Forbidden Fruit (30 page)

One weekend about this time, Eamonn took his pleasure, as was now normal, by rubbing up against me. By then, if he had tried
to enter me, the child, whom in my mind I had christened Thumper, would have kicked him out of me.

* * *

Thumper made it plain he liked the sun and long walks. I told him, “My first child died because I didn’t love it. But you
won’t die for lack of love.”

People used to eye me oddly when I was in Stephen’s Green or walking through the city toward the Rotunda. I kept rubbing my
tummy telling Thumper what a beautiful day it was, which were the boy and girl ducks, where we were headed.

Thumper was also possessive; he did not like Eamonn near me. Eamonn felt supplanted. From the womb, I felt the enmity between
the two of them.

It was time for a bit more honesty. I told Eamonn that I was being cared for at the Rotunda.

“I thought,” he said, “you were going to the Coombe.”

“Did
I
say that?”

“No.”

“Did
you
?”

“No, but I took it for granted.”

“Why?” I asked innocently.

“Have it your way,” he said, in a tone that suggested it would not be for long.

He asked if Bridget had decided to marry Wentworth.

“She’s keeping an open mind on that,” I said.

“Maybe she should give up her baby, too.”

“She may.”

I ignored his assumption about what I would do with Thumper. Thus the attempt to communicate ended with the areas of deceit
widening like ripples on a lake. But he was now sure of two things. I had deceived him in the most maddening way, by my silence;
and he had lost time and some of the high ground.

The enmity between two people who loved each other was coming more and more into the open. The pain of knowing your dearest
friend and fiercest foe are one is indescribable. We both realized that the sincerest, most passionate kiss could be followed
by one of betrayal. It was like eating blindly a bowl of strawberries, one delicious, the next rotten to the core.

The contest was even now. Now, he, too, knew we were on a collision course.

One weekend in April, Eamonn came to the apartment. Seeing that sex was a problem for me, he said, heartbroken: “You don’t
need me anymore, Annie; maybe I should go.”

“
No
,” I assured him, “it’s got nothing to do with
us
.”

He felt ousted all the same and very jealous.

“Tell me honestly, do I disgust you?” Seeing he was ready for a final good-bye for all the wrong reasons, I grabbed him and
shook my head miserably at his lack of understanding.

He had no cause to be hurt. People need each other at different times in different ways. If only he had men friends at work
or in the pub who could explain things to him and help him cope with this new but quite normal situation. He had learned the
great pleasure of giving pleasure. It was hard for him to grasp that, at this stage of my pregnancy, I needed a comforting
presence as much as I once needed sexual love to prove to me my worth. But he saw no role for himself except as my religious
counselor.

I said again I was scared an orgasm might dislodge my baby.

“ ‘Tis the baby making the commandments now, is that so? No, ‘tis
you
who do not want
me
.”

He came to bed with me and I allowed him to enter me, but I wanted no physical arousal. I was there only for him, and he seemed
content with that.

A crisis occurred one weekend. Before coming to my room, Eamonn visited Bridget, who was still unwell. He told her he was
praying for her all the time. Maybe this genuine concern led Bridget to say that we were being counseled at the Rotunda by
a Sister Eileen.

“Good,” was his first reaction. A nun was surely a tool in his hands. “What is she telling you to do, then?”

“She doesn’t tell anyone what to do,” Bridget said. “She just helps us make up our own minds about whether to keep our babies
or not.”

“Is that so?”

He said no more, but I could see the wheels spinning in his head.

I
PHONED MARY, NEWLY DIVORCED, and told her the news. She called me a moron for being banged by a bishop.

“Is the guy giving you money?… No? You under a specialist?…
What
, after you already had one disgusting miscarriage? Okay, where’re you booked in for the delivery?… You’re kidding. The stingy
bastard. His baby’s going to be born in a public hospital.… I know, Annie, where Jesus was born, but He came to have bricks
thrown at Him, didn’t He? But a bishop’s baby, Chu-rist.”

She had too many troubles of her own to want me on her doorstep. That was why she, like Eamonn, pressed for adoption. “I’ll
send you some of my maternity clothes, Annie.”

