The Custodian of Paradise

by Wayne Johnston

  However lame is the sexual innuendo of the Harbour Mainiacs, it serves to increase the awkwardness between Smallwood and me.

  By tacit understanding, we never mention “them” when we’re alone together. Them and, by implication, the sole subject that inspires them. About which, it sometimes seems to me, Smallwood has yet to be fully informed. Certainly, he has no experience.

  Him, never. Me, once. What a gap between never and once. Between him and me. God knows what, down through the years, he overheard in that tiny house.

  Thirteen children his mother has had. Perhaps he sees desire as a cause or symptom of poverty and ignorance. A trait of the poor and ignorant. Sex as an indulgence of the weak-willed that destroys more lives than it creates. As repugnant as liquor and idleness.

  “You made me look like a fool,” he said, once he had closed the door of my room behind us.

  “I thought I made them look like fools.”

  “You make everyone look like fools. Why couldn’t you just let me defend myself? You’d think I was a momma’s boy—”

  “Smallwood, there must have been twenty of them—”

  “I told you, I can talk my way out of trouble. I wasn’t planning to fight them.”

  “Smallwood, they were not spoiling for a debate. I only got away with what I said because I’m a woman. No one really got hurt.”

  “The point is I have to show them I’m not afraid of them.”

  “You should be afraid of them. I am. But I promise. From now on, I won’t intervene.”

  “It wasn’t because you are a woman. You’re willing to say anything to anyone because you have no reputation to protect.”

  “Look, you’re upset—”

  “Or should I say, your reputation is not worth protecting.”

  I looked away from him.

  “Who respects you, Fielding? Can you think of one person who respects you?”

  “I thought you did.”

  “Lots of people are afraid of you and your so-called wit. But that’s not respect.”

  “The question of how I am regarded by others has never much concerned me. Most others, anyway.”

  “You are an only child. Your father is a doctor. You will inherit your father’s house and money. You can afford to be indifferent. Disdainful. Sarcastic. Aloof. One day, you will have as much respect as money can buy, and that’s a lot. I am one of thirteen children whose parents have no money. I don’t have an inheritance to fall back on in case I fail—”

  “In the highly unlikely event that my father includes me in his will, I will never accept a cent from him. But as it happens, his plans for his estate do not include me—”

  “You’re no different from my socialist friends. The ones who play at being poor. New York is just a holiday for all of you—”

  “Being the lone associate of Joey Smallwood is no holiday.”

  “Did your father offer you money when you told him you were going to New York? Or did he offer you money so that you would go?”

  “He offered me money when I told him I was going to New York.”

  “And you accepted it?”

  “Yes.”

  “Does he send you money?”

  “Yes. It is—it is, as you know, more difficult for a woman to find employment—”

  “Especially one who, in spite of prohibition, is a drinker. Whose room and board includes a bottle of booze every other day.”

  “Why are you saying these things?”

  “Because they’re true.”

  “You know what I mean.”

  “My father buys booze for no one but himself. The hunger of his children satisfies his thirst. A booze allowance. That’s what you have. A rum trust fund. And you say he will exclude you from his will.”

  “Yes. He cares as much for his reputation as you do for yours. He is afraid of how it would make him look if his daughter wound up penniless. A penniless drinker. Or worse. He is afraid of me for many reasons. Better to keep me in money. Mollified and ossified. No telling what I might do or say if he cut me off. But about his legacy he is unconcerned. What I might do or say once he is gone he does not dwell on. After a life of paying lip service to God and religion, he says there is no afterlife. Only oblivion. Which he is looking forward to.”

  “What are you talking about, Fielding? What do you mean by what you ‘might say or do’? What could be worse for him that what you’ve already said and done?”

  “Never mind. I have no excuses, Smallwood.”

  “And if you accept money from your father now, why would you decline what he leaves you in his will?”

  “Perhaps you’re right. Perhaps, if he left me something, I wouldn’t decline it.”

  The next evening, Smallwood loitered on the stoop, sitting on his stump speaking-chair until the Harbour Mainiacs came home from work. I convinced him to let me wait with him, promising that I would speak in no one’s defence except my own.

  At the approach of the eerily similar-looking men from Harbour Main, he rose from his chair, carried it down the steps and stood on it. I remained, standing, on the stoop.

  “I am here,” Smallwood said, “to tell you how to start a union and to explain to you the principles of socialism. I am here to tell you why your children never have enough to eat—”

  “And I am here,” Dalton said, “to explain to you how women get knocked up.”

  “I am here to explain to you why the men you work for pay you next to nothing—”

  “What’s she doing standing all the way up there? Why don’t you make a speech, ya big bitch? We’ll see who walks away this time.”

  I remembered my promise not to intervene.

  “Who corrupted the Senate? The capitalists. Who fixes congressmen? The capitalists.”

  “Who wipes Joey’s arse? FIELDING.”

  I knew it would not be long before they made for Small wood.

  “All those wives of yours, alone in Harbour Main,” I shouted. “While the Harbour Mainiacs are away, the nymphomaniacs will play. But I don’t suppose you know what nymphomaniac means, do you? It means your wives are just as good at balancing on beams as you are. They spend as much time erecting things as you do.”

