The Custodian of Paradise (48 page)
“That’s the stuff for a chilly night now,” the woman said, though she stared dubiously at the flask.
“Poor thing,” I heard the woman say when I went on past the door, resuming the clumping and thudding that itself, I supposed, was part of the evening din at the Cochrane, part of the general torment to those few residents who after dark pursued nothing more than sleep or relaxation.
“Poor thing, my arse,” another woman’s voice said. “She’s a bit full of herself with that flask and that fancy cane of hers.”
I became known, in those first few months, before my columns began to attract attention and the Harlotry, illiterates without exception, learned of their irreverent tone by word of mouth, as The Doctor’s Daughter, a member of The Quality. I was, for some unimaginable reason, an interloper among those I regarded as my inferiors. Laid low by TB and my weakness for the bottle but nevertheless an eccentric in any context but the one from which I came—that seemed to be how they regarded me. If not for my leg and my limp and my ability to affect unaffectedness, I might have become the target of scorn instead of pity, however begrudged the latter was.
Sometimes, as I was making my way to the stairs, Portuguese fishermen who were just arriving would collectively appraise me, by no means repulsed by my limp or my oversized leg. They addressed me in words whose gist was clear enough though I could not understand them. They surrounded me, talking to me and to one another, grinning, laughing, nodding. Young, physically attractive men, their breath reeking of their foreign cigarettes and smuggled moonshine, men my own age and even younger who took their robust health for granted.
What did they see? I wondered. An exotically marred, incongruously haughty and composed young woman whose height affronted them and therefore made them want to have her that
much more, as if only by having her might they, in every sense, bring her down. Once, when one of them took me by the arm, I rapped him on the kneecap with my cane. The others, as he hopped about in pain, doubled over laughing, at the sound of which some of the Harlotry came out and in phrases that were part-English, part-Portuguese, summoned “Mario” inside.
“There’s no need for you to live like Sister C., my love,” said one of the women who lagged behind. “I can send Mario down to the Corner one of these nights if you like. You could even make yourself a bit of money.”
I wished I’d had some Scotch before setting out, for I found myself blushing deeply at this ingenuously extended offer, this attempt at recruitment that I should have found more amusing and even touching than otherwise.
“There’s a man who I think is going to ask me to marry him soon,” I heard myself saying, all the while wondering why, without sounding offended or embarrassed, I hadn’t simply and politely declined the offer. I foresaw the necessity for an all but endless elaboration of this lie.
“Is there now? A man who is going to ask you to marry him soon?” the woman said, regarding me as she drew deeply from a cigarette, one arm folded across her chest, the other, the one between the fingers of whose hand the cigarette was held, resting on it. I foresaw myself being regarded as either deluded or as putting on airs, pretending that a return to the social standing that had once been mine was imminent, a possibility that would be transparently absurd.
“There’s no man,” I said, trying to laugh, the old sorrow surging up as it hadn’t done in years. “I mean, there
was
one. But that was a long time ago. Excuse me.”
I managed to blurt out the last two words before a sob that would have stopped me in mid-sentence rose up in my throat. I hurried away from the woman, making more noise with my leg and my cane than I needed to in case I couldn’t swallow down this sudden surge of grief. The woman muttered something, but I did not catch the words.
The landlord
was
a bootlegger, but only in moonshine, and seemed to regard bootlegging as an avocation forced upon him by a clientele who were unworthy of him and his hotel. When I asked him if he knew where I could get something “unusual” to drink, he feigned mystification at first but became abruptly forthright when I showed him some money
“I can get you some of what I get that crowd upstairs,” he said. “That’s all.”
“No Scotch?”
To this, as if he thought I were poking fun at his self-image and faux-genteel demeanour, he said nothing.
It never left my mind that the man who saved me on the Bonavista was watching me. Or his delegate was. Watching over me. One afternoon I woke to find a letter on the floor inside the door.
My dear Miss Fielding:
What a place in which to live. But I suspect that if I were to give you money, you would either destroy it or give it away or use it for something other than finding better accommodations. I suspect that you would only buy yourself a better brand of liquor and that you would drink even more than you do now. You
must
stop drinking or some day it will destroy you
.
Perhaps you have already guessed some of what I am about to tell you
.
I ended my last letter by telling you that, after your mother left me on Cape Cod, I went back to Boston and kept watch on her parents’ house. It was just such a mansion as I had often imagined it must be
.
I noticed that there was one frequent visitor to the house, a woman about your mother’s age who arrived and left on foot. I followed her when she left the house. Every day but one she went to what I assumed was her home. On that one day she took a
different route and left a pink envelope in the mailbox on the veranda of a house far removed from hers, then went away
.
When she was gone, I hurried up the laneway, removed the letter and escaped without notice
.
The letter inside read:
My darling Sylvia:
I must ask you again to please forgive the manner of our correspondence. I could not take the risk of entrusting such a letter to my mother or father who might unseal it. Mary, who has been my lifelong friend but in whom I have not fully confided, is the one visitor the doctor allows me and so I give her my letters when we are alone and she delivers them for me. I trust her completely to do only what I ask her to. I must ask that if you wish to reply to this letter you do so through her
.
Sylvia, I feel as though I have emerged from a period of temporary madness. As though I came to my senses just in time to avoid complete disaster
.
To think that I ever believed that I was meant to be a nun, that I could endure to be one. And then the subsequent delusion. Which was perhaps necessary to escape the first. A second spell cast upon me to release me from the first
.
You mustn’t think me heartless, my dear friend
.
I know that
he
was deeply hurt. For that I am truly sorry. But I did not entice him from the Church, force him from the priesthood. I did not destroy his vocation or his Faith
.
