The Navigator of New York

by Wayne Johnston

  “Some of the men building the bridge are from Newfoundland,” I said.

  “The replaceable ones,” she said. “The ones who are interchangeable with all the other men who have come from far away to build that bridge.”

  She said that Lily’s “crowd” seemed limitless. At a succession of dinners and parties, she had not seen the same face twice. She wondered what Lily’s impression of St. John’s would be. For the first time in her life, she felt insecure, inadequate in social situations.

  She told a woman that she was from Newfoundland. “Oh, yes,” the woman said. “I’ve heard of it, I think. Where did you learn English?”

  There were times, she said, when it occurred to her how easy it would be here to escape. She would look at the Manhattan span of the great bridge arching off into the sky like some monument to opportunity, and it would occur to her that if she wanted to, she could simply disappear. Unlike in St. John’s, it would take no effort. She could simply walk away. She pictured herself boarding a ferry and sitting alone as it made its way across the Hudson River to New Jersey. That was as far as her imagination took her. Where she was headed, what her plans were, how she would support herself, she stopped short of considering. All she wanted was to escape.

  Escape. Escape from what? I asked her. She merely shrugged.

  The three of us took a hansom cab one evening along Madison Avenue, which was a residential street for the well-off but not quite rich, and then we turned off into Central Park. The windows were open, the canvas top was rolled back. Your mother said she had not looked up at the night sky since coming to New York. It was clear, but the stars were not as bright as in the sky above St. John’s.

  “They say that at night, from the high point of the Brooklyn Bridge, Manhattan looks like the sky,” she said. “Constellations of lights with nothing but darkness in between them. Don’t you think that’s wonderful?”

  I told her I thought it was. Central Park at night. A wilderness within the city, enclosed by the city. It no longer seems quite so wild as it once did. That descent into the park conferred upon those who made it some sort of exemption from inhibition. It was like bathing at the seashore or being at the seashore after dark. This, it seemed, was the purpose of the park: to allow the furtive expression of things that people of a certain class must otherwise pretend do not exist. The clopping of horses’ hoofs. The murmured conversations that would stop as you went past, then resume again. The unlit parts of the path between one gas lamp and the next. The grass a silver sheen of dew down where it was cooler. The smell of the water through the trees. You could faintly hear the treetop breeze, though on the ground the air was still. Things were said there that could not be said elsewhere, desires admitted to, secret fears and hopes acknowledged. You were never unaware that you were hemmed in by the unseen city. The knowledge that none of this would last was necessary to the effect. It cast over everything an elusive, wistful, enjoyable sadness. To leave the park, to go back up into the city, was like waking from a dream. No one ever spoke of the dream, and most of it was soon forgotten.

  Poor discreet and patient Lily, pretending that we were not whispering, that my arm was not around your mother’s waist, that she was unaffected by the park, that she alone was able to resist its spell.

  “They say that by 1900, every inch of Manhattan will be so lit up the stars will be invisible,” your mother said. By 1900. Not long from now. She had every reason to think that she would live to see if this was true. It is not. You can still, in Manhattan, see the stars.

  She told me, as we sat the next day in Madison Square Park and Lily, as if by prearrangement, walked farther from us than usual, that she was engaged to a man she did not love and did not wish to marry.

  At first, I did not know what to say.

  “He is very kind,” she said. “He comes from a good family, as do I, though my parents are deceased. We are said to be a ‘good match.’ Many good matches make good marriages. But this one will not. I should have declined his proposal. Now it seems to be too late.”

  “It is not too late,” I said. “You are not yet married. You should not make yourself unhappy just because of how it would look if you changed your mind. Perhaps you are not cut out for marriage. Or is it that you think marriage to some other man would make you happy?”

  She looked at me.

  “I have met the man who would make me happy,” she said.

  “I believe you have,” I said.

  On her second-last day in New York, knowing that she would be expected to spend the last day with Lily’s family, we met one final time, without Lily’s help or knowledge.

  We intended only to have one afternoon completely to ourselves, to say what, in the company or near proximity of Lily, we dared not say. But we found that even without Lily, we could not speak as intimately as we wished to, not in public. She said she felt as though she was in St. John’s and everyone was watching us. I said that, as large and crowded as Manhattan was, I had sometimes encountered acquaintances by accident while walking in the street.

  We agreed that we should find somewhere private where we could talk. When I told her that I knew of a cheap but respectable hotel on lower Broadway, she nodded and looked briefly at me in a way that I knew I would never forget. How beautiful she was. “I love you,” I whispered.

  We took separate cabs there, arrived separately and rented separate rooms. We would not have been allowed to register together without proof that we were married—nor, even had we been allowed, could we have endured the awkwardness and embarrassment of doing so. For a young woman to register alone was embarrassment enough.

  I registered first, then read a paper in the lobby until she arrived. She held her key so that I could see the number, then went upstairs. Fifteen minutes later, I joined her in her room.

