Instead of going back to her, I went to the radio station. I had done almost no preparation, got there just in time to go on the air. The station manager was in a panic. I was supposed to give him hours of notice if I couldn’t make it. I somehow managed to get through fifteen minutes, ringing the ship’s bell, feeling ridiculous as I yanked once on the cord before and after each advertisement. This was what I did; this was who I was. A man who read toothpaste and pet-milk advertisements to an audience of people cloistered in their outports by the sea. I was not a man who made love to women on winter afternoons.
It was probably the most uninspired, perfunctory episode of “The Barrelman” I ever did. When it was over, I got out of there as quickly as I could.
By now it was fully dark. The early evening darkness of midwinter in St. John’s. It had never seemed to get dark my first winter in New York, and by the second winter, I had revised my notion of what darkness was. During my first winter back in Newfoundland after five years in New York, I could not believe it had ever been this dark before. How had I never noticed? This darkness was like the prevailing wind. It came, self-propelled, across the ocean on some mission of obliteration not primarily concerning us. We just happened to be in the way, in the middle of the ocean, a place to erase while passing time between the Old World and the New.
She had asked me in such a way that if I turned her down, I would seem to be doing so because of her leg. “It’s not that hard to look the other way. Really it’s not. Most men manage it. Even under the most intimate of circumstances.” Most men. So presumably there were some who tried but did not manage it. Did she say it for her own sake or for mine? It’s not me you’ll be rejecting, just my leg. I wouldn’t blame you if you did. As if she knew that I wanted to and that her leg was all that held me back. Perhaps she hardly knew what she was saying. She was drunker than I’d ever seen her and grieving for Hanrahan.
Virginia. The continent’s first colony. Jamestown. The birthplace of America. A hundred and twenty years after Cabot broadsided Newfoundland, yet so far ahead of us by now that Newfoundlanders went there to begin again. I remembered him from Pleasantville. No rough edges. Almost a parody of chivalry, gallantry. In his voice a kind of drawling grace. A captain before the age of thirty. Star graduate of some military academy renowned for teaching horsemanship, no doubt. Fielding’s affluent half-brother.
I phoned Clara to tell her I had to work late. She was used to such calls. I could not go home. I drove aimlessly around the city, or not altogether aimlessly, for I often found myself approaching Fielding’s boarding-house from one direction or another. Sometimes I glanced up to see if her light was on, sometimes resisted doing so just to prove that I could. Always, her room was dark. She must still be sleeping. It had been only a few hours since I had left her. She had been so exhausted that in spite of the booze, she might sleep for days.
I parked the car in empty lots throughout the city and sat in silence, thinking. Would she remember having extended her invitation when next we met? Would she pretend to have forgotten? Would we both tacitly agree it hadn’t happened?
About ten o’clock, assuring myself that I would soon go home, I drove in sight of her boarding-house again and saw that this time her light was on. Far from sleeping for days, she was up already. Perhaps working, working for the first time in weeks, revived despite my rejection, reinvigorated, diverted from her sorrow by my act of kindness. I pictured her writing longhand at her desk, unable to use the typewriter, her bad hand on her lap. Better she was thus engaged than at the same desk drinking, holding a bottle of Scotch between her knees while trying to untwist the cap with her one good hand.
Her light went off. Perhaps she had merely been to the bathroom. I put the key in the ignition, ready to head home at last … and saw Prowse emerge from Fielding’s boarding-house, prosperous Prowse in a long beige overcoat, putting on his leather gloves, jauntily skipping down the steps, his arms swinging like a sprinter’s. I watched him walk down Cochrane Street away from me to what I now recognized to be his car. Had it been there all along, every time I had driven by? It could not have been. For half the time since I had finished the show? For all of it? Surely I would have seen it. Surely it was only there since the last time I drove by. Twenty minutes at the most.
