Forbidden Fruit Read online

  Chapter Two

  MARY O’RILEY, his thirty-year-old housekeeper, emerged from the front door and came down the steps to greet me. She had red hair and mint-green eyes and the sad furtive gaze of a countrywoman.

  She took charge of my bags while Eamonn led me into his home, my home. The pretty Georgian ceiling with fine old moldings reflected the rich red from the carpet.

  “It matches your socks,” I whispered, and he whispered back, “You are wicked,” so that I felt flattered.

  A corridor went the length of the house with fourteen Stations of the Cross around the walls. I had not seen their like since I gave up practicing the Catholic faith seven years before.

  On the corridor there were small windows, like peepholes, onto the ocean. Almost opposite the front door was a small red-carpeted alcove with an altar where presumably Eamonn said Mass, and there were four bedrooms, two at each end.

  “Hurry for lunch.” Eamonn directed me to my room at the far end of the corridor. “You must be famished as a crow.”

  My room was a small rectangle, with light blue walls and its own bathroom. Built into the hillside and with hedges of yellow-flowering forsythia outside the windows, there was only the tiniest view of the sea, but I could hear it and smell it.

  I barely had time to freshen up before Eamonn rapped on my door and led me to the dining room. From the french windows there was a splendid sea vista. In the hearth was a fire that gave off a warm sweet earthy odor and a bluish flame.

  He anticipated my question.

  “Turf.” His hand was shaking not from nerves but from the sheer vitality he put into every word. “Cut from the bogs around here.”

  In the center of the room was a gleaming mahogany table with solid silver cutlery and candelabra as well as silver vases bright with spring flowers.

  Eamonn said grace, then Mary, who had learned to move at his pace, dashed a plate down in front of me. A furtive smile passed between them.

  With my fork I probed the white sticky matter covered in a white sauce.

  “Come on,” he urged, his lips twitching. “Try it.”

  I put a minute amount in my mouth. It had an unusual texture. Was it sweetbread? No, surely the organ of some animal; and I hardly ever ate meat because most meats made me ill. I had a big problem chewing even this small bite. I began to apologize for being a fussy eater.

  “Know what it is, Annie? Lamb’s brains.” And he laughed heartily.

  I dropped my fork with a clatter on my plate.

  Seeing my blanched face, his laughter ended abruptly.

  “You don’t like it?”

  He was upset. He had wanted to introduce me to a local delicacy. But the result, though he could not possibly have known why, brought back a past I had come to Ireland to forget.

  There was plenty of other food, potatoes, vegetables, salads, but I could not eat a thing.

  “I am so sorry, Annie,” he said, “I’ll take you for a walk soon and restore you.”

  He busily finished his own lunch and, after I had brushed my hair and put on cherry-red lipstick and dangling Indian-style earrings, we went up the steep mountain path behind the house. I was nervy because I suffered from agoraphobia and there were no trees to hide behind.

  He must have sensed my unease because as soon as we were out of sight of the house he took my hand in his—“Since there’s no donkey’s tail to hold on to.” Moments later, he stopped as if he had received an electric shock.

  “That’s odd, Annie.” He peered closely at my hand and echoed my thoughts: “I feel so comfortable with you. As if I’d known you always.” He looked at me, appealingly. “Do you feel the same?”

  I nodded. That touch had mysteriously bonded us.

  We walked or, rather, ran up the mountain path hand-in-hand like happy children.

  “I am so honored,” he said, “to have you as my guest.”

  Before I could say thank you, he started to tell me in his excited way how much he loved this place though it had so many inches of rain a year even angels couldn’t count them. Here he charged his batteries and sometimes it rained when there wasn’t a cloud in the sky.

  “Really?” I said.

  “Indeed, the good Lord has to keep His hand in.” And when I reacted, he added, “You really have the loveliest smile.”

  We stopped on the heights and, though there was rain in the strong tangy wind and I, lightly clad, was chilled, my breath was taken away, not so much by the speed of the ascent as by the beauty of the land.

