The Custodian of Paradise Read online

  I dreaded that more than I hoped that Sarah, by seeking me out, might alleviate my grief, more than I hoped that after that first letter or phone call, we would keep in touch and the Sarah of my imagination would at last be real.

  But Sarah had not contacted me. Nor I Sarah.

  My fifth night on Loreburn, while I was staring at Mr. and Mrs. Trunk, I decided that I would try to read my journals and to fill in the many blanks, the gaps in my story that had occurred when I could not bring myself to write or was physically unable to. And what for so long had proved impossible was no longer so. For nights and days on end, while it rained or was so foggy that I dared not leave the house for fear of getting hurt or lost, I read and wrote to the point of exhaustion, pausing only to sleep fitfully on the kitchen bed. I wrote what follows at one sitting:

  I was fifteen when my father booked passage for the two of us on a ship whose ports of call before New York were Halifax and Boston. We would travel together, though for weeks he hadn’t spoken to me except when the conveyance of information made it absolutely necessary. Doubtless he was concerned with how it would look if he did not go with me. His sister had died a few years ago. There was no one he could trust with our secret, no one who could be his delegate and my chaperone on this journey to New York, make sure I did not debark in Halifax or Boston or blurt out my secret to someone on the ship.

  “Sheilagh’s going to see her mother,” he told the many people on the waterfront who knew him, some of whom were his patients and a few of whom would be our fellow passengers to Halifax. I felt sorry for him as he moved about in uncharacteristic conviviality, talking to anyone who would listen about this ex-wife of his he had spoken to no one about in years. The measure of how embarrassed they were to be reminded of it could be read in their faces and the looks they exchanged when he moved on from one group to another.

  I stood wordlessly beside him in the first-class queue, a full head taller than him and almost everyone else, craving the inconspicuous-ness of other girls my age but also wishing I could bring myself to help him carry off this charade. How unprecedented it would have been for me to look around and smile excitedly and earnestly at the prospect of anything, let alone that of visiting my long-absent mother. But I couldn’t help thinking that the women who were there could somehow tell that I was pregnant just by looking at my face, my pallor, by a certain something about my carriage or my amplitude that men could not detect. I was terrified of meeting the gaze of any woman for fear that my eyes would betray my secret.

  Also, I had, a month before, been expelled from Bishop Spencer School. All that was known publicly was that I had admitted to writing an infamous, mischief-making letter. The anonymous letter had been sent to the editor of a newspaper about the poor conditions prevalent in the dormitories at Spencer’s brother school, Bishop Feild.

  My admission was false. The real author of the letter was my father, who had written it in such a way that the blame had fallen on a boy named Smallwood, who I had told my father was the one who made me pregnant. I had guessed correctly that, because Smallwood came from such a notoriously poor family, my father would never confront him or them demanding satisfaction, a hastily arranged marriage that would save his and his daughter’s reputation. But I could not bring myself to let Smallwood take the blame for what my father had done. Or to tell my father that I knew that he had written the letter.

  Doubtless there were people on the waterfront who felt sorry for my father for having been scandalized, first by his wife, and now by his daughter, who perhaps even admired him for shouldering their reputations, pitied him the mortification of this scene that he was so transparently staging. I hoped that someone, anyone, thought well of him, no matter what the implication of that might be for me.

  Not long after the ship cleared the Narrows, my laying-in began. I became sick, though whether from the rolling of the sea or the baby inside me I wasn’t sure. I imagined the water in which the baby was immersed rising and falling in sympathy with the motion of the sea, the little vessel bobbing up and down, sinking as the ship rose, rising as it sank. Though my father said it would make me feel better, I would not let myself throw up, for I could not imagine surviving such a convulsion. Nor could I, when I closed my eyes, see anything but that slowly bobbing baby whose eyes, in the heaving darkness of my womb, were always closed.

  I did not emerge from my berth once throughout the voyage. My father had come with me so that he—and not the ship’s doctor, who might have discovered my pregnancy—could attend to me. As it was, the ship’s doctor, who said that he was more or less a specialist in seasickness, offered his assistance, which my father politely but emphatically declined. I frequently heard voices outside our door, those of other passengers who walked my father back to his berth after meals, commiserating with him, saying what a shame it was that his daughter, on her first trip abroad, was missing everything that first class had to offer. I heard my father say many times, when people wondered if I might improve were I to mingle, that I wanted neither to mingle nor to have visitors.

  “I don’t understand it,” I heard a voice I took to be the ship doctor’s say. “It really isn’t very rough at all. I can’t think why she would be so ill.”

  My father brought me tea, clear broth, unbuttered toast. I drank the tea but refused to eat. The sicker I became, the more apprehensive of a miscarriage he became.

  “How would we hide the evidence of that?” he said.

  “If a miscarriage will cause us problems,” I said, “imagine the trouble we’ll be in if I should die.”

  “Galoot of a girl, galoot of a girl,” he said. Sometimes it sounded like “beautiful girl.”

  I wondered once, while half-awake, if I would give birth to one, a beautiful girl. Sometimes I imagined my father, mistaking my delirium for sleep, was whispering endearments he could not bring himself to whisper when, as I lay there in lucid distress, he sat by my bedside, wringing his hands.

