Forbidden Fruit (34 page)

“Did
you
?”

“Your father —”

My last question sank in and it shamed him for violating my father’s trust. He went back to rubbing his face, which was getting
ever redder. Eventually, he raised both hands a few inches apart, fingers stretched, in front of my face. “You knew from the
start that you and I can never be together as man and wife. I’m a priest and I’m also married to my diocese.”

He held up his finger with the ring on as if to say this was the only ring he was entitled to wear.

“You mean, after what we both did you can still be a good bishop but I’m bound to be a rotten mother?”

“I mean simply and honestly, Annie, that a single mother can never give that beautiful baby all it needs.”

He had a point, but was it not better for Peter to be half an orphan than a full one?

I stopped listening. I was at the sharp end of the Church Eamonn served. I was angry that he felt his vow of celibacy bound
him more than the demands of his own son. I knew he had to deal with the guilty feeling that the only Apostle he was descended
from was Judas Iscariot. I also knew that sin was his profession, so to speak, and he had to make his peace with his God.
But did the price of peace have to be a bloody war over our son?

I was reminded of the first night he came into my room and tried to make love to me. He was ravenous then and he was, in a
hateful way, ravenous now. Violent then in wanting to possess me, he wanted now, with the same violence, to dispossess me.

But this time I was not willing to be the food to sate the massive hunger of his self-will. After about forty minutes of his
pleading and silently praying, I had had more than enough. I was exhausted first from having the baby and now warding off
this pressure. I felt I was about to blow like a geyser. And guess who saved me?

Suddenly Peter began to cry. Not just cry but scream. He balled his baby fists like spring buds, screwed his face up, and
shook. He was his father’s son. He must have sensed that there was enmity in that room and that his whole future was under
threat. He had somehow—I really believe this—tuned in to my anguish, my fears, and feeling of abandonment.

Eamonn went white as my pillow. It got through to him, I think, for the very first time that there was a third person in the
room. We were not just talking about what to do with the furniture. There was a little human being here with a voice of his
own—and what a voice. That baby cry shook Eamonn more than if the devil himself had come screaming at him like a banshee.

As for me, I felt strangely secure. Of course, I would guard my son for as long as he needed me, but this baby boy would also
in some obscure way defend me. He would fill me with the courage to face the might of Eamonn and the powerful ages-old institution
that stood right behind him. Make no mistake about it, I had seen Eamonn operate, I was really scared of what he could do
to me. Wasn’t he the original warlock, the sorcerer who could attack from any position at any time?

He jumped to his feet, realizing, intuitively, that a mother will always listen to her child before the man who fathered him.
When a baby cries, it’s like the Angelus: the whole world stops. That child, a rock indeed, was his rival, and he knew it
and feared it.

Maybe he even grasped dimly that, for all the wealth and force at his command, this little fellow who couldn’t even feed himself
would not be a baby forever. Eamonn might trust me, but could he rely on Peter when he grew up not to open his mouth and destroy
his life as I never would?

“Good-bye,” he said. “I’ll be back.”

Knowing Eamonn, I had not the slightest doubt that in this at least he was telling the truth.

W
HEN EAMONN LEFT, I squeezed my breasts, fearing anguish would sour my milk.

No sooner had I quieted Peter in my arms than in barged Father Coughlin, goose-necked chaplain, gargoyle extraordinary, founder
member of the Church Belligerent. He started in at once. “You are morally unfit to keep that child.”

If he showed me any kindness during this theological stampede, I must have blinked. I was not sure if he knew who the father
was, but he was shrewd in a peasant sort of way. Besides, even some of the medical staff suspected Eamonn was the culprit.

“I am not doing it for that man,” Father Coughlin said. “I’m concerned with you. And you’re no good for this child.”

I told him that his attack on the Bishop was part of his strategy for separating me from my son. If two clerics who did not
see eye-to-eye agreed that I was unfit to mother my baby, God agreed with them, they must think.

