The Colony of Unrequited Dreams

by Wayne Johnston

  “So who was the father?” I said.

  She looked startled and glanced at the duffel bag again.

  “I told my father you were,” she said.

  “Why?”

  “Because you were too young to marry me. And I didn’t want to marry — him.”

  “Hines?” I said.

  She sniffed. “All Hines ever did was take pictures of me.”

  I winced, knitted my eyebrows in puzzlement. She tried to look unfazed. “Then who was the father? It doesn’t say in your journals. You just refer to him as ‘he.’ ”

  “It was who you think it was.”

  “Prowse.”

  “We used to go to the judge’s house. It was a big house; the judge lived there by himself and sat all day in his study. Oblivious. We did what we pleased where and when we pleased.”

  “But what about Hines?” I said. “Where does he come into it?”

  “One thing I told you about him was true. He worked for the Morning Post, remember. He was the ‘friend of the school’ that Reeves referred to when he interrogated all you boys. My father paid Hines to intercept the letter after it arrived at the Post. He had to make sure it wound up in Reeves’s hands so Reeves could see the postmark.”

  I remembered how Hines, in his sermon, had seemed to know so much about my days at Bishop Feild. The way the masters treated you at school and laughed at your ambition. You will never live down the mark they gave you for character. He must have found out about me from Fielding’s father, who perhaps found out from Fielding. I did not want to know.

  “Why did Hines leave Newfoundland in such a hurry after I confronted him? You had no way of proving he was involved.”

  “Actually, I did,” she said. “I found the History at the back of my father’s closet one day. I was always snooping around. Prowse said once that because my father wasn’t married any more, he must have dirty pictures somewhere. If he did, I never found them. But when I was looking for them, I found the book. I knew about the letter by then; Prowse had told me about it. I’d read the judge’s book a hundred times. I knew what words were missing. I pieced the letter together, realized it was my father who had written it. I also found in the History a letter from Hines demanding money from my father to buy his silence. I don’t know if my father ever paid him anything. Anyway, after you came here and told me about Hines, I tracked him down and told him I still had the blackmail letter. He denied knowing anything about it. But the next day he was gone.”

  “And Prowse never knew anything?” Fielding shook her head. “When did you tell your father you were pregnant?”

  “I never did. He found out himself. He used to give me semiannual check-ups. When I was due my next one, I told him I would feel embarrassed having him examine me, now that I was — growing up. Nothing to be embarrassed about, he said. Which was true. By that time, I’d been leaving my clothes on for years while he examined me. He heard the heartbeat when he was listening to mine. Heard it through my dress. He insisted on knowing who the father was.”

  “And you told him it was me. But I was almost old enough to marry you. Who would have been the wiser?”

  “In a situation like that, every month makes a difference.”

  “That’s not it, Fielding,” I said. “Why don’t you tell the truth at last? Forty years later and you still can’t tell the truth about it.”

  “And what truth might that be?” she said, twirling her glass about on the table.

  “You know,” I said. “Just like I knew who the father was.”

  “My father wouldn’t have wanted me to marry you,” she said. “Under any circumstances.”

  “Someone like me, you mean.”

  “I knew if I told my father it was Prowse, there would be a confrontation. He would talk to Prowse’s father and demand marriage. He thought very highly of the Prowses. Prowse and I would have been marrying younger than people in our set usually did, of course, but only by a few years. I was four months pregnant. My father would have considered it a good marriage. He and Prowse’s family would have made sure that the baby and I were well cared for until Prowse finished his education. People would certainly have guessed what was up, but with everyone doing the honourable thing, there would have been only one of those modest, short-lived, everyone-pretending-to-look-the-other-way sort of scandals, the sort that two families acting in consort could easily have faced down. It would in time have been forgotten. Or at least never talked about. Like my father’s divorce. I knew of a similar arrangement that had been made between two other families in our circle. On the other hand, perhaps I was wrong, perhaps I panicked, perhaps even if I had told him Prowse was the father — who knows? But anyway, I told him it was you. I had no reason to think you would ever find out, or would ever be harmed by it. Maybe it was not just marriage to Prowse but marriage altogether I was trying to avoid. I chose you because of the store my father put by social standing, money, all of that. Not because of the store I put by it. I hope you won’t confuse his world-view with mine.”

