The Navigator of New York (47 page)

Her reputation was his alibi. It seemed to him that he was meant to get away undetected.

His ship made port, and he went back to Brooklyn.

“I have known of this for so long,” Dr. Cook said. “I did not think it would pain me so much to speak of it.”

He covered his face with his hands and sobbed. I, too, was crying, looking out the window of the train at my reflection.

“I cannot bear to think that she died that way because of me,” Dr. Cook sobbed. “Alone, at the bottom of that hill, at the hands of a man driven mad by what I did. I turned away from her, Devlin. Three weeks. Three weeks I knew her, and every day I think of her and wish that I had had the courage to answer her last letter, to say yes.

“Nothing in her life was undone by the manner of her death. I tell myself that over and over.”

I could speak no words of comfort to him, nor even
feel
anything for him. I had never really felt my mother’s presence, her absence, until now. For the first time in my life, I felt sorrow for her, which was so much heavier, so much more gravid, than mere sadness. Had I been standing, I would have fallen to the floor beneath its weight.

I thought of that unremembered afternoon when I had sat in the house, wondering until it got dark where my mother was, why she was not there to meet me at the door as she always was.

“She told him my name, Devlin, in the hope of saving you. For all she knew, he would go straight to the house anyway when he was done with her. But there was at least a chance he would not. I’m sure it was not just in the hope of escaping that she struggled
with him. She tried to throw him from the ledge or pull him over with her.”

A shudder of revulsion passed through me. Francis Stead, while I sat alone in my mother’s house as it grew dark, had sat in his hotel room less than a hundred yards away, also waiting, wondering when they would come for him.

Dr. Cook looked at me.

“When Francis finished his story, I asked him what he meant to do with me. ‘Nothing,’ he said. ‘I joined this expedition with the intention of killing you. But I have changed my mind. I mean to do nothing at all.’ He turned and began to walk back to Redcliffe House. Then he faced me again. ‘I have told Peary everything,’ he said. ‘Just a few hours ago. I also told him that I would confess to you.’

“That night, he walked away from Redcliffe House and was never seen again.”

He looked as drained as if he had just heard of her death for the first time.

For ten minutes, as the train jostled about on the tracks, we both looked out the window.

“Over the next few months,” he said, “some parts of Francis Stead’s story kept coming back to me. Such as his account of how ferociously your mother struggled for her life. There should have been bruises on her body that gave evidence of such a struggle, bruises that even someone predisposed to think that she had killed herself would have noticed. Her forearms, especially her wrists, would have been bruised from where he held her to keep her from striking him. She would have had bruises on her face, especially around her mouth, from having tried to bite him. Her clothing would have been in a telltale state of dishevelment, certainly torn and probably with pieces missing. Yet her death had so quickly been ruled an accident and the rumours of suicide had been allowed to flourish.

“I was so puzzled that about a year after the expedition I visited St. John’s to conduct an investigation of my own. I discovered that there was no coroner, as such, in St. John’s at the time of your mother’s
death. Post-mortems were conducted, at the request of the police, by whatever physicians were available. I looked up your mother’s death certificate. Accidental drowning, it said. It was signed by your uncle. I am not suggesting that he was in any way involved in your mother’s death. He might have guessed, however, or considered it a possibility, that Francis was responsible. Without ever having communicated with Francis, he might have done what he could to cover it up, but it does not seem very likely. I think something like this happened: The police allowed him to do the post-mortem as a favour to one of their own, so to speak, a favour to a doctor they had often worked with in the past. Given your mother’s circumstances, the police would have presumed suicide, as would your uncle. A matter to be handled delicately, everyone would have agreed. Your uncle might have asked if he, a family member, could do the post-mortem just to keep gossip to a minimum. Then, to his surprise, he finds evidence of murder, which he withholds from the police, not to protect Francis, but to minimize the scandal, to keep it from getting out that his brother’s wife was murdered. People are almost never murdered by strangers. There had, I discovered from talking to some people when I was in St. John’s, been rumours about your mother. Unfounded rumours, I have no doubt whatsoever, though your uncle might have believed them. Even if he was certain or thought it likely that the rumours were unfounded, he would have known that people would draw their own conclusions: that she was killed by one of the many men she supposedly consorted with, disreputable men. In the public mind, her having been murdered would, perversely, confirm the rumours, especially if the murder went unsolved, which he would have known was likely, given the absence of any suspects. Better to cover it up for the sake of the family name, for his and his brother’s sake, and even, I supposed, not yet knowing your uncle, for Amelia’s sake.

