The Colony of Unrequited Dreams (39 page)

“No,” I said. “You’re probably right. Her heart was never in it. Her heart was never in anything as far as I can tell.”

If Prowse was wounded, it didn’t show. What did he want? He stood up and looked around the makeshift, grubby “newsroom,” which I manned alone day after day.

“I don’t know how you stand it here, Smallwood,” he said. “I know I couldn’t.”

I said nothing. It was a feeble parting shot, and I could tell by his expression that he knew it.

Lady Squires was elected in Lewisporte by a landslide, by a margin of victory even greater than Sir Richard’s had been in the last election, not that I brought this fact to his attention. “Having the prime minister’s wife as your member in the House is as good as having the prime minister himself,” Sir Richard said when I went to see him one night. “She will not embarrass me,” he added reassuringly, as if I had all along been saying that she would. “She has completed courses in elocution and public speaking at the Emerson College of Oratory in Boston.” Whereas I, I felt like saying, had merely completed a course in public speaking as a means of self-preservation in the slums of Harlem, where it was my daily task to convince blacks whose ancestors had been brought to America in slave ships that the election of thirty-seven white presidents in a row was no cause for them to do something cynical like refuse to vote. It also occurred to me that the subject of the only speech I had ever heard Lady Squires give was “Why women should not be allowed to vote.”

I was trying, unsuccessfully it seems, not to scowl. Though I need not have bothered, for Sir Richard seemed more puzzled than
displeased by my dismay, as if, his happiness being uppermost in everybody’s mind, he could not understand my disappointment.

I saw Fielding struggling towards her boarding-house one day in mid-winter, trying to make her cane look like an affectation, trying not to look as though she needed it to walk. I followed behind her, making sure she didn’t see me. She stopped every fifty feet or so, exhausted, chest heaving, mouth open, and leaned against something, a wall, a gatepost, as if the better to examine something that had caught her eye, or as if she were pausing at the halfway point of a long walk and would soon be on her way again. To the people passing briskly by she nodded, as if to include herself in this fellowship of walkers.

She resumed her journey and eventually reached her boarding-house and, with me mere feet behind her, began to make her way up the icy steps, clutching the rail. When she got to the top, I called her name. She turned around and looked down at me.

“Oh, to be in England, now that Smallwood’s here,” she said. We had not met since we had written about our school days in the papers.

“It was just politics, Fielding,” I said, trying to sound as if I had got the best of the exchange and so was magnanimously offering the olive branch. “You can’t expect people not to fight back if you write about them like you do. Some of my best friends are people I’ve accused of doing worse.”

“There must be something about you that inspires forgiveness, Smallwood,” she said, “or else you’d have been murdered long ago. Come up and have a drink with me. I find myself in a mood that makes even your company seem preferable to none at all.”

We went up to her room.

“Do you know,” she said, “my intake of rum exactly matches my output of words. A column a day, a bottle a day. When I wrote two columns a week, I drank two bottles a week. One sip, one sentence; one drink, one paragraph; one bottle, one column. I don’t
know if the drinking helps me write, or the writing makes me drink. Both perhaps. At any rate, I have been told by a doctor that I have to cut back to one bottle a week, one column a week, if I want to witness Sir Richard’s second resurrection from the dead, which by my reckoning should take place eight years from now. I’d just as soon miss it, to tell you the truth, if the alternative was anything but nothing.”

“I practically write the whole
Dog
myself,” I said. “I hardly ever take a drink.”

“An extraordinary accomplishment, to be sure,” she said. “I can’t even read it while I’m sober. It’s not how you foresaw yourself at thirty, is it, Smallwood? Defending Richard Squires in a paper called the
Dog
?”

“Prowse works for Sir Richard,” I said. “He’s his executive assistant. But of course you knew that?” When she didn’t answer, I got up to leave.

“Sit down, sit down,” Fielding said, putting her hands on my shoulders and all but forcing me into the chair. She poured herself a drink and stood with her back against the wall.

“My father died last week,” she said. “They didn’t tell me. Some kind of mix-up. My uncle thought my aunt was going to, and she thought he was going to, or something. I don’t know. The desk editor at the
Telegram
assumed I knew, or else he would have called me when they phoned it in, he said. I read about it in the paper. Ever since I left the San, I’ve been scanning the obituaries, keeping tabs on the old crowd. Ghoulish of me, I know. And there, Tuesday last week, was my name. Fielding. I bet a lot of the San crowd thought it was me. It didn’t dawn on me until I was halfway through the obituary who it was I was reading about.”

“I’m sorry,” I said, and I was, though I could not help sounding like I begrudged her even my condolences, as if for her to lapse from irony even to confess her father’s death was not playing by the tacitly agreed-upon rules that governed our relationship.

“Was your father religious?” I said.

“He went to church,” Fielding said. “Why do you ask?”

“Do you believe in God?” I said.

“I believe in God the way I believe that this is my last drink,” she said. “I believe it, even though I know it’s not.”

“Well,” I said, “I have to go.”

“You won’t have a drink with me,” said Fielding.

“I can’t,” I said, certain I could not hold out much longer against the urge to feel sorry for her and lose the sense of grievance against her that I realized had become curiously sustaining. “I have to go,” I said. “I have — I have to meet someone.” I looked around the room, at the bed. I felt as though we had last spoken that night in New York at the Hotel Newfoundland.

“Prowse came to see me,” I said. “To ask about New York.” I was not sure if I was trying to make her feel better or worse.