  “A convenient distinction,” I said. “There’s more of the snob in you than you’ll ever admit to or even understand, Fielding. You say you were sure there was no risk and yet there was, wasn’t there? And you were quite happy to risk me. You didn’t know for sure what he would do.”

  “I’m sorry,” she said.

  “Tell me something,” I said. “When you were in the Harbour Light, why did you give me that letter?”

  Fielding shrugged. “I know what you’re thinking, that I wanted you to find out. Maybe I did.”

  “And your confession about writing the letter to the Morning Post?” I said.

  “You may not believe it, but it was partly to spare you being punished for something I knew you hadn’t done.”

  “But mainly to protect your father.”

  “Yes. He didn’t know I knew. At least, I never told him. I was afraid that if I did, he would tell Reeves what he’d done and he’d be ruined. Even after I was expelled, I said nothing. I thought he might confess to me. Just to me, I mean. I thought it could be our secret. But he never did.”

  “Didn’t your father, when he heard why you’d been expelled, ask you why you confessed?”

  She nodded. “I told him I did it because they suspected you of writing the letter and I wanted to keep you out of trouble. We said nothing more about it.”

  “Why did you want to protect someone who didn’t have the courage to protect you?”

  “I was pregnant; I was going to have to leave school anyway.”

  “Not the way you did, not like that. In disgrace for something he did —”

  “Was provoked by me into doing —”

  “Why didn’t he come forward?”

  “It would have been pointless for him to ruin his reputation —”

  “Better to ruin mine and yours —”

  “I didn’t have one to ruin. And I didn’t want to acquire one. I didn’t care about being expelled. I knew what I wanted to do with my life, I knew I wanted to be some sort of writer —”

  “You cared,” I said.

  “All right, Smallwood, I cared. My mother abandoned me. I was planning to renounce my child. I knew that Prowse was — Prowse. All I had left was my father. When I left Bishop Spencer, he sent me away to the States, to New York, where my mother hid me in her house until the babies were born. She pretended they were hers, faked a pregnancy, padded her dress more and more as the weeks went by. Not as unusual as it sounds. Quite a lot of mothers have done it through the ages. She had married another doctor, a man my father had gone to medical school with. He helped us hush it up, delivered the babies in his house. My mother and her husband raised them. David, my son. Sarah, my daughter. Who is nearly forty now. They thought it was best that I not see them. Took them away until after I went home. Alone. As alone as I have ever been.

  “After you left for New York in 1920, I wrote my mother, using a pseudonym on the envelope, and asked if I could see the children.
That’s why I couldn’t go with you right away, remember? When you told me where you were going?”

  “I was foolish enough to think,” I said, “that you were sad that I was leaving.”

  She smiled. “I would have been,” she said, “if I hadn’t known that I was going, too, which I did right from the start, I really did.” I looked away from her.

  “I knew I couldn’t make that trip again and not see them. So I wrote my mother. She wrote back saying, ‘David and Sarah believe that I am their mother. It would be unthinkable to tell them the truth at this point in their lives.’ I wrote back and said she could introduce me to them as someone she once knew in Newfoundland, not as their mother or even their half-sister. They were barely five years old. They would never have guessed or suspected anything. But my mother refused again. She didn’t trust me not to say anything, not to cry and make a scene. I wouldn’t have done either, but she had no way of knowing that.

