The Custodian of Paradise

by Wayne Johnston

  “All right. Don’t upset yourself. We’ll speak no more about it.”

  I waited at the rear of the courthouse late one afternoon. I knew that Prowse always left by the rear entrance, which was close to his house.

  I did not wish others to witness me confronting him, so I followed him after he came out, struggling to keep pace with him as he strode up the hill with a satchel beneath his arm.

  Near the top, a few feet behind him, I prodded him quite forcefully in the back with my cane. He whirled around, slapping at the cane with his hand. I took a few more steps until we were standing side by side.

  “Fielding,” he said, staring at my cane, seeming fearful I would strike him a second time. He looked up at me. “I heard that you were back. I was hoping the rumours were untrue.”

  “I’m sure you were.”

  “I meant the rumours that you had passed away. It seemed there was a new one every day for the past ten years. People saying, ‘Have you heard about Fielding? Poor thing, she was murdered in New York. Poor thing, she perished in the San. Poor thing, she went astray on the Bonavista. Presumed dead.’ You have ‘died’ so many times I can’t keep count.”

  “Mr. Prowse,” I said. “Have you entered into some sort of arrangement with my father?”

  “I have no idea what you mean.”

  “He says he’s been giving you money. In payment for some investigation you’re supposedly conducting.”

  “Your father is a good man who at times becomes confused.”

  “He says that, sponsored by you, he was made a member of the Old Comrades Club.”

  “Now that is true. He has flourished in your absence. Not professionally, but socially. No doubt it is your return that has him so confused. During your absence, the mere mention of you so upset him that we agreed never to speak of you.”

  “If I hear that you have accepted another cent from him, I will collect it back from you myself.” “Is that a threat?”

  “It is a statement of fact. Find some other way to pay your debts.”

  “I do not know what he told you, or why, or if indeed he told you anything. But if you make public accusations against me, I shall sue you. And if you try to, as you say, collect money from me, I shall have you arrested.”

  “Prowse. My father has nearly lost his mind because of you.”

  “Come now, Fielding. Should your father lose his mind, we both know which one of us would be to blame.”

  I knew that I was in part responsible for my father’s state of mind, but I was wounded by that Exhibit A. And the memory of the way Prowse smiled when he saw his words hit home.

  In the street, I heard people snickering about how the Old Comrades Club had recently made a fool of old Dr. Fielding. I heard references to some sort of “trial” at which he had been found guilty.

  I went to Herder, who, though not a member of the Old Comrades Club, was friendly with a few who were.

  “You don’t want to hear it,” he said.

  “It was that bad?”

  “Yes.”

  “Then I want to hear everything.”

  He told me about a meeting that took place not long after I confronted Prowse.

  The Old Comrades Club.

  The men of the “quality.” Doctors, lawyers, politicians, businessmen.

  They conducted their meetings, their mock trials, late at night in the courthouse on Duckworth Street. At the most recent meeting, there had been someone dressed like me. Lopsided stilts. One stilt longer than the other. An effigy. Several signs hung from my neck, some down the front, some down the back. They were like chapter headings: Baby Sheilagh, Silver Spoon, Motherless Waif, Unhappy (Dear Old Golden) School Days, Expelled!, Precocious Lush, Spencer Spinster, Fielding the Forger, Socialism, The Missing Years, The San, Crippled Tippler, Hermitage, The Prodigal Daughter.

  Dangling from various parts of the costume were a boot with a huge black heel, a wooden cask, a package of Yellow Rag cigarettes.

  I walked hunched over, my cane clumping on the floor. My hair, as grey as an old woman’s, hung down past my shoulders. My face was a mass of warts and wrinkles, my clothing ragged and sprinkled all over with wig-powder that fell from me like the dust of ages when I walked or raised my arms. I clanked and rattled like Jacob Marley’s ghost when I moved. My father stared at me.

  Prowse “prosecuted” my father, who sat there with a sign around his neck that read CUCKOLD. Sharpe, Smallwood’s main tormentor when we covered court, was there. He “defended” my father. He moved that the sign be removed. And Prowse objected.

