The Custodian of Paradise

by Wayne Johnston

  I read another entry, the one I wrote when I returned from New York.

  July 12, 1916

  My father was not there to meet me this afternoon. He was in his surgery attending to matters he considered to be more important than the return home of his daughter from New York. How peevish that sounds.

  I did as I vowed to do on the ship and destroyed the letter that I discovered in my berth. I will say nothing about it to him. And who but him could I speak to about it?

  I went to the house and slept until I heard him climb the steps not long after midnight.

  “Your mother wrote to say that everything went well.”

  “She would not let me write to you. She made some obscure reference to my letter-writing reputation.”

  “She asked that I not write to her. Or you. She was concerned. She said that letters could be—intercepted. All she wrote was that everything went well.”

  “No incriminating details. Of the sort that you and I would have had no better sense than to include.”

  “So. It is over and done with, then. Behind you now.”

  “Yes. Over and done with. In no time I’ll forget that I am the mother of two children.”

  “Two?”

  “Yes. Twins. A boy and a girl.”

  “Well. She did not speak of twins.”

  “She did not speak of them to me until she had to. But I believe they are well.”

  “How is she? My wife.”

  “Your wife, who is in the curious habit of referring to herself as Mrs. Breen, is doing fine.”

  “Did she ever—speak of me?”

  “I, too, am doing fine, Father. You need have no concerns about my health.”

  “What—”

  “She did not speak of you. Except when I did so first.”

  “What did she say?”

  “She did not speak ill of you. She said she hoped that you were happy.”

  “She said that.”

  “Yes.”

  “Did she ever—say my name?”

  “Sometimes.”

  “Perhaps she thinks of me as often as I think of her.”

  “Perhaps. She is—as you know—a very private person.”

  “Yes. She was always very private. A woman of few words.”

  “I tried to make up for her deficiency.”

  “You met him?”

  “Only in the sense that one ‘meets’ a person in whose house one is a guest for almost six months. Only in the sense that one ‘meets’ one’s obstetrician.”

  “You must have formed some impression of him.”

  “No. And I was never concerned with making one on him.”

  “You haven’t changed.”

  “He is a very—sensible man. Level-headed. I would say that, in descriptions of him, the words ‘witty’ and ‘hilarious’ are universally withheld—”

  “Girl—”

  “He is rich, Father. That was my impression of him.”

  “A tall man, I suppose.”

  “Yes. A rich, tall man who met my mother six years after I was born.”

  “He told you that?”

  “It is common knowledge.”

  “What if, years ago, he visited St. John’s? What if he met her then? What if she left six years later to join him in New York. No longer able to endure a loveless marriage.”

  “Was it loveless?”

  “It may have seemed so to her.”

  “There is simply no reason—Look, Father. I am several inches taller than him. He has red, almost orange hair—”

  “His name is Breen?”

  “Yes.”

  “I will check the shipping registries. I should have done it years ago. If I find his name—”

  “And if you don’t. What then?”

  “Then I will have ruled out at least one man.”

  I looked closely at him. He had changed a great deal in six months. His eyes moved constantly about as if he were attending to a host of inner voices. Six months brooding on the fact that his unwed, pregnant daughter was living in his rival’s house. In hers. In theirs. Me giving them my child. Leaving it with them who would pretend to be its parents. Waiting for me to come back to his house.

  I went with him to the registry office, fearing that otherwise he would blurt out his real reason for wishing to consult the records. We checked their files a year on either side of the latest possible date of my conception. There was no record of a Dr. Breen, or any Breen, arriving or departing. “There,” I said when we left. “Now you have ruled out at least one man.”

  What did he foresee for me? Apparently, that I would go on as before, living in his house. No longer in school. Unsuitable for marriage. His housekeeper and caretaker by default. One of those single women who spend their lives tending to their parents. I would be regarded by the people of St. John’s as a name-blackened spinster, only child of the eccentric, twice-betrayed-by-women Dr. Fielding, disqualified from life as others lived it.

