The Colony of Unrequited Dreams

by Wayne Johnston

  Fielding. If I had ever met her father, I would have had to call her Sheilagh. And she, if she had ever met my family, would have had to call me Joe. Our one moment, our one point of intersection, had just come and gone. We had for years been moving closer together and from now on we would move apart. She had left the feel of her body on mine but already she was fading like water drying on my skin.

  “Where does Sarah live?” I said.

  “Still in New York,” Fielding said. “She’s married, has a little girl named Karen. I keep track of her by subscribing to her alumni newsletter. I’m fairly certain I’m the only person in this boarding-house getting mail from Columbia University.”

  “You should have got married, Fielding. After I asked you, I mean. Since then, I mean. You should stop drinking, live somewhere more … You should see your daughter and your granddaughter; you should see Sarah, that’s something you can do.”

  “What would I tell her? The woman you think was your mother, the man you think was your father, on whose headstones you are named as their daughter, were not really your parents. I am your mother and the man you think was your father was not related to you by blood at all. What good would that do her now?”

  “You’re so alone, Fielding,” I said. “Don’t you mind?”

  “I’m afraid to write Sarah,” she said. “I’m afraid that she won’t answer, or that she will and she’ll say that she never wants to see me.”

  I thought of the Lost Newfoundlanders page in the Backhomer.

  “The day might come when you lose track of Sarah,” I said. “When you don’t know where she is or even if she’s still alive. What then? Imagine her and Karen never knowing you existed.”

  Fielding sobbed again, one hand over her mouth.

  “You’ve got to write to her,” I said. “You’ve got to.”

  June 17, 1955. St. John’s

  Dear Sarah:

  Perhaps David wrote to you about meeting me in St. John’s while he was on his way to France in 1944. He gave me a picture of you, which I have often looked at since he died. David died not knowing who I was. And perhaps because of that I felt his death even more keenly than I would have had he known. I can think of no better way to say this than simply to say it. I am your mother — that is, I gave birth to you and David. You have a right to know who your father is, and I will tell you should you ever ask.

  I have only lately been able to admit to myself that my father did not love me as much as I have all my life been pretending that he did. He loved me as much as his heart and his circumstances let him, I am sure. I tell you this, not in the hope of making you feel sorry for me, but to help you understand why I would so much like to meet you.

  You owe me nothing, Sarah. I have done nothing yet to earn your affection or respect. Any silly, giddy girl can have a baby, even two at once. I was happy when I was sixteen to be shipped off to New York before my pregnancy began to show, and to let my mother pretend that she was pregnant while I went about my lying-in for five months in her house; happy to let her pretend, to save my reputation and my father’s, that the babies, when I had them, were her own. But I have not often been happy since.

  My mother was a woman who was capable of great courage. I am sure that if she could have, she would have taken me with her when she left my father — for which, knowing my father as I did, I bear her no more ill will than can be helped. I would like to have had her as my mother. But she was and always will be yours. I would not expect you to ever call me Mother, or think of me as that. I would not expect you to introduce me to anyone as such. Our secret can remain our secret, if you like. You can call me Fielding. Everybody does.

  I cannot imagine how strange it must be for you to receive such a letter — even stranger, I am sure, than it seems to me to be writing it so late in life. It may seem to you that you have nothing to gain from meeting me, or that I have no way of proving that what I say is true. As to the latter, I have since I was twelve faithfully kept a journal of my life, which now fills many volumes and in which all that I have told you is set out in more detail. As for the former, I can tell you only that I have felt your absence, yours and David’s, all my life. I was for a time, many years ago, confined to a sanatorium with an illness that left me unable to conceive more children. I thought about you often while I was in the San.

  Perhaps if I had never met David, I would not be writing to you now. I know it is foolish, but I sometimes cannot help thinking that if I had told David I was his mother, he might have made it through the war.

  I believe that when David looked me up, it was with the intention of paying a brief and dutiful visit. I remember opening the door to find him standing there, in uniform, his hat removed, as if he had come to the wrong address bearing bad news. He did not expect to be greeted so fervently by a half-sister who had never been to visit him, but I couldn’t help myself. When I saw his name on his lapel, I threw my arms around him and hugged him until he hugged me back. Three days later, when we were saying goodbye, I cried and made such a fuss that I embarrassed him. I told him I loved him and, perhaps because he knew I wanted him to, he told me he loved me too.

  Three months later, when they told me he was dead, it seemed strange that I hadn’t sensed or felt his death the moment it occurred, which had been weeks before. His death was for me only a dreaded possibility until I opened my door and saw the two officers. Perhaps others who were joined to him by something more important than mere blood sensed it when it happened. Perhaps my mother did, perhaps you did. I don’t know. I don’t know if such things can be felt. I didn’t know until I was told that my father was dead, or until her brother wrote me that my mother was.

  But blood must count for something, Sarah. It did when I met David and held him in my arms. I look at your picture every day and wonder what you look like now and imagine meeting you. I wonder what your daughter looks like and imagine meeting her.

