The Navigator of New York

by Wayne Johnston

  The best thing for him, most of all, though he would not say it.

  “She’ll find out where I went eventually,” I said. “And why. My name might be in the papers someday.” I had pictured this already. A photograph of me in the local papers, and in the New York papers. “Among the expeditionaries is Devlin Stead, the son of Dr. Francis Stead, who served with Dr. Cook …”

  “You will be older then. Perhaps much older. Daphne will be less inclined to interfere, and you better able to resist her. And she’ll have got used to your absence by then.”

  “But if I just up and leave—”

  “She’ll worry. But not as much as she would if she knew of your decision to follow in your father’s footsteps. Let’s not forget where those footsteps led or what they left behind. She may adjust to your absence more quickly than you think. There was a time when she had no trouble getting by without you. Such a time may come again. Two–thirds of the threesome disappeared, and we got along without them. We have grown quite used to disappearances. That, with you gone, my brother’s whole family will have disappeared may one day seem to her quite natural.”

  No doubt he thought, or was hoping, that nothing much would come of my meeting Dr. Cook, and that, finally free to forget my childhood, I would, in the immigrant tradition, start all over in America, where it would be easy to believe that my past in Newfoundland had never been.

  I never want to see you again, he might as well have said. “My brother’s family.” He had never thought of me as part of his. I had been merely a guest, and now my stay was over. Soon his arrangement with Dr. Cook would end, those letters would stop coming and his torment, whatever it proceeded from, would be removed. Go, go and don’t come back. Ever. Don’t write. Allow us to forget that you exist. I had no affection for him, but I could not help feeling the sting of his contempt for me.

  “I will buy you a second-class ticket to New York,” he said, “and give you as much money as there is in the trust account that Daphne established for you with the money your father left behind. I cannot, for obvious reasons, withdraw money from that account, nor can you without approaching Daphne. I will top up the amount to two hundred dollars. That should set you nicely on your way.”

  It sounded so much like a bribe, so much like Judas money, that I felt like declining it. But I could not afford to. The question of how I would get to New York had been much on my mind.

  “If you want to keep your destination secret from Daphne, you will have to keep it secret from everyone. You cannot be seen boarding a passenger ship that all of St. John’s knows is going to New York. I will arrange something and get back to you about it.”

  We met again, days later, and he told me that he had arranged passage for me on a schooner bound for Halifax, where I could catch a passenger ship from England that, not having stopped off at St. John’s, would have on it no one who knew me. I would board the schooner not from the waterfront, where I was certain to be seen, but outside the Narrows, sometime after dark, probably very early in the morning, when it was least likely there would be witnesses to the temporary deviation of the schooner’s course.

  “They will anchor and send a rowboat in to get you,” he said. “It’s summer. A few hours outdoors at night will do you no harm. This time.”

  “What about my trunk?” I said.

  “You will take no more with you than you can fit in this,” he said, handing me a doctor’s bag that Francis Stead had once used, and that still bore his initials, F below one clasp, S below the other.

  “You may, when you get to New York, want to use a different name,” he said. “See what your correspondent thinks.”

  Leave her a note. A mere note to the woman who loved me as if I was her son.

  Dear Aunt Daphne:

  It is not because of anything you said or did that I am leaving. I am going away, but not forever. To where, I cannot tell you. For how long, I do not know. I know now that there is nothing wrong with me. I will make my own fate. If you can bring yourself to believe that, you will not fret too much for me or doubt that we will meet again. “I leave everything to Daphne,” my mother said. She knew you could do what she could not. You made me happy. I wish I could have done the same for you. I hope that when we meet again, I will be a more worthy object of your affection. You will always be the object of mine.

  All my love,

  Devlin

  It was so much less than she deserved that I wondered if it might be better to leave no note at all. But anything I wrote would be so much less than she deserved. What would she think when she read it? Despite my assurances, that she was to blame, that I was leaving because she had asked me if I had thought about doing myself harm. That it was to do myself harm, to do myself harm in some place where she would never know about it, that I was leaving. If the former, she would be partly right. If the latter, she had even less faith in me than I’d imagined. I vowed that I would somehow, as soon as possible, in some way that would not jeopardize my relationship with Dr. Cook, put her mind to rest.

  Holding a lantern in one hand and the doctor’s bag that was once Francis Stead’s in the other, I made my way down the steep path towards the sea. I had been walking downhill for ten minutes when the slope inclined upward again. I was almost literally following in my mother’s footsteps. She would not have taken quite the same route, however, having descended this hill in mid-spring, when there might still have been snow on the ground and the path was hard to find. Nor did anyone know if she had waited until after dark to make her way downhill to the water. I tried not to think about her. I wondered if Uncle Edward had intended this perverse congruity, mother and son “leaving” by the same route. Perhaps there really was no other place that a schooner could wait at anchor unseen from the harbour. I knew of none.

  “The Stead boy is gone.” It would be all over town by the next morning. Gone for good this time. Left a note in which he did little more than bid his poor aunt goodbye. Aunt Daphne, thinking it might not be too late to catch me, would insist on some sort of search, an investigation. Uncle Edward would go along with it, do everything he could to help, then console her when it turned up nothing.

