When she drew her legs up to get at her boots, her skirt and the slip beneath it rode up almost to her knees. I caught a glimpse of garter belts and the undersides of thighs. Her bad leg was closer to the wall, but I could see it, clearly from the knee down, in shadow from there up. She wore nylons, but I saw that from just above the heel to behind her knee, her leg was serrated as if parts of her lower calf had years ago been cut away and what was left laminated pink and red and white. Above the knee, the serration continued, but it looked as if more of the flesh of her upper calf had survived.
Fielding swiftly unsnapped the buttons of her boots; as she was tugging the boots off, toe of one boot on the heel of the other, her skirt and slip slid down into her lap and I was afforded a more detailed view of the undergarments of a woman who was not my wife than I had ever seen. Finally chastened, I looked away and waited.
After I heard the squeaking of bedsprings, which I assumed meant she had climbed beneath the blankets, I turned around.
Among the articles of clothing on the floor were her blouse and skirt. She lay with the blankets pulled up to her chin, her arms outside them, eyes closed. Asleep again.
I thought of her legs. The left leg was about half as wide as the right, the leg of another, smaller woman or the leg of a child, as if, as she aged, that one limb had lagged behind. On top it was intact, unwithered, almost as shapely as the other one.
She opened her eyes, staring straight at me as if she had been watching all along.
“I should go,” I said.
“Pull up that chair and stay a while,” she said. I turned the chair upright, placed it even farther from the bed than it had been. From where I sat, I could see out her one window. It was getting dark. A snow flurry was encroaching slowly from the Brow, blotting out more and more of the city, the black felt roofs of flat-topped houses.
“It’s not that hard to look the other way,” she said. “Really it’s not. Most men manage it. Even under the most intimate of circumstances.”
My heart hammered. I could think of nothing to say.
“I suppose it’s not fair of me to talk like that,” she said. “I’m drunk. You’re not. You’re married. I’m not.”
The snow pattered lightly against the window and the room grew darker. I thought of what her legs would have looked like pressed flat against the blankets, the bad leg sunken slightly so you could not see the scar. I pictured two flawless but mismatched legs, a disparate, inverted, lopsided V-like pair. And me between them? Had any men seen her like that? How many? It might just all be talk. Fielding starting rumours about herself. Her wanting everyone to think, to wonder. It might be that was all she had. Talk. Had any man ever touched her there, on the underside of her bad leg. Would she want him to? Would he want to? Did I? I thought of scenes from movies and books in which men gallantly pretended not to mind some scar or physical defect and thereby proved their
everlasting love. But in the movies it was always some barely perceptible imperfection, a little lightning bolt above the lip.
I could not. I could not do it. No matter how flat she lay. No matter how much my weight sank her legs into the bed. I could not do it because I was married, I told myself. Because she was drunk and just back on the bottle after seven years. Otherwise—
“Hanrahan is my half-brother,” she said. “His first name is David. I also have a half-sister named Sarah. The issue of my mother’s second marriage to a Doctor Hanrahan of Gramercy Park.”
“I don’t remember you going to see them in New York,” I said.
“I didn’t,” she said. “I would have had to see my mother, too. And my stepfather probably. Neither of which I wanted to do.”
“Hanrahan didn’t sound like he was from New York,” I said.
“He went to Virginia when he was seventeen. To a military college. He was only at Fort Pepperrell for three days, but he looked me up. Knock, knock, I open the door and there he is.”
“And something has happened to him?” I said.
She nodded. “I used the present tense to describe him. I should have used the past.” I did not know that she was crying until I saw a tear emerge from beneath her eyelid and run down beside her nose.
“Are you sure you’ll be all right?” I lamely said. She nodded. “What if I just sat here?” I said. “Until you fall asleep?”
She nodded again, turned her face away from me.
I sat there until the room was dark. Fielding, eyes closed and unmistakably asleep, went on leaking tears. Her face, in repose, was quite relaxed, her breathing deep and regular. What did she think of me, I wondered. Did she think I wanted to but lacked the courage? To how many others did she extend such invitations? I looked at her grey hair with its tinge of yellow, still full, still young, despite its colour. Her nicotine-stained fingers on the coverlet, the bandaged hand cradled tenderly against her side. There must have been no one there to keep her from falling when she fell.
