The Colony of Unrequited Dreams (18 page)

I
WAS TO LEAVE
the next day. I walked up Signal Hill, from which you could see the whole city, though it was not St. John’s I looked at but the sea, crashing on the rocks at the base of the red sandstone cliffs. The hill was carpeted with unripe, red-and-yellow partridge berries. They needed almost no soil, grew on sod that was draped like a ragged carpet over rocks. The remains of gun batteries, crumbling fortifications and forgotten barracks lay everywhere. Down below were the charred ruins of a cholera hospital so hard to reach that it was never used except for smallpox patients, who never saw St. John’s, only the grotto of rock around them and the open sea.

It occurred to me, for the first time, that I might not come back.

The sea brought out such thoughts in me. My virtual non-existence in comparison with the eternal sea-scheme of things. I never felt so forlorn, so desolate as I did looking out across the trackless, forever-changing surface of the sea, which, though it registered the passage of time, was suggestive of no beginning and no end, as purposeless, as pointless as eternity.

I had never liked to think of myself as living on an island. I preferred to think of Newfoundland as landlocked in the middle of some otherwise empty continent, for though I had an islander’s scorn of the mainland, I could not stand the sea. I was morbidly drawn to read and re-read, as a child, an abridged version of Melville’s
Moby Dick
, a book that, though I kept going back to it, gave me nightmares. Ishmael’s notion that the sea had some sort of melancholy-dispelling power mystified me. Whenever it was a damp, drizzly November in my soul, the last thing I wanted to look at was the sea. It was not just drowning in it I was afraid of, but the sight of that vast, endless, life-excluding stretch of water. It reminded me of God, not the God of Miss Garrigus and the Bible, whose threats of eternal damnation I did not believe in, but Melville’s God, inscrutable, featureless, indifferent, as unimaginable as an eternity of time or an infinity of space, in comparison with
which I was nothing. The sight of some little fishing boat heading out to sea like some void-bound soul made me, literally, seasick.

On the other hand, I was an islander. I thought of my father’s stint in Boston, where he had discovered the limits of a leash that up to that point he hadn’t even known he was wearing. I wondered if, like him, I would be so bewildered by the sheer unknowable, unencompassable size of the world that I would have to come back home. How could you say for certain where you were, where home left off and away began, if the earth that you were standing on went on forever, as it must have seemed to him, in all directions? For an islander, there had to be natural limits, gaps, demarcations, not just artificial ones on a map. Between us and them and here and there, there had to be a gulf.

I walked down the sea side of Signal Hill, following the steep and winding path that led to the Narrows. When I reached the pudding-stone, the wave-worn conglomerate of rock that marked the high water-line, I saw the Boot, the old wooden boot attached to the iron rod bored into the cliff with the name of Smallwood written on it, eerily glowing, swaying slightly back and forth in the wind. The Boot was like some flag, Smallwood the name of some long-reigning monarch or a family that had laid claim to the place two hundred years ago. The republic of Smallwood. “My God, Smallwood,” Reeves had said, “what are your parents trying to do, start their own country?”

But the Boot would not be the last thing I saw on leaving, for I planned to sail from Port aux Basques after, for the first time in my life, crossing Newfoundland by train. I relished the thought of a journey that would carry me farther and farther inland from the sea. I had no conception of what Newfoundland looked like outside a forty-mile radius of St. John’s.

As though I had contracted from my father an irrational fear of it, I dreamed about the old man’s Boot the night before I left. I was sailing out through the Narrows, alone on a boat of some kind, and there was the Boot, with my name on both sides of it,
Smallwood, glowing in the dark. When I passed it, I turned to look back at it and only as it began to grow dim did I realize that I had cleared the Narrows and was drifting out to sea. I stood in the boat and called for help, but by then I had rounded the point and the Boot, my name and the harbour lights had vanished. It was so dark I could not make out the headlands. There was no wind and I could not even smell the sea. I could not feel the boat beneath me, or hear the slightest sound. I turned around and faced what I believed was seaward, but there was nothing there but darkness. I made to touch my arms to reassure myself of my existence, but it seemed that even my own body had disappeared. I tried to shout again for help, but could make no sound. I woke from this insensate darkness to the darkness of my room and felt my arms and legs and face, and said my name out loud.

