The Colony of Unrequited Dreams (21 page)

I remember the evening sunlight on the eastern ramparts of the Hudson, as the train outraced the river and the boats. I calculated that the water we were passing now would reach New York sometime early in the morning and be parted by the island of Manhattan in the dark, hours after we arrived there. It was as though an alternate time stream was moving parallel with ours, plied at sluggish speeds by ancient modes of transportation as we in the train, city-bound, got older faster, though in space our destinations were the same.

I must confess that at Grand Central Station, my first impulse was to take the next train back to Boston while I could still afford it. I have never understood why the concourses of train stations have to be the great, vaulting chambers that they are. If the point
was to impress upon the newcomer that he had arrived at a city to be reckoned with, I was suitably affected. The place was like some secular cathedral and it seemed strange, looking up at the brass-domed ceiling, not to see depicted on it some religious scene that could match the place for sheer momentousness. People were all but running in every direction, sending up an echoing murmur in the station, which despite the teeming floor seemed almost empty, so much enclosed space was there above the multitude. They were striding purposefully, skilfully dodging one another, and for all I knew, every one of them had just arrived and, like me when I got off the ferry at North Sydney, were trying only to look like they knew where they were going.

I did not know that I had happened to arrive in New York at rush hour and that the place was not always quite so hectic. It was early evening and around the edges of the concourse, on ledges, on the floor, vagrants were already bedding down to catch a few hours’ sleep in that din before the cops cleared the place at twelve o’clock. Others of their number, likewise on the edges, looked all too alert, and I fancied that more than one of them had his eye on me and my pulley-drawn steamer trunk. I had no idea just how unpromising-looking a mark I was, and that though the place, as I suspected, was crawling with pickpockets and thieves, they were on the lookout for better game than me.

I was wearing the only suit I owned, the smallest adult-style suit I’d been able to find, a threadbare dark brown Harris tweed with a Norfolk jacket and trousers so oversized they bunched in folds around my feet. There survives a photograph from that time, in which I am standing with one foot up on a crate half as high as me and one arm resting on my knee, the only pose I could assume in which my clothing could be drawn tight enough to make it appear to fit me. The pose also highlights, unfortunately, my spindle-thin, emaciated arms and legs. I am holding in my hands what looks like some sort of scroll (a rolled-up newspaper?) and am staring resolutely at the camera, apparently confident of cutting a
fine, impressive figure, a not-to-be-trifled-with ninety-five-pound twenty-one-year-old.

I crossed the concourse as fast as I could and went outside. I saw cars, taxis, streetcars, buses, newspaper vendors, a stream of pedestrians, across the street a hotel doorman waving a white-gloved hand to someone. I did not really believe that any of it had been going on before I got there. If asked, I would have said of course it had been, but I did not really believe it. I hailed a cab. I must have made on the cabbie the same impression I had on the concourse thieves, for he asked to see my money first and, when I told him where I was headed, demanded that I pay him in advance.

I went to a large boarding-house on West Fifteenth Street that had been recommended to me by a friend back home. It was known to its occupants as the Newfoundland Hotel because so many Newfoundlanders lived there, and because it fell so far short of its opulent namesake back home in St. John’s. The Newfoundland Hotel was a red-brick building, comprising two adjoining blocks of seven storeys.

It was convenient, aside from the fact that I could afford it, because it was about a block from Fifth Avenue and five minutes’ walk from Union Square, the speaker’s corner of New York socialism, where such giants of “the cause” as Eugene Debs and Thorstein Veblen spoke, and which would someday, I fancied, be thought of as the place where Smallwood spoke.

It was situated among a dingy maze of narrow streets that, because they were lined by warehouses and run-down office buildings, almost never saw the sunlight. On one side of the neighbourhood was Greenwich Village and on the other the affluent edge of upper Fifth Avenue, which it would soon become my habit to stroll through disdainfully on Sunday afternoons.