Whether he liked Eamonn or not, they worshiped the same forbidding God. If my mother was Wishie, Father Coughlin was Don’tsie.
Everything was Don’t do this, Don’t do that. On and on he went, scouring me with his words, and I gave as good as I got by
telling him he was a bag of sour wind, a bark without a dog. Finally, I had had my bellyful of clerics for one day. I clambered
out of bed.

“What’re you doing, woman?”

I gently laid Peter in his crib before turning on this tower of a man with “Shove off.”

“I am not —”

“Get out of here this minute or”—I pointed—“I’ll punch you where it hurts.”

I don’t suppose he had been threatened with physical violence since he wore a clerical collar. Certainly not by a woman and
one recently delivered. “You wouldn’t dare,” he said, backing away.

“Just try me, you hypocrite. You may not be strong”—he looked as if a light wind would knock him over—“so if you don’t
leave I’ll punch the hell out of you.”

We both called out, “Nurse!” at the same time.

One came running. Seeing my ready-to-go fist, she must have wondered if I wanted her as a referee. “Will you please,” I said,
“for his own safety, get this out of here?”

Father Coughlin halted at the door. “I swear to God I’ll be back and I’ll take that boy with me.”

I raised a clenched fist at him again and he went, leaving nothing but a faint candle smell behind. But Father Coughlin did
get his revenge in a most terrible way.

In the hospital, a young woman with Down’s syndrome, Maura, had recently given birth. The staff feared she might accidentally
kill her baby; it was, therefore, taken from her. Maura had then snatched someone else’s baby and, if a porter hadn’t stopped
her, she would have walked out of the Rotunda with it.

On the sixth day, I returned from the shower, with my hair in curlers and wearing only an old bathrobe. My baby was gone.
Thinking Maura had snatched Peter, I was frantic.

A nurse said, “Father Coughlin’s got him.” She pointed me down the corridor.

Hearing Peter crying, still clutching my damp bath towel, I ran with dread in my heart. The storeroom was a place full of
mops, brooms, and pails, and it smelled of urine, medicines, and disinfectants. There was Father Coughlin holding my baby.
With two women flanking him, he was doing his best to stop Peter’s bawling and not succeeding. Babies seem to scare the shit
out of priests.

“What’re you doing?” I screamed.

“Baptizing it.”

I was dumbfounded. I had registered as a Catholic—what else when my child’s father was a bishop?—but I had not asked for
him to be christened. Maybe this was another way Eamonn had of demonstrating his power. “Let him be baptized and, behold,
it was so,” regardless of the mother’s feelings.

“Name?” Father Coughlin demanded.

I was worried lest he drop or soil my baby. I said: “You know my name.”

He held the baby up. “His.”

Why hadn’t Eamonn baptized him himself? He was, after all, in the business. Maybe he feared that would give the game away:
a bishop baptizing a bastard. Or maybe that went against the rules, like absolving me after we had made love. But it was against
the rules to sire Peter in the first place, and that hadn’t deterred him. And why not in the hospital chapel; why the hurry?
Our son was not even ill, let alone in danger of death. Even if he were in danger of death, Eamonn was not concerned with
Peter’s going to heaven, only with himself going to hell—this side of the grave, I mean. I concluded that Peter was being
baptized as the necessary prelude to being adopted by a Catholic couple.

“His name?” Father Coughlin repeated.

“His
names
,” I said belligerently. “He’s entitled to more than one.”

“All right.” He was putting a ribbon-like stole around his neck, purple side up. “Names.”

“Peter Eamonn.”

His face creased even further. If he had doubted who the leg-over man was, he surely knew now.

He had brought a small bag with him like the one my father carried when visiting patients. Out of it he took a bottle of blessed
water and a prayer book. He handed the baby to one of the women and somewhere along the line he poured water over Peter Eamonn’s
head and made him a Christian like his father.

Peter Eamonn did not seem to approve. The cold water made him scream his defiance even louder at the priest. Another proof
he was his father’s son.

My God, I thought, when he grows up he’ll eat the likes of Father Coughlin. But why do clerics keep making my son cry?

