The Custodian of Paradise

February 6, 1943

Captain D. Hanrahan.

It was not the first time an American serviceman had been at the Cochrane, but what a din the Harlotry sent up as he walked down the hall.

Late in the afternoon it was, though I was but an hour out of a bed that I had left unmade.

Whistles. Catcalls. Laughter. Mock beckonings.

“Captain D., come with me!”

It must have been obvious, somehow, that he had not come for that, or else the beckonings would have been more bold.

I have heard other men walk that gauntlet of prostitutes to a din of a different tone and purpose. A din that always ends with the slamming of a dozen doors. The man chooses or, more likely, is chosen, dragged into a room. And the other women go back to waiting.

I made nothing of the noise. It has been customary at any hour of the day or night since the war began. Though it started up so suddenly, as if one of them had been keeping watch and warned the others he was coming. Like a surprise party thrown by women he had never met, never heard of, but who had somehow heard of him.

But I knew none of this.

Just another afternoon at the Cochrane. My day begins when theirs does. The city subsides. The light begins to fade. Nightfall. Another night, another column. Time to work while others sleep. To walk while others lie awake, hoping sleep will come.

And so I thought it would be this time. I waited for the slamming of the doors.

“Where are you going, Captain D.? There’s no one at the end but her.”

I made nothing of it. Nor of his passing all their doors until none was left but mine. I presumed he would go straight past my room and down the other stairs. Having strayed into the wrong place, perhaps, beet-faced with embarrassment, bent on making his escape without a backwards glance.

The sudden silence of the Harlotry the second he knocked on my door. As if every one of them were watching. Which they were.

I was at my table, which doubles as my desk. My cane on the floor beside my foot.

Another series of knocks, a sideways fist, a knock without knuckles, “thud, thud, thud.” As if to say, I know you’re in there. I slipped on my boots, leaving them untied, and grabbed my cane. Did my version of a shuffle to the door that I opened just as he began to knock again.

I pulled the door away from his outstretched fist. And there he was. I saw his name tag first. Captain D. Hanrahan. The last my mother’s maiden name.

D. What must he have thought when I gasped in what might have been fright and, letting my cane drop, threw my arms around him, one around his neck, one around his waist, and pressed his face against my shoulder before he even had a chance to open his arms?

“Sis!” he said, half-laughing, amused, bewildered. “Sis. I was hoping you’d be glad to see me, but I never expected anything like this.”

Sis. Remember, he doesn’t know, I thought. Be careful what you say. So much he must never know came flooding back at once. New York. Six months of night it might have been, all spent in that one room.

A second heartbeat. Which one was born first? The girl. His sister.

Be careful how you seem. He doesn’t know.

There were more whistles and catcalls from the Harlotry.

“Helloooo, brother,” one of the women said.

He laughed.

“Come in,” I said. He did. The dozen doors closed all but silently.

“Nice digs.”

My son. My son. My son. My heart thumping, saying what I could not say out loud.

“What?”

“Nice digs.”

He was smiling. Not unprepared for what he saw. My surroundings, my height, my limp, my look. The smell of Scotch, which persists in my room though I have not had a drink in seven years. Unless no one else but me can smell it, which may be, for I can taste it too, whenever I drink water from my flask, which I do often, at home, in public, openly, stared at by those who though they’ve heard that there is nothing in the flask but water, choose not to believe it.

The unmade bed. He had heard of “Fielding.” From whom? From everyone.

“The Maharajah Suite, they used to call it. All the rooms had names when I moved in. I must have been about your age.”

“I’m twenty-seven.”

I know how old you are.

I cannot bring myself to say his name. He looks more like my mother than he looks like me. But not like Prowse. David. Where does my height come from? Where did it go? He must be five foot ten. Less perhaps. Sarah? Another giantess?

“Twenty-seven. Like your sister, Sarah.”

“Yes.” He looked away at the mention of her name, as if she might be—I drew a deep breath, tried to swallow down a surge of dread.

“How is Sarah?”

“She is very much herself.”

I knew that, if I asked, he would not tell me what he meant. I heard it in his voice. Very much herself. It could mean anything. Twenty-seven years about which I knew almost nothing.

