The Custodian of Paradise

by Wayne Johnston

  Again that condescending smile. “I will give you some laudanum if your sleeplessness persists.” A couple of times he drew from a bottle some drops of laudanum that he mixed with water. Each time, after drinking it, I fell into a dreamless sleep, but woke still feeling tired.

  “Do you know what my father calls an obstetrician, Stepdoctor Breen?” I asked him one day.

  “No,” he said. “I can’t imagine.”

  “A plumber in the ladies’ room. Ironic, isn’t it? An obstetrician who can’t make his wife pregnant. A sterile obstetrician. Attending at the birth of other people’s babies, attending every day to the pregnant wives of other men.” His face turned crimson red. I feared that he would shout at me.

  “The problem may be with your mother,” he said at length.

  “How gallant of you to say so.”

  I fancied that his past, present and future patients would be somehow reassured to hear that his wife was at last expecting, that it would remove the one nagging reservation they had always had about him.

  February 14, 1916

  Valentine’s Day. Your father is a boy named Prowse. You and he will live in ignorance of each other’s existence. Mind you, Prowse lives in ignorance of everyone’s existence but his own. If astronomers were to announce that the planets revolve around not the sun but Prowse, everyone but Prowse would be surprised. The character flaw you are least likely to suffer from is low self-esteem. He is tall, good-looking, the captain of his school, which he still attends. How strange that seems, that he is still a schoolboy while here I lie with his schoolboy’s baby inside me. I once thought he was in love with me. I was in love with him, though I never said so.

  You will likely be tall, given Prowse’s height and mine. In which case, since both my mother and Dr. Breen are short, you may get the same kind of kidding I did about where your height comes from.

  You will know nothing of the nights we spent together in this room. You will not know that, for six months, this odd, makeshift room was the sole site of your mother’s confinement and your gestation. They will dismantle this room after I am gone. It, the room it was before they altered it for me, may be yours when you are older. They might, regardless of the irony and the memories that it evokes for them, make it your playroom. You might run through here, years from now, oblivious to what it once looked like and the six months you spent here as my body made you ready for the world.

  Secrecy. So many secrets to be kept from you. Everyone else in this house will know the truth and be committed to protecting you from it. Wary of letting something slip in front of you. Of what they commit to paper. Mindful, at all times, of where you are in the house. As watchful of you as they would be of an invalid. Ready with answers to any questions you might ask about why you look absolutely nothing like your father or any of your father’s relatives. Or questions about your half-sister in St. John’s, whom you might ask to see a photograph of and whose spitting image you might be. And though you might find that resemblance remarkable, you will put it down to our being blood relatives. You the cynosure of so much secrecy and vigilance.

  What will they tell you if you ask about me? It may depend on where, by the time you are old enough to ask, I am, what I am doing, what, if anything, they know about me. I can imagine your future far more easily and vividly than I can my own. Perhaps I will measure out my life, my age, by yours, by your birthdays, by the stages of your childhood. I cannot imagine a minute passing without my thinking of you, wondering where, at that moment, you are, what you look like, who you are with.

  I have no hopes or expectations. I don’t mean that my life is hopeless, only that I know of no other life for a woman than the one that, having been expelled from it, I renounced.

  Oh, how they will spoil you! It seems absurd to be jealous of my unborn child. And yet I am. You will think you are her child and you will have her love that I, who am her daughter, never had. You will have all that she withheld from me. You, my child, will have my childhood. I don’t doubt that you will have the best of everything. I know next to nothing of the man who will pretend to be your father. He seems to have no doubts or misgivings about this arrangement—though who knows how time might change both him and my mother? It may be that your true parentage will become a sense of torment to him, that he will grow weary, even resentful of passing you off as his to a world that will accord him credit that he knows is undeserved. Or blame. And so it might be with her. To the degree that, in their eyes, you do not measure up, they may blame your blood parents and resent you all the more because they cannot voice that blame in front of you.

  Chapter Three

  LOREBURN

  I TOOK A BREAK FROM WRITING. SPENT MOST OF THREE DAYS outdoors, sitting on the beach and staring out to sea. I watched the light at Quinton blinking just perceptibly when it was foggy and listened to the foghorn. Always the shotgun was beside me in case the dogs came near. I imagined the conning tower of a German submarine surfacing far out in the bay. But my mind was in Manhattan, preoccupied with a time when the outcome of the war before this one was still in doubt. It was not long before I was writing again.

  Sometimes Dr. Breen examined me internally, drawing a sheet down from above my bed so that I couldn’t see what he was doing or what he was doing it with, a bed sheet that rolled off a spool fixed to the wall. With Miss Long assisting, he examined me. I was grateful to be shielded from the sight of them. I tightly closed my eyes, clenched my teeth and gripped the bedsheets with my fists. I heard the clinking of metal instruments and a murmured exchange between him and Miss Long.

  “You would tell me if you were in pain or discomfort, wouldn’t you?” he said when, the examination complete, he drew down my nightgown and rewound the sheet onto its spool. “You wouldn’t keep it to yourself?”

  “I would tell everyone,” I said.

