The Custodian of Paradise Read online

  A vulnerable spot for many girls was their father’s profession. One girl’s father, who ran a store that specialized in uniforms and equipment for upper-crust sports, I called The Merchant of Tennis.

  I didn’t mind that by casting names like spells on other girls, I ensured that I would have no friends. If I must be shunned, as it seemed my height made inevitable, then better I be so out of fear than scorn.

  When in the house alone, I often browsed through my father’s medical books, which teemed with illicit photographs and illustrations.

  I had two favourites. The book depicting healthy or normal anatomy I called The Silly, while I called the book of pathology The Vile.

  The Silly: men and women, shown from the front and back, clinically naked; models looking as sombre and blankly mystified as convicts, seemingly trying to look like their every feature was typical, representative of their gender, the man with his typical penis, typical scrotum and growth of pubic hair, the woman with her typically sized and shaped breasts and typical thatch of vagina-disguising pubic hair.

  Endless close-ups of the sex organs, their component parts. I tried to imagine the circumstances under which such photographs had been taken.

  The Vile: people unspeakably disfigured by all sorts of diseases somehow convinced to pose naked for photographs, their expressions as blank and noncommittal as those of their healthy counterparts.

  I was rendered incredulous by illustrations and explanations of what was called The Sex Act. Its name made it sound like some sort of parliamentary decree, as did others like The Act Necessary for Conception and The Pro-Creative Act. It seemed they should all have included the year they were passed. The Sex Act of 1853, by which, presumably, something was regulated or forbidden. An illustration of an erect penis, paired with an illustration of an only slightly less unprepossessing flaccid one confounded me. I thought an illustration from The Vile had somehow been included in The Silly, the two illustrations meant to demonstrate the difference between a normal penis and one with some horrific disease-caused malformation.

  The erect one was described by a variety of euphemisms, though its primary clinical name, appearing in bold letters just above it, was Penis Rampant. It might have been the name of some minor character from Dickens or Defoe. “Chapter Seventeen in which an explanation is offered by Steerforth; a proposal, at first accepted, is rejected, and the reader is introduced to one of Steerforth’s more unctuous associates, Penis Rampant, whose brief appearance on the stage is of greater importance than first supposed by Copperfield.”

  Painted in colours as lurid as those in some medieval version of the crucifixion, at first glance, Penis Rampant seemed to be a body part so traumatized as to be unidentifiable. “Tumescent.” “Engorged.” “Potent.” “Aroused.” “Anticipatory” and “Exceptional.”

  The one whose primary label was Penis Quiescent was also referred to as detumescent and flaccid. “Quiescent” was said to depict the penis’s “prevalent state.” None of these words, even when I looked them up in the dictionary, were of any help in making plain to me what it was the two illustrations were meant to demonstrate.

  The vagina, which was most often referred to as The Feminine, looked the same in all illustrations but one, which was labelled Feminine Receptive. A multi-lipped mouth roundly open in what might have been empathy, as if it had witnessed a painful mishap like the dropping of a stone on someone’s foot.

  I looked up “receptive.” “Ready to receive.” It seemed the reader was assumed to know a great many things that were left unstated, such as the means by which Penis Quiescent transmogrified into Penis Rampant, or what it was about the Feminine Receptive that caused “the penis to jettison its cargo of life-conveying sperm,” or, indeed, what made the feminine receptive in the first place. All of those seemingly self-modifying body parts. What a riot of misconception my mind was for a time.

  But after many afternoons spent gawking and reading, I got the farfetched gist of it. The egg-producing female with her nine months of gestation. Birth. Procreation: an alarming illustration of two bodies so weirdly entangled I assumed that a doctor had supervised their entanglement, his presence as necessary at procreation as it was at birth.

  The growth inside a woman of a baby, the life-threatening expulsion/extraction of which, depicted in many photographs, rivalled anything to be found in the pages of The Vile. I read and read and the discovery that it was neither rare nor accidental made it seem no less alarming.

  I knew that if I carried to school those two enormous volumes and displayed them on the playground, they would be seized from me in minutes by the Misses. On the other hand, I could not simply describe their contents to the other girls, in part because I had never really spoken to most of them before and to begin doing so by quoting from The Silly and The Vile would be unthinkable.

  I decided that I would bring the books to school one at a time and put them on the shelves in the little room that served as our library. Both had on the inside of their front covers labels that bore my father’s name: Dr. William Fielding. I hid them inside my bookbag and placed them, at random, side by side on the shelves.

  The day after I planted the books, there was talk on the playground at lunchtime that a girl named Suzie House had, for some unknown reason, run crying from the library and, evading teachers and friends who asked her what was wrong, had left school without permission and gone home. She was absent from school the next day. Her mother sent a note saying she was ill, but there was no talk among the girls of any sort of protest to Miss Emilee. I checked the library and found that the books were still where I had left them. The absence and silence of Suzie House unnerved me and made me feel guilty. Perhaps I had done her some irreparable harm. I decided to remove the books.

  The next day, I arrived uncharacteristically early at school. I hurried to the library where I discovered that The Silly and The Vile were gone. I considered going home and waiting for a visit from Miss Emilee, whom I pictured ascending the steps in front of my chastened and humiliated father. I went back out to the playground that by now was teeming with girls.

