The Custodian of Paradise

EVEN ON SUNDAYS MY FATHER GETS UP EARLY, COMES home late, spends the intervening hours at his surgery, alone. He does not, cannot spend his day of rest at home, because of me, perhaps. There would be no avoiding me if he stayed home. He has no patients, no appointments, no house calls to make or rounds to keep, but he spends his day of rest at work, “keeping abreast of new developments,” he says, reading the latest books and journals as any “chest man worth his salt” would do.

I believe that what he really catches up on is his sleep, but I never say so. In his surgery. Not normally a place of peace or sleep. All the better then. Revelling in his surroundings, reminders of what he is seeking respite from. The kind of sleep I yearn for but that nothing can induce. His narcotic is exhaustion, but it doesn’t work for me.

I write to the point where not another word will come, go out and walk for miles, read until my eyes begin to close, then try to sleep. I nod off momentarily, then wake as though someone has just burst into the room. I sit up, heart pounding. Who is it? Who is unaccounted for? Whose bed, though they should have been home long ago, is empty? That is what it feels like when I wake. But I do not think of names or faces. Whomever it was that in my negligence I overlooked is beyond recall.

It is almost midnight when I leave the house. How many nights in a row has it been? More than twenty. Almost midnight. It seems my neighbours haven’t noticed these middle-of-the-night departures from my house. They would think I had found some new way of mortifying Dr. Fielding. “That one. Where is she off to at this time of night?”

More likely, some early riser has seen me, a single woman, coming home near dawn. Rumours. Whores and rumours of whores.

It is snowing lightly, but the wind is calm, snowflakes so small they look like raindrops, falling straight down like grains of ice though they are soft against my face and make no sound.

I take the same streets, the same route as always, past the same dark and silent houses, descending slantwise, heading slightly south but mostly west, barely able to see the ground in front of me, the unpaved, potholed, snow-covered street that smells faintly of manure. The lamps, long since extinguished, are all I have to go by, their shapes just visible against the sky.

It seems that everything that is not me is reconciled to its place and purpose in the world. That the world comprises everything not me.

For a while, as if to will it open, I stare at the window, the curtain taut behind the glass. A pair of boots in frozen footprints. It reminds me of the sealers, feet frozen fast in the ice, bodies frozen past the point where they could fall. I move my feet to make sure that I still can.

I will ask him to meet me somewhere. What harm could there be in that? Or to come outside and walk with me. I would go inside if he invited me. I will suggest it. So we can have a proper conversation, one whose duration is not determined by how long I can stand the cold. Or by whatever impulse of his it is that makes him dole out his questions night after night, when he could have asked and told me everything in one night if he wanted to. Everything. Can you conceive of no reason why a woman might decide to leave her daughter?

I wipe off the snow that has gathered on my shoulders, remove my hat, shake it, put it back on. I look down at my feet to find that nothing but the laces of my boots are showing. How long have I been waiting? I have a watch but decide not to consult it. It would only make the time pass more slowly. On some nights, I tell myself, he has kept me waiting a very long time.

I look down at my hands that grip the knob of my cane. I can just make out their shape beneath the snow, shadowed fissures between the fingers of my gloves. The snow is so wet that even the cane is covered with it and is almost invisible against the ground. To someone watching from a certain angle, it would seem that I am leaning on nothing at all. I would look as eerily stiff and motionless and as wholly enveloped by snow as the sealers did when they were found. I hope that no one is watching from the darkened windows, no one witnessing this spectacle, this spectre who might be the ghost of one of the sealers, standing out there in the street, staring at the window of what might once have been its house and that it is now powerless to enter or ask admittance to.

He has never kept me waiting this long before. Snow is melting on my face, water dripping from my eyebrows, nose and chin, ice forming on my lashes so that I can barely blink.

I decide I have had enough of waiting. I will break the rules. I no longer care what he will do or say. I step closer to the window, raise my snow-encrusted cane and tap the tip of it against the glass. When there is no response, I tap again, louder, more insistently. I will keep on tapping until I hear the window slide upward, the sound of wood within a groove of wood that I have heard every night for more than twenty nights.

“Miss,” I hear a voice say. A familiar voice. A boy’s. It comes from behind me.

I look over my shoulder and see, through the falling snow, standing on the opposite street corner as if waiting for traffic to pass, P.D. the First, who is holding in his arms something so heavy he is bending backwards to keep from dropping it.

“P.D.,” I shout, in part because I am glad to see him for, though I know he was planning an escape to the mainland, I have been worried that something sinister accounted for his sudden disappearance.

