The Custodian of Paradise

by Wayne Johnston

  “Fielding,” shouted one of the tallest boys. “They say that you are never to be found without your cane. They even say you take it with you when you go to bed.” In addition to the somewhat forced laughter of the boys, there was a chorus of gasps and half-suppressed giggles from the girls behind me.

  “You have very small hands for a boy your size,” I said. “Or, rather, for a boy your height. I’m sure that, for a boy your size, one of them will do.”

  Behind me there were more gasps and less laughter than before.

  “My name is Prowse, Miss Fielding,” said the boy, who stood almost opposite me, his hands behind his back in the manner of a man out with his wife and children for an evening stroll. “My father was once headmaster here. I am the captain of the school.”

  “Whereas I, Mr. Prowse,” I said, “am merely the master of my fate and the captain of my soul.”

  “William Ernest Henley,” Prowse said.

  It was hardly an obscure couplet, but I was suitably impressed with Prowse in spite of his affectatious manner. He might have been a gentleman introducing himself formally to a woman held universally in high regard. He did look manly, sporting beneath his blazer a blue vest that was not part of the official school uniform and so signalled some sort of exemption or special status. He was almost absurdly attractive, standing there with his feet planted far apart as if to say that he would, calmly and unostentatiously, hold his ground no matter what. His blond hair was parted down the middle and brushed back so that the whole of his strong but small-browed forehead was shown to best effect. I could see, even from this distance, that his eyes were bright blue. A boy, almost a man, such as I could never hope to have. Yet he had addressed me without condescension or scorn, addressed me in a manner that had disarmed everyone, myself included.

  The boys on either side of him, among them the boys who had taunted me, regarded me somewhat differently now, their expressions begrudgingly noncommittal. I wondered if they were thinking that, though Prowse had accorded me more respect than they believed I deserved, it was still possible that he would change his tone, that he was disarming me as a prelude to repaying my Lilies of the Feild remark.

  “Miss Fielding is formidable,” he said, “though not, we may dare to hope, our opponent at heart.” He nodded with the same exaggerated formality with which he spoke. “Good day to you, Miss Fielding,” he said. As he turned away, the other boys did likewise. He ambled, hands still behind his back, across the playing field, the boys he clearly thought of as his boys surrounding him. He might have been some visiting dignitary whom the boys had been asked to show about the school, looking this way and that, as if he had never seen the grounds before, nodding, smiling at their efforts to impress him.

  Seventeen years old at most, I thought. A mere boy. Absurd in his pretentiousness. Though no more so, perhaps, than I was in mine. I hoped I did not convey the sort of impression Prowse did. Yet how deftly he had brought the confrontation to an end, minimizing the damage to the Feild, yet at the same time seeming to intervene on my behalf, as well as on that of Bishop Spencer, preserving an as-yet never-interrupted peace between the two schools, and somehow even suggesting that, were it necessary, were he forced to stoop to my sort of tactics, he could have cut me down to size.

  I stopped patrolling the fence. The way my encounter with Prowse had ended, it seemed out of the question to go back to baiting the other boys into making fun of me. That I had routed the boys with one line did nothing to alter or elevate my standing at Spencer. I had thought that day, especially as Prowse had addressed me so directly and with such deference, that something would come of it. But Prowse stayed as far from the fence as he always had. I saw him—even from a distance he was conspicuous both by his carriage and by the knot of boys by whom he was constantly surrounded—standing near the front entrance to the Feild, seemingly looking my way, though from that distance, it was hard to tell.

  One day I followed the fence all the way to where it ended at Bond Street, walked around the iron post and stepped onto the other side, the Feild side, something that, in my time at Spencer, no other girl had been known to do. Seeing that none of the masters was about, I made my way across the playing field, bringing to a silent halt a football game whose participants gawked at me.

  I walked straight through them, leaving it to them to step out of my way, focusing my eyes on the distant Prowse whose full attention I was now sure I had, for he and his delegation had begun to walk towards me. We met near the fringe of the playing field, still on the grass.

