The Custodian of Paradise

by Wayne Johnston

  “The windows have been painted shut. This side of the house is not far from the one next door. We can’t run the risk of you being seen. Something as simple as you peeking out through the curtains might cause us all a lot of difficulty.”

  “I can see why you would not have wanted me to arrive by cab at the front door, but is it really necessary that I be locked up like a prisoner in these rooms?”

  “You have not thought it through,” my mother said. “We have told people that I, that we are expecting. It is essential that you not be seen, especially after you have begun to show. You are hardly a paragon of either discretion or reliability, but even if you were, these precautions would be necessary.”

  “You must have got my reservation mixed up with Marcel Proust’s,” I said. “My rooms must be those just down the hall.”

  “I don’t want you to feel that you’re a prisoner here,” my mother said. “But five or six months is a long time. You might not be able to help yourself. You might give in to the craving for sunlight and fresh air.”

  “I might shout things from the windows.”

  “Yes. You might. We don’t want you ever to be alone in here, except at night, of course, when those doors will be locked. We have a housekeeper, a very loyal, dependable woman who has been with the Breen family all her life. She will sit with you.”

  “Months on end in this little room. I’ll go mad. I’m not the nun you used to be.”

  “I’m sure you’ll find these arrangements sufficient.”

  How crowded with euphemisms was my mother’s relation of the terms of my new existence.

  I felt as though they had fashioned for me a womb like my own, like my baby’s, a dark place of confinement sufficient unto itself by which I would be housed and sustained until the womb within the womb released the baby, at which point I myself would be released, emerge transformed, fully developed into—what? What would I be when this period of gestation was complete?

  “Father asked me to give you his regards. He also asked me to give you his loathing and contempt, but I couldn’t fit them in my luggage.”

  My mother said nothing.

  “So how is Stepdoctor Breen?” I said.

  “My husband, whom you will refer to as Dr. Breen, is well, thank you.”

  “And you, how are you? You look well. So much for that old expression, ‘Once you’ve had a taste of life in Newfoundland, you can never go back to being wealthy in New York.’”

  “Must you coat everything in irony?”

  “I find it makes things easier to swallow.”

  “And how are you, Sheilagh?”

  “Aside from taller than when you saw me last?”

  “You’re taller than my husband.”

  “Yes. But his belly will always be bigger than mine.”

  “I suppose I might as well reconcile myself to such vulgarity.”

  “The last thing I expected was a reconciliation. What should I call you? Mrs. Fielding? Mrs. Breen? Mother seems so presumptuous, don’t you think?”

  “There’ll be no talking to you, I can see that. I thought we could at least be civil with each other. My husband and I have gone to a great deal of trouble and expense to bring you here.”

  “Your coming here caused me a great deal of trouble and expense.”

  “You want me to apologize for leaving? Is that what you’re waiting for?”

  “I am waiting for this child to come so I can go. For ten years I’ve been wondering what it feels like to leave a child. Now it’s my turn to find out.”

  “You are such an unforgiving, selfish girl.”

  “In return for the loss of a mother, I am giving you a child.”

  “You would be on the road to ruin if not for my husband and me.”

  “I am a delinquent daughter. Have been one for quite some time. Delinquent in correspondence especially. Can you believe that I stopped writing letters to you just because the first five hundred went unanswered?”

  “You exaggerate. Just like your father.”

  “Now he would have no trouble deciding what to call you.”

  “Dr. Breen and I will have as few visitors as possible while you are here,” she said. “I will warn you when visitors are coming. You must keep absolutely still while they are here. Even with these rugs, we can’t have you pacing about overhead. During these visits, the doors will be locked and Miss Long will keep you company.”

  There seemed to be, implicit in the tone in which she delivered these instructions, some sort of threat, though I couldn’t imagine my mother expelling me from the house or sending me home and thereby bringing upon herself, a twice-married woman, the further scandals of having it become known that she had faked a pregnancy and of her only daughter delivering a baby out of wedlock at the age of fifteen.

  She left. So this was my mother. I had foolishly hoped that I would take to her and she to me. My eyes filled with tears, but I clenched my teeth to keep from crying.

  To my relief, I discovered, after my luggage was brought up by my mother and Dr. Breen, that my stash of cigarettes was still inside. The first night, hours after the doors had been locked and I was left alone, I sat up in bed and smoked two of my Yellow Rags. Yellow Rags were the cheapest, most acrid-smelling cigarettes to be had in St. John’s.

  In the morning, I could see by the look on Miss Long’s face that she smelled and perhaps even saw cigarette smoke, but the old woman said nothing. Later that morning, however, my mother raised the matter when she came to visit.

  “You seem by the age of only fifteen to have acquired every conceivable vice,” my mother said.

  “There are far more vices in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in your philosophy,” I said.

  “I could put my foot down and forbid you ever to smoke cigarettes in this room again. I could take your cigarettes away from you. But it was not in the hope of reforming you that I brought you here. If you, a mere girl, feel you must persist in this disgraceful, unladylike habit, so be it.”

  “I feel I must,” I said.

