The Custodian of Paradise

by Wayne Johnston

  Something gravid, something leaden has crept into my bones, some enervation whose source might be my mind. Each day I leave nothing behind, though there is nothing in my bag that I could not easily replace or live without.

  The money my father gave me when I left St. John’s is almost gone. The amount I put aside for my return passage I will not use on rent, in which case I have at most a few weeks left.

  I have lost a lot of weight. I can tell by the looseness of my clothes and by the way my face feels when, after splashing it with water, I towel it dry.

  There is no mirror in my room and I no longer go elsewhere to look at my reflection, no longer appraise my figure in department stores or the windows of neighbourhood shops. I almost never eat because of the cost of the gin that my landlord seems to have a limitless supply of.

  I carry in my coat pocket the letter from my Provider. The letter that, several times each day for the past few months, I have read. I put my portmanteau between my feet, tuck my cane beneath one arm, and right there on the sidewalk, oblivious to the other pedestrians who are forced to sidestep me and mutter at me in frustration, read the letter.

  I have become famous in the neighbourhood as “the letter lady,” the tall woman with the cane and the portmanteau who stops suddenly in mid-stride to extricate from her pocket and read, as if she received it just this morning and cannot credit its contents, the creased and yellowed letter, the letter that, by the way she pores over it in sheltered doorways on rainy days, contains some life-altering revelation. Which perhaps it does, if only I could understand the words.

  One day, when I wake in the morning, I find that an envelope has been slipped beneath my door. A notice of eviction I think, until I open it.

  The first thing I notice is the closing salutation, Your Provider.

  I am so startled I let the single page fall and stand there holding the empty envelope with both hands. I stare at the paper on the floor. I have the feeling that everything that has happened to me since I opened his last letter has been orchestrated by him. I know this cannot be, but I can’t help feeling that it is.

  Bending down, I pick up the letter, slowly unfold the pages.

  Dear Miss Fielding.

  (It is almost as though I hear him say the words, as if I am back on Patrick Street again and the window that for so long has been closed has just slid open. I almost reply, almost chastise him for keeping me waiting so long out here in the cold.)

  Dear Miss Fielding:

  When you were just an infant, I held you in my arms. When you put your hand inside that curtain on Patrick Street and I held it in mine, it had been sixteen years since I had touched you, though I had been close enough to do so countless times.

  You must not feel ashamed. You are not the first to fall on hard times in Manhattan.

  You are better off without that socialist, though it may not seem so now. Better that you be alone than waste your time with him.

  Though I will give him this much. He is as single-minded as I wish you were. As you will have to be or you will fail.

  One can cease to be a wife, as your mother did, even if only to become one again. But you can never cease to be a parent. Dr. Fielding forever ceased to be a husband. Hers or anyone else’s. But he and I will always be your fathers.

  I was never married to your mother. When I say that I am one of your fathers, I do not mean one of your stepfathers. Nor am I speaking figuratively. I am physically, biologically your father. You may think that your mother is unsure who your father is, that she was unfaithful to Dr. Fielding. But she was not.

  I am sorry that it is necessary to speak in riddles. That it is necessary, you need not doubt.

  I have never been a husband. Perhaps you guessed as much. I was once your mother’s lover. But I have never been or had a lover since. In fact, I am a virgin twice removed. Once more than you.

  Twice fathered. But I am unlike Dr. Fielding. Your mother knows that I am nothing like him. Two men jilted by the same woman who after she was done with them did not, could not move on. That may be how it seems to you. Two jilted, stunted men. Mired in the past. Still in love with the woman who threw them over.

  You will never understand your mother if you think of me that way.

  I am writing to you again to urge you to go home. New York is not for you.

  You stand there on the sidewalk staring at my letter like some illiterate immigrant, someone who cannot even read their own language, let alone English. “Please, sir, could you help me with this letter. I am new here and do not understand these words.”

  You go about in a daze, with your bag and your cane, like someone the authorities at Ellis Island should have intercepted, someone they should have scrawled an X on with a piece of chalk and sent back home. I am sorry to have to speak so plainly, but I fear that you have no idea what you are headed for.

  At first my delegate often intervened on your behalf. Intercepted those who meant you harm. You would long ago have been relieved of your possessions, and probably your life, if not for him. How discreet his interventions were. How conspicuous, how obvious a mark you were. You still are, but most are now persuaded of the folly of interfering with Miss Fielding.

  For six months now, you have lived in the same city as your mother and your children. The city where you gave birth to your children. Where you, literally, gave your mother grandchildren. Where you gave birth to your mother.

  Though you may not have admitted as much to yourself, you have stayed because you plan to seek them out. It would be reckless folly to do so. The house of your laying-in you would not recognize if you walked past it. For all you know, you have walked past it.

  Let that be enough and go home now while you still can.

