The Navigator of New York

by Wayne Johnston

  Being a doctor, he could, if she was willing to go along with it, have chosen what Dr. Cook, by implication, called the less honourable option. I wondered if they had talked about it, the simple procedure that would have cut me off in pre-existence. “Nor was I with her after we were married.” What a lonely marriage it must have been for both of them.

  In my room at night, by the light of a candle, I read the letter over many times. How unlike any man I knew was Dr. Cook. He had written me a letter asking me for my forgiveness, my absolution. He seemed to think his sanity, his very life, depended on it. How much I would never have known if not for that letter, which, for all I knew about its author, might have fallen from the sky.

  Another letter came.

  My dearest Devlin:

  I cannot tell you how happy you have made me. Your “Yes” has renewed my spirits and my courage. I did not, until hearing from your uncle Edward, quite believe that you were real.

  My first marriage was to Libby Forbes, who died after giving birth to a child who lived but a few hours. A double sorrow from which, for a time, it seemed I would not recover. Anna Forbes, my fiancée, is Libby’s sister. Anna, when I last saw her in New York, was ill, in part from fretting about what might happen to me on this voyage. All this is by way of saying that as yet I have no children except for you.

  I am happy, Devlin. Or at least, for the first time in ages, I believe in the possibility of happiness. How differently you see the world, knowing, as I never really have done until now, that there exists in it a child of your creation, a person half composed of you.

  In two days, we set out for Patagonia. Tomorrow I will write and send to you another letter. By the time you read it, I will have arrived in Patagonia. My soul is on the move again. The world, for so long stalled, has lurched into motion.

  I am headed, once again, for the Old Ice. Those of us who have been there cannot even tell each other how we feel about it. But I know of no one who, having been there once, has not wished to go again, no one who, by the mere sight of it, was not profoundly changed.

  An opaque, impenetrable wall divides those who have travelled in the polar regions from those who have not. The first have seen not only the best but also the worst of human nature. That polar exploration brings out the “best” in men you will have often heard it said. That it brings out the worst, never, unless in my letters to you I have hinted at it. I daresay you believe that you understand what, in the context of exploration, is meant by those two words, best and worst. You do not, however, and nothing I could write would make you understand. I have seen and done things that make it impossible for me ever again to take seriously the great game known as society. I should add that not taking a game seriously often makes one quite adept at playing it. Such is the case with both me and Peary. The motives, the supposedly secret longings of the non-explorer seem as transparent to me as those of children. I am no longer misled or confused by language. The eyes, the face, the colour of a man’s complexion and the carriage of his body are as revealing to me of his real self, whether I meet him on a Brooklyn street, on the Old Ice or in some port in Patagonia. I once had my ear bent for hours by a man whose measure I took in a few seconds by the simple sound of his voice, a sound independent of, and usually at odds with, the meaning of the words he spoke. This is one of the reasons I have asked that you not write back to me. By writing, you would, without intending to, either cause me to see you as someone you are not or, more likely, try to create what was so obviously a posture that it would dispose me against you. You may think you have caught me at a double standard, may wonder why, if I am so distrustful, even disdainful, of language as to forbid you to write to me, I am writing to you. It has for obvious reasons been impossible for us to meet, but even if it had been possible, it would have been unwise. You are on the other side of the wall I spoke of earlier. I have been lobbing messages to you in the only language that you understand by the only means available to us.

  Goodbye for now.

  Yours truly,

  Dr. F.A. Cook

  April 13, 1898

  • CHAPTER SEVEN •

  THE LONELINESS AND TEDIUM OF THE MISFIT LIFE I HAD BEEN living was dispelled by the letters. They were my life outside the classroom and the house. All other things—church; the outings to concerts, plays and picnics that Aunt Daphne was forever arranging for me in the vain hope that through them I would make some friends; even the readings with Aunt Daphne—were little more than distractions that made bearable the intervals between one letter and another, or the intervals between bouts of solitude, when I was content just to think about them. They were also ways of disguising, camouflaging, my obsession with the letters. Only when I was reading or re-reading them, or wondering when the next one would arrive and what it would contain, did I feel like I was going about the true business of my life. Perhaps, if not for the letters, I would have found, would have been forced to find, some way of fitting in.

