The Custodian of Paradise

by Wayne Johnston

  It was not my intention to become one of them, but the Cochrane, though not a boarding house, was the cheapest place to stay in the city, at least the cheapest of the places that were at least barely habitable. And it was all I could afford. I had decided I would not, ever again, live in my father’s house, not even after he died, assuming he did so before me, not even if he left it to me in his will, which I very much doubted he would do. I did not plan to disown him. While at the section shack, I had written to him, informing him that I was feeling better.

  He had written back that he was glad to hear of my recovery, but he made no attempt to explain why he had stopped writing to me while I was in the San. Though he did, vaguely, allude to my children.

  “I have never understood you,” he wrote. “But it seems that, no matter what, you will go your own way, regardless of the consequences to yourself or others. Why you prefer to the lights of St. John’s the gloom of Bonavista a greater mind than mine could not discover. I have done all that I can, and more than I was obliged to, considering my circumstances, some of which were solely of your making. I am a doctor. That is all that I am, all that I have, an occupation, a profession that I once performed in the service of God and now simply perform. I trust I will see you again. You will choose strangely, but you will not be true for long to any of your choices. To do so is not in your nature, which is so very unlike mine that I cannot begin to understand it. But you are still welcome in my house.”

  That he was able to reconcile this view of himself with the fact of his having written to a newspaper an anonymous letter that had changed, and possibly ruined, the lives of others seemed inconceivable to me at that time, though it seems much less so now.

  I knew I would, when I was ready, go by his house some evening, the house where he and I had lived alone, the house my mother left one morning for good without bidding me goodbye. If the lights were on I would knock on the door and he would admit me like the unexpected guest I was, one to whom he felt bound to offer his hospitality but whom he hoped would not stay long. And I would sit there in the dim, lamp lit room and, in what once had been my home, amidst surroundings that were not much changed from when I was just a girl and in which the past persisted like a panoply of voiceless ghosts, I would make conversation with my father, sit in filial silence while he spoke, speak when his reticence became unbearable. And then I would say that it was late and there was still something in my day that must be done. And he would, in token disguise of his relief, tell me I must come again and I would tell him yes, I would. And I would leave and, descending the steps clumsily in the sideways fashion required of me by all forms of descent, I would look back and see my father make his way from lamp to lamp, extinguishing the memories that my visit had invoked, the other life that might have been forever shadowing the one that was. And then I would turn away, walk away from what had been my home and, investing my soul by force of will with hope, make my way in summer twilight through the dark streets of St. John’s to the place to which my life had somehow brought me, up to a room where, lying on my bed, I would read some book that I had read before and between whose words memory would somehow make its way. I would do all this, not once, but many times, until the stranger who at one time was my father no longer answered when I let the knocker fall. I knew that day would come and suspected that he knew it too. The day would come for him when he would prefer fantasy and revery to the company of others when he could no longer see a difference between his mind and the world.

  The rooms at the Cochrane Street Hotel were known as suites. Each had been given by the original, now long-forgotten landlord an ironic name that, though it did not appear on the door, was known to all the residents. The theme of these names was Old World opulence and luxury. I was assigned, upon registering, the Maharajah Suite, which I was relieved to discover was now referred to by my fellow tenants as the Corner, whereas the room called the Tajmahal was referred to as the Taj, another by its full name, the Sultan. The Palace of Versailles was called the Palace, the Vatican, the Vat. The ironic intent of whomever had named the rooms was not lost on the residents, but the names, which seemed to be known to some only in their short forms, were spoken as matter-of-factly as room numbers would have been. I witnessed my neighbours giving visitors directions to the Palace or the Taj or the Buckingham with earnest, straightfaced helpfulness, their expressions much like the landlord’s when he had told me that the only room available was the Maharajah Suite. I smiled when he said it, but all he could manage in response was a weary grin, as if he would just as soon have dispensed with this business of the names of the rooms of the Cochrane Street Hotel that he, and proprietors before him, had inherited from the original owner, because he had higher hopes for the place that would never be realized as long as these gleefully derisive names were still in use.

  I moved into the Maharajah Suite in minutes with little more than a duffle bag filled with clothing. My books were at my father’s house. Herder had promised to have a typewriter delivered to me when I sent him my address, which I knew that he, if no one else, would find amusing. Fielding at the Cochrane. Where else would I wind up?

  The possibility that the Corner, one of several, sea-facing corners of the Cochrane, would become my permanent home did not occur to me, any more than it did that anyone could become as fond of such a place as I would at length become. A single bed pushed hard against the wall, a chrome, Formica-topped kitchen table and two chairs with canvas-covered upholstery in which there were taped-over puncture wounds, a hot plate, a single cupboard with one of each utensil from unmatched sets, a closetlike toilet with a sink from which most of the porcelain was missing, more black than white, and above the sink a frameless mirror with uneven, jagged edges—these were what the sign outside on the street had advertised as “furniture and complete amenities.”

  The place was cheaper than any boarding house that the cab driver, had he acceded to my request, could have found for me, and I didn’t mind the lack of whatever meagre meals were being served in boarding houses of the time. It was, I decided, exactly what I needed for now, exactly what someone needed who planned to write as I planned to, for I could not risk writing like that if I owed anything to anyone, if I had anything that I could not bear to part with, anything that might be taken from me.

