The Custodian of Paradise

by Wayne Johnston

  How could we have spoken of it? I wondered if he was afraid. He did not seem to be. Though neither did he seem eager, excited, deluded about what others his age might have mistaken for some great adventure.

  We might have been sightseers, both strangers to the city, a brother and sister visiting a place about which we had heard from friends, an exotic place where there was no end of things to remark upon, to visit, no end of ways to maintain the illusion that nothing of the world remained beyond these shores.

  “We looked like identical twins when we were small children,” he said. “Until we went to school. Mother dressed us exactly alike. Had our hair cut exactly alike. In some photographs, you can’t tell who’s who, who’s the boy and who’s the girl. We both looked like curly haired girls, but also both looked like tomboys. I mean, even I can’t tell who’s who. Coveralls and curly hair. Mother wanted it that way, wanted us inseparable for as long as possible.

  “Even after we started school, she made sure we looked alike, until Father intervened. He worried I’d grow up to be a sissy. Sis and Sissy. Someone called us that. He told her I’d be teased to death by other boys. Our school uniforms were different, but on the weekends we still dressed alike. Until Father put his foot down.

  “You can see the sudden change in the family albums. It’s as if we were replaced, as if we simply vanished from the family. Suddenly, where Sis and Sissy used to be there are this boy and this girl smiling as if they’ve been there all along.”

  Not quite nostalgia. He sounds like he’s trying to make a case of some kind against someone. Citing evidence. Pointing to what he now sees were the early signs of something. Of whatever it is that makes him so loath to speak of anything more recent than his early childhood.

  In the restaurant.

  “We seem to turn a lot of heads no matter where we go.”

  “Sorry. It’s me they’re staring at. For a lot of reasons. Not all of which are obvious. Sightings of me at any time are rare, but in the daytime they’re unheard of. I don’t have lunch at lunchtime or dinner at dinnertime. It’s been fourteen years since I had breakfast. Almost no one in this city has ever seen me eating food. But believe me, this is all much stranger for me than it is for them. I’m not used to doing things when other people do them. Doing what other people do when I’m asleep.”

  But they were staring at him, too. The son of the woman who deserted Dr. Fielding. Living proof of her. There were people in the restaurant old enough to remember her.

  And there was also the matter of his last name, the one on his uniform that was known to be her maiden name. Word of that must have quickly spread. Word that he seems to have renounced his father’s name, his family name, in favour of the one that his mother hasn’t used in decades.

  Fielding’s half-brother is in town.

  The unlikely sight of me walking arm in arm with anyone, let alone an American officer in uniform, was one not to be missed.

  As we strolled down Water Street, people who saw us coming alerted others, ducked into shops and houses and offices, the doors and windows of which, by the time we passed, were crammed with the curious, the mystified, the astonished and the scornful.

  “Parades must bring them out in droves,” he said.

  Children, looking as if they’d been told I ate children, usually avoided me, though a few of them chanted rhymes about me from a distance or otherwise demonstrated their courage to their peers by taunting me.

  But emboldened by this new development, they turned their attention to David, whom they took to be my date, a newcomer who didn’t know my reputation and was fool enough not to be put off by my appearance.

  “She’s Fielding, sir,” a boy shouted as if my mere name was proof of the folly of consorting with me.

  “She lives at the Cochrane.”

  “She has consumption.”

  “She’s always drunk.”

  “She makes up lies called Forgeries.”

  “So many children singing my praises,” I said.

  What does he think of me? I wondered. It’s one thing to have heard about me, another altogether to see me and my lodgings for yourself. Perhaps the visit is an ordeal that he is determined to see through to the end, one that, though it is even worse than he expected, he knows will soon be over and will never have to be repeated.

  He must be leaving behind someone besides them. No ring on his finger. Still, he may have a girlfriend who is already fretting for him. And friends aside from his fellow officers.

  Not like Prowse. Not like me.

  Perhaps only because I am devoid of self-knowledge, have an entirely countefeit self-image, I half-expect him to reveal that he’s impersonating David who told him all about me. Something of my father’s obsession in my blindness to resemblances.

  A shirking of responsibility for his existence. A way of keeping him distant from me, lest his imminent, and perhaps permanent, departure be unbearable.

  I don’t know. I search his face, his eyes, note his mannerisms, his facial expressions, his gestures—but nothing seems familiar, which would be in keeping with his having changed his name if he had changed it to something other than my mother’s.

  “Do people still say you look a lot like Sarah?” I said.

  “I no longer associate with anyone who knows us both,” he said, then grimaced as if he had let slip something he had vowed to keep to himself. “I simply mean that, because of where we live, we rarely see each other.”

  I am to blame, I felt like saying. For whatever it is that has happened between you and your sister, I am to blame.

  “You’re not married,” he said. “I would say by choice.”

  “Yes,” I said. “Other people’s choice.”

  “Really?”