“No need. I’m still wearing jeans and blouses.”

“At over five months? You stopped eating or something?”

A few weeks later, when Eamonn came to the apartment, I had suddenly blossomed into the tree of life. I was wearing a tied
skirt and pretty maternity blouse.

Seeing my roundness, his eyes lit up as of old. “Let me see,” and he lifted my skirt up. “Take it off, Annie, please, and
your panties.”

I did so, watching his face, as I showed him wonders in return for the wonders he had shown me. With eyes twitching, he preached
eloquently, breathlessly on the size, beauty, glossiness of my gold-hued tight-as-a-plumskin belly. With trembly hands, he
warmed this great globe of flesh as though it were a full brandy glass before tenderly kissing it.

“Off with your blouse, Annie.”

I unfastened my blouse and bra and let them fall to the ground, so I stood naked and statuesque before the Bishop like the
original earth-mother in the first of all springtimes.

“So rich you are,” he gasped. “So round.” He marveled at the nipples’ big chestnut-colored areoles, kissed each mellowing
breast, then knelt adoringly before me shaping the roundness of my belly with a sculptor’s hands, feeling, wide-eyed and open-mouthed,
the kicking from within.

“A dancer like his father,” I said. I stood looking down on him, mesmerized by his reverence for me and for the awesome changes
that had come over me.

Now that he had felt with his own hands, seen with his own eyes what he had done, witnessed this close the golden harvest
of our love, would it make a difference? Would he, in spite of that clerical garb, want to share for a lifetime the child
our love had brought into being?

The answer came sooner than I expected. His joy turned to puzzlement, to sadness.

I shook involuntarily as, still kneeling, he leaned a hard head against me. His pectoral cross pressed into my bare flesh.
Too near my child.

“What are you thinking, Eamonn?”

He held me tighter, his alien cross digging deeper, as he answered in a voice muffled by my belly, “Since I loved you, I feel
I love God more than I ever did.”

“Oh, yes, yes. Why should that make you sad?”

He lifted misty eyes to me. “Because I feel He loves me less.”

“But He must love you more the more you love Him, surely?”

He shook his head. “Sometimes, I feel He is ready to hurl me into hell.”

The anguish with which he said it tore at me. “How could He, Eamonn, if you love Him more than ever?”

It was a conundrum to which he had no answer.

“Even if you did wrong, Eamonn, surely God will forgive you over and over?”

He rubbed his hands fondly, almost nostalgically, over my breasts but made no answer.

Catholics are always talking about God’s forgiveness but they really think they are far more forgiving than He is. They never
trust Him because He is the God of Law not Love; He has to punish all lawbreakers. My own view is that God, like a loving
parent, has to forgive everyone everything because He is so helplessly good.

As Eamonn once more stroked my belly, I soothed his troubled head. Poor Eamonn, he had talked about sins of the flesh for
year after year yet he did not know what the flesh was till I taught him. One hand fondled my breast and he, who had heard
everything, knew he knew nothing. In my arms came the sudden terrible shock of recognition.

Till then, the flesh had only been an idea, which is precisely what it is not. The flesh is the means of merging and becoming
one with another, with the world, beyond all thought and imaginings, beyond all sense and consequence. Lovers, entwined, lost
in one another’s arms, experience in flesh the dark night of thought. To love is to die in the sweetest way in order to live
anew. But my tragedy was, in teaching him about the flesh, I had unwittingly, unwantingly, made him aware, too keenly, of
sin. The more he loved me, the more he despised and feared for himself.

With the same quiet inevitability with which other people accept death, Catholics deny it; they are from conception made for
immortality. And I, through a love that should have banished fear, had made Eamonn fear perhaps for the first time in his
life that he was headed toward immortal loss.

If he felt a failure for not making me more religious, I felt equally a failure for not weaning him from his barbaric, punitive
God.

“Annie,” he said, at length, “you can’t go on working in Dublin. You must take good care of yourself.”

So it was that I reluctantly gave up my job and my freedom. He drove me under cover of darkness to Inch.

At eleven o’clock, when we were a few miles from the house, the Mercedes suddenly stopped. He had run out of gas.

He banged the steering wheel.

“This has never happened to me before, Annie.”

