Chapter Fourteen   

THE BONAVISTA, THAT WAYSTATION BETWEEN THE SANITORIUM and the city.

Two years after my Provider rescued me, I went back to St. John’s, taking to Riverhead Station the train that Smallwood shunned.

I didn’t mind that there was no one there to meet me.

After having been more or less in hiding for years, I decided I would live as I had done in New York, in some place where the landlord doubled as a bootlegger.

The newspapers I had read while at the shack had often run stories about such iniquitous places, stories whose real purpose seemed to be to advertise to those who wanted it where moonshine could be found.

I hailed a horse and cab, which I struggled into without help from the driver. There were motor cars waiting at the station, but I had never, not even in New York, ridden in a car. That horse-drawn vehicles would some day be obsolete, that there would not always be this mixed sort of traffic, this embroilment of horse and machine, did not occur to me.

“Take me to the cheapest boarding house that you can find,” I said.

Fifteen minutes later, I alighted from the cab that had stopped in front of what did not seem to be a boarding house. I was on Cochrane Street, looking up at a place that bore a name befitting of the grandeur it no longer had: the Cochrane Street Hotel. I would learn that it was now referred to simply as The Cochrane, which, throughout the city, was a euphemism for a kind of flamboyant seediness. It was home to that faction of the locally infamous who managed to combine with indigence and destitution a redemptive flair for eccentricity of some kind.

There were, among the many prostitutes who lived there, a woman who was so synonymous with prostitution that prostitutes in St. John’s were collectively referred to by her name, which was Patsy Mullins.

There was a convicted forger, a Pole who had worked off part of his sentence painting frescoes on the ceiling of Government House, working for years, Michelangelo fashion, on his back on a piece of board atop a perilous scaffolding.

There was a defrocked nun who had started her own one-woman order called the Sisters of Celestine Fecundo and spent most of her working hours “fundraising” at the corner of Duckworth and Prescott streets. Many others.

It was not my intention to become one of them, but the Cochrane, though not a boarding house, was the cheapest place to stay in the city, at least the cheapest of the places that were at least barely habitable. And it was all I could afford. I had decided I would not, ever again, live in my father’s house, not even after he died, assuming he did so before me, not even if he left it to me in his will, which I very much doubted he would do. I did not plan to disown him. While at the section shack, I had written to him, informing him that I was feeling better.

He had written back that he was glad to hear of my recovery, but he made no attempt to explain why he had stopped writing to me while I was in the San. Though he did, vaguely, allude to my children.

“I have never understood you,” he wrote. “But it seems that, no matter what, you will go your own way, regardless of the consequences to yourself or others. Why you prefer to the lights of St. John’s the gloom of Bonavista a greater mind than mine could not discover. I have done all that I can, and more than I was obliged to, considering my circumstances, some of which were solely of your making. I am a doctor. That is all that I am, all that I have, an occupation, a profession that I once performed in the service of God and now simply perform. I trust I will see you again. You will choose strangely, but you will not be true for long to any of your choices. To do so is not in your nature, which is so very unlike mine that I cannot begin to understand it. But you are still welcome in my house.”

That he was able to reconcile this view of himself with the fact of his having written to a newspaper an anonymous letter that had changed, and possibly ruined, the lives of others seemed inconceivable to me at that time, though it seems much less so now.

I knew I would, when I was ready, go by his house some evening, the house where he and I had lived alone, the house my mother left one morning for good without bidding me goodbye. If the lights were on I would knock on the door and he would admit me like the unexpected guest I was, one to whom he felt bound to offer his hospitality but whom he hoped would not stay long. And I would sit there in the dim, lamp lit room and, in what once had been my home, amidst surroundings that were not much changed from when I was just a girl and in which the past persisted like a panoply of voiceless ghosts, I would make conversation with my father, sit in filial silence while he spoke, speak when his reticence became unbearable. And then I would say that it was late and there was still something in my day that must be done. And he would, in token disguise of his relief, tell me I must come again and I would tell him yes, I would. And I would leave and, descending the steps clumsily in the sideways fashion required of me by all forms of descent, I would look back and see my father make his way from lamp to lamp, extinguishing the memories that my visit had invoked, the other life that might have been forever shadowing the one that was. And then I would turn away, walk away from what had been my home and, investing my soul by force of will with hope, make my way in summer twilight through the dark streets of St. John’s to the place to which my life had somehow brought me, up to a room where, lying on my bed, I would read some book that I had read before and between whose words memory would somehow make its way. I would do all this, not once, but many times, until the stranger who at one time was my father no longer answered when I let the knocker fall. I knew that day would come and suspected that he knew it too. The day would come for him when he would prefer fantasy and revery to the company of others when he could no longer see a difference between his mind and the world.

The rooms at the Cochrane Street Hotel were known as suites. Each had been given by the original, now long-forgotten landlord an ironic name that, though it did not appear on the door, was known to all the residents. The theme of these names was Old World opulence and luxury. I was assigned, upon registering, the Maharajah Suite, which I was relieved to discover was now referred to by my fellow tenants as the Corner, whereas the room called the Tajmahal was referred to as the Taj, another by its full name, the Sultan. The Palace of Versailles was called the Palace, the Vatican, the Vat. The ironic intent of whomever had named the rooms was not lost on the residents, but the names, which seemed to be known to some only in their short forms, were spoken as matter-of-factly as room numbers would have been. I witnessed my neighbours giving visitors directions to the Palace or the Taj or the Buckingham with earnest, straightfaced helpfulness, their expressions much like the landlord’s when he had told me that the only room available was the Maharajah Suite. I smiled when he said it, but all he could manage in response was a weary grin, as if he would just as soon have dispensed with this business of the names of the rooms of the Cochrane Street Hotel that he, and proprietors before him, had inherited from the original owner, because he had higher hopes for the place that would never be realized as long as these gleefully derisive names were still in use.

I moved into the Maharajah Suite in minutes with little more than a duffle bag filled with clothing. My books were at my father’s house. Herder had promised to have a typewriter delivered to me when I sent him my address, which I knew that he, if no one else, would find amusing. Fielding at the Cochrane. Where else would I wind up?

The possibility that the Corner, one of several, sea-facing corners of the Cochrane, would become my permanent home did not occur to me, any more than it did that anyone could become as fond of such a place as I would at length become. A single bed pushed hard against the wall, a chrome, Formica-topped kitchen table and two chairs with canvas-covered upholstery in which there were taped-over puncture wounds, a hot plate, a single cupboard with one of each utensil from unmatched sets, a closetlike toilet with a sink from which most of the porcelain was missing, more black than white, and above the sink a frameless mirror with uneven, jagged edges—these were what the sign outside on the street had advertised as “furniture and complete amenities.”

The place was cheaper than any boarding house that the cab driver, had he acceded to my request, could have found for me, and I didn’t mind the lack of whatever meagre meals were being served in boarding houses of the time. It was, I decided, exactly what I needed for now, exactly what someone needed who planned to write as I planned to, for I could not risk writing like that if I owed anything to anyone, if I had anything that I could not bear to part with, anything that might be taken from me.

I had met with Herder, for whose paper, the Telegram, I had not written since leaving with Smallwood for New York.

“I am going to write what I want to write,” I said. “If you will publish it. The bishop can make whatever threats he wishes. I have had enough of protecting my father’s reputation.”

Herder hired me again. “Welcome back,” he said. “We’ll see how long you last this time.”

That I would become a regular at the Cochrane, as much a fixture as the oldest of the prostitutes, seemed especially unlikely in the first few weeks. To the Cochrane every night came Portuguese fishermen from The White Fleet who were known collectively in St. John’s as “Mario.”

“Come in, Mario, my love” or “Here he is, here’s Mario, here to visit us again,” the prostitutes shouted while standing in their open doorways, shouted at stage-voice volume and tone in a token attempt to disguise the real reason of “Mario’s” visit, as if some minimum of decorum was required by their deluded, ambitious landlord. After the public greetings and the slamming of doors came the private sounds of squeaking bedsprings and perfunctory cries of “Oh Mario, oh Mario,” followed hours later by what sounded like the mass exodus of the sailors of The White Fleet from the Cochrane Street Hotel.

I began, from necessity, to keep prostitute’s hours, working at night and sleeping by day. To sleep at night was impossible, to write at night nearly so, what with all the noise made by Mario and the women that Sister Celestine called, again collectively, the Harlotry. Sister Celestine, if she knew any of the prostitute’s first or last names, never used them. The Harlotry answered Sister Celestine’s rebukes by saying that at least they “earned” their money and hadn’t been deemed “not good enough” by the nuns, whom they referred to as the Presentation.

“The Presentation kicked you out,” they’d say, or “You were so holy even the Presentation couldn’t stand you any more.” Any reference to her expulsion from the nuns sent Sister Celestine into a rage. “They were all a bunch of bitches just like the Harlotry,” she shouted, only indirectly addressing her tormentors, as if even to be referred to by pronouns was more of an acknowledgment of their existence than they deserved. Walking up and down the hallway, though, she pounded on their doors while she sermonized the Harlotry. And the Harlotry, even while entertaining Mario, would shout, “Put yourself out of your misery and get a man. One Blessed Virgin is enough.” At which Sister Celestine would shriek “Blasphemers” and run back to her room.

Sister C. was bad for business, for the sight of her in her habit in the hallways of the Cochrane Street Hotel stirred up the conscience of “Mario,” memories of a home where he was not exempted by his complexion, not presumed to be helpless to resist infidelity by virtue of his comical exoticism.

“Mario” always looked chastened, sometimes even frightened, at the sight of Sister C., who would sometimes block his way, standing at the top of the stairs, holding out, as though to fend him off with it, her wooden cross. The Harlotry, when they heard Sister C., called out to Mario, told him to go no farther. They would come out and escort him past her, holding him by the arms and cajoling him so loudly that their multitude of voices all but drowned out that of the old nun as she warned of the eternal torment that awaited all of them in hell.

