The Custodian of Paradise
Page 19
Late in what for other people was the night, my father would come home to find me reading in front of the fire or walking about upstairs, dressed as though it was midday and visitors were overdue. He never slept in what had been their bedroom, had slept nowhere but in his fireside chair since her departure. He had all but forsaken the upper storeys of the house, their bedroom, his study, the bedrooms where the children they once planned to have were to have slept and that were superfluous guest rooms now, guests being unheard of. I was wide awake and reading at bedtime in what was essentially his bedroom, coals in the fire cracking loudly.
“Do you ever sleep, girl?” he said one night as he walked into the front room after the weary exhalation that always followed the closing of the door.
“I slept from seven until midnight,” I said. “I have never been able to sleep more than five hours at a stretch. I must inherit that from you.”
It was cruel, especially at that hour, to speak of “inheriting” anything from him, cruel, however implicitly, to invoke the Question.
He grunted and muttered. “She slept lightly too,” he said. He sat with another sigh in his recliner, which he tilted back until he was staring at the ceiling.
“You are like a ghost in this house,” he said. “There is not a patient of mine whose skin is as pale as yours. You need fresh air, sunshine. How unlike your peers you are. Have you no friends that you can spend time with?”
“No,” I said. “But I will happily converse with any friends that you bring home.”
“The way you did with Dr. Wheeler.”
“He is not your friend.”
“Not any more. The Forger’s Father. That’s how I am known. A laughingstock.”
“I know of no one who thinks that.”
“You know of no one. Period. But you sit here in this house, day after day, inciting people you have never met. About whom you know nothing. What do you know of the world? The million decisions and compromises men must make each day. Just to keep the whole thing going. Just to make it work.”
“I have seen something of the world.”
“Yes. Yes. Enough of it to make you run and hide. This cannot continue. You have no idea—how much damage you are doing. To people’s reputations. To those of this city’s most important institutions. The churches. The courts. The schools. And important men. Merchant families. Long-established names—”
“I know exactly what I’m doing.”
“Measures must be taken. For the common good. Including yours.”
“What sort of measures?”
“The bishop has asked me to intervene.”
“WHAT—”
“He wants you to—step down.”
“What on earth does that mean?”
“Stop writing those infernal forgeries.”
“Why should I—”
“We met. At his request. And together we—came up with some suggestions. He does not wish to embarrass you further. And certainly has no intention of destroying you.”
“What were these ‘suggestions’?”
“As I said, he would like you to step down. Otherwise, he will instruct his ministers to instruct their congregations to cease purchasing or reading the Telegram. Also, he will issue an edict against advertising in the Telegram. Take my word for it, girl. The people of this city will follow their bishop’s instructions. The merchants will follow his instructions. Your stubbornness, if it persists, could well ruin your employer. But no one need be ruined. We spoke of reputations. He asked me to imagine it. Our name spoken from every pulpit in the city. The bishop has met with the Catholics. Everyone is in agreement. Our name singled out as a name to be avoided. You singled out. As someone whose writings are too sinful to be read. My God, girl, the embarrassment. The shame. The bishop wants to avoid this as much as I do.”
“You met with him. And what a meeting it must have been.”
“Girl. It is the measure of your—your limited knowledge—that you did not foresee something like this.”
“Why did the bishop not have someone intervene with Herder?”
“Because he knows that Herder is—unreasonable. Reckless. He is always spoiling for a fight, no matter what the cost.”
“A fight that he might win. He has been a publisher for thirty years. I’m sure he has faced such threats before. Survived denunciation from the pulpits of St. John’s—”
“But I would not survive it—”
“No. No, you would not. A fact of which the bishop is all too aware.”
“This way is more discreet. Ministers, priests in the pulpit forbidding people to read your Forgeries. Or even say your name. It would be as good as forbidding them to be my patients.”
“Said the bishop. Though not in those exact words, I’m sure.”
“Girl, we will both be ruined. You must understand. I am merely conveying a message.”
“Yes, Father. I was never under the illusion that the bishop met with you to ask for your advice.”
“I have nothing but my practice.”
“You have me, Father.”
“You, too, girl would be ruined. Herder might survive. But you would not. I think the man would happily die trying to survive.”
“I believe, Father, that the time has come for me to leave this house.”
“What? No. There is no reason that this should cause a rift between us. Is there? I am only a messenger. If I were older, wealthy. But I am barely fifty, girl. Aside from my practice and this house, I have nothing but my name.”
“And you can keep all three.”
“I will be alone here.”
“We have both been alone for quite some time.”
“You are not disowning me.”
He seemed genuinely frightened.
“You will never intervene on my behalf again. Do you understand what I am saying?”
“All right.”
“Promise me that and I will stay.”
“All right. I promise.”
I got up abruptly.