The truth, which he as much as admitted to me, is that only in the priesthood could he even have come close to fitting in. He is by nature, even by stature, unsuited for life as others live it. He renounced the one sanctuary that was open to him
.
I know it is unkind to say—in which case, I will not say it. I somehow thought I loved him but I do not and never did
.
I have written nothing to you thus far of the matter that you know most about
.
I cannot thank you enough, or ever repay you, for your love, assistance and support. I could never have gone through
that
alone. Could never have kept it a secret without your help
.
It.
Whether a boy or a girl they could not tell. Thank God for that. These past few weeks have been difficult enough and others just as difficult or worse still lie ahead
.
My parents are happy. They know nothing but that I have left the convent. You know how opposed they were to me joining in the first place. There were no complications from the procedure. Had there been, I would have said I had a miscarriage, but even that has proved to be unnecessary. My parents tell me how wonderful it is to have me back. My confinement to bed they attribute to a kind of benign breakdown
.
They think that, on the ruins of the fool that I briefly was, the old Susan can be built again. Perhaps they are right. When I think of how close I came to losing everything—but I must not dwell on the past
.
I look forward to the time when we can once again meet face to face. You should consider yourself fiercely hugged and kissed
.
Your grateful friend
,
Susan
I felt as though I could batter my way into heaven to find a place for what she called
it,
that I would not take no for an answer, would not accept the consignment of my little child to limbo, but would storm heaven and fight my way through a host of white-clad angels, the guardians of a God who would not dare defy me
.
But in truth there was nothing I could do
.
Even now, so many years later, tears fall onto the paper as I write
.
I felt that I had failed my child. Unaware that I was a father, unaware that a child of mine had been waylaid on its journey to the world
.
Using “Mary” as my go-between, I began writing to your mother for reasons that at first were unclear to me
.
I didn’t threaten her with violence or blackmail
.
I signed my letters Father Aquinas. I gave no return address
.
Would have given none even if I’d had what could be called a residence
.
At times I walked about Boston, far from my old parish, dressed as a priest, dressed, excepting my white collar, all in black
.
I was assumed to be an affiliated priest, one visiting from some adjoining parish. Catholics genuflected or blessed themselves when I drew near and I responded by making the sign of the cross
.
But it soon became obvious, from the state of my uniform and my incongruous suitcase that might have been the tool box of some tradesman, that something was amiss
.
I was never laughed at, never mocked, in part, no doubt, because of my stature, but in part, I believe, because my aspect, my demeanour had been profoundly altered by what had taken place since I left the Church
.
I could see that I was feared. People gaped at the spectacle of such an able-bodied hobo whose two suits of clothes, acquired who knows where or how, were the dresslike cassock of a priest, and the jacket, vest and slacks of a priest, the leisure wear of the ordained
.
A hobo “priest” whose attire was a blasphemy. I was known as Father Tom, a hulking defrocked priest who roamed about with a suitcase filled with booze that he drank from a chalice
.
There were complaints about my uniform, my habit. Policemen asked if I had other things to wear. I told them no. They asked me to identify myself. I told them that, until recently, I had been a priest at St. Paul’s parish church
.
When they discovered my story to be true, they no longer interfered with me. They were Catholics, regarded me nervously as if a man, once ordained, was always a priest of some kind
.
The old priest and some younger ones who had been my fellow seminarians came to see me
.
They addressed me as Thomas. No longer “your Highness Aquinas.” They seemed to feel some responsibility for what had
become of me. Urged me to seek help from my family, the counsel of a priest. Perhaps admit myself to hospital
.
“There is no need for you to live like this, Thomas. You still have your Faith, and Faith is everything.”
They would start to cajole me as they had done before, until they saw, by the way I looked at them, that I was no longer one to be cajoled
.
I refused the money and the food they offered me. I told them I wanted to be left alone
.
They asked me when I had last been to confession
.
I ignored them. They went away
.
I gave Mary different kinds of letters
.
My first was one word
.
“Murderess.”
My second was one sentence
.
“Our child is nameless. Neither a boy nor a girl but still a child.”
My third: “Neither of us will ever know a moment’s peace.”
My fourth: “Perhaps you imagine that you can live as if it never happened. Perhaps, if not for me, you would
.
“I do not know you
.
“You need only have had it in secret and given it to me
.
“Even if you had given it up for adoption I would have found it. Or at least been comforted by the mere knowledge of its existence
.
“Did you think, ‘Better that it die than be raised by someone else?’
“No. Vanity. All is vanity. You took her life to preserve your reputation
.
“To whom will you confess this sin?
“Not if a thousand priests forgave you would you truly be forgiven. No mere man can cleanse your soul.”
I soon after found a note on the front seat of the carriage I no longer drove but slept in:
“You are mad. I would have let it live if its father had been anyone but you. Guilt still lies like lead upon my soul. Mad you are
.
You have lost your mind and your memory as well, it seems. It was you, you alone, who decided to leave the Church. The night after we bid you goodbye, I was coming back from vespers. Had gone ahead of the other nuns to perform some errand. A couple of hundred feet it was from the sacristy to the convent. And you were waiting for me in the dark. Or did it matter to you which one of us you took? Your hand covered my whole face. I couldn’t breathe. You picked me up and took me to your car, where you taped my mouth and tied my hands. And then drove us to a cottage you broke into on Cape Cod.”
All lies, Miss Fielding. I would not otherwise repeat them to you. Addressed to the one person who knew them to be lies. The measure of her desperation to rebuild “Susan” on the ruins of the woman I once loved
.
I assure you that I can prove every word of this. For I still have the letter to her friend, Sylvia, the handwriting in which, when the time comes, you will recognize
.
Your Provider
