The Custodian of Paradise (33 page)

It is different in Union Square than it was on the waterfront in St. John’s. The audiences are much larger, but the speakers
who compete for their attention far more numerous. It was a revelation to Smallwood that there are different schools of socialism.

Each school has its champion who tries to woo the others’ audience away. Smallwood winds up preaching to the other speakers, imploring them, while he stands on his chair, and they stand on theirs, to unite behind him.

The socialists alternately address each other and the audience so that each seems to be making two speeches at once, one to his chair-elevated colleagues, the other to the audience whose upraised faces never linger long on one speaker.

I call our nightly visit to Union Square “The Hour of Babel.”

In addition to socialist stumpers, there are preachers of major denominations and obscure religions, Baptists warning of hellfire and Pentecostalists of Armageddon. Pro-prohibitionists, anti-prohibitionists, suffragettes and anti-suffragettes. Champions of such arcane creeds and ideologies as The Living Light Crusade, Vanguardianism and something simply called Resplendence.

Smallwood, as he departs the square with his chair beneath his arm, is infuriated, frustrated, incredulous, indignant.

“Only legitimates should be allowed to speak,” he says.

I bite my tongue, do not say that most of the audience comes out to be entertained, and as far as they are concerned, the “illegitimates” are far more entertaining.

“They could have auditions,” I said, “but who would get to choose the judges?”

“Any sober-minded person should be allowed to speak,” he said. “But all the cranks should be banned.”

“Who would you trust to tell the two apart?”

“I’m a speaker, not an organizer.”

“It would be much easier if cranks were made to wear badges identifying them as such.”

“Much easier.”

“Likewise lunatics, imbeciles, bedlamites and crackpots. It is a common misconception that they are all the same. Your badge would identify you as A Voice of Reason.
The
Voice of Reason. Which would you prefer?”

“One voice of reason in all that pandemonium. Who would even notice? The place is full of unlicensed stumpers. No one bothers to ask them for credentials. The police prefer it the way it is. Mayhem. That way, no one hears the socialists. Or if they
do
hear them, no one takes them seriously. They get lumped in with all the other cranks.”

The other night, after we were told that, standing side by side, we looked like some sort of vaudeville act, Smallwood told me to mingle with the crowd and hand out leaflets. My absence was noted by the regulars, who told him that, if he sat on my shoulders, he was sure to get a bigger audience.

I am one of only a few women at Hotel Newfoundland. The only one not staying here with her husband. It is officially forbidden for an unmarried woman, or a woman unaccompanied by her husband to live here. But I talked and bribed my way around that rule. I got strange looks and suggestive remarks from the other tenants at first.

“What’s
she
doing here?” I heard a woman on the elevator whisper to another woman at a volume I was meant to overhear. “A bit grand for this place. If she’s half as grand as she thinks she is. And single too. They say she drinks.”

“She
does
drink,” I said so loudly that both women jumped with fright. “She
is
single. And she doesn’t think she’s half as grand as you think she does. As for what I’m doing here, I’m keeping company with a platonic friend of mine. So far, he’s been as platonic as Socrates. And I see no sign that he’s about to change. Unfortunately. I may have to
take matters into my own hands. Though there’s not much matter to him.”

Now the suggestive remarks have stopped, as have the strange looks, if only because people have grown used to the sight of me.

The other night, pretending to be drunker than I was, I asked Smallwood, “Isn’t it about time you made me a dishonest woman?” Perhaps believing that, by the next day, I would forget having asked the question, he said nothing.

I said to a woman in the hallway who, as we passed, ignored me except to stand righteously erect, and with her chin uplifted, stare straight ahead: “I chased him here, but he remains chaste. Whereas I remain unchased and therefore chaste.”

God knows what she thought I meant. I will not indulge them by defending myself against unspoken accusations, especially since I wish the accusations were true.

About half the people at Hotel Newfoundland are from a small outport called Harbour Main. It is believed that they have an innately superior sense of balance, and they are therefore much sought after as construction workers, especially high-beam walkers.

For generations, Harbour Mainiacs, as they are called, have been coming to New York. They are said to have helped build the Brooklyn Bridge, as well as some of the city’s tallest buildings.

Although they stay at Hotel Newfoundland, they keep to themselves, perhaps because they are almost all related—fathers, sons, brothers, cousins, uncles, nephews, all of whom are said to return to Newfoundland only often and long enough to impregnate their wives, Harbour Main being, for most of the year, populated solely by women and children.

There is an unmistakable Harbour Mainiac look. Almost all have red hair and freckled faces, stand about five-six and
are broadly built. Their proportions are said to give them a low centre of gravity.

The third floor is theirs and theirs alone.

