The Custodian of Paradise

by Wayne Johnston

  The sound I heard I remembered from my childhood. A certain kind of snowstorm has begun. A southeaster. An anomaly that may not last for long. On this coast, especially this early in the year, a southeast wind almost always means rain. But, when I dimmed the lantern and went to the window, I saw huge snowflakes pattering against the glass, each leaving what might have been a thumbprint. I half-expected to see someone outside, peering in, face pressed against the glass like mine, our noses a pane apart as we stared into each other’s eyes.

  I wrote to Sarah and David in my journal on a succession of their birthdays, letters they would never read or answer.

  Years went by with a letter every other month from my Provider. Not rebukes, but cautionary letters just the same.

  When my children were old enough to have finished high school and, for all I knew, had moved away from home to attend college, I thought of writing to my mother to ask how they were occupied and where they were. I knew she would not divulge addresses or telephone numbers—nor did I want her to. I could not bear to contact them while posing as their half-sister and was not sure that, if I knew how to reach them, I could resist telling them the truth.

  David and Sarah. A young man, a young woman. The children of a child. I still thought of them as babies and of myself as a girl younger than Sarah was now. I knew that, unless I met them, this would never change. I told myself that it was best to leave things as they were, as they had always been, the three of us stalled in time.

  The ’Stab, whom I had never written about in my column and who had never paid me much attention when I passed them in the streets, night or day, now took every opportunity to speak to me.

  “Here she comes,” one of a pair said as I approached them one night where they were standing at the foot of Garrison Hill. “Fielding the Forger.”

  “And what are you famous for?”

  “I’ve made something of myself.”

  “If you make any more of yourself, you’ll need a new uniform.”

  “Never wedded, never bedded, never sober. That’s what they say about you.”

  “The toadies of the merchants. The pawns of the politicians. The brawn behind the Crown. But does anyone ever give you the credit you deserve? Challenged by me to prove that he could write, a constable once urinated his initials in the snow.”

  “That’s more than you could do,” the other constable said. “Bet ya had fun watchin’, though. Prob’ly never seen one before. Unless it was yer daddy’s. Whoever he might be.”

  “Police should be visible deterrents to crime, not to those considering careers in law enforcement.”

  In a mock tribute to the Constabulary called “A Trib’ to the ’Stab,” I wrote that the chief recruited from the “quantity” in adherence to the “it-takes-one-to-know-one school of law enforcement,” and that upon swearing in a recruit he said, “Just keep doing whatever it is you’ve been doing all your life.”

  I explained in rhyme how the force became known as “The ’Stab”:

  “No word as long as Constabulary/can be found in their vocabulary/The ones they like, so goes the song/Are ones that are four letters long.”

  I was terrified of them as a child after several times seeing them driving the Black Mariah through the streets like charioteers.

  Now they had begun to watch me as they never had before. And I watched them.

  I saw them on their night patrols. And they, seeing me watching them, demanded to know what I was staring at.

  “Nothing,” I told a constable.

  “Tall one, aren’t ya,” he said.

  “How tall are you?” I said.

  “Five-nine. More than regulation minimum.”

  “Really?” I said. “On foot or on horseback?”

  “Smart mouth. Forger. I know another six-letter word that starts with F and ends with R. Suits ya better.”

  “I have never been a fencer in my life. Though you, I imagine, have done quite a lot of fencing. They say that, in fencing, even the slightest little prick counts.”

  At night they gathered in groups and talked for hours. I passed a number of them while heading west across the city—and encountered the same number in the same place when heading east, hours later.

  “Well, if it isn’t the Confabulary.”

  “Big words. Big woman. Big mouth. Big deal.”

  “You’re very fond of that word ‘big,’ small as it is.”

  “Just pullin’ yer leg. Might match the other one if I pull it hard enough.”

  “Pull all you like. You’ll never make it longer. The same goes for my leg.”

  “What’re you doing out this time o’ night? Tryin’ to sell something? You won’t get any takers, not even if it’s free.”

  I’m told that for a while the ’Stab went undercover, but that you had so little success concealing your identity, let alone your profession, that it was as plain as the nose on your face that you were a cop. And so you became known as the “Plain Nose Detective.”

  But imagine trying to infiltrate the criminal element, trying to blend in with the worst degenerates and miscreants of our society.

  Imagine having to be as good at pretending to be on your last legs as criminals who have been doing it since they were born.

  Imagine extracting information from criminals while pretending to be as ridden with disease as they are.

  Imagine covertly gathering evidence while winning the solidarity of criminals by convincingly affecting absolute exhaustion.

  Even as I write, the Constabulary are out there in such parts of the city as even the health officials and the clergy will not venture into, building cases against the Huns before one statute of limitations or another renders them exempt from prosecution.

  “But you’re not to blame because what they call “the plague of vagrancy” remains unchecked. Nor for the two-thirds of the city’s population that declines employment.

  Given that, for every bribe-accepting politician and civil servant, there are a hundred loiterers, who can doubt that your efforts are well focused?

  It is not your fault that the question of how loitering is to be eliminated from a society whose horses are more likely to be shod than its human beings remains unsolved.

