“What about Prowse?” I said.
“He knows about that,” she said.
“But you said —”
“He hasn’t known all along.”
She put her elbows on the table, her face in her hands.
“I told him not long after David died,” she said, her voice muffled. She lowered her hands. She looked as if she had been crying for hours. “David named me as one of the people who should be informed in case anything happened to him. He never knew I was his mother. He thought I was just his half-sister. ‘My son. You are my son.’ The words were on my lips, Smallwood, all the time he was here. That night in the movie-house. Sitting next to you is the woman in whose body you began. I wondered if he might somehow sense it.” She cried, the heel of her palm on her forehead, tears dripping onto the table.
“That’s enough,” I said. But she shook her head.
“Two officers from Fort Pepperrell came to the door one day and handed me a telegram. ‘We regret to inform you …’ That’s when I went back on the bottle. I think I would have anyway, I was so worried about him. I couldn’t sleep. He wrote to me a few times from France. I wrote to him. ‘P.S. I’m your mother,’ I always felt like writing. Three months after we first met, he was killed.”
“I’m sorry,” I said.
She nodded, bit her lip. Blinked back a sudden surge of tears. “Oh, my poor boy. My poor, sweet, darling boy.” She slumped over the table, her head between her arms, shoulders heaving. I put out my hand and touched her hair, brushed it back from her forehead.
“I told Prowse about two weeks later,” she said. “Maybe I shouldn’t have. To find out, on the occasion of his death, that you had a son you never knew you had, never met.”
She straightened, not caring now that I could see her face. “He didn’t believe me at first. At least, he said he didn’t. I assured
him that no one but him could be the father. I asked him what reason I would have to lie. He begged me never to tell anyone that he was the children’s father. He was more concerned that I keep it a secret than anything else. But maybe that’s not fair. Who knows what he went through later when he was alone, what he’s been through since? I told him not to worry. I wouldn’t tell anyone.”
I had to ask. “Did you tell Prowse about David the day … the day I met you at the Press Club, the day we came back here —”
“The day I tried to get you into bed,” she said, laughing and crying at the same time. “Yes,” she said. “I called him at his house when I woke up. It took some doing to convince him to meet me here. I must have sounded like I was in no shape to meet him somewhere else. But how did you know that?”
“I drove around for hours that night,” I said. “I drove by here a hundred times wondering if I should — see how you were doing.” Fielding put her hand over her mouth to suppress a smile, a generous, even-keeled smile. “I saw Prowse leave. He stopped by his car and looked up at your window. You turned the lights on, then off. Then on, then off again. I thought it must be some sort of signal.”
“And you jumped to certain conclusions.”
“Yes,” I said. “Yes, I suppose I did.”
“Prowse and I have hardly spoken since our school days,” Fielding said. “Not even when I told him about David could he bring himself to touch me. Especially not then, perhaps.”
“Then why? Why did you do that with the light?”
“When we were — going together,” she said, “when we were at the judge’s house, I would always leave first, by the back door, which you couldn’t see from the street. I would stand in the backyard and wait for Prowse to flash the upstairs light, to signal that the coast was clear, that there was no one on the street and I could leave. It all seemed so exciting. Our secret signal. Our way of saying goodbye. The night I told him about David, I said I would flick the lights after he left. I didn’t know until now that he waited for the signal. But I’m glad to hear he did.”
I remembered Prowse skipping jauntily down the steps of Fielding’s boarding-house. Having just been told his son was dead. Trying to convince himself, perhaps. Nothing has happened that I cannot control. My life need not change. A son I did not know I had is dead. He did not exist for me yesterday, he does not exist today. A daughter I will never meet lives a thousand miles away. Nothing has changed. For a moment there I thought it had, but I was wrong. No one but Fielding will ever know. Fielding’s life and mine are still far apart and they always will be. Nothing has happened that makes it more likely that I will ever have to live like Fielding. I will never live like Fielding. I have nothing new to fear.