Fielding said nothing, only raised her eyebrows in a token of mock surprise. She stared at her glass.

“It might not be a bad idea,” I said. “Cutting back on the booze.”

She shrugged. Tears welled up in her eyes.

“Well,” I said again, “I have to go.”

“You don’t have to,” she said. “You can stay. For as long as you like.”

“No,” I said, “I’ve got to — I know you’re — I’m sorry about your father.”

I hurried out and closed the door behind me. When I got outside, I had to grab the rail to keep my hands from shaking.

F
IELDING’S JOURNAL
, J
ANUARY
17, 1932

Dear Father:

You were a doctor, a “chest man,” scornful of your profession because you loved your patients and pitied them for having no
one better to turn to for help than, as you put it, “the likes of me.” If you muttered aloud in your consulting room the way you did at home about some man who, for all you knew, your remedies were inadvertently murdering by slow degrees, your patients must have been a fretful lot
.

You inherited from your father a reprint of a pamphlet that was written in the sixteenth century by a John Fielding, who was probably not an ancestor of ours, though you liked to believe or pretend that he was. The pamphlet described in great detail a medical procedure that you called mental ventilation, that is, the drilling of holes in the skulls of the sick to let the “evil spirits” out. You loved to read the pamphlet aloud. “This yeere have we the skull drille employed with great success. Three men died who woulde anywaye have perished, but three still live and showe signes of recoverye that we hope will soone make possible a seconde application of the drille
.”

You were my mother’s husband when you were home and aware of her existence, which wasn’t often, not nearly often enough. You worked long hours. We lived in a place, you said, where nothing thrived except disease. My mother was from Boston and went back there when I was five. And moved from there to New York when I was ten
.

For a long time I believed, and was probably right in believing, that you wished my mother had taken me with her when she left. There was no question of her doing so, of course. Even a widow with a child would not have made a good marriage prospect, but a woman who, however justifiably, had left her husband and had in her care a constant reminder to herself and others of that fact would not have fared well in Boston. My mother had no resources and no means of getting them but marriage. She could not have had any confidence when she thought of setting out from Newfoundland that she would soon or ever be able to support a child
.

I have only the faintest, possibly counterfeit, recollections of my mother. I don’t remember her saying goodbye to you. There was apparently a divorce worded with sufficient vagueness as to absolve both of you with faint blame. My mother’s father came from Boston to escort her home. He did not come into the house, or perhaps he did and I was kept from seeing him, I’m not sure. I think I remember my mother walking down the driveway with her father, presumably to a waiting cab. I remember her crying, squatting down to embrace me
.

What I was told was happening and by whom, I don’t remember, but I’m sure I wasn’t told she was leaving us for good. Nor do I remember when I realized she wasn’t coming back
.

You did not purge the house of her after she went back to Boston. As if to prove you were neither broken-hearted nor humiliated, you left her picture on the mantelpiece. My mother as she was not long after you first met. Perhaps that was the point, to distinguish the girl you fell in love with from the woman you divorced. You did not so much show me as leave where I might find them the albums in which there were pictures of you and her together, Dr. and Mrs. Fielding and with them, sometimes, Baby Sheilagh
.

The kind of silence that follows the slamming of a door persisted in that house for years. It was there even while the radio was playing and when relatives came to visit, and when we talked. We were never quiet in each other’s company if we could help it; the silence made her absence so palpable. It was as though life as it would have been if she had stayed was taking place in some room in the house that, no matter how long we searched for it, we could never find
.

You cursed your body’s need for sleep and, in token protest of it, slept while sitting in a chair with all your clothes on. I was always in bed before you got home, always in bed but never asleep. Even the housekeeper, on your instructions, never waited
up, but left something in the stove for you to eat, which was often still there in the morning
.

After I heard you coming up the steps and opening the front door, I waited for you to settle down, then tiptoed out to see if you were still awake, which you sometimes were, tipped back in your recliner, staring at the ceiling
.

You rarely noticed me until I was standing right beside you, though the sight of me never startled you. As though you were as immobilized as one of your patients, you turned just your head and smiled and reached out your hand for mine, squeezing it lightly. “Hello, there,” you said. You looked at me, and as if my very age was an expression of unwarranted optimism, you shook your head in fond disbelief that anyone could be so naive as to be five years old. You didn’t see girlhood so much as a stage in life as a character trait. I was girlish, you were mannish; these things would always be the case
.

And so you told me everything, things five-year-olds should not hear, I suppose. You told me of patients who had died or were going to, and of others who were getting better, always speaking of the latter with a tinge of irony, as if to say that however much better they got, the world they were returning to was still the same
.

Sometimes, you fell asleep while talking to me, or I came out and found you asleep, your arms folded across your chest. If you were wearing your hat, I took it off and put it on the floor beside your chair, as you did when you remembered to. I didn’t have to be especially careful not to wake you, for, once asleep, you slept soundly, deeply, as if your body was making the most of the few hours it had you in its care
.

It was a strange sight to see you sleeping. It was hard to believe you’d trust something so unreliable and treacherous as your body to sustain you without your supervision. I stood beside you, marvelling that there existed in you something more basic, more fundamental than your will, something that made
your chest move up and down, drew air into your body and forced it out again. It always made me think there must be more to your waking self than met the eye, not that you seemed to me lacking or deficient in anything exactly. Perhaps it was your sleeping in your clothes, sometimes even in your hat and coat, that did it. It seemed to me that your impressive hat and coat and vest and pants and shoes were sleeping, too
.