“Shh, Miss,” he hisses at me from across the street, a warning that seems superfluous, even melodramatic, given that, as always, there is no one else in sight and the houses could not be more dark and silent if they were empty.

Before I can spare him the trouble of lugging his burden across the street, he scuffs through the snow, so bent backwards he is staring almost straight up, surely unable to see where he is going. God knows how far, thus encumbered, he walked tonight. It seems impossible that he has avoided tripping over some obstacle or slipping on some snow-covered patch of ice and dropping what his way of holding it suggests is something breakable. Something, I have no doubt, that they have warned him not to break. A boy his size walking unmolested through the dark streets while toting a bundle that might as well have the words “precious” stamped all over it. Unintercepted by police. Unrobbed.

“What are you doing here?” I say as he stoops to lay the bundle in the snow. Something square inside a brown bag. The faint clinking of glass.

“I think I might have broken one,” he says, grunting with relief as he sets his cargo down and straightens up. He sighs, out of breath. Hurriedly brushes snow from his head and body as if it is contaminated, as if he cannot stand to bear it on his clothing, snow that he has been unable to attend to until now.

“Twenty-four callabogus. Well. Twenty-three, I think,” he says, smiling sheepishly.

“I thought you’d gone away.”

“Not yet. Maybe soon.”

“What are you doing here, P.D.?”

“They told me to meet you here with this. And this.” He reaches inside his ragged coat and withdraws a sealed white envelope that he extends to me. I stare at it, faintly hear the snow grains as they strike the paper.

“Take it,” P.D. says. “It’s getting wet.” I take it from him, shake it free of snow and tuck it inside my coat.

“What is it?”

“A letter,” he says, shrugging, as if he has only the vaguest notion of what a letter is.

“A letter from whom?”

“They told me to give it to you. But it’s not from them because they can’t read or write. They never said who it was from. They just said, make sure she gets it.”

“Your parents?”

He nods.

“Tell me everything you know about all this,” I say. “It’s very important to me. What about this callabogus?”

He shrugs again. “Same thing. ‘Make sure she gets it.’”

“They knew where I would be?”

“Yeah.”

“Have they had any visitors lately? Other than the usual ones maybe.”

Another maddening shrug.

“Think,” I almost shout. He steps back, more frightened, it seems, than is warranted by my one-word command. But it occurs to me that he must be often shouted at, and worse. That, in spite of how well I have treated him in the past, he may believe me to be capable of anything, capable of changing, turning on him, in an instant.

“I’m sorry,” I say. “But please, try to remember—”

“No one ever comes to visit us,” he says.

“How do they find their customers?” Another shrug.

“What else did they tell you? Am I supposed to read the letter and give you my reply?”

“They said give her the paper and the ’bogus. That’s all they said.”

I look at the window, the curtain, tap the glass with my cane.

“Do you know who lives here?” I say. He shakes his head. “Have you ever sold callabogus or any other kind of booze to the man who lives here?”

“No. We don’t sell to anyone on Patrick Street. Someone else does.” He glances about as if this “someone else” might be watching.

“I have been here every night for more than three weeks,” I say. “And I have never seen or heard another soul. Except some passing constables. And I have spoken with a man who sits at that window every night. He opens the window and we speak. But I have never seen him. Every night until tonight, I have heard his voice, which I am certain I have heard before. Somewhere, but I can’t think where. It seems that tonight the house is empty. And here, instead of him, are you whom I have had dealings with before. Which I suspect is no coincidence. Here are you, P.D., you with a letter and a case of callabogus. What am I to make of that?”

“I am just a messenger, miss. No one tells me nothing.”

“Perhaps if I could speak to your parents—”

“Oh no, miss, please. They would kill me if you went to see them. Please, miss.” Suddenly he is on the verge of tears.

“But I would make it crystal clear that it was my idea, P.D. That you did what you were told and were not to blame for anything. And I would offer them money in exchange for information.”

Now he was crying. “Miss, please. Don’t get me into trouble. They’ll think I told you where they live. If you ask them questions, they’ll take it out on me, they will. They’ll kill me. I still don’t have enough to go away—”

“Calm down, P.D. How much more money do you need—?”

“A lot. But even if you had that much—look, you don’t understand. They’re not really my parents. I don’t want any trouble. You don’t know what they’re like. They’re not like you. He says he won’t just take my arm and break it like before. ‘If you misbehave again,’ he said, ‘I’ll cut you open like a fish.’”