I thought of Fielding, whom I had not heard from since that day when she had acted so strangely on the waterfront. I wondered if she had insisted on not seeing me the past two weeks because she knew she would not be going to New York. It seemed to me it might be her and not my imminent departure that had given rise to the dream.

As I lay there in the darkness in my boarding-house room, I imagined kissing her and taking off her clothes. I could not picture what she looked like, I knew only that she was naked and I was not. I could not imagine myself unclothed in front of anyone. I felt the buttons of my longjohns. My fantasy was having no physical effect. Up to that point, my sex life had been confined to racy postcards. Some woman, divan-reclined, legs crossed, a feather boa wound about herself. For her, an erection like a chisel and a feverish half-hour of self-administration. For Fielding, nothing.

I had once, when I was eleven, happened on a man and a woman in the woods above the Brow. They were in a place we called the Spruces, where little light came through and the forest floor was thick with moss. It was a summer Sunday afternoon, overcast but warm, humid. There was hag hair hanging from the trees above the couple, strands and whiskers of it everywhere. The
woman was faced full length away from me, unclothed, lying on her side on a blanket. All my mind would recall of her later, and recalled of her now, was her wide bare back, though I watched for so long I saw much more. All I could see of him were his hands, on her, though I could hear his voice and her laughing in a kind of teasing way each time he finished speaking. For a while, a shameful while, unable to resist, I watched, crouching down so they wouldn’t see me, watched and — even more, I think — listened, for I had been told of such things and seen pictures, but I had never heard such sounds. The strange commotion they made; the ever-intensifying sounds from the woman after the man climbed on top of her, so that she sank into the moss, almost out of sight. There was the sense of something secret, something awful, letting loose. It frightened me; it was hard to believe, listening to them, that they knew where this was going, that it wasn’t as new to them as it was to me; hard to believe that they hadn’t just discovered it by accident, setting into motion something that they were powerless to stop and that, for all they knew, would be the end of them, so panicked, so helpless did they sound. I had heard a boy at school say his parents did “it” every night, but I was sure he didn’t mean this.

I watched until they finished and then left. In memory, I was both drawn to it and repulsed by it, and ashamed of myself on both counts. I wondered what the implications of my ambivalence might be; if there might be something wrong with me.

I knew that my mother and father must have performed the act itself. My father had once said that if he merely threw his pants on her bed, my mother would get pregnant. But that they had never done
that
, that it had never been like
that
between them I was certain.

I had been awakened once or twice by the furtive and shortlived squeaking of their bedsprings in the middle of the night. And once, while returning from the outhouse, I had heard, above the barely squeaking springs, my mother sucking air through her clenched teeth as if my father were sticking her with pins. I had
stood outside their door, transfixed. I heard my father shudder to a finish and my mother almost instantly afterwards saying, as if she was terrified he would fall asleep on top of her, “Get off me, Smallwood.” The bed squeaked momentarily as my father obliged her, and soon after there was snoring, not my mother’s, I was sure. I heard her murmur something in a plaintive, almost self-ironic tone, then all was silent.

That sound my mother made — I had been unable to rid myself of it. I could not look at a woman and not hear it, or imagine my mother in the darkness drawing air in through her teeth. The sound of air passing through my mother’s teeth, and the screams of the woman whose body by the weight of the man’s was pressed into the moss until all I could see was him, him obliterating her so that all that was left of her was sound, screams as if she was giving birth or being murdered.