When Prowse reached his car, he lit a cigarette, then turned and faced the boarding-house, looked up at the window, which I was able to see quite well for I had slouched down behind the wheel to avoid detection.
Fielding’s light came on, went off. Prowse kept looking up. Came on again, went off again. Prowse tossed down his cigarette, turned, got in his car and drove off, accelerating a little too quickly, so that the car fishtailed slightly on the snow-covered road, then straightened out. As if Fielding had signalled him to do exactly that. Prowse who threatened to cane her. And would have if not for Slogger Anderson. And scorned her on the playing grounds once her star had fallen. And with me wrote that letter which appeared in all the papers. And crossed over to the British and grabbed me when I said that I would wring Hope Simpson’s neck.
Prowse in Fielding’s room. In Fielding’s arms. In Fielding’s bed. A signal of some kind that dimming of the lights had been. How familiar must they be to be using signals? Lovers using signals. Lovers’ little games. Prowse standing by his car, looking up, waiting for Fielding to bid him goodnight; their private, presumably long-established, signal. Prowse had not signalled, had not waved. But then Fielding’s one light switch was nowhere near the window; it was just inside the door. He knew she could not see him while she signalled. On, off. On, off. An interval of perhaps two seconds in between. A last kiss, momentarily prolonged.
And Fielding, that afternoon, only hours before, had invited me into her bed. “Even under the most intimate of circumstances.” Spoken from experience, I had assumed even then, but not experience with Prowse. Prowse who, like me, was a married man with children. Had she perhaps told him of my visit, had she known I would say no and asked just to see how I would react, what excuse I would make?
My eyes burned with tears of spite. Had she called him, had he called her? So many times as I drove by, the room had been dark. Dark for hours. For hours. While I presumed she was in there as I had left her, sleeping, her wounded hand outside the blankets, her lame, little girl’s leg beneath them. When all the time she had been with him.
Was Prowse some sort of replacement whom she had called because her afternoon with me had left her in the mood? I would have preferred that to this. On, off. On, off. Goodnight, sweet Prowse.
I had sat with her while she slept until the room grew dark. I had done that, not Prowse. What a fool I was, what a fool to think that I played as large a part in her life as she did in mine. I vowed that she would no longer play any part in my life, that with this betrayal, a curtain had come down between us, a severance of the absurdly one-sided love that had succoured me for decades. But no more. Fielding, as soon as the sting of this wound faded, would be consigned to the outer darkness of my life, a place inhabited by the likes of Prowse and Reeves and Hines.
I hoped there were a lot of men, not just Prowse. A different signal for each one. Tears streamed down my face. It might just as easily have been Prowse she had been crying about, a falling out with Prowse that had driven her to drink again. How could I ever have doubted that she had written that letter to the Morning Post? The wonder was not that she had written it, but that she had confessed.
Could I possibly go up there now and demand an explanation, denounce her, tell her I knew at last what everybody else had known for years? No. She must never know I saw Prowse leave or saw him look up at her window as she flashed the light. Prowse must never know. It would be a long while before I could stand to see either of them, before I could be certain I would hold my tongue and not blurt out everything I knew.
It would not be enough, however, to know that my humiliation was a secret. I would have to find some way to hide it from myself.
FIELDING’S JO
URNAL, APRIL 22, 1944
Dear David:
In this journal I write to people as if I am bidding them goodbye, as if they are asleep in the next room and will read what I have written in the morning when I’m gone. I keep on writing to them, though, over and over. That’s what this journal is, I think; one long goodbye.
I went for a last look at you and Sarah before I left New York for Newfoundland in 1923. I stood at the iron fence and watched you with her on the school playground, holding her hand as if my mother had warned you not to leave her side. A swarm of children and the two of you among them. How mortified you looked at having to hold your sister’s hand. But you held it and she let you. She seemed frightened, overwhelmed. As if she was hoping some recent misadventure would not repeat itself. For three nights I couldn’t sleep, remembering that expression on her face. There she was, in mid-existence, and there was I, merely watching. Spying. Speculating. How easily I could have — intervened. How reckless, how foolish of me just to be that close.