  The school bell that summoned us inside and that I usually heard while strolling up Bond Street towards the school clanged loudly.

  Miss Emilee was waiting for me just inside the door. I would not have been surprised to see the Church of England bishop waiting with her. It was her habit to fall in with the girls as they filed into school. She walked beside me, hands folded in front of her, maintaining her usual morning silence, all the girls and other teachers walking in respectful mimicry of their principal, no one speaking, the only sound that of the march of girls’ and women’s feet through the hallway of the school. The girls and their teachers fell out of line as they reached their classrooms.

  I was about to join the queue for history class when I felt Miss Emilee’s hand firmly grip my left elbow. In a fashion that was meant to be inconspicuous but that was noticed by the other girls whose heads seemed all at once to turn in our direction, she led me past the open doors of all the classrooms until we reached that of her office, into which she guided me and closed the door behind her.

  The room, which I had only peered into from outside before, was so sparely furnished it looked like she had just moved in. Near-empty bookshelves, a desk with a blotting pad and paperweight, some token knick-knacks, maps on the wall showing the counties of England, the provinces of France. It might have been that, even after twelve years, she was unreconciled to the idea that Bishop Spencer was more than just a temporary posting. It did not occur to me that these were all the provisions that even for its principal Bishop Spencer could afford.

  Also on her desk were The Silly and The Vile, one atop the other as if the books were hers, the authoritative sources of her philosophy of education. She motioned to a chair on the near side of the desk and sat in the one opposite, her back to an octagonal window with amber-coloured glass. She took off her hat and laid it on the desk in what seemed to be its accustomed place
in the far right corner.

  She looked at me and shook her head.

  “Your father’s books,” she said.

  “Yes,” I said, trying to sound defiant.

  “Found by one of the girls who brought them to Miss Sullivan’s attention.” Her voice was soft, almost wistful.

  I said nothing, only stared at the books, trying without success to imagine them being found by Suzie House and taken to Miss Sullivan.

  “Why, Sheilagh?”

  I shrugged. She had never called me Sheilagh before. It was always Miss Fielding.

  “Why?” She sounded not outraged on behalf of Suzie House and the other girls but genuinely concerned about me, if also convinced that I was far beyond her help. That she would both feel sorry for me and believe me to be a lost cause filled me with such desolate remorse I had to fight to remain composed. I felt the blood rush to my face, pounding at my temples. And something like grief surged up in my throat so suddenly I dared not try to swallow.

  “Why, Sheilagh?” she said. Not a tactic of any kind. An earnest plea for an explanation.

  I couldn’t speak.

  “These books,” she said. “Your father’s textbooks. Granted, he shouldn’t have left them where you could find them. But what were you thinking, bringing them to school? This one especially,” she said. She pointed at the bottom book, The Vile, The Book of Human Pathology. “Those photographs. Those poor people with their horrible afflictions. People beyond help who agreed to be photographed for the sake of others. The fear in their faces. But the beauty and the dignity as well. Is there nothing in you that answers to such things?”

  “I suppose there mustn’t be,” I said loudly, lest my voice begin to quaver. “I think the people in both books look ridiculous. Only fools would let themselves be photographed like that.”

  Miss Emilee shook her head again.

  “I don’t know if you even understand what you’re saying,” she said. “What did you hope to accomplish by leaving these where the other girls could find them?”

  “I am not as taken with the other girls as you seem to be,” I said. “Nor are they much taken with me.”

  “So you meant this as revenge?”

  “No. Not revenge.”

  “What then?”

  I shrugged.

  “You knew you would be caught. You must have wanted to be caught. Were you looking for attention? Did you think the other girls would find this funny and think more highly of you for it? Think you daring and clever for putting one over on the school. On me. And all the other teachers. Easily shocked unmarried women.”

  “I have no idea what the other girls find funny. I have no idea how some of them find their way back home each afternoon. I have nothing against easily shocked unmarried women. I may be one myself some day.”

  “I suppose you must hate your mother, Sheilagh.”

  “A woman not easily shocked but easily unmarried.”

  “Not so easily, perhaps.”

  “Do you know why my mother left?”

  “No. But let’s speak about your father for a while. Have you thought about the damage you might have done to his career?”

  Might have done. Then she meant to keep the matter secret. Believed that it could be kept secret.

  “I doubt it would have done much damage.”

  “Then did you think how disappointed in you he would have been? How ashamed of his own daughter?”

  “My father reserves his shame and disappointment for himself.”

  “A terrible thing to say.”

  “I know my father. Far better than he knows me. It is the mere fact of my existence that torments him. This prank of mine could not have made things worse.”

  “You are a bitter girl, Sheilagh. Bitter and clever. A potent combination. I fear for those who cross you. Were you hoping to be expelled?” She looked at me as if to repeat the question.

  I shook my head.

