Forbidden Fruit (48 page)

To evade prying eyes, we left Fanton Hill at the ungodly hour of one in the morning. Arthur and Stan were in the truck, Mary
was driving Stan’s car, while Peter and I headed the convoy in ours. I had the cash in my shoes. Driving on money helped me
feel secure. Also, hearing the river run over the rocks after spring rains gave me the first hint of hope.

As I made the turn out of Weston into Westport and onto the throughway, I handed Peter a book of maps. “How’d you like to
see the whales in Seattle, Washington?”

“Great, Mom.”

“I’d like to live in Seattle. On the way there we’ll see some wonderful sights.” We took Exit 14 through South Norwalk, past
the housing projects. Slanting buildings with bars on every window, men in rags asleep on park benches with newspapers for
bedding, litter scuttling like mice in the night breeze—poverty is the cruelest of all prisons. I would fight to the death
to keep my son from that sort of jail.

Saying good-bye to Mary and Stan, we drove through the night. Beyond Philadelphia, we started our quest for stability but
never found it. We chose cheap motels, which depressed us. We passed ghettos, like the one on the south side of Chicago, that
made their counterpart in Norwalk seem like paradise. And in between the dirt and devastation, we saw scenes of awesome beauty.

Arthur wanted us to settle in Vancouver. Unfortunately, such was the price of property, even to rent was beyond our slender
means and job opportunities for people with our skills did not exist.

I called McKay and he brought me up to date. Hearing nothing from Listowel by his deadline, on May 11 he had faxed Pierse
again, saying, “I shall assume that your client, Bishop Casey, has no interest in resolving this matter in a private forum
and shall so instruct my client. I am sorry that Bishop Casey saw fit not to take advantage of this opportunity.”

Pierse had replied that Eamonn was dealing with the matter himself. “Wait for the good news,” McKay told me cheerily. “The
Bishop finally phoned to say he’s coming to New York on June fifteenth or twenty-first. He wants to see you.”

To see me? After all those years? I was so flustered I did not know how to respond.

I disliked the delay in settling but since we had come so far and had time to spare until that meeting, we drove down the
West Coast to California and then eastward through the blazing South. Arthur even took Peter to Disneyland as a diversion.

The worst moment of all was near the end at Newark, New Jersey. We pulled into a truck stop with a McDonald’s on site. The
parking area was full of ancient cars crammed with adults and children sleeping. They were transients, one step away from
the sidewalks of some street without a name. Filled with terror at a fate that could so easily be ours, I jumped back into
the car, causing Peter to wake up.

Yawning, he got out and walked along the line of cars. Moments later: “Mom, people live in those things. They’ve got pillows,
blankets, paper plates. They homeless, Mom?”

“Yes,” I said.

“Are we?”

I made a big display of showing him the money we had left. “Homeless? Us? Never. Look”—I pointed—“the New York skyline.”

“Forget that,” Peter said, with the sudden leap of a near-sixteen-year-old into manhood. “I’ll make Eamonn pay up.”

“Sure,” I said, “but let’s do it peacefully, eh?”

“I don’t know about that,” he said, with a fierce look in his eyes.

A
FTER EAMONN DELAYED HIS TRIP to the United States, James J. Kelly, a friend of Eamonn’s from his hometown of Adare in Ireland,
finally fixed a meeting with Eamonn for July 15. Kelly, a Brooklyn priest, was also an attorney at law.

Peter insisted on coming with me to McKay’s office. “I want to sit across the room from him, Mom. He doesn’t have to talk
to me, but I tell you he’s gonna have to look me straight in the eye.”

“Are you sure you —?”

“I need to know who this guy is and who I am. He denied me to Arthur, if he denies me to my face, well —”

I admired him. He was fearless, like his father. But since he had not been brought up a Catholic, I tried to explain to him
the problems from Eamonn’s point of view. As a priest, he was not supposed to have relationships with women or father children.
It was hard for him to admit that he had been untrue to his vows.

From Connecticut where we were staying with Mary, we drove into the city early on a sunny afternoon. At the Paramount Building,
I left Peter in charge of McKay’s young assistant, Richard. In the lobby was a white-haired priest, probably Eamonn’s chaperon.
I had guessed, correctly, that Eamonn had arrived early. I told Richard I refused to see Eamonn. This was strictly business.
Besides, with Eamonn unwilling to acknowledge his son and accusing me before Arthur of sleeping with any number of men, I
might say something I would regret.