Between the two sides of this combative gauntlet I made my way back each night, the sight and sound of me heightening the spectacle. “Mario” looked wide-eyed from the Harlotry to Sister C. to me, the limping, leg-dragging giant of a woman that I was. I liked to fancy that, by comparison with Sister C. and the Harlotry, I was inconspicuous, that these were probably the only circumstances in which, for me, inconspicuousness was possible, though Mario looked at me as if I were, in the spectacle, some bizarrely incongruous third element, an apparition by the fact of which there was no telling what, or from where, something even stranger might appear.

Sister Celestine circulated a petition to have me evicted on the grounds that I had once been a TB patient at the San. I was informed of this by one of the Harlotry, who told me that no one but Sister Celestine had signed the petition that nevertheless bore several dozen signatures, all forged by Sister C.

At the height of the squabblesome revelry and mayhem, I made my way from the Corner to the front stairs at the far end of the hallway, passing the rooms of the Harlotry, some of whose doors were wide open, if Mario was merely carousing. I glanced inside and saw women dancing with those homesick and lonely fishermen from Portugal, all of them, despite Prohibition, holding in plain view what I guessed from their swiftly acquired and far-gone degree of drunkenness was moonshine. Some of the women waved, and when I waved back, motioned with their cigarette-bearing hands for me to come inside. “Come in, my duckie, and have a drink with us.” I knew they had heard me coming down the hall, heard the clumping of my cane and my brace-and-boot-encumbered leg. When I stopped to acknowledge their invitation by declining it, they looked down at my thick-soled boot.

“I have to give this leg some exercise,” I said. “Doctor’s orders.”

“Well, here’s to you, my love,” a woman said once, raising her jar. In what I hoped would be a mollifying show of solidarity, I took out my flask and saying, “Here’s to you,” drank deeply from it.

“That’s the stuff for a chilly night now,” the woman said, though she stared dubiously at the flask.

“Poor thing,” I heard the woman say when I went on past the door, resuming the clumping and thudding that itself, I supposed, was part of the evening din at the Cochrane, part of the general torment to those few residents who after dark pursued nothing more than sleep or relaxation.

“Poor thing, my arse,” another woman’s voice said. “She’s a bit full of herself with that flask and that fancy cane of hers.”

I became known, in those first few months, before my columns began to attract attention and the Harlotry, illiterates without exception, learned of their irreverent tone by word of mouth, as The Doctor’s Daughter, a member of The Quality. I was, for some unimaginable reason, an interloper among those I regarded as my inferiors. Laid low by TB and my weakness for the bottle but nevertheless an eccentric in any context but the one from which I came—that seemed to be how they regarded me. If not for my leg and my limp and my ability to affect unaffectedness, I might have become the target of scorn instead of pity, however begrudged the latter was.

Sometimes, as I was making my way to the stairs, Portuguese fishermen who were just arriving would collectively appraise me, by no means repulsed by my limp or my oversized leg. They addressed me in words whose gist was clear enough though I could not understand them. They surrounded me, talking to me and to one another, grinning, laughing, nodding. Young, physically attractive men, their breath reeking of their foreign cigarettes and smuggled moonshine, men my own age and even younger who took their robust health for granted.

What did they see? I wondered. An exotically marred, incongruously haughty and composed young woman whose height affronted them and therefore made them want to have her that much more, as if only by having her might they, in every sense, bring her down. Once, when one of them took me by the arm, I rapped him on the kneecap with my cane. The others, as he hopped about in pain, doubled over laughing, at the sound of which some of the Harlotry came out and in phrases that were part-English, part-Portuguese, summoned “Mario” inside.

“There’s no need for you to live like Sister C., my love,” said one of the women who lagged behind. “I can send Mario down to the Corner one of these nights if you like. You could even make yourself a bit of money.”

I wished I’d had some Scotch before setting out, for I found myself blushing deeply at this ingenuously extended offer, this attempt at recruitment that I should have found more amusing and even touching than otherwise.

“There’s a man who I think is going to ask me to marry him soon,” I heard myself saying, all the while wondering why, without sounding offended or embarrassed, I hadn’t simply and politely declined the offer. I foresaw the necessity for an all but endless elaboration of this lie.

“Is there now? A man who is going to ask you to marry him soon?” the woman said, regarding me as she drew deeply from a cigarette, one arm folded across her chest, the other, the one between the fingers of whose hand the cigarette was held, resting on it. I foresaw myself being regarded as either deluded or as putting on airs, pretending that a return to the social standing that had once been mine was imminent, a possibility that would be transparently absurd.

“There’s no man,” I said, trying to laugh, the old sorrow surging up as it hadn’t done in years. “I mean, there was one. But that was a long time ago. Excuse me.”

I managed to blurt out the last two words before a sob that would have stopped me in mid-sentence rose up in my throat. I hurried away from the woman, making more noise with my leg and my cane than I needed to in case I couldn’t swallow down this sudden surge of grief. The woman muttered something, but I did not catch the words.

The landlord was a bootlegger, but only in moonshine, and seemed to regard bootlegging as an avocation forced upon him by a clientele who were unworthy of him and his hotel. When I asked him if he knew where I could get something “unusual” to drink, he feigned mystification at first but became abruptly forthright when I showed him some money

“I can get you some of what I get that crowd upstairs,” he said. “That’s all.”

“No Scotch?”

To this, as if he thought I were poking fun at his self-image and faux-genteel demeanour, he said nothing.

It never left my mind that the man who saved me on the Bonavista was watching me. Or his delegate was. Watching over me. One afternoon I woke to find a letter on the floor inside the door.

My dear Miss Fielding:

What a place in which to live. But I suspect that if I were to give you money, you would either destroy it or give it away or use it for something other than finding better accommodations. I suspect that you would only buy yourself a better brand of liquor and that you would drink even more than you do now. You must stop drinking or some day it will destroy you.

Perhaps you have already guessed some of what I am about to tell you.

I ended my last letter by telling you that, after your mother left me on Cape Cod, I went back to Boston and kept watch on her parents’ house. It was just such a mansion as I had often imagined it must be.

I noticed that there was one frequent visitor to the house, a woman about your mother’s age who arrived and left on foot. I followed her when she left the house. Every day but one she went to what I assumed was her home. On that one day she took a different route and left a pink envelope in the mailbox on the veranda of a house far removed from hers, then went away.

When she was gone, I hurried up the laneway, removed the letter and escaped without notice.

The letter inside read:

My darling Sylvia:

I must ask you again to please forgive the manner of our correspondence. I could not take the risk of entrusting such a letter to my mother or father who might unseal it. Mary, who has been my lifelong friend but in whom I have not fully confided, is the one visitor the doctor allows me and so I give her my letters when we are alone and she delivers them for me. I trust her completely to do only what I ask her to. I must ask that if you wish to reply to this letter you do so through her.

Sylvia, I feel as though I have emerged from a period of temporary madness. As though I came to my senses just in time to avoid complete disaster.

To think that I ever believed that I was meant to be a nun, that I could endure to be one. And then the subsequent delusion. Which was perhaps necessary to escape the first. A second spell cast upon me to release me from the first.

You mustn’t think me heartless, my dear friend.

I know that he was deeply hurt. For that I am truly sorry. But I did not entice him from the Church, force him from the priesthood. I did not destroy his vocation or his Faith.

The truth, which he as much as admitted to me, is that only in the priesthood could he even have come close to fitting in. He is by nature, even by stature, unsuited for life as others live it. He renounced the one sanctuary that was open to him.

I know it is unkind to say—in which case, I will not say it. I somehow thought I loved him but I do not and never did.

I have written nothing to you thus far of the matter that you know most about.

I cannot thank you enough, or ever repay you, for your love, assistance and support. I could never have gone through that alone. Could never have kept it a secret without your help.

It. Whether a boy or a girl they could not tell. Thank God for that. These past few weeks have been difficult enough and others just as difficult or worse still lie ahead.

My parents are happy. They know nothing but that I have left the convent. You know how opposed they were to me joining in the first place. There were no complications from the procedure. Had there been, I would have said I had a miscarriage, but even that has proved to be unnecessary. My parents tell me how wonderful it is to have me back. My confinement to bed they attribute to a kind of benign breakdown.

They think that, on the ruins of the fool that I briefly was, the old Susan can be built again. Perhaps they are right. When I think of how close I came to losing everything—but I must not dwell on the past.

I look forward to the time when we can once again meet face to face. You should consider yourself fiercely hugged and kissed.

Your grateful friend,
Susan                    

I felt as though I could batter my way into heaven to find a place for what she called it, that I would not take no for an answer, would not accept the consignment of my little child to limbo, but would storm heaven and fight my way through a host of white-clad angels, the guardians of a God who would not dare defy me.

But in truth there was nothing I could do.

Even now, so many years later, tears fall onto the paper as I write.

I felt that I had failed my child. Unaware that I was a father, unaware that a child of mine had been waylaid on its journey to the world.

Using “Mary” as my go-between, I began writing to your mother for reasons that at first were unclear to me.

I didn’t threaten her with violence or blackmail.

I signed my letters Father Aquinas. I gave no return address.

Would have given none even if I’d had what could be called a residence.

At times I walked about Boston, far from my old parish, dressed as a priest, dressed, excepting my white collar, all in black.

I was assumed to be an affiliated priest, one visiting from some adjoining parish. Catholics genuflected or blessed themselves when I drew near and I responded by making the sign of the cross.

But it soon became obvious, from the state of my uniform and my incongruous suitcase that might have been the tool box of some tradesman, that something was amiss.

I was never laughed at, never mocked, in part, no doubt, because of my stature, but in part, I believe, because my aspect, my demeanour had been profoundly altered by what had taken place since I left the Church.

I could see that I was feared. People gaped at the spectacle of such an able-bodied hobo whose two suits of clothes, acquired who knows where or how, were the dresslike cassock of a priest, and the jacket, vest and slacks of a priest, the leisure wear of the ordained.

