The Colony of Unrequited Dreams Page 16

  We were on the same floor, five rooms apart. I walked with her to her room. Even in her state, she noticed me looking nervously about.

  “Whose reputation are you more concerned with protecting, Smallwood,” Fielding said, “yours or mine? Don’t worry, I can take it from here.” She fumbled to fit her key in the lock, the severed cigarette in her mouth, strands of tobacco hanging from it.

  “I’ll come see you when you’re — when you’re not so tired,” I said.

  “No point waiting until Christmas,” she said. At last she managed to open the door.

  “Sorry, Smallwood,” she said, gesturing goodnight with her cane, raising it slightly and nearly falling down. “You’re right. I’ll see you when I’m not so tired.” She went in and sprawled face up across her bed, fully clothed, cane in hand, shoes on, arms outspread. She was almost instantly asleep. I backed out and closed the door.

  Fielding’s Condensed

  History of Newfoundland

  Chapter Eight:

  A PROPER CENSUS

  Charles II has been unjustly blamed for what happened in Newfoundland in 1675. Historians who bother to look closely into the matter will uncover the following sequence of events.

  The king orders the fishing admirals to inform the settlers that they have the choice of being relocated to other colonies or transported back to England. The convoy commander, Sir John Berry, will follow afterwards to conduct a census to determine how many settlers are still left in Newfoundland, how many houses, how many boats, etc.

  The written order, however, is lost, and the admirals are left to remember it as best they can. Confusion reigns among the convoy that sails for Newfoundland that spring. From bunk to bunk, from ship to ship, men argue over which of the following two statements is the right one: (a) Those who wish to live in England or other colonies may do so; or (b) Those who wish to live may do so in England or other colonies. By the time the fleet nears Newfoundland, the captains are so addled by this syntactical conundrum that the only way they can think to solve it is to flip a coin.

  Luckily, advance word that a census is to be conducted reaches the settlers, who, cryptically declaring that “no goode will come of being counted,” abandon their settlements and take to the woods.

  The fishing admirals have been favouring statement b for weeks, burning and pillaging everything in sight, by the time Sir John arrives. Sir John is outraged by what they have have done, which is no less than to have made it almost impossible to conduct a proper census.

  Sir John does the best he can, enumerates as many settlers as can be coaxed out of the woods. He writes back to a friend in England: “The harbours look like cemeteries, with crucifix-like masts everywhere protruding from the water.” By counting the masts, he is able to estimate how many boats there were, and is likewise able to estimate the number of houses by toting up the chimneys that remain.

  The Call

  THE COMPANY OF FIELDING revived my spirits. I suddenly noticed how many women there were about, flappers and would-be flappers. They were everywhere with their rouged knees, bobbed hair and short skirts. Some even went so far as to bind their feet so they could walk flat-footed. Fielding, in token acknowledgement of the new trend, wore a floppy hat fringed with bright rosettes.

  At her urging, I went to the Call at West Fourth Street. I was led to a man named Charlie Ervin, the managing editor, whom I tried to convince to hire me by addressing him as though I wanted him to join a union. He smiled with a sort of world-weary kindness while I spoke, as if he could already foresee how far short of my expectations being a socialist reporter would fall. “We are the greatest socialist newspaper in the world, Mr. Smallwood,” he said. “Which puts us at the top of a very tiny ladder.” I stared in mute wonder at him.

  “Explain your terms,” he said. I thanked God I had met Grimes. I told him what I understood socialism to be, what its aims were and how they could be achieved.

  “Comrade Smallwood,” he said, “there is, in what you say, more bullshit than Bolshevism.” I thought I had failed the interview until I saw him holding out his hand. “There are two things we never have enough of at the Call. One is money and and the other is reporters willing to work for next to nothing. You don’t look as though you have the former, so I guess you’ll have to be the latter.” I blinked at him in confusion. “You’re hired,” he said.

