The Navigator of New York (22 page)

He had not offered in the vestibule to take it from me. Perhaps he knew by how I held it that I would not have wanted to part with it. He might even, from that, have guessed its contents. If so, he had perfectly disguised any uneasiness he felt about it.

I was suddenly aware of how I looked, what an odd pose I had struck and maintained since I sat down. I saw myself dimly reflected in the window of a cabinet that held a display of silver plates. Shoulders hunched, knees primly together, feet flat on the floor, holding the bag on my lap with both hands as women hold their purses.

The oddball I had been I would be no longer, I vowed. I was
starting over. No one in New York knew anything about “the Stead boy,” who in any case did not exist except in the minds of people I might never see again. In New York, people would have cause to think of me only as Dr. Cook’s assistant. “I will introduce you … you will introduce yourself to anyone you meet …” I had no idea how to socialize, what the rules and norms of interaction were. I foresaw, though not clearly, a series of catastrophes, followed by a quick retreat and a reappraisal of my possibilities by Dr. Cook.

I put the valise on the sofa beside me, right beside me, within easy grasping distance should any of the people who were absent from the house suddenly return. I put my hands palms down on my thighs, where, clammy as they were, they adhered to my trousers.

“Someday, Devlin,” Dr. Cook said, “you’re going to be very happy.” He had, I remembered from his second letter, said that very thing to my mother the day they met. I looked at him, wondering if my unhappiness was
that
obvious to him. I hoped that he knew next to nothing about “the Stead boy.” He smiled reassuringly. I felt a great rush of emotion I could not name, and my eyes welled up with tears.

“I am placing all my trust in you,” he said. “I am entrusting everything to you. All I have and hope to have. Everything I am and hope to be.”

Dr. Cook introduced me to Marie when she came home as “the young man I’ve been telling you about.” Nothing about him suggested that anything more momentous was taking place than the meeting of his wife and his new assistant, the son of a deceased colleague and friend.

She had a small, pretty face but was otherwise a good deal on the heavy side. Clinging to her hand, with the fingers of her free hand in her mouth, was a little girl, perhaps three years old, whom she introduced to me as Ruth, the only child of her first marriage. I saw in Mrs. Cook’s eyes a protracted fatigue, as well as a general wariness, as if she were forever having to fend off impositions, this young man in front of her clearly being one that she had been unable to fend off. She was very
polite with me, pointedly so, no doubt to make it clear that though I was joining the household, I was doing so merely as an employee.

“You’ve had a long journey, Mr. Stead,” she said. “You must be very tired.”

“A little,” I said. Can
she
see the resemblance? I wondered. Not that it mattered. Even if she thought that in some ways her husband and I looked alike, she would think nothing of it.

“You’re all that my husband has talked about since yesterday. ‘Dr. Stead’s son will soon be here.’ He must have said it twenty times. I understand that he and your father were good friends. Explorers come back from expeditions either the closest of friends or arch-enemies for life. And some, of course, do
not
come back, a fact of which I know you are painfully aware. I am sorry about your father. I hope you do not catch the polar fever from my husband. There is adventure enough, exploration enough, to be done, if explore one must, in Prospect Park.”

This was hardly evidence of a “Jo Peary–like willingness” to be his companion in exploration, but I resisted the urge to look at Dr. Cook.
Happiness through marriage
.

“My further advice to you is to stay on this side of the river and have nothing more to do with Manhattan than you have to. But I suspect that instead of my advice, you will follow the example of my husband. Well, I’m sure you will prove an invaluable assistant to him. I hope you enjoy your stay in Brooklyn.” She spoke these last two sentences as if she doubted that our paths would ever cross again. She turned abruptly and walked off down the hall.

Dr. Cook told me my room was in an unoccupied wing of the house that was so remote he referred to it as the Dakota, an entire block of rooms on the west side that were never used. It was, as he put it, “simply there.” The house minus the Dakota was referred to as the Cooks’.

He told me he had named the Dakota after an apartment building constructed in 1884 on the Upper West Side, at that time so remote a location that the name had seemed appropriate—which it still did. “The city hasn’t really pushed that far west yet,” he said.

