The Custodian of Paradise

by Wayne Johnston

  I looked about the kitchen again. There were no snowshoes. The canvas-covered floor, though dry, was streaked with stains, including footprints of huge unshodden feet.

  The clothes I had been wearing were hung over two chairs near the stove.

  Propped against the back of one of the chairs was my cane.

  On a third chair, Smallwood’s “clothes” hung, water dripping from them.

  On the floor, closer to the stove, were our boots, mine dry to the ankles, Smallwood’s, which had somehow not fallen to pieces, still damp all over, the boot and soles lashed together with string that, despite all his thrashing about in the snow, was still knotted.

  I wondered if perhaps my rescuer, though momentarily absent, intended to return. I was all but certain this was so when I noticed a sheet of paper tacked to the wall between the stove and tub. Several sheets, in fact. A letter that, I saw instantly from the handwriting, had been penned by my Provider.

  My dear Miss Fielding:

  I had begun to think that I would never find you in this storm. My delegate waited here for hours, wondering if even I might not return.

  But you are safe.

  Even that “man” whom Dr. Fielding thinks is the father of your children is still alive. Or was when we left. Inspired bones he has, though death is waiting patiently to seep in through his pores. He may not survive the night. There was nothing we could do for him but immerse him in hot water. You should do likewise with him, though it may be too late.

  The memories that gas mask brought back. It belongs to my delegate, who stole it from his regiment when we came home from the war. I met him overseas, in France.

  I know how much you miss that sanitorium. More than miss it, perhaps. There are times when I still long for the place of my near-death.

  For some it is difficult, once they have accepted death, to return to life. Do you feel reborn, Miss Fielding, or merely that your death has been deferred? Unrealized ambitions, missed opportunities, foolish mistakes, near triumphs that came to nothing, romantic disappointments and betrayals, broken promises, all that in its sum was known as my lot in life and that was lost I had to recontend with. Do you see the world as recreated or merely as it would have been if you had died? I found it difficult at first. Saw that even the most unbearably petty details would remain unaltered in my absence.

  A feather fallen from a bird would be forgotten just as easily.

  The simple stone I clutched with all my might would persist despite the passing of my soul.

  But all this changed. Though there may be no one, no agency to thank for its restoration, my life has been restored. As yours will be.

  Two souls are kindred that once were close to death.

  Like me, you have seen what no one should before their time. You are out here on this living limbo called the Bonavista because your life is elsewhere. And what is true of space you have fooled yourself into thinking may be true of time. You hope that memory, which measures time, will fade.

  But you cannot will forgetfulness. You, especially, cannot, Miss Fielding. Your daemon, like mine, is memory. You have no choice but to do as I did and go back to where you came from. Stop running from your daemon and confront it face to face.

  How you have changed since you left New York. Your body, like your soul, has been transformed. That boot. Like some shameful emblem that you are forced by law to wear.

  The way you walk. To think that, just ten years ago, you were a schoolgirl. The symmetry of all your parts has been thrown off by your leg. Which looks so strange beside the other, unafflicted one. Your good leg is the measure of your loss. Two legs that once were twins.

  We could not help but see, see all of you, when we put you in the water. You must once, my child, have been so much more beautiful, though beautiful you still are in your austerity. I have never seen such eyes. Such eyes have never seen what yours have. Your head hung back over the edge of the tub at so sharp an angle I had my delegate support it with his hands.

  Legs so long that they were drawn up almost to your chin. Your arms we folded carefully across your breasts, your hands not on your shoulders but under water.

  But always, impossible to look away from, that leg. As if one part of your body had been made an example of, singled out in chastisement of the others.

  A crime for which no one will ever have to answer.

  Your face in repose was the measure of your innocence. Yes, your body is still beautiful, but it is no longer a body in which new life can grow.

  As they lay aspraddle, steam from the water rose up between your legs, your thighs flushed from the heat, splotches of red spreading up towards your knees, then up your belly and your arms and the furrow of your sternum that runs wide between your breasts.

