The Custodian of Paradise (15 page)

I went almost every day to the Feild, following the fence to Bond Street, walking round to the other side. When I did not go, it was because I could see no sign of Prowse, by whose bland perfection I was captivated, mesmerized. Who with such ease controlled the other boys. I suspected that, were I to visit in his absence, the whole thing might deteriorate into mere name-calling.

I noticed, but didn’t mind, that Prowse’s manner with me soon began to change. Less deferential, less polite. I felt, I knew, I was being called on to perform, my being both willing and able to do so with a crowd of boys hilarious because of my gender and my enrolment at such a haven of propriety as Bishop Spencer. Prowse always led me to “perform” at what he encouraged the other boys to think of as their, and his, mock expense, for he did not spare himself when provoking me.

“So, Fielding,” he said. “Here you are. You’re like a stray cat who, because she was fed once, keeps coming back.”

“And is there not a mouse among you who will try to bell the cat?” I said. “Or, rather, is there no one among you who has heard of that expression?”

“What cat could resist so many Feild mice?”

“To me, to the girls, to most of St. John’s, you will always be the lilies of the Feild.”

“You exaggerate your fame.”

“You underrate my infamy.”

“Do you know what the lily symbolizes, Fielding? Purity. Chastity. Innocence. In which case you have paid us a compliment.”

“Yes. The one of assuming that you had a sense of irony. Behold, the lilies of the Feild. They do not reap. Neither do they sow. Their fathers do that for them.”

It went on like that for a while, but the exchanges became increasingly risque, Prowse trying to draw me into a boyish display of ribaldry.

“We have practice this afternoon, Fielding. Would you be willing to retrieve our balls?”

“I’m sure there are plenty of boys who would be willing to retrieve your balls. And what a shame it is that your team keeps losing. I’m sure your balls will go farther when your bats get bigger.” I knew that this was just the sort of thing they wanted me to say. And it was difficult to answer such lewdness with real wit. But, though they laughed, they were terrified of me. I could see, in the eyes of most of them, that they wished I would go back to keeping to my side of the fence.

“Fielding,” I heard one day as I was walking home from school to my house on Circular Road, behind the grounds of Government House. It was Prowse, standing in the doorway of one of the finer houses of the city, a late-Victorian mansion built after the fire of 1892. Perhaps ten houses removed from mine. I knew it to be his grandfather’s house, but I had never seen Prowse on Circular Road before. He looked furtively up and down the street.

“Would you like to meet my grandfather?” he said. Prowse’s grandfather. The eminent D.W. A retired judge famous for having written the authoritative history of Newfoundland, a book that he was once quoted as saying was “owned by almost everyone and read by next to none.” I had not read it, though my father had a copy in his study, a massive volume as pristine-looking as the ones around it.

I thought of declining Prowse’s invitation on some pretence, wondering why he wanted me to meet his grandfather. The thought of making polite conversation with the aging judge whose book I hadn’t read and with whomever else was in the house did not appeal to me. But I could think of no way of declining that would not seem clumsily churlish and by which Prowse would not gain over me some sort of advantage, the redoubtable Fielding so eager to hurry home to her famously empty house.

Why do you want me to meet him?
I felt like saying. Blood rushed to my face as I imagined Prowse “declaring” himself or making some sort of pledge.

“Come in,” Prowse said. “Come in. I’ve told him all about you. He would love to meet you.”

“All right,” I said. “But I can’t stay long because—”

“He’ll be happy just to shake your hand.”

I crossed the street and, ascending the steps, walked past Prowse as he held the door open for me, my shoulder slightly brushing his waistcoat. I let slip some hybrid of “thank you” and “excuse me,” which I hoped he didn’t hear. Once inside, I stopped, waiting for him to lead the way to the front room where I assumed his grandfather, and others perhaps, were waiting.

“Straight upstairs,” Prowse said and began to make his way up them two at a time.