A hobo “priest” whose attire was a blasphemy. I was known as Father Tom, a hulking defrocked priest who roamed about with a suitcase filled with booze that he drank from a chalice.

There were complaints about my uniform, my habit. Policemen asked if I had other things to wear. I told them no. They asked me to identify myself. I told them that, until recently, I had been a priest at St. Paul’s parish church.

When they discovered my story to be true, they no longer interfered with me. They were Catholics, regarded me nervously as if a man, once ordained, was always a priest of some kind.

The old priest and some younger ones who had been my fellow seminarians came to see me.

They addressed me as Thomas. No longer “your Highness Aquinas.” They seemed to feel some responsibility for what had become of me. Urged me to seek help from my family, the counsel of a priest. Perhaps admit myself to hospital.

“There is no need for you to live like this, Thomas. You still have your Faith, and Faith is everything.”

They would start to cajole me as they had done before, until they saw, by the way I looked at them, that I was no longer one to be cajoled.

I refused the money and the food they offered me. I told them I wanted to be left alone.

They asked me when I had last been to confession.

I ignored them. They went away.

I gave Mary different kinds of letters.

My first was one word.

“Murderess.”

My second was one sentence.

“Our child is nameless. Neither a boy nor a girl but still a child.”

My third: “Neither of us will ever know a moment’s peace.”

My fourth: “Perhaps you imagine that you can live as if it never happened. Perhaps, if not for me, you would.

“I do not know you.

“You need only have had it in secret and given it to me.

“Even if you had given it up for adoption I would have found it. Or at least been comforted by the mere knowledge of its existence.

“Did you think, ‘Better that it die than be raised by someone else?’

“No. Vanity. All is vanity. You took her life to preserve your reputation.

“To whom will you confess this sin?

“Not if a thousand priests forgave you would you truly be forgiven. No mere man can cleanse your soul.”

I soon after found a note on the front seat of the carriage I no longer drove but slept in:

“You are mad. I would have let it live if its father had been anyone but you. Guilt still lies like lead upon my soul. Mad you are. You have lost your mind and your memory as well, it seems. It was you, you alone, who decided to leave the Church. The night after we bid you goodbye, I was coming back from vespers. Had gone ahead of the other nuns to perform some errand. A couple of hundred feet it was from the sacristy to the convent. And you were waiting for me in the dark. Or did it matter to you which one of us you took? Your hand covered my whole face. I couldn’t breathe. You picked me up and took me to your car, where you taped my mouth and tied my hands. And then drove us to a cottage you broke into on Cape Cod.”

All lies, Miss Fielding. I would not otherwise repeat them to you. Addressed to the one person who knew them to be lies. The measure of her desperation to rebuild “Susan” on the ruins of the woman I once loved.

I assure you that I can prove every word of this. For I still have the letter to her friend, Sylvia, the handwriting in which, when the time comes, you will recognize.

Your Provider

The letter left me in tears. It was, it seemed to me, written with too much passion and conviction to be untrue. Who, were they guilty of rape, would confess to having been accused of rape? For me, the “proof” he spoke of would be redundant. Did my Provider see me as a replacement for this aborted child? An eye for an eye. A child for a child. His story did not explain his infatuation with me or his belief that I was his child or that I was “twice fathered.” And it made me all the more anxious about my children, who were being raised by the person who of all the people he knew was surely the one that he despised the most.

Only a few days later, another letter arrived.

My dear Miss Fielding:

I brooded for weeks, then did exactly what I had sworn to myself I would not do. Stooped to seeking revenge. I wrote to her:

“I have proof of what you did that I could supply to the police and to everyone whose opinion of you matters to you or whose reputations would be ruined along with yours. I place no value on ‘reputations,’ but I know how much they mean to you and yours.

“Imagine the effect on your parents of this revelation, especially now that, just when they had given up hope, you have returned to the family fold.

“I could do all this without identifying myself, let alone implicating myself. Or I could reveal that I was the father of your murdered child. You as good as identified me in your letter to your friend.

“A nun and a priest. The scandal of scandals. That you, a high-born nun, had destroyed a child, had what you call a ‘procedure’ performed on you would be bad enough. But that a priest had been your partner in this crime. Such a scandal could never be lived down. Not even if your parents disowned you could they save their all-important reputations. What laughingstocks they, not to mention your brothers, sisters, aunts, uncles, cousins would be. What a slaughter of ‘innocents’ and reputations there would be.

“You would be laughed at, reviled, shunned, shut out.

“But I am going to give you a choice, one that I dare say you will give more thought to than you did to the matter of our child. A very difficult choice.

“You will have to decide which of two alternatives will hurt the ones you love the least. It may be they will suffer equally no matter which way you decide. Or it may be that, after all, no one’s reputation and no one’s happiness is more important to you than your own. In that case, the decision would be easy, but the consequences—well. You know your loved ones. I do not. The judgment will be yours to make. You will envy Solomon, so easily resolved was his dilemma in comparison with yours. Here, then, are your choices.

“Stay or leave. If you stay, I will do everything I can to ensure that the subsequent scandal brings down the House of Hanrahan. Imagine the homiletic editorials. The irony that such a family as the Hanrahans could be involved. The gleeful incredulity of readers. The high-born brought down into the gutter, revealed for what people will say they all along suspected them to be. Corruption born of decadence and arrogance.

“And who would believe, Miss Hanrahan, that your parents did not know of your ‘situation,’ that you did not go to them, begging them for help?

“All of this is avoidable if you choose as I think you will.

“You have only to do what you did when you joined the convent. Throw over your present life in favour of another. Tell them you still disapprove of the way they live. Tell them that, though you were right to leave the convent, you should never have come back to them. Renounce them as you did before, as you did the convent. As you did me. As you renounced our child.

“So many renunciations. One more should not be difficult.

“Except that this time you must renounce not others, but yourself. The life you hoped to have. The one you left the convent for. The one for which you destroyed our child.

“Either way you choose, you must renounce yourself. The life you value above all other lives you cannot have. I have taken it from you.

“The House of Hanrahan will fall unless you leave. Without you, it will bear up as it did the first time you renounced it.

“You are not necessary to your family’s survival. On the contrary, you are a hindrance to it. Inimical to it. They will be destroyed unless you turn your back on them forever. As will you.”

She replied:

“That you would carry out the threats you have made, I have no doubt. To think that you were once a priest. Or once fooled people into thinking you were one.

“Unless I renounce the ones I love you will destroy them.

“So. I hereby renounce them. I will leave not for my sake, but for theirs. If I could spare them by doing so, I would happily destroy myself.

“We Hanrahans love each other. But love, too, has its limits, and ours, it sorrows me to say, would not withstand the onslaught you describe.

“I will leave. I will offer them no explanation. I will not say goodbye. I will not forewarn them. I will leave a note that they will find after I am gone. The note will read: ‘I should not have come back home when I left the convent. For reasons I cannot explain, we must never meet again.’

“They will try to find me and will almost certainly succeed, but I will not relent.”

And so she left just as she said she would. And in a briefer time than even she could have foreseen, they reconciled themselves to her decision.

She seems to have expected that they would never give up hoping for a reconciliation. But they did. I can tell you that there came a time when even to speak her name was forbidden in that house.

She learned of each of her parents’ deaths by reading of them in the papers. She has never seen her nieces or her nephews, who may not even know that she exists.

She deflected their attempts to communicate.

I am not boasting, Miss Fielding. Am not gleefully recounting my revenge. That it was a terrible thing I did I fully understand and regret, yet there are still times I cannot help but speak unkindly of her. What I did was terrible in its pointlessness. It did not bring back my child. It merely took someone else’s child away. But to be dismissed as a misfit by the mother of your never-born child. There comes a point when spite is an end in itself. When bitterness somehow both sustains and enervates the soul. I lived in such a state for years.

Sometimes I dream that I am blameless. That in spite of everything I merely turned my back on her and began my life again. I feel such relief, release. I dream that my crime was just a dream from which I have woken to realize that I am innocent. But then I wake from this buoyant dream of absolution to find that I am guilty. “Guilt still lies like lead upon my soul,” she wrote. Yes, like lead. My whole body sags from the weight of it the way it did when the nuns layered me with gold-woven vestments in the sacristy. Reverse alchemy.

After a period of wandering, she moved to Newfoundland and married Dr. Fielding.

Imagine her arriving in St. John’s on a ship from Halifax and Boston. Her arrival was described to me by my delegate.

By no means did she arrive penniless in Newfoundland. She had renounced her parents and their money, but not the money that her grandfather had left in trust for her. He died when she was sixteen and left to each of his grandchildren a considerable sum of money to which no conditions were attached except that they not be allowed to draw upon it until they came of age.

Your mother, when she took her vow of poverty, did not renounce this modest fortune or donate it to some charity or to the Church. The one thing she did not renounce was money. It was there, waiting for her, while she was in the convent, while she was living like the other nuns whose vows were sincere and for whom poverty was not some sort of game that they could walk away from when they tired of it.

Of course, she could not arrive in St. John’s otherwise “bereft.” She had to have, in addition to money, some sort of past, some sort of explanation as to why, unmarried, unaccompanied, she had simply turned up in St. John’s, presumably leaving behind her, somewhere, a family, a set of peers, a social position, a city, a country.

She chose to come to Newfoundland because it was far from Boston but not so far that her social credentials would not be recognized. She did not change her name. She let it be known that she was one of the Hanrahans of Boston, briefly a nun, a woman who, though she had broken with her family for undisclosed reasons, had not broken with their money.

And, in a way, she was not unaccompanied, for she had been corresponding with Dr. Fielding, of whom she had heard from a medical-school classmate of his.

He, without ever having met her, proposed. And she, without ever having met him, accepted.

It must have seemed to both of them to be as good a match as they could hope for.

