The Custodian of Paradise (53 page)
“Second best at best,” the judge declared. “It would seem the Milkman is our man unless the Silent Stranger has been holding something back.”
The Silent Stranger opened his cloak and spread wide his arms.
My mother fainted.
The judge leaned forward.
“Well, now I’ve seen it all,” he said. “At least I hope I’ve seen it all.”
The Silent Stranger closed his cloak.
“There can be no doubt,” the judge said. “The Silent Stranger is the father of this woman. Your mother conceived you, Miss Fielding, with the Man of Many Masks. Daughter, meet your father. Father, meet your daughter.”
They all slapped their knees and roared with laughter.
“This court rules that the charge has been proven. That while Mrs. Fielding was yielding to the advances of the Stranger, Dr. Fielding was at work in his surgery. The deed was done, the horns were hung. Well hung, in fact. Dr. Fielding is hereby declared a cuckold and sentenced to his daughter’s life, including time served, that being the age of his daughter plus nine months, give or take a week or two, at the moment of his death or at the moment of her death, whichever comes first. The court is adjourned.”
My father soon after resigned from the Old Comrades Club, citing gout as the reason he preferred to stay at home.
A month after that, he took out an ad in the papers announcing that he was retiring from the practice of medicine and offering to refer his patients to other doctors.
“I cannot concentrate,” he told me. “Perhaps my hearing is bad. I miss most of what my patients say. I haven’t made any mistakes, but there have been a few complaints. Personality clashes. Nothing really. But there you go. I haven’t touched a scalpel in five years anyway. No operations. Just referrals. Can’t concentrate. My mind wanders, you see. As you get older. Only natural. No point resisting nature. Irresistible. I think about all sorts of things. Not just about her. I’m better off at home where I can concentrate.”
He was so inept at disingenuousness I could not bear to listen to him. As it was ages since he had had a housekeeper, I had to hire a woman to see to his daily needs and a man to manage his financial affairs. I paid them with
his
money, having none of my own to spare.
It soon seemed that my father, without prompting from me and the housekeeper, would never have moved from his chair.
I went to see Herder.
“I’ve written something,” I said.
“A Forgery?” he said. Eager. Hopeful.
I showed it to him. He read it, chuckling, shaking his head.
“It is no longer possible for the Anglican archbishop to intercede with his congregation and admonish them to consult with any doctor but my father, because my father is no longer able to practise medicine.”
“I am sorry to hear it,” Herder said. “But if I publish this, I’ll be sued for every cent I have.”
“I know.”
“It’s worse than your other Forgeries. More risky, I mean. Far too risky.”
“I don’t want you to publish it,” I said. “Merely to print it. Five hundred copies.”
“A broadsheet? What do you plan to do with it?”
“Distribute it. Door to door. At night. I’ve made a list of who should get a copy. But don’t print it if you’re worried they can trace it back to you.”
“I would not want to be on that list.”
“You’re not.”
“What pseudonym would you use?”
“No pseudonym.”
“That would be foolish. Pointless. He’ll sue you. See to it that you never work again.”
“I have nothing. My father no longer has any patients they can warn away from him. As for making sure I never work again, well, I could write under pseudonyms, or anonymously. For you.”
“You’re risking everything.”
“Maybe. But it’s true, what I’ve written. Even though I can’t prove it. Not
all
of it. But imagine how embarrassing a suit of any kind would be for them.”
“And for you. And your father.”
“My father’s humiliation is complete. Believe me. And my skin is thicker than most.”
Three weeks later, Herder told me the broadsheets were ready. He said he could hardly deliver such a conspicuous bundle to my boarding house, so I would have to come to his warehouse after hours.
There were only forty names on my list. The balance of the broadsheets I would simply leave in bundles wherever they were certain to be found.
I could easily cram forty copies of the broadsheet in a satchel. Forty households, most of them in the same area of town, the east end. The Old Comrades. Forty doors under each of which I would slip a broadsheet. Then back to the warehouse. I would distribute as many bundles as I could before the sun came up.
I visited the forty houses one mid-week night in late September. I had waited for a clear, calm night so that the broadsheets I left outside would not be rained on or blown away. I set a few dogs to barking, but they stopped when I hurried away. In one house, a light came on upstairs but soon went out again. I was at it all night.
I left batches of broadsheets on sidewalks, on the steps of churches, in the doorways of stores.
During the last hour before the sun came up, I distributed a final sixty broadsheets randomly. I was so tired when I got back to my boarding house that I fell asleep sober.
Dear Editor:
It is time that the B.I.S., by way of coming to the aid and defence of Mr. David Prowse, made itself and its mandate known to the people of Newfoundland
.
None have been more unjustly victimized by us than Mr. Prowse. Not for a moment more should he be left to speculate about who is to blame for what people have been saying for years behind his back
.
We, the B.I.S., are regretfully to blame. We are, to our eternal discredit, the source of every bit of vicious gossip, malicious innuendo and unfounded rumour currently circulating about the poor man. The man we hand-picked. The man we unanimously agreed would, at no peril to himself, be most useful to us in making Newfoundlanders aware of the existence, nature and purpose of irony
.
We fear that, like most Newfoundlanders, Mr. Prowse has not heard of the B.I.S., the Benevolent Ironists’ Society
.
In the charter that we drew up at our first meeting, we defined irony as “the art of saying the opposite of what you mean.” This incomplete definition caused even our members to confuse irony with deceit, hypocrisy and bald-faced lying, with the result that never was a man more artlessly slandered with more benign intent than Mr. Prowse
.
We refined the definition thus: “Irony is the art of making the listener or reader understand that you mean the opposite of what you say.”