  I topped the second hill and saw the lights of the schooner three hundred feet from shore. I waved my lantern. One of the lights on the schooner swayed back and forth. I descended the hill and saw, just up the rocky shore, another light, that of the rowboat, I presumed.

  There was no beach. The land fell off abruptly on my right and the going was treacherous. As I neared the light, I spotted a dry creek bed and followed it until I was just above the rowboat, which was bobbing on the water, kept in place by an anchor and a massive man, who with both hands was clinging to a knob of rock. “Good thing it’s not rough,” he said. The boat was still at least ten feet below where I was standing.

  “How do I get in?” I said.

  “You turn down that lantern, then hand it to me along with that bag. And then you jump.”

  “I’ll keep the bag,” I said. It contained, along with my personal effects, the portrait photograph of my mother and the collected correspondence of Dr. Cook, the tightly rolled scrolls of paper that for years had been hidden in my bedpost.

  “Suit yourself,” he said. I reached the lantern down to him. When he removed one hand to take it, the bobbing of the boat increased. He put the lantern as far behind him as he could without losing his grip on the rock.

  “All right,” he said. “Jump.”

  I hesitated. I thought of my mother again. They had found her about as far from shore as the boat was now. Even at this time of year, that water would be frigid. The jolting cold, a sudden intake of breath, a great gasp before my head went under. If I was found in the very place where she had been found, how eerily but suitably congruent that would seem.

  I felt a spurt of panic. If I was found washed up against the very rocks my mother had leapt from fifteen years ago, who would doubt that I had died by my own hand? I told myself that I was being absurd. Uncle
Edward was surely incapable of doing such a thing, and surely not that desperate to remove me from his life.

  I jumped. As he caught me, the man somehow kept his balance in the lurching boat, his hands beneath my armpits, all but enclosing them, it felt like, his thumbs all but touching his fingers. Even as he held me in mid-air, I wondered if he was about to lower me over the side and hold me under. How easily he could have done it and not left a mark on me. He put me down slowly, sat me down so that I faced him. He sat, pulled up the anchor, put the oars in the oarlocks. With the first stroke, the boat rose on the water. Soon we were skimming along as if we were being towed by a steamship.

  I could see him clearly now by the light of the lantern. He was wearing a tattered watchcap, through which showed tufts of thick red hair. As unlikely an associate of Uncle Edward’s as could be imagined.

  Uncle Edward. Aunt Daphne.

  I might be leaving her alone with him for life.

  BOOK TWO

  • CHAPTER THIRTEEN •

  My dearest Devlin:

  How dearly I cherish my beloved Brooklyn each day when I look across the river at Manhattan. Or when I am required to make a crossing of the Brooklyn Bridge.

  In every field—science, commerce, engineering, transportation, communications—inventors file for patents every day. It seems that every resident of Manhattan is a specialist in something, a master of some task vital to everyone that he alone can perform.

  The tendency of almost everything is “up.” There is no room left in the sought-after parts of Manhattan for new building sites, so they are tearing down the old buildings, in some cases less than ten years old, and building higher ones. Last year, when a building of twenty storeys was completed, the papers said that no higher building could be made. Now higher ones are being built, and even higher ones being talked about—thirty-, forty-storey buildings that will make the greatest of cathedrals seem like a parish church.

  The streets are crammed with traffic, so other “streets” have been built above them, the el trains that block out what little sun would otherwise find its way down to the streets. The rivers are jammed with ferries, so bridges must be built above the rivers, and bridges built on bridges.

  One walks along a city street as though at the bottom of a canyon. Except that in the canyons of Manhattan, there is not solitude and silence but the pandemonium of Milton’s hell.

  The elevated trains were built with no one in mind but the people who would ride them. It is nothing less than perilous to walk beneath them when every thrust of their engines and every application of their brakes sends showering down on the people below a multitude of red-hot cinders, sparks and coal and a choking storm of soot.

  Occasionally, I travel to the northern part of Manhattan to attend to some charity cases. There you can see what the whole island looked like not so long ago. It is a collection of barely connected shanty towns in which live people who have never seen Manhattan, whose only proof of its existence is the glow from the lights of its buildings, which at night illuminates the southern sky. It is an eerie thing, even for me, to look south from these shanty towns and see that glow, to stand on the ever-thinning wedge of the past and see the present / future in the distance. Not many people have seen, as I have, both segments of Manhattan, the one growing and the other shrinking, soon to disappear.

  Manhattan is like some enormous diorama that illustrates the changes that have taken place in technology in the past one hundred years. If in the shanty towns they are ignorant of the city, those in the city are even more ignorant of them. What lies beyond the northernmost edge of the city most neither know nor care.

  I do not talk to them, the shanties, as they are called, of the great metropolis that daily lurches farther north, though they have heard of it. I think that soon they will be able to hear the thunderous advance of its construction. If I were to tell them that just a few miles away, buildings seem to go up as fast as they come down, that speed is everything, that it is as if fortifications are being erected in advance of some invasion force, they would think me mad.