It had become clear to your father and to all who knew him that no woman of social consequence would take him as a husband. In a way, he was just what your mother was looking for. Credulous, in peril of lifelong bachelorhood, ready to “settle” for less than a man of his station could reasonably have expected in a wife. He would not inquire too assiduously, if at all, into her past, could easily be discouraged from attempting to reconcile her with her family in the unlikely event that it even occurred to him to try.

So. They were married. I wrote to her frequently, lest she think I had lost interest in her, moved on, become a “meddler” now in someone else’s life. Perhaps removed myself from life itself.

My delegate described her life. Their lives. They had no friends and few associates. She was regarded as being snobbish, remote, uninterested in the wives of other doctors.

They would go out walking in the evening, arm in arm, the doctor smiling and brandishing a cane, raising it abruptly in a gesture of greeting, all but knocking the hats off men and women who passed them in the street.

That she had cast so wide a net and still captured no better specimen than Dr. Fielding.

To go so far afield for a husband and conclude that your best bet was a man about whom people had been making jokes since he was ten.

You could see the disappointment in her face. What could he possibly have written to her that had so inflated her expectations?

I confess that I am not merely repeating my delegate’s reports. I should not still be gleeful about her predicament after all these years. It is cruel and self-demeaning, but I cannot help myself. It was almost comical, how completely unprepared she seemed to be for deficiencies that even in a letter should have been obvious to anyone. This woman from Boston had settled for what no woman from St. John’s would settle for.

They walked, they took the evening air but, as far as my delegate could tell, they never spoke. Despite their silence, Dr. Fielding seemed immensely pleased with himself, as if the wife on his arm proved how badly he had been misjudged by the women of St. John’s.

“Dr. Fielding. Sister Fielding,” some men said as they tipped their hats to them. The doctor seemed oblivious to their scorn, to the insult to his wife, seemed to think they had been greeted with respect or had been joked with good-naturedly, to which he responded by smiling and laughing, while she stared impassively ahead as if she had no choice but to endure such slights in silence.

You may think that I was jealous of Dr. Fielding, but nothing could be more untrue.

The woman I had loved had been a phantom. She had never existed. She had always been the woman Dr. Fielding married. A spoiled heiress who had drawn me into her experiment with religion, self-sacrifice and poverty. A woman whose frivolousness I had seen too late. An heiress. An erress. A woman given to making mistakes, grave ones, and capable of doing anything to avoid their consequences. Heiress. Erress. Murderess. All of these. Yet not undeserving of forgiveness. It is as much to save one’s own soul as to save one’s enemies’ that one forgives.

I could simply have turned my back on her. There have been many times since when I wish I had. But why, having forgiven her, can I not forgive myself?

Your Provider

Prohibition was repealed at last.

The post-Prohibition limit for liquor of any kind was three bottles a week and liquor stores were open only two days a week, on Fridays and Saturdays from two to six in the afternoon.

It was not unusual for men to spend two hours in what were known as the Booze Brigades that stretched like Depression-era breadlines for a quarter of a mile. Prohibition supporters swore that if staple goods had been rationed, the queues for them would not have been as long as the Booze Brigades, clergymen that if their churches were burning down, the water brigades would not have been half as long.

Aside from spending two hours outside in the snow, cold, rain or wind, those who manned the Booze Brigades had to endure the humiliation of being seen waiting to buy booze.

Temperance Society volunteers, usually women, picketed the Booze Brigades, holding signs that read: YOU’LL NEVER SLAKE YOUR THIRST IN HELL and BOOZE FOR MEN OR MILK FOR BABIES? and DON’T CHOOSE BOOZE, and JOIN THE CHURCH LADS BRIGADE, NOT THE BOOZE BRIGADE.

When a temperance volunteer spotted an acquaintance in the Booze Brigade, she and her fellows stopped and singled him out for a lecture intended to hound him into leaving his place in line out of sheer humiliation.

“Look at you, Larry Scott,” shouted women with voices that carried half the length of Water Street, “skulking in the Booze Brigade, waiting to spend your family’s last five cents on booze, and you with five children and a poor wife with one on the way. You haven’t done a real day’s work in years—”

On and on the lectures went, the more detailed the more effective, as the volunteer recited the names of every one of a man’s children.

Whenever a crimson-faced man left the queue, collar up, head down, hands in his pockets, the temperance volunteers, in chorus, shouted, “Hallelujah, another soul and paycheque saved.”

A Salvation Army band, consisting of a chest-drummer, a trombonist and a trumpeteer, went up and down the queue endlessly playing “When the Saints Come Marching In,” accompanied by a uniformed choir of men and women.

That inconspicuousness was impossible did not stop men from trying to achieve it. To avoid blocking pedestrian traffic, the queue formed hard to one side of the boardwalk, up against the storefronts that Brigadiers faced, their backs to their tormenters, hoping not to be recognized, all but disguised in clothing they had borrowed from various friends to whom they had likewise lent their clothes.

There was no chance of fooling the liquor purveyors who worked the line selling coupons for one, two or three bottles and knew everyone by name. If you did not have a coupon, you were denied entrance to the store. Each of the three playing-card-sized coupons was a different colour and when a red coupon, known as a Tripler, changed hands, the temperance women shouted, “Shame, shame, shame.”

A yellow coupon, known as a Doubler, brought cries of “Shame, shame,” and a blue coupon, a Single, a mournful “Shame.”

But coupons, once purchased, often changed hands again as “regulars” hired visiting dockworkers and men from foreign boats to stand in line for them and split with them the booze they bought.

It was not illegal for women to buy liquor, but it was almost unheard of. I was a well-known member of the Booze Brigades for a while because Herder refused to be my supplier, telling me I drank too much and would soon be at the point where I could not write.

Every Saturday afternoon, for the better part of a year, I took my place in the Booze Brigades rather than waste money hiring two men to do it. I needed six bottles, so I did hire one man, as my limit, like everyone else’s, was three.

For the first time in my life since school, I attended regular public gatherings and became more to the people of St. John’s than someone to be gawked at from a distance.

I drew so much wrathful attention from the protestors that, at first, men kept their distance from me—behind me, in front of me, there were long gaps in the brigade.

Once the Temperance volunteers gave up trying to shame me from the Booze Brigades, men took advantage of my stature to literally hide behind my skirts.

But until then, there was a confrontation between me and the leader of what I called in my newspaper column the Auntie Antis every Friday afternoon.

Mrs. Enderby, a woman of great girth, especially from the waist down, tried to make a model case of me.

“Back for more fuel, Miss Fielding.”

“Yes, Mrs. Enderby. The fire is burning low, all ten of my naked children are out scouring the dumps in search of God knows what and my mister hasn’t left the house since 1918 when he came back from the war. There wouldn’t be a drop of booze in the house if not for me. All twelve of us would have to go without. The sight of a stone-cold sober six-year-old is not a pretty one, I can tell you. So I take it upon myself, not that I’m complaining, to go out every week and get the booze.”

“Do you know the Seven Deadly Sins, Miss Fielding?” said Mrs. Enderby.

“I know that gluttony is one of them,” I said. “But then, what an inspiration you are to the God-fearing parents of malnourished children everywhere.”

“Gluttony is one of them. You can be gluttonous in many ways and drinking booze is one of them. And all the other six sins attend upon booze. Booze is the cause of them all.”

“Such an all-purpose commodity. It should cost seven times as much.”

“Mockery is but a form of pride.”

“So is sanctimoniousness.”

“And pride is the worst of all the sins.”

“Why should pride get so much discredit? Mockery is every bit as bad. So is sanctimoniousness. A lot of sins never get the discredit they deserve. Thousands of them. There should be Seven Thousand Deadly Sins. And if anyone’s time would be best spent learning them by heart, it would be yours.”

“So much God-given intelligence, so ill used and wasted. What a force for good you could be if you joined us. For every man who goes home from here humiliated but with money still in his pocket, one family will have food on the table tonight.”

“Mrs. Enderby, you do an even greater service for the people of this city than you realize. Every man who leaves here without reasonably priced properly distilled liquor goes to a moonshiner and buys unreasonably priced improperly distilled liquor, one of whose minor side effects is death. Every moonshiner in the city would be out of business if not for you. Moonshiners hang your portrait on their walls. You are their patron saint, if not for whom they would have no patrons. Have you ever wondered where your anonymous contributions come from? From the modest, unassuming, yet-to-be-taxed entrepreneurs of St. John’s.”

“Miss Fielding, we are two of a kind.”

“If you mean that each of us, in our own way, is twice the size of a normal woman, I would agree with you.”

“You know what I mean. Every one of these men is afraid of you.”

“That must be why I’m Miss Fielding.”

“You tower over them. In many ways. But you stoop to their level when it comes to booze and your defiantly abject ways.”

“I stoop to conquer. And to liquor.”

“You should stoop to conquer liquor.”

“Touché. That’s French for ‘such wit.’ Some say I stoop to their level, others that I am high and mighty. Some say I live in the gutter, some that I look down on people from my ivory tower, especially when I get on my high horse, which is when they would most like to cut me down to size or take me down a peg. I am, according to one rival columnist, a hoity-toity member of the hoi polloi.”

“Words, words, a flood of words. Would you be so eloquent if you were sober?”

“If I may be so bold as to ask, would you be so bold as to ask if you were drunk?”

“I have never been drunk. I do not drink. I never have. I never will.”

“Really? Aren’t you worried that people who do drink will picket your house or single you out in public to give you the tongue-lashing, the dressing-down they presume to think you deserve? Are you not afraid of being followed about by men carrying signs that read: CHOOSE BOOZE?”

“We are always recruiting, Miss Fielding. No matter how many times you decline an invitation, we will extend another one. But remember, your life, like God’s patience, is finite. They will expire at the same time if you do not reform.”

“These coupons will expire unless this line moves faster.”

“How do you see yourself, Miss Fielding?”

“At the moment as a lady in waiting.”

“A lady?”

“In waiting.”

