The Custodian of Paradise

by Wayne Johnston

  I remember the sigh of impatience from the other side of the screen. I might have been the penitent and she the confessor who had all too many times heard my self-indulgent litany of sins.

  I stopped in mid-sentence, a priest deferring to a nun whose novitiate had yet to end. I felt intimidated by her. That sigh, it seemed to me, was the measure of my ignorance of other people’s lives, the lives of those, especially, who took for granted things that I would never know existed.

  I waited for her to speak.

  “I mean the vow of celibacy,” she said.

  I knew the older priest would have stopped her at that point and told her never to speak of such things with anyone but the Mother Superior of her convent. But I said nothing and she seemed to take my silence as encouragement or permission to continue.

  “It’s not so much sex,” she said.

  I had never heard the word spoken before in my life. I hoped the other nuns waiting to make their confessions had not heard her.

  “Lower your voice,” I said, lowering mine.

  “It’s children,” she said, “the idea of never having children.”

  “Surely you must have thought of this before you made your vows,” I said.

  “Yes,” she said. “But I assumed it was the same for the other girls. I assumed it was something that all nuns learned to live with.”

  Girls. I thought of the old nun I had seen the day before polishing the feet of the crucifix that was otherwise covered in what might have been a winding sheet, one hand atop the other as she pressed on that pair of feet with all her might—one hand atop the other as the feet of the crucifix were placed one atop the other and fastened by a gleaming spike. The old nun paused from time to time to kiss the feet that she was polishing, not so much, it seemed, in love or tribute—she was begging a pardon for being so presumptuous, so brazen as to touch those feet, even for the purpose of keeping them clean.

  Girls. Was that what the younger nuns called each other when no one else could hear them?

  “Even Mary’s mother, who was barren, had Mary by the Holy Spirit,” she said. The Virgin Birth. The birth of the Virgin.

  “And Mary, who never knew Joseph—“Joseph, the archetypal cuckold. Cuckolded by an archangel, a dead-of-night visitation upon the Virgin while she slept.

  A fluttering of life within her womb, Life Spontaneous, like the first flicker of light in the dark cave of eternity, the moment of creation in the void.

  “Joseph, my husband, I am with child.” Joseph was told by the Lord that he must not doubt the fidelity of his wife who, though he had never “known” her, was with child.

  “You know it is prideful to compare yourself with Mary,” I said. “Mary’s greatest virtue is humility. Your doubts and yearnings are your God-sent imperfections. At the same time as you seek perfection you must expect to fail, to fall short of Those to whom you owe the gift of your vocation.”

  However unusual it may have been for a young nun to speak of such things to a young priest instead of her Mother Superior, there was, I suspected, nothing unusual about your mother’s doubts and desires.

  Never to know a man. Never to have a child. Celibacy. The burdensome urges of the clergy. The nagging nuisance of biology.

  I think your mother would have gone elsewhere with her doubts had I not begun admitting to my own.

  I one day admitted, while I was in the midst of my customary chastisement, that I did not entirely believe what I was saying, that my conviction was perfunctory, habitual, that I was merely aping my own older, unyielding confessor who I said counselled me not as an equal or even as a young priest who one day would be his equal, but as a child.

  Your mother sighed as audibly as she had the first time she confessed to me, but this was a sigh not of exasperation but relief, release.

  An almost erotic sigh, it seemed to me, as if she had suddenly, unexpectedly reached some point she had despaired of ever reaching.

  And so began a long charade.

  A young nun discovers in a young priest a kindred spirit. The two carry out, under the pretext of confession, a kind of courtship, though they speak of nothing but their vocational misgivings. They speak of the burden of celibacy as if each of them, in their former lives, had been in love, had left, unconsummated, romances to which they are now fighting the temptation to return: each implies they have a lover whom they hope is waiting for them, yet are ashamed of this hope and each takes solace in the other’s shame.

  Most crucial to the charade is that they express no attraction to each other but only to these nebulous, never-named lovers who by now may have forgotten them.

  A platonic Pyramus and Thisbe, in love with each other’s voices but unable to touch.

  I began to drink. I paid a church-going drunk to buy whisky for me and bring it to the rectory at night.

  I drank myself to sleep.

  It would be said of me, when I left the Church, that I had lost my Faith, as if I had misplaced it. That I had been tempted into faithlessness and paganism. Untrue.

  The vow of celibacy began to seem as burdensome to me as it did to your mother, with whom, in my imagination, I shared my bed each night.

  One Saturday afternoon in winter when it was almost dark, your mother came to make her confession.

  We had for months been going through the motions of the ritual, so it would not have surprised me when she said, “Bless me, Father, for I have sinned” except that she said it with such fervour.

  When I asked her what her sins were, I expected her to speak informally as always of the various ways in which she was unsuited for the Sisterhood.

  “Father, I have decided to leave the convent,” she said.

  I had been drinking, so much that I doubted what I’d heard and said nothing, though my heart was pounding.

  “I am leaving the convent, Father,” she said.