  Your Provider

  I sit down on my bed. My first thought is that I will not spend this day wandering the streets. In spite of the contents of the letter, I feel relieved that, at last, something has happened. My stalled life has begun again. Relieved. Revived. He has been watching me. If he claimed to have been doing so since the day that I was born, I would be almost willing to believe it. He or someone acting on his behalf, perhaps his “delegate,” tracked me to Manhattan from St. John’s.

  His delegate. My shadow. My guardian angel to whom, I suppose, I should be grateful, assuming that what my Provider writes is true. Most are now persuaded of the folly of interfering with Miss Fielding. He has been assigned to me. An endless assignation with a woman he must never meet or who, if they meet or have already met, must never know it. It sounds as though the man does nothing else, has no other task but me.

  I am frightened for my children in spite of how solicitous he sounds. Reading his letters is like squinting through a bank of fog at sea. No matter how many hazards, on close inspection, prove to be mere apparitions, I cannot relax, cannot stop bracing for an impact that may never come.

  What if I went to the police, showed them the letters? Or, so as to guard the secret whose revelation would destroy so many, simply told them I was being followed? They would doubt my sanity. A man I have never seen who refers to himself as my Provider has set me a riddle in the form of two letters. Another man whom he refers to as his “delegate” follows me about, for my protection, though I have never seen him either and have no idea what he looks like.

  Never married. Never taken a lover since being jilted by my mother. Nor had he one before. A virgin twice removed. Twice he denies being what he seems to be, a jilted, stunted man, mired in the past. He seems to be, at once, an apologist for my mother, and my mother’s nemesis. Perhaps he is mad, leading me towards a revelation that doesn’t exist.

  But about one thing he is right. I have been stalling. Trying to work up the nerve to see my children. He thinks I should go home without doing so, act as though they don’t exist. Yet I, whom he thinks is his child, am the main obsession of his life.

  It is time for me to find the house where I had my children. Though I will not, as he puts it, seek them out. Not my childr
en, nor my mother, nor Dr. Breen. That is, I will not confront them. I will find the house whose location, I am certain, my Provider and his delegate already know. I will go there, followed by the delegate, who, even now that I am aware of him, will somehow conceal himself. I will do what he does. Spy on others. Follow them. But keep my distance, lest I be discovered. And while I am watching them, he will be watching me.

  But I must see them. I will not leave New York until I do.

  LOREBURN

  The dogs have taken to roaming and barking at all hours.

  Until about two weeks ago, I had never heard them at night, but I have heard them every night since, sometimes far from the house, sometimes so close to it I have checked to make sure that all the doors are closed.

  Can they be hunting nonstop, storing up provisions for the winter, killing everything they can before their prey go into hibernation?

  The fittest of the dogs already look like they will not survive the winter. I take the shotgun with me when I go out to the barn for food or water and even when I go down to the beach at night, lanternless in spite of Patrick’s warning. I can’t carry both gun and lantern as well as my cane and I dare not leave my gun behind.

  I am tempted to leave food out for the dogs, would have done so by now had Patrick not told me what folly it would be. He told me they would hang about the house and “would not take no for an answer” when my supplies were so low that I could spare them nothing more.

  In the middle of the night, the pack erupts all at once as if someone or something has happened upon them while they sleep, stumbled upon their secret place and found themselves in the middle of what I imagine as a warren of wild dogs.

  Once the barking starts, it goes on for hours. The pack goes by the house, snarling and yelping. The sound of them grows fainter for a while but then returns as if whatever they are pursuing is leading them in circles.

  There is something distinctively nocturnal in the way they bark at night, a sound of urgency or panic as if at night it is they who are the prey, they who are running for their lives, in retreat from some silent but relentless predator, something better suited than they are to the night, something that prevails from sunset to sunrise but in the daylight is never seen, something from which, for the dogs, the day is a respite.

  I half-expect to hear the sound of them scratching at the doors, the sound of nails, theirs or someone else’s, his, clicking on the windows.

  Those windows would not stop anything or anyone determined to get in. Especially that one in the front room that is like a wall of glass.

  An invitation.

  February 17, 1921

  I chose today, Sunday, to go see the house. The day they were most likely to be home. I watched the house from one street over, stared between two pairs of houses, two pairs of bordering backyards separated by a laneway. It was as close as I dared go, and even then I knew that I could only walk up and down the street so often, could only pause so often to look down that laneway before the strangers on the neighbouring street noticed me and became suspicious.

  A modest mansion surrounded by less-modest ones. Made of brown brick with a Tudor turret on one side. Three evenly spaced gabled windows on the second floor. A two-toned automobile in the driveway, green and white, a machine that somehow looked both sleek and massive and shone in the sunlight, as if it had never been driven.

  There was such a “car” in every driveway on both streets, to my eye all the same except for colour, all as pristine-looking as if they were merely ornamental, the “car” the latest thing in outdoor decoration. I have never been in a car, never been a passenger, let alone a driver. To my children it will seem that there were always cars.

  I saw them all today, though never all together. My mother and Dr. Breen left the house by the front door. They were not wearing coats, despite the cold. I thought they were headed for the car but, arms folded for warmth, they went around to the back of the house as though headed somewhere unreachable by the back door. They looked, at least from that distance, just the same as when I saw them last.

