The Custodian of Paradise (34 page)

They bowled over Smallwood as they would have some inanimate object and charged towards the stoop.

The first of them were on the bottom step when we
were all startled by the sound of a police siren. A police wagon that not even I, who was facing the street, had seen pull up, was right behind them, presumably having been summoned by the landlord.

This man who, even when accepting my bribe-augmented rent, had said as few words to me as possible and taken my money in a manner meant to suggest that, in less exigent times, he would have refused it, soon appeared on the stoop beside me.

He pointed at me.

“Here’s the trouble-maker, Officers,” he shouted. “She’s been nothing but trouble since she moved in.” He pointed at Smallwood, who, having crawled out from beneath the scrum of his would-be converts, was kneeling on the pavement, replacing his glasses and his hat.

“She told me she was married to that man there,” the landlord said as Smallwood rose to his feet.

“That’s a lie,” Smallwood shouted. “We are merely friends. Under socialism, men and women can be friends without prudes accusing them of scandal.”

If I had had to name the thing that Smallwood was least justified in accusing someone else of, it would have been prudishness.

The cops, prying them apart with their nightsticks, made their way through the clan from Harbour Main until they reached the stoop, where one of them, a sergeant, looked up at me.

“What
kind
of trouble has she been making?” the sergeant said.

Before the landlord could speak, I did. “Apparently the kind that no fewer than thirty men can settle,” I said.

“A filthy-minded slut is what she is,” said Dalton, which earned him a rap on the upper arm with the sergeant’s nightstick.

“There’s no need for that kind of talk,” the sergeant said.

“It’s the only kind she understands,” Dalton said.

“Those two are communists,” the landlord said, “him and her. And this one, this one is
always
drunk.”

“Who better to pronounce on my sobriety than a moonlighting moonshiner. Many is the night I would have spent parched if not for him.”

“More lies,” the landlord said.

“What started all this?” the sergeant said. “If someone doesn’t tell me soon, I’ll put you all in jail. Including you.” He pointed his nightstick at me.

“All right,” I said, “all right. The truth is they were fighting over me. Asking me which of them I like the most. Shouting endearments like the one you heard sweet Mr. Dalton use just now. They’ve been wooing me for months, but I keep telling them that my heart belongs to Smallwood. Then a fight began that Smallwood was in the act of breaking up when you arrived.”

The Harbour Main men surged forward, but the cops held them back.

“You lying bitch,” they shouted, shaking their fists, “you drunken whore.”

The cops struck each one who hurled a profanity, beating arms or legs with their nightsticks. At which Dalton punched the sergeant so hard in the face that he fell into the arms of one of his officers, unmistakably unconscious.

The other men from Harbour Main started throwing punches. With their red hair and freckled faces, they were all but wearing uniforms as distinctive as those of the cops.

Smallwood stood outside the mayhem, hat and glasses properly adjusted, watching the struggle as if, any second, he planned to join it.

“SMALLWOOD,” I shouted, “come around this way.” I motioned to the side of the stoop. He shook his head.

“You have nothing to lose but your brains,” I shouted.

“WHAT?”

“SMALLWOOD,” I shouted again. “You’ll be no use to the Cause if you’re in jail.”
Or in the morgue
, I restrained myself from saying. He hurried around to the side of the stoop, where I helped him up, grabbing his wrists and lifting him until he was able to reach the rail.

“All right, let go, let go,” he said, as if, from the start, my assistance had been superfluous.

We went inside and began to make our way upstairs, both of us breathless.

“Now look at what you’ve done,” Smallwood said. “All those men will wind up in jail because you incited them. There might have been no real trouble if not for you.”

“If not for me, those redheads would have strung you up tonight. They still might.”

“They will go to jail, and when they get out, they’ll be sent back to Newfoundland. No jobs, no money for their families. Because of you.” That they would, or even might, be deported had not occurred to me.

“You should never have moved in here. Women are not allowed in this building.”

“Especially in
your
room,” I muttered.

“What?” he said.

“I thought you
wanted
me to move here,” I said.

“To New York,” he said. “I never asked you to move in
here
. There is a difference between socialism and iniquity.”

“You’re against both iniquity and inequity.”

“Here you are,” Smallwood said. “Inside, safe and sound. You start a riot, then walk away from it.”

“Actually I ran. And you weren’t far behind me.”

“You think that someone you can’t have a witty conversation with is a waste of time.”

“It is just that I do not detect in the Harbour Mainiacs
quite as much yearning for social reformation as you do. It is not society they are trying to reform, but the faces of anyone who is not from Harbour Main.”

