Forbidden Fruit (11 page)

“Anyway, Eamonn, it was good of you to bail her out.”

“Bail
her
out. I only wanted it kept out of the papers. Had I not been a bishop I would have left her to her fate.”

This worried me. He had an overriding need to safeguard his reputation even in this small matter. What lengths would he go
to if he was really threatened?

That night, I began the lovemaking. But with a difference. To stop him wilting as soon as he was inside me, I smartly rolled
him over on his back.

He looked really scared at this turn of events.

“God Al
mighty!
” he screeched. “Am I a log that you do this to me?”

I kept silent. Talk would help him relax so he could perform better, but I had to fix my mind on the sensuous.

Something in his eyes registered,
What am I doing upside down
? At first, I thought it was because he held that any but the missionary position was a sin. Certainly his dignity was compromised.
A man, above all a bishop, had to be seen to be top dog, especially in bed. But unless he were underneath he would not have
sufficient control to satisfy me.

From his unaccustomed position of inferiority he explained that his major concern was that I might get pregnant, especially
as he was staying in me longer.

Being in the womanly position, he was thinking like a woman. It was almost as if he was asking himself,
What if
I
get pregnant
?

For the first time, he said, “This is a worry, Annie.”

“Not for me.”

“But if you conceive ‘twould ruin your holiday.”

“True,” I said. “But I wouldn’t mind having your child.”

“Not right
now
, when we have only just begun.”

I liked the promise in that remark.

“If you got pregnant, Annie, I’d die. I really don’t want to make you sick and all that.”

With me astride him, I wondered if what he really meant was,
I don’t want to spoil my fun too soon
.

“You’re a strange man,” I said.

He looked up shortsightedly. “In what way?”

“Up to now, you’ve been upset because you couldn’t enter me and now you’re terrified because you can.”

The expression on his face as he pondered this was so funny, I fell right off him and out of bed in convulsions and pulled
the covers on top of me.

Eamonn was left lying naked on his back on a bare bed.

Moments later, two big swimming eyes peered over the edge.

“What in God’s name,” he yelped, “are you up to?”

I put my fingers to my lips and mouthed, “Mary.”

“Why’d you think I gave her a special cocktail?”

With that, he tried to grab the bedclothes for fig leaves but I hung on to them so that he, too, fell out of bed on top of
me. In doing so he banged his head on the wall.

I kissed his instantly bumpy cranium and we enfolded each other. Our whole bodies rocked with uncontrollable laughter. It
made us more naked to one another than being without clothes. This was as one-making and sacred as sex. Twin selves were bonded
by the greatest of all gifts: laughter.

“Oh, God,” he gulped, his eyes disappearing in his mirth, “this is terrible. Sex is crazy.” He clutched his chest. “I think
I’m going to die.”

“Don’t try to kid me.”

“Seriously, I’ve already had a slight heart attack.”

“Sex is good for you,” I said. “Without it, you might have a
big
heart attack.”

“No, no, no,” he said.

“It’s not sex but the mad way you drive that’ll make you ill.”

He put the end of a sheet in his mouth to stifle his great guffaws. “Tomorrow… I… might… drive… faster.”

“Why?”

“Thinking of all those fishes that just went into you.”

“You’ve saved them up for forty-six years, can you imagine how potent they are?”

“Don’t
say
that or I’ll —”

“Wash my mouth out with soap and water?”

“How,” he said, “did you know I was going to say that?”

“These fishes are more like bullfrogs.”

“To kill ‘em you’d need harpoons.”

“At least.”

“And there are millions of them,” he gurgled.

“Maybe one of them will make a hit.”

“Be serious, Annie,” he said, with an owl-like hoot. “I’ve studied this a great deal. Stand up quick.”

“Why?”

“Stand up, I say, and”—he demonstrated—“walk around.”

“
I’m
not going to prance around naked.”

“Sure I don’t care what you’re wearing or not wearing. I promise I won’t look, just get those bullfrogs out of you.”

Clutching the sheet more tightly round me, I asked, “What do you want me to do, gouge myself?”

“No, just walk around. These things swim. And they like warmth. Your egg is probably boiling after what we just did.”

