Forbidden Fruit (39 page)

“The least of my fears.”

He pressed his sensitive hands even harder on my head as if he, too, was trying to do something that would outlast the ravages
of time.

“Then accept the blessing of a foolish man who loved —”

“
Loves
.”

“Yes, Annie,
loves
you. Dear God”—he laughed—“the terrible things you make me say.”

“I didn’t make you do a damn thing,
ever
.”

“I know that. I sinned all on my own.”

“
Your
word.” For Eamonn—oh, sad—I was always an occasion of sin, whereas he made my head swim with the glory of love.

He said, “I knew better than Moses, didn’t I? Wrote myself an exclusion clause to a Thou Shalt Not.” He took his hands away,
saying, in his gentlest tone: “This is an emotionally hard time for you. Your parents don’t know what to expect. Did you know
Mary called me?”

I shook my head.

“When she said, ‘Eamonn, you son-of-a-bitch, I’ve been looking for you all over,’ I almost died.”

“Almost? Shame.”

“I hung up on her as if she had got the wrong number.”

“The local operator was listening in like God?”

He nodded. “She called me back and I said, ‘Mary, Mary, Mary,’ so she knew she had done something very wrong. She told me
your parents won’t know about the baby —”

“About your son.”

“Until you return. What will you tell them?”

“That’s my problem. Daddy will probably be glad you’re the father.”

He stroked his chin. “I suppose he does admire me.”

“Did. Get your tenses right.”

“I repent of what I did with you —”

“Thanks.”

“But at least I’m bright.”

“Except when you’re a thick Mick.”

He took an envelope out of his pocket. “The two thousand dollars. I don’t have a penny more. It’ll take me at least six or
seven months to get any more.”

“Try the truth just for a change.”

“So for God’s sake, use it sparingly. You’ll probably soon be getting a job.” I was grateful to have the money and I knew
my brother Peter had sent Mary a check for five hundred dollars to give me.

We went down and joined Pat and Helena and had a bite to eat before we drove to the airport. Helena was very excited. She
kept picking Peter up and hugging him. Just before I left, she said, with tears in her eyes, “You take care of that
baby
.”

She knew who the father was.

Eamonn looked very upset as we climbed into the car, whereas I was enthralled by Peter, who was looking up at me as if I were
his whole world.

We arrived at the airport around 10:00
A.M.
I checked in and was pleased to see how reluctant Eamonn was to see us go. I was provided with a wheelchair, and this gave
him the opportunity to pull rank and take me alone to the departure lounge. Maybe he had planned even that. As we traveled
the long green-carpeted corridor, bypassing the duty-free store, I was aware of his gaze drilling the back of my head but
I was busy with Peter, my lips brushing his oats-soft cheek and fontanel, so I was unable to pay him much attention. Until,
suddenly: “Eamonn.”

He stopped wheeling me and stood in front of me, expecting some final message. The ice had melted in his eyes.

“Yes, Annie?”

“You didn’t steal my pills again?”

He balled both fists—just like Peter!—and held them up shudderingly to heaven where all vengeance was. “Dear God, she
is not changed one bit, not one tiny bit.” He lowered his eyes. “D’you think I want you telling the other passengers that
you are going to shoot the yellow liver of the Bishop of Kerry all over his Palace walls?”

Now he kept going over everything I needed for the journey. Had I my pills, boarding card, passport, money?

When the flight was called, I handed him a present, which I had kept hidden. It was the only book I had brought with me to
Ireland, Thomas Wolfe’s novel
You Can’t Go Home Again
.

He broke out in a smile, which instantly left him when a stewardess took charge of my wheelchair. Our eyes locked in a final
deathless glance, an unending good-bye.

The stewardess pulled me back onto a moving ramp. It was strange and somehow symbolic, moving backward and downward as I took
my leave of Eamonn, as though time itself were going slowly, pitilessly into reverse. Such a sunset moment.

Over my son’s downy head I saw only him, as I had seen only him when I flew in to Shannon. What a difference of mood between
an arrival and departure lounge, what a difference of tears!

He did not dance now nor did he sing. His white-knuckled hands clutched the metal rail. So sad were his eyes it hit me that
this was how I first saw him in Manhattan when I was seven years old. That long-ago meeting was a premonition of a heartbreak.
This time I could not say, “It’s going to be all right, Eamonn. It’s going to be all right.”

