The Navigator of New York

by Wayne Johnston

  Yours truly,

  Dr. F.A. Cook

  February 11, 1897

  By the time I finished the letter, my mind was a riot of half-formed thoughts and questions. I jumped with fright when the door off the landing opened and Uncle Edward stepped inside. He looked composed until he saw how I looked. I did not realize how badly my hands were trembling, and with them the pages of the letter, until I saw that he was staring at them with a look of sheer dread in his eyes.

  “It goes without saying,” he said, struggling to control his voice, “that Daphne would disapprove of your corresponding with Dr. Cook. If she were to find out about it, she would contact him and you would never hear from him again. If you agree to receive letters from Dr. Cook, I will burn each one after you have read and copied it by hand, just as you will copy this one. You will stay and watch while the letter burns. We will meet from now on in your father’s surgery. Remember, it would be assumed that letters in your handwriting had been written by you, however advanced in style and content they might seem to be for a boy your age, so it would be foolish to show these copies to others, who would think that you were writing letters to yourself.”

  He motioned to the pen and inkwell on his desk.

  “Write your answer,” he said.

  I went to the desk, wrote “Yes” on the envelope, then handed it to him.

  He looked at the word I had written. He sighed, with resignation, relief, regret, it was hard to tell.

  “Copy the letter,” he said, handing me two blank sheets of paper. “And be quick about it.” I copied out the letter as fast as I could, Uncle Edward standing, arms folded, with his back to me, as if to ensure that he did not see a single word.

  “I’m finished,” I said.

  “Put your copy in your jacket pocket,” he said. When I had done so, he turned around.

  “The original letter,” he said. “Fold it first.”

  I did and held it out to him. He took it. Holding it at arm’s length between his thumb and index finger, as if he wanted as little to do with it as possible, he spun it into the fire.

  “Uncle Edward—” I said, but he raised his hand. He was as deeply into this subterfuge as he cared to go, his expression seemed to say. Why had he ventured even this far into it? He had seemed very anxious that I should correspond with Dr. Cook. What did he have to gain if I said yes or lose if I said no? No doubt he liked the idea of my going behind Aunt Daphne’s back, perhaps foresaw the whole thing driving us apart someday. He was jealous of me, as absurd as that seemed, believed she was fonder of me than she was of him. Perhaps he saw these letters as his one hope of not spending the rest of his life second to me in her affections. But that, surely, could not be why he was acting as Dr. Cook’s “postman.”

  No doubt he thought that with him as go-between, there was less chance that yet another scandal would be put against the name of Stead. That Dr. Cook’s letter to me was of a scandalous nature he knew. That was clear from the way he was acting. He knew that Dr. Cook had asked me to write my “answer” on the envelope. But he really seemed not to have read the letter—it was still sealed when he gave it to me, and he had told me in advance that he would burn it when I gave it back to him, as if it was necessary that I see him burn it, be witness to the fact that he had never read it. Uncle Edward went to his desk and sat down, reversing his chair so that it faced the window.

  “I don’t know when Dr. Cook will write again, or when his letter will arrive. He must wait to hear from me before he sends it. Coming from”—he gestured vaguely at the ceiling—”from God knows where, it may take a very long time. I therefore tell you in advance that you must be patient. I doubt it will get here any sooner than December.”

  Three months from now.

