The Custodian of Paradise

by Wayne Johnston

  “If I write like that,” I said, “the only following I will have is a lynch mob.”

  “That’s how I want you to write.”

  I told him that only by the use of an irony so close to absolute that I would seem to the tone-deaf majority to be saying the very opposite of what I meant would I survive.

  When the essay was published, there was more protesting than his sanguine manner had led me to expect. He published what might well have been every letter of protest, the gist of which was that the essay was drivel, nowhere near as good as the runners-up or even the “selected others.” Some said it was impossible to understand. What was it supposed to mean? Why had its author pretended to be twelve years old? Hidden her gender? What sort of woman would write such a thing? The essay was unpatriotic, a mockery of Newfoundland and England and all the men who were fighting and dying in a just and necessary war that the Germans had provoked. Entrants were supposed to choose one of the two subjects, not write, inscrutably, on both. Much of the protest was directed specifically at me, the confessed author of the infamous letter to the Morning Post. How dare the Telegram reward me for my second forgery—one every bit as subversive as the first? I was up to my old tricks, this time hiding behind a pseudonym instead of anonymity. A letter from Headmaster Reeves in which he professed himself “outraged” and Bishop Feild to be “slighted yet again”—the Feild was built on inherited wealth—was published in several papers. The Telegram was attacked by other papers, denounced as unpatriotic, frivolous, sensationalist, unethical. How could Herder have given me a job? Was this essay the sort of thing readers could expect from me twice a week from now on?

  The edition in which my first column appeared sold more copies than any other in the history of the Telegram.

  Herder said he was not surprised. “Some of them get it,” he said. “They might not admit it, but they do. They get it and like it and agree with you. Most of them just want to see what you will say. How can they gossip about you if they don’t know what you’ve written? The real test will be to see if your notoriety will last. Who knows? At some point, they may just ignore you. Even a fool would rather be hated than ignored.”

  My first column under the byline of Sheilagh Fielding was an answer to the uproar caused by the publication of my essay:

  In this, my inaugural column with the Evening Telegram, I would like first to congratulate my fellow winners in the essay competition, each of whose essays was, I confess, superior to mine.

  That mine was rewarded with a prize of five pounds and that it elicited from the editor of the paper the offer of employment that might have been made to any one of this city’s persistent host of unremunerated scribes whose first submissions to essay competitions predate my existence by a decade mystifies no one more than it does me.

  I find myself embarrassed to have been deemed, even if only in this case, a better writer than the author of these words: “Nay, though it seem to some like progress, the horseless carriage is the vilest contraption ever devised by those worshippers of science whose belief in the perfectibility of man is a blasphemy that, like the locomotive train, will become more difficult to stop the longer it is left unacknowledged.”

  Allow me to address the main objections to my essay and the manner of its submission.

  “She would not have won had she not cheated.” I will waste neither my time nor readers’ by refuting a statement that is so obviously true.

  “The Telegram now has in its employ a woman who confessed to slandering this city’s finest school in a forged letter and attempting to have this slander published.…”

  The proof of the unintentional inaccuracy of this statement lies in the sterling character of its author, Headmaster Reeves, who is possessed of a moral zeal with which his eloquence cannot keep pace. For were this statement true, it would be necessary that a self-evident falsity was true, namely that this city’s finest school now has in its employ a man who blackballed a student for committing the very crime that I confessed to and of which he must therefore have known the student to be innocent. This paper will happily publish any clarification of his statement that Headmaster Reeves would like to make.

  The reader who is curious about what he can expect to encounter in this column in forthcoming days may be interested to know that my curiosity is commensurate with his.

  The reader who writes, “She is a seventeen-year-old girl, and therefore not qualified to offer enlightening commentary on anything but needlework and the cooking of cakes and pies” gives me too much credit. Unlike the Deservedly More Fortunate, I know nothing of needlework or cooking. It was just before I was to take courses in both that I was expelled for forgery, the subject about which I am most well informed.

  So I have decided that all of my columns will be forgeries. Each one will have a different byline, and some of the names will be ones with which the reader is familiar. The reader should think of this space as being reserved twice weekly for guest columnists, the first of whom was Henry Fielding. The name Sheilagh Fielding will never appear in this space again. The name of this column will be “Fielding the Forger.”

  “Fielding the Forger,” my father said. “Have you lost your mind, girl? How do you expect to—to live down what you did at school when a columnist called Fielding the Forger appears twice every week in a newspaper?”

  “I have no wish to live down what I did.” I knew the effect that calling my column Fielding the Forger would have on him, since it was he who was Fielding the Forger, a fact he would very much have liked to forget, as he would that I had taken the blame for what he did.

  “You are only making matters worse for yourself, and for me,” he said. “We bear the same name. A twice-blackened name. Thrice-blackened, if you count—” He paused. “You worry me, girl. You worry me so much it gives me nightmares. What will you admit to next?”

  “Something I am guilty of, perhaps.”

  “Precisely. That is what torments me. That some day, for some reason, God knows what, you will tell people about—that business in New York.”

  “I will never do that,” I said. “And I would rather that you didn’t speak of it to me.”