  “No. But I can think of no corners in which I would be considered a catch. Even before this.” I tapped my boot with my cane.

  “There was never anyone?”

  “For a brief time, my type—six-foot three-inch women who were lame and lived as though they had taken a vow of insolvency—were all the rage. But the competition was fierce. Suddenly, every woman in St. John’s was six foot three and limping back and forth from places like the Cochrane Street Hotel.”

  “You could just have said ‘Next question.’”

  “Sorry. I grew up an only child, without a mother, and more or less without a father. I grew accustomed to solitude, independence.”

  “People, and I don’t just mean children, seem to be afraid of you.”

  “Some, I suppose.”

  “Afraid you’ll write about them.”

  “Afraid that I won’t.”

  “It’s considered fashionable to be written about by Sheilagh Fielding?”

  “It’s considered unfashionable to be ignored, even by me.”

  “I am a writer too.”

  “That explains the uniform.”

  “I’ve written every day since I was twelve. But I’ve never tried to publish anything.”

  “Why not?”

  “I use real names.”

  “So do I.”

  “My family’s names. My friends’ names. I write about their lives. And mine. I don’t change anything. Even if I changed the names, everyone would know who my characters are.”

  “You wouldn’t be the first writer—”

  “No. I wouldn’t. Do you write about your friends?”

  “No.”

  “Because they’d no longer be your friends?”

  “Because I have no friends. I make do with the company of enemies. Whom I do write about.”

  “You’re exaggerating.”

  “The people who are least distressed at the sight of me are the closest things I have to friends.”

  “You have readers.”

  “Yes.”

  “I would rather have readers than friends.”

  “I doubt it. But if so, why don’t you try to publish what you write?”

  “I wouldn’t mind losing them as friends. But I wouldn’
t want to hurt them.”

  “Then you should learn to make things up.”

  “I’ve tried. I can’t. Nothing that’s any good. Nothing that matters to me.”

  “Why did you enlist in military college?”

  He made a dismissive motion with his hands. “Mother rarely spoke about St. John’s,” he said.

  “She rarely spoke about St. John’s while she lived here,” I said.

  “She never spoke about your father.”

  “My father used to refer to your father as his ‘rival.’ Right up until he died.”

  “His ‘rival’?”

  “Yes.”

  “Hard to think of my father as another man’s rival.”

  “Hard to think of mine that way as well.”

  “So many years and miles apart,” he said. “Yet with the same mother.”

  Mother. How strange to hear him call her that. Every time he says it, I give a start, think, for a moment, that he’s addressing me. “Mother.” How casually he says the word. How commonplace it is to have a mother, to be raised by one. An unremarkable achievement.

  “Not the same.”

  “How so?”

  “The mother you know is not the mother I remember.”

  “Sorry.”

  My words had a double meaning. Everything I said to him had more than one. A fine way to spend what little time I had with him. Verbally sparring. Yet it was irresistible. So hard to speak of her at all, let alone to hear him call her Mother.

  “Not your fault.”

  “She must have had her reasons for—leaving.”

  “Did she ever tell you what they were?”

  “No. But then—well, it was something we were not supposed to talk about. Whenever we got close she changed the subject. Or Father did.”

  Father. An absurd image of Prowse presiding at their dinner table. Prowse, my mother and my children.

  “She never said a word about me?”

  “She said that you were very tall.”

  “My father must have told her.”

  “What?”

  “She left when I was six years old, not when I was six feet tall. My father must have written to her.”

  “Did they correspond?”

  “Someone must have written to her, ‘You’ll never guess how tall she is. It’s a mystery where her height comes from.’ That sort of thing.”

  “Your father wasn’t very tall?”

  “No. Shorter than average.”

  “Then it is a mystery.”

  “No one thought so more than he did. He never stopped thinking of her as his wife. Of himself as her husband.”

  “So he talked about her.”

  “Indirectly. But relentlessly. My father didn’t think I was his daughter.”

  “Whose daughter did he think you were?”

  “Every man’s but his.”

  “Hardly a compliment to my mother.”

  “Or to me. Men are disinclined to compliment the women who desert them. Perhaps his suspicions were a kind of revenge.”

  “What were they based on?”

  “Me.”

  “I see.”

  “I’m sure you think you do.”

  “You don’t mean that you share his suspicions.”

  “No. Which made him all the more suspicious. One less thing we had in common. If I had shared his suspicions, he might have been less suspicious. Like father, like daughter. Does that give you some idea how his mind worked?”

  “I feel sorry for him.”

  “Yes. So do I. Though he saw me as one of the many banes of his existence.”

  “I think you’re given to exaggeration. How tall are you?”

  “In my stockinged feet, depending on which side you measure, I am either six foot three or six foot one.”

  “Does your leg—bother you?”

  “It bothers everyone. I am, in many senses of the word, a bother.”

  “But does it bother you?”

