The Custodian of Paradise (32 page)

Will this winter never end? he said in early spring. No Newfoundlander would speculate in early spring about the end of winter. Yet I know I have heard his voice before.

Above the Narrows, despite the heavy overcast and falling snow, the sky is faintly blue. In an hour, maybe less, my father will start stirring in his chair. I must hurry home and read the letter that I hope has not fallen from my coat. Lost. Or found by someone who can read. I press my body against the box and hear the crackle of paper.

My dear Miss Fielding:

I am sorry that I was forced to miss our last appointment. I hope you will accept the callabogus as a token of my regret
.

Even now, as I write this, hours before you will appear outside my window, I fancy I can see you there, unmistakably Miss Fielding, waiting patiently, reposefully erect, as motionless as if you were under orders from me to remain that way
.

A semicircle of cigarette butts in the snow outside my window every morning, half-enclosing what might have been the footprints of a man. Evidence of your protracted vigil. A succession of vigils. Fresh evidence each morning. By noon ground into shreds beneath the boots of those whose faces I have come to know, by whose passage I can tell the time of day
.

Those to whom this street is home, those looking out their windows late at night, have seen you standing there, have grown accustomed to the sight of you standing outside Number 43
.

An open secret in the neighbourhood. Like me. Subject of fruitless speculation. You whose name they know. Me whose real name they suspect is not the one I gave when I moved in. Who made it clear to them he wanted to be left alone
.

If you ask the people of Patrick Street about me, they will tell you this: a man from away rented that house. We don’t know who he is. We thought you might know why, but we were told not to ask you. And not to tell you anything about him, not that there is much to tell. We don’t want any trouble. What they might not tell you is that I bought their silence with money
.

Never really having seen me, they will be unable to tell you what I look like. Or looked like, I should say. A man can disguise everything except his height. They might tell you I am very old. And even that would be inaccurate
.

At first your voice was unmistakably a woman’s, though not like those of other women. You sounded imperiously bored. As if there was nothing I or anyone could say that you hadn’t heard before or could not easily predict. A jaded child
.

For that was what your voice became, that of a child
.

You will never be anything but a child to me, Miss Fielding. Though it may seem to you that you have not been one since the day your mother left. Or that your childhood ended when your motherhood began
.

As mine did when my fatherhood began. The child is father of the man
.

You changed. You became less able to disguise your fear. You have always been afraid, my child
.

Callabogus. Alky. Juneshine. Junibeer. Afraid that sleep will never come. Dreamless sleep. Surcease from memory. Afraid the words will never come. The moving finger stalls and, having stalled, must point the blame. What if you had to choose between the words and the bottles you bring home each night? Which one would come at a cost that you are not prepared to pay? An unfair question now. But one that you may ask yourself some day
.

Twice fathered. Once by me. I understand you better than I understand myself. Our great fear that from lack of sleep we would lose our minds. And all the things we meant to do would remain undone
.

Those “forgeries” of yours. You are a better writer at eighteen than those you fear will ever be. Could ever have been, under any circumstances. A better one by far than me. How proud you make me feel
.

I am proud of you, your talent, your courage
.

I should be warning you of the perils of everything you do. The road to perdition. Never too late to double back. Reformation. But I am not a hypocrite. I will never know how much better or worse I might have been. A coward’s epitaph, perhaps. But not a hypocrite’s
.

I knew your mother before she came to Newfoundland. We met in Boston when she and I were your age. I stayed in Boston when, a year after breaking off our engagement, she moved to St. John’s, where she was married some months later. Dr. and Mrs. Fielding
.

I was once very much in love with your mother, far more so than she ever was with me
.

If you tell your mother about our conversations and this letter, she will deny all knowledge of me. She will admit to nothing, and not just for the sake of your children. As will Dr. Fielding. Though, in his case, the profession of ignorance would be sincere. He has no idea who I am, though we have met
.

I have never lied to you and I never will
.

We will meet again. I am more certain of this than I am of anything else
.

As you read this, I am on a boat bound for the mainland
.

Some day, Miss Fielding, I will ask your forgiveness for three transgressions, two of which have yet to be committed
.

Your Provider

September 3, 1920

I asked him, “What are we, Smallwood? You and I. What are we?” He pretended not to understand me. Looked like a child confronted with the evidence of misbehaviour. This
after inviting me to go to New York, “with” him, I presumed he meant. Perhaps he did but lost his nerve. All he is willing to admit to himself is that he wants our association to continue. What an absurd-looking couple I and any man would make. Almost any man. There must be some as tall as me. What an absurd-looking couple he and any woman would make. The height of nonsense. The nonsense of height.

What an association it has been. He believes the answer to everything is socialism. War. Poverty. Disease. Injustice. Corruption. Exploitation. Travesties like the deaths of the sealers. The slaughter of the Regiment at Beaumont Hamel. Unhappiness. He believes that, ruled by socialists, under socialism, people will be nicer to each other. I, of course, share none of his beliefs.

Searching for that “answer” is like—well, I am searching for a different answer, though I have said nothing to Smallwood about my Provider.