  “And I am leaving the priesthood,” I said.

  She inhaled as if through clenched teeth, as if she had been stabbed.

  “For you,” I said, “to be with you.”

  “Oh my God—“

  “I would rather spend my life with you—“

  “May God forgive us—“

  “I am in love with you.”

  “My God. I thought—I would have to leave without you, Father. I came to say goodbye. God forgive me, I have made you lose your Faith. Before I came to you, you had no doubts—I have infected you with mine.”

  “No,” I said. “You are right that I had no doubts. Nor do I have any now. I have not lost my Faith. But I must forsake my vocation. For you. Susan.”

  “I too am in love with you,” she said.

  I should have known it was—if not a lie, what?—she was drawn into my dream, but not for long.

  “Will you marry me?” I said.

  She whispered, “Yes.”

  Love. Protestations of love between a nun and a priest, a proposal of marriage whispered through the screen of a confessional. A nun and a priest. How drearily farcical it seems from the distance of decades.

  We planned it all over the next few days. She would leave the convent and a month later I would leave the priesthood. There would be no avoiding a scandal, but we would be inviting one far worse than it had to be if we were to leave the Church at the same time.

  I declined when the older priest and then the bishop urged me to take a six-month retreat for reflection and prayer.

  I left the rectory with my one suitcase, in which was a chalice that I had found in the basement of the rectory, a deconsecrated vessel that I reconsecrated and from which I still drank as faithfully as do you from your flask.

  We were still believers, but we knew we could not be married by the Church. The one holy, apostolic Church, marriage to which we had thrown over for marriage to each other.

  We would be married in a civil ceremony but not in unseemly haste.

  Knowing that her family would look about as favourably on her choice of a husband as they had upon her choice
of a vocation, she thought it best that we marry without their knowledge and inform them when it would be too late for them to intervene.

  A close friend of your mother allowed us to stay for a few days in her family’s cottage on Cape Cod. It was to be a kind of advance honeymoon.

  This was in the winter, the dead of the off-season when the cape was deserted but for us.

  We lived as any two young soon-to-be-married lovers would have.

  As if we were already married.

  By day, in spite of the cold, we walked for miles over the sand dunes and along the beaches of the cape, not minding the wind though it blew constantly onshore.

  I sheltered your mother from it sometimes. She with her back to me and I with mine to the wind, we stood motionless for minutes.

  She leaned back against my chest, her hands on my arms that were under hers, my forearms pressing her against me.

  We shouted above the howling of the wind and the crashing of the waves that we loved each other.

  I see it in my mind like one of those “portrait” photographs you see in shops whose purpose it is to sell the frame, as if your image need only be enclosed by that frame for you to be as “happy” as that nameless couple.

  You can still see the last light of day where the sea meets the sky. But the young lovers cannot see it.

  It seems likely, though you cannot tell for sure, that their eyes are closed.

  For them, except for the moment of this rapture, the world does not exist.

  See how her head is thrown back against his chest in abandon, as if to be thus enfolded by his arms is all that she could ever want.

  And see how his back is hunched so that he can tenderly, playfully, rest his chin in the crook of her neck while her long hair swirls about his face, obscuring it.

  I look at the “photograph” and cannot believe that I was once that man, or that she, however delusion-driven, was once that woman, or that there ever was such a moment on the seashore at Cape Cod.

  For her, there never was.

  I wonder, as I look at the photograph, how can she be thinking of what she was soon to do?

  And yet she must have been.

  I woke the next morning to find myself alone in bed.

  Awoke to find, in place of her, a note. On her pillow of all places. How trite of her, how shabbily banal. How absurdly ordinary the whole thing had been right from the start, for her. It had all seemed one way to me and another way to her. We had never, for a moment, been together.

  Doubt, as I have said, was her daemon. Obsessively preoccupied with consequences, possibilities, ramifications. She had never really renounced her upbringing, had never really been a nun, had never really been in love.

  Cape Cod was the outmost limit of her imagination. Her courage. She was pulled back into the commonplace. The safety of predictability.

  What to me seemed like life dissolved into clichés. The rich girl rebels and—oh, could it be more farcical—becomes a nun. Rebels again and leaves the convent for the man she loves who in her imagination could only be a priest. Young lovers in flight from their pasts plan their future on Cape Cod in winter.

  And there, for her, the story ends. She has played out her flirtation with rebellion. She hopes she will be welcomed back. Hopes that her ever having strayed will be forgotten, never mentioned, discreetly avoided when she is present and only vaguely alluded to when she is not. It will not be an impediment to suitors of the sort approved of by her family. She has been disqualified from nothing. She hopes.

  That I had no such haven to return to she may or may not have understood.

  “My dearest,” she wrote, “I have made a grave mistake. I do not love you but …”

  On how many pillows beside how many sleeping unsuspecting lovers have such notes been left? But not if a billion had been duped like me would I have been consoled.

  I stayed on the cape for two months, not in her friend’s cottage but in others that were boarded up for winter. When there was no food left in one, I moved on to the next.