But he waited for that signal, and when he saw it, threw aside his cigarette as if hoping with that gesture to dismiss the past, the notion that anything that happened then could matter to him now. But even for Prowse, as Fielding said, other moments were still to come, perhaps. At times, when he is by himself, the name some stranger gave his son will come to mind. David. The son whose picture and whose gravestone he has never seen. The daughter he has never seen and knows he never will.
“That night at the movie-house —”I said.
“My mother had told David when she thought he was old enough to understand such things that he had a half-sister in St. John’s. From her first marriage. He looked me up. I don’t know why I was so nervous when we saw you. Maybe I thought you would know from looking at him who his father was, see Prowse in David’s face. Maybe I felt guilty. I couldn’t bear to introduce him to you as what he thought he was, my half-brother. Also, I could see that you were jealous and the idea of leaving you in your misery appealed to me.
“Oh, Smallwood. Three days we had, three days. Every spare minute he had we spent together. The whole time I wondered if I should tell him who I really was, who he really was. He called me sis. He’s going to war, I thought. This might be your only chance.
He might not come back. But then I thought, He’s going to war, he’ll need all his wits about him, this is no time to turn his whole world inside out. So I didn’t tell him. I spent three days with him, pretending to be his half-sister, biting my tongue while he introduced me as that to all his friends. Though he never said ‘half-sister,’ just ‘sister.’ ‘This is my sister, Sheilagh Fielding.’
“He told me all about Sarah, gave me a picture of her. ‘Here she is,’ he said, ‘your sister.’ On the back, he’d had her write, ‘To Sheilagh, from Sarah.’
“Sometimes, I think that if I had told him who I was, he would not have died. He would have been nudged onto a path far enough from the one he followed that it would have led him safely home. I know it makes no sense —”
I pulled my chair over beside hers. She raised her head and looked at me. I kissed her on the lips; she kissed me back. And then she all but pulled me from the chair and held me to her, her arms beneath mine, which were crossed around her neck, her arms enfolding me completely, hugging me twice as hard as I hugged her, or was able to, for I was hugging her with all my might.
I thought of what she had said about David, how it tortured her to think that if she had told him who she was, he might have made it safely home. A nudge here, a nudge there. Had any one of a thousand things been different, the two of us — But I had no sooner thought it than I knew that I was wrong, that I had freely chosen to remain apart. And though the past was not lost to us, though it was there with us in that room while we held each other, I would not have changed it if I could.
Forty years of love were consummated with one hug. With my face pressed against her neck, I smelled her skin, a smell whose distinctiveness made me realise I had never held anyone this close, this fervently, before. Not even my wife. I felt or heard, I could not tell which, the beating of her heart, felt her cheek, wet and warm, against mine, tears from her face dripping onto mine as if both of us were crying.
We could not have stayed that way for long. Had she hugged me any harder, my bones would not have held. And soon she was out of what breath her old illness begrudged her at the age of fifty-five. We pulled apart.
Fielding. If I had ever met her father, I would have had to call her Sheilagh. And she, if she had ever met my family, would have had to call me Joe. Our one moment, our one point of intersection, had just come and gone. We had for years been moving closer together and from now on we would move apart. She had left the feel of her body on mine but already she was fading like water drying on my skin.
“Where does Sarah live?” I said.
“Still in New York,” Fielding said. “She’s married, has a little girl named Karen. I keep track of her by subscribing to her alumni newsletter. I’m fairly certain I’m the only person in this boarding-house getting mail from Columbia University.”
“You should have got married, Fielding. After I asked you, I mean. Since then, I mean. You should stop drinking, live somewhere more … You should see your daughter and your granddaughter; you should see Sarah, that’s something you can do.”
“What would I tell her? The woman you think was your mother, the man you think was your father, on whose headstones you are named as their daughter, were not really your parents. I am your mother and the man you think was your father was not related to you by blood at all. What good would that do her now?”
