The Navigator of New York (19 page)

I was now on the port side, where a drama that seemed to be of no interest to anyone on starboard or onshore was taking place. Looking out around the barrier, I saw that steerage passengers were disembarking over several gangplanks onto ferries that bore the name of Ellis Island. Some passengers, who seemed to think that they were being turned away from America, tried to resist, sobbing and
protesting as they were dragged along by implacable officials who, I guessed, were well used to such behaviour.

I knew that you could be refused admittance to America at Ellis Island if you showed signs of mental instability, an
X
scrawled in chalk on your shoulder or your back. My mother, had she travelled to America in steerage, might not have been admitted.

“No outward signs of being ill.” The mentally ill were easiest to spot. I wondered if, to the trained eye, to an expert in such things, I showed any “outward signs” of the illness that so many were convinced was in my blood. I did not feel ill, but then my mother had not seemed so to those who knew her either.

I could just imagine with what haste a man from steerage clutching to his chest a bag of paper scrolls would be deported, especially if some official went so far as to read the letters. I could not think of any explanation that would save me, not even the far-from-simple truth. Least of all the far-from-simple truth. The redhead on the schooner had told me that I should say, if asked, that my possessions had been sent on ahead of me in a steamer trunk. “Don’t tell them you have nothing but that little bag,” he had said.

Suddenly fearful of discovery, I felt wash over me a sense of the oddness of my mission. For a second I regarded myself as others would if they knew not only the contents of my bag, but the purpose of my trip. And in that second, it must be said, what an odd young man I seemed to myself to be.

I went back to starboard. The stewards asked us to form a line beginning about ten feet from the stairs that had been lowered from the ship. I was well back in the line and could not see the head of it, but I could hear that before each person disembarked, a man spoke so briefly he might have been extending to them some sort of official welcome.

It looked as if the entire city had turned out to meet the ship. At the front of the crowd was what I would have called a cordon of policemen had they in any way been acting in concert. They seemed randomly spaced at the head of the crowd, here a threesome of them, then a gap of a hundred feet where none was stationed. Some stood
with their backs to the ship, but only so that they could chat with people at the head of the crowd; others stood with their backs to the crowd, hands in their trouser pockets, trying not to look as if they had no idea why they had been posted there.

Now and then, to the apparent amusement of the cops, little begrimed boys broke through the line of grown-ups at the front and ran straight at passengers who were just setting foot on land. They grabbed the handles of their bags and suitcases as if they meant to steal them. Some passengers gave up their bags without resistance and, as the fierce-faced boys disappeared into the crowd, ambled after them with an air of unconcern. Others held firm to theirs, and the boys, after a short, comical struggle, gave up and ran back into the crowd again.

When I saw that beyond the crush of people lay an army of conveyance vehicles and horses, I realized that the boys were freelance porters. I saw them climb up on hacks, hansom cabs and carriages. Standing beside the drivers, who in their tall black hats sat so motionless they might have been asleep, they waved to the people they had pressed into being customers, holding their bags aloft so they would know which vehicle was theirs. Once the customers and bags were aboard, the boys accepted payment from the drivers and ran back towards the ship again.

One man relinquished his bag to a boy who was running flat out, holding it about a foot from his body to make it easier for the boy, who came up from behind him to close both hands upon it. There was a smattering of applause, as much for the man as for the boy, it seemed to me, for the exchange had taken place as smoothly as if they had been practising for years. It might have been anything from a custom peculiar to this pier to one common throughout the harbours of America. It was neither forbidden nor encouraged by the cops, just wryly observed. There must have been a point at which they would have intervened, however, or why else were they there?

Everyone whose bags were not toted by a porter in uniform was expected to fend for himself when set upon by those little boys. People, even newcomers, would somehow sort themselves out and
need not be interfered with by officials, the assumption seemed to be. I would have been more disposed to appreciate how entertainingly anarchic a spectacle it was had I not been about to make my descent into the luggage rats myself.

I decided I had no choice but to hold my bag with both arms against my chest just as I had pictured some poor immigrant doing, thereby giving himself no hope of passing inspection.

I would hold the bag in one hand until I made it past the man at the head of the line, who, as I heard someone in front of me say, was a doctor, though he was not even wearing a token stethoscope.

“Where are you from, young man?” he said when my turn came. He was bald, his face beet red and sweating. He was impeccably dressed and without a doubt well on his way on that early afternoon to being drunk.

“St. John’s, Newfoundland,” I said, but he had already shifted his gaze to the person behind me, as if my ability to speak English was proof enough that I carried no contagion.

Holding my bag high and with both hands, I descended the stairs. Once on the ground, I veered away from a boy who came running at me as if he meant to knock me down, and was by him distracted long enough that I did not see the boy who came at me from the side and jumped half his height into the air to grab the handles of my bag with both hands. When he landed, he almost yanked the bag from my hands. I improved my grip.

“I can carry it myself,” I said. The boy, as if he had either not heard or not understood a word I said, looked not at me but at the bag, his face contorted with exertion, cheeks puffed, eyes squinted almost shut. I could not believe his strength. Exerting equal force, we began to go around in a circle, four feet scuffing on the cobblestones as though we were playing some sort of game. “You’ll break the bag,” I said, but still the bag was all he stared at. I glanced at the police, half hoping for, half dreading their intervention, wondering what would happen if the bag burst and the odd-looking scrolls spilled out.

Finally, afraid that if the struggle went on much longer the cops
would intervene, I relented, releasing the handles so suddenly that the boy went flying backwards and lost his balance, skidding on his backside on the cobblestones but holding the bag clear of the ground.

