The Custodian of Paradise (11 page)

“You see your abandonment of me when I was six as an act of courage?”

“Yes, I do. Though I do not mean to hurt you by saying so. And that is all that I will say about it.”

“If that was courage, I can only pray that I remain a coward all my life.”

“Perhaps you will.”

“The babies really will look nothing like you,” I told Dr. Breen. “Have you thought of that? They will not have the Breen family look, whatever that might be. I’ll bet you were hoping for a son, at least one son. A son and heir, in whom there will run not one drop of Breen blood. And what if both of them had been girls? Would you have kept bringing pregnant girls in here until you got a boy?”

“How could a girl like you be your mother’s daughter?” he said, shaking his head.

“Why did you marry her?”

“What?”

“Why did
you
marry
her
? Why would a man like you, from a family like yours, marry her? A woman who was known to be divorced. And to have had a child by her first marriage. And to have been born a Catholic.”

“You’ve heard of love, perhaps?”

“Yes. I’ve heard of it. Have you heard that money is the best cure for a tarnished reputation?”

He turned, his face so engorged with blood I doubted he would make it to the door. But he did and locked it loudly behind him, giving the key such an emphatic, savage twist that it shook the room.

I had put aside my wit for common insults that, though probably true, had been the measure of my defeat. The girl behind the wit had
been spooked from her hiding place like a rabbit by a pack of hounds. He, they, had won. They knew it. Had known it before the babies came. All that remained was for me to leave the house. I would make no more “remarks.” They would be magnanimous, polite, attentive, solicitous, even kind in victory, and their magnanimity would be unbearable.

They had known that when it came to relinquishing my child, my wit would let me down, my bravado would vanish. They had foreseen what I had not. I had thought I could hold up until I left the house, perhaps maintain my composure even in some place of perfect privacy, maintain it forever.
Two heartbeats
.

I would stay in the house, in the suite, Dr. Breen said, until he decided I was well enough to travel.

I lived in dread of hearing the babies crying, but even late at night I did not hear them. I wondered if they had been taken from the house, not to be returned until after my departure. But I did not ask my mother or Dr. Breen for fear that their response, whatever it was, would increase my agitation.

Day after day, Dr. Breen examined me and told me it was not yet safe for me to leave.

“Not safe for you,” I said. “Nor my mother.” That was something they could not afford, having me fall ill on the ship to Newfoundland or in the weeks after my homecoming and, upon being examined by a doctor who might not be my father, be found to be suffering from after-birth complications.

It was three weeks before he pronounced me ready to leave. Three interminable weeks. Whenever I woke, the gown I wore was wet with milk. Those weeks might have been unbearable if not for what he called his “pain potions,” which made me numb. I stared at my still-swollen belly for hours without so much as a single thought passing through my mind.

I did not even know if the babies were in the house when I left it, left it at night by the same route and in the same manner that I had entered it six months before. Except that now it was summer. A
winter and a spring had come and gone since I had last set foot outdoors. Now, in Manhattan, in early summer, the night air was warmer than I had ever known it to be in Newfoundland.

I had barely taken a single breath of fresh air before the door of the carriage closed behind me and Dr. Breen drew the curtains just as my father, six months ago, had done.

A great trunk of books was loaded onto the back of the carriage. An absurdly long, drawn-out transaction was at last complete. The house had what it wanted. And I had a trunkload of books.

Only shortly before I left did I learn the names of my children. Someone else, presumably my mother and Dr. Breen, had chosen them. As was their right since it was they who would be raising them and pretending to the world that they were theirs. It was my mother who told me what their names were after the ceremony had taken place without me, its date and time and very fact of its occurrence withheld from me, told me what they had been christened at their baptisms. In fact, she did not “tell” me but left a note on my pillow the night before I left the house. “Their names are David and Sarah” was all it said. Not “I” or “We” have named them but “Their names are.”

Authoritative, beyond question. You’d think they were following instructions. I had never allowed myself to speculate what names I might have chosen under different circumstances. Not even while I was pregnant had I thought about what the baby’s name might be or who would choose it.

I thought of my father, whom I was soon to see again. After “diagnosing” me and after a short but intense period of solitary rage that he had taken no pains to prevent me from overhearing, he had handled everything. “Ruined,” he shouted, “ruined by this galoot of a girl. I might not even be her father. God only knows who it might be. No daughter of mine would do such a thing, only a daughter of
hers
, the daughter of the woman who betrayed me.”

I provided her with two children in each of whom ran one-quarter of my mother’s blood.

Perhaps that was the point, that there was less of her ex-husband
in them, her grandchildren, than there was in me. That there was also less of her own blood in them than there was, is, in me did not matter as much. How she must have come to despise my father, I thought, during their short marriage. She renounced me, her own daughter, because half of me was him.

Their names are David and Sarah
. I took the note and put it in my pocket purse, a dark blue velvet purse with opposing clasps that could be eased open but that snapped shut loudly. Since then I have carried the purse with me, everywhere, always, kept it on my person or, at bedtime, stored it safely somewhere; even throughout my years in New York and at the San. I often take it out and read it or, without unfolding it, merely look at it, before replacing it. I have never felt the need to be discreet about it, except around my father. No one could guess the meaning of those words. That simple sentence. Not even Prowse. The purse, with the note inside it, is beneath my mattress now.

LOREBURN

I put down my pen, looked around the front room at Mr. and Mrs. Trunk, thought of how absolutely non-judgmental they would be if I took a drink.

It had been a while since I had opened the unsigned note from my mother. Yellowed and desiccated with age, it had so frequently been folded and unfolded that it barely held together at the creases, more of the paper having pulled apart than remained connected so that it now consisted of eight small squares that seemed to adhere by little more than habit or an ancient compatibility of once-interlocking shapes.

How small the note was, about the size of a sheet from one of my father’s prescription pads. Folded three times, it was not much bigger than a postage stamp. I had often imagined pressing it into someone’s hand with my thumb and then, with both my hands, closing that
person’s fist around it. The handwriting as neat and even as that on a birthday cake, it might have been written for the little girl I had been the day before my mother went away.

I tried to write more but could not. I read a journal entry that I had written in the berth of a ship bound for Newfoundland.

The letter is so devoid of detail that I have no idea if its writer knows my secret as he claims or is only guessing that I have one. Guessing that a girl out on the deck past midnight dressed in black must be brooding over something. I feel certain that the writer is a man but cannot say just why. What he means when he says “we” I cannot imagine. I saw no one on the deck but the crew members. It
sounds
as if the person watching with him was a man, though I’m unsure what I mean by “sounds.” The veiled reference to protecting me from the crew perhaps.

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.