The Colony of Unrequited Dreams

by Wayne Johnston

  “You don’t get socialism like you get religion,” I said. “We can’t do anybody any good, ourselves included, until we get elected.”

  “But den I bet you gonna do yourself a lotta good,” the woman said. I felt foolish; I saw myself as they did, a strange-looking little guy of such low standing among his fellow socialists that they had sent him into Harlem, knowing he might not come back, and whose ambition was to become prime minister of some obscure, possibly non-existent country — and who was unaccountably accompanied by Fielding.

  More men and women got up from where they were sitting on their tenement steps and gathered round to hear what else this prodigy of gullibility would admit to having swallowed.

  “Under socialism,” I said, “the black man and the white man will be equal. A black man and a white man will have an equal chance of becoming president.”

  “Sure,” a man near the front of the crowd who was dressed in what I recognized to be the uniform of a Pullman porter said, “there’ll be a black president soon. It’s just a coincidence that the first thirty-six were white.” The crowd roared with laughter. It was like the St. John’s waterfront all over again, me being laughed at and Fielding standing mute beside me, the two of us like a pair of buskers whose routine was not yet ready for the streets.

  I was supposed to speak in Union Square at seven-thirty, but the engagement had been cancelled. At about six I went to Fielding’s room to tell her. The door was open, but there was no sign of her. On the little table that doubled as her desk, exactly in the middle of it, almost prop-like, was what looked like a shopkeeper’s ledger, a large green book with black triangles on the corners of the covers.

  I opened it. The first line of page one read “Dear Prowse.” In the top right-hand corner of the page, the entry was dated March 11, 1912. I turned to the middle of the book. Again, the first line of the page read “Dear Prowse,” the entry dated September 23, 1918. Years after leaving Bishop Feild, years after the near-caning, she was still — still what? I turned to another part of the book, near the middle. The first line of the page read “Dear Smallwood.” It was dated two months ago, November 4, 1923.

  “See anything you like?”

  Startled, I snapped the book shut, put it on the table and turned around. Fielding was only a couple of feet away.

  “How far did you get?” she said.

  “I didn’t read anything,” I said. “Just the salutations.”

  I looked at her, expecting to see a grin of mischief on her face.

  “September 23, 1918?” I said. “Dear Prowse?”

  “Yes,” Fielding said. “You see, Prowse is the Gaelic word for diary — ” She stopped. “Look, I don’t — ”

  “Dear Smallwood?” I said. “What are you up to, Fielding?” I said. “Is this a diary, a journal, what?”

  “Both,” she said. “Neither. I don’t know. More like unsent letters, I suppose.”

  “To Prowse? And then to me? Why?”

  She swallowed and put one hand to her face, rubbing her forehead with her fingers. “It’s something writers do; they, they address their thoughts to their friends, you see — ”

  “You still considered Prowse your friend after Bishop Feild?” I said. “After what happened?”

  “I still wrote to him in my journal, that’s all. We never met after I left school. He never knew. Just like you never knew until now.”

  “What exactly is it that I don’t know?” I said.

  “Oh, for God’s sake, Smallwood, for God’s sake,” she said. “I I don’t really expect anything. I know you don’t — I mean, I thought — I’ve never seen you with anyone. I mean, I know now that you don’t, I know you’re not — It doesn’t have to mean we can’t be friends.” I knew what she was trying to say, but suddenly all I could think about was her and Prowse.

  “You and Prowse — you dated?” I said.

  “Yes,” she said exasperatedly. “We were, what? sweethearts, you might say. Everyone at the Feild and Spencer knew.”

  “Everyone except me, apparently,” I said.

  “That’s not the point, now,” she said.

  “Even after what he did, you were still — infatuated with him?”

  “Yes,” she said. “Even after that. But that’s not the point. The point is — The point is I’m not now.”

  “Some of those letters say ‘Dear Smallwood,’ ” I said. “Do you think about me the way you did about him?”