I stopped rubbing my longjohns, then considered getting a postcard from my collection in my dresser drawer. The woman in the woods. It could not be that way for me. Somehow I knew it. Some “over me” was always watching, and not for an instant could I forget it. Perhaps it could not be that way for any man, I wasn’t sure, and I had no intention of asking anyone. Nothing I had ever read in books enlightened me. On the one hand I envied her, that woman on the moss, wished I could be capable of such abandonment. But it was, I told myself, a carrot dangled by biology, the animal impulse to chase after which I must not give in to or it would mean my doom. I well understood my father’s horror of domesticity, of entrapment and confinement. The thought of nights in some fetid breeding bed while the products of other such nights lay listening in the next room or outside the door I found so revolting that I vowed I would never marry. My parents’ marriage was the only marriage I knew from the inside out. To me, their marriage
was
marriage. To live thus would be to forsake all destinies but the anxiety-ridden drudgery of caring for a horde of children. A pedestiny. I would never drag myself out of poverty if
I got married, let alone achieve more than the limited success considered proper for the best of my kind by men like Reeves.

Trapped in a marriage, I would be driven mad by the casual assumption of privilege and preferment and innate superiority of “the quality,” if its effect on my father was anything to judge by. But unlike my father, I told myself, I was outraged by the “quality,” not only on my own behalf, but also on behalf of others. I saw no contradiction in wanting to achieve greatness through altruism. How else but through altruism could one be both virtuous and great?

Before I could make up my mind about the postcard, I fell back to sleep.

Besides what little clothing I had, I didn’t bring much with me except my oilcloth map of Newfoundland, a fishermen’s union pullover with its codfish-emblazoned badge, which I planned to wear while working at the
Call
, and my father’s
History of Newfoundland
.

My parents and brothers and sisters went with me to the railway station to say goodbye, and though they made quite a fuss, especially my mother and the girls (my father and the boys manfully shook hands with me and clapped me on the back), they were upstaged by the entire Jewish community of St. John’s, about whom I had written a laudatory feature in the
Telegram
two months before and who were surreally on hand to see me off, waving their black hats and weeping as if one of their number was leaving them for good.

Because of them and because of my oversized nose, many of my fellow passengers took me to be Jewish, a misconception I did nothing to discourage, since it made them less likely to sit with me, not because they had anything against the Jews, but simply because they doubted they could sustain a conversation for long with so exotic an individual. Normally, there is nothing I would rather do than talk, and I knew if I got started I might well talk all the way from St. John’s to Port aux Basques, oblivious to the landscape
we were passing through. I would, many times in the future, spend cross-country train trips in just that manner, staying awake twenty-eight hours at a stretch, hardly noticing when one exhausted listener made way for the next, but on this trip I wanted to keep to myself and that, for the most part, is what I did.

The building of the railway had been one of the few great ventures in Newfoundland not connected with the fishery. Its primary purpose was not to link the scattered settlements around the coast, but to convey passengers and freight back and forth between the eastern and western seaports, St. John’s and Port aux Basques, to give Newfoundlanders access to both the ships that crossed the ocean to England and those that crossed the gulf to the mainland. Its route was not determined by the sea, nor was the sea visible at more than a few points along the way.

We started out from St. John’s just after sunrise. In two hours, we had crossed the Bog of Avalon, a sixty-mile stretch of barrens and rock scraped bare and strewn with boulders since the ice age. This gave way to a lonely, undifferentiated tract of bog and rolling hills devoid of trees because of forest fires that had burned away even the topsoil so that nothing would ever grow there again that was more than three feet high. It was September, but not so far into the month that the browning of the barrens had begun. An overcast day with a west wind that would keep the fog at bay. There was beauty everywhere, but it was the bleak beauty of sparsity, scarcity and stuntedness, with nothing left but what a thousand years ago had been the forest floor, a landscape clear-cut by nature that never would recover on its own. It was a beauty so elusive, so tantalizingly suggestive of something you could not quite put into words that it could drive you mad and, however much you loved it, make you want to get away from it and recall it from some city and content yourself with knowing it was there.