The Custodian of Paradise Read Free Page A

light.”
    I had not seen a lighthouse, but then I had not looked out my window until the boat was almost at the wharf.
    “Where is it?” I said.
    “Down around the point. Where the rocks and the reef are.”
    I felt like turning round but was aware of how absurdly dramatic it would be to do so now. And when this woman saw my face, well—she would find nothing in it, nothing in my eyes especially, that would reassure her.
    “What are we going to do with you?”
    It went on like this, the woman alternating between addressing me and then herself, as if I couldn’t hear her. As if someone not right in her mind must in all her senses be deficient.
    “You’re being selfish,” she said, though not severely. “Making us responsible for you.”
    She was right. If I did somehow get to Loreburn, it would not be possible for any of them, and especially not for this woman, to forget that I was out there. How she would fret for me on winter nights. But it could not be helped.
    “All I want to be is left alone, out there,” I said. I looked at the fishing boat. I imagined the woman, her husband and children coming out with hampers on Sunday afternoons. Better they think that I was crazy, unreceptive to such kindnesses. Alone. I knew that even this isolation-bound, lighthouse-inhabiting woman was wondering why anyone would want to live alone.
    I had crammed into my improvised luggage as many of my belongings, as much of my former life as I could manage. Twenty years before, I had seen the immigrants at Ellis Island. I imagined myself in steerage, dressed not much better than the others, but looking somehow aloof, like some recently deposed aristocrat, some woman of affluence, the only visible emblem of whose past life was her cane.
    How bereft I was of all that was so precious to other people. The immigrants had brought with them ancestral photographs and heirlooms, keepsakes, letters from which they hoped their descendants would piece together some sort of family history. I had brought none of the few family photographs I possessed. They were in a box in a closet in my room just as they had been for years, looked at by no one, not even me. I had astonished my landlord by giving him three years’ rent the day before I left. I warned him that a friend of mine would come to check on the room from time to time and make sure that he didn’t, in my absence, rent it out to someone else. But I had made no such arrangement. Both keys to the room were in one of the trunks.
    I was wearing most of
my
keepsakes. Of these, all but my cane were self-acquired. My cane, my silver flask concealed in the inside pocket of my vest, attached to it by a silver chain. My lorgnette. My black ivory cigarette-holder. All had been affectations of my young womanhood, my later school years, of which I had assumed I would divest myself and which I might have done had things not turned out as they had. My ancient, thick-soled boot, if not for which I might have been mistaken from a distance as the Fielding of my school days on the grounds of Bishop Spencer in St. John’s. Though no one else would have named it as an heirloom, there was my leg itself, which made the cultivation of a “look” redundant.
    It had been decades since I had gone shopping for clothes. I infrequently ordered them from special catalogues. Six foot three. “Galoot of a girl,” my father said when I was thirteen. “You’re not growing like a horse, you’re the size of one already. Soon I’ll have to measure you in hands.” Seven years it was by then since my mother left.
    The two trunks might have been mistaken as storied family relics, but I had bought them in a used furniture store on Duckworth Street. Though they looked like the least-esteemed loot of some disappointing salvage operation, they proved to be quite sturdy. Stood on its end, one was a foot taller than me, the other about my height. How companionable they looked, standing side by side. Mr. and Mrs. Trunk. There