by Annie Murphy
Helena’s daughter Jenny started to walk into the sea and was knocked over, which caused Eamonn to rush back and rescue her. Putting her on his shoulder, he walked out until the water was up to his chest. Finally, he restored her smiling to her mother.
Helena nudged me. “I don’t know what sort of husband he would have made, but what a fantastic father.”
Yes, there was Eamonn, no longer the great god directing people’s destinies but the head of a family.
My mind went back to when my own family was on vacation at Rockaway Beach, New York. I was five or so. My mother was sober, tanned, and beautiful, and all four of us kids were playing on the sands. Till Daddy, with me on his shoulders, went marching into the sea on his stork-like legs. Waves crashed around us and over our heads. I spluttered, “Daddy, Daddy,” and pulled on his circlet of hair and tugged on his ears. He reacted by stroking my leg. “It’s okay, sweetheart.” He swiveled me around on his shoulders so I could look into his eyes. “Nothing’s going to happen to you.” I felt safe in his arms, as safe as Jenny now felt in Eamonn’s. As safe as I wanted to be in Eamonn’s arms forever.
Helena’s doubt about Eamonn’s being a perfect husband challenged me. I looked out to sea and saw the sun transfiguring his lovely face and the waves foaming about his neck and shoulders. He was everything I ever wanted. He was the man with the helium-filled balloons that would help me fly.
All the things till now denied me could be given me through this man, my man. He was a wizard like my father.
As a kid I always looked on Daddy’s surgical skills as a kind of magic. He cut into your flesh and poked around inside you; whereas anyone else would kill you, he healed you. He removed all the bad and sewed you up again so you were better than before. He healed minds, too. He healed them with his humor, sometimes caustic when he refused to let patients yield to the sickness of self-pity. Pain, he said, could be a healing force.
Used to the magic of life, I believed in the impossible.
Eamonn was a surgeon, too. He had taken on many sick people like Siobhan, Helena, and me and was presently challenging the mighty sea. Would he be able to break away from the stationary, immovable earth of his past and come away with me to dreamland? And if he would not do this for me, maybe he would for a child of his own? In my bed I had seen him as a man; on the beach I saw him for the first time as a father.
I had always loved children but I hated my husband so much that the only baby I had carried, his, I failed to love. But I could not fail to love Eamonn’s. He would love and cherish our child and our child would love and respect him. And even if he rejected it as I rejected my first child, I would not. I’d still have a part of Eamonn to carry with me through life.
While the kids paddled in small pools and played with buckets and spades on the sand, I waved to Eamonn and shouted, “I’m coming in.”
The sea, with rainbow colors shining on it, was our balloon, the element that buoyed us up and took us away from earth.
I swam right up to him and we went away together like a couple of fishes.
“You really can swim, Annie,” he puffed, admiringly.
To prove it, I went under and pulled his trunks down.
He dragged me up to the surface, hissing, “Stop it. If I emerge from this water naked, I’ll kill you.”
“Take it easy,” I said, laughing and making him laugh.
“I wish I’d never brought you out here. God Almighty, if I float on my back you’ll nip the trunks off me. You said you were afraid of the water and you’re not, you deceitful witch.”
A big wave hit me, and crying, “Help, help,” I sank. And he came searching for me and lifted me up.
As our heads rose out of the waters we saw it at the self-same moment. Reflected off diamonded water was the land, with yellow dunes, and children paddling and making sand castles. Sheep, lambs among them, and a single ram were grazing on the emerald green and corn yellow slopes of the cliff, and above us was a motionless sky without a cloud. And we, the only bathers, companions in peril, seemed to be apart from humankind, in our own magic bubble, our own watery birth sac, baptized with a real baptism into our own new world of being. And the cold cold sea had turned kind and warm in us and bonded us as sex and laughter had already done.
“The undertow can rip you, Annie. Don’t get overconfident.”