  “This is how you will know that a letter has arrived.” When he came down for breakfast in the morning, he said, he would wear, in the pocket of his vest, a red paisley handkerchief, the one that Aunt Daphne disliked so much she would think it was for her sake that he wore it no more than once every few months—which was likely how often a letter would arrive. “Whenever I wear it, it will be your red-letter day,” he said, wincing ruefully, as if it was I who had punned at his expense. On that day, he would tell his nurse that he was going to have his lunch across the hall in his brother’s surgery, where he could relax in quiet with a book. I was to tell Aunt Daphne that because of choir practice, I would not come home for lunch. Making sure that none of the other boys saw me, I would go to his surgery, walk around to the iron gate by which one entered the secluded back garden, and which he would leave unlocked, and using the door marked “Doctor’s Entrance Only,” go slowly and quietly up the stairs to the landing. He would be sitting in a chair on the landing just outside my father’s surgery, the patient’s entrance to which was permanently bolted from the outside. There would, in other words, be no way I could come and go without him seeing me. I would arrive promptly at 12:30 and, saying not a word to him, go inside, where the letter would be waiting for me in the top drawer of the desk. I was not to turn the lights on in the office. By day, there would be light enough to read and copy out the letter. When I was done, I was to come out to the landing and, without speaking a word, hand him the original. Then both of us would go back inside, where I would watch him burn the letter in the fireplace and then leave. Upon arrival and departure, and throughout my time in my father’s surgery, I was not to say a word. If anyone saw me leave by the doctor’s door and asked what I was doing, I would say that I had been to see my uncle for a check-up. If it somehow got back to Aunt Daphne that I had been to see him, our story would be that it was to save her needless worry that we had not told her about the check-up.

  I did not go back to school after I left the surgery. Nor did I go straight home. I had to prepare myself before I saw Aunt Daphne, before she saw me and started asking what was wrong. She would not relent until I told her something. Fearing that even strangers would notice my distress, I took the shortest route to the woods, followed a path some distance, then left it and sat down against a tree, where no one passing by could see me.

  No wonder Dr. Cook could not imagine how his letter would affect me. Now that the original no longer existed, it was easy to imagine that it never had. Or that Dr. Cook had lost his mind, or even that the letter was from someone pretending to be him.

  But another one was coming, for I had written “Yes” on the envelope. How, having read the letter, could I have told him not to write to me again? My head was spinning. If the claims made by Dr. Cook were true, my father had gone from being a man whom I could not remember to one whom I had never met.

  My father had always been a stranger to me, in life, in death. And now, it seemed, in life again. Now this stranger had a different name and was still alive. Both my fathers were doctors turned explorers. There was little to distinguish one from the other except that one had written me a letter.

  I remembered phrases from it, not bothering to consult the copy in my pocket. “The cold blood of biology.” “How this can change, I am unable to foresee.” “You hold in your hands a document … that if made public could do me and mine great harm.” The original document could have done him great harm. My copy, as Uncle Edward had said, could harm no one but me were I to show it to others.

  Why had he written to me? If, as he hinted, we could never meet, never appear in public as father and son—if he did not even want me to write him back—why had he written to me? Why did he think that writing to me would restore his courage? He had more or less admitted, in the first few paragraphs, that he had nearly lost his mind.

  And my mother. To think that she had allowed, even encouraged, me to think that her absent husband was my father, all the time knowing he was not. Our short life together was not what she had made it seem. Every moment of it had been undercut by irony, by what she knew and I did not, a bit of knowledge that she must have planned to withhold from me forever.

  I started back towards home, wondering if I sho
uld tell Aunt Daphne. I had not, by the time of my arrival, made up my mind. When I opened the door, she was coming down the hall to meet me, all but running.

  “There you are,” she said. “My God, you’re so late getting home from school I was about to … Edward didn’t find anything wrong with you, did he? Devlin, what did he say?”

  I would have spoken, said no to prevent her from jumping to the wrong conclusion, but I did not trust my voice.

  “Devvie?”

  I shook my head and gulped hard to keep from crying.

  “Darling, you look … What did Edward say?”

  “He said I’m fine,” I said quickly. I gulped again.

  “But something’s wrong. What is it?”

  I doubted that I could make any explanation sound convincing.

  “It’s just something I don’t want to talk about, that’s all. Something Moses Prowdy said.”

  “You’re sure Edward found nothing wrong with you?”

  I nodded. “Ask him if you like.”

  I went upstairs to my room and lay down. Was it possible that she knew, that she, too, had misled me all my life? I decided I would hold off from telling her, at least until the next letter came.

