The Navigator of New York

by Wayne Johnston

  Because of a high hill on the south side of the city called the Brow, you could see the harbour but not the sea from most parts of St. John’s. It was easy to pretend that the harbour was a lake, and that nothing lay beyond the Brow but still more lakes and hills. Only from a certain place could you see out through the Narrows, at the mouth of which the sea abruptly changed, churned up by the wind that one foot the other way you couldn’t feel, the harbour and the sea in such opposing states of agitation it was hard to believe that both were water.

  “It’s time you really saw the sea,” Aunt Daphne said one day.

  She and I drove in my mother’s cabriolet, pulled by Pete, to the top of Signal Hill. As we ascended, I looked behind me at the city, which from that height assumed the shape it had on maps. We lived on the edge of civilization. North of St. John’s there were settlements with names, but you could not call them towns. St. John’s was on the edge of a frontier that had not changed since it was fixed four hundred years ago. I imagined what it looked like from the sea, the last light on the coast as you went north, the last one worth investigating anyway. The forest behind the outlying houses was as dense as the forest in the core. In the woods between neighbourhoods, men set snares for rabbits, hunted birds with rifles within a hundred feet of schoolyards. Not outside the city but at some impossible-to-pinpoint place inside it, civilization left off and wilderness began.

  Halfway up the hill, the road reached a plateau on which there were two hospitals, both strictly quarantined, one for diphtheria and fever, and one for smallpox. The road gave them as wide a berth as was permitted by the tolts of rock. I looked up at the blockhouse, from which mercantile flags were hoisted whenever ships making for St. John’s came into view. The purpose of the flags was to alert waterfront firms that their ships were coming, giving them time to prepare for docking and unloading.

  “I saw the sea for the first time when I was twelve years old,” Aunt Daphne said. She described how one day, in defiance of her parents and her teachers, she first went up on Signal Hill. It was not to see the sea, she said. She went with some other girls, whose real goal was to see the gallows, about which they had heard so many stories. But they went off course and wound up on the summit of the hill.

  “The open sea,” she said. “I had known all along that it was there. But that’s like knowing that the pyramids are there.”

  We crested the hill, and Aunt Daphne brought Pete to a halt. I saw the open Atlantic.

  “Well,” she said, turning her face sideways, shouting above the roar of the wind that suddenly was everywhere.

  “It’s so flat,” I said.

  She smiled. I could think of nothing else to say. Sky. Wind. Light. Air. Cold. Grey. Far. Salt. Smell. Now all these words meant something they had never meant before, and the word sea contained them all. The word sea spread outward in my mind, flooding all its chambers until, by that one word, every word I knew was changed. I would find, the next day, that from having seen the sea, I was better able to smell and taste it, too, no matter where in the city I was—indoors, outdoors, at home, at school, in my bedroom late at night.

  “They don’t know we’re here,” she said. “We know we’re here. We know all about them. But they don’t know we’re here.”

  “Who?”

  People elsewhere, she said; the people we knew about from reading books and magazines; the people on whose lives we modelled ours, like whom we ate and dressed, like whose houses our own were furnished and whose pastimes we pursued.

  “England is that way,” Aunt Daphne said. “Canada that way. America that way.” Then she pointed up the coast.” Labrador,” she said. “And Greenland. To the right. Northeast of Labrador.”

  “Where my father goes,” I said.

  She smiled and nodded. The smile faded. She looked at me for a long time. I realized that it was to encourage me to talk about my mother that she had brought me here. It was a subject that both of us had been avoiding since she died.

  “They found my mother down there,” I said, pointing, though we couldn’t see the water’s edge from where we stood.

  “Somewhere down there, yes. If it bothers you to be here, we can go.”

  “It doesn’t bother me,” I said. “Was she nice? I don’t really remember her.”

  “She was very nice,” Aunt Daphne said.

  “Why did she jump in the water?”

  “No one really understands such things,” she said. “It wasn’t anybody’s fault. Not even hers.”

  So she believed that what I had heard at school was true.

  She drew me to her and kissed the top of my head.

  In the evenings, Daphne read aloud from books. She was not reading to me or Uncle Edward. She did it whether there was someone in the room with her or not, and often after we had gone to bed, her voice faintly eerie as, late into the night, she read to herself in the front room.

  Nor, she said, did it have anything to do with being lonely or having no one to talk to, or being unable to bear it after we had gone to bed and the house was silent. It was simply how she preferred to read. Even had she been a social gadfly, she said, she would have read aloud whatever books she still had time to read.

  She had got into the habit, she said, from reading aloud to her parents, who found it relaxing to listen to her after dinner.

  Whether or not she did it to dispel loneliness, she sounded so lonely I could not bear to hear her down there by herself, as though she were conversing with imaginary friends, as though the only life she had aside from me and Uncle Edward was the one she found in books. I could not, when I heard her, help thinking of my mother.

  One night, I sat at the top of the stairs until she noticed me.

  “Am I keeping you awake?” she said. I shook my head.

  “You can read in my room if you want to,” I said.