  Herder, who when we first met had not asked me why I forged the letter to the Morning Post, did not object to the name or premise of Fielding the Forger.

  “You will cause quite a stir,” he said, “assuming the identity of real people.”

  “Everyone will know that these real people didn’t write the columns.”

  “You might be surprised,” he said. “There are people dense enough not to know the difference. And others who will know the difference but be too dense to get the point.”

  “Are you concerned about lawsuits?”

  “Of course I am. You should be too.”

  “I don’t have anything that they could take from me.”

  “Your father does.”

  “He’s not writing ‘Fielding the Forger.’”

  “And you’re not old enough to be sued. They’d sue him instead.”

  “If you don’t want me to—”

  “Oh, I want you to. I’m just making sure you know what you might be in for.”

  I foresaw some of it. Even before the first Forgery appeared, I was referred to while out walking as Fielding the Forger by boys from Bishop Feild and girls from Bishop Spencer who pointed me out to one another.

  “Fielding the Forger,” the boys shouted, and the girls laughed as if to say that, at last, I had a nickname, one I had been foolish enough to give myself. “Fielding the Forger,” cabbies shouted, most often good-naturedly as if the name somehow suited or derived from my stature.

  My announcement in the paper of the name and premise of the column drew another protest in print from Reeves, who, ignoring my challenge to “clarify” his statement, merely said again that I was flaunting my attempted slander of his school and that the Telegram was “abetting, no, sponsoring, this renewed and flagrant attack.” At least my self-christening was accurate, he
said. A forger was a fake, a fraud, a charlatan, a coward, all of which I had confessed to being. A forger was a non-person, an impersonator.

  “If Miss Fielding intends to practise some sort of journalistic ventriloquism, she had better be careful of what words she puts in whose mouth. Mr. Herder is also to blame. He is inciting Miss Fielding to this nonsense.”

  The columns, I decided, would all take the form of letters, written by someone living, dead, or imaginary to someone living, dead, or imaginary. There was a great deal of speculation as to who my first “correspondent” would be and to whom his or her letter would be addressed.

  Dear Headmaster Reeves: I concur with every word of your letter to me of April 7. “As regards Miss Fielding,” you wrote, “I would have expected more from one of Miss Emilee Stirling’s girls. Is it unreasonable of me to hope that Bishop Spencer girls remain at least one step above forgery after they have left your school?”

  Indeed, Headmaster, it is not unreasonable. I myself have such high expectations for my girls, as do you, I am sure, have high expectations for your boys.

  Who for instance would call you unreasonable for having expected more of Mr. Shephard of the graduating class of 1906? It is not at all unreasonable of you to hope that Bishop Feild boys remain at least one step above committing murder after they have left your school. Your hopes for your boys will have been fully met if, after graduation, none of them are hung. May I propose, as the minimum code of conduct for your boys, that their cause of death not be execution? This would entail a slight amendment of your school motto, which at present is, “He is not dead whose good name lives.” Might I propose: “He is not dead who was not found guilty of a capital offence.”

  Not deemed to be capital offences by our courts are such things as embezzlement, adultery, fraud, graft, theft, tax evasion, usury, malpractice, assault of spouse or children, molestation, consorting with prostitutes, smuggling, poaching, vandalism and public displays of any of the following: lewd-ness, drunkenness, unruliness, blasphemy, profanity, indecency, belligerence and mischief. Capital crimes are fewer: murder, attempted murder, treason, arson and rape.

  May I therefore say, on behalf of one too modest to make any declaration that might seem intended to enhance his own good name, that if the above list tells us anything, it must be this: The graduates of Bishop Feild are far more likely to be imprisoned than executed.

  Bishop Feild and Bishop Spencer have long been brother/sister schools. We share the same founders, the same religion, the same traditions. It is almost the rule that our graduates marry yours and that their children attend our schools. May our schools continue hand in hand into the future. (Though, if I may say so, I wonder if perhaps you exaggerate the degree to which Bishop Feild is a source of civic pride to the vast majority who if they so much as set foot on your cricket pitch would be arrested. But this is a matter we can discuss in our customary manner over tea and tarts when next we meet.)

  As for the motto of Bishop Spencer, might I suggest a new one: “She is dead whose husband, having outlived his good name, was buried with a noose around his neck.”

  Editor’s Explanation: Lest there be any confusion as to the intent of Miss Stirling’s words, we would like to point out that, inasmuch as she is capable of doing so in her florid, ostentatious style, she says exactly what she means. She regards Headmaster Reeves with as much respect and admiration as would anyone who has known the man for twenty years. Her respect and admiration are by no means unreciprocated. They meet often for professional discussions, after which the Headmaster has been heard to exclaim, “I couldn’t if I lived forever say enough about that woman and her girls.”

  For her part, Miss Stirling is glad of the near proximity of Bishop Feild to Bishop Spencer. As is Headmaster Reeves, as the following demonstrates: One day, surveying the many boys who had stopped to watch as she and the skirt-clad members of her field hockey team made their way down to the pitch, Miss Stirling was moved to exclaim, “What an embarrassment of riches.” It seems that all the boys who were staring at her girls appeared to have been ill-served by the same tailor who had made them seem, as the saying goes, “too big for their britches.” Headmaster Reeves gaily replied, “More like an embarrassment of bitches.”

