The Custodian of Paradise

by Wayne Johnston

  I would do or divulge if she refused, I would only have made things worse for her and therefore for the children. If I contacted her, she would be forever fretful, even more so than she would otherwise have been, a woman with a secret that she must withhold from everyone, especially her children.

  I have gone by the house three times now. Three Sunday afternoons in a row I have walked up and down the next street over, have lingered in that laneway as long as I dared, longer than I should have.

  Today, a man passing by on foot asked me if I needed help. I was so caught up in watching the house I didn’t notice him approaching. He must have been using the laneway as a shortcut between the streets.

  “You don’t look well,” he said, scrutinizing my face and then glancing at my cane.

  I was clutching a latticework fence with my free hand. Probably looked as though, if not for the fence and my cane, I would have fallen down. Which I might have, for I have been running a fever for days and twice today came close to fainting.

  “How long have you been out here in the cold?” he said.

  “Not long,” I said. “Are you his delegate?”

  “What?” Sincerely mystified.

  “Never mind. My mistake.”

  I told him I had merely stopped to rest and would soon be on my way. He asked how far I had to go. He seemed more concerned than suspicious.

  I stifled a momentary urge to tell him everything. Fearful that he would offer to walk me home, I told him I did not live in the neighbourhood, had only been visiting friends and would hail a cab as soon as I had caught my breath. I tried without success to think of an explanation for my breathlessness.

  “My dear, you will catch your death of cold,” he said. “Dressed like that this time of year.”

  I assured him I felt fine and walked away with as much of a show of vigour and alacrity as I could manage.

  For all I know, my mother or one of the others have seen me and they are trying to decide what to do. But surely, in that case, they would keep the children indoors.

  Perhaps others in the neighbourhood have noticed me. I lose track of time while standing there, forget to vary my routine or no longer bother to, it is hard to say which.

  I haven’t been clear-headed since I first went by the house. Since before that, perhaps. Can’t remember the last time the world seemed fixed and solid, the last time I was certain of my lucidity, that my apparent clear-headedness was not just some delusion.

  My clothes still appear to be those of a woman of means who has fallen on hard times, but they will not look that way much longer. My once-blue cape is almost grey. My dresses, too, are faded, frayed at the hems. My button boots are missing several buttons. Soon I will look like I am wearing second-hand clothes, the discards of the sort of woman I want to be mistaken for.

  Even though I force myself to eat something every day, I am losing weight faster than when I was eating nothing.

  When I get back to my room, I am so exhausted that I fall asleep without having had a drink, something I have not done in years.

  His “delegate.” Come out, come out, wherever you are, I feel like shouting. Stopping on the sidewalk and shouting until he shows himself. As if that would flush him out, provoke him to panic. No doubt he briefs my Provider at the end of every day. Tells him exactly where I’ve been and what I’ve done. Gives him an account of everything I do from the moment I leave my room to the moment I return to it. As well as an account of my appearance, my physical decline, my fever-flushed complexion, the look in my eyes, the state of my clothes.

  I wonder how close to me this man has been without my knowing it. Even sensing it. My Provider said that he had many times been close enough to touch me. When you were just an infant, I held you in my arms. His delegate, when I almost fainted, may have been close enough to catch me. Not that he would risk me returning to consciousness while he held me in his arms.

  I feel as though if I do not leave this city soon I never will.

  I can’t stand to live any longer in such close proximity to the children. It seems that nothing but leaving the continent, nothing but putting an ocean between me and them will do.

  I will leave a letter, an envelope for him somewhere inconspicuous, a place where no one hoping it contained something of value would make off with it. A letter the delegate could take to my Provider. He might think it was a ruse, that I planned to watch the letter from some hiding place until he collected it, meant to surprise him, catch him in the act. Or try to turn the tables and follow him. Or merely note his appearance so that I would recognize him in the future. Point him out to others and ask them who he was. Discover his identity and thereby my Provider’s. But I can think of nothing else to do.

  I cannot decide what tone I should take in the letter. I am tempted out of sheer spite to write him a letter in the manner of Fielding the Forger, something entitled “The Delegate Recounts to his Provider the Movements of Miss Fielding,” but I don’t want to provoke my Provider into doing the very thing the letter is intended to prevent.

  There is no telling what he might perceive as a provocation or take offence to. A confiding, pleading, obsequious or flattering tone is as likely to provoke him as a defiant or scornful one. Nor am I certain of my ability to sustain any tone or distinguish one from another.

  Today, after sitting on the stoop until there was a gap in the sidewalk traffic, I slipped an envelope partway under the door of my boarding house, then walked away, staying on my street so that the delegate could keep me in sight, satisfy himself that I did not plan to double back.

  I did not return to my room until after dark. As I expected, the envelope was gone, but I have no idea who took it. It may have been discarded long ago by a disappointed vagrant. Or read by someone who was mystified by every word.

  I used no names in the letter, not even “Provider” in case that is how he is known to others. Not even delegate. There was neither an opening nor a closing salutation.

