The Custodian of Paradise

by Wayne Johnston

  How tempted we were to intervene before we did.

  This time you acted in defence of Dr. Fielding. Or you would have if not for us.

  We could not let you debase yourself to please a man like that.

  Prowse sent the constables away after we told them we wished to speak to Mr. Prowse in private.

  “This is not something you would want others to hear,” I told him.

  He listened very carefully to what I said.

  I told him that he was the father of two illegitimate children. I told him who the mother was. I told him I would tell others if he did not release you from your promise.

  You will not be charged with prostitution.

  You need not retract a word of what you wrote. You need not recant, apologize or make promises that in any case you would not keep.

  But have no more to do with Prowse. He has pledged to have no more to do with you.

  Your Provider

  I read and reread the letter.

  Prowse knew. Perhaps he did not believe what he was told but was merely concerned about the damage the rumours would do him. He has pledged to have no more to do with you.

  My Provider and his delegate watching from some hiding place. A man that tall and broad roaming about unnoticed, or if noticed, unremarked upon by anyone. Impossible. I had had to reach up, arms fully outstretched, to grab at his gas mask in the blizzard.

  The housekeeper I hired to care for my father found him dead one morning in his sleeping chair, open-eyed, facing the fireplace, which was heaped with coal that he had not got round to lighting.

  On his dresser I found a letter to me which looked to have been written years ago, as if he had foreseen his decline and, while he was still able to, had composed his epilogue:

  Girl:

  I have gone where none can further lacerate my heart. Gone, if the universe is just, to some sort of reward for a lifetime of service and forbearance.

  I confess to a blasphemous dread of oblivion. Or a never-ending senescence. Death but an endless prolongation of old age.

  Dread. Fear. Doubt. Suspicion.

  I know myself to be a brooder. How much of what I am is owing to my Maker, to what degree, by force of will, I could have altered, if not my nature then my circumstances, I do not know. It is a question that I have pondered endlessly to no conclusion.

  I know that others think such preoccupations to be a waste of time.

  As they do the more mundane ones that have plagued me all my life.

  I have been the dupe of many men whom I was acquainted with.

  And of one who remains a stranger.

  But those “many” were mistaken who believed that I was taken in by their solicitude, their mischievous “concern” for me.

  I as often used men like Prowse as they used me. I played the dupe in order to discover what inspired their disingenuous reassurances, a knowing Othello to a score of Iagos who repeated rumours they would otherwise have kept from me.

  That I have been the dupe of one woman is certain, for that she married and deserted me is in the record.

  I was further duped by her and a man I will always think of as my rival. The man whose identity remains unknown to me.

  Perhaps, though, as I look down from the height of heaven all things are apparent and the answers, whatever they might be, seem unimportant.

  I would like to think that from this vantage I regard all things, including my earthly self, with fond amusement. Wry relief.

  A congregation of souls like me shaking our heads good-naturedly at the fools we were and which those we left behind still are.

  A presumptuous dream, a phantom of hope.

  I have often asked myself why the pain of her betrayal is so persistent, why, with the passage of so much time, it has not only not diminished but intensified.

  I have never loved another woman. It is not only that I have dared to love but once, only that all souls but hers seem dead to mine.

  About you, girl, I find it difficult to write.

  I do not know you.

  I do not understand what, if anything, you want. Can name nothing you believe in or seem to think worth fighting for, or even living for.

  You are someone with whom I would feel no kinship even if you were my daughter.

  Even if you were, biologically, my daughter, I would feel as though I had somehow been the conduit of another man’s nature, a party to the creation of a soul that from the start has been a stranger’s.

  Whose are you, girl?

  It has sometimes seemed to me that, if anyone could answer that question, it was you. That you have always known why your mother went away. I have, absurd as it may seem, suspected you of meeting with your father and taking from him advice whose contrariness to mine was absolute.

  A perverse, unacknowledged father whom you somehow managed to keep secret from the world. A confidant. Consultant.

  The explanation, no others being conceivable to me, of your manner, your behaviour, your mystifying, exasperating eloquence, your arrogance, your disregard for your reputation and for mine, your insensibility to insult.

  Do you know how others see you? Are you not able to see how you are commonly regarded? Your nature is as much an aberration as your stature.

  Your lameness seems intrinsic, the outer emblem of some inner deviance, an injury that was latent in your bones from birth.

  Whose are you, girl? Who is your father?

  Well above six feet, with an appetite for alcohol that rivals any stevedore’s.

  That business in New York.

  The advantages you have squandered. The damage you have done my name by damaging the names of other men.

  I do not know you.

  Girl, you and I have lived as strangers in this house.

  There have been times when, arriving home late at night, I have been startled to hear your footsteps overhead, so completely had I forgotten that I was not alone.

  Who was it who, for years, occupied the second floor while I sat down here in my chair beside the fire?

  To whom am I writing?

  Whose are the hands that hold this letter, whose the eyes that read my final words?

  Of whom is it that I hereby take my leave?

  To whom, alone of all the souls on earth that Fate or Chance might have matched with mine, do I say goodbye?