“As is our mother. And my father.”

“Good.”

“But you, quite understandably, do not wish to speak of our mother.”

“No—”

He put up his hand. “It’s all right,” he said. “I don’t mind. I don’t often speak of her myself. I don’t mean to sound so ominous. Nothing’s amiss. Everything is fine between us all.”

Said with such finality. He might as well have said, we need not speak of them again. Fine. A fine family. Merely irked he might be by something one of them had recently said or done. Twenty-seven years.

We spent two days together.

Went to the movies, where we encountered Smallwood who mistook David for a suitor. Serves him right, I told myself.

Had dinner in a restaurant. I hadn’t been in one in decades.

We walked about the city. I didn’t tell him that I sleep by day and work by night, so I was soon exhausted. Happily, giddily exhausted.

My son. My son. My son. My heart exulting in these words.

He took my arm as we walked, which made walking difficult for both of us, what with my cane and my limp. He had no choice but to mimic my gait. I wondered if he could feel my pulse in my arm as I did when he gripped me tightly with his hand. The sweet touch of my son, whom I had long been reconciled to never meeting.

My face was flushed from the moment I saw him in the doorway to the moment we said goodbye.

For a while we spoke only of inconsequential things. The weather. The landscape. I took him past my father’s house, but we didn’t stop for long and didn’t speak of her. The house that, in his will, my father left to the Medical Association, as he did every penny of his savings.

David said he was a graduate of a military college in Virginia in which he had enrolled when he was twenty.

Following his lead, I said little of my past. Nothing of Bishop Spencer, my time with Smallwood in New York. I told him of my illness and my time in the San and he listened in silence and nodded. But I said nothing of the Bonavista, nothing of my drinking, nothing of Prowse.

Nor did we speak of the future, his imminent departure for England and then Italy, the war, reminders of which, aside from the uniform he wore, were everywhere, the streets full of other men and women in uniform—American, Canadian, British. The war in which he would soon be taking part.

How could we have spoken of it? I wondered if he was afraid. He did not seem to be. Though neither did he seem eager, excited, deluded about what others his age might have mistaken for some great adventure.

We might have been sightseers, both strangers to the city, a brother and sister visiting a place about which we had heard from friends, an exotic place where there was no end of things to remark upon, to visit, no end of ways to maintain the illusion that nothing of the world remained beyond these shores.

“We looked like identical twins when we were small children,” he said. “Until we went to school. Mother dressed us exactly alike. Had our hair cut exactly alike. In some photographs, you can’t tell who’s who, who’s the boy and who’s the girl. We both looked like curly haired girls, but also both looked like tomboys. I mean, even I can’t tell who’s who. Coveralls and curly hair. Mother wanted it that way, wanted us inseparable for as long as possible.

“Even after we started school, she made sure we looked alike, until Father intervened. He worried I’d grow up to be a sissy. Sis and Sissy. Someone called us that. He told her I’d be teased to death by other boys. Our school uniforms were different, but on the weekends we still dressed alike. Until Father put his foot down.

“You can see the sudden change in the family albums. It’s as if we were replaced, as if we simply vanished from the family. Suddenly, where Sis and Sissy used to be there are this boy and this girl smiling as if they’ve been there all along.”

Not quite nostalgia. He sounds like he’s trying to make a case of some kind against someone. Citing evidence. Pointing to what he now sees were the early signs of something. Of whatever it is that makes him so loath to speak of anything more recent than his early childhood.

In the restaurant.

“We seem to turn a lot of heads no matter where we go.”

“Sorry. It’s me they’re staring at. For a lot of reasons. Not all of which are obvious. Sightings of me at any time are rare, but in the daytime they’re unheard of. I don’t have lunch at lunchtime or dinner at dinnertime. It’s been fourteen years since I had breakfast. Almost no one in this city has ever seen me eating food. But believe me, this is all much stranger for me than it is for them. I’m not used to doing things when other people do them. Doing what other people do when I’m asleep.”

But they were staring at him, too. The son of the woman who deserted Dr. Fielding. Living proof of her. There were people in the restaurant old enough to remember her.