  To those who say you are better suited to sweeping up after horses than to riding on them; to those who say, obscurely, that “a lolling drone gathers no dross;” to those who say that, in this city, the words “police, police” are more likely to be a warning than a cry for help, we say: “Sour grapes.”

  I was surprised one night to see Prowse, accompanied by two constables, standing at the foot of the courthouse steps.

  “It’s been a long time since last we spoke,” he said.

  “Yet I remember it so well.”

  “What’s it like, Fielding,” Prowse said, “living at the Cock?”

  “If you mean the Cochrane Hotel, I find it to be a first-rate establishment.”

  “First-rate whorehouse.”

  “I will leave the rating of whorehouses to you.”

  “Proper place for you. You must fit right in.”

  “I’m told by my fellow tenants that you have trouble fitting in. Or is it fitting it in? I can’t recall.”

  “Whore.”

  “Rumour must have it that I’ve had a busy week. Last Monday I was called a virgin. I fear that, in my haste to be offensive, I have overlooked some people and in some obscure corners am still regarded with respect.”

  “Not many. Did you really think you could make a fool of me in public and get away with it?”

  “Why give me so much credit for doing once what you have done a thousand times?”

  “You turned the whole city against you, years ago. As for me, my fortunes have risen.”

  “What never rises never falls. I’ll be on my way if you’ll get out of it.”

  “You’re on your way, all right.”

  He kicked my cane from my hand so quickly that I had no time to catch my balance and fell forward o
nto the ground at his feet, my hands skidding on the gravel.

  “That’s more like it,” he said. “You look good down there. You’d look even better on your knees. Something in your mouth to shut you up is what you need.”

  The two constables laughed.

  My cane some distance away, I tried to stand. I leaned my weight on my good foot, fingers splayed on the ground, and rose enough to drag my left foot into place. Thus crouching, I made a tentative effort to push myself upright, but, as I began to list to one side, I dropped my hands to the ground, again squatting on my haunches. My bad leg felt about to break.

  “If someone comes by—”

  “They will see what we see. A woman so drunk she cannot stand without her cane,” Prowse said.

  The constables murmured and nodded.

  “It seems you need some help. You won’t get it unless you ask for it.”

  “You’re the one who’s asking for it.”

  “You’re in no position to make threats.”

  “I’d give you credit for that pun if I thought it was intentional. But you are right. It seems I cannot stand up without my cane.”

  “What can you do without your flask?”

  “What?”

  “Give me your flask and I’ll give you your cane.”

  “And then what?”

  “We’ll see.”

  I got down on all fours and, reaching inside my coat, withdrew the flask and extended it to him. He took it from me and, unscrewing the top, raised the flask to his lips and tilted his head back. I watched the muscles of his throat contracting as he swallowed.

  “It seems that it was empty after all,” he said, glancing at the constables, who again nodded their assent, then slipping the flask into one of his breast pockets.

  “Where did you find Beadle Dim and Beadle Dumb? They must owe you something more than their allegiance. They seem to be afraid of you.”

  “How typical of you to confuse respect with fear. Have you ever had anyone’s respect?”

  “Perhaps I have had the respect of some who were afraid to show it.”

  “An imaginary faction of secret admirers. How pathetic.”

  “What do you want, Prowse?”

  “What do you want?”

  “My cane,” I said.

  He retrieved it but did not give it back to me.

  “Could be used as a weapon,” he said. “I’d better hold on to it for now. Your nightstick, Constable.”

  One of them extended his nightstick.

  “Here,” Prowse said to me, “take hold of this and I’ll pull you up.”

  I thought he meant to play some trick on me but could think of nothing but to do as he said. I grabbed the nightstick with my right hand and, though I all but pulled him on top of me, I managed to stand.

  Breathless from the effort, pulse pounding in my temples, I looked down at him. He took a step backwards, then another, the nightstick in one hand, my cane in the other.

  “Stay right where you are.”

  “You’re the one with the weapons,” I said. “A cane, a club and two constables. I am unarmed. Almost unlegged.”

  “We can’t have you getting hurt,” he said. “You are a woman, despite all evidence to the contrary.”

  “The evidence leaves no doubt as to what you are.”

  “You’ll be relieved of those boots when we get inside. Talk about weapons. You could beat a man’s brains out with that left one.”

  “That your ability to assess an object’s skull-cracking potential is superior to mine I am willing to admit. But why are we going inside?”

  “Because you are under arrest for prostitution.”

  “On what evidence?”

  “These constables have been watching you. You have been seen accepting money from men with whom you have then gone to what is widely known to be a brothel.”

  “It is widely known to be my home.”

  “And that of many other prostitutes.”

  “Whose invitations to enlist in their profession I have many times declined. As they will tell you.”

  “You think they will admit to prostitution in order to absolve you of it? You think that, in open court, they will contradict the testimony of these constables or dare to make an enemy of me? That is the problem with having nothing but secret admirers. They want their admiration to remain a secret. There is not a person of consequence, Fielding, who will speak in your defence.”

