The Custodian of Paradise (18 page)

“I thought—I thought you were going to send me to some convent, one in America or Canada.”

“There is too much risk involved. Don’t you see? One slip, one mistake. This Dr. Breen is a very wealthy man. She says they can arrange it so that nothing, absolutely nothing, is left to chance. It is not unusual in such cases for the girl’s mother to pretend the child is hers.”

“I will not let that woman have my child.”

“What do you propose? That you simply stay here in this house and have the child? I would disown you first. I would send you away to fend for yourself. I would buy space in the papers and declare that you were not my child. Who would disbelieve me?”

“Oh, you are such a fool, Father, such a fool—”

“She is capable of anything—”

“Yet you want her to raise my child—”

“Which may not be my grandchild, as you may not be my daughter—”

“Oh, stop it. You sound like you are mad. I cannot believe that there was no one else that you could turn to. Have you no family or friends that you could trust?”

“Thank God this boy of yours has no sense of honour. Thank God he has not come forward and declared himself. I have no one I can trust. Not even you.”

They can arrange it so that nothing, absolutely nothing is left to chance
. But they could not provide the people of St. John’s with an explanation as to why my father would take me out of Bishop Spencer halfway through the school year and send me away for months. How many rumours would
that
give rise to?

It was a problem that was solved in a manner stranger than any of the events that had led to its creation.

One afternoon, after school, just a day before my father was to have informed Miss Emilee that I would soon be leaving Bishop Spencer, I was lying on the sofa in my father’s study, staring at the volumes on his shelves. I noticed that some of the books had been rearranged, ones that, before now, had not been touched in years. There were even some that were not fully pushed into place, their spines extending beyond the edges of the shelves. And there were fingerprints in the dust on the shelves that I did not think were mine. For so long, no hands but mine had disturbed the shelves. But now, everywhere, were what could only have been my father’s fingerprints. I got up to investigate.

Showing signs of having been recently disturbed were books of philosophy, history, literature, biology, medicine, mathematics, classical mythology. I began flipping the pages of the books until, from one of them, from Newton’s
Principia Mathematic
, a piece of paper fell and fluttered to the floor. I picked it up and saw, newly written on it, in my father’s handwriting, the following:

“Susan: Perhaps only you can understand how loath I am to confess that I have desperate need of your assistance. How sweet to me you once were. How suddenly you changed. Too sudden for its cause to have been some deficiency in me that you discovered. I can think of nothing that would so suddenly incline you against me other than wayward affections. So many years have passed since these events transpired that, were you to tell me the truth now, I would not blame you
for leaving no matter what the cause. The question of my daughter’s patrimony has long been a matter of torment to me. You could put an end to my uncertainty with a few mere words. I would think no less of her were you to confirm what I have long known. Fickleness in matters of romance is, regrettably, a commonplace. You were young. I have no wish to know who the man might be. No wish to confront him. Nor any intention of chastising you. I merely wish to
know
. I stare at every tall, large-framed man of my age that I see, wondering, searching for that resemblance that there is no trace of in myself. I know of half a dozen men who might be her father. It is all I can do to keep from asking them. But there is no one but you who can say for certain what I
need
to know.” The letter ended there. I found another one.

“Sir: My daughter is with child and the father is your son.
Your
son. You may think this will do no harm to your reputation, nor to his. You may be able to think of nothing that would harm your reputation since one need do nothing but speak your name to set men laughing. No doubt you will deny this accusation as publicly as possible merely to associate your name with mine, your son’s name with my daughter’s. But even a man as low as you can be brought down and you will soon see how. You have marched roaring drunk into my waiting room and demanded to be seen ahead of others who were there before you, causing such a scene that I had no choice but to see you first despite their protests. You sent, by way of one of your children, a note saying that I must come to what you called your premises as you were too ill to come to mine. Thank God I ignored it. Thank God I did not see the squalor in which the boy was raised who, against her will, defiled my daughter. But know this, sir: I have already devised the manner and the means of my revenge. As it is through my daughter that I have been disgraced, so will your disgrace come through your son. My only regret is that not even your complete ruination would sufficiently repay your debt to me.”

I wondered if he had written these letters merely in the hope of some catharsis, or if he planned to send them and thereby bring about the very catastrophe, the very scandal and disgrace that he so feared.
His state of mind worsening day by day until he could focus on nothing but the most reckless and self-destroying manner of revenge.

I picked up his copy of Judge Prowse’s
History of Newfoundland
and, leafing through it, saw that letters and words had been cut from the pages, cut so as to leave the pages intact but perforated, as though he had made his excisions with a scalpel. The implications of the missing letters and words did not occur to me at first. I stared through the holes in the pages, mystified, until I recalled the words of the boy I had questioned after Miss Emilee called me to her office. “It was made with cut-out words and letters.”
I have already devised the manner and the means of my revenge
.

My father had sent that anonymous letter to the
Morning Post
. How close to catastrophe we had come. How close to it we might still be, for there was no telling what else, in his present state of agitation, he might do. But I could think of no way that anyone could trace the forged letter back to him. And no one at the school had really suffered from it.

The next day, at Bishop Spencer, Miss Emilee again summoned me to her office.

“It seems that I owe you an apology, Miss Fielding,” she said. “Headmaster Reeves has discovered who sent the letter.”

“Who was it?” I asked, thinking that she was about to name my father.

“I would not tell you if I thought you would not find out from someone else. Someone who might be less than fully informed. It was the Smallwood boy.”

I was so startled I all but stood up.

“What is the matter?” said Miss Emilee.

“No. No, I’m sure it wasn’t him,” I said.

“How can you be sure?”

“How do they know he wrote the letter?”