I heard him calling out after me, ten times at least, “Good-bye, Annie. Good-bye, Annie.”

Each time it got fainter, farther away, until it was no more than a whimper: “Good-bye, Annie.”

That parting forsaking cry, I knew, would follow me all the days and the nights. There was so much pain everywhere, no God
could have designed a world like this. “I don’t believe in You,” I said to Him, to get my small revenge, “but take care of
Eamonn for me, please.”

We were three, we would always be three; why was one of us being left behind? It was because I had asked too much of him.
He had this loyalty, call it patriotism, toward his Church and I could not breach it for all his talk and deeds of sin. I
might as well for my sake have asked a painter never to touch another canvas, an author or poet never to write another line,
a musician never to finger another tune. For I had wanted Eamonn, for my sake, to give up not just the adulation due him as
a bishop. I was asking this more-than-painter-poet-composer to stop doing the daily miracle of the Mass, stop changing bread
into Christ’s Body and putting God into people’s mouths, stop forgiving unforgivable sins, stop smoothing the paths of the
dying to paradise, stop turning the dead into seeds that would spring up into eternal life.

I had naïvely thought that love was limitless whereas now I knew to my cost there are some things that love, real love, should
never ask.

But this was almost like childbirth, when a baby comes out of you and there’s a brutal tearing. There was in this moment a
brutal tearing from Eamonn, made so much worse because I felt I would never see him again. Such a tremendous stillbirth feeling
of uncreative loss.

I looked down at Peter. I was taking something precious from Ireland, immortality, and Eamonn had the vocation that he cherished
so much. By thinking of these things, I managed to pull myself together.

But not for long. Even before I boarded the plane I started to shake, and tears fell. Tears should be red, the reddest red
there is. I resent the transparent blood of tears. It’s incredible, but only in that desolate moment was I fully aware of
all that Eamonn had given me: his courage, his strength, his vitality. And I was afraid I might not, without him, survive
the long husbandless years ahead.

Summoning up all my courage, I took a final look at this gorgeous land. It was less green and leafy than when I saw it first,
but indelibly green in memory and no less dear. Was it really only eighteen months since I flew in on my magic carpet and
fell in love with Eamonn almost as soon as I set eyes on him and teased him about his red socks?

I was crying now because Ireland was for me a special place, my little bit of heaven. I didn’t want to leave, I wanted to
stay for a lifetime, I wanted my body eventually to dissolve—dust to dust—in its soil.

But none of this was possible.

I thumbed through all the memories I had stored. Inch and Killarney, Castleisland and Dublin; all the people I had met and
befriended and who had befriended me; and over everything—the hypnotic presence of Eamonn, my only love.

I remembered his dancing feet and his hands that moved up-up-up in bed when his feet were still. I remembered my jazzman bringing
the world—rocks, hills, distant islands, birdsong—to life on the top of a mountain and, most miraculously of all, bringing
to life in me a love that other men had extinguished, I had once thought, forever.

He had healed me, after all, and risked hell itself to do it; and I knew that in time to come, if ever this story should be
told, people, including those who love him, would not understand anything of that and they would say, because their rules
and his rules obliged them to say it, that he did wrong.

Oh, yes, my Eamonn risked losing their respect and even that of his outraged God because he loved me.

Then I called to mind his laughter, the whole range of it from a shuddering bass snort to a high infectious giggle, and how
he had made me laugh as I never laughed before, when we fell out of bed at Inch or struggled into our clothes in a gravel
pit, even when I threatened to kill him. Locked in my seat, my baby, his baby, our baby who looked so like him, in my arms,
I started to laugh and laugh, so that the stewardess came running.

“Is there something wrong, ma’am?”

And I couldn’t answer her because, through floods of tears, I was laughing too much.

W
HEN WE FLEW under a cloudless sky into New York, it was dusk. The lights, bustle, noise of the airport came as a shock after
the peace and quiet of Ireland.

Apart from feeling the absence of Eamonn like an open wound, being in a wheelchair confused me. I felt I no longer had control
over my life. With Peter wrapped in a shawl in my arms, refusing to take sugared milk, screaming uncontrollably, I began to
fear that Eamonn was right: I would not make a good single parent.

