The Custodian of Paradise (24 page)
“A clergyman forging letters?” my father said. “Worse than the obscenities about boys’ britches in that other forgery. The shittery? As if leaving out the first two letters made it any less profane. Quoting the bishop? The bishop, for heaven’s sake.”
“Everyone is against us,” Herder said, “and yet the
Telegram
subscription rate has nearly doubled since your Forgeries began.”
“In that case,” I said, “you should pay me twice as much,” which he agreed to do.
He was soon paying me even more because I agreed to write a column every day.
My Dear God Almighty: I have some quibbles with the Bible
.
Adam and Eve. It’s hard to understand what deficiency in the life of an Omnipotent Being a naked man and woman were intended to correct
.
It’s hard to understand how an all-powerful, all-knowing Creator could think that no garden would be complete unless it contained the most evil agency in all the universe
.
For an all-powerful God, would a garden without the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil have been any more difficult to make?
Five thousand years ago, a naked couple stole an apple from Your garden. In order that their punishment should fit the crime, You sentenced them, and every person who ever has been or ever will be born, to death. You told them that nothing but to have them obsequiously worship and apologize to You for all eternity could make up for Your disappointment in them for doing what You made them do
.
Previously never having heard of sex, birth or death but now unable to think of anything else, Your children are no longer welcome in Your garden
.
Cain and Abel. Imagine being told by God to be fruitful and multiply when the only woman in the world was your mother. That the human race had its origins in incest is not the worst explanation for history that I’ve ever heard. Then again, neither is the fact that a lot of people believe the human race began that way
.
The Ten Commandments. Moses ascends Mount Sinai and descends with tablets of stone on which the Ten Commandments are inscribed. The Israelites have some difficulty understanding them. Take the Fifth commandment for instance:
Man, hereinafter known as the Subject, shall not kill upon pain of death anyone who, in the opinion of God, doesn’t have it coming, His opinion being impossible to consult except
ex post facto
, the consequence of guessing it incorrectly being that the Subject shall be murdered in the same manner as his victim. God reserves to Himself the exclusive right to veto or revoke this “eye for an eye” commandment, and to slaughter, especially, but not exclusively, on a mass scale anyone who breaks any of the other commandments in what shall hereafter be referred to as the Document. This commandment shall
supersede any subsequent commandment or commandments, agreements or covenants, and the Subject shall be held liable notwithstanding any paradox or contradiction, real, apparent or illusory, unless otherwise specified in codices to this agreement to which the Creator shall have exclusive access unless He waives such access within a period of time to be determined by him and not disclosed to the Subject
.
Noah’s Ark. You decide You must destroy the world by having it rain for forty days and forty nights, but You forewarn a man named Noah, instructing him to build a boat large enough to accommodate him and his family and one male and one female of every kind of animal on earth. Noah, never one to be mistaken for a skeptic, sets about the first task with the level of enthusiasm necessary to enable a non-shipwright to construct in a matter of days a boat nearly two thousand times the size of the largest one on earth. At the same time, he is surprised by the alacrity with which pairs of wild animals agree to be herded together from every corner of the globe and loaded onto an unprecedentedly capacious and hastily constructed watercraft for forty days and forty nights
.
Everyone on earth, having irked their omnipotent Creator by living sub-omnipotent lives, perishes in the Flood
.
Sodom and Gomorrah. You are now faced with the deviants of Sodom and Gomorrah. Lot and his family, forewarned by You, flee Sodom and Gomorrah just before You destroy the two iniquitous cities by fire. But Lot’s nameless wife turns to take one last look and You decide that the punishment that best fits her crime is to turn her into a pillar of salt, which must have been a chastening sight for her children
.
The Promised Land. The Israelites, led by Abraham, wander endlessly in search of the Promised Land. Some ask Abraham to ask You to give him a hint as to how long the search will last. When Abraham refuses they wonder if You really plan to make good on Your promise or if this is just
another test to see how long it will take them to wise up to the fact that You are playing them for chumps again. “He could just tell Abraham where the Promised Land is, or draw him a map,” they say. There is some question over whether even an all-knowing, all-powerful God could design a map that Abraham could read. “Would you with your riddle-addled brain recognize the Promised Land,” they ask Abraham, “if it was standing right in front of you?” Abraham says it may be that, a thousand generations hence, the Chosen People will still be looking for the Promised Land, to which one of his followers replies that a career as a motivational speaker may not be in Abraham’s future. “I’ve been wondering about this whole ‘Chosen People’ thing,” he says. “Our descendants might have trouble making friends and allies if they tell people that whole civilizations have been built just so that the Israelites could be excluded from them.”
Abraham and Isaac. You appear to Abraham and command him to kill his son Isaac as a demonstration of his love for his Creator. Abraham, who is far more sanguine about Your wisdom than is Isaac, binds Isaac to an altar made of stones. The Bible is silent on the question of Isaac’s level of reassurance when his father, holding a huge knife above his head with both hands, tells him not to be afraid. At the last second, You stay Abraham’s hand and ask him how he could have thought that You would let him kill his own son. The Israelites urge Abraham not to say anything in reply, especially nothing about having known all along that You would intervene and only raised the knife above his head to call Your bluff. Even worse would be to ask You how long You think it will be before Isaac gets a good night’s sleep
.
Your Faithful Servant,
The Right Reverend Archbishop
Cluney Aylward
Every day, alone in that big house, I composed my columns after reading the newspapers that Herder’s printer’s devil brought by the armload to my door, copies of every paper in the city, by a quick perusal of which I kept myself informed about current events and the issues of the day—government corruption, church edicts, the progress of the far-away war, high-society gatherings and other functions.
