Fielding’s Father
I WENT TO WORK for a paper in Corner Brook (sending money on to my family in St. John’s), and as each day went by, my bitterness abated and common sense got the better of me. As I had concluded before, Liberalism was my only way of advancement in politics, so I had to swallow my pride and try to stay in Sir Richard’s good graces. I began keeping track of his administration in St. John’s and even wrote him letters of advice from time to time, which he did not acknowledge.
But in 1930, he wrote me from St. John’s and asked me to come see him right away. I took the train across the island and went to his house, where Cantwell gave me a small amount of money and instructed me to hole up in the Brownsdale Hotel on New Gower Street until further notice.
I knew that Sir Richard was soon to call a by-election in the district of Lewisporte, and I was hoping that, guilty over not having rewarded me properly before, he was going to offer me the Liberal nomination. I languished at the Brownsdale for three weeks, thinking Sir Richard had forgotten me, until finally he phoned. Before he could speak, I did. I told him this by-election was especially important to me because the Lewisporte seat had formerly been held by George Grimes, my first mentor, who had just passed away.
“It would be a great honour for me to run in Lewisporte, Sir Richard,” I said. “I can win there for you; Pd like the Liberal nomination.”
“I’m sorry, Smallwood,” Sir Richard said, “but I’ve already promised it to someone else.”
“Who?” I all but shouted into the phone, certain the someone else must be Prowse.
“Lady Squires. My wife will be the first woman elected to the House of Assembly,” Sir Richard said, as if he were announcing yet one more thing he would be remembered for, as if he considered it to be more of an achievement for him than for her:
“Then what do you want me to do?” I managed to choke out. He said he wanted me to start up a Liberal propaganda sheet, to be called the Watchdog, whose sole purpose would be to counter the Tory propaganda sheet, which was called the Watchman. My job would essentially be to dig up dirt on members of the Opposition and other of Sir Richard’s enemies.
The Watchman and the Watchdog. To make it easier to distinguish between them in conversation, the papers were referred to simply as the Dog and the Man. “We got the worst of that abbreviation,” Sir Richard said, as though it were my fault. Sir Richard got some revenge by “obtaining” the Man’s mailing list and having me send the Dog free of charge to lifetime Tories, not in the hope of converting them, but in the hope word would get round among their fellow Tories that they were subscribing to the Dog. We managed to stir up quite a lot of trouble before our ruse became common knowledge.
There appeared in a Tory paper a cartoon depicting me as a bespectacled, emaciated mongrel sitting in rapt attention to a phonograph from which were issuing the words “Sic him, Smallwood, sic him.” The caption read “His master’s voice.” To me, to be depicted, however unflatteringly, as a sidekick of Sir Richard’s was a breakthrough. I cut out the cartoon and pasted it on the wall above my desk.
Every so often, Prowse would come by the Dog’s offices, which were located in a freezing, ill-partitioned warehouse on Water Street, with some press release that Sir Richard wanted translated into propaganda. There was no doubt that even at age thirty, Prowse looked prime ministerial, and that Sir Richard was the mentor to him I wanted him to be to me.
One day, after he threw a hand-scribbled note from Sir Richard on my desk, Prowse lingered, as he did not usually do, and I knew that at long last he wanted to talk, I presumed about our falling out at the Feild, to talk about it and smooth it over, since our paths had crossed yet again and would likely go on crossing.
“So,” he said, “I hear that you were in New York when Fielding was there.”
I reddened, wondering if he could possibly know what had happened between Fielding and me there.
“She was there when I was there would be a better way of putting it,” I said. “She didn’t last long. It’s a big city. Not like St. John’s or Halifax.”
“But you came back?” Prowse said, disingenuously interrogative, mock-earnest.
“After five years,” I said. “Who told you Fielding was there, anyway?”
“She did,” Prowse said.
Dear Prowse, September 12, 1918. Years after the caning. Years after Prowse had carried me about in triumph for mocking Fielding’s father on the pitch at Bishop Feild. When had she stopped loving him? Had she stopped? Had she ever loved him? Or me? She said she felt more for me than she ever had for him. It seemed to me now that that could mean almost anything. Even after the letter Prowse and I had co-written and the other boys had signed, she might be writing to him. Or more. Those stories she had told me about being propositioned by married men, men with children. Had she intended me to assume that it was Prowse she meant? It might have been her way of saying that she was available to me, a married man with children. Or her way of making me think she was.