  How it wounded me that there should be no closing salutation.

  My father’s death all but coincided with word of another.

  My dear Miss Fielding:

  I write with sad news about the man to whom you owe your life as surely as I do.

  My delegate, who since the war has been my only friend, has died. The one true friend of my life, perhaps. My fellow isolate.

  He was as devoted to you as he was to me, which I know must seem strange to you since you never met him and do not even know what he looked like.

  But he admired you as if you were as much his child as mine. He told me so many times. “She is like us,” he said. With what glee he sent me copies of the columns that you wrote. “She is the scourge of fools and scoundrels,” he said. “And she is well acquainted with the night.”

  We lived frugally, on war pensions, on minuscule inheritances, on money from whatever work the task of watching over you left us with time for. We also lived platonically, in case you have ever wondered, which I suspect you have.

  He asked, before he died, that I not tell you his name. I agreed that I would not and did not ask him why he wanted it that way.

  But I can tell you this.

  He was one of your own, Miss Fielding.

  A Newfoundlander. Born and raised in a small settlement on what he said was called “The Boot.” The Burin Peninsula on the south coast.

  We met during the war. I joined long before my country did. For thousands of years, we told ourselves, true believers had been doing God’s bidding on the battlefield.

  He joined the Newfoundland Regiment just in time to see his first fighting on the
morning of July 1 at the battle of the Somme. His first and last.

  As I’m sure you know, the Regiment was deployed near a town called Beaumont Hamel. We met in an army hospital, a hundred beds housed by a massive tent. His bed was beside mine. There were other Newfoundlanders there, but also Englishmen and a few Americans.

  He lay for days with his hand behind his head, staring in silence at the overhead tarpaulin. Not even at night did he move or close his eyes. “Shell shock,” the doctors said. He came out of it as much as he ever would one day while I was sleeping. He afterwards took it upon himself to tend to me as if he’d been assigned to do so by the doctors.

  “A bullet in the leg,” he said. “It must have hurt.” I nodded. “I never seen a man your size in all my life,” he said, shaking his head as if my stature might be a shell-shock-caused delusion. In all the time we spent in that hospital, he never spoke a word to anyone but me. Who knows? Perhaps he took encountering a man my size as some sort of sign.

  “Don’t tell anyone,” he said, “but I’m not going home.” He said that back home they would regard him as a coward, as not having really fought at all. As having hidden perhaps or pretended to be dead, lain down in shameful mimicry of those who really were, shielded from the bullets by the bodies of his friends. I could see that he doubted he could ever prove himself deserving of survival, more deserving than the dead, more deserving of being unharmed than those who were so marred they would never heal. “One hour in the war,” he said. “I’ll be a laughingstock.”

  We had barely met when he told me that when he was released he was going to New York. “You’ll need a place to stay,” I said. “We both will.” When I invited him to stay with me, he nodded as if he had long ago foreseen my invitation.

  I think he left France in a state of mind from which he never did emerge. For the most part his delusions were benign and not apparent to people unacquainted with his past.

  After his honourable discharge, upon reaching Manhattan, he wrote to his family and told them that, although he was well, he would not be coming home. He did not explain himself, he said, because he could not have found the words to do so. He did not disclose his whereabouts and did not contact or hear from his family again. I could, without his permission, have written to his family—I knew their name and the name of his hometown, Fortune—but he exacted from me a promise not to do so. I often encouraged him to change his mind, but even when he knew that he was dying he would not release me from my promise. In fact, he exacted a second promise, that even after his death I would not seek out or contact any member of his family.

  Piecemeal, over a course of years, he told me the story of Beaumont Hamel as he remembered it.

  During the roll call after the battle, seven hundred and seventy-eight names were read aloud.

  To seven hundred and ten names, no one answered. The highest casualty count, per capita, of any country in the war. Hundreds of towns in Newfoundland have smaller populations than the number of men who died at Beaumont Hamel. He was one of the sixty-eight who answered “here.”

  He often referred to them as the “Sixty-Eight.” And to his fellow fortunates as “the Sixty-Seven.” Inasmuch as he belonged to any group, it was to this Sixty-Eight, none of whom he ever sought out or kept in touch with.

  “The Unknown Soldier,” he sometimes called himself. An apt name, he said, because his having been a soldier had had absolutely no effect, had registered on nothing and no one. Because his whereabouts were unknown to anyone from his past life. Because he was so adept at moving about without detection. Because, without apparent regret or ruefulness, he believed he was long forgotten by whomever he’d left behind in Fortune.

  Other times he called himself the Unknown Newfoundlander, as if he believed himself to be representative of Newfoundlanders, all of whom, no matter where they lived, were “unknown,” their country’s history, geography, culture, its very existence unknown to all but fellow Newfoundlanders. And unknown to you, Miss Fielding. He referred to expatriates as ex-islanders, savouring the pun. Exiled. Ex-isled.

  Unknown soldiers from an unknown country, fighting for the liberation of a people who had never heard of Newfoundland.

  How could he go back when the Newfoundland he left was no longer there?