“Meanwhile, you are setting a bad example for these men who know that, in spite of your appetites, you come from one of the better families of St. John’s.”

“It will be a long time before the people of St. John’s go to costume parties dressed like me.”

The men in the Booze Brigades, on the rare occasions when they spoke to me, said things like “You told her off” or “You set her straight,” which always made me feel guilty, for as sanctimonious as Mrs. Enderby and her followers were, it was true that most of these men could not afford to drink as much as they did and their families did go hungry because they spent their meagre paycheques or welfare vouchers on liquor coupons.

But while I could not abide Mrs. Enderby’s self-congratulating lectures, I never spoke against her in her absence. Congratulated by the men for routing her yet again, I said nothing.

It was when the Booze Brigades became so volatile that the ’Stab began to patrol them on horseback that Herder relented and insisted that I let two young men from his printers be my surrogates.

“Consider it to be a raise,” he said. “But I am not responsible for the consequences.”

I was happy no longer to be a member of the Booze Brigades, near-destitute men who set me to brooding too much.

When I was no longer womanning the Booze Brigades, I often thought of the sight I must have made, Fielding in her costume of drab elegance, both hands on the knob of her cane, her whole frame out of kilter, tilted to one side because of her leg, but still a head taller than the men with whom she filed along the sidewalk. In winter, snow collecting inches deep on my hat and shoulders as it did on theirs, all of us shivering, faces red with cold, heads inclined against the wind.

Liquor was supposedly dispensed in this public, tedious manner to discourage people from buying it. But the liquor taxes increased by half each year.

At first many men were shamed into leaving their place in line. But for most men, no amount of humiliation was worse than a week without a drink, or a week of juneshine and callabogus. The number of Mrs. Enderby’s converts dwindled to almost zero.

Sometimes, on Friday afternoons after Herder appointed two of his men to take my place, I would go far enough downtown to see the Booze Brigades without being spotted by any of my former fellows.

I saw the men in their sod caps and overalls shuffle along, trying to ignore the Temperance, the Salvation Army band, and the ’Stab on horseback.

I tried to think of how many people I knew who lived in generous-hearted hope and not in secret fear or despair cloaked in piety, submerged in devotion to some cause, some zealotry they hoped would pass for passion. Not many.

Smallwood, who was now the prime minister’s unpaid assistant, came to mind. Smallwood was almost literally an errand boy for the prime minister, about whose corrupt regime I wrote week after week.

Herder’s printer’s devil would deliver my six bottles of Scotch to me on Friday evenings—late on Friday evenings, at Herder’s orders, and the printer’s devil was under orders not to give me the Scotch until I gave him my column for Saturday’s issue of the Telegram.

The printer’s devil, a twelve-year-old whom I knew only by his nickname, Gint, reminded me of P.D., whose fate I was resigned to never knowing. I had not seen P.D. since the night we met on Patrick Street, he burdened down with callabogus and carrying on his person what I worried might be the last letter from my Provider.

I tipped Gint even more generously than I had P.D. in a pointless attempt to make up for what I feared had become of P.D. and for whatever part I had unwittingly played in the final misadventure of his life. Though for all I knew he was alive and well somewhere.

I wrote “on the run” at night. I descended the stairs, went past the landlord’s locked and bolted door, the din of the Cochrane receding behind me just in time to hear the bell that, like a signal that my neighbours’ day was over, summoned them to evening prayers.

I made my way down the steps and, by the route that most quickly took me out of sight of the Cochrane, began my walk and the composition of my column that I would type from memory when, early in the morning, I returned.

A deadline to meet every day but Sunday, though even Saturday night I spent walking through the city, revelling in the freedom of allowing my mind to wander, to admire what, on other nights, I forced myself to ignore.

On Saturday nights, I did not have to wait until my column was typed to take a drink, did not have to go out with mere water in my flask, to count on this mimicry of drinking to sustain me until my column had been typed and left for Gint outside my door.

But there was always the danger on Saturday nights, especially with my flask full of moonshine, that my wandering mind would lead me where I did not want to go, back into the past and my confinements in my mother’s house, or into speculation about the welfare of my children, the details and progress of their lives, their whereabouts, how they looked, lying asleep in their beds, unwatched over in their rooms, their appearances, the colour of their eyes and hair, the kind of clothes they wore, the games they liked to play. Always the danger that I would think of my Provider and his delegate and decide to stay inside, lest one or both of them were watching me.

A woman who did not know the colour of her children’s eyes, the colour of their hair, their distinctive complexions and facial expressions.

On especially bad nights, I took from my pocket purse the note my mother left me, unfolded it and read by whatever light I could find. “Their names are David and Sarah.” My mother’s handwriting traced out ten years ago in ink that had begun to fade, on paper that had so often been folded and unfolded the creases were cracked.

It was sometimes more exhausting on Saturday nights to concentrate my mind on events and objects close at hand than it was on other nights to compose my columns while the time allotted for me to do so ticked away, while I dared not look out through the Narrows for fear that I would see, in the east on the ocean horizon, the first blue light of morning.

How an affair or even a brief liaison between my mother and my Provider, if there had been such, could have gone undetected in St. John’s I could not imagine. Nor how even a brief visit to Newfoundland by a man of such proportions could have gone undetected or been forgotten, let alone a stay of months or even years.

And surely, if my father remembered such a man, he would not have spent the last two decades torturing himself with speculation about his identity.

Even if my mother had been absent from St. John’s (or Newfoundland) and the timing of her absence was, in light of my birth date, even vaguely suspicious, my father would have seized upon it as certain proof of her infidelity and would have presented me with that proof, since he had made no efforts to keep secret from me, his sceptical “daughter,” his mistrust of my mother.

I decided to embark upon an investigation I had been putting off since my return for fear of the consequences it might have. But such was my curiosity that I could put it off no longer.

As the train on which I had returned to St. John’s had moved west along the Bonavista and joined the main line, heading south, I had mulled over the thought that had occurred to me while I was talking to Smallwood in the section shack. Might I be able to find out who had bought from Smallwood’s Boots and Shoes a pair of boots such as Smallwood said my rescuer had worn?

Smallwood might, as I had told him, have seen boots bearing his family name nowhere but in some delirium dream. But it was possible that he had seen those boots, big boots as he had described them, indicating their size with his two hands as though he were speaking of “the one that got away.”

I wondered what sort of records were kept in the Smallwood factory on Duckworth Street or the retail stores on Water Street. Such a pair of boots as would fit my rescuer might, even if there was no official record of them, be remembered, especially if they had been custom-made or had had to be specially ordered from some firm on the mainland.

I was reluctant to go to Smallwood’s Boots and Shoes. I knew that word of my strange investigation would quickly spread, word that I had gone there, asking questions about a mysterious and probably non-existent pair of oversized boots. My curiosity would be taken as conclusive proof that I had lost my mind. At the very least, it would enhance my reputation as a dipsomaniacal oddball.

But my main reluctance was not owing to concern with how I was regarded in St. John’s. It was the effect on my father of my investigation that concerned me—and, secondarily, the question of what Smallwood would do when he heard of my visit to the family firm.

That both of them would hear that I was going round posing questions about oversized boots, I had no doubt. It was certain to fuel my father’s obsession with the question of my patrimony. He would demand to know what I knew and would probably suspect that I was, and perhaps had been for years, part of some conspiracy, privy to knowledge or nurturing suspicions that I had withheld from him.

And Smallwood. Would he, by my investigation, be prompted to make one of his own? He might get more co-operation from his relatives than I would.

Smallwood might not only find out about my children but about my Provider and his delegate as well.

Still, there was the possibility that, by a mere visit to Smallwood’s Boots and Shoes, I could discover the identity of the latter two myself.

I went to the Duckworth Street factory where I spoke to Moakler, the foreman. I waited for him in his office, which overlooked the factory floor.

Moakler’s “office” looked like the factory in miniature. Piled on his desk, on the window shelves and scattered about the floor were the discrete, constituent parts of boots. I removed some shoe soles from one of the two chairs in the office and sat down just as Moakler made his entrance.

I stood up and he walked around to my side of the desk, I thought to greet me in some fashion, but he merely motioned to the chair I had just risen from. I sat back down and, without a word, he knelt in front of me and took my orthopaedic boot in his hands. He lifted my leg, moved it up and down. He shook his head as he stared at the sole and sides of the boot and especially when he grasped the heel. He stood up as a doctor might who, the consultation I had come for now complete, was about to write me a prescription. He went to his side of the desk and sat down, clearing his blotter of shoe parts and then leaning his forearms on it.

“I have heard of that boot,” he said. “The workmanship is disgraceful.”

“Well, just so that no one will see me leaving here wearing what they might think was a typical pair of Smallwood boots, I’ll use the back door. Wouldn’t want people thinking that, after a month of wearing your boots, they’ll be walking like me.”

“No one would think that was one of ours. It looks like a flat-iron. Weighs about the same. You got it from Hammond’s Boots and Shoes. That’s where the doctors send all their patients.”

“Only the ones with bad feet.”

“Even that boot on your good foot is disgraceful. Unconscientious workmanship. I could make you a better pair. No charge.”

“In which case, I would be a walking advertisement for Smallwood boots. I’d be willing to lurch about St. John’s wearing a sandwich board for the right price.”

“Fred used to tell me his nephew knocked about with you. Charlie’s oldest, Joe. You made up some lie about him and they threw him out of Bishop Feild.”

“Versions of our story are many and various.”

“Nothing but trouble, he said you were. Young Joe must not be the type to carry a grudge.”

“He puts it on wheels and pulls it behind him.”

“My offer still stands. No need to go around in boots like those.”

“Thank you, but no. You see, even if my feet matched, I’d be unsteady on them.”

“Yes. I’ve heard about your flask too.”

“Disgraceful workmanship. Unconscientious flaskmanship. You could make me a new one of those.”

“Shameful habit for a woman like yourself. Not to mention—”

“Consider it unmentioned.”

