Forbidden Fruit (33 page)

I phoned Eamonn from the General Post Office to tell him the good news and mailed him my letter. He came up at once to congratulate
Bridget. “Tell me, Bridget,” he said, “are you going to get married or not?”

Heavens, I thought, he’s still trying to organize people’s lives. Why can’t he stick to sorting out his own mess? Then it
occurred to me: maybe he was, maybe that was the real reason he was visiting the Rotunda.

Three days later, I got a desperate call from Bridget.

“Murphy, my baby’s dying.”

Catherine had contracted gastroenteritis. Bridget wanted my help to get the baby into a private clinic.

I went to see her and gave her most of my freedom in the form of a hundred pounds.

The baby was admitted to a clinic in the north of Dublin. It took two buses to get me and Bridget there and the sight of so
many sick babies made me feel very unwell.

Catherine looked extremely sick and close to death. On July 30, we visited her a second time. Bridget was very happy because
her baby was expected to live.

Of the two of us, I was now the weaker. We had to wait for ages for a bus. When it came, I got on and immediately got off
because it was full of handicapped children on an outing. It was too much like a premonition.

Nothing for it but to walk miles back to town. That day was one of the most uncomfortable of my entire life.

When I finally reached the Devlins’, my mother phoned. “I was expecting you to call, Annie. Did you forget it was my birthday?”

“Of course not,” I lied.

Daddy came on the line. “I just feel there’s something wrong.”

“No. What gave you that idea?”

What are families for if you can’t lie to them when you need to?

Mommy grabbed the phone again and, in a hiccupy howl: “Are mothers so unimportant nowadays? You’ll be a mother yourself someday,
then you’ll know what it’s like not to get a card on your birthday.”

A
T ABOUT ELEVEN THAT NIGHT, I was getting into bed when my waters broke. Till then, Thumper had scarcely stirred. I had been
told he was big and I was too little. Now these great jerks inside me. I tried to walk to the door but on the polished pine
floor the water was as slippery as oil. I was afraid I would fall and injure my baby, so I just stood there, calling, “Denis?
Somebody help me, please?”

I was happy and frightened, laughing and sobbing at the same time, but in control. Within ten minutes, I had been helped to
dress and Barbara drove me to the Rotunda. It must have been around midnight when I was taken on a stretcher straight to emergency.

“Get her chart. Y’hear, her chart!”

A concerned admissions nurse examined me. “Have you had a baby before, dear?”

“Yes. Stillborn at five months or so.”

She nodded. “That explains the dilation.” She patted my tummy. “This little mite won’t take long.”

A nurse came to shave me, another gave me an enema. I was put in a small overheated room with cubicles separated by curtains.
Next to me, a woman was about to have twins. I had cramps, but what she had to endure only her animal screams suggested.

Some people think God is a woman. They must be joking.

I told myself:
Mustn’t get frightened. Mustn’t scream. Mustn’t curse Eamonn. It’s not good for my baby
. To dull the pain, to block my ears to the cries of my fellow sufferer, I put myself into a kind of self-hypnosis. Having
recently read
Nicholas and Alexandra
, I went in spirit to the Crimea. I saw Yalta’s mountains with their feet in the water and cypresses with cones like little
bells. I inhaled scents of magnolia and wisteria vines. I walked the cool corridors of the Tsars’ shiny white Livadia Palace
beside the Black Sea.

It worked. In this soul-time, I heard no more screams, felt no more cramps. All I remember—this was three hours later —
was being wheeled to the delivery room. Not even the Crimea could anesthetize the pain of being knifed from within. I wanted
the nurses to leave me. I wanted to be alone like a cow calving in a field. Thumper seemed to sympathize with me, pushing
consistently. It was as if he knew when he wanted to come out, as if he already had a sense of himself.

Suddenly, at 2:30 in the morning, I was a mother and, with the pain gone, I saw my darling child. At seven pounds two ounces
and twenty-two inches long, Thumper was a string bean of a boy with dark hair, black gorgeous eyes, and a big birthmark on
his left knee. He was like Eamonn in every way.

