The Custodian of Paradise (63 page)

“I met with David once, wearing my disguise, and showed him this.”

He takes from the inside pocket of his jacket the sort of box in which a ring might be displayed, a small, black, velvet-covered box whose silver clasps and hinges gleam. He holds it up between his thumb and forefinger as a person with a smaller hand might do with the ring itself, the better to allow someone to admire it.

“It once held an engagement ring,” he says. “I spent everything I had. She wore it for two weeks before the morning she crept from bed while I was sleeping. She left the ring on her pillow. Beneath the ring, held in place by it, she left a note. Which I put in this box after I threw the ring away.”

“You showed this to David?”

“I should not have. But—yes. I did.”

He holds the box at arm’s length, offers it as though for her inspection.

“Take it,” he says.

She rises from the altar, takes the box from him, holds it between thumb and forefinger in mimicry of him. It looks so delicate, so fragile that, handled any other way, it might crumble into pieces.

“Open it,” he says.

She places it on the palm of her other, outstretched hand. It looks new, fresh from some display case, the velvet unblemished, unfaded, the metal without so much as a trace of rust.

The opposing clasps slide almost silently apart. She feels as though she is opening a miniature casket or crypt, an impression that is heightened by the gleaming white upholstery inside. Tucked beneath the loop by which the ring is held in place is a tiny scroll of paper that, despite its age, looks well preserved.

Placing the box on the nearest pew she removes and unscrolls the note. The paper crackles like parchment but does not break.

Her mother’s handwriting. She recognizes it instantly.

She reads the words aloud, unmindful of what their effect on him may be:

Thomas: I have made a grave mistake. I must break off our engagement. As I am undeserving of it, I will not ask for your forgiveness. I do not love you and must return to my true home. Goodbye
.

“Her true home,” he says, his voice quavering. “Not the convent, which was but the first part of her grave mistake. Her true home. Her old life.”

“She falsely accused you of raping her.”

“Yes.”

Fingers trembling, she rescrolls the note and replaces it in the box, which snaps loudly when she closes it.

“Keep it,” he says. “I want you to have it.”

She puts it in the pocket that contains her empty flask.

“My mother—”

“I travelled to St. John’s when I heard from my delegate that your mother was married. I arranged to meet your mother in the boarding house where I was staying. As always, my ‘disguise’ was a wheelchair. My story, our story, was that I was an aged, crippled relative of hers visiting from Boston who was not staying with her because it would have been too difficult for me to navigate the many stairways of her house. This was what she told Dr. Fielding who several times came with her to see me.

“‘Why have you followed me here,’ she said when we were alone. ‘What do you want from me?’

“‘Until recently I wasn’t sure,’ I said.

“’And now?

“‘Restitution. Of a sort. An eye for an eye. A child for a child.’

“‘I will not have a child just so you can take it from me or destroy it.’

“‘I did not say I meant to take it from you or destroy it. The latter is, for me at least, unthinkable. As is the former, though for different reasons. My plans are—not compatible with raising children.’

“‘Then in what sense would my child be restitution?’”

“‘I would, with your cooperation, follow its progress. You would write to me about it. Consult with me regarding certain matters. I would send you money stipulating how it should be spent. The child and I need never meet. It need never know of my existence. Dr. Fielding need never know.’

“‘I would go mad living like that,’ your mother said. ‘Knowing that that man of yours was always watching, as I’m sure he would be. I would never stop wondering what you had in mind and when you would alter the terms of your agreement.’

“‘I do not see what choice you have. Dr. Fielding—’”

“‘Has yet to share my bed and now he never will.’

“‘Another vow of chastity.’

“‘That I will keep this time.’

“‘Even though I could destroy you and your entire family.’

“‘I will pay any price to protect my family except the one you’ve named,’ she said. ‘I would not subject a child to that.’

“Oh what a blunder I had made, Miss Fielding. I realized too late that I had been a fool, that I should have waited, should not have made her aware of my presence in St. John’s, should not have approached her until she was expecting a child.

