The Navigator of New York

by Wayne Johnston

  “I was not with her before we married,” Francis said to me. He looked at me to be sure I knew what he meant by “with her.” I nodded.

  He said that your mother implored him to keep her secret, which there were two ways of doing. He and your mother chose the more honourable one: they told their families that she was pregnant by him. Their wedding soon after followed.

  “Nor was I with her after our marriage,” Francis Stead said as he walked away from me.

  A few nights later, he disappeared from Redcliffe House. Most of what I wrote in the report that appeared in the papers is true, as is what was written later in The New York Times. Francis Stead, long before he confided in me, did have a falling-out with Peary and did ask for permission to remain up north after the rest of us had left for home. His interest in the Eskimos exceeded even my own, which is considerable.

  Peary forbade him to stay behind, and they did not speak for months. Although I do not wish to imply that Peary was in part to blame for Francis Stead’s death—I myself, as I have said, must bear the blame—I can tell you that I will never again be a member of an expedition led by Peary. I will have no more to do with the man and so will say no more about him.

  What follows is the full story of what happened in Manhattan eighteen years ago.

  Your mother had a cousin named Lily in Manhattan. Her mother and Lily’s had been close sisters. Now Amelia’s mother was dead and Lily’s a widow who had remarried.

  They had decided by correspondence that although they had never met, Lily would be the maid of honour at Amelia’s wedding, which would take place in St. John’s. To Amelia, it was a way of honouring her mother’s memory, to name as her maid of honour the daughter of the woman her mother had been closest to.

  Lily invited your mother to spend a few weeks in New York with her so that they could get to know each other before the wedding. She in turn would spend the few weeks immediately before the wedding in St. John’s. It would be a chance for your mother to spend time away from Newfoundland, which she had never done and, life being what it was, might never do if she waited until after she was married.

  The two of them attended a graduation party for Columbia medical students.

  There was a great deal of drinking done by the young men and women. Among the latter was your mother who, like the other young women, was not so used to drinking as the men were. Perhaps she had never had more than a glass or two before.

  I was not a guest at the party. I was just sixteen years old. I had a weekday job as an office boy, and on the weekends, I did whatever odd jobs I could find. The couple, both doctors, the man a professor of medicine at Columbia, the woman a homeopath, hired four boys about my age to help out at the party, a notorious annual event that no serving girl, no matter how needful of work, would have had anything to do with. We fixed and served drinks, served food, cleaned up discarded plates and glasses to make way for others.

  Even in being hired as a servant for this party, I was above my station. The other three boys were the sons of doctors, semi-guests for whom helping out at the party was a rite of passage to Columbia.

  The real-estate agency for which I collected rent was owned by the couple who threw the party but managed by someone else. The couple made one of their rare visits to the office at a time when I happened to be there. They engaged me in conversation. When I told them that my deceased father had been a doctor, they became very interested in me. The woman, one of the few women doctors of any kind in the country, wanted to know where my father had “gone to school.” All I knew was that it had been somewhere in Germany—Hamburg, I thought.

  I remember the expression on the woman’s face when I said “Hamburg.” It was not unkind or condescending, but knowing. She knew my family story in an instant. My parents were immigrants from Germany, where my father had been not a doctor but a “doctor.” Dr. Koch. He had somehow gained enough knowledge of medicine that the people of the small town where he came from, and where he “practised,” called him Doctor. His patients, having no money, paid him with what they grew or raised on their farms. The same was true of the people of the small town in New York State to which he immigrated, and where, despite being a doctor, he died of a disease, pneumonia, to which the New World poor were prone, leaving us to eke out an existence like any immigrant family. (Like you, Devlin, I grew up without a father.) My family moved from Port Jervis to New York. I pitched in with my three brothers to help support the family when I was old enough to work. I saw that this woman saw all this, and perhaps she detected in my face some measure of humiliation or resentment. At any rate, she invited me to be a servant at their party. I eagerly accepted.

