The Custodian of Paradise

by Wayne Johnston

  “My children were here to visit me,” I remember telling one nurse, whose reply was “That’s wonderful, Miss Fielding,” her voice so flatly indulgent, so faintly patronizing it must have been Nurse Nell’s, as if it was well known that the apparition of visiting children meant that the end was near. I believe that I told the entire story, piecemeal, a narrative so entangled that no one could unravel it, though I remember how good it felt to be telling someone at last, unburdening myself of secrets, as I felt certain I was doing.

  “Their father has never seen them,” I said. “He doesn’t even know he has children. He doesn’t even know they exist.” That these utterances, though the product of delirium, had some significance for me the nurses and doctors seemed to understand.

  “Is that right, Miss Fielding?” they’d say, though not unkindly. Some even took to calling me “Miss Fielding, my love,” which confirmed my belief that my remaining time was short. Perhaps they believed that my story arose from my regret that I had never married, that it was a comforting fantasy for a woman who was childless and would die that way. Or perhaps they thought that, when I said “their father,” I was really referring to my own father. Where those nun/nurses were concerned, when it came to the mortally ill, any non-blasphemous delusion must be indulged.

  “They live with their parents in New York,” I said. Just the sort of illogic they were accustomed to, a woman describing “her” children as living with “their parents” in New York. “We have the same mother but our fathers have never met,” I often said. “My Provider is one of my fathers.”

  “Their names are David and Sarah,” I said.

  “David and Sarah. Well, those are lovely names,” the nuns said. “Names from the Bible.”

  My “story,” my “real” one, was well known to them. The daughter of a doctor whose wife had left him. Father still in Newfoundland. Mother in New York. The patient herself something of a scandal. Expelled from Bishop Spencer for writing a libellous letter about the dorms of Bishop Feild. An unmarried woman who was known to drink and to have spent time in New York as, of all things, a newspaper writer. All forgivable, or at least explainable, by the ill example of her parents and her having been brought up motherless by a busy doctor who, though known to have done his best, had had, with this giant of a girl whom he must have known no man would marry, far more than he could manage.

  “Of course, I have never seen my children either,” I told the nurses. “Not really. Not until today. Imagine, a woman who has never seen her children. It was so nice of them to come. So nice to see them after all this time.”

  “Yes, it must have been very nice, Miss Fielding.”

  They thought I was confusing my own life with my mother’s. My mother, whom I fancied would want to see me one last time but who, for all anyone but my father knew, may not even have been aware that I was ill. Whom my father had probably disowned on my behalf and who therefore had sent no letters, messages or gifts. Who may herself have disowned me.

  A phantasmagoric, dreamlike version of my life through which glimpses of my real life could be had, that is how my story must have seemed to them, even when I insisted that “if I die, their father must be told.” I know that I became quite agitated about this. “Their father must be told,” I said over and over and had to be restrained from getting out of bed. “Prowse,” I said. “He wrote A History of Newfoundland. He must be told.” An impulse to speak plainly cast in the language of delirium.

  I know I spoke Smallwood’s name as well. Why the old judge and historian and Smallwood figured so largely in my delirium must have mystified the nuns, even if they remembered that it was for framing Smallwood for my crime that I had been expelled from Bishop Spencer.

  I felt, when I was nearest death, resignation, indifference, profound apathy and lassitude, all of it mistaken by onlookers for “peacefulness.” I lacked the energy to care about the outcome of my buried struggle, to regret things I had done or the loss of what I might have done had I lived longer. I felt neither hope nor despair, neither fear nor anticipation of what would follow after death. I felt, if anything, mildly curious about what would happen “next.” I remember thinking that, soon, I would know what no one knew. Perhaps just a prelude to oblivion—to that possibility too, I was apathetically resigned, even as someone was shouting “MISS FIELDING,” a mouth at my ear. I wondered from which side my name was being called, from here or there, though the answer to the question did not seem especially important. I followed that voice back into life with all the languor of someone rising reluctantly from a warm bed on a winter morning.

  It still seems strange to me that, when the only word I might respond to was my name, none of them thought to shout “SHEILAGH” in my ear. “Fielding” would have worked best of all, though they had no way of knowing that.

  There was the ward for new admissions, Ward One, which was a quarantine within a quarantine where the new, most highly contagious patients were treated. I have no memory of the time I spent there. It was as far as most patients got.

  Then there was what was called “The Middle Ward,” in some ways the most sinister and feared of all three wards for it was a kind of battleground where the symptoms of the illness were most apparent and where prolonged struggles for survival took place. It was where patients, because their having got that far gave them hope, were most afraid.

  But when I say “the San,” it is really what was known as “the Third Ward” that I am referring to. Though it was by no means certain that, if you made it to the Third Ward, you would survive. The Waiting Ward it should have been called, for you were sent there to wait after the most virulent stages of your illness seemed to have passed, to wait to see if you would relapse. To see if you had sufficient reserves of strength, after your passage through the other wards, to trudge back up those last steps into life.