And there was also the matter of his last name, the one on his uniform that was known to be her maiden name. Word of that must have quickly spread. Word that he seems to have renounced his father’s name, his family name, in favour of the one that his mother hasn’t used in decades.

Fielding’s half-brother is in town.

The unlikely sight of me walking arm in arm with anyone, let alone an American officer in uniform, was one not to be missed.

As we strolled down Water Street, people who saw us coming alerted others, ducked into shops and houses and offices, the doors and windows of which, by the time we passed, were crammed with the curious, the mystified, the astonished and the scornful.

“Parades must bring them out in droves,” he said.

Children, looking as if they’d been told I ate children, usually avoided me, though a few of them chanted rhymes about me from a distance or otherwise demonstrated their courage to their peers by taunting me.

But emboldened by this new development, they turned their attention to David, whom they took to be my date, a newcomer who didn’t know my reputation and was fool enough not to be put off by my appearance.

“She’s Fielding, sir,” a boy shouted as if my mere name was proof of the folly of consorting with me.

“She lives at the Cochrane.”

“She has consumption.”

“She’s always drunk.”

“She makes up lies called Forgeries.”

“So many children singing my praises,” I said.

What does he think of me? I wondered. It’s one thing to have heard about me, another altogether to see me and my lodgings for yourself. Perhaps the visit is an ordeal that he is determined to see through to the end, one that, though it is even worse than he expected, he knows will soon be over and will never have to be repeated.

He must be leaving behind someone besides them. No ring on his finger. Still, he may have a girlfriend who is already fretting for him. And friends aside from his fellow officers.

Not like Prowse. Not like me.

Perhaps only because I am devoid of self-knowledge, have an entirely countefeit self-image, I half-expect him to reveal that he’s impersonating David who told him all about me. Something of my father’s obsession in my blindness to resemblances.

A shirking of responsibility for his existence. A way of keeping him distant from me, lest his imminent, and perhaps permanent, departure be unbearable.

I don’t know. I search his face, his eyes, note his mannerisms, his facial expressions, his gestures—but nothing seems familiar, which would be in keeping with his having changed his name if he had changed it to something other than my mother’s.

“Do people still say you look a lot like Sarah?” I said.

“I no longer associate with anyone who knows us both,” he said, then grimaced as if he had let slip something he had vowed to keep to himself. “I simply mean that, because of where we live, we rarely see each other.”

I am to blame, I felt like saying. For whatever it is that has happened between you and your sister, I am to blame.

“You’re not married,” he said. “I would say by choice.”

“Yes,” I said. “Other people’s choice.”

“Really?”

“No. But I can think of no corners in which I would be considered a catch. Even before this.” I tapped my boot with my cane.

“There was never anyone?”

“For a brief time, my type—six-foot three-inch women who were lame and lived as though they had taken a vow of insolvency—were all the rage. But the competition was fierce. Suddenly, every woman in St. John’s was six foot three and limping back and forth from places like the Cochrane Street Hotel.”

“You could just have said ‘Next question.’”

“Sorry. I grew up an only child, without a mother, and more or less without a father. I grew accustomed to solitude, independence.”

“People, and I don’t just mean children, seem to be afraid of you.”

“Some, I suppose.”

“Afraid you’ll write about them.”

“Afraid that I won’t.”

“It’s considered fashionable to be written about by Sheilagh Fielding?”

“It’s considered unfashionable to be ignored, even by me.”

“I am a writer too.”

“That explains the uniform.”

“I’ve written every day since I was twelve. But I’ve never tried to publish anything.”

“Why not?”

“I use real names.”

“So do I.”

“My family’s names. My friends’ names. I write about their lives. And mine. I don’t change anything. Even if I changed the names, everyone would know who my characters are.”

“You wouldn’t be the first writer—”

“No. I wouldn’t. Do you write about your friends?”

“No.”

“Because they’d no longer be your friends?”

“Because I have no friends. I make do with the company of enemies. Whom I do write about.”

“You’re exaggerating.”

“The people who are least distressed at the sight of me are the closest things I have to friends.”

“You have readers.”

“Yes.”

“I would rather have readers than friends.”

“I doubt it. But if so, why don’t you try to publish what you write?”