  Having checked that I was not too cold, with a huge intake of salt- and heather-scented air, he said:

  “Annie, when I… when I stand here, I feel I am holding hands with the Almighty.”

  Feeling an inferior substitute for his normal climbing companion, I said a quiet yes.

  He was the perfect showman. He loved surprising and overwhelming people. Releasing my hand to enable him to gesture to his heart’s content, he exclaimed:

  “I come here so I can be in a place that man can never spoil. There it is, Annie. There are the clear waters, Annie, and the silent mountains, Annie, and the air clean and fresh as the Virgin’s tears, Annie.”

  And each mention of my name seemed part of a litany that went straight from our hushed mountain up to the throne of God.

  He was a jazzman like my father. There, on that mountaintop, he seemed to me to be playing Dixieland jazz on a saxophone, fingers fast moving, body rhythmically swaying, so I had the weird impression that the music, bis music, was creating the world around us, bringing to life sea, sky, stone, misty islands, and even the song of the birds.

  More mundanely: “See that hotel over there across the bay? That is Glenbeigh. I intend to take you to a meal there soon. And I’m hoping to give you”—a wide cruciform sweep of his arms—“a tour of the entire Dingle Peninsula. Then you really will feel reborn.”

  I was beginning to feel it already.

  He clasped my hand again. He, doubtless, was praying. So was I in my own way. This was a timeless moment in a place beyond this world where I could become me. I glimpsed grazing sheep, their faces deep in spring. I heard, then saw, fluttering and trilling, a solitary lark below me, looking like a moth, singing like an angel.

  All the guilt in my soul drained out of me. I had been hurt too much. I had a right to be happy. Never had I had the guts to do something for myself alone, but my hour had come. Proof of it was that I said:

  “I have a headache, Eamonn. I’d like to go down and rest, if you don’t mind.”

  This modest request was new to me. I had always let myself be led. I had such confidence in Eamonn I was prepared to ask for something for me.

  “Poor, poor Annie,” he said.

  Hand in warm hand we slowly retraced our steps. I realized with a start that though my panic attacks from which I suffered might recur, my agoraphobia was gone. And forever. The wild open spaces were given back to me. One heart’s disease had been emptied out of me into the sea or the clear mountain air. More likely, into Eamonn’s magnanimous soul. How good he must be to be able to lift such a burden by the touch of his hand. I only hoped that in healing me he would not wound himself.

  I was reluctant to say good-bye if only for a few hours. On that walk, I had felt his power enter me, power such as I had never felt in anyone else.

  It was about three in the afternoon when I got to lie on my bed, fully clothed, not having the energy to unpack. I slept as I had not slept in over three years.

  I awoke at ten. It was dark and I was thirsty. I fumbled my way to the door. The lights in the hallway were dimmed, the way I like them. Hearing me move around, Mary came to tell me she had prepared tea and biscuits for me and the Bishop. She was off to bed.

  Eamonn was already in the living room with the orange drapes pulled across all the windows except for one. He jumped up from his armchair and greeted me as if I had been away for months.

  Who could fail to warm to a man who every time he sees you gives you a hun
dred thousand Irish welcomes?

  Through the one window he had purposely left undraped we could see by starlight, so clear was the night air, across the bay.

  I admired the heavy oriental rug, Waterford crystal, and gleaming black baby grand piano. Here, too, there was a turf fire in the hearth. In this romantic setting, I lay down in front of the fire for warmth. The room’s colors, though earthy, were warm, including, I told him, his splendid socks of which I now had the best possible view.

  At once, he began to question me about my life. My father must have written to him about my marriage. I sensed he knew I had wed a Jew in front of a rabbi in my husband’s family home.

  “Your marriage was far from happy, I can tell.”

  “I am over the worst of it.”

  He shook his head like a dog out of water. “It couldn’t possibly be so; otherwise why did you come to Ireland?”

  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.

  Chapter Three

  EIGHT 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 glori
ous 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.”