In my shocked state I stood barefoot in my old bathrobe, a towel girding my waist, and silent. In our family, baptisms were
big things. Mommy spent two hundred dollars on a christening robe alone, and there was always a family gathering, and home
movies made as a memento. And Peter was a bishop’s son; he was entitled to be baptized in a cathedral. Father Coughlin’s private
Barnum & Bailey was over in three or four minutes. He hovered over my son and asked him in all seriousness if he renounced
Satan and all his works and pomps. I felt like saying,
Why not ask that of his daddy
?

As I walked back to my room, my baby in my arms, baptism seemed to have made no more difference to him than it did to me.
Who was supposed to be cleansing whom?

What worried me most was not that silly game in the storeroom but the feeling that what that priest had done had somehow,
in his mind at least, given him and the institution he represented a hold over my son.

We would see about that. If there was to be a fight, I would take them all on—Father Coughlin, Bishop Casey, the Pope himself.
“Don’t you worry, Peter,” I said, as I settled him back in his crib. “I’ll give them all a bloody nose.”

As a professional counselor, Sister Eileen was horrified at the Bishop’s attitude. “Most inappropriate,” she said, too moderately.

I had never even hinted that Eamonn was Peter’s father, but she was so wise she could have found no other explanation of his
behavior at Inch and now. As to Father Coughlin, she described his action not only as “bizarre” but probably against canon
law. The Bishop must have put him up to it.

Eileen advised me to go to St. Patrick’s, a home for unmarried mothers run by French Sisters of Charity on the outskirts of
the city. There, I could make my own decision about adoption. Now that Peter was baptized, I was eligible.

I accepted Eileen’s advice and she made the arrangements. Eamonn approved of St. Patrick’s, possibly because it was his idea
in the first place. Nuns were part of the system that he could manipulate.

On the day before I left the Rotunda, he paid me a second visit, which was a carbon copy of the first. Except that this time
he really tried to pick the baby up but, in the end, withdrew his hands as if they were too near a raging fire. I was perplexed.
Each day at Mass he took a bit of bread, changed it into the body of God, and held it up, marveling. But we, in love, had
taken an invisible seed and an invisible egg and turned them into the miracle of a human being and he dared not touch it.

Once more I crawled down my bed and picked Peter up. “Look, Eamonn, he’s the spitting image of you, can’t you see?”

He could, and it terrified him. He gulped painfully but did not react in any other way.

“He’s got your bump on his upper lip, the same ears, the same big birthmark on his left knee.”

He shielded his eyes. “It’s unbelievable. I don’t know how I did this, I really don’t.” His voice sharpened. “Put it down.
I can’t talk to you till you do.”

He did not like being outnumbered two to one; I put Peter down so we could converse in a civilized way.

“If you’re not ready to come back to Inch,” he said, drawing up his chair close to my bed, “Saint Pat’s is the best place
for you.”

My milk had turned sour after his first visit. What would this visit do? “Talk for as long as you like,” I said, “provided
you don’t mention adoption.”

He was unable to stop. It was his obsession. Cuckoo-time again. He had even brought adoption papers with him. He waved them
in front of me. Could I not see that I was fallen, that the child deserved a proper home and family?

For an hour he went on. When he had finished, I was convinced he had composed his own special Ave. It went:
Hail Annie, full of sin… cursed be the fruit of thy womb, Peter
.

Eamonn was such a decent person; he really cared for the sufferings of little ones all over the world. Yet there was no room
in the inn of his heart for his own son.
Oh, Eamonn
, I thought,
you are so good; how can you do this bad thing
?

By now I no longer trusted him. If Peter were adopted, Eamonn would know where he was and the name he was adopted under —
wasn’t he a bishop, an all-seeing peregrine on a cathedral spire?—whereas I would never know. I would always be wondering:
What is he like now? Is he well? Is he making progress at school? Is he even alive? Moreover, what would Peter think of me?
Would he hate me for not loving him enough or having courage enough to keep him? Would he want to look for me as much as I
would want to look for him? Would we go to our separate deaths, distant graves, with unfulfilled longings in our hearts?

With all trust waning, I felt Eamonn’s one concern was to cover his traces. As far as he was concerned, it would have been
better if Peter, like Judas, had never been born.