“I wouldn’t mind losing them as friends. But I wouldn’t want to hurt them.”

“Then you should learn to make things up.”

“I’ve tried. I can’t. Nothing that’s any good. Nothing that matters to me.”

“Why did you enlist in military college?”

He made a dismissive motion with his hands. “Mother rarely spoke about St. John’s,” he said.

“She rarely spoke about St. John’s while she lived here,” I said.

“She never spoke about your father.”

“My father used to refer to your father as his ‘rival.’ Right up until he died.”

“His ‘rival’?”

“Yes.”

“Hard to think of my father as another man’s rival.”

“Hard to think of mine that way as well.”

“So many years and miles apart,” he said. “Yet with the same mother.”

Mother. How strange to hear him call her that. Every time he says it, I give a start, think, for a moment, that he’s addressing me. “Mother.” How casually he says the word. How commonplace it is to have a mother, to be raised by one. An unremarkable achievement.

“Not the same.”

“How so?”

“The mother you know is not the mother I remember.”

“Sorry.”

My words had a double meaning. Everything I said to him had more than one. A fine way to spend what little time I had with him. Verbally sparring. Yet it was irresistible. So hard to speak of her at all, let alone to hear him call her Mother.

“Not your fault.”

“She must have had her reasons for—leaving.”

“Did she ever tell you what they were?”

“No. But then—well, it was something we were not supposed to talk about. Whenever we got close she changed the subject. Or Father did.”

Father. An absurd image of Prowse presiding at their dinner table. Prowse, my mother and my children.

“She never said a word about me?”

“She said that you were very tall.”

“My father must have told her.”

“What?”

“She left when I was six years old, not when I was six feet tall. My father must have written to her.”

“Did they correspond?”

“Someone must have written to her, ‘You’ll never guess how tall she is. It’s a mystery where her height comes from.’ That sort of thing.”

“Your father wasn’t very tall?”

“No. Shorter than average.”

“Then it is a mystery.”

“No one thought so more than he did. He never stopped thinking of her as his wife. Of himself as her husband.”

“So he talked about her.”

“Indirectly. But relentlessly. My father didn’t think I was his daughter.”

“Whose daughter did he think you were?”

“Every man’s but his.”

“Hardly a compliment to my mother.”

“Or to me. Men are disinclined to compliment the women who desert them. Perhaps his suspicions were a kind of revenge.”

“What were they based on?”

“Me.”

“I see.”

“I’m sure you think you do.”

“You don’t mean that you share his suspicions.”

“No. Which made him all the more suspicious. One less thing we had in common. If I had shared his suspicions, he might have been less suspicious. Like father, like daughter. Does that give you some idea how his mind worked?”

“I feel sorry for him.”

“Yes. So do I. Though he saw me as one of the many banes of his existence.”

“I think you’re given to exaggeration. How tall are you?”

“In my stockinged feet, depending on which side you measure, I am either six foot three or six foot one.”

“Does your leg—bother you?”

“It bothers everyone. I am, in many senses of the word, a bother.”

“But does it bother you?”

“Yes. But it also reminds me of things I might otherwise forget. Don’t ask me which things. You’re asking questions as if you plan to write about me.”

“I probably will. Would you mind?”

“At last. A taste of my own medicine. I’ll write about you too.”

“We should each write about the time we spend together and then—”

“Compare?”

“Yes. Though I’d be terrified. Do you write about people the way you talk about them?”

“No. In my writing, I’m not so affectionate and sentimental.”

“You’re very—funny.”

I felt myself blushing. You are showing off for him. Almost flirting with him.

“Do you like living here?”

“I prefer it to living elsewhere.”

“It looks—old, if that makes sense. An old-souled city. Not just the land but the houses, the buildings, the streets. They look like they’ve been here forever.”

“It’s the weather. The wind especially. It never stops. The houses take on the look of the land. Everything looks old on a grey and foggy day. Even Manhattan, in the rain, looks older than it is.”

“You’ve been there.”

“When I was in my early twenties. I was a reporter.”

“You didn’t come to visit us.”

“To visit her. There’s something about not having heard from your mother in fifteen years that makes you disinclined to stop by for a cup of tea.”