  The Third Ward. It was almost comical-looking. The patients lying about as if they had all ingested some torpor-inducing poison for which there was no antidote but time. Moving about among the prostrate patients the robust nuns, health being their reward for moral rectitude. Lassitude. Languor. Torpor. Trying to outwait a heat wave we might all have been, lying on top of the blankets in housecoats and pyjamas. Midday in the servants’ quarters of some East Indian plantation. All that were missing were mosquito nets and ceiling fans.

  It seemed that we were being quarantined to protect us from the outside world, not vice versa. Most of the patients on the Third Ward had never eaten so well in their lives. Meat, fresh fruit and vegetables. Once they left the ward, they never ate so well again. I didn’t.

  The outside world, which we could see through the windows that were enclosed by wire mesh, was where we had fallen ill. Out there, it often seemed, lay the illness that inside we were safe from. Some dreaded their return to that place where their lot in life would be the same or worse than formerly and where, it seemed to them, a relapse was a certainty.

  I thought often of my Provider, wondered if he had followed me back home and knew about my illness. I read his letters that, even during my time on the first two wards, had not been discovered by the nuns. Or, if they were discovered, the nuns dismissed them as nonsense born of my illness, letters written by me and that to acknowledge would have been a waste of their time and my energy.

  I never doubted, once I was admitted to the Third Ward, that I would survive. My conviction was based on nothing in particular, certainly not on any comparisons I made between myself and the other patients.

  “You’re going to survive,” a nurse whispered to me one day on the ward as she was changing the linen with me still in the bed.

  An absolute fact, it might have been, not a medical prediction or prognosis.

  “You’re going to survive.” I lacked the strength to feel either elated or dubious or to ask her to elaborate.

  She was quite expert at resheeting and making a bed while it was occupied. She rolled me about, onto one side, then the other, helped me sit up, raise my backsi
de, draw up my knees. She was a Presentation nun who wore a short-sleeved blouse beneath her tunic from which her massive bare forearms protruded like a surgeon’s.

  During the height of my illness, when I was unable to read his perfunctory letters, my father stopped sending them and did not resume writing to me though the nurses assured me he knew of my recovery. It was as though, having endured my “death” once, he could not bear doing so again.

  In its advanced stages, tuberculosis spreads from the lungs into the bones. By the time I was told that I’d survive, the illness and the countless surgeries needed to control it had withered my right leg, which lay always above the blankets in its massive brace as though on display to the others to show what a woman might endure, might be encumbered with for life and still survive.

  The other patients stared from their beds at the brace as if to say, what is this illness of the chest doing shackled to her leg? It was a rare patient who, though the illness made its way into their very bones, survived. Mine was a body to be marvelled at, one through whom the illness had run its full course yet that still remained in its accustomed bed, a fixture, an emblem, a symbol on the ward it might never leave.

  Yet the sign of me in convalescence did not inspire hope. Most attributed my survival to my physical stature, which they marvelled at as much as they regarded with dread that massive brace. I was the measure of what it took to survive the illness that afflicted them, a woman larger than most men. The state to which it had reduced a woman of my dimensions was the measure of their chances.

  The spectacle of me lying there on a bed borrowed from the men’s ward and that was still too small for me to stretch out to my full length, the endless hours I spent engrossed in books or in writing in my journal while the best-educated among them was barely literate, the rare event it was for me to speak a single word, but the mannered authority and volume of my voice when I did speak, the witticisms I was famous for in spite of their rarity, all combined to make them regard me as exotic—nowhere else but in a TB sanitorium could such a woman as Miss Fielding have been found.

  They knew me to be the daughter of a doctor, a chest doctor, and seemed to attribute some of my resilience to that as well. I think they believed me to have inherited from my father a nature inimical to the maladies whose treatment he was an expert in.

  Though there was the opposite view as well, that there was something ominous in the irony of the daughter of a chest doctor catching TB, not to mention the oddity of someone born of “the quality” coming down with what was stigmatically known to be an illness of “the scruff,” the poor, malnourished and unsanitary.

  I was a chastening sight and presence to many of them.

  I did not read nearly so much there as the other patients thought I did. I often stared for hours at the same page or even sentence of a book, unable to find the impetus to keep the words moving in my mind, but wide awake nevertheless, so sated with sleep that all I could manage, exhausted though I was, was a kind of immobilizing drowsiness.

  They assumed, whenever they saw me reading, that I must be downcast, in need of cheering up, or stuck for someone to talk to, for they could not imagine anyone choosing to read when there was an alternative of any kind. They fretted when, as I was reading, I deflected their attempts at conversation. Those who were able to, walked around their beds, glancing at me now and then, muttering and shaking their heads and seeming to blame themselves for being unable to break me of the habit of brooding over books.

  “So your father is a doctor,” they’d say, hoping that this statement of my father’s profession would accomplish what it had, on umpteen previous occasions, failed to do. “You’re a great one for reading.” They were willing to endure an explanation of my fondness for something in which they had no interest if nothing else but books would inspire me to conversation.