  Alone, secretly alone at last. Soon to part, soon to be a thousand miles apart, but together now. For hours, together in that room into which sounds drifted from the outside world, from the oblivious swarm of people passing on the street below. It did not seem possible to me, as we lay there in each other’s arms, that anyone else had ever been in love. For a short while she slept, her forehead against my cheek, her warm breath on my neck.

  It occurs to me now that I knew, I must have known, that she was risking more than I was. I was risking losing her. She was risking everything.

  Over and over, we said we loved each other. I asked her if she would marry me, and she said yes. I told her that when she returned to Manhattan, I would give her an engagement ring.

  I told her that she had to formally break off her engagement with her fiancé before we met again and make a public announcement of it in the papers, saying that the decision to end the engagement was wholly hers and not motivated by anything said or done by her fiancé, whose conduct, throughout the term of their acquaintanceship, had been above reproach. She would move to Manhattan and live with Lily, and we would then begin a courtship that would lead, without unseemly haste, to our engagement and eventual marriage. Until her prior engagement had been severed, we would say nothing to Lily—nor, though your mother said she was certain of her support no matter what the circumstances, would we ever tell her about our afternoon together.

  If we proceeded cautiously, there would be no scandal, I told her, only at worst some short-lived rumours as to how and when we met relative to the end of her first engagement.

  She said it would be best if I did not write to her.

  We parted. She went back home.

  I received letters from her, through Lily, sometimes two or three a day, unopened. Lily knew which letters addressed to her were for her and which for me because mine bore an X beside her name.

  The letters from your mother contained no news, only expressions of anticipation and impatience with herself for not having yet worked up the nerve to do what she knew had to be done. After one in which she wrote, “I will tell him very soon,” they stopped coming.

  I never heard from her again.<
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  After three weeks, Lily came to me to pass on, she said, a message from Amelia, who wanted me to know that she and her fiancé would soon be married.

  For a long time, I was so fretful I could neither eat nor sleep. She had changed her mind. She had fallen in love not with me, but with Manhattan, with the fantasy of leaving Newfoundland, with her dreams of nebulous escape—escape not just from a marriage to a man she did not love, but from everything she was disenchanted with. Or perhaps she really did love her fiancé. I found that thought especially intolerable.

  I know now, of course, that she did what she thought was best for everyone. I have known it since Francis Stead confided in me. She married the man who loved her, but whom she did not love. Spared me from scandal because she loved me, from having to choose between her and the good reputation that I had made clear to her I was determined I would have one day.

  The hosts of the party at which I met your mother took it upon themselves to better me. I became their protégé. They treated me as I am sure they would not have if they knew my secret. They invited me to help out at their annual party every year until I myself became a medical student. I dared not decline their invitations for fear that it would make them lose interest in me.

  At every party, I invented some excuse to go upstairs so that I could see the hallway where I met the woman with the strange accent who had said, “I am Amelia.”

  The couple helped me earn my way through college, loaning me money first for a printing business and then to expand a small milk-and-cream company that I ran with my brothers. In 1887, they helped get me accepted to the College of Physicians and Surgeons at Columbia, convincing the college deans that as the son of a “physician,” I should have my matriculation fee reduced. The balance of it, they paid.

  I am friendly with them to this day, though when my family moved to another part of the city, making a commute to Columbia impossible for me, I transferred to the New York University medical school and did not see my patrons as often as before.

  I do not go to their annual parties, which they still hold at their house. I am rarely in the city when these parties are held, but even when I am, I stay away, for the house contains too many memories for me, memories that have been unpleasant ones since the day Francis Stead confided in me.

  Devlin, I am, however indirectly, to blame for the deaths of both your mother and Francis Stead. She was so dazzled, so overwhelmed by New York that her better judgment was overthrown. I have no such excuse. When Francis told me of your mother’s death, I felt such shame, such guilt as I had never felt before—which, only days later, was compounded when he disappeared. For years, I have lived with the burden of this secret, trying to convince myself that I was not to blame, that however shamefully I acted when I took advantage of your mother, I could not possibly have foreseen the consequences.

  For years, I have tried without success not to think of you, the boy who was parentless because of me, the third and only surviving victim of my recklessness. The son of the woman who, though I knew her for but three weeks, I am still in love with. Recently, after my torment reached its height with such effects as I described to you in my first letter, I realized that I had to make myself known to this boy whom I alone knew to be my son. That and nothing else would do. That, it seemed to me, would be a first step towards redressing the harm I have done. A part of her lives on in you. I am done with pretending to myself that you do not exist.

  Francis Stead put forward sufficient proof to convince me that what he said was true, but you, being unfamiliar with the people and the places he named, may still have your doubts. I believe that, upon reflection, you will realize there exists no motive that would cause me to mislead you on this matter.