The Dakota. It sounded like not one structure but many. Or rather, like a territory on which a number of dwellings had been built and were being maintained in pristine condition in anticipation of a wave of people who might never come. A ghost town in reverse, never lived in but forever ready to be occupied.

“You are to be its first resident,” said Dr. Cook, “and the only resident for now, although I visit it sometimes. It really is quite absurdly huge.”

“I hope my being here has not upset Mrs. Cook,” I said.

“She is tired,” Dr. Cook said. “Anaemic. Otherwise she would be happy to have you stay in the Cooks’. The prospect of getting worse and being pent up indoors by illness has her on edge.”

My room was enormous, the ceiling as high as in the main part of the house, the furnishings as lavish. Because of the height of the ceiling and two large revolving fans, the room was cool. I had my own bathroom, my own icebox, which had been fitted with a new block of ice that morning and stocked with soft drinks and fruit. The servants, Dr. Cook said, would keep it stocked and maintain it for me. My only tasks would be the ones he assigned me.

“It’s so much,” I said. “This is so generous of you and Mrs. Cook.”

“It’s your salary,” he said. “Of course I will pay you something on top of your expenses, but you should think of all this as your salary.”

He asked me if I had left anything at my hotel. “A change of clothes and some toiletries,” I said.

“I’ll have them sent for,” he said. “You move in as of this moment.” Still he did not so much as look at the valise, which I had put down on the bed. “You will not be having dinner with us most nights, I’m afraid. At least not for a while.”

He said that his study and his surgery were at opposite ends of the house, roughly equidistant from the Dakota. A small room just down the hallway from his study would be my office. Exactly what I would do in this office, exactly what being his assistant would entail, he said he would tell me once I was settled in.

He left me to explore the rest of the Dakota. The house, he said,
had been designed to accommodate an extended family, but the Lipsians, though they extended, wound up in various residences, and so the Dakota was never used, not even by them.

In the whole house, there had been at least two, and in some cases three, of everything when they moved in—two or three dining rooms, drawing rooms, living rooms, libraries, etc. Some of these rooms they had converted to other purposes, but the Dakota had remained untouched.

In the otherwise dormant Dakota, a few rooms had been revived for me: the bedroom, the bathroom closest to it and the relatively small and cozy library, a room that shared all its walls with other rooms, and thus had no windows. I would take my meals in there at the reading table, Dr. Cook said, the thought of my doing so at a dining-room table whose remaining thirty-nine chairs would be empty being unbearable to him. By pushing a button on the wall outside the dining room, I could summon someone from the kitchen anytime between seven in the morning and eight at night.

I walked through the rooms several times, the last time after dark, switching on lights as I went. Not for a long time had these rooms been lit, I suspected—except by someone checking to see that the lights still worked—though they were cleaned twice weekly. There were not even cobwebs in the corners of the ceilings. The gilded ceilings, panelled walls, and floors and parts of floors that were not covered with rugs gleamed as if the Dakota had been abandoned, the sheets thrown over the furniture, just the day before. All the major pieces of furniture were covered with white sheets. Some of the covered pieces looked like faceless statues, with the faint suggestion of bodies beneath folds and layers of marble garments. It was generally possible, by the shape of a sheet, to guess what lay beneath it.

I had expected that aside from my revived rooms, the rooms in the Dakota would be unfurnished, mere enclosures of empty space, nothing but wainscoted walls and hardwood floors. But if not for the sheets, there would have been little except for the pristine fireplaces and the complete lack of any odours to indicate that no one lived
there. There were rugs, tassel-tied draperies, expansive tapestries; peeking beneath the sheets, I saw paintings, man-sized vases, gleaming tables, upholstered chairs and sofas, ottomans, glass lamps, fully stocked china cabinets, hutches of crystalware and silverware. The Cooks could have taken up residence in the Dakota without any sacrifice of comfort, without having to move anything except for toiletries and clothing. Everything the Cooks’ had the Dakota had.

It had been designed to accommodate not just one-half of an extended family, but scores of invited guests as well; designed for parties, receptions, seasonal gatherings, annual gatherings of the sort that I presumed took place in the Cooks’ while its alternate lay empty.

