Free The Custodian of Paradise by Wayne Johnston

understand each other.”
    “I doubt that we will ever understand each other.”
    So the “arrangements” were made. I felt that it was me who had conceded something, not my mother.
    I wrote on a piece of paper that I gave to the poker-faced Miss Long the quantity and brand of cigarettes I wanted. I switched fromYellow Rag to the more expensive Royal Emblem, figuring that my mother was unlikely to quibble about such things.
    A day or two later, after he had finished his daily examination of me, Dr. Breen removed a package of cigarettes from his jacket pocket as he was leaving and placed them, wrapped in brown paper and tied with string, on the dresser just inside the door. I was the child who had been left a mollifying treat after submitting to the ministrations of a doctor.
    The purpose of the suite was to hide me from them, and them from me, as much as it was to hide me from the world. How formal and aloof they were with me, as if they believed it was important that I not see them as they really were. Or did they merely think it was wise not to allow any sort of familiarity to grow between us lest it make me think they wanted me to do anything after I gave birth but go away? It seemed to me that my unborn baby was already a member of their faction, already one of
them
, and that this, too, was the point they wished to make by their aloofness, that I should regard this child of mine as they regarded me.
    I could not bring myself, at first, to think about the child, to speculate about its gender, or what it would look like, or what sort of future it would have, or how I would feel about it ten or twenty years from now.
    Somewhere in the house, I realized, there was, in all likelihood, a newly prepared, unoccupied room in which my baby, when it came, would sleep. A room with a crib and a bassinet and scores of children’s toys. None of which I would ever see. Perhaps a room adjacent to the one in which Dr. Breen and my mother slept. For all I knew, adjacent to
my
room. One wall away from where I lay my baby would grow up without me. A wet nurse who believed the baby to be Mrs. Breen’s would feed it the milk she fed her own newborn, while my own milk-heavy breasts would go on lactating pointlessly for weeks after I returned to Newfoundland.
    Not so much lying-in as hiding out, I began to write at night, through the night sometimes, from the turning of the key in the lockin the evening to its turning in the morning and the rearrival of Miss Long, as punctual as the jailor she was and the nurse she pretended to be.
    LOREBURN
    I stopped writing and read one of my earliest journal entries. There in the handwriting of a girl was my first address to my unborn child:
    February 2, 1916
    Miss Long, at long last, has gone and has locked the doors behind her. Royal Emblem time. Sometimes, she nods off while reading her Bible, or while pretending to read it. Not so much nods off, for her head never moves, though her eyes close and stay closed for hours at a time. I am leaving you to her, to them. People I would not want to be left to or be raised by. Though you will never hate me for it. Only my father will hate me, for other reasons. Miss Long will forget me. My mother and her husband will thank God for causing good to come from my transgression. My father will hate me for leaving him with no choice but to consign his grandchild to a life with
her
and thereby help her remedy the main deficiency in the life she left his for. My father will hate me for having a baby by someone as lowborn as Smallwood.
    During the early days of my lying in after I had begun to show, my mother accepted visits from select members of her social circle so that they could witness her “pregnancy.” Dr. Breen had fashioned for her a kind of pregnancy prosthetic that she wore beneath her dress and sometimes did not bother to remove on one of her rare visits to the suite. I never saw the device, only the shape it made. I pictured a kind of inflatable