  Although I had told no one, I wanted to be a doctor because my father had been one. How serving sandwiches and drinks to medical students and professors would bring me closer to that goal I didn’t know, but I sensed it would. I told my mother on Saturday morning that, as I often did, I was going over to Manhattan to see if someone would hire me to do chores at Fulton Market. Instead, after killing time in Manhattan, I went at five o’clock to the address they had given me.

  The eldest of us four boys was drunk before the party was an hour old. When they saw that no one seemed to notice, the other boys sipped from every drink they made before they served it.

  I had never been at such an event before. The house was so crowded that the guests had to keep their drinks up in the air to keep their glasses from being crushed.

  I assumed it was a typical New York party. There was enough food there to feed my family of six for a year. Everywhere there were sandwiches that had been nibbled and then put aside; the same with helpings of smoked salmon, chunks of watermelon, wedges of grapefruit. There were such things as pâté, caviar, aspic, which I had never seen before, did not know the names of or how they should be served. These nameless dishes, too, went uneaten, were barely picked at. I thought the food had to have something wrong with it. I would not have eaten a morsel anyway, though I was starving, for the other three boys showed no interest in the food, and being naïve enough not to realize that my clothes gave me away, I wanted those boys to think I was just like them.

  This was not my world. I had for hours been moving about in a world that, before that day, I had got only glimpses of. I had walked along the city streets at night, taking home from work shortcuts that wound through neighbourhoods like this one. I had looked in through the large windows from across the street, the best vantage point from which to see into such houses, since it was impossible from the near sidewalk to see anything above the level of the windowsills but chandeliers. In the brightly lit rooms of these houses, I had seen briefly, not daring to stop and stare for long, groups of men and women in what I now know was evening dress sitting down to dinner, waited on by maids and butlers who, for all the attention that was paid them, might as well have been invisible. I had seen young families, a man and a woman watching from their chairs as their children ran about. My family, the six of us, lived in two rooms in a section of Brooklyn known as Williamsburg. We were a stone’s throw from the East River and forever in the shadow of what we called the sugar towers, a sugar refinery whose days were longer than my mother’s, and from which the noise of men and machines and the sickly smell of liquid sugar issued ceaselessly.

  Now, this day, I was in one of these very houses, had spoken to people who lived in others like it, had served liquor and carried trays of food such as I had never seen before.

  They kept on drinking, the other three boys, not even bothering to hide what they were doing, for after a while the party guests began to serve themselves.

  There were a pair of fiddlers in one room, playing reels that Lily, announcing your mother’s “Irish” heritage, insisted Amelia dance to. She had done quite a lot of step-dancing as a child and was soon alone in the middle of the room while the others clapped along.

  It was a warm spring, much warmer in New York than she was used to. She removed her jacket. She was wearing a plain bodice with a
row of buttons down the front, a flounced skirt with drapes, stockings and buttoned boots. The skirt came barely to her knees, so it was good for dancing.

  Whenever she declared that she was thirsty I was called for, and there was much amusement as, with the guests urging me to work faster, I fixed her a drink and brought it to her. If not for the dancing, I think she would have been sick.

  The point came when she could dance no longer. As soon as she stopped, she fainted, or began to. I caught her. There was a great outburst of applause and cheers, which was so loud that they revived her somewhat and I managed with Lily’s help to get her to her feet, though she kept saying that the room was spinning.

  Lily said it might be best if they went home, but your mother was adamant that both she and Lily would stay. She said that if she could lie down for a short time, she would be all right. Lily, whom I could tell was reluctant to leave such a lively party, agreed that a lie-down might be just the thing. There would be no harm in it if your mother fell asleep. We led her to the stairs, at the foot of which she stopped and said that she could go the rest of the way herself. She went up the stairs quite briskly, God knows how, and Lily turned back to the party.

  I followed her up the stairs. On the landing, she made for a door and either tripped on something or fainted again. She fell forward and instinctively threw out her arms to break her fall.

