Forbidden Fruit (29 page)

“Christ,” she would yell suddenly, as we were preparing supper, and bang me on the head with a wooden spoon. “Screw that Bishop
till he gives you more money. If not, I will.”

Bridget found us an apartment at an affordable price. Eamonn sent me another £200 for the move so I did not have to carry
heavy things. He still believed I was having a hysterical pregnancy, but he was taking no chances.

My parents called me at the hotel for Thanksgiving on November 26. I was then sick all the time, as I had been when I lost
my first baby.

Bridget came with me to the drunken doctor in Ranelagh who had confirmed her pregnancy. He was madly in love with her and
chased her all around his office, promising to bring up her baby as his own. It could only happen in Ireland.

When he was finally persuaded to turn his attention to me, he took a urine sample. From then on, Bridget saw to it I did not
work mornings; otherwise, my head would be in the bucket in a second.

We moved into our basement apartment on December 1. It was near Herbert Park, not far from the hotel. Bridget gave me the
bigger of the two bedrooms. I thought it was her generosity till I realized it was far colder than the other and winter was
on the way.

Within a few days, Eamonn came to see me and was delighted with the apartment. He fixed himself a drink as if he owned it.
He asked me out to Jury’s for dinner.

At the table, he told me his eighty-three-year-old father was very ill. After his second drink: “Now, Annie, tell me.”

I shrugged as if to say,
Isn’t it obvious
?

“So, you are —?”

“The doctor thinks I’m into my second month. He has yet to confirm it.”

His head sank on his chest. “This is a tragedy, Annie. A tragedy, the very worst.”

“I was always honest with you,” I said, angrily. “Did I get pregnant by myself?”

He shushed me in case the other diners heard. “Maybe,” he said, “it was that Arab who bit your ear.”

“Say one more word,” I hissed, “and I’ll stand up and beat you to death.”

“But you told me you were meeting other men.”

“I said that and I will. To cover your ass and mine. But
you
are the father.”

“You don’t
know
that. You could have been drunk and —”

I picked up the water jug.

“Now, Annie. Please behave.”

I pointed my finger at my breast. “
Me
, behave?”

He motioned me to sit. The escape artist was at it again.

“I’m not asking you,” I said, “to leave the priesthood or marry me.”

After we had eaten a little, he said, still knocking back the liquor, “The gravel pit —”

“Oh, no. I’m just not up to it.”

“Will you come to Inch?”

“After Christmas, maybe. And if I do, you’ll have to drive me because the train could bring on a miscarriage.”

After dinner, we returned to the apartment. Wentworth was on a late shift, so Bridget was on her own in her bedroom.

Eamonn stayed late in my room, gazing for long periods into the coal fire, saying little. He had a distant look in his eyes,
as if things were beyond repair.

When I lay down on my bed, he climbed alongside me.

“You can’t do that,” I said, pointing in the direction of Bridget’s room. “She’s still awake, reading.”

“She’ll never say a word.”

He removed most of his clothes and most of mine.

“You look so bad,” he said. “I only want to make you feel better.”

“This is almost worse than the gravel pit,” I said.

“No, no, no. But ‘tis a very cold climate in here, that’s for sure.”

O
NE EVENING, the drunken doctor called to say, biblically, “You are with child.” Surprised at my joyful reaction to his unangelic
annunciation, he warned me, “We Irish do not exactly cheer mothers minus wedding rings.”

Because of my previous miscarriage, he suggested I see a top gynecologist named Charles Feeney.

I phoned Eamonn and told him the pregnancy was confirmed. I named the specialist I hoped to see.

“You don’t sound happy about it,” I said.

“Annie,” he whispered, “I buried my father today.”

“Eamonn, I’m… If only… Oh, Eamonn.”

Feeling part of him and his family, I was sad not to have been told of the death or invited to the funeral. If only I had
been at the graveside, sharing his grief and afterward, in a quiet moment, telling him that, though he had laid his father
in the ground, he had lifed a child, bone of his bone.

This was a testing time for him. The child was the continuance of his own story, his inextinguishable fire. Would he welcome
him as his victory over death or as his disgrace?

