The Custodian of Paradise (22 page)
Soon after the closing of the contest deadline, I received a letter from the
Evening Telegram
that read:
Dear Henry Fielding (if that is your real name):
If you are twelve, then I am ninety-nine. But I have chosen your essay as the winner of our contest. I would like, with your permission, to publish it under the byline that you used—“Henry Fielding, 12 years old.”And then, on a separate page, reveal your real identity, about which, I confess, I am very curious. And add a note explaining that you withheld your real name, gender and age until now. And that I have hired you to write for me. The reaction of my readers will be interesting. I wonder if you would agree to write two columns a week for me? Any subjects you want. Why don’t you come see me to discuss terms? Shall we say at three in the afternoon of March 9?
Yours, Editor-in-chief, Martin Herder
Elated, mystified, slightly suspicious, I met with Herder. He was a short, somewhat pudgy man with long sideburns that almost joined beneath his chin and hair ragged and curled up at the back as if in compensation for his otherwise being absolutely bald. I walked, not inconspicuously, through the newsroom of the
Telegram
. I was gawked at, recognized by some whom I heard say my name. “Mr. Herder’s office?” I said. It was pointed out to me. The door was slightly open. I knocked.
“Come in,” a shrill, almost childlike voice said.
“Good afternoon,” I said, closing the door behind me. “I am Sheilagh Fielding. Pseudonym Henry.”
“A woman,” he said, sounding not especially surprised.
“A young woman,” I said. Even had he been standing, I would have towered over him. That may have been why he remained seated. “I hope that doesn’t change your mind.”
“Sheilagh Fielding. Not the first time you forged a letter, is it? I seem to remember—”
“My confession. Yes. And does
that
change your mind?”
“My mind is not easily changed.”
“The columns. Under what name—?”
“Your own. It will help. You being already somewhat … established.”
“Notorious. My father says my name is blackened.”
“What’s in a name? Besides, I can’t imagine that you care about such things.”
“I have to get by.”
“Yes. There is always that.”
“So must you get by.”
“I publish nothing they can sue me for. And nothing that even
I
think is offensive.”
I was already drinking but needed some man’s help to acquire my supply. I made an arrangement with my editor, who did not blink when I said I needed his “assistance,” as if he somehow knew just what the euphemism meant.
“I’ll keep you in supply,” he said when I elaborated. “I wouldn’t, except I suspect you don’t write when you’re not drinking.”
I told him this was only partly true, that, though I was always sober during the hours that I wrote, I could not keep from drinking afterwards and that if I did not drink I was unable to write the
next
night. “So I do not write while drunk,” I said.
“You’re already making bargains with yourself,” he said. “Concocting explanations. It’s a bad sign. But I’m not your keeper. I’ll do my best to keep you in supply. And you won’t get one drop that you don’t pay for.”
“Don’t worry,” I said. “I have very few expenses. There’ll be no problem as long as you pay me what I’m worth.”
“I’ll pay you what I think you’re worth,” he said.
We were, if otherwise different, alike in one way. We were, politically speaking, unaffiliated. For a newspaper editor in St. John’s in 1916 to be politically unaffiliated was a rare thing, in part because almost all those who could read were affiliated and chose to buy the paper whose politics they shared.
“It is not,” Herder said in an editorial, “that we keep an open mind. On the contrary, the one premise of our closed mind is that all people who have or seek power, or curry the favour of those who have it, are corrupt.”
I did not share this premise, but I suspected that he was the closest thing I would find to what I wanted. We came to terms.
“A woman,” he said. “That’s what will upset them most.” A woman writing not for the social pages, not describing in lavish language for those who would never be invited to them the houses of the rich and influential, but a woman writing as not even men dared or were able to, mocking the pretensions and corruption of those sent out from England to oversee the running of the colony into the ground, the exploitative merchant class, the ersatz aristocrats, the fatuous and pompous, the Churches and their parochial, morally dictatorial leaders whose own natures were teeming with the very vices they denounced in those who by their circumstances were less able to resist them …
“If I write like that,” I said, “the only following I will have is a lynch mob.”
“That’s how I want you to write.”
I told him that only by the use of an irony so close to absolute that I would seem to the tone-deaf majority to be saying the very opposite of what I meant would I survive.
When the essay was published, there was more protesting than his sanguine manner had led me to expect. He published what might well have been every letter of protest, the gist of which was that the essay was drivel, nowhere near as good as the runners-up or even the “selected others.” Some said it was impossible to understand.
What was it supposed to mean? Why had its author pretended to be twelve years old? Hidden her gender? What sort of woman would write such a thing? The essay was unpatriotic, a mockery of Newfoundland and England and all the men who were fighting and dying in a just and necessary war that the Germans had provoked. Entrants were supposed to choose one of the two subjects, not write, inscrutably, on both. Much of the protest was directed specifically at me, the confessed author of the infamous letter to the
Morning Post
. How dare the
Telegram
reward me for my
second
forgery—one every bit as subversive as the first? I was up to my old tricks, this time hiding behind a pseudonym instead of anonymity. A letter from Headmaster Reeves in which he professed himself “outraged” and Bishop Feild to be “slighted yet again”—the Feild was built on inherited wealth—was published in several papers. The
Telegram
was attacked by other papers, denounced as unpatriotic, frivolous, sensationalist, unethical. How could Herder have given me a job? Was this essay the sort of thing readers could expect from me twice a week from now on?
