The Custodian of Paradise (23 page)
When the column appeared, the protests began with a visit to the
Telegram
by Headmaster Reeves. I was not there, but Herder was. Reeves demanded that the entire column be retracted, that the paper
print an apology to him and all his students, past and present, and to the people of St. John’s, who had long been proud of their city for having in it such a school as his. Reeves demanded that I be fired before it became necessary and justifiable to have me sued. Then he stormed out and wrote a letter that Herder published. “The Forger is driven by malice and envy,” he wrote. “Malice towards me for thwarting her first attempt to smear my school. Envy towards those boys and girls who, unlike her, were not expelled from school, those who were awarded diplomas and have gone on to colleges and universities while she, who, even at school, was forever an outsider, forever shunned, seeks to revenge herself on those against whom she could never measure up, never keep pace with, those she blames for making her feel that she did not fit in, did not belong, when the truth, which she knows deep down, is that she did not fit in
because
she did not belong. I invite those whose disgust and outrage at her portrayal of Bishop Feild and its students matches mine to write a letter of protest to this paper, demanding that the ‘Forger’ be removed.”
Such letters poured in and Herder printed them all, telling me people were certain to buy a paper in which their names appeared. He also assured me he had no intention to remove me. On the contrary, he wanted another Forgery as fast as I could write it.
My father blamed everything on “that business in New York.”
“Much of the business transaction you speak of took place in St. John’s,” I said.
“Do not take with me,” he said, “the tone you take in those Forgeries of yours. ‘The Forger,’ Reeves calls you. It isn’t even necessary any longer to include your name. Everyone knows who the Forger is. My God, what if people start calling me the Forger too? One of those family nicknames.”
“Don’t worry,” I said. “The worst they’ll call you is the Forger’s Father.”
“I have a reputation to uphold,” he said. “
I
cannot make an
occupation
of blackening my name. I cannot earn a living from it. Nor will you be able to much longer, you mark my words. This Herder man is
using you. Why can you not write an honest, straightforward letter for a change? A sincere apology to Reeves. This man Herder might not print it, but someone would. It would be a start.”
“The first step,” I said, “on the long road to rehabilitation.”
“More mockery,” he said. “No one ever prospered from mockery or forgery.”
“Fielding and Daughter, Mockers and Forgers since 1853.”
“Are you bent on self-destruction, girl?”
It seemed that he, who had written the first forgery, had convinced himself that
I
had, or regarded my confession as such folly that he believed it was more to blame for my expulsion from school than his letter to the
Morning Post
had been.
“Perhaps I will sign
your
name to one of my Forgeries,” I said. “Who would you like me to write to on your behalf?”
“Good God,” he said. “Good God. What a travesty that would be. You must promise me you will never use my name like that.”
“It would be interesting,” I said, “writing a letter from your point of view.”
“YOU MUST PROMISE ME,” he shouted, “THAT YOU WILL NEVER FORGE MY NAME LIKE THAT. NEVER ASSUME MY IDENTITY FOR THE PURPOSE OF MOCKERY OR MISCHIEF OR FOR ANY OTHER REASON.”
“I was only teasing you, Father.”
“Your mother’s last name was once Fielding,” he said, suddenly subdued. “I ask only that you treat it with as much respect as it deserves.”
“You have two grandchildren,” I said. “Do you ever think about that? Wonder what they look like? Do you ever wish that you could see them? For some reason other than to satisfy yourself that they are yours? That I am yours.”
“I think only of who their father is,” he said. “I saw him, often, when you were in New York. I—kept track of where he went.”
“You followed him?”
“Sometimes I could barely keep myself from speaking to him. Telling him where you were because of him. How tormented I was
because of him. Only the wretched sight of him restrained me. The thought of giving his like something he could use against me. An excuse to associate with me. The thought of making his life part of mine. I would realize at the last second what folly it would be, hold back at the last second and watch the wretch pass by. To think. You. And the son of a man like Charity Charlie. I have seen him, too, passed within inches of him. I was barely able to resist confronting him as well. He carries a wooden staff of some kind. God knows why. To protect himself with. I dare say he does not want for enemies. Or people he owes money to. It’s their like you should write about. Why don’t you write about the scruff?”
