The Colony of Unrequited Dreams Page 15

  Equally transparent, Child says, is their ploy of fasting the last few weeks before the fleet arrives, to shed what he calls fish fat from their bodies. Settlers are punished according to how long they have fasted, which is calculated from their degree of emaciation. The closer to death a settler appears to be, the more severely he is flogged.

  “Yet,” Child says, “try to imagine the admiral as he carries out the sentence, weeping tears of frustration, knowing that no matter how hard he applies the lash, he cannot replace the fish the settler has consumed.”

  “Enough,” King Charles says. “Enough, honest Josiah. I cannot stand to hear any more about what people once possessed of English virtues have been reduced to by life in Newfoundland.” The king is convinced that the only way to stop the exploitation of the merchants by the settlers is to depopulate the island.

  The Newfoundland Hotel

  FIELDING’S JOURNAL, OCTOBER 23, 1920

  Dear Smallwood:

  I am below decks in the supposedly “dry” lounge, which contains a large number of people who are very obviously drunk. I am drunk, too, though not obviously so. A band you can hear all over the boat is playing Newfoundland music. I am familiar with most of the songs they’re playing, songs about fishermen, sealers, loggers, but I know little more about the lives of such people than I know about the lives of Eskimos. It seems a pity there are no songs for people like me. You would probably think it very unsocialist of me, but to pass the time I have been making up titles of white-collar folk-songs: “Journalist’s Jig,” “Lawyer’s Lament,” “Concerning an Architect Named Joe,” “The Chartered Accountant from Harbour Le Cou,” “The Banker’s Song,” “The Real Estate Reel,” “Come All Ye Civil Servants.”

  I remember my uncle Patrick singing, upon request at Christmas time, “The Ryans and the Pittmans,” sitting in his chair with his head thrown back, his face flushed from drinking, his eyes closed as though he could smell the salt spray, as though he were revelling in voyages past, despite the fact that, so terrified was he of the water, he could not be coaxed into going once around the pond in his row-boat at the cottage.

  “The Ryans and the Pittmans” is sung to the tune of “Farewell and Adieu to You, Spanish Ladies,” and everyone joins in the chorus: “We’ll rant and we’ll roar like true Newfoundlanders,/We’ll rant and we’ll roar on deck and below.”

  I remember a photograph from our family album. Once, on a moderately rough crossing of the gulf from St. John’s in 1898, almost everyone on the ship had been seasick, including my father and mother, who were heading to Boston for the funeral of some relative of my mother’s. The only thing Newfoundlanders did on deck and below that day was throw up. The stewards went around wearing and distributing little paper masks designed to keep the contagion of mal de mer from spreading. Even in the throes of seasickness, my father, realizing how funny it would seem in retrospect, had the photographer on board take their picture: my parents, masked, queasy-eyed, sitting side by side, staring abjectly at the camera. On the back of the photograph, my father had written: “Summer, 1898. Here we are on the plague-ship Robert Bond.”

  Summer, 1898. My mother may have been pregnant with me at the time, though if she was it doesn’t show. It would depend on when in the summer the photograph was taken. You can see, though she wears that little paper mask, that she is smiling. You can see it in her eyes. Smiling through seasickness and possibly the queasiness of pregnancy.

  When I told my father where I was going, he said nothing. He knows I am not going there because of her. He does not know I am going there because of you. He will miss me, though he did not say so. Now that I am gone, the house will have him to itself. I told him he should sell it, but he shook his head and smiled. “Goodbye,” he said. “Goodbye, my D. D.” His little nickname for me. It means “my darling daughter.”

  AT MY FIRST SIGHT ever of land that was not Newfoundland, I felt a sudden surge of loneliness. On the entire continent that had just come into view, I did not know a single soul, and it was not much consolation that I carried in my trunk letters of reference from dozens of people in St. John’s. A continent of strangers. For the longest time, we seemed to be getting no nearer to land, and I had the feeling that if I were to go to the other end of the boat, Newfoundland would still be visible.

  When we docked at North Sydney, I walked off the ship, trying not to look too obviously like what I was: someone for the first time setting foot on foreign soil. I moved with a kind of purposeful nonchalance, as if I had disembarked thus many times. All around me, passengers were being met by friends and relatives.

  I stood on the dock until the noise and clamour of arrival had died down. It was six o’clock in the morning, three hours before my train for Halifax was due to leave; the sun was barely up. I was in a place I had never been before, there was no one there I knew. I put down my trunk and, cupping my mouth with my hands, shouted “Hello” as loud as I could. Up on the road, someone who sounded as though he thought I must be off my head, shouted back, in a kind of mock echo, “Helloooo.”

  I noticed after the train began to make its way across Cape Breton that every little thing looked different. I had expected differences, of course, but it had never occurred to me that absolutely nothing would be the same, that to some degree, the landscape would differ in every detail from the one back home. I had seen other places in movies, in photographs, but it was not the same.

  I exhausted myself trying to take it all in, noting every little variation and departure from how things were supposed to be. My notion of home and everything in it as ideal, archetypal, was being overthrown. It was as though the definitions of all the words in my vocabulary were expanding at once.