Yet I like spending time with him while he tries to change the world. I follow him about as if I am his mother, as if socialism is a toy and I must make sure he does not hurt himself while playing with it. Must feign interest in his fascinations and not allow my mind to wander. Must coo encouragement while disguising boredom, lest I make him jealous of whatever it is that preoccupies
me
. A mother, arms folded, trailing patiently after a boy who gravitates infallibly towards hazards that I must somehow teach him to avoid.

Perhaps it is the discrepancy in our statures that makes me think this way.

No amount of teasing can discourage him, but I defend him anyway. And, afterwards, tease him myself. This, though they tease him because of me. Just as in court. Here comes Joey with his mommy. Smallwood with his bodyguard. Fielding with her protégé.

He stump-speaks. Stands on a chair that he carries with him from wharf to wharf, pier to pier. Beseeching stevedores and lumberjacks and fishermen to unionize.

But we have no followers. “We are sowing the seeds of revolution,” Smallwood said a month ago. “If it takes a hundred years for them to sprout, then so be it.” But he is already impatient. He speaks of John Reed’s
Ten Days That Shook the World
.

“Ten
days,”
he said.

“Ten Millennia that Shook the World doesn’t have quite the same ring to it, does it?” I said.

“What is the point of planting seeds if you never see what grows from them?” he said yesterday.

And so he says he must move on to New York. Where he swears that socialism is “flourishing.”

“Not unless ‘flourishing’ is a synonym for ‘languishing,’” I said. Everyone but Smallwood seems to know that, in America, the party’s fortunes are falling fast.

“Politics are cyclical,” he said.

“Hammer and siclical,” I said, but he seemed not to notice.

I told him to go to New York. Said I wasn’t sure what I would do. Then said I was certain I would stay here. He grinned. Said he was certain I would change my mind.

New York. How can I go back there? How can I
not
go back there? But so soon. Though it seems like an eternity since I was there. For all I know, my mother and her husband have moved to some other city and I have no reason to fret about New York.

Whatever else is uncertain, it is certain I will lose Smallwood if I stay behind. I don’t even know if I
want
him.

There are times when I can imagine no future for myself. No goals, no purpose, no ambition. No fellow travellers. What
do I risk? Already, a thrice-broken heart. My mother. Prowse. My children. What was it Miss Emilee once said in class? An allusion, it seemed, to some past and secret sorrow of her own. “Hearts, like rules and promises, are made to be broken.” More sententious than profound, except that when she spoke, she sounded so dreamily preoccupied, unmindful of her audience of uncomprehending girls.

Not entirely uncomprehending. They mimicked her after class, finding hilarious the thought that Miss Emilee had been jilted, that she had once been in love and thought herself loved. That she had let slip this secret in front of all her girls. “Hearts, like rules and promises, are made to be broken.” The truism of a jilted spinster.

Yet she has managed to resist bitterness. She persists in caring for others, whom she knows will forever be oblivious to her effect on their lives, she forever unappreciated. Yeats says, “Be secret and take defeat/from any brazen throat,/Be secret and exult,/Because of all things known/That is most difficult.” And Miss Emilee does it every day.

I
AM FOREVER AFRAID, FOREVER HOPEFUL THAT, HERE IN
Manhattan, I will encounter them by chance. My mother and my children. My children and Miss Long. Or, my fondest wish, my children and some nanny whom I have never met, who knows nothing of my existence and has no reason to doubt that the children are Mrs. Breen’s.

I wonder if I would recognize my children. My own children flanking some stranger, holding her hands. I feel certain that I would. Though I have never seen them. Never. I would see myself in them, perhaps.

Though I wouldn’t care if it was by their resemblance to my mother or my father or even to Prowse that I recognized them. As long as I didn’t do the unthinkable, and as oblivious to their proximity as they were to mine, pass them by.

I don’t want to seek them out. Find their house, the house where I gave birth to them but have never seen, and spy on them. No. So much better if it seemed my children and I found each other.

Day after day I stare at pairs of children who look like they might be twins, a boy and a girl dressed so alike they
must
be twins. Every day I spot at least one such pair, some days several of them. A boy and girl in sailor suits. In green-and-black plaid wearing tam-o’-shanters.

I stare at them and realize that, for how long I have no idea, one of them has been staring back at me, quizzical, transfixed, sometimes looking on the verge of tears. I get concerned, suspicious looks from their guardians, their nannies, mothers, parents, and avert my eyes, hurry away, feeling as creepily intrusive as they must think I am, obsessive, furtive, set apart from the hordes of unhaunted people living their unhaunted, ordinary lives.

I have yet to see a pair of children that I think might be them. But also yet to see a pair of children that, at first, I don’t think are them. At first glance, every set of twins in this city look like mine. But then I look into their eyes and know I am mistaken. Know instantly. What if my twins are sometimes taken separately for walks? Then
any
six-year-old of either gender might be mine.