  “Are you all right, miss?” I said.

  She turned her head and looked up at me. She had the most remarkably large, round eyes, blue though her hair was black.

  “I hope you haven’t hurt yourself,” I said. “I think there is altogether too much drinking being done. You are not used to it. Not like the others seem to be. The last two drinks I gave you were water, and you didn’t seem to notice.”

  “What’s your name?” she said, and I detected what I thought was an English accent. I assumed that any accent I had never heard before was English.

  “Fred,” I said. It seemed absurdly short, too abrupt to be a name, an impression she confirmed when she said, “I am Amelia.” Six syllables, four of them her name. I am Amelia. I could not have said, “I am Frederick,” without sounding ridiculous, but she sounded as if Amelia was not just her name but what she was.

  I crouched down on one knee, one foot on the floor. Our eyes were level and inches apart. “Where do you live?” she said.

  “Brooklyn,” I said. “Where do you live?”

  “Newfoundland,” she said. “But I’ve been telling people I’m from Ireland just so I don’t have to explain where Newfoundland is.”

  “Ships on their way from England and on their way up north stop off in Newfoundland,” I said. “I’ve never been there. I’ve never been anywhere except Brooklyn and Manhattan.”

  “Who would need to go anywhere else if they lived here?” she said.

  I saw that she was looking at my clothes.

  “Each thing belongs to someone different,” I said. “My brother”; I pointed at my trousers. “My uncle; I pointed at my vest. Not even my shoes were mine, I said, explaining that they had belonged to my father, who had died some years ago.

  “You are a very kind young man,” she said. When she smiled at me, I looked away for a moment, then met her eyes again.

  “You should go home,” I said. “I’ll get your friend.”

  “Cousin,” she said. “Cousin and dear friend. But I’m all right.”

  “You’re a good dancer,” I said.

  “It’s been years since I danced like that. When I was a girl. It’s funny, dancing by yourself. I’d never do it back home in St. John’s, now that I’m grown up. I don’t know why they taught us if they wanted us to stop once we grew up.”

  “You’re getting married soon,” I said, looking at her engagement ring.

  “Yes,” she said, also looking at the ring. “Eighteen and engaged to be married. He’s a doctor.” She fell silent.

  “Do you like New York?”

  “It’s so much bigger than St. John’s. But yes, I do like it. I wonder what sort of person I’d be if I had lived here all my life.”

  “My mother’s never come across the river to Manhattan,” I said. “She says she doesn’t like the look of it from Brooklyn.”

  She laughed.

  “Someday,” I told her, “you’re going to be very happy.” She looked at me, wondering, I think, if her unhappiness was as obvious to everyone as it was to me. She smiled, as if to assure me that she was not universally regarded as unhappy. A young man born into poverty feeling sympathy for her. Any other such man she would have resented perhaps, dismissed his sympathy as presumptuous. But she said later that she could see that I did not begrudge the privileges conferred on the people at that party by accidents of birth. She said she believed that to inquire into the natures of other people was the main pleasure of my life. Which in part was true.

  “It’s just that I feel a little out of place,” she said, but she looked as though she were pondering some deeper discontent.

  “Playing marbles, are we?” a voice behind us said. It was Lily, at last come to see how your mother was doing.

  “She just tripped,” I said.

  Lily and I helped your mother to her feet.

  “I’ll take it from here,” Lily said, and led her off to a room down the hallway. I went back downstairs.

  She said she thought of me often the next day, how I seemed to know how coming to New York had made her feel, knew the doubts she had about her fiancé, the many times she thought about escaping, walking away from her life, losing Lily in the crowd, losing herself in the limitless swarms of Manhattan rather than returning to Newfoundland.