We decided to begin with the propagation of the least subtle form of irony—that is, by making statements whose untruth we believed would be obvious to everyone
.
It was, and still is, our belief that there was no one in St. John’s more admired and therefore more impervious to irony than Mr. Prowse
.
And so we spread the rumour that, because of his hopeless ambition to be a judge some day, he was referred to by his colleagues as B. W. Prowse
.
We said that the initials stood for Big Wig and pointed out that they rhymed with those of his historian grandfather, D.W. Prowse, who was also a judge. And so was born the famous saying: “Prowse has about as much chance of matching his grandfather’s accomplishments as he does of keeping his wife out of other men’s beds.”
Alas, the irony of this was lost on everyone who was not a member of the B.I.S. Mr. Prowse would, it was said, never be a B.W. but only a W.B., a Would Be. A. Would Be this, a Would Be that
.
In an attempt to undo the wrong against Mr. and Mrs. Prowse, the B.I.S. spread the story that it was Mrs. Prowse’s love of acronyms that had given rise to her reputation for promiscuity
.
Mrs. Prowse, who playfully called her husband B. W., so certain was she of his eventual appointment to the bench, also called him W.B., after the poet Yeats, from whose work it was her husband’s habit to read to her at bedtime. The Prowses’ butler was
himself fond of acronyms and given to keeping Mrs. Prowse company in the making of them and the fanciful decipherment of those already in existence
.
But he was not a learned man and misunderstood when Mr. Prowse said to him, “I am told that while I am at work you are at play with my acronymphomaniac of a wife.” Thinking both he and his lady to have been insulted and ignoring Mr. Prowse’s protests that an acronymphomaniac was “someone whose appetite for acronyms is insatiable,” he punched Mr. Prowse, giving him a black eye, which all assumed that Mr. Prowse had received at the hand of a rival for his wife’s affections
.
It was when we saw Mr. Prowse’s black eye that we of the B.I.S. realized that things were getting out of hand
.
“They have inverted the oath of fidelity,” I heard a lawyer say about the Prowses. “The only man she says no to is her husband and the only woman he says no to is his wife.” Thus was Mr. Prowse also rumoured to be promiscuous. Those of us in the B.I.S. came to his defence
.
We spread rumours of a letter in which the phrase the “satiric Mr. Prowse” occurred. We composed a broadsheet that stated: “There are certain words that, like children, should be seen and not heard.” This was by way of claiming that someone had overheard the letter being read aloud and had taken the word “satiric” for “satyric,” which means “a man given to excessive and abnormal sexual craving.” “Thus,” our broadsheet stated, “just as, by the mere omission of a prefix, Mrs. Prowse earned a reputation as a slut, Mr. Prowse, by the substitution of but one letter for another, earned one as a lecherous, skirt-chasing whoremonger.”
Alas, we could find no one who would print our broadsheet and it was soon said of Mr. Prowse that “he is just as mad for it as she is.”
One night, someone wrote the following on the courthouse steps and signed it Mrs. Winnifred Prowse: “LLB—Baccalaureate of Law my foot. ‘Long-legged Bastard’ is more like it. He would be
more nicely proportioned if each of his legs was two inches shorter and his –ck was two inches longer.”
There was much speculation about the incomplete word. Neck? Back? Most favoured neck, given Mrs. Prowse’s oft-quoted and no doubt apocryphal remark that only on the gallows would her husband be well hung
.
Mr. Prowse, having been deemed a bastard, was now said to have been born out of wedlock and had to endure it that people thought that the real identity of his father was a mystery even to his mother
.
Soon there were rumours of whose source we of the B.I.S. were ignorant, rumours that Mr. Prowse was deeply in debt, rumours of how he came to be in debt and the lengths to which he was going to get out of it. At first he was said to have been financially laid low by bad investments and blackmail, and there was talk of his habit of borrowing money he had no intention of repaying from spinsters, widows and unhappy wives
.
We of the B.I.S. countered the rumours with our own
.
“A woman I had every reason to trust has left me penniless,” Mr. Prowse was said to have told a “friend.” In a letter to the editor of all the papers, we wrote: “Mr. Prowse refers, of course, not to his wife who is so frugal that ironists have been heard to say that a penny would burn a hole in her purse, but to the only other woman he has ever consorted with, namely Lady Luck.”
The true cause of his insolvency, we further explained, was his habit of giving money to those less fortunate by placing extravagant bets during every clandestine charity-supporting game of chance in the city. We quoted a true friend of his as having said: “Except that I know that he is losing on purpose, I would say that Prowse was the biggest imbecile who had ever tried his hand at cards.”
But it was no use. Mr. Prowse’s insolvency was soon put down to gambling and rumour fed on rumour until we of the B.I.S. decided that there was nothing left but to resort to absolute, inscrutable, opaque irony
.
We wrote to the papers: “Mr. David Prowse has bilked an old man out of his savings by making him suspect his ex-wife of adultery and doubt that his daughter was really his and by pretending to be conducting an expensive investigation into the matter.”
Alas, the accusation was taken at face value
.
We tried again. We said that since the amassment of his debt, he had frequently been drunk in court and that no one regretted his recent turn to drink more than those of his clients who, though innocent, now languished in prison. We also circulated rumours that some of his clients were incarcerated because he accepted, in exchange for “throwing” cases, bribes from prosecutors who coveted as much as he did an appointment to the bench
.
We continued back-stabbing him with more apparent glee than the senators of ancient Rome did Caesar. Though his name now be synonymous with all things iniquitous, we predict that as a result of this letter a statue will one day be erected in his name
.
Yours respectfully
,
We of the B.I.S
.
Chapter Fifteen