  “No. I — You mean more to me than he ever did — ”

  This was the first such declaration that anyone had ever made to me. I couldn’t find the voice to tell her that I felt the same, and had for some time now.

  “Will you marry me?” I blurted out. I who had vowed I would never marry.

  She winced as if I had misunderstood her. But what, other than that she loved me, could she have meant by saying what she had? Almost imperceptibly she shook her head, looked away from me.

  I felt that I had been tricked into making a proposal she had no intention of accepting. I had proposed without saying her name. When I had been thinking of how I would ask her, in the instant before I did, it had seemed ridiculous to call her by her last name while proposing marriage. On the other hand, I could not, after all this time of acting as if I did not know what it was, call her by her first name, Sheilagh. “Sheilagh, will you marry me?” It would have seemed ridiculous to have transformed her into someone I did not know, someone who did not exist.

  She was not Sheilagh, not to anyone except her relatives, I suppose; she was Fielding, which suddenly made me realize what a blunder I had made. She was Fielding. She was the sort of woman people called by her last name. Her expression confirmed my panic. She was at a loss as to how to turn me down. She clutched her cane in both hands, tap-dancer fashion, clutched it until her hands went white.

  “Smallwood …” she said. She paused for a very long time, more than long enough to convince me that a “yes” would not be forthcoming. It was the same for her, not able to call me by anything but my last name. She had been right on the waterfront to ask me what we were. We were not lovers. What were we? What did she want us to be? Sexual associates? How could you seem other than absurd declining a proposal of marriage from someone you only ever called by his surname? She could not say my first name for the same reason that I could not say hers.

  I did not want to be let down easily, or even awkwardly, by Fielding, who after all was only Fielding and had been all along, nothing more. How could I have been so stupid, so guileless? I was not heartbroken, I assured myself, just humiliated, and Fielding was as much to blame for my humiliation as I was, if not more.

  “I’m sorry — ” she said. “I don’t know how — ”

  I could think of no way to extricate myself except to pretend that I had been joking, in the hope that as she had so many times about other matters, she would pretend to believe me.

  “You didn’t think that I was serious, did you?” I said. For an instant, the other, unselfconscious Fielding showed her face, momentarily forgetting I was there. Fielding unlooked at, unobserved; Fielding out of time, seeing the world for what it was, for how it would have been without her in it. Then the real one was back and time began again.

  “You don’t really think I’d ask you to marry me, do you?” I said. “I mean, there’s nothing wrong with you or anything. You’re just not the type of woman a man like me would want to marry, and I’m sure I’m not the type of man you’d want.”

  “I don’t think we should do this any more,” she said ambiguously. “This” meaning “talk like this” or go on spending time together?

  “I think you’re right,” I said. “It’s really no way for two people who feel nothing for each other to conduct themselves.”

  “Quite right,” she said, her voice quavering but clipped. “Not for two people who feel nothing for each other. Two people should feel something. Though it was, after all, you who asked me to marry you.”

  “If that’s
how you choose to remember it,” I said, “it’s fine with me.”

  “If I could choose my memories,” she said, “I would choose to forget that we had ever met. I would forget a lot of other things as well.” She turned her back to me, body ramrod straight, head high. It reminded me of the way she had stood after the boys of Bishop Feild released her that day in the training centre.

  I doubted that anything I said could have changed her mind about me, and believed that if she knew how completely I had fallen for her, she would forever have me at a disadvantage. The thought of declaring my love and being laughed at or even tenderly rejected was more than I could bear. I had vowed never to marry, never to be ruled by mere biology or relinquish my self-sufficiency, my very self — how could I make resolutions with myself only to forget them on the impulse of the moment? My instincts had been right.

  “You can go now,” she said.

  A few days later, I heard that Fielding had moved out of Hotel Newfoundland, to where no one knew.

  FIELDING’S JOURNAL, FEBRUARY 12, 1923

  Dear Smallwood:

  The first half of my name was for a second on your lips. Or did I just imagine it? “Fiel — ” The barest whisper.