  No one met us at the dock when we reached Manhattan. It was late afternoon but already dark because it was mid-January. Before I could form a first impression of the city, we were in a cabriolet to whose driver my father gave an address I presumed to be my mother’s. He drew down the shades of the cab.

  “When we are within a hundred yards, I want you to stop,” my father told the driver. “Stop and let me out. Then you will go the rest of the way with the other passenger.” I wondered how they had arranged it, imagined them, my mother and father, corresponding after an interval of ten years.

  When the driver stopped and informed my father that the house was not far off, my father turned to me and for a moment it seemed that he planned to take his leave by shaking hands with me. But he put one hand on my hands, which were folded in my lap. It seemed he could not bring himself to speak. Yet he looked in the direction of the driver, as if fearful of being overheard.

  “They have promised they will take good care of you,” he said. “And when all this is over, they’ll make sure you get back home safe and sound.” Then he turned away abruptly and, opening the door of the cab, stepped down onto the street, keeping hold of the door so that he could close it behind him without turning round.

  I heard an exchange of words between him and the driver and then, after the snap of reins, the cab began to move again.

  An almost comically brief interval later, it stopped, and before I could even get a grip on the handle, the door opened and a man who was not the driver was standing there, top hat in hand. He was tall, broad-shouldered, with red hair so slick with pomade it looked like a skullcap. He had a horseshoe-shaped moustache that, being bushy and unwaxed, made me think he might be wearing a disguise.

  “Miss Sheilagh,” he said, extending his hand. “I am Dr. Breen. Your mother’s husband. Welcome to New York.”

  “Hello, Stepdoctor Breen,” I said. But I was terrified.

  He helped me down from the cab and, after my luggage had been removed from the back, paid the driver. Soon, the cab was gone
and we were alone with my suitcases on the sidewalk of a dark street that did not look like the sort of place where Dr. Breen and my mother would live. Another cabriolet emerged from a nearby alleyway and stopped beside us. “In you go,” Dr. Breen said. He climbed in after me and shut the door.

  My father had wanted to avoid seeing not only her but him as well and no doubt their house. Did not want to see his “rival,” as he called him, the man for whom his wife had left him. This was how, at any rate, my father had sometimes spoken of him, as “the man she left me for,” even though, as far as I knew, my mother and Dr. Breen had yet to learn of each other’s existence the day my mother left us in St. John’s. His “rival.” As if the two of them were courting her and there was no telling yet which one would win. I looked at Dr. Breen. Perhaps he had been just as anxious not to meet or even to see my father.

  The cab drove perhaps ten minutes, then slowed almost to a stop and sharply turned, soon after coming to a complete stop.

  “Stay here until we’re ready for you,” said Dr. Breen, alighting and closing the door behind him.

  I heard what sounded like the whispering of precise, urgent instructions, a multitude of hushed voices.

  The door opened again.

  “We will get out on that side,” said Dr. Breen, again climbing in beside me, pointing to the door that neither he nor my father had used. “Please wait until the door opens.” At which, as if these words were a signal that someone outside had been waiting for, the door was opened, though I could not see by whom.

  I was ushered by unseen hands into my mother’s house, outdoors for but a fraction of a second, not long enough, they must have hoped, for any neighbour who might have been watching from an upstairs window to have seen me.

  It was in this manner, through this door and into a waiting cab at night, that six months later I would leave my mother’s house, having spent every second of that time inside it.

  I was led up a staircase, on each of the countless landings of which there was a closed door, until at last we reached one whose door was open. I felt Dr. Breen’s hand on my back, gently easing me forward.

  “Your mother is waiting for you,” he said.

  As I heard him descend the stairs behind me, I stepped forward into a vestibule that was dimly lit and whose doors opened onto a large bedroom where, by the light of a chandelier from which most of the bulbs had been removed, I saw the woman I recognized from photographs to be my mother standing with her hands clasped in front of her.

  “Hello, Sheilagh,” she said. I hated to hear her say my name. “It’s good to see you. After all this time.”

  I could tell that she was startled by my height. It was one thing to be told that your daughter, in your nine-year absence, had grown to more than six feet tall, another to see it for yourself. Assuming my father had told her anything about me except that I was pregnant.

  “A nine-year growth spurt,” I said. I took off my hat and outer coat and put down my cane, which she stared at. “You still have your cane.” As if my mother had said “Let me get a good look at you,” I had an urge to twirl about. Still unaccustomed to my height, I doubted I could manage it without stumbling. On my mother’s face was a look of faint distaste. Something about me, perhaps my height, had put her off. I knew it was not my resemblance to my father, for I bore none whatsoever. We stood far apart, my mother still with her hands folded in front of her, me with mine hanging awkwardly at my sides. I had never learned to stand with poise without my cane.

  “You’re so tall. It looks like I’m the daughter and you’re the mother,” my mother said.

  “Soon we’ll both be mothers,” I said.

  Up to that point, it had seemed possible that we would, however perfunctorily, embrace. But my mother’s face, at the allusion to my pregnancy, went blank.