  Fielding did not apply for a job there, but she was soon doing some freelance pieces for The New York Times. She frankly admitted she would not need regular work for a while, having been given a substantial “going-away bribe” by her father. But she spent time with the Call crowd and helped me fit in with them, for though they professed the same world-view as I did, they had, I discovered, more in common with her than they did with me.

  There were dozens of reporters at the Call, some of them my age. We all but lived in the ramshackle loft warehouse that had been the paper’s home for years despite having been swarmed by rioters and fire-bombed several times. There were still scorch marks on the ceiling of the newsroom.

  We sought out the cheapest eating places we could find, the Three Steps Down Cafeteria in Greenwich Village, the Russian Bear Tearoom, the Fourteenth Street Automat. On Friday, payday, we swarmed Child’s Restaurant on Twelfth Street and, while arguing socialism, fed ourselves to bursting on sixty-five-cent four-course meals.

  The others knew about Hotel Newfoundland and were already inclined towards seeing Newfoundlanders as predisposed to oddness by the time Fielding and I came along, and it must be said that nothing about us made them less so. I was taken up by the others as something of a mascot. Some of them were Jewish and got a lot of mileage out of my story about how all the Jews of St. John’s had turned out to see me off. Then there was the fact that I was Jewish-looking, a Jewfoundlander, they called me, or sometimes just Jewfie, or Joey the Jewfie, always affectionately, though my attempts to get them to take me more seriously only made them less inclined to do so.

  They would mispronounce Newfoundland on purpose just to get me to pronounce it properly, which they for some reason found hilarious and would repeat to one another, mimicking my hyper-earnest expression as they put the stress on land. “NewfoundLAND,” Pincus Hockstein would say to Eddie Levinson. “Not NewFOUNDland, not NEWfoundland, but NewfoundLAND, like understand, understand?”

  The women were like none that I had ever met before. Compared with them, Fielding was withdrawn and reticent. Dorothy Day took one look at me when we met at Child’s and, right in front of the others, declared that I was a virgin, “a virgin if I ever saw one,” she said, as though she were unmasking me as some sort of fraud. I was too dumbstruck to deny it and, in any event, the change in my complexion confirmed her diagnosis. The table erupted in laughter, as though they had just discovered that, sitting in their midst, was the oldest, or possibly the last, virgin on the planet.

  “Now tell us, Joey,” Dorothy said. “Are you saving yourself for some young thing back home who, in exchange for a kiss, extracted from you the night before you left a promise of engagement, or is it just that you haven’t yet worked up the nerve to ask some girl to bed?”

  I prayed for a touch of the wit by which I had undone Fielding years ago, but none was forthcoming. Instead, I was saved by Fielding herself, to whom they had taken as if she was playing well some role they were familiar with but liked, Fielding with her silver-knobbed cane, her — to me — suddenly acquired political scepticism, her affected aloofness, her eloquence, her irony.

  “He may not in matters carnal be an adept,” Fielding said, putting one hand on my shoulder, “but Smallwood is a true socialist. He has a horde of influential enemies and” — she took them all in with a gesture of her cane — “a handful of inconsequential friends. Besides, Dorothy, how do you know that I am not the tutor in matters carnal of the alluringly emaciated man you see before you?”

  They were quoting her in no time. “Well, if it isn’t Smallwood’s tutor in matters carnal,” they said when the
y saw her. They were bemused by her professed lack of commitment, political or otherwise, and teased her about working for such an “establishment” publication as The New York Times.

  They seemed too Grimes-like to me right from the start, their interest in socialism too theoretical, and I told them so. They saw themselves as advancing the cause of some worldwide movement to whose real-life effects they had not given much thought, while I was mainly interested in how socialism could be of benefit to Newfoundland, a view they dismissed as too parochial.

  We argued for hours, Fielding drinking more than any of us but rarely speaking.