“When I wrote to him, I told him that Francis had confessed to the murder of Amelia. I did not, of course, tell him that I was your father. I made no explicit threats, no mention of the death certificate. I was fairly certain that he would co-operate. Francis spoke often
about your uncle. I think he was the only man that Francis Stead understood. He understood his brother much better than he understood himself, even though the two of them were very much alike.

“If accusations that Amelia had been murdered came out—if I made public the story I was told by Francis Stead and it was revealed that your uncle had signed her death certificate, citing accidental drowning as the cause of death—he would have been suspected of having covered up the murder of his brother’s wife. It would have ruined his reputation.

“So he complied with my every suggestion. I asked him to forward my letters to you unopened—that is, with the seal unbroken. I let him assume that I had instructed you to tell me when a seal was broken, and that I had devised some system whereby you would know if he had withheld a letter from you. I’m sure he never read the letters. You may think of what I did as blackmail. But I enlisted his help without harming him or extracting from him anything he valued. I felt I had to. Corresponding secretly with a grown-up is difficult enough. To do so with a child impossible without some such arrangement as I devised.”

So Uncle Edward, as I had suspected, did not know that Dr. Cook was my father.

“I should have told you before how she died. But imagine my dilemma. You had for so long believed that your mother had taken her life. Should I now break your heart a second time and tell you she was murdered by her husband?”

“Why have you told me now?” I said.

“So you would know that Peary is in part to blame for your mother’s death. Because he, for the pettiest of reasons, gave Francis Stead my name. Peary knows that I blame him, though we have never talked about it. He knows that he
is
to blame—he and I and Francis Stead. He despises me. How I regard
him
, he is well aware. It has never been more important to me that you understand his nature. That you understand why his failure is as important to me as our success.”

T
HE
N
EW
Y
ORK PAPERS DID NOT REPORT
D
R
. C
OOK’S
humiliation as fully as we had feared they would. Since there had been no mention of Dr. Cook in the stories about Peary’s plan to “abdicate,” there was also no explicit mention of the effect of Peary’s change of heart on Dr. Cook.
The New York Times
said that Peary had “unambiguously declared his intention to keep trying for the pole,” that he had expressed the fervent hope that he would succeed while Roosevelt was in the White House, and that his announcement had taken many by surprise, “including the evening’s alternative guest of honour, the mountain climber Dr. Frederick Cook.”

Still, I wondered how we would be received by Manhattan society. I had no doubt that it was widely known that the congress of explorers had all but thrown Dr. Cook a parade in advance of Peary’s speech, that he and I and countless others had assumed that we would return from Peary’s city to our own in triumph, Dr. Cook wearing the mantle that Peary had discarded.

“Perhaps we should wait a while before accepting any invitations,” Dr. Cook said. I told him that would only make things more awkward when we did accept one.

At first, it seemed to me that we were not regarded much differently than before. No one mentioned what took place in Washington. And therefore it seemed to be invoked by every word.

I wondered if
I
should talk about Washington, enough to give the impression at least, however transparently untrue it might be, that no
great harm had come of what had happened, that we had merely suffered a rough knock of the sort to which, as explorers, we were well-accustomed. We had come out the worse, I might imply, but our friendly rivalry with Peary was far from settled. But I was not sure I could bring it off.

“They hardly seem to care about what happened,” I said one night as we were heading home from a Christmas party.

“Of course they care,” said Dr. Cook. “Everyone knows and cares. We are, if anything, even more interesting to them than before. A highly interesting chapter has just concluded, but it is still too soon, because of you, to guess how the book will end. I believe I would no longer be invited out if not for you.”