I couldn’t get up because I was laughing too much. When he tugged on my sheet, I spun on the floor like a top.

“Please, Annie, you are in the worst possible position down there with your legs waving in the air. Keep them
still
.”

“But you just told me to walk around.”

“Waving your legs upside down is the worst thing. All the blood goes to your lower parts and these fishes love warm blood.
Get the blood out of there
.”

We waited a couple of minutes for our gales of laughter to blow out before we got back into bed and pulled the covers around
us. He felt more mine than ever.

As we nestled up to one another, he told me that his favorite niece, Helena, was coming to stay.

“You remember her from the old days?”

I reminded him that I had first seen his sad eyes when he came on a week’s visit to the States in 1954 to see his sister Kitty,
who was Helena’s mother. I had wanted then to take him by the hand and tell him it was going to be all right.

“Remember, Eamonn?”

He shook his head. “Anyway, Helena is bringing her four children and her sister, Maureen.”

“Is she okay now?”

Maureen, born premature, had weighed two and a half pounds and was given no chance to live.

“As far as she will ever be,” Eamonn said.

When I was a girl, my mother visited Helena’s mother. Kitty O’Hara, recently widowed, was living then in a rundown New York
tenement. Kitty was so ill she couldn’t care for her five children. My mother had the guts and good sense to tear the newborn
Maureen out of Kitty’s arms. The baby was starving and covered with lice. Also, mentally retarded.

My parents took the whole family to our home in Connecticut. Those kids were wild and they gave their lice to us. Everyone
called us “dirty Irish.” Even Daddy got lice and was unable to make his hospital visits for three days.

Daddy gave the O’Haras vitamins and Mommy fed them good food. In one month, they were all back to health.

Eamonn was saying, “I keep two double beds in my room to house families like Helena’s.”

He had a special interest in Helena. When she came back from America in the fifties, he had helped her overcome her fears.
He had even taken her to London where he introduced her to her husband, Patrick.

Eamonn seemed to look on Helena as the reincarnation of another Helena, his saintly and prolific mother who had, besides ten
kids, several miscarriages to help her on the road to heaven.

“If Helena takes over your room, where will you sleep?”

“In the spare bedroom.”

This room was used for vesting when he said Mass at home.

I was not happy that his niece had rights over his room when mine were not yet firmly established. The forbidden deed was
taking place in my territory. This, I think, helped Eamonn fool himself that sex was not sin but therapy.

“Remember Inafield, Eamonn?”

He smiled. “Didn’t I spend a day there with your family? I met your parents, Peter and Johnny, and your sister, Mary.”

“
And
me.”

“Did I, now?” he said, teasingly.

Inafield, our home “in a field” of fifty acres, was a big old Victorian hunting lodge five blocks from the center of Redding,
Connecticut.

I stored in memory almost every moment of that day. I heard crazy stuttering laughter coming from our pine-paneled bar and
I, who could never resist laughter, wondered what sort of person could possibly make a noise like that.

It was Eamonn. I went into the bar and jumped up on the radiator because I wanted to hear it again.

That was the first time he met my father. He was always thankful to Daddy for helping Kitty. His gratitude was finally expressed
in his offer to help me find serenity in Ireland.

He and my father got on famously. He made Daddy play all his Dixieland jazz. Eamonn tapped his feet and swayed from the hips
and moved his hands as though music was coursing through his body like blood.

Sixteen or so years later, I found myself lying naked next to the jazzman, asking, “Hey, remember how I cursed you?”

“Wait, ‘tis coming back into focus.”

“You told me to stop and I said I would for fifty cents and you said, why should I pay you to stop cursing me? So I took you
into my bedroom where I kept a big Indian head I used as a piggy bank. ‘Put fifty cents in there,’ I said, ‘and no more curses
from me.’ You said ‘Why pay you to stop being wicked?’ So I called you a son-of-a-bitch and you ran after me threatening to
wash my mouth out with soap and water and I yelled, ‘Stop it, if Daddy hears about this he’ll kill you.’ And you said, ‘I’ll
tell him you cursed,’ and I said, ‘I’ll tell him I didn’t,’ and you said, ‘Why would he believe you and not me?’ and I said,
‘Because I’m the best liar around.’ “

“You were a liar even then, Annie.”