  “Newfoundland,” I told them one night, “will be one of the great small nations of the earth, a self-governing, self-supporting, self-defending, self-reliant nation, and I will be prime minister of Newfoundland.”

  “And I will be president of the United States,” Pincus said, laughing, raising his glass to me.

  “I will,” I said, standing up, which I was just barely able to do, swaying, though I was only on my second drink.

  “This woman here can hold her liquor better than you can,” Dorothy said.

  “There is more of me to hold it in,” said Fielding, though whether in defense or further mockery of me I wasn’t sure.

  “You are looking at the future prime minister of Newfoundland,” I said. They looked me up and down, and as if the disproportion between what I was and what I claimed I would become was just too much for them, burst out laughing all at once.

  “What about you, Fielding?” Dorothy said. “Is it your mission in life to further the ambitions of Smallwood here?”

  “It is my mission in life,” Fielding said, “to further no one’s ambitions but my own. Once I have decided what they are, I shall pursue them relentlessly.”

  “How would you describe your world-view?” said Dorothy.

  “I am a phlegmatist,” said Fielding.

  I was presumed to be from the working class because of my appearance, my accent, my lack of formal education, my social clumsiness, my eagerness to please and be accepted. I did nothing to disabuse them of this notion, said nothing about my middle-class grandfather or uncles or my time at Bishop Feild. I was in their eyes something of a catch, a legitimizing presence in the newsroom. The more shabbily and unfashionably I dressed, the more out of place I looked among them, the better, as far as they were concerned.

  Most of them lived better than was warranted by what they were paid for working at the Call, so I suspected that, like Fielding, they were being kept in money by their parents. Many of them were from quite well-to-do families, on sabbatical from lives of privilege to which they openly admitted they planned to return someday.

  I did not describe life in my father’s house. When they told stories of their own self-imposed, recently endured privation, flashing their socialist credentials, I said nothing. But I let slip that my mother was a Pentecostal.

  “Pentecostals,” Dorothy said. “Aren’t they the ones who speak in tongues and thrash about on the floor like epileptic auctioneers?” I felt I had given myself away. Pentecostalism. The religion of the poor.

  I told them they, or rather we, were not really poor, because we could stop being poor anytime we wanted to, whereas the poor thought their poverty would last forever. What I really meant, but did not say because I feared it would make me seem like too much of an authority on the subject, was that the worst part of poverty is that you believe you can no more shed it than you can your personality or character, that you see your condition as a self-defining trait that, no matter how much money you come into, you can never divest yourself of or, worst of all, hide from other people.

  “Here’s to a world in which no one feels they have anything to hide,” said Dorothy, sincerely. We all drank to such a world, and we all knew it was me that we were toasting.

  Fielding’s Condensed

  History of Newfoundland

  Chapter Nine:

  THE PROBLEME OF THIS NEW FOUNDE LANDE

  Sir John Berry submits his census of the island to the king, who, in his famous Proclamatione Regardynge the Colonye of New Founde Lande, declares: “… it be certaine from the informatione contained in the census that the probleme of this New Founde Lande in tyme will solve itselfe. It is cleare that human life in this wilde place cannot be sustained and that the planters will either leave or by attrition perishe. I do hereby decree that they be not molested but lefte to encounter whatever fate or variety of fates as may please Almightye God.”

  It is because of its belief in the settlers’ right to self-determination that England is slow to respond to the invasion of Newfoundland by France in 1696.

  After every English settlement except Bonavista and Carbonear is destroyed, England decides to fortify her colony. The two countries struggle for ownership of Newfoundland until 1713, when, under the Treaty of Utrecht, England recognizes France’s historical right to part-ownership of Newfoundland by giving to France what it believes to be a worthless stretch of coastline, the northeast one-third of the Newfoundland shore. England can be excused for this so-called blunder, for the only people who advise against it are the settlers who have lived on the shore for years and are to be supplanted by the French, and so can hardly be expected to give an honest estimation of its worth.