  I thought of how it would be. Entering my father’s office by the door reserved for him. Opening the desk drawer. Reading the letter. Making my copy. Watching Uncle Edward burn the original.

  The day after my talk with my uncle, I half expected him to come downstairs for breakfast with a red handkerchief in his vest pocket. He wore a blue one instead, and a green one the day after that.

  It was hard to think about anything else knowing that a letter was on its way to me from Dr. Cook. Pointless to expect a letter any sooner than three months from now, Uncle Edward had said. Every morning for three months, I looked to see what colour handkerchief he wore, revelling in the day when he would come downstairs with the red one protruding from his pocket.

  When the three months was up, three months to the day from when Uncle Edward had called me to his office, his handkerchief was grey. What, I asked myself, were the chances that my uncle’s estimate of when the letter would arrive would be exact? It meant nothing that the letter had not come.

  How eagerly, from then on, I waited to see what he’d be wearing when he came downstairs. It was hard to hide my disappointment when there was either no handkerchief or one that wasn’t red. I ate my eggs and toast and gulped my tea with consolatory gusto. How strange it seemed that my mood depended on the colour of my uncle’s handkerchief.

  I went through the same thing every morning for the next three months. Finally, I began to wonder if something was wrong. Perhaps my uncle had changed his mind about acting as “postman” for Dr. Cook. Surely, if he had, he would break our agreement never to speak about the letters and not leave me wondering forever what was wrong. Or perhaps Dr. Cook had changed his mind, decided that he could not trust Uncle Edward after all, or that he would make no further revelations to me, a mere boy.

  I considered pretending I was sick so I could go to see Uncle Edward at his office, but I thought better of it. Around the house, he was careful that we were never alone together. In the company of Aunt Daphne, he looked at me and spoke to me as he always had.

  I remembered a paragraph from Dr. Cook’s official “report” on my father’s death: “Though it moves the mystery no closer to being solved, it seems worthwhile to point out that the strange case of Dr. Stead is by no means the strangest in the annals of Arctic exploration. Others have disappeared as surely as if, while sleepwalking, they attempted a crossing of the crevassed glaciers onto which not even the Eskimos will venture after dark.” This man from whom I was waiting to receive a letter about my father might easily be dead.

  As I lay in my warm bed, as I watched Aunt Daphne pile up heaping helpings on my dinner plate, I wondered where at that moment Dr. Cook was, wondered about his safety as I never had about my father’s.

  • CHAPTER SIX •

  NEARLY SIX MONTHS AFTER OUR MEETING, BY WHICH TIME I HAD almost given up hope of hearing from Dr. Cook, Uncle Edward came downstairs for breakfast wearing the red paisley handkerchief. How conspicuous it seemed. It seemed impossible that Aunt Daphne would not guess why he was wearing it. As hard as it had been to hide my succession of disappointments, hiding my elation now was all but impossible. I was sure that my face matched the colour of the handkerchief, at which I could not stop staring. My heart was pounding. Uncle Edward was his usual impassive self. Not even I, who knew what he must be thinking, how anxious he must be that I do or say nothing to make his wife suspicious, could detect in his face anything unusual. How would I make it through a morning of school?

  Somehow I did, and at lunchtime I went to Devon Row, crossed the street, stopped. A hansom cab went by, but there were no pedestrians. I went around to the back, opened the gate, let myself in through the door marked “Doctor’s Entrance Only,” closed it quietly behind me, then tiptoed up the stairs.

  Uncle Edward was sitting in a chair on the landing, far enough from the window that he could not be seen from the outside. He was no longer wearing the red handkerchief. (But he was wearing it later, when he came home from work.) On the upper of his crossed legs was a book from which he glanced just long enough to put a finger to his lips. With a shooing motion of his hand, he indicated that I should not stop but go straight into the office.