I shudder, almost begin to cry myself. I know nothing, really, of the kind of life he leads. The childhood he is hoping to escape from. I believe him, believe that I will, if I go to see them, be risking nothing less than his life.

“All right, P.D., all right. I promise not to find out where they live. I won’t ask anyone any questions. I won’t say a word to anyone about you.”

He wipes his eyes and nose with the back of his hand but looks at me as if he doubts that I will keep my word.

“How much for this callabogus?” I say. “What do I owe you?”

“Nothing,” he says, but does not look me in the eye. “They said to tell you that it’s paid for.”

“Are you sure? You’re not just saying this—”

“I’m sure. That’s what they said.”

The voice he must use for all his other customers, the ones he fears almost as much as he fears them. If only I could take back what I said. Even if he does not panic, does not jeopardize his plan for freedom, I have lost his respect. His affection. I had no idea that losing it would mean so much to me.

I look down at the case of callabogus. Enough to tide me over until I find another provider, he must have thought. Soon, my father will once again be my Provider. I look at the boy. They’re not really my parents. In other circumstances, I would ask him to explain. But not now. And not here on this cold and snowy street with morning in the offing.

“Goodbye, P.D.,” I say. “Here, I’ll give you a penny like before.” He shakes his head. I decide against holding out my hand in case he might refuse it or somehow misunderstand the gesture. I suspect he hopes that he will never see me again. I believe that he will get his wish. This parting that I dread for reasons that I do not fully understand cannot come too soon for him. I have a feeling of momentousness that it saddens me to think he doesn’t share.

“Goodbye, miss,” he says and, turning, runs swiftly away, as if to make it impossible for me to follow him. He runs down Patrick Street, unburdened by callabogus, heels high, arms pumping, turns right at the next intersection. Heading west. To the bridge, probably. And then uphill to the Brow.

I lay my cane on top of the callabogus, pick up the box. The boy is less than half my size. How far he must have carried this for me.

I must hurry home. I am the very definition of conspicuous. I go east, slowly ascending the hill, taking the slope slantwise, afraid that, if I fall, someone will hear the crash of breaking glass, see the liquid seeping from the sack, melting the snow around it, running down the hill, a reeking, incriminating mess. Snow covers my cane and the top and sides of the box so that, to someone watching, it would look as though I am clutching to my chest a block of ice.

Will this winter never end? he said in early spring. No Newfoundlander would speculate in early spring about the end of winter. Yet I know I have heard his voice before.

Above the Narrows, despite the heavy overcast and falling snow, the sky is faintly blue. In an hour, maybe less, my father will start stirring in his chair. I must hurry home and read the letter that I hope has not fallen from my coat. Lost. Or found by someone who can read. I press my body against the box and hear the crackle of paper.

My dear Miss Fielding:

I am sorry that I was forced to miss our last appointment. I hope you will accept the callabogus as a token of my regret.

Even now, as I write this, hours before you will appear outside my window, I fancy I can see you there, unmistakably Miss Fielding, waiting patiently, reposefully erect, as motionless as if you were under orders from me to remain that way.

A semicircle of cigarette butts in the snow outside my window every morning, half-enclosing what might have been the footprints of a man. Evidence of your protracted vigil. A succession of vigils. Fresh evidence each morning. By noon ground into shreds beneath the boots of those whose faces I have come to know, by whose passage I can tell the time of day.

Those to whom this street is home, those looking out their windows late at night, have seen you standing there, have grown accustomed to the sight of you standing outside Number 43.

An open secret in the neighbourhood. Like me. Subject of fruitless speculation. You whose name they know. Me whose real name they suspect is not the one I gave when I moved in. Who made it clear to them he wanted to be left alone.

If you ask the people of Patrick Street about me, they will tell you this: a man from away rented that house. We don’t know who he is. We thought you might know why, but we were told not to ask you. And not to tell you anything about him, not that there is much to tell. We don’t want any trouble. What they might not tell you is that I bought their silence with money.

Never really having seen me, they will be unable to tell you what I look like. Or looked like, I should say. A man can disguise everything except his height. They might tell you I am very old. And even that would be inaccurate.

At first your voice was unmistakably a woman’s, though not like those of other women. You sounded imperiously bored. As if there was nothing I or anyone could say that you hadn’t heard before or could not easily predict. A jaded child.

For that was what your voice became, that of a child.

You will never be anything but a child to me, Miss Fielding. Though it may seem to you that you have not been one since the day your mother left. Or that your childhood ended when your motherhood began.

As mine did when my fatherhood began. The child is father of the man.

