by Annie Murphy
I crashed the phone down.
In addition to my sister Mary, now Bridget knew, and Bridget lived in Ireland, had an Irish boyfriend, and drank heavily. But it was when I myself got drunk that I spilled the beans. This was two weeks later. Bridget blackmailed me into it by telling me, truly or not, that I was to blame for the morning sickness she was experiencing.
The night after that, the most momentous thing in my whole life occurred.
In spite of our skirmish with the police, Eamonn still took his chances in the gravel pit. He was simply more careful to park his car on firmer ground. He also brought a piece of wood in the trunk in case he needed it to get out of the mud.
Why wood? Maybe it reminded him of salvation by the wood of the cross. I told him an old sack or a piece of carpet was better.
We had no sooner reached our destination than I saw another car parked in the shadows. “Do you think the cops are waiting for us?” I whispered.
“That car is not marked.”
“Undercover agents?”
The couple in the other car must have had their suspicions about us because they drove away on squealing tires.
It was the very end of October, a near-full moon was in the sky. My parents were about to leave Ireland, which meant this was probably our good-bye to the gravel pit.
I felt in my abdomen a kind of pain that was for me the sign of ovulation. I told him frankly, “Tonight is the night.”
“Don’t spoil it, Annie, please.”
I smothered his warnings with kisses. That time, I insisted on being on top in the reclining front seat of the car. Had he struggled, my weight, in that confined space, would have made it impossible for him to throw me off. I wanted no spark of lust. This was to be love and only love.
Almost the grimmest place in Ireland was transformed for me that night. It was as when a perfect rose rises out of a dung heap. There was no romance in the setting, only and entirely love. This was romantic because love was reduced to its essence: two people who cared for each other and wanted only to express their love.
It struck me what we did had been done in far uglier places, in hovels, prisons, and refugee camps, among Jews in cattle trucks taking them to Auschwitz. It is an expression of richness in poverty, proof that love can conquer everything.
The car in which my child was conceived was our little church. Whether people make love on grass in the open air, in the bed of a bishop’s palace, or on the floor of a hovel, whether to a background of surf, sea, and wind, or of noisy automobiles, there for them is their holy place. Inside me, whatever Eamonn might say, was his true place of worship, more splendid, more worthy than any cathedral built by hands.
Yet we were so ordinary. Not anarchists, not immensely wicked. Only because of circumstances were we subjects of what many would consider a sordid little drama that might easily end in tragedy. All this subterfuge and pain because society makes complicated rules and insists that God’s reputation depends on us keeping them. Because society will not allow ordinary people like us to behave in the most ordinary of ways.
That night, unusually for me, I was very verbal, rapturously so. I wove a spell of words around him. I told him all that he meant to me, all that he had done for me. “My time here has been magical,” I said, “and I’ll never again meet anyone like you.”
I wanted him to know that I would never have the slightest regret for whatever happened to me. I told him I loved him now and forever.
And when he said he loved me and came inside me I felt utter gladness and serenity, as if life itself were flowing inside me. In that mutual profession of love, I knew that in my body we were two, my child and I.
This was one of those strange psychic moments when you know with certainty what cannot possibly be known. And from this point on, from a deed done in love in the harsh surroundings of a gravel pit, my entire life was about to change forever.
Chapter
Twenty-Six
MY PARENTS PREPARED TO FLY HOME. Daddy found Dublin an extended village with little to distract him from the raw, insinuating presence of Wishie.
Then there was the yellow smear of autumn, too many days when the sun did no sightseeing, the intense cold and early dark reminding him of death. He had forgotten how soon winter comes to Ireland and how bone-rotting the damp, once September days had passed. Above all, he missed the glitz and frenzy of New York.
The morning my parents left, Daddy said, “It’s good to see you so settled. I told you Eamonn would heal you.”
“How’d he do it?” Mom said. “That’s what I want to know.” “You can’t stay here forever,” Daddy said at the airport. “But whenever you come home, Annie, I’ll be there.”
Eamonn called to check that my parents had left. Our talk turned to money. I told him that Bridget wanted to share the apartment with me and neither of us earned a lot.
“I have quite a small income myself, Annie, and everything else is on credit card.”
“Money,” I said, “could be the least of your worries.”
“You mean I might become a different type of father?”
“Don’t let’s celebrate too soon,” I said.
I sensed that this man who so often prided himself on being lucky—never so far an accident in driving or in having sex with me—was becoming resigned to the inevitable.
No matter. He was a cork on the ocean, afloat and upright even in a storm. He lived only for the moment, regardless of consequences. Which is why he made a good lover. But if and when it was confirmed that I was carrying his child, would he come away with me or discard me for good?
In my heart, I knew the answer already.
I had worked overtime at the Burlington. On the Friday after my parents’ departure, I was free to stay with Eamonn at Inch until Sunday night.
On the train that afternoon, I saw little of the countryside because in early November it soon gets dark. But I began the habit of talking to my baby. “I love you,” I kept saying. “I love your father and I love you and I swear to God I’ll never be separated from you.”
