The Custodian of Paradise (47 page)

T
HE
B
ONAVISTA, THAT WAYSTATION BETWEEN THE SANITORIUM
and the city.

Two years after my Provider rescued me, I went back to St. John’s, taking to Riverhead Station the train that Smallwood shunned.

I didn’t mind that there was no one there to meet me.

After having been more or less in hiding for years, I decided I would live as I had done in New York, in some place where the landlord doubled as a bootlegger.

The newspapers I had read while at the shack had often run stories about such iniquitous places, stories whose real purpose seemed to be to advertise to those who wanted it where moonshine could be found.

I hailed a horse and cab, which I struggled into without help from the driver. There were motor cars waiting at the station, but I had never, not even in New York, ridden in a car. That horse-drawn vehicles would some day be obsolete, that there would not always be this mixed sort of traffic, this embroilment of horse and machine, did not occur to me.

“Take me to the cheapest boarding house that you can find,” I said.

Fifteen minutes later, I alighted from the cab that had stopped in front of what did not seem to be a boarding house. I was on Cochrane Street, looking up at a place that bore a name befitting of the grandeur it no longer had: the Cochrane Street Hotel. I would learn that it was now referred to simply as The Cochrane, which,
throughout the city, was a euphemism for a kind of flamboyant seediness. It was home to that faction of the locally infamous who managed to combine with indigence and destitution a redemptive flair for eccentricity of some kind.

There were, among the many prostitutes who lived there, a woman who was so synonymous with prostitution that prostitutes in St. John’s were collectively referred to by her name, which was Patsy Mullins.

There was a convicted forger, a Pole who had worked off part of his sentence painting frescoes on the ceiling of Government House, working for years, Michelangelo fashion, on his back on a piece of board atop a perilous scaffolding.

There was a defrocked nun who had started her own one-woman order called the Sisters of Celestine Fecundo and spent most of her working hours “fundraising” at the corner of Duckworth and Prescott streets. Many others.

It was not my intention to become one of them, but the Cochrane, though not a boarding house,
was
the cheapest place to stay in the city, at least the cheapest of the places that were at least barely habitable. And it was all I could afford. I had decided I would not, ever again, live in my father’s house, not even after he died, assuming he did so before me, not even if he left it to me in his will, which I very much doubted he would do. I did not plan to disown him. While at the section shack, I had written to him, informing him that I was feeling better.

He had written back that he was glad to hear of my recovery, but he made no attempt to explain why he had stopped writing to me while I was in the San. Though he did, vaguely, allude to my children.

“I have never understood you,” he wrote. “But it seems that, no matter what, you will go your own way, regardless of the consequences to yourself or others. Why you prefer to the lights of St. John’s the gloom of Bonavista a greater mind than mine could not discover. I have done all that I can, and more than I was obliged to, considering my circumstances, some of which were solely of your making. I am a
doctor. That is all that I am, all that I have, an occupation, a profession that I once performed in the service of God and now simply perform. I trust I will see you again. You will choose strangely, but you will not be true for long to any of your choices. To do so is not in your nature, which is so very unlike mine that I cannot begin to understand it. But you are still welcome in my house.”

That he was able to reconcile this view of himself with the fact of his having written to a newspaper an anonymous letter that had changed, and possibly ruined, the lives of others seemed inconceivable to me at that time, though it seems much less so now.

