The Custodian of Paradise

by Wayne Johnston

  “When I’m headed overseas.”

  Overseas. The universally accepted euphemism.

  Inconceivable that, soon, other young men will be trying to harm him. My son to whom I’m speaking now will soon be off to war. War that so changed my Provider and his delegate. To do unto others as they do unto him. Strangers with whom he has no complaint.

  Inconceivable that others will regard him as the enemy. A threat to their lives. The sinister “other” from whom they must protect themselves. My son. Twenty-seven. Overseas. As if to say “abroad.” As if he is merely on the eve of travel. Off to see the world.

  “Yes,” I said. “You shouldn’t be—preoccupied. Or have doubts about your mother. I should never have spoken of her as I did. You are right. I’m sure she had her reasons for everything she did.”

  “Distraction,” he said. “Preoccupation. They’re exactly what I need.”

  “All that—the war—seems so far away. Unreal. Things are all so normal here. Well, except the place is overrun with all you Yanks.”

  “You’re changing the subject.”

  “I didn’t mean to remind you of-—overseas. I don’t know what I should say—”

  “To put me in the right frame of mind? There is no right frame of mind.”

  “No. I suppose there isn’t.”

  “The answer is ‘a man you’ve met.’ That’s the strangest thing they said. It’s as if the person who wrote that really knows the answer.”

  He seemed even more intrigued than would have been understandable under the circumstances. Something more than his mother’s fidelity at stake, the rhyme evocative of something he couldn’t put his finger on, reminding him of something he couldn’t quite remember. “It’s as if the rhyme was written by the ‘man’ in question. Who else would be in a position to know, besides my mother? My mother who, I think we can safely say, is not the author of anything but your misfortune?”

  “You’re making something out of nothing.”

  “Even assuming the rumour to be completely untrue, you can hardly expect me to pretend I’ve never heard it.”

  “Let’s talk about something else.”

  “It’s—extraordinary. It must be very—eerie. Hearing children chant about you in the streets like that.”

  “I don’t mind.”

  “I know my mother, Sis. She wouldn’t have abandoned her own child out of mere—discontent. With your father, with this place. Something must have happened.”

  “Now I’ve made you suspect her.”

  “Something might have happened that your father didn’t know about. Didn’t even suspect, I mean. Not—infidelity. Something else.”

  “Such as?”

  “I don’t know. I’m just pointing out what seem like possibilities.”

  “That you should want to think the best of your mother is only natural. Admirable. But my view of her is not based on speculation.”

  “No.”

  “Think of my mother as Mrs. Fielding and yours as Mrs. Breen. The same person under two different sets of circumstances. Both of them are real.”

  “I prefer to think of her as Susan Hanrahan.”

  “Yes, I noticed. I didn’t want to ask.”

  “Father and I have always had our differences.”

  “And Sarah.”

  “I’d rather not speak of Sarah.”

  “Oh, David, I’m so sorry. For whatever has happened between you two, I mean.” I felt such dread I could barely speak. What had I fated my children to by letting her take them? Her and him. Both strangers to me.

  The time has not yet come for him to leave.

  But nothing lies between now and then to make then seem more distant than it is, no interval of night or sleep, no barrier between us and goodbye.

  Two days is all we had, and even if in that first day there had been twenty years, I would have thought of nothing from the start but what lay at the end of it.

  If I had told him everything. How strange it would have been for both of us, to speak of such things so soon after meeting and, then, so soon afterwards, to say goodbye.

  I was sure that it was with the intention of telling me something that he came to visit and something about me put him off, made him lose his nerve.

  If we never meet again. I will remember him as but a boy who didn’t know I was his mother and who, on the eve of war, was better off unburdened by the knowledge.

  When he was leaving I hugged him so fiercely I lifted him clear off the ground.

  “Goodbye, David,” I said, then began to cry what I told him were tears of happiness, which in part they were.

  “So long, Sis,” he said. “Everything will be all right.”

  “I know,” I said, “I know it will,” because I thought he was speaking of the war. But now it seems to me that his jaw was set against something else, something I fear I should have forced him to talk about. Sarah. My mother. Dr. Breen.

  He did not assure me that we would meet again.

  Everything will be all right. When he returns from overseas, will he visit me again? He did not say. I should have asked.

  I’m not sure that my mother and Sarah know that he has been to see me or that he even told them that he planned to try to find me.

  Twenty-seven. Hoses from which fire gushed like water. A military college. Where he studied war, how best to wage it, how best to kill and avoid being killed. How did such madness come to seem so commonplace, so reasonable?

  What seemed, when he was here, to be a military comportment, an air of self-containment born of years of instruction, indoctrination, now seems to have been a curious aloofness, a resignation to some fate whose power over him he was scornful of to the point of total disregard.

  My son. My son. My son. My heart, even while I sleep, will say “my son.”

  And then, months later, the telegram was delivered to my door. We regret to inform you.

  I fell to the floor when I saw the black-bordered envelope.