  Cape Breton was much like Newfoundland, yet everything seemed slightly off. Light, colours, surface textures, dimensions — objects like telegraph poles, fence posts, mail boxes, which you would think would be the same everywhere, were bigger or smaller or wider by a hair than they were back home. That I was able to detect such subtle differences made me realize how circumscribed my life had been, how little of the world I had seen.

  Suffering a temporary loss of nerve, I lingered for a while in Halifax. I got a job at the Halifax Herald, but it was not much of a step up from the Telegram, if any at all, nor was Halifax much bigger than St. John’s, so I did not think I could learn much there that would prepare me for Boston or New York. I wrote to Fielding, who did not write back. Restless, I began smoking more than I ever had before, even drinking a little more, risking arrest in Halifax, sneaking back to my room with a couple of bottles of beer in my jacket pockets.

  I left Halifax after several months, taking the train to Yarmouth and then the overnight ferry to Boston, once again crossing a great divide by boat at night. Boston, like Halifax, was something of a disappointment, and after two months there, living in a boarding-house on Allston Street off Scollay Square with almost no furnishings except my map and working for the Herald-Traveler, I made up my mind that I was as ready for New York as I would ever be.

  As the train went south along the Hudson River, I realized that I was travelling through the setting of many of the books I had read. I was not just city-bound, but world-bound, it seemed, where the books I read were published, where the papers I read were written. A relative of my father’s had once written him from New York: “Dear Charlie: There are more people in my apartment building than there are in my home town!” That optimistic exclamation point. The marvels of New York.

  Doubts that would never be wholly laid to rest started up in me on that journey south through the Boston states. I passed a land border for the first time in my life, the one between Massachusetts and Connecticut, an arbitrary border on either side of which the landscape was identical, as I had no doubt it was on either side of the border between New Brunswick and Maine, Canada and America. Perhaps we Newfoundlanders had been fooled by our geography into thinking we could be a country, perhaps we believed that by nothing short of achieving nationhood
could we live up to the land itself, the sheer size of it. It seemed so nation-like in its discreteness, an island set apart from the main like the island-nations our ancestors left behind. Perhaps it was not patriotism that drove us on, so much as a kind of guilt-ridden sense of obligation. Yet no sooner had these thoughts occurred to me than I felt guilty for thinking them and chased them from my mind, telling myself I was only looking for an excuse to justify my leaving home, about which I was also feeling guilty.

  I remember the evening sunlight on the eastern ramparts of the Hudson, as the train outraced the river and the boats. I calculated that the water we were passing now would reach New York sometime early in the morning and be parted by the island of Manhattan in the dark, hours after we arrived there. It was as though an alternate time stream was moving parallel with ours, plied at sluggish speeds by ancient modes of transportation as we in the train, city-bound, got older faster, though in space our destinations were the same.

  I must confess that at Grand Central Station, my first impulse was to take the next train back to Boston while I could still afford it. I have never understood why the concourses of train stations have to be the great, vaulting chambers that they are. If the point was to impress upon the newcomer that he had arrived at a city to be reckoned with, I was suitably affected. The place was like some secular cathedral and it seemed strange, looking up at the brass-domed ceiling, not to see depicted on it some religious scene that could match the place for sheer momentousness. People were all but running in every direction, sending up an echoing murmur in the station, which despite the teeming floor seemed almost empty, so much enclosed space was there above the multitude. They were striding purposefully, skilfully dodging one another, and for all I knew, every one of them had just arrived and, like me when I got off the ferry at North Sydney, were trying only to look like they knew where they were going.

  I did not know that I had happened to arrive in New York at rush hour and that the place was not always quite so hectic. It was early evening and around the edges of the concourse, on ledges, on the floor, vagrants were already bedding down to catch a few hours’ sleep in that din before the cops cleared the place at twelve o’clock. Others of their number, likewise on the edges, looked all too alert, and I fancied that more than one of them had his eye on me and my pulley-drawn steamer trunk. I had no idea just how unpromising-looking a mark I was, and that though the place, as I suspected, was crawling with pickpockets and thieves, they were on the lookout for better game than me.

  I was wearing the only suit I owned, the smallest adult-style suit I’d been able to find, a threadbare dark brown Harris tweed with a Norfolk jacket and trousers so oversized they bunched in folds around my feet. There survives a photograph from that time, in which I am standing with one foot up on a crate half as high as me and one arm resting on my knee, the only pose I could assume in which my clothing could be drawn tight enough to make it appear to fit me. The pose also highlights, unfortunately, my spindle-thin, emaciated arms and legs. I am holding in my hands what looks like some sort of scroll (a rolled-up newspaper?) and am staring resolutely at the camera, apparently confident of cutting a fine, impressive figure, a not-to-be-trifled-with ninety-five-pound twenty-one-year-old.

  I crossed the concourse as fast as I could and went outside. I saw cars, taxis, streetcars, buses, newspaper vendors, a stream of pedestrians, across the street a hotel doorman waving a white-gloved hand to someone. I did not really believe that any of it had been going on before I got there. If asked, I would have said of course it had been, but I did not really believe it. I hailed a cab. I must have made on the cabbie the same impression I had on the concourse thieves, for he asked to see my money first and, when I told him where I was headed, demanded that I pay him in advance.