  I had met with Herder, for whose paper, the Telegram, I had not written since leaving with Smallwood for New York.

  “I am going to write what I want to write,” I said. “If you will publish it. The bishop can make whatever threats he wishes. I have had enough of protecting my father’s reputation.”

  Herder hired me again. “Welcome back,” he said. “We’ll see how long you last this time.”

  That I would become a regular at the Cochrane, as much a fixture as the oldest of the prostitutes, seemed especially unlikely in the first few weeks. To the Cochrane every night came Portuguese fishermen from The White Fleet who were known collectively in St. John’s as “Mario.”

  “Come in, Mario, my love” or “Here he is, here’s Mario, here to visit us again,” the prostitutes shouted while standing in their open doorways, shouted at stage-voice volume and tone in a token attempt to disguise the real reason of “Mario’s” visit, as if some minimum of decorum was required by their deluded, ambitious landlord. After the public greetings and the slamming of doors came the private sounds of squeaking bedsprings and perfunctory cries of “Oh Mario, oh Mario,” followed hours later by what sounded like the mass exodus of the sailors of The White Fleet from the Cochrane Street Hotel.

  I began, from necessity, to keep prostitute’s hours, working at night and sleeping by day. To sleep at night was impossible, to write at night nearly so, what with all the noise made by Mario and the women that Sister Celestine called, again collectively, the Harlotry. Sister Celestine, if she knew any of the prostitute’s first or last names, never used them. The Harlotry answered Sister Celestine’s rebukes by saying that at least they “earned” their money and hadn’t been deem
ed “not good enough” by the nuns, whom they referred to as the Presentation.

  “The Presentation kicked you out,” they’d say, or “You were so holy even the Presentation couldn’t stand you any more.” Any reference to her expulsion from the nuns sent Sister Celestine into a rage. “They were all a bunch of bitches just like the Harlotry,” she shouted, only indirectly addressing her tormentors, as if even to be referred to by pronouns was more of an acknowledgment of their existence than they deserved. Walking up and down the hallway, though, she pounded on their doors while she sermonized the Harlotry. And the Harlotry, even while entertaining Mario, would shout, “Put yourself out of your misery and get a man. One Blessed Virgin is enough.” At which Sister Celestine would shriek “Blasphemers” and run back to her room.

  Sister C. was bad for business, for the sight of her in her habit in the hallways of the Cochrane Street Hotel stirred up the conscience of “Mario,” memories of a home where he was not exempted by his complexion, not presumed to be helpless to resist infidelity by virtue of his comical exoticism.

  “Mario” always looked chastened, sometimes even frightened, at the sight of Sister C., who would sometimes block his way, standing at the top of the stairs, holding out, as though to fend him off with it, her wooden cross. The Harlotry, when they heard Sister C., called out to Mario, told him to go no farther. They would come out and escort him past her, holding him by the arms and cajoling him so loudly that their multitude of voices all but drowned out that of the old nun as she warned of the eternal torment that awaited all of them in hell.

  Between the two sides of this combative gauntlet I made my way back each night, the sight and sound of me heightening the spectacle. “Mario” looked wide-eyed from the Harlotry to Sister C. to me, the limping, leg-dragging giant of a woman that I was. I liked to fancy that, by comparison with Sister C. and the Harlotry, I was inconspicuous, that these were probably the only circumstances in which, for me, inconspicuousness was possible, though Mario looked at me as if I were, in the spectacle, some bizarrely incongruous third element, an apparition by the fact of which there was no telling what, or from where, something even stranger might appear.

  Sister Celestine circulated a petition to have me evicted on the grounds that I had once been a TB patient at the San. I was informed of this by one of the Harlotry, who told me that no one but Sister Celestine had signed the petition that nevertheless bore several dozen signatures, all forged by Sister C.

  At the height of the squabblesome revelry and mayhem, I made my way from the Corner to the front stairs at the far end of the hallway, passing the rooms of the Harlotry, some of whose doors were wide open, if Mario was merely carousing. I glanced inside and saw women dancing with those homesick and lonely fishermen from Portugal, all of them, despite Prohibition, holding in plain view what I guessed from their swiftly acquired and far-gone degree of drunkenness was moonshine. Some of the women waved, and when I waved back, motioned with their cigarette-bearing hands for me to come inside. “Come in, my duckie, and have a drink with us.” I knew they had heard me coming down the hall, heard the clumping of my cane and my brace-and-boot-encumbered leg. When I stopped to acknowledge their invitation by declining it, they looked down at my thick-soled boot.

  “I have to give this leg some exercise,” I said. “Doctor’s orders.”

  “Well, here’s to you, my love,” a woman said once, raising her jar. In what I hoped would be a mollifying show of solidarity, I took out my flask and saying, “Here’s to you,” drank deeply from it.

  “That’s the stuff for a chilly night now,” the woman said, though she stared dubiously at the flask.