  Blood is a place to start from, I think, for you and me, and for Karen, should you choose to tell her who I am. Only rarely in my life have I been joined to others by something more important than mere blood. I hope that you will write to me and that we will see each other soon.

  Sheilagh Fielding

  October 9, 1955. New York

  Dear Miss Fielding:

  Your letter seemed sincere, which makes it all the more difficult for me to assure you that you must be mistaken. I have checked the hospital records here in New York and with everyone who knew my mother, including two of her brothers. They confirmed what I have always known — that I have a half-sister in St. John’s — but they were as mystified by your letter as I was. Although it would not further your purpose any, I would like to meet with you — we are half-sisters, after all. If you can make your way to New York, we could meet at the address below, which you will notice is not mine. I’m sure you will understand why, under the circumstances, I would prefer that our first meeting not be at my home.

  Yours truly,

  Sarah Taylor

  “Did you tell her everything?” I said.

  “Everything,” Fielding said. “I even told her I’d kept journals —”

  “You should have sent them,” I said. “She doesn’t mention them in her letter.”

  “No,” said Fielding. “She doesn’t.”

  “She wants you to come see her, anyway; that’s a good first step. She must know, or half know, that what you say is true.”

  There was a long silence.

  “Maybe,” Fielding said at last. “Or maybe she thinks that if she doesn’t agree to meet me, I’ll just show up on her doorstep someday and scare the life out of Karen. I should never have written her. She doesn’t want it to be true, and I don’t blame her. It’s not as if she or Karen knew about this all their lives, like me. And she’ll want to know who her father is. What will I tell her?”

  “Tell her the truth. If she ever meets Prowse, she’ll know that you’re telling the truth, even if he denies it. You’ll go and you’ll bring the jo
urnals with you,” I said. “And I’ll go with you. I don’t mean I’ll meet her with you. I’ll just make sure that you get there.”

  Something More Important Than Mere Blood

  FIELDING’S JOURNAL, FEBRUARY 23, 1957

  Dear David:

  I have decided that I will go and see Sarah. But before that, I have to stop doing something I went back to doing when they told me you were gone. I stopped once before, when I was in my thirties, but I am in my fifties now, not as strong and more afraid. I start tomorrow. I will write all night and go to bed when the sun comes up, but no amount of Scotch will make me sleep. And at three o’clock in the afternoon, I will pack a bag and, with my cane in hand, walk down the hill to a place they call the Harbour Light. It will be a long walk. And a long time before I write to you again.

  TWO YEARS LATER — it took her that long to make up her mind and work up the nerve to quit the booze again — an aide drove me to her boarding-house at six in the morning. She came down the steps, stopping with both feet on each step, stepping always with her right foot first, then bringing down the left, holding a bag of luggage in each hand. She let my aide take one bag and lugged the other one, the one that contained her journals, to the car.

  With her luggage in the trunk, she stood with her arms tightly at her sides, rounded shoulders slightly hunched, holding her cane at the middle with one hand, not in front of her as she usually did. She looked vulnerably hopeful.

  “I still think we should have flown,” I said, but she shook her head.

  “I haven’t thought it all through yet,” she said. “I reserve the right to change my mind.”

  My aide drove us to Riverhead Station, where we boarded the train. We had reserved two berths and one compartment, in which, after we had stowed our luggage, we sat facing forwards.

  Fielding said nothing from the moment the train began to move to when we reached the Bog of Avalon.

  “I’ve never seen the whole island before, you know,” she said. “I went both times by boat from St. John’s. I’ve never been farther west in Newfoundland than where the Bonavista branch begins.”

  I remembered my own first cross-island journey in 1920. I was almost able to summon up how first seeing Newfoundland had felt. I resisted the urge to tell her what sights she had in store. She was the closer to the window and she leaned her forehead against it and for a few seconds closed her eyes. It was going to be a sunny day once the morning fog burned off.

  We saw, far off in the distance, the headlands of Conception Bay and from time to time the bay itself in alternating shades of blue depending on the sky.

  “All David ever saw of Newfoundland was St. John’s. Maybe —” She wiped her eyes. “We’ll see,” she said. “We’ll see.”

  I tried to busy myself with work but could not concentrate. “Fielding,” I said. “Why, in your journals, is it only after Confederation that you spell things out? Before that, you wrote as if someone was looking over your shoulder.”

  “It had to do with deciding to come back to St. John’s, deciding to be an atom of dissent beneath your mattress. For Newfoundlanders after 1949, the past was literally another country. It was for me. I finally realized I had more to fear from the future than the past.”

  “I wonder why your father picked Prowse’s History to compose the letter,” I said. “The first book that came to hand, I suppose?”

  Fielding shook her head. “I told my father that Prowse took you to see the judge to have your father’s book signed, just like he took me. Told him the inscriptions were exactly the same. And he sensed, without knowing the details, that Prowse had hurt me in some way. For my father, there would have been a certain symmetry in choosing that book.