My two brothers saved me. Johnny, six-foot-two, and Peter, blond and blue-eyed, were waiting for me, positive and smiling
broadly.

“You some sort of Orphan Annie?” Peter said. “Get out of that chair.” And he hauled me to my feet.

Johnny, a father of three, took one look at my son and said, “He’s half starved. I’m getting him something to drink.”

He grabbed the baby’s bottle and disappeared.

Peter told me meanwhile that he had only just called our parents. Daddy had been surprised to hear I was coming home. “Oh,
I miss her so,” he had said. And Peter had said, “She’s had a pretty rough time.” “Tell me more.” “Well, Dad… she’s had a
baby.” “For Christ’s sake,” Daddy had said, before exploding with “Who’s the father?” When Peter told him, he had sighed.
“Could have been worse. At least, the guy’s got drive and brains.”

When Johnny returned with formula milk, Peter drank it greedily. That, too, gave me fresh hope.

At about ten, I walked apprehensively into my parents’ spacious sixth-floor apartment overlooking the sea at Old Greenwich.

Mommy threw her arms around me in warm greeting, but as I hobbled into the living room, there was Daddy.

Blank-eyed, arms folded, his huge cane in one hand, he was seated on his favorite black chair. Dressed in an open-necked shirt
and khaki shorts, he showed a pinkish artificial leg with its big hinge, his black shoe with a white sock on the end. With
his huge smooth head, he looked like a sinister giant idol carved from stone. While the lips smiled, his eyes had a pained
and angry look. I would have to tread very warily.

He softened only when he looked at Peter and saw his inflamed cheeks, reddish hair, and Eamonn’s beautiful lips.

“That,” he said, maybe remembering his own abused childhood, “is a cry of pain. Hannah, a cushion.”

Mommy put one on the long table. Another imposing gesture from Daddy, and I placed the baby on the cushion. Peter’s hands
immediately went up-up-up, in a nervy way.

“Eamonn, all right,” Daddy said. “It’s in the genes.”

He proceeded with an examination. “Number one, Annie, he’s too swaddled up.” After I had removed Peter’s clothes, with his
long fingers he gently probed his limbs. “Number two, the kid’s undernourished. Feed him on demand.”

I nodded.

“Also, Annie, see that—a skin infection and thrush.”

While Mommy dressed Peter, Daddy said, “You’ve been ill.”

I lifted the bottom of my jeans so he could see my ankle. He shook his head. “Trouble ahead with that leg, Annie.” He beckoned
me to him and kissed me. “Glad you’re home.”

“Me, too.”

I was not sure if I was or not. I was tired, emotionally drained, and suffering from a bad cold.

“Did Eamonn give you any money?”

I handed Daddy an envelope and he counted out eighteen hundred dollars. “I’ll bank it for you. You’ll have to economize for
the rest of your life. From now on, you answer to me, young lady.”

I didn’t disagree. I was his hostage.

To take care of Peter, I was going to need my parents’ help. Mommy, delighted to have a purpose in life, came off the booze,
and Daddy, too, was marvelous.

I applied to go back to school to train as a nurse, but I was told that my bad leg made nursing impossible. Instead, I got
a job as a receptionist in the hospital across the street. To my father, that was another sign of my failure. It proved to
him he had to dominate my life; and God help me if I crossed him or did anything wayward.

As the weeks went by, he interrogated me with Teutonic thoroughness. I was only permitted to answer his precise question.
Slowly, meticulously, he dragged out of me the whole story, including our lovemaking in a gravel pit and how Eamonn had left
me to rot in St. Patrick’s. He angrily accused Eamonn of gross negligence.

For months, I refused every invitation from men to dine out or go to a movie. Daddy had hurt me too much and made me feel
too guilty. Besides, the memory of Eamonn was too vivid in spite of the ocean between us. I used to calculate the five-hour
time difference between Kerry and New York. What was he doing now? Was he happy? Did he ever think of me?

Love of this intensity, I sometimes felt, should not be allowed. Why this sharp pain and this equally sharp ecstasy? The pain
was not in any part of me. It was everywhere and nowhere, so it seemed to be even in the things and people around me. To ease
it, I tried desperately not to think of him. I walked, as it were, miles around any idea that might bring back the memory
of him. I always failed.