The Custodian of Paradise Read online

  At first I thought my father had sent someone to chaperone me home. I might have known.

  I will not show him the letter or even tell him about it. It would only worsen his obsession. Seem to him to confirm his suspicions. It would also terrify him. The thought that someone knows what he thinks of as his secret.

  I will tear the paper to pieces, scatter it into the sea breeze and the darkness.

  Still, I can’t help being excited by it. Something has happened. Something mysterious and unforeseen. Just the sort of thing a “child” in my circumstances might be thought by grown-ups to daydream about. Reassurance and salvation just when all seemed lost. Except that I don’t feel reassured and all that was lost before the letter remains so.

  It may all come to nothing. I may never hear from him again. But—who knows? I would welcome almost any intervention.

  LOREBURN

  I could not bring myself to sleep in either of the bedrooms. I slept, not in these museum rooms but, like Patrick, in the kitchen, in the daybed that in most houses was reserved for daytime naps. Perhaps, depending on the length of my stay, I would some day choose a bedroom, but for now the only room where I felt unintrusive was the lived-in-looking kitchen, which had the added appeal of being about the size of my room on Cochrane Street. Not since I left my father’s house had my living quarters consisted of more than one room. I felt somehow oppressed by the size of Patrick’s house, by the first floor alone, but also by the thought that no matter where I went on that first floor, there were two storeys of barred-off empty rooms above me.

  In the kitchen, eating, reading or writing at the table, I felt uneasy, restless, felt I was squandering the other rooms of the first floor, pointlessly depriving Patrick of his entire house in order to occupy his kitchen. Depriving him of it? He had seemed almost eager to give it up in spite of all the trouble he had gone to, not just restoring the house but doing so in secret. He might have been waiting for the opportunity to lend this “place” of his to someone whose discretion he could count on.

  I got up from my kitchen chair at night and walked aimlessly and guiltily about, in the end either returning to the kitchen or forcing myself to sit still on the sofa in token occupation of that front room with its massive window.

  I read and wrote by night, by lantern light, by candlelight, or sat by the light from the fireplace in the front room in thoughtless revery, looking at the fire’s flickering reflection in the window.

  I went to bed when I saw the first dim sign of dawn out on the ocean. I closed the kitchen curtains and hung my extra blankets over them to keep out the light, and then tried to sleep. The daybed, like all the beds I had slept in since achieving my full height, required that I draw my legs up slightly lest my feet stick out from beneath the blankets and over the edge of the mattress.

  I knew that, to get by out here alone, I would have to alter my sleeping schedule, would have to be up and about during at least some of the daylight hours in order to get done the bare minimum of tasks necessary for survival. Also, if I meant to go out walking for even a fraction of my accustomed time and distance, I would have to do so by day. But for now, with winter still a month away and the cupboards crammed with provisions, I could live more or less as I had in the city with the exception of visits to the water pump or the outhouse, both of which I made upon waking when there was still some daylight left.

  I dreamt more than usual, or woke more often and therefore remembered more of what I dreamt. Not even out here could I shake my David-dreams.

  I did not read on the sofa as I had imagined I would but merely stared out the window or, in the nighttime, at the window, at the reflection of Mr. and Mrs. Trunk keeping silent vigil with me, standing with the patient, unobtrusive immobility of servants, like some old couple who had never worked elsewhere and never would. Waiting for me to prevail upon their services, to open one of them and pour myself a drink—which every night it seemed inevitable that I would do and which, every morning, I renewed my vow not to do. As I had planned before Patrick had even left, I put half the Scotch in Mr. Trunk and half in Mrs. Trunk. The notebooks that Sarah had sent me were on the bottom shelf of Mr. Trunk, still waiting to be read, though I tried not to think of them.

