The Custodian of Paradise

by Wayne Johnston

“I understand, Miss Fielding. I have taxed you far too much. Forgive me. You are cold and tired. And thirsty. Time for our exchange.”

  Again he took my hand when I proffered my money. I let him hold it for a while. Nothing in that touch but simple tenderness. I pulled away, but waited until the bottle was pushed out from behind the curtain.

  Night after night. It has been weeks since I have slept for more than a few minutes at a time. Young Mr. Prowse. Perhaps it proves nothing. Common knowledge that I visited the judge’s house while Prowse was there. But it is also common knowledge that the judge was there. And not even the neighbours knew how far gone he was. As good a chaperone as any, they must have thought.

  For all people know, there were other chaperones. They probably assumed there were, given how frequently and openly I came and went. Other chaperones. Other visitors. I remember Prowse mentioned other visitors. It may be that my “Provider” is merely repeating a rumour. Testing me. Trying to draw me out. What proof could he or anyone have? No proof is possible. Not even if Prowse boasted of his high-school exploits to his friends, unaware of the consequences of those exploits, can anyone prove that I have—had children, let alone who their father is. Perhaps he will run out of rumours if I wait him out. And the rationing of alky cannot last forever.

  “Good evening, Miss Fielding.”

  “One bottle of callabogus and I’ll be on my way.”

  “Will this winter never end? Nearly a month now since they brought the sealers home and it feels like it was only yesterday. Does it feel like that to you?”

  “It feels like I’ve been standing outside this window for a month.”

  “You have a great deal on your mind. A great burden. As do I.”

  “If this is how you spend your time, no wonder—”

  “I know about your mother too, Miss Fielding. More about her than you do. I too am tormented by memories of her. For most mothers, it would be a great sacrifice, raising your daughter’s children as your own, but not for her. A blessing, not a sacrifice, for her. A far greater one than she deserves, let me assure you. It must seem so to you.”

  “The timing of my visit to New York was mere coincidence. A fortunate one. I was able to help her with her children. You misunderstood me the other night when I asked you not to say their names. I was speaking of my mother’s children. Their names.”

  “Yet you could not bear to hear me speak them.”

  “The pregnancy was unexpected. They had given up hope. My mother had been diagnosed with some sort of—untreatable condition. It was a blessing, as you say. I stayed indoors. Her husband did too. My mother was afraid that we would catch something and pass it on to her. Her health was—And when the babies were born, they were so small and frail, we were so afraid of, of infecting them with something, that all of us, we never went outside.”

  “Not one person, Miss Fielding, even recalls hearing of your visit. Your mother and her husband said not a word about you to their friends.”

  “No one was more surprised, or more pleased of course, than my mother and her husband when they found out she was pregnant. She invited me to visit her when she found out. She knew there would never be a better time for us to—reconcile. For so many years we had no contact. None. And then she wrote to me. Not just to tell me her news but to ask for my forgiveness. Such a wonderful letter. I wish I had it with me. I read it every day. She said that all the doctors had told her it would never happen. It seemed like a miracle when she heard that she was pregnant. A miracle. And she knew that there was only one way she could repay God for his kindness and his mercy. And that was to make amends with me. She said the past could not be changed, but the future—it was what God wanted her to do, she said. She knew it. She felt it. And so she wrote to me, asking me to—what was the word she used?—to come and celebrate with them. How wonderful it was to see her, and to be there when she had her children. Children. Yes. A boy and a girl. As if one child—God saw fit—it was—we were all so happy—such a happy house it was—I can’t begin to—to make you understand. I stayed on for months, I might have stayed forever except I knew my father needed me, so I came back.”

  I have no idea how often he had tried to interrupt me by the time I heard him shout my name.

  “SHEILAGH.”

  My eyes were closed. I was leaning on my cane, if not for which I would have fallen forward. I realized that I was crying. I opened my eyes and, through a blur of tears, saw that everything, the window, the ground, my cane, seemed to be revolving.

  I managed to stop the spinning momentarily by staring hard at the knob of my cane. But then it began again, the silver knob not so much spinning now as lurching repeatedly from right to left. I held my breath and closed my eyes. The crying stopped. I opened my eyes. The dizziness had passed.

  “You need not be afraid of me.”

  “You knew my mother?”

  “I thought I did. I know of Dr. Fielding’s doubts, Miss Fielding. I know he suspects that you are not his child.”

  “Everyone knows that.”

  “There is another question that you wish to ask me. You may never have another chance.”

  “Are you my father?”

  “One of them.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “You were twice fathered.”

  I heard the window sliding shut. I raised my cane and tapped the glass. Considered breaking it.

  I was about to turn and head for home when I saw, on the window ledge, conspicuously, blatantly in view, a bottle of callabogus. I took it, concealed it beneath my coat and, just able to keep from running, made my way down Patrick Street.

  What will he do next? I was such a fool. Bursting into tears like that. Reciting that silly fairy tale. Like the daydreams, the fantasies of some unhappy ten-year-old. A letter from out of nowhere that fixes everything. My remorseful mother, her conscience, her true nature awakened by a miracle, begging my forgiveness. The dawning of a better day for everyone except my father. It’s a wonder I didn’t work him into it somehow. With that outburst I confirmed everything my Provider said. But still he has no proof.

