The Custodian of Paradise

by Wayne Johnston

  “And there is the matter of how much you would miss me.”

  “Smallwood. I have seen that scarecrow of a boy. That worthless wretch. Skin and bones. A crow’s nose. Skulking about like a thief. Wears the same thing every day. A boy like that at Bishop Feild … His father’s son. Pure scruff. Scruff bred from scruff. Why on earth?—a boy like that.”

  “You asked me not to speak of love.”

  “How could you love a boy like that? And even then, how could you—why would you—?”

  “You cannot even bring yourself to use a euphemism.”

  “What man could, even if he knew he was your father? What proper word is there for such degenerate behaviour? I can think of many euphemisms, but you would not want to hear them. A mere girl, well brought up, sent to the best of schools. Where on earth could such a thing have taken place?”

  “It’s not as if we would have had to sneak about this house, is it? Given how rarely you are here—”

  “In my own house—”

  “I can see no point in providing you with details.”

  “My God. What has happened to you? You sound as though you were brought up like that boy. The words that I hear coming from your mouth.”

  “Well. It has been a long time since we spoke.”

  “Do not even think of blaming me for this disgrace. Your mother—”

  “May I think of blaming her for this disgrace?”

  “I blame you both. I have done my best. As much as any man could do in such circumstances. You, girl—you. I once expected so much more from you. So much better.”

  “Perhaps you should have said so.”

  “Yes. I can see that you will blame me. And her. Everyone except yourself.”

  “I blame no one but myself. Not even him.”

  “Did you ever visit this boy’s house?”

  “No. Never. I could not tell you where it is.”

  “I have been inside such houses. Perhaps if you had been. I do not understand it. Are there no supervisors at these schools? Headmaster Reeves, Miss Stirling, they both have much to answer for. Yet I cannot speak a word against them. And my so-called housekeeper—”

  “Is not to blame. Like all the others we have had, she does what I tell her to and then goes home. What I tell her you told me she should do.”

  “How could so much have been going on without my knowledge?”

  “The world has been going on for years without your knowledge.”

  “You know nothing of the world, girl. I see the world every day. Illness, misery, unhappiness, poverty. And ignorance. I have pledged myself against these things. Do you think, child, that you are worldly because of what you did with that Smallwood boy? Because you are old enough to reproduce?”

  “No. You are right. I have yet to see the world. But I would like to.”

  “Well, you will see it soon. Like mother, like daughter. This confirms my suspicions. You are no child of mine. You must tell no one of this. No one. Once I am certain of your condition, I will take—the necessary measures.”

  “Such as?”

  “I will need to think about it. There are things that can be done. I know of certain cases. Will you give me your word that you will not abominate this child? You would never commit such a crime, would you? Against God. Unforgivable.”

  Abominate. The first three letters were the same. I had considered this possibility as well. But I had no idea how to go about it. No one to confide in who might help me and whose discretion was assured. And I was afraid for myself. I had heard rumours of women who had died or who afterwards were barren. I had given little thought, as yet, to the child itself. I knew only that I wanted to be rid of it. It seems harsh to say so. But I had no idea what “to be rid of it” would mean. All I knew of childbirth was what I had seen and read in The Vile, which terrified me now even more than before.

  “I will not, as you say, abominate this child. But neither will I raise it as my own.”

  “That, too, is out of the question. Of course. I will take the necessary measures.”

  I suspected that he had no more idea than I did what he meant by the necessary measures. I felt sick at the likelihood that he would somehow let slip our secret, that the whole thing, left to him, would end in a welter of scandal, confusion, accusations.

  “When you are considering ‘the necessary measures,’ would you keep in mind that I am your daughter? I am sorry for the trouble I have caused you.”

  “Galoot of a girl. The horse has bolted. Apologies are like barn doors. My father told me that. Too late to bar the door. Were you thinking of whose daughter you supposedly were when you let that boy? Were you thinking of whose life you might destroy?”

  “I was thinking neither of destroying nor creating life.”

  “Well, I dare say you are thinking of it now. You are to have nothing more to do with Smallwood, you understand. You must not, above all else, tell him that he made you pregnant.”

  “Of course not. It would come as a great surprise to him.”

  “I would tell him some things if I could. Idiot boy. This is how he repays his uncle’s kindness. But what would one expect. A boy from a family like that. With a father like that. And a mother. The two of them breeding like a pair of animals.”

  “He is not the sort of boy you think he is,” I said.

  My father examined me to make sure I was pregnant. I had no doubt that I was. I was more than a month late. Queasy every morning, sometimes all day long. He told me that his having to examine me was itself “an abomination, a humiliation that I will spare you, though not myself, by conducting it while you are under ether.”

  One evening at his surgery, after all his patients had left, he had me lie, fully clothed, on his examination table. I saw, in one corner of the room, an apparatus whose purpose I divined from the two metal stirrups that descended from it. He tied a cloth mask over my mouth and nose, instructed me to close my eyes. My heart raced. I smelled what I thought was alcohol. An instant later, unaware of having been “under,” I opened my eyes. My head ached, pounded with each pulse. In my mouth a strange, medicinal taste that made me want to gag. The mask he had tied around my face was gone. There was something wet and cold between my legs.