I knew I would, when I was ready, go by his house some evening, the house where he and I had lived alone, the house my mother left one morning for good without bidding me goodbye. If the lights were on I would knock on the door and he would admit me like the unexpected guest I was, one to whom he felt bound to offer his hospitality but whom he hoped would not stay long. And I would sit there in the dim, lamp lit room and, in what once had been my home, amidst surroundings that were not much changed from when I was just a girl and in which the past persisted like a panoply of voiceless ghosts, I would make conversation with my father, sit in filial silence while he spoke, speak when his reticence became unbearable. And then I would say that it was late and there was still something in my day that must be done. And he would, in token disguise of his relief, tell me I must come again and I would tell him yes, I would. And I would leave and, descending the steps clumsily in the sideways fashion required of me by all forms of descent, I would look back and see my father make his way from lamp to lamp, extinguishing the memories that my visit had invoked, the other life that might have been forever shadowing the one that was. And then I would turn away, walk away from what had been my home and, investing my soul by force of will with hope, make my way in summer twilight through the dark streets of St. John’s to the place to which my life had somehow brought me, up to a room where, lying on my bed, I would read some book that I had read before and between whose words memory would somehow make its
way. I would do all this, not once, but many times, until the stranger who at one time was my father no longer answered when I let the knocker fall. I knew that day would come and suspected that he knew it too. The day would come for him when he would prefer fantasy and revery to the company of others when he could no longer see a difference between his mind and the world.

The rooms at the Cochrane Street Hotel were known as suites. Each had been given by the original, now long-forgotten landlord an ironic name that, though it did not appear on the door, was known to all the residents. The theme of these names was Old World opulence and luxury. I was assigned, upon registering, the Maharajah Suite, which I was relieved to discover was now referred to by my fellow tenants as the Corner, whereas the room called the Tajmahal was referred to as the Taj, another by its full name, the Sultan. The Palace of Versailles was called the Palace, the Vatican, the Vat. The ironic intent of whomever had named the rooms was not lost on the residents, but the names, which seemed to be known to some only in their short forms, were spoken as matter-of-factly as room numbers would have been. I witnessed my neighbours giving visitors directions to the Palace or the Taj or the Buckingham with earnest, straightfaced helpfulness, their expressions much like the landlord’s when he had told me that the only room available was the Maharajah Suite. I smiled when he said it, but all he could manage in response was a weary grin, as if he would just as soon have dispensed with this business of the names of the rooms of the Cochrane Street Hotel that he, and proprietors before him, had inherited from the original owner, because he had higher hopes for the place that would never be realized as long as these gleefully derisive names were still in use.

I moved into the Maharajah Suite in minutes with little more than a duffle bag filled with clothing. My books were at my father’s house. Herder had promised to have a typewriter delivered to me when I sent him my address, which I knew that he, if no one else, would find amusing. Fielding at the Cochrane. Where else would I wind up?

The possibility that the Corner, one of several, sea-facing corners of the Cochrane, would become my permanent home did not occur to me, any more than it did that anyone could become as fond of such a place as I would at length become. A single bed pushed hard against the wall, a chrome, Formica-topped kitchen table and two chairs with canvas-covered upholstery in which there were taped-over puncture wounds, a hot plate, a single cupboard with one of each utensil from unmatched sets, a closetlike toilet with a sink from which most of the porcelain was missing, more black than white, and above the sink a frameless mirror with uneven, jagged edges—these were what the sign outside on the street had advertised as “furniture and complete amenities.”

The place was cheaper than any boarding house that the cab driver, had he acceded to my request, could have found for me, and I didn’t mind the lack of whatever meagre meals were being served in boarding houses of the time. It was, I decided, exactly what I needed for now, exactly what someone needed who planned to write as I planned to, for I could not risk writing like that if I owed anything to anyone, if I had anything that I could not bear to part with, anything that might be taken from me.

I had met with Herder, for whose paper, the
Telegram
, I had not written since leaving with Smallwood for New York.

“I am going to write what I want to write,” I said. “If you will publish it. The bishop can make whatever threats he wishes. I have had enough of protecting my father’s reputation.”

Herder hired me again. “Welcome back,” he said. “We’ll see how long you last this time.”

That I would become a regular at the Cochrane, as much a fixture as the oldest of the prostitutes, seemed especially unlikely in the first few weeks. To the Cochrane every night came Portuguese fishermen from
The White Fleet
who were known collectively in St. John’s as “Mario.”