  From time to time, I glimpsed Miss Long and the children in the backyard, Miss Long supervising while they played with each other in the snow. Five years old my children are. I saw Miss Long first, then David, then Sarah chasing him. Because of the snow, the children were so unsteady on their feet that Miss Long’s sole purpose seemed to be to pick them up when they fell and set them on their feet again, keeping her hands on their shoulders until she was sure they had their balance.

  My mother joined Miss Long for a while. The two of them seemed oblivious to each other as they followed the children about, my mother not so much playing with David as seeming to have been assigned to him, as if she and Miss Long, who likewise looked assigned to Sarah, were fellow nannies in the Breen household, affecting as much interest in other people’s children as they could.

  How strange, that I should see the children for the first time from that distance. I could make out almost nothing but their sizes and shapes. They wore winter caps so I could not see the colour of their hair. Two children who might have been anyone’s. There were times, when the house obscured both my mother and Miss Long, when I almost called out to them, almost shouted out their names and waved. My children. It was more or less how I had always imagined seeing them, at a safe remove, the two of them unaware that they were being watched.

  They have never been mere names to me, but what they were they will never be again. In my mind, if in no one else’s, they have been transformed. Confirmed. They have crossed over into memory. And in doing so have altered me forever. Perhaps my Provider was right. I should have gone home.

  I could not resist the shadow of a thought of what might have been. Could not resist the idea that our being a family was somehow possible. An upsurge of hope that left me more desolate when it subsided than I have been in years.

  They went inside when it was getting dark. For them, the end of an ordinary Sunday afternoon. Ahead of them an evening that would pass much as their neighbours’ would.

  There was no telling which was the window of what had been my room. But I knew this was the house, not only because I had looked up Dr. Breen’s address in the phone book but because I “recognized” it in some way, “remembered” it. The children still live in the house where they were born. My mother and her husband still live in the house where they concealed me from their neighbours.

  It feels as if I saw the children first and then imagined they were mine, saw that woman first and then dreamt she was my mother, saw that house first and then dreamt that in it I gave birth to twins who when I left remained behind.

  I did not feel as though I were being watched, though I’m sure I was. I have been keeping a lookout for my Provider’s delegate, for some man I must have seen, surely, once or twice before. But no face looked familiar.

  By now, he has reported back to my Provider, told him that I did what he urged me not to do, told him how I looked and acted.

  I wonder if my Provider goaded me into seeking out my children. His warning may have been disingenuous. More of a temptation than a warning. Perhaps he wants me to be the instrument of his revenge on my mother. He may think that, now that I have seen the children, I will be unable to resist meeting them, or trying to. Approaching them. Touching them. Which I long to do, though I know I mustn’t.

  Perhaps he wants me to somehow get them alone and tell them the truth. The mayhem I could cause if I wanted to. Or if I lost control.

  When I saw my mother today, watching anxiously over my children, her grandchildren, I thought of the question he has challenged me to answer. Why did your mother leave?

  She loves them. I was both gladdened and resentful. More than resentful. Jealous of my own children, who have won her love as I could not.

  I have no idea what will happen now. I know that I must not approach the children, yet my doing so, or doing something to make them aware of me seems inevitable. Two heartbeats. Not one but two children.r />
  But I must not delude myself that this can be undone or remedied.

  I should not have gone there today. I should leave for Newfoundland while I still can, before I start to spend the money I put aside for my return.

  How will my Provider know when I have solved his riddle? Riddles. The riddle of why my mother abandoned me, the riddle of being twice fathered. I have no way of contacting him. But he seems to think that he will know, that it will somehow be apparent. As if the solution will have some visible effect on me that could be attributable to nothing else. “Can you really not conceive …”

  I dread the answers, dread their consequences.

  Four days now since I saw them. Four all but sleepless nights.

  I feel that, if I leave New York, I will be leaving them to him. My Provider has never threatened them. Never been anything but kind to me. His delegate often may have saved my life. But still I am afraid for them.

  I read and reread his letters. I can dismiss their contents as the writings of a madman, but I cannot dismiss the fact of them, the fact of him.

  If I were to write to my mother, he would never know it. His delegate might see me posting a letter, but he wouldn’t know to whom it was addressed. I need to meet you about a matter that does not concern the children. I do not wish to meet the children or make them aware of my existence, but there is a matter of great importance that possibly concerns their safety that I must speak to you about. A matter that possibly concerns your safety and your husband’s.

  She might take it as a threat. My Provider said that she would deny all knowledge of him. He wrote of her disavowal with complacent certainty, as if it was all the same to him if I believed him or not, approached her or not. And if she did agree to meet with me, I could not tell her anything that would make her any better able to protect the children or herself. It wouldn’t matter whether she, truthfully or untruthfully, denied all knowledge of him or confirmed that everything he said was true. My intervention would accomplish nothing. If she refused to meet me, or agreed only for fear of what