The Custodian of Paradise (49 page)

My dear Miss Fielding:

I brooded for weeks, then did exactly what I had sworn to myself I would not do. Stooped to seeking revenge. I wrote to her:

“I have proof of what you did that I could supply to the police and to everyone whose opinion of you matters to you or whose reputations would be ruined along with yours. I place no value on ‘reputations,’ but I know how much they mean to you and yours
.

“Imagine the effect on your parents of this revelation, especially now that, just when they had given up hope, you have returned to the family fold
.

“I could do all this without identifying myself, let alone implicating myself. Or I could reveal that I was the father of your murdered child. You as good as identified me in your letter to your friend
.

“A nun and a priest. The scandal of scandals. That you, a high-born nun, had destroyed a child, had what you call a ‘procedure’ performed on you would be bad enough. But that a priest had been your partner in this crime. Such a scandal could never be lived down. Not even if your parents disowned you could they save their all-important reputations. What laughingstocks they, not to mention your brothers, sisters, aunts, uncles, cousins would be. What a slaughter of ‘innocents’ and reputations there would be
.

“You would be laughed at, reviled, shunned, shut out
.

“But I am going to give you a choice, one that I dare say you will give more thought to than you did to the matter of our child. A very difficult choice
.

“You will have to decide which of two alternatives will hurt the ones you love the least. It may be they will suffer equally no matter which way you decide. Or it may be that, after all, no one’s reputation and no one’s happiness is more important to you than your own. In that case, the decision would be easy, but the consequences—well. You know your loved ones. I do not. The judgment will be yours to make. You will envy Solomon, so easily resolved was his dilemma in comparison with yours. Here, then, are your choices
.

“Stay or leave. If you stay, I will do everything I can to ensure that the subsequent scandal brings down the House of Hanrahan
.
Imagine the homiletic editorials. The irony that such a family as the Hanrahans could be involved. The gleeful incredulity of readers. The high-born brought down into the gutter, revealed for what people will say they all along suspected them to be. Corruption born of decadence and arrogance
.

“And who would believe, Miss Hanrahan, that your parents did not know of your ‘situation,’ that you did not go to them, begging them for help?

“All of this is avoidable if you choose as I think you will
.

“You have only to do what you did when you joined the convent. Throw over your present life in favour of another. Tell them you still disapprove of the way they live. Tell them that, though you were right to leave the convent, you should never have come back to them. Renounce them as you did before, as you did the convent. As you did me. As you renounced our child
.

“So many renunciations. One more should not be difficult
.

“Except that this time you must renounce not others, but yourself. The life you hoped to have. The one you left the convent for. The one for which you destroyed our child
.

“Either way you choose, you must renounce yourself. The life you value above all other lives you cannot have. I have taken it from you
.

“The House of Hanrahan will fall unless you leave. Without you, it will bear up as it did the first time you renounced it
.

“You are not necessary to your family’s survival. On the contrary, you are a hindrance to it. Inimical to it. They will be destroyed unless you turn your back on them forever. As will you.”

She replied:

“That you would carry out the threats you have made, I have no doubt. To think that you were once a priest. Or once fooled people into thinking you were one
.

“Unless I renounce the ones I love you will destroy them
.

“So. I hereby renounce them. I will leave not for my sake, but for theirs. If I could spare them by doing so, I would happily destroy myself
.

“We Hanrahans love each other. But love, too, has its limits, and ours, it sorrows me to say, would not withstand the onslaught you describe
.

“I will leave. I will offer them no explanation. I will not say goodbye. I will not forewarn them. I will leave a note that they will find after I am gone. The note will read: ‘I should not have come back home when I left the convent. For reasons I cannot explain, we must never meet again.’

“They will try to find me and will almost certainly succeed, but I will not relent.”

And so she left just as she said she would. And in a briefer time than even she could have foreseen, they reconciled themselves to her decision
.

She seems to have expected that they would never give up hoping for a reconciliation. But they did. I can tell you that there came a time when even to speak her name was forbidden in that house
.

She learned of each of her parents’ deaths by reading of them in the papers. She has never seen her nieces or her nephews, who may not even know that she exists
.

She deflected their attempts to communicate
.

I am not boasting, Miss Fielding. Am not gleefully recounting my revenge. That it was a terrible thing I did I fully understand and regret, yet there are still times I cannot help but speak unkindly of her. What I did was terrible in its pointlessness. It did not bring back my child. It merely took someone else’s child away. But to be dismissed as a misfit by the mother of your never-born child. There comes a point when spite is an end in itself. When bitterness somehow both sustains and enervates the soul. I lived in such a state for years
.