“She would have been glad to see you.”

“No. She would not. And you’ll have to take my word for that.”

“All right. But you must have been—tempted. Curious. Something.”

“Yes. Something.”

“Did she even know that you were in the city?”

“I don’t think so.”

“Strange. Where did you go after Manhattan?”

“Sanhattan. A much smaller place.” He looked puzzled.

“The sanitorium,” I said. I tapped my boot with my cane again.

We happened upon some girls playing hopscotch in the street.

“Stop before they see us,” I told him. “And listen to what they’re chanting.” It is something I have heard and seen many times in the past few years but will never grow accustomed to.

A girl of about ten took her turn on the hopscotch squares while half a dozen others chanted with her as she hopped from square to square drawn in chalk on the cobblestones of Water Street:

Fielding’s father loved her mother,
But Fielding’s mother loved another.
The man who Fielding’s mother married
Was not the man whose child she carried.

You’ll never guess in all your life
Who stole Dr. Fielding’s wife.
Can you guess which man I mean?
Oh no, it wasn’t Dr. Breen.

Fielding’s father’s nine feet tall
Dr. Fielding’s far too small.
And even though he’s five foot eight
Dr. Breen came far too late.

These are all the clues you get.
No one’s solved this riddle yet:
You won’t solve it, I just bet.
The answer is “A man you’ve met.”

The girl, standing on one foot, finally lost her balance on the word “met.” The others laughed, clapped, jeered.

“My God,” David said. “That rhyme is about you. And my mother and father.”

“And my mother and father,” I said. “My two fathers, I should say.”

“They’re saying Dr. Fielding’s not your father. Where did that idea come from?”

“Well, as I told you, from Dr. Fielding. He grew suspicious when she left. Before that, too, for all I know. And his suspicions became an obsession.”

“A very public one. How long have girls—?”

“I think it predates ‘London Bridge Is Falling Down.’ Actually, I’m not sure. I heard it in the street one day a few years ago. How old it was by then—who knows?”

“Who wrote it? Who made up that rhyme?”

“No idea.”

“Someone must have made it up.”

“Yes. Someone older than those girls.”

“Do people here really think my mother—that Dr. Fielding is not your father?”

“Some do. Some like to think it. Everyone has fun with it. A rhyming rumour cannot be put to rest.”

“How strange. A nursery rhyme. Do you think those girls understand what they’re saying?”

“Yes.”

“But does it make you—wonder?”

“If it might be true?”

“A rumour so—widespread. So—universal. My God. Little girls chanting it while playing hopscotch. It must make you think.”

“As I said, the rumour started with my father. Or maybe it was fed to him by some of his so-called friends. Then there is the matter of me.”

“Your height.”

“My everything. The idea that I wasn’t his child tormented my father, but he found the idea of blaming someone else for my—nature—well, it appealed to him.”

“You’re not exaggerating?”

“No. Regrettably.”

“But you’re sure he was your father?”

“No one’s sure who their father is.”

“Aside from that.”

“You’re wondering if I suspect my mother.”

“Our mother. Yes, I am.”

“No. Not of that.”

“I don’t know what to think. Girls singing hopscotch songs about my family in the street.

“It’s not as if I know your story.”

“It’s an all too ordinary story. Not like yours. I can’t imagine my mother … But I suppose—well, it’s hard to imagine your mother being anything except your mother.”

“Much harder for you than for me.”

“Sorry again. But it doesn’t really seem like your mother and mine are the same person.”

“All the world’s a stage, et cetera.”

“Yes. Still—”

“I should have steered you away from those girls. It’s just a rumour. Not something you should be distracted by, not now. I mean—”

“When I’m headed overseas.”

Overseas. The universally accepted euphemism.

Inconceivable that, soon, other young men will be trying to harm him. My son to whom I’m speaking now will soon be off to war. War that so changed my Provider and his delegate. To do unto others as they do unto him. Strangers with whom he has no complaint.

Inconceivable that others will regard him as the enemy. A threat to their lives. The sinister “other” from whom they must protect themselves. My son. Twenty-seven. Overseas. As if to say “abroad.” As if he is merely on the eve of travel. Off to see the world.