  To confess is to ask forgiveness, but it would be presumptuous of me to ask for yours so soon. Instead, I ask only that you renew your promise of discretion, if you still think any request of mine to be worth honouring, and your permission to write to you again. (As before, write “Yes” or “No” on the envelope.)

  I am not yet ready to meet you, but I hope that by the time I am, I will, in your judgment, have earned the right to do so, and that by then, you will find the idea of such a meeting as appealing as I do. I wait in hope for your reply.

  Yours truly,

  Dr. Frederick Cook

  March 14, 1898

  P.S. I must ask that you not write to me. For reasons I cannot now explain, it will be better for both of us if you do not.

  How many boys had ever been spoken to about their mothers as he, by way of proving that he was my father, had spoken to me about mine? Was ever a person given so detailed an account of the circumstances of his own conception? By anyone, let alone his father? How easily the most intimate details seemed to flow from the mind and the pen of Dr. Cook. All this he was relating to the son who had issued from his one encounter with my mother. I doubted that most men would have been anywhere near that forthcoming, even in a letter to a friend. Far from being offended, I was greatly flattered.

  I wrote “Yes” on the envelope, then copied out the letter on blank pages that I withdrew from the pocket of my jacket, writing furiously, for I feared that sooner or later Uncle Edward would grow impatient, come inside and burn the original whether or not my copy was complete.

  I copied Dr. Cook’s letter word for word, punctuation mark for punctuation mark. I as good as had the real thing with me when I left. I had no intention of showing it to anyone. I did not doubt my own ability to keep a secret or to keep a mere few pages hidden from the world. (I put this letter, as I had done with the first one and would do with all the others that came after it, inside a bedpost in my room, the top of which, as I had discovered by accident when I was eight, unscrewed quite easily. I scrolled the letters, one inside the other, knowing they would last longer this way than if I folded them.)

  I went out to the landing, handed the original and the envelope to Uncle Edward, who, receiving them silently, did not look up from his book as he rose from his chair. I followed him inside. I stood silently at the fireplace while he performed again the solemn ritual of burning the letter. He struck a match and lit the envelope, which he placed flame down in the grate between two bars. We watched it.

  When it was burnt, he nodded almost imperceptibly. I left, descended the stairs slowly, closed the outer door behind me and hurried to the garden gate.

  The letter left me with no doubt that Dr. Cook was my father. I thought he put far more blame on himself than he deserved. The line of causation was clear, that of culpability much less so. But I supposed that when it came to such things as guilt and shame, rationality and logic mattered no more to Dr. Cook than they did to me. For I realized now that I had believed what Moses Prowdy had only hinted at: that it had been because of me, an accidental, unhoped-for child, that my parents married, that my father deserted my mother, and that my mother, and then my father, died.

  How strange it was reading about my mother, being made to see her from someone else’s point of view, that of a man who knew her when she was in no way defined by her relationship to me. The young woman in the letter was not the young woman in the photograph on which “Amelia, the wicked one” was written. She was posing in that photograph.

  Poor Francis Stead. Even though she was pregnant by another man, he married her. Why? Because he loved her? Because she “implored him to keep her secret”? But once they were married, things must have changed.

  I was glad that the man who disappeared on the North Greenland expedition was not my father, not only because it restored my father to life, but because I was relieved to know that I was not the son of a man who had given in to desolation, a man whose death was a morbid enigma that those he left behind would never solve but would have hanging over them forever. I was still the son of just such a woman, but I, at least, was free of him. For me, the enigma of him was solved.

  As for my mother, for six years she had harboured her shameful secret, keeping it from everyone, especially me,
me the evidence of it, the ever-present reminder of it. All those years wondering if her husband would reveal their secret to someone else. Which in the end he did.

  I would tell Aunt Daphne nothing, or else she would write to Dr. Cook, and that would almost certainly mean never hearing from Dr. Cook again. I felt guilty about deceiving her, but I told myself that by keeping silent, I would spare her feelings. She would not rest knowing there existed this Dr. Cook by whom she and Uncle Edward might be supplanted as my parents. I could not imagine telling her about an affair my mother had had when she was engaged, an affair of which I was the issue; could not imagine Aunt Daphne hearing from my lips that my mother had conceived me with a man she hardly knew, and that I bore to the man whom the world knew as my father no relation whatsoever. No, for my own sake and for hers, I would not tell her.

  “Did my mother ever take a trip away from Newfoundland?” I could not resist asking Aunt Daphne one night at dinner when Uncle Edward was working late. I searched her face but saw nothing.

  “Once,” she said. “She went to New York. She had a cousin there named—what?—Lily, I think. Your second cousin. She invited her. Your mother was getting married soon. Lily told her she should see the world, a bit of it anyway, before she settled down.”

  “Did she say what New York was like?” I said.

  “Oh, she said it was exciting. Lots of people.” I searched her face again. Still nothing. It was something that hadn’t crossed her mind in years.

  My mother had gone to Francis Stead and told him she was pregnant. I could not imagine what sort of exchange must have taken place between them.