The Colony of Unrequited Dreams

by Wayne Johnston

  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.

  In the way you would say of someone, “He’s not himself today,” I thought of you as being permanently not yourself. Lack of sleep, overwork, your wife’s absence, made you what you seemed to others to be, but I believed there was another latent Dr. Fielding and was always waiting for him to show himself.

  You were a good “chest man,” but not an especially good one, not, as you said of other doctors in other fields, “top-notch.” I was ten before I realized this, before I realized that others did not see you as I did, were not as awed by you as I was, that there were men in the world in whose company you felt inferior, deficient. I noticed you never referred to other “chest men” as “top-notch,” not even those who visited St. John’s from places like New York and London. There were, and still are, a good many “chest men” in St. John’s. This was the specialty where you could not only do the most good but make the most money, and you would leave it to me, you said, to decide which of these two considerations mattered most to your colleagues.

  I think that over the years, you made some sort of peace with your limitations. Not that admitting to yourself that you would never be top-notch made you any less inclined to push yourself or more inclined to sleep. But you were motivated now by guilt, not by ambition. You were still trying to compensate for being unexceptional, but you were doing so for your patients now.

  When I was twelve, you asked me if I wanted to go to a private school in Scotland like so many other girls my age were doing. I told you I would go if that was what you wanted. You took me in your arms and hugged me. “We’ll send you to Bishop Spencer instead,” you said. “How would that be?” I nodded and you kissed me on the cheek. It was the only time in my life that you ever hugged or kissed me. I didn’t understand then that the point of the question was not to try to get rid of me, but to see if I wanted to be rid of you.

  We drifted apart after they released me from the San. Not that we saw each other any less frequently. I still went to the old house on Circular Road, but I could see in your eyes that you wanted me to stay away. I knew why, though we never talked about it. We would sit there on Sunday afternoons and often, in spite of yourself, you let me make you laugh.

  You were so ashamed of yourself, you couldn’t bear to see me, couldn’t forgive yourself. You thought I didn’t understand, or that I was pretending not to understand, how profoundly you betrayed me by not coming to the San to say goodbye. But it was because you stayed away that I knew how much you loved me. I didn’t feel abandoned or betrayed.

  And you thought I didn’t know that you had done something else for which you thought you didn’t deserve to be forgiven. But I knew.

  In the end, you found what you must have thought was the perfect way of making restitution.

  You told the other Fieldings not to send for me.

  You knew that they would do as you said, that they thought you didn’t want me there because, like them, you were ashamed of me, because you had come to your senses at last and disowned me.

  You fancied that by this, it was yourself you were denying. You had abandoned me and so you deserved to be abandoned. An eye for an eye. How could you not have known that this, of all the ways you might have hurt me, was the worst?

  Still, you cannot stop me from remembering.

  On those rare occasions when you were able to make time for me, you used to give me make-believe check-ups. You put your stethoscope on the soles of my feet and listened with an air of grave concentration. You put it on my forehead and claimed that you could hear what I was thinking. You tapped me on the head with your little rubber hammer and looked at me quizzically, appraisingly, as if awaiting some result. To test my eyes, you put a tongue depressor on your own tongue, said, “Ahhhh,” and asked me to tell you what I saw.

  You were nominally, perfunctorily, a Methodist. We went to church regularly because, you said, “Patients like to think their doctors are in God’s good books.” But whether you believed in God or some promised land, some happy sight, some “Bonavista” that was waiting for you on the other side, I don’t know. Asked to declare yourself on the subject, you once said, “The grave’s a fine and private spot / where none I think do ought but rot.”

  I love you now no less than when I was just a girl. To quote the inscription on the headstone of your favourite writer, “He has gone where savage indignation can lacerate his heart no more.”

  Fielding’s Condensed

  History of Newfoundland

  Chapter Nineteen:

  THE COLONIAL OFFICE SEES ITS ERROR

  There is dancing in the streets of St. John’s on April 26, 1841, when the legislature is dissolved and the constitution is suspended.

  It is recommended that in their place should be put an amalgamated assembly consisting of fifteen elected and nine appointed Protestant members.

  When it is observed that all the Protestant Conservatives need to dominate the assembly is to win four of the fifteen elected seats, the Colonial Office sees its error and increases the number of appointed members to ten.

  The passage of bills is found to be much easier under this system. Unfortunately, it lasts but seven years, and would not have lasted even that long had not the city of St. John’s been destroyed by fire on June 9, 1846, twenty-seven years after the Reevesian Reverend Lewis Amadeus Anspach published his maddening History of the Island of Newfoundland.

