The Navigator of New York

by Wayne Johnston

  I decided I had no choice but to hold my bag with both arms against my chest just as I had pictured some poor immigrant doing, thereby giving himself no hope of passing inspection.

  I would hold the bag in one hand until I made it past the man at the head of the line, who, as I heard someone in front of me say, was a doctor, though he was not even wearing a token stethoscope.

  “Where are you from, young man?” he said when my turn came. He was bald, his face beet red and sweating. He was impeccably dressed and without a doubt well on his way on that early afternoon to being drunk.

  “St. John’s, Newfoundland,” I said, but he had already shifted his gaze to the person behind me, as if my ability to speak English was proof enough that I carried no contagion.

  Holding my bag high and with both hands, I descended the stairs. Once on the ground, I veered away from a boy who came running at me as if he meant to knock me down, and was by him distracted long enough that I did not see the boy who came at me from the side and jumped half his height into the air to grab the handles of my bag with both hands. When he landed, he almost yanked the bag from my hands. I improved my grip.

  “I can carry it myself,” I said. The boy, as if he had either not heard or not understood a word I said, looked not at me but at the bag, his face contorted with exertion, cheeks puffed, eyes squinted almost shut. I could not believe his strength. Exerting equal force, we began to go around in a circle, four feet scuffing on the cobblestones as though we were playing some sort of game. “You’ll break the bag,” I said, but still the bag was all he stared at. I glanced at the police, half hoping for, half dreading their intervention, wondering what would happen if the bag burst and the odd-looking scrolls spilled out.

  Finally, afraid that if the struggle went on much longer the cops would intervene, I relented, releasing the handles so suddenly that the boy went flying backwards and lost his balance, skidding on his backside on the cobblestones but holding the bag clear of the ground.

  He was still skidding as he turned and gained his feet. He ran off through the crowd towards the carriages, ran at full speed as the bag was all but weightless. I ran after him, trying to keep sight of him through the crowd, terrified that I might mistake some other boy for him and never see the scrolls again. I brushed up against scores of people and was glad that, on the advice of the redhead, I had moved my money from my wallet to the pockets of my slacks. Leg pockets were harder to pick, he said, and assured me that in New York, pickpockets were everywhere. “Two hundred in cash,” he said, shaking his head as he watched me transfer it from my wallet to my pocket. I had seen American money before but had never held it in my hand. “Put some in each pocket,” he said, “and once you’re squared away, put it in a bank or you won’t have it very long.”

  I saw the boy jump onto the sideboard of a hansom cab. I grabbed my bag from him just as he held out his hand to receive the penny the driver was extending to him between thumb and forefinger. The driver, a beefy fellow with an ill-fitting bowler and a square moustache, closed his fist around the coin and looked at me.

  “Do you want a cab or not, sir?” he said in what I took to be an Irish accent. I looked at the boy, whose eyes were glued on the driver’s fist, which held the penny he had earned but might not get, still as oblivious to me as when we had struggled for the bag.

  “Yes,” I said, though I had planned, unladen as I was, to walk, exactly where I wasn’t sure. The driver dropped the penny. The boy was already in mid-stride when the penny hit his hand. He bolted back into the crowd towards the ship. I asked the driver to take me to some moderately priced hotel.

  That night, I lay above the blankets in my sweltering room. I had opened both windows but could not sleep because of the noise, which even at that hour showed no sign of dying down.

  How could the air, in a city so close to a river and the sea, be so still, I wondered. I longed for a breeze as the thirsty in the desert long for water. The curtains hung motionless. It had never been as warm indoors in St. John’s as it was outdoors in Manhattan at that moment.

  When I closed my eyes, I saw the face of the boy who had fought me for the bag, and whom I doubted I would ever see again, though I was sure I would recognize him if a year from now I passed him in the street. A child as old as the city itself, he might have been; a Manhattan artifact on whom my existence had in no way registered. I wondered if he had been able to speak English.

