Forbidden Fruit by Annie Murphy, Peter de Rosa Read Free Book Online

door, he said, looking pleased with me, with himself:
    “Thank you for opening your heart to me. That took courage.”
    I went to bed, but my mind was racing so I could not sleep.
    What was he thinking? He looked on himself as a great healer, and what healer could ever resist the temptation to raise the
     dead? I did so need his healing hand.
    I heard him as before saying his breviary, walking up and down, past the Stations of the Cross. He reminded me of the tide
     ebbing and flowing.
    Forty or so minutes later, he must have seen my light was still on—the lamp deliberately directed to the door—for he knocked
     gently, put his head inside, saw me sitting up in bed in my nightdress.
    “Good night, Annie, and God bless you.”
    He said it so kindly, with such generosity, that the whole of me felt humbled and warmed.

Chapter Five
    N EXT MORNING, I AWOKE LATE. I showered. A woman showered. I dressed. A woman alive for the first time to feelings of hope,
     dressed. I put on my face. To the mirror: Hello, stranger.
    Mary heard me moving about my room. She had my breakfast prepared. The Bishop, she said, had gone off to Killarney as usual.
     Mary, it was plain, never spoke about the Bishop’s private matters. She was completely loyal.
    Or was she?
    It struck me that Eamonn had not waked me because he did not want me around. He needed time and leisure to ponder what I had
     told him the night before. I hoped so.
    Mary had set out my breakfast in the kitchen. Looking at the clock, she switched on an old radio. Out of it came nothing but
     the sound of many bongs.
Bong-bong-bong
. It was the Angelus. Mary made the sign of the cross and her lips moved in prayer.
    I came from a country where there was a strict separation of Church and State, and here was a national radio network putting
     out the prayer of a particular religion. It made the job of men like Eamonn that much easier. No wonder they were so powerful.
    After breakfast, Mary offered to take me with her to shop. She drove me in her tiny Volkswagen twenty miles to Killorglin.
     We first traveled east, past fields of golden gorse, with the Slieve Mish mountains on our left and Castlemaine Harbor on
     our right. Then we turned south on the Ring of Kerry, where giant rhododendron and fuchsia bushes were in bud.
    First I had tasted strange air, tea, bread, and now a strange town. Killorglin, on the River Laune, was set on a hill so steep
     you needed a ski lift to get up it. Everything and all the people in it seemed wild.
    They were so relaxed you got the impression they had nowhere of importance to go to. Even the postman, with a packed bag on
     his shoulder, gazed in every shop window as if he were out on a stroll to see his pals and had arrived two hours early. He
     stopped on the bridge to see if the trout were biting that day or were just up for air and wanting a chat.
    We went into the butcher’s shop. He was a big man with a red face and a bent knee of a nose with nostrils like a horse. All
     the time he was laughing and gesturing and wielding a bloody cleaver as though he were Oliver Cromwell.
    He followed Mary out to the car and heaved in, off a bloodied shoulder, what looked like half a cow. He threw it in the backseat,
     without any wrapping, touched his forelock, laughed raucously again, and, brushing his meaty hands, went back to his shop.
     Used as I was to the neat expensive packaging of New York, this was quite an experience.
    Killorglin, Mary told me, was a “pagan place.” They held a three-day Puck Fair there every summer. The maidens of the town,
     and there were still some in Ireland in those days, competed for the affections of the Goat, a monstrous horned creature.
     The luckiest of them became his August bride.
    In midafternoon Mary dropped me off on Inch strand, while she took the meat to the Palace in Killarney where she kept a couple
     of freezers full of food for when Eamonn entertained. The beach was deserted. It suited me to walk, squired by