  I all but had the cape to myself. I sometimes saw other solitaries on the dunes or walking by the sea, but when they saw me they changed their courses as if in my appearance there was something sinister. A man my size dressed all in black wandering the cape in winter.

  I returned to Boston in the spring. I stole a horse and carriage from an occupied cottage on the cape.

  I found your mother’s house, watched her comings and goings undetected. I saw no one who appeared to be a suitor.

  It seemed that it was over.

  Your Provider

  It was something I could imagine my mother doing, she who had abandoned me when I was six. It might all be true. My Provider had once been a priest. Father Thomas. But that was not what he meant when he said that I had been twice fathered.

  How could any stranger not attract notice or altogether avoid detection on the Bonavista. But this man—this man would be the talk of St. John’s within hours of arriving there. Yet he had often been there, had lived in that house on Patrick Street for weeks at least, who knew for how long. Yet there had never been talk of him.

  It seemed inconceivable, all the more so out here. Not even if this blizzard had been raging since my first day on the Bonavista could he have concealed himself so perfectly. I had overheard nothing, been told nothing, about him. Had not, as I surely would have been if anyone had seen him, been warned about him by the older men.

  Two strangers somehow escaping notice on the Bonavista, two men no one knew keeping company out here where the appearance of an unclaimed dog was the talk of the section shacks.

  Yet he had written as if no explanations were necessary.

  Bitterness towards my mother lingered in his letter despite what he called the “restoration” of his life.

  I thought of how my father would have greeted the sight of him, at last a man tall enough to be my real father, a man whose height and presence in St. John’s my father would be certain bore out his suspicions.

  He and his delegate removed my clothes. They must have put me on the bed. Two men undressing me, raising my arms above my head, pulling off my dress and then my slip and underwear.

  The massive fingers of the man who rescued me and lifted me from the snow as if I were a child fumbling with the buttons of my slip. The two of them working—how?—frantically, methodically, in silence or whispering instructions to each other, lest they wake me?

  And what if I had woken? Why would it have mattered if I saw their faces, given how unlikely I was to see them again unless they wished me to?

  How he held my wrists when I tried to remove the mask. Not just so that he would not perish in the storm, not just so that he could breathe and thereby rescue me. As if he were playfully testing my strength.

  Two men brought together by war. It sounded as if they could not have been more unalike. One close to seven feet tall, with shoulders more than a doorway wide. The other? Featureless. A man about my mother’s age, I guessed.

  Two pairs of hands undressing me, though I could imagine only one. Two men who saw my body as no one had seen it since the San, as no one but the nurses at the San, not Prowse, not the doctors or my father, have ever seen it.

  The man he calls his delegate must have held me in his arms while I was naked and put me in the washtub while my Provider saw to the disposition of my parts, my torso, my arms and legs, arranged me in a swoon-like pose while the other, perhaps in one hand, cupped my head.

  How tenderly, almost lovingly, he wrote about my body.

  I have no idea where they could have gone to in this storm.

  The trolley is on the tracks in front of the section shack.

  They would not strike out like that, in a storm at night, without a plan, with no expectation of survival. He would not.

  The one who saved me could carry an ordinary man on his back for miles. Perhaps, farther up or down the tracks, the storm is not so bad.

  No evidence remains that they were
here. I have hidden the letter. Wiped the floor so that Smallwood, if he lives, will not see those giant bootprints. Outside, their footprints have long since been filled in by the snow.

  Smallwood is gone. It seemed for a while that those words might have a different meaning.

  Gone. Dead. His body cold beneath those blankets. His mouth open in mid-breath.

  For two days and two nights, I heard, even above the roaring of the wind, a sound like someone slowly drawing a shovel back and forth on cobblestones. Air scraping through his throat and lungs as he inhaled, then a long, suspenseful pause when it seemed his body could not bear to breathe it out, could not endure the scraping of it back against the grain, the withdrawal from his body of something it was too thin to contain.

  I once weighed more than twice what he does, for most of my life ate better, lived in comfort while he lived in squalor. And it was me who came down with an illness that left me lame and him who walked across the island.

  But it seemed, these past two days, that however long overdue it was, his turn had come.

  I could not sleep because of that sound, at once hating it and dreading its cessation, covering my ears, then straining until I heard that ghastly, reassuring rattle.

  I assumed he had pneumonia and I knew, from years of listening to my father note the chances of his patients, that it was almost always fatal. I kept getting up and putting cold compresses on his forehead, having no idea what effect, if any, they were having.

  On the pillow in which his head made almost no impression there was a halo of perspiration. I told myself that, if he survived, it would be thirty years before he looked this old again.

  But I was certain beyond hope that he would die. And I was for the first time certain, too, that I still loved him, though I could think of no one thing about him that appealed to me, no discrete characteristic or even mannerism that I found attractive, let alone irresistible. It was the sum of him I loved for which no description but “Smallwood” would suffice, as none but “Fielding” would suffice for me.