life, I said to Eamonn, “You’re driving at sixty-five miles an hour through a town full of people.”

  “Ah,” he said, making things worse by lifting his hands off the wheel with a Lord-be-with-you motion, “there’s nobody here. And if there were I’d give ‘em a miss.” With butterfly flutters of his gold-ringed hand he blessed the invisible people to right and left as if his benediction alone would keep them from all harm. “God bless you and you and you,” ending with another rippling laugh.

  I couldn’t resist that. He was a fountain of laughter.

  “You should be arrested,” I said.

  “Whatever for, Annie?”

  I liked the way he spoke my name in his soft voice. No longer little Annie.

  “If you hit someone, it’ll be homicide.”

  “And won’t I do them the honor of giving them the last rites of holy Mother Church? Imagine being sent to heaven courtesy of a bishop.”

  “You think you can get away with murder, Eamonn?”

  I liked the sound of his name, too.

  As he turned to me, I said, “Eye on the road, please. I’m not ready for heaven yet.”

  The car hit a bump, and my head touched the roof. He lifted both hands off the wheel again and laughed all the louder. He was theatrical without trying to be.

  “Slow down,” I gasped.

  “I’ve never been killed yet, as far as I know.”

  I doubted it. I wondered if he were a wizard, like Merlin in the legends. Maybe Eamonn Casey was a warlock, a sorcerer. Maybe he had lived many lives, had many adventures, surprised his enemies, fought and died in many wars and been reborn as often as was necessary.

  “I heard,” I said, when I got my breath back, “you were supposed to drive on the left over here, not down the middle.”

  Not only were his hands now off the wheel, he was looking fixedly at me with eyes that flickered like distant lightning.

  “You’re a crowing hen, Annie Murphy, d’you realize that? You make fun of my socks, accuse me of being ambitious, and now I don’t know how to drive.”

  “Look out,” I yelled, to stop him from going straight into the back of an old Ford van.

  He swerved just in time onto the grass verge and on again without a change of pace.

  “Annie,” he growled, “you are a positive menace on the road. For a split-second back there, I was close to growing grass instead of whiskers on my chest.”

  Heavens, I thought, he blames me for his own mistakes.

  A few times after that he beeped his horn just for the fun of it. I smiled at him. We both liked fun. The signs were we had the same sense of humor.

  Suddenly, coming toward us in the middle of the road was a big cow, ready for milking. We screeched to a halt, so the round-eyed long-lashed black-and-white creature found herself looking straight at us, not a little startled, through the windshield. A small bell around her neck rang tinnily.

  “God Almighty,” Eamonn said, honking. “Get away with you, moo-moo-moo, ye silly woman, before I excommunicate you.”

  Slowly, with swishing messy tail, the huge animal lurched by, brushing my door.

  “Next time, mind where you’re going, madam,” Eamonn bawled after her, his head backward out the window, “otherwise I’ll set a papal bull on you.”

  A mile farther on we passed the cow’s owner, an old man with a lame sheepdog that hurled itself suicidally at the back wheels of our car just for the hell of it. Did everything around here like flirting with death?

  Suddenly I yelled, “Look out for that bomb crater!”

  “A modest pothole,” he said, swerving wildly.

  “That is a pothole?”

  “The roads of Ireland are built around them. That one we just passed dates from 1123.”

  “I thought it might be earlier.”

  Eamonn was a great leg-puller. I liked that in a man.

  After another wrenching bump, I said, “Why don’t you fill these things in?”

  “They have a preservation order on them. Local priests bless them twice a year with a bucket of holy whiskey.”

  There was a big crunch and a bang as we went in and out of a pothole he had not seen.

  “Just testing my springs, Annie.”

  As he scooted along narrow, winding, potholed roads, I felt he was testing my willingness to put my life in his hands. He got a high from driving fast; I appreciated that because, deep in my soul, among the many bad things, I, too, was in love with danger. There was peril here and treachery for both of us amid the awesome beauty of the land.

  His charm, his humor, his warmth made me feel happy. Fear and trust had merged in me; it felt so good to rely totally on another. Also, I had a strange sense that his crazy way of driving, his laughter in the face of death, was his way of flirting with me. He was, I admit this from the start, bishop or no bishop, a very sexy man.

  I put this crazy thought out of my mind. Tried to.

  Outside the bubble of magic I was moving in was a Ryan’s Daughter of a land. I had seen the movie only three months before. The photography, color, music, had made me, a Murphy from New England, feel I had roots, and those roots were here, all around me. Something came up at me through the soles of my feet out of the earth, out of long-traveled roads and the dry bones of the dead. Through the open window I, lately a city girl used to concrete and gasoline fumes, saw fleshy green skin covering winter’s wounds, smelled spring and growing things, the grass, furze, and cattle. And I, usually so irresolute, was ready for anything.

  So this was County Kerry where my grandfather, old Pop Murphy, was born with a brogue not unlike Eamonn’s and a couple of shillelaghs on the wall to prove it. Soon we reached the Dingle Peninsula and the coastal road that rose to Inch. Below and far away, the rocky din-filled gullies were snow white with the droppings of seabirds, which soared above or refuged in the heather-strewn cliffs. There were guillemots, kittiwakes, petrels, razorbills, even puffins, one of which flew by red-nosed and with a
laughing sprat-filled mouth. Out there, beyond a harbor called Castlemaine, for as far as the eye could see was the sparkling ocean over which gulls and gannets flew, reflecting the sun’s fire. Was there a more romantic place in the world? How could Pop, in spite of his rheumatism, have been crazy enough to leave it?

  Eamonn said he was taking me to his country residence at Inch, which means “Island.” Now a peninsula, it was probably an island once. He rarely stayed overnight at his Palace in Killarney. He preferred to finish each day in a seaside retreat, though he had to drive twenty-five miles to get there.

  As we motored up the tendril-like road toward his house, I saw the four-mile-long seemingly inaccessible Inch strand. Before us to the west were tall mountains. Islands, dotted distantly here and there, were misted by the sea.

  Eamonn was telling me I would be staying mostly at Inch but sometimes I would go with him to Killarney and even “abroad” to Dublin and other exotic faraway Irish places.

  As we climbed, Eamonn gestured at the splendid features of the landscape, relating their history in his throbbing voice.

  Soon we roared into his short sloping driveway. The high hedges on each side almost touched overhead, giving the impression that we were passing through a leafy tunnel into another world.

  Once more I had moved from darkness to light, but this time he had carried me there. Here, in three acres of God’s own country, was beauty within beauty, and mystery within a larger mystery.

  Having braked sharply—how else?—he was on my side of the car and flinging my door open.

  “Out with you, Annie. Out, out,” as he beckoned me with bird-swift hand movements to stand next to him.

  Then the most amazing thing: I looked into his eyes and there I was. It was so fleeting, I could not be sure if it had really happened or I had imagined it.

  When I was on my feet, he gestured eloquently around us, breathing deeply and shaking his head; there, nestling on a rocky knoll, surrounded by exquisite flower gardens, was a single-storied slate-roofed Georgian house built of red sandstone, a beautiful aerie above the sea.

  “My home, your home,” he said, with an infectious grin.