“Girl,” he said. “I know I am not the sort of man you wish I was. I am what I am. I know I disappoint you, but I cannot help it. I can only tell you that it was not because of me, not because of anything I did or didn’t do, that she left. I hope you believe me. You may doubt it, girl, but I worry about you. Which seems pointless, for I have no idea how to make things better for you. I forget, in part because of your size, that you are just a child. In part because of your wit. I wish I were not so self-absorbed. And at the same time so concerned with how I am regarded by my peers and even my inferiors. But I cannot simply will myself to be other than I am. I want you to remember what I’m telling you, for I know it is a rare occasion when anyone but me is uppermost in my thoughts. How can one be so aware of one’s flaws yet so helpless to be rid of them? People speak of character. How this man’s character differs from that man’s. In which, there is no room for free will. Oh, sometimes I think it is just that each of us is uniquely deranged.”
He vowed that from now on we would be a family, take our meals together, go out walking in the evenings arm in arm and share a pot of tea beside the fire.
“I know what happened,” Herder said before I could say a word. “Now you know why I have no family and no friends.”
“You saw it coming, but you hired me.”
“I hoped things might be different.”
“Hoped I might be—more resilient.”
He shrugged.
“I need a job,” I said.
“If not that you are six foot three, you would be out of luck. But I need someone to cover the courts. No woman has ever done it in St. John’s. Men last a few months at the most.”
“I’ll take it.”
“What I want is a reporter. But not someone merely to write a plain account of who did what. I will want you to make every crime seem as gruesome, as sensational as possible. It is the lowest kind of hack work, but it helps to sell papers.”
“May I use a pseudonym?”
“The pseudonym will, ever so slightly, lessen my humiliation. And also make a point of sorts. A pseudonym is a form of forgery. A token of protest. As much irony as I can get away with.”
“For now. Things will change. Blow over. But it will take some time.”
“Harold Dexter.”
“What?”
“My pseudonym. Harold Dexter.”
Chapter Six
THE COURTS. THE NUMBER OF DEFENDANTS WHO WERE POOR WAS absurdly blatant, disproportionate. The phrase most often spoken by a judge: “Your circumstances do not mitigate your guilt.”
The lawyers. A fraternity hardened by the terms of their profession, exchanging cryptic jibes, laughing as if no one but one of their own could possibly understand them or appreciate their special hard-nosed brand of humour. I could see the men they once were or might have been, the men they would have liked to be—and see, too, how this common disappointment was a kind of joke among them, ironic amusement at the idealism of their youth.
“They’re having a field day with your comeuppance,” my father said. “All the papers. All the enemies you made. They’re all saying that Herder fired you because people lost interest in your Forgeries. That man Reeves will not stop crowing about your downfall.”
“My downfall. My comeuppance. Have I come up or fallen down?”
“You will never learn your lesson, girl. They have left you with nothing and you go on making jokes.”
“It’s your assessment of my prospects that keeps me so light-hearted.”
“I have done my best with you. The best that circumstances would allow.”
“How much better off everyone would be if not for circumstances. I propose a society for the eradication of circumstances.”
“You smell like you’ve been drinking, girl.”
“I smell like what I have been drinking. Which is Scotch. It seems I have a taste for it. And a tolerance.”
“No sooner do I put a stop to one scandal than you find yourself another. You are a woman barely older than a girl, for heaven’s sake. How did you acquire a taste and a tolerance for Scotch? Not in this house. Not from me. I never drink. Not even brandy.”
“Acquiring a taste for it was easy. The hard part was acquiring the Scotch.”
“How long—”
“Months. I was having trouble sleeping.”
“You must nip this disgraceful habit in the bud.”
“We must nip nipping in the bud in the bud.”
“This confirms it. No one in my family has ever turned to drink.”
“I shall keep an eye out for a tall man with a taste for Scotch. How many of them could there be?”
“God only knows whose child you are. Someone passing through St. John’s from who knows where. Going who knows where.”
“Yes, I could tell from the moment I met her in New York. I could just see her gallivanting round the waterfront in search of roughnecks. Sneaking out at night while you were sleeping. All your suspicions seemed far-fetched until the moment I set eyes on her. And then it struck me just how well you knew your wife. So many secret liaisons. Men whose names she can’t remember any more, if she ever knew them in the first place. Do you think she even knows herself who my father is? I could see her sizing me up, trying to remember which one of them I looked like.”
“Stop it. I have never accused her of such behaviour.”
“Of what, then? Cheating on you with a better class of men? Gallivanting round at garden parties in search of doctors who were passing through? Or visitors from Whitehall? Perhaps I am the daughter of some bibulous aristocrat. Lord Lofty of Kent, sir.”
“You think you know that woman, but you don’t. You think you know people, but you don’t. What they are capable of doing.”
“There are more things in heaven and earth—”
“Yes, a lot more.”
“Perhaps you could hint darkly at some of them.”