At Killarney, Eamonn was waiting for me in his Mercedes. He was very pleased to see me, but I noticed an almost forlorn look in his wide-open eyes. “I missed you,” he whispered. “So good to have you back.”
“And away from the gravel pit.”
A wild dark night, and his driving had not changed. Inside the front door he started kissing me. Good, Mary was absent.
His hands were in my hair, on my breasts, up my dress. Locked together, we lurched down the hallway with him undressing me with trembling fingers and removing his jacket and muttering, “This thing, this thing,” as though something alien had him in its grip.
1 was sad for him, for his lack of control, and at the same time overwhelmed by his sweetness and innocence.
“I can’t make it to the bed,” he gasped, pulling me down on my hands and knees.
“Please,” I said, “not here.” I spoke out of pity for him.
He stretched me backward on the floor at the entrance to his room. Above me was the first Station of the Cross: Jesus Is Condemned to Death. That upset me because the chief thing I loved about the Catholic religion was Jesus, a good Man, going to an undeserved death. I imagined the look of bewilderment on His face as it dawned on Him that people were bad enough to want Him dead when He only came to help.
On Eamonn’s face was the same look, of vulnerability, of someone condemned for something he did not understand; but this was allied to such deep want in him that I felt I had never loved him more. Self-sacrifice had made him deny his real self. What I saw, as I lay under the first Station of the Cross, was the real Eamonn hidden too long under all the sham desire to live like an angel.
“Let’s go to bed,” I said. “This floor’s too much like the gravel pit.”
For him, the bed was a mile away. I held him and stroked him as he quivered and quaked against me. Afterward, we lay completely still, warmed by each other, mindlessly one.
; In a kind of pained dream-like soliloquy, he said, “Wild, wild, wild, hungry, to give and receive so much, to be aware of loneliness, to be so needy, to feel such warmTh, to be so… afraid.”
Grandfather Humphry Murphy, c. 1890, stole Annie’s grandmother’s heart.
Grandmother Murphy and Annie’s father, John, at age two.
Annie’s mother, Hannah, with Annie’s brothers, Johnny (left), four years old, and Peter (right), three years old.
Annie in her youth.
Eamonn Casey at his graduation from Maynooth Seminary class, 1947.
Red Cliff House—the Bishop’s house at Inch, where Eamonn took Annie the day she arrived from America.
The beach at Inch, where Eamonn and Annie walked together.
St. Mary’s, the Bishop’s cathedral in Killarney.
The Bishop’s palace at Killarney.
Annie and Peter.
Eamonn Casey (far right) with Pope John Paul II (center) and Cardinal Tomas O’Fiaich (far left) in 1979 in Knock, Ireland. (The Irish Times)
Peter in childhood.
Annie’s parents off to Europe from the United States, June 1972.
Eamonn wearing Bishop’s miter, c. 1980. (The Irish Times)
Progression of the house that Annie and Arthur bought and rebuilt.
Nine-year-old Peter with Grandma Hannah Murphy.
Annie and Peter.
Eamonn singing with other children, c. 1985. (The Irish Times)
Eamonn giving a speech on Central American issues, c. 1983. (The Irish Times)
Annie today.
I stood up and held out my hand. He took it and I led him to the bed, helped him get in, and climbed in next to him.
“I really love you, Annie, but I’m scared.” I touched his lips to show I did not like that last word.
“I feel as if I have been taken over by a force I can’t master.”
“Talk about it,” I said.
He told me how he was recently at an important meeting—millions of pounds of European Community grants at stake: “And, boom, Annie, you come into my mind. Suddenly, someone coughs—‘Bishop’—and I come to, unaware of anything said for perhaps five minutes. And, Annie —”
I felt honored. “Yes?”
“Even at Mass, I think of you.” He was lost, muttering something about even Judas had the decency not to turn up on Calvary.
I was the last to make up his mind for him. As soon ask a sheep the way to the slaughterhouse. But my reluctance to speak was due only to my profound respect. I loved him but I could not tell him whether he should love me or not. I could not take responsibility for him giving up a lifelong calling however unsuited to it he was. I could not tell him that he had only to change his thoughts, and his love for me would seem a sign not of weakness but of strength.
My role was to support him in whatever he decided to do. Even to say “Send me away, Eamonn, and I’ll go” would be to apply the wrong sort of pressure. My silence devastated him. He blamed me for not providing an answer that only he could give. Did he want me to change water into wine by giving him back his innocence?
In years to come, I might regret my silence. I could have said that what we had done had made his life as a cleric impossible, especially if I was carrying his child. I could have begged him to swallow his pride and choose one of several alternatives. I could have come right out with “Eamonn, you might be celibate but you cannot be chaste; not because you are weak but because you were abused as a child by the imposition of a mistaken piety.”
I had still to ask myself the most difficult questions.
Suppose he came away with me—would we be happy, as happy, I mean, as we had been at Inch?
Could I bear to see him stripped of his titles and banished from his Cathedral, see him exchange his bishop’s robes for a collar and tie and executive suit?
Could I bear to see him lose the respect due him as a priest from his father, friends, the public at large?