I will drive myself mad this way, scouring a city of millions for two children I have never seen. And what if my mother should see me? At any moment, as I walk these streets, I might be accosted by her or even Dr. Breen, who will demand to know what I am doing here. Or else, if they see me, they will make sure that I do not see them. For all I know, this has already happened. For all I know, they are waiting for the day that I turn up at their house, and praying that that day never comes.

I imagine the Breens peering out from behind the curtains of their house, ever watchful for the woman who might ruin their lives. Imagine them warning Miss Long about me. The ever-loyal Miss Long keeping vigil. Perhaps they are making plans to move, or have already moved.

I am freelancing for newspapers, under a new pseudonym, just in case some Newfoundlander here has heard of Harold Dexter.

I am going to New York, Father. (Galoot of a girl. You will ruin me.) I am not going there because of them. (Then why not
choose some other city?)
Yet he left a note that read: “Goodbye, my D.D.” Darling Daughter. He used to call me that before she left. Not often. He wrote it once on a birthday card. “Happy Birthday D.D.” I think he believes I am never coming back.

I did not tell him about Smallwood, whom he had taken to calling “the lesser of two devils, the greater being Smallwood’s father Charlie.”

I am going to be a writer, Father
.

More Forgeries
.

I promise not to contact them. If they find out I’m there, it will be from someone else, or by accident
.

Often, in these first months in New York, I have thought of my Provider. I wonder where he is and if he knows where I am. Suspect that, somehow, he does.

A “purveyor,” they would call him at Hotel Newfoundland, the boarding house where I live with a host of other Newfoundland expatriates, including Smallwood. Purveyors are easy to find in New York. I’m staying at Hotel Newfoundland partly because the place is teeming with them. Prohibition and its enforcers are flouted openly. That liquor is illicit merely makes its procurement and consumption that much more entertaining. The purveyors at Hotel Newfoundland sell to no one else but Newfoundlanders. I don’t have to risk being robbed or arrested in a city I am unfamiliar with. But whenever I complete a transaction, I think of my Provider. I read his letter every day, trying so hard to decipher it that I know it by heart. The sentences run unbidden through my mind.

Twice-fathered
has become a kind of mantra.
Can you really think of no good reason why a woman would renounce her little girl?

On a boat bound for the mainland
, he said. He might be in New York. For him too, a man I have never seen, I search
the streets, for a man as tall as the size of his hand would suggest, staring at me, approaching me.

But
all
men stare at me. Because of
my
height. All
people
do. Not even here can I be inconspicuous. Even here I am a spectacle, gawked at, one of the exotic sights of New York. I am presumed to be a New Yorker, the sort of indigenous oddity that has made the city famous, that draws people to it from around the world.

I try to play the part, to carry myself as if I belong here, so accustomed to being looked up at and pointed at that I no longer notice, try to look like I am flaunting my exoticism to shock the small-minded, provincial newcomers to New York.

But I can’t think of this city as anything but
their
birthplace, the site of that house, that room where for six months I was confined. I feel as though I spent those six months asleep, oblivious to this apparently purposeful frenzy, the mass conveyance of humanity in all directions by all existing forms of transportation, the ceaseless clamour of demolition and construction.

Not quite oblivious to it. It is vaguely familiar, in the manner of a landscape I once crossed while drowsing at the window of a train.

I was in the city for weeks before I realized that it was the sounds that I remembered, that made their way into that house from the unseen city, that I grew accustomed to while I waited, while I slept and dreamt. Yes, I have been here before. I remember it; or rather, I feel as I do when I wake from an unremembered dream.

All the Newfoundlanders know me. To them, I am Fielding the Forger, though what exactly this means few of them could say as they cannot read and have been away from home so long. They are surprised that I associate with Smallwood, whom they know was forced from Bishop Feild because of me. But there is a kind of understanding here
that the past is temporarily on hold, that this city and the peculiar kind of homesickness it inspires convey on everyone a sort of amnesty.

Not that Smallwood or I fit in here. Smallwood’s fate, it seems, is to be regarded as a kind of mascot no matter where he goes. I walk with him, follow him as he carries his chair about. A chair like all the other speakers have, like I have seen others lugging about the city or resting upside down on their laps in subway cars. A chair.
The
chair. That identifies you to all as one
of them
. Not just a socialist, not a communist, but a speaker, a stumper. That advertises to all that your destination is Union Square.

Fondly regarded, so far at least. The other Newfoundlanders find it hilarious that he has come to New York to, as he puts it, “learn how to be a socialist.” The rest of them have come in search of work that cannot be found at home, which they would rather not have left and are forever planning or fantasizing their return to.

They are incredulous that we are here by preference, that we quit the jobs we had back home that paid better than the ones we have here, which aren’t really jobs at all, just a kind of allowance given to us by the organizers of the Cause we are trying to advance.

They assume that, like Smallwood, I am working for this Cause, but I’m not. It would be pointless to try to explain to them the distinction between his occupation and mine, to explain why I make more money by writing for profit-making papers but do far less work.

I have no interest in the Cause. I spend time with those who do because Smallwood does. I am in New York for him and, ever increasingly, for
them
.