The Colony of Unrequited Dreams

by Wayne Johnston

  The next few servicemen who went in were ineffectually heckled, but after that nothing more was said. We waited there in the rain, deferring to the servicemen. The MPs, the rain spattering on their white helmets, stood in conversation at the head of the line. An easterly wind was blowing up through the Gut from Quidi Vidi Village, straight in from the sea.

  I told myself I should have provoked something, got some Yank, a military policeman, to lay his hands on me, take a swing at me; that would have got the townies going, one of their own being manhandled by some Yank, the Barrelman being picked on by someone twice his size and half his age.

  I stood there brooding in the rain, an old, all-too-familiar feeling of inconsequentiality taking hold of me. The land on which Fort Pepperrell and other bases in Newfoundland was built had been leased by the Americans for ninety-nine years. Bargained down from one hundred by the British commissioners, no doubt. Ninety-nine seemed longer anyway. An eternity. It was what criminals who were not meant to see the light of day again were sentenced to. Not even in my family, whose members were notorious for their longevity, had anyone lived that long. I would have to live to 141 to witness the Americans’ departure. The Americans here for ninety-nine years. Just in case.

  Who knew what the coming decades would bring? The Commission of Government was here for no one knew how much longer. I was forty-two years old, and if I was to speak out loud to anyone now the ambitions I had when I was twenty, they would laugh. I vowed that I would leave Newfoundland if things went on like this much longer. But where would I go? I was glad Clara was not with me tonight. I winced to think how I would have looked beside her standing in the rain, watching her. I imagined with what envy she might have looked at the local women walking into the movie-house on the arms of their Yankee sweethearts.

  Finally, the MPs started letting Newfoundlanders in. I shuffled forward and, when I was almost at the box office, considered stepping out of line and leaving in a gesture of defiance. The Barrelman slinking away like a whipped cur with his tail between his legs. I was suddenly keenly aware of how little my local fame would have mattered to any American who by some chance was made aware of my existence. The Barrelman. It was like some ironic nickname, for I was anything but barrel-shaped.

  I paid my twenty-five-cent admission at the box office. A WAC in a khaki hat took my money and handed me my ticket. The lights were still up when I went inside. Most of the preferred seats were, as the corporal had hinted they would be, occupied by the Americans. A few of the ones still empty were marked “reserved.” Newfoundlanders sat off to either side or in the middle section at the back, a drab civilian horseshoe within which the Americans sat, looking, because they were all wearing the same uniform, as if a light were shining on them.

  The Newfoundlanders did not look as though they minded the seating arrangements in the least. The Fort Pepperrell movie-house was by far the most popular one in the city. Just released movies that otherwise would not have made it to St. John’s until years later, if ever, played there every Friday and Saturday night. Tonight’s movie starred Betty Grable and Clark Gable, “Grable and Gable” as they were billed on the sparkling new marquee outside. There was a murmur of excitement and anticipation in the air. I half expected to see Grable and Gable come strolling arm in arm down the aisle.

  I settled into one of the plush red seats, choosing one on the left-wing aisle, and looked around. The corporal had been right. This was their movie-house, a pavilion of Americana, a haven for the homesick, who, although they had to spend time in Newfoundland, did not have to live like Newfoundlanders. It was absurd to resent them for it, I told myself. Newfoundlanders in this situation and having the means would have done the same.

  I was just beginning to feel a little cheered and reconciled to my circumstances when I heard a familiar gait on the steps behind me. First foot, second foot, stop. First foot, second foot, stop. I had no doubt it was Fielding, whom I had not seen in months.

  My heart rose, and so did I, with the intention of inviting her to join me. She would be ideal company for this occasion; she would wittily dismiss the Yanks as she had for so long been doing with the British.

  I turned to face her. It was Fielding, but she was not alone. She was being helped down the steps by one of them, the first time I had ever seen her accept such help from anyone. He held her left hand and supported her left elbow while Fielding with her right hand held her cane. Each row of the movie-house fell silent as they passed, everyone watching this display of gallantry, gawking at Fielding, who was taller than her escort and who some of the Newfoundlanders must have recognized, for there was much whispering and conferring of heads.