But I could not work up the nerve to visit the
Call
. I dreamed of being the next John Reed, writing the next
Ten Days That Shook the World
, but balked at the thought of going to the very paper he had worked for and asking for a job. I began having
nightmares about going back to Newfoundland after an absurdly brief period of time, a stint abroad that would make my father’s notoriously short one seem like a grand success. I woke up every morning feeling anxious and depressed.

The hotel was like some sort of vertically arranged indoor community, as if the entire population of some outport had been relocated to New York and was now being housed in this one building. Each floor was like a neighbourhood, each hallway on each floor like a street. There were always people lounging about in groups in the hallways, on the stairs, in the lobby. From about eight to midnight, most people left the doors of their rooms open to indicate their willingness to receive visitors. Even when they went visiting themselves, they left their doors open, as if the thought that something might be stolen never crossed their minds. “Look who’s here,” I often heard my neighbour say when he came back from visiting to find his room occupied by someone who, in his absence, had made himself at home.

People seemed to take as a personal affront the fact that during visiting hours I kept my door closed. Having no money, I did not often venture out into the city. I spent my nights reading, but even had they known this, my fellow roomers would not have considered it sufficient cause to be unsociable. Sometimes, in protest, they drummed lightly on my door as they were going by. People who for some reason did not know that the former tenant, a man named Clar, no longer lived there, came looking for him at all hours of the night, knocking on the door, shouting his name. “C’mon, Clar,” a man said, “open up, ya silly bastard, open up,” laughing when I told him he had the wrong apartment, as if to put someone up to this had been a favourite trick of Clar’s.

Once, arriving home at night in the middle of my fourth week in New York, I found myself jammed in the elevator with a group of men and women on their way to a party on one of the upper floors. Because they were gingerly holding aloft, above head height,
lit cigarettes and brim-full glasses of prohibited liquor, they could not use their hands for balance and so lurched all over the place every time the primitive elevator stopped or started.

“Sorry, my love,” one girl apologized as she flattened me against the wall and spilled part of the contents of her glass down the front of my coat. While alternating between genuine remorse and weak-kneed hilarity at having just spilled her prohibited drink on some total stranger in an elevator, she kept apologizing, telling me she would wipe my coat clean for me if her arms were not stuck up in the air the way they were.

“That’s all right,” I said. Some of them had their hands so full they had to leave their cigarettes in their mouths and were making the trip with their heads tilted back, puffing smoke upward as best they could, eyes squinting.

Every time the elevator stopped and the doors opened to reveal another group of revellers, a roar of greeting and mutual recognition went up.

“Here’s de byes, here dey are. What floor are we on? Four are we? I didn’t think anyone on the fourth floor stayed up after eight o’clock.”

They piled off in a mad rush, announcing their arrival to the inhabitants of the host floor by letting out a roar like that of some invasion force or mock stampede, which was met with an even louder roar from somewhere down the hallway. I was all but carried off with them. Then the doors closed again and I was left in the smoky elevator, alone I thought, until I heard a voice behind me.

“Have you ever seen so many island-pining, mother-missing, sweetheart-I-left-behind-bemoaning, green-arsed Newfoundlanders in your life?”

“Fielding!” I said. I turned around and there she was, obviously drunk, both eyes squinting, a cigarette shoved to the high corner of her mouth so that she seemed to be smoking out of her cheekbone, slumped against the wall, two hands on her cane, which was customarily
planted on the floor in front of her, though at a treacherous angle.

“Smallwood!” she said, in mimicry of me. I was so glad to see her I threw my arms around her and broke her cigarette in half, the lit tip falling to the floor, sparks showering between us, though she did not seem to notice. When I broke the embrace, she stood exactly as she had been, as if she dared not trust herself to stay upright without the help of the cane.

“I thought you weren’t coming,” I said. “I’d given up on you. Where are you staying?”

“Here,” she said. “In fact, it looks like we’re on the same floor, unless you’re sleeping on the roof.”

“When did you get here?” I said.

“Yesterday,” she said. “Been drinking ever since.”

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

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

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

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

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

Fielding’s Condensed
      
History of Newfoundland

Chapter Eight:
A PROPER CENSUS

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

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

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

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

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

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

The
Call

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

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