  Miss Stirling is, of course, not saying that Headmaster Reeves should consider any graduate of Bishop Feild who manages to stay one foot ahead of the hangman to be a vindication of his educational methods. She acknowledges that he should have, and does have, loftier ambitions for his boys than that they not be put to death for the betterment of society. She was merely suggesting what the range of his ambitions might be. Putting Mr. Shephard at the bottom of the scale, one might put at the top that legion of boys who, far from being hung, will never be incarcerated.

  This group comprises 98 per cent of the graduates of Bishop Feild, though not because, as one critic puts it: “Nothing stands between them and incarceration but the preponderance of lawyers and prosecutors among their former classmates.”

  When the column appeared, the protests began with a visit to the Telegram by Headmaster Reeves. I was not there, but Herder was. Reeves demanded that the entire column be retracted, that the paper print an apology to him and all his students, past and present, and to the people of St. John’s, who had long been proud of their city for having in it such a school as his. Reeves demanded that I be fired before it became necessary and justifiable to have me sued. Then he stormed out and wrote a letter that Herder published. “The Forger is driven by malice and envy,” he wrote. “Malice towards me for thwarting her first attempt to smear my school. Envy towards those boys and girls who, unlike her, were not expelled from school, those who were awarded diplomas and have gone on to colleges and universities while she, who, even at school, was forever an outsider, forever shunned, seeks to revenge herself on those against whom she could never measure up, never keep pace with, those she blames for making her feel that she did not fit in, did not belong, when the truth, which she knows deep down, is that she did not fit in because she did not belong. I invite those whose disgust and outrage at her portrayal of Bishop Feild and its students matches mine to write a letter of protest to this paper, demanding that the ‘Forger’ be removed.”

  Such letters poured in and Herder printed them all, telling me people were certain to buy a paper in which their names appeared. He also assured me he had no intention to remove me. On the contrary, he wanted another Forgery as fast as I could write it.

  My father blamed everything on “that business in New York.”

  “Much of the business transaction you speak of took place in St. John’s,” I said.

  “Do not take with me,” he said, “the tone you take in those Forgeries of yours. ‘The Forger,’ Reeves calls you. It isn’t even necessary any longer to include your name. Everyone knows who the Forger is. My God, what if people start calling me the Forger too? One of those family nicknames.”

  “Don’t worry,” I said. “The worst they’ll call you is the Forger’s Father.”

  “I have a reputation to uphold,” he said. “I cannot make an occupation of blackening my name. I cannot earn a living from it. Nor will you be able to much longer, you mark my words. This Herder man is using you. Why can you not write an honest, straightforward letter for a change? A sincere apology to Reeves. This man Herder might not print it, but someone would. It would be a start.”

  “The first step,” I said, “on the long road to rehabilitation.”

  “More mockery,” he said. “No one ever prospered from mockery or forgery.”

  “Fielding and Daughter, Mockers and Forgers since 1853.”

  “Are you bent on self-destruction, girl?”

  It seemed that he, who had written the first forgery, had convinced himself that I had, or regarded my confession as such folly that he believed it was more to blame for my expulsion from school than his letter to the Morning Post had been.

  “Perhaps I will sign your name to one of my Forgeries,” I said. �
�Who would you like me to write to on your behalf?”

  “Good God,” he said. “Good God. What a travesty that would be. You must promise me you will never use my name like that.”

  “It would be interesting,” I said, “writing a letter from your point of view.”

  “YOU MUST PROMISE ME,” he shouted, “THAT YOU WILL NEVER FORGE MY NAME LIKE THAT. NEVER ASSUME MY IDENTITY FOR THE PURPOSE OF MOCKERY OR MISCHIEF OR FOR ANY OTHER REASON.”

  “I was only teasing you, Father.”

  “Your mother’s last name was once Fielding,” he said, suddenly subdued. “I ask only that you treat it with as much respect as it deserves.”

  “You have two grandchildren,” I said. “Do you ever think about that? Wonder what they look like? Do you ever wish that you could see them? For some reason other than to satisfy yourself that they are yours? That I am yours.”

  “I think only of who their father is,” he said. “I saw him, often, when you were in New York. I—kept track of where he went.”

  “You followed him?”

  “Sometimes I could barely keep myself from speaking to him. Telling him where you were because of him. How tormented I was because of him. Only the wretched sight of him restrained me. The thought of giving his like something he could use against me. An excuse to associate with me. The thought of making his life part of mine. I would realize at the last second what folly it would be, hold back at the last second and watch the wretch pass by. To think. You. And the son of a man like Charity Charlie. I have seen him, too, passed within inches of him. I was barely able to resist confronting him as well. He carries a wooden staff of some kind. God knows why. To protect himself with. I dare say he does not want for enemies. Or people he owes money to. It’s their like you should write about. Why don’t you write about the scruff?”