  I felt vaguely, obscurely, disappointed by what had seemed certain, this time yesterday, to be one of the great days of my life. What had I expected? Some feeling of momentousness, I supposed, at my first sight of the city in which I was conceived; perhaps even a sense of homecoming, of returning to the place where I began. It had often struck me, when I looked at photographs or postcards of Manhattan, that I was looking at the place of my conception. I suppose I had thought that what I felt when I saw these images of Manhattan I would feel with a thousand times the force when I saw the place for real. But it had not been so on the ship, nor as I drove in the hansom cab through the teeming streets, and I was not sure why.

  All I could think was that this was the city where Francis Stead had gone to live when he could no longer stand to come back home and be reminded by the sight of me that he was not my father. It was not Brooklyn, not the city where my real father lived between one expedition and the next. But not even the sight of that city had moved me as I thought it would.

  I wondered if each time he looked across the river at Manhattan, Dr. Cook was reminded of me, of the day he crossed over on the ferry and at that party met my mother. Of all the lofty thoughts that might come to mind as, from Brooklyn, one watched the sunlight sink lower on the buildings of Manhattan, could Dr. Cook’s have been “There, over there, is where my son was conceived”? Did he think of that day each time he crossed the Brooklyn Bridge into Manhattan?

  I thought of Aunt Daphne and realized instantly that it was guilt that was smothering the exhilaration I ought to have been feeling—guilt at having deserted her the way I had, even more abruptly than Francis Stead had deserted my mother and me. This was my fourth night away from home, counting the night I left. I doubted she had slept for more than minutes at a time since finding the note I had left for her in the middle of my bed. She was alone again in that house with Uncle Edward, as she had not been for fourteen years. “Can you imagine what it was like when there were just the two of us?” she had joked when she told me the rhyme “Their plates wiped clean they sit and wait / While at the trough he ruminates.”

  Her plate wiped clean she sits and waits. She had never said it out loud until she said it to me, I suspected.

  Here I was in Manhattan and all I could think about was Newfoundland.

  The next morning I vowed to make myself known to Dr. Cook that very day. The bellhop had told me when I checked in that I could take the el train across the Brooklyn Bridge.

  I got out of bed and was headed for the bathroom when I saw an envelope on the floor just inches from the door. A message of some kind from the hotel, I presumed.

  I picked it up. It was sealed, with nothing written on it, not even my name. I opened it and withdrew a single folded sheet of paper. Even before I unfolded it and saw the handwriting, I knew that Dr. Cook had somehow found me first.

  My dearest Devlin:

  Welcome to New York! I have known for some time that you were coming. My new wife, Marie, will be out all day. I have dispatched the servants on various pretexts and errands that I hope will keep them occupied all afternoon. If you come to my house at two-thirty, we will have a few hours alone before Marie gets back. I will explain everything when we meet. I have thought of an arrangement that I believe will work.

  There was no closing salutation or signature.

  Uncle Edward, despite his promise, had to have told him I was coming. Dr. Cook, or someone acting on his behalf, had to have been there when my ship arrived and followed me to this hotel.

  How long had the envelope been lying
there? All night? Slipped soundlessly under the door while I was lying on the blankets, too hot to sleep? Or since sometime after sun-up?

  I felt both cheated and relieved. Cheated out of my chance to, however discreetly, surprise him, drop from out of nowhere into his life as he had dropped into mine. Relieved because I had, as yet, been able to think of no way of discreetly surprising him. I had dreaded making myself known to him so clumsily that he would form an unfavourable first impression of me, or that I would so startle him that he would be loath to see me again.

  It was not two years since the death of Anna Forbes. He had not mentioned in his letters that he was engaged again to be married. He had not mentioned Marie at all. I wondered why.

  “I have thought of an arrangement that I believe will work.” Another arrangement of his devising. What would it be this time? More letters, only now he would allow me to reply? I had not come to New York merely to write to him.