He shrugged. “What did you want to see me about?”

“I’m writing a newspaper piece—”

“You’re not going to write one of your Forgeries about me.”

“That’s right, I’m not. No, it’s a straightforward piece about boots.”

“You’ve come to the right person. I know more about boots than anyone in Newfoundland.”

“Then my hunch was correct. When writing about boots, better to start with a bootmaker than a clergyman.”

“If you’re planning to make me look like a fool—”

“No, no. I’m sorry. That was the flask talking. Now it’s my turn. I’m especially interested in big, oversized boots.”

“Why?”

“Well, you may have noticed that, as women go, I am somewhat oversized, so it’s only natural—I wear men’s boots, winter boots, I mean. No one makes women’s boots in my size.”

“Oversized boots.”

“Yes. Well, I want to write a piece on just how big the biggest boots are. The kinds, perhaps, that you don’t see on the shelves.”

“Custom-made boots.”

“Precisely. What size was the biggest boot you ever made? Any kind of boot.”

“Fourteen. Fifteen. I’m not sure.”

“I wear size thirteen. Not that I need to tell you that.”

“You should wear size twelve.”

“Are you sure you’ve never made a bigger boot? Size eighteen or nineteen? Even bigger.”

“I’m sure I’d remember making a boot that big. I’ve never seen a boot that big.”

“And if a pair that big had been made here recently?”

“If a pair that big had been made here in the past twenty-five years, I would know about it.”

“Yes, well, you see, I’ve seen such a pair of boots. Last October on the Bonavista. Each boot had the name Smallwood on it.”

“Who was wearing them?”

“I don’t know his name.”

“How did you meet him? What did he look like? Was he a railwayman—?”

“I didn’t actually see him. All I saw were his boots. Outdoors. He must have—left them there.”

“Where?”

“Just by the railway track. I only saw them once. I went back to look at them again but they were gone.”

“I believe you are trying to play some sort of joke on me, Miss Fielding.”

“No, really, I’m not. Might you have ordered in a pair that size from some firm on the mainland?”

“We never deal with mainland firms. They do inferior work.”

“Unconscientiously.”

“No boots that big were ever made by us. And if you write something sarcastic about this so-called interview, you’ll be sorry.”

I promised him I wouldn’t write a word.

Smallwood heard of my visit to the family firm before my father did. He came by my room on Cochrane Street one evening—pushed his way in after I, having heard someone knock, was just turning the doorknob. I hobbled backwards a couple of steps, doorknob still in hand. Without it, I would have fallen.

“Smallwood,” I said. “You’ve caught me without my makeup,” by which I meant without my boots on. Though I was wearing heavy woollen socks, he glanced distastefully at my inturned left foot, then looked away, and without an invitation from me, sat in the chair at my writing desk, his back to me as if he had surprised me in the act of getting dressed. I hurriedly put on my boots, leaving them unlaced, then sat on the bed, the only other place to sit.

“You can look now,” I said, and he turned his chair about to face me. He was about to speak but paused when he saw where I was sitting, staring at the bed as though at something I should have had the decency to conceal or disguise when I had company.

“There’s not much room in this room. It isn’t a very roomy room, is it?” I said.

He looked round, his expression of distaste growing more pronounced. The wallpaper was in tatters, the walls themselves with gaping holes through which you could see the tightly packed newspapers that passed for insulation. My one window was curtainless and, had it not been covered in dust decades deep, would have afforded a fine view of the Southside Hills.

“You’re living in a brothel,” he said.

“It’s cheap.”

“That’s what they say about the women who live here.”

“Well, if anyone would know how much they charge, they would.”

“Moakler told me you came by asking about size-twenty boots.”

“By the time the whole city knows, they’ll be size thirty.”

“A pair of Smallwood boots. He said you told him you saw them on the Bonavista. You were asking about the boots I saw, weren’t you.”

“The ones you say you saw.”

“Why?”

“To find out who was wearing them.”

“If you don’t believe I saw them, why are you looking for their owner?”

“I’m worried that if there was someone out there besides us, he might have perished in the storm.”

“They would have found his body by now, don’t you think?”

“You never know. Maybe not, if they weren’t looking for it. Tramps hitch rides on the Bonavista all the time. If he wandered any distance from the tracks, it might be years before his remains were found by accident.”

“A man wearing size-twenty boots wouldn’t exactly be inconspicuous. He’d be the talk of the island. Everyone would know if he went missing.”

“I thought I’d check just in case. And remember, you’re the one who says you saw the boots.”

“I thought I did. But I must have been mistaken. Delirious, as you said. You were a lot more sure of yourself then than you are now.”

“I’ve had time to think about it.”

“So have I. What are you up to, Fielding?”

“Don’t worry, Smallwood. Your secret is safe with me. No one will ever know that a woman saved your life.”

“Are you going back to writing Forgeries again?”

“A single woman has to make a living somehow. Or so my neighbours keep telling me.”

“Galoot of a girl,” my father said. “Size-twenty boots. You’re the talk of the town. Why did you go to that bootmaker asking about boots? They say I’ll be known as the chest man whose daughter married a footman. A footman! Lost your mind, they say. Out there in that shack, all alone on the Bonavista. They may be right for all I know. Explain yourself.”

“I was going to write a piece about how hard it is for tall people to get clothes that fit them. Especially footwear. That’s all.”

“Then why did you ask about a pair of boots you say you saw beside the railway tracks?”

“Because they were the biggest boots I’ve ever seen. And I wanted to interview the man who owned them.”

“Asking about Smallwood boots. That cursed, cursed name. That boy who was expelled from school because of you and your confession. Why would you confess to something—It’s not just you they’re teasing me about. It seems that, for some time, they have known about my—misgivings.”

“Your ‘misgivings’ have been common knowledge for years. You know that, Father.”

“‘There’s no cuckold like an old cuckold,’ they’re saying. The cuckold who went cuckoo. And drove his daughter cuckoo too.”

“I’m sure no one said that.”

“I know what they think about me.”

“Ignore them.”

“Why did you ask that man about those boots? Size-twenty boots. The boots of a man big enough to be your father. Is that it? Do you know who he is? Do you know his name? A pair of boots beside the tracks. Out there on the Bonavista. You must know something, suspect something—”

“You’re making yourself upset over nothing. I have no suspicions. I have never doubted for a moment that you are my father.”

“What about your children? Are your children tall?”

“A cruel question. You know that I have never seen my children. Nor have they ever been described to me.”

“When I heard about those boots, I thought, even she has known all along. Her mother must have told her. Or someone else. My rival. Other girls at school. From some boy at Bishop Feild. That Smallwood boy. That business in New York. Such a short little wretch—if only he had been short-lived, the world would be a better place. To think of him getting off scot-free. Never so much as losing one night’s sleep because of what he did. The father of two children he doesn’t even know exist.”

“Never mind about all that,” I said. “It is over and done with. Forgotten.”

“Out there on the Bonavista. What a strange place for him to be.”

“There is no him, Father. No one but you suspects my mother. She may have had reasons of her own for leaving that you and I could never understand.”

“What reasons?”

“I am not saying that I know of any reasons. Only that there might be some. That we will never know.”

“You know something, don’t you?”

“No, Father, I know NOTHING. No matter what I say—you are so determined—to find an excuse. Anything that excuses you—”

“What are you saying, girl?”

“Never mind. Every word I say just makes things worse.”

“People whispering and snickering behind my back. I have heard you referred to as Exhibit A. Living proof, they say, that your mother is guilty.”

Exhibit A. It did not sound like something he was capable of inventing.

“Who refers to me as Exhibit A?”

“My best friend told me about it. My only friend, I sometimes think. A young man named Prowse. The grandson of our great historian.”

“Prowse? Prowse is your best friend?”

“More than that. The son I never had. I have told him so. Perhaps the child I never had.”

“And he told you that I am referred to as Exhibit A?”

“Yes. He said I was better off not knowing why.”

“Prowse is not to be trusted, Father.”

“This is why I have been dreading your return, girl, this, this torment. I hate to say so, but I must be frank.”

“If you must, you must.”

“In the time—what has it been, almost ten years—in the time that you were—away, I have, I have re-entered society. Acquired a circle of friends. At last. True friends.”

“I am glad to hear it.”

“Men who were so intimidated by you they kept their distance from me.”

“What men? Besides Prowse, I mean.”

“You see. I hear it in your voice. How could such a man as I make friends?”

“I merely wondered—”

“I fear that you will jeopardize these friendships. For so long, until you went away, I had no one but my patients. Spoke to almost no one else. Nothing but my work. But things have changed. I could not bear to live like that again. You must promise me you will not interfere.”

“You sound as if you wish I had not—returned.” I almost said “survived.”

“It is just as they warned me it would be. You have not changed.”

“Who are they?”

He put his hands over his ears and shook his head as if to block out not my voice but some inner one.

“Please, please, girl, you must not start. My torments are barely endurable. Without my friends—”

“I have no intention of depriving you of friends—”

“That’s enough. No more. No more.” He sat down, red-faced, sweating as if recovering from some great exertion.

“Are you ill, Father?”

“Lately—I don’t know. Nothing seems—fixed. It seems that things are always moving. At times, at night, there is so much noise. Musical instruments. Of some kind. And people shouting. In the house. I hear them as I lie in bed. But when I get up—”

“You are ill—”

“‘You mustn’t fret so much,’ he said. He’s right, you know. I do fret. But he says there is an answer and that we will find it. It’s as simple as that, he says. I cannot express my gratitude.”

“Who do you mean?” I said. “A doctor?”

“No, no. Young Mr. Prowse. He has welcomed me. His friends are my friends. I cannot tell you how much I look forward to the meetings.”

“Prowse takes you to meetings.”