  A Modest Proposal

  THOUGH I HAD COME to New York as early in life as I could, I had come too late to be part of the heyday of the Call or the socialist movement in America. It was not long before I realized that like the Socialist Party itself, the Call was on its last legs. Just as I was arriving on the scene, hyper-earnest, idealistic, the others were starting to reconcile themselves to the idea that to be an American socialist was to adhere to an ideology that, though righteous, would soon be out of favour for all time, a lost, just cause.

  I had been two years in New York when the paper folded and, though it soon after resurfaced as a weekly, I was not rehired. One of the results of the decline in the fortunes and membership of the party was that socialist newspapers all over started shutting down and what few reporters were left found themselves unemployed. I had had the company of like-minded people for the kind of rare, short time that in your youth you think will never end.

  I managed to make some money freelancing for what few socialist publications there still were and, with Fielding’s help, for The New York Times and other mainstream papers, but because I had no full-time job, I had time for doing what I had really come to New York to do anyway, to make speeches, the result being that while my standing in the decimated party rose steadily, I grew progressively more destitute.

  I was soon spending more time at the non-paying avocation of stump-speaker than I was reporting. I was much valued by the party as a speaker because I could pass for a lot of things that I was not. I was not Jewish, but because of my nose and dark features I could pass for Jewish, a Jew of inscrutable heritage once my accent was factored in, but a Jew nonetheless and one preferable to the real thing, the Jewish intellectuals who in the East Side ghettos could not hold an audience because they were so clearly not ghetto-born themselves.

  I was not really working class but, luckily for the party, I was starving (I would not accept money from Fielding, no matter how much she insisted) and every day wore the same suit of clothes, so I could pass for working class. The other socialists, who dressed down for their speaking engagements, always looked enviously at me as if they wondered how I managed to look so uncultivatedly shabby and so authentically emaciated. The party would have lost a valuable asset if I had succeeded in becoming as well-fed, well-clothed and well-rested as those on whose behalf I campaigned day after day, but fortunately the one thing that poverty did not diminish was my ability to elude good fortune.

  Because of my Newfoundland accent, I could pass for an Irishman, a Welshman, a Scot. The Chameleon, Fielding called me, but it was really the audiences that changed, each one mistaking me for something different.

  One thing I could not be mistaken for w
as black, but that did not stop Charlie Ervin from choosing me from among the thinned ranks of his “stumpers,” proclaiming me a “specialist in race relations” and sending me to Harlem. Fielding went with me and, as she had done along the waterfront in St. John’s, went about rounding up an audience for me, standing on street corners with her cane held aloft and proclaiming: “Joseph Smallwood will give a speech in five minutes on the subject of socialism, a speech that none of you will soon forget, the likes of which you have not heard before and may not hear again.…”

  I stood on a soapbox and looked out over a sea of black faces, blacks at first mute with incredulity at the sight of these two whites among them — Fielding in her “finery,” me exhorting them to self-betterment by voting for a party that, though it claimed to be colour-blind, had almost no black members. I was, at first at least, so ingenuously unaware of the danger I was in and so earnest in describing the racism-free society that I believed would come about through socialism that they let me speak, their expressions seeming to say that they might as well let me entertain them.

  I told them I was from Newfoundland, and when they said they had never heard of it, I said, as though by way of proving it existed, that I would be its prime minister one day.

  “You’re the puniest politician I ever seen,” one man said. I told him I was not a politician yet, but was speaking on behalf of a party candidate who was running in the state elections and who could not be everywhere at once.

  “Never mind once,” the man said, “he ain’t never been here. He’s afraid to come in here, das why he sent you.” The crowd laughed.

  “Under socialism, you will all have better lives,” I said.

  “You got socialism,” a woman said. “It don’t look like it done you much good.” She turned to Fielding. “Why don’t you let him have some of the food? You look like you eatin’ it all and then some.”