Fielding
WE LIVED “on the side of the hill.” It brought back to me memories of the years we spent on the hill when I was young, the years before the Brow. The poor neighbourhoods were still predominantly Catholic; their flag, the pink, white and green, still hung from makeshift poles above the doors of the houses that lined the unpaved, pothole-ridden, muddy streets. Lines of row houses that looked like motels, with each unit painted differently, faced each other down the undulating length of Gower Street.
A year after we were married, we had the first of three children, a son, Ramsay Coaker Smallwood. I was for a short time infatuated with him, the sheer fact of him, the sight of him in Clara’s arms or in his crib. I had taken the birth of children for granted all my life. My childhood had been full of bawling babies, the sound they made as much a part of the climate as the wind. But I had never regarded myself or one of my brothers or sisters as a hybrid of my parents, a commingling of two natures. I had considered the Smallwood children, physically at least, to be my mother’s. Their natures came from her by a process that, though set into motion by my father, was otherwise uninfluenced by him. But here was little Ramsay, every part of him undeniably shot through with Clara and me. It seemed both miraculous and off-putting to think of myself not as my self but as being jointly derived from Minnie May and Charlie Smallwood.
I admonished myself not to be so taken with Ramsay that I would lose sight of my purpose, about which all I could have said with any certainty was that it was one no doting father or uxorious husband could achieve.
I was soon well on the way to pursuing an almost completely autonomous life, leaving Clara alone in the house for days and nights and weeks on end while I worked and travelled. I was no better a father or husband than my father was, not even when it came to providing for my family, for most of what I earned went into underwriting the cost of publishing newspapers whose purpose was to advance my ever-evolving cause.
Dear Smallwood:
He loves her, he loves me not. He loves me, but he marries her. I have seen her, Smallwood. Met her, really. I turned a corner onto Water Street one day and bumped into the pram that she was pushing. I knew who she was, for I had seen your wedding pictures in the paper. I knew her name was Clara. I almost said it.
The pram was a surprise. At first I thought that you were with her and that you would see me see you three together — the Joseph Smallwoods, as you must be called. Or that you might even introduce me to her. The street was crowded. It was a few moments before I realized that she was unaccompanied.
She must have wondered why I looked so startled. When she saw my cane and noticed I was limping, she apologized, as if even a woman with a pram must give way to a woman with a limp. But that is not fair, for there was not a trace of condescension in her voice or in her face. I don’t believe I have encountered someone more obviously sweet-tempered in all my life.
She was flustered, embarrassed. “I should have looked where I was going,” she said. “No,” I said. “It was my fault.” Which it was, for it was Sunday, my day off, and I had got up and started drinking earlier than usual. “I hope I didn’t wake the baby,” I said. She said she wished I had, but that nothing could wake him in the daytime or make him sleep at night.
“A baby after my own heart,” I could not help saying. She took it as an invitation to go on talking. I wondered how I would get out of it. I could just see her describing me to you and you recognizing me in her description. She mentioned you. That is, she said the words my husband as if she was cheerfully resigned to something for which she had heard all husbands are notorious. A woman unaccustomed to loneliness, especially the loneliness of marriage. The peculiar loneliness that I have seen in so many women. As if nothing in her childhood, nothing that had happened between her parents or that she had even sensed between them, had prepared her for it. What had she expected? Née Oates. Still feeling new to St. John’s after three years, still missing Harbour Grace.
I think if I had gone round and looked at the baby in the pram, we would have wound up having tea or going for a walk. Instead, I interrupted her, told her that I had somewhere to be and that I hoped the baby would soon sleep through the night. I was too abrupt, perhaps. I was nearly crying, and not just for the reasons that would be obvious to you.
I have seen her since, pushing the baby, sometimes walking with a man who must be her brother, they look so much alike. Though I’m sure she wouldn’t mind if strangers passing by took them to be husband and wife. A young family out walking on a Sunday afternoon. Marriage as she imagined it would be. I can see her writing letters home that make her sound lonesome and at the same time absolve you of any blame. Letters that are clearly fishing for invitations or for visitors.
I make sure she doesn’t see me. I know the route she takes and I avoid it. I know she would remember me, the limping woman she collided with. A familiar face.
You are never with her, for which I should feel grateful, I suppose, though I can’t help feeling sorry for her. I can see that she minds, but not as much as my mother must have. Or else she minds as much but loves you more than my mother loved my father. Or differently. She will never leave you, Smallwood. I saw it in her eyes. I wonder what she sees in yours.
One winter day, walking along Duckworth Street, preoccupied with trying to figure out where I would get the money to support my new family, I realized after I had been looking at her for quite some time that Fielding was in front of me, limping along at a clip, a pile of books under her arm, unmistakably Fielding, though she was even more stooped than when I had last seen her and her limp seemed more pronounced. I shouted her name several times, but she didn’t turn around, so I had to run to catch her.
“Fielding,” I said, “didn’t you hear me calling to you?”