  “You know, my father blamed you for everything, not just for getting me pregnant, but for everything I did after I had Sarah and David, even things I would have done anyway. He wanted me to finish school somewhere, then go to university, but I refused. I had been a recluse for so long I wanted to go on being one. But I came out of it and talked the publisher of the Telegram into letting me have the reporting job that was least popular among the men. My father didn’t think it proper, of course, my being a reporter — and spending all my time in the courts, at that — but when he found out you were working the courts, too … He had already made me swear that you didn’t know about the baby and that I would never tell you, but he made me do it all over again. Of course, I didn’t tell him about you converting me to socialism, which by the way you never did, I just pretended so I could be with you — My God, Smallwood, how many shades of purple are you capable of turning? I’ve never seen that one before.”

  She had spoken so offhandedly she had caught me off guard.

  “I’m sure he blamed you when I came down with TB. A little over a year later, I was in the San. A year after that, the doctors told him what, as a doctor himself, he must have known already: that I wouldn’t last another month. He blamed you for my death, even though it didn’t happen. He blamed himself, too. Even after I was well again.”

  She stopped talking, but still I could not settle down. It was not the country we were passing through that kept distracting me, but Fielding seeing Newfoundland for the first time at the age of sixty.

  “When I asked if you would marry me —” I said. She did not look away from the window.

  “I was going to tell you everything that night,” she said. “And then see if you still wanted me.”

  “You mean — “I said. “You mean you would have said yes?”

  “Would you have still wanted me, knowing then what you know now?”

  She knew the answer was no, or she would not have asked. She had known that night in New York thirty years ago, because of how I acted when she paused to think and when, instead of yes, she said my name. My last name. And because of the way I misread her expression and intentions, and the way that, to spare myself, I retracted my proposal and pretended I was joking. Such a man, had he known then what he knew now, would have withdrawn his proposal. I would have run; I would have done what I wound up doing anyway, would have tried to convince myself that I had never really loved her and that it therefore did not matter that she was not what I had imagined her to be. She loved me then, as absurd, vain, pompous, strutting and ambitious as I was, and perhaps she loved me now.

  I had that. And I had loved her, I had at least once in my life been capable of that, able to escape my self long enough to love. Suddenly, the unacknowledged sorrows and blunders of my life surged up in me all at once. I thought I would be sick. I gasped, put my hand over my mouth until tears began collecting on my fingers. I took my hand away and looked at it as if I had just discovered I was bleeding.

  Fielding turned away from the window.

  “Thank you,” I said. She nodded, smiled, turned back to the window.

  When we were just outside of Port aux Basques, she knocked on the door of my berth, waking me. Still lying in bed, I opened the door. She was fully dressed.

  “Would you mind if I went by myself from here?” she said. “It’s not because of you. I’ve thought about it. It’s best if I make the trip from Port aux Basques to New York by myself.”

  I saw her off. I caused quite a stir when I was spotted on the dock. I was cheered and patted on the back like some national mascot. People waving goodbye to passengers looking down from the ship pointed to me.

  “It’s Joey,” they said excitedly. “It’s Joey,” as if I often appeared thus to punctuate the visits to Newfoundland of people from away, or to bid goodbye to Newfoundlanders leaving home. They allowed me to make my way to the edge of the dock. Fielding stood at the railing as the boat slowly pulled away from shore. None of the people gathered there knew who it was that I was seeing off, but they were curious.

  Fielding blankly surveyed the crowd, the receding dock, as if she could not find me or was not trying to, her mind, perhaps, already on her destination.

  She raised her cane in a general, faintly benedictory way, as if s
he were dismissing an apology or resisting the urge to make one.

  She would, of course, be coming back. But not to me. I thought of my wife, my two sons and my daughter. To whom I had never been a husband or a father. If it was not too late for Fielding to start again, it might not be too late for me. I decided I would drive to the nearest airport and fly back to St. John’s.

  This time, I really had crossed the country by train for the last time. Soon there would be no more trains in Newfoundland, no way to cross the core except by bus or car. Even sooner than that, I would win my last election.

  I did not solve the paradox of Newfoundland or fathom the effect on me of its peculiar beauty. It stirred in me, as all great things did, a longing to accomplish or create something commensurate with it. I thought Confederation might be it, but I was wrong.

  Perhaps only an artist can measure up to such a place or come to terms with the impossibility of doing so. Absence, deprivation, bleakness, even despair are more likely than their opposites to be the subject of great art, but they otherwise work against greatness. Or the sort of self-sacrificing, love-driven person who Sir Richard said did not exist.

  Or Fielding, who is both. Fielding to whom no monuments will be raised, after whom no streets or buildings will be named. Unlike me, in whose name books have been written, plaques placed, statues erected.

  She loves me, but not just me. But I love only her.

  I tried, for the fifteen years of public life I still had left after I rode the train with her to Port aux Basques, to camouflage by great accomplishments my broken heart.

  I could not admit to myself that what I was attempting was impossible. Having gained power so late in life, and having no way to console myself for losing it, I could not renounce it. I no longer had the luxury of patience, was no longer able to disbelieve in my own mortality. If I was going to live to see Newfoundland transformed and live to take the credit, that transformation would have to happen soon and therefore as the result of some grand, unprecedented scheme.