The Custodian of Paradise (58 page)

February 6, 1943

Captain D. Hanrahan.

It was not the first time an American serviceman had been at the Cochrane, but what a din the Harlotry sent up as he walked down the hall.

Late in the afternoon it was, though I was but an hour out of a bed that I had left unmade.

Whistles. Catcalls. Laughter. Mock beckonings.

“Captain D., come with me!”

It must have been obvious, somehow, that he had not come for
that
, or else the beckonings would have been more bold.

I have heard other men walk that gauntlet of prostitutes to a din of a different tone and purpose. A din that always ends with the slamming of a dozen doors. The man chooses
or, more likely, is chosen, dragged into a room. And the other women go back to waiting.

I made nothing of the noise. It has been customary at any hour of the day or night since the war began. Though it started up so suddenly, as if one of them had been keeping watch and warned the others he was coming. Like a surprise party thrown by women he had never met, never heard of, but who had somehow heard of him.

But I knew none of this.

Just another afternoon at the Cochrane. My day begins when theirs does. The city subsides. The light begins to fade. Nightfall. Another night, another column. Time to work while others sleep. To walk while others lie awake, hoping sleep will come.

And so I thought it would be this time. I waited for the slamming of the doors.

“Where are you going, Captain D.? There’s no one at the end but
her.”

D.

I made nothing of it. Nor of his passing all their doors until none was left but mine. I presumed he would go straight past my room and down the other stairs. Having strayed into the wrong place, perhaps, beet-faced with embarrassment, bent on making his escape without a backwards glance.

The sudden silence of the Harlotry the second he knocked on my door. As if every one of them were watching. Which they were.

I was at my table, which doubles as my desk. My cane on the floor beside my foot.

Another series of knocks, a sideways fist, a knock without knuckles, “thud, thud, thud.” As if to say, I know you’re in there. I slipped on my boots, leaving them untied, and grabbed my cane. Did my version of a shuffle to the door that I opened just as he began to knock again.

I pulled the door away from his outstretched fist. And there he was. I saw his name tag first. Captain D. Hanrahan. The last my mother’s maiden name.

D. What must he have thought when I gasped in what might have been fright and, letting my cane drop, threw my arms around him, one around his neck, one around his waist, and pressed his face against my shoulder before he even had a chance to open
his
arms?

“Sis!” he said, half-laughing, amused, bewildered. “Sis. I was hoping you’d be glad to see me, but I never expected anything like this.”

Sis. Remember, he doesn’t know, I thought. Be careful what you say. So much he must
never
know came flooding back at once. New York. Six months of night it might have been, all spent in that one room.

A second heartbeat.
Which one was born first? The girl
. His sister.

Be careful how you seem. He doesn’t know
.

There were more whistles and catcalls from the Harlotry.

“Helloooo, brother,” one of the women said.

He laughed.

“Come in,” I said. He did. The dozen doors closed all but silently.

“Nice digs.”

My son. My son. My son. My heart thumping, saying what I could not say out loud.

“What?”

“Nice digs.”

He was smiling. Not unprepared for what he saw. My surroundings, my height, my limp, my look. The smell of Scotch, which persists in my room though I have not had a drink in seven years. Unless no one else but me can smell it, which may be, for I can taste it too, whenever I drink
water from my flask, which I do often, at home, in public, openly, stared at by those who though they’ve heard that there is nothing in the flask but water, choose not to believe it.

The unmade bed. He had heard of “Fielding.” From whom? From everyone.

“The Maharajah Suite, they used to call it. All the rooms had names when I moved in. I must have been about your age.”

“I’m twenty-seven.”

I know how old you are
.

I cannot bring myself to say his name. He looks more like my mother than he looks like me. But not like Prowse. David. Where does my height come from? Where did it go? He must be five foot ten. Less perhaps. Sarah? Another giantess?

“Twenty-seven. Like your sister, Sarah.”