  But far from feeling that I was missing something, I believed that the life of the most popular boy at Bishop Feild did not come close to matching mine. In which boy’s life was there such excitement as I felt when I climbed the stairs to “my father’s” surgery, knowing that inside it there lay waiting for me a letter from the man who was secretly my father? It was the stuff of boys’ adventure books. But to me, and only to me, Uncle Edward’s strange contribution notwithstanding, was it real. Each time I slowly climbed the stairs, there was the inscrutably accommodating Uncle Edward, on whom Dr. Cook relied, on whom I relied, a mute sentinel requiring from me no tribute but discretion. (Always the handkerchief was gone, and always it was back when he got home.)

  Walking along the street, I would, just for the illicit fun of it, mutter to myself, “I am the son of Dr. Cook. I am the son of Dr. Cook. I am not the son of Dr. Francis Stead. Dr. Cook is my father, and Dr. Francis Stead is not.” I made a game of it. How close dared I get to someone approaching me on foot, or someone I was catching up to, before I stopped chanting my secret out loud? Some people heard me—heard my voice, that is, heard the weird rhythm of it—but they could not make out the words. I didn’t care that this behaviour earned me a reputation for talking to myself and prompted observations that I was clearly headed where my parents had gone.

  In a way, the letters were almost as profound an intervention in my boyhood as physical confinement would have been.

  I felt as though I was in them, contained by them, more set apart from everyone and everything around me than I had ever been. The world of the letters became my preferred one, and it made my own world seem less real, less substantial. I saw the danger in this, the danger of remaining so long in the letter world that the door to it would close behind me, trapping me inside. I imagined this happening, the better to revel in my power to prevent it, for I was certain that I could.

  Indeed, a time came when I was no longer able to will myself away from his world. Walking to school, sitting in the classroom, I was there with Francis Stead and Dr. Cook on the North Greenland expedition when Francis Stead told him the story that, except for the ending, Dr. Cook already knew. I was side by side with Dr. Cook when, at age sixteen, he helped my mother up the stairs of that house in Manhattan in 1879. I walked home from the party with my mother, back to her cousin’s house, and watched her as she lay on the bed, unable to sleep, though her eyes were closed. What Dr. Cook left out, I imagined in detail, fashioned lengthy stories out of single sentences. I sweltered with him in his quarters on the ship in South America when he awoke from nightmares, screaming. I watched him while he wrote to me, watched his face and sometimes his pen as it moved across the page, forming the words that, from having read them so many times, I knew by heart. I watched him write my name. DEVLIN. Six letters.

  I went from reading him to hearing him. Phrases from his letters came unbidden to my mind, the voice that I invented for him declaiming at such volume while I sat in the front room that it seemed impossible that Aunt Daphne had not heard it or t
hat I had not said the words out loud.

  Once, in my room at night, I stared at the bedpost that contained the letters, all of them scrolled one inside the other. How easy it would be to burn them as Uncle Edward had burned the originals, tell Uncle Edward I had had enough; what a relief, in one way, it would be to never again have to wait in suspense at the breakfast table to see if Uncle Edward’s handkerchief was red. The whole thing would be over.

  But there was nothing in my life more precious to me than those letters. I could not imagine living without the expectation that another one was coming, without the thrill of being unable to foresee what path my life and Dr. Cook’s would take.

  I unscrewed the bedpost, unscrolled the letters, holding them open with two hands as I had seen done with navigation maps. “Dr. Cook is my father,” I said. “He met my mother in New York in 1879.” It gave me some relief to say the words out loud, right there in that house in which Francis Stead and my mother had once lived and Uncle Edward and Aunt Daphne now lay sleeping.