  Long arms crossed as if to remove an article of clothing, a sweater or a camisole, your hands beneath the water, one immersed to the wrist, the other to the elbow.

  In the steam it seemed your body was restored, fleshed out, a halo round the ruinous beauty that remains. The apparition of your grey but girlish hair, strands of it on the nape of your neck, a second furrow that collected damp drops of sweat that ran slowly down your shoulders and your back.

  As my delegate held your head, I daubed your face with ice, your forehead, your cheeks, your neck, the ice melting so quickly that for moments all that touched you were my fingers and my hands. You have passed from girlhood into middle age. Your body is that of a woman, but the woman you were you will never be again.

  There is a line of freckles in the hollow of your throat, just below your sun line, in the pale skin below the hemline of your dress. And on the blade of your left clavicle a mole as smooth as a fingertip. A million other such details.

  “Though much is taken, much abides … that which we are, we are.” I saw that you were reading that insipid Tennyson. A great talent consumed by nostalgia and regret. But so it is with poets. Lugubrious inaction. Would you rather that, instead of me, a poet had been sent to save you? Or a man like the one I saved for your sake?

  When we lifted you from the tub, your head fell back against my chest, a grey, top-heavy posy in which drops of water were suspended. Water brought up by your body gushed back down between your legs as if—I looked away until my delegate held you in his arms.

  You were so slippery, your body so limp and sagging, he had to hoist you up several times on his knee. His distress was almost comical. Difficult enough to hold you without the quandary of where to put his hands.

  On the bed he laid you and we tried to dress you again, in different clothes, but you were getting cold so we put you as you were beneath the blankets.

  I tucked you in so tightly in case you tossed about. I knew that, in your fever, you would dream that you were lost again, buried to your arms in snow that you would mistake the blankets for, but I could not have you roll off onto the floor and freeze.

  We stayed with you, watching, waiting for signs of your revival. The storm within, the storm without.

  You moved your head from side to side as if you could hear the wind and your mind was fashioning some torment from it.

  But at last your eyelids fluttered and you began to speak. Questions. Interrogative gibberish. Your tone sometimes merely one of curiosity. Sometimes severe, demanding an answer.

  Then that, too, passed and you began to sleep more peacefully. The deep breathing of exhaustion, restorative, each chestful of air repairing what it could, though in your lungs there is a permanent congestion, a rattle, a whistle that at first concerned me until I realized that it dated from the time of your confinement in the San.

  Before we left, I put my hand on your forehead, not to check for fever but in case we should never meet again.

  Not that I believe we won’t. But there is so much less of you than when I saw you last. Less flesh. Though at a glance it seems you do not so much have less flesh as have bigger bones, as if your bones have grown and your skin will soon be unable to contain them.

  It is time
that I told you something about myself and how I met your mother. To do so now could do no harm.

  In the seminary, I was known as “His Highness, Aquinas.”

  “Highness” not because I was haughty or put on airs, as your mother was said to do, but simply because of my height.

  The “Aquinas,” too, was inspired by my height and because my name was Thomas.

  Saint Thomas Aquinas is said to have been six foot ten. Not quite as tall as me.

  He was called “the great dumb ox of Sicily.” The “dumb” was ironic, of course, for he was a genius and neither unable nor disinclined to speak.

  Albert the Great said, “The roaring of this ox will echo throughout the universe.” As it did.

  His family disapproved of his vocation, as your mother’s did of hers.

  Like me, he became a Dominican monk. His Pope commissioned him to prove the existence of God, which he was for hundreds of years believed to have done in his Summa Theologica, a book still considered by the Church to be almost as important as the Scriptures.

  Aquinas, like your “mother,” came from a monied family. A Sicilian family. His brothers were officers in the imperial army and his sisters married wisely, for power, not for love.

  My marriage prospects were not considered to be good.