“Yes.” He looked away at the mention of her name, as if she might be—I drew a deep breath, tried to swallow down a surge of dread.

“How
is
Sarah?”

“She is very much herself.”

I knew that, if I asked, he would not tell me what he meant. I heard it in his voice.
Very much herself
. It could mean anything. Twenty-seven years about which I knew almost nothing.

“As is our mother. And my father.”

“Good.”

“But you, quite understandably, do not wish to speak of our mother.”

“No—”

He put up his hand. “It’s all right,” he said. “I don’t mind. I don’t often speak of her myself. I don’t mean to sound so ominous. Nothing’s amiss. Everything is fine between us all.”

Said with such finality. He might as well have said, we
need not speak of them again.
Fine
. A
fine
family. Merely irked he might be by something one of them had recently said or done. Twenty-seven years.

We spent two days together.

Went to the movies, where we encountered Smallwood who mistook David for a suitor. Serves him right, I told myself.

Had dinner in a restaurant. I hadn’t been in one in decades.

We walked about the city. I didn’t tell him that I sleep by day and work by night, so I was soon exhausted. Happily, giddily exhausted.

My son. My son. My son. My heart exulting in these words.

He took my arm as we walked, which made walking difficult for both of us, what with my cane and my limp. He had no choice but to mimic my gait. I wondered if he could feel my pulse in my arm as
I
did when he gripped me tightly with his hand. The sweet touch of my son, whom I had long been reconciled to never meeting.

My face was flushed from the moment I saw him in the doorway to the moment we said goodbye.

For a while we spoke only of inconsequential things. The weather. The landscape. I took him past my father’s house, but we didn’t stop for long and didn’t speak
of her
. The house that, in his will, my father left to the Medical Association, as he did every penny of his savings.

David said he was a graduate of a military college in Virginia in which he had enrolled when he was twenty.

Following his lead, I said little of
my
past. Nothing of Bishop Spencer, my time with Smallwood in New York. I told him of my illness and my time in the San and he listened in silence and nodded. But I said nothing of the Bonavista, nothing of my drinking, nothing of Prowse.

Nor did we speak of the future, his imminent departure for England and then Italy, the war, reminders of which, aside from the uniform he wore, were everywhere, the streets full of other men and women in uniform—American, Canadian, British. The war in which he would soon be taking part.

How could we have spoken of it? I wondered if he was afraid. He did not seem to be. Though neither did he seem eager, excited, deluded about what others his age might have mistaken for some great adventure.

We might have been sightseers, both strangers to the city, a brother and sister visiting a place about which we had heard from friends, an exotic place where there was no end of things to remark upon, to visit, no end of ways to maintain the illusion that nothing of the world remained beyond these shores.

“We looked like
identical
twins when we were small children,” he said. “Until we went to school. Mother dressed us exactly alike. Had our hair cut exactly alike. In some photographs, you can’t tell who’s who, who’s the boy and who’s the girl. We both looked like curly haired girls, but also both looked like tomboys. I mean, even I can’t tell who’s who. Coveralls and curly hair. Mother wanted it that way, wanted us inseparable for as long as possible.

“Even after we started school, she made sure we looked alike, until Father intervened. He worried I’d grow up to be a sissy. Sis and Sissy. Someone called us that. He told her I’d be teased to death by other boys. Our school uniforms were different, but on the weekends we still dressed alike. Until Father put his foot down.

“You can see the sudden change in the family albums. It’s as if we were replaced, as if we simply vanished from the family. Suddenly, where Sis and Sissy used to be there are this boy and this girl smiling as if they’ve been there all along.”

Not quite nostalgia. He sounds like he’s trying to make a case of some kind against someone. Citing evidence. Pointing to what he now sees were the early signs of something. Of whatever it is that makes him so loath to speak of anything more recent than his early childhood
.

In the restaurant.

“We seem to turn a lot of heads no matter where we go.”