  “I put it to you that she would not let you put it to her,” Prowse said to my father.

  “Erection, Your Honour,” Sharpe said.

  “Unsustained.”

  “Precisely, Your Honour.”

  It went on like that. When other Comrades were on “trial,” the “charges” were always trivial. Another doctor was once tried for being vain about his appearance. A lawyer for the way he walked about in court. Another for putting too much powder on his wig. Mis-demeanours of personality. But my father was tried for cuckoldry. Not for the way he held a cigarette or smoked a pipe.

  If guilty, by whom was he cuckolded?

  Was Mrs. Fielding “yielding or unyielding”?

  “I put it to you,” Prowse said to each of the witnesses in turn, “that you are the real father of Sheilagh the She Man.”

  All of them denied it. The Silent Stranger by shaking his head. The Silent Stranger wore a black mask and a long cloak that covered his stilts. He did not reply when asked a question except to nod or shake his head.

  “The Silent Stranger,” Prowse said, “refuses to account for his whereabouts on any of the days when the deed might have been done. Or on any other days. He refuses to account for his very existence, this mute brute. I take his silence as an admission of guilt, My Lord. I suggest that this faceless, voiceless phantom is her father.”

  “Have you heard enough?” Herder said.

  I shook my head. I wanted to hear it all, enraged though I was.

  “We must have proof, Mr. Prowse,” the judge said. “This court commands the Silent Stranger to remove his mask.”

  He complied, only to reveal another mask. And under that, yet another.

  “A man of many masks,” said the judge.

  “Which of you,” Prowse asked, “is responsible for this prodigy of prodigality? There she stands, Fielding the unwieldy one, Fielding the Hobbler, Fielding the Wobbler. Her height and her leg make it hard enough for her to keep her balance. But you may wonder what makes her list to one side like that. You wouldn’t say it by the size of her, but she’s a nipper. She was nipping from a silver cask—I mean, flask when she was still in school. Which of you fathered this lop-sided Colossus? Who is the Mog to her Magog, the Galoot to her Goliath? Step forward.”

  None of them stepped forward.

  “Any one of you might be the man. Do you recognize any of these men, Mrs. Fielding?”

  Mrs. Fielding. My mother, dressed as a nun, played by Dr. Wheeler, whom I had made a fool of years ago when he came to visit my father.

  Mrs. Fielding said she had never seen any of them before in her life.

  “Well,” Mr. Prowse said, “all of the suspects had the motive, namely Mrs. Fielding. All had the opportunity, given that Dr. Fielding was at his surgery six days a week. But did all have the means? I take it Your Lordship knows what ‘means’ means?”

  “I do, Mr. Prowse.”

  “I suggest that each reveal his means to His Lordship and Mrs. Fielding.”

  So the Milkman, the Stevedore, the Best Man and the Silent Stranger, with their backs to all but Mrs. Fielding and the judge, took turns unveiling their “means.”

  Somehow my father sat through it all. Herder said he even laughed when the others did.

  First, the Milkman. The sound of a zipper. The judge, eyebrows raised, asked if “Milkman” was his profession or his nickname.

  “Both, Your Lordshi
p.”

  My mother, fanning herself, smiled coyly.

  Next the Stevedore: “I taught myself how to tie knots with it, Your Lordship. I never could untie this knot.”

  “The court is satisfied that the Stevedore is not Miss Fielding’s father.”

  The Best Man. My mother covered her face with her hands but peeked through her fingers.

  “Second best at best,” the judge declared. “It would seem the Milkman is our man unless the Silent Stranger has been holding something back.”

  The Silent Stranger opened his cloak and spread wide his arms.

  My mother fainted.

  The judge leaned forward.

  “Well, now I’ve seen it all,” he said. “At least I hope I’ve seen it all.”

  The Silent Stranger closed his cloak.

  “There can be no doubt,” the judge said. “The Silent Stranger is the father of this woman. Your mother conceived you, Miss Fielding, with the Man of Many Masks. Daughter, meet your father. Father, meet your daughter.”