  “So when I got to New York, I went to her street. All day one Saturday I watched my mother’s house, half-hiding, walking back and forth, first on one side of the street, then on the other. I wore a hat pulled down low, a scarf. I doubt my mother would have recognized me anyway. I had changed a lot in five years. Finally, about three in the afternoon, this was in October, she and Sarah and David came out of the house and walked hand in hand, Sarah on one side of her, David on the other, down the street towards me. I crossed over to the other side and walked along far enough behind them that they wouldn’t notice. My mother and my children, holding hands. My mother with my children, pretending they were hers.

  “I crossed the street again, followed behind them until they stopped at an intersection. I stood directly behind them. Close enough that I could see Sarah’s face. More like Prowse than me. Blond and blue-eyed. They were both dressed in little blazers — I wanted so much to touch them. Hold them in my arms. You can’t imagine what living in New York was like for me after that, Small-wood. Always knowing they were in the same city. A thousand times, every time I saw a woman with two children, I thought it might be them. A few other times, as you know, I watched them from outside the playground at their school.”

  “What about Prowse?” I said.

  “He knows about that,” she said.

  “But you said —”

  “He hasn’t known all along.”

  She put her elbows on the table, her face in her hands.

  “I told him not long after David died,” she said, her voice muffled. She lowered her hands. She looked as if she had been crying for hours. “David named me as one of the people who should be informed in case anything happened to him. He never knew I was his mother. He thought I was just his half-sister. ‘My son. You are my son.’ The words were on my lips, Smallwood, all the time he was here. That night in the movie-house. Sitting next to you is the woman in whose body you began. I wondered if he might somehow sense it.” She cried, the heel of her palm on her forehead, tears dripping onto the table.

  “That’s enough,” I said. But she shook her head.

  “Two officers from Fort Pepperrell came to the door one day and handed me a telegram. ‘We regret to inform you …’ That’s when I went back on the bottle. I think I would have anyway, I was so worried about him. I couldn’t sleep. He wrote to me a few times from France. I wrote to him. ‘P.S. I’m your mother,’ I always felt like writing. Three months after we first met, he was killed.”

  “I’m sorry,” I said.

  She nodded, bit her lip. Blinked back a sudden surge of tears. “Oh, my poor boy. My poor, sweet, darling boy.” She slumped over the table, her head between her arms, shoulders heaving. I put out my hand and touched her hair, brushed it back from her forehead.

  “I told Prowse about two weeks later,” she said. “Maybe I shouldn’t have. To find out, on the occasion of his death, that you had a son you never knew you had, never met.”

  She straightened, not caring now that I could see her face. “He didn’t believe me at first. At least, he said he didn’t. I assured him that no one but him could be the father. I asked him what reason I would have to lie. He begged me never to tell anyone that he was the children’s father. He was more concerned that I keep it a secret than anything else. But maybe that’s not fair. Who knows what he went through later when he was alone, what he’s been through since? I told him not to worry. I wouldn’t tell anyone.”

  I had to ask. “Did you tell Prowse about David the day … the day I met you at the Press Club, the day we came back here —”

  “The day I tried to get you into bed,” she said, laughing and crying at the same time. “Yes,” she said. “I called him at his house when I woke up. It took some doing to convince him to meet me here. I must have sounded like I was in no shape to meet him somewhere else. But how did you know that?”

  “I drove around for hours that night,” I said. “I drove by here a hundred times wondering if I should — see how you were doing.” Fielding put her hand over her mouth to suppress a smile, a generous, even-keeled smile. “I saw Prowse leave. He stopped by his car and looked up at your window. You turned the lights on, then off. Then on, then off again. I thought it must be some sort of signal.”

  “And you jumped to certain conclusions.”

  “Yes,” I said. “Yes, I suppose I did.”

  “Prowse and I have hardly spoken since our school days,” Fielding said. “Not even when I told him about David could he bring himself to touch me. Especially not then, perhaps.”

  “Then why? Why did you do that with the light?”

