The Custodian of Paradise

by Wayne Johnston

  My father can foresee no future for me. To him, future means marriage. Or some spinsterly career. The Spencer Spinsters. Less embarrassment if one remains unmarried for a reason. Or rather if, having been left on the shelf, one makes the best of it. “A woman in your situation could do worse.” His great fear, that I will do worse. Though he cannot, or will not, guess what worse might be.

  A woman in my situation. I would have to go away, far away, and hope to somehow start again. As all the Spencer women are rumoured to have done. Each with something in her past that only time or distance could erase. My father imagines I could be a teacher, somewhere. And then remembers that I never finished school, and why. A teacher who betrayed her teachers and her school. A woman whose “past” took place at school could never hope to be a teacher no matter where she went. No matter how long ago. Miss Emilee all but said so.

  I met her on the street last week as I was walking past the Feild. Late in the afternoon, the playing fields of both schools long since deserted. I believe she saw me from the window of her house and came out to meet me. Though she pretended that she, too, was strolling aimlessly along. Our meeting a coincidence.

  “Hello, Sheilagh.”

  “Hello, Miss Stirling.” I always thought of her as Miss Emilee. Miss Emilee, who had kept my secret to herself. I saw it in her eyes. You have had a child since we last spoke. But neither one of us will speak of it this time.

  “You have been causing quite a stir,” she said and smiled. A smile of unstinting kindness and affection.

  How few such smiles there seemed to be. My throat constricted. I had to swallow twice before I spoke. Do not cry here on the street and leave her with no choice but to take you in her arms. Tiny Miss Emilee, clinging to me as if she were the one in need of comforting.

  We talked for a while as if nothing in my life was out of order.

  “What are your plans, Sheilagh?”

  I told her, truthfully, that I had no plans.

  “I would offer you a place at Bishop Spencer if I could,” she said.

  “Which I would gratefully decline,” I said.

  She nodded in that worried way of hers. How long can you go on doing what you do? She didn’t ask. She could see that I understood my situation and that for either one of us to dwell on it was pointless. A fall day. The usual clattering stampede of leaves along the street each time the wind came up. Don’t cry. Better not to tell her everything. Better not to make her feel more helpless than she did already.

  “I hope you don’t mind,” I said. “Me writing that Forgery as if you wrote it.”

  She smiled. “You should have seen Headmaster Reeves.”

  “Well. He has had the last laugh.”

  “There will be other laughs,” she said.

  “Yes,” I said. “There will be.”

  What does my father think as he goes shamefaced to the druggists? Each script of eight ounces of alky costs a dollar. But eight ounces makes a lot of Triple A. I give him as much money as I can, almost every cent I make. I eat next to nothing and would eat no more if I were rich. But he says that I will put him in the poorhouse.

  What will I do? How much longer can I stand that courthouse? Were I to somehow stick it out for years, I would have daily encounters with Prowse, whom I saw last week. Spoke to last week. He is articling at his father’s firm. We met on the steps of the courthouse.

  “Fielding,” he said. “Good God. What happened to the other half of you?”

  “A good many people,” I said, “have got their pound of flesh.”

  “A living example of what junibeer will do.”

  “And you, Prowse,” I said, “are a living example of what roast beef will do.”

  He had filled out even more and had the beginnings of a “barrister’s belly.”

  “I have sense enough to keep body and soul together,” he said.

  “I see no evidence,” I said, “of soul enlargement.”

  “You see no evidence of anything, Fielding.”

  “I saw none against Smallwood.”

  “Then why did you confess?”

  I shrugged.

  “You got what you deserved, didn’t you, for writing those Forgeries of yours?”

  “I stepped down,” I said. “I had grown tired of writing them.”

  “The way I heard it, certain people grew tired of reading them.”

  “People who find reading tiresome.”

  “The same old Fielding,” he said. “You still think making smart remarks will get you somewhere.”