  Workers swarm like ants on construction sites. They walk, without harnesses or safety ropes, with as much confidence in their balance as cats, on the beams of the iron skeletons on which the walls of the monoliths are draped as tents are draped on poles, hundreds of feet above the ground.

  I once stood in one of these buildings, safely inside one that was finished while across the street another one was being built. I was close enough to the men on the iron beams to see the expressions on their faces. Above, below and all about them there was only space. How incongruous they looked, as if they had not climbed to this height, but had had the earth fall away beneath them, leaving them by sheer chance on these iron beams, horizontal spans that seemed to have no vertical attachments, no anchors, but merely, and who could say for how much longer, hung suspended in mid-air.

  If every man now at work on these buildings in New York fell from his place, the next day these construction sites would look the same, so massive is the force of workers now available. I have heard it said that the Lower East Side of Manhattan is the most densely inhabited portion of the earth.

  I have read that a “train” of ships, a fleet in single file with less than a few hours’ sailing between one ship and the next, stretches every day from America to Europe, every ship filled to capacity, especially in steerage, with what might be just one of the many raw materials this city, this nation, needs to build itself. Passenger ships loaded like barges with their cargo.

  The papers say that more than ten thousand immigrants are admitted to America through Ellis Island every day, and that about one-quarter of them settle down forever in Manhattan. It is no longer the Irish and the Germans who make up the largest groups, but the Jews of eastern Europe. Three thousand new strangers in the city every day—strangers not just to Manhattan, but to America, to the English language, to all customs and traditions but the ones of their fellow countrymen.

  Three thousand. It seems inconceivable until one sees them wandering bewildered and dumbfounded in the streets, pushing trunks and chests and carts that contain everything they own, the rest of their possessions having been forsaken forever in a homeland they will never see again.

  Most of them, upon disembarking from the ferries at the Hudson piers, will never leave the island of Manhattan, not even to cross the river on a ferry or to ride in the most primitive of horse-drawn vehicles across the great arch of the Brooklyn Bridge. They will have that view of Manhattan only once, will see it nearly whole only once.

  I doubt that most of them realize this as they jostle at the rails to see our great, green, torch-bearing lady; to see the buildings they have read about in letters they received from relatives who have already moved here, letters embellished to convince the Old Worlders to come, so lonesome and homesick are the New Worlders in Manhattan.

  But it is impossible, Devlin, once having seen it, to walk away from it and live as if it isn’t there.

  They see it, the newcomers, from afar, the frieze of stone that from that distance is Manhattan—great, massive, a joyous sight after two weeks of confinement on the ships. From that prospect, it does not overwhelm, or if it does, they revel in it, for to be overwhelmed is what they want. Nothing less will convince them that the decision they have made and cannot unmake is the right one.

  It seems to them that the city will always look that way. But then they enter into it and soon forget that the handful of saplings that mark the boundaries of their existence are part of a great forest that one day long ago they saw the shape of from a distance.

  There is something about it all that both exhilarates and frightens me. I am frightened not, I think, by the larger implications of the pace of all this growth, which are still difficult to read, so much as at the possibility of being myself unable to keep up with it, of being left behind. I do not give in to this fear; I fight it, resist it, though to do so takes great effort.

  It may surprise you
that I would say this, given how eager I seem to be to leave all of civilization behind. But it is impossible to look upon it and not feel as though one is being left behind, not feel forsaken. And this is what seems to animate everyone—not just the people who, with their hands, are making the city, but also the people who are paying them to make it, and paying its architects and engineers.

  No one wants to be left behind, but as to what the destination is, no one ever seems to give a thought. The papers speak of the thrill of “new beginnings” as an explanation for the frenzy that one feels here night and day. But all of it feels to me not so much like a new beginning as a last chance.

  For what? Who knows. That is what I see in people’s eyes. One feels that if this frenzy was to increase by just one notch, this race to get ahead would become a race to get away, this pursuit would become a great retreat. What it is that we pursue or might one day flee in panic from, other than nebulous “progress,” I cannot say. And yet I, too, am barely able to resist it, despite having no clue what “it” is.

  I am myself caught up in a race whose real goal sometimes seems as inscrutable as that of the men who make the buildings.

  Explorers set out in noble terms the importance to mankind of reaching the North and South poles as swiftly as possible. But most of them do not labour in the service of mankind.

  I believe that I am one of the few who does. I look at the builders of the city as they run about, and I see not myself, but men like Peary.

  Each man thinks there must be a goal, or why would everyone be running? So he runs too. Each man thinks the man beside him is the one who knows where he is headed, and who therefore must be followed.

  I cannot, each man thinks to himself, I must not, I will not be left behind.

  Yours truly,

  Dr. F.A. Cook

  May 11, 1900

  I read Dr. Cook’s letter several times over on the voyage from Halifax. The last I had received from him, it had reached me in June and had convinced me to put off no longer the flight from home that I had for so long been contemplating.