  I had hoped to find another envelope waiting for me in my room, slipped beneath my door as before, but there was nothing.

  I came to this city against my better judgment. Was enticed here by what I thought was love. But, as it seems you once were, I was mistaken.

  It was not to see my children that I came here, yet I have seen them. Several times. Until I read your letter, I thought I might be able to resist doing what I knew was wrong, what I knew might cause them grief of the sort I myself suffered as a child.

  No matter how often I rewrite this letter, self-pity and recrimination come creeping in. I do not want sympathy. I do not want protection, yours or anyone else’s. I have no one to blame for my dilemma but myself. I should never have set eyes on my children. But now that I have, I can think of nothing else.

  You and I met by what I thought at first was chance but now know could not have been.

  I know nothing about you but what you have told me, have no way of knowing if one word of it is true. My mother’s rejected lover. A virgin twice removed. My father. One of my two fathers. A handful of other “facts,” which, it seems, if only I could decipher them I would “understand” my mother.

  You sound vaguely as though you are waging, or intend to wage, some sort of vendetta.

  I assume you think of my children as your grandchildren, though you have never said so. Are you waiting for them as you did for me, waiting until they are older? And then what? I dare not speculate.

  I am writing to you not because I suspect you are deceiving me, but to help you see things as I do, to give you some sense of how it feels to know that every moment of one’s life is being documented and appraised by an unseen stranger. Of this too, this forever being watched and followed, I can take no more.

  What you see as the ultimate end of this surveillance of my life I do not know. I wonder if, when I return to St. John’s, you or your delegate will follow me.

  As you may know, I am ill. I fear that if I don’t soon go home I never will. But I am also afraid
of what will happen if I leave. You have posed me a riddle that I confess I cannot solve. And I can’t help feeling that, for this failure, there will be some penalty. If so, it is I who should pay it, not my children or my mother or her husband.

  Why you will not simply tell me why my mother went away when I was six I do not know. Nor do I know what purpose this game of yours is meant to serve. I’m confounded to the point where, at times, I’m uncertain of my sanity and think you and your delegate may be nothing but effects of my derangement.

  I’m sorry that I’m unable to conceive of whatever it is that, in your judgment, excuses or explains my mother’s conduct. It seems that, for her offence against me, you have forgiven her, but will not do the same for her offence against you, which seems to me to be by far the lesser one, if indeed rejection in romance can be considered an offence at all. But I may not be in full possession of the facts. Nor of my faculties, for that matter.

  My sentences seem to make sense, but that, too, may be an effect of my derangement. I assure you that, however it reads, this letter is not meant to offend you.

  I am sure that you have no intention of harming my children. But such is my condition that I fear for them even though I know my fears to be unfounded.

  I write in the hope that you will humour me and, however superfluously, assure me that my fears are unfounded. I know this to be an absurd request, but I beg you not to leave it unfulfilled.

  For two days and two nights I lay on my bed, waiting for an answer from him, which arrived at last while I was sleeping. As if he somehow knew I was asleep, knew I would not hear him at the door, see the envelope appear, open the door and confront him.

  My dear Miss Fielding:

  You are not deranged. Nor am I.I am not unfamiliar with derangement and I see none of its effects in you or your letter.

  I am surprised that you have waited this long to write to me.

  Like yours, my actions are guided, but not by anything as grand or nebulous as fate. By things substantial. Unambiguous.

  You say you wrote in the hope of making me see things as you do. Yet to see things as others see them is, so far at least, beyond you. I do not mean that as a rebuke. You are too young to assume another’s point of view.

  I do think of your children as my grandchildren. That, after all, is what they are. I will never harm them nor allow them to be harmed.

  More than thirty years have passed since your mother parted with me.

  In your letter, you give offence, then assure me that your doing so was unintentional. You make accusations against me that you assure me are unfounded. Again, I am not rebuking you. Merely pointing out things that, in your state, you cannot help but be unaware of.

  It took great courage to write to me on behalf of your children.

  You are nothing like your mother. Sea-born, you might be. Fatherless, like Aphrodite.

  I am trying to forgive your mother for what she did to you and me.

  That is my quest, to achieve a state of forgiveness, to live without a yearning for revenge.

  My dear, I can do no more now than beg you to go home.

  Your Provider

  I must leave forever the city of their birth.

  If I had been in my present condition years ago, the authorities would have barred me from the country, sent me back to the one I came from, the one this ship is bound for.

  What a sight I am. A spectacle. A parody of disappointment and defeat, of the once-brash rube who, battered and humbled by the big city, heads home bereft of everything except her clothes.

  I heard someone mutter that I should be quarantined or put in steerage. But most are kinder.

  “My dear, you’re burning up,” a woman said.

  I touched the back of my hand to my forehead, which felt cool.

  “I’m fine,” I said, and though I gave her what I thought was a reassuring smile, she winced as if I had insulted her.

  “Go to your cabin,” she said, “get in bed and stay there until I bring the doctor.”

  I assured the doctor that my flask, which he found beneath my pillow, was just a souvenir.

