Forbidden Fruit Read Online Free PDF Page B

offer him in recompense?
    Nothing, unless there was deep inside him a torrent of need still to be revealed. I could lead only by following. I could
     attract only by not attracting. On my part, there was no guilt or guile in this. It was instinctive. It expressed the intent
     of a woman who had come out of darkness for the first time in her life and felt she was owed happiness.
    But how could Eamonn bestow happiness on me, and what form would that happiness take? I had no clear idea as yet. I only knew
     that I wanted to be worthy of someone so good and so considerate.
    The second night, we edged ever closer as we sat and talked by the fire.
    “I can do more for you, Annie,” he said, neither humbly nor proudly, “than any psychiatrist.”
    I did not doubt it. If only I could find a way to open my heart to him. Yet if I succeeded, it might lead to his ultimate
     failure. So deep now was my respect for him I did not want him to fail. He was bigger than I was, bigger even than any possible
     love between us. How could I want to corrupt a man whom I loved because he was incorruptible?
    His personality so overpowered me, maybe I believed that this wizard and this magical land could accomplish the impossible.
     I blocked my ears to the drums of doom.
    He stretched out and stroked the back of my hand. “Care to tell me about your marriage?”
    “It was a disaster.”
    “Your husband was a Catholic?”
    My father had told him otherwise, but Steven’s religion was not the reason why our marriage failed.
    “He was a Jew. I was married in front of a rabbi.”
    “ ‘Twasn’t a real marriage, then.” Eamonn said it with a certain amount of satisfaction. “The Church does not recognize the
     marriage of a Catholic in such circumstances.”
    “I had ceased to think of myself as a Catholic then.”
    He reflected for a moment. “That was your trouble, Annie.”
    I let it pass. I was still feeling the pain of a marriage that I had never been able to speak of to anyone.
    Tears must have rainbowed in my eyes as I silently recalled all this, for Eamonn said, ‘Ready to talk?’
    As I shook my head, a sharp chill come over me.
    “You are free in the eyes of God, Annie,” he said, stroking my hand fondly, “to marry again.”
    “No.”
    “To love again.”
    “To love.” I omitted the word
again
. “Perhaps.” The expressive motion of his hand on mine told me he liked both distinctions.
    What is it about firelight that brings out deep things in the mind and heart? Especially this sort of fire made of peat, dug
     from the very land on which people walk and live and love. I had read that the great old Irish storytellers liked nothing
     more than to tell their stories by a big turf fire which, at the day’s end, was never put out but simply covered over. Fires
     would thus go on for generations, until perhaps the house was demolished. A sign, this, that people’s stories, like the land
     itself, its rivers, fields, and hills, would never end. Stories outlive mountains.
    So we contented ourselves with telling stories—carving the past in fabled stone—of our families, of mutual relatives,
     laughing and sobbing, and hardly knowing the difference.
    He told me he was the sixth of “a pewful of children,” ten in all. They lived in a yellow Georgian house at Adare in the County
     Limerick, with white and pink roses round the door.
    John, his father, was manager of two dairies. He rose at 4:30 every morning and came home late at night but he always squeezed
     in Mass during the day.
    His mother, Helena, dead now for over ten years, was a perfectionist. Good clothes for the children, finest food served at
     table with lace and silver, fresh flowers, and best china. She never complained, though her health was always bad. She was
     a brilliant pianist—Eamonn pointed to her piano by the wall. All the children took music and dancing lessons and Eamonn
     won many prizes in Irish dancing.
    “I was a thin child, Annie, with stomach