The Custodian of Paradise Read online

  “My father is a doctor, not a writer. He rarely writes letters.”

  “Will you remember my offer of help and advice?”

  “I assume that I am expelled.”

  I saw that Miss Emilee had tears in her eyes.

  “I suggest that we leave that assumption to everyone else. I will say that you are leaving school because your father believes you are ill. That is all. I will never use the word ‘expelled.’ And should you change your mind and wish to re-enrol—”

  “I will not be coming back, Miss Stirling.”

  “I am sad to hear it. More so, perhaps, than you will ever understand. But not surprised.”

  “You—I will remember you, Miss Stirling.”

  “Goodbye, Miss Fielding.”

  Not being at liberty to rebuke my father for framing Smallwood, I chose instead to speak to him about my mother whenever I had the chance, knowing how much it would agitate him. But sometimes I spoke sincerely.

  “Were we ever happy, Father? The three of us, I mean. Was there no time in those six years before she left when we were happy? I seem to remember that there were. Or have I just imagined it?”

  “No. There were such times. Though I wonder now if she was just pretending. If all along she knew that one day she would leave. She always seemed so—restless. She’d smile, but then, as if she’d remembered some unpleasantness, the smile would fade.”

  “What sorts of things did we do together?”

  “We had the same nickname for each other. A family nickname it was that stood for all sorts of things. D.D. Darling Daughter. Darling Daddy. Dimple Dumpling. That’s what she called you.”

  “Really? My mother called me that? What did we call her?”

  “Enough of this. I’m sorry, girl. We stopped using nicknames when she left.”

  “Yes. You call her different sorts of nicknames now.”

  “I have never accused her of licentiousness,” he said. “A moment’s weakness at most. After having had too much to drink, perhaps. He may have forced himself upon her. She may have been entirely innocent.”

  “Like me.”

  “I will not speak of that.”

  “You think she left because she knew I was not your child.”

  “I can think of no other reason.”

  “Perhaps you might be able to if you were not so opposed to farfetched speculation. But tell me. How could she have known that I was not your child.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean, how could she have known for certain? I can think of only one way.”

  “NO, NO. Is there no depth to which you will not go? I assure you that we were, in every sense of the word, married.”

  “Were you, in every sense of the word, married nine months or so before—?”

  “I have told you.”

  “Therefore—”

  “She may not have known for certain but suspected it, perhaps. Perhaps the guilt was more than she could bear. The sight of you a constant reminder—but you have drawn me into speaking of things I do not wish to speak of.”

  “I was a reminder of her momentary lapse?”

  “Possibly. You looked nothing like me—”

  “I have yet to meet the six-year-old girl who was the spitting image of her father. Sideburns, beard, moustache, spectacles, premature baldness—”

  “Stop it, stop it. I am talking about real resemblance. Such as one sees in the eyes—”

  “The windows of the soul—”

  “You are a prodigy of mockery—”

  “I doubt that a lack of resemblance between me at six years old and you at—”

  “It would not of itself be cause for suspicion. I am not a fool. But if there was already cause for it—but there are some things better left unsaid.”

  “She told you she had an affair?”

  “No. No one told me. Nor did I have any proof. Merely—a feeling.”

  “In the photographs, Father, I look no more like her than I look like you.”

  “There is an unmistakable resemblance. And it is not the identity of your mother that is in doubt.”

  “Did it bother you, before she left, that you and I did not look alike? Did you even notice that we didn’t?”

  “Of course I did.”

  “And this made you suspicious?”

  “I became suspicious with good reason.”

  “Which was?”

  “I will not speak of it.”

  “Never mind, Father. Or would you rather I didn’t call you that?”

  “I am not the man whose blood runs in your veins.”

  “My last name should be Nameless.”

  “You reduce everything to comedy.”

  “Elevate.”

  “It is exasperating. To know nothing of your rival except that he is tall.”

  “I saw a man on Duckworth Street today whose eyes were just like mine. Numerically speaking.”

  His rival. He used the word to mean both my “real” father and my mother’s second husband. “What a deluded man this Dr. Breen must be. He probably thinks that, because he has been married to your ex-wife for a decade, this matter of a rivalry between you has been settled.”

  “Enough, girl.”

  A few days after my expulsion from school, my father had a visitor. I eavesdropped on their conversation, then came downstairs.

  “May I join you for a moment?”

  My father looked ready to demur, but Dr. Wheeler, half-rising from his chair, said, “Of course, my dear, of course.”

  “I know your daughter, Dr. Wheeler,” I said. “She was in my class at Bishop Spencer.”

  “Oh yes. Then you must be friends.”

  “No. But she, too, is an interesting case.”

  Dr. Wheeler smiled.

  “Though not where the inheritance of features is concerned.”

  He smiled again as though to indulge my attempt to imitate my elders.

  “It is said at school that Ursula is a paragon of modesty.”

  “That is very kind.”

  “They say the modesty of her bosom is matched only by that of her intelligence.”