  They all slapped their knees and roared with laughter.

  “This court rules that the charge has been proven. That while Mrs. Fielding was yielding to the advances of the Stranger, Dr. Fielding was at work in his surgery. The deed was done, the horns were hung. Well hung, in fact. Dr. Fielding is hereby declared a cuckold and sentenced to his daughter’s life, including time served, that being the age of his daughter plus nine months, give or take a week or two, at the moment of his death or at the moment of her death, whichever comes first. The court is adjourned.”

  My father soon after resigned from the Old Comrades Club, citing gout as the reason he preferred to stay at home.

  A month after that, he took out an ad in the papers announcing that he was retiring from the practice of medicine and offering to refer his patients to other doctors.

  “I cannot concentrate,” he told me. “Perhaps my hearing is bad. I miss most of what my patients say. I haven’t made any mistakes, but there have been a few complaints. Personality clashes. Nothing really. But there you go. I haven’t touched a scalpel in five years anyway. No operations. Just referrals. Can’t concentrate. My mind wanders, you see. As you get older. Only natural. No point resisting nature. Irresistible. I think about all sorts of things. Not just about her. I’m better off at home where I can concentrate.”

  He was so inept at disingenuousness I could not bear to listen to him. As it was ages since he had had a housekeeper, I had to hire a woman to see to his daily needs and a man to manage his financial affairs. I paid them with his money, having none of my own to spare.

  It soon seemed that my father, without prompting from me and the housekeeper, would never have moved from his chair.

  I went to see Herder.

  “I’ve written something,” I said.

  “A Forgery?” he said. Eager. Hopeful.

  I showed it to him. He read it, chuckling, shaking his head.

  “It is no longer possible for the Anglican archbishop to intercede with his congregation and admonish them to consult with any doctor but my father, because my father is no longer able to practise medicine.”

  “I am sorry to hear it,” Herder said. “But if I publish this, I’ll be sued for every cent I have.”

  “I know.”

  “It’s worse than your other Forgeries. More risky, I mean. Far too risky.”

  “I don’t want you to publish it,” I said. “Merely to print it. Five hundred copies.”

  “A broadsheet? What do you plan to do with it?”

  “Distribute it. Door to door. At night. I’ve made a list of who should get a copy. But don’t print it if you’re worried they can trace it back to you.”

  “I would not want to be on that list.”

  “You’re not.”

  “What pseudonym would you use?”

  “No pseudonym.”

  “That would be foolish. Pointless. He’ll sue you. See to it that you never work again.”

  “I have nothing. My father no longer has any patients they can warn away from him. As for making sure I never work again, well, I could write under pseudonyms, or anonymously. For you.”

  “You’re risking everything.”

  “Maybe. But it’s true, what I’ve written. Even though I can’t prove it. Not all of it. But imagine how embarrassing a suit of any kind would be for them.”

  “And for you. And your father.”

  “My father’s humiliation is complete. Believe me. And my skin is thicker than most.”

  Three weeks later, Herder told me the broadsheets were ready. He said he could hardly deliver such a conspicuous bundle to my boarding house, so I would have to come to his warehouse after hours.

  There were only forty names on my list. The balance of the broadsheets I would simply leave in bundles wherever they were certain to be found.

  I could easily cram forty copies of the broadsheet in a satchel. Forty households, most of them in the same area of town, the east end. The Old Comrades. Forty doors under each of which I would slip a broadsheet. Then back to the warehouse. I would distribute as many bundles as I could before the sun came up.

  I visited the forty houses one mid-week night in late September. I had waited for a clear, calm night so that the broadsheets I left outside would not be rained on or blown away. I set a few dogs to barking, but they stopped when I hurried away. In one house, a light came on upstairs but soon went out again. I was at it all night.

  I left batches of broadsheets on sidewalks, on the steps of churches, in the doorways of stores.

  During the last hour before the sun came up, I distributed a final sixty broadsheets randomly. I was so tired when I got back to my boarding house that I fell asleep sober.