  The one drawback for me, where the letters were concerned, and therefore the one advantage to Uncle Edward, was Aunt Daphne.

  The letters subverted so much of what she believed was true.

  I could think of nothing while in Aunt Daphne’s company but that my whole life rested on a premise that I knew to be untrue, but that she still believed. Francis Stead was not my father.

  My father had not been my father, and my mother, every moment that we spent together, had pretended that he was. I imagined her, pictured her sitting in the front room at night, reading or staring into the fire. There she sat, impassively keeping her secret to herself, dissembling with such self-incriminating ease. But this was not fair. It was not so that she could regard me as a fool that she had misled me. Nor to make Francis Stead one that she had married him.

  Uncle Edward was not my uncle. I was in no way connected to the Steads by blood. Not even Uncle Edward knew this. It seemed he did not want to know why Dr. Cook was writing to me. So much wanted not to know that he made sure I witnessed the burning of each letter, which, when passed from his hand to mine, had been sealed. It was as if, in the event that our arrangement was discovered, I could testify to Aunt Daphne, to whomever, that he had not read the letters. Uncle Edward was assisting Dr. Cook in a subterfuge for reasons that he would not divulge. Uncle Edward and I were conspiring against Aunt Daphne, but not one word about this conspiracy ever passed between us. Duplicity was everywhere. I doubted that anyone was what he seemed to be. I was not what I seemed to be. I could not for a second forget what I was hiding, or who I was hiding it from.

  “You don’t seem to look forward to our readings or lose yourself in them like you used to,” Aunt Daphne said. “I hope it’s not because you think you’re too grown up. Not because you think you’re too old to be read to by your aunt.” I assured her this was not the case. “I’ve been choosing all the books,” she said. “Why don’t you choose them for a while?”

  I chose, borrowed from the library, books I knew she would like, all the while thinking what it would be like to divide between us my entire cache of letters and read them to each other.

  I imagined Uncle Edward panicking, his carefully cultivated equanimity gone for good when he realized that what he was hearing from downstairs, from her lips and mine, were the forbidden words of Dr. Cook. I thought of how much, under other circumstances, she would have enjoyed having such letters read to her, and reading them to me. The person who could best appreciate what they meant to me was the last person who could know of their existence.

  I could not help feeling that the balance of my allegiance had shifted from her to him, from my aunt to my uncle. He and I shared a secret that we kept from her. That this secret only increased the enmity between us did not matter.

  As Uncle Edward was excluded, even if by choice, from the readings, Aunt Daphne was excluded from the letters, and not only from their contents, but from knowledge of their very existence. What were a few pages of some novel written fifty years ago to what was in those letters, whatever it might be, Uncle Edward’s expression sometimes seemed to say. We shared knowledge and an arrangement for its conveyance from him to me that allied us more profoundly than she and I could ever be allied by reading to each other from Jane Austen or Fanny Burney.

  She and I could read to each other as long and loudly as we liked, his expression seemed to say as, when we began to read, he went upstairs. He knew it for the sham it was, and me for the hypocrite I was. He didn’t dare go so far as to make a face, or even smile at me, lest she detect it or he provoke me. But he so rarely looked at me that these looks could have had no other meaning but the one I gave them.

  I felt like a hypocrite, especially when I read to her. I could not stand the sound of my voice, the sound of me compounding my betrayal of her with every word. I read tonelessly, for to read with feeling, with sincerity, made the whole thing seem like a joke at her expense, the words undercut with an irony that she was blind to and I shared with the absent but eavesdropping Uncle Edward. When she read, I felt chastened. It was as if, during the readings, there were now three of us: the two who read and the one who neither read nor listened, but sat there in subversive silence.

  I half hoped that she would find us out. I imagined her saying something like: “Why is it that Edward always wears his red handkerchief on the day you have choir practice?” And then me confessing everything.

  “What’s wrong, Devvie?” Aunt Daphne asked me one day in the study. “You haven’t been yourself lately.”