“Do not say his name like that. Because of him, I am a member of the Old Comrades Club. You have badly misjudged the man. And others like him. For years. Warned me away from them, for no reason. They are men of high standing. Influential, well-connected, powerful men. You assume that all such men are corrupt. Suspect them of having hidden, sinister motives. But they sincerely wish the best for me. They wish to put my mind at rest. And they have helped me to see you for what you are.”

“Which is?”

“They do not speak ill of you. If anything, they scold me for doing so. They have helped me see that, given everything that has happened to you, you cannot help yourself. Your mother. Your school days. Your —”

“Have you told Prowse about my children?”

He shook his head.

“ARE YOU CERTAIN, FATHER?” I shouted.

He nodded. “I never speak of it. I try not to think of it. That awful business in New York.”

“And you are never to speak of it. Do you understand, Father?”

“I do not wish you to bring more shame upon me than you have already. The two of you. If word got out that you had children—that like you they have no idea who their father is—what a laughingstock I would become.”

“You are right. They also have no idea who their mother is,” I said. “And I want it to remain that way.”

“As to you. It seems that—that others have shared my suspicions that, in order to spare my feelings, they withheld from me.”

“Yes. I have often witnessed the sparing of your feelings.”

“Prowse has been making investigations. He says he will submit a report to me when his investigations are complete.”

“Father—”

“Of course, I can’t have him out of pocket on my account—”

“You haven’t given him any money?”

“Just enough to cover his expenses. I can’t have him out of pocket, not after all his financial reversals. For which he was not to blame.”

“How much have you given him?”

“I don’t know—” He waved his hands as if the figure was irrelevant or trivial.

“Has he given you receipts?”

“No, no. I do not want receipts. I do not want him to account for how he spends the money. This is what I mean. When you are around, there is so much distrust—”

“All right. Don’t upset yourself. We’ll speak no more about it.”

I waited at the rear of the courthouse late one afternoon. I knew that Prowse always left by the rear entrance, which was close to his house.

I did not wish others to witness me confronting him, so I followed him after he came out, struggling to keep pace with him as he strode up the hill with a satchel beneath his arm.

Near the top, a few feet behind him, I prodded him quite forcefully in the back with my cane. He whirled around, slapping at the cane with his hand. I took a few more steps until we were standing side by side.

“Fielding,” he said, staring at my cane, seeming fearful I would strike him a second time. He looked up at me. “I heard that you were back. I was hoping the rumours were untrue.”

“I’m sure you were.”

“I meant the rumours that you had passed away. It seemed there was a new one every day for the past ten years. People saying, ‘Have you heard about Fielding? Poor thing, she was murdered in New York. Poor thing, she perished in the San. Poor thing, she went astray on the Bonavista. Presumed dead.’ You have ‘died’ so many times I can’t keep count.”

“Mr. Prowse,” I said. “Have you entered into some sort of arrangement with my father?”

“I have no idea what you mean.”

“He says he’s been giving you money. In payment for some investigation you’re supposedly conducting.”

“Your father is a good man who at times becomes confused.”

“He says that, sponsored by you, he was made a member of the Old Comrades Club.”

“Now that is true. He has flourished in your absence. Not professionally, but socially. No doubt it is your return that has him so confused. During your absence, the mere mention of you so upset him that we agreed never to speak of you.”

“If I hear that you have accepted another cent from him, I will collect it back from you myself.” “Is that a threat?”

“It is a statement of fact. Find some other way to pay your debts.”

“I do not know what he told you, or why, or if indeed he told you anything. But if you make public accusations against me, I shall sue you. And if you try to, as you say, collect money from me, I shall have you arrested.”

“Prowse. My father has nearly lost his mind because of you.”

“Come now, Fielding. Should your father lose his mind, we both know which one of us would be to blame.”

I knew that I was in part responsible for my father’s state of mind, but I was wounded by that Exhibit A. And the memory of the way Prowse smiled when he saw his words hit home.

In the street, I heard people snickering about how the Old Comrades Club had recently made a fool of old Dr. Fielding. I heard references to some sort of “trial” at which he had been found guilty.

I went to Herder, who, though not a member of the Old Comrades Club, was friendly with a few who were.

“You don’t want to hear it,” he said.

“It was that bad?”

“Yes.”

“Then I want to hear everything.”

He told me about a meeting that took place not long after I confronted Prowse.

The Old Comrades Club.

The men of the “quality.” Doctors, lawyers, politicians, businessmen.

They conducted their meetings, their mock trials, late at night in the courthouse on Duckworth Street. At the most recent meeting, there had been someone dressed like me. Lopsided stilts. One stilt longer than the other. An effigy. Several signs hung from my neck, some down the front, some down the back. They were like chapter headings: Baby Sheilagh, Silver Spoon, Motherless Waif, Unhappy (Dear Old Golden) School Days, Expelled!, Precocious Lush, Spencer Spinster, Fielding the Forger, Socialism, The Missing Years, The San, Crippled Tippler, Hermitage, The Prodigal Daughter.

Dangling from various parts of the costume were a boot with a huge black heel, a wooden cask, a package of Yellow Rag cigarettes.

I walked hunched over, my cane clumping on the floor. My hair, as grey as an old woman’s, hung down past my shoulders. My face was a mass of warts and wrinkles, my clothing ragged and sprinkled all over with wig-powder that fell from me like the dust of ages when I walked or raised my arms. I clanked and rattled like Jacob Marley’s ghost when I moved. My father stared at me.

Prowse “prosecuted” my father, who sat there with a sign around his neck that read CUCKOLD. Sharpe, Smallwood’s main tormentor when we covered court, was there. He “defended” my father. He moved that the sign be removed. And Prowse objected.

“I put it to you that she would not let you put it to her,” Prowse said to my father.

“Erection, Your Honour,” Sharpe said.

“Unsustained.”

“Precisely, Your Honour.”

It went on like that. When other Comrades were on “trial,” the “charges” were always trivial. Another doctor was once tried for being vain about his appearance. A lawyer for the way he walked about in court. Another for putting too much powder on his wig. Mis-demeanours of personality. But my father was tried for cuckoldry. Not for the way he held a cigarette or smoked a pipe.

If guilty, by whom was he cuckolded?

Was Mrs. Fielding “yielding or unyielding”?

“I put it to you,” Prowse said to each of the witnesses in turn, “that you are the real father of Sheilagh the She Man.”

All of them denied it. The Silent Stranger by shaking his head. The Silent Stranger wore a black mask and a long cloak that covered his stilts. He did not reply when asked a question except to nod or shake his head.

“The Silent Stranger,” Prowse said, “refuses to account for his whereabouts on any of the days when the deed might have been done. Or on any other days. He refuses to account for his very existence, this mute brute. I take his silence as an admission of guilt, My Lord. I suggest that this faceless, voiceless phantom is her father.”

“Have you heard enough?” Herder said.

I shook my head. I wanted to hear it all, enraged though I was.

“We must have proof, Mr. Prowse,” the judge said. “This court commands the Silent Stranger to remove his mask.”

He complied, only to reveal another mask. And under that, yet another.

“A man of many masks,” said the judge.

“Which of you,” Prowse asked, “is responsible for this prodigy of prodigality? There she stands, Fielding the unwieldy one, Fielding the Hobbler, Fielding the Wobbler. Her height and her leg make it hard enough for her to keep her balance. But you may wonder what makes her list to one side like that. You wouldn’t say it by the size of her, but she’s a nipper. She was nipping from a silver cask—I mean, flask when she was still in school. Which of you fathered this lop-sided Colossus? Who is the Mog to her Magog, the Galoot to her Goliath? Step forward.”

None of them stepped forward.

“Any one of you might be the man. Do you recognize any of these men, Mrs. Fielding?”

Mrs. Fielding. My mother, dressed as a nun, played by Dr. Wheeler, whom I had made a fool of years ago when he came to visit my father.

Mrs. Fielding said she had never seen any of them before in her life.

“Well,” Mr. Prowse said, “all of the suspects had the motive, namely Mrs. Fielding. All had the opportunity, given that Dr. Fielding was at his surgery six days a week. But did all have the means? I take it Your Lordship knows what ‘means’ means?”

“I do, Mr. Prowse.”

“I suggest that each reveal his means to His Lordship and Mrs. Fielding.”

So the Milkman, the Stevedore, the Best Man and the Silent Stranger, with their backs to all but Mrs. Fielding and the judge, took turns unveiling their “means.”

Somehow my father sat through it all. Herder said he even laughed when the others did.

First, the Milkman. The sound of a zipper. The judge, eyebrows raised, asked if “Milkman” was his profession or his nickname.

“Both, Your Lordship.”

My mother, fanning herself, smiled coyly.

Next the Stevedore: “I taught myself how to tie knots with it, Your Lordship. I never could untie this knot.”

“The court is satisfied that the Stevedore is not Miss Fielding’s father.”

The Best Man. My mother covered her face with her hands but peeked through her fingers.

“Second best at best,” the judge declared. “It would seem the Milkman is our man unless the Silent Stranger has been holding something back.”

The Silent Stranger opened his cloak and spread wide his arms.

My mother fainted.

The judge leaned forward.

“Well, now I’ve seen it all,” he said. “At least I hope I’ve seen it all.”

The Silent Stranger closed his cloak.

“There can be no doubt,” the judge said. “The Silent Stranger is the father of this woman. Your mother conceived you, Miss Fielding, with the Man of Many Masks. Daughter, meet your father. Father, meet your daughter.”

They all slapped their knees and roared with laughter.

“This court rules that the charge has been proven. That while Mrs. Fielding was yielding to the advances of the Stranger, Dr. Fielding was at work in his surgery. The deed was done, the horns were hung. Well hung, in fact. Dr. Fielding is hereby declared a cuckold and sentenced to his daughter’s life, including time served, that being the age of his daughter plus nine months, give or take a week or two, at the moment of his death or at the moment of her death, whichever comes first. The court is adjourned.”

My father soon after resigned from the Old Comrades Club, citing gout as the reason he preferred to stay at home.