That was provided the child came to full term. I was throwing up so much I had to be hospitalized for a day or two. When I
came out, I went to see Dr. Feeney in fashionable Fitzwilliam Square. He was a big shapeless man with embalmed eyes behind
half-moon glasses, and with yellow hair plastered slantwise over a shiny dome.

While taking my particulars, he scarcely lifted his gaze off the page. Except when I said I had no husband. “Oh?” and he waited.

Seeing I had nothing to add, he went on in a monotone: “In cases of unwed mothers like your good self, you see, we send them
to the Coombe. From where, you see, the child is, well, adopted.”

I did not like the way he said, “We send them,” as though we were packages in the mail. Nor did I like his Irish assumption
that all unwed mothers had their children adopted.

After he had inquired about my previous problem pregnancy, without examining me, he declared himself satisfied.

“Can you tell me, Doctor, when the baby’s due?”

“When do you think it was conceived?”

I told him, “The last day of October.”

“Then,” he said, “the end of July.” He wrote in my notes, 31 July. “I won’t be taking your case. No need, you see.”

I was really Coombe material.

“May I settle the fee now?”

He waved the suggestion aside. “Not one farthing.”

I felt bad for having judged him harshly.

As he was showing me to the door with his big fleshy hand on my shoulder: “You come to Ireland, you see, for a rest and you
get pregnant. A tragedy, a very great tragedy.” He shook my hand. “Take my advice—go to the Coombe and have that baby adopted.”

My shame instantly dissolved. He was parroting Eamonn, who must have got to him and probably paid his fee.

Eamonn
is
powerful
, I thought.
I’ll have to keep my wits about me if I’m to keep this child
. I called him at Killarney. “You really did a good job on that consultant,” I said.

“Must you see everything in terms of a conspiracy?”

“He wouldn’t take me on.”

He snickered. “Didn’t think he would.”

“Exactly,” I said, “he was a snob, too. I’d be bad for his practice.”

I slammed the phone down—it was getting to be a bad habit—and started throwing glasses at the wall. “You dirty son-of-a-bitch,
take that and that.”

Bridget came running and slapped my face. “Murphy,” she yelled, “are you out of your mind?”

She backed away and narrowly escaped a plate. She came at me again and grabbed me by the arms. When we had cleaned up the
mess that seemed to symbolize the breakages in both our lives, we shared the womanly communion of a pot of tea.

“Murphy, we mustn’t let these male bastards get to us.”

“Eamonn’s talking as if this is all my fault.”

“Annie, the guy’s a bishop. Grow up.”

Bridget and Eamonn knew each other pretty well.

“I’m tempted,” I said, “to tell the world about Eamonn.”

Bridget laughed aloud. “Listen, kid, even Wentworth refuses to believe Eamonn is the father of your baby.”

“I didn’t know Wentworth was a good Catholic.”

“Bad Irishmen are the very best.”

“What hope for me, then?”

“None.” She peered at me. “Murphy, don’t you ever cry?”

I shook my head. “And I’m not going to the Coombe.”

She took my hand in a sisterly handshake. “That makes two of us. But never tell Eamonn what you’re up to. Not unless you want
him to be two steps ahead of you.”

On a crisp golden day in mid-January, we signed on to have our babies at the Rotunda, in Parnell Street, Dublin. It was a
state hospital over which the Catholic Church had no control.

We were, it’s true, assigned to a social worker who chanced to be a Catholic nun. Sister Eileen was in her midthirties with
a spring to her step in spite of being a bit plump. She had a round freckled face and hazel eyes with extra-long black lashes
and the friendliest smile. Bridget saw her first and came out with her thumbs up.

Sister Eileen’s only personal question to me was, “Do you and the child’s father have any hope of a future together?”

“None,” I said.

“That takes care of that, Annie. Remember, I’m here to back whatever decision you make. Now, do you have a religion?”

“A born Catholic but I fell away years ago.”

“You’ll get no pressures of any sort from me.”

“Pardon me, Sister,” I said, “but are you a Catholic nun?”

She gave me a radiant smile.

“I like to think so, but my only task is to help you walk a lonely road.” She suggested that for the last couple of months
of my pregnancy I might like to live with a family in exchange for light domestic work.