  “Yes. But it also reminds me of things I might otherwise forget. Don’t ask me which things. You’re asking questions as if you plan to write about me.”

  “I probably will. Would you mind?”

  “At last. A taste of my own medicine. I’ll write about you too.”

  “We should each write about the time we spend together and then—”

  “Compare?”

  “Yes. Though I’d be terrified. Do you write about people the way you talk about them?”

  “No. In my writing, I’m not so affectionate and sentimental.”

  “You’re very—funny.”

  I felt myself blushing. You are showing off for him. Almost flirting with him.

  “Do you like living here?”

  “I prefer it to living elsewhere.”

  “It looks—old, if that makes sense. An old-souled city. Not just the land but the houses, the buildings, the streets. They look like they’ve been here forever.”

  “It’s the weather. The wind especially. It never stops. The houses take on the look of the land. Everything looks old on a grey and foggy day. Even Manhattan, in the rain, looks older than it is.”

  “You’ve been there.”

  “When I was in my early twenties. I was a reporter.”

  “You didn’t come to visit us.”

  “To visit her. There’s something about not having heard from your mother in fifteen years that makes you disinclined to stop by for a cup of tea.”

  “She would have been glad to see you.”

  “No. She would not. And you’ll have to take my word for that.”

  “All right. But you must have been—tempted. Curious. Something.”

  “Yes. Something.”

  “Did she even know that you were in the city?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “Strange. Where did you go after Manhattan?”

  “Sanhattan. A much smaller place.” He looked puzzled.

  “The sanitorium,” I said. I tapped my boot with my cane again.

  We happened upon some girls playing hopscotch in the street.

  “Stop before they see us,” I told him. “And listen to what they’re chanting.” It is something I have heard and seen many times in the past few years but will never grow accustomed to.

  A girl of about ten took her turn on the hopscotch squares while half a dozen others chanted with her as she hopped from square to square drawn in chalk on the cobblestones of Water Street:

  Fielding’s father loved her mother,

  But Fielding’s mother loved another.

  The man who Fielding’s mother married

  Was not the man whose child she carried.

  You’ll never guess in all your life

  Who stole Dr. Fielding’s wife.

  Can you guess which man I mean?

  Oh no, it wasn’t Dr. Breen.

  Fielding’s father’s nine feet tall

  Dr. Fielding’s far too small.

  And even though he’s five foot eight

  Dr. Breen came far too late.

  These are all the clues you get.

  No one’s solved this riddle yet:

  You won’t solve it, I just bet.

  The answer is “A man you’ve met.”

  The girl, standing on one foot, finally lost her balance on the word “met.” The others laughed, clapped, jeered.

  “My God,” David said. “That rhyme is about you. And my mother and father.”

  “And my mother and father,” I said. “My two fathers, I should say.”

  “They’re saying Dr. Fielding’s not your father. Where did that idea come from?”

  “Well, as I told you, from Dr. Fielding. He grew suspicious when she left. Before that, too, for all I know. And his suspicions became an obsession.”

  “A very public one. How long have girls—?”

  “I think it predates ‘London Bridge Is Falling Down.’ Actually, I’m not sure. I heard it in the street one day a few years ago. How old it was by then—who kn
ows?”

  “Who wrote it? Who made up that rhyme?”

  “No idea.”

  “Someone must have made it up.”

  “Yes. Someone older than those girls.”

  “Do people here really think my mother—that Dr. Fielding is not your father?”

  “Some do. Some like to think it. Everyone has fun with it. A rhyming rumour cannot be put to rest.”

  “How strange. A nursery rhyme. Do you think those girls understand what they’re saying?”

  “Yes.”

  “But does it make you—wonder?”

  “If it might be true?”

  “A rumour so—widespread. So—universal. My God. Little girls chanting it while playing hopscotch. It must make you think.”

  “As I said, the rumour started with my father. Or maybe it was fed to him by some of his so-called friends. Then there is the matter of me.”

  “Your height.”

  “My everything. The idea that I wasn’t his child tormented my father, but he found the idea of blaming someone else for my—nature—well, it appealed to him.”

  “You’re not exaggerating?”

  “No. Regrettably.”

  “But you’re sure he was your father?”

  “No one’s sure who their father is.”

  “Aside from that.”

  “You’re wondering if I suspect my mother.”

  “Our mother. Yes, I am.”

  “No. Not of that.”

  “I don’t know what to think. Girls singing hopscotch songs about my family in the street.

  “It’s not as if I know your story.”

  “It’s an all too ordinary story. Not like yours. I can’t imagine my mother … But I suppose—well, it’s hard to imagine your mother being anything except your mother.”

  “Much harder for you than for me.”

  “Sorry again. But it doesn’t really seem like your mother and mine are the same person.”

  “All the world’s a stage, et cetera.”

  “Yes. Still—”

  “I should have steered you away from those girls. It’s just a rumour. Not something you should be distracted by, not now. I mean—”