A month after that, he took out an ad in the papers announcing that he was retiring from the practice of medicine and offering to refer his patients to other doctors.

“I cannot concentrate,” he told me. “Perhaps my hearing is bad. I miss most of what my patients say. I haven’t made any mistakes, but there have been a few complaints. Personality clashes. Nothing really. But there you go. I haven’t touched a scalpel in five years anyway. No operations. Just referrals. Can’t concentrate. My mind wanders, you see. As you get older. Only natural. No point resisting nature. Irresistible. I think about all sorts of things. Not just about her. I’m better off at home where I can concentrate.”

He was so inept at disingenuousness I could not bear to listen to him. As it was ages since he had had a housekeeper, I had to hire a woman to see to his daily needs and a man to manage his financial affairs. I paid them with his money, having none of my own to spare.

It soon seemed that my father, without prompting from me and the housekeeper, would never have moved from his chair.

I went to see Herder.

“I’ve written something,” I said.

“A Forgery?” he said. Eager. Hopeful.

I showed it to him. He read it, chuckling, shaking his head.

“It is no longer possible for the Anglican archbishop to intercede with his congregation and admonish them to consult with any doctor but my father, because my father is no longer able to practise medicine.”

“I am sorry to hear it,” Herder said. “But if I publish this, I’ll be sued for every cent I have.”

“I know.”

“It’s worse than your other Forgeries. More risky, I mean. Far too risky.”

“I don’t want you to publish it,” I said. “Merely to print it. Five hundred copies.”

“A broadsheet? What do you plan to do with it?”

“Distribute it. Door to door. At night. I’ve made a list of who should get a copy. But don’t print it if you’re worried they can trace it back to you.”

“I would not want to be on that list.”

“You’re not.”

“What pseudonym would you use?”

“No pseudonym.”

“That would be foolish. Pointless. He’ll sue you. See to it that you never work again.”

“I have nothing. My father no longer has any patients they can warn away from him. As for making sure I never work again, well, I could write under pseudonyms, or anonymously. For you.”

“You’re risking everything.”

“Maybe. But it’s true, what I’ve written. Even though I can’t prove it. Not all of it. But imagine how embarrassing a suit of any kind would be for them.”

“And for you. And your father.”

“My father’s humiliation is complete. Believe me. And my skin is thicker than most.”

Three weeks later, Herder told me the broadsheets were ready. He said he could hardly deliver such a conspicuous bundle to my boarding house, so I would have to come to his warehouse after hours.

There were only forty names on my list. The balance of the broadsheets I would simply leave in bundles wherever they were certain to be found.

I could easily cram forty copies of the broadsheet in a satchel. Forty households, most of them in the same area of town, the east end. The Old Comrades. Forty doors under each of which I would slip a broadsheet. Then back to the warehouse. I would distribute as many bundles as I could before the sun came up.

I visited the forty houses one mid-week night in late September. I had waited for a clear, calm night so that the broadsheets I left outside would not be rained on or blown away. I set a few dogs to barking, but they stopped when I hurried away. In one house, a light came on upstairs but soon went out again. I was at it all night.

I left batches of broadsheets on sidewalks, on the steps of churches, in the doorways of stores.

During the last hour before the sun came up, I distributed a final sixty broadsheets randomly. I was so tired when I got back to my boarding house that I fell asleep sober.

Dear Editor:

It is time that the B.I.S., by way of coming to the aid and defence of Mr. David Prowse, made itself and its mandate known to the people of Newfoundland.

None have been more unjustly victimized by us than Mr. Prowse. Not for a moment more should he be left to speculate about who is to blame for what people have been saying for years behind his back.

We, the B.I.S., are regretfully to blame. We are, to our eternal discredit, the source of every bit of vicious gossip, malicious innuendo and unfounded rumour currently circulating about the poor man. The man we hand-picked. The man we unanimously agreed would, at no peril to himself, be most useful to us in making Newfoundlanders aware of the existence, nature and purpose of irony.

We fear that, like most Newfoundlanders, Mr. Prowse has not heard of the B.I.S., the Benevolent Ironists’ Society.

In the charter that we drew up at our first meeting, we defined irony as “the art of saying the opposite of what you mean.” This incomplete definition caused even our members to confuse irony with deceit, hypocrisy and bald-faced lying, with the result that never was a man more artlessly slandered with more benign intent than Mr. Prowse.

We refined the definition thus: “Irony is the art of making the listener or reader understand that you mean the opposite of what you say.”

We decided to begin with the propagation of the least subtle form of irony—that is, by making statements whose untruth we believed would be obvious to everyone.

It was, and still is, our belief that there was no one in St. John’s more admired and therefore more impervious to irony than Mr. Prowse.

And so we spread the rumour that, because of his hopeless ambition to be a judge some day, he was referred to by his colleagues as B. W. Prowse.

We said that the initials stood for Big Wig and pointed out that they rhymed with those of his historian grandfather, D.W. Prowse, who was also a judge. And so was born the famous saying: “Prowse has about as much chance of matching his grandfather’s accomplishments as he does of keeping his wife out of other men’s beds.”

Alas, the irony of this was lost on everyone who was not a member of the B.I.S. Mr. Prowse would, it was said, never be a B.W. but only a W.B., a Would Be. A. Would Be this, a Would Be that.

In an attempt to undo the wrong against Mr. and Mrs. Prowse, the B.I.S. spread the story that it was Mrs. Prowse’s love of acronyms that had given rise to her reputation for promiscuity.

Mrs. Prowse, who playfully called her husband B. W., so certain was she of his eventual appointment to the bench, also called him W.B., after the poet Yeats, from whose work it was her husband’s habit to read to her at bedtime. The Prowses’ butler was himself fond of acronyms and given to keeping Mrs. Prowse company in the making of them and the fanciful decipherment of those already in existence.

But he was not a learned man and misunderstood when Mr. Prowse said to him, “I am told that while I am at work you are at play with my acronymphomaniac of a wife.” Thinking both he and his lady to have been insulted and ignoring Mr. Prowse’s protests that an acronymphomaniac was “someone whose appetite for acronyms is insatiable,” he punched Mr. Prowse, giving him a black eye, which all assumed that Mr. Prowse had received at the hand of a rival for his wife’s affections.

It was when we saw Mr. Prowse’s black eye that we of the B.I.S. realized that things were getting out of hand.

“They have inverted the oath of fidelity,” I heard a lawyer say about the Prowses. “The only man she says no to is her husband and the only woman he says no to is his wife.” Thus was Mr. Prowse also rumoured to be promiscuous. Those of us in the B.I.S. came to his defence.

We spread rumours of a letter in which the phrase the “satiric Mr. Prowse” occurred. We composed a broadsheet that stated: “There are certain words that, like children, should be seen and not heard.” This was by way of claiming that someone had overheard the letter being read aloud and had taken the word “satiric” for “satyric,” which means “a man given to excessive and abnormal sexual craving.” “Thus,” our broadsheet stated, “just as, by the mere omission of a prefix, Mrs. Prowse earned a reputation as a slut, Mr. Prowse, by the substitution of but one letter for another, earned one as a lecherous, skirt-chasing whoremonger.”

Alas, we could find no one who would print our broadsheet and it was soon said of Mr. Prowse that “he is just as mad for it as she is.”

One night, someone wrote the following on the courthouse steps and signed it Mrs. Winnifred Prowse: “LLB—Baccalaureate of Law my foot. ‘Long-legged Bastard’ is more like it. He would be more nicely proportioned if each of his legs was two inches shorter and his –ck was two inches longer.”

There was much speculation about the incomplete word. Neck? Back? Most favoured neck, given Mrs. Prowse’s oft-quoted and no doubt apocryphal remark that only on the gallows would her husband be well hung.

Mr. Prowse, having been deemed a bastard, was now said to have been born out of wedlock and had to endure it that people thought that the real identity of his father was a mystery even to his mother.

Soon there were rumours of whose source we of the B.I.S. were ignorant, rumours that Mr. Prowse was deeply in debt, rumours of how he came to be in debt and the lengths to which he was going to get out of it. At first he was said to have been financially laid low by bad investments and blackmail, and there was talk of his habit of borrowing money he had no intention of repaying from spinsters, widows and unhappy wives.

We of the B.I.S. countered the rumours with our own.

“A woman I had every reason to trust has left me penniless,” Mr. Prowse was said to have told a “friend.” In a letter to the editor of all the papers, we wrote: “Mr. Prowse refers, of course, not to his wife who is so frugal that ironists have been heard to say that a penny would burn a hole in her purse, but to the only other woman he has ever consorted with, namely Lady Luck.”

The true cause of his insolvency, we further explained, was his habit of giving money to those less fortunate by placing extravagant bets during every clandestine charity-supporting game of chance in the city. We quoted a true friend of his as having said: “Except that I know that he is losing on purpose, I would say that Prowse was the biggest imbecile who had ever tried his hand at cards.”

But it was no use. Mr. Prowse’s insolvency was soon put down to gambling and rumour fed on rumour until we of the B.I.S. decided that there was nothing left but to resort to absolute, inscrutable, opaque irony.

We wrote to the papers: “Mr. David Prowse has bilked an old man out of his savings by making him suspect his ex-wife of adultery and doubt that his daughter was really his and by pretending to be conducting an expensive investigation into the matter.”

Alas, the accusation was taken at face value.

We tried again. We said that since the amassment of his debt, he had frequently been drunk in court and that no one regretted his recent turn to drink more than those of his clients who, though innocent, now languished in prison. We also circulated rumours that some of his clients were incarcerated because he accepted, in exchange for “throwing” cases, bribes from prosecutors who coveted as much as he did an appointment to the bench.

We continued back-stabbing him with more apparent glee than the senators of ancient Rome did Caesar. Though his name now be synonymous with all things iniquitous, we predict that as a result of this letter a statue will one day be erected in his name.

Yours respectfully,
We of the B.I.S.