  My dear Miss Fielding:

  I have, since learning of your son’s death, been grieving for my delegate and for my own lost child or else I would have written to you sooner.

  My delegate. If for no other reason he was fortunate to have died when he did. How it would have haunted him that he was not only powerless to save your son but that your son fell victim to the very fate that he escaped, that in battle he was spared but the son of the woman for whose sake he lived and breathed was not.

  Your son. My grandson. His life was a brief interval of peace between two wars. I can no more shield you from this sorrow than I could shield you from disease.

  I would console you if I could, Miss Fielding. Bring David back. Bargain him back from anyone who thought my life a fair exchange. But I can do nothing for the woman whose provider I long ago presumed to be. David’s death reminds me of the other war. So many men. So close they were when they were found, yet each one died alone. He reminds me too of my delegate, who asked:

  “How is it that the main motivation of a being that claims to have been made in God’s image, that claims that in each of us there burns inextinguishably a spark of the divine, should be revenge?”

  But, aside from my being helpless to protect you, there is a sense in which I am to blame for David’s death. I cannot bear to tell you more. Not yet. I did something I swore I would never do again. Perhaps I would not have done so were my delegate still alive. But that absolves me of nothing. I feel as though, having long ago stopped drinking, I have begun to drink again. I have renewed my vow to live as my delegate would have wanted me to. As I know I should live. But something has been lost that can never be restored.

  I should not torment you by merely hinting at such things. Yours is the greater grief, I have no doubt. Though my child was robbed of its entire life. No one remembers it but me. Your mother, perhaps.

  I never knew my child. Not even as briefly as you knew yours. Better to have lived and lost your life than never to have lived at all.

 
; There is no balm for what you feel. But remember that he lost the balance of his life, not the whole of it. His death destroyed his future but not his past, which, for as long as they live, those who loved him will remember.

  Your Provider

  I could not think of how he could be in any sense responsible for David’s death, but I believed him. And how that sentence enraged me. I vowed that I would have nothing more to do with him. I began and abandoned many replies to his cryptic confession. “You send me condolences for my son’s death and then tell me that you caused it.” “For what you have done, however you have done it, I will never forgive you.” “You cast your culpability in the form of yet another riddle.” “You who have written to me with such eloquent incredulity that the whole world is once again at war.” In the end, I decided I would not even write to him to tell him not to write to me again. If further letters arrived, I would leave them unread and destroy them. But none did arrive in the months before my departure for Loreburn.

  LOREBURN

  Two in the morning. I could wait until tomorrow night. I am exhausted. I could wait until then to open the notebooks from David that Sarah sent me. But if I wait I won’t sleep. Perhaps, once I have read the notebooks, I will be unable to resist the contents of Mr. and Mrs. Trunk. As it is, I am barely able to.

  Only moments ago, I took the notebooks from the trunk and, using a pair of shears, cut the metal clasp. How tightly they were bound I didn’t realize until, the clasp removed, the books sprang free, the compressed pages turning as though of their own volition so that now the notebooks lie on the table in front of me as they would had some reader placed them there face up.

  Pages turn from right to left, some invisible finger leafing through them, skipping ahead in search of something. Now they have stopped. They have decided for me where I should begin.

  There is a letter whose pages are pasted onto the larger pages of the notebook.

  Dear Sheilagh:

  I leave these documents with my sister with instructions that she not read them and that she forward them to you in case I do not return from overseas.

  I realize that, by waiting, I run the risk of never telling you in person that I know you are my mother.

  But I cannot stand the thought of telling you before I leave.

  I write in the present tense, which, under the circumstances, must seem strange to you, as it does to me.

  But I cannot bring myself to write to you in the past tense. I feel, however irrationally, that I would make my survival less likely by doing so.

  It is, of course, my fervent wish that you never read this letter, that it remain forever unsent, forever unread.

  I will be in St. John’s for a few days on my way overseas. I will see you there, but it does not seem to me that that will be the right time to tell you what I know and have known for the past two years.

  I feel certain that I will return safely from overseas and I would like to speak to you then of the contents of this letter that I hope you have not read.

  I have arranged for these letters to be sent to you in what I believe is the extreme unlikelihood of my death. I cannot explain, even to myself, why I feel so confident that I will return to you unharmed.

  I cannot stop thinking of how strange those few days with you would be if I told you what I know, and the effect they might have on both of us. On the one hand, it might be that, as I headed overseas, I would feel more at peace if we had spent time together as mother and son, that the certainty of a few days together without there being such a secret between us is better than the possibility of none at all. And it might be that I would therefore be in as good a frame of mind as possible for whatever I will soon be facing.

  But, on the other hand, it seems more likely that for me to acknowledge you as my mother under such circumstances would be folly. I think it would raise a thousand questions that we would not have time to answer. I think it would send my mind into a turmoil that might be the cause of my misfortune. And, superstitiously, I think it would be tantamount to admitting that I doubt my chances and I would therefore bring upon myself the wrong kind of luck.