  I suppose that Aquinas was my childhood hero, inasmuch as I can be said to have had a childhood or a hero.

  A boy taller by age ten than his six-foot father. You can imagine how I was teased, though perhaps you cannot picture me trying to defend myself from hordes of older, smaller boys.

  Clumsy, soft, oafish, awkward, selfconscious. A sap of a child who could have made things easier for himself but instead made them worse.

  I read a kind of “Boys’ Own” account of the great dumb ox and tried to model myself after him. I discovered that the schoolyard is no place for saintliness. I do not blame those older, smaller boys. I know what, had I been “average,” I would have made of a meek and gentle giant. But enough about my so-called boyhood.

  “Yes, His Highness, Aquinas.”

  “Tom looks down on the rest of us.”

  “Tom thinks that he’s above us all.”

  “They had to go to great lengths to find a habit that would fit him.”

  I decided, better to be a priest than to ally myself with those Dominicans. Ineffectuals who spent their time examining their uneventful lives.

  Known in the seminary as the “Holy Ghosts.”

  The Order of Grim Reapers with their hoods and sleeves that hid their hands and cloaks belted at the waist with leashlike ropes.

  And so I left the monastery for the seminary. Holy Orders. Better punsters? No.

  His Highness, Aquinas, I was called again.

  A verse whose rhymes were “lummox,”

  “flummox” and “dumb ox.” It was so ineptly composed that I rewrote it for them, after which they stopped reciting it. Seminarians teasing one another like schoolboys. A second childhood much like my first.

  “Prominent Bostonian Catholics,” your mother called her parents. “Members of the PBC,” she said.

  She seemed to think that all the nuns and priests of Boston had once been members of the PBC, our solidarity deriving less from our Faith than from what we had rebelled against, the values we had all rejected, the life that all of us had walked away from.

  Of course, most of us had only the vaguest notion of what she had renounced when she took her vow of poverty.

  To become a priest was in the eyes of my parents the ultimate achievement, the greatest gift they could hope for from any son, the realization of a far-fetched dream.

  Even your “mother’s” family might have been pleased to have a son in the priesthood. Priests from the right sort of families could become what were known among the seminarians as “officers,” be promoted through the ranks to become monsignors, bishops, archbishops, even cardinals, whereas the rest of us were unlikely to rise above the Church equivalent of sergeant.

  Power, wealth, privilege—an “officer,” regardless of his vows, could have them all. But a nun could not.

  To any priest, the phrase Mother Superior was an oxymoron. This much your mother understood. But she was scornful of the would-be “officers,” the young men of the PBC who regarded the priesthood as a good career choice, and she expected the “infantry” to share her scorn, as if like her, we had all once had what the “officers” were hoping to retain and build upon.

  She was like some blue-blooded socialist among comrades from the working class, blind to our scepticism, our doubts about the depth of her commitment to the cause, our scorn at how ignorant she was of the people she thought were so in need of her.

  I was attracted to her in part because of this naïveté and in part because of the allure the life she had renounced held for me, an allure all that much greater, perhaps, because she had renounced it and thereby, it seemed to me, confirmed my opinion of it, though that opinion was based as much on ignorance as was hers on the life that I had left behind.

  I was at once sceptical of and intrigued by her. She was twenty-three and was barely three months in the convent before her fellow novices had nicknamed her Sister Superior, which in time became simply “Superior.”

  “Did you hear what Superior said?”

  “Do you know what Superior did?”

  We met infrequently until by chance we were assigned, after our novitiates, to the same parish.

  She was the youngest of the nuns in the convent that stood on the grounds of the rectory where I was paired with an older priest.

  I was the priest’s apprentice, so to speak, assisting him at Mass on Sundays, saying Mass myself on weekdays, hearing the confessions of those few parishioners who thought my power to forgive their sins to be equal to his. And others whose voices he recognized and whose history of transgressions he knew, recidivists who hoped to avoid his wrath by confessing to me.