They have an unerring ability to spot or uncover a sore point that they revel in, attacking in the slyest, most mean-witted way. Mere seconds after they have decided they dislike someone, they are attributing to their new enemy’s mother and sisters the most arcane forms of sexual deviance.

Smallwood, who, in his first encounter with them, unwisely denounced them for some relatively mild innuendo about his mother, is one of their favourite targets.

They tell him, in fewer words, that the only part of him big enough to satisfy me is his nose.

They inferred, from the colour of Smallwood’s face one day when they teased him about doing “it” with me, that we have yet to do it.

“What’re ya waitin’ for, Joey, your mommy to lend you a guiding hand?”

“You should ignore them,” I said when we were in his room. “Talking back only makes it worse.”

“I can hold my own with that crowd,” he said.

“For God’s sake, Smallwood,” I said. “Don’t say anything to them about holding your own.”

Collectively armed with what seemed to be an exclusively scatological wit, they have, in spite of their illiteracy, a rudimentary knack for salacious puns, any one of which would be easy to ignore, but there seems to be no end to them, each Harbour Mainiac building on another’s pun in a relentless bombardment that the most stoic of victims, let alone Smallwood, could not withstand in silence.

“He’s a good man, Joey is. In spite of his
short
comings.”

“You’re a disgusting bunch of scoundrels,” Smallwood said.

“She’s a big one, Joey. You might need a map to find it. Now me, I wouldn’t need a map.”

“No,” I said. “Not if it had words on it. But you
would
need a rope and a gun.”

“I know my way around women.”

“Yes. I see you go around them all the time.”

“I can stand up for myself,” Smallwood all but shouted at me.

“You’re a tightly knit group of men, aren’t you,” I said. “All from the same place. All look as much alike as your signatures. Besides ‘X,’ there
are
twenty-five other letters in the alphabet, you know. You can use them to make what are known as words, not all of which have four letters or end with
ck
. And if you learn enough words, you can write what is called a sentence. Like you, most sentences are simple. But some are compound and others complex.”

They use the nearby Guaranteed Discreet Letter-Writing-and-Reading Service to communicate with their wives. They refer to it simply as “The Service” and go there furtively throughout the week.

Their illiteracy is a sore point with them, but even more so is their refusal to do what others at Hotel Newfoundland do and avail themselves of literate residents to communicate with their wives and families.

“My friends at the Service tell me all is well back in Harbour Main,” I said. “And I feel that I understand all of
you
so much better too, now that I have read your letters to your wives and their replies to you.”

They glared uncertainly at me.

“Oh, I know the people at the Service can be trusted to keep what you tell them to themselves. But, you see, I work there part-time, and we all read one another’s letters. But otherwise we’re perfectly discreet.”

Some of them looked at a man named Dalton, who, though not much older than the others, seemed to be regarded as their patriarch.

“You don’t work for the Service,” he said, focusing an unblinking, menacing stare at me, blue eyes among freckles so numerous they all but coalesced into a single birthmark.

“I’d be honoured if you hired me to write and read letters on your behalf. But it’s gratifying to hear about you from the others.”

“Liar,” he said. “That’s what you’re famous back home for, telling lies. Fielding the Forger. I heard you got Smallwood here kicked out of school.”

“Well,” I said, “you can’t believe everything you read—I mean, that someone reads to you.”

Dalton looked at Smallwood.

“Hiding behind a woman’s skirts,” he said. “Some man you are, mommy’s boy.”

“Good news, Mr. Dalton. Your son has decided to do the honourable thing and marry your daughter.”

“You shut your gob, before I shuts it with this.”

“You have no need to be ashamed.”

“I told you to shut your gob.”

Smallwood took a step in his direction, but I held out my cane, pressing it against his chest.

“It’s time to go inside,” I said, “and give these poor men some privacy. They have as much right as anyone to bawl their eyes out without being gaped at by the less sensitive and more stout-hearted.”

However lame is the sexual innuendo of the Harbour Mainiacs, it serves to increase the awkwardness between Smallwood and me.

By tacit understanding, we never mention “them” when we’re alone together. Them and, by implication, the sole subject that inspires them. About which, it sometimes seems to me, Smallwood has yet to be fully informed. Certainly, he has no experience.

Him, never. Me, once. What a gap between never and
once. Between him and me. God knows what, down through the years, he overheard in that tiny house.

Thirteen children his mother has had. Perhaps he sees desire as a cause or symptom of poverty and ignorance. A trait of the poor and ignorant. Sex as an indulgence of the weak-willed that destroys more lives than it creates. As repugnant as liquor and idleness.

“You made me look like a fool,” he said, once he had closed the door of my room behind us.

“I thought I made
them
look like fools.”

“You make everyone look like fools. Why couldn’t you just let me defend myself? You’d think I
was
a momma’s boy—”

“Smallwood, there must have been twenty of them—”

“I told you, I can
talk
my way out of trouble. I wasn’t planning to fight them.”