  “Galoot of a girl—”

  “I heard you and my father speaking of the inheritance of features. Ursula is in that sense quite unexceptional. Well, what I mean is, she is unmistakably a Wheeler. Anyone who knew you and your wife but had never met her could tell if they passed her on the street whose daughter she was. Her mother’s simple manner, her father’s ample backside—”

  “That is the height of insolence,” said Dr. Wheeler.

  “I doubt that you will think so by the time you leave.”

  “Dr. Fielding—”

  “Girl.”

  “I must be leaving, Dr. Fielding.”

  “I apologize—”

  “Ursula does exhibit certain interesting patterns of behaviour. No doubt inherited. Such as a tendency to weep whenever Miss Connolly impugns her needlework. A tendency to burst into tears whenever Miss Stirling says her name while taking attendance.”

  “Good evening, Dr. Fielding.”

  “Dr. Wheeler.”

  “There is an obscure expression among the teachers at school. Whenever they are faced with a tedious task, they will for some reason say, ‘I would rather spend a week trying to explain the concept of subtraction to Miss Wheeler.’”

  Dr. Wheeler was by this time picking up his coat and hat from the sofa.

  “I’m sure Ursula will be delighted to hear of our meeting.”

  “If you accost my daughter, I will see to it that you are expelled from Bishop Spencer.”

  “Too late.”

  “Good night, Dr. Fielding.”

  “Dr. Wheeler, on behalf of my daughter, I must ask your forgiveness—”

  But the door closed behind Dr. Wheeler before my father could finish.

  I wondered how many other such “associates” he had. Men who exchanged anecdotes about him at the gatherings they did not invite him to and the socia
l clubs of which he was not a member. “You should have heard what Fielding said the other day.” “You’ll never guess what Fielding asked me.” Fielding. It had not before occurred to me that they might call him Fielding. That each of us was known among our associates by the same name. I wondered if he knew that at Spencer and the Feild I was known as Fielding by everyone except the teachers, that many of the boys and girls could not have said what my first name was. They call us Fielding, Father. There is our family resemblance.

  “Why, girl, would you say such things?”

  “I doubt that you and Dr. Wheeler will have any further discussions.”

  “You insulted him, his wife, his daughter—”

  “Tit for tat—”

  “What—”

  “One good turn of the screw deserves another—”

  “Girl—”

  “Why do you never use my name?”

  “You are changing the subject.”

  “No. Narrowing the subject.”

  “I don’t know what you mean. What other man of quality in Newfoundland was abandoned by his wife? Even among the scruff, such things are almost unheard of. A man wakes up one morning to find that his wife has written him a letter of goodbye. No explanation. No airing of complaints or discontent. No suggestions as to what changes she thinks might make her happy. Nothing. Only a letter of goodbye. ‘William: I left last night on a vessel bound for Halifax. From there I will travel to Boston, and from Boston to New York where I have friends with whom I plan to stay. I will not be coming back to Newfoundland. I mean to make a new life for myself. Please tell Sheilagh that, before I left, I kissed her on the cheek while she was sleeping. She is but a child, too young to understand. I can think of nothing I have left unsaid except goodbye.’ Nothing I have left unsaid. I have no idea what she means. We never argued. We had no disagreements. Never talked about divorce. Everything was left unsaid. Everything.”

  I was little more than a nuisance, an occasional intruder on his solitude, a presence that prevented his withdrawal from becoming absolute.

  “Father,” I said one Sunday afternoon as I walked into the front room where he was lying on the sofa with his hands behind his head. He was not napping but lying there with his eyes wide open, as if he had never considered the purpose of a ceiling or how one was constructed. He moved slowly to a sitting position, then just as slowly rose to his feet. It was only when he pointed a shaking finger at me that I realized he was enraged.

  “From now on you are not to speak to me unless I address you first,” he said. “Is that understood?”

  “Father—”

  “ENOUGH OF THAT,” he shouted, moving so near to me that his toes were but inches from mine. He looked up at me. “THERE WILL BE NO MORE OF THIS OR THAT, DO YOU UNDERSTAND ME—”

  “Has something happened, Father?”

  “YOU KNOW AS WELL AS I DO WHAT HAS HAPPENED.”

  “Besides that, I mean.”

  “LEAVE ME BE,” he said. “CONSIDER YOURSELF TO BE ALONE IN THIS HOUSE UNTIL I SPEAK TO YOU.”

  “Very well.”

  “Each man—each man … Now. Forever after. Leave me be.” He went back to the couch and resumed his former pose of contemplation. Now. Forever after. Leave me be.

  It was not difficult to consider myself alone in that enormous house. He worked longer hours and, when he did come home, fell asleep, fully dressed, downstairs, often with his hat still on his head. As other men might have taken inexorably to excessive drinking, he sank deeper and deeper into this murk of self-absorption. I wondered what kind of care he was giving his patients, how attentive he could possibly be when they described their symptoms, how thoroughly he examined them, how accurate his diagnoses were, how effective his treatments and prescriptions. I half-expected him to let his practice lapse, renounce it in favour of indolence and revery. I dreaded that, as the result of complaints by patients and other physicians, he would be decertified, his reputation irrevocably destroyed. But his devotion to his specialty became absolute. He declared a one-man war on diseases of the chest, as if these diseases, though the affected bore no blame for them, derived from the same fetid and ultimately evil source as inconstancy and treachery.

