Forbidden Fruit (5 page)

“I had a popcorn temper in those days, Annie, and got into a few fights. Twice I was hit with a billiard cue here”—I sighed
as he touched the top of his head.

I liked the fact that he had no physical fear. He gained the small boys’ confidence and together they unmasked the bullies
to the authorities.

“I could not sleep at nights, Annie, for my anguish at this slaughter of God’s little lambs.” He smiled painfully. “One night,
a twenty-year-old came at me with a cue. I grabbed it from him and snapped it in two. Then I twisted his arm behind him and
put his head down the toilet bowl and flushed it.”

His frankness encouraged me to tell him how, until I was about twelve, I used to break into houses with my friend Corey. I
could pick any lock, get through any window. I chose people I didn’t like and ate the food in their iceboxes. Once, I broke
into the house of Mr. Thompson, who used to abuse children.

“So,” I told Eamonn, “I put the plug in his bath and turned the faucets on. When he got home hours later, the whole place
was ruined.”

Eamonn was shocked. “You are a terrible case for a Novena.”

I was no less shocked. He saw no parallel between his attack on perversion and mine. He had nearly drowned a human being whereas
I had only ruined a few floors and carpets.

I resolved to be more careful. Maybe Eamonn had double standards: one set for him and another for everyone else.

As the night lengthened, as the same fire warmed us and welded us into one, we returned once more to my marriage. I do not
think Eamonn ever doubted his magnetic power to draw the badness out of me.

“Before we married…”

He came very close, stroking my hair, sensing that I was about to open my heart to him. “Yes, Annie?”

“He took precautions so we would not have a child.”

“If you were not then married…”

He seemed to think I was speaking of morals but I wasn’t.

“One night,” I said, gulping, “Steven realized he was losing me. It had finally got to him that I feared something inside
him that was wanting to corrode me.”

“So?” Eamonn urged.

“He came to me without a condom so I would conceive.”

“You mean, so you would be forced to marry him?”

I nodded, shaking all over at the memory of unimaginably bad things.

“Anyway, Annie, I’m pleased he failed.”

“But he didn’t.”

He turned ashen. “You conceived?”

“Yes. We married three months later.”

“So there was a child?” His jazz hand was quite still on my head. “I never knew.”

I could almost read his thoughts through his musical hand’s patting, resting on my hand and my hair.

“What became of —?”

“Because of me, it died.”

He momentarily withdrew his hand in horror. Then the professional in him, I guess, made him put it back on my head.

“You mean, you had an abortion. Did… he”—I liked that he could not bring himself to use the word
husband
—“did he know about this?”

“It wasn’t an abortion.”

His blink was another small victory for me.

“No?”

I shook my head. “Women can get rid of babies without having an abortion.”

He was mystified by this. It was new for him to be so out of his depth. It made me interesting, a challenge, and he, a competitive
man who always got his way, liked a challenge.

“Was it a boy or a girl?”

“I don’t know.”

He was even more surprised. “How could you
not
know? Oh, I see. The baby was taken from you when it was born and adopted so you never knew whether it was —”

“It was not adopted.”

“No, of course not,” he said, soothingly, as if I were not quite sane. “You said you were somehow responsible for its dying.
But surely”—this was the genuine plea of someone who cared—“you only mean that you gave him… Or her…” He shook his puzzled
head. “But you said you did not give your baby for adoption.”

He looked into the fire for a very long moment.

“Annie, you’re not making any sense.”

“Nothing in my life makes sense.”

By now, I suspect, he did not know whether I was crazy, a monster, or a plain fantasist. Yet something told him I was telling
the truth.

For the first time,
I
reached out and held
his
hand.

“In the fifth and a half month, Eamonn, the baby died.”

“You said you didn’t—“

“Didn’t take poisons or use a metal coat hanger.”

I could sense the relief of this good man who valued infant life flooding through him.

“So you didn’t kill… the baby.”

It had struck him that the sex of a baby at five and a half months is plain and yet, for some reason, I had no idea whether
my baby was a boy or a girl.

“I told you I
was
responsible for it not living.”

“But…” He needed both hands now to express his utter bewilderment.

“Has it never occurred to you, Eamonn, that human beings die when they know they are not loved?”

“Die?”

“That’s why I’m dead.”

He held his warm hand close to my warm cheek and, with an almost frightened laugh, said, “You are very
much
alive.”

“Not inside me, Eamonn. Not where it matters.” I spoke the next words with as much passion as any woman ever mustered. “No
one is alive who is not loved and I have
never
been loved.”

“But —”

Once more he seemed to me to convey his thoughts through the touch of his hand:
But you
are
loved, Annie
. I
love you
.

If only I could be sure they were his thoughts.

“You said, Annie, that no one is alive who is not loved?”

I nodded, sensing that he was asking himself if God’s love were enough for happiness. What if he, a bishop, was thinking the
most terrible thought of all:
Could it be that I, Eamonn Casey, who believe myself to be so alive, am really dead, have always been dead, will remain dead
forever and ever
?