“You’re so alone, Fielding,” I said. “Don’t you mind?”
“I’m afraid to write Sarah,” she said. “I’m afraid that she won’t answer, or that she will and she’ll say that she never wants to see me.”
I thought of the Lost Newfoundlanders page in the
Backhomer
.
“The day might come when you lose track of Sarah,” I said. “When you don’t know where she is or even if she’s still alive. What then? Imagine her and Karen never knowing you existed.”
Fielding sobbed again, one hand over her mouth.
“You’ve got to write to her,” I said. “You’ve got to.”
June 17, 1955. St. John’s
Dear Sarah:
Perhaps David wrote to you about meeting me in St. John’s while he was on his way to France in 1944. He gave me a picture of you, which I have often looked at since he died. David died not knowing who I was. And perhaps because of that I felt his death even more keenly than I would have had he known. I can think of no better way to say this than simply to say it. I am your mother — that is, I gave birth to you and David. You have a right to know who your father is, and I will tell you should you ever ask.
I have only lately been able to admit to myself that my father did not love me as much as I have all my life been pretending that he did. He loved me as much as his heart and his circumstances let him, I am sure. I tell you this, not in the hope of making you feel sorry for me, but to help you understand why I would so much like to meet you.
You owe me nothing, Sarah. I have done nothing yet to earn your affection or respect. Any silly, giddy girl can have a baby, even two at once. I was happy when I was sixteen to be shipped off to New York before my pregnancy began to show, and to let my mother pretend that she was pregnant while I went about my lying-in for five months in her house; happy to let her pretend, to save my reputation and my father’s, that the babies, when I had them, were her own. But I have not often been happy since.
My mother was a woman who was capable of great courage. I am sure that if she could have, she would have
taken me with her when she left my father — for which, knowing my father as I did, I bear her no more ill will than can be helped. I would like to have had her as my mother. But she was and always will be yours. I would not expect you to ever call me Mother, or think of me as that. I would not expect you to introduce me to anyone as such. Our secret can remain our secret, if you like. You can call me Fielding. Everybody does.
I cannot imagine how strange it must be for you to receive such a letter — even stranger, I am sure, than it seems to me to be writing it so late in life. It may seem to you that you have nothing to gain from meeting me, or that I have no way of proving that what I say is true. As to the latter, I have since I was twelve faithfully kept a journal of my life, which now fills many volumes and in which all that I have told you is set out in more detail. As for the former, I can tell you only that I have felt your absence, yours and David’s, all my life. I was for a time, many years ago, confined to a sanatorium with an illness that left me unable to conceive more children. I thought about you often while I was in the San.
Perhaps if I had never met David, I would not be writing to you now. I know it is foolish, but I sometimes cannot help thinking that if I had told David I was his mother, he might have made it through the war.
I believe that when David looked me up, it was with the intention of paying a brief and dutiful visit. I remember opening the door to find him standing there, in uniform, his hat removed, as if he had come to the wrong address bearing bad news. He did not expect to be greeted so fervently by a half-sister who had never been to visit him, but I couldn’t help myself. When I saw his name on his lapel, I threw my arms around him and hugged him until he hugged me back. Three days later, when we were saying goodbye, I cried and made such a fuss that I embarrassed him. I told him I loved
him and, perhaps because he knew I wanted him to, he told me he loved me too.
Three months later, when they told me he was dead, it seemed strange that I hadn’t sensed or felt his death the moment it occurred, which had been weeks before. His death was for me only a dreaded possibility until I opened my door and saw the two officers. Perhaps others who were joined to him by something more important than mere blood sensed it when it happened. Perhaps my mother did, perhaps you did. I don’t know. I don’t know if such things can be felt. I didn’t know until I was told that my father was dead, or until her brother wrote me that my mother was.
But blood must count for something, Sarah. It did when I met David and held him in my arms. I look at your picture every day and wonder what you look like now and imagine meeting you. I wonder what your daughter looks like and imagine meeting her.