The Custodian of Paradise

by Wayne Johnston

  To think that I ever believed that I was meant to be a nun, that I could endure to be one. And then the subsequent delusion. Which was perhaps necessary to escape the first. A second spell cast upon me to release me from the first.

  You mustn’t think me heartless, my dear friend.

  I know that he was deeply hurt. For that I am truly sorry. But I did not entice him from the Church, force him from the priesthood. I did not destroy his vocation or his Faith.

  The truth, which he as much as admitted to me, is that only in the priesthood could he even have come close to fitting in. He is by nature, even by stature, unsuited for life as others live it. He renounced the one sanctuary that was open to him.

  I know it is unkind to say—in which case, I will not say it. I somehow thought I loved him but I do not and never did.

  I have written nothing to you thus far of the matter that you know most about.

  I cannot thank you enough, or ever repay you, for your love, assistance and support. I could never have gone through that alone. Could never have kept it a secret without your help.

  It. Whether a boy or a girl they could not tell. Thank God for that. These past few weeks have been difficult enough and others just as difficult or worse still lie ahead.

  My parents are happy. They know nothing but that I have left the convent. You know how opposed they were to me joining in the first place. There were no complications from the procedure. Had there been, I would have said I had a miscarriage, but even that has proved to be unnecessary. My parents tell me how wonderful it is to have me back. My confinement to bed they attribute to a kind of benign breakdown.

  They think that, on the ruins of the fool that I briefly was, the old Susan can be built again. Perhaps they are right. When I think of how close I came to losing everything—but I must not dwell on the past.

  I look forward to the time when we can once again meet face to face. You should consider yourself fiercely hugged and kissed.

  Your grateful friend,

  Susan

  I felt as though I could batter my way into heaven to find a place for what she called it, that I would not take no for an answer, would not accept the consignment of my little child to limbo, but would storm heaven and fight my way through a host of white-clad angels, the guardians of a God who would not dare defy me.

  But in truth there was nothing I could do.

  Even now, so many years later, tears fall onto the paper as I write.

  I felt that I had failed my child. Unaware that I was a father, unaware that a child of mine had been waylaid on its journey to the world.

  Using “Mary” as my go-between, I began writing to your mother for reasons that at first were unclear to me.

  I didn’t threaten her with violence or blackmail.

  I signed my letters Father Aquinas. I gave no return address.

  Would have given none even if I’d had what could be called a residence.

  At times I walked about Boston, far from my old parish, dressed as a priest, dressed, excepting my white collar, all in black.

  I was assumed to be an affiliated priest, one visiting from some adjoining parish. Catholics genuflected or blessed themselves when I drew near and I responded by making the sign of the cross.

  But it soon became obvious, from the state of my uniform and my incongruous suitcase that might have been the tool box of some tradesman, that something was amiss.

  I was never laughed at, never mocked, in part, no doubt, because of my stature, but in part, I believe, because my aspect, my demeanour had been profoundly altered by what had taken place since I left the Church.

  I could see that I was feared. People gaped at the spectacle of such an able-bodied hobo whose two suits of clothes, acquired who knows where or how, were the dresslike cassock of a priest, and the jacket, vest and slacks of a priest, the leisure wear of the ordained.

  A hobo “priest” whose attire was a blasphemy. I was known as Father Tom, a hulking defrocked priest who roamed about with a suitcase filled with booze that he drank from a chalice.

  There were complaints about my uniform, my habit. Policemen asked if I had other things to wear. I told them no. They asked me to identify myself. I told them that, until recently, I had been a priest at St. Paul’s parish church.

  When they discovered my story to be true, they no longer interfered with me. They were Catholics, regarded me nervously as if a man, once ordained, was always a priest of some kind.

  The old priest and some younger ones who had been my fellow seminarians came to see me.

  They addressed me as Thomas. No longer “your Highness Aquinas.” They seemed to feel some responsibility for what had become of me. Urged me to seek help from my family, the counsel of a priest. Perhaps admit myself to hospital.

  “There is no need for you to live like this, Thomas. You still have your Faith, and Faith is everything.”

  They would start to cajole me as they had done before, until they saw, by the way I looked at them, that I was no longer one to be cajoled.

  I refused the money and the food they offered me. I told them I wanted to be left alone.

  They asked me when I had last been to confession.

  I ignored them. They went away.

  I gave Mary different kinds of letters.

  My first was one word.

  “Murderess.”

  My second was one sentence.

  “Our child is nameless. Neither a boy nor a girl but still a child.”

  My third: “Neither of us will ever know a moment’s peace.”

  My fourth: “Perhaps you imagine that you can live as if it never happened. Perhaps, if not for me, you would.

  “I do not know you.

  “You need only have had it in secret and given it to me.

  “Even if you had given it up for adoption I would have found it. Or at least been comforted by the mere knowledge of its existence.

  “Did you think, ‘Better that it die than be raised by someone else?’

  “No. Vanity. All is vanity. You took her life to preserve your reputation.

  “To whom will you confess this sin?