  The Nones of 1932

  Newfoundland was one hundred million dollars in debt, much of it owing to the cost of fighting on the side of England in the First World War. The interest charges alone equalled half our annual revenue. Over 50 per cent of the country’s population was unemployed.

  I devoted an entire issue of the Dog to explaining why the worldwide depression, and not Sir Richard, was to blame. I even went about the city, stump-speaking as I had done in New York, sermonizing those who
could not read, trying to explain to them what the word depression meant and how the success of our economy was tied to the economies of other, larger countries where things were almost as bad now as they had been five years ago in Newfoundland.

  I became known throughout St. John’s as Crackie, a pun on the Dog, a crackie being a small, incessantly barking dog whose inconsequential tenacity strikes people as hilarious.

  I stood one day in early April in Bannerman Park on a kitchen chair while hundreds of unemployed men gathered round me and demanded to know why Sir Richard was letting this “depression” go on. A hundred feet away, inside the Colonial Building, Sir Richard was having this very question disingenuously put to him by the Opposition, who knew the depression had nothing to do with Newfoundland.

  I looked out across a sea of sod-tweed caps and suddenly realized that if I delivered my defence of Sir Richard in Swahili, it would have the same effect. I indignantly denied, without having any idea whether it was true or not, an allegation that had been made by Sir Richard’s own finance minister, Peter Cashin, that Sir Richard had falsified cabinet minutes to conceal misuse of public funds. I told those men assembled there in the pouring rain that there was nothing hypocritical about him paying himself, over and above his salary as prime minister, a yearly stipend of five thousand dollars as Newfoundland’s war reparations commissioner while at the same time reducing benefits to war veterans.

  They were on the dole, being paid by the government six cents a day, which worked out to twenty-one dollars and ninety cents a year. They stood there in the slantwise driven rain, coughing, shivering, faces fiercely braced against the wind, and they listened to me, and it seems incomprehensible to me now that they did not take me and hang me from the nearest tree. All that saved me, as it had so many times in New York, was my appearance, for I was dressed no better than they were and, if anything, had less meat on my bones.

  When I heard that the Tories were organizing an anti-government march on the Colonial Building, I searched the public accounts and set out in detail in a special edition of the Dog the large sums of public money that had gone to opposition leader Alderdice’s firm over the last twenty-five years.

  I joined the march minutes before it reached the Colonial Building. The merchants had declared the day of the march a holiday and ordered their employees to attend, an order they had complied with, as I could tell from how well, relatively speaking, some of the crowd were dressed.

  But most of the men there were unemployed and Tory henchmen were going about among them with boxes, handing out free bottles of rum. By the time the march reached the Colonial Building, most of the mob of ten thousand were well on their way to being drunk.

  I worked my way through the crowd, handing out free copies of the Dog, some of which were thrown back at me. But as most of the men there could not read, they thought I was a Tory handing out anti-Squires propaganda sheets and not only let me through but cleared the way for me.

  While Alderdice was speaking, denouncing what he called Sir Richard’s scandal-racked administration, I managed to get within earshot of him and so often and so loudly demanded I be allowed to address the crowd that he gave in and invited me up on-stage, literally gave me a hand up while around me men were telling me what my fate would have been were Mr. Alderdice not such a gentleman.

  I thought he was being gracious, but I was not long into my speech before I realized that I had been had, that Alderdice had foreseen that nothing would incite the crowd against Sir Richard like someone getting up to speak in his defence. I told the ten thousand I was facing to beware of Greeks bearing gifts, beware of Water Street merchants giving advice in politics.

  “Shut him up,” the crowd roared. “Throw him off the steps.” But Alderdice allowed me to continue. I walked back and forth on the steps as though I were on a stage, wagging the finger of my upraised hand each time I enumerated one of Sir Richard’s successes as prime minister.

  I had often envisaged a scene like this when I was under the tutelage of Grimes, “the people” storming the Colonial Building like the Bolsheviks storming the Winter Palace. I had not imagined a revolution led by businessmen, or that I would be fighting to preserve the status quo.

  I wandered too near to the side of the steps and a pair of massive hands reached out and grabbed me by the ankles. I was still singing Sir Richard’s praises as I toppled over onto a canopy of upraised hands. Thus held aloft, on my back and still declaiming, I was passed from row to row all the way to Military Road, where I was dumped onto the pavement and where a man told me he would “stop my gob for good” if I said another word.