  “How was your trip?” she said, sitting down on one of the sofas. I remained standing. “You are as tall as your father said you were.”

  “Yes. But the rumours of my breadth have been greatly exaggerated.”

  “And as sharp-tongued as my husband said you were.”

  “A hasty diagnosis.”

  “How are you, Sheilagh?”

  “Robust. Vivacious. All that might be expected of a pregnant woman after seven days of seasickness.”

  “You are very beautiful. Unlike me.”

  “Thank you. On both counts.”

  She sighed.

  “Am I every bit as beautiful as my father said I was?”

  “Your father was never one for giving compliments.”

  “My father suspects that he is not my father.”

  “Your father, sadly, suspects me of many things that are not true.”

  “I can’t imagine what led him to such a state of confusion.”

  “You are very much his daughter.”

  “Exactly as much as I am yours.”

  “No doubt you wonder why I went away.”

  “No doubt.”

  “Well. You have shown yourself to be too young to understand such things.”

  “When you think I’m ready to hear your explanation, let me know.”

  “I have no intention, ever, of explaining myself to you.”

  “I don’t understand why, if he did something unforgivable, you can’t tell me what it was. Or simply tell me that you left because of something that he did, if it must remain a secret.”

  “Your father did nothing unforgivable.”

  “A woman does not leave her husband and her child without a reason. I was only six years old—”

  “Yes. I remember. Far more clearly than you do. I had my reasons. Which made things no less difficult. But I have no wish to dwell upon the past. Together, we can all make, out of something unfortunate, something wonderful.”

  “You look different than I expected. Not like in the photographs.”

  “Older.”

  “Different.”

  “I suppose I am different. People change.”

  “My father has.”

  “Not as much as you think, perhaps. But you. You have changed so much. Children change quickly. It is a miracle, childhood, so many transformations that you never notice until afterwards. It seems that, suddenly, one day, they are strangers.”

  “You sound as though you’ve been watching other people’s children very closely.”

  “Oh, Sheilagh, why must you—?”

  “Imagine all the transformations that you missed. The ones my father saw. His little girl grown to more than six feet tall by the time she was twelve. It’s a miracle he recognized me from one day to the next.”

  “I recognize you.”

  “Delightful,” I said. “I am tired. I never got my sea legs. I think someone else wound up with mine. It feels like this house is going up and down.”

  “Dr. Breen will give you something to settle your stomach.”

  “I would rather he gave me something to settle my nerves.” I removed my silver flask from the left pocket of my vest. “The road to well,” I said, “is paved with good libations.”

  “You are a fifteen-year-old girl.”

  Holding it by my thumb and forefinger, I shook the flask. “Empty, alas. It’s just an affectation. A present. From me to me. It was taken from me many times at Bishop Spencer and sent home to my father. It has my name engraved on the bottom. I mostly just drink water from it. Though I do find that one glass of Scotch at bedtime helps me sleep.”

  “There is no liquor in this house,” my mother said. “Only table wine and sherry.”

  “I don’t suppose I’ll be dining very often with the two of you, will I?”

  “You will take your meals up here. You’ll be staying here, in fact, in these two rooms. I think you’ll find them comfortable.”

  I did not know anything of my mother’s circumstances other than that her second husband was a doctor. I’d presumed that she’d had more children, half-siblings of mine whom I had never met and was never meant to meet. But I sensed, perhaps fr
om something in my mother’s manner, that there were no children in this house.

  “I am your only child,” I said.

  “Yes, you are,” my mother said.

  “I might have known.”

  “We would have done the same if we had half a dozen children.”

  “Really.”

  “But our marriage has not yet been blessed with children.”

  “My child has not yet been blessed with marriage. What kind of doctor is Stepdoctor Breen anyway? Another chest man like my father?”

  “He is an obstetrician.”

  I smiled. “A childless obstetrician. No wonder you want my baby. To fill in that glaring gap on your husband’s resumé.”

  The credit that I had begrudgingly accorded my mother for helping my father and me now evaporated. My eyes stung with tears that I hoped my mother could not see.

  “You expect me to believe you really want my child?” I said.

  “Yes. We want it very much.”

  “I am your child. I might have come if you had sent for me.”

  “That was not possible, for reasons I will not explain. And I knew I would remarry. I knew that your father would not. I did not want him to be left alone.”

  “You don’t even care if I believe what you say, do you? All that matters is that you not be stuck for words.”

  “Also, Dr. Breen wanted children of his own.”

  “But now he’ll settle for one of mine.”

  “Our primary motive is to help you, Sheilagh. And your father. God has found a way to help us all.”

  I looked around. There were two rooms: a bedroom and a sitting room. I could see that they had been altered in preparation for my arrival. The elevated bed turned out, on close inspection, to be a hospital bed, though it had light blue pillows with gold tassels and a dark blue coverlet. The rooms had, probably just short of the point where the noise from alterations would have attracted attention from next door, been soundproofed and lightproofed. Behind the long drapes that enshrouded the walls, there were, I would soon discover, canvas shades that were fastened to the window frames by rows of tacks. Thick, footstep-muffling rugs that were not tacked into place but were too big for the floors ran from wall to wall.