  “Not if a thousand priests forgave you would you truly be forgiven. No mere man can cleanse your soul.”

  I soon after found a note on the front seat of the carriage I no longer drove but slept in:

  “You are mad. I would have let it live if its father had been anyone but you. Guilt still lies like lead upon my soul. Mad you are. You have lost your mind and your memory as well, it seems. It was you, you alone, who decided to leave the Church. The night after we bid you goodbye, I was coming back from vespers. Had gone ahead of the other nuns to perform some errand. A couple of hundred feet it was from the sacristy to the convent. And you were waiting for me in the dark. Or did it matter to you which one of us you took? Your hand covered my whole face. I couldn’t breathe. You picked me up and took me to your car, where you taped my mouth and tied my hands. And then drove us to a cottage you broke into on Cape Cod.”

  All lies, Miss Fielding. I would not otherwise repeat them to you. Addressed to the one person who knew them to be lies. The measure of her desperation to rebuild “Susan” on the ruins of the woman I once loved.

  I assure you that I can prove every word of this. For I still have the letter to her friend, Sylvia, the handwriting in which, when the time comes, you will recognize.

  Your Provider

  The letter left me in tears. It was, it seemed to me, written with too much passion and conviction to be untrue. Who, were they guilty of rape, would confess to having been accused of rape? For me, the “proof” he spoke of would be redundant. Did my Provider see me as a replacement for this aborted child? An eye for an eye. A child for a child. His story did not explain his infatuation with me or his belief that I was his child or that I was “twice fathered.” And it made me all the more anxious about my children, who were being raised by the person who of all the people he knew was surely the one that he despised t
he most.

  Only a few days later, another letter arrived.

  My dear Miss Fielding:

  I brooded for weeks, then did exactly what I had sworn to myself I would not do. Stooped to seeking revenge. I wrote to her:

  “I have proof of what you did that I could supply to the police and to everyone whose opinion of you matters to you or whose reputations would be ruined along with yours. I place no value on ‘reputations,’ but I know how much they mean to you and yours.

  “Imagine the effect on your parents of this revelation, especially now that, just when they had given up hope, you have returned to the family fold.

  “I could do all this without identifying myself, let alone implicating myself. Or I could reveal that I was the father of your murdered child. You as good as identified me in your letter to your friend.

  “A nun and a priest. The scandal of scandals. That you, a high-born nun, had destroyed a child, had what you call a ‘procedure’ performed on you would be bad enough. But that a priest had been your partner in this crime. Such a scandal could never be lived down. Not even if your parents disowned you could they save their all-important reputations. What laughingstocks they, not to mention your brothers, sisters, aunts, uncles, cousins would be. What a slaughter of ‘innocents’ and reputations there would be.

  “You would be laughed at, reviled, shunned, shut out.

  “But I am going to give you a choice, one that I dare say you will give more thought to than you did to the matter of our child. A very difficult choice.

  “You will have to decide which of two alternatives will hurt the ones you love the least. It may be they will suffer equally no matter which way you decide. Or it may be that, after all, no one’s reputation and no one’s happiness is more important to you than your own. In that case, the decision would be easy, but the consequences—well. You know your loved ones. I do not. The judgment will be yours to make. You will envy Solomon, so easily resolved was his dilemma in comparison with yours. Here, then, are your choices.

  “Stay or leave. If you stay, I will do everything I can to ensure that the subsequent scandal brings down the House of Hanrahan. Imagine the homiletic editorials. The irony that such a family as the Hanrahans could be involved. The gleeful incredulity of readers. The high-born brought down into the gutter, revealed for what people will say they all along suspected them to be. Corruption born of decadence and arrogance.

  “And who would believe, Miss Hanrahan, that your parents did not know of your ‘situation,’ that you did not go to them, begging them for help?

  “All of this is avoidable if you choose as I think you will.

  “You have only to do what you did when you joined the convent. Throw over your present life in favour of another. Tell them you still disapprove of the way they live. Tell them that, though you were right to leave the convent, you should never have come back to them. Renounce them as you did before, as you did the convent. As you did me. As you renounced our child.

  “So many renunciations. One more should not be difficult.

  “Except that this time you must renounce not others, but yourself. The life you hoped to have. The one you left the convent for. The one for which you destroyed our child.

  “Either way you choose, you must renounce yourself. The life you value above all other lives you cannot have. I have taken it from you.

  “The House of Hanrahan will fall unless you leave. Without you, it will bear up as it did the first time you renounced it.

  “You are not necessary to your family’s survival. On the contrary, you are a hindrance to it. Inimical to it. They will be destroyed unless you turn your back on them forever. As will you.”

  She replied:

  “That you would carry out the threats you have made, I have no doubt. To think that you were once a priest. Or once fooled people into thinking you were one.

  “Unless I renounce the ones I love you will destroy them.

  “So. I hereby renounce them. I will leave not for my sake, but for theirs. If I could spare them by doing so, I would happily destroy myself.