  Eyes no longer fixed with amusement on Smallwood, they stared at me.

  “You think that no-dick midget of a doctor back home is your daddy? Your mommy must have done it with the Tall Man from the circus—”

  “Plenty of new letters from the Service today,” I said. “Plenty of news from home. Your wife, Mr. Dalton, insists that you mustn’t be ashamed about your problem. She says she knows lots of men who wet the bed. In fact, she says that in your absence, some of them are wetting yours. Exactly what she meant by that she didn’t say.”

  “I don’t see any sign that you are a woman,” Dalton said, “but even if you are, you opened that big gob of yours one too many times.”

  They bowled over Smallwood as they would have some inanimate object and charged towards the stoop.

  The first of them were on the bottom step when we were all startled by the sound of a police siren. A police wagon that not even I, who was facing the street, had seen pull up, was right behind them, presumably having been summoned by the landlord.

  This man who, even when accepting my bribe-augmented rent, had said as few words to me as possible and taken my money in a manner meant to suggest that, in less exigent times, he would have refused it, soon appeared on the stoop beside me.

  He pointed at me.

  “Here’s the trouble-maker, Officers,” he shouted. “She’s been nothing but trouble since she moved in.” He pointed at Smallwood, who, having crawled out from beneath the scrum of his would-be converts, was kneeling on the pavement, replacing his glasses and his hat.

  “She told me she was married to that man there,” the landlord said as Smallwood rose to his feet.

  “That’s a lie,” Smallwood shouted. “We are merely friends. Under socialism, men and women can be friends without prudes accusing them
of scandal.”

  If I had had to name the thing that Smallwood was least justified in accusing someone else of, it would have been prudishness.

  The cops, prying them apart with their nightsticks, made their way through the clan from Harbour Main until they reached the stoop, where one of them, a sergeant, looked up at me.

  “What kind of trouble has she been making?” the sergeant said.

  Before the landlord could speak, I did. “Apparently the kind that no fewer than thirty men can settle,” I said.

  “A filthy-minded slut is what she is,” said Dalton, which earned him a rap on the upper arm with the sergeant’s nightstick.

  “There’s no need for that kind of talk,” the sergeant said.

  “It’s the only kind she understands,” Dalton said.

  “Those two are communists,” the landlord said, “him and her. And this one, this one is always drunk.”

  “Who better to pronounce on my sobriety than a moonlighting moonshiner. Many is the night I would have spent parched if not for him.”

  “More lies,” the landlord said.

  “What started all this?” the sergeant said. “If someone doesn’t tell me soon, I’ll put you all in jail. Including you.” He pointed his nightstick at me.

  “All right,” I said, “all right. The truth is they were fighting over me. Asking me which of them I like the most. Shouting endearments like the one you heard sweet Mr. Dalton use just now. They’ve been wooing me for months, but I keep telling them that my heart belongs to Smallwood. Then a fight began that Smallwood was in the act of breaking up when you arrived.”

  The Harbour Main men surged forward, but the cops held them back.

  “You lying bitch,” they shouted, shaking their fists, “you drunken whore.”

  The cops struck each one who hurled a profanity, beating arms or legs with their nightsticks. At which Dalton punched the sergeant so hard in the face that he fell into the arms of one of his officers, unmistakably unconscious.

  The other men from Harbour Main started throwing punches. With their red hair and freckled faces, they were all but wearing uniforms as distinctive as those of the cops.

  Smallwood stood outside the mayhem, hat and glasses properly adjusted, watching the struggle as if, any second, he planned to join it.

  “SMALLWOOD,” I shouted, “come around this way.” I motioned to the side of the stoop. He shook his head.

  “You have nothing to lose but your brains,” I shouted.

  “WHAT?”

  “SMALLWOOD,” I shouted again. “You’ll be no use to the Cause if you’re in jail.” Or in the morgue, I restrained myself from saying. He hurried around to the side of the stoop, where I helped him up, grabbing his wrists and lifting him until he was able to reach the rail.

  “All right, let go, let go,” he said, as if, from the start, my assistance had been superfluous.

  We went inside and began to make our way upstairs, both of us breathless.

  “Now look at what you’ve done,” Smallwood said. “All those men will wind up in jail because you incited them. There might have been no real trouble if not for you.”

  “If not for me, those redheads would have strung you up tonight. They still might.”

  “They will go to jail, and when they get out, they’ll be sent back to Newfoundland. No jobs, no money for their families. Because of you.” That they would, or even might, be deported had not occurred to me.

  “You should never have moved in here. Women are not allowed in this building.”

  “Especially in your room,” I muttered.

  “What?” he said.

  “I thought you wanted me to move here,” I said.

  “To New York,” he said. “I never asked you to move in here. There is a difference between socialism and iniquity.”

  “You’re against both iniquity and inequity.”

  “Here you are,” Smallwood said. “Inside, safe and sound. You start a riot, then walk away from it.”

  “Actually I ran. And you weren’t far behind me.”

  “You think that someone you can’t have a witty conversation with is a waste of time.”