For some time, it had been the printer’s devil who brought my Scotch to me from Herder, who acquired it for me. It was true, as I told my father, that I had had trouble sleeping. It had got to the point where I simply could not sleep at all, though I was always tired.
I tried in vain to ration my supply of Scotch, to make it last from one payday to the next, could not resist drinking as much per day as I wanted to until I had exhausted my supply with days or even a week to go before I would be paid. Herder would sometimes give me an advance, but he was reluctant, because he knew where the money was going.
“Maybe that job is not for you,” he said, which heartened me until he made it clear that there were no other jobs. I knew that no other paper, no other editor in the city, would hire me.
“I can do the job,” I said. “I’m just getting used to it, that’s all. Once I’m used to it, I’ll be able to sleep like I did before.”
“I can no longer, in good conscience, keep you supplied with Scotch. I’m sorry, Fielding.”
“What you need, miss,” P.D. said, “is something really strong.”
“I don’t suppose you know someone who could find me something really strong,” I said. He nodded.
Herder’s printer’s devil was now my supplier as well as my delivery boy. No longer the middleman, the boy, known as P.D., could lay his hands on nothing but gin. I instructed him to keep a permanent eye out for rum or whisky, but gin was all I ever got.
“Juneshine,” he called it, after the juniper berries from which it was locally, and illegally, made. It came in bottles without labels, amber bottles with fat, unattenuated necks such as you might find in a laboratory, stoppered with ragged chunks of cork. Instead of having the clear-as-water look of commercial gin, juneshine was cloudy and often had juniper needles floating about in it, as well as other unidentifiables that lay on the bottom like specimens of some sort that the juneshine was intended to preserve.
“They said to tell you this is something really strong, miss,” P.D. said. Who are they? I felt like asking. I assumed he meant his parents, from whom he hid the pennies that I gave him. “They said to tell you not to drink it straight.”
“You didn’t tell them who I am?”
“No. They tells me to tell everyone not to drink it straight. You’re supposed to mix it with something sweet. Like spruce beer. I can get you some spruce.”
“I suppose they make the spruce beer too, do they?”
“Yes, miss. But they don’t charge much. Especially not for juneshine customers. Some people mixes the juneshine with syrup or juice, but spruce beer is better for your stomach. It settles your stomach so you don’t get sick. Junibeer is the best. That’s what they calls it.”
“Junibeer?”
“Yes, miss.”
“Why don’t they mix it themselves?”
“’Cause you can’t leave it mixed for very long. The bottles might blow up. The juneshine blows up sometimes too, but the junibeer is worse. You can’t leave it lying around too long, not even in the icebox. If you don’t drink it after a week, you’re supposed to get rid of it. Just in case.”
I couldn’t decide if this was well-meant advice dispensed at their instruction or a tall tale meant to sell more beer by discouraging customers from hoarding their supply of juneshine. How strange it was listening to him, this twelve-year-old advising me on the most cost-efficient and least-nauseating way of getting drunk on juneshine. As full of helpful hints about the use of his product as any salesman.
“All right, P.D. Get me some spruce beer.”
He always made his deliveries before dark, he said, so I would hurry home as soon as court let out in the afternoon. He came to the house on the pretence of having been sent to get my copy for tomorrow’s paper. When I heard the knocker, I let him in and we exchanged commodities, he giving me juneshine and spruce beer, me giving him money, including a penny for himself, and my court stories. I began to think that his job at the Telegram was merely
a cover, for he often referred to other customers and I wondered how multiple daily deliveries were possible unless he had somewhere in the city to store the juneshine and spruce beer, as well as the empty bottles that, with each delivery, he collected and brought back to them.
“You writes up people’s names from court, don’t you?” he asked me one day.
“Yes,” I said. “I’m the court fink for the Telegram.”
“’Cause you got caught for forgery, right?” he said.
I saw that he was impressed with me for having been “caught” for something, me, this woman who lived in circumstances so unlike his own, in this big house on Circular Road. Even if he had no idea what forgery was, he respected me for having been up to something either illegal or disapproved of by the ’Stab, the name for the Constabulary.
“Yes,” I said. “I was caught for forgery. That’s how I ended up in court.” It occurred to me that he could not read one word of the stories he took from me for Herder. Had not been able to read one word of the Forgeries. An illiterate printer’s devil.
Sometimes, walking to the courthouse in the morning, I looked across the harbour at the Brow, where he lived. Columns of smoke rose up here and there from the dense woods above the houses. Any one of them could be coming from the still where my juneshine and spruce beer were made.
“Have you ever been caught?” I asked him.
“No, miss,” he said, shaking his head as if he had never considered the possibility. “Have they ever been caught?” I said. “No, miss,” he said, though he looked grave this time. He knew what the implications of their being caught would be for him. He must have been conspicuous walking about with those wrapped bundles clutched against his chest, especially on streets like ours where there were no stores and not much traffic.
“Has no one ever asked you what you have inside those bundles?”