“Smallwood, they were not spoiling for a debate. I only got away with what I said because I’m a woman. No one really got hurt.”

“The point is I have to show them I’m not afraid of them.”

“You should be afraid of them.
I
am. But I promise. From now on, I won’t intervene.”

“It wasn’t because you are a woman. You’re willing to say anything to anyone because you have no reputation to protect.”

“Look, you’re upset—”

“Or should I say, your reputation is not
worth
protecting.”

I looked away from him.

“Who respects you, Fielding? Can you think of one person who respects you?”

“I thought
you
did.”

“Lots of people are afraid of you and your so-called wit. But that’s not respect.”

“The question of how I am regarded by others has never much concerned me. Most others, anyway.”

“You are an only child. Your father is a doctor. You will inherit your father’s house and money. You can afford to be indifferent. Disdainful. Sarcastic. Aloof. One day, you will have as much respect as money can buy, and that’s a lot. I am one of thirteen children whose parents have no money. I don’t have an inheritance to fall back on in case I fail—”

“In the highly unlikely event that my father includes me in his will, I will never accept a cent from him. But as it happens, his plans for his estate do not include me—”

“You’re no different from my socialist friends. The ones who play at being poor. New York is just a holiday for all of you—”

“Being the lone associate of Joey Smallwood is no holiday.”

“Did your father offer you money when you told him you were going to New York? Or did he offer you money so
that
you would go?”

“He offered me money when I told him I was going to New York.”

“And you accepted it?”

“Yes.”

“Does he send you money?”

“Yes. It is—it is, as you know, more difficult for a woman to find employment—”

“Especially one who, in spite of prohibition, is a drinker. Whose room and board includes a bottle of booze every other day.”

“Why are you saying these things?”

“Because they’re true.”

“You know what I mean.”

“My father buys booze for no one but himself. The hunger of his children satisfies his thirst. A booze allowance.
That’s what you have. A rum trust fund. And you say he will exclude you from his will.”

“Yes. He cares as much for his reputation as you do for yours. He is afraid of how it would make him look if his daughter wound up penniless. A penniless drinker. Or worse. He is afraid of me for many reasons. Better to keep me in money. Mollified and ossified. No telling what I might do or say if he cut me off. But about his legacy he is unconcerned. What I might do or say once he is gone he does not dwell on. After a life of paying lip service to God and religion, he says there is no afterlife. Only oblivion. Which he is looking forward to.”

“What are you talking about, Fielding? What do you mean by what you ‘might say or do’? What could be worse for him that what you’ve already said and done?”

“Never mind. I have no excuses, Smallwood.”

“And if you accept money from your father now, why would you decline what he leaves you in his will?”

“Perhaps you’re right. Perhaps, if he left me something, I wouldn’t decline it.”

The next evening, Smallwood loitered on the stoop, sitting on his stump speaking-chair until the Harbour Mainiacs came home from work. I convinced him to let me wait with him, promising that I would speak in no one’s defence except my own.

At the approach of the eerily similar-looking men from Harbour Main, he rose from his chair, carried it down the steps and stood on it. I remained, standing, on the stoop.

“I am here,” Smallwood said, “to tell you how to start a union and to explain to you the principles of socialism. I am here to tell you why your children never have enough to eat—”

“And
I
am here,” Dalton said, “to explain to you how women get knocked up.”

“I am here to explain to you why the men you work for pay you next to nothing—”

“What’s she doing standing all the way up there? Why don’t
you
make a speech, ya big bitch? We’ll see who walks away this time.”

I remembered my promise not to intervene.

“Who corrupted the Senate? The capitalists. Who fixes congressmen? The capitalists.”

“Who wipes Joey’s arse?
FIELDING
.”

I knew it would not be long before they made for Small wood.

“All those wives of yours, alone in Harbour Main,” I shouted. “While the Harbour Mainiacs are away, the nymphomaniacs will play. But I don’t suppose you know what nymphomaniac means, do you? It means your wives are just as good at balancing on beams as you are. They spend as much time erecting things as you do.”

Eyes no longer fixed with amusement on Smallwood, they stared at me.

“You think that no-dick midget of a doctor back home is your daddy? Your mommy must have done it with the Tall Man from the circus—”

“Plenty of new letters from the Service today,” I said. “Plenty of news from home. Your wife, Mr. Dalton, insists that you mustn’t be ashamed about your problem. She says she knows lots of men who wet the bed. In fact, she says that in your absence, some of them are wetting yours. Exactly what she meant by that she didn’t say.”

“I don’t see any sign that you
are
a woman,” Dalton said, “but even if you are, you opened that big gob of yours one too many times.”