  “So you’re not having any pain?” He sounded faintly surprised in a way I found offputting.

  “No,” I said, “but if I do, I’ll be the first to know.”

  “Let’s try to be serious now. You will tell me, won’t you?”

  “I suspect my discomforts are the customary ones.”

  “Such as?”

  “My bladder.”

  “It hurts?”

  “It works. It can’t stand to be anything but empty.”

  “Anything else?”

  “My back.”

  “It’s been complaining.”

  “It’s been complaining that I don’t lie on my stomach any more.”

  I felt like some unethical experiment of his, something for which he would be banished from his profession if his colleagues got wind of it.

  He and my mother acted as if the baby had no father, as if I merely willed it into being, perversely and spontaneously generated what I knew would be a predicament for everyone. I wondered if my father had told them who I said the father was, the name of the unsuitable-for-marriage man that I supplied him with.

  I thought of Prowse, whom only I knew to be the baby’s father, Prowse whose air of entitlement I had mistaken for ardour.

  I was the habitation, the shelter of a creature that was half-composed of Prowse, whom I had loved and now wished I could bring myself to hate. This half-Prowse would grow up in this house, in this city that Prowse had never seen, raised by parents Prowse would never know, this half-Prowse of whose existence Prowse would never know. But I, in spite of Prowse, my mother and Dr. Breen, would always think of the baby as wholly mine.

  The customary and cursory morning examination became abruptly more elaborate and endlessly drawn out. Dr. Breen seemed to put his stethoscope on every square inch of my belly, then work backwards to the place that he had started from. His expression was both quizzical and wondrous, as if I had arrived at the stage in my pregnancy that he found most fascinating. I thought that perhaps his thoroughness and look of delight had to do with this being, for the first and only time, his baby whose health he was monitoring, whose sounds he was attending to, all h
is medical detachment having given way to what he had never before regarded as the miracle it was. I looked at his face, inches from my belly as, with his head cocked sideways and the tubes of the stethoscope depending from his ears, he moved the amplifier almost imperceptibly. He looked like a doctor mapping out a woman’s womb, as if the stethoscope were an experimental instrument of his invention and he had no idea yet what the sounds were that it enabled him to hear.

  “Can I listen?” I said.

  He stuffed the stethoscope into his doctor’s bag.

  “Do you think America will join the war?” I said. “The rest of the world is going up in flames and here you are—”

  “There are more pleasant things to think about,” he said.

  It is strange. David was born during one World War and died in another.

  At night I felt that this was a house in waiting, a house in which no one slept soundly. Everyone was waiting, wondering. The rest of them waiting for the baby to come and for me to go. I for whatever would come next, the unimaginable future that would begin the day I left this house. There were four of us now and there would be four when I was gone. All waiting for this strange interregnum to be over with. For the house to be cleansed of its secret and of the danger that secret posed to all of them. Feeling as if this period of yearning and dread would never end. Looking forward to when it would seem, when it might even be possible to pretend, that this time had never been.

  March 7, 1916

  I like it best here, or hate it least, when I can hear something from outside. It feels as though I am in the hold of a ship, in some luxurious but windowless compartment. This suite is to me as my body is to you. Sometimes I do not so much hear the weather as feel it hit the house. Tonight, though it feels as if it might be cold outside, cold enough to snow, rain drums loudly on the roof. No wind, no thunder, only winter rain, pounding overhead on what might be the deck. I would not be surprised to hear footsteps overhead, boots clomping on bare board as the crew, taken off guard by it, tries to catch up with the storm.

  Sometimes, though not tonight, gusts of wind make the whole house shake, though not so much as a draft can enter this room. I have heard the thumping of hailstones on the roof and on the windowpanes of other rooms that I have never seen. And the weird clicking of wind-driven sleet that sounds like the tapping of a multitude of fingernails on glass. Proof, at once reassuring and unsettling, that the world outside persists in spite of my being unable to observe it.

  Miss Long sat by the bed even when I wasn’t in it, reading her Bible, wetting her finger when she wished to turn one of the tissue-thin, translucent pages. Reading at an impossibly slow, ponderous pace, not so much seeking edification or instruction, it seemed, as teaching herself to read, the achievement of literacy by a perusal of the Bible being the single, never-to-be-completed pastime of her life. Her lips not quite silently mouthed the words so that there issued from them constantly a kind of sibilant murmur that so irritated me I offered to read the book out loud. Miss Long, by her silence, declined the offer.

  Each evening, as Miss Long locked the doors of my suite from the outside, I called her “Florence Nightinjail.” “Good night, Florence Nightinjail.” How I would have loved to see a smile tugging at the corners of her mouth. Or anyone’s.

  Each morning she would look at the risen mound of my belly and shake her head, unable to believe how inexorable and protracted was the course of this affliction. Did she expect that, what with all the Bible reading that was done in its proximity, she would come in one morning to find that the swelling of this girl’s body had reversed itself, that the illness for whose alleviation she had prayed so long had run its course?