  The rear door of it was wide open, left that way by him, no doubt, so that his nurse and his patients across the hall would not hear me. I pictured him sitting there on the landing the past few minutes, dreading my audible arrival. I went inside. I had been there once or twice before, but never by myself. I could hear murmuring from across the hall. A shadow fell across the frosted glass of my father’s door. A man putting on his hat. On the desk, there was nothing but a blotter and the pen my father had used to write prescriptions and referral letters, attached to the metal holder in which it stood by a gleaming silver chain. And his beach-rock paperweight, which rested on the far right corner of the blotter. The only wall-hanging was his Edinburgh diploma. There was an empty bookcase with glass doors, a dark brown leather sofa whose armrests were scrolled with studs of brass.

  The top drawer of the desk was open. Another precaution. It was as if Uncle Edward was sitting there in the gloom with his finger to his lips. Looking up at me from the otherwise empty drawer of the desk was an envelope that bore my name. DEVLIN. Only that. No doubt mailed like the first one, I thought, inside another envelope addressed to Uncle Edward. It bore no postmark, no return address. It was slit open. I took from inside it a note that read: “Just a rehearsal. No letter yet.” I replaced it in the envelope.

  Bitter with disappointment, I went back out to the landing. Uncle Edward extended his hand. I gave him the envelope. We went back inside. He struck a match, held it to the envelope, which he stood flame down in the grate of the fireplace so that in seconds there was nothing left but a wisp of glowing ash. Eyes fixed on it, he motioned with his hand for me to leave. I walked down the stairs slowly, as per his instructions.

  Only a few days later, he wore the red handkerchief again. I suspected another gratuitous rehearsal.

  Again he was in the chair on the landing, with what looked like the same book as before on his lap. I went straight into my father’s surgery.

  Again Uncle Edward had opened the envelope, slit it so cleanly he might have used a scalpel. But it looked to me as if he had not removed the letter from inside. He had opened it as a precaution, to reduce the rustle and ripping of paper. I eased a sealed letter from the envelope, broke the seal, which was made of red wax and bore the imprint of a sailing ship. There was not just a single page as before, but several, tightly folded. I eased them open and began to read.

  My dearest Devlin:

  When Francis Stead took me aside on the North Greenland expedition, he said that twelve years before, in 1880, his wife had attended a party thrown for the graduates of the College of Physicians and Surgeons
at Columbia University. He correctly named the man and woman at whose house the party was held. Your mother told Francis Stead that at this party, she had got drunk and been taken advantage of by someone about whom she remembered nothing, not even his face or name. She could remember nothing of the party, she said, but the first half-hour. Her next memory was of waking up just before dawn, alone, in one of the many bedrooms of a strange house. As a result of this encounter, she was pregnant.

  Your mother, when we met, had told me neither the first nor the last name of her fiancé, so I had, up to the point where Francis began his story, no idea what my fellow medical officer and I had in common.

  He was in mid-story when I realized who he was, who I was, that the supposedly nameless, faceless man she had met at that party was me. “Amelia.” Not even when he first said her name did I suspect a thing, though of course I noted the coincidence. Bit by excruciating bit, I learned the truth. I had fathered a boy whose name was Devlin Stead, and who was being raised by his aunt and uncle. I could barely keep from crying when Francis told me that his wife was dead, when it hit me that the woman whom he said had accidentally drowned was my Amelia.

  I am the cause of all of it, I thought as he kept on talking, all that has taken place without my knowledge. His abandonment of you and her, the ruination of his life, the awful state of mind he was in. Even, in a way, the death of my Amelia, who, had she never met me, would have been led by the dictates of chance away from the accident that took her life. And later I would blame myself for the death of Francis Stead.

  It took a great deal of effort to keep my composure. I sat there listening, one of the characters in his tale, but acting as though I was waiting to hear what would happen next. Had a third man been present, I’m sure he would have noticed the effect Francis Stead’s story had on me. But Francis was too absorbed in the telling of his story to notice.