  You were twice fathered.

  I should not have asked the question. The answer of a man gone mad.

  That bottle of callabogus. Free of charge. I should have left it there. But what a night I would be facing if I had.

  It was not by chance that he saw me or heard me that first night. P.D. the Second told me where I should go, where I should wait, must have done so on instructions from my Provider.

  I am important to him. Because he is “one of” my fathers. Because of my mother, whom he says he “thought” he knew. But he seems unsure of what he wants. It is as if he is waiting for me to reveal the purpose of our conversations.

  Everyone, the ’Stab included, are giving him a wide berth. His part of the street is always empty, the windows of the other houses always dark. We speak quietly but surely audibly to the people in the house adjoining his. But no one ever appears or even knocks on a window to complain. Do his neighbours go elsewhere for the night? Perhaps they know him to be some crackpot who is better left alone. More trouble than it’s worth confronting him or crossing him. But yes, it feels as if everyone is elsewhere and he alone is housebound. Left each night to stare out at his deserted street. Hard to guess his age from his voice. Thirty? Forty-five?

  “All those young men who are dying in France. In someone else’s war. Cannon fodder.” Far more animated about the war than about the sealers.

  “Were you in the war?” I said. “Were you wounded in the war?” An image had come to mind. A man behind that curtain in a wheelchair. An arm or leg blown off in the war. A young man brooding on his pointless fate.

  “Yes. I was in the war.”

  “Is that why you are hiding from me? Were you—?”

  “Disfigured in the war? No. Wounded. Not badly. I look the same as I did before the war.”

  “But it must have affected you.”

  “It is a wa
r, Miss Fielding. Terrible even as wars go. Unspeakable. But not what made me what I am.”

  “Which is?”

  “Still a man.”

  “What do you do now? For a living, I mean.”

  “I have an inheritance of sorts.”

  “You have no occupation?”

  “Why did your mother leave, Miss Fielding?”

  I couldn’t speak.

  “She must have had her reasons.”

  “Yes.”

  “Do you know what they were?”

  “No. I suppose she—”

  “Wanted to begin again? Got bored? Couldn’t stand it here in Newfoundland? Fell out with your father? None of them is true. You should not suppose.”

  “I don’t—”

  “Extraordinary. For a woman to leave her husband and her little girl and not look back. Don’t you think?”

  “I’m tired of these conversations.”

  “And now your mother has replaced you with your children. Your own children.”

  “Why don’t you ask for what you want? I have very little money.”

  “What about your father? Why is it that your father thinks you are someone else’s child, not his?”

  “Who knows why?”

  “He is confused. And lonely. And ridiculed by other men.” And because he is ashamed of me, I almost said. Because he needs someone other than himself to blame for what she did.

  “All true. But not the answer to my question.”

  “You said you were one of my fathers. That I was twice fathered. What is that supposed to mean?”

  “When you were in New York, did you ask your mother why she left?”

  “No. Not really.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because I knew she’d be—evasive.”

  “You must wonder what her reasons were.”

  “The point is that she left. Long ago.”

  “That she left you, you mean. That to her you weren’t a good enough reason to stay. But how can you blame her without knowing why she left? Without knowing what the cost to her of staying would have been. Can you conceive of no reason why a woman might decide to renounce her little girl?”

  “None that are flattering to her.”

  “The reasons that you left your children. Were they flattering to you?”

  What is the point of denying what he knows or even just assumes is true? I asked myself. It is not as though you will be supplying him with proof by admitting you have children. He is already certain he is right. Nothing you say can make him more certain or more dangerous.

  “I hope that, because of my decision, they will have better lives. I believe they will. Unless someone interferes.”

  “Because of your decision, they will have better lives. Might your mother not have hoped that, because of her decision, you would have a better life?” In his voice another hint of tenderness. A quavering as on the night when we first met. As if, in spite of what he says, he will side with her against me.

  “I don’t see how.”

  “No. You don’t. But perhaps you will some day. It would be pointless if I told you now. You would not understand.”

  “Look, if you know something, why don’t you just—”

  The window slid shut so loudly I thought the glass would break. A bottle of callabogus was on the ledge. I took it and went home.

  I will demand to meet him face to face.

  Chapter Eight

  EVEN ON SUNDAYS MY FATHER GETS UP EARLY, COMES home late, spends the intervening hours at his surgery, alone. He does not, cannot spend his day of rest at home, because of me, perhaps. There would be no avoiding me if he stayed home. He has no patients, no appointments, no house calls to make or rounds to keep, but he spends his day of rest at work, “keeping abreast of new developments,” he says, reading the latest books and journals as any “chest man worth his salt” would do.

  I believe that what he really catches up on is his sleep, but I never say so. In his surgery. Not normally a place of peace or sleep. All the better then. Revelling in his surroundings, reminders of what he is seeking respite from. The kind of sleep I yearn for but that nothing can induce. His narcotic is exhaustion, but it doesn’t work for me.