  She sat in a high-backed wicker chair beside my bed, beneath the gas lamp on the wall, the only one she left on, so that her image was cast in shadow on the opposing wall, her every feature magnified and sharply drawn. I watched her shadow each time she turned the page, as she paused in her reading, then began again.

  She read Jane Austen, Charles Dickens, Fanny Burney, Thackeray, the Brontë sisters. I took little notice, at first, of the titles of the books she read. All that stayed with me from one night to the next were the names of the characters. For a stretch of nights, it would be Camilla, Sedley, Mandelbert. Then Cecilia, Delvile, Mortimer and Monckton. Emma, Harriet and Knightley. Elizabeth, Darcy, Bingley, Lady Catherine. She was often well into a new book before I realized that a different set of characters was recurring.

  “That’s a new one,” I’d say.

  Even though it was our understanding that she was not reading to me, that we were merely keeping each other company, it irked her that I was so oblivious to the meaning of what she read.

  “Yes, it’s a new one,” she said. “It’s so new that I have only ten pages left.”

  At some point, I began to follow along as she read, which she discovered when one night I asked her to remind me who some character was who had been offstage for a hundred pages.

  Long after I dropped off to sleep, she went on reading. I would sometimes stir myself awake to find that she was reading still, her voice more subdued, her tone introspective, for though I lay there close beside her, there was not even the illusion now that she was reading to anyone but herself. But I stayed awake for as long as I could, propped up on the pillows, almost sitting, with my back against the headboard. To an observer, it would have looked as though she was reading to an invalid, seeing him through the nights of some long convalescence.

  I would wake up, sometimes hours after dropping off, when it was very late or even getting light outside. I would see her, asleep in the chair, head to one side, her book still open on her lap. If it was past two when I awoke to find that she was sleeping, I should leave her be, she said, for she could never, after waking from a deep sleep, drop off again. She sometimes spen
t the entire night in the chair in my room, which Uncle Edward would remark upon disapprovingly at the breakfast table.

  • CHAPTER THREE •

  I WENT TO BISHOP FEILD, WHICH ALL THE CHILDREN OF THE Church of England upper crust attended.

  Boys my age, who either were unaware of my father’s continued absence or didn’t understand its implications, were eager to talk to me about him. They envied me my famous father, whose romantic occupation was “explorer” while their fathers were barristers, merchants, politicians. They would have me point out to them on the classroom map his present location in the North, and they asked me what adventures he had related in his last letter home. I obliged, making it all up.

  “He’s right there,” I’d say, pointing at some part of Labrador or Greenland, or farther north at some landmass or stretch of frozen sea that had no name, and whose shape and even existence were entirely conjectural, a fact signified by its being stamped all over with question marks.

  “He’s probably around there,” I said, “but this is the arctus incognita, so no one really knows.” Dr. Francis Stead of the arctus incognita. I told them of near drownings; encounters with polar bears, walruses and other monsters; blizzards that went on for weeks. There were, in my stories, many mishaps, all of which necessitated on my father’s part an act of heroism or a heretofore undreamt-of feat of surgical skill. I caught the attention of a boy named Moses Prowdy.

  Moses was the son of a judge and the grandson of a sealing skipper in comparison with whom Captain Ahab was the very picture of benevolence and moderation. “Follow On” had been the skipper’s nickname, for even when his ship was far beyond the point at which even the most reckless of the other skippers turned around and made for home, he ordered his crew to “follow on” in search of seals, his ship often so weighted down with pelts it sank to the gunwales in the ice. Only once had a crew convinced him to lighten his load, which he did by setting thirty-five men adrift in lifeboats.

  There was more in Moses of the sealing skipper than the judge, though academically he was one of the school’s best students, scoring top marks with an effortless brilliance that went uncomplimented, unremarked upon by the masters, who wordlessly and with faint, ironic smiles returned his papers and examinations to him. They seemed to believe that, Moses being Moses, the knowledge he acquired at the Feild could only be misused.

  He had a smooth pink complexion, a small round mouth that always looked as if he had just gobbled a grease-laden piece of meat. He slicked his hair back with pomade, wore a vest, a gold fob watch. He was, at fourteen, more than six feet tall. It was said that his father, whom he towered over and outweighed by fifty pounds, was afraid of him. The masters were not, at least not collectively. It was said that the masters had told Moses to remember that if he tried anything with one of them, he would have to deal with all the others.

  He carried about in his pocket cigars that, in full view of the masters, he puffed on reflectively while watching the school and the playground from across the street. For smoking cigars, for coming to school smelling of whisky, for being found in possession of books of “filth,” he was frequently caned, barely wincing, as if his hide was made of leather.

  “Moses Prowdy,” Aunt Daphne said, “has caused me to radically revise my definition of the word boy.”

  But he was also regarded with a certain fondness by the masters, who would look at him and say that it was often the boys who outwardly seemed the most unpromising who inwardly, sometimes unconsciously, were harbouring a vocation for the ministry. Moses would smile and raise his eyebrows.