  I had no intention of living like that. I went out walking every day, unconcerned about who I might encounter. I wanted to see just how “blackened” my name was. I walked every day along Bond Street, past Spencer and the Feild at lunchtime when the playing grounds were full. Girls from Spencer stared and pointed at me, gathering in small groups to talk. When I stopped and stared back, they turned away, dispersed. My class had graduated, but I recognized many of the girls. The supervising teachers who walked among them, women who for years had been my teachers, looked at me, then looked away, not pointedly but casually. It was not their concern how girls who had once attended Spencer now occupied themselves. I saw Miss Emilee a few times, walking among her girls, her hands clasped in front of her. She saw me once and stopped, and though by the sheer fixity of her stare she acknowledged me, she did not wave or come one step closer to the fence. Perhaps she was waiting to see what I would do. Or meant to make it clear that, while she could make no public indication of it, she was available to talk should I wish to seek her out. She knows, I reminded myself. She knows why I went away, why I have gained weight since she saw me last. That I was once in love. She knows it was because of what my father did that I confessed. It would not surprise me if she has guessed that Prowse is the father of my child. My visits to the Feild when he was captain of the school. That first exchange between us at the fence, word of which would have got back to her. My visits to the judge’s house. She knows or has guessed too much of what I plan to put behind me.

  I walked past the Feild. Prowse and his class had graduated. Smallwood had long since dropped out. But many of the boys recognized me and, like the girls at Spencer, stopped to stare. The first time I went past the Feild, I heard someone shout my name, but it happened only once. I was out of bounds only in part because of what they believed I had done to smear the school, my confrontation with Reeves, my confession and expulsion. I was also out of bounds because I was no longer what each of them had been their entire lives—a student. I was part, now, of the outside, unknown, unstructured world of limitless possibilities and hazards.

  I went by the judge’s house. My father had mentioned that the judge died while I was in New York. I had waited until I was alone, then cried for hours. The house, though not boarded up, was unoccupied, empty of furniture, the windows without drapes or curtains, no flickering of firelight inside, no smoke rising from the chimneys. The day was overcast, and through the unreflective windows I saw the stairs that led up to the landing and the hallway on the second floor where his study used to be. The front room, the bare, wainscotted walls, the place where the sofa had been where Prowse, after the judge’s bewildering outburst, had kissed me. Someone, Prowse himself perhaps, had gathered up the books that had made a ransacked library of the first floor. And someone, too, presumably, had gathered up the judge’s papers, the thousands of sheets on which the phantom revision of his book was scrawled. Like the ashes of a fire that were swept out in the morning and thrown high into a gale of wind, all of them were gone. Months lat
er, the house was sold. When I went by, it looked, reanimated by its owners, like a different house. Like the ones on either side of it. Brightly lit. Occupied by some ordinarily fortunate family who could not imagine happiness more exceptional than theirs. A happy house. The house of the judge and that of the children I conceived there, and that of the boy and girl who in a moment as fleeting as an exhalation had been lovers. All of it and all of them were truly gone.

  LOREBURN

  I lived in hope of discovering another letter from the man who wrote to me when we were on the ship. But there were no letters, none though month after month went by. I tried to reconcile myself to the fact that the whole thing had been nothing but a prank.

  The newspapers in St. John’s were forever running essay contests. The suggested “themes” were an indication of the sort of essay that usually won. “Religion in a Time of Strife.” “Social Progress?” “Civic Duty: A Meditation.”

  After my return from Manhattan, I entered contest after contest, writing parodies of the earnest pontificating style in which the winning, and subsequently published, essays were written, hoping to catch the attention of some editor/adjudicator who appreciated parody. I signed my own name, pseudonyms, women’s names, men’s names, the names of the living and the dead. My essays were always returned with a form letter thanking me for my participation.

