The Custodian of Paradise

by Wayne Johnston

  We bought and borrowed books and stole them when we had to. In the early days we were known to our neighbours as The Students and later simply as The Readers.

  Aside from in the flat, we read only in the Cornelia Street Café, where we read as though our life’s work was to locate some obscure quotation. It was a gathering place for writers and readers who regarded us with fond amusement as we devoured books like food in silence. We were like literary archaeologists sifting through the ruins in search of artifacts with which we hoped to piece together a picture of the world as it once was or might still be.

  I cannot imagine going there conspicuously alone.

  At home, in the house of books, we talked about God as many people do, as if he were a character in a novel called the Bible. We talked especially often of the first chapter, Genesis.

  We talked of paradise, how unappealing the prospect of spending an eternity in pastoral idleness seemed. “But Genesis was written by men like you and me,” I said, “men who, being fallen, were unable to imagine what paradise was like. We can only think of ‘loss’ as we know it and of God as something by whom, and in whose image, we were made.” “You still talk like a priest,” my delegate said. I smiled but did not relent. I asked him to tell me how he pictured paradise. “How do you picture it being now, at this moment? And how do you picture God?”

  Neither my delegate nor I could ever think of paradise as a tropical place as described in the Bible or by Milton, especially paradise in the wake of Adam and Eve. No, it was always winter there. My delegate pictured it as an island on which God lived alone in a great house to which he “hoped” his children would return some day, even as he knew that, because of his own irrevocable edict, they never would. “The paradox of paradise,” my delegate called this. He imagined God at twilight, looking out the topmost window of his house upon an unblemished tract of snow, soon to light the candle that he placed in the window every night as a guide in case the two he sent away for good came back.

  I, too, thought of paradise as a house, one in which, always in some impossible-to-pinpoint room, God could hear it: the lost laughter, the lost music. The sound of a great throng of people engaged in animated but lighthearted conversation.

  In the absence of his delinquent children, it fell to him to maintain the great house and the measureless compound of paradise, to preserve it for a day that he knew would never come. “I picture an old man making the rounds of his vast estate for the umpteenth time. In my paradise it is always twilight and in the sky above the eastern gate through which Adam and Eve were driven, you can see, like the promise of a sun that never rises, the glow of the flaming sword of the angel whose back is always turned to God, the angel whom he posted there for all eternity to keep anyone from intruding on the solitude of paradise.”

  And that’s how it started, Miss Fielding, the very serious but entertaining game of inventing synonyms for God and imagining what it was like after he cast out his fraternal twins and paradise was deserted but for him. The “hermit of paradise,” we called him. “The recluse of paradise.” Even the “charlatan of paradise,” because we could not shake the notion that the fall was “fixed.” My favourite was the “custodian of paradise.” “We are all three of us, you and I and Miss Fielding, custodians,” I said, “withdrawn from the world to preserve, to keep inviolate, something that would otherwise be lost.”

  If not for you, we would have lost ourselves in such speculations, and in books lived lives of the mind as if the world we read about had vanished long ago. You were our link with the world. Your mother, too, of course, and your children, but we never intervened in their lives. There were times when it seemed that it was for your sake that we read so much, as if our goal was to understand and control all the forces that were acting upon you—as if you were somehow representative and our goal was to perfect you.

  Sometimes he went to Newfoundland alone, sometimes we went together. I never went alone. We also corresponded with a few people in St. John’s whom we paid a pittance to keep us informed of new developments in your life.

  We travelled nowhere except between New York and Newfoundland. He must have made the crossing more than fifty times, perhaps thirty times with me. Thirty times that prospect of the island when it first came into view. Thirty times Manhattan as it looked from the porthole of a ship.

  “Time to book passage for the island,” I’d say, and my delegate would smile.

  It was often necessary for us to be apart. Sometimes for long stretches of time. He called these separations our “sabbaticals.”

  It seems to me now that he is merely on sabbatical in Newfoundland and will soon return.

  I hope you will give some thought to this man who sacrificed so much for others. I know that he would want you to remember him.

  Now you are solely my charge. Men of my stature are conspicuous. And I would be all the more so if travelling alone. Once in St. John’s, I could not, without the help of my delegate, conceal myself from you as I have done in the past and must still do. Perhaps you have already guessed my method of concealment. At any rate, I will do my best, under these new circumstances, to watch over you. It would please me greatly to receive an answer to this letter.

  Your Provider

  He included a post office box number in Manhattan. And so we began a correspondence. His letters no longer appeared as if by magic in my room. I collected them from the mail depot. I wrote to him as I had in Manhattan, with no opening salutation. He deflected my many requests to explain in what sense he was my father. “You seem to believe that I was twice-begotten,” I wrote. “I do believe it,” he wrote back, but that was all.

  I like it that my minder was a Newfoundlander, though it may seem selfish to say it given what drove him to minding me. But it feels less strange to have been followed and watched all these years by, as you say, one of my own.

  To think that all along it was a Newfoundlander who tracked me in Manhattan and back here in St. John’s and on the Bonavista. I suppose it is partly from the simple fact of knowing his story that I feel less strange.

