The Colony of Unrequited Dreams (67 page)

The time was long past when, in the hallway of a boarding-house at night, I could shout my name.

“It’s me,” I said. She opened the door. She was wearing a white, open-necked blouse outside a pair of black slacks, and her feet were bare.

“Oh, God,” she said, her cigarette shunted to one side of her mouth. “A midnight visit from the premier.” I was about to speak, but she beat me to it. “What’s that?” she said, “a bag of money? You can just leave it with all the others if you like. First door on your left as you leave the building.”

“Can I come in?” I said. She motioned me inside with a waiter-like flourish of her hand.

“You were working?” I said.

“I was,” she said, mock-sighing, “so many scandals, so little column space. A woman’s work these days is never done. We’re starting something new this weekend, the Valdmanis supplement —”

“I’m not here about all that,” I said. She glanced at the duffel bag again.

“Sit down,” she said, “sit down.”

We sat at the only table in the room, the one on which she worked, ate, read, drank, and slumped over some nights and slept,
I had no doubt. Now that I lived where and how I did, her accommodations seemed unbelievably shabby. There was a bottle of Scotch in its usual place, the back right corner of the desk. I was so accustomed to seeing it there, it looked like a knick-knack. For her, since Confederation, nothing much had changed.

We sat at right angles, me side-on to the narrow end of the table. I put the bag on the floor beside my feet. She poured herself a glass of Scotch from the bottle, offered me one, but I declined.

“All right,” she said, “I’ll bite, what’s in the bag? The head of someone you’re not as fond of as you used to be? The —”

“Copies of your journals,” I said. “All of them, or most of them, I’m sure, since you were in the San. Valdmanis had them made while the three of us were travelling abroad. That’s why he suggested I invite you along, to get you away from here long enough to give the place a thorough going over.”

Fielding slumped back in her chair, fingered and stared at her glass, sighed.

“I don’t understand,” she said, “I don’t pose that much of a threat to you, do I?”

“No. But I convinced him that you did,” I said. “After I convinced myself. Not so much a threat as a — distraction. A lifelong distraction. But I didn’t know about” — I indicated the bag — “about this. I didn’t know he had — people in here while the three of us were on that junket. He wanted something on you, you see, not something he could use against you, but something he could use to get a favour from me, should the need ever arise, which he had every reason to think it might.”

Fielding looked away from me, waiting, I was sure, to see how much I knew, how much I had deduced from the journals in which, though she must have intended that no one else would ever read them, she had been inscrutably secretive about some things until after Confederation, constantly referring to “it” or the “something” that had happened. Early in my reading of the journals, I thought Valdmanis was trying to trick me; I had to read so much
before I found what I was looking for. In fact, there were still some things I did not know, and other things I was convinced were true but could not prove. I believed I knew who the writer of the letter was, but I was still not sure of his motivation. That seemed as good a place as any to start.

“Your father sent that letter —”

“Don’t be ridiculous —”

“You confessed for him, to protect him.”

“Does that seem like the sort of thing that he would have done?” she said. She stood up, however, grabbed her cane, which was leaned against the wall, and hobbled to the window, her back to me. For a long time neither of us spoke. She turned and came back to the table, turned her chair to face mine, one arm resting on the table, cupping her cheek. She closed her eyes.

“Yes,” she said at last, nodding her head. “It seems that things are not always exactly what they seem to be. My father knew that you were the only townie in the dorm and that, because the letter was postmarked St. John’s during Christmas, when all the bayboys were away, Reeves would assume or at least suspect that you wrote it.”

“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.”