  “You have charisma, Prowdy,” said Headmaster Gaines, the principal of Bishop Feild, “which is, literally, the light of the Holy Spirit. You are, like it or not, a leader. It is at your age that boys are least able to resist temptation, most vulnerable to Satan, whom their innocence and promise makes spiteful and envious. It may be that, knowing what you might become, he tempts you even more than he tempts other boys. Satan, if God calls you, cannot prevail. You, if God calls you, cannot resist. Or it may be that, after all, there is nothing in your future but imprisonment. Only time will tell.”

  Moses fell in beside me one day as I was walking home. He looked down at me and smiled.

  “You’re Stead, aren’t you? The son of the famous explorer Dr. Stead?”

  I nodded.

  “May I call you Devlin?” he said.

  “Of course,” I said.

  “Of course,” he said. “How magnanimous you are to those of us who know what our fathers look like.” He smiled, so I smiled back.

  “Devlin,” he said, putting his arm around me, his merely doing that enough to earn us stares from the other boys. He was so much older than I was, so much bigger. Older, bigger boys did not walk home with younger, smaller ones. And Moses, of all the older, bigger boys, was most conspicuous doing so.

  “MOSES,” one of his friends shouted, but he pretended not to notice.

  Moses, I was about to discover, knew as much about the parents of his schoolmates as most grown-ups did. Truth, half-truth, gossip, rumour—Moses knew it all. He mocked and pestered other boys, too, but seemed to have focused on me, and on my parents, as the most promising, most interesting targets.

  “All the ships coming south stop off in St. John’s on their way to the mainland. Did you know that, Devlin?”

  I shook my head.

  “Your father’s ships, for instance, stop off in St. John’s. One of them was in St. John’s last spring. He was in St. John’s, but he never came to see you, did he? Strange that he would come so close and not even say hello. Or pay a visit to your mother’s grave.”

  When I asked Aunt Daphne if what Moses had said was true, she said that on two occasions in the past two years, expedition vessels on which my father had served as medical officer had made port in St. John’s. But she knew of no one who had seen him, not even the reporters who went looking for an interview and were on both occasions told that he was sick.

  “You knew he was here?” I said.

  “Yes, I knew he was here.”

  “Why didn’t you tell me?”

  “Once, I sent a message to the ship,” Aunt Daphne said. “He didn’t answer it. I don’t even know if it got to him. I didn’t want to raise your hopes.”

  “What about my mother? Did any of his ships make port when she was still alive?”

  “Yes,” she said.

  “Did she ever go to see him?”

  She shook her head.

  “Why not?”

  “He knew where you lived,” she said. “He would have come to see you if he had wanted to.”

  “How come he doesn’t want to?”

  “I don’t know. I really don’t, Devlin.”

  Moses again. “Devlin, you were born seven months after your parents were married. Do you know what that means?”

  “Yes,” I said, hoping that would shut him up, though I had no idea what difference it made when, in relation to my parents’ wedding, I was born.

  “It means they couldn’t wait till they were married. Your mother was a minx and your father was a goat. He only married her because he had to. Because of you. That’s why he ran off. Because he couldn’t stand his shotgun marriage any more.”

  What should I do? Run away? How could I defend my parents when I only dimly understood his accusation? My greatest fear was that others would overhear him. Any reaction from me was certain, given his reputation, to attract an audience.

  Again I consulted Aunt Daphne.

  “My God, I can’t believe it,” she said. “Fourteen years old. What a fiend, what a devil that Prowdy boy must be.”

  She explained the significance of my being born seven months after my parents were married.

  “I should have told you myself,” she said. She said there had been nothing you could call a scandal. My parents were, after all, not the only couple in St. John’s to consummate their marriage in advance. When, seven and a half months after their marriage, she g
ave birth to me, people tactfully pretended to believe that I was premature.

  “The day they were married, they loved each other very much,” she said. “When you were born, they were still in love and they loved you. I don’t know why your father changed; I really don’t.”

  Moses. “Stead wouldn’t know his father if he met him on the street.” Included now among his audience were the younger boys who had once hung on my every word. “Nor would the great explorer know his son. Stead has no more idea where his father is than do we who read the papers. His father never writes to him or to his aunt and uncle. The great explorer has disowned them.”

  He walked home with me again. He put his hand on my far shoulder, inclined his head towards me.

  “Why do you think it is, young Devlin,” he said, lowering his voice, “that your father would rather do it with a squaw than with your mother?” I knew what “it” was, the mechanics of it and its biological purpose at least. “I pity your poor mother,” he said. “She was left to a widow’s consolation even though her husband was still alive. Do you know what a widow’s consolation is? No? You should ask your aunt and uncle, then.”

  With that, to my great relief, he walked on ahead of me.

  But it was the same the next day.

  “Now do you know what a widow’s consolation is?” he asked.

  I shook my head.

  “They wouldn’t tell you? Well, I’m not surprised—”

  “I didn’t ask them,” I said as neutrally as possible.

  “A delinquent father, a dead mother and guardians who ignore you. You poor fellow. Well, let me help you, then. A widow’s consolation. I must put it in some way that won’t upset you. You see, when you were at school, men went by your mother’s house. She took them upstairs to her room. They paid her money. The house you live in used to be a whorehouse. Everyone knows about it.”

  When I reported this latest “revelation” to Aunt Daphne and asked her if it was true, she said that she had had enough.