by Annie Murphy
I tugged his hair in retaliation. “Stop it, please, you arc making me worse.”
He turned to Pat. “Did you bring her any Valium? No? Annie used to take ten a day, didn’t you, Annie?”
When my marriage had been at its worst, I had been on Valium. But Eamonn only said this for Father O’Keeffe’s benefit. If he had had doubts about my needing a cure, my present looks would have dispelled them. Eamonn, the great healer, was dealing, in however unorthodox a way, with a sick young lady.
“She was a Valium addict, John, like Siobhan.”
Father O’Keeffe obviously knew what had been done for Siobhan, and Eamonn was intimating that I, too, was on the path to recovery. He may even have been pleased that Dubliners would assume that I was an American girl with a health problem and not a source of temptation to a middle-aged bishop.
“You are doing over a hundred, Eamonn,” Father O’Keeffe called out. “Slow down, you are making Annie worse.”
I had somewhat improved by the time we reached the Burlington Hotel on the southern edge of Dublin. Eamonn was well known there but he did not make a big thing of it. He carried his own bags upstairs. Our double-bedded rooms were together. Eamonn’s and mine were next to one another, while I had Pat on my other side and he had Father O’Keeffe.
I spent a while in Pat’s room because she wanted to make sure I was better. Then we all went down to the lounge where Eamonn was given a quiet table in the back. We had drinks and a bar lunch of soup and sandwiches.
Afterward, while the men went off on business, Pat and I took a cab to Stephen’s Green, a kind of oasis in the middle of town. There we fed the ducks for an hour or so. Pat, a country girl from Sligo, guessed, rightly, that this would calm me. It was blustery for a July day but the trees were fully leafed and the grass shiny green.
From the Green we walked north, past the ancient university of Trinity College, turned west, and crossed the disappointingly narrow River Liffey by the Halfpenny Bridge. We took a cab to the key tourist sights of Dublin, including O’Connell Street with Daniel O’Connell’s big black statue. Also the General Post Office, which, Pat said, was the chief stronghold of the Irish during the Easter Rising of 1916. After an hour, we taxied back to north O’Connell Street, where, in the Gresham Hotel, we had old-style tea.
Finally, we took a cab to Grafton Street, the most fashionable shopping center. I bought a blouse and Pat bought a dress. I had my hair cut and while Pat was having hers done, I went into Switzers store pretending to look at duvets. In fact, I bought something which I carefully rolled up and put at the bottom of my bag.
We met the two men for dinner around 9:00. They mostly talked business and we retired at 11:30.
Pat said, “If you get nervous, Annie, call me.”
I had no idea if Eamonn wanted us to get together, especially as he had told me to be on my best behavior in Dublin. After midnight, he put his head round my door. “Come and see me in twenty minutes?”
We were within earshot of Eamonn’s two closest aides. What if either of them found us in bed together? Knowing how Eamonn had treated the lady who had an abortion, they would have been obliged to quit and I did not want that.
I waited until Pat’s room fell completely silent. Then I lazily showered and dried my hair, put on makeup, perfume, and pearl earrings. Finally, I slipped on my new purchases from Switzers: a pale nightdress with slits up the sides, covered with a bathrobe of pale pink with roses.
I had ordered a sherry from room service for my sore throat. From time to time, I eyed the femme fatale in the mirror and we winked at each other. Behind the play-acting, I wanted Eamonn to see what life would be like with me not in the quiet of Inch but in the busy world. He had connections at the highest levels in Germany, France, and Britain. Maybe he could get a job in the European Community. We both liked travel. He had choices.
It was a whole hour before I joined him. Never had I seen him so impatient, as he twirled his brandy. There was very little talk between us, apart from a huskily whispered “That’s the sexiest thing I’ve seen you in. Where’d you get it?”
“In the States. I wasn’t going to waste it on just any night.”
“You’re lying, as usual. But ‘tis wonderful, Annie. Take the outside bit off. Fine. Why, in that negligee, you’re more alluring than when you’re naked.”