Forget Fielding, I told myself. You never so much as held hands with her. Your courtship lasted about three minutes, from her declaration of affection, if that is what it was, to your blundering proposal. I felt as foolish as I had that night when I saw in her eyes what I should have seen all along. Still, here was Prowse. The thought of him having her almost made me sick.
“You’re still on speaking terms? You still see each other?” I deadpanned. “In spite of everything, I mean.”
“Oh, I bump into her on the street from time to time,” said Prowse. “It’s a small city. Not like New York.”
“She never mentions you,” I said. He smiled.
“You worked at the Call,” Prowse said. It was not a question. I nodded. “I can’t imagine Fielding working there—”
“She didn’t,” I said.
“Oh, I know,” Prowse said. “Fielding a socialist, can you imagine?”
“She was one,” I said, aware too late of how ridiculous it sounded, as if we were fighting over Fielding, whom we both claimed to despise.
“Not really,” Prowse said. “She may have pretended to be one. Just for a lark. More grist for the mill, you know. One more thing to write about. Fielding would never have taken seriously anything as ridiculous as socialism.”
The gauntlet had been thrown down. A challenge of one-upmanship, which I declined. I thought of Grimes, the Sunday afternoons when the three of us had gone canvassing from door to door. Fielding and I, the two of us not yet twenty, trying to start up unions on the waterfront. Fielding’s decision to follow me to New York. Fielding inexplicably crying the day I told her I was leaving Newfoundland. Inexplicable then. I savoured the memory now. A woman crying at the thought of losing me. I had plenty of ammunition if I cared to use it. Still, there was nothing to be gained from provoking Prowse. I would let him imagine whatever he liked. It even occurred to me he might be trying to get me to admit to something he could someday use to buy my silence.
“No,” I said. “You’re probably right. Her heart was never in it. Her heart was never in anything as far as I can tell.”
If Prowse was wounded, it didn’t show. What did he want? He stood up and looked around the makeshift, grubby “newsroom,” which I manned alone day after day.
“I don’t know how you stand it here, Smallwood,” he said. “I know I couldn’t.”
I said nothing. It was a feeble parting shot, and I could tell by his expression that he knew it.
Lady Squires was elected in Lewisporte by a landslide, by a margin of victory even greater than Sir Richard’s had been in the last election, not that I brought this fact to his attention. “Having the prime minister’s wife as your member in the House is as good as having the prime minister himself,” Sir Richard said when I went to see him one night. “She will not embarrass me,” he added reassuringly, as if I had all along been saying that she would. “She has completed courses in elocution and public speaking at the Emerson College of Oratory in Boston.” Whereas I, I felt like saying, had merely completed a course in public speaking as a means of self-preservation in the slums of Harlem, where it was my daily task to convince blacks whose ancestors had been brought to America in slave ships that the election of thirty-seven white presidents in a row was no cause for them to do something cynical like refuse to vote. It also occurred to me that the subject of the only speech I had ever heard Lady Squires give was “Why women should not be allowed to vote.”
I was trying, unsuccessfully it seems, not to scowl. Though I need not have bothered, for Sir Richard seemed more puzzled than displeased by my dismay, as if, his happiness being uppermost in everybody’s mind, he could not understand my disappointment.
I saw Fielding struggling towards her boarding-house one day in mid-winter, trying to make her cane look like an affectation, trying not to look as though she needed it to walk. I followed behind her, making sure she didn’t see me. She stopped every fifty feet or so, exhausted, chest heaving, mouth open, and leaned against something, a wall, a gatepost, as if the better to examine something that had caught her eye, or as if she were pausing at the halfway point of a long walk and would soon be on her way again. To the people passing briskly by she nodded, as if to include herself in this fellowship of walkers.
She resumed her journey and eventually reached her boarding-house and, with me mere feet behind her, began to make her way up the icy steps, clutching the rail. When she got to the top, I called her name. She turned around and looked down at me.