  How the congregation gasped when I assisted at my first Mass. Gasped at the sight of this novice who had to duck his head beneath the archway of the sacristy as he preceded the priest to the altar, dressed like the boys in front of him except their soutanes were red and his was black.

  Can you see me lurching through the church? Can you see me on the altar, my back to the congregation, my arms outstretched as I face the tabernacle and the crucifix, seeming to span from sacristy to pulpit as though I am about to enfold the ravaged, cruciform body of Christ, that sinewy, bony body, its head fallen to one side in a posture of sorrowful exhaustion, eyes rolled back in beseechment of the end He knows is near, the blood and water seeping from the lance-pierced side and blood alone from the mocking crown of thorns?

  Giving Communion to those kneeling at the altar rail, I had to bend over as though to pat a toddler on the head, fingers fumbling in the cerebum for wafers that to others were the size of quarters but seemed to me like dimes that no matter how delicately I held them between my thumb and forefinger bent into crescents that I dropped onto each quivering, outthrust tongue.

  Your mother must either have thought there would be more to being a nun than playing handmaiden to a pair of priests or simply been unable to foresee the effect on herself of the drudgery of it all.

  The nuns were our cooks, our housekeepers, our all-but-unseen-by-the-congregation attendants before, during and after Mass.

  They did our laundry, sent our uniforms to the dry cleaners, polished until it gleamed every gold-woven strand of our heavy vestments, never speaking unless bidden to by one of us, answering our queries in deferential tones.

  They had to stand on footstools while they dressed me for the altar as though I were some statue they were draping, nuns like miniature tailors taking measurements and testing alterations.

  My long vestments were too heavy for any one nun to lift to the height of my shoulders, so two of them each took a side and struggled audibly, groaning and stretching with the weight of what might have been a set of curtains lined with lead.


  “Dressing Father Thomas,” it was called. The burdensome task was one they shared stories about in private and that distinguished them from other members of their Order. An exacting procedure much talked about among those novices whom you’d think had to master it before qualifying as nuns.

  When they had finished dressing us, they stood around us, heads bowed, hands joined, waiting for any final requests or instructions we might have. The old priest would dismiss them with a regal half-wave of one hand. I was thus attended to by women three times my age, and by others your mother’s age.

  Your mother helped make the Communion wafers, removed them from the oven on a tray and from the tray with a spatula.

  She and the other nuns polished with wax until they gleamed the holy vessels, the cerebum, the chalice, the chasuble, the cruets of water and wine. The dome of the tabernacle.

  I saw them when the church was otherwise empty, the char ladies of Our Lord, scrubbing, washing, polishing, the sleeves of their habits rolled up as they crawled and climbed around the altar, leaning out from stepladders.

  Can you imagine that, your mother stretching to her utmost from a ladder to remove from the tabernacle some stain or smudge that to the congregation was invisible? Your mother on hands and knees scrubbing from the carpet the stain from a droplet of wine that some altar boy had spilled during Mass?

  I remember the smell of detergent in the church, the incongruous sight of metal pails brimful with water on the altar that was swarmed by nuns indecorously posed, on their stomachs, on their backs, nuns’ rumps everywhere and your mother’s among them. Your mother’s, Miss Fielding.

  I prayed for wisdom in all my self-evaluations and I reminded myself that pride was the greatest sin.

  Nevertheless, it started. Your mother and I.

  I was her confessor.

  Your mother did not confess as others did.

  Her daemon was doubt.

  She doubted her vocation. What she called her “worthiness” to be a nun, her “suitability” for the cloistered life.

  She said she was certain of the sincerity of all her vows but one. Given her upbringing, I assumed she meant the vow of poverty. I said something absurd about how there might never come a time when her “renunciation of luxury” was absolute, about how she must offer up to God what to all of us were “deprivations” and which to her might sometimes seem unbearable.