He made me walk around in it. For a few seconds. His undressing of me was a work of art.
That was an exciting night. We were in a hotel together, like man and wife. The international setting, the lateness of the hour, a capital city full of bustle, noise, and winking lights, it all seemed to make this man, who loved danger, even more tempestuous.
We stood beside a full-length mirror. I was naked and he had his shirt open; and I saw him looking at us in one another’s embrace. He was a voyeur of his own sexuality, which he had denied himself for so long. He saw himself kiss me all over and he delighted in his own expertise. He saw himself bring me to orgasm, filming everything in his head, as it were, for the years to come.
Throughout that night, all the psychological barriers that prevented us from expressing our deepest desires dissolved. It was no longer Bishop Casey and Annie Murphy. We were one animal, one being. Our individual selves had ceased to exist. We were not even playing anymore, nor wanting to talk anymore. There was no guilt, no recrimination. This was our right. This was self-ceasing, self-forgetting. This was pure woman and pure man. It was real, and forever.
I returned to my room about five in the morning and rose late. All through our relationship, in spite of the torrid nights, I was sleeping better in his arms than I had done in years because I no longer feared to see monsters in my sleep or when I awoke. He made sleep sweet to me as it had not been since I was a child.
Pat must have looked in on me because she left a message saying we had to vacate the rooms at midday. Having showered and dressed, I went out for lunch all by myself. It was nice to be on my own among so many people. To be alone when you are not lonely is the greatest luxury.
I met up with Pat at about three and we shopped before going to Jury’s Hotel. We all four had a bite to eat before we set off for Kerry at around nine. Halfway home, I started coughing violently. My breathing became so labored, the others were worried.
Eamonn stopped the car. He told Father O’Keeffe I was having something like an asthma attack and asked him to drive. Eamonn joined me in the back, but none of the medicines worked. He took advantage of the dwindling light and my condition to hold me tight.
“You’re crazy,” I whispered.
We spent the last hour of that journey locked together like a couple of teenagers. He kept kissing me even though Father O’Keeffe, from time to time, glanced at us in his rearview mirror when Eamonn was umistakably making out with me.
My mind was in a whirl. When we slept together in the Palace, he was so concerned not to give the least hint of our relationship to the nuns, yet here he was revealing his hand to his closest aides. This was suicide. Did he want to tell them without telling them?
I was embarrassed because this was too much like double-dating, which I had never liked. And yet, secretly, I rejoiced because if Eamonn and I were ever to go away together, he would need, if not the approbation of people like Joan Browne, at least the understanding of colleagues and priest friends.
We dropped off Pat and Father O’Keeffe in Killarney and on the drive back to Inch, I asked Eamonn why he had been so open in front of them. He shrugged it off. “They didn’t think anything of it.”
“You gave us away.”
He told me not even to think about it. At that moment, I felt that kissing in the back of an official car was more significant in terms of the future than sleeping in the Bishop’s bed in Killarney. If he was brave or foolish enough to advertise our relationship, he might be brave or foolish enough to come away with me.
As soon as we reached home, I went straight to my room, changed, and got into bed.
“Please,” I begg
ed him, “get me one of Mary’s Valium.”
With it, he brought back something even better, a glass of milk. I smelled it suspiciously but he made me drink it. We talked and I laughed foolishly for about ten minutes until the mix of Valium, cough medicine, and the unknown liquor in the milk knocked me out.
I awoke fourteen hours later. It was evening. He heard me moving around and came to my room. “How’s your cough?”
I tested my throat and said, “Seems to have gone.”
He laughed. “I should have been a doctor.” He had laced the milk with poteen.
“You could have killed me,” I said.
“Killed you, Annie? But I am a healer, remember?”
Chapter
Twenty-Two
SUDDENLY, Inch was full of Eamonn’s relatives and their friends from Dublin and Limerick. One afternoon, eight of them, all in their twenties, came hurtling up the drive, making it plain by their shrieks of laughter that they were out for a good time. The weather was warm and the setting idyllic.