“Yes, I did,” she said, “but this is as fast as I can go.”
“Are you still at Twelve Mile House?” I asked.
“No,” she said, “I am now at three-cent house, a marvellous establishment on Cochrane Street, which I share with an as yet un-unionized nest of prostitutes.”
“You lost your job?”
“No,” she said, “I know exactly where it is. As of two months ago, it was taken from me.”
“You didn’t lose your job because of the union,” I said, “you lost your job because you wouldn’t join the union.”
“Smallwood,” Fielding said, “are you some sort of agency of fate that it would be pointless of me to resist? If you are, tell me now so I can shoot myself without regret.” She looked about at the shops of Duckworth Street, the cars and streetcars and horse-drawn cabs going by, surveyed it all with an air of puzzlement as though surprised to see people still caught up in pursuits she had long ago forsworn.
“Have you found another job?”
“As I told you, I’m on the waiting-lists of various hermit professions: lighthouse-keeper weather-observer, telegraph operator …”
“Are you still writing that history of yours?”
“I regret to say that whenever you ask me that question, the answer will be yes.”
“I suppose I’m in it.”
“Why would you be?”
I suppressed the urge to turn around and walk away.
“If you can write history, you can write for a newspaper again,” I said. “My newspaper for instance.”
“Your newspaper? Are you telling me there are people in this world whose livelihood depends on the success of an enterprise run by you?”
“I’m offering you a job.”
“From hermit to reporter —”
“You wouldn’t have to be a reporter; you could just write commentary, columns, whatever you want.”
She slumped against a storefront and looked down at me appraisingly.
“I wouldn’t have to cover anything, establish contacts, conduct interviews …”
“You can write at home if you want to, as long as your copy gets to me on time.”
Fielding said yes, eventually, though the list of things she insisted she be exempted from doing was endless (“no hobbing, no nobbing, no chitting, no chatting …”). And at the first mention of joining a union, she would be gone, she said.
Twelve Mile House had been for her a kind of halfway house between the San and the world, a way of easing back into life after two years spent in limbo. But it was as if, having come so close to death and seen so many people die, she could no longer manage the suspension of belief in her own mortality that is necessary to getting on from day to day.
She drank almost constantly as far as I could tell, though she generally managed to get her copy in on time. Every day, a boy about twelve would deliver it to the cubby-hole on Water Street that I referred to grandly as my “newsroom.” As per her instructions, I paid him for his trouble out of Fielding’s meagre wages.
I published her in the series of papers I founded over the next few years. She wrote under the pseudonym Ray Joy, and one of the terms of her employment was that I not reveal her identity to anyone. I was surprised at how willingly she churned out the kind of propaganda I wanted. She wrote earnest socialist commentaries, scathingly criticized whatever public official I deemed to be deserving of scathing criticism. The mysterious Ray Joy was quite popular among left-leaners of all kinds and I was often pressed to admit that I was in fact Ray Joy, which Fielding assured me I could do if I wanted to. I put her willingness to be a pen-for-hire down to her cynicism, her scepticism, knowing she did not even believe in the end for which the propaganda was the means, let alone the propaganda itself.
Just how right I was I did not find out until it became public knowledge that Fielding, for the previous three years or so, had also been writing for an opposing propaganda sheet, the archconservative Gazette, under the pseudonym Harold Prowdy, attacking in one paper the opinions she had expressed in the other and getting a war of words going between her two imaginary selves, Joy and Prowdy going at it week after week, each denouncing the other with such fervour that it was largely to see how Joy would answer Prowdy and vice versa that people bought our paper and the Gazette. She had extracted from her other publisher a promise, like the one she extracted from me, that her identity would remain a secret. It was when this publisher confessed to someone he thought he could trust the real identity of Harold Prowdy, and this someone passed the information on to me, that Fielding was found out. I phoned the other publisher and told him that Joy was Prowdy was Fielding, and both of us fired Fielding on the same day.
“I suppose it had to happen sooner or later,” Fielding said when, in something of a rage, I went to her boarding-house on Cochrane Street and told her she was fired. The sight of the place almost made me change my mind.
Outside, it was painted dark green and trimmed with white — or those at least were the colours it had once been painted with, for there was not much paint left, mostly grey stump-coloured clapboard and a black-felt roof. It was impossible to tell, from the outside, what the original structure had looked like, it had been so frequently added on to. The whole thing was now a haphazard agglomeration of extensions, with a dozen doors and sets of stairs.
Fielding was at the top of what, from the inside, you could tell had been the original building, at the end of a short dark hallway in a room that faced the harbour and the Brow. Hers, the living quarters of the original owner, was the choicest room of the Cochrane, as the place was called, the only one with its own bathtub and sink. The hallway of that boarding-house was the same regardless of the weather or the time of day. On clear days, the sunlight that came through the little porthole window at the end of the hallway could do little to dispel the time-retarding gloom.