  “But never in my presence, or my husband’s, or Miss Long’s. You may do only what, without so much as seeking my permission, you did last night. You may sit here alone in this room, in solitude and confinement, and indulge in what I will concede is the least disgraceful of your inclinations.”

  “It will not take long for my supply of Yellow Rag to run out,” I said. My mother winced at the words “Yellow Rag.”

  “Arrangements will be made,” she said. “You will write notes stating your requirements and give them to Miss Long. But this is a matter that is never to be spoken of again. I am demanding discretion, not asking for it.”

  “I shall smoke as discreetly as I can.”

  “Good. Then we understand each other.”

  “I doubt that we will ever understand each other.”

  So the “arrangements” were made. I felt that it was me who had conceded something, not my mother.

  I wrote on a piece of paper that I gave to the poker-faced Miss Long the quantity and brand of cigarettes I wanted. I switched from Yellow Rag to the more expensive Royal Emblem, figuring that my mother was unlikely to quibble about such things.

  A day or two later, after he had finished his daily examination of me, Dr. Breen removed a package of cigarettes from his jacket pocket as he was leaving and placed them, wrapped in brown paper and tied with string, on the dresser just inside the door. I was the child who had been left a mollifying treat after submitting to the ministrations of a doctor.

  The purpose of the suite was to hide me from them, and them from me, as much as it was to hide me from the world. How formal and aloof they were with me, as if they believed it was important that I not see them as they really were. Or did they merely think it was wise not to allow any sort of familiarity to grow between us lest it make me think they wanted me to do anything after I gave birth but go away? It seemed to me that my unborn baby was already a member of their faction, already one of them, and that
this, too, was the point they wished to make by their aloofness, that I should regard this child of mine as they regarded me.

  I could not bring myself, at first, to think about the child, to speculate about its gender, or what it would look like, or what sort of future it would have, or how I would feel about it ten or twenty years from now.

  Somewhere in the house, I realized, there was, in all likelihood, a newly prepared, unoccupied room in which my baby, when it came, would sleep. A room with a crib and a bassinet and scores of children’s toys. None of which I would ever see. Perhaps a room adjacent to the one in which Dr. Breen and my mother slept. For all I knew, adjacent to my room. One wall away from where I lay my baby would grow up without me. A wet nurse who believed the baby to be Mrs. Breen’s would feed it the milk she fed her own newborn, while my own milk-heavy breasts would go on lactating pointlessly for weeks after I returned to Newfoundland.

  Not so much lying-in as hiding out, I began to write at night, through the night sometimes, from the turning of the key in the lock in the evening to its turning in the morning and the rearrival of Miss Long, as punctual as the jailor she was and the nurse she pretended to be.

  LOREBURN

  I stopped writing and read one of my earliest journal entries. There in the handwriting of a girl was my first address to my unborn child:

  February 2, 1916

  Miss Long, at long last, has gone and has locked the doors behind her. Royal Emblem time. Sometimes, she nods off while reading her Bible, or while pretending to read it. Not so much nods off, for her head never moves, though her eyes close and stay closed for hours at a time. I am leaving you to her, to them. People I would not want to be left to or be raised by. Though you will never hate me for it. Only my father will hate me, for other reasons. Miss Long will forget me. My mother and her husband will thank God for causing good to come from my transgression. My father will hate me for leaving him with no choice but to consign his grandchild to a life with her and thereby help her remedy the main deficiency in the life she left his for. My father will hate me for having a baby by someone as lowborn as Smallwood.

  During the early days of my lying in after I had begun to show, my mother accepted visits from select members of her social circle so that they could witness her “pregnancy.” Dr. Breen had fashioned for her a kind of pregnancy prosthetic that she wore beneath her dress and sometimes did not bother to remove on one of her rare visits to the suite. I never saw the device, only the shape it made. I pictured a kind of inflatable codpiece. She comes here, I thought, to judge by my belly how big hers should be. It was a strange thought and made me wonder just how elaborate and self-deluding my mother’s vicarious experience of my pregnancy would be.

  As mine progressed, my mother’s phantom pregnancy did likewise. Then began my mother’s own period of confinement, after the start of which there were no more visitors, though she went on wearing the pregnancy prosthetic rather than shutting up the entire house in the manner of my room. “We can hardly keep all the curtains closed for months.”

  Dr. Breen I continued to address as “Stepdoctor Breen.”

  “Stepdoctor Breen,” I said, “my admonishing monitor.”

  “Have you no gratitude for all that your mother has done for you?” he said.

  He had a habit of defending his wife even when the target of my remarks was him.

  “How do you like your accommodations?” he said.

  “I feel like a guest in some hotel who’s been assigned the Unwed Mother’s Suite.”

  “Your mother is being very generous.”

  “Six months’ room and board for just one baby.”

  He smiled to let me know that I would never nudge him from the moral high ground with mere words. He knew that I did not want the baby, would rather that they have it than endure all that keeping it would mean. This was implicit in his every word.

  “How did you meet my mother?”

  “We were introduced by a mutual friend.”

  “Did she ever show you a photograph of me?”