  LOREBURN

  It is not until minutes after I hear, or think I hear, the voices from outside that I am startled by them.

  It is just past three in the morning. A voice shouts something I cannot make out, another answers it: first a man’s voice, then, I think, a woman’s. Some sort of late-night skylarking of the sort I often heard at home, voices of young men and women oblivious to the possibility that at this hour others besides themselves might be awake. In St. John’s, a momentary distraction that normally did not merit protest or investigation, night voices that would move on and whose purpose I would never know.

  Then I remember where I am and, heart thumping, stand up from the table so quickly that my chair tips over and clatters loudly on the floor. I extinguish my lantern, the only light that is burning in the house, thinking that whomever I heard might have been attracted by it, surely the only one to be seen in Loreburn, unless there are inhabitants of whom Patrick is unaware.

  German sailors? Patrick said nothing about a blackout, never warned me to turn my lights off after dark, didn’t give me blackout curtains.

  I fear that the owners of the voices heard my chair tip over, worry that I was too late in putting out the light, too late in trying to camouflage the fact of my presence in the house. I listen for the voices but hear nothing.

  I feel foolish, guilty, because Patrick has been so hospitable and here I am trying to keep my existence secret from people who might need my help, who may have got lost at sea and used my light to guide themselves ashore. Now that my light is gone, they may be mystified, scared, out there without shelter in darkness so absolute they dare not take a single step. Perhaps they took the sudden disappearance of my light as a sign that the house’s occupants might pose some sort of threat to them, might consider their presence a sufficiently unwelcome intrusion as to wish to do them harm.

  I go to the window and, looking out, cannot even see the silhouettes of trees against the sky. I try to calm my breathing so that I can hear better, hear them speaking again or moving about.

  I can’t hear a sound from outside except the barely audible one of waves breaking on the beach below.

  I feel ridiculous in my timidity, peering out from inside this house in which I am so newly resident that I couldn’t navigate it in the dark, to which I have little more right than whoever it is who might be out there in need of shelter or assistance.

  I think of the shotgun, then decide to go to the door without it, lest, in a moment of panic, I shoot someone who means me no harm.

  It must, judging by the amount of condensation on the window, be near to freezing outside.

  I feel my way in the darkness to the porch and then to the storm door that, lifting the latch, I nudge open with my shoulder.

  Unable at first to make out even the vaguest of shapes, I feel the night air cold on my forehead and in my nose and mouth that emit plumes of frost, though even those I can’t see.

  I look up at the sky but can see no stars. I catch the smell of spruce trees and fall grass wet with dew. I hear beach rocks clatter seaward as a wave withdraws, then an interval of silence until another wave breaks with a sound like air peacefully exhaled from a body deep in sleep.

  “HELLO,” I shout, my voice echoing once, returning to me from the hill above the house on which the homes of Loreburn stand. There is no reply, nor any sound of movement, no footsteps, no rustling or breaking of branches. They either have passed out of earshot or are hiding from me. Or I imagined their voices.

  Perhaps I heard the voices of people in some boat that even now is tied up at the wharf or anchored in the harbour or headed out to sea again. No, the water is too far away. I would have heard the boat’s engine before I heard their voices.

  The beating of my heart returns to normal.
/>   How strange that, while writing, I lapsed into believing myself to still be in my boarding house on Cochrane Street, still in my corner room beneath which, at all hours, the voices of stragglers can be heard. Is my mind, in the new silence of this house, playing tricks on me? No doubt this house has its nighttime sounds as all houses do, and perhaps I mistook some of these for voices. The woods have their nighttime sounds as well by which a woman from the city might be fooled. Those of an owl or a lynx or some other nocturnal predator.

  I close the door and feel my way back to the kitchen, find the lantern on the floor beneath the window and relight it.

  Just able to concentrate enough to resume writing, I go to Mrs. Trunk, take out one of my early journals and turn to the entry I wrote just before I left for New York with my father.

  January 16, 1916

  New York. It is still nothing but mere photographs. I have never been more than ten miles from St. John’s. We leave tomorrow morning. My first time on a ship. My first time on the sea. A typical townie. My first look at the city from the Narrows. Perhaps my last.

  “I have come to say goodbye,” I told the judge one day during school hours when I knew that Prowse would not be there. “Goodbye, my dear,” he said. I told him things that by now he has forgotten, that people will ignore should he repeat them. Things that no one else will ever know. “You are the great-grandfather of my child. Whose last name should be Prowse. I once loved the boy who bears your name. Daniel. Your great-grandchild was conceived here in this house. While you were in your study, your head, flanked by your hands, turned sideways on your desk as you lay there dreaming of the book you planned to write or might have written. Convinced of your defeat, your failure. And that of the country that so confounded explanation. Because of a letter written by my father with words he took from you, a boy named Smallwood had to leave Bishop Feild. Your great-grandchild will be raised by my mother and will never know its father’s name.” I told him everything, and as I spoke he nodded as if he understood me perfectly, and also understood the deeper implications of the words. No record of the truth exists, except in my mind and in his. A story that forever joins us. Goodbye, old man.