  Weeks after being informed of David’s death, I had received at the post office a box with no return address but postmarked Manhattan, a small cardboard box in which I found the notebooks—or, rather, what looked like a diary fastened shut with metal clasps for which I could find no key. Taped to it was a typewritten note: “My brother wanted me to send you these. He also asked that I not read them and that you not communicate with me about them. I have followed his wishes. I trust that you will do the same.” These. I looked more closely and saw that the clasps held together several discrete volumes. Sarah had not only not read them, she did not know what to call them, what they were. I, for need of a name, called them notebooks. There was only that laconic, cryptic note, with neither opening nor closing salutations. Not “Dear Miss Fielding,” “Dear Sheilagh Fielding,” not “Dear Sister.” Nothing. Not “Yours truly, Sarah …”What was Sarah’s last name now? She had not even called David by name. My brother wanted me to send you these. How cold that seemed, especially in light of the circumstances.

  I had been unable to bring myself even to pry open the metal clasps that I guessed I could easily do with a screwdriver or a knife, for they were flimsy, more decorative or symbolic than otherwise, though they did serve the purpose of keeping the books shut, their covers and pages unwarped.

  From the lack of a return address, from the tone of the covering letter, it seemed that Sarah was sincere in not wanting me to reciprocate in any way. I was certain that something had happened between them. Knowing nothing about Sarah and next to nothing about David, I could not begin to imagine what. Something that, because of David’s death, could never be resolved. I so dreaded finding out what this something was, in part because I sensed I was somehow to blame for it. Or was perceived as being so by Sarah.

  There had been no mention of Sarah in his letters from Italy, which were heavily censored by the military with more words blacked out than not. Each page of the letters looked like a completed crossword puzzle. The letters, because of the deletions, read like code of some kind, cryptically fragmented letters from which, it was now tempting to believe, all mention of Sarah had for some reason been expunged, as if the mere fact of his having a twin sister could somehow be made use of by the enemy, a point of weakness on which they would focus should he be captured and interrogated. I knew that this was just a foolish fancy. He had not mentioned Sarah. It was as simple and as sinister as that. But how much more sinister those black blocks had made the letters seem. Oblivion had bled into our correspondence, intermittent erasures, precursors of the absolute obliteration that for him would come so soon. Half-lines, lines, paragraphs, whole pages had been blacked out, sometimes rendering what was left inscrutable, ambiguous. The larger the amount that had been blacked out, the greater the peril I imagined he was in. I dreamt of receiving, by way of an announcement of his death, a letter that was entirely blacked out, page after page of expurgated text.

  I knew that my letters to David were being likewise edited, arriving in the same state as his, marred by frustrating black blocks, superfluous reminders of his predicament. I had tried, while writing the letters, to exclude anything the army censors might strike out, to anticipate their objections to what I wrote, to follow their “Guide to Wartime Correspondence,” which forbade the obvious: mention of military installations, locations of ships, troops, communication centres, but also anything that was “critical of the Allied cause or detrimental to morale.” And so, no subtleties of expression, no irony or comic euphemisms, lest they be misunderstood or met with such total incomprehension the censors would refuse all further letters from me. I tried to write in a straightforward but not hyper-earnest manner. But I didn’t want to make David any more apprehensive than I was certain he must be, though little apprehensi
veness had showed through in those parts of his letters that survived the censors. They had been very bland, not the sort of letters I would have expected from the young man I had met. Perfunctory descriptions of weather and landscape such as one might fill a postcard with. Nothing about the war, nothing about his childhood or young manhood in New York. No future, no past, just an affectless present.

  You are writing to your son, I told myself, whose very life may depend on what you say. If something I wrote caused him a split second of doubt or preoccupation, inspired him to distraction or daydreaming, it could mean his life. The “Guide to Wartime Correspondence” encouraged “cheerfulness and optimism” and urged the writer to speak of “victory and survival as simple certainties.”