  “You will not be expelled. Nor even suspended. Only four of us know who put these books in the library. You and I. The girl who found them. And Miss Sullivan. I hope that I can count on your discretion. This is what you will do, Miss Fielding, or else I will expel you. You will take these books home now and you will not bring them to this school again. You will say nothing to anyone about this matter. Nothing to the other girls, nothing to your teachers. Nothing to your father. Nothing, as I say, to anyone. Is that clear?”

  I nodded.

  She opened a drawer in her desk and removed a canvas bag into which she carefully slid the books.

  “Take them home now,” she said. “Show them to no one and never remove them from your house again. You will not get a second chance. It is not to protect you that I have chosen to proceed this way.”

  When I took the bag from her and stood up to leave, she sighed.

  “All right then,” she said, her voice husky as though she were wishing some dear friend a last goodbye. “Off you go. Off you go, Sheilagh Fielding.”

  Chapter Four

  I WAS, AS FAR AS THE GIRLS OF BISHOP SPENCER KNEW, NO MORE “out of bounds” than before, though I felt that, for the teachers of Spencer, I as good as lived in outer darkness, a student known to have done something Miss Emilee considered unspeakable who was allowed to remain only because, by expelling her, they would run the risk that she would tell everyone about her prank and thereby smear the school.

  My conversation with her had left me feeling desolate. Her never-voiced but all too obviously grim view of my future prospects weighed upon my mind and spirit. She had all but said that I was by nature unsuited for happiness, an innately perverse young woman hopelessly inclined to waste her intelligence on subversive mischief. I could have told her that I did not share this view, but that would have involved explaining myself to her, which I was loath to do, loath to tell her that I wanted to be taken out of the running for the “prize” about whose value the other girls had not the slightest doubt. The girls who seemed unable even to conceive of another sort of life than the one for which Spencer was preparing them, a life for which I was all too happy to admit I was unsuitable.

  The problem was that I could only vaguely conceive of alternatives, vague versions of the lives for which our brother school, Bishop Feild, was preparing its students, the potent, effectual, dynamic lives of men. But even the sort of life that might be led by a graduate of Bishop Feild did not appeal to me. I somehow knew that, even as a boy, I would be disaffected, disdainful of my single-minded peers, inclined to opt out but having no idea what to do instead. I could clearly see what sort of man I would have made—one begrudgingly enlisted in a life that I disdained, an ineffectual crank who would become even more bitter as he aged, a figure of amusement to the captains of the world.

  I could not have told Miss Emilee that I had acted out of reckless desperation with no real end but notoriety in mind, notoriety from which I hoped that, somehow, something matching my notion of good would come.

  My motives, several years later, for beginning to associate with the boys of Bishop Feild were just as unclear.

  Spencer and the Feild bordered on each other, separated only by a tall iron fence between whose bars the smaller or skinnier of the students from either side could have squeezed, though it was only the boys who did so and only then to retrieve a wayward cricket ball.

  The girls of Spencer pretended not to notice the balls or the mock pleas of the boys to throw them back. It was an endless game between the students of the two schools, the boys overthrowing their balls on purpose, then standing at the fence and holding the bars jail-cell fashion while peering between them and shouting out the names of the more attractive and audacious girls.

  Occasionally, one of the girls, in what was considered an act of brazenness and daring, picked up the errant cricket ball and threw it with all her might over the fence, as far from the nearest boy as she could, which always drew a cheer from the boys, none of whom wanted to be the one appointed to chase down a ball thrown back in such a fashio
n by a girl. If no girl threw back the ball, the captain of the Feild ordered one of the boys to retrieve it, a boy who, by his ability to fit through the fence or willingness to scale it, won for himself a kind of fame that, though not to be taken seriously, at least saved him from the obscurity that would otherwise have been his fate.

  It had always been my practice to stay far clear of the fence, lest my conspicuous size and solitude make me a target of the boys. I was certainly not unknown to them—I had sometimes heard taunting shouts of “Fielding” from a distance, my name drawn out to “Fieeelllding,” but had always pretended not to hear it, and the girls of Spencer were too terrified of me to draw my attention to it, let alone join in the teasing.

  But one day I walked back and forth, looking through the fence at No Girls’ Land, looking, I imagined, because of my size and carriage, like one of the teachers of Spencer whose duty it was to patrol the fence each day. On the third day of my patrol, a group of boys gathered at the fence, at first conferring in whispers among themselves, until one of them spoke up.

  “It must be hard,” he said, “finding clothes to fit you.” The boys with him laughed, but I kept walking back and forth. “It’s not as though you can wear your mother’s hand-me-downs, now is it?” They laughed again and were joined by other boys until the fence was a crammed phalanx of blue-blazered boys, the sight of which drew the girls of Spencer who formed a line behind me. The boys and girls stood like two opposing armies, while I walked up and down between them. “I think I saw you last year at the circus,” another of the boys said to more laughter, though the girls looked on in silence.

  I stopped walking and, facing the boys, pointed my purely ornamental cane at them, moved it slowly from left to right. “Behold,” I said loudly. “The Lilies of the Feild.” The girls of Spencer all at once burst out laughing and I heard them repeating to each other what I realized with a mixture of glee and dread would be an enduring nickname. I had not expected the other girls to gather round, let alone to laugh at something I said at the expense of the boys who had for so long adored them from a distance.