I followed at a normal pace, wondering if the house might be empty except for him and me. When he reached the first landing, he walked out of sight, though I could hear his footsteps in the hallway above. As I reached the second floor, I saw him leaning against a door jamb, peering inside a room with a smile on his face. He silently motioned me forward with his hand as if it was a sleeping baby he was looking at and wanted me to see. Puzzled, I all but tiptoed down the hall.

“Look,” Prowse said.

I looked inside and saw a figure hunched over a desk, a long-bearded man with white hair that looked as if it had not been attended to in years, his face resting to one side on a mass of maps and charts, his eyes closed, his hands flanking his head, slightly curled up in a way that instantly made me feel sorry for him.

“Grandfather,” Prowse said loudly before I could protest. The old man’s eyes opened slowly, then closed again. “Grandfather,” Prowse shouted, and this time the old judge sat up, blinking rapidly as though he was not yet aware of his surroundings or the time of day. He looked at us in the doorway and smiled. “My dear,” he said, and held out his arms to me as if he had known me all his life. I stepped forward and, unsure of what else to do, took his hands in mine. “How tall you’ve grown,” he said. “A grown woman. A lovely young woman.” The smile faded from his face and was replaced by a look of distress, almost panic. I instinctively, and hoped reassuringly, tightened my grip on his hands.

“This is Miss Fielding, Grandfather,” said Prowse, who was still leaning, arms folded, against the door jamb. “She is a student at Bishop Spencer.”

The smile returned. “Of course, of course, Miss Fielding. How are you today, my dear? That’s a different dress than you wore before, isn’t it?”

“Yes,” I said. “It is. It’s new.”

“Well, it’s lovely. You’re looking lovely.”

“Come on, Miss Fielding,” Prowse said behind me. “Let’s let Grandfather get back to his work.”

“We’ll meet again, soon, my dear,” the old man said. “It is always such a pleasure.”

“For me as well, Judge Prowse,” I said. I removed my hands from his, turned and, ignoring Prowse as emphatically as I could, walked past him and out into the hallway along which I walked rapidly this time and began to make my way downstairs. Prowse caught up with me at the bottom.

“I know what you think,” he said.

“If you did, you would not have come downstairs.”

“You think I humiliated my grandfather and played a trick on you.”

“He is an old man in his dotage—”

“A lonely old man. That’s why I bring him visitors. You’re not the first. You won’t be the last. He would never see another soul if not for me. My father and his other sons avoid him. So do his daughters. Because he insists on remaining in this house. He had a stroke a while ago. Everyone’s ashamed of him except for me. They want to shut him away where he can’t embarrass them. But he stays here. I’m practically all he has. I bring him food. I come by to make sure that he hasn’t hurt himself.”

I looked at Prowse. I thought of the judge’s unkempt appearance. The house resembled a ransacked library. Books that looked like they’d been flung about lay everywhere; bookless covers; coverless books whose first pages were missing. The judge’s small study had been even worse, the floor rug invisible beneath footprint-bearing maps and charts. The one window piled so high with books that only creases of light showed through. Hunting trophies that must once have adorned the walls piled in a heap in one corner—elk’s antlers, a black bear skin, a stuffed lynx with gleaming yellow eyes, photographs of the younger judge holding by its mouth a salmon more than half his size.

“You should have told me what to expect,” I said.

“I’m sorry,” Prowse said. “I just wanted you to meet him. It seemed very important to me.”

I looked away from him. “Well,” I said. “I’m glad to have met him. But now I have to leave.”

“Will you come again?” Prowse said. “I think it would mean a great deal to him. Especially if you stayed longer.”

“Perhaps,” I said. “I’ll see. I don’t think he would remember me.”

“If he thinks he remembers you, it’s the same, isn’t it? For him, I mean.”

“I suppose,” I said. “All right then. I’ll come back.”

And I did go back, several times over the following months.

Prowse would often leave me alone with the judge, who, though he seemed not to recognize me from one visit to the next, was very fond of me, prone to pouring out to me the sea of self-doubt that his mind became in his most lucid moments.

