The Colony of Unrequited Dreams (23 page)

I stood on a soapbox and looked out over a sea of black faces, blacks at first mute with incredulity at the sight of these two whites among them — Fielding in her “finery,” me exhorting them to self-betterment by voting for a party that, though it claimed to be colour-blind, had almost no black members. I was, at first at least, so ingenuously unaware of the danger I was in and so earnest in describing the racism-free society that I believed would come about through socialism that they let me speak, their expressions seeming to say that they might as well let me entertain them.

I told them I was from Newfoundland, and when they said they had never heard of it, I said, as though by way of proving it existed, that I would be its prime minister one day.

“You’re the puniest politician I ever seen,” one man said. I told him I was not a politician yet, but was speaking on behalf of a party candidate who was running in the state elections and who could not be everywhere at once.

“Never mind once,” the man said, “he ain’t
never
been here. He’s afraid to come in here, das why he sent you.” The crowd laughed.

“Under socialism, you will all have better lives,” I said.

“You got socialism,” a woman said. “It don’t look like it done you much good.” She turned to Fielding. “Why don’t you let him have some of the food? You look like you eatin’ it all and then some.”

“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.

F
IELDING’S JOURNAL
, F
EBRUARY
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”: