The Navigator of New York (28 page)

The fire had burned down and I could barely make him out.

I could not speak. I felt almost as wrenched from my former life as I had when I read his first letter. He and my mother were not who or what I thought they were.

This man whose baby she could not stand to be away from for a second
. My mother had loved me that much. Yet she had abandoned me.

“My mother’s death,” I said, “was officially declared an accident. But Francis Stead was right. It is widely believed in St. John’s that she took her life.” I realized, too late, that it sounded like an accusation, as good as saying, “She took her life because of you.”

“I think it might be best for you to go,” I said. “It is very late.”

He rose from the sofa.

“I will keep my mother’s letter,” I said. “For now. I will return it to you soon.”

“Goodnight,” he said and made his way in silence to the near door, which he did not close behind him.

I sat there for some time after the fading of his footsteps. I thought of the scrolled letters, saw them now in a different, tainted light. I recalled a phrase from his second letter: “I believe that, upon reflection, you will realize that there exists no motive that would cause me to mislead you on this matter.”

I left the drawing room and went back to my bedroom. I lay down and tried to sleep.

Though it seemed strange, I felt elated. Also disappointed and betrayed. But elated, most of all. For it seemed to me that the toll his story had taken on him was the measure of his feeling for me. How fearful he was that I would turn away from him. He had seemed, until now, so remote, as if he might be having second thoughts about his promise to include me in his life. Now he was a new, in some ways lesser, Dr. Cook. The ideal, flawless man of the letters and the past few weeks did not exist. No such men existed anywhere. But tonight he had poured out to me his most shameful secrets. And now he was lying awake in bed wondering what I would do.

I would stay.

I still believed in him, still trusted him.

Despite that, however, I compared the handwriting in my mother’s letter to that of the handwriting on the back of the portrait photograph of her. In particular, I compared the two signatures, the “Amelia” on the letter and the “Amelia” on the back of her photograph, where she had written “Amelia, the wicked one.” They were, as
far as I could tell, exactly the same. The paper the letter was written on was creased with age. There was no doubt that my mother had written the letter twenty years ago.

I looked in the mirror on the wall beside my bed. “I can see her in your eyes,” he’d said. But as yet I could see no one in my eyes.

I went by the study the next day after he came back from his rounds. It would be even harder now to call him Dr. Cook.

“I want to assure my aunt that I am well,” I said, “without revealing to her where I am.” It was more of a demand than a statement. But implicit in it was the answer he was hoping for.

“That can easily be arranged,” he said. It was the first time he had not looked me in the eye while speaking to me. He looked elated, relieved, abashed, scolded. I think that at that moment, I could have got his consent to almost anything.

“How can it be done?” I said, though I knew how.

“I think I could impose upon your uncle one last time. Send him an unmarked envelope from you. Have him tell her it was pressed upon him in the street by a man he did not know.”

“All right,” I said.

I imagined Uncle Edward’s reaction at the sight of another envelope from Dr. Cook, who had assured him there would be no more. And then his reaction when he saw what the envelope contained. And there would be not just this one last imposition. I owed it to Aunt Daphne to keep assuring her that I was safe.

This was the letter I gave to Dr. Cook. Also, I gave back to him the letter from my mother.

“We have begun, Devlin,” he said as he took the letters from me. “There are no obstacles between us now.”

In the winter, I began to venture out into Brooklyn and Manhattan on my own, delivering messages for Dr. Cook, bringing others back to him. What I was really doing, he assured me, was meeting the people I needed to know.

I went on using Francis Stead’s valise. I found a hiding place for the letters: the desk in the library, to which I alone had a key.

Most of my errands took me to Manhattan. I felt as though I were seeing the city with my own eyes for the first time. I saw hope in every face, the faces of the rich and the faces of the poor. In the papers it said that the rich were getting richer and the poor less poor every day. “Why pity a woman, or even a child, schlepping garments through the streets,” one paper asked, “when only a year ago these same people were caught up in wars, famine and disease?” The paper said that the lightless, unventilated, suffocating tenements would soon, by an order of the city, be renovated or replaced with better ones.

The city, once it had been reined in, once this irresistible torrent of energy had run its course, would make allowances for everyone, even the street arabs, who, it now seemed to me, were quite cheerfully anarchic, mocking everything they saw so entertainingly that people stopped to listen to them.

I no longer saw, on the Lower East Side, the blank gazes I had seen before. I saw intent, purposeful faces, immigrants pursuing whatever dream they had chosen to pursue from among the millions on display.

I could not bring myself to resent the rich their houses or the
other great structures of the city—the buildings, bridges, museums, train stations, monuments and statues that, with their money, had been raised up from the ground. It was impossible to rail against such things when the very sight of them filled you with such wonder. I felt sorry for the poor but did not hold their poverty against the rich.

“I
BELIEVE,”
D
R
. C
OOK TOLD ME, “THAT
R
OBERT
P
EARY WOULD
number me among his friends. That I do not number him among mine, I think he knows but does not care. To Peary, friendship is a rank that he bestows on others. The question of reciprocation is, to him, irrelevant.

“I have never told you so before, but I am a member of the Peary Arctic Club. Think of that, Devlin. I am a member of a club whose sole reason for existence is to further Peary’s quest to reach the pole.”

He said that he had been invited to be a member and, for the sake of appearances, could not decline. He hoped that his own quest to reach the pole would one day become the club’s sole reason for existence, and therefore he had to remain on good terms with its members.