I wrote in my father’s study, at the desk he hadn’t used in years, the newspapers scattered about me on the floor, the curtains on the only window drawn so that, if not for the writing lamp, the room would have been dark. The dimly lit study reminded me of the rooms in my mother’s house in New York and also, of course, of my two lost children.
Their names are David and Sarah
. I would pause in my writing, take out the little note my mother had left for me on the pillow and stare at it, calculating how many days it was since they were born.
But I did not linger long in speculation about them. My six o’clock deadline made idleness an unaffordable luxury. I woke every day with a sense of urgent purpose, set to work almost instantly, often without bothering to go downstairs for breakfast, or to light the main fireplace in the front room. When I heard the six o’clock knock of the printer’s devil, I was still writing and was forced to contrive some abortive ending to my column.
I went downstairs, still in my housecoat, and opened the door to find the little boy on the step, a raggedly dressed fellow with bright blue eyes and an ink-and-newsprint smudged face and hands as notched and filthy as a blacksmith’s. I had for weeks been tipping him a penny each day before I found out that, for some reason thinking it was for Herder, he folded the penny inside the pages of my column and slipped the whole lot under Herder’s door. Herder, taking the penny to be some good luck ritual of mine, kept it without a word either to me or the devil. When Herder, in a note delivered to me by the devil, mentioned “our lucky penny” one day, I discovered from the devil what was happening. Herder agreed when I told him to give the boy the eleven pennies he was owed.
“Eleven cents, miss,” he said the next day, regarding me with a mixture of gratitude and suspicion.
“Yes,” I said. “Eleven cents. What will you do with it?”
“I got it hid some place,” he said. “Where me mother and father won’t find it.”
I gave him another penny. “Here,” I said. “You better hide this one too then. It’s a good hiding place, is it?”
“Oh yes, miss. No one knows.”
It was now rare for me to go outside or even to see daylight, so immersed was I in work by day, so tired by six o’clock. I had no energy for anything but reading. I drank, some nights far too much. Time seemed, as it had in New York, like one interminable night, during which I alternated between wakefulness and sleep, as much according to whim as to the pressures of my deadline. Inasmuch as I even thought about the future, I imagined that I would live like this forever. And it was an appealing prospect.
Late in what for other people was the night, my father would come home to find me reading in front of the fire or walking about upstairs, dressed as though it was midday and visitors were overdue. He never slept in what had been
their
bedroom, had slept nowhere but in his fireside chair since her departure. He had all but forsaken the upper storeys of the house, their bedroom, his study, the bedrooms where the children they once planned to have were to have slept and that were superfluous guest rooms now, guests being unheard of. I was wide awake and reading at bedtime in what was essentially his bedroom, coals in the fire cracking loudly.
“Do you ever sleep, girl?” he said one night as he walked into the front room after the weary exhalation that always followed the closing of the door.
“I slept from seven until midnight,” I said. “I have never been able to sleep more than five hours at a stretch. I must inherit that from you.”
It was cruel, especially at that hour, to speak of “inheriting” anything from him, cruel, however implicitly, to invoke the Question.
He grunted and muttered. “She slept lightly too,” he said. He sat with another sigh in his recliner, which he tilted back until he was staring at the ceiling.
“You are like a ghost in this house,” he said. “There is not a patient of mine whose skin is as pale as yours. You need fresh air, sunshine. How unlike your peers you are. Have you no friends that you can spend time with?”
“No,” I said. “But I will happily converse with any friends that you bring home.”
“The way you did with Dr. Wheeler.”
“He is not your friend.”
“Not any more. The Forger’s Father. That’s how I am known. A laughingstock.”
“I know of no one who thinks that.”
“You know of no one. Period. But you sit here in this house, day after day, inciting people you have never met. About whom you know nothing. What do you know of the world? The million decisions and compromises men must make each day. Just to keep the whole thing going. Just to make it
work.”
“I have seen something of the world.”
“Yes. Yes. Enough of it to make you run and hide. This cannot continue. You have no idea—how much damage you are doing. To people’s reputations. To those of this city’s most important institutions. The churches. The courts. The schools. And important men. Merchant families. Long-established names—”
“I know exactly what I’m doing.”
“Measures must be taken. For the common good. Including yours.”
“What sort of measures?”
“The bishop has asked me to intervene.”
“WHAT—”
“He wants you to—step down.”
“What on earth does that mean?”
“Stop writing those infernal forgeries.”
“Why should I—”
“We met. At his request. And together we—came up with some suggestions. He does not wish to embarrass you further. And certainly has no intention of destroying you.”
“What were these ‘suggestions’?”
“As I said, he would like you to step down. Otherwise, he will instruct his ministers to instruct their congregations to cease purchasing or reading the
Telegram
. Also, he will issue an edict against advertising in the
Telegram
. Take my word for it, girl. The people of this city will follow their bishop’s instructions. The merchants will follow his instructions. Your stubbornness, if it persists, could well ruin your employer. But no one need be ruined. We spoke of reputations. He asked me to imagine it. Our name spoken from every pulpit in the city. The bishop has met with the Catholics. Everyone is in agreement. Our name singled out as a name to be avoided. You singled out. As someone whose writings are too sinful to be read. My God, girl, the embarrassment. The shame. The bishop wants to avoid this as much as I do.”
“You
met
with him. And what a
meeting
it must have been.”
“Girl. It is the measure of your—your limited knowledge—that you did not foresee something like this.”
“Why did the bishop not have someone
intervene
with Herder?”
“Because he knows that Herder is—unreasonable. Reckless. He is always spoiling for a fight, no matter what the cost.”
“A fight that he might win. He has been a publisher for thirty years. I’m sure he has faced such threats before. Survived denunciation from the pulpits of St. John’s—”