  Perhaps he thought I knew the answer to that question, though in fact I didn’t.

  “She must have mentioned Newfoundland. How did she describe it?”

  Again he merely smiled.

  “Did you know that, according to her father’s will, she would have been disowned had she not come back to the mainland? He would not have left her a single cent. Not that that influenced her decision to leave my father and me.”

  “You are very versatile in your precocity,” he said. “But you have your facts all wrong.”

  “Really? Enlighten me.”

  But he frowned as if to say he’d said too much already.

  February 4, 1916

  Doctors have yet to figure out what makes you kick. The feel of your foot against my womb may be your one sensation. Only when you kick do I feel you. The first time I felt you it was as if, at last, you had awakened from that life-preceding dream, that mysterious deep sleep into which you never fell yet in which you somehow began. I felt as if I had swallowed something that was still alive, something that would slowly die and then decay inside me. I was terrified. I suppose that, until that moment, I had not really believed that another body could proceed from mine, that another body could not only grow but live and move inside of mine. I still find it hard to believe, though no longer terrifying. I like it when you kick me. It is probably as much communication as we will ever have.

  It seemed that it was always night. It was not possible to see unless the lights were on or a lamp was lit. It was darker by day than my room at home had ever been by night. Not even at what, according to my watch, was midday did light make it into the rooms. My watch, the clock on the mantel above the fireplace, though they always agreed, were of no use to me in distinguishing day from night.

  It was primarily by the arrival of Miss Long, by the sound of the key in the door, that I knew it was morning, though whether the sun was up or not I didn’t know. It was the same with evening. I knew, by Miss Long’s departure, that outside it must be evening, that the sun was either setting or had set, that it was twilight or that night had come. I couldn’t remember, was in fact not sure that I had ever known, at what time the sun rose on certain days or even months of the winter. I would wake sometimes in the darkness and wonder if Miss Long, to play a trick on me, had put the fire out and left the suite.

  Sometimes, I woke to the dim light of a lamp and heard the thundering of rain on the roof. I asked Miss Long what the weather was like. She ignored me. She would not speak to this girl who had caused such profound upheaval in what she clearly thought of as her house.

  I fell out of rhythm with the hours of the day. I was as likely to sleep while Miss Long sat by my bed as after Miss Long had left the suite, as likely to read throughout the night as after I had finished breakfast. It was partly that it was more bearable to read in solitude than while Miss Long sat in silence beside me. Had I dispensed with my calendar, lost faith in Miss Long and asked no questions of my mother or Dr. Breen, I could easily have lost track of the date.

  Whatever book I asked for was brought to me, bought new for me, not borrowed from a library. My mother told me I could take the books with me when I left.

  “I arrive with a baby and I leave with books,” I said. But, perversely, I asked for far more books than I had time to read. They lay like a second, variously coloured blanket on my bed and spilled over onto the floor. Novels. Histories. Miss Long regarded them all with the same degree of distaste and suspicion, as if she were comparing their collective worthlessness to the infinite value of the Bible she held open on her lap, as if my desultory reading habits were evidence of a dissatisfied and restless soul.

  “So, tell me what is new at Bedside Manor?” I liked to ask her, though I knew she wouldn’t answer.

  “She never speaks to me, never,” I complained to Dr. Breen. “I would rather she sermonized me all day than just sat there, saying nothing.”

  “I have told
her to say nothing that might upset you, so she says nothing at all because every word you say upsets her. She would speak to you if you were less—provocative.”

  “Tell me, Stepdoctor Breen, what is the silent treatment meant to treat?”

  He grinned as if to say that he knew that my wit was but bravado, knew I was afraid because I had no idea what giving birth was like, unlike him who had witnessed, overseen and managed it a thousand times before.

  “What a marvel of conversation she would be if only she had time to learn a language.”

  “Miss Long has always been a woman of few words,” my mother said. “She has been with my husband’s family all her life.”

  “If only you had known her years ago,” I said, “you could have learned from her example. You might have been with your husband’s family all your life.”

  “You make a mockery of things that you will never understand.”

  Dr. Breen examined me daily, palpating my belly gently with his fingers and hands, now and then looking at my face as if my belly were some strange musical instrument and the score for the piece that he was playing at a pitch that only he could hear was written on my forehead.

  The only other doctor who had ever examined me was my father, whose palpations were nowhere near as gentle as Dr. Breen’s. My father would put one hand atop the other and press down until I winced or protested that it hurt, at which point he would grunt and move on as if taking inventory of my organs, trying to confirm that all were present and properly located. I suspected that Dr. Breen was a better doctor than my father, to whom, in spite of everything, I felt a filial loyalty. It seemed that by submitting to Dr. Breen’s ministrations, I was being unfaithful to my father. To have been examined only by this pair of father-doctors—how strange that seemed.

  “I find that one drink of Scotch at bedtime helps me sleep,” I said, wondering if my mother had repeated those words to him.

  He shook his head to indicate that I would not be getting any Scotch, but also, it seemed, in wonderment at the word “find,” implying habitual use of whisky by a girl who was only fifteen.