“It seems that he was not so clever as he thought. Headmaster Reeves determined that the letter had to have been written by one of the dormitory boys. It contains information about dormitory life
that only they would know. Of course, there are many dorm boys. But on the date that it was postmarked all of them had gone home for Christmas. Only one dorm boy, this Smallwood, was in St. John’s over Christmas.”

I was as much responsible for Smallwood’s predicament as my father was. More so. I should have lied more vaguely than I had, should never have named
anyone
as the father of my child. Should have done what I was ashamed to do. Confessed to a casual liaison with some man whose name I didn’t know and of whom I could give nothing but a vague description. But I could not, partly because the thought of the revulsion and contempt with which my father would regard me was unbearable, and partly because of my memory of that afternoon in the judge’s house. I had been terrified of what might happen to my father if I refused to give him
any
name. Never to know the name of
my
father or the father of my baby. I feared he would at last suffer the breakdown it seemed he had been staving off for years and start hurling accusations in public about my patrimony and my child’s. And so I had chosen as a surrogate for Prowse the hapless Smallwood, with results for which I was responsible, however impossible to anticipate they had been. Even my father, I was certain, had not written the letter to the
Morning Post
in order to get revenge on Smallwood in particular. The letter had been a general lashing out, against Bishop Feild, against Headmaster Reeves for having admitted such a student as Smallwood in the first place. Against the reputation of the school, among whose boys, he probably believed, were my “true” father’s son or sons, boys who two people, my mother and my father’s “rival,” knew were my half-brothers. I had no doubt that, given his state of mind, my father believed the letter would be published, and that it was only by sheer fluke that the finger of blame seemed to point at Smallwood. He would have had no way of knowing that the postmark on the letter would implicate Smallwood.

I decided to confess to writing the letter. It seemed to me that I had little to lose by doing so. I would be expelled, but that would merely provide me with the excuse I needed for leaving school just
months short of graduation. My father’s reputation, having survived divorce, would survive this.

There
was
the question of how he would react if I confessed to doing something
he
had done. But I knew that my father would never sacrifice himself for me, never own up to his bit of mischief for my sake. Or for Smallwood’s. The certainty that he would allow me to be blamed for his crime made me queasy with sadness.

I all but ran from Spencer to the Feild, where I planned to seek out Headmaster Reeves and tell him that Smallwood was innocent, that I was the writer of the letter. School was out for the day, the playing field deserted, but I could see a light in what Prowse had once pointed out to me as Reeves’ office. A snowstorm that I sensed would soon get much worse had started. The wind was at my back, gusting so hard from the east that I twice fell forward onto my hands, despite my cane. New snow sifting on top of the old was already forming small dunelike drifts that I waded through without bothering to hike my dress. I ran up the steps to the main door that I feared might be locked but that gave way so easily that in my haste I fell forward again, this time onto the floor wet with melted snow. I picked myself up and made my way through the dark and unfamiliar hallways, doubling back several times until at last I saw a closed door with a frosted window and a light inside.

I knocked but did not wait for an answer, opening the door to find Headmaster Reeves standing at the window behind his desk, his hands behind his back. He turned to face me.

“What do you mean, barging in like this?” he said. “Spencer girls are not permitted in my school. I know you. I have seen you out there, on the grounds, talking with the boys. You’re the one they all call Fielding.”

“I’ve come about the letter,” I said. “Smallwood didn’t write it. I did.”

“Who told you Smallwood wrote it?”

“It doesn’t matter.
I
wrote it.”

“Don’t be ridiculous,” he said and turned back to the window as if to resume his brooding contemplation of the storm.

“I wrote it,” I said. “To get back at Smallwood. He made a fool of me one day by spreading rumours about my mother.”

“It is you who made a fool of yourself in front of all the boys. Not once but many times.”

“Then you and I have at least one thing in common.”

He turned to face me again.

“You impudent thing.” Prowse appeared to have modelled his appearance after Headmaster Reeves. Hair parted down the middle and brushed back. A paisley vest inside his longcoat. But also a florid black moustache and tufted eyebrows left untrimmed in the hope of achieving some inscrutable effect. His face, his neck, even his hands and wrists were red with indignation.

“I am confessing to writing the letter. That, I am willing to wager, is something Smallwood has not done.”

“That, in his case, would be the honourable thing. In yours, an obscurely motivated lie. Get out of my office this instant.”

“I will tell everyone I wrote the letter. And then this injustice will be common knowledge.”

“While I cannot say with absolute certainty that Smallwood wrote that letter, there is more evidence that tends to that conclusion than to any other. What evidence do
you
have that
you
wrote it?”

I thought of the book back home in my father’s study with its perforated pages, all the missing words and characters that comprised the letter to the
Morning Post
.

I can show you the book
, I almost said,
from which I cut with one of my father’s scalpels every word of that letter to the
Morning Post. My father’s scalpel. My father’s book. Suspicion might still fall on him.

“I am confessing,” I said. “Surely that is all the proof you need.”

“I know of those two books you left in her library where anyone could find them. I believe,
Miss
Fielding, that you are no more than a mischief-maker. A trouble-maker who makes trouble not only for others but for herself. Perhaps the answer to your behaviour lies in the way you were raised. The example set for you at an early age. One of recklessness and irresponsibility.”

“And where, Headmaster, does the answer to your behaviour lie?”

“Why you—if you were—”

“What? Half your size?”

“If you were not a girl, I would teach you a lesson.”

“I would hate to have my gender get in the way of benefitting from your tutelage.”

“Many a boy in this school has learned from me the hard way.”

“I’m sure they have. I would be honoured if you set about my education as you would were I a boy.”

“I can see nothing in your future, Miss Fielding, but perdition. You cannot flout authority or regard the whole of society with complete contempt and expect to prosper. You will drop into the dregs, mark my words. You are halfway there already. The great pity of all this is that your poor father—”