“I could not endure membership in the club if Peary lived in New York instead of Philadelphia—that is, if Peary was present at the meetings of the club. Thankfully, he is almost never there when we meet. I skip as many meetings as I can, short of making my record of attendance so unseemly that for me to resign would be less harmful to my reputation. When I do attend, I rarely contribute unless called upon.”

It was to the members of the Peary Arctic Club, most of whom were the “backers” Dr. Cook had so often spoken of in his letters, that I delivered messages, returning their replies and other correspondence to Dr. Cook.

He told me that I should say nothing to anyone of his ambitions, or mine. It was thought that he had no designs on the North Pole, that his goals were the South Pole and the climbing of Mt. McKinley, in Alaska, the highest peak on the continent. “The North Pole is the one true prize,” he said, a greater challenge than the South, which was a fixed point on an ice-covered continent. To reach the South Pole, you did not have to contend with an ever-shifting surface, with ocean currents, with ice that moved one way while you moved the other, so that you had to walk twenty miles to travel ten, a portion of that ten being undone while you slept or were delayed by weather.

“I do not want them to think,” he said, “that I am some sort of spy or saboteur among the members of the club. I am merely waiting for the club to realize what I have known for years: that Peary’s day is done; that the mantle must now pass to the man, the American, most capable of completing the quest that Peary has started. They may come to this realization when Peary returns from his present expedition, which his physical state doomed to failure from the start. Peary is the most ‘backed’ of all the explorers on earth. That, in spite of this, he has still not reached the pole has made some people doubt that anyone can reach it. I will have to assuage these doubts and, at the same time, gently lead the club members to the conclusion that Peary is no longer their best bet. All this will have to be done without unduly offending Peary and his most loyal supporters. It will take a very delicate touch.

“It is no secret that there was antipathy between Francis Stead and Commander Peary on the North Greenland expedition. There were even rumours that Peary was in some way responsible for the doctor’s disappearance. He was much criticized in some quarters for his apparent indifference to the fate of Dr. Stead.

“That you are now working for a member of the Peary Arctic Club may surprise some of the other members. They must not think that you bear a grudge against Peary, or that my hiring you hints at some animosity against him on my part. You must seem supportive of Peary and entirely convinced of the inevitability of his success. This will allay any concern they may have that your presence will stir up
the controversy surrounding the North Greenland expedition or be an embarrassing reminder of it.

“Make no attempt to conceal who you are—whose son you supposedly are, that is. It would only make things worse for you. People would find out eventually, so tell them straight out. The backers won’t feel awkward about it if you show them that you don’t.”

It would only make things worse for you
. He foresaw how difficult it would be for me to go on being Devlin Stead. “The Stead boy” was to me a fiction, but to others, he was very much alive. And this would always be the case.

I hated having to introduce myself as the son of Francis Stead to the members of the club. The son of a man remembered as a fool, a hapless explorer who had been disloyal to Peary and had killed himself. Most of them knew my “story,” all but the part about my happening to meet Dr. Cook by chance outside a Broadway beer garden one afternoon last August. They knew Dr. Stead’s story and that of his wife. Words like
desertion
and
suicide
hung in the air, unspoken.

“So you’re the boy,” one man said. The boy the ill-fated Steads were known to have left behind in Newfoundland.

Most of the backers moved on quickly from Dr. Stead to Dr. Cook, for which I was grateful. I always met them in their “business rooms,” which were just off to the right as you entered their enormous houses. Of those houses, those business rooms were all I saw, all that I expected I would ever see.

“So you just up and came to Manhattan from Newfoundland?” one man said, nodding approvngly.

These men, it seemed to me, didn’t care that I was Francis Stead’s son, didn’t think my being his son predisposed me to anything. I had come to the city where the past was beside the point, where there
was
no past, where
everyone
came to begin again, not only me. Most of them liked it that I had bypassed college, though they insisted on college for their own sons. I was told many times how fortunate I was to be a young man in Manhattan at the start of what was certain to be the greatest century in history.

I wished I could tell them the simple truth: that it was as my real father’s delegate that I was here. I wanted them to know that it was not because he felt sorry for me or out of a sense of obligation to a fallen colleague that Dr. Cook had hired me or invited me into his home.

“It is especially important that you make a good impression on Herbert Bridgman,” Dr. Cook said. Bridgman was the secretary of the Peary Arctic Club, a very powerful man, though neither high-born nor wealthy. He was powerful because the backers trusted him to make decisions on their behalf. The club members trusted him to tell them when Peary was asking for more money than he absolutely needed. They trusted him to tell them what amendment of Peary’s plans would increase his chances of success. They then proposed that amendment to Peary as if they had thought of it themselves. But Bridgman was also Peary’s pitch man. Peary needed Bridgman to convince the backers that his expeditions were worth investing in. Everything necessary to them but not including the expeditions themselves Bridgman organized on behalf of Peary—the raising of funds, publicity, lecture tours, the recruitment of crew members, the purchasing of all supplies (including an ice-breaking vessel should a new one be needed, as it almost always was). Bridgman also negotiated agreements between Peary and the club members as to how the spoils of each expedition would be shared—things like minerals, furs, narwhal and walrus tusks, relics, exhibits (including live Eskimos and animals like polar bears). Bridgman, in short, was trusted by both sides. Everything he did for Peary, Dr. Cook hoped he would one day do for him.

“We are good friends. I have known him since he was the business manager of the
Brooklyn Standard Union. I
believe he knows that I see myself as Peary’s successor, though of course we have not spoken openly about it. I am certain that once Peary is no longer a contender for the pole, I can convince Bridgman that no American is more qualified to succeed him than I am.”