Dear Mr. Herder: I am writing in response to Headmaster Reeves’ exhortation that those of us who are proud of Bishop Feild come out in its defence
.
Neither my wife nor I could agree more with what the man we call HMR said about the school we call B.F. (We are, by the way, every bit as proud of Bishop Spencer, which we refer to as B.S.) I am a resident of the part of St. John’s known fondly to us who live there as the Battery, and just as fondly to those who don’t as the –ittery, owing to there being not a home in the neighbourhood with indoor plumbing or an outhouse because of the impossibility of drilling through the granite on which our houses stand and from which, in a good gale, they sometimes slide straight into the sea
.
What my wife refers to as our nothing-to-be-ashamed-of is collected twice weekly by—yours truly. I collect in the Battery and other parts of town as well. But I am straying from the point, which is our fondness for B.F. and the exception we took to the remarks made about it in Monday’s Forgery
.
The degree to which B.F. is a source of civic pride to me and mine
cannot
be exaggerated. None of my eleven
boys will ever go to Bishop Feild. None of my six girls will ever go to Bishop Spencer. But I do not resent these schools. It would make as much sense for me to resent all the other schools that have as yet been unattended by my offspring. What a bitter man, in that case, I would be, since none of my seventeen children has ever been enrolled in
any
school
.
Would we be more cheerful knowing that there was not a man, woman or child in this city who could read or write? (I am dictating this letter to a clergyman who each day is kind enough to read the newspaper aloud to my wife and me. He tells me that he is, as he puts it, doing his utmost with all the gifts that God gave him, to translate my “rough eloquence” into something that barely approximates comprehensibility. I have no idea what this means.) “Bless their hearts,” my wife says whenever we walk past either school. But especially B.F., whose boys, my wife points out, will, in their adulthood, oversee the welfare of our children, just as their fathers have overseen our own
.
My wife and I often speculate about what goes on in schools. We are told that children are taught to read and write, but all we know about those things is that they are two of what our clergyman refers to as “our long list of as yet unmastered skills.”
“They teach them to count, I’m sure,” my wife will say. “Higher than anyone in our house can count.” Though what she means by “count higher” neither of us really knows
.
“Imagine young Harry dressed up like that boy there,” my wife will say, and the two of us will chuckle cheerfully. “Imagine young
Rodney
dressed up like that. Now wouldn’t
that
be something?” one of us will say
. A
nd before you know it we are laughing so hard that tears are running down our cheeks and it is necessary for me to keep my doubled-over stomach-clutching wife from falling to her knees
.
What a credit B.F. is to us. What delight we take in winter at the sight of the B.F. boys, their shodden feet and pox-free complexions, their bodies fully covered in what are known as “uniforms,” clothes that all look alike and have no holes or patches
. A
s for HMR. What nitpickers we would be if we did not take pride in a man simply because he was once overheard saying that he would rather die screaming on the rack than admit one of our children to his school
.
Not everyone can make it to the top. It wouldn’t be the top if they did. The top would be the same as the bottom and then
no one
could make it to the top. Or the bottom. Or the middle. My clergyman just cautioned me against revealing what he calls “yet another of your unmastered skills.” He says he hopes that some of you will understand what he means
.
Though my name is Barnable, I am known as HWM (The Honeywagon Man). My clergyman tells me that these are my “initials” and that two of my “initials” are the same as HMR’s. Each of our initial initials are the same. He doesn’t have my second initial, but I have his. There is also an
R
and a
W
, but instead of sharing these we keep them to ourselves. I am honoured
. A
nd would be more so if HMR allowed me, even if only once, to collect his nothing-to-be-ashamed-of. I believe I have made myself clear on the subject of HMR, B.F. and B.S
.