  What do you feel, Smallwood? Do you feel anything? I was not expecting a proposal, not like that, not then. Still, I should have known that one was coming, that even you would get around to it sometime. I should have been prepared.

  Was ever a proposal so hastily withdrawn? At least you didn’t leave me at the altar. Might there have been a way of telling you what, before you married me, you had a right to know; a way of telling you that would not have made you change your mind or scared you off? Why am I even asking? The expression on my face, the look in my eyes, was enough to scare you off.

  At home I was always so careful with my journal, but in New York it seemed there was no one I had to hide it from but you. What were you doing there, hours early?

  You must have been telling the truth when you said that all you had read were the salutations. You would not have proposed otherwise.

  Or would you have? What do I wish you had said?

  “Fielding, I am a man whose heart is ruled by foolish vanity and pride. But, Fielding, I have loved you since I was twelve years old. Fielding, when I’m with you I feel like the boy I used to be and remember, as if she were standing beside me, the girl you were when we first met that day on the field beside the school. It was sunny, but the first sad chill of fall was in the air. I remember things, too, Fielding. You on the heights of Bishop Feild and behind you the roofs of the city descending to the harbour, to the water and the Narrows and Signal Hill five hundred feet above the sea. Fielding …”

  Do men speak like that to women except in books or in the journal fantasies of jilted girls? Why, if the you I love is just someone I invented, do I care? You with your mawkish ambitiousness, your delusionary confidence. And under all that bluster, you are barely resisting disillusionment and bitterness at the age of twenty-three.

  How can I have been so stupid? My heart, if I had let it, might have mended. But not now.

  Fielding’s Condensed

  History of Newfoundland

  Chapter Ten:

  THE PLANTER’S ‘PLAINT

  It is easy enough to dismiss Hayman as a rhyming simpleton, as Prowse does, yet how poignantly in Quodlibets does he capture the boredom of day-to-day routine in this supposedly “new” world in his poem “The Planter’s ‘Plaint”:

  Fish for breakfast, fish for lunch,

  Of fish I cannot stand the sight.

  And worst of all this savage bunch

  Who bugger me night after night.

  I wish we had some women here,

  I wish some womenfolk would come.

  The men then might not be so queer,

  Nor, I think, so sore my bum.

  Hines

  FOR WEEKS, TOO overwrought to do much work, I walked about the streets of New York, occasionally basking in the fact that none of the thousands of people passing by knew my secret, my humiliation. Fleetingly, among strangers, it seemed to me I had nothing to be ashamed of, no reason to feel humiliated or sick at heart. I told myself that whatever I had felt for her, I would feel for other women, more, in fact. There were women in the world who could inspire in me more love than Fielding had; it was foolish to fret and moon about the way I was. Not that I would marry any of these women, or even have affairs with them, or … Gradually, in this manner, I came to miss her more and more as the weeks went by.

  Things got no better in New York for reporters. In midwinter, when I could no longer afford my boarding-house, where the rent was six dollars a week, I moved out, temporarily, I hoped. I allotted myself forty cents a day for food: a ten-cent breakfast and a thirty-cent plate of pork and beans and bread, and apple pie and coffee for dessert. That was my dinner menu every day for the next two months.

  I moved into a flop-house near the Forty-Second Street public library on Sixth Avenue. The room was fifty cents a night and its main drawback was that every so often, the el train would roar by, so I did not get much sleep. I stayed there for a few days, then realized I had to find an even cheaper place or I would soon be out of money. I moved into a twenty-five-cent-a-night flop-house farther downtown, a disconcertingly short distance from the Bowery, which for people down on their luck was looked upon as the point of no return.

  For me, it would be the point of return, the return to Newfoundland, that is, but the thought of going home a failure, as my father had done from Boston thirty years before, made me determined that I would somehow stick it out.

  I moved to a dorm-like flop-house called the Floor, where all you got for your fifteen cents was floor space. I was never more aware of not looking like I could put up much resistance. I had heard of what happened at the Floor to people too drunk or too enfeebled to protect themselves.