It seems like only yesterday that you were here. Remember? I could not stop looking at you, marvelling at the man you had become, searching your face for ways we looked alike, for signs of me in you. You caught me once and looked away, embarrassed. You must have thought me strange. You remarked that you could see our mother in my face. And so you could. And that I looked like you and Sarah, though I did not think so.
I watched you when you had a drink at dinner. You can tell a drinker by the way he holds his glass, by the way he looks at it. A million other ways, too. Had you been a drinker, I would have known it from watching just one sip. But you were not. How relieved I was that whatever else we shared, we did not share that.
You did not know about me or else you would not have had a drink. Nor, when I declined one, would you have encouraged me to change my mind, which I almost did. That was the closest I had been to booze in seven years. “C’mon, sis, have one drink with me, just one drink,” you said. I knew what you meant, that this might be my only chance to have a drink with you, though I refused to consider that that was even a remote possibility. I don’t know what I would have done had you insisted, but you didn’t.
I was glad you didn’t know, glad that my mother seemed to have told you nothing about me or my father except that we existed. When you insisted on seeing my father’s grave, I could not bear to go with you, but I told you where it was.
I’m glad we met when we did and not when I was drinking. As I am now. Again. After so long. You might not have found this half-sister quite so charming, might not have taken her to the movies or to dinner or walked with her and held her arm. I would have had even more to drink than usual, knowing that in three days you were off to war. God knows what I would have said or done. Nothing that would have put you in the right frame of mind for France. Though nothing I said when I was sober did that either, did it?
When you went away, I was afraid to sleep, for it seemed to me that you were most in peril while I slept. Still, I did sleep and every day, like a dozing sentry who thinks he hears a noise, woke up with a start. At bedtime and when I awoke I would calculate what time it was in France, as if by that the gap in my vigil was accounted for. I still do that. I always know what time it is in France.
While you were overseas I had all sorts of strange thoughts. That it was up to me to see you safely through the war. That if I imagined the worst, the worst would happen. That there was something fateful about our meeting just before you joined the war. I’m sorry, sweetheart, that I couldn’t see you through it.
I hugged you when you were leaving and I kissed you on the cheeks a dozen times. To think I held you in my arms just once. Half-sisterly hugs and kisses. Half-sisterly tears. But you could see that I was troubled beyond what the situation called for, though you could not guess why. “So long, sis,” you said. “Everything will be all right.” Meaning not that you, but that I would be all right, that this sorrow of mine, whatever it proceeded from, would pass.
There were other things and other people on your mind. My mother. Your father. Sarah. The war. You may have been in love for all I know. The man I mourn, I hardly knew. I know no one who knew you. Perhaps, one day, I will find out from Sarah who you were. It will make me miss you more. I may be wrong in thinking that my heart is broken now. It may be that I know nothing yet of heartbreak.
I could not tell you that I loved you, not the way I wanted to. I had to hold that back or else it would have all come pouring out. I can tell you now, for what it’s worth. I love you, David.
The black-bordered telegram they sent me ended with their motto of condolence, a quote from Tennyson’s “Ulysses,” though I’m not sure if they know it is Tennyson they’re quoting: “Though much is taken, much abides.” What of you abides for me? A smattering of memories.
I did not know you for long, David. For me, your life begins on a sidewalk in New York and ends with the letters you wrote to me from France. And there is almost nothing in between. Still, I fancy we are linked by something more important than mere blood.
“I will drink / Life to the lees.” That is also from “Ulysses.”
As are these lines: “ ’Tis not too late to seek a newer world.… To sail beyond the sunset and … all the western stars.” As it must have seemed to Cabot he was doing; Cabot, who, the second time he set out, did not come back.