  “Humiliating,” my father said. “My own daughter. No man should have to. Unforgivable.”

  By nearly a month later, my father had still not told me what “measures” would be taken. In fact, he had, in all that time, not spoken a single word to me. I was going to Spencer each day, sitting as usual among my classmates, feigning attentiveness as best I could.

  One day, in history class, Miss Emilee said she wished to see me in her office after school. My first thought was that she somehow knew I was pregnant. That my father, in whatever “measures” he was taking, had included her. Or that she was somehow able to “see” I was pregnant, so acute was her perception when it came to girls. Or that my father, in any one of a million possible ways, had blundered and our so-called secret was now common knowledge. I sat at her desk as before in that sparely furnished, almost empty room.

  “Something has happened at Bishop Feild,” Miss Emilee said. “I am accusing you of nothing. If you are responsible for what has happened, you will need no further explanation. Are you responsible, Miss Fielding?”

  “I have no idea what you mean, Miss Stirling,” I said.

  “You must understand, Miss Fielding, that should I discover that you were responsible, you will be expelled.”

  “I still have no idea what you mean.”

  “Very well,” she said. “I have no choice but to accept your word.”

  Something has happened at Bishop Feild. Why, if it happened there, had Miss Emilee questioned me about it? I decided to ask one of the boys of the Feild what had happened, one of the boys so in awe of Prowse he would never presume to speak to him. I waited just off Bond Street after school until almost all the boys had gone by. Then I saw just the sort of lower-form straggler I had in mind. I stepped out in fro
nt of him and laid my cane on his shoulder.

  “If you try to run away, I’ll catch you,” I said. “If you start to cry, I’ll crack you on the backside with this cane.”

  “Fielding,” he said, looking up at me, eyes and mouth wide open. “I never made fun of you. I never laughed at you. I swear.”

  “Yes,” I said. “Big, bad Fielding. Tell me or I’ll send you home wearing nothing but your blazer. What is going on at Bishop Feild? What is all the fuss about?”

  “One of the ’Tories,” he said. “One of the dormitory boys.”

  “Yes? Something happened to him?”

  “No. He did something.”

  “Who is he and what did he do?”

  “I don’t know who he is.”

  “What in God’s name are you talking about?”

  “A letter. To the Morning Post. About how awful things are in the dormitory. That’s where the boys from around the bay live. A pack of lies, Reeves said. At night, it says in the letter, it’s too cold and there’s not enough to eat. And the masters keep their spending money for themselves. And other stuff. There was no one’s name on it.”

  “Did you think there would be?”

  “What?”

  “This letter. It was in the Morning Post?”

  “No. Someone at the Morning Post sent it back to Reeves. It’s supposed to be a secret, but all the boys have heard about it.”

  “Who is being blamed? Can’t they find out from the writing who it is?”

  “It was made with cut-out words and letters.”

  “What else?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “What else do you know?”

  He shrugged.

  “Get out of my sight,” I said. “And don’t tell anyone I spoke to you or I’ll drag you into Spencer by your ears.”

  And Miss Emilee had suspected me. She must have heard of my supposed humiliation at the hands of Prowse and Smallwood and the others. And thought the letter was revenge.

  A few days later, my father came home shortly after dark. I was in the front room, reading by the light of a single lamp beside the fire that he stared into after he sat down.

  “Arrangements have been made,” he said.

  I closed my book.

  “I wrote to her. I thought she might not bother writing back, but she did. And signed her letter Mrs. Susan Breen. My letter had no salutation. Except at the end. I signed myself ‘Your husband.’ I couldn’t bear, after all these years, to write her name. Or mine. Who else could I ask for help? I could think of no one. I knew I could count on her discretion. She, too, has her reputation. What remains of it. I did not expect her to reply the way she did. I asked only for her help, you see. I told her it was her fault. Hers and yours. That here was a way to make amends. And spare my reputation that, by divorcing me, she had smeared, given it what could have been a fatal blow.”

  I knew that in a letter asking her assistance he would not have said any such thing.

  “New York is so much bigger than St. John’s. You could, with their help, have it there or somewhere even farther from St. John’s. Where no one who knows us would find out. It might be adopted or grow up in some orphanage, I said. Her letter reached me yesterday. I cancelled my appointments. I read it in my surgery. It began, like mine, without a salutation. How strange to hear from her. For so long I was certain I would never see or hear from her again. For her, too, I dare say it was strange. Stranger. She was not expecting it. Out of the blue. What must she have wondered when she saw it?”

  “You said arrangements had been made.”

  “I found it hard to believe what I was reading. I thought I might decline her—offer. But I could think of no alternatives. And we have so little time.”

  “What sort of offer?”

  “She said they would like to raise the child themselves. As their own. Pass it off as their own.”

  “You are suggesting that I give my child to the mother who abandoned me, the woman who when I was six years old abandoned us. My own child is to take my place. Have as its mother the mother who would not have me?”

  “As I said, I, too, thought I might decline her offer. And that of a man who took from me the woman I still think of as my wife. Who in the eyes of God is still my wife.”