He was warning me not to get in over my head. He knew his limitations, but he was afraid that I did not.
“I might be able to save you, Annie, but drowning people sometimes beat the hell out of their rescuers.”
He was back fearing what people would make of scratches and bruises above the line of the clerical collar. The spell was broken. But not entirely.
* * *
As soon as we were home, while Helena attended to her kids, Eamonn came into my room. I wore only panties as I dried my hair with a towel.
“Wasn’t that invigorating?” he said, breathing deeply. “Before, I was very, very tired. And look at you, Annie. Radiant.”
True. The anxiety that surrounded me seemed to have been rinsed out of me.
“I thought you’d be too scared to go in the sea, Annie.”
I said, “I saw you delighting in it and I have shared so many things with you I wanted to share that, too.”
He felt my breast. “Touché. I’m getting out of here now, so lock the door behind me.” He winked. “So I’m not tempted to come back in.”
All that day, he and Helena did the cooking. Dressed in black slacks and a bright, striped shirt, he was filling the kids’ glasses with lemonade and ours with wine and cocktails as we sunbathed in the garden. He gave everybody an equal amount of time and attention.
Helena, now shiny with joy, confided in me that she had been hysterical when she knew she was carrying Jenny. She had wanted a rest from childbearing. When Jenny was a year and a half, she started having seizures, with a temperature of 104. Patrick, her husband, was away on business, the doctor couldn’t come. Certain that Jenny was going to die, she put it down to her own reluctance to have her.
“It was only myself and God who saved her.”
This explained why she was always edgy when Jenny disappeared for a few moments.
After Jenny recovered, Helena was ready to accept as many children as God sent her. Anything was preferable to the guilt of a dead child.
I understood only too well. Helena helped me realize that other women felt as I did.
She had obviously told this story to Eamonn and he had helped her see the spiritual dimension of it. As a result, he not only judged Helena to be the ideal Irish woman, he probably saw a parallel between her experience and mine.
Maybe he thought he would be able to heal me as he had healed her.
Chapter Twelve
WHEN HELENA LEFT, Mary came back and life at Inch returned to normal.
Tanned and full of energy, Mary looked around the house and called me a saint. She had expected to have to clean up after all the children but I had done it for her.
She made us lunch of spaghetti bolognese while I prepared a salad. We also drank sherry together. Only a sip, she insisted, time after time, winking.
That lunch was fun. She criticized the Bishop for being such a miser. Long-hosted spite came out of her for hours till the shadows lengthened and heavy rain started to fall.
“I see a tremendous closeness between you and the Bishop,” she said. “Watch him.”
Without a word, she staggered out of the kitchen into the living room. I found her on her knees at the liquor cupboard.
“When’s he coming back, Annie?”
“About ten.”
“Gives us plen’y of time.”
She tugged out one expensive bottle after another.
I uncorked a decanter of Madeira and took a swig.
“Good for you, Annie Murphy,” she said with a laugh. “I happen to know how he makes cocktails.”
She mixed large measures of vermouth, gin, vodka, brandy, fruit juices, an
d crushed ice in a shaker.
“That,” I said, “would kill a Shire horse.”
As she poured the cocktail out into two nine-inch silver goblets, wind and rain gusted against the french windows.
She set the glasses on a low coffee table in front of a roaring fire. Having finished one drink, she helped herself to another. Soon she was wobbling.
We put on some Irish music. It was the signal for Mary to go back to the cupboard and draw out an unlabeled bottle.
“Gin?” I asked. “Vodka?”
She winked both eyes because she could not wink one on its own. “Ireland’s own. Poteen.” She uncorked the bottle and sniffed. “Oh God, dear God, the smell of it.”
I grabbed the bottle and the licorice smell made my head rock back.
“ ’Tis the secret of everblasting life.”
I giggled at her slip of the tongue.
She took a vase filled with flowers, tipped the contents into the fire with a smoky sizzle, half filled the vase with poteen, and drained it.
“Why’d you do that, Mary?”
“Never like mixing my drinks.”
I was sober enough to realize that Mary was not just gone, she was beyond-the-Himalayas gone.
She squirted, out of the side of her mouth, “Bed.”
She tried to get up and did a split.
I lugged her to her feet like a sack of coal.
“Thassright. Get poor Mary to beddy bed.”
With that she fell to the floor. I grabbed her feet and dragged her out the room, across the corridor, and into her bed. Kneeling down briefly beside her, I begged her, “Don’t die, Mary.”
Recent events—Helena’s visit, the swim in the sea—made me want to indulge an entirely new mood.
Good-bye, godly cleric, I thought. Put all restraints behind you, Eamonn, and live.
I put on an aggressive low-cut tie-blouse decorated with red roses and tight-fitting black velvet pants with a wide red belt. I brushed my hair so it stood up high and put on big jangling Indian earrings. Having applied makeup, I peered into the mirror and decided, pursing my lips to kiss my own image, good enough to wow the returning warrior.
I had enough of sleeping with him after he had insulted both me and his God by praying for nearly an hour. Tonight, no grace before meals. This was my show.
Back in the living room, swaying this way and that, I played very loud music. First, “Suspicion” by Elvis Presley. Then some Sinatra, beginning with “Bewitched, Bothered and Bewildered.”
All the while I was jumping like a cat from the couch to the chair and growling.
Through the slanting rain beyond the windows, I saw the headlights of his car as it screamed up the drive and halted by the front door.
I turned the music up to maximum. Blaring away at the time was “Fly Me to the Moon.” That was the sound that greeted Eamonn when he came through the front door. Nothing, though, could have prepared him for the sight of me, with glistening eyes and exploding hair as I lay barefoot and purring among the crystal on top of his glossy black piano.
He came into the living room dressed impeccably with his episcopal chain round his neck. After two steps, his chin fell as he surveyed the chaos, including his precious bottles scattered around.
“God Almighty,” he roared above the music, “you’re drunk. Where’s Mary?”
“Dead.”
“All that liquor. Did you drink it?”
“Mary poisoned herself.”
“She must have just passed out,” he said. “But she may have vomited in her sleep and choked.”
He ran out of the room and straight back in again.
“Annie”—he shook a wavy hand at me—“don’t move on my piano till I get back. You might scratch it or break my best Waterford crystal.”
He ran across the corridor to Mary’s room and came back seconds later, saying, “She’s gone, she is dead.”
Though tipsy, I could see how excited he was. After a bare dark mountain road came this assault on all his senses: dimmed lamps and firelight on gleaming wood and crystal, thick-pile rugs, skin-tingling music, a young woman looking good with animal smells and movements, the sensuous, slightly orgiastic challenge to his own dull orthodox attire.
How would he react? A precious clue: his foot was tapping to the music. This was for him a much better prelude to lovemaking than walking up and down for ages past the Stations of the Cross.
He had only been to Mary’s room to check that she would not wake in a hurry. The intoxicating music, the Puck-style paganism was new to him and he, taster of all life’s wines, found it irresistible.
I congratulated myself on knowing my man so well.
“You have corrupted her, Annie.”
“She got drunk before I came.”
“Never before in this house.”
He poured himself a brandy. Twirling the big globe, he came up to me and said, “Mind that glass. You could get splinters in your backside.”
“You’re worried about your mother’s piano.”
“That, too,” he admitted. “Get down, now.” He held out his hand. “Down.”
When I refused he went to switch off the music.
“Don’t do that,” I warned him, “or else.”
Seeing I wanted to control the scene, he came back to me and extended his hand. I took it and jumped into his arms. Taken by surprise, he fell back on the floor, spilling brandy all down him.
“My poor back,” he yelled, “you snapped it in two.”
I kept running around the room and jumping clean over the big high-backed cushiony couch. He lay down on the couch, maybe in the hope of getting me to lie next to him.