  “It is just that I do not detect in the Harbour Mainiacs quite as much yearning for social reformation as you do. It is not society they are trying to reform, but the faces of anyone who is not from Harbour Main.”

  “You don’t understand them,” Smallwood said. “How could you, with your upbringing?”

  “I haven’t noticed any of your classmates from Bishop Feild among them. As for your understanding them better than I do, they are doubtless more appreciative of being understood by you than they let on. But who knows, given how easy it is to mistake bloodlust for gratitude.”

  Only a few hours after going back to my room, I left Hotel Newfoundland for good. Crammed what clothing I had in my portmanteau, along with my journals and pencils, two bottles of Scotch and one of a sickly sweet bourbon I had bought from the landlord the week before.

  The landlord was in his cubicle when I came downstairs, a little room with a kind of bank teller’s window. You put your money in a metal tray that he then withdrew, emptied the contents of and replaced so that his hands were never within grabbing distance of yours. I put the rent I owed him in the tray.

  “I’m leaving,” I said. “For good.”

  “You should be in jail. Good riddance to you. Nothing but trouble is what you’ve been. The place will have a bad name now.”

  “He is not dead,” I said, “whose good name lives.”

  “What?”

  “Smallwood’s not to blame,” I said. “There’s no need to evict him.”

  “He’s a socialist.”

  “Not really,” I said. I tapped the window lightly with my cane and he stepped back. “So don’t evict him.”

  There was no one on the stoop. All the Harbour Mainiacs had been taken away or gone inside. I descended the steps, and with no destination in mind, walked away from Hotel Newfoundland.

  Will you marry me? Smallwood asked me. Just like that, in the middle of the argument about whose fault the riot was.

  We had never kissed, had never so much as hugged or held hands.

  In spite of my drinking, in spite of the riot for which he blamed me, in spite of the low opinion of me he has lately been expressing, he proposed.

  And I hesitated. Though not out of surprise. My first thought was of them. And then of my Provider. I realized that I should either have told Smallwood about them long ago or never have become his—what?

  His first pass at me, a proposal of marriage. Had I said yes, we might have sealed the deal by shaking hands.

  If I had told him about my children, we would not have become friends. Whether I told him who the father was or not. He would have received the news with revulsion. Regarded me with disgust. There is far more in him of his mother than his father.

  But marriage to any man would be a sham if I did not tell him of my children. My heart would not be wholly his unless I told him.

  The look in his eyes when he saw the doubt in mine. The first such overture of his life rejected.

  Before I could devise some explanation, he retracted his proposal, pretended it was just a joke. And then went on to mock the idea that a man like him would ever want a derelict like me.

  My eyes as I walk the streets of Lower Manhattan burn with tears. Self-pity. Sorrow. I try not to blink, lest it cause the tears to overflow and trickle down my cheeks. It is enough that every passerby appraises me as usual. The sight of me with tears streaming unchecked down my face would likely draw a crowd.

  I will find a place to rest somewhere and drink until I sleep.

  It seems that every part of me is clenched. My teeth. My jaw. My stomach. The toes inside my shoes. I must not let go. Neither out here in the street nor in whatever room I rent. If I let go I will not recover. I must hold on until this, whatever it might be, has passed.

  Something will drag me under if I let it. I will sin
k. It seems that everything confirms it, every object, every looming building, every motor car and every face.

  The smallest things seem unbearably detailed. The refuse in the gutters. I wish I could stop noting the texture of everything. The paved street, the granite blocks of buildings, the fabric of other people’s clothes. Why is my mind pointlessly enumerating every thing I see? Heralding a state of soul I have never known before.

  I must get indoors. Indoors, perhaps, my mind will be free of this swirling surfeit of detail.

  It is fall, late November. My first fall in Manhattan. Night will soon be falling and I have nowhere to go.

  LOREBURN

  I wound up on the Lower East Side where there were mainly Jews but enough non-Jews that I knew the only things remarkable about my presence there would be my height and my being alone, unaccompanied by either a man or children. I still had enough money to convince most landlords to set aside their qualms about renting to a single woman. I took the cheapest room I could find. It was small, stale-smelling, windowless, unventilated except for the crack beneath the door. The single piece of furniture was a blanketless cot on which I lay down and tried to sleep.

  February 3, 1921

  I had not intended to stay longer than one night in the room I found the day I left Hotel Newfoundland, but it has been three months now and I am still here. Living here, though I pay my rent one day at a time and when I leave in the morning take my portmanteau with me and carry it about the city as if I am searching for another room.

  Each morning, I go through the ritual of checking out, settling up with my landlord and leaving the boarding house as if enacting the first step of some plan, walking briskly away, trying to look as though there is somewhere I must get to, some appointment I must keep.

  I have taken leave of the boarding house so often in this manner that the landlord knows his part by heart, takes the key from me and, smiling, says “Glad to have had you with us” and says “Very good” when I tell him he can rent my room, obliging the delusions of some harmless lunatic, he must think, another resident of Manhattan who, once entertainingly eccentric, is now demented. As I fear that I might be in fleeting moments.