  “Hello, Miss Fielding,” Prowse said. “Or is it true that people merely call you Fielding?”

  “At Spencer they just call me Fielding,” I said. “I prefer it.”

  “Then Fielding it will be,” he said.

  I noted the future tense. Further visits would be welcome. Or merely expected?

  “I will call you whatever the boys call you,” I said.

  “They call me Prowse.”

  “Then Prowse it will be.”

  “Is that what you want to be, Fielding, one of the boys?” Prowse said. His tone had changed. Derision? No. A mere lapse into informality?

  “Boys will be boys,” I said.

  “One of the men, then?” he said.

  “Men also will be boys,” I said. “I have merely come to visit.”

  “But look at the stir you’ve caused,” Prowse said, pointing across the Feild towards Spencer, where the girls had gathered at the fence, gripping and peering through the bars. “What will Miss Stirling think?”

  I shrugged.

  “Are you not concerned,” he said, “about your reputation?”

  “My visits,” I said, “will do more harm to your reputation than to mine.”

  Prowse laughed. “You plan to come back? What if Miss Stirling forbids it? What if Headmaster Reeves forbids it?”

  “Then I will have to think of something else,” I said.

  But my visits were not forbidden, by either Miss Emilee or Headmaster Reeves. I think she spoke to him about me, perhaps told him that, as my purpose was to agitate, the best thing to do was ignore me.

  I went almost every day to the Feild, following the fence to Bond Street, walking round to the other side. When I did not go, it was because I could see no sign of Prowse, by whose bland perfection I was captivated, mesmerized. Who with such ease controlled the other boys. I suspected that, were I to visit in his absence, the whole thing might deteriorate into mere name-calling.

  I noticed, but didn’t mind, that Prowse’s manner with me soon began to change. Less deferential, less polite. I felt, I knew, I was being called on to perform, my being both willing and able to do so with a crowd of boys hilarious because of my gender and my enrolment at such a haven of propriety as Bishop Spencer. Prowse always led me to “perform” at what he encouraged the other boys to think of as their, and his, mock expense, for he did not spare himself when provoking me.

  “So, Fielding,” he said. “Here you are. You’re like a stray cat who, because she was fed once, keeps coming back.”

  “And is there not a mouse among you who will try to bell the cat?” I said. “Or, rather, is there no one among you who has heard of that expression?”

  “What cat could resist so many Feild mice?”

  “To me, to the girls, to most of St. John’s, you will always be the lilies of the Feild.”

  “You exaggerate your fame.”

  “You underrate my infamy.”

  “Do you know what the lily symbolizes, Fielding? Purity. Chastity. Innocence. In which case you have paid us a compliment.”

  “Yes. The one of assuming that you had a sense of irony. Behold, the lilies of the Feild. They do not reap. Neither do they sow. Their fathers do that for them.”

  It went on like that for a while, but the exchanges became increasingly risque, Prowse trying to draw me into a boyish display of ribaldry.

  “We have practice this afternoon, Fielding. Would you be willing to retrieve o
ur balls?”

  “I’m sure there are plenty of boys who would be willing to retrieve your balls. And what a shame it is that your team keeps losing. I’m sure your balls will go farther when your bats get bigger.” I knew that this was just the sort of thing they wanted me to say. And it was difficult to answer such lewdness with real wit. But, though they laughed, they were terrified of me. I could see, in the eyes of most of them, that they wished I would go back to keeping to my side of the fence.

  “Fielding,” I heard one day as I was walking home from school to my house on Circular Road, behind the grounds of Government House. It was Prowse, standing in the doorway of one of the finer houses of the city, a late-Victorian mansion built after the fire of 1892. Perhaps ten houses removed from mine. I knew it to be his grandfather’s house, but I had never seen Prowse on Circular Road before. He looked furtively up and down the street.