“Oh, to be in England, now that Smallwood’s here,” she said. We had not met since we had written about our school days in the papers.
“It was just politics, Fielding,” I said, trying to sound as if I had got the best of the exchange and so was magnanimously offering the olive branch. “You can’t expect people not to fight back if you write about them like you do. Some of my best friends are people I’ve accused of doing worse.”
“There must be something about you that inspires forgiveness, Smallwood,” she said, “or else you’d have been murdered long ago. Come up and have a drink with me. I find myself in a mood that makes even your company seem preferable to none at all.”
We went up to her room.
“Do you know,” she said, “my intake of rum exactly matches my output of words. A column a day, a bottle a day. When I wrote two columns a week, I drank two bottles a week. One sip, one sentence; one drink, one paragraph; one bottle, one column. I don’t know if the drinking helps me write, or the writing makes me drink. Both perhaps. At any rate, I have been told by a doctor that I have to cut back to one bottle a week, one column a week, if I want to witness Sir Richard’s second resurrection from the dead, which by my reckoning should take place eight years from now. I’d just as soon miss it, to tell you the truth, if the alternative was anything but nothing.”
“I practically write the whole Dog myself,” I said. “I hardly ever take a drink.”
“An extraordinary accomplishment, to be sure,” she said. “I can’t even read it while I’m sober. It’s not how you foresaw yourself at thirty, is it, Smallwood? Defending Richard Squires in a paper called the Dog?”
“Prowse works for Sir Richard,” I said. “He’s his executive assistant. But of course you knew that?” When she didn’t answer, I got up to leave.
“Sit down, sit down,” Fielding said, putting her hands on my shoulders and all but forcing me into the chair. She poured herself a drink and stood with her back against the wall.
“My father died last week,” she said. “They didn’t tell me. Some kind of mix-up. My uncle thought my aunt was going to, and she thought he was going to, or something. I don’t know. The desk editor at the Telegram assumed I knew, or else he would have called me when they phoned it in, he said. I read about it in the paper. Ever since I left the San, I’ve been scanning the obituaries, keeping tabs on the old crowd. Ghoulish of me, I know. And there, Tuesday last week, was my name. Fielding. I bet a lot of the San crowd thought it was me. It didn’t dawn on me until I was halfway through the obituary who it was I was reading about.”
“I’m sorry,” I said, and I was, though I could not help sounding like I begrudged her even my condolences, as if for her to lapse from irony even to confess her father’s death was not playing by the tacitly agreed-upon rules that governed our relationship.
“Was your father religious?” I said.
“He went to church,” Fielding said. “Why do you ask?”
“Do you believe in God?” I said.
“I believe in God the way I believe that this is my last drink,” she said. “I believe it, even though I know it’s not.”
“Well,” I said, “I have to go.”
“You won’t have a drink with me,” said Fielding.
“I can’t,” I said, certain I could not hold out much longer against the urge, to feel sorry for her and lose the sense of grievance against her that I realized had become curiously sustaining. “I have to go,” I said. “I have — I have to meet someone.” I looked around the room, at the bed. I felt as though we had last spoken that night in New York at the Hotel Newfoundland.
“Prowse came to see me,” I said. “To ask about New York.” I was not sure if I was trying to make her feel better or worse.
Fielding said nothing, only raised her eyebrows in a token of mock surprise. She stared at her glass.
“It might not be a bad idea,” I said. “Cutting back on the booze.”
She shrugged. Tears welled up in her eyes.
“Well,” I said again, “I have to go.”
“You don’t have to,” she said. “You can stay. For as long as you like.”
“No,” I said, “I’ve got to — I know you’re — I’m sorry about your father.”
I hurried out and closed the door behind me. When I got outside, I had to grab the rail to keep my hands from shaking.
Dear Father:
You were a doctor, a “chest man,” scornful of your profession because you loved your patients and pitied them for having no one better to turn to for help than, as you put it, “the likes of me.” If you muttered aloud in your consulting room the way you did at home about some man who, for all you knew, your remedies were inadvertently murdering by slow degrees, your patients must have been a fretful lot.