It had about it an air that reminded me of Francis Stead’s surgery, as if it was being maintained for someone whose return was doubtful or no longer possible, no longer believed in by anyone, or as if the doctor and his wife had had in mind for it some purpose, their abandonment of which they could not bear to acknowledge. I could not help asking, as I went from room to room, “What is it
for?”

In the Dakota alone, a large family could have lived in spacious luxury. It was just as well that everything was covered in sheets. In no way would it have been possible for me to “live” in more than a fraction of it. I would have felt absurd sitting alone in one of those cavernous rooms night after night, reading or listening to music on the gramophone.

Hanging from the ceiling of the drawing room was a chandelier so massive that when it started up, I could hear it hum to life and for a second feel the floor vibrate beneath my feet. It was a great bowl from which depended what looked to me like a vast symmetry of icicles, each one lit from within and casting its reflection on the others, the whole thing a teeming concavity of light, an inverted igloo.

And one part of the otherwise dormant, enormous drawing room had some time ago been revived for Dr. Cook. This was the part he had alluded to when he said that he visited the Dakota sometimes: his “spot,” he called it, the place he came when he needed absolute solitude in which to think. It was the far edge of the room, a little
semi-circle of unsheeted furniture near the fire. He liked to go there at night and sit by himself on the sofa or in the armchair. Even with me in the Dakota, he would go on doing so, he said, so I ought not to be alarmed if I heard something in the drawing room or saw that the doors were closed and a light was on inside. He said that he wished not to be interrupted when the doors were closed, but that I should take their being open as an invitation to join him.

My main task, said Dr. Cook, would be to “cull the mail.” He received, as I soon discovered, an enormous amount of correspondence every day, and he found it a nuisance separating the small portion of it that was worth reading from the much larger portion that was not. Among the latter was an avalanche of correspondence from inventors imploring him to use, and thereby publicize and prove the effectiveness of, some new invention of theirs on his next expedition.

“Invention is the national pastime,” said Dr. Cook. He was asked to experiment with outerwear made from some material that was “thermally superior to fur and completely waterproof.” Snow goggles that doubled as binoculars. A “foldable, feather-light auger that will cut through ice better than augers made of steel.” A sled that was lighter, stronger and faster because its blades were made from some “friction-less alloy.” Longer-lasting candles. A miniature stove that required “no fuel but water.” A “skin-restorer that can undo the ravages of frostbite.” Eye-drops “guaranteed to prevent and cure snow-blindness.” Frostbite-proof moccasins. “A never-tiring breed of dog that will put at a disadvantage all who insist on using huskies and the like.”

My job was to reply to all these pitches, politely decline them on his behalf, explaining that “Dr. Cook prefers to use equipment of his own design.”

“Nothing galls people like having their letters to the famous go unacknowledged,” he said.

All letters to him were to be acknowledged, except “crank” letters, of which I should dispose.

There were many letters from people recommending themselves
as members of his next expedition—hunters, photographers, journalists, novelists, businessmen, physicians—or offering to pay him to take them or their sons to the Arctic. I was to write them, telling them that he was no longer for hire as an Arctic guide and now took with him on his expeditions only people he had travelled with before.

He was no longer for hire, he forthrightly told me, because of his wife’s money, which it would be pointless of him to refuse just to prove to the bloody-minded that he had not married for money.

He gave me a list of “legitimate explorers,” men from all over the world, but mostly from America, Canada, Scandinavia and Europe. All correspondence from these men I was to forward to him unopened. Many of the names—Peary, Amundsen, Dedrick, Cagni, Astrup, Bartlett, Wellman—were familiar to me.

I would, once I knew the city well enough, deliver messages and packages from him to people all over Brooklyn and Manhattan.

His study was cluttered with a decade’s worth of polar relics. Sextants and globes. Bird feathers. Snowshoes. Patagonian mementoes. A dictionary of a Patagonian tribe known as the Yahgans. Flinthead spears. Mounted on the wall was a small wooden sled. Even its runners were made of wood.” Ash,” said Dr. Cook.” It weighs thirteen pounds. It carried five hundred. Nearly forty pounds for every pound it weighs. I designed it myself.”