You changed. You became less able to disguise your fear. You have always been afraid, my child.

Callabogus. Alky. Juneshine. Junibeer. Afraid that sleep will never come. Dreamless sleep. Surcease from memory. Afraid the words will never come. The moving finger stalls and, having stalled, must point the blame. What if you had to choose between the words and the bottles you bring home each night? Which one would come at a cost that you are not prepared to pay? An unfair question now. But one that you may ask yourself some day.

Twice fathered. Once by me. I understand you better than I understand myself. Our great fear that from lack of sleep we would lose our minds. And all the things we meant to do would remain undone.

Those “forgeries” of yours. You are a better writer at eighteen than those you fear will ever be. Could ever have been, under any circumstances. A better one by far than me. How proud you make me feel.

I am proud of you, your talent, your courage.

I should be warning you of the perils of everything you do. The road to perdition. Never too late to double back. Reformation. But I am not a hypocrite. I will never know how much better or worse I might have been. A coward’s epitaph, perhaps. But not a hypocrite’s.

I knew your mother before she came to Newfoundland. We met in Boston when she and I were your age. I stayed in Boston when, a year after breaking off our engagement, she moved to St. John’s, where she was married some months later. Dr. and Mrs. Fielding.

I was once very much in love with your mother, far more so than she ever was with me.

If you tell your mother about our conversations and this letter, she will deny all knowledge of me. She will admit to nothing, and not just for the sake of your children. As will Dr. Fielding. Though, in his case, the profession of ignorance would be sincere. He has no idea who I am, though we have met.

I have never lied to you and I never will.

We will meet again. I am more certain of this than I am of anything else.

As you read this, I am on a boat bound for the mainland.

Some day, Miss Fielding, I will ask your forgiveness for three transgressions, two of which have yet to be committed.

Your Provider

September 3, 1920

I asked him, “What are we, Smallwood? You and I. What are we?” He pretended not to understand me. Looked like a child confronted with the evidence of misbehaviour. This after inviting me to go to New York, “with” him, I presumed he meant. Perhaps he did but lost his nerve. All he is willing to admit to himself is that he wants our association to continue. What an absurd-looking couple I and any man would make. Almost any man. There must be some as tall as me. What an absurd-looking couple he and any woman would make. The height of nonsense. The nonsense of height.

What an association it has been. He believes the answer to everything is socialism. War. Poverty. Disease. Injustice. Corruption. Exploitation. Travesties like the deaths of the sealers. The slaughter of the Regiment at Beaumont Hamel. Unhappiness. He believes that, ruled by socialists, under socialism, people will be nicer to each other. I, of course, share none of his beliefs.

Searching for that “answer” is like—well, I am searching for a different answer, though I have said nothing to Smallwood about my Provider.

Yet I like spending time with him while he tries to change the world. I follow him about as if I am his mother, as if socialism is a toy and I must make sure he does not hurt himself while playing with it. Must feign interest in his fascinations and not allow my mind to wander. Must coo encouragement while disguising boredom, lest I make him jealous of whatever it is that preoccupies me. A mother, arms folded, trailing patiently after a boy who gravitates infallibly towards hazards that I must somehow teach him to avoid.

Perhaps it is the discrepancy in our statures that makes me think this way.

No amount of teasing can discourage him, but I defend him anyway. And, afterwards, tease him myself. This, though they tease him because of me. Just as in court. Here comes Joey with his mommy. Smallwood with his bodyguard. Fielding with her protégé.

He stump-speaks. Stands on a chair that he carries with him from wharf to wharf, pier to pier. Beseeching stevedores and lumberjacks and fishermen to unionize.

But we have no followers. “We are sowing the seeds of revolution,” Smallwood said a month ago. “If it takes a hundred years for them to sprout, then so be it.” But he is already impatient. He speaks of John Reed’s Ten Days That Shook the World.

“Ten days,” he said.

“Ten Millennia that Shook the World doesn’t have quite the same ring to it, does it?” I said.

“What is the point of planting seeds if you never see what grows from them?” he said yesterday.

And so he says he must move on to New York. Where he swears that socialism is “flourishing.”

“Not unless ‘flourishing’ is a synonym for ‘languishing,’” I said. Everyone but Smallwood seems to know that, in America, the party’s fortunes are falling fast.

“Politics are cyclical,” he said.

“Hammer and siclical,” I said, but he seemed not to notice.

I told him to go to New York. Said I wasn’t sure what I would do. Then said I was certain I would stay here. He grinned. Said he was certain I would change my mind.

Chapter Eight