  “Father, no man took her from you. She met her husband in New York—”

  “But then I reconsidered. What choice did I have but to accept her offer? Do you think I will just stand by while you shame me? Where in this country could you go to have this child without word getting out that you were Dr. Fielding’s daughter?”

  “I thought—I thought you were going to send me to some convent, one in America or Canada.”

  “There is too much risk involved. Don’t you see? One slip, one mistake. This Dr. Breen is a very wealthy man. She says they can arrange it so that nothing, absolutely nothing, is left to chance. It is not unusual in such cases for the girl’s mother to pretend the child is hers.”

  “I will not let that woman have my child.”

  “What do you propose? That you simply stay here in this house and have the child? I would disown you first. I would send you away to fend for yourself. I would buy space in the papers and declare that you were not my child. Who would disbelieve me?”

  “Oh, you are such a fool, Father, such a fool—”

  “She is capable of anything—”

  “Yet you want her to raise my child—”

  “Which may not be my grandchild, as you may not be my daughter—”

  “Oh, stop it. You sound like you are mad. I cannot believe that there was no one else that you could turn to. Have you no family or friends that you could trust?”

  “Thank God this boy of yours has no sense of honour. Thank God he has not come forward and declared himself. I have no one I can trust. Not even you.”

  They can arrange it so that nothing, absolutely nothing is left to chance. But they could not provide the people of St. John’s with an explanation as to why my father would take me out of Bishop Spencer halfway through the school year and send me away for months. How many rumours would that give rise to?

  It was a problem that was solved in a manner stranger than any of the events that had led to its creation.

  One afternoon, after school, just a day before my father was to have informed Miss Emilee that I would soon be leaving Bishop Spencer, I was lying on the sofa in my father’s study, staring at the volumes on his shelves. I noticed that some of the books had been rearranged, ones that, before now, had not been touched in years. There were even some that were not fully pushed into place, their spines extending beyond the edges of the shelves. And there were fingerprints in the dust on the shelves that I did not think were mine. For so long, no hands but mine had disturbed the shelves. But now, everywhere, were what could only have been my father’s fingerprints. I got up to investigate.

  Showing signs of having been recently disturbed were books of philosophy, history, literature, biology, medicine, mathematics, classical mythology. I began flipping the pages of the books until, from one of them, from Newton’s Principia Mathematic, a piece of paper fell and fluttered to the floor. I picked it up and saw, newly written on it, in my father’s handwriting, the following:

  “Susan: Perhaps only you can understand how loath I am to confess that I have desperate need of your assistance. How sweet to me you once were. How suddenly you changed. Too sudden for its cause to have been some deficiency in me that you discovered. I can think of nothing that would so suddenly incline you against me other than wayward affections. So many years have passed since these events transpired that, were you to tell me the truth now, I would not blame you for leaving no matter what the cause. The question of my daughter’s patrimony has long been a matter of torment to me. You could put an end to my uncertainty with a few mere words. I would think no less of her were you to confirm what I have long known. Fickleness in matters of romance is, regrettably, a commonplace. You were young. I have no wish to
know who the man might be. No wish to confront him. Nor any intention of chastising you. I merely wish to know. I stare at every tall, large-framed man of my age that I see, wondering, searching for that resemblance that there is no trace of in myself. I know of half a dozen men who might be her father. It is all I can do to keep from asking them. But there is no one but you who can say for certain what I need to know.” The letter ended there. I found another one.

  “Sir: My daughter is with child and the father is your son. Your son. You may think this will do no harm to your reputation, nor to his. You may be able to think of nothing that would harm your reputation since one need do nothing but speak your name to set men laughing. No doubt you will deny this accusation as publicly as possible merely to associate your name with mine, your son’s name with my daughter’s. But even a man as low as you can be brought down and you will soon see how. You have marched roaring drunk into my waiting room and demanded to be seen ahead of others who were there before you, causing such a scene that I had no choice but to see you first despite their protests. You sent, by way of one of your children, a note saying that I must come to what you called your premises as you were too ill to come to mine. Thank God I ignored it. Thank God I did not see the squalor in which the boy was raised who, against her will, defiled my daughter. But know this, sir: I have already devised the manner and the means of my revenge. As it is through my daughter that I have been disgraced, so will your disgrace come through your son. My only regret is that not even your complete ruination would sufficiently repay your debt to me.”

  I wondered if he had written these letters merely in the hope of some catharsis, or if he planned to send them and thereby bring about the very catastrophe, the very scandal and disgrace that he so feared. His state of mind worsening day by day until he could focus on nothing but the most reckless and self-destroying manner of revenge.

  I picked up his copy of Judge Prowse’s History of Newfoundland and, leafing through it, saw that letters and words had been cut from the pages, cut so as to leave the pages intact but perforated, as though he had made his excisions with a scalpel. The implications of the missing letters and words did not occur to me at first. I stared through the holes in the pages, mystified, until I recalled the words of the boy I had questioned after Miss Emilee called me to her office. “It was made with cut-out words and letters.” I have already devised the manner and the means of my revenge.