The Colony of Unrequited Dreams

by Wayne Johnston

  And so, what happened three months later in mid-January was, at first at least, almost comforting. I met an acquaintance of mine from the Evening Telegram while walking along Duckworth Street one day. We talked for a while, then parted.

  “Oh, by the way,” he shouted back. “Did you hear about Fielding?”

  “No,” I said, trying to sound offhandedly interested, “what about her?” He made a drinking motion, hand to his mouth, head tilted back. Then, shaking his head and grinning, he walked off.

  Fielding drinking again after — what had it been? — nearly seven years. I had not seen her since that night at Fort Pepperrell. She had shown no signs of backsliding then.

  I headed straight for her boarding-house on foot, for it was closer than my car. I dreaded the thought that this Hanrahan meant so much to her that he had something to do with her going back on the booze. Had he jilted her? Had he been killed in action? This last possibility was intolerable. A lover whom she had not known long enough to discover his flaws, whom she would idealize forever.

  I climbed the stairs to her floor, walked down the dingy, cabbage-reeking hallway to her room. I could understand why she lived there when she was drinking and spending all her money on Scotch, but why she had stayed there through seven years of sobriety was beyond me.

  Taped to the door was a note bearing Fielding’s barely legible scrawl: “Shorthall: Gone to Press Club. Do not disturb unless absolutely necessary. Tell Harrington to run one from the file. F.” Shortall was the printer’s devil who collected her copy every day to spare her the walk to the Telegram and back. She did not own a car, did not have a driver’s licence. The “file” was an assortment of all-purpose columns of hers that the Telegram kept on hand for days when she was too sick or otherwise indisposed to write.

  I all but ran down the hill to my car, then drove to the Press Club, where reporters in St. John’s gathered after work but at which, as far as I knew, Fielding was not a regular. But then, neither was I. It was three o’clock in the afternoon.

  The Press Club was in the basement of an office building, accessible from a narrow alleyway that ran between Duckworth Street and Water Street. I descended the two steep flights of stairs to the landing, opened the door and went inside. Lit only by a fireplace just inside the door and by one ground-level window in the far wall, the place was so dark that at first I could make out next to nothing and simply stood there, waiting for my eyes to adjust to the lack of light.

  I barely heard her call my name, though she pronounced it emphatically as if she had already said it several times to no effect. I looked in the direction of her voice and saw her in the alcove formed by the walls of the washroom and the coat check. She was sitting on a pew-like bench, side-on to a table, with her bad leg fully extended. Her left hand was heavily wrapped in a white-gauze bandage.

  “What happened?” I said.

  “Fell down,” she said. There were two brim-full glasses of Scotch on the table.

  “I’m replenishing with my own supply,” she said, tapping her blazer. I heard the clunk of what I presumed must be her flask. “Don’t tell him,” she said, cocking her head in the direction of the bar, where a waiter from whom she was hidden and whom I knew in passing nodded at me, looking as if he was glad to have the reinforcements.

  “What can I get you, Mr. Smallwood?” he said.

  “Just a glass of ginger beer,” I said and sat down opposite Fielding. We were the only customers. The place oppressed me. I was all too familiar with the way bars look and feel on winter afternoons when there is not much light left. I remembered it from my childhood, when on Saturdays my mother sent me to fetch my father home from one of his “establishments.”

  “What brings you here?” she said.

  “You do,” I said.

  She put her cigarette in the ashtray, picked up her Scotch, sipped it, put it down, picked up the cigarette. “Best I can do with one hand,” she said. “Who told you I was here? Harrington?”

  I said nothing.

  “Figures,” she said. “So you’re today’s knight in shining armour.”

  “You had it licked,” I said. “Why did you start again?”

  “Suddenly I’m everybody’s business.”

  “How long?” I said.

  “Two weeks, I think,” she said. “Haven’t written a word in two weeks. More fun talking, don’t you think? I was talking to myself when you arrived.”