“She smiled as if she could read my thoughts.

“‘You speak,’ I said, ‘of what you would not subject a child to. YOU—’”

“I stopped when I saw that she was still smiling.

“I could neither conceal nor control my rage. I then did, Miss Fielding, what I did not do on Cape Cod. She did not resist, not in the least. She merely submitted. As if she had long ago resigned herself to the idea that one day this would be the form of my revenge. As if her false accusation had been a kind of prophecy. I apologized afterward, told her that it had never been my intention. Miss Fielding, I assure you that it happened only once.”

She raises her cane high in the air but cannot bring herself to strike him with it, though she imagines what it would be like to bring that ornamental knob down on his skull.

“In all those letters you wrote to me,” she says, “you made it sound as if you had come to see the folly of revenge. As though you were on the verge of making peace with your past.”

“I have relapsed many times. I did not speak of my relapses in my letters because I wanted to impress you. Win your approval, even your affection. But I have lately come to wonder if I truly lapsed when I gave in to the urge to be magnanimous, to espouse a way of life that I was merely imitating.”

“What did you do after you raped my mother?”

“Though she discontinued her visits I did not leave St. John’s. I believe she thought that the score between us had been settled, but it did not seem so to me. I feared that she might try to leave the city but my delegate told me that she rarely left her house.

“I was about to contact her to demand that she come to see me when she arrived of her own accord one afternoon while I was napping.

“‘I am pregnant,’ she said the instant she closed the door behind her. ‘With what can only be your child.’

“‘Dr. Fielding—’”

“‘Knows that I am pregnant with someone else’s child. As much as he will ever know unless you tell him more.’

“‘He will divorce you?’”

“‘He is primarily concerned about his reputation, which a divorce, especially one so soon, would tarnish. If I were to subsequently have a
child, it would make certain things clear to everyone. He would look like a cuckolded fool. His main fear is that I will leave him.’

“‘Will you?’”

“‘No.’

“‘I don’t believe you. It would be a grave mistake to do with this child what you did—’”

“‘I intend to have this child.’

“So we waited, Miss Fielding. Until she began to show to the point that not even the largest, most loose-fitting clothes could conceal her pregnancy, we met twice a week, the four of us sometimes. Politely making conversation, Dr. Fielding doing most of the talking while I pretended to drowse, nodding off while my delegate, who introduced himself to Dr. Fielding as my son, sat there in silence. When there were just the two of us, we spoke very little. She not at all except to answer my questions. I asked her how she was feeling. Asked her if her doctor had detected any problems or complications.

“I asked her if she remembered conversations we had had in my confessional or in the cottage on Cape Cod. ‘Yes’ was all she ever said. Did she remember the plans we made, the way the seashore looked in winter? She nodded. She remembered everything but contributed no memories of her own. I recounted every detail of our courtship and elopement. Yes, she said every few minutes while I spoke. It got so that even when I didn’t ask if she remembered she said yes, nodding reflectively it seemed.

“We sat there in that room, Miss Fielding, the two of us and you. I noticed how her body changed from week to week, month to month. Once I put my hand on her belly and felt you kick inside her womb.

“‘Are you going to take this child from me?’ she said.

“Countless times I told her no, but she was not convinced. She seemed almost resigned to losing it. You.

“One day I told her: ‘You have let it live longer than you did our nameless child. It is now older than that one ever was.’ She said nothing.

“I asked her which she was hoping for, a boy or a girl. She didn’t answer. Perhaps because I had not told her what I was hoping for and she was fearful of what I would say or do if her hope clashed with mine.

“‘I’m hoping for a girl,’ I said.

“‘What if it’s a boy?’ she said.

“I shrugged.

“‘I will have no more children after this one,’ she said.

“‘Your husband—’”

“‘Is what he seems to be. He will reconcile himself to anything I do or do not do.’