  Two-thirty. It was now eight o’clock. According to the bellhop, I could make it to Bushwick and Willoughby in ninety minutes, even less depending on the time of day I travelled. I could still surprise him, show up early when the servants, who might not know that I was coming, were still there. But he might not be there. Or he might be in his surgery, available only to those who had appointments. Or he might be somewhere else.

  I could simply ignore his note and send him one asking him to meet me somewhere. But given that he had gone to such great lengths to contact me before I contacted him, I doubted that he would relent and do things my way. I might, if I sent him a note, wait in vain for a second one from him.

  I left the hotel and went to a cheap restaurant across the street for breakfast. On the wall beside my table was a poster advertising the “soon-to-be-completed subway,” the tunnels for which were now being dug. The poster showed illustrations of the inside of the subway cars. They looked like furnished tombs and the stations like the shafts of horizontal mines.

  As I ate, I read a morning paper that was full of predictions, inventions and rumours of inventions. The imminent triumph of the “horseless carriage,” the obsolescence of horse-drawn vehicles. The day when every street of Manhattan would lead to a bridge and the ferry-filled East River would be reserved for pleasure boats. The filing of patents, one for a central cooling mechanism that would counter the heat of summer the way radiation did the cold of winter. I dearly hoped for its success. The subway would make most surface transit superfluous. One day soon, work would begin on the subway to Brooklyn. Trains would run on tracks laid in tunnels that were dug so deep beneath the riverbed that not a drop of water would make it through.

  Between the restaurant and the el train station, I saw hundreds of signs advertising jobs. Most of them read: “If you can read this, the job is yours.” I could easily get a job if I had to.

  I climbed a covered, winding staircase with landings every half-dozen steps on which older people rested, out of breath. There was a waiting room, but it was empty, everyone having proceeded outside to the covered platform, for the train was coming.

  The el wound its way among buildings whose tops I could not see no matter how low I slumped down in my seat. The el. It seemed ironically named. It could not have been much more than forty feet above the ground.

  From the el train I could see the Brooklyn Bridge, which we were due to reach in fifteen minutes. Traffic of all kinds on the bridge was ceaseless in both directions, as if the two boroughs were exchanging populations.

  The train began to go upgrade, and soon the first cables of the bridge reared up outside the window, though land was still beneath us, the distant river barely visible at this angle through the struts and web of cables.

  The valise, which now contained nothing but the portrait of my mother and Dr. Cook’s letters, including the one I found that morning, was on my lap. I had removed the rest of my scant belongings and left them in my room, unable to bring myself to leave the letters, let them out of my possession, or to think of a foolproof hiding place.

  Again I was struck by the oddness of my mission. For a second, as though from some omniscient’s point of view, I saw myself: a young man just arrived from Newfoundland, bound for Brooklyn from Manhattan, riding the el train across the Brooklyn Bridge, propping on his lap a leather valise in which lay scrolled the letters of a Dr. Cook, who claimed to be his father—letters written not in the hand of Dr. Cook, but in that of the person to whom they were addressed, the young man himself, as if he were mad and the whole thing a concoction of which the climax, not the resolution but the dissolution, was fast approaching.

  I was glad I had the portrait and the letters, glad I would not have to confront Dr. Cook empty-handed. They seemed like credentials of some kind. They made up a partial autobiography of Dr. Cook, an autobiography addressed to me. I imagined opening the bag, holding it out so he could see the heap of scrolls inside. And the picture of my mother.

  It was probable that he did not have a picture of her. How accurately, after all this time, did he recall her face? I would take out the photograph and show it to him, give it to him, tell him he could keep it. I had thought of the moment many times since I left St. John’s. What more appropriate gift could I give him on the occasion of meeting him than a picture of my mother?

  Countless levels of conveyance spanned the river to join the downtowns of Brooklyn and Manhattan. I knew that we were travelling beneath a wooden walkway, though I could not see it from the train, and that beneath us ran cable cars and streetcars, and below or beside them horse-drawn vehicles and motor cars, the latter spooking the horses with whom they contended for space.