“Come in, Mario, my love” or “Here he is, here’s Mario, here to visit us again,” the prostitutes shouted while standing in their open doorways, shouted at stage-voice volume and tone in a token attempt
to disguise the real reason of “Mario’s” visit, as if some minimum of decorum was required by their deluded, ambitious landlord. After the public greetings and the slamming of doors came the private sounds of squeaking bedsprings and perfunctory cries of “Oh Mario, oh Mario,” followed hours later by what sounded like the mass exodus of the sailors of
The White Fleet
from the Cochrane Street Hotel.

I began, from necessity, to keep prostitute’s hours, working at night and sleeping by day. To sleep at night was impossible, to write at night nearly so, what with all the noise made by Mario and the women that Sister Celestine called, again collectively, the Harlotry. Sister Celestine, if she knew any of the prostitute’s first or last names, never used them. The Harlotry answered Sister Celestine’s rebukes by saying that at least they “earned” their money and hadn’t been deemed “not good enough” by the nuns, whom they referred to as the Presentation.

“The Presentation kicked
you
out,” they’d say, or “You were so holy even the Presentation couldn’t stand you any more.” Any reference to her expulsion from the nuns sent Sister Celestine into a rage. “They were all a bunch of bitches just like the Harlotry,” she shouted, only indirectly addressing her tormentors, as if even to be referred to by pronouns was more of an acknowledgment of their existence than they deserved. Walking up and down the hallway, though, she pounded on their doors while she sermonized the Harlotry. And the Harlotry, even while entertaining Mario, would shout, “Put yourself out of your misery and get a man. One Blessed Virgin is enough.” At which Sister Celestine would shriek “Blasphemers” and run back to her room.

Sister C. was bad for business, for the sight of her in her habit in the hallways of the Cochrane Street Hotel stirred up the conscience of “Mario,” memories of a home where he was not exempted by his complexion, not presumed to be helpless to resist infidelity by virtue of his comical exoticism.

“Mario” always looked chastened, sometimes even frightened, at the sight of Sister C., who would sometimes block his way, standing at the top of the stairs, holding out, as though to fend him off with it, her wooden cross. The Harlotry, when they heard Sister C., called out to
Mario, told him to go no farther. They would come out and escort him past her, holding him by the arms and cajoling him so loudly that their multitude of voices all but drowned out that of the old nun as she warned of the eternal torment that awaited all of them in hell.

Between the two sides of this combative gauntlet I made my way back each night, the sight and sound of me heightening the spectacle. “Mario” looked wide-eyed from the Harlotry to Sister C. to me, the limping, leg-dragging giant of a woman that I was. I liked to fancy that, by comparison with Sister C. and the Harlotry, I was inconspicuous, that these were probably the only circumstances in which, for me, inconspicuousness was possible, though Mario looked at me as if I were, in the spectacle, some bizarrely incongruous third element, an apparition by the fact of which there was no telling what, or from where, something even stranger might appear.

Sister Celestine circulated a petition to have me evicted on the grounds that I had once been a TB patient at the San. I was informed of this by one of the Harlotry, who told me that no one but Sister Celestine had signed the petition that nevertheless bore several dozen signatures, all forged by Sister C.

At the height of the squabblesome revelry and mayhem, I made my way from the Corner to the front stairs at the far end of the hallway, passing the rooms of the Harlotry, some of whose doors were wide open, if Mario was merely carousing. I glanced inside and saw women dancing with those homesick and lonely fishermen from Portugal, all of them, despite Prohibition, holding in plain view what I guessed from their swiftly acquired and far-gone degree of drunkenness was moonshine. Some of the women waved, and when I waved back, motioned with their cigarette-bearing hands for me to come inside. “Come in, my duckie, and have a drink with us.” I knew they had heard me coming down the hall, heard the clumping of my cane and my brace-and-boot-encumbered leg. When I stopped to acknowledge their invitation by declining it, they looked down at my thick-soled boot.

“I have to give this leg some exercise,” I said. “Doctor’s orders.”

“Well, here’s to you, my love,” a woman said once, raising her jar. In what I hoped would be a mollifying show of solidarity, I took out my flask and saying, “Here’s to you,” drank deeply from it.