“The whole thing is a failure,” the judge told me one day as he sat in his chair beside the desk, I in a chair that I had pulled up close to his so that our knees were nearly touching. He weighed his book in his hands as if thereby to gauge the extent of its failure. “It’s a great book,” I said, feeling as though I was assuring this old man who was near the end of his life that he was not unloved. “I can’t help thinking of the book that might have been. Well, I have always had more ambition than ability. I knew the destination but could never find the way.”

“You have written a great book,” I firmly said. “A great book,” over and over, hoping his mind might incorporate the words “great book,” that they might give rise to a new, more comforting illusion. Delusion. What did it matter now if what he thought was true was not, as long as he was happy? I tried to comfort him. After I left the judge, I went downstairs where Prowse always waited for me, standing in the late-afternoon gloom before a fire he had lit.

“I don’t know what would have happened to him if I had not kept coming to visit him. There is a woman who prepares his food. I think she comes by when it suits her. My father has not seen the judge in
months. Nor have any of my aunts and uncles. He sees only me and the few people who accept my invitations. His friends stopped coming after the stroke when they realized he had no idea who they were. Your visits are doing wonders for him.”

“Really?” I said. “I always have to pretend we’re meeting for the first time. It’s very strange. Very sad.”

“Not for him,” Prowse said. “That’s what you must remember. For him, having you come visit—it’s as if a young, adoring reader of his book had sought him out. It may not be so bad, I think, having everything remain so new.”

I first met the old man in September, but all the visits now seem like a succession of November afternoons. While I sat on the sofa, Prowse stood, hands behind his back, staring into the fire as if in contemplation of the judge’s life and fate.

I walked down Circular Road on those autumn afternoons, a gale of wind at my back if the sky was clear and one straight in my face if it was not. Impelled by the wind in the same direction as the leaves that clattered past me, I often used my cane to keep from falling forward, my free hand on my hat that would otherwise have blown away too fast for me to catch it. When the wind was against me, it was often raining, the rain driven slantwise so that even when my umbrella was not blown inside out, it was useless. I looked down the street at the house that appeared to be unoccupied, the windows reflecting daylight, still opaque though the sun had nearly set. It was possible to see inside the bright front rooms of other houses in which I assumed normal life was taking place, children running about, grown-ups smoking and conversing.

Horses pulling carriages and passengers went by, and the drivers, without fail, tipped their hats, mistaking me for a grown woman out to take the air in that interval between last light and evening. The twilight that in everyone else inspired comradeship seemed to me as if it would never end. And, still looking at that melancholy house, I pictured the old man in his study on the second floor, his grandson in the front room by the fire as though keeping
watch, waiting for the judge to call his name. I thought of my own house to which my father might not return until after midnight when he ran out of rounds to make, when the last family made it clear that, grateful though they were, it was time for him to leave and he had no choice but to climb into his carriage and, falling asleep, trust his horse to take him home. I looked at the sky before entering the judge’s house, the last light showing in the gaps between the clouds and above the ridge beyond the lake that I could just see through the trees. Breathing deeply I smelled the chill of a season soon to change, woodsmoke in the air. The grass was yellow and the trees had lost their leaves.

My hands red with cold I knocked on the door and Prowse let me in and brought me upstairs, returning to the fire almost instantly. I felt like a nurse come to pay my customary visit to the judge. I paused on the landing of the second floor, wondering if I would find the judge asleep and, if so, if I should wake him. Prowse told me I should never let him sleep or else, as though he were a baby, he would not sleep at night.

An old man in irreversible decline, but he always brightened at the sight of me. When I shook him gently, he woke up in bewilderment until he saw my face, at which he smiled and sat up slowly, turning on his swivel chair to face me. Who he mistook me for each day I didn’t know. All he ever called me after that first day was “my dear,” because of which I had no idea what to call him, what delusion of his I ought to be indulging. I may, each day, have been someone different, or every day the same young woman whose previous visit, however recent, was beyond recall. I pulled my chair up close to his and took his hands.

“How good it is to see you after all this time,” he said one day when I found him writing in a frenzy.

“I would have come sooner,” I said. “But it seems there is always some unavoidable delay.”

“Of course, of course. It is much the same with me. My family and friends are forever telling me that I should consult the calendar more often. Or even my watch.”