The Colony of Unrequited Dreams (24 page)

Fish for breakfast, fish for lunch,
Of fish I cannot stand the sight.
And worst of all this savage bunch
Who bugger me night after night.
I wish we had some women here,
I wish some womenfolk would come.
The men then might not be so queer,
Nor, I think, so sore my bum.

Hines

F
OR WEEKS, TOO
overwrought to do much work, I walked about the streets of New York, occasionally basking in the fact that none of the thousands of people passing by knew my secret, my humiliation. Fleetingly, among strangers, it seemed to me I had nothing to be ashamed of, no reason to feel humiliated or sick at heart. I told myself that whatever I had felt for her, I would feel for other women, more, in fact. There were women in the world who could inspire in me more love than Fielding had; it was foolish to fret and moon about the way I was. Not that I would marry any of these women, or even have affairs with them, or … Gradually, in this manner, I came to miss her more and more as the weeks went by.

Things got no better in New York for reporters. In midwinter, when I could no longer afford my boarding-house, where the rent was six dollars a week, I moved out, temporarily, I hoped. I allotted myself forty cents a day for food: a ten-cent breakfast and a thirty-cent plate of pork and beans and bread, and apple pie and coffee for dessert. That was my dinner menu every day for the next two months.

I moved into a flop-house near the Forty-Second Street public library on Sixth Avenue. The room was fifty cents a night and its main drawback was that every so often, the el train would roar by, so I did not get much sleep. I stayed there for a few days, then realized I had to find an even cheaper place or I would soon be out of money. I moved into a twenty-five-cent-a-night flop-house farther downtown, a disconcertingly short distance from the Bowery, which for people down on their luck was looked upon as the point of no return.

For me, it would be the point of return, the return to Newfoundland, that is, but the thought of going home a failure, as my father had done from Boston thirty years before, made me determined that I would somehow stick it out.

I moved to a dorm-like flop-house called the Floor, where all you got for your fifteen cents was floor space. I was never more aware of not looking like I could put up much resistance. I had heard of what happened at the Floor to people too drunk or too enfeebled to protect themselves.

There was no one there to keep order, no one to appeal to for help. Behind the desk downstairs, there was a huge fellow whose one concern was that no one make off with one of the three-cents-a-night blankets and who discouraged the practice by hanging on the wall behind him a conspicuously dented baseball bat.

I spent three nights at the Floor but never slept. For fear of having them stolen out from under my head, I did not use my boots for a pillow as some were doing, but left them on my feet. I wish everyone had followed my example, for the place reeked of stinking socks and boots. Sitting up with nothing to lean against, even with my hands on the floor behind me, proved to be exhausting, and when I could no longer do it, I rested on one forearm and signalled my degree of wakefulness by smoking cigarettes at measured intervals to make them last.

It was now early spring, the middle of a milder than usual April in New York. Determined not to stay at any more fifteen-centers,
and so that I could use what little money I still had left for food, I joined the ranks of men who slept behind the library on the marble benches in Bryant Park. For blankets I used newspapers that I fished from garbage cans. I woke up many mornings with my hair and whiskers rimed with frost after a night of feverish, shivering dreams in which the cold and Fielding always played a part. In one dream, I met her on the street walking arm in arm with Reeves, and when I tried to explain away the tremors and the palsied shaking of my hands, she smiled at Reeves as if she had warned me I would come to this unless I changed my ways. Other nights, it seemed the bench beneath me was a wooden bunk, and I could hear the coal crank and the pelt chute of the S.S.
Newfoundland
. To keep warm, I smoked cigarettes beneath a canopy of newspapers. I slept on the same bench every night, making sure I got back to the park in time to claim it. I somehow managed to fit my body to its distinctive shape, found a little hollow in the marble for my hip, but in the mornings awoke so stiff-limbed that I could barely move.

It was the duty of a cop named Barnes, who patrolled the park, to keep the benches vagrant-free throughout the day. Early in the morning, he walked along the bench-lined path, whacking each sleeper on the soles of his feet with his nightstick. “Rise and shine,” Barnes would say. Soon, all over the park, like statues coming to life, men were sitting up, yawning, rubbing their eyes.

I wondered what my father would say if he could see me, reduced to bedding down on my marble bench at night. Yet the only thing that made this existence tolerable was knowing that anytime I wished, I could escape it and resume my other life in Newfoundland. At the same time, I hated the thought of being forced to go back home against my will, penniless and looking it. I would have to telegraph to my first cousin, Walter, who now, after Uncle Fred’s death, owned the boot-and-shoe factory, for my fare home for one thing. I knew that he would send it, but I also knew that even if I paid him back, he would treat me forever after as his father had treated mine.

Bryant Park was full of men like me, trying to hold out as long as they could, hoping their luck would change, dreading the day they would have to admit that the big city was too much for them and go back home. It was the knowledge that there were so many others just like me that was most dispiriting; all of us who had come to the city convinced that we were exceptional, unique, were now beset by the same hackneyed fate, living out the last days of our stint in the big city in this rube-ville of a holding park before we went back home to take up our roles as local object-lessons for those who imagined they were different.

One morning I was awakened on the marble bench, not by Barnes, but by someone who, because I was not wearing my glasses, I could not make out and whose voice I did not recognize.

“Oh my, oh my, oh my,” boomed the voice. For a while, I thought that I was dreaming. “Another starry-eyed Newfoundlander reduced to nothing in New York.”