  “Would you like to meet my grandfather?” he said. Prowse’s grandfather. The eminent D.W. A retired judge famous for having written the authoritative history of Newfoundland, a book that he was once quoted as saying was “owned by almost everyone and read by next to none.” I had not read it, though my father had a copy in his study, a massive volume as pristine-looking as the ones around it.

  I thought of declining Prowse’s invitation on some pretence, wondering why he wanted me to meet his grandfather. The thought of making polite conversation with the aging judge whose book I hadn’t read and with whomever else was in the house did not appeal to me. But I could think of no way of declining that would not seem clumsily churlish and by which Prowse would not gain over me some sort of advantage, the redoubtable Fielding so eager to hurry home to her famously empty house.

  Why do you want me to meet him? I felt like saying. Blood rushed to my face as I imagined Prowse “declaring” himself or making some sort of pledge.

  “Come in,” Prowse said. “Come in. I’ve told him all about you. He would love to meet you.”

  “All right,” I said. “But I can’t stay long because—”

  “He’ll be happy just to shake your hand.”

  I crossed the street and, ascending the steps, walked past Prowse as he held the door open for me, my shoulder slightly brushing his waistcoat. I let slip some hybrid of “thank you” and “excuse me,” which I hoped he didn’t hear. Once inside, I stopped, waiting for him to lead the way to the front room where I assumed his grandfather, and others perhaps, were waiting.

  “Straight upstairs,” Prowse said and began to make his way up them two at a time.

  I followed at a normal pace, wondering if the house might be empty except for him and me. When he reached the first landing, he walked out of sight, though I could hear his footsteps in the hallway above. As I reached the second floor, I saw him leaning against a door jamb, peering inside a room with a smile on his face. He silently motioned me forward with his hand as if it was a sleeping baby he was looking at and wanted me to see. Puzzled, I all but tiptoed down the hall.

  “Look,” Prowse said.

  I looked inside and saw a figure hunched over a desk, a long-bearded man with white hair that looked as if it had not been attended to in years, his face resting to one side on a mass of maps and charts, his eyes closed, his hands flanking his head, slightly curled up in a way that instantly made me feel sorry for him.

  “Grandfather,” Prowse said loudly before I could protest. The old man’s eyes opened slowly, then closed again. “Grandfather,” Prowse shouted, and this time the old judge sat up, blinking rapidly as though he was not yet aware of his surroundings or the time of day. He looked at us in the doorway and smiled. “My dear,” he said, and held out his arms to me as if he had known me all his life. I stepped forward and, unsure of what else to do, took his hands in mine. “How tall you’ve grown,” he said. “A grown woman. A lovely young woman.” The smile faded from his face and was replaced by a look of distress, almost panic. I instinctively, and hoped reassuringly, tightened my grip on his hands.

  “This is Miss Fielding, Grandfather,” said Prowse, who was still leaning, arms folded, against the door jamb. “She is a student at Bishop Spencer.”

  The smile returned. “Of course, of course, Miss Fielding. How are you today, my dear? That’s a different dress than you wore before, isn’t it?”

  “Yes,” I said. “It is. It’s new.”

  “Well, it’s lovely. You’re looking lovely.”

  “Come on, Miss Fielding,” Prowse said behind me. “Let’s let Grandfather get back to his work.”

  “We’ll meet again, soon, my dear,” the old man said. “It is always such a pleasure.”

  “For me as well, Judge Prowse,” I said. I removed my hands from his, turned and, ignoring Prowse as emphatically as I could, walked past him and out into the hallway along which I walked rapidly this time and began to make my way downstairs. Prowse caught up with me at the bottom.

  “I know what you think,” he said.

  “If you did, you would not have come downstairs.”

  “You think I humiliated my grandfather and played a trick on you.”

  “He is an old man in his dotage—”

  “A lonely old man. That’s why I bring him visitors. You’re not the first. You won’t be the last. He would never see another soul if not for me. My father and his other sons avoid him. So do his daughters. Because he insists on remaining in this house. He had a stroke a while ago. Everyone’s ashamed of him except for me. They want to shut him away where he can’t embarrass them. But he stays here. I’m practically all he has. I bring him food. I come by to make sure that he hasn’t hurt himself.”

  I looked at Prowse. I thought of the judge’s unkempt appearance. The house resembled a ransacked library. Books that looked like they’d been flung about lay everywhere; bookless covers; coverless books whose first pages were missing. The judge’s small study had been even worse, the floor rug invisible beneath footprint-bearing maps and charts. The one window piled so high with books that only creases of light showed through. Hunting trophies that must once have adorned the walls piled in a heap in one corner—elk’s antlers, a black bear skin, a stuffed lynx with gleaming yellow eyes, photographs of the younger judge holding by its mouth a salmon more than half his size.

  “You should have told me what to expect,” I said.

  “I’m sorry,” Prowse said. “I just wanted you to meet him. It seemed very important to me.”

  I looked away from him. “Well,” I said. “I’m glad to have met him. But now I have to leave.”

  “Will you come again?” Prowse said. “I think it would mean a great deal to him. Especially if you stayed longer.”

  “Perhaps,” I said. “I’ll see. I don’t think he would remember me.”

  “If he thinks he remembers you, it’s the same, isn’t it? For him, I mean.”

  “I suppose,” I said. “All right then. I’ll come back.”

  And I did go back, several times over the following months.

  Prowse would often leave me alone with the judge, who, though he seemed not to recognize me from one visit to the next, was very fond of me, prone to pouring out to me the sea of self-doubt that his mind became in his most lucid moments.

  “The whole thing is a failure,” the judge told me one day as he sat in his chair beside the desk, I in a chair that I had pulled up close to his so that our knees were nearly touching. He weighed his book in his hands as if thereby to gauge the extent of its failure. “It’s a great book,” I said, feeling as though I was assuring this old man who was near the end of his life that he was not unloved. “I can’t help thinking of the book that might have been. Well, I have always had more ambition than ability. I knew the destination but could never find the way.”

  “You have written a great book,” I firmly said. “A great book,” over and over, hoping his mind might incorporate the words “great book,” that they might give rise to a new, more comforting illusion. Delusion. What did it matter now if what he thought was
true was not, as long as he was happy? I tried to comfort him. After I left the judge, I went downstairs where Prowse always waited for me, standing in the late-afternoon gloom before a fire he had lit.

  “I don’t know what would have happened to him if I had not kept coming to visit him. There is a woman who prepares his food. I think she comes by when it suits her. My father has not seen the judge in months. Nor have any of my aunts and uncles. He sees only me and the few people who accept my invitations. His friends stopped coming after the stroke when they realized he had no idea who they were. Your visits are doing wonders for him.”

  “Really?” I said. “I always have to pretend we’re meeting for the first time. It’s very strange. Very sad.”

  “Not for him,” Prowse said. “That’s what you must remember. For him, having you come visit—it’s as if a young, adoring reader of his book had sought him out. It may not be so bad, I think, having everything remain so new.”

  I first met the old man in September, but all the visits now seem like a succession of November afternoons. While I sat on the sofa, Prowse stood, hands behind his back, staring into the fire as if in contemplation of the judge’s life and fate.

  I walked down Circular Road on those autumn afternoons, a gale of wind at my back if the sky was clear and one straight in my face if it was not. Impelled by the wind in the same direction as the leaves that clattered past me, I often used my cane to keep from falling forward, my free hand on my hat that would otherwise have blown away too fast for me to catch it. When the wind was against me, it was often raining, the rain driven slantwise so that even when my umbrella was not blown inside out, it was useless. I looked down the street at the house that appeared to be unoccupied, the windows reflecting daylight, still opaque though the sun had nearly set. It was possible to see inside the bright front rooms of other houses in which I assumed normal life was taking place, children running about, grown-ups smoking and conversing.