There was a pile of papers on the floor outside her door, and at first I thought she had been letting them pile up for days, until I saw the different mastheads and realized she was subscribing to every paper in the city. Copies of that day’s Gazette and my paper were among them. It was always a thrill for me to see in print something I had written, and how she could stand to leave her columns there all day, unread, unrevelled in, was beyond me.
I knocked on the door, on which there was a little sign that read San. San.
“Leave it on the floor,” Fielding roared from inside, though it was long past delivery time for even the latest evening paper.
“It’s Joe Smallwood,” I shouted back. There was a theatrical, offstage-like commotion from inside, running, limp-thumping footsteps, the rustle of paper, drawers opening and closing, as if she wanted me to know or think that she was hiding something. At last the door opened.
“He comes, I live,” said Fielding and, with a flourish of her arm, motioned me inside. Whatever they had been, the sounds I had heard had not been those of cleaning up. It occurred to me that when I identified myself, she might have run about messing up the room for effect. Her silver flask and a bottle of Scotch both stood unstoppered on her desk as if she was about to transfer the contents from one to the other. There was a single unmade bed against the wall, a table, a couple of chairs, a dresser with all the drawers half open and with clothing hanging out. Books were scattered everywhere in the manner of Judge Prowse, open-faced on the floor, stacked in draft-blocking piles against the walls and on the window sill. Overhead shone a lone light bulb.
I sat on one of the chairs and Fielding sat on her bed, leaned back, her arms supporting her, her legs stretched out, feet crossed. She was wearing buttoned boots, the sole of the left boot built up several inches higher than the other. Not an inch of her withered left leg was showing.
I accused her of disloyalty, of hypocrisy, of being an intellectual whore. She smiled, lips tilted, puffing on a cigarette. She was wearing a tweed skirt with a zipper at the hip that was open, broken probably, and through which the end of her white blouse protruded like a pocket turned inside out.
“You knew I never meant a word I wrote,” she said, after I told her she was fired, “but as long as you thought I was furthering your cause, you didn’t care. You shouldn’t expect fidelity from someone you know is prostituting her talents.” I was so accustomed to her irony, it was a few seconds before I realized that she had said exactly what she meant.
“Do you believe in anything, Fielding?” I said. “Why are you writing a book if you don’t believe in anything?”
“I believe you still owe me three dollars,” Fielding said. “And you know where to send it.”
I had the money with me. It had taken some doing to scrape it together. It was in coins, in an envelope that I removed from my pocket and threw with a loud clunk on the table.
“So how is married life?” she said, sitting up straight and lighting a cigarette.
“Better than it would have been with you,” I said, instantly aware of how foolish, how churlish, it sounded.
“Never know, will you?” she said. “Besides, you were only joking when you asked me, remember?”
“I remember,” I said. “So what about you, Fielding? Any prospects?”
As if to emphasize the shabbiness of the question, she got up and limped to the table, where, standing, she poured herself a glass of Scotch.
“I’m never proposed to,” she said, “but I’m often propositioned. Mostly by men whose proposals have already been accepted and whose children have already started school. Sometimes even by men whose children have children. I seem to have acquired some sort of reputation.”
“I can’t imagine how,” I said.
“No,” she said, “I’m quite certain that you can’t. Most men tell me that because I’ve been ‘left on the shelf,’ the sort of thing they have in mind is the most I can hope for. So there you are. I’ve been left on the shelf.”
I felt my face go red. I’d thought at first that she was joking. Fielding with other men.
“You can’t be embarrassed,” she said. “You first spoke to me about such things when we were children. I believe you said your father ‘lives with his wife, who is the mother of his children.’”
“I’ve got to go,” I said.
“Then go,” she said, and looked at the window as I got up to leave.
Once outside, I hurried home, wondering along the way if she was really propositioned by married men or if she had just been trying to make me jealous or to shock me. It was news to me that she had a “reputation.” But then it would be. I knew I was looked upon as being something of a prude. The sort of sexual bantering that went on between men often stopped when I appeared, as if my distaste for it was evident, though I tried not to let it show. Often, upon departing from a group of men, I would hear a raucous laugh behind me when I was just far enough away that we could all pretend it was not me they were laughing at.
Fielding’s scam did not discredit her in the newspaper business. On the contrary, all the other publishers took great delight in our being hoodwinked and printed stories about it in their papers.
She was hired by the Evening Telegram to write a column a day, under her own name, a column called Field Day, which appeared in the first panel on page three of the Telegram.
She began writing satirical columns, so irony-laden you could not pin down her politics. They would eventually become quite popular, but reaction to them was not good at first. To St. John’s readers, a newspaper was a platform from which to make a speech, to defend or promote one’s party or one’s cause, and to attack other causes, other parties. But here was Fielding, finding fault with everyone and everything. And she was a woman, and women columnists were rare enough that many people believed, or professed to believe, that Fielding’s style was typical of women.
She was called a fence-sitter and was challenged to defend herself, which she did by saying the accusation might or might not be true.