  The waiter came with my beer, looked at Fielding, then meaningfully at me.

  “Been giving him a hard time, have you?” I said when he went away.

  “He has come to the conclusion that there is no way that he can throw a crippled woman with a broken wrist out of his bar that will not make him look ridiculous.” She stretched out her leg, wagged a new orthopedic, thick-heeled shoe back and forth. “It’s supposed to make me limp less. I think it’s why I fell.” She patted her cane, which lay on the bench beside her, as if to assure it that it would never be replaced by this new shoe.

  “What happened, Fielding?” I said.

  She shrugged.

  “Seven years,” I said. “Something must have happened. Was it Captain Hanrahan?” I prayed for a scornful reply.

  “I haven’t seen Captain Hanrahan,” she said, “since that night you two met at the movie-house. It was by that time not quite three days since he and I first met.”

  “You seemed to know him fairly well,” I said.

  She shook her head. “I didn’t,” she said. “I didn’t know him at all.”

  “So you started drinking again for no reason?” I said.

  “I stopped for no particular reason,” she said. “I stopped. I started. As simple as that. Things are almost always that simple, Smallwood. Almost everything is exactly what it seems to be. No surprises. No disappointments. Life so far has met my expectations.”

  “I think you should go home, Fielding,” I said. “You’ve only been back on the bottle for two weeks. It wouldn’t be that hard to quit again. Not as hard as it was before. Not as hard as it will be a year from now.”

  She picked up one of the glasses and drank it dry. “I should have stayed home,” she said. “But I can’t bear to be by myself these days.”

  “I’ll go home with you,” I said.

  She raised her eyebrows and put her hand on the neckline of her dress.

  “I mean I’ll make sure you get there,” I said. “I’ll even listen to you for a while.”

  “I probably should leave before the boys from the Telegram show up,” she said. “You never know who might take advantage of a girl with a bum leg. Lucky for me it’s hollow, too. I’m widely presumed to be hard up for it, you know.”

  “Yes, I know,” I said under my breath as I stood up. “You’re not often proposed to, but you’re often propositioned.”

  “I’m often disposed to, too,” she said.

  “You’re drunk,” I said.

  “Probably,” she said. “I’m out of practice after all.” She downed her remaining drink, took some money from her coat pocket and put it on the table, then picked up her cane from the bench. I left some money, too.

  “Where’s your purse?” I said.

  “Do you mean to say, Smallwood,” she said, “that in all this time, you’ve never noticed that I don’t carry a purse?”

  She laughed, eased out from behind the table, then stood up. Swayed, eyes closed. I took her beneath the arm.

  “Out we go,” I said. “Purse or no purse.”

  “You haven’t touched your ginger beer,” she said.

  “Out,” I said, waving to the sheepishly grateful bartender.

  Outside, we barely managed to climb the stairs together. Fielding paused every few seconds to lean back against the building, her overcoat open, her bandaged hand on her chest, her breath coming in rasping plumes of frost. She closed her eyes and looked as though she was ready to fall.

  “Come on,” I said. “My car is parked right at the top of the steps.”
/>   We made it to the car and Fielding, once inside, revived somewhat, catching her breath, smiling, closing her eyes in relief as if we had found shelter from a cloudburst. I drove to her boarding-house and helped her up the stairs to her room, the door of which she had left unlocked.

  “Wait here,” she said, “there are some things I have to put away.” She closed the door. I heard her inside, moving slowly about, her cane clunking on the hardwood floor. I heard a door, a closet door it must have been, opening then closing. Likewise some dresser drawers. Fielding crossed the floor again.

  There was a prolonged silence, then suddenly the sound of the cane clattering with force on the floor and something overturning with a crash. I pushed open the door and hurried inside. Fielding, still clutching her cane, lay supine on the floor, her chest heaving, beside her an upended kitchen chair. “I’m fine,” she said. “I’m fine. It’s just my leg. And that damn new boot. Nothing new in falling down. Done it a thousand times.”