The speaker had a deep, quavering voice that projected clear across the park, prompting the men on the benches to sit up and stare, not only at him, but also at me, as if they were wondering what was wrong with me that I had to be addressed at such a volume.

I took out my glasses and put them on and saw, standing over me, a man who appeared to be well over six feet tall. He had curly, black, wildly unkempt hair that came down almost to his eyes, thick black eyebrows and burnsides that joined like a strap beneath his chin. He wore a black peaked sea-captain’s hat and glasses with thick lenses that made his dark eyes look even larger than they were, which in turn, along with a knowing half-smile, made it seem that he was staring at you as if he thought you were trying to hide something and, under close scrutiny, would give yourself away.

He wore a kind of tail-coat that at one time might have been the jacket of a footman or a butler. It hung down almost to his knees and was frayed at the edges, smudged all over with what
might have been dust or chalk as if he had begun the day by rolling in the street.

“How did you know I was a Newfoundlander?” I said.

“It’s written all over you,” he said. “Literally. You have the name of Smallwood on your shoes.” He smiled and shook his head. “I walk through all the parks in the city from time to time,” he said, “on the lookout for Newfoundlanders. They aren’t usually as easy to spot as you. I’ve had my eye on you for quite some time.”

I wondered how close to me he must have got to be able to read the name of Smallwood on the soles of my shoes.

“What do you mean?” I said. “Who are you?”

“First,” he said, “let us settle the question of who you are. You are, judging by your accent, from St. John’s. You have been in New York for three, at the most four, years. You have been shunning your own kind since you arrived, for they remind you of things you came here to forget or at least to get away from for a while. After achieving some small success at home, you came here to prove that you could be successful anywhere. You either believe, or did when you set out, that you will never go back home, or else that you will go back someday in triumph, a made man who will never have to prove himself again.”

“You could be describing any Newfoundlander in New York,” I said.

“If you had been spending time with Newfoundlanders in New York, you would not think so. Most Newfoundlanders come here with other Newfoundlanders and, while here, associate with Newfoundlanders. But it could have been myself I was describing, myself some years ago.”

The whole thing had the self-consciously momentous tone of some biblical encounter, the first meeting of Christ with one of his apostles. It was unnerving.

“Another reason I know you haven’t been associating with Newfoundlanders is that you don’t know who I am,” he said. “I am Tom Hines, and I am the owner and publisher of a newspaper
called the
Backhomer
. Subscribers in forty different countries. More foreign correspondents than
The New York Times
.”

“I’ve never heard of it,” I said.

He smiled. “What’s your name?” he said.

“Joe Smallwood,” I said. “And yes, I am related to the man who makes the boots. My grandfather started the store and my cousin runs it now.”

“What about your father?” he said, looking at me with those enlarged eyes of his. One of them was badly bloodshot.

“He’s not involved with the store,” I said.

“And therein lies a tale, I’m sure,” said Hines. “What do you do? Or should I say, what did you come here in the hopes of doing?”

“I
am
a newspaper reporter,” I said. “I worked for nearly two years at the
Call
before it folded.”

He smiled as if he knew everything about me now that he would ever need to know.

“The
Call
,” he said. “Written and read by One Worlders. It’s just as well it went under. I’m told it was published on paper so thin it never made much of a blanket.”

Angrily throwing off the newspapers I was covered with, I stood up with the intention of replying in kind when a wave of dizziness hit me and sent me backwards onto the bench. When I opened my eyes, Hines was still there, smiling down at me as if my dizziness was his doing.

“When did you last eat?” he said.

I shrugged.

He reached into his blazer and took out a card. “This is the address of a place where you can stay until you are better able to support yourself.” He took a pencil out of the same pocket and began to write something on the back of the card. “And this,” he said, “is the address of the
Backhomer
. Come see me. I don’t exactly have a job for you, but if you come to work for me, I’ll give you a place to stay and pay you when I can.”

He extended the card to me and, when I declined to take it, tucked it into the pocket of my jacket. I was too dizzy and too weary to resist.

“Remember, man,” I thought I heard him saying as he left, “thou art a Newfoundlander and unto Newfoundland thou shalt return.”

I lasted two more nights on my bench in Bryant Park, sleeping in the library throughout the day with a book on my lap that I pretended I was reading.

The third morning after meeting Hines, I awoke before the sun was up, gingerly eased myself into a sitting position. I saw on the ground a cigarette butt, reached down to pick it up and toppled off the bench, hitting the ground harder, or sooner, than it seemed I should have. I lay on my back. Then, remembering my childhood misconception that lying on your back was a symptom of the onset of TB, I rolled over onto my side and went back to sleep.

When I awoke again, another man, covered in newspapers, was sleeping on my bench. I somehow managed, using the bench as a support, to get to my feet and considered waking him and telling him the bench was mine, but he looked as though I would be no match for him.

I wandered through the park, looking for an empty bench, but did not find one. I figured I was a day, two at the most, from complete prostration. I fished in my pocket for the card Hines had given me. The address was in Brooklyn. I set out for it on foot.

Twelve hours later, I arrived at my destination, just able to stand. All I noticed of the address was the number 1693 and an illuminated red crucifix above the door. I went inside and handed my card to a woman who sat behind a hotel desk. She took the card from me and scrutinized it.

“We’ll be right with ya, my love,” she said. Then she yelled, “George, there’s one here for the Coop. He’ll be one for the ward if you don’t hurry up.”