by Annie Murphy
This puzzled me. “Explain, please.”
“We mustn’t adopt a pattern. In a couple of days, Jim’d be looking through his keyhole at around four.”
Now I knew why Foxy-Loxy was wearing his watch.
I said, “Will you give me a timetable tomorrow?”
He put on his pajama jacket and, as he kissed me good-bye: “That walk down the corridor is going to be frightening.”
1 volunteered to hold his hand for him.
“No, no, no. Jim would really delight to find me out.”
“If he finds you naked in my bed, I’m sure you have your explanation ready. He’d end up apologizing for thinking bad of you.”
“Jim would like nothing better than to betray me.”
“Why would he want to betray you?”
He suddenly looked at me. “Why do you want to?”
“Me?” He really shook me.
“You love me but you delight in treachery.”
“What’s the matter with you?” I said. “Are you sleeping with treachery and is treachery behind Jim’s door? What are you, then?”
“I am what I am because I am.”
I blinked because I recognized the words as being from the Bible, in which they are put in the mouth of God.
“You mean you are the only innocent?”
“Completely.”
He meant it. His self-deception was total. I was back to being his patient.
I said, “Innocent? You? After what you just did?”
“I really am. I am only here as a passage in your life.”
The magician had changed himself from sinner into savior.
When Helena and her family rejoined us from Donegal on the Friday night, I had to vacate my room and sleep on the floor in Mary’s room.
Eamonn had arranged a special Saturday dinner at the Glenbeigh, the hotel he had pointed out to me from the hill on my first afternoon in Inch.
“This,” he told me, “will be an unforgettable experience.”
But even he, with his powerful imagination, could not have foreseen what was going to happen.
Chapter Fourteen
I WENT TO THE HOTEL with Jim, Dinah, Helena, and Mary, while Eamonn came on direct from Killarney.
In our party of about twenty were Eamonn’s cousins Joan Browne, a widow, and Paddy Joe Brosnan, both from Castleisland. The rest were his friends, colleagues, and acquaintances, among them Pat Gilbride, her sister, and Father O’Keeffe.
Paddy Joe was a small man. He said little but heard everything and conveyed it by the blink of an eye.
Joan Browne, my mother’s favorite cousin, was the exact opposite. A blustery warm-eyed Kerrywoman in her sixties, she was a rebel like me. You felt she was made of velvet. Her curses sounded better than many a benediction.
“I have heard so much about you, Annie.”
Her eyes took in my tan, my thick hair, the subtly applied makeup and shocking pink lipstick, the big hooped earrings.
“Aren’t you a gypsy of all gypsies?”
Now she was viewing my peasant blouse with its intricate patterns made up of unusual beads running through it.
“And those black velvet pants, Annie,” she said, with a smooth laugh, “why, they would tempt a bishop. Especially when you are so very pretty.”
As a waiter passed with a tray of drinks, she grabbed a sherry before putting an arm around my shoulder. “And how is my cousin, the big bad Bishop, behaving these days.”
“He’s very kind,” I said.
She pursed her lips and pushed them forward, hooded her eyes, and shook her head as if to say, “We all know what that means.” Though, really, no one knew.
In the restaurant, I sat next to Joan at a magnificently prepared table in an alcove with a view of the bay.
The food was excellent, the wines were vintage French. A band played a medley devised by Eamonn himself.
I was relaxed until I saw Mary O’Riley, a few places higher up the table, getting steadily drunk.
Joan passed a message to her brother, Paddy Joe, and he kept pushing the wine away from Mary but she simply stretched across the table for more.
After dinner, there were liqueurs. By which time, Mary’s head was on her shoulder.
Eamonn at the top of the table caught my eye and went “Oh, God, God, God.” But he had to be careful in case Jim Ross was watching out for any sign of complicity between us.
Now began Irish dancing in which I joined, though I knew nothing about it. There were hornpipes, jigs, four-handed reels, and a country dance, a kind of old quadrille.
A Russian in folk costume took over the floor and gave a dazzling display of dancing.
Then Eamonn stood up and did, solo, a few fast rigid steps of Irish dance, hopping and twirling. The applause that greeted him was deafening. Perspiring, smiling broadly, he took a bow. But he wasn’t finished yet.
He nodded to the leader and the band struck up “The Rose of Tralee,” which he rendered in a fine tenor voice.
He had no sooner finished than I noticed Mary lurching toward the ladies’ room.
Joan and I caught up with her just as she was doing the splits. We lifted her by her arms and carried her to her destination. Where she threw up, partly over me.
A couple of women washing their hands were scandalized until I called over Mary’s shoulders, “Please, please, this lady is handicapped.”
Joan helped me clean Mary up and bathed her face with cold water while I dried my shoes and stockings.
Another lady came in and said, pointing to Mary, “Isn’t she with Bishop Casey’s party? You can’t take her out there, she’ll disgrace him.”
“Who cares?” Joan said. “We have to get her out to the car and the only way is through the front entrance.”
Right outside the ladies’ room was the Bishop.
As we marched Mary past him, she lurched out of our grasp and sprawled at his feet.
He took his pipe out of his mouth to say, “God Almighty, she will not be coming again.”