  My leg was thinner, shorter, my foot smaller. It would not return to normal. Or, rather, “its deficiency will not reverse itself.” My doctor. Nor would that of my lungs. But, as my “constitution” was “robust,” I would otherwise be fine. Perhaps live as long as I would have if I had not fallen ill.

  “There is one other matter.” He seemed embarrassed, or guilty. “You will be unable to conceive. The disease often has this effect. We are not sure why.”

  Unable to conceive. “Conceive.” A verb without an object. As if he were telling me I would never think again. Telling me they had had to remove my imagination. Conceive.

  I felt like telling him, In that case, I have as many children as I will ever have. He assumed I had none. Would never be a mother. I had long since decided not to have more children. Or thought I had. Yet I felt a surge of sorrow. Unable. Never. Felt that I had been forced to renounce even the possibility of children, however certain I thought I was of not wanting more.

  I must have looked appropriately aggrieved. He put one hand lightly on my shoulder.

  Not long after I began to wonder if he had decided never to contact me again, I received a letter from my Provider.

  My dear Miss Fielding:

  I was helpless to protect you. For two years I have fretted over you, dreaded hearing from my delegate that you had died.

  Perhaps you found some strength in the knowledge that you were not forgotten. I find it comforting to think so.

  I know that, until recently, you would not have been able to understand a letter if it was read to you, let alone have been able to read it yourself. And so I have only written to you letters that remain unsent but which nevertheless sustained me during these many months when I could not see with my own eyes that you were still alive.

  Dr. Fielding no longer writes. I wonder how much you care. Far more than he thinks you do, I suspect. The man has always been afraid to hope. Hope is a kind of prayer and he long ago stopped praying, for you or for himself.

  I am told that, as a consequence of your illness, you are no longer able to conceive a child. Barren. A cruel, blame-pointing, unforgiving word. You are the only child that I will ever have. Your well-being and happiness are all-important to me. But I think they would be so if I had ten children. You would be my favourite. You are your mother’s masterpiece. And your father’s.

  It may seem to you that you have less to live for than your fellow patients do. That few would mourn your passing or miss you if you died. The truth is that you have more to live for than most. You have a great talent, my dear, a great gift. I believe you have no idea by how many you are envied, how much the average person would happily part with in exchange for what you have. To be in some way exceptional, extraordinary—that is the dream of all the drudges of the world.

  You have your children, with whom, by some means you cannot now imagine, you may be reunited and loved as their true mother. Do not be afraid to hope.

  And you have, may I presume to say, me to live for. Though we will never meet unless one day this illness of yours is superseded by a greater grief.

  Your Provider

  Spring of 1924. More than two years in the San. Two years without a drink, not counting the occasional bottle that some of us shared after it seemed to bribe itself past the doctors and the nuns. But I went back to drinking the day I left the San.

  After two years indoors, I was declared “cured.” On the day of my release, I was given two dollars and a fortifying bag of apples. I had become so unused to fresh air that, as I lumbered away from the San, dragging my bad leg as if someone sad to see me go were clinging to it, I thought the doctors’ diagnosis must be wrong, for I could not catch my breath.

  The air was dissolving barriers, making its way into passages in my lungs that had been closed for years. It felt harsh, corrosive, my throat scorched as though I had swallowed the wrong way something that no amount of coughing could expel.

  Even as I coughed, bent over on my cane to keep from falling, I looked back at the doors and saw two nuns watching me, impassively, grimly, it was hard to say. I realized that I was not so much cured as merely non-contagious. I wonder
ed what the two nuns thought my chances of survival were, how long they thought it would be before I was back again.

  They turned away before I did. I managed to control my coughing sufficiently to straighten up and look around. It was June, late spring. A cool wind that betokened fog was blowing from the east, but the day was partly sunny with low, racing clouds, their undersides dark by contrast with the bright blue sky. Some seagulls went flying by, two of their number fighting, one with its beak clenching the other’s, which held what looked like a heel of bread.

  Many times in the past two years, I had, while looking out the windows of the San, seen such scenes of commotion, but that was nothing like being in the midst of it. The wind whose existence I had for years inferred from the sound it made and its effect on the world outside my window blew my clothes flat against my body in a manner I had once known well but had forgotten. I saw the wind move through the new leaves like a wave, the leaves’ silver sides upturned, sunlit, glittering like coins, the sound like that of a distant stream.

  On the road, cars and horses whose drivers seemed alarmingly certain of their destinations and usefulness went by. I felt as though I were still in my bed, still on the ward whose windows had swung open all at once, admitting the elements that indoors seemed so incongruous, as if some large wild animal, panicked by confinement, was trying to escape. This, it all seemed to say, is the pace of the world to which you have returned. This is how you used to live and what you will have to keep up with from now on. I had to get indoors, had to find another sanctuary.

  Chapter Eleven

  LOREBURN

  ALMOST EVERY NIGHT, I HEAR THE PLANES PASS OVERHEAD. AS I did when, in defiance of the curfew, I went out walking in St. John’s. On those few nights when the sky is clear, I see them, an endless swarm of blinking lights, squadron after squadron in formation, a hundred miles from the air base but already in descent.