The Custodian of Paradise (13 page)

“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.

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?”