They put him in my arms, and in that first instant I knew what millions of mothers before me had known: I would never give
him up. See, touch, feel, hold, and keep forever. They would have to cut me to bits before I gave up this vulnerable little
thing who was part of me.

Instantly, the hitherto anonymous Thumper had a name. “Hello, my Peter,” I whispered.

There this warm bundle lay for five minutes, mewing, scarcely moving. This miracle was all mine. Since I came to Ireland,
new smells, tastes, sights, colors, sounds, and now the newest keenest most overwhelming sense of all: motherhood.

A nurse showed me Peter’s feet were a bit webbed. Nothing serious, she said, smiling. Due to him being cramped in the womb.
She put some kind of instrument on them. “Just for a while,” she assured me.

They moved me to a room I shared with five other mothers, where, later, my son was brought to me clothed in a white fleecy
gown with a little collar. He was put in a crib at the foot of my bed.

A second nurse came and said, “I’ll have to take him away for a while. As you can see he’s a yellowy brown.” I hadn’t noticed.
All I could see was the beauty of him.

“A touch of jaundice, Annie. Get some rest. You’ll soon have him back.”

I couldn’t wait to be reunited with Peter for my heart was full of him. When they gave him back, the sense of miracle was
still upon me. This was a wonder that would never go away.

Hey, maybe God was a woman, after all.

I hugged him so tight the nurse had to warn me, “If you go to sleep with him like that you might smother him.”

I allowed him to be put back in his crib and then slept on and off for a few hours.

Around 2:30 that afternoon Eamonn appeared. I had asked the Devlins to telephone him when I went into the hospital, but I
had not expected him so soon. He scared me. Could I withstand the pressure he was bound to exert?

His shock on entering my room was even greater than mine at seeing him. I don’t think it had crossed his mind on his rush
across Ireland that there would be a crib at the foot of my bed, or that there would be a baby in it.

His eyes exploded with anger. Because the other mothers might hear, he said in a quiet, tense voice, “Why is
that
here?”

“Didn’t you get my letter?”

“Forget the letter.”

“
That
,” I said, “is a baby.”

“It should be in the nursery.”

Something in my subconscious stirred uneasily at the little word
it
. Eamonn did not even want to know if I had had a boy or a girl.

“That baby,” I retorted sharply, “is not an
it
but a
he. It
is a boy, Eamonn.”

His head jerked back.

“He’s my son,” I said, “your son, our son.”

Reality was coming even closer to him. Danger was taking an ever more definite shape. I gestured to the crib. “Say hello to
Peter.”

His problem even had a name. He blinked savagely as though a vulture not a stork had brought the baby. Maybe the word
Peter
, meaning “rock,” something not easily shifted or hidden away, troubled him.

He got up to draw the curtains around us and sat near me. “It—he—cannot stay here.”

“He
is
staying here. And, please, don’t raise your voice. He doesn’t like it.”

This big tough man who ordered people around had not the courage to look at his own son. Didn’t he want to know if he looked
like me, like him? Where was the human being in him that I had found, touched, loved? Did he believe that by not looking at
Peter, his dark little secret might go away?

“Look at him, Eamonn.”

He scraped his chair even closer to the bed. With a heavy emphasis: “You know… you cannot keep… this baby.”

I pursed my lips and shook my head inches away from his.

Firming his jaw, he said, “It is not yours to keep. You must give this baby up. You
must
.”

Mouth open to show my teeth, I shook my head again. “I am as likely to give up my son as the Virgin Mary.”

“
You
are no Virgin Mary.”

“And
you
,” I said, “are no Saint Joseph.”

With a tremulous lift of the voice, he said, “You’re not thinking right. You
will
give it up.”

I was saying to myself,
I lost one baby, Eamonn, don’t make me lose another
. I pushed the covers aside and, not trusting my legs now that he had unnerved me by his enmity, started to crawl to the end
of the bed.

“What’re you
doing
?”

“Picking him up so you can see him.”

“Don’t
do that
.”

As though I were kneeling on a mountain in Kerry, I gazed down upon this child in his crib, the fruit of our love.