The edition in which my first column appeared sold more copies than any other in the history of the
Telegram
.
Herder said he was not surprised. “Some of them get it,” he said. “They might not admit it, but they do. They get it and like it and agree with you. Most of them just want to see what you will say. How can they gossip about you if they don’t know what you’ve written? The real test will be to see if your notoriety will last. Who knows? At some point, they may just ignore you. Even a fool would rather be hated than ignored.”
My first column under the byline of Sheilagh Fielding was an answer to the uproar caused by the publication of my essay:
In this, my inaugural column with the
Evening Telegram
, I would like first to congratulate my fellow winners in the essay competition, each of whose essays was, I confess, superior to mine
.
That mine was rewarded with a prize of five pounds and that it elicited from the editor of the paper the offer of employment that might have been made to any one of this city’s persistent host of unremunerated scribes whose first submissions to essay competitions predate my existence by a decade mystifies no one more than it does me
.
I find myself embarrassed to have been deemed, even if only in this case, a better writer than the author of these words: “Nay, though it seem to some like progress, the horseless carriage is the vilest contraption ever devised by those worshippers of science whose belief in the perfectibility of man is a blasphemy that, like the locomotive train, will become more difficult to stop the longer it is left unacknowledged.”
Allow me to address the main objections to my essay and the manner of its submission
.
“She would not have won had she not cheated.” I will waste neither my time nor readers’ by refuting a statement that is so obviously true
.
“The
Telegram
now has in its employ a woman who confessed to slandering this city’s finest school in a forged letter and attempting to have this slander published.…”
The proof of the unintentional inaccuracy of this statement lies in the sterling character of its author, Headmaster Reeves, who is possessed of a moral zeal with which his eloquence cannot keep pace. For were this statement true, it would be necessary that a self-evident falsity was true, namely that this city’s finest school now has in its employ a man who blackballed a student for committing the very crime that I confessed to and of which he must therefore have known the student to be innocent. This paper will happily publish any clarification of his statement that Headmaster Reeves would like to make
.
The reader who is curious about what he can expect to
encounter in this column in forthcoming days may be interested to know that my curiosity is commensurate with his
.
The reader who writes, “She is a seventeen-year-old girl, and therefore not qualified to offer enlightening commentary on anything but needlework and the cooking of cakes and pies” gives me too much credit. Unlike the Deservedly More Fortunate, I know nothing of needlework or cooking. It was just before I was to take courses in both that I was expelled for forgery, the subject about which I am most well informed
.
So I have decided that all of my columns will be forgeries. Each one will have a different byline, and some of the names will be ones with which the reader is familiar. The reader should think of this space as being reserved twice weekly for guest columnists, the first of whom was Henry Fielding. The name Sheilagh Fielding will never appear in this space again. The name of this column will be “Fielding the Forger.”
“Fielding the Forger,” my father said. “Have you lost your mind, girl? How do you expect to—to live down what you did at school when a columnist called Fielding the Forger appears twice every week in a newspaper?”
“I have no wish to live down what I did.” I knew the effect that calling my column Fielding the Forger would have on him, since it was he who was Fielding the Forger, a fact he would very much have liked to forget, as he would that I had taken the blame for what he did.
“You are only making matters worse for yourself, and for me,” he said. “We bear the same name. A twice-blackened name. Thrice-blackened, if you count—” He paused. “You worry me, girl. You worry me so much it gives me nightmares. What will you admit to next?”
“Something I am guilty of, perhaps.”
“Precisely. That is what torments me. That some day, for some reason, God knows what, you will tell people about—that business in New York.”
“I will never do that,” I said. “And I would rather that you didn’t speak of it to me.”
Herder, who when we first met had not asked me why I forged the letter to the
Morning Post
, did not object to the name or premise of Fielding the Forger.
“You will cause quite a stir,” he said, “assuming the identity of real people.”
“Everyone will know that these real people didn’t write the columns.”
“You might be surprised,” he said. “There are people dense enough not to know the difference. And others who will know the difference but be too dense to get the point.”
“Are you concerned about lawsuits?”
“Of course I am. You should be too.”
“I don’t have anything that they could take from me.”
“Your father does.”
“He’s not writing ‘Fielding the Forger.’”
“And you’re not old enough to be sued. They’d sue him instead.”
“If you don’t want me to—”
“Oh, I want you to. I’m just making sure you know what you might be in for.”
I foresaw some of it. Even before the first Forgery appeared, I was referred to while out walking as Fielding the Forger by boys from Bishop Feild and girls from Bishop Spencer who pointed me out to one another.