Sometimes I dream that I am blameless. That in spite of everything I merely turned my back on her and began my life again. I feel such relief, release. I dream that my crime was just a dream from which I have woken to realize that I am innocent. But then I wake from this buoyant dream of absolution to find that I am guilty. “Guilt still lies like lead upon my soul,” she
wrote. Yes, like lead. My whole body sags from the weight of it the way it did when the nuns layered me with gold-woven vestments in the sacristy. Reverse alchemy
.

After a period of wandering, she moved to Newfoundland and married Dr. Fielding
.

Imagine her arriving in St. John’s on a ship from Halifax and Boston. Her arrival was described to me by my delegate
.

By no means did she arrive penniless in Newfoundland. She had renounced her parents and their money, but not the money that her grandfather had left in trust for her. He died when she was sixteen and left to each of his grandchildren a considerable sum of money to which no conditions were attached except that they not be allowed to draw upon it until they came of age
.

Your mother, when she took her vow of poverty, did not renounce this modest fortune or donate it to some charity or to the Church. The one thing she did not renounce was money. It was there, waiting for her, while she was in the convent, while she was living like the other nuns whose vows were sincere and for whom poverty was not some sort of game that they could walk away from when they tired of it
.

Of course, she could not arrive in St. John’s otherwise “bereft.” She had to have, in addition to money, some sort of past, some sort of explanation as to why, unmarried, unaccompanied, she had simply turned up in St. John’s, presumably leaving behind her, somewhere, a family, a set of peers, a social position, a city, a country
.

She chose to come to Newfoundland because it was far from Boston but not so far that her social credentials would not be recognized. She did not change her name. She let it be known that she was one of the Hanrahans of Boston, briefly a nun, a woman who, though she had broken with her family for undisclosed reasons, had not broken with their money
.

And, in a way, she was not unaccompanied, for she had been corresponding with Dr. Fielding, of whom she had heard from a medical-school classmate of his
.

He, without ever having met her, proposed. And she, without ever having met him, accepted
.

It must have seemed to both of them to be as good a match as they could hope for
.

It had become clear to your father and to all who knew him that no woman of social consequence would take him as a husband. In a way, he was just what your mother was looking for. Credulous, in peril of lifelong bachelorhood, ready to “settle” for less than a man of his station could reasonably have expected in a wife. He would not inquire too assiduously, if at all, into her past, could easily be discouraged from attempting to reconcile her with her family in the unlikely event that it even occurred to him to try
.

So. They were married. I wrote to her frequently, lest she think I had lost interest in her, moved on, become a “meddler” now in someone else’s life. Perhaps removed myself from life itself
.

My delegate described her life. Their lives. They had no friends and few associates. She was regarded as being snobbish, remote, uninterested in the wives of other doctors
.

They would go out walking in the evening, arm in arm, the doctor smiling and brandishing a cane, raising it abruptly in a gesture of greeting, all but knocking the hats off men and women who passed them in the street
.

That she had cast so wide a net and still captured no better specimen than Dr. Fielding
.

To go so far afield for a husband and conclude that your best bet was a man about whom people had been making jokes since he was ten
.

You could see the disappointment in her face. What could he possibly have written to her that had so inflated her expectations?

I confess that I am not merely repeating my delegate’s reports. I should not still be gleeful about her predicament after all these years. It is cruel and self-demeaning, but I cannot help myself. It was almost comical, how completely unprepared she seemed to be for deficiencies that even in a letter should have
been obvious to anyone. This woman from Boston had settled for what no woman from St. John’s would settle for
.

They walked, they took the evening air but, as far as my delegate could tell, they never spoke. Despite their silence, Dr. Fielding seemed immensely pleased with himself, as if the wife on his arm proved how badly he had been misjudged by the women of St. John’s
.

“Dr. Fielding. Sister Fielding,” some men said as they tipped their hats to them. The doctor seemed oblivious to their scorn, to the insult to his wife, seemed to think they had been greeted with respect or had been joked with good-naturedly, to which he responded by smiling and laughing, while she stared impassively ahead as if she had no choice but to endure such slights in silence
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You may think that I was jealous of Dr. Fielding, but nothing could be more untrue
.

The woman I had loved had been a phantom. She had never existed. She had always been the woman Dr. Fielding married. A spoiled heiress who had drawn me into her experiment with religion, self-sacrifice and poverty. A woman whose frivolousness I had seen too late. An heiress. An erress. A woman given to making mistakes, grave ones, and capable of doing anything to avoid their consequences. Heiress. Erress. Murderess. All of these. Yet not undeserving of forgiveness. It is as much to save one’s own soul as to save one’s enemies’ that one forgives
.

I could simply have turned my back on her. There have been many times since when I wish I had. But why, having forgiven her, can I not forgive myself?

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