  “Dear David,” I had begun my first letter. “How delightfully reassuring it is to receive your letters.” I changed this to simply “How delightful it is …” No mention must be made of my need for reassurance or what I needed to be reassured about. Mere adjectives and adverbs seemed so treacherous. I wrote that he sounded like he was in good spirits and of looking forward to that not-far-distant day when he would be given leave and we would meet again.

  I could not bring myself to read the notebooks Sarah had sent me, not even out there by myself on Loreburn where none would witness whatever further anguish they might cause. I could only write.

  Sarah has lost her brother. As an only child, I’ll never know what it’s like to lose a brother or a sister. Now she is an only child, though not in the sense that I am one. I suppose no one who once had a brother or a sister can ever be an only child. Perhaps I do not even know what it is like to lose a son, since I knew him for but a few days of his life and otherwise knew only of the fact of his existence. There is more substance in Sarah’s vision of his future than there ever was in my vision of his past.

  Had he survived the war, how much of what remained of his life would he have spent with me? I’m not sure that I could have borne even to correspond with him much longer under the pretence of being his sister. And so he would again have existed for me only in the realm of speculation and conjecture, a vague fantasy inspired by the time we spent together. No mother’s memories of her son, nothing by which to measure the lost promise of a life cut short by war. Memories might be more of a torment than a consolation.

  I have felt them, my children, every day since they were born, felt them so much it seemed impossible that they could not feel me. Just a delusion, a notion I invented to sustain myself through those nights when I awoke from dreams so vivid that I thought the bed I lay in was the one in which the two of them were born, that it was only days since they had been taken from me and I was convalescing in my mother’s house, still in that strange room whose door Miss Long locked every night and whose lights she turned on every morning. Just woken from such dreams, I lay in my bed, waiting to hear Miss Long scratching at the doorknob with her key.

  How often, since I left that room, have I waited for Miss Long in vain, waited, wondering what was keeping her, waiting for my benevolent jailor to bring me my breakfast and sit in silent contemplation of her Bible while I ate. Slowly I would realize that this bed was not that bed, this room not that room, that Miss Long would not be coming, that day, not night, was ending, and it was therefore time for me to rise and light the lamps, which I always did hastily, wanting to be met by all the mundane, concrete details of my room before thoughts of my son and daughter could arise.

  I wonder what Sarah’s childhood was like.

  Surely unlike mine.

  After age nine, I had the house to myself most of the time. I was often in bed, asleep, by the time my father got home. Seemingly too weary, after so long a day, he would not ascend the stairs but would sleep in the front room on his reclining chair or on the sofa, still wearing his overcoat, his hat on the floor beside him.

  Every day after school, I sat in the front room, reading, brooding, pondering the after-school life of other girls my age, not so much waiting for my father to come home as wondering if this night and all the nights to follow he would not. It seemed possible. What one parent had done, the other might do. I could not imagine what his alternatives might be, what sort of life he might prefer to the one he had, how, if not for me, he might be different than he was. But I was sure that he regarded me as being, in some way, impedimental, an obstruction. He survived by withdrawing from a world in whose eyes, as in his own, he was humiliated, scorned by his wife, the mother of his child. I thought he must regard me as the cause of his being deserted or as the reason he could not begin again. Or both.

  The knowledge that his resentment was in either case unjust did not make me feel less guilt-ridden, less to blame for some obscure transgression. You are to blame for nothing more than reminding him of her, I told myself one day. He wishes she had taken you. You are a remnant of his interrupted life. As you get older, as you change and grow and in your young womanhood begin to look like her, scenes from the life that might have been play out before his eyes like the memory of things that never were, the unlived life that dogs his own, the clamour of happiness that echoes in the empty house, forever happening one room, one door away.

  Alone in the house, I ransacked every room in search of the secrets I assumed every grown-up had. I found none, though to go each day from room to room, pulling open drawers, searching the pockets of every garment in his closets, looking underneath his bed, became a ritual.