  I can’t help but think of his family. Their son survives the war without a scratch. And yet, as though he was killed, does not come home. He renounced them as absolutely as my mother did the Hanrahans.

  But I feel sorry for him. As surely a casualty as all the others in the Regiment. The strangest casualty of all, perhaps. The transformation that occurred in him in that one hour at the Somme. His becoming my minder was the most unforeseeable of all the consequences of that slaughter. I owe him far more than I realized.

  He returned so many times to Newfoundland in spite of the dreams he knew he would have there and upon returning to New York. The Unknown Newfoundlander. The Unnamed Newfoundlander. From Fortune. I’ve never been there. The son of a fisherman, no doubt, who would have been a fisherman himself and had a wife and children.

  Sent from Newfoundland to France so that he could be one of the sixty-eight who at that roll call heard his name. Seven hundred and seventy-eight. Less than one in ten.

  How it must have overwhelmed him to have been singled out like that. I’m glad he never fired a shot. I could go to Fortune. Easily find out his name, speak with his surviving relatives. And thereby make things worse for them. No. Better that I never know his name.

  Sheilagh Fielding

  My dear Miss Fielding:

  I have never written to you about my own experience of war.

  No man is prepared for what he sees and does in war. But he was even less prepared than most. Younger than the rest of us, most of whom were boys. He was the kindest person I have ever known, the one least inclined to bitterness and recrimination. He should never have gone to war.

  Most of my memory of the war was displaced by dreams. That is, I remembered the war when I was asleep but while awake remembered nothing but my dreams.

  I dreamt of the new weapons that were used. Armour-plated tractors with guns the size of cranes. Machines with hoses from which
fire gushed like water. Canisters that seeped yellow gas that in seconds did more damage to the lungs than illness could in years.

  I dreamt of two opposing settlements of trenches filled with men who crawled about like rats below the ground and at intervals swarmed out of their trenches in the hope of claiming the closest enemy trench as their own. The front-line trench kept changing hands. Control of it might have been the sole object of the war.

  The history of humankind had led to this. This is how men created in God’s image and possessed of free will thought it best to spend their time. The most prized thing in all of creation was a trench dug in the mud.

  I dreamt that all of humankind lived in trenches, the trench being the most sophisticated dwelling place yet conceived of by our species. From a God’s-eye view, I saw that all the land masses of the world were treeless mud flats in which trenches had been clawed since time began. Nothing existed above ground, nothing whatsoever.

  I often laughed out loud and was looked at as if I had lost my mind, though I somehow remained sane through it all. No one is innocent in war. All are guilty. There is neither justice nor injustice, courage nor cowardice. The dead are killed in the act of trying to kill. It is not what is done to them but what they who are supposedly doing His bidding do to others that once convinced me there could not be a God.

  Your Provider

  Not to anyone have I ever written as I do to you. Not from anyone have I received such letters as I receive from you. I no longer care that I have never seen your face and, as it seems, must never know who you are. If such must be the terms of our correspondence I happily agree to them. I hope you will never write to me to tell me that you will never write to me again, that the letter I am reading is the last one from you that I will ever read. Your letters, which I once dreaded the sight of, now help sustain me. As does writing back to you. In part through my own fault, there are few people who at the sight of me will smile and take my hand. I have not been enfolded in someone’s arms since you saved my life. I fall asleep alone. Wake up alone. Read and write and eat alone. Drink alone. But I do not regard life as merely something to be endured.

  Sheilagh Fielding

  Chapter Sixteen

  LOREBURN

  THE WIND HAS DROPPED. AND THEREFORE THERE MAY NOT BE rain. Only snow. Not a storm but a fall of snow. A snowfall in the fall. Snow as silent as fog.

  The time has come to read of the day that I met David. I can almost recite from memory this portion of my journal.

  February 6, 1943

  Captain D. Hanrahan.

  It was not the first time an American serviceman had been at the Cochrane, but what a din the Harlotry sent up as he walked down the hall.

  Late in the afternoon it was, though I was but an hour out of a bed that I had left unmade.

  Whistles. Catcalls. Laughter. Mock beckonings.

  “Captain D., come with me!”

  It must have been obvious, somehow, that he had not come for that, or else the beckonings would have been more bold.

  I have heard other men walk that gauntlet of prostitutes to a din of a different tone and purpose. A din that always ends with the slamming of a dozen doors. The man chooses or, more likely, is chosen, dragged into a room. And the other women go back to waiting.

  I made nothing of the noise. It has been customary at any hour of the day or night since the war began. Though it started up so suddenly, as if one of them had been keeping watch and warned the others he was coming. Like a surprise party thrown by women he had never met, never heard of, but who had somehow heard of him.

  But I knew none of this.

  Just another afternoon at the Cochrane. My day begins when theirs does. The city subsides. The light begins to fade. Nightfall. Another night, another column. Time to work while others sleep. To walk while others lie awake, hoping sleep will come.

  And so I thought it would be this time. I waited for the slamming of the doors.