  I went to a large boarding-house on West Fifteenth Street that had been recommended to me by a friend back home. It was known to its occupants as the Newfoundland Hotel because so many Newfoundlanders lived there, and because it fell so far short of its opulent namesake back home in St. John’s. The Newfoundland Hotel was a red-brick building, comprising two adjoining blocks of seven storeys.

  It was convenient, aside from the fact that I could afford it, because it was about a block from Fifth Avenue and five minutes’ walk from Union Square, the speaker’s corner of New York socialism, where such giants of “the cause” as Eugene Debs and Thorstein Veblen spoke, and which would someday, I fancied, be thought of as the place where Smallwood spoke.

  It was situated among a dingy maze of narrow streets that, because they were lined by warehouses and run-down office buildings, almost never saw the sunlight. On one side of the neighbourhood was Greenwich Village and on the other the affluent edge of upper Fifth Avenue, which it would soon become my habit to stroll through disdainfully on Sunday afternoons.

  But I could not work up the nerve to visit the Call. I dreamed of being the next John Reed, writing the next Ten Days That Shook the World, but balked at the thought of going to the very paper he had worked for and asking for a job. I began having nightmares about going back to Newfoundland after an absurdly brief period of time, a stint abroad that would make my father’s notoriously short one seem like a grand success. I woke up every morning feeling anxious and depressed.

  The hotel was like some sort of vertically arranged indoor community, as if the entire population of some outport had been relocated to New York and was now being housed in this one building. Each floor was like a neighbourhood, each hallway on each floor like a street. There were always people lounging about in groups in the hallways, on the stairs, in the lobby. From about eight to midnight, most people left the doors of their rooms open to indicate their willingness to receive visitors. Even when they went visiting themselves, they left their doors open, as if the thought that something might be stolen never crossed their minds. “Look who’s here,” I often heard my neighbour say when he came back from visiting to find his room occupied by someone who, in his absence, had made himself at home.

  People seemed to take as a personal affront the fact that during visiting hours I kept my door closed. Having no money, I did not often venture out into the city. I spent my nights reading, but even had they known this, my fellow roomers would not have considered it sufficient cause to be unsociable. Sometimes, in protest, they drummed lightly on my door as they were going by. People who for some reason did not know that the former tenant, a man named Clar, no longer lived there, came looking for him at all hours of the night, knocking on the door, shouting his name. “C’mon, Clar,” a man said, “open up, ya silly bastard, open up,” laughing when I told him he had the wrong apartment, as if to put someone up to this had been a favourite trick of Clar’s.

  Once, arriving home at night in the middle of my fourth week in New York, I found myself jammed in the elevator with a group of men and women on their way to a party on one of the upper floors. Because they were gingerly holding aloft, above head height, lit cigarettes and brim-full glasses of prohibited liquor, they could not use their hands for balance and so lurched all over the place every time the primitive elevator stopped or started.

  “Sorry, my love,” one girl apologized as she flattened me against the wall and spilled part of the contents of her glass down the front of my coat. While alternating between genuine remorse and weak-kneed hilarity at having just spilled her prohibited drink on some total stranger in an elevator, she kept apologizing, telling me she would wipe my coat clean for me if her arms were not stuck up in the air the way they were.

  “That’s all right,” I said. Some of them had their hands so full they had to leave their cigarettes in their mouths and were making the trip with their heads tilted back, puffing smoke upward as best they could, eyes squinting.

  Every time the elevator stopped and the doors opened to reveal another group of revellers, a roar of greeting and mutual recognition went up.

  “Here’s de byes, here dey are. What floor are we on? Four are we? I didn’t think anyone on the
fourth floor stayed up after eight o’clock.”

  They piled off in a mad rush, announcing their arrival to the inhabitants of the host floor by letting out a roar like that of some invasion force or mock stampede, which was met with an even louder roar from somewhere down the hallway. I was all but carried off with them. Then the doors closed again and I was left in the smoky elevator, alone I thought, until I heard a voice behind me.

  “Have you ever seen so many island-pining, mother-missing, sweetheart-I-left-behind-bemoaning, green-arsed Newfoundlanders in your life?”

  “Fielding!” I said. I turned around and there she was, obviously drunk, both eyes squinting, a cigarette shoved to the high corner of her mouth so that she seemed to be smoking out of her cheekbone, slumped against the wall, two hands on her cane, which was customarily planted on the floor in front of her, though at a treacherous angle.

  “Smallwood!” she said, in mimicry of me. I was so glad to see her I threw my arms around her and broke her cigarette in half, the lit tip falling to the floor, sparks showering between us, though she did not seem to notice. When I broke the embrace, she stood exactly as she had been, as if she dared not trust herself to stay upright without the help of the cane.

  “I thought you weren’t coming,” I said. “I’d given up on you. Where are you staying?”

  “Here,” she said. “In fact, it looks like we’re on the same floor, unless you’re sleeping on the roof.”

  “When did you get here?” I said.

  “Yesterday,” she said. “Been drinking ever since.”