  “Yes,” I said. “The same old Fielding. Nothing new since we saw each other last.” He looked quizzical, as if he thought he was supposed to know what my tone of voice implied. Their names are David and Sarah. Prowse. Staring at me with no indication that he’d ever touched me. I had once loved him. But he would not let himself love me. He could not be both my husband and Prowse.

  “Goodbye,” I said, lighting up a Yellow Ragarette as I walked away.

  I will have to find another job before Prowse is called to the bar. The sight of Prowse every day. A constant reminder to me of what he doesn’t know. A constant reminder of them. His face, his voice, his presence every day. Their faces, voices, presence. I could not endure it.

  I felt, just for a few moments, how I felt that day on the school grounds when he turned away from me. To suddenly find myself unloved. The day after our last day at the judge’s house. Betrayed. Dismissed. The sensation of falling. Almost sick to my stomach. How did I manage to keep from crying? Prowse exulting with the others. Go, Fielding, go! While I stood there, remembering as if it had not been the day before but years ago that we had—twilight in the judge’s house. My face burning. Both of us still out of breath. The smell of coal. How quickly my body grew cold when he pulled away. Silent with his back to me. Faint sounds from horse’s hooves. Two people, two voices, passing by. For them a day, a moment like other days, other moments. Oblivious to us. It seemed impossible. I looked at his face, his eyes, his mouth. Like him. Already, perhaps, they look like him. They will be tall like him and me. How tall will Sarah be? Height a disadvantage for a woman.

  Smallwood. Him too I have met. I saw him first. Hands in his pockets. Drew his trousers tight so I could see how thin his legs were. What happened to the other half of him? He was half gone to begin with. When he went to Bishop Feild. We forgo food for different reasons. Me because it interferes with drinking. Him so that his siblings can have his. Unlike P.D., he gives his money to his mother, who hides it from his father.

  But he no longer looked incongruous as he had at Bishop Feild. Duckworth Street was full of others like him. How out of place Prowse would have looked on that same street. Men like Prowse will be one day do not walk the streets. Only the distance from their carriage to the door.

  God knows how long Smallwood had been walking when I saw him. His face in profile like an axe. That same Norfolk from the Feild. The one he held together with both hands as he stood encircled by the boys. Short work of him, I thought back then. But now I could see what a fight they would have had. Where is he going? Where has he been? With nothing in his pockets but his hands. That jacket whose only purpose now was decoration. His shirt showed through at the seams so that the sleeves seemed unconnected to the shoulders, as if they might have been pinned to his shirt. The whole thing might have been a dozen separate pieces pinned onto him in the semblance of a jacket. I imagined him donning them one by one. Assembling the jacket piece by piece like a tailor in the early stages of his work. His socks showed through the toes of his boots. His hat looked like someone had used it to butt out cigarettes. His glasses were all tape and bits of string. His years at Bishop Feild had left no mark on him. There was nothing left of the boy whom Prowse befriended and betrayed, nothing but that defiant stride. No one without a destination, with nowhere to go, could look more like a man bent on getting somewhere fast than Smallwood.

  “Smallwood,” I shouted. He jumped, startled, as if no one had ever sa
id his name before. As if to be accosted in the street could only mean trouble. What sort of reverie? What could so preoccupy that mind? He stopped and looked furtively around as if preparing to defend himself. I was across the street.

  “Over here,” I said. I waved, as if I needed to. He stared at me but did not cross the street, so I crossed over to his side, forcing a motorcar whose driver recognized me to stop.

  “Smallwood,” I said. “It’s Fielding.” As if he might otherwise have confused me with some other woman who was six foot three.

  “Fielding,” he said. “You look like you’ve been sick or something. Nothing fits you any more.”

  “Nothing ever did fit you,” I said.

  “Everything I’m wearing once belonged to someone else,” he said, almost boastfully.

  “Yes,” I said. “He used to go to Bishop Feild.”

  “What do you want, Fielding? Planning to get me into trouble again?”

  “I got you out of trouble.”