The truth was I was scared of what I might see or not see if I looked into his eyes.

Before long, Peter came down to the lobby, pale and dazed.

“To think I waited sixteen years for
that
.”

I was sad for Eamonn that he found it impossible to speak with his own son, a boy who should have evoked pride in him. I was
sadder still for Peter. He had pinned his hopes on this long-delayed encounter. As we went out for a bite to eat, he babbled
on.

“I really wanted to get to know him, Mom, but he wouldn’t let me in. It was like talking with a stranger. A butcher or a mailman
meeting me for the first time would have been friendlier.”

“How long did he give you?”

“Four minutes.”

It was the length of an average confession.

“I was a mistake, Mom, wasn’t I?”

McKay, he said, had hidden him in his library until he had finished his business with Eamonn, then he introduced him as “Peter
Murphy.” Eamonn was too surprised to decline to meet him. As McKay prepared to leave, Eamonn shook Peter’s hand. There was
no embrace, though he had not seen his son since he was a baby.

I said to Peter, “Didn’t he say
anything
?”

“He asked me what I wanted to do with my life. He told me he prayed for me twice a day. Then good-bye.”

“That was it?”

Peter nodded. His hurt was slowly turning to hostility. “What did you ever see in him, Mom? He lacks the basic decencies.”
He screwed his face up. “I intend to nail that bastard to the wall.”

It was with redoubled fury that I went back to McKay’s office after lunch.

McKay came from a theatrical family. His meeting with Eamonn, he told me, was the most intriguing in his career since he represented
George Wallace, the governor of Alabama, in a libel suit.

Eamonn came alone into his office, dressed in full clericals. Maybe he thought that a “McKay”—good Irish name—would be
intimidated by the trappings of power. After all, Richard, a practicing Catholic, had stooped to kiss his ring.

“Eamonn really does have an aura about him,” McKay said. “In seeing him, you sense the power of the Church he represents.”

McKay had thanked him for coming. Then: “Bishop, we have a problem, sir.”

“Yes, Peter, we do. What will it cost?”

When McKay told him $125,000 in total, he seemed to sigh inwardly with relief and they shook hands on it.

“It was all over in one minute, Annie. I could have got you up to half a million!”

I said, “I only wanted enough to provide for my son.”

He sympathized with me for the curt way Peter had been treated. “When Peter left the room,” McKay said, “I went back in. The
Bishop seemed quite indifferent to the boy. All he wanted was for Peter to sign a paper to the effect that now all his paternal
responsibilities ceased.”

“Never!” I gasped.

McKay nodded. “I pointed out that this was
your
settlement, Annie. For damages caused over the years to you, your health, your life. I told him why you felt you could never
marry again. If you sign, I promised Eamonn, you will no longer be able to sue.”

“And Peter?”

“I said, he can’t sign because he’s under age. There’s no question of him giving up his rights to paternal maintenance. For
that we’d need a guardian in the court system. We’d have to disclose the reason for the guardian to the court.”

“What did he say to that?”

“Keep it private.”

“As always,” I said.

“For me,” McKay mused, “the most perplexing thing is the Bishop’s blind spot. He still doesn’t see that his only danger comes
from Peter.”

On July 25, 1900, the promised money was paid to me by McKay after receipt of a check from Father Kelly. I signed a paper
releasing Eamonn from all responsibility toward me.

But, as McKay had seen so clearly, some stubborn streak in Eamonn prevented him from taking the boy seriously.

Keen to try and make a new life in the old world, on July 29, 1990, just before the Gulf War, we flew on a Kuwaiti 747 to
London, England. From there, we took the train to Arthur’s old city of Edinburgh. I had only one month to try to settle Peter
in a school for the next academic year.

Unfortunately, it soon became clear that the minimum cost of a decent house was £50,000, which was beyond our means. Moreover,
in that part of Scotland, neither Arthur nor I had any job prospects.

McKay had warned me that in my desire not to ask Eamonn for too much I had asked for too little.