We marched her through the dining room and out into the parking lot where we put her into the back of Eamonn’s Mercedes.
When Eamonn had settled the account, it was past midnight. He told Jim, who had Dinah and Helena with him, to lead the way while we brought up the rear of the convoy.
I wanted to jump in the back to tend to Mary but he made me sit next to him in the passenger seat.
He had had too much to drink and Mary was groaning horribly. I did not relish the prospect of the trip home. To make matters worse, he put his hand down my blouse.
“Mary,” I said.
“Completely gone, Annie. Open up your pants.”
Now I realized why he worked it so we were the last car. He did not want Jim Ross coming from behind and overtaking us.
Mary began to throw up again.
“Oh, no,” he said, “not that,” as he puffed more furiously than ever on his pipe.
I felt suddenly sick myself.
“Careful how you drive,” I warned.
“Are you telling me again I don’t know how to drive a car?”
“Think, Eamonn. If you have an accident, you’ll reek of liquor, there’s a drunk in the back of your car, and a young woman next to you with her blouse undone and her panties half off. Think of your obituary.”
“Let me think of that,” he said, laughing a deep laugh.
All this time, he was driving with the right hand, which certainly knew what his left hand was doing.
He got a kick out of the fact that directly ahead of us were Pat and her sister. The more unthinkable the deed, the more he had an urge to do it.
He nuzzled me. “C’mon, Annie, feel me, too.”
“Give me a break,” I pleaded. “I’m not feeling well.”
“There may be no chance when we get back, not with Jim peeping round the door. This is great craic [fun], now.”
To me it was lechery. But it was his night.
Ahead of us, Pat stopped for
gas at a one-pump garage that was completely blacked out. Eamonn said he might as well fill up himself.
“Make yourself decent,” and he zipped up his own fly.
He and Pat must have frequented this garage because they had no compunction about waking the owner up. Pat banged on the door, yelling, “The Bishop needs petrol.”
A minute later, a tousle-haired youth switched on a small outside light as he stuffed his shirt in his pants. He stopped to light his cigarette, probably his first reaction when he woke up in the morning.
The young hand filled up Pat’s car first, then carried the nozzle to the Mercedes without turning off the fuel ejection lever. In his confusion, he dropped his cigarette, causing the gas to ignite and fuse instantly in two directions.
Pat had already driven out of the danger zone.
Eamonn, jumping out of the car, whipped open my door and grabbed me by the hand.
“Annie, out, quick.”
I needed no second invitation.
We went some distance to a hedge while the young hand went for a bucket of sand and a fire extinguisher.
Eamonn whispered, “I have been for a hundred thousand fill-ups and the first time you are with me, the petrol catches fire.”
“Wait,” I said. “Mary’s still in the car.”
Eamonn held me by the shoulder. “Leave her, Annie.”
“No, I’m getting her out before the car explodes.”
“She is a dead weight,” he said, “and with puke all over her. There’s no danger.”
“Then what are we doing here?”
“I have no idea how to put out fires.”
“That’s the first confession of ignorance I’ve ever heard from you and a most convenient one.”
As I made to return to the car he pulled me roughly to him. “Stay where you are.”
This was our first row.
With his pipe still alight in tight lips, he said, “She has caused enough damage for one night.”
“To your car?”
“Correct.”
“To your reputation?”
“Indeed.”
“Is that why you’re prepared to let her burn to death?”
“She will not and if she does won’t she go straight to heaven?”
I punched a tattoo on his arm. “Anything’s better than Inch, you mean, even heaven.”
“God, Chicky Licky, with you, the heavens are always falling in. Look, the fire is out already.”
We got back in the car and, to my horror, he no sooner started the engine than he behaved exactly as before.
That was the moment when I knew without a shadow of a doubt that I had no hand in Eamonn’s fall; he was bad before we met.
It made no difference to us. I loved him not for his virtues, though they were many, nor in spite of his vices, which were many, too. I loved him because I loved him.
But my man was no saint, and I felt an indescribable relief. Because neither was I.
However much he fooled himself that he was a holy man, he was worse than me; and unless it were so, there could have been no fellowship between us. How else could he, pledged not to love women, be the best lover I ever had? Yet, bad as I am, I could never have left Mary to fry in the car.
I realized anew that Eamonn was feeling me, fondling me, sleeping with me because he needed me. My need of a companion of passage was as unreal as Mary’s supposed preference for heaven. Eamonn simply used religion to get his own way.
This meant, of course, that I could never wholly trust him. One day, should I, for instance, be a threat to his position, he was bad enough to set fire to me and everything I held dear—and call it God’s will.
Our life appeared to be more than ever doomed. From then on, I resolved to remember everything—words, smells, birdsong, feelings, facial expressions, the fall of petals, shadows on a wall—because in time I would be left with nothing else. I might even end up remembering things I preferred to forget.
As the holy man leaned over to lift the edge of my frilly panties and intimately finger me, I gave him a fierce love-hate-bite on the back of the neck only a fraction below his collar. My way of telling him that we were now on the margin of acceptable behavior. My way of saying that beneath the clerical regalia and sanctimonious talk, he was out for himself.