  I write to the point where not another word will come, go out and walk for miles, read until my eyes begin to close, then try to sleep. I nod off momentarily, then wake as though someone has just burst into the room. I sit up, heart pounding. Who is it? Who is unaccounted for? Whose bed, though they should have been home long ago, is empty? That is what it feels like when I wake. But I do not think of names or faces. Whomever it was that in my negligence I overlooked is beyond recall.

  It is almost midnight when I leave the house. How many nights in a row has it been? More than twenty. Almost midnight. It seems my neighbours haven’t noticed these middle-of-the-night departures from my house. They would think I had found some new way of mortifying Dr. Fielding. “That one. Where is she off to at this time of night?”

  More likely, some early riser has seen me, a single woman, coming home near dawn. Rumours. Whores and rumours of whores.

  It is snowing lightly, but the wind is calm, snowflakes so small they look like raindrops, falling straight down like grains of ice though they are soft against my face and make no sound.

  I take the same streets, the same route as always, past the same dark and silent houses, descending slantwise, heading slightly south but mostly west, barely able to see the ground in front of me, the unpaved, potholed, snow-covered street that smells faintly of manure. The lamps, long since extinguished, are all I have to go by, their shapes just visible against the sky.

  It seems that everything that is not me is reconciled to its place and purpose in the world. That the world comprises everything not me.

  For a while, as if to will it open, I stare at the window, the curtain taut behind the glass. A pair of boots in frozen footprints. It reminds me of the sealers, feet frozen fast in the ice, bodies frozen past the point where they could fall. I move my feet to make sure that I still can.

  I will ask him to meet me somewhere. What harm could there be in that? Or to come outside and walk with me. I would go inside if he invited me. I will suggest it. So we can have a proper conversation, one whose duration is not determined by how long I can stand the cold. Or by whatever impulse of his it is that makes him dole out his questions night after night, when he could have asked and told me everything in one night if he wanted to. Everything. Can you conceive of no reason why a woman might decide to leave her daughter?

  I wipe off the snow that has gathered on my shoulders, remove my hat, shake it, put it back on. I look down at my feet to find that nothing but the laces of my boots are showing. How long have I been waiting? I have a watch but decide not to consult it. It would only make the time pass more slowly. On some nights, I tell myself, he has kept me waiting a very long time.

  I look down at my hands that grip the knob of my cane. I can just make out their shape beneath the snow, shadowed fissures between the fingers of my gloves. The snow is so wet that even the cane is covered with it and is almost invisible against the ground. To someone watching from a certain angle, it would seem that I am leaning on nothing at all. I would look as eerily stiff and motionless and as wholly enveloped by snow as the sealers did when they were found. I hope that no one is watching from the darkened windows, no one witnessing this spectacle, this spectre who might be the ghost of one of the sealers, standing out there in the street, staring at the window of what might once have been its house and that it is now powerless to enter or ask admittance to.

  He has never kept me waiting this long before. Snow is melting on my face, water dripping from my eyebrows, nose and chin, ice forming on my lashes so that I can barely blink.

  I decide I have had enough of waiting. I will break the rules. I no longer care what he will do or say. I step closer to the window, raise my snow-encrusted cane and tap the tip of it against the glass. When there is no response, I tap
again, louder, more insistently. I will keep on tapping until I hear the window slide upward, the sound of wood within a groove of wood that I have heard every night for more than twenty nights.

  “Miss,” I hear a voice say. A familiar voice. A boy’s. It comes from behind me.

  I look over my shoulder and see, through the falling snow, standing on the opposite street corner as if waiting for traffic to pass, P.D. the First, who is holding in his arms something so heavy he is bending backwards to keep from dropping it.

  “P.D.,” I shout, in part because I am glad to see him for, though I know he was planning an escape to the mainland, I have been worried that something sinister accounted for his sudden disappearance.

  “Shh, Miss,” he hisses at me from across the street, a warning that seems superfluous, even melodramatic, given that, as always, there is no one else in sight and the houses could not be more dark and silent if they were empty.

  Before I can spare him the trouble of lugging his burden across the street, he scuffs through the snow, so bent backwards he is staring almost straight up, surely unable to see where he is going. God knows how far, thus encumbered, he walked tonight. It seems impossible that he has avoided tripping over some obstacle or slipping on some snow-covered patch of ice and dropping what his way of holding it suggests is something breakable. Something, I have no doubt, that they have warned him not to break. A boy his size walking unmolested through the dark streets while toting a bundle that might as well have the words “precious” stamped all over it. Unintercepted by police. Unrobbed.

  “What are you doing here?” I say as he stoops to lay the bundle in the snow. Something square inside a brown bag. The faint clinking of glass.

  “I think I might have broken one,” he says, grunting with relief as he sets his cargo down and straightens up. He sighs, out of breath. Hurriedly brushes snow from his head and body as if it is contaminated, as if he cannot stand to bear it on his clothing, snow that he has been unable to attend to until now.

  “Twenty-four callabogus. Well. Twenty-three, I think,” he says, smiling sheepishly.