  She asked Lily to arrange for us to meet again. Lily knew right from the start that your mother was taken with me. She, too, knew that your mother was unhappy. It was obvious that your mother had told her so, perhaps in a letter. It might have been for this reason that Lily invited her to New York. I think Lily saw me not as a marriage prospect, a replacement fiancé, but as the first of many steps your mother needed to take to extricate herself from her situation back home.

  With Lily’s help, we met almost every day for the duration of your mother’s stay in Manhattan. The three of us went to pleasure palaces—amusement parks, we call them now—panoramas, museums, vaudeville shows at Tammany Hall, art galleries, theatres. We walked about in Long Acre Square, a neighbourhood built by a rich family called the Astors. They call it Times Square now. It has become famous for its high-class “houses,” which are known as silkhat brothels.

  Lily was our chaperone, our alibi, our disguise. So that your mother and I could link ours, we all three linked arms, Lily and your mother on either side of me as we strolled down Broadway, looking at the stores. To observers, we hoped, Lily would appear to be “with” your mother as much as I did, and Lily as much with me as your mother did. Lily walked with us, hardly saying a word as your mother and I talked, sometimes trailing slightly behind when she sensed that we would like some time alone.

  Your mother and I sat on benches in the parks while Lily idled up and down in front of us beneath her parasol.

  We went to the largest of the pushcart markets, the one on the Lower East Side. The city has changed much since your mother was there, but even then the Lower East Side seemed to her so dense with people and with buildings that she found herself gasping for breath, clinging to Lily or me as we walked unmindfully along.

  There were markets everywhere, in most parts of the city, sudden swarms of people in the distance that always made your mother think an accident had happened or a fight was taking place—the usual reasons, she said, for which crowds gathered outdoors in St. John’s.

  I told her that more than half a million people lived on the island of Manhattan. More than two million people live there now. That New York seems to me like nothing next to this one.

  To think, she said, that on an island thirteen miles long and two miles wide, not all of which was inhabited, there were five times as many p
eople as lived in all of Newfoundland. She was overwhelmed by the density and clamour.

  The Brooklyn Bridge was not quite finished, but you could see it from almost everywhere in Brooklyn or Manhattan, arching off into space at such an angle that from one side of it you couldn’t see the other. It was being built from both sides and would be joined in the middle. As the middle span was not in place, each half seemed suspended in mid-air, as if the span that joined the arches had collapsed. It was such a spectacle, she said, seemed so perfect as it was, that she forgot it would soon have a practical purpose.

  There were so many vessels in the river you could barely see the water. We crossed from shore to shore on ferries just to feel the cooling East River breeze.

  Lily and I took her to see Trinity Church, then the highest structure in Manhattan, a towering Gothic Revival at Broadway and Wall Street.

  We took cable cars and elevated trains throughout Manhattan. The latter were very popular because, the joke went, the only way to avoid the red-hot cinders, oil and coal ash that rained down from the steam-powered el was to ride the wretched thing. Cinders burnt holes in the awnings that stretched out above the sidewalks, landed on horses and pedestrians, the latter examining their hats for damage and choking on the dust as the train rattled overhead. Everyone cursed the el except its passengers. It was great fun. Most of the lines are electrified now, not as much of a nuisance as before.

  Manhattan filled your mother with all sorts of conflicting feelings: on the one hand a craving for privacy and space, on the other a yearning to feel at home as Lily did, as she thought I did.

  It made her miss her fiancé, she said, and it made her wish that they had never met. (Neither she nor Lily ever spoke the first or last name of Francis Stead.) One moment, she wanted to leave for home as soon as possible, and the next, she could not imagine ever living in St. John’s again.

  She had always suspected that, in the greater world, families like hers were “insignificant” or “unimportant.” But these words, she now saw, were inadequate. She was witnessing the collective pursuit of something for which its pursuers had no name, for which no one knew the grand design, though everyone acted as if there was one. Newfoundland’s complete obliteration would not have made one person in this city pause, she said. If Newfoundland were to vanish from the earth, it would not slow down the progress of the Brooklyn Bridge.