“Stop it,” he said, digging his left hand into my softest part and driving around a treacherous bend on two wheels. “Do you want to kill me?”
May be I did.
Back at Inch, Helena and I washed Mary and put her to bed.
When Jim’s back was turned, Eamonn signaled to me to come to his room when the house had settled down for the night.
For the first time I was reluctant to meet with him, but he greeted me very tenderly.
“What about Jim?” I said.
“He’s gone completely. Dinah had to drive him home.”
“He may be pretending.”
He stroked my arm.
“You’re sore at me, Annie. If only you knew what Mary has put me through over the years.”
“What if the pain was mutual?”
He pondered that. “Maybe so. I have always tried to include her in my dinners when most priests wouldn’t.”
There was, I knew, a special kind of magnanimity in Eamonn.
In spite of my anger, I let him have sex with me—to punish him. I had not suffered the unspeakable agonies of childhood confession for nothing.
Next morning, Eamonn would have to say Sunday Mass in the house without a chance to confess. He had condemned Mary to heaven. Why not give him a taste of hell?
He was so besotted with me that he did not heed the consequences till the deed was done. I thought more like a bishop than he did. Or maybe drink had confused him so he forgot which day of the week it was.
He no sooner came out of me than: “My God, tomorrow I have to —”
In my head, I was saying, Maybe it’s good for you also to die a little. I actually said:
“Why not forgive yourself?”
“Even the Pope cannot do that.”
“Your real sin was to risk letting Mary die.”
“Stop it, Annie, what we just did was a mortal sin.”
“Speak for yourself.”
It struck me that there was something kinky in his attitude. How could this completely innocent man repeatedly commit grave sin and just as often ask forgiveness for it in confession while fully intending to do the same again? Where was his purpose of amendment? The little nun who instructed me when I was seven would have called that telling lies to the Holy Ghost.
“Eamonn, I’ll hear your confession, if you like.”
“Pet, pet, things are bad enough already.”
To prove they could get worse, I knelt at his feet, signed myself and said, “Bless me, Father, for I have sinned. A week since my last confession. Since then, I screwed Annie Murphy at least ten times.”
He grabbed me by the shoulder and whipped me to my feet. “Can’t you see this is serious?”
I suddenly could, and my heart hurt for him. Letting Mary die was not serious but his conscience, wounded out of love for me, was in agony. He hungered for a fellow priest to speak absolution over his unrepentant head.
Catholics, I told myself, can be such sad twisted people. Real wrongs are imaginary, imaginary wrongs are real.
That night, I slept on the couch in the living room. Fitfully, because I hopped up any number of times to check that Mary was still breathing.
Next morning, I attended Mass at the back of the small congregation. This was the most sacred moment in Eamonn’s day. For this he became a priest in the first place.
The Mass was the bluntest challenge to our love. He either danced in finery at the altar or he danced naked in bed on me. If ever he came away and shared his life with me, he would have to give this up.
Sometime, somehow, he would have to face up to his hypocrisy of the double-dance and say a final yes or no to me.
Being a gambler, I gambled.<
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As he consumed the large Host at communion, the rest of the household knelt and bowed their heads. I stayed upright, looking fixedly at him, suggesting, “This is a game, Eamonn. I know what these others don’t.”
In the melee after Mass I brushed past Eamonn as he was unvesting.
He glared at me as if I had trespassed on holy ground, which I knew I had.
He said, “Jim could have seen you leering at me.”
“Maybe he did.”
“He has eyes in the back of his head.”
“Then he certainly did.”
“That,” he snorted, poltergeists playing under his facial skin, “was the wickedest thing done to me in my life.”
“Wickeder than your sleeping with me?”
“Much.”
With his homemade rules of right and wrong, he had no idea of what real wickedness was.
“I’m beginning to think,” I said, “you’re a bad hat.”
“If so, you are a black bowler to match.”
I joined Helena in the kitchen, aware that things at Inch were turning treacherous.
Chapter Fifteen
THE GUESTS DEPARTED, leaving just the three of us in the house.
One morning, Eamonn set off very early. He drove off faster than ever before, returning late and utterly exhausted.
“Why’d you leave so early?” I asked.
He indulged in magpie chatter before saying, “Today, I had the first of my annual confirmations.”
“I didn’t know kids scared you.”
“Well,” he retorted, “they damn well do.” After a pause: “I had to make doubly sure I went to confession first.”
The children’s innocence was bringing him face to face with the contradictions in his own life.
In the living room after dinner—no fire, for it was June—he asked me, “Were you ever confirmed?”
I nodded. “It did me no good.”
I was twelve. For weeks, the sisters had said nothing but “The Bishop is coming,” as if he were an archangel at least.
“So you looked forward to it, Annie.”
“The hell I did.” The day itself was hot and sweltering. The Bishop turned out to be a huge, fat, ugly old man.
Eamonn chipped in with, “Not at all like me.”
“Wrinkly skin dripped off him and he was dressed like a Hollywood actress fifty years past her prime. Our spiritual leader looked as if he had done nothing all his life except be chauffeured from one meal to the next.”