“Yes,” I said. “You shouldn’t be—preoccupied. Or have doubts about your mother. I should never have spoken of her as I did. You are right. I’m sure she had her reasons for everything she did.”

“Distraction,” he said. “Preoccupation. They’re exactly what I need.”

“All that—the war—seems so far away. Unreal. Things are all so normal here. Well, except the place is overrun with all you Yanks.”

“You’re changing the subject.”

“I didn’t mean to remind you of-—overseas. I don’t know what I should say—”

“To put me in the right frame of mind? There is no right frame of mind.”

“No. I suppose there isn’t.”

“The answer is ‘a man you’ve met.’ That’s the strangest thing they said. It’s as if the person who wrote that really knows the answer.”

He seemed even more intrigued than would have been understandable under the circumstances. Something more than his mother’s fidelity at stake, the rhyme evocative of something he couldn’t put his finger on, reminding him of something he couldn’t quite remember. “It’s as if the rhyme was written by the ‘man’ in question. Who else would be in a position to know, besides my mother? My mother who, I think we can safely say, is not the author of anything but your misfortune?”

“You’re making something out of nothing.”

“Even assuming the rumour to be completely untrue, you can hardly expect me to pretend I’ve never heard it.”

“Let’s talk about something else.”

“It’s—extraordinary. It must be very—eerie. Hearing children chant about you in the streets like that.”

“I don’t mind.”

“I know my mother, Sis. She wouldn’t have abandoned her own child out of mere—discontent. With your father, with this place. Something must have happened.”

“Now I’ve made you suspect her.”

“Something might have happened that your father didn’t know about. Didn’t even suspect, I mean. Not—infidelity. Something else.”

“Such as?”

“I don’t know. I’m just pointing out what seem like possibilities.”

“That you should want to think the best of your mother is only natural. Admirable. But my view of her is not based on speculation.”

“No.”

“Think of my mother as Mrs. Fielding and yours as Mrs. Breen. The same person under two different sets of circumstances. Both of them are real.”

“I prefer to think of her as Susan Hanrahan.”

“Yes, I noticed. I didn’t want to ask.”

“Father and I have always had our differences.”

“And Sarah.”

“I’d rather not speak of Sarah.”

“Oh, David, I’m so sorry. For whatever has happened between you two, I mean.” I felt such dread I could barely speak. What had I fated my children to by letting her take them? Her and him. Both strangers to me.

Everything will be all right. When he returns from overseas, will he visit me again? He did not say. I should have asked.

I’m not sure that my mother and Sarah know that he has been to see me or that he even told them that he planned to try to find me.

Twenty-seven. Hoses from which fire gushed like water. A military college. Where he studied war, how best to wage it, how best to kill and avoid being killed. How did such madness come to seem so commonplace, so reasonable?

What seemed, when he was here, to be a military comportment, an air of self-containment born of years of instruction, indoctrination, now seems to have been a curious aloofness, a resignation to some fate whose power over him he was scornful of to the point of total disregard.

My son. My son. My son. My heart, even while I sleep, will say “my son.”

My dear Miss Fielding:

I have, since learning of your son’s death, been grieving for my delegate and for my own lost child or else I would have written to you sooner.

My delegate. If for no other reason he was fortunate to have died when he did. How it would have haunted him that he was not only powerless to save your son but that your son fell victim to the very fate that he escaped, that in battle he was spared but the son of the woman for whose sake he lived and breathed was not.

Your son. My grandson. His life was a brief interval of peace between two wars. I can no more shield you from this sorrow than I could shield you from disease.

I would console you if I could, Miss Fielding. Bring David back. Bargain him back from anyone who thought my life a fair exchange. But I can do nothing for the woman whose provider I long ago presumed to be. David’s death reminds me of the other war. So many men. So close they were when they were found, yet each one died alone. He reminds me too of my delegate, who asked:

“How is it that the main motivation of a being that claims to have been made in God’s image, that claims that in each of us there burns inextinguishably a spark of the divine, should be revenge?”

