The Custodian of Paradise by Wayne Johnston Page A

departure. But I did not ask my mother or Dr. Breen for fear that their response, whatever it was, would increase my agitation.
    Day after day, Dr. Breen examined me and told me it was not yet safe for me to leave.
    “Not safe for you,” I said. “Nor my mother.” That was something they could not afford, having me fall ill on the ship to Newfoundland or in the weeks after my homecoming and, upon being examined by a doctor who might not be my father, be found to be suffering from after-birth complications.
    It was three weeks before he pronounced me ready to leave. Three interminable weeks. Whenever I woke, the gown I wore was wet with milk. Those weeks might have been unbearable if not for what he called his “pain potions,” which made me numb. I stared at my still-swollen belly for hours without so much as a single thought passing through my mind.
    I did not even know if the babies were in the house when I left it, left it at night by the same route and in the same manner that I had entered it six months before. Except that now it was summer. Awinter and a spring had come and gone since I had last set foot outdoors. Now, in Manhattan, in early summer, the night air was warmer than I had ever known it to be in Newfoundland.
    I had barely taken a single breath of fresh air before the door of the carriage closed behind me and Dr. Breen drew the curtains just as my father, six months ago, had done.
    A great trunk of books was loaded onto the back of the carriage. An absurdly long, drawn-out transaction was at last complete. The house had what it wanted. And I had a trunkload of books.
    Only shortly before I left did I learn the names of my children. Someone else, presumably my mother and Dr. Breen, had chosen them. As was their right since it was they who would be raising them and pretending to the world that they were theirs. It was my mother who told me what their names were after the ceremony had taken place without me, its date and time and very fact of its occurrence withheld from me, told me what they had been christened at their baptisms. In fact, she did not “tell” me but left a note on my pillow the night before I left the house. “Their names are David and Sarah” was all it said. Not “I” or “We” have named them but “Their names are.”
    Authoritative, beyond question. You’d think they were following instructions. I had never allowed myself to speculate what names I might have chosen under different circumstances. Not even while I was pregnant had I thought about what the baby’s name might be or who would choose it.
    I thought of my father, whom I was soon to see again. After “diagnosing” me and after a short but intense period of solitary rage that he had taken no pains to prevent me from overhearing, he had handled everything. “Ruined,” he shouted, “ruined by this galoot of a girl. I might not even be her father. God only knows who it might be. No daughter of mine would do such a thing, only a daughter of
hers
, the daughter of the woman who betrayed me.”
    I provided her with two children in each of whom ran one-quarter of my mother’s blood.
    Perhaps that was the point, that there was less of her ex-husbandin them, her grandchildren, than there was in me. That there was also less of her own blood in them than there was, is, in me did not matter as much. How she must have come to despise my father, I thought, during their short marriage. She renounced me, her own daughter, because half of me was him.
    Their names are David and Sarah
. I took the note and put it in my pocket purse, a dark blue velvet purse with opposing clasps that could be eased open but that snapped shut loudly. Since then I have carried the purse with me, everywhere, always, kept it on my person or, at bedtime, stored it safely somewhere; even throughout my years in New York and at the San. I often take it out and read it or, without unfolding it, merely look at it, before replacing it. I have never felt the