“I’ve reformed,” I lied.

“I can tell,” he lied. “Didn’t I chase you somewhere?”

It occurred to me that his chasing of me, like his famous laugh, had stayed in my mind through the years without my knowing
it.

“You chased me into the garden where there were raspberry bushes and I hid inside them and laughed and cursed at you all the
louder because I was getting scratches on my legs and you were laughing too but red-faced because your groping hands couldn’t
quite reach me and you said, ‘Just you wait, little Annie, one day I’ll catch up with you.’ “

He stroked my breast fondly. “Didn’t I keep my word?”

Sure
, I thought.
But my curses did work, after all. Eamonn, you should’ve paid up your fifty cents
.

“When Helena comes,” he said, “I will be spending quite a bit of time with her.”

“Even nights?”

“Indeed. I settle down on the chaise longue and sometimes we talk into all hours. So don’t be surprised if in the first couple
of nights you don’t see me at all.”

“What’ll
I
do?”

“Catch up on some sleep.”

“You can surely pop in for a minute or two.”

“God Almighty, Annie,” he said, “you won’t come to the door and whistle for me?”

I winked at him and purred like a kitten.

“If I’m hungry, I’m not sure what I’ll do.”

“I believe you,” he said. “But remember, she’s a woman with a woman’s instincts.”

“Then,” I said, “don’t use so much after-shave.”

“Why not?”

“I smelled it on you the moment you kissed me at Shannon and we don’t want Helena smelling it on both of us.”

“True, and you use less perfume, then.”

“And make sure you shave more closely.”

He was puzzled by this.

I said, “My chin is getting red and flaky.” I pointed. “How will Helena think I got this?”

“God Almighty, ‘tis as red as my socks. Even Mary’d notice it. And Pat would, certainly.”

“It’s okay, Eamonn, I’ve got some cucumber for it.”

“Mary told me you are partial to cucumbers.”

“Not for eating. I spit bits out into my table napkin. A slice of cucumber soaked in tea draws out the redness. Pancake makeup
does the rest.”

“Amazing,” he said. “Maybe next time I should shave before I come to bed.”

“Provided,” I said, laughing, “you don’t use an electric razor. Helena would stay awake all night wondering.”

“And please, Annie, be sure not to scratch me above my collar, especially on my sensitive ears.”

I giggled again. “Aren’t I always careful to only scratch you where it doesn’t show?”

“I don’t mind love bites on my belly but not on my
nose
.”

“What about your head?”

“That, too, is off limits.”

When I roared at him like a tiger and showed my claws, he nearly fell backward out of bed.

“Life is very complicated sometimes,” he mused. “But we have to be ultra-careful with Helena. She knows me well.”

“Eamonn,” I said, “I don’t imagine anyone in the whole world knows you well.”

I
N MID-MAY, Mary took off for a few days to her farmhouse across Dingle Bay.

When Helena came from Dublin by train, we embraced warmly. How different she was from the jumpy, blotchy-faced girl I remembered.
Her dark shiny hair was pulled back in a bun. She was smartly dressed and serene, though she looked tired from having four
children in quick succession. The last, John, was only a few months old.

For the next week, the character of the house changed. It was noisy and full of fun.

I enjoyed Helena’s company. She appreciated my help and that of my family for her sister. Now aged seventeen, Maureen’s body
sagged, especially her tremendous breasts. She had bright red hair. Her eyes were slightly vacant under long lashes. Being
innocent, she said whatever came into her head.

The bishop in Eamonn found this hard to take.

Maureen’s job was to take care of the children. She proved her common sense one afternoon when Helena was resting on her bed
and I walked with her up the mountain track.

I was pushing John in a red baby carriage when, high on the hill, we came across a bull lying in an open field.

I was terrified. If anything happened to a child of Helena’s, Eamonn was old-fashioned enough to take it as a sign from God
that we should part.

The bull slowly heaved himself to his feet.

I laughed so hard, out of nerves, I fell on the ground while Maureen grabbed the handle of the carriage and tore downhill.