  “We Hanrahans love each other. But love, too, has its limits, and ours, it sorrows me to say, would not withstand the onslaught you describe.

  “I will leave. I will offer them no explanation. I will not say goodbye. I will not forewarn them. I will leave a note that they will find after I am gone. The note will read: ‘I should not have come back home when I left the convent. For reasons I cannot explain, we must never meet again.’

  “They will try to find me and will almost certainly succeed, but I will not relent.”

  And so she left just as she said she would. And in a briefer time than even she could have foreseen, they reconciled themselves to her decision.

  She seems to have expected that they would never give up hoping for a reconciliation. But they did. I can tell you that there came a time when even to speak her name was forbidden in that house.

  She learned of each of her parents’ deaths by reading of them in the papers. She has never seen her nieces or her nephews, who may not even know that she exists.

  She deflected their attempts to communicate.

  I am not boasting, Miss Fielding. Am not gleefully recounting my revenge. That it was a terrible thing I did I fully understand and regret, yet there are still times I cannot help but speak unkindly of her. What I did was terrible in its pointlessness. It did not bring back my child. It merely took someone else’s child away. But to be dismissed as a misfit by the mother of your never-born child. There comes a point when spite is an end in itself. When bitterness somehow both sustains and enervates the soul. I lived in such a state for years.

  Sometimes I dream that I am blameless. That in spite of everything I merely turned my back on her and began my life again. I feel such relief, release. I dream that my crime was just a dream from which I have woken to realize that I am innocent. But then I wake from this buoyant dream of absolution to find that I am guilty. “Guilt still lies like lead upon my soul,” she wrote. Yes, like lead. My whole body sags from the weight of it the way it did when the nuns layered me with gold-woven vestments in the sacristy. Reverse alchemy.

  After a period of wandering, she moved to Newfoundland and married Dr. Fielding.

  Imagine her arriving in St. John’s on a ship from Halifax and Boston. Her arrival was described to me by my delegate.

  By no means did she arrive penniless in Newfoundland. She had renounced her parents and their money, but not the money that her grandfather had left in trust for her. He died when she was sixteen and left to each of his grandchildren a considerable sum of money to which no conditions were attached except that they not be allowed to draw upon it until they came of age.

  Your mother, when she took her vow of poverty, did not renounce this modest fortune or donate it to some charity or to the Church. The one thing she did not renounce was money. It was there, waiting for her, while she was in the convent, while she was living like the other nuns whose vows were sincere and for whom poverty was not some sort of game that they could walk away from when they tired of it.

  Of course, she could not arrive in St. John’s otherwise “bereft.” She had to have, in addition to money, some sort of past, some sort of explanation as to why, unmarried, unaccompanied, she had simply turned up in St. John’s, presumably leaving behind her, somewhere, a family, a set of peers, a social position, a city, a country.

  She chose to come to Newfoundland because it was far from Boston but not so far that her social credentials would not be recognized. She did not change her name. She let it be known that she was one of the Hanrahans of Boston, briefly a nun, a woman who, though she had broken with her family for undisclosed reasons, had not broken with their money.

  And, in a way, she was not unaccompanied, for she had been corresponding with Dr. Fielding, of whom she had heard from a medical-school classmate of his.

  He, without ever having met her, proposed. And she, without ever having met him, acc
epted.

  It must have seemed to both of them to be as good a match as they could hope for.

  It had become clear to your father and to all who knew him that no woman of social consequence would take him as a husband. In a way, he was just what your mother was looking for. Credulous, in peril of lifelong bachelorhood, ready to “settle” for less than a man of his station could reasonably have expected in a wife. He would not inquire too assiduously, if at all, into her past, could easily be discouraged from attempting to reconcile her with her family in the unlikely event that it even occurred to him to try.

  So. They were married. I wrote to her frequently, lest she think I had lost interest in her, moved on, become a “meddler” now in someone else’s life. Perhaps removed myself from life itself.

  My delegate described her life. Their lives. They had no friends and few associates. She was regarded as being snobbish, remote, uninterested in the wives of other doctors.

  They would go out walking in the evening, arm in arm, the doctor smiling and brandishing a cane, raising it abruptly in a gesture of greeting, all but knocking the hats off men and women who passed them in the street.

  That she had cast so wide a net and still captured no better specimen than Dr. Fielding.

  To go so far afield for a husband and conclude that your best bet was a man about whom people had been making jokes since he was ten.

  You could see the disappointment in her face. What could he possibly have written to her that had so inflated her expectations?

  I confess that I am not merely repeating my delegate’s reports. I should not still be gleeful about her predicament after all these years. It is cruel and self-demeaning, but I cannot help myself. It was almost comical, how completely unprepared she seemed to be for deficiencies that even in a letter should have been obvious to anyone. This woman from Boston had settled for what no woman from St. John’s would settle for.

  They walked, they took the evening air but, as far as my delegate could tell, they never spoke. Despite their silence, Dr. Fielding seemed immensely pleased with himself, as if the wife on his arm proved how badly he had been misjudged by the women of St. John’s.