  “You’ll need what’s in that souvenir,” he said, but did not elaborate. He gave me some pills but omitted to explain their purpose.

  It seems I no longer have the capacity to concentrate. My mind jumps from thought to thought. A cavalcade of unconnected images when I close my eyes. I write but every other sentence defies completion. I merely scratch them out. Fragments. Page after page of never-to-be-completed thoughts, dead-end sentences.

  Their names are David and Sarah.

  I am leaving you again.

  Goodbye.

  Chapter Ten

  LOREBURN

  I AM BARELY ABLE TO CONCENTRATE ENOUGH TO WRITE OR READ. My body feels as if it is mimicking that of my past self. That young woman about to leave New York for the second time in her life, exhausted in body and mind, determined to remain lucid until she made it home.

  I look about Patrick’s kitchen. I look at the daybed. The last thing I want is to sleep, yet it is a long time since I have looked forward so eagerly to first light. Looked forward to it, yet dreaded what it might reveal.

  After going to the front room and extinguishing the lantern, I sit on the sofa and look at the black opacity of the window.

  There are no lights out there on the unseen water, not even far-distant ones. The large window faces due south onto ocean open all the way to the northeast coast of South America. Nothing between here and there but the occasional Loreburn-like island, though not ghost islands for they have never been occupied and never will be. A plumb line on a map would bypass North America. Bypass New York, where my daughter with whom I have never corresponded lives.

  Upon waking, fully clothed, on the sofa, I cannot remember leaving the kitchen. I light the lantern and look about me but see no evidence, a glass, my flask, a bottle, that I’ve been drinking. I look over my shoulder at Mr. and Mrs. Trunk. The locks on both of them are still in place. I do not feel like I’ve been drinking. There is the absence of that feeling that supersedes all physical sensations, the feeling that I have lapsed, given in again, that despite the certainty I felt when my “day” began that with it my reformation had begun, my “day” ended as every day for years had done and now yet another resolution was required that I would somehow have to convince myself was sincere. I don’t feel the wearied sense of waste and loss and guilt, nor the forced hopefulness that I need to summon before I can drag myself from bed.

  “I am sober now,” I’ve told myself thousands of times as I lay in bed. “Sober but hungover. In spite of yesterday, I will never drink again.”

  But I have not been drinking. Months of sobriety do not lie in waste behind me. I must, blessedly, have fallen without a drink into a dreamless sleep, only for a few hours it feels like, but still.

  I look at the large window. The glass is so unblemished there seems to be no glass at all. I cannot have been asleep very long, for there is still no sign of morning.

  I have been careful, in the weeks since moving in, not to touch the glass, not to press my nose against it while looking out. The room might as well be wide open to the air. Passersby could not see me more clearly if they were in the room, on my side of the glass.

  Remembering the voices and the gunshot, I decide to return to the kitchen. I can’t sit here, perhaps spied on from outside by someone who, whether my light was on or not, I would not see if they were standing ten feet from the window.

  I will go out looking at first light for evidence that someone passed close to the house, someone who must have seen my light, and on the night of the voices heard the chair fall on the kitchen floor when I stood up. Someone who must have seen the light go out. Evidence that Loreburn has had visitors whom I scared away or who, for whatever reason, wanted to avoid me. Someone.

  April 11, 1922

  In the San.

  Perhaps it was the intolerability of dying without ever having met my children tha
t sustained me, without ever having spoken to or even written to them. Without having solved my Provider’s riddle, the riddle of my mother and of what it meant to be twice fathered.

  I dreamt of encountering Sarah and David by accident, spotting them together on some street, unaccountably strolling through the city of St. John’s, unmistakably my children—and happy to hear from me the true story of how they had come to exist, which they did not doubt and received without resentment.

  But in my fever dreams, things were different. A boy and girl, they were always in the company of doctors and nurses whom they seemed to be assisting or consulting with, hyper-specialists whose single area of expertise was me and who, in those strange dreams, said things like “I pity her poor father” and “She’s heard nothing from her mother,” utterances that, if they were real, must have been those of doctors or nurses, but spoken in my fever dreams by them.

  It was only very rarely that they spoke directly to me or to one another. “It would be a shame, Sheilagh, if you died so young,” Sarah said once. And David once asked Sarah, “When is she coming home?” I tried in these dreams to talk to them but, though I formulated words in my mind, I could never speak them out loud. “I am your mother,” I tried to say in objection to them calling me my name. “Tell everyone. Tell him.” Prowse, I meant. But the words would not be spoken.

  We never communicated in these dreams. Sarah and David always seemed unaware that I was conscious, and something, guilt perhaps, prevented me from making myself heard by them, or touching them though I tried to reach out my hands towards their faces, stared at my hands, willing them to move but they would not. Nor, in these dreams, did either one of my children touch me. They would stand at the foot of my bed, inaudibly and impassively conferring like physicians, my two lost children standing there, unaware that I was watching them. Nine-year-olds, identical in every way, members of some neutral gender known as twins, dressed like schoolboys, schoolgirls.