  I hung back at the edge of the crowd, which soon turned into a mob. They no longer listened to Alderdice. They threw rocks and empty rum bottles at the front of the Colonial Building. A cheer went up each time a pane of one-hundred-year-old glass was broken.

  In a last-ditch attempt to restore order, the Guards Band came out on the steps and struck up a shaky rendition of “God Save the King.” Every man in the crowd stood rigidly to attention and took off their caps, some with rocks still clenched in their fists, and stayed that way until the anthem ended, at which point they put on their caps and went back to rioting. The Guards Band struck up “God Save the King” a second time, but they were pelted with rocks and forced to disperse.

  Alderdice and his caucus looked about at what they must have known they would be blamed for starting. They shouted and ran about, trying to restore order, but when it became clear that the distinction between government and opposition supporters was becoming lost on the crowd, they fled in all directions.

  Government members who had been inside the building also began to flee, and though they were pelted with rocks and denounced as thieves and worse, no one tried to prevent their escape. It was Sir Richard the mob wanted, him and no one else.

  They moved forward, hurling rocks and bricks through already broken windows, forced their way through a line of constabulary members on horseback that had just begun to form and proceeded to loot the lobby, dragging furniture out of it, rolling armchairs, sofas, flower-pots and vases down the steps. They piled them in a heap, threw some rugs and paintings on top and set fire to it all.

  The grand piano, on which, on formal occasions, “God Save the King,” the “Ode to Newfoundland” and anthems of other nations were played, was sent, keys clattering, down the steps and wound up on its side with a crescendo twang. A cheer went up and soon the piano was ablaze.

  I made my way, as inconspicuously as possible, along the iron fence, accepting an occasional kick in the backside rather than fight back and draw even more attention to myself.

  “Where are you headed?” a voice off to my left said. Fielding was leaning on the Bannerman Park side of the fence, watching the riot through the iron bars, notebook in hand, frantically scribbling. It was like some tableau of her life: Fielding the critic, aloofly watching a riot from the safe side of the fence.

  “If you’re planning to make another speech, I’d choose a different theme if I were you,” she said.

  She was wearing a heavy woollen overcoat and a stevedore-style stocking cap, her hair hanging down from beneath it. I noticed that her hair was greying and that it had picked up a yellowish tinge from the smoke of cigarettes. But it was still the thick and full hair of a thirty-five-year-old woman. A strand of it, when the wind blew, clung between her lips. She pulled it away with exactly the same flourish of annoyance as when she was a girl. Her cheeks were pink with the cold, her nostrils raw from rubbing and over her eyes there was a glaze of wind-bidden tears, which she kept blinking back. In spite of her overcoat, her lips were quivering. It made me want to touch them with my fingers. For an instant I saw her as I had seen Newfoundland when I had returned to it the first time. It was as if we had never met and never would, Fielding as she would have been if I did not exist, a person apart from me who would remain when I was gone. The world resumed; the mob roared all around me and a gust of wind that seconds ago had come in
from across the water blew hard against my face.

  “I didn’t think you actually covered anything,” I said, gulping down a lump in my throat. “I thought you only wrote about what you read in other papers.”

  She wryly smiled. “I just followed the crowd,” she said. “They went right below my window.”

  “The Squireses are still inside, both of them, Sir Richard and Lady Helena,” I said. “I’m trying to get in there, but I’ll never make it by myself, I’m such a runt. I don’t suppose you’d help clear the way for me.”

  “What good will you be able to do once you get inside?” she said.

  “I don’t know,” I said. “But for all I know, they may be in there by themselves.”

  Fielding looked at me, then at the Colonial Building, pursed her lips, sighed. “I’m sure there’s a column in it,” she said. She put her notebook and her pencil in the pocket of her overcoat, passed her cane through the fence to me, undid her overcoat, hiked her dress up above her knees, then, with surprising quickness, climbed onto the fence, hoisting herself up onto each of the rungs with her good leg, then lifting the other. I saw the bad leg, or the shape of it, at least — she was wearing longjohns — for the first time. It was not malformed, it seemed, just shrunken, withered, each part in proportion to the others, as much of it as I could see, at least. It might have looked perfectly normal on a woman half her size.

  With one leg on either side, standing on top of the fence, she paused to look out over the crowd, shook her head. Then she climbed down, good leg, bad leg, good leg, bad leg, as before. She jumped the last few feet to the ground, took her cane from me and waded into the crowd. She took off her hat and stuffed it in her pocket, shook out her hair, I presumed so the men, seeing that she was a woman, might let her through.