For several minutes we peered together into the heart of the fire. Maybe the fire was telling us that we held the secret to
one another’s lives. Maybe it was not merely the focus but the creator of a story, a new story, our story, that would outlast
the lakes and snowcapped mountains of Kerry. If I loved Eamonn and he loved me, two long-dead people, a lonely man and a lonely
woman, might rise from the dead, hand in hand.

I suddenly launched into the story of my marriage.

I had hoped against hope for happiness, and Steven and I had a lot of fun together. But when I sensed danger, when I came
head-on against the destructive part of him, I wanted out. He desired me only because I no longer desired him. That was when
he grabbed me and took me violently. “I won’t let you go,” he said. “You’ll never leave me.”

That night I conceived.

Almost immediately I became ill. It was not the usual morning sickness. On a Brooklyn street, as I was almost fainting, women
shoppers said, “Get this girl to a hospital, she’s real bad.” My doctor said, “Lots of pregnant women are this way.” But I
knew that something was wrong.

Now I was talking to Eamonn. My story was, so to speak, entering history, no, making history.

“Deep down, I
wanted
something to be wrong.”

“Why?”

“Because
I
was all wrong, don’t you see?”

He nodded, though whether he yet understood how wrong I was I could not tell. I continued:

“By the time I was five and a half months gone, I was sleeping all day and all night. No energy. Felt close to death. Then
I started bleeding. I was taken to St. Vincent’s Hospital, down in the city, you know, in the Village. Someone examined me
and I was put on a drip. A nurse said it was to induce labor. But I was months away, my mind, my body, not ready. I didn’t
want that baby. Didn’t want to see it. Let it stay in the dark, I thought, the dark in which I shower, the dark where it belongs
forever. Then a doctor came.

“ ‘You have to let that baby out,’ the doctor said, and I said, ‘Why?’ ‘Because it’s dead and it’s poisoning you.’ I thought,
‘Dead? Then we’ve poisoned each other.’ “

“No, Annie, no,” Eamonn said, reassuringly, his soothing hand pressed in a circling movement on my head.

“The doc said, ‘If you don’t let it out we’ll have to cut you.’ So I let go. It was still, my God, painful. Went on for hours,
through the night and next day. And finally the baby came out and they…”

“Yes?”

“They put it in a bedpan.”

“Oh, Annie; poor Annie.”

“It was not a pretty sight. A big head, natural, I guess, for its stage of development. Then a beeper went. Emergency. The
nurses rushed off, leaving me. And there was a dead kitten of a baby sitting in a bedpan next to my bed. And I said to this
little stranger, over and over, ‘I let you die, little one, oh, I wish I could be sorry, I really wish that.’ “

“You did
not
let it die.”

“I did,” I responded heatedly, “I did, I
did
. It was so fragile looking, with blood all over it. I could see how it was formed—muscles, bones, sinews, veins like in
an autumn leaf—all this I saw through the transparent skin. And I was responsible for its dying because I hadn’t loved it.
Because I couldn’t. Because babies should only come from love and this baby was my husband’s doing and I hated
him
for making me so hate myself.”

Even as I took a big gulp, a gulp that pained me, I was theatrical, too. I mean I wanted to make an impression on Eamonn.

“So,” I continued, “I
was
responsible, you see.”

This time Eamonn wisely did not attempt to speak.

“I kept ringing the bell, Eamonn. Kept hollering, ‘For God’s sake, somebody come and take it away.’ Everyone was too busy.
I was left wishing desperately that somehow, somewhere, inside me I would find the love to love it.”

His hand stopped for a few seconds stroking my hair, then continued.

“I don’t believe in God, only in the hell He created.”

“God loves you, Annie,” he said, his eyes misting up.

“No, He’s dead. Maybe He died because no one loved Him.”

Eamonn, dear Eamonn, let the blasphemy pass. I never told him that I became virtually a vegetarian, not from principle but
necessity, the moment I saw that baby lying dead in the pan.

“I was a doctor’s daughter. From age five I peeped into my father’s medical books. I told myself that this covering”—I plucked
at my cheek—“the skin, was not real; the real me was underneath, invisible. That’s what I still feel. No one will ever see
the real me.”

“No one?”

“No one,” I repeated, challenging him. “The only real self I ever saw was my husband’s baby, the baby in the bedpan, which
ripped me apart. I saw into it, saw what it was made of.”

“Which was?”

“Death. I wanted it dead. That’s why it died.”

“Annie, Annie, are you listening to me?” He pressed my hand vigorously. “Good. There was probably a simple explanation —”

“The doctor said later there was absolutely nothing wrong with it. It simply died. And I was responsible.”

Eamonn, man of the world, one who had seen everything, knew everything, was stunned. “You looked at it for how long?”

“A half hour, maybe. I couldn’t tell its sex because its little legs were crossed and I couldn’t have got out of bed to look
if I had wanted to.”

“And you never asked? No.”

By now, I felt as tired as the day of my miscarriage. The fire in me, like the one in the hearth, was low.

“Enough, Annie. It’s past two o’clock.” He drew me to my feet. “Time for you to hit the hay.”

At my 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.

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.