I am not at that point yet. I think that as long as I can write, I never will be. And even when I’m drinking, I can write.
David, are you reading as I write? Can you hear me say the words as I form them on the page? I wish I could make myself believe that you can. I have never wanted there to be an afterlife more than I do now.
Fielding’s Condensed
History of Newfoundland
Chapter Twenty-Six:
WINTERING THE REIDS
Prime Minister James S. Winter negotiates one of the most controversial contracts in Newfoundland history, the Railway Contract of 1898, with Scots-Canadian railway magnate Robert G. Reid.
Having completed construction of a trans-island railway under the terms of what was known as the Labour of Love Contract, Reid seeks to negotiate a more favourable agreement for the operation of the railway and the construction of various branch lines.
So straitened is he by the first contract, Reid has little choice but to consent to the following new terms: he must accept five thousand acres of Crown land per mile of new railway; if he wishes to own the entire Newfoundland railway outright for all time, he must give back half of this land and some of the money he was paid to build the railway; he must assume ownership of the Newfoundland Telegraph service, the St. John’s drydock, seven steamships, sundry hydro and railway stations, and finally, must agree to pave Water Street from end to end with granite cobblestones.
Thus will Newfoundlanders say of someone they get the best of in negotiations, “We Wintered them,” or in the case of an especially one-sided deal, “We gave them a good Wintering.” Newfoundlanders are more given to Wintering than being Whitewayed. For all their supposed hospitableness, there is something in the character of Newfoundlanders, a deviousness let us call it, that comes out in their dealings with outsiders who would do well to stay away.
As one-sided as the Reid deal is (one observer draws an inverse analogy with the purchase of Manhattan), the degree to which Reid has been bilked is not known until it comes out that finance minister Alfred B. Morine acted as Reid’s solicitor during the negotiations, talking him into the deal by assuring him that “Newfoundlanders are too green to burn.”
It is further revealed that, in total, the Newfoundland government has palmed off on Reid four million acres of land that it claims is “neither barren, boggy, nor otherwise unsuitable,” a patently false claim since there exists in Newfoundland less than half that many acres of land of that description.
Such is the public uproar over a contract for which Winter can offer no better excuse than the need to avoid a major financial crisis and reduce the public debt that G
overnor Murray collects twenty-three thousand signatures on a petition in protest of the contract and forces Morine’s resignation from the Cabinet.
The harm is done, however, and though Reid is given some relief in 1901 under the administration of Sir Robert Bond — 2.5 million dollars and permission to give back the railway after fifty years — he embraces a world-view into which cynicism too often creeps and in 1908 dies in Montreal, a broken man tortured by the thought that he leaves to his son a company that employs more people than the government of Newfoundland.
In 1907, he is knighted, no doubt at the request of the Newfoundland government, for Newfoundlanders think a knighthood fixes everything. They are forever petitioning the Colonial Office for knighthoods to appease some badly Wintered financier. The Colonial Office, to its discredit, is only too happy to oblige.
The worse the Wintering, the more promptly the face-saving knighthood is conferred and the sooner Sir Someone or Other is slinking off under cover of darkness for the mainland.
Only if one imagines them all on a single ship — cramming the decks, lining the rails, hunched figures in overcoats and bowler hats, clutching their scrolls of knighthood in their hands, their florid moustaches belying their despair — can one even begin to appreciate the enormity of our crime. There they go. One sees them sail out through the Narrows on the S.S. Winter, bilked, duped, outmanoeuvred, hopes dashed, expectations thwarted, taking their last look at Newfoundland.
V
CONFESSIONS
Both from an Imperial and Colonial point, the union of the British North American colonies is a consummation devoutly to be wished.
— D. W. PROWSE, A History of Newfoundland
Scuttlework
Field Day, April 17, 1945
Joe Smallwood is back in town. But where, the reader may wonder, has he been these past few years?
The Colony of Unrequited Dreams Page 39