Bob Clooney, Eamonn’s nephew, had brought along Sinead, his girlfriend. One of his nieces, Shelagh, a quiet pretty girl, was with her husband. Charlie had no job. Well dressed, with blond hair and fine pink skin, he ate and drank everything in sight. Eamonn’s generosity toward his visitors was astonishing. The kitchen was piled high with thick T-bone steaks, chickens, hams, gâteaux, and liquor of all kinds.
Things began quietly. Eamonn was extremely careful. Highly sexed young people would find him out soonest of all. He came to my bedroom only once, locking the door behind him and staying at most for three hours.
When he left on a four-day business trip to London, the house turned wild. We had bathing jaunts on the beach, parties on the lawn, and loud, boozy sing-alongs every night.
Mary resented the visitors, Charlie in particular. He smoked the Bishop’s cigars and drank his best liquors. I was no paragon. One evening, I invited the crowd down to the local pub. I was in the car with Bob Clooney and Sinead. We had our heads through the roof and the strong wind affected us like wine. We screamed like crazy going down the hill and a few hours drinking with the locals did not improve us. All I remember of that night was a loud argument about birth control. Charlie said, “You were married and had no kids, who are you to talk?” and I said, “Who’s talking?” as I threw my beer in his face.
Next morning, he said I had disgraced them. “How can I atone?” I said. “Cook you another three thick steaks? Put three more of Eamonn’s cigars in your fat lips?”
The crowd gathered around us.
“Take a look at yourself, you shitty American.”
I said, “I don’t smoke Eamonn’s five-dollar cigars from the time my eyes open in the afternoon.”
Bob Clooney took me aside. “Not for his sake, Annie, but for yours, let’s have peace, eh?”
“Sure,” I said, “peace to all present,” and I walked out, slamming the door after me.
I had had to vacate my room. At night, as I lay on a mattress next to Mary’s bed, I could feel her antagonism building up. She was having to clean up their messes. On the third morning, I woke to find her packing. “Someone’s ill in my family,” she lied.
What most stuck in her throat was that Bob spent hours behind closed doors with Sinead.
“I found them together in…” Her voice trailed off.
“For God’s sake, complete your —”
“The Bishop’s bed.”
Within an hour of her departure, the couple were back in the Bishop’s room.
When Eamonn returned from London, he called Inch from Killarney asking us all to drive over to meet him.
I went first into his study. “I heard you were in the pub completely blotto.”
“What is this,” I said, “the third degree?”
“Mary found Bob and Sinead sleeping in my bed.”
“What’s the big deal? They’re getting married soon.”
He said, huffily, “I want no advice from you about right and wrong.”
I was astonished. It was as if it had never occurred to him before that such things happened in his house. Also, I didn’t like his attitude of “Don’t do as I do, do as I say.” He walked one way, his shadow walked another.
“But, Famonn, think what you do under your own roof.”
“Guests should know better than to sin in my bed.”
He spoke to Bob privately and the lad apologized. We were all going that night to Tralee but, Bob assured him, they would leave next day.
When Eamonn met up with us in a bar in the center of Tralee, he was subdued. I felt he was seeing the world through different glasses. If he was horrified at an engaged couple sleeping together, what would people think if they knew that he, a bishop, slept nightly with me?
Charlie said something particularly nasty to me. Maybe it was the strain of the last few days, but I ran out crying. Bob came bounding after me but I turned on him unkindly and yelled, “Stay away from me.”
Eamonn came after me in his car. He found me on my way to the beach. Whenever I panicked, I went like a fish in search of water and he knew that.
“Annie,” he pleaded through the car window, “you cannot scream like that when you belong to the Bishop’s party.” As always, for Eamonn appearances were reality; things were what they seemed.
“I’m sick and tired of belonging to the Bishop’s party,” I told him. “I don’t want to be inhibited like you Irish.”