  “Poor thing,” I heard the woman say when I went on past the door, resuming the clumping and thudding that itself, I supposed, was part of the evening din at the Cochrane, part of the general torment to those few residents who after dark pursued nothing more than sleep or relaxation.

  “Poor thing, my arse,” another woman’s voice said. “She’s a bit full of herself with that flask and that fancy cane of hers.”

  I became known, in those first few months, before my columns began to attract attention and the Harlotry, illiterates without exception, learned of their irreverent tone by word of mouth, as The Doctor’s Daughter, a member of The Quality. I was, for some unimaginable reason, an interloper among those I regarded as my inferiors. Laid low by TB and my weakness for the bottle but nevertheless an eccentric in any context but the one from which I came—that seemed to be how they regarded me. If not for my leg and my limp and my ability to affect unaffectedness, I might have become the target of scorn instead of pity, however begrudged the latter was.

  Sometimes, as I was making my way to the stairs, Portuguese fishermen who were just arriving would collectively appraise me, by no means repulsed by my limp or my oversized leg. They addressed me in words whose gist was clear enough though I could not understand them. They surrounded me, talking to me and to one another, grinning, laughing, nodding. Young, physically attractive men, their breath reeking of their foreign cigarettes and smuggled moonshine, men my own age and even younger who took their robust health for granted.

  What did they see? I wondered. An exotically marred, incongruously haughty and composed young woman whose height affronted them and therefore made them want to have her that much more, as if only by having her might they, in every sense, bring her down. Once, when one of them took me by the arm, I rapped him on the kneecap with my cane. The others, as he hopped about in pain, doubled over laughing, at the sound of which some of the Harlotry came out and in phrases that were part-English, part-Portuguese, summoned “Mario” inside.

  “There’s no need for you to live like Sister C., my love,” said one of the women who lagged behind. “I can send Mario down to the Corner one of these nights if you like. You could even make yourself a bit of money.”

  I wished I’d had some Scotch before setting out, for I found myself blushing deeply at this ingenuously extended offer, this attempt at recruitment that I should have found more amusing and even touching than otherwise.

  “There’s a man who I think is going to ask me to marry him soon,” I heard myself saying, all the while wondering why, without sounding offended or embarrassed, I hadn’t simply and politely declined the offer. I foresaw the necessity for an all but endless elaboration of this lie.

  “Is there now? A man who is going to ask you to marry him soon?” the woman said, regarding me as she drew deeply from a cigarette, one arm folded across her chest, the other, the one between the fingers of whose hand the cigarette was held, resting on it. I foresaw myself being regarded as either deluded or as putting on airs, pretending that a return to the social standing that had once been mine was imminent, a possibility that would be transparently absurd.

  “There’s no man,” I said, trying to laugh, the old sorrow surging up as it hadn’t done in years. “I mean, there was one. But that was a long time ago. Excuse me.”

  I managed to blurt out the last two words before a sob that would have stopped me in mid-sentence rose up in my throat. I hurried away from the woman, making more noise with my leg and my cane than I needed to in case I couldn’t swallow down this sudden surge of grief. The woman muttered something, but I did not catch the words.

  The landlord was a bootlegger, but only in moonshine, and seemed to regard bootlegging as an avocation forced upon him by a clientele who were unworthy of him and his hotel. When I asked him if he knew where I could get something “unusual” to drink, he feigned mystification at first but became abruptly forthright when I showed him some money

  “I can get you some of what I get that crowd upstairs,” he said. “That’s all.”

  “No Scotch?”

  To this, as if he thought I were poking fun at his self-image and faux-genteel demeanour, he said nothing.

  It never left my mind that the man who saved me on the Bonavista was watching me. Or his delegate was. Watching over me. One afternoon I woke to find a lette
r on the floor inside the door.

  My dear Miss Fielding:

  What a place in which to live. But I suspect that if I were to give you money, you would either destroy it or give it away or use it for something other than finding better accommodations. I suspect that you would only buy yourself a better brand of liquor and that you would drink even more than you do now. You must stop drinking or some day it will destroy you.

  Perhaps you have already guessed some of what I am about to tell you.

  I ended my last letter by telling you that, after your mother left me on Cape Cod, I went back to Boston and kept watch on her parents’ house. It was just such a mansion as I had often imagined it must be.

  I noticed that there was one frequent visitor to the house, a woman about your mother’s age who arrived and left on foot. I followed her when she left the house. Every day but one she went to what I assumed was her home. On that one day she took a different route and left a pink envelope in the mailbox on the veranda of a house far removed from hers, then went away.

  When she was gone, I hurried up the laneway, removed the letter and escaped without notice.

  The letter inside read:

  My darling Sylvia:

  I must ask you again to please forgive the manner of our correspondence. I could not take the risk of entrusting such a letter to my mother or father who might unseal it. Mary, who has been my lifelong friend but in whom I have not fully confided, is the one visitor the doctor allows me and so I give her my letters when we are alone and she delivers them for me. I trust her completely to do only what I ask her to. I must ask that if you wish to reply to this letter you do so through her.

  Sylvia, I feel as though I have emerged from a period of temporary madness. As though I came to my senses just in time to avoid complete disaster.