But, aside from my being helpless to protect you, there is a sense in which I am to blame for David’s death. I cannot bear to tell you more. Not yet. I did something I swore I would never do again. Perhaps I would not have done so were my delegate still alive. But that absolves me of nothing. I feel as though, having long ago stopped drinking, I have begun to drink again. I have renewed my vow to live as my delegate would have wanted me to. As I know I should live. But something has been lost that can never be restored.

I should not torment you by merely hinting at such things. Yours is the greater grief, I have no doubt. Though my child was robbed of its entire life. No one remembers it but me. Your mother, perhaps.

I never knew my child. Not even as briefly as you knew yours. Better to have lived and lost your life than never to have lived at all.

There is no balm for what you feel. But remember that he lost the balance of his life, not the whole of it. His death destroyed his future but not his past, which, for as long as they live, those who loved him will remember.

Your Provider

Dear Sheilagh:

I leave these documents with my sister with instructions that she not read them and that she forward them to you in case I do not return from overseas.

I realize that, by waiting, I run the risk of never telling you in person that I know you are my mother.

But I cannot stand the thought of telling you before I leave.

I write in the present tense, which, under the circumstances, must seem strange to you, as it does to me.

But I cannot bring myself to write to you in the past tense. I feel, however irrationally, that I would make my survival less likely by doing so.

It is, of course, my fervent wish that you never read this letter, that it remain forever unsent, forever unread.

I will be in St. John’s for a few days on my way overseas. I will see you there, but it does not seem to me that that will be the right time to tell you what I know and have known for the past two years.

I feel certain that I will return safely from overseas and I would like to speak to you then of the contents of this letter that I hope you have not read.

I have arranged for these letters to be sent to you in what I believe is the extreme unlikelihood of my death. I cannot explain, even to myself, why I feel so confident that I will return to you unharmed.

I cannot stop thinking of how strange those few days with you would be if I told you what I know, and the effect they might have on both of us. On the one hand, it might be that, as I headed overseas, I would feel more at peace if we had spent time together as mother and son, that the certainty of a few days together without there being such a secret between us is better than the possibility of none at all. And it might be that I would therefore be in as good a frame of mind as possible for whatever I will soon be facing.

But, on the other hand, it seems more likely that for me to acknowledge you as my mother under such circumstances would be folly. I think it would raise a thousand questions that we would not have time to answer. I think it would send my mind into a turmoil that might be the cause of my misfortune. And, superstitiously, I think it would be tantamount to admitting that I doubt my chances and I would therefore bring upon myself the wrong kind of luck.

I feel certain I am right.

I nevertheless enclose to you these letters that were written to me and which I have pasted in my notebooks.

Goodbye,
David

My dear Mr. Breen:

I lack the strength and the grace to leave your queries unanswered, or to protect your mother by answering untruthfully.

The explanation that your “mother” gave you for the correspondence between her and me that you discovered was untrue. As were all the accusations that she made against me.

I once loved your mother, who for years has lived in denial of our relationship and its consequences.

Out of sight, out of mind. Out of body, out of mind.

Your real mother thinks almost constantly of you and of your sister.

It is true that your mother is your “mother’s” daughter and your half-sister.

A stranger whom you have heard of but have never met.

The woman you think of as your mother has never given birth.

She is your grandmother.

Not one drop of your “father’s” blood runs in your veins or in anyone’s.

Your “father” has no children.

Your mother had our child destroyed while it was in her womb.

And now, defending herself. She tells you that I committed rape, that she became pregnant because of it. This is untrue. And I will prove it to you.

New York, 1939

Mr. and Mrs. Trunk.

There seems to be no reason not to take a drink. If I were not here, if I had read those letters and journals in St. John’s, I would be halfway to oblivion by now. Out here I am afraid of what will happen if I start and can’t stop.

There have been nights, better nights by far than this one, when I have poured the water from my flask, gone to Mr. Trunk and opened his doorlike lid and taken out a bottle like the one that I have left unopened by the sofa while I wrote.

I’m writing in the kitchen, my empty flask on the table beside my notebook.

No reason not to take a drink. Every reason not to. Sarah. My mother. Even David. David more than anyone perhaps. What did he expect of me? He says nothing in his letter about what he thinks I should do if …

I have lost one child, and must never tell the other who I am. What I am. What we are.