  I submitted, by mail, an essay to a contest in the Evening Telegram. A first prize of five pounds was being offered, along with three one-pound prizes for honourable mentions. I signed it “Henry Fielding, 12 years old.” All four winning essays, along with “selected others,” were to be published in the Telegram. Entrants were to choose between two themes: “The Far-Away War” and “The Horseless Carriage.” I chose both:

  My father is in Europe now, waging war against the Hun. Before he left, he took me aside and said, “Son, I am leaving to fight in a far-away war.” I asked him why. “Because the Hun will not be satisfied until the horseless carriage has surpassed the horse and he sleeps in Buckingham Palace. All the horses will be kept in stables where the King will have to work until he dies. Even the Hun’s horses. Then the Hun will be in charge of Newfoundland. Can you imagine taking orders from the Hun?” I shook my head. “Do you want your horse to be surpassed?” I shook my head again and started crying.

  My father went on and on. A Hun’s head on King George’s pillow in the palace. Hun governors instead of English ones. Huns looting stores and taking liberties. Motor cars all over London and St. John’s. Children forced to watch while their horses were surpassed.

  Did I think a horseless carriage, if its driver fell asleep, would take him home? A horseless carriage, if you let it, would go anywhere. It had no sense of direction or loyalty. It was perfect for the Hun who wanted chaos and would stop at nothing to get it. There was a difference between making noise and making progress but try explaining that to the Hun while he’s trying to install a Lutheran archbishop.

  It may be true, as any Hun will tell you, that the motor car is cleaner than the horse, but what would you rather do, get stuck in clean snow or not get stuck in dirty snow? But logic does not matter to the Hun. You can argue with the Hun until you are blue in the face and he will still invade a lot of democratic countries.

  If you tell him that motor cars are always breaking down, he will tell you that it takes more bullets to stop a horseless carriage than it does to stop a horse. And that it is because of the horseless carriage and larger versions of them known as trucks and tanks that the Huns will win the war. That is how his mind works.

  If you tell him that all a horse needs is water that costs nothing while a horseless carriage needs expensive gasoline, he will tell you that you have to feed a horse even when it isn’t being used and that the proper word for gasoline is petrol. To which you might reply that oats cost less than what you put in cars no matter what you call it, and before you know it the subject will be imperialism and why his country should be allowed to dominate the world, why it has just as much right to dominate the world as Britain does.

  There are horseless carriages in Newfoundland, I said. My father told me to remember that all drivers of horseless carriages are traitors or even infiltrators who will try to fool you by saying that it is a “personal choice” and not “unpatriotic” to drive a horseless carriage. They might tell you that the only reason you don’t own a horseless carriage is that you can’t afford one and that you would get one in a second if you could. My father told me to pay no attention to those who say such things, misfortunates whose clarity of perception is impaired by inherited wealth.

  It is for these boys as much as for me, my father said—boys whose fathers will realize too late that they missed their one chance to oppose the Hun—that he is going off to war. A great struggle is taking place in the world, he said. He said it is possible that, unless he enlists in this faraway war, Picadilly Circus and Trafalgar Square will never be the same. Could I sleep knowing that, if only my father had intervened, Picadilly Circus and Trafalgar Square would not be overrun by Godless Huns and horseless carriages? A world in which it was no longer true that the sun never sets on the British empire—I know my little boy too well, he said, to believe that he thinks his father’s life is more important than the territorial ambitions of a country neither one of us has ever seen.

  I nodded. “There’s my boy,” he said. And so we said goodbye, and he said goodbye to my mother and all my brothers and sisters. We went down to the waterfront where he got on board a troop ship with a lot of other men, all wearing the Newfoundland Regiment uniform. There was not a horseless carriage to be seen. “Only horses unsurpassed in spite of their decrepitude,” my father said. We are in good spirits. Father writes home a lot. He and the others will be leaving soon for France.