I liked and trusted Eileen. No crucifixes to be seen in her verdant office. Only a fine picture of Christ ascending into glory
and another of her rural birthplace in County Sligo.

Bridget and I went downstairs and waited three hours in a long line of pregnant women for a medical examination.

Hearing one woman say, “This is my tenth,” I nudged Bridget. “Join the club.”

That visit took a load off me. My baby was doing well and I was not going to a Catholic institution. The way to keeping my
baby was now open to me.

The following week, I had four days off. Eamonn picked me up in his Mercedes and drove me more slowly than usual to Inch.
The same warm love nest, but on a broken bough.

It was freezing at Inch but exquisite. In the clear air, sound carried for miles. After a proud red devil of a dawn, morning
was crisp with winds so wild they needed Valium. There were white cowls on silent peaks but on lower slopes a mere early-day
salting of frost.

Mary had left for her farmhouse, so I felt relaxed, especially as I was over the worst of my sickness. As to Eamonn, he was
now most liberated in his lovemaking. He could not wait to get me into bed, especially as, in his unromantic words, “the damage
has been done.” He praised my skin, my rosy cheeks, the glow of my hair. “Lovelier you are than ever, Annie,” he sighed, exhilarated
by my voluptuous breasts.

He sensed, too, without seeing into it, that my soul was different. I was not so easily disturbed. My tantrums were a thing
of the past. Motherhood had done this to me, but I don’t think he yet connected my changed manner with a baby.

Even when he was within me, as close as he could be to our child, even when I told him, “You have to be gentler now,” he was
still only dimly aware of the new, already quivering rival.

I was first to grasp that the baby was taking up Eamonn’s space and I became protective. Every love suffers multiple deaths
and resurrections. But now, in the warmth of our embraces, we were preparing to say good-bye. Each kiss was both a pleasure
and an elegy; each act of intercourse a requiem.

I tried to avoid orgasms in case I lost my baby, but without success, because Eamonn’s excitement over my body aroused me.
Yet what thrilled me before now terrified me.

He noticed. On the third night, we were in his bed when he complained, “You’re clamping me real hard, Annie. If you’re scared
of losing the baby, I won’t enter you.”

“I
am
scared,” I said.

He immediately got out of bed, opened a drawer, and returned naked to bed with a thick black prayer book. “Read it. ‘Twill
help you discover God’s will for you.”

This, his first attempt to influence me in religion, came hard on the heels of my admission that full sex between us might
have to stop. I disliked the way my naked evangelist assumed that less sex meant we would become more spiritual. I was wary,
knowing how God’s will and Eamonn’s had an annoying habit of coinciding. And I had done a bad thing: I had got a bishop into
trouble.

He had marked certain prayers for me. They stuck like bones in my throat. They were about sorrow for sin and atonement. I
had too much joy inside me to be in tune with them.

He read a few prayers in his melodious voice, but as soon as he mentioned God, I blocked him out.

His God and mine were not on speaking terms. His was of the male sort that sensible women hate. He loved whiners and breast-beaters
and enjoyed nothing more than seeing terror in the eye. Strangest of all, Eamonn’s God never laughed, whereas every day mine
woke up and went to bed laughing and went on laughing in His sleep.

For the rest of that visit, Eamonn, postcoitally pious, was relaxed because he assumed that I would go along with whatever
plans he made for me. I would give birth in a Catholic hospital of his choice and the baby would be adopted by a Catholic
couple.

He relied on me to let him start his life all over.

I knew we were on a collision course.

For the first four months of 1974, through the harsh winter and into spring, Eamonn remained very kind. He came to town every
weekend whenever Wentworth was on late shift. He took me to dinner, after which we returned to my room and slept together.

His confidence in Bridget’s reliability was unshakable. And he was right, even though she said to me, “He’s a fox, a real
cheeky bastard.” She was careful never to come anywhere near my room when she saw Eamonn’s trench coat in the hallway.

I was worried about her. I wondered if she had a wasting disease, because she had no belly at all.

Eamonn admired her for not having an abortion. He could not stand the thought of anyone destroying nascent life. He brought
her flowers and fruit. He offered to get Wentworth help for his drinking problem to ease their path to marriage.