“Fielding,” I said, as if the name expressed completely what she was, who she was, this woman I was watching over and whose bed I did not dare go any closer to. Her tears kept coming. Her heart sending forth a surplus of tears while her guard was down, seeping sorrow while she slept. I stayed until the tears were coming minutes apart. I stood up.
I could kiss her now and she would never know. But she would see it, see something in my eyes when next we met that would put me at a disadvantage. I had said no. I had had my chance and made my decision.
On the way out, I removed from the door the note to the printer’s devil telling him where she was. I set off to the
Telegram
and conveyed to Harrington her message that she was indisposed.
No sooner was I in my car again than it occurred to me that it was still not too late to go back, to climb into bed beside her. It could all be done in the darkness without words. There was no question of my leaving Clara, of course, nor would Fielding want me to. It was just —
Lately, during times when I had felt as if the world without me in it would in no way be diminished, I had found myself thinking of Fielding. It was not that this sustained me, not that she was some sort of antidote to despair. It was just that at such moments, an image of her came unbidden to my mind. Not the lights that in my childhood traced out the streets at night as I stood looking down upon them from the back deck on the Brow. Not the faces of my children, not Clara’s as she stood in the doorway waving and I shouted to her from the car that I was leaving for a month or maybe more. Not these, but Fielding.
I pictured her waiting at the gates of Bishop Feild, outside the gates, holding the bars and watching as I walked across the field to meet her. Behind her was the sloping city, its old black rooftops gleaming after rain. And beyond the city, through the Narrows, the sea, which, after all, it seemed, was not my fate and which I no longer feared. I imagined it was summer, early evening, not yet
dark. We wound our way among the streets, following the streetcar route to where the car barn was and past it to where a train that should not have been leaving at that time of day sat waiting just for us. We boarded the train together and settled in our seats. In my mind, our leaving like this broke no one’s heart, no one felt abandoned or betrayed. We would not be coming back, but neither would our journey ever end. Could I leave my wife and children? Fielding’s mother left her husband and her child.…
What a fool the woman made me be. Even if she
had
agreed, for me to do what I’d imagined would have been the end of everything I hoped for, for no man who left his wife and child would ever be elected in St. John’s or otherwise amount to anything. And would a life with Fielding have made up for that? Stupid, pointless, adolescent dreams, fantasies of escape, not from my life, but from life itself. I felt sorry for her for having lost her half-brother, but that was all.
Instead of going back to her, I went to the radio station. I had done almost no preparation, got there just in time to go on the air. The station manager was in a panic. I was supposed to give him hours of notice if I couldn’t make it. I somehow managed to get through fifteen minutes, ringing the ship’s bell, feeling ridiculous as I yanked once on the cord before and after each advertisement. This was what I did; this was who I was. A man who read toothpaste and pet-milk advertisements to an audience of people cloistered in their outports by the sea. I was not a man who made love to women on winter afternoons.
It was probably the most uninspired, perfunctory episode of “The Barrelman” I ever did. When it was over, I got out of there as quickly as I could.
By now it was fully dark. The early evening darkness of midwinter in St. John’s. It had never seemed to get dark my first winter in New York, and by the second winter, I had revised my notion of what darkness was. During my first winter back in Newfoundland after five years in New York, I could not believe it had
ever been this dark before. How had I never noticed? This darkness was like the prevailing wind. It came, self-propelled, across the ocean on some mission of obliteration not primarily concerning us. We just happened to be in the way, in the middle of the ocean, a place to erase while passing time between the Old World and the New.