  Dear Editor:

  It is time that the B.I.S., by way of coming to the aid and defence of Mr. David Prowse, made itself and its mandate known to the people of Newfoundland.

  None have been more unjustly victimized by us than Mr. Prowse. Not for a moment more should he be left to speculate about who is to blame for what people have been saying for years behind his back.

  We, the B.I.S., are regretfully to blame. We are, to our eternal discredit, the source of every bit of vicious gossip, malicious innuendo and unfounded rumour currently circulating about the poor man. The man we hand-picked. The man we unanimously agreed would, at no peril to himself, be most useful to us in making Newfoundlanders aware of the existence, nature and purpose of irony.

  We fear that, like most Newfoundlanders, Mr. Prowse has not heard of the B.I.S., the Benevolent Ironists’ Society.

  In the charter that we drew up at our first meeting, we defined irony as “the art of saying the opposite of what you mean.” This incomplete definition caused even our members to confuse irony with deceit, hypocrisy and bald-faced lying, with the result that never was a man more artlessly slandered with more benign intent than Mr. Prowse.

  We refined the definition thus: “Irony is the art of making the listener or reader understand that you mean the opposite of what you say.”

  We decided to begin with the propagation of the least subtle form of irony—that is, by making statements whose untruth we believed would be obvious to everyone.

  It was, and still is, our belief that there was no one in St. John’s more admired and therefore more impervious to irony than Mr. Prowse.

  And so we spread the rumour that, because of his hopeless ambition to be a judge some day, he was referred to by his colleagues as B. W. Prowse.

  We said that the initials stood for Big Wig and pointed out that they rhymed with those of his historian grandfather, D.W. Prowse, who was also a judge. And so was born the famous saying: “Prowse has about as much chance of matching his grandfather’s accomplishments as he does of keeping his wife out of other men’s beds.”

  Alas, the irony of this was lost on everyone who was not a member of the B.I.S. Mr. Prowse would, it was said, never be a B.W. but only a W.B., a Would Be. A. Would Be this, a Would Be t
hat.

  In an attempt to undo the wrong against Mr. and Mrs. Prowse, the B.I.S. spread the story that it was Mrs. Prowse’s love of acronyms that had given rise to her reputation for promiscuity.

  Mrs. Prowse, who playfully called her husband B. W., so certain was she of his eventual appointment to the bench, also called him W.B., after the poet Yeats, from whose work it was her husband’s habit to read to her at bedtime. The Prowses’ butler was himself fond of acronyms and given to keeping Mrs. Prowse company in the making of them and the fanciful decipherment of those already in existence.

  But he was not a learned man and misunderstood when Mr. Prowse said to him, “I am told that while I am at work you are at play with my acronymphomaniac of a wife.” Thinking both he and his lady to have been insulted and ignoring Mr. Prowse’s protests that an acronymphomaniac was “someone whose appetite for acronyms is insatiable,” he punched Mr. Prowse, giving him a black eye, which all assumed that Mr. Prowse had received at the hand of a rival for his wife’s affections.

  It was when we saw Mr. Prowse’s black eye that we of the B.I.S. realized that things were getting out of hand.

  “They have inverted the oath of fidelity,” I heard a lawyer say about the Prowses. “The only man she says no to is her husband and the only woman he says no to is his wife.” Thus was Mr. Prowse also rumoured to be promiscuous. Those of us in the B.I.S. came to his defence.

  We spread rumours of a letter in which the phrase the “satiric Mr. Prowse” occurred. We composed a broadsheet that stated: “There are certain words that, like children, should be seen and not heard.” This was by way of claiming that someone had overheard the letter being read aloud and had taken the word “satiric” for “satyric,” which means “a man given to excessive and abnormal sexual craving.” “Thus,” our broadsheet stated, “just as, by the mere omission of a prefix, Mrs. Prowse earned a reputation as a slut, Mr. Prowse, by the substitution of but one letter for another, earned one as a lecherous, skirt-chasing whoremonger.”

  Alas, we could find no one who would print our broadsheet and it was soon said of Mr. Prowse that “he is just as mad for it as she is.”