  Sixty-eight. He said it felt like that was how many Newfoundlanders there were still left alive. As if the country’s entire population had been thrown into the fight and, but for sixty-eight, had been wiped out in one hour. As if nothing but the Sixty-Eight stood between Newfoundlanders and their extinction. He dreamt of the Sixty-Eight wandering like ghosts through their otherwise deserted country that looked as the battlefield at Beaumont Hamel had when the fighting stopped. He had dreams that consisted of nothing but the kind of silence that prevails in the wake of battle.

  For a while, for a long while, I tried to reason with him. I assured him that such ideas were nothing more than fleeting impressions that some day would vanish. I spoke to him of his family.

  “You must miss them,” I said. “You had no falling-out with them. Don’t you wonder how they are, wonder what they think drove you away from them?”

  “I try not to think of them,” he said, adding that he never wanted them to see what he’d become, what he’d be reduced to, if he went back home.

  He never fired a shot, he said. Between the order to attack and the order to retreat, the muzzle of his rifle was pointed at the sky. For him, the entire war consisted of running as fast as he could to a certain point and then as fast as he could back to where he started. “All I did was run,” he said. “It’s not as if you ran away,” I said. “I might as well have,” he said. “I might as well have had no gun at all. I wonder what the other sixty-seven did. The same as me, maybe. Maybe the Germans didn’t shoot at us because we didn’t shoot at them.” “There wouldn’t have been time for them to size you up like that,” I said. “And don’t forget the artillery and the planes overhead that fired into groups of men, not at one or two.” He shrugged. “It was like walking through a thunderstorm and coming out bone dry.” Had the Sixty-Eight been cursed or blessed? What if no agency but chance had been present on that battlefield? “Maybe you were spared so that you could help Miss Fielding,” I said. “Maybe,” he said. He grinned sheepishly.

  I know it mattered greatly to him that the woman who was so important to me and whom I deputized him to protect was a Newfoundlander. He never called me “Provider” or referred to himself as my delegate, though he knew that I used those names when I wrote to you. He said that you were his “charge” and he was your “minder.” To watch over without hope of gain or gratitude a fellow countrywoman fast became one of the three main purposes of his life. Along with reading and being my companion. We tacitly agreed that there was no more worthwhile thing for us to do with our lives than devote them to protecting you, at least to the degree that unforeseeable and uncontrollable circumstances would allow. “Shielding Sheilagh Fielding.” It might have been the code name of some military operation. It was as though we had been entrusted with your soul, charged with escorting it through life. Sometimes it seemed that it was to learn how best to be your guardians that we read so much, as if such exhaustive study of the record of humankind was essential to the proper guardianship of a single human being. And it therefore seemed too that it was because of your exceptionality that we had been assigned to you.

  And so it was life that we deserted, Miss Fielding. Not the war. Deserted everything upon returning to New York. Our ties to the past. Our Faith. All interest in the outcome of the war. The idea of God. The Grand Design. The idea of any design. The notion that history is purposeful. I spoke to him at first as if I was still a priest, repeated the old shibboleth about the inscrutability of God’s plan for his children. But I stopped.

  He did not take his faithlessness as a licence to do as he pleased. He was solicitous of those who, not having seen what he had, did not know what some were capable of. He believed that people were, through no faul
t of their own, naïve, credulous, good-hearted to the point that persecution of some kind was their fate.

  We were by this time almost a pair of hermits, though we lived in New York.

  I told him everything about your mother and me. He did not hate your mother, did not wish her any harm. On the contrary, he often urged me to examine my conscience after I had spoken ill of her, which I did often in the early years of our friendship.

  I told him everything about you. I told him that it was my intention to accompany you through life to whatever extent my meagre resources would allow. He asked to become my partner in this—vocation.

  I could not have found even as much peace as I have if not for him.

  We made no pact per se. We never found it necessary to speak explicitly of the goals that inspired our collaboration.

  How did we live? A question you must many times have asked yourself. We lived much as a childless couple would. Each for the other a remedy for loneliness and displacement.

  Since the war we have lived in a small flat in Lower Manhattan. We have been the subject of much conjecture, I have no doubt, but we never bothered to invent an explanation of ourselves and our arrangement that would satisfy our neighbours. What we did not spend on rent and basic sustenance we spent on you. When we travelled together or were both in New York, we did not speak exclusively of you, were not forever pondering your fate, though for us to converse for hours at a time was not unusual.

  When we first met, my delegate was not an educated man, but he became one with my guidance. And there came a time when he could speak as knowledgeably as I could on almost any subject.

  We did not simply read books, we studied them, examined them in search of what he ingenuously called The Answer, in the existence of which he believed as fervently as he once believed in God and for which he was still searching when he died. Philosophy, religion, literature, science. We read and read. For decades. Though my own quest was not so earnest, I too read for enlightenment, though without hope of an Answer. Our flat was overrun with books the way used bookstores in big cities often are. It contained, I dare say, something not far short of an account of mankind, the collected works of our species. How often we sat up all night, he in one chair, I in another, each of us turning the pages of our respective books as if the end of our collaboration was to read every worthwhile volume ever published.