She had asked me in such a way that if I turned her down, I would seem to be doing so because of her leg. “It’s not that hard to look the other way. Really it’s not. Most men manage it. Even under the most intimate of circumstances.” Most men. So presumably there were some who tried but did not manage it. Did she say it for her own sake or for mine? It’s not me you’ll be rejecting, just my leg. I wouldn’t blame you if you did. As if she knew that I wanted to and that her leg was all that held me back. Perhaps she hardly knew what she was saying. She was drunker than I’d ever seen her and grieving for Hanrahan.
Virginia. The continent’s first colony. Jamestown. The birthplace of America. A hundred and twenty years after Cabot broadsided Newfoundland, yet so far ahead of us by now that Newfoundlanders went there to begin again. I remembered him from Pleasantville. No rough edges. Almost a parody of chivalry, gallantry. In his voice a kind of drawling grace. A captain before the age of thirty. Star graduate of some military academy renowned for teaching horsemanship, no doubt. Fielding’s affluent half-brother.
I phoned Clara to tell her I had to work late. She was used to such calls. I could not go home. I drove aimlessly around the city, or not altogether aimlessly, for I often found myself approaching Fielding’s boarding-house from one direction or another. Sometimes I glanced up to see if her light was on, sometimes resisted doing so just to prove that I could. Always, her room was dark. She must still be sleeping. It had been only a few hours since I had left her. She had been so exhausted that in spite of the booze, she might sleep for days.
I parked the car in empty lots throughout the city and sat in silence, thinking. Would she remember having extended her invitation when next we met? Would she pretend to have forgotten? Would we both tacitly agree it hadn’t happened?
About ten o’clock, assuring myself that I would soon go home, I drove in sight of her boarding-house again and saw that this time her light was on. Far from sleeping for days, she was up already. Perhaps working, working for the first time in weeks, revived despite my rejection, reinvigorated, diverted from her sorrow by my act of kindness. I pictured her writing longhand at her desk, unable to use the typewriter, her bad hand on her lap. Better she was thus engaged than at the same desk drinking, holding a bottle of Scotch between her knees while trying to untwist the cap with her one good hand.
Her light went off. Perhaps she had merely been to the bathroom. I put the key in the ignition, ready to head home at last … and saw Prowse emerge from Fielding’s boarding-house, prosperous Prowse in a long beige overcoat, putting on his leather gloves, jauntily skipping down the steps, his arms swinging like a sprinter’s. I watched him walk down Cochrane Street away from me to what I now recognized to be his car. Had it been there all along, every time I had driven by? It could not have been. For half the time since I had finished the show? For all of it? Surely I would have seen it. Surely it was only there since the last time I drove by. Twenty minutes at the most.
When Prowse reached his car, he lit a cigarette, then turned and faced the boarding-house, looked up at the window, which I was able to see quite well for I had slouched down behind the wheel to avoid detection.
Fielding’s light came on, went off. Prowse kept looking up. Came on again, went off again. Prowse tossed down his cigarette, turned, got in his car and drove off, accelerating a little too quickly, so that the car fishtailed slightly on the snow-covered road, then straightened out. As if Fielding had signalled him to do exactly that.
Prowse who threatened to cane her. And would have if not for Slogger Anderson. And scorned her on the playing grounds once her star had fallen. And with me wrote that letter which appeared in all the papers. And crossed over to the British and grabbed me when I said that I would wring Hope Simpson’s neck.
Prowse in Fielding’s room. In Fielding’s arms. In Fielding’s bed. A signal of some kind that dimming of the lights had been. How familiar must they be to be using signals? Lovers using signals. Lovers’ little games. Prowse standing by his car, looking up, waiting for Fielding to bid him goodnight; their private, presumably long-established, signal. Prowse had not signalled, had not waved. But then Fielding’s one light switch was nowhere near the window; it was just inside the door. He knew she could not see him while she signalled. On, off. On, off. An interval of perhaps two seconds in between. A last kiss, momentarily prolonged.
And Fielding, that afternoon, only hours before, had invited me into her bed. “Even under the most intimate of circumstances.” Spoken from experience, I had assumed even then, but not experience with Prowse. Prowse who, like me, was a married man with children. Had she perhaps told him of my visit, had she known I would say no and asked just to see how I would react, what excuse I would make?