Above all, could I bear to see him abandon his special role as provider for the hungry in distant lands?
Our life together had so far taken place in a world of ambiguity and make-believe. That had made it dangerous and almost mystical. Could we bear the humdrum nine-to-five job, the commuting, the heavily mortgaged house in suburbia, the quiet nights in front of the television—after we had lived inside a magic bubble?
What if our love was beautiful precisely because it was destined not to last? Oh, God, what if he left the priesthood and came away with me and, when the dream within a dream dissolved, we awoke to unreality and found ourselves strangers? “Who am I? Who are you?”
Having refused his offer to speak, from then on I was at Eamonn’s mercy. But if I could not rely on that, what point was there in living anyway? For an hour or more we lay side by side, holding hands, not speaking a word, in dread.
While he fixed us a meal, I went into my bedroom to unpack my few things. I opened the curtains to let in the pure rays of the cloud-peeled moon. I saw in silhouette the mountains, their peaks like motionless horsemen; I heard waves pound the shore. How good to look at and listen to timeless things. How many sorrows felt to be unendurable had happened here at Inch under the watchful eyes of those mountains, against the soothing sounds of that sea, and all their pain had passed?
I played Eamonn the Chieftains’ tape, “Playboy of the Western World,” after which we slept in his bed and woke up about two. He fetched himself a brandy and a cup of tea for me. Eamonn the vulnerable turned into Eamonn the suspicious.
I had not told him I had used Bridget as my confessor but he was afraid that if she became my flatmate, she might wonder what he was doing on his visits. “She’s as tough as old boots, Annie. An old thirty. And you could not fart, excuse me, without her knowing. Even if you did it silently she would see your skirt move that fraction of an inch.”
He told me not to drink too much with her around, and I assured him I had given that up.
“Has she a boyfriend?”
I told him the name and the fact that he was a hurling player and also the security officer at the Burlington.
“An ex-cop,” I said. “A detective. He drinks.”
“God Almighty, Annie, I’ll check him out. That flat’s been leased in my name. It could become a gin hall.”
He rubbed his head and his stomach.
“You don’t seem to realize, Annie, your beauty would shame a rose and you are very, very sexy. You could be raped.”
“Thanks for the kind word.”
He also feared Bridget might persuade me to date. “If you did meet somebody else,” he said, in a mournful tone, “you mustn’t consider me.”
“Of course not, Eamonn.”
He instantly demanded, “Of course not, what?”
His jealousy irritated me. I was even faithful to my favorite pair of jeans. I wore them practically till disgrace did us part. Could I discard my perfect love in favor of another? I said, “You fear for me in wicked Dublin? That’s rich coming from the Playboy of the Western World.”
“Who? Me?” he gasped. “What do you mean?”
“I mean your new Lancia and you wearing devilish red tights and misbehaving in a Dublin gravel pit so even the cops have to flush you out.”
“Don’t joke me, Annie. Bridget living in the flat could be far more dangerous than what happened in the gravel pit.” He calmed his fears with a second helping of lovemaking.
Next morning, he left at nine, saying he would not be back till midnight.
I spent the day in a restless mood. I went out onto the lawn. Season of frugal beauty. A day of whitewashed skies and heavy-lidded sunshine, the light brassy where the sun should have been. A needlepointed wind pricked my cheeks. Somewhere, a dog barked. From a far-off gully, rain headed my way like a swarm of flies.
Nothing, not even the sere grass, the trees antlered by the fall, the last shabby rose, looked real. Low over the white blossom of the sea, a guillemot and her young chick were flying happily together
when a great black-backed gull appeared and attacked the chick. The mother made frantic efforts to act as a decoy, and when that failed, she tried to beat him off with her wings. The gull swooped and swooped, forcing the chick to dip ever lower toward the sea. It was an unfair contest, but I did not see its resolution because all three birds disappeared around the headland.
That day and for many days after, I kept seeing the mother bird instinctively trying to protect her babe, her joy, her future, from the vicious black-backed gull.
Once more, the certainty came to me that I had a second life to guard. I had noticed in my first pregnancy the change of smell in my urine, this acceleration of all my bodily processes, this salmon-leap of my pulse.
I went indoors for one of Mary’s Valium. At the same time, I went through her small library for a book to help me pass the time. I settled on The Betsy by Harold Robbins. I laughed at the impossible sexy passages.
Becoming bored, I walked the lawn in the grape-bloom light of dusk. A wind rose suddenly, fallen leaves turned into butterflies.
Back indoors, I watched TV while drinking endless cups of tea. I was all edges. Through the window I saw the rise of a sunburned moon and from the west clouds were on the march. A wind rose with the force of a sea, first going puh-puh-puh like gas igniting before banging brassy knuckles on every inch of the house. I ran to meet Eamonn when his car came up the drive. The front door fairly hurtled against me as I opened it.
He was tired and distant. So was I, for I sensed the impending conflict between us over our child. The child, the proof of our oneness, was threatening to prise us apart. The storm mirrored this. Its scattering effect only jerked us like stretched elastic suddenly released into one another’s arms. At the moment we were losing each other we were closest of all.