  “Where are you going, Captain D.? There’s no one at the end but her.”

  D.

  I made nothing of it. Nor of his passing all their doors until none was left but mine. I presumed he would go straight past my room and down the other stairs. Having strayed into the wrong place, perhaps, beet-faced with embarrassment, bent on making his escape without a backwards glance.

  The sudden silence of the Harlotry the second he knocked on my door. As if every one of them were watching. Which they were.

  I was at my table, which doubles as my desk. My cane on the floor beside my foot.

  Another series of knocks, a sideways fist, a knock without knuckles, “thud, thud, thud.” As if to say, I know you’re in there. I slipped on my boots, leaving them untied, and grabbed my cane. Did my version of a shuffle to the door that I opened just as he began to knock again.

  I pulled the door away from his outstretched fist. And there he was. I saw his name tag first. Captain D. Hanrahan. The last my mother’s maiden name.

  D. What must he have thought when I gasped in what might have been fright and, letting my cane drop, threw my arms around him, one around his neck, one around his waist, and pressed his face against my shoulder before he even had a chance to open his arms?

  “Sis!” he said, half-laughing, amused, bewildered. “Sis. I was hoping you’d be glad to see me, but I never expected anything like this.”

  Sis. Remember, he doesn’t know, I thought. Be careful what you say. So much he must never know came flooding back at once. New York. Six months of night it might have been, all spent in that one room.

  A second heartbeat. Which one was born first? The girl. His sister.

  Be careful how you seem. He doesn’t know.

  There were more whistles and catcalls from the Harlotry.

  “Helloooo, brother,” one of the women said.

  He laughed.

  “Come in,” I said. He did. The dozen doors closed all but silently.

  “Nice digs.”

  My son. My son. My son. My heart thumping, saying what I could not say out loud.

  “What?”

  “Nice digs.”

  He was smiling. Not unprepared for what he saw. My surroundings, my height, my limp, my look. The smell of Scotch, which persists in my room though I have not had a drink in seven years. Unless no one else but me can smell it, which may be, for I can taste it too, whenever I drink water from my flask, which I do often, at home, in public, openly, stared at by those who though they’ve heard that there is nothing in the flask but water, choose not to believe it.

  The unmade bed. He had heard of “Fielding.” From whom? From everyone.

  “The Maharajah Suite, they used to call it. All the rooms had names when I moved in. I must have been about your age.”

  “I’m twenty-seven.”

  I know how old you are.

  I cannot bring myself to say his name. He looks more like my mother than he looks like me. But not like Prowse. David. Where does my height come from? Where did it go? He must be five foot ten. Less perhaps. Sarah? Another giantess?

  “Twenty-seven. Like your sister, Sarah.”

  “Yes.” He looked away at the mention of her name, as if she might be—I drew a deep breath, tried to swallow down a surge of dread.

  “How is Sarah?”

  “She is very much herself.”

  I knew that, if I asked, he would not tell me what he meant. I heard it in his voice. Very much herself. It could mean anything. Twenty-seven years about which I knew almost nothing.

  “As is our mother. And my father.”

  “Good.”

  “But you, quite understandably, do not wish to speak of our mother.”

  “No—”

  He put up his hand. “It’s all right,” he said. “I don’t mind. I don’t often speak of her myself. I don’t mean to sound so ominous. Nothing’s amiss. Everything is fine between us all.”

  Said with such finality. He might as well have said, we need not speak of them again. Fine. A fine family. M
erely irked he might be by something one of them had recently said or done. Twenty-seven years.

  We spent two days together.

  Went to the movies, where we encountered Smallwood who mistook David for a suitor. Serves him right, I told myself.

  Had dinner in a restaurant. I hadn’t been in one in decades.

  We walked about the city. I didn’t tell him that I sleep by day and work by night, so I was soon exhausted. Happily, giddily exhausted.

  My son. My son. My son. My heart exulting in these words.

  He took my arm as we walked, which made walking difficult for both of us, what with my cane and my limp. He had no choice but to mimic my gait. I wondered if he could feel my pulse in my arm as I did when he gripped me tightly with his hand. The sweet touch of my son, whom I had long been reconciled to never meeting.

  My face was flushed from the moment I saw him in the doorway to the moment we said goodbye.

  For a while we spoke only of inconsequential things. The weather. The landscape. I took him past my father’s house, but we didn’t stop for long and didn’t speak of her. The house that, in his will, my father left to the Medical Association, as he did every penny of his savings.

  David said he was a graduate of a military college in Virginia in which he had enrolled when he was twenty.

  Following his lead, I said little of my past. Nothing of Bishop Spencer, my time with Smallwood in New York. I told him of my illness and my time in the San and he listened in silence and nodded. But I said nothing of the Bonavista, nothing of my drinking, nothing of Prowse.

  Nor did we speak of the future, his imminent departure for England and then Italy, the war, reminders of which, aside from the uniform he wore, were everywhere, the streets full of other men and women in uniform—American, Canadian, British. The war in which he would soon be taking part.