“Annie, I had an awful meeting in England and my stomach is killing me.”
“Blackmail.”
“Not true. Now my house is a mess. And I thought so highly of Sinead.”
“Are you telling me she’s trash?”
“I was going to marry them.”
“And now?”
“With her in white, it’d embarrass them, knowing that I know.”
“Know what, that they love each other? What’s the matter with you, where’s the spirit of Christian forgiveness?” Religious people hate having religion thrown at them.
“You sure,” he said, “you didn’t whip this up?”
“That is despicable,” I shouted. “Whatever they did in your house they’ve been doing for a while.”
“Maybe.”
I left him abruptly, heading for the beach, and he drove alongside me:
“Annie, please.”
I walked on without turning my head.
“Pet, I am in a very strange place in my life.”
“Explain.”
“Look at me on the way back from Dublin. If I didn’t know you better, I’d have said you pretended to be ill so I —”
“Pretended?”
When I faced him, my anger suddenly dissolved. He was suffering so badly from his colitis. He halted and I jumped in the rear seat.
He looked at me through his rearview mirror with distrust. It was as if I were incorrigible, and the bad in me was getting worse, corrupting people dear to him.
The shift in his attitude sent a shiver through me. We had reached the summit of our relationship and from now there was nowhere to go but down.
In a subdued mood, the young people left Inch early the next morning. Within the hour, Eamonn came home.
I led him into the dining room and flipped open his cigar box. Empty. I held up my arms. “I didn’t smoke them, honest.”
I threw open his gutted cocktail cabinet.
Faced with desolation. “But —”
“I spent hours cleaning this house. On my own.”
I followed him into his bedroom. “I’m certainly not sleeping on these sheets,” he said, whipping them off his bed.
Mary returned an hour after Eamonn, and a coldness seemed to grip all three of us.
It came as no surprise to me that he came into my bedroom that night with the plain intention of not sleeping with me. When he tried to kiss me good night, I said: “No thanks.” I did not want him off-loading his guilt on me. “You live your own life.”
Next morning, a
fter breakfast, he came into my room. “Annie,” he sighed, “I’m lost. Many EEC grants have fallen through. Maybe I was wrapped up in you and got careless.”
“Thanks,” I said, sharply.
“I’m blaming me, Annie.”
I said I knew his work came first, which was why I was going home to America.
“Not yet,” he begged.
That night, when Eamonn came home from Killarney, he tried to enter my room and found it locked.
This was talking-through-doors time. I said: “I’m packing.”
“Let’s talk.”
“In the living room after dinner.”
In the middle of our talk he suggested we drive down to the beach. He got into black slacks and a white shirt. On the moonlit sands, he took my hand and we walked on the edge of the waves that sent up a fragrant cooling breeze. I rolled up the legs of my jeans and took off my shoes, so I could walk by myself in the water. It was as if I were floating, leaving no more trace behind me than the wind. I loved the silky feel of water, the broad white moon-path across the sea, the deep faraway swan-lake of stars. In silvery light, under a haloed moon that presaged a sunny tomorrow, I had an elemental feeling that everything was somehow connected with everything else. If only we could see these almost unimaginable wonders, see, if need be, through pain, that there is hope and redemption through the communion of all created things.
Across the distance I had deliberately put between us to show we had choices, even the most terrible, Eamonn said: “But you’re not ready to go yet.”
“You mean, you’re not ready to let me go.”
We walked in silver-shadowy silence before he responded, his arms sweeping the tremulous sea, his fingers going up-up-up to the unshy moon. “You’re right. If you left now I would think I had failed you.” He beat his breast. “Whatever good I did you was annulled by my concern for my image. Also, my life has gone topsyturvy.”
“Tell me how.”
Another painful silence before:
“I’ve broken all my vows. I run around in the mornings like a maniac to make my confession. Lately, I haven’t even bothered to do that because my confessor keeps saying, ‘You’ve got to let her go.’ And… I can’t.”