  Fielding, I was certain, was embellishing her limp, not so much to win sympathy for herself, it seemed, as to magnify the gallantry of the young man to whose arm she clung as if, without him, she would have fallen to the floor.

  Fielding, even roaring drunk, had never needed this much help to negotiate a set of stairs. And here she was, sober — I wondered if there had been some change for the worse in her physical condition.

  At first I assumed that having seen her trying to navigate the stairs by herself, this man had offered his assistance, and I was still intending to invite her to join me. He did not wear the folding, inverted wallet-like cap of the enlisted man, but an officer’s peaked cap. I caught a glimpse of his insignia: two horizontal black bars, a captain. Fielding wore some sort of fur wrap that I had never seen before, but otherwise no coat. And there was no coat check in the movie-house. She must have come with someone. Him. He must have sent a car for her. Or they might have had dinner somewhere on the base.

  I had halfway extended my hand and, forced to do something to disguise the gesture, put it on the back of my seat and with my other hand pretended to wipe something from the cushion. Then, head bowed, affecting a kind of brisk irritability, I turned abruptly and sat down again. I prayed that Fielding hadn’t seen me. I thanked God that she and her captain would not be sitting behind me.

  They went on by. No question about it, Fielding was playing up her limp for all it was worth. When they reached the American section, the enlisted men jumped to their feet — clearly they had not been expecting a captain — and stood at attention, saluting — saluting Fielding, it might have been. I could well imagine how much she was enjoying herself. The captain, a trimly robust man who looked to be in his mid-thirties, perfunctorily returned their salute. The enlisted men sat down again, though a few of them and their dates vacated a clutch of seats in the middle about twelve rows from the front. Fielding and her captain, with no one directly behind them, in front of them or beside them, took their seats.

  I was flushed. My ears were burning. I was certain the people behind me had noticed the change in my complexion. This — Fielding and the captain — could not be a date of any kind, I assured myself. The captain was merely escorting her so she would not have to sit alone, merely being chivalrous in the army tradition to a woman whose game leg had left her on the shelf and forced her into earning her own living.

  There was still the question of how they had met. I watched them. He leaned close as if to confide in her and Fielding laughed out loud. A girlish laugh. The captain laughed, too. Fielding, I could not help noticing, was a good deal more attractive since she had stopped drinking. Her face was full, her eyes wide and round. I looked closely. It hardly seemed possible, but she was wearing make-up. Lipstick. Some sort of rouge. When the captain looked away for a second, Fielding looked at him, darted a glance at him, just for a moment, almost shyly, as if making a good impression on him mattered to her. I had never seen her give anyone such a look before, had never known anyone to make her laugh out loud like that.

  The lights went down. “The Star-Spangled Banner” began to play. The American flag, fluttering, appeared onscreen. I saw, in silhouette, the captain help Fielding to her feet. As if she needed helping. I recalled her scaling the iron fence the day the Colonial Building was mobbed. Fielding must have arra
nged all this, I thought. She must be planning to write a piece on the Americans, must have contacted someone at Fort Pepperrell and, not knowing the sort of columns she wrote and charmed by the novelty of a woman reporter and further by her disability, which Fielding would somehow have found a way to work into the conversation, they had invited her to be their guest at Pleasantville and had appointed this captain to escort her to the movies. What a surprise they were in for. What a shock it would be to the captain to see how she portrayed him in her column.

  The anthem ended. All sat down. The newsreels began. A voice that sounded as though it had been narrating world events since time began told of the impact the Americans were already having on the war. There was footage of an American destroyer, all guns blazing, and of presumably enemy planes trailing smoke as they nosedived into the sea. Pearl Harbor was mentioned and Roosevelt was heard describing how the Americans in their “righteous might” were going to retaliate. The enlisted men cheered. I watched Fielding and her captain. Every time he pointed at the screen, Fielding nodded vigorously. She was either sincerely interested in what he was saying, or sincerely wanted him to think she was.