“You don’t understand them,” Smallwood said. “How could you, with your upbringing?”

“I haven’t noticed any of your classmates from Bishop Feild among them. As for your understanding them better than I do, they are doubtless more appreciative of being understood by you than they let on. But who knows, given how easy it is to mistake bloodlust for gratitude.”

Only a few hours after going back to my room, I left Hotel Newfoundland for good. Crammed what clothing I had in my portmanteau, along with my journals and pencils, two bottles of Scotch and one of a sickly sweet bourbon I had bought from the landlord the week before.

The landlord was in his cubicle when I came downstairs, a little room with a kind of bank teller’s window. You put your money in a metal tray that he then withdrew, emptied the contents of and replaced so that his hands were never within grabbing distance of yours. I put the rent I owed him in the tray.

“I’m leaving,” I said. “For good.”

“You should be in jail. Good riddance to you. Nothing but trouble is what you’ve been. The place will have a bad name now.”

“He is not dead,” I said, “whose good name lives.”

“What?”

“Smallwood’s not to blame,” I said. “There’s no need to evict him.”

“He’s a socialist.”

“Not really,” I said. I tapped the window lightly with my cane and he stepped back. “So don’t evict him.”

There was no one on the stoop. All the Harbour
Mainiacs had been taken away or gone inside. I descended the steps, and with no destination in mind, walked away from Hotel Newfoundland.

Will you marry me?
Smallwood asked me. Just like that, in the middle of the argument about whose fault the riot was.

We had never kissed, had never so much as hugged or held hands.

In spite of my drinking, in spite of the riot for which he blamed me, in spite of the low opinion of me he has lately been expressing, he proposed.

And I hesitated. Though not out of surprise. My first thought was of
them
. And then of my Provider. I realized that I should either have told Smallwood about them long ago or never have become his—what?

His first pass at me, a proposal of marriage. Had I said yes, we might have sealed the deal by shaking hands.

If I
had
told him about my children, we would not have become friends. Whether I told him who the father was or not. He would have received the news with revulsion. Regarded me with disgust. There is far more in him of his mother than his father.

But marriage to any man would be a sham if I did not tell him of my children. My heart would not be wholly his unless I told him.

The look in his eyes when he saw the doubt in mine. The first such overture of his life rejected.

Before I could devise some explanation, he retracted his proposal, pretended it was just a joke. And then went on to mock the idea that a man like
him
would ever want a derelict like me.

My eyes as I walk the streets of Lower Manhattan burn with tears. Self-pity. Sorrow. I try not to blink, lest it cause the tears to overflow and trickle down my cheeks. It is enough
that every passerby appraises me as usual. The sight of me with tears streaming unchecked down my face would likely draw a crowd.

I will find a place to rest somewhere and drink until I sleep.

It seems that every part of me is clenched. My teeth. My jaw. My stomach. The toes inside my shoes. I must not let go. Neither out here in the street nor in whatever room I rent. If I let go I will not recover. I must hold on until this, whatever it might be, has passed.

Something will drag me under if I let it. I will sink. It seems that everything confirms it, every object, every looming building, every motor car and every face.

The smallest things seem unbearably detailed. The refuse in the gutters. I wish I could stop noting the texture of everything. The paved street, the granite blocks of buildings, the fabric of other people’s clothes. Why is my mind pointlessly enumerating every thing I see? Heralding a state of soul I have never known before.

I must get indoors. Indoors, perhaps, my mind will be free of this swirling surfeit of detail.

It is fall, late November. My first fall in Manhattan. Night will soon be falling and I have nowhere to go.

February 3, 1921

I had not intended to stay longer than one night in the room I found the day I left Hotel Newfoundland, but it has been three months now and I am still here. Living here, though I pay my rent one day at a time and when I leave in the morning take my portmanteau with me and carry it about the city as if I am searching for another room.

Each morning, I go through the ritual of checking out, settling up with my landlord and leaving the boarding house as if enacting the first step of some plan, walking briskly away, trying to look as though there is somewhere I must get to, some appointment I must keep.

I have taken leave of the boarding house so often in this manner that the landlord knows his part by heart, takes the key from me and, smiling, says “Glad to have had you with us” and says “Very good” when I tell him he can rent my room, obliging the delusions of some harmless lunatic, he must think, another resident of Manhattan who, once entertainingly eccentric, is now demented. As I fear that I might be in fleeting moments.

Something gravid, something leaden has crept into my bones, some enervation whose source might be my mind. Each day I leave nothing behind, though there is nothing in my bag that I could not easily replace or live without.