  I feel certain I am right.

  I nevertheless enclose to you these letters that were written to me and which I have pasted in my notebooks.

  Goodbye,

  David

  He knew. When he looked up his “half-sister” at the Cochrane Street Hotel, he knew I was his mother. When he strolled with me about St. John’s, he knew. And when we stopped to listen to the children playing hopscotch in the street, he knew. I put my hand over my mouth as if there is someone else here whom an unstifled sob would disturb.

  I nevertheless enclose …

  I recognize the handwriting in the letters as that of my Provider.

  My dear Mr. Breen:

  I lack the strength and the grace to leave your queries unanswered, or to protect your mother by answering untruthfully.

  The explanation that your “mother” gave you for the correspondence between her and me that you discovered was untrue. As were all the accusations that she made against me.

  I once loved your mother, who for years has lived in denial of our relationship and its consequences.

  Out of sight, out of mind. Out of body, out of mind.

  Your real mother thinks almost constantly of you and of your sister.

  It is true that your mother is your “mother’s” daughter and your half-sister.

  A stranger whom you have heard of but have never met.

  The woman you think of as your mother has never given birth.

  She is your grandmother.

  Not one drop of your “father’s” blood runs in your veins or in anyone’s.

  Your “father” has no children.

  Your mother had our child destroyed while it was in her womb.

  And now, defending herself. She tells you that I committed rape, that she became pregnant because of it. This is untrue. And I will prove it to you.

  New York, 1939

  I continued reading but could not find the proof of which the Provider spoke. There was a diary or journal entry in which David said that, for two years, he had borne his secret for Sarah’s sake. He had not been home since 1939 and no longer saw or corresponded with his “parents.”

  He wrote of how hard it was not to be able to explain himself to Sarah, to witness her perplexity at how suddenly he changed, her resentment for the way he treated and defied their parents.

  “I have paid a price for not confronting them with what I know,” he wrote.

  He had tried in vain to go on thinking of them as his parents and to regard them with his customary affection and respect, and tried, again in vain, to pretend that his feelings had not changed. “It is not because of biology that I have turned against them. Not because they misled us into thinking we were theirs. That in itself would be no crime.”

  When he ultimately found himself with no choice but to put some distance between himself and them or “confront” them, he left home and corresponded with no one but his sister, his sister, whose anguish at the way he was treating their parents he had no choice but to endure in silence.

  Even when she threatened to disown him as he had, seemingly, arbitrarily, disowned them, he did what he thought was best for her. For Sarah, to whom family was all-important. Who regarded their foursome as indivisible, each one interchangeable with the other three, the Breens, a micro-species that spoke a language, that interacted in a manner that no non-Breen could understand.

  It was to preserve for her at least something of what she valued most that he lopped off one part of the family—himself.

  I have read the letters in which she protested, pleaded with him to mend the breach, assuring him that, despite his delinquency, no one loved him any less and would welcome his return, told him of the toll his baseless desertion was having on their parents. All of these he answered in the same way, offering no defence but a desire for independence and an interest in things either unval
ued by, or disapproved of, by their parents.

  I found a letter from my Provider in which there is a gap of half a page. It seems that half a page has been cut out with scissors. Then there is one line:

  When we meet, I will show you proof. You have only to examine it.

  The rest of the letter is missing.

  David should not have come to see me. Not with so much already on his mind.

  Or he could have come earlier before there was a war to go to. He could have come to visit two years ago and stayed as long as he wanted, as long as necessary. He could have shown me those letters from my Provider and my mother sooner.

  We might have been something like mother and son. Might have decided together what was best for Sarah.

  It sounds as though I am blaming him for his own death.

  Mr. and Mrs. Trunk.

  There seems to be no reason not to take a drink. If I were not here, if I had read those letters and journals in St. John’s, I would be halfway to oblivion by now. Out here I am afraid of what will happen if I start and can’t stop.

  There have been nights, better nights by far than this one, when I have poured the water from my flask, gone to Mr. Trunk and opened his doorlike lid and taken out a bottle like the one that I have left unopened by the sofa while I wrote.

  I’m writing in the kitchen, my empty flask on the table beside my notebook.

  No reason not to take a drink. Every reason not to. Sarah. My mother. Even David. David more than anyone perhaps. What did he expect of me? He says nothing in his letter about what he thinks I should do if …

  I have lost one child, and must never tell the other who I am. What I am. What we are.

  In which case she is almost as surely lost to me as David is.

  Now I know what my Provider meant when, after the death of his delegate, he wrote of having broken a vow. Having for decades forsworn revenge, he reverted to it by answering David’s letter. How careless of my mother to leave correspondence between her and my Provider where David could find it. She should have destroyed it. If he told David everything, then David, when we met, knew more than I did. For I still don’t know why she abandoned me. I still don’t know what it means to be “twice fathered.” In what sense am I his daughter?