“C’mon, c’mon, c’mon,” he urged.
I took no notice. I jumped on top of him from unexpected angles and before he could grab me I was off on another cat-like tour of the room, sniffing and miaowing.
Finally, I jumped on top of him and started to undo his clericals. I got his jacket off so I could work on the gold chain with the cross on it that always frightened me.
“ ’Tis very heavy.” In holding up his hand to check me, he showed his ring with a big amethyst surrounded by diamonds. “You’ll break my neck.”
“I will if I’m careful.”
I tried to pull his ring off but he clenched his fist as if to say, “Anything but that.”
He feared that in my present mood I might fling it in the fire or over the cliff. He saw I wanted that ring not because it was worth a fortune but because it symbolized he was wedded to something other than me.
“I want to put it on, Eamonn. I do, I do.”
“Don’t be ridiculous, pet. You have tiny fingers and it would fall off you. Please, I love you, but stop.”
I refused so he took refuge in another glass of brandy.
“Would you mind if I turned down the music a little bit?”
“Just… a… little… bit.”
For the next few minutes I kept coming around the couch and growling at him.
Finally, in mock terror, he stood on a chair, which I tipped over, bringing him down on the floor.
“Don’t scratch me above the collar,” he pleaded. “Or I’ll get the scissors out and cut your nails.”
“I would stick you with them.”
His gaze met mine without a waver.
“I’d do the same to you, Annie. You have met your match.”
“Not when I’m drowning in a sea of alcohol, Eamonn. I have tremen-dous strength.”
When I finally cornered him, I started ripping more of his clothes off and scattering them. With each item of his removed, I removed one of mine—my blouse for his shirt, my velvet slacks for his pants—as though we were playing strip-poker. He himself chose to remove my bra.
“Does it unhook at the back or front? God, you need to be a magician to get rid of these things. Ah, it opens at the front and out they pop.”
In the end, we danced naked before the flashing fire. It was rough but it was fun and very se
xy.
Finally, we made love on the Afghan rug in front of the fire. Alcohol warmed us within and the peat fire without, and Frank Sinatra was serenading us and a compliant wind howled its approval from the sea.
He was more masterful than I, who was by then high as a kite. He went touring all the isles and inlets of me, verbalizing his pleasures in every place. That night, he was top dog and I felt he would not yield that right easily again.
After we were more than satisfied, we lay on our backs in silence, contemplating the still white sky of the ceiling.
“Now, Annie,” he said, rolling over at last, “you must get some sleep. Your pulse is racing.”
I was beginning to feel bad. He led me to my bed where I fell straight asleep with him next to me, so happy he broke his vow never to sleep again without wearing his pajama pants.
About four in the morning I sat up with an electric start. Owing to the alcohol I was having a panic attack. I felt that he/she/it/they were about to kill me.
I nudged him awake. It took a while.
“Eamonn,” I gasped, “go to Mary’s room.”
“What? What?” Seeing me shaking: “What’s the matter?”
“Panic attack. Valium. Mary keeps it in her bedroom.”
“I can’t go in there.”
“You must. I’m paralyzed with fear.”
“What shall I do?”
“Just told you.”
“But Valium after all that alcohol might kill you.”
He got up and fell over before he managed to struggle into his pajama pants.
“Put something on, Annie, and come with me. I don’t know where her tablets are.”
“Bring me at least two or I’ll kick your mother’s damn piano to pieces with my bare toes. Run.”
He vanished in a totter down the corridor. I heard him in Mary’s room rummaging around for minutes that took years off my life. I couldn’t wait any longer.
Slinging on my knee-length nightdress, I ran into his bedroom for the nearest exit, flung open his french windows, almost breaking them, and crashed out onto the lawn. There I lay with racing heart and pumping lungs in the friendly dark, burying my head in my hands. I rolled around, feeling on my skin the cold wet grass and cold morning air.