The money my father gave me when I left St. John’s is almost gone. The amount I put aside for my return passage I will not use on rent, in which case I have at most a few weeks left.

I have lost a lot of weight. I can tell by the looseness of my clothes and by the way my face feels when, after splashing it with water, I towel it dry.

There is no mirror in my room and I no longer go elsewhere to look at my reflection, no longer appraise my figure
in department stores or the windows of neighbourhood shops. I almost never eat because of the cost of the gin that my landlord seems to have a limitless supply of.

I carry in my coat pocket the letter from my Provider. The letter that, several times each day for the past few months, I have read. I put my portmanteau between my feet, tuck my cane beneath one arm, and right there on the sidewalk, oblivious to the other pedestrians who are forced to sidestep me and mutter at me in frustration, read the letter.

I have become famous in the neighbourhood as “the letter lady,” the tall woman with the cane and the portmanteau who stops suddenly in mid-stride to extricate from her pocket and read, as if she received it just this morning and cannot credit its contents, the creased and yellowed letter, the letter that, by the way she pores over it in sheltered doorways on rainy days, contains some life-altering revelation. Which perhaps it does, if only I could understand the words.

One day, when I wake in the morning, I find that an envelope has been slipped beneath my door. A notice of eviction I think, until I open it.

The first thing I notice is the closing salutation, Your Provider.

I am so startled I let the single page fall and stand there holding the empty envelope with both hands. I stare at the paper on the floor. I have the feeling that everything that has happened to me since I opened his last letter has been orchestrated by him. I know this cannot be, but I can’t help feeling that it is.

Bending down, I pick up the letter, slowly unfold the pages.

Dear Miss Fielding
.

(It is almost as though I hear him say the words, as if
I am back on Patrick Street again and the window that for so long has been closed has just slid open. I almost reply, almost chastise him for keeping me waiting so long out here in the cold.)

Dear Miss Fielding:

When you were just an infant, I held you in my arms. When you put your hand inside that curtain on Patrick Street and I held it in mine, it had been sixteen years since I had touched you, though I had been close enough to do so countless times
.

You must not feel ashamed. You are not the first to fall on hard times in Manhattan
.

You are better off without that socialist, though it may not seem so now. Better that you be alone than waste your time with him
.

Though I will give him this much. He is as single-minded as I wish you were. As you will have to be or you will fail
.

One can cease to be a wife, as your mother did, even if only to become one again. But you can never cease to be a parent. Dr. Fielding forever ceased to be a husband. Hers or anyone else’s. But he and I will always be your fathers
.

I was never married to your mother. When I say that I am one of your fathers, I do not mean one of your stepfathers. Nor am I speaking figuratively. I am physically, biologically your father. You may think that your mother is unsure who your father is, that she was unfaithful to Dr. Fielding. But she was not
.

I am sorry that it is necessary to speak in riddles. That it
is
necessary, you need not doubt
.

I have never been a husband. Perhaps you guessed as much. I was once your mother’s lover. But I have never been or had a lover since. In fact, I am a virgin twice removed. Once more than you
.

Twice fathered. But I am unlike Dr. Fielding. Your mother knows that I am nothing like him. Two men jilted by the same woman who after she was done with them did not, could not
move on. That may be how it seems to you. Two jilted, stunted men. Mired in the past. Still in love with the woman who threw them over
.

You will never understand your mother if you think of me that way
.

I am writing to you again to urge you to go home. New York is not for you
.

You stand there on the sidewalk staring at my letter like some illiterate immigrant, someone who cannot even read their own language, let alone English. “Please, sir, could you help me with this letter. I am new here and do not understand these words.”

You go about in a daze, with your bag and your cane, like someone the authorities at Ellis Island should have intercepted, someone they should have scrawled an X on with a piece of chalk and sent back home. I am sorry to have to speak so plainly, but I fear that you have no idea what you are headed for
.

At first my delegate often intervened on your behalf. Intercepted those who meant you harm. You would long ago have been relieved of your possessions, and probably your life, if not for him. How discreet his interventions were. How conspicuous, how obvious a mark you were. You still are, but most are now persuaded of the folly of interfering with Miss Fielding
.

For six months now, you have lived in the same city as your mother and your children. The city where you gave birth to your children. Where you, literally, gave your mother grandchildren. Where you gave birth to your mother
.

Though you may not have admitted as much to yourself, you have stayed because you plan to seek them out. It would be reckless folly to do so. The house of your laying-in you would not recognize if you walked past it. For all you know, you
have
walked past it
.

Let that be enough and go home now while you still can
.

Your Provider