His religion made it necessary for him to blame somebody even for accidents and his own mistakes.

“I apologize,” I said. “I should have checked the oil and the tires.”

“Take those big earrings off,” he barked. “And why wear a skimpy pink dress that barely covers your knees?”

The dress had simply risen up my bulging belly.

“I’ve got to get petrol, got to.”

He was going as crazy as in the gravel pit when the cops were around. He hated the idea of a breakdown while he had a pregnant
young woman in his official car.

“You want me to get in the trunk?”

“Not in your condition.”

The look on his face made me laugh.

“You have no idea, Annie, how very, very serious this is.” Cold rain was falling, and he turned to the backseat, only to find
he had forgotten to bring his mackintosh.

“Flag a car down,” I said.

He pushed his head up close to mine and hissed, “No cars around. Even if there were, the Bishop of Kerry cannot thumb a lift
for himself and a pregnant woman on a dark night.”

“It’ll be worse if you wait for the light of day.”

“ ’Tis true. The two of us will be one dead frozen lump.”

“The three of us,” I reminded him.

About fifty yards ahead there was a light in the porch of a house. He jumped out and started trotting toward it.

I shouted after him, “I hope they don’t have a couple of Dobermans.”

In the car’s headlights, I saw him raise his fists to heaven.

Seconds later, he was tapping on the window of the house and calling out, “Hello, hello, hello.”

A minute later, he was back complaining that they hadn’t answered because they were Protestants.

“Protestants? Just because they don’t answer you?”

“I know them.”

“Okay, I’ll go.”

“God Almighty, no,” he squawked. “The curtain in an upstairs room moved. They recognized me.”

He returned down the road, tapping and then banging fiercely on the door. “Please,” he kept calling out, like a dog whining
for a bone. “Plea-ease.”

After fully ten minutes, an outside light went on.

I cordially thanked Eamonn’s God. Pathos had paid off.

A minute later, the light went out. Eamonn came back to the car, chicken-shaking the rain off his shoulders and muttering
hysterically, “Didn’t I tell you those Protestants knew it was me, me, me? And they have the fecking nerve to call themselves
Christians!”

“Please, plea-ease,” I whined, mimicking him, which only offended him more.

“I am not giving up,” he said, grittily. “I swear to God I’d sooner knock that door down.”

With a snort, he went back and the resulting knocks were thunderous in the quiet country air.

Someone came from around the back of the house shining a torch. I heard Eamonn asking for petrol as an emergency. Whenever
he wanted anything, it was an emergency.

He came back with a can of petrol.

“There,” I said, “those Protestants are Christians, after all.”

“That was Paddy, their only Catholic hand.”

We both laughed and were still laughing when we arrived at Inch only five minutes later. He ran at once for his brandy and
came to my room. He was stroking the glass and, in his mind, maybe—no, certainly—me.

April’s end. I watch and wait without envy. Most calming, hopeful, delicate of days. Mountains try to levitate. The swallow
arrives, not yet the rose. Life-burst of budding and beading, lambing and sparrow-cheeping. Everything trickling and softening;
everywhere, out of mold and bark and fiber, the scents of spring. In air liquefied by a still apprenticed sun, forsythias
have yellowed again, trees are retenanted with feathery leaves and leaf-like feathers. Old twigs into new nests, a yeasty
year-round life-lasting spring since I came to Ireland. I had loved Eamonn for a whole opulent unforgettable year.

At Inch, a new cycle was about to begin, but how different from the first.

Eamonn was excited; he seemed proud of my condition. The first three weeks that we were alone were bliss. When the weather
allowed, we trod the blustery beach at night. Afterward, we had sex but I, still ripening, had overcome the need to climax.
I rested, relaxed and rosy-cheeked, in voracious arms, feeling to the full his vagabonding hands.

But once when we walked on the sands he alarmed me. “Annie, that Arab who bit your ear —”

“He never came near me, Eamonn. No one did.”

“You are sure?” No apology, only a repeat of the question.
My God
, I thought,
be is beginning to believe his own lies, the ones he tells people like Pat and Father O’Keeffe. To salve bis conscience he
makes me out to be a whore
.