  Soon after the closing of the contest deadline, I received a letter from the Evening Telegram that read:

  Dear Henry Fielding (if that is your real name):

  If you are twelve, then I am ninety-nine. But I have chosen your essay as the winner of our contest. I would like, with your permission, to publish it under the byline that you used—“Henry Fielding, 12 years old.”And then, on a separate page, reveal your real identity, about which, I confess, I am very curious. And add a note explaining that you withheld your real name, gender and age until now. And that I have hired you to write for me. The reaction of my readers will be interesting. I wonder if you would agree to write two columns a week for me? Any subjects you want. Why don’t you come see me to discuss terms? Shall we say at three in the afternoon of March 9?

  Yours, Editor-in-chief, Martin Herder

  Elated, mystified, slightly suspicious, I met with Herder. He was a short, somewhat pudgy man with long sideburns that almost joined beneath his chin and hair ragged and curled up at the back as if in compensation for his otherwise being absolutely bald. I walked, not inconspicuously, through the newsroom of the Telegram. I was gawked at, recognized by some whom I heard say my name. “Mr. Herder’s office?” I said. It was pointed out to me. The door was slightly open. I knocked.

  “Come in,” a shrill, almost childlike voice said.

  “Good afternoon,” I said, closing the door behind me. “I am Sheilagh Fielding. Pseudonym Henry.”

  “A woman,” he said, sounding not especially surprised.

  “A young woman,” I said. Even had he been standing, I would have towered over him. That may have been why he remained seated. “I hope that doesn’t change your mind.”

  “Sheilagh Fielding. Not the first time you forged a letter, is it? I seem to remember—”

  “My confession. Yes. And does that change your mind?”

  “My mind is not easily changed.”

  “The columns. Under what name—?”

  “Your own. It will help. You being already somewhat … established.”

  “Notorious. My father says my name is blackened.”

  “What’s in a name? Besides, I can’t imagine that you care about such things.”


  “I have to get by.”

  “Yes. There is always that.”

  “So must you get by.”

  “I publish nothing they can sue me for. And nothing that even I think is offensive.”

  I was already drinking but needed some man’s help to acquire my supply. I made an arrangement with my editor, who did not blink when I said I needed his “assistance,” as if he somehow knew just what the euphemism meant.

  “I’ll keep you in supply,” he said when I elaborated. “I wouldn’t, except I suspect you don’t write when you’re not drinking.”

  I told him this was only partly true, that, though I was always sober during the hours that I wrote, I could not keep from drinking afterwards and that if I did not drink I was unable to write the next night. “So I do not write while drunk,” I said.

  “You’re already making bargains with yourself,” he said. “Concocting explanations. It’s a bad sign. But I’m not your keeper. I’ll do my best to keep you in supply. And you won’t get one drop that you don’t pay for.”

  “Don’t worry,” I said. “I have very few expenses. There’ll be no problem as long as you pay me what I’m worth.”

  “I’ll pay you what I think you’re worth,” he said.

  We were, if otherwise different, alike in one way. We were, politically speaking, unaffiliated. For a newspaper editor in St. John’s in 1916 to be politically unaffiliated was a rare thing, in part because almost all those who could read were affiliated and chose to buy the paper whose politics they shared.

  “It is not,” Herder said in an editorial, “that we keep an open mind. On the contrary, the one premise of our closed mind is that all people who have or seek power, or curry the favour of those who have it, are corrupt.”

  I did not share this premise, but I suspected that he was the closest thing I would find to what I wanted. We came to terms.

  “A woman,” he said. “That’s what will upset them most.” A woman writing not for the social pages, not describing in lavish language for those who would never be invited to them the houses of the rich and influential, but a woman writing as not even men dared or were able to, mocking the pretensions and corruption of those sent out from England to oversee the running of the colony into the ground, the exploitative merchant class, the ersatz aristocrats, the fatuous and pompous, the Churches and their parochial, morally dictatorial leaders whose own natures were teeming with the very vices they denounced in those who by their circumstances were less able to resist them …