You inherited from your father a reprint of a pamphlet that was written in the sixteenth century by a John Fielding, who was probably not an ancestor of ours, though you liked to believe or pretend that he was. The pamphlet described in great detail a medical procedure that you called mental ventilation, that is, the drilling of holes in the skulls of the sick to let the “evil spirits” out. You loved to read the pamphlet aloud. “This yeere have we the skull drille employed with great success. Three men died who woulde anywaye have perished, but three still live and showe signes of recoverye that we hope will soone make possible a seconde application of the drille.”
You were my mother’s husband when you were home and aware of her existence, which wasn’t often, not nearly often enough. You worked long hours. We lived in a place, you said, where nothing thrived except disease. My mother was from Boston and went back there when I was five. And moved from there to New York when I was ten.
For a long time I believed, and was probably right in believing, that you wished my mother had taken me with her when she left. There was no question of her doing so, of course. Even a widow with a child would not have made a good marriage prospect, but a woman who, however justifiably, had left her husband and had in her care a constant reminder to herself and others of that fact would not have fared well in Boston. My mother had no resources and no means of getting them but marriage. She could not have had any confidence when she thought of setting out from Newfoundland that she would soon or ever be able to support a child.
I have only the faintest, possibly counterfeit, recollections of my mother. I don’t remember her saying goodbye to you. There was apparently a divorce worded with sufficient vagueness as to absolve both of you with faint blame. My mother’s father came from Boston to escort her home. He did not come into the house, or perhaps he did and I was kept from seeing him, I’m not sure. I think I remember my mother walking down the driveway with her father, presumably to a waiting cab. I remember her crying, squatting down to embrace me.
What I was told was happening and by whom, I don’t remember, but I’m sure I wasn’t told she was leaving us for good. Nor do I remember when I realized she wasn’t coming back.
You did not purge the house of her after she went back to Boston. As if to prove you were neither broken-hearted nor humiliated, you left her picture on the mantelpiece. My mother as she was not long after you first met. Perhaps that was the point, to distinguish the girl you fell in love with from the woman you divorced. You did not so much show me as leave where I might find them the albums in which there were pictures of you and her together, Dr. and Mrs. Fielding and with them, sometimes, Baby Sheilagh.
The kind of silence that follows the slamming of a door persisted in that house for years. It was there even while the radio was playing and when relatives came to visit, and when we talked. We were never quiet in each other’s company if we could help it; the silence made her absence so palpable. It was as though life as it would have been if she had stayed was taking place in some room in the house that, no matter how long we searched for it, we could never find.
You cursed your body’s need for sleep and, in token protest of it, slept while sitting in a chair with all your clothes on. I was always in bed before you got home, always in bed but never asleep. Even the housekeeper, on your instructions, never waited up, but left something in the stove for you to eat, which was often still there in the morning.
After I heard you coming up the steps and opening the front door, I waited for you to settle down, then tiptoed out to see if you were still awake, which you sometimes were, tipped back in your recliner, staring at the ceiling.
You rarely noticed me until I was standing right beside you, though the sight of me never startled you. As though you were as immobilized as one of your patients, you turned just your head and smiled and reached out your hand for mine, squeezing it lightly. “Hello, there,” you said. You looked at me, and as if my very age was an expression of unwarranted optimism, you shook your head in fond disbelief that anyone could be so naive as to be five years old. You didn’t see girlhood so much as a stage in life as a character trait. I was girlish, you were mannish; these things would always be the case.
And so you told me everything, things five-year-olds should not hear, I suppose. You told me of patients who had died or were going to, and of others who were getting better, always speaking of the latter with a tinge of irony, as if to say that however much better they got, the world they were returning to was still the same.
Sometimes, you fell asleep while talking to me, or I came out and found you asleep, your arms folded across your chest. If you were wearing your hat, I took it off and put it on the floor beside your chair, as you did when you remembered to. I didn’t have to be especially careful not to wake you, for, once asleep, you slept soundly, deeply, as if your body was making the most of the few hours it had you in its care.