  I helped her to her feet, followed her as she headed for her bed, a daybed that was pushed against the wall between her closet and the bathroom. She collapsed onto it, lifted her bad leg up with her good one, hooking one boot beneath the other. She was instantly asleep, her cane companion-like on the bed beside her.

  She might be there for days like that, I thought, in her coat on top of the blankets.

  “Fielding,” I said, nudging her shoulder. She stirred, murmured some complaint.

  “Fielding,” I said. “You’ve got to take off your coat and boots and get under the blankets.”

  In the manner of someone irritated at having been woken from a deep sleep to perform some pointless task, she sat up in bed and swiftly began to undress. She seemed amazingly supple under the circumstances — sitting up in bed without support, with one bad leg and one bad arm, while profoundly drunk. She gave a little hop, just enough to raise her backside so she could pull her coat out from beneath her. She was wearing a white blouse and a full-length pleated black skirt.

  When she drew her legs up to get at her boots, her skirt and the slip beneath it rode up almost to her knees. I caught a glimpse of garter belts and the undersides of thighs. Her bad leg was closer to the wall, but I could see it, clearly from the knee down, in shadow from there up. She wore nylons, but I saw that from just above the heel to behind her knee, her leg was serrated as if parts of her lower calf had years ago been cut away and what was left laminated pink and red and white. Above the knee, the serration continued, but it looked as if more of the flesh of her upper calf had survived.

  Fielding swiftly unsnapped the buttons of her boots; as she was tugging the boots off, toe of one boot on the heel of the other, her skirt and slip slid down into her lap and I was afforded a more detailed view of the undergarments of a woman who was not my wife than I had ever seen. Finally chastened, I looked away and waited.

  After I heard the squeaking of bedsprings, which I assumed meant she had climbed beneath the blankets, I turned around. Among the articles of clothing on the floor were her blouse and skirt. She lay with the blankets pulled up to her chin, her arms outside them, eyes closed. Asleep again.

  I thought of her legs. The left leg was about half as wide as the right, the leg of another, smaller woman or the leg of a child, as if, as she aged, that one limb had lagged behind. On top it was intact, unwithered, almost as shapely as the other one.

  She opened her eyes, staring straight at me as if she had been watching all along.

  “I should go,” I said.

  “Pull up that chair and stay a while,” she said. I turned the chair upright, placed it even farther from the bed than it had been. From where I sat, I could see out her one window. It was getting dark. A snow flurry was encroaching slowly from the Brow, blotting out more and more of the city, the black felt roofs of flat-topped houses.

  “It’s not that hard to look the other way,” she said. “Really it’s not. Most men manage it. Even under the most intimate of circumstances.”

  My heart hammered. I could think of nothing to say.

  “I suppose it’s not fair of me to talk like that,” she said. “I’m drunk. You’re not. You’re married. I’m not.”

  The snow pattered lightly against the window and the room grew darker. I thought of what her legs would have looked like pressed flat against the blankets, the bad leg sunken slightly so you could not see the scar. I pictured two flawless but mismatched legs, a disparate, inverted, lopsided V-like pair. And me between them? Had any men seen her like that? How many? It might just all be talk. Fielding starting rumours about herself. Her wanting everyone to think, to wonder. It might be that was all she had. Talk. Had any man ever touched her there, on the underside of her bad leg. Would she want him to? Would he want to? Did I? I thought of scenes from movies and books in which men gallantly pretended not to mind some scar or physical defect and thereby proved their everlasting love. But in the movies it was always some barely perceptible imperfection, a little lightning bolt above the lip.