  The movie must have been rushed into production to shore up American morale, for Grable and Gable were war-crossed lovers, she a WAC, he a pilot in the possibility of whose death at the hands of the enemy we were supposed to believe. I was not convinced, but I was hoping for it nonetheless as if it were Fielding’s captain up there on the screen.

  When I guessed it was only minutes until the lights went up for the intermission, I decided to go outside to the lobby. I doubted that Fielding would go to the bother of pretending she needed her captain’s help to scale the steps, but she might get up to stretch her legs, might turn around and see me.

  I went out to the concession area, where a line-up for popcorn had already begun to form. I lit a cigarette and stood at the glass doors of the lobby, looking out. The wind was blowing even harder now. On Quidi Vidi Lake, there was a lop whose white-caps I could make out even in the darkness. What a night. I considered leaving; I told myself it would be the sensible thing to do. But I stayed.

  I thought of what Fielding had once said to me while sitting on her bed in her boarding-house. “I am not often proposed to, but I am often propositioned.” I wondered again if this had been an invitation. Why could I never read what people meant, what women meant, when they said such things? An invitation to be just one of many, to join the crowd, was that what she meant? Had she been mocking me to get revenge for that night in New York? What, if I had taken her up on the offer, if an offer it was, would she have done? Not that I would have taken her up on the offer. Could this American captain have already got wind of her reputation? Did she really have one?

  I did not often go to places of entertainment, even movie-houses. Sheer melancholic boredom had driven me out of the house tonight. Perhaps Fielding was often seen in the company of men. I had many times considered asking around about her, but I could think of no way of doing it that would not make me look ridiculous or cause someone to be suspicious of my intentions. Smallwood, married man and confirmed prude, inquiring into the private life of an unmarried woman about whom jokes of a certain kind had been going round for years.

  “Excuse me, please,” a voice behind me said, that of an American from somewhere in the South. I was blocking the door. In one motion, I turned and stepped aside … for Fielding and her captain, who were leaving the movie at intermission.

  “Oh — ” Fielding said, sounding genuinely startled. O Captain! my Captain! What school poem did that come from? She looked flustered. So must I have. The captain looked back and forth between us. Fielding extended her black-gloved hand. I shook it lightly.

  “I haven’t seen you in quite some time,” she said, as if it was unusual for our paths not to have crossed for so long. She was pretending to this captain to be someone or something she was not and was tacitly inviting me, even pleading with me, to play along. I looked at the name-plate on his tunic. Captain D. Hanrahan.

  I would be damned if I would play along for Fielding’s sake, whatever she was up to. She must have seen this in my eyes. “Captain Hanrahan,” she interjected, “this is Joe Smallwood, a colleague of mine in the journalism trade.” I had never heard her speak my first name before. That she had done so on the occasion of introducing me to an American soldier whose intentions where she was concerned were all too obvious from the stilted way she spoke enraged me. I thought of the knowing look in that corporal’s eyes after I withdrew my horns while standing outside with all the other Newfoundlanders in the rain.

  “So what have you been up to lately, Fielding?” I said. I knew it was exactly this, my calling her by her last name, that she had been trying to head off. I was not about to call her Sheilagh for the first time in my life just because she had a captain on her arm. He took a step forward.

  “I don’t believe that is the proper way to address a lady,” he said, in his southern U.S. accent. I saw now that he was younger than I had guessed, in his late twenties perhaps. Young to be a captain. His rank and the way he carried himself had fooled me.

  “No,” I said, “It’s — ”

  Fielding stepped forward, put her cane between us, pressed it, in a way that implied familiarity, against the captain’s chest.

  “Everyone in the newspaper business calls me Fielding,” she said. “I take it as a compliment. The men all call each other by their last names. Smallwood, this is Captain David Hanrahan.”

  Not until he extended his hand did Fielding lower the cane. I shook his hand. He held mine so firmly while he spoke that I could feel his pulse. “You’ll have to forgive me, Smallwood,” he said. “We in the military only address our subordinates by their last names.”