It was a strange sight to see you sleeping. It was hard to believe you’d trust something so unreliable and treacherous as your body to sustain you without your supervision. I stood beside you, marvelling that there existed in you something more basic, more fundamental than your will, something that made your chest move up and down, drew air into your body and forced it out again. It always made me think there must be more to your waking self than met the eye, not that you seemed to me lacking or deficient in anything exactly. Perhaps it was your sleeping in your clothes, sometimes even in your hat and coat, that did it. It seemed to me that your impressive hat and coat and vest and pants and shoes were sleeping, too.
In the way you would say of someone, “He’s not himself today,” I thought of you as being permanently not yourself. Lack of sleep, overwork, your wife’s absence, made you what you seemed to others to be, but I believed there was another latent Dr. Fielding and was always waiting for him to show himself.
You were a good “chest man,” but not an especially good one, not, as you said of other doctors in other fields, “top-notch.” I was ten before I realized this, before I realized that others did not see you as I did, were not as awed by you as I was, that there were men in the world in whose company you felt inferior, deficient. I noticed you never referred to other “chest men” as “top-notch,” not even those who visited St. John’s from places like New York and London. There were, and still are, a good many “chest men” in St. John’s. This was the specialty where you could not only do the most good but make the most money, and you would leave it to me, you said, to decide which of these two considerations mattered most to your colleagues.
I think that over the years, you made some sort of peace with your limitations. Not that admitting to yourself that you would never be top-notch made you any less inclined to push yourself or more inclined to sleep. But you were motivated now by guilt, not by ambition. You were still trying to compensate for being unexceptional, but you were doing so for your patients now.
When I was twelve, you asked me if I wanted to go to a private school in Scotland like so many other girls my age were doing. I told you I would go if that was what you wanted. You took me in your arms and hugged me. “We’ll send you to Bishop Spencer instead,” you said. “How would that be?” I nodded and you kissed me on the cheek. It was the only time in my life that you ever hugged or kissed me. I didn’t understand then that the point of the question was not to try to get rid of me, but to see if I wanted to be rid of you.
We drifted apart after they released me from the San. Not that we saw each other any less frequently. I still went to the old house on Circular Road, but I could see in your eyes that you wanted me to stay away. I knew why, though we never talked about it. We would sit there on Sunday afternoons and often, in spite of yourself, you let me make you laugh.
You were so ashamed of yourself, you couldn’t bear to see me, couldn’t forgive yourself. You thought I didn’t understand, or that I was pretending not to understand, how profoundly you betrayed me by not coming to the San to say goodbye. But it was because you stayed away that I knew how much you loved me. I didn’t feel abandoned or betrayed.
And you thought I didn’t know that you had done something else for which you thought you didn’t deserve to be forgiven. But I knew.
In the end, you found what you must have thought was the perfect way of making restitution.
You told the other Fieldings not to send for me.
You knew that they would do as you said, that they thought you didn’t want me there because, like them, you were ashamed of me, because you had come to your senses at last and disowned me.
You fancied that by this, it was yourself you were denying. You had abandoned me and so you deserved to be abandoned. An eye for an eye. How could you not have known that this, of all the ways you might have hurt me, was the worst?
Still, you cannot stop me from remembering.
On those rare occasions when you were able to make time for me, you used to give me make-believe check-ups. You put your stethoscope on the soles of my feet and listened with an air of grave concentration. You put it on my forehead and claimed that you could hear what I was thinking. You tapped me on the head with your little rubber hammer and looked at me quizzically, appraisingly, as if awaiting some result. To test my eyes, you put a tongue depressor on your own tongue, said, “Ahhhh,” and asked me to tell you what I saw.
You were nominally, perfunctorily, a Methodist. We went to church regularly because, you said, “Patients like to think their doctors are in God’s good books.” But whether you believed in God or some promised land, some happy sight, some “Bonavista” that was waiting for you on the other side, I don’t know. Asked to declare yourself on the subject, you once said, “The grave’s a fine and private spot / where none I think do ought but rot.”
I love you now no less than when I was just a girl. To quote the inscription on the headstone of your favourite writer, “He has gone where savage indignation can lacerate his heart no more.”