  “Men from all over the world make port in St. John’s, you know,” I said. “Your employers are going to get quite a surprise when the baby’s born. I mean, for all they know, his father might be Portuguese or Spanish. Or West Indian. He might be from Hong Kong. Wouldn’t that be a hard one to explain to their friends, how Dr. Breen and my mother managed between them to conceive a baby who was half-Chinese? It might start some rumours about my mother, don’t you think? Or send Stepdoctor Breen’s relatives clawing through the branches of their family tree. I really don’t know what complexion the little bundle of joy will be. But I can see the announcement in the papers. ‘Dr. and Mrs. Breen are pleased to announce the addition to their household of a bouncing black baby boy.’”

  The old woman slammed shut her Bible and, instead of turning away as usual, leaned towards me without touching the bed and, though we were alone in the room, whispered, “Dr. Breen heard two heartbeats. Do you understand? He heard two heartbeats.”

  These were the first words she had ever addressed to me.

  She all but hissed the last two words, as if in them lay the essence of my wickedness.

  “What do you mean?” I said.

  “Two heartbeats,” Miss Long hissed again.

  “Mine and the baby’s,” I said.

  The old woman shook her head. “Two heartbeats,” she said. “The beating of two hearts.” She pointed at my belly. “In there.”

  I felt that the old woman, in pointing at my belly, had punched the breath from my body. I heard myself groan and I clenched my insides in anticipation of another blow.

  “That wasn’t one of your smart remarks now, was it,” she said.

  Twins. Suddenly, another life to be relinquished, another life that, with the one to whose renunciation I was reconciled, would come tumbling out. All along, beside the guilt I had felt for my one child, waiting to take on form and substance, had been the ghost of this second guilt. A child that, even in the womb, was unknown and unacknowledged by its mother. And he had known. It had been for that reason that he had all but pressed his ear against my belly, the better to hear those heartbeats, dissynchronous, distinct.

  After the old woman had gone, I lay there on the bed, my hands on the belly whose shape they had grown used to but now seemed unfamiliar to me. I felt as if my own body had betrayed me, withheld the truth from me as surely as my three attendants had. My body, which had given up its secret to Dr. Breen, had kept it from me. The other baby had been there all along, beneath my hands that cradled the drum-tight egg of my belly as I walked about my rooms. The other, hidden baby that did not so much as insinuate itself into my dreams, that had been lying low as if it had its reasons for not wanting me to know of its existence. How could my attendants know of this second child while I, the host in whose body it was growing, by which it was nourished and protected, did not know? No doubt this secret knowledge had helped them endure my behaviour, my “smart” remarks.

  March 10, 1916

  Wombmates. I suppose I should be glad that you will have each other in the world, in this house. I should be glad that you will have each other for companionship through what will surely be a curious childhood. Neither of you will be what your mother was, is: an only child. They think of themselves as doubly blessed now, which they surely are. But they will have to guard their secret more than twice as carefully, infinitely more, having to cope with that strange alliance, the weird conspiracy of twins. I should be glad to be the source and vessel of a second soul. I am glad for you, my—what should I call you?—second child. Though you have been there all along, neither first nor second, merely undetected. All of my letters should have been addressed to you both. I will never know which of your two beating hearts it was that Dr. Breen heard first and which one he discovered later. He will never know. But though there is no first or second, one of you will precede the other from me and one of you will have to wait your turn. Why, if I am glad for you, has my sorrow grown by the same incalculable measure as their joy? I am ashamed of feeling sorrowful.

  Two of you to live forever under the same misapprehension. Two of you lost to me. Two lives to speculate about for the rest of mine instead of one.

  I thought of my mother, lying awake at night, imagining her twice-blessed future, my mother knowing that in her daughter’s womb lay a c
hild that her daughter did not know was there. A child that when it issued with its double from her daughter’s body would be hers.

  “Stepdoctor Breen,” I said, hoping my voice and pallor did not betray me. “Miss Long tells me that you have some news. News that you have had for some time now.”

  “She told me of your conversation.”

  “I suppose it was her idea of a conversation.”

  “You’re having twins.”

  “You mean you and my mother are getting twins.”

  “God willing.”

  “When were you going to tell me? When God said it was time to?”

  “Please do not add blasphemy to your list of vices.”

  “I can think of one vice you should be glad is on my list.”

  “If that is how you choose to see it.”

  “It is.”

  “I discovered the second heartbeat only weeks ago.”

  “I discovered it only hours ago.”

  “I was worried that it might upset you—”

  “Or make me change my mind?”

  “It never occurred to me that you might, as you put it, change your mind. You’ve been sensible so far. I had no reason to think that that would change.”

  Sensible. He meant me to take it for the euphemism it was. Too “sensible” to go back to Newfoundland, to step off the ship with twin infants in her arms.

  “You chose what was best for your child and yourself,” he said, as if he had just cautioned himself that he must not provoke me. “I didn’t want you to fret. I thought you might think that giving birth to twins was twice as hard. That you might be even more apprehensive than you were already. I was thinking of your health. And the babies’ health. Miss Long should not have spoken to you as she did. I have told her so and she has asked me to apologize on her behalf.” Like my mother, he said things he did not even wish to be believed.

  “I did what any sensible young girl would do.”