Clergyman’s Confession: My labours on this letter were protracted and exhausting. I did not actually read Headmaster Reeves’ letter of protest to Mr. Barnable. I merely summarized its contents for him, though “merely” is a misleading word where any effort on behalf of Mr. Barnable is concerned, and especially so in this case since more than thirty summaries were necessary, the language of each more simplified than the previous one, before Mr
.
Barnable declared that, as he had still not got “the drift of it,” it was unlikely that he ever would
.
The truth is that I have not actually read
anything
to Mr. Barnable in quite some time. It was my practice, when I first began ministering to him and his family, to read at length to him. He would nod while I read, which I took to be a sign of comprehension until one day he told me that the nodding was his way of keeping time with what he called “the sound inside my head.” Though disappointed, I found the phrase quite charming, imagining this sound to be some simple folk melody or melodies with which he whiled away the time and which was a sign of how happily reconciled he was to his exacting circumstances
.
Over a period of years, it dawned on me gradually that this was not at all what he meant by “the sound inside his head,” that this sound, whatever it was, had neither words nor melody. Nor, even in the most figurative sense of the word, did it consist of “sound” of any kind
.
One day after I had paraphrased the births and deaths pages for him—I simply said that so-and-so had had a baby and that so-and-so was dead—I committed the sin of fabrication for the first time. I paraphrased for him what I said was called “The Feeling Poorly” page
. A
week later, it was the “Still Kicking” page, and after that the “Hanging on by a Thread” page. In other words, I found it more satisfying to lie to him than to endlessly reword the truth to no effect
.
Before long, everything I read to him was pure invention and worded in a way that he could understand. It was only for a brief time that I had the knack of making myself understood to him, a brief, strange, almost dreamlike time of which, in my memory, not the faintest trace remains
.
After what seemed like the lifting of a spell, I confessed my wrongdoing to my bishop in a manner that, though also lost to memory, inspired him to instruct me to ask myself
the following question: Were I to sign the resignation letter that my bishop drafted for me, move to another country and there pursue some profession wholly unrelated to the church, is there even the remotest chance that by the time I am about to meet my maker, I will have ceased, even for one moment, my speculation about what the words “the sound inside his head” might mean?
There being, to my mind, no such chance, I did not sign the letter. Instead, I continued, at a cost to myself that the reader should by this time be well qualified to estimate, to “read” to Mr. Barnable. His “reply” to Headmaster Reeves’ denunciation of the Forger, every word of which is mine, is as close as anyone could come to rendering in language what Mr. Barnable would think of the Forger were it possible to make him aware of her existence
.
Having said so, I must hereby make another confession: All the letters in protest of the Forger that were published in this paper, including the one bearing the name of Headmaster Reeves, were written by me. I tried, for so long, to read to Mr. Barnable, became so adept at paraphrasals and blatant falsehoods that, when I read the first column of the Forger, I could not resist the attempt to outdo her at her own game
.
The only real letter of protest of the Forger is that of Mr. Barnable. The idea that Headmaster Reeves has anything but the utmost respect for the Forger is pure fabrication, as are all the letters supposedly written at his exhortation—but in fact written by me, the Forging Clergyman
.
Editor’s Note: The name of the Forging Clergyman has been withheld for the sake of his church and his parishioners, and for his own, and at the request of the bishop, who assured me he does not write resignation letters for his charges and would never suggest that a man of the cloth, no matter how disturbed, forsake his church
.
What a sad story is that of the Forging Clergyman. How dismayed his parents back in Yorkshire, who must have had such high hopes for him, will be to hear how he has fared in the New World. It is said that they were greatly concerned when he first told them of his posting to Newfoundland. His father: “I would rather you were sent to Africa.” His mother: “I would rather you converted to Catholicism or admitted you were secretly a Jew.” But when the day of his departure came, he was heartened by their encouragement and optimism. But the moving finger writes and, having writ, moves on. There is, in spite of all, cause for celebration: All the Forger’s enemies are phantoms, all opposition to her imaginary. Her supposed nemesis, Headmaster Reeves, is in fact her staunchest supporter and awaits with much anticipation her next instalment
.