I told him that this was nonsense, that it was clearly his company they valued more. He said nothing, as if I had protested so lamely that I had proved his point.

“I think I would prefer it if they simply let me be,” he said. “There really is no reason why you cannot attend these functions by yourself. They believe that you are still worth watching. But they will soon see that
I
am not.”

This seemed to me to be an unfair assessment of the people at whose homes we were dining every other night and attending balls and parties. Most of them seemed to me to be far more sympathetic to us than he made them out to be.

“I am like a match,” he said. “They use me to start a conversation and then discard me.”

I demurred, but I soon realized that there was some truth in what he said.

Not that he was avoided or ignored. If anything, he was approached, addressed, even more often than before.

One evening, a woman asked him which of the poles he thought would be discovered first.

“The South,” said Dr. Cook. “In the Antarctic, there is a landmass beneath the ice and snow, so one does not have to deal with ocean currents. You see, there is no fixed North Pole
per se
, for the ice is
always moving. The north polar explorer seeks after what is merely an illusion.”

This was followed by many disapproving murmurs and much shaking of heads.

“But surely, Dr. Cook,” said a man whose family had made its fortune in the manufacture of steel rivets, “those same ocean currents could be used to one’s advantage if one knew what one was doing. If, instead of travelling against the currents, one travelled with them, one would make up time, not lose it, would one not?” But he looked for a reply not to Dr. Cook but to a young man who sat across from him and nodded vigorously before elaborating on the other man’s suggestion. Neither of them had the faintest idea what he was talking about, but it was clear that Dr. Cook’s appraisal of their ideas would not be welcomed. He could, if he wished, have been just one of many disputants at the table, but this was not in his nature. He sat there in silence.

In this way, throughout dinner, were started conversations from which, after making a few contributions, he wound up being excluded, or excluding himself. No longer consulted, no longer inclined to offer his opinion, he sat there expressionless.

It was clear that everyone felt a great deal more sympathy for me than they did for him.

It seemed to me that at our first few gatherings after the congress, the men gave my hand an extra, encouraging squeeze and everyone’s tone was more solicitous than usual, as if they wanted me to know, without embarrassing me by a direct allusion to it, that they thought that what happened to me in Washington was a bit of bad luck that could have befallen anyone who happened to be seated next to Dr. Cook, and that no one thought any less of me because of it.

It seemed to have become the collective mission of Manhattan society to salvage me from the wreck of Dr. Cook. Clearly, people were concerned about my being fastened to someone whose star was falling. I even sometimes suspected that those little extra squeezes of my hand were meant to tell me something, perhaps that I should
consider whether it would be best for me to strike out on my own, as Dr. Cook himself had come close to suggesting.

I saw Kristine two weeks after I came back from Washington. I began to ask her if she had heard of what happened, but, as if she hadn’t heard a word I said, she wondered if it might not be time for us to start calling each other by our first names. “Or should I just be grateful,” she said, “that you call me
something
instead of just looking at me when you speak as you do with Dr. Cook?” I told her that first names would be fine.

“Then I will say yours first,” she said. “That way, it may take you less than five years to get around to saying mine. What do you think of that, Devlin?”

“That’s fine with me,” I said, and paused until she prompted me by raising her eyebrows expectantly. “That’s fine with me, Kristine.”

“There,” she said, “that wasn’t so difficult, was it? That’s what names are for, you see, Devlin. They’re a way of letting people know that you remember having met them before, that you aren’t mistaking them for someone else or that you don’t believe that everyone who is not you goes by the name of ‘you.’ They help us sort out who is talking to whom and who it is we are talking about. They help us avoid confusion such as you might have if ten people answered the same question all at once. Names make it possible to get someone’s attention from a distance, rather than getting everyone’s attention and then having to point and say, ‘No, not you,
you’ a
lot. Am I teasing you too much? The truth is, I love names. I love to say them and hear mine being said. You can tell a lot by how people say each other’s names. You can’t let someone know you like them without calling them by name, can you?”