  “After you got me into bigger trouble. Why did you write that stupid letter to the Morning Post, anyway? Did you actually think they’d print it?”

  “No. I thought they would ignore it. It was just a prank. That got out of hand. At your expense.”

  “Well, I never would have graduated anyway. Reeves would have seen to that. You certainly got his goat. With those Forgeries of yours. I knew they wouldn’t let you keep writing those for long. So what are you doing now? I suppose it’s no great thing to lose your job when your father is a doctor.”

  “You haven’t heard?”

  “Heard what?”

  He seemed not to know that I was Harold Dexter.

  “Nothing much. Still living with my father.”

  “I’m not.”

  “Why would you be living with my father?”

  “I have things to do, Fielding.”

  “Such as? You should see a doctor, Smallwood. You really don’t look well.”

  “You are the daughter of a doctor and look at you.”

  “I have an excuse for not eating. I drink instead.” I took the flask from my pocket, sipped swiftly from it and replaced it.

  Smallwood shook his head. “What in God’s name is in that? It smells like—”

  I told him the ingredients, but not my source, of Triple A. He shook his head. I told him I had started out on juneshine and spruce beer.

  “Junibeer,” he said. “One of my father’s favourites. A woman your age. And you could be arrested.”

  “You, I suspect, have a better excuse for not eating. You have no food.”

  He denied this. Denied having no money for food. Denied having no job.

  “Smallwood,” I said, “you would deny it if I accused you of needing to wear glasses. You would deny it if I accused you of wearing glasses.”

  He began to walk away. He was right. Reeves would never have let him graduate. The “quality.” The “quantity” Reeves and others called the poor majority. The mass of men. He seemed to have no mass at all. The immaterial. Most of the “quantity” were like him. A mass of shadows. It might have been not his clothes but the parts of his body that were pinned together. Adhering out of habit. Yet the optimism, the ambition of that stride. A member of the quantity, but for him anything is possible. Knows what he wants and just how to get it. An outlook so at odds with his appearance and his circumstances that he seemed delusional.

  “The Morning Post,” I said, “is looking for a court reporter.”

  Now we are rival reporters. He had heard of Harold Dexter but had no idea it was a pseudonym, let alone mine. How surprised he was to see me in my “office.”

  The lawyers are merciless with him. With us. Though he hardly seems to notice. They know our “history.” Neither of us has told them how he got the job. They think it some hilarious coincidence. Two “bitter enemies” working side by side. Fielding who framed Smallwood, ruined his meagre prospects, then confessed, thus getting herself expelled. Now elbow to elbow.

  “Working elbow to ear,” they say. Not joined at the hip. Joined at the hip and shoulder. Hilarious, they think, the difference in our height and bulk. Even in my present state, I am twice as broad as him. Fielding and her sidekick. “More meat on her cane than there is on you.” They talk to my cane, pretending that it’s him. Fielding and her nephew. Manservant Smallwood. Known collectively as Fieldwood. “Here comes Fieldwood,” they say, as we enter court. My cane is Bigwood. Lots of ribald “wood” puns at his expense. And mine. My preference for Bigwood. Poor Smallwood. Do I sit him on my lap? Do I bounce him on my knee? When will he be starting school? He seems oblivious, but I defend him anyway.

  Smallwood worries that his father will show up in court some day. Public drunkenness. Buying from bootleggers and causing a disturbance. Profanity. Resisting arrest. He scans the courtroom docket every day in dread. He frequently encounters people that he knows or knew, boys, now men, that he grew up with. Friends of his father whom his father, like mine, calls “associates.”

  “Smallwood?” my father said when he first heard that we were colleagues at the courthouse. “Then you must quit your job at once,” he said. “How can you consort with him? After what he did. The likes of him. The dregs. Have you forgotten who he is? He must have no shame. That business in New York. God knows what he would do. Who he would tell some day if you tell him something after you’ve been drinking. Or worse. What he did once he might do again, especially if you’d been drinking. Take advantage of you like before. My God, he must never know. I would think that, of all the people you wanted to stay clear of—have you lost your mind? You cannot associate with him. You will wind up telling him your secret.”