“Fielding the Forger,” the boys shouted, and the girls laughed as if to say that, at last,
I
had a nickname, one I had been foolish enough to give myself. “Fielding the Forger,” cabbies shouted, most often good-naturedly as if the name somehow suited or derived from my stature.
My announcement in the paper of the name and premise of the column drew another protest in print from Reeves, who, ignoring my challenge to “clarify” his statement, merely said again that I was flaunting my attempted slander of his school and that the
Telegram
was “abetting, no, sponsoring, this renewed and flagrant attack.” At least my
self-christening was accurate, he said. A forger was a fake, a fraud, a charlatan, a coward, all of which I had confessed to being. A forger was a non-person, an impersonator.
“If Miss Fielding intends to practise some sort of journalistic ventriloquism, she had better be careful of what words she puts in whose mouth. Mr. Herder is also to blame. He is inciting Miss Fielding to this nonsense.”
The columns, I decided, would all take the form of letters, written by someone living, dead, or imaginary to someone living, dead, or imaginary. There was a great deal of speculation as to who my first “correspondent” would be and to whom his or her letter would be addressed.
Dear Headmaster Reeves: I concur with every word of your letter to me of April 7. “As regards Miss Fielding,” you wrote, “I would have expected more from one of Miss Emilee Stirling’s girls. Is it unreasonable of me to hope that Bishop Spencer girls remain at least one step above forgery after they have left your school?”
Indeed, Headmaster, it is not unreasonable. I myself have such high expectations for my girls, as do you, I am sure, have high expectations for your boys
.
Who for instance would call you unreasonable for having expected more of Mr. Shephard of the graduating class of 1906? It is not at all unreasonable of you to hope that Bishop Feild boys remain at least one step above committing murder after they have left your school
. Y
our hopes for your boys will have been fully met if, after graduation, none of them are hung. May I propose, as the minimum code of conduct for your boys, that their cause of death not be execution? This would entail a slight amendment of your school motto, which at present is, “He is not dead whose good name lives.” Might I propose: “He is not dead who was not found guilty of a capital offence.”
Not deemed to be capital offences by our courts are such things as embezzlement, adultery, fraud, graft, theft, tax evasion, usury, malpractice, assault of spouse or children, molestation, consorting with prostitutes, smuggling, poaching, vandalism and public displays of any of the following: lewd-ness, drunkenness, unruliness, blasphemy, profanity, indecency, belligerence and mischief. Capital crimes are fewer: murder, attempted murder, treason, arson and rape
.
May I therefore say, on behalf of one too modest to make any declaration that might seem intended to enhance his own good name, that if the above list tells us anything, it must be this: The graduates of Bishop Feild are far more likely to be imprisoned than executed
.
Bishop Feild and Bishop Spencer have long been brother/sister schools. We share the same founders, the same religion, the same traditions. It is almost the rule that our graduates marry yours and that their children attend our schools. May our schools continue hand in hand into the future. (Though, if I may say so, I wonder if perhaps you exaggerate the degree to which Bishop Feild is a source of civic pride to the vast majority who if they so much as set foot on your cricket pitch would be arrested. But this is a matter we can discuss in our customary manner over tea and tarts when next we meet.)
As for the motto of Bishop Spencer, might I suggest a new one: “She is dead whose husband, having outlived his good name, was buried with a noose around his neck.”
Editor’s Explanation: Lest there be any confusion as to the intent of Miss Stirling’s words, we would like to point out that, inasmuch as she is capable of doing so in her florid, ostentatious style, she says exactly what she means. She regards Headmaster Reeves with as much respect and admiration as would anyone who has known the man for twenty years. Her respect and admiration are by no means
unreciprocated. They meet often for professional discussions, after which the Headmaster has been heard to exclaim, “I couldn’t if I lived forever say enough about that woman and her girls.”
For her part, Miss Stirling is glad of the near proximity of Bishop Feild to Bishop Spencer
. A
s is Headmaster Reeves, as the following demonstrates: One day, surveying the many boys who had stopped to watch as she and the skirt-clad members of her field hockey team made their way down to the pitch, Miss Stirling was moved to exclaim, “What an embarrassment of riches.” It seems that all the boys who were staring at her girls appeared to have been ill-served by the same tailor who had made them seem, as the saying goes, “too big for their britches.” Headmaster Reeves gaily replied, “More like an embarrassment of bitches.”
Miss Stirling is, of course, not saying that Headmaster Reeves should consider any graduate of Bishop Feild who manages to stay one foot ahead of the hangman to be a vindication of his educational methods. She acknowledges that he should have, and does have, loftier ambitions for his boys than that they not be put to death for the betterment of society. She was merely suggesting what the range of his ambitions might be. Putting Mr. Shephard at the bottom of the scale, one might put at the top that legion of boys who, far from being hung, will never be incarcerated
.
This group comprises 98 per cent of the graduates of Bishop Feild, though not because, as one critic puts it: “Nothing stands between them and incarceration but the preponderance of lawyers and prosecutors among their former classmates.”