  “What do you hope to accomplish, Prowse? It’s not as if I have a reputation to protect.”

  “No. You have nothing but a father to protect.”

  “My father is in his dotage. He is barely aware of his surroundings. Nothing I do or that is done to me will have any effect on him.”

  “You’re willing to take that chance?”

  I hesitated.

  “Why leave anything to chance? Admit that you wrote that broadsheet. Retract every word of it. Offer me a sincere, unambiguous apology. All in print, of course. In your column.”

  “As I said, my father is in his dotage. Insensible to his surroundings—”

  He seemed so certain of his reputation and chances for further advancement. The old Prowse, the one who at Bishop Feild had seemed so invulnerable and promising, was back. He had drained the contents of my flask without pausing for breath.

  I tried to think.

  Prowse going by my father’s house one day to break the news. Prostitution? I’m afraid so, Dr. Fielding. Better, sir, that you hear this from a friend. Prowse showing him the stories that the rival newspapers would gleefully publish about my being charged and found guilty.

  Some of it might find the mark. Some version of it might be absorbed into the tumult, the swirling torment of my father’s mind. Fined for prostitution. Who? Her. Who bore his name though she was someone else’s daughter. Whose? Not a drop of his blood in her. A woman no more related to him than any other randomly selected woman. Yet she bore his name. Was regarded as his daughter. Except by those who mocked him as a cuckold. A fool on whom the horns were hung by some stranger. A fool who had raised as his daughter a freakish misfit. By how much might his torment be multiplied if even a shadow of this latest calamity registered on his consciousness. His dotage might be less profound than it seemed. Perhaps the words I spoke to him had their effect hours or days later, in my absence.

  I remembered Judge Prowse inscrutably nodding, intermittently lucid. I had no way of knowing the workings of my father’s mind. I had thought of it as a house that, though furnished as always, had lost its doors and windows, that while the basic notions on which his mind was built still stood, notions of a different kind, ones as flimsy and transient as wind-blown bits of paper, came and went. But for all I knew his mind admitted and retained everything.

  “All right,” I said. “I’ll write the retraction, and the apology.”

  Both Prowse and the constables exhaled audibly.

  As for Prowse, he lowered to his sides the nightstick and my cane as if some altercation between us that he had long dreaded had at the last moment been averted.

  “No ambiguity, no irony,” he said. You’d think we had agreed to a duel and were now deciding what sort of weapons we would use. “A remorseful admission of guilt, a full retraction, an apology and a promise not to slander me again.”

  “Why don’t you just write it yourself?” I said, “and I’ll sign my name to it?”

  “Oh no,” he said. “I don’t write Forgeries. You’ll write it. The words will be yours.”

  “People will know I don’t mean a single one of them. That I was somehow forced to write them.”

  “You’ll write as if you mean them. Why is Fielding grovelling to Prowse? people will wonder. Let them wonder. That’s the point. Fielding eating crow. A day they thought would never come. Who’ll be impressed by your clever columns from now on?”

  “Be careful. You might talk me out of it.”

  “I don’t think so. It’s not just a matter of the insult to your fathe
r. There is the insult to you as well. Thought of as a prostitute, condemned as one by all the victims of your Forgeries.”

  “I would like my flask back. My cane as well.”

  He removed the flask from his pocket, unscrewed the cap that was attached to it by a chain, then wedged the tip of my cane as far into the neck as it would go. He handed the cane to me flask first. I took it from him and pulled the cane and flask apart. After pocketing the flask, I planted the tip of the cane in the ground and put both hands, one atop the other, on the silver knob.

  “Unless I see an apology in the Telegram two days from now, you’ll hear from us again. Crow à la Prowse. Be careful not to choke on it.”

  I walked away from them like a woman resuming her progress after some brief inconsequential interruption.

  By the time I returned to my boarding house, I was reconciled to writing the retraction. I planned to write it as rapidly and plainly as I could and deliver it to Herder, for whom I would have to concoct some sort of explanation, lest he antagonize Prowse further by confronting him or writing some sort of philippic. I opened the door of my room and, stepping inside, heard the familiar crackle of paper beneath my feet.

  My dear Miss Fielding:

  He waited patiently for years, rebuilt himself until enough people were so afraid of him that it was safe to strike.

  What a scene we witnessed from nearby. Worthy of El Greco.

  That granite, Gothic courthouse.

  Three men in front of it stand around a woman who is on her hands and knees.

  It is Night. One man holds a silver flask. An otherwise deserted street. They are looking down at her. Are they about to help her up? Is she begging for something? Has she fallen after being struck by one of them? Are they mocking her or offering to help?

  If you look closely, you can see that one of her boots is much bigger than the other. A lame woman who has stumbled? Who is searching for something on the ground?

  On the ground, off to one side, lies a cane with a silver knob. The flask, the apparently discarded cane, the oversized boot, the two policemen, the civilian with whom they seem to be acquainted. A near-infinite number of possible interpretations.

  You on the ground. Helpless. On your hands and knees in the dirt, looking up, waiting for instructions, head down as you obeyed an order not to look anywhere but at the ground.