We swiftly toured Scotland, a kind of consolation prize to Peter. Then, not wanting to squander our money, we took the train
to Holyhead in Wales, whence we caught the ferry to Ireland. Since Ireland was a poor country, the housing situation was bound
to be better there.

On the boat, Peter came down with food poisoning. He was so ill, I went up on deck and facing west cursed this bitch called
Ireland that was once more blighting my hopes. Someone must have heard. Peter recovered after a couple of days in St. Michael’s
Hospital, four blocks from the ferry. The nuns and doctors were the most caring people I had ever met.

After trying several places on the east coast, we settled on the southern town of Kinsale, County Cork. It has a fine harbor
on the Atlantic. But properties here were expensive, too. In the end, we paid £32,000 for a rather plain two-bedroom cottage
a couple of miles out of town. It came with a nice piece of tree-lined land overlooking rolling hills and the wide Bandon
River. There was plenty of scope for development.

On the Friday morning, we enrolled Peter in the local Catholic school of Our Lady of the Rosary. We chose it because of its
high academic standards. Peter was horrified at the thought of nuns, uniforms, church, but I told him he would have to put
up with that if he wanted to go to the university. There was also something shrewd and honest about Sister Mary, the head
of the school, that made me trust her instantly.

That same afternoon, we rented a car, threw some luggage in the back, and headed for Kerry. How good it was to go back to
Killarney. It had kept the flavor of a market town. As we approached the Great Southern Hotel, Arthur opted to stay there
overnight. “No,” I said, “we’re driving to Inch,” and Peter backed me.

Arthur suspected I was reliving my times with Eamonn. He did not want me retreating again into what he called a fantasy world.
Yet he knew I had to return to Inch for the boy’s sake, to help him find out who he was and the strange circumstances that
had brought him into being.

On the way, I noticed many new whitewashed bungalows with red-tiled roofs. Intruders. Opening the car window, I smelled the
sea of fifteen summers past. The hills rose to mountain heights and there—at last, at last—was the Inch strand jutting
out into the gray Atlantic with its grass-covered dunes and ocean roar.

I turned into the parking lot and braked. Without a word, without thinking, I leaped out of the car and ran.

“Hey, Mom, where’re you —?”

I did not stop running till I kicked my shoes off and ran, sparrow-splashing, into the surf and gazed toward the glistering
west. I was hungry to be by myself. I wanted all to myself the waves, the blue-white sky, the purple-streaked sun setting
in oranges and pinks.

Peter was a stranger beside me, clutching my arm, saying, with wonder, “I never saw you move like that before, Mom. You looked
on fire.”

Arthur, the stranger’s friend, said, only half mockingly, “She thought Eamonn was calling her from the sea.”

“Be quiet,” I said, “and look at the sea and the sky.” But I was really looking at yesterday.

In a meltdown of the years, it all came back to me. How hand-in-hand, under a clean white moon, we walked these sands and
listened to the precise slow rhyming of this sea. Nights I remembered, oh, such long sweet nights when we made love. Time
had passed slowly since then, but my love had not waned; it had throbbed however painfully in the long dull hours between
the seconds of my life.

Arthur, trying gallantly to understand, said, “I’m really pleased you’re sharing with Peter the part of his life denied him
till now.”

“Thank you,” I murmured, still gazing out toward the sun-lipped sea in which Eamonn and I had bathed together.

“I think,” he went on, “you were running to meet
him
.”

I nodded.

Slowly, achingly, he said: “I swear to God, Annie, if I had it in my power to make him appear this minute so all three of
you could go down this beautiful beach together, I’d walk away without a sound.”

I gripped his arm in gratitude.

“But he’s not here, Annie. He hasn’t been around you for years. And I have.” Heart-cut, he released my arm as if to let me
go.

Poor Arthur. He did not seem to know that true love never dies, is never replaced by any other.

With the noble grief of his words, the year turned to 1990. I looked landward. Above the path was the hotel, vacant, boarded
up, its yellow-white paint peeling, half covered by time and drifting sand. There was a beach shop, deserted, on whose gabled
end was a fading inscription: “Dear Inch, must I leave you? / I have promises to keep / Perhaps miles to go to my last sleep.”