In which case she is almost as surely lost to me as David is.

Now I know what my Provider meant when, after the death of his delegate, he wrote of having broken a vow. Having for decades forsworn revenge, he reverted to it by answering David’s letter. How careless of my mother to leave correspondence between her and my Provider where David could find it. She should have destroyed it. If he told David everything, then David, when we met, knew more than I did. For I still don’t know why she abandoned me. I still don’t know what it means to be “twice fathered.” In what sense am I his daughter?

I suspect that my Provider’s version of the story is true and he didn’t rape my mother. If only I had the “proof” that he speaks of.

Can you conceive of no reason why a woman would decide to leave her daughter?

I still cannot. None that would be flattering to her.

My dear Miss Fielding:

What a succession of surrenders and retreats our lives have been.

It seems that you will never stop running and I will never stop pursuing you, even though it is not me that you run from, though perhaps you think it is.

What a fool I was to try to justify myself to him. Your son. I could have simply ignored his letters.

Loreburn. Like a glimpse of the world as it will be when there is no one left alive. Even the houses will remain when I am gone.

I can imagine the Loreburns setting sail, a makeshift fleet without a flag renouncing this republic.

You would never know here that the whole world is at war.

I hardly know now why I joined the first one. Perhaps in the hope that I would not return. “Flagpole,” I was called. By everyone except my delegate. One morning it snowed. Snowflakes the size of quarters. Neither side fired a shot until the snow gave way to rain. I was wounded that afternoon. A bullet broke my leg. Every night for years, from the time I forced your mother to leave New York until I joined the war, I drank myself to sleep. I quit when a doctor told me that, unless I did, I would not survive much longer.

This war may be the one that ends them all. How strange if no one lives to tell the tale. No one to claim victory or apportion blame. Though the end might not come until a hundred wars from now. The unmet expectations of Judgment Day. No afterlife? It might be so. Though I have hope that is based on—nothing but the need to hope.

We live from first to final breath. The same fate for the good and the bad. It might be so. Or it might not.

But it will not be as foretold. Revelations is just a campfire ghost story. The sky will go on being blue. The moon, though every drop of blood on earth be spilled, will not turn red. The stars will shine as usual. The end of days. “God” dims the lights and goes to bed. How can things have come to this in a mere five thousand years?, I used to ask those whose faith I envied. It was from examining their own nature, not from second sight that the prophets foresaw the future.

You, Miss Fielding, have given up because you lost a child. And because you think you are unloved. And think you have earned the right to regard all of creation with contempt. As if you were meant for a different world but were somehow stranded on this one. But you must not doubt that you have great courage.

Your child died at the hands of strangers, mine at the hands of someone I once loved and who once claimed that she loved me.

Your son was a brave man who might have lived to become a wise one if not for me.

He sought you out. You were able, while he still breathed, to hold him in your arms.

My child’s life had no duration.

It spent its entire life entombed in the body of your mother.

So many days and nights not knowing where your children were.

David and Sarah.

I know better than you do what Sarah looks like. I could many times have reached out and tapped her on the shoulder, touched her hair.

I confess that I felt sadness when I learned about your mother’s death. I wonder what you felt or feel.

Sarah, too, is broken-hearted, but young and strong as you and I once were.

She doesn’t know what David knew, Miss Fielding. Because of all of us, you, Dr. Fielding, me, your mother and her husband, and because of David, she doesn’t know her real mother is alive.

And what if word of the death of her half-sister in St. John’s, who is nothing to her but a name, should reach her some day? It would not touch her heart, let alone break it.

It has long seemed right to me that one of us be spared the truth, that one of us survive. And that that one be Sarah.

You should be proud of both your children, as I am proud of you. Your son lived almost selflessly. Your daughter is such a woman as you are and my other child might have been.

I have come a long way. I have not been this close to you since that day on the Bonavista when I held you in my arms.

I have come a long way, but can go no further. If you wish to meet me, you will have to seek me out.

I am back where I began.

I have come here for a purpose that by now you may have guessed.

Your Provider

Chapter Sixteen