  Bishop Spencer School. It seems now like a chapter from someone else’s life. Spencer with its succession of unmarried headmistresses (the “Spencer Spinsters,” they were called), as if marriage would have rendered them unsuitable for supervising girls. Their portraits lined the hallway. Miss Hutchins. The Misses LeGallais of Jersey, Channel Islands. Miss Clara Butler of Quebec, who posed for her portrait with her pet monkey on her shoulder. Miss Nutting. Miss Edith de la Mare. Miss Harvey. Miss Sutter. Miss Cowling. All of them from England or “the colonies,” brought by no one seemed to know what set of circumstances to St. John’s.

  Yet to have her portrait hung, for she was still our principal, was Miss Emilee Stirling. Not Emily but Emilee. We were taught needlework, art, music, sewing, cooking. Also arithmetic, English, Old World history.

  There were about a hundred of us in this school for the daughters of the city’s Anglican elite. The job of the unmarried women was to ready us for marriage and to maximize our appeal as marriage prospects. We were to be socially and domestically adept by graduation, sufficiently educated and refined as to be able to follow and deferentially contribute to the conversation of eligible, unmarried men. The paradox of being schooled in the ways of eliciting proposals of marriage from the sons of the city’s “quality” by women who themselves either never had been proposed to or had turned away from the sort of life they were so earnestly recommending for their students was lost on no one. And, indeed, some of the Misses were said to have rejected marriage proposals, or to have broken off engagements, or to have suffered in love some disappointment so profound that the thought of marriage to any man other than the one they would always think of as their “intended” was intolerable. Single by choice, married to their profession, in the most remote and least appealing of the colonies, far from home, the better to forget their disappointments in romance, the better to avoid and forget some now married man whom they loved no less for his having jilted and humiliated them—many of the Misses had stories such as these attached to them. Broken engagements, the tragic deaths of fiancés, plans of elopements discovered and prevented, disownments by parents, flights from scandal.

  There were also euphemistic rumours at Spencer, oblique allusions to Misses who were “women who like women” or “women who do not like men,” though these rumours circulated exclusively, at a kind of subterranean level, among the older girls.

  The autumn of 1910. I was said to be “motherless,” which caused some girls to think my mother was dead like the mothers of a few other girls at Spencer. Some were led by the word into all so
rts of misconceptions about the oddness of my origins and the composition of my family. For others, it was a euphemism for “divorce,” a way around using so scandalous a word that merely to say it of someone else’s parents might cause a girl to be deemed an improper or unsuitable companion.

  “She’s motherless. Her father raises her himself.” The older girls knew what divorce meant, knew my father was not a widower. They liked to say that “She couldn’t stand her husband the doctor so she ran off to New York in search of a second opinion.”

  But no one spoke to me directly about such things. Or about my height, which by age eleven was more than six feet. “My God, here she comes, shut up, shut up,” they whispered in mock terror. They liked to shriek or even run at my approach as if it tickled them to imagine what a girl my age and size would do if provoked to anger.

  It was not my body but my mind that the girls had good reason to fear, something that many of them realized too late. Nina Bishop was favoured to become captain of the school. When I overheard her speculate why a girl whose supposed father was so short had grown so tall, I named her Nina Bishop Spencer and shortened it to “Nibs,” a nickname that, in spite of its inventor, caught on. Nina was Nibs forever after to all but her closest friends. She finished third in the school elections and morosely accepted, when it was offered to her, the position of secretary-treasurer. Her school career and possibly her after-Spencer future had been altered by the mere application of a nickname, a four-letter name cast upon her like a curse by the girl whom she had thought could be slighted with impunity.

  Violet Butler was part of a playground clique consisting of the daughters of four men who were partners in law. In retaliation for some remark they made about my mother, I called the girls “Butler, Footman, Doorman and Cook,” after which they went out of their way not to huddle or travel as a foursome, either breaking up into pairs or singles or including others in their group, lest the sight of the four of them together set the other girls to chanting their collective nickname.