“Look at him, Eamonn, he’s beautiful. He’s the most beautiful little baby. Hold him just for a minute.”

“No!” His horror sent a shiver through me. There was such a gulf between us. This child was everything to me and nothing to
him.

“At least look at him, for God’s sake.”

It hurts me to say it but, at that moment, I reckon he could have run Peter over like a lamb on the road and not cared. Had
he hated me I could have understood, but he hated our son.

“No!” he repeated. I couldn’t believe this. He was a priest, he called himself father, and he couldn’t rest his eyes on his
own son?

“You
look
at him,” I insisted, in a kind of wail. “If you don’t, I’ll cause a scene, I really will.”

Turning sideways on the bed to face him squarely, I said: “You may not hold him but, by God,
you will look at him
.”

There must have been something savage in my new mother-face that made him stand up and walk to the crib. Circling it with
those restless tap-dancing feet of his, he looked down while I searched his features. There must be some sentiment, some pride,
some fatherly affection there.

I saw only a skull.

After at most three seconds, he said, but not from the heart, “Yes, a beautiful child.”

He could not see the child for the sin.

I went back to bed and as he sat beside me I could read what he was about to say in those eyes I knew so well. “Stop it, Eamonn.”

“I will not. It must be adopted.”

His face brightened up insincerely. He smiled, but it looked wrong, like a green sun. “Afterward, you can come back to Inch
with me. We’ll go to Greece, London, wherever you like.”

I banged my forehead with my fists. “What will that do for
me
? I won’t have my baby anymore.”

He touched his heart, next to his pectoral cross, as if to say,
You’ll still have me
. I was always worried he wore a cross so close to his heart.

“After Greece, Eamonn?”

“You could stay in a convent for a year or so to recover.”

“Go into a crazy house to recover my sanity? Besides, nuns worship a different God from me.”

He wasn’t listening. “After you have recovered your peace of mind, you might like to work in an orphanage.”

“In a
what
? Give up my baby to strangers so I can look after other people’s children?”

“You would know how they feel.”

I felt at that moment that I was dealing with a lunatic. Or, rather, with a man who had worked that trick before. “No, no,
no, Eamonn,” I said. “I’d never even talk with you again. Whenever I saw you I’d be thinking, ‘This is the man who took my
baby from me.’ And I would hate you for that, and I really don’t want to hate you.”

He sighed deeply to show my words had no effect on him. It was like talking to someone for ages before you realize you are
alone in the room. But I tried. I had to. “If Peter’s adopted, Eamonn, I don’t know what’ll happen, because one day, I promise
you, one day I’ll turn on you.”

“You are threatening me?”—as if this was only a bishop’s prerogative.

“I’m just talking sense. We can’t have physical relations ever again.”

He shrugged as if to say,
Why not
?

“Because,” I went on, “we already have a child and I couldn’t have another with you. What the hell, are we going to keep on
having children which you keep forcing me to give up? Are we going to fill an orphanage?”

He was rubbing the sides of his face madly and scrubbing his head and scraping his chair on the floor. I pitied him, but I
could not spare him. I said, “This is horrible what you want me to do.”

“Not horrible—just the opposite.”

“Can’t you,” I cut in, “call me by my name just once?”

“The whole thing is God’s way of cleansing you… Annie.”

Poor Eamonn. What had religion done to him?

I asked, “Whose God are you talking about?”

That got through his pious defenses. He really didn’t believe there was any God but his, the One he had created out of nothing
and had a patent on. He spat out: “We both know you are not morally fit to keep that child.”

His mouth actually twisted as he said, “That child.”

“Who are
you
to tell me that? That came out where you went in.”

“How,” he said, waving my words aside, “can you ruin the life”—he indicated the crib as if it were a mile away—“of that
beautiful child?”

“I reckon he’d take his chances with me.”

“But you are a nervous wreck, Annie. Think how you hide in wardrobes and run out of the house at nights and are unable to
communicate.”

“I communicated with
you
. Time after time after time.”

“Then”—with a dismissive gesture of his ringed hand—“think of your poor family, Annie.”