He was still skidding as he turned and gained his feet. He ran off through the crowd towards the carriages, ran at full speed as the bag was all but weightless. I ran after him, trying to keep sight of him through the crowd, terrified that I might mistake some other boy for him and never see the scrolls again. I brushed up against scores of people and was glad that, on the advice of the redhead, I had moved my money from my wallet to the pockets of my slacks. Leg pockets were harder to pick, he said, and assured me that in New York, pickpockets were everywhere. “Two hundred in cash,” he said, shaking his head as he watched me transfer it from my wallet to my pocket. I had seen American money before but had never held it in my hand. “Put some in each pocket,” he said, “and once you’re squared away, put it in a bank or you won’t have it very long.”

I saw the boy jump onto the sideboard of a hansom cab. I grabbed my bag from him just as he held out his hand to receive the penny the driver was extending to him between thumb and forefinger. The driver, a beefy fellow with an ill-fitting bowler and a square moustache, closed his fist around the coin and looked at me.

“Do you want a cab or not, sir?” he said in what I took to be an Irish accent. I looked at the boy, whose eyes were glued on the driver’s fist, which held the penny he had earned but might not get, still as oblivious to me as when we had struggled for the bag.

“Yes,” I said, though I had planned, unladen as I was, to walk, exactly where I wasn’t sure. The driver dropped the penny. The boy was already in mid-stride when the penny hit his hand. He bolted back into the crowd towards the ship. I asked the driver to take me to some moderately priced hotel.

That night, I lay above the blankets in my sweltering room. I had opened both windows but could not sleep because of the noise, which even at that hour showed no sign of dying down.

How could the air, in a city so close to a river and the sea, be so still, I wondered. I longed for a breeze as the thirsty in the desert long for water. The curtains hung motionless. It had never been as warm indoors in St. John’s as it was outdoors in Manhattan at that moment.

When I closed my eyes, I saw the face of the boy who had fought me for the bag, and whom I doubted I would ever see again, though I was sure I would recognize him if a year from now I passed him in the street. A child as old as the city itself, he might have been; a Manhattan artifact on whom my existence had in no way registered. I wondered if he had been able to speak English.

I felt vaguely, obscurely, disappointed by what had seemed certain, this time yesterday, to be one of the great days of my life. What had I expected? Some feeling of momentousness, I supposed, at my first sight of the city in which I was conceived; perhaps even a sense of homecoming, of returning to the place where I began. It had often struck me, when I looked at photographs or postcards of Manhattan, that I was looking at the place of my conception. I suppose I had thought that what I felt when I saw these images of Manhattan I would feel with a thousand times the force when I saw the place for real. But it had not been so on the ship, nor as I drove in the hansom cab through the teeming streets, and I was not sure why.

All I could think was that this was the city where Francis Stead had gone to live when he could no longer stand to come back home and be reminded by the sight of me that he was not my father. It was not Brooklyn, not the city where my real father lived between one expedition and the next. But not even the sight of that city had moved me as I thought it would.

I wondered if each time he looked across the river at Manhattan, Dr. Cook was reminded of me, of the day he crossed over on the ferry and at that party met my mother. Of all the lofty thoughts that might come to mind as, from Brooklyn, one watched the sunlight sink lower on the buildings of Manhattan, could Dr. Cook’s have been “There, over there, is where my son was conceived”? Did he think of that day each time he crossed the Brooklyn Bridge into Manhattan?

I thought of Aunt Daphne and realized instantly that it was guilt that was smothering the exhilaration I ought to have been feeling—guilt at having deserted her the way I had, even more abruptly than Francis Stead had deserted my mother and me. This was my fourth night away from home, counting the night I left. I doubted she had slept for more than minutes at a time since finding the note I had left for her in the middle of my bed. She was alone again in that house with Uncle Edward, as she had not been for fourteen years. “Can you imagine what it was like when there were just the two of us?” she had joked when she told me the rhyme “Their plates wiped clean they sit and wait / While at the trough he ruminates.”

Her
plate wiped clean
she
sits and waits. She had never said it out loud until she said it to me, I suspected.

Here I was in Manhattan and all I could think about was Newfoundland.

The next morning I vowed to make myself known to Dr. Cook that very day. The bellhop had told me when I checked in that I could take the el train across the Brooklyn Bridge.

I got out of bed and was headed for the bathroom when I saw an envelope on the floor just inches from the door. A message of some kind from the hotel, I presumed.

I picked it up. It was sealed, with nothing written on it, not even my name. I opened it and withdrew a single folded sheet of paper. Even before I unfolded it and saw the handwriting, I knew that Dr. Cook had somehow found me first.

There was no closing salutation or signature.

Uncle Edward, despite his promise, had to have told him I was coming. Dr. Cook, or someone acting on his behalf, had to have been there when my ship arrived and followed me to this hotel.

How long had the envelope been lying there? All night? Slipped soundlessly under the door while I was lying on the blankets, too hot to sleep? Or since sometime after sun-up?

I felt both cheated and relieved. Cheated out of my chance to, however discreetly, surprise him, drop from out of nowhere into his life as he had dropped into mine. Relieved because I had, as yet, been able to think of no way of discreetly surprising him. I had dreaded making myself known to him so clumsily that he would form an unfavourable first impression of me, or that I would so startle him that he would be loath to see me again.

It was not two years since the death of Anna Forbes. He had not mentioned in his letters that he was engaged again to be married. He had not mentioned Marie at all. I wondered why.

“I have thought of an arrangement that I believe will work.” Another arrangement of his devising. What would it be this time? More letters, only now he would allow me to reply? I had not come to New York merely to write to him.

Two-thirty. It was now eight o’clock. According to the bellhop, I could make it to Bushwick and Willoughby in ninety minutes, even less depending on the time of day I travelled. I could still surprise him, show up early when the servants, who might not know that I was coming, were still there. But
he
might not be there. Or he might be in his surgery, available only to those who had appointments. Or he might be somewhere else.