  Farther below, steamers, ferries, barges drawn by tugboats, expensive sloops and smaller vessels made their way across the river. Below the water and, inconceivably, below the riverbed would someday run the subway.

  Dr. Cook had crossed that stretch of water to Manhattan in a ferry one afternoon more than twenty years ago. Because of that, one of his thousands of childhood journeys to Manhattan, I was now going the other way, across the river on the bridge to Brooklyn to see him face to face at last.

  I tried to imagine him setting out that day for Manhattan: a boy too lightly dressed for a ferry crossing of the river so soon after winter, teeth chattering, shivering, hugging himself for warmth; a boy who has been working in Brooklyn with his brothers since the sun came up, and whose day, had it ended when theirs did, would still have been too long. He has been hired to “help out” at a party in Manhattan, and what that means he has no idea. All he has is an address that he will walk to if he can find it from the dock. He has made up some story for his mother, who would not approve of his earning money in this fashion, or of his going to Manhattan for any reason by himself.

  He looks up as the ferry moves into the shadow of the uncompleted bridge. The shadow bridge, because of the angle of the sun, is bigger than the real one, and in the shadow, it is even colder. The boy looks at the shadow shape, in which everything is magnified to twice its size, then back up at the bridge again.

  His mother, who has come to dread the completion of the bridge, says it will mean the end of Brooklyn as they know it.

  They have been building this bridge since before he was born. His world has always been one in which “the bridge” was being built. It seems in the nature of bridges to be not quite finished. Though it looks to him like the bridge is finished. The last piece of the span will soon be put in place. The braided steel-and-iron cables thicker than a man’s body hang taut from the towers and the columns overhead.

  The boy, whose glance includes that part of the bridge from which his son will look down at the water twenty years from now, feels no premonition, not of what is to happen in twenty years, nor of what is to happen in two hours. They are just docking at the pier when, up on the bridge, a series of electric arc lights come on all at once. Their light never flickers, not like the light from lamps that run on gas or kerosene. Flameless, unflickering, unnatural light.

  Their coming on
has for months been a signal to the people of both cities that the day is nearly over. They stay lit long after dark, for the push to complete the bridge is on.

  They are still lit when he goes back to Brooklyn after midnight. By then, the licensed ferries have stopped, but he catches a ride for three times the legal fare from a man who runs an after-hours tug across the river, a tug that arrives and leaves at no appointed time. When the number of stranded has grown to the point where he deems a crossing to be worth his while, the tug driver collects his fares and sets out for the other shore. Until then, the boy waits on board, shivering, his mind blank with wonder as he stares down the river at the still-blazing arc lights on the bridge …

  I roused myself from this revery. A lattice of shadow cast by the cables of the bridge lay over everything. It was coming on to noon, and the sun was beating down so fiercely that passengers closed their eyes as if in prayer and fanned themselves.

  At the apex of the bridge, all I could see was a blinding sheen of sunlight from the water. And then the Brooklyn tower of the bridge came into view. I remembered Dr. Cook writing that the great arch had seemed to him like a sculpture, nearing the completion of which someone had by accident discovered that it could also be a bridge.

  In each of the towers, there were two semi-ovals, pointed Gothic arches like massive church windows from which the glass had been removed. Rounded Roman arches had been proposed, but they were rejected in favour of the Gothic to appease the clergy, who were affronted by the cathedral-dwarfing bridge.

  One arch admitted through the tower traffic that was headed east, the other traffic that was headed west.

  Heading east, it was not until we passed through the tower that I felt I had left Manhattan and was truly on the bridge. It would not be until I passed through the semi-oval of the Brooklyn tower that I felt I was in Brooklyn. Between the towers, I felt a welcome sense of placelessness, a respite from the city. There was, suddenly, so much space.