“A week after the baby came, she took it—you—to see me. I poured a cup of water on your head and baptized you ‘Sheilagh.’ The name I chose for you.”

She still holds the cane aloft, now with both hands, and again feels and resists the urge to strike him with it. She could kill him if she wanted to.

“My God, I never knew my mother. And now it is too late.” She cannot speak further. She trembles so much she almost drops her cane, almost falls forward. Tears that quickly cool stream down her face, fall from her chin like drops of sweat. A shudder like the ones she felt while giving birth courses through her. Her chest heaves as she fights to catch her breath.

She now knows what David knew when he saw her in St. John’s. She looks at the old man who has not once looked at her since he began his story. With those massive hands that must have held her mother down as easily as most men could a child she was baptized. By those hands she was held while her mother watched and might already have been contemplating her escape. She bore the name that
he
chose for her. Her mother kissed her on the cheek while she was sleeping. And years later took two children from the child that she abandoned.

In spite of everything she could have stayed. Or could she have? A child for a child
.

She is sobbing now, sobbing and coughing as she did on her worst days in the San when it seemed that she had lost for good the knack of drawing breath and felt certain she would die.

She doubles over, fearful with each cough that she will spray the floor with blood, that her illness has returned. He looks away from her. He kneels there in the pew as if he thinks she would rather he ignore her than come to her assistance or otherwise acknowledge her distress. Or else he is ashamed that a daughter of his would let him see her lose control.

Bent over from the waist, both hands on the knob of her cane as she looks up at him, she tries to speak, her throat souring with bile.

She stands over him, her cane upraised. He does not flinch or even look at her. She says, “If not for you—”

“Yes. If not for me. If not for her. That is how it goes. Not just with you and her but with everyone. There is no end to it. Nor can anyone remember how it all began.”

“What do you
want
from me?” she says. “For God’s sake, will you tell me what you
want?”

She looks at him. His shoulders are stooped, hunched like hers. There
is
the same high forehead, the same jaw for which she searched Dr. Fielding’s face and her mother’s face in vain. His eyes
are
blue, sky blue like hers. And in them, still strong despite his age, is that unrelenting something that she has seen in hers that prevents anyone from locking eyes with her for long.

She is the blending of two other natures, but feels that she is no one’s child but his.

“My hands, Miss Fielding, are shaking from the cold. Shaking, as they say Judge Prowse’s did for years before he died. Isn’t it strange, the silence of an empty church? I left the doors open for you in case I was asleep when you arrived. I sat all night on the floor, my back against the bottom step of six that lead up to the altar. The chalice was on the floor beside me, brimful with water that by morning had partly frozen.

“Last night, as I imagined what meeting you would be like, I felt like some expectant father to whom a motherless child would soon be born.

“I wish I could have bullied your disease the way I bullied men like Mr. Prowse. It was often said that you had perished in that place. I felt such relief each time I was told that you were still alive. But I saved you on the Bonavista. The second and last time I held you in my arms. You said ‘thank you’ and then complained that you were thirsty. Lady Lazarus in your upright tomb of snow.

“What strange places I have been because of you, Miss Fielding. Though none stranger than this little church. But I should not have mocked it. When I was a child I loved it when the church was empty but for me, as this one was last night. On winter nights worshippers who would otherwise have spent the night alone came out to hear the priest recite the Stations of the Cross.

“‘Death closes all.’ But I have been thinking lately that perhaps death does
not
close all. Something like my old faith has returned to me. I am very curious, Miss Fielding, to
know
. But I will not hasten my death one moment to gain that knowledge. There will be no reckoning. No judgment. No punishment and no reward. But there may be
something
. Something more appealing than any of those things. To exist in a state of forgiveness. To feel neither guilt nor regret nor a craving for revenge.

“I could not resist intervening in David’s life. I never felt so vengeful as I did when my delegate died and I was left alone. David was terrified by what he read and by what I told him. Ashamed of his mother and himself. Confused. It must have seemed to him that his whole world had been overthrown.