  “I told you I will never speak of it,” I said. “Never. He knows nothing about that business in New York and he never will. No amount of Triple A could loosen my lips about that. It is by pure chance that we wound up working together. I can’t quit my job. I might never get another one. Herder is the only man I know who doesn’t mind my—reputation.”

  “Have you no shame?”

  “I have no choice.”

  Smallwood asks often about what New York was like. Doesn’t understand my reticence. “You spent, what, six months there? Six? In the greatest city in the world. And you never talk about it.”

  I describe New York to him as I have seen it on postcards, in photographs, in books. I repeat descriptions of it I have read.

  “What do you remember most vividly about it?”

  “The Brooklyn Bridge,” I said. “It’s—an amazing bridge. To tell you the truth, Smallwood, all I did while I was there was argue with my mother and her husband.”

  “Six months in New York,” he said. “You must have seen every inch of it. I would have. Did you go to Central Park much?”

  “Yes,” I said. “Central Park is very beautiful.”

  “I don’t think I would ever have come back,” he said. “All this must seem so different to you now.”

  “Very different,” I said. “Before New York, and after New York. That’s how I see my life.”

  “Before New York and after New York. Yes I can see that. St. John’s must seem so small. You must think about New York all the time.”

  “Yes. I do. All the time.”

  “Do you think you’ll go back?”

  “I don’t know. I may never see New York again.”

  “I’m going there some day. And if I do come back, I’ll be prime minister of Newfoundland. Also some day.”

  I smiled. He said it as if his ascension to the top was as good as accomplished, preordained. I smiled, he thought condescendingly, but I was touched. I foresaw no such rags-to-riches rise in his future. Foresaw disillusionment and disappointment. And pointless persistence.

  “I will have the last laugh,” he said.

  His self-confidence entirely unjustified and entirely unshakeable. Reporting for pennies a day. Talking as if he is ideally situated to surpass all the lawyers and judges he works among.

  Smallwo
od says his publisher has convinced one of the merchants to let him write about the seal hunt. See it first-hand. He has a berth on the S.S. Newfoundland. Captain Westbury Keane is the skipper. Son of “old Man Keane.”

  “I won’t be allowed to leave the ship,” he said.

  “Not even if it’s sinking,” a lawyer said.

  “I have to watch the seal hunt through binoculars,” Smallwood said. What an image. Smallwood at the gunwales of the otherwise deserted ship, the only man left on board the S.S. Newfoundland, a pair of binoculars pressed against his glasses, trying, as always, to make out what is going on “out there.” Trying to understand a world that will always keep him at a distance.

  “I’ll see everything that happens on the ship,” he said. “Close up. I’ll have a bunk like all the other men.”

  “Are you sure you won’t be sharing one?” said Sharpe. “It would be a shame to waste three-quarters of a bunk.”

  The lawyers are laying bets on his chances of survival.

  “Three weeks,” he says. He could be talking about three weeks in New York or London. “Because of me, people will find out what it’s really like.” His stories, he says, will be telegraphed daily to St. John’s.

  “Yes,” I said, “after Keane blacks out the parts he doesn’t like. And puts in the parts that you left out.”

  He is convinced that other reporters are jealous of him. With the exception of me, he says, for, being a woman, I am “automatically ineligible.” No women allowed on board. Bad luck. Even a woman my size.

  “I don’t believe in bad luck,” he said. “I’m not superstitious. But you have to admit that a woman on a ship would be distracting.”

  “Smallwood,” I said, “a more distracting, less likely sight on a sealing ship than you is something I cannot imagine.”

  It is just as I told him it would be. The “realistic” accounts of the seal hunt that bear his byline are romantic adventure stories. “Over the side the brave men go and the hunt is on. They are sealers of great skill who jump from one ice pan to the next as matter-of-factly as you or I would walk on solid ground.”