“Sorry. It’s me they’re staring at. For a lot of reasons. Not all of which are obvious. Sightings of me at any time are rare, but in the daytime they’re unheard of. I don’t have lunch at lunchtime or dinner at dinnertime. It’s been fourteen years since I had breakfast. Almost no one in this city has ever seen me eating food. But believe me, this is all much stranger for me than it is for them. I’m not used to doing things when other people do them. Doing what other people do when I’m asleep.”

But they were staring at
him
, too. The son of the woman who deserted Dr. Fielding. Living proof of
her
. There were people in the restaurant old enough to remember her.

And there was also the matter of his last name, the one on his uniform that was known to be her maiden name. Word of that must have quickly spread. Word that he seems to have renounced his father’s name, his family name, in favour of the one that his mother hasn’t used in decades.

Fielding’s half-brother is in town.

The unlikely sight of me walking arm in arm with anyone, let alone an American officer in uniform, was one not to be missed.

As we strolled down Water Street, people who saw us coming alerted others, ducked into shops and houses and offices, the doors and windows of which, by the time we passed, were crammed with the curious, the mystified, the astonished and the scornful.

“Parades must bring them out in droves,” he said.

Children, looking as if they’d been told I ate children, usually avoided me, though a few of them chanted rhymes about me from a distance or otherwise demonstrated their courage to their peers by taunting me.

But emboldened by this new development, they turned their attention to David, whom they took to be my date, a newcomer who didn’t know my reputation and was fool enough not to be put off by my appearance.

“She’s Fielding, sir,” a boy shouted as if my mere name was proof of the folly of consorting with me.

“She lives at the Cochrane.”

“She has consumption.”

“She’s always drunk.”

“She makes up lies called Forgeries.”

“So many children singing my praises,” I said.

What does he think of me?
I wondered.
It’s one thing to have heard about me, another altogether to see me and my lodgings for yourself. Perhaps the visit is an ordeal that he is determined to see through to the end, one that, though it is even worse than he expected, he knows will soon be over and will never have to be repeated
.

He must be leaving behind someone besides
them.
No ring on his finger. Still, he may have a girlfriend who is already fretting for him. And friends aside from his fellow officers
.

Not like Prowse. Not like me
.

Perhaps only because I am devoid of self-knowledge, have an entirely countefeit self-image, I half-expect him to reveal that he’s impersonating David who told him all about me. Something of my father’s obsession in my blindness to resemblances
.

A shirking of responsibility for his existence. A way of keeping him distant from me, lest his imminent, and perhaps permanent, departure be unbearable
.

I don’t know. I search his face, his eyes, note his mannerisms, his facial expressions, his gestures—but nothing seems familiar
,
which would be in keeping with his having changed his name if he had changed it to something other than my mother’s
.

“Do people still say you look a lot like Sarah?” I said.

“I no longer associate with anyone who knows us both,” he said, then grimaced as if he had let slip something he had vowed to keep to himself. “I simply mean that, because of where we live, we rarely see each other.”

I am to blame, I felt like saying. For whatever it is that has happened between you and your sister, I am to blame.

“You’re not married,” he said. “I would say by choice.”

“Yes,” I said. “Other people’s choice.”

“Really?”

“No. But I can think of no corners in which I would be considered a catch. Even before this.” I tapped my boot with my cane.

“There was
never
anyone?”

“For a brief time, my type—six-foot three-inch women who were lame and lived as though they had taken a vow of insolvency—were all the rage. But the competition was fierce. Suddenly, every woman in St. John’s was six foot three and limping back and forth from places like the Cochrane Street Hotel.”

“You
could
just have said ‘Next question.’”

“Sorry. I grew up an only child, without a mother, and more or less without a father. I grew accustomed to solitude, independence.”

“People, and I don’t just mean children, seem to be afraid of you.”

“Some, I suppose.”

“Afraid you’ll write about them.”