  There was no one there to keep order, no one to appeal to for help. Behind the desk downstairs, there was a huge fellow whose one concern was that no one make off with one of the three-cents-a-night blankets and who discouraged the practice by hanging on the wall behind him a conspicuously dented baseball bat.

  I spent three nights at the Floor but never slept. For fear of having them stolen out from under my head, I did not use my boots for a pillow as some were doing, but left them on my feet. I wish everyone had followed my example, for the place reeked of stinking socks and boots. Sitting up with nothing to lean against, even with my hands on the floor behind me, proved to be exhausting, and when I could no longer do it, I rested on one forearm and signalled my degree of wakefulness by smoking cigarettes at measured intervals to make them last.

  It was now early spring, the middle of a milder than usual April in New York. Determined not to stay at any more fifteen-centers, and so that I could use what little money I still had left for food, I joined the ranks of men who slept behind the library on the marble benches in Bryant Park. For blankets I used newspapers that I fished from garbage cans. I woke up many mornings with my hair and whiskers rimed with frost after a night of feverish, shivering dreams in which the cold and Fielding always played a part. In one dream, I met her on the street walking arm in arm with Reeves, and when I tried to explain away the tremors and the palsied shaking of my hands, she smiled at Reeves as if she had warned me I would come to this unless I changed my ways. Other nights, it seemed the bench beneath me was a wooden bunk, and I could hear the coal crank and the pelt chute of the S.S. Newfoundland. To keep warm, I smoked cigarettes beneath a canopy of newspapers. I slept on the same bench every night, making sure I got back to the park in time to claim it. I somehow managed to fit my body to its distinctive shape, found a little hollow in the marble for my hip, but in the mornings awoke so stiff-limbed that I could barely move.

  It was the duty of a cop named Barnes, who patrolled the park, to keep the benches vagrant-free throughout the day. Early in the morning, he walked along the bench-lined path, whacking each sleeper on the s
oles of his feet with his nightstick. “Rise and shine,” Barnes would say. Soon, all over the park, like statues coming to life, men were sitting up, yawning, rubbing their eyes.

  I wondered what my father would say if he could see me, reduced to bedding down on my marble bench at night. Yet the only thing that made this existence tolerable was knowing that anytime I wished, I could escape it and resume my other life in Newfoundland. At the same time, I hated the thought of being forced to go back home against my will, penniless and looking it. I would have to telegraph to my first cousin, Walter, who now, after Uncle Fred’s death, owned the boot-and-shoe factory, for my fare home for one thing. I knew that he would send it, but I also knew that even if I paid him back, he would treat me forever after as his father had treated mine.

  Bryant Park was full of men like me, trying to hold out as long as they could, hoping their luck would change, dreading the day they would have to admit that the big city was too much for them and go back home. It was the knowledge that there were so many others just like me that was most dispiriting; all of us who had come to the city convinced that we were exceptional, unique, were now beset by the same hackneyed fate, living out the last days of our stint in the big city in this rube-ville of a holding park before we went back home to take up our roles as local object-lessons for those who imagined they were different.

  One morning I was awakened on the marble bench, not by Barnes, but by someone who, because I was not wearing my glasses, I could not make out and whose voice I did not recognize.

  “Oh my, oh my, oh my,” boomed the voice. For a while, I thought that I was dreaming. “Another starry-eyed Newfoundlander reduced to nothing in New York.”

  The speaker had a deep, quavering voice that projected clear across the park, prompting the men on the benches to sit up and stare, not only at him, but also at me, as if they were wondering what was wrong with me that I had to be addressed at such a volume.

  I took out my glasses and put them on and saw, standing over me, a man who appeared to be well over six feet tall. He had curly, black, wildly unkempt hair that came down almost to his eyes, thick black eyebrows and burnsides that joined like a strap beneath his chin. He wore a black peaked sea-captain’s hat and glasses with thick lenses that made his dark eyes look even larger than they were, which in turn, along with a knowing half-smile, made it seem that he was staring at you as if he thought you were trying to hide something and, under close scrutiny, would give yourself away.