  “I’ve changed for the better,” I felt like saying. The “self” I hadn’t been lately I didn’t want to be. Why did she assume, from my having changed, that something was wrong? Because she knew of nothing to attribute the change to. But couldn’t she see that I was happier, livelier?

  “You seem so listless all the time,” she said. “You look so tired, so pale.”

  What she saw was just the opposite of what I felt, but I looked in a mirror and was startled to find that she was right. What I saw was the opposite of what I felt. How could my inner and outer selves be so at odds?

  “Maybe it’s just adolescence,” Aunt Daphne said.

  I realized that I was exhausted. I had been drugged on euphoria for months, narcotized to the point of almost total self-absorption, literally feverish with an excitement that had started with Dr. Cook’s first letter and had not abated since. It got so that to appraise myself in a mirror was more than I could bear.

  “The boy has ‘it,’ too; just you wait,” I heard a woman behind me say one Sunday as we were leaving church. Her tone suggested that people had been saying this or something like it for years. If Aunt Daphne and Uncle Edward overheard the remark, they gave no sign.

  I wondered if this state that I had worked myself into was the first manifestation of “it.” It didn’t matter that I could point to a cause for feeling and looking as I did. In my mother’s life, too, there had been such causes.

  But the notion of my having “it” was based on both of my parents having had “it.” And I knew that there was nothing in me of Francis Stead. And nothing of “it” in Dr. Cook. There was no reason to think that for keeping the same secret my mother had kept, I would pay the same price. It was not my secret nearly so much as it was hers. It was more for her and Dr. Cook that I was keeping it than for myself. And the burden of doing so was nothing like the one she had borne. I told myself it was absurd to think that because Aunt Daphne had said, “You haven’t been yourself lately,” she had detected in me what she thought might be the first signs of the morbid turn my mother took when she was in her late twenties. I watched her to see if she was watching me, to see if I could tell by her expression whether she was wondering if, as other people thought, “it” was in my blood. I saw nothing in her face, however, but the usual quiet confidence that no real harm would come to anyone while they were in her care.

  She sent me to Uncle Edward for “another” check-up. “Just to be
on the safe side,” she said.

  This time he actually gave me a check-up, examined me, poked and prodded, asked me questions. Not until just before I left did he refer even obliquely to the letters.

  “Be careful how you act,” he said. “You act like you think you’re invisible. Be careful how you look. I hope your recent behaviour is not a prelude to something worse. A breakdown of some kind. You understand that I have not been involved in all of this, don’t you?”

  “Yes, of course I do,” I said.

  “And that nothing exists that could prove otherwise?”

  “Yes.”

  If, as he said, there was no way that anyone could implicate him in anything, why was Uncle Edward so afraid? The likeliest result of my telling someone about Dr. Cook, or showing my copies of his letters that bore, in my handwriting, his signature, was that I would be laughed at, or worse. Writing letters to himself in which he pretended he was someone else, in which he spoke in the voice of a man he had never met but imagined was his real father—was this not just the sort of thing that Devlin Stead would do? Not even Aunt Daphne would believe my story. Dr. Cook himself, though I believed him, could not prove he was my father.

  It struck me, quite suddenly, why Uncle Edward had arranged things as he had. Not to provide himself with an alibi, should I go to Aunt Daphne and tell her about the letters. He didn’t need an alibi. It wasn’t Aunt Daphne whom he needed to convince that he hadn’t read the letters. It was Dr. Cook.

  By passing the letters on to me without having read them, the seal on them unbroken, by burning them in front of me the instant I returned them to him, he had not been taking precautions—he had been following instructions. Dr. Cook had told him not to read the letters and had somehow convinced him to comply.

  There was only one explanation: Uncle Edward was acting as “postman” for Dr. Cook and me against his will. How did Dr. Cook know that Uncle Edward did not read the letters? I was the only one who knew that, and Dr. Cook had expressly asked me not to write to him.