  I could not. I could not do it. No matter how flat she lay. No matter how much my weight sank her legs into the bed. I could not do it because I was married, I told myself. Because she was drunk and just back on the bottle after seven years. Otherwise—

  “Hanrahan is my half-brother,” she said. “His first name is David. I also have a half-sister named Sarah. The issue of my mother’s second marriage to a Doctor Hanrahan of Gramercy Park.”

  “I don’t remember you going to see them in New York,” I said.

  “I didn’t,” she said. “I would have had to see my mother, too. And my stepfather probably. Neither of which I wanted to do.”

  “Hanrahan didn’t sound like he was from New York,” I said.

  “He went to Virginia when he was seventeen. To a military college. He was only at Fort Pepperrell for three days, but he looked me up. Knock, knock, I open the door and there he is.”

  “And something has happened to him?” I said.

  She nodded. “I used the present tense to describe him. I should have used the past.” I did not know that she was crying until I saw a tear emerge from beneath her eyelid and run down beside her nose.

  “Are you sure you’ll be all right?” I lamely said. She nodded. “What if I just sat here?” I said. “Until you fall asleep?”

  She nodded again, turned her face away from me.

  I sat there until the room was dark. Fielding, eyes closed and unmistakably asleep, went on leaking tears. Her face, in repose, was quite relaxed, her breathing deep and regular. What did she think of me, I wondered. Did she think I wanted to but lacked the courage? To how many others did she extend such invitations? I looked at her grey hair with its tinge of yellow, still full, still young, despite its colour. Her nicotine-stained fingers on the coverlet, the bandaged hand cradled tenderly against her side. There must have been no one there to keep her from falling when she fell.

  “Fielding,” I said, as if the name expressed completely what she was, who she was, this woman I was watching over and whose bed I did not dare go any closer to. Her tears kept coming. Her heart sending forth a surplus of tears while her guard was down, seeping sorrow while she slept. I stayed until the tears were coming minutes apart. I stood up.

  I could kiss her now and she would never know. But she would see it, see something in my eyes when next we met that would put me at a disadvantage. I had said no. I had had my chance and made my decision.

  On the way out, I removed from the door the note to the printer’s devil telling him where she was. I set off to the Telegram and conveyed to Harrington her message that she was indisposed.

  No sooner was I in my car again than it occurred to me that it was still not too late to go back, to climb into bed beside her. It could all be done in the darkness without words. There was no question of my leaving Clara, of course, nor would Fielding want me to. It was just —

  Lately, during times when I had felt as if the world without me in it would in no way be diminished,
I had found myself thinking of Fielding. It was not that this sustained me, not that she was some sort of antidote to despair. It was just that at such moments, an image of her came unbidden to my mind. Not the lights that in my childhood traced out the streets at night as I stood looking down upon them from the back deck on the Brow. Not the faces of my children, not Clara’s as she stood in the doorway waving and I shouted to her from the car that I was leaving for a month or maybe more. Not these, but Fielding.

  I pictured her waiting at the gates of Bishop Feild, outside the gates, holding the bars and watching as I walked across the field to meet her. Behind her was the sloping city, its old black rooftops gleaming after rain. And beyond the city, through the Narrows, the sea, which, after all, it seemed, was not my fate and which I no longer feared. I imagined it was summer, early evening, not yet dark. We wound our way among the streets, following the streetcar route to where the car barn was and past it to where a train that should not have been leaving at that time of day sat waiting just for us. We boarded the train together and settled in our seats. In my mind, our leaving like this broke no one’s heart, no one felt abandoned or betrayed. We would not be coming back, but neither would our journey ever end. Could I leave my wife and children? Fielding’s mother left her husband and her child.…

  What a fool the woman made me be. Even if she had agreed, for me to do what I’d imagined would have been the end of everything I hoped for, for no man who left his wife and child would ever be elected in St. John’s or otherwise amount to anything. And would a life with Fielding have made up for that? Stupid, pointless, adolescent dreams, fantasies of escape, not from my life, but from life itself. I felt sorry for her for having lost her half-brother, but that was all.