  “When we were — going together,” she said, “when we were at the judge’s house, I would always leave first, by the back door, which you couldn’t see from the street. I would stand in the backyard and wait for Prowse to flash the upstairs light, to signal that the coast was clear, that there was no one on the street and I could leave. It all seemed so exciting. Our secret signal. Our way of saying goodbye. The night I told him about David, I said I would flick the lights after he left. I didn’t know until now that he waited for the signal. But I’m glad to hear he did.”

  I remembered Prowse skipping jauntily down the steps of Fielding’s boarding-house. Having just been told his son was dead. Trying to convince himself, perhaps. Nothing has happened that I cannot control. My life need not change. A son I did not know I had is dead. He did not exist for me yesterday, he does not exist today. A daughter I will never meet lives a thousand miles away. Nothing has changed. For a moment there I thought it had, but I was wrong. No one but Fielding will ever know. Fielding’s life and mine are still far apart and they always will be. Nothing has happened that makes it more likely that I will ever have to live like Fielding. I will never live like Fielding. I have nothing new to fear.

  But he waited for that signal, and when he saw it, threw aside his cigarette as if hoping with that gesture to dismiss the past, the notion that anything that happened then could matter to him now. But even for Prowse, as Fielding said, other moments were still to come, perhaps. At times, when he is by himself, the name some stranger gave his son will come to mind. David. The son whose picture and whose gravestone he has never seen. The daughter he has never seen and knows he never will.

  “That night at the movie-house —”I said.

  “My mother had told David when she thought he was old enough to understand such things that he had a half-sister in St. John’s. From her first marriage. He looked me up. I don’t know why I was so nervous when we saw you. Maybe I thought you would know from looking at him who his father was, see Prowse in David’s face. Maybe I felt guilty. I couldn’t bear to introduce him to you as what he thought he was, my half-brother. Also, I could see that you were jealous and the idea of leaving you in your misery appealed to me.

  “Oh, Smallwood. Three days we had, three days. Every spare minute he had we spent together. The whole time I wondered if I should tell him who I really was, who he really was. He called me sis. He’s going to war, I thought. This might be your only c
hance. He might not come back. But then I thought, He’s going to war, he’ll need all his wits about him, this is no time to turn his whole world inside out. So I didn’t tell him. I spent three days with him, pretending to be his half-sister, biting my tongue while he introduced me as that to all his friends. Though he never said ‘half-sister,’ just ‘sister.’ ‘This is my sister, Sheilagh Fielding.’

  “He told me all about Sarah, gave me a picture of her. ‘Here she is,’ he said, ‘your sister.’ On the back, he’d had her write, ‘To Sheilagh, from Sarah.’

  “Sometimes, I think that if I had told him who I was, he would not have died. He would have been nudged onto a path far enough from the one he followed that it would have led him safely home. I know it makes no sense —”

  I pulled my chair over beside hers. She raised her head and looked at me. I kissed her on the lips; she kissed me back. And then she all but pulled me from the chair and held me to her, her arms beneath mine, which were crossed around her neck, her arms enfolding me completely, hugging me twice as hard as I hugged her, or was able to, for I was hugging her with all my might.

  I thought of what she had said about David, how it tortured her to think that if she had told him who she was, he might have made it safely home. A nudge here, a nudge there. Had any one of a thousand things been different, the two of us — But I had no sooner thought it than I knew that I was wrong, that I had freely chosen to remain apart. And though the past was not lost to us, though it was there with us in that room while we held each other, I would not have changed it if I could.

  Forty years of love were consummated with one hug. With my face pressed against her neck, I smelled her skin, a smell whose distinctiveness made me realise I had never held anyone this close, this fervently, before. Not even my wife. I felt or heard, I could not tell which, the beating of her heart, felt her cheek, wet and warm, against mine, tears from her face dripping onto mine as if both of us were crying.

  We could not have stayed that way for long. Had she hugged me any harder, my bones would not have held. And soon she was out of what breath her old illness begrudged her at the age of fifty-five. We pulled apart.