  “See you again, Smallwood,” Fielding said, smiling. By the time I realized that I had been slighted by this captain, they were headed out the door.

  Outside, beneath the marquee, they paused while the captain opened an umbrella. Fielding took his outstretched arm and they walked off, umbrella angled into the wind, in the direction of the officers’ barracks. I turned away and lit another cigarette. What did it matter to me, why should it matter to me, what Fielding did and with whom?

  Fielding’s Condensed

  History of Newfoundland

  Chapter Twenty-Five:

  GOSSE FILS, GOSSE PERE, AND PROWSE

  Prowse’s History is published in 1895.

  It sits on the desk in front of us as we write, goading us to refutation, disputation, sustaining us through this corrective.

  “D. W. Prowse, Q.C.” A pair of initials pretentiously placed on either side of his surname. A prefatory note by Edmund Gosse.

  My name has no need of initials, my History no need of Edmund Gosse and his fond reminiscences of a place he never set eyes on in his life. He devotes more of his two-page note to capelin than he does to Prowse.

  He claims an “old family tie with Newfoundland,” namely, that his father spent eight years here running about with a beetle bottle, catching insects, managing to pass off as “entomology” behaviour that in others would have been sufficient proof of madness.

  We are supposed to be charmed that the Gosse household in Devonshire was full of insects, pickled and preserved, from Newfoundland.

  Perhaps Gosse might not have found them so charming had they attacked him in the manner their like did me when last I ventured out of doors six months ago.

  Perhaps Gosse fils was kept from visiting Newfoundland by reading this passage in Sir Richard Whitbourne’s Discourse on the Island of Newfoundland: “Those flies seeme to have a greate power and authourity upon all loytering people that come to the Newfoundland; for they have the property that when they find any such lying lazily, or sleeping in the Woods, they will presently bee more nimble to seize on them, than any Sargeant will bee to arrest a man for debt.”

  But no mind. It is November now, and even the hardiest of bugs will have retreated to whatever hellish p
laces bugs retreat to in the winter.

  We are supposed to feel a kinship with Gosse, or acknowledge his with Newfoundland, because there arrived each year of his childhood at their house in Devon kegs of capelin from Carbonear. Easy enough it is to speak bravely of capelin when they are dead and if put down one’s shirt do not flop about and cause one to act in a manner amusing to one’s less bookish siblings.

  We are supposed to commiserate with Gosse that his father did not live to see the fruit of Prowse’s labours. Rest easy, Philip Henry Gosse. In what agonies might you have spent your final days had you not had the good fortune to die before you were obliged, by your son’s sycophantic friendship with its author, to read the cursed book.

  That BOOK! Had we departed from this world ignorant of its existence we should have been happier than we expect to be when the final curtain falls. Little comfort is it now that upon the publication of our History all memory of his will from the minds of the reading public be erased. If not from mine. No, never from mine, unless one of the balms of heaven be amnesia!

  The Most Intimate of Circumstances

  I READ FIELDING’S COLUMN every day for the next few weeks, still expecting to find in it some irony-laden account of her “date” or some send-up of the Yanks, who, it seemed to me, badly needed sending up. But nothing like that appeared. I even thought I detected a certain mellowing in the way she wrote, but dismissed it as being nothing more than my imagination.

  I did not go so far towards acknowledging the possibility that Fielding might be “in love” as to think the words. Even had I acknowledged the possibility, it would have been only to refute it something like this: Fielding could no more fall in love than I could. The relationship we had had was the closest to falling in love that either of us would come. It was not in our natures. There were too many more important things to dedicate one’s life to than romantic love. It was because we agreed on this one thing that we could not bear each other’s company. I had married sensibly, and Fielding, sensibly, had remained unmarried. Still, it was important to me that I knew and sometimes crossed paths with a kindred soul of the opposite sex. It was important to me that Fielding go on being Fielding, and in the life of the real Fielding there was no place for Captain Hanrahan.