The Navigator of New York

by Wayne Johnston

  He said he saw it in the faces of the people we passed, and felt it, just barely, beneath all the optimism and excitement. He believed that each time they heard of some new invention, some new and better way of doing things, the people of this city felt a little foolish. Or rather, some of the people felt this way, those whom one might call the marks of this society.

  “Do you know who the marks are?” he said.

  “No,” I said.

  Not the rich, he said; not the entrepreneurs, or the inventors, or the poor, who built the city with their hands, or the destitute.

  “Then who?” I said.

  “You and me,” he said. “The middle mass of men.” That portion of society on whom, on whose gullibility and guilelessness, all of the above relied for their survival. We were the ones the new city was intended to impress. Did I think it was intended to impress the street arabs or the unseen occupants of tenements that were home to more people than every settlement in Newfoundland except St. John’s? Did I think I would ever live to see a man like Jacob Astor gaping at the Brooklyn Bridge? No, the city was intended to captivate us, the ones who, it was hoped, would partake of things we played no part in making, things that, although we could afford them, were beyond our understanding and control.

  “Yes, people like me,” he said. “At least, people of my station before I fell in love with someone who happened to be rich.”

  I had only the faintest notion of what he meant, and none at all of why he was getting so worked up.

  He pointed out men wearing Homburg hats, men with walking sticks who watched as steam shovels lurched about in excavation sites, gawked in befuddlement at the demolition of a building twice their age of whose imminent demise they appeared to have known nothing until this very moment. This middle class of men, Dr. Cook said, was an invention more profound than all the others put together.

  We followed the eastern edge of Central Park, went west for a few blocks, then south until once again the streets were jammed with people and conveyances.

  “The noise seems to be part of what drives the city,” he said. “As does the lack of light and space and air. Perhaps it has been determined that for New York to grow at its present pace, exactly these conditions must prevail.”

  Most streetcar lines and el trains were electrified. Overhead there were so many wires it was as though a loosely woven fragment had been draped above the city. “But at least,” he said, “soot and cinders do not rain down from above as they did when Amelia was here.”

  At this mention of my mother, I asked him if the house where he had met her was still standing.

  “Almost nothing from twenty years ago is still standing,” he said.

  After a long interval of silence, he added, “I believe it is still there. It’s been more than fifteen years since I went by it. I haven’t even seen it from the outside since the last time I waitered there. The doctors who once owned it moved out long ago. I’ve gone out of my way to avoid them and their house. I don’t know who lives there now.”

  “Will you take me there?” I said.

  “If you would like to see it, you will have to go alone. I will tell you where it is, but I could not bear to go with you.”

  “I just want to see it,” I said. “I don’t want to go inside. I don’t see why you can’t go with me.”

  “I don’t know why you want me to.”

  “It will seem less like a secret then, our being related. I know it has to be one, but not between us. It’s like your wanting me to call you Dr. Cook even when there’s no one else around.”

  “Going by that house would stir up painful memories for me. Shameful ones.”

  “Then you must have those memories when you look at me.”

  “It’s not the same, Devlin.”

  “It feels the same to me. Your not wanting to go makes me feel ashamed.”

  “The more we talk about this in private, the harder it will be to pretend in front of other people.”

  “Francis Stead and my mother didn’t die because of you. All that happened because of you was me.”

  “I’m sorry. I can’t go with you. I will give you the address; you can go there in a cab and meet me—”

  “No,” I said. “I’m tired of sneaking about all the time. If, someday, you change your mind, we’ll go together.”

  He said nothing.

  On we drove. After a while, I noticed that we were headed for the bridge. The streets were nowhere near as crowded as before. The sky above Brooklyn was no longer blue. The light was fading fast.

  “Not everything I wrote to you in my letters is true,” he said, staring straight ahead, as expressionless as if I were a paying passenger.

  I felt a spurt of panic. What was I about to hear? Anything seemed possible, here in this city where being unable to speak English would not have made me feel more out of place than I felt already. What a fool I was to think I could simply enlist in a history that wasn’t mine. His history, this city’s, this country’s—none of them was mine.

  “What do you mean?” I said, expecting him to reveal nothing less than that, after all, he was not my father; that all my worst fears were justified; that the notion that I was his son was a fiction that for him served some inscrutable purpose that, now that I had stepped out of my life and into his, he was about to own up to to be rid of me. I was not who I thought I was, not his son but Francis Stead’s after all, back to being Francis Stead’s. I broke into a sweat and felt so weak he had to take my arm to keep me from pitching from the cab.

  “I cannot tell you here,” he said, half shouting, half whispering. “I thought that driving about the city would divert me from the urge to tell you. Perhaps I should have gone out driving by myself.”

  I have no proof, I told myself. He has no proof. No proof is possible. I took the word of a man I had never met. Who is he, after all? What, besides what he has told me, do I know about him? I had been unable to resist those letters because I wanted to believe they were true. How circumscribed the world had seemed, how predictable the future, before the first one came.

  “Dr. Cook—”

  “We will meet in the Dakota, and I will tell you there.”

  • CHAPTER FIFTEEN •

  WE MET IN THE DRAWING ROOM AFTER HE WENT TO THE COOKS’ to tell his wife that he and I had business to discuss. The largest room in the Dakota, it was the one in which we could sit farthest from the doors and walls, keeping to a minimum the chance that the sound of our voices might carry through them.

  The room, the never-lived-in room that even with us in it still seemed unoccupied, served only to increase my sense of not belonging, of having made some terrible, irreversible mistake. Going back to Newfoundland would not reverse it. Nothing would. I had started down a path that I could not bear to double back from, a path that even if only in my mind I would follow to the end. Back home—knowing that what I had been looking forward to for years would never happen, that the person I thought I was had never been—I might well end up like my mother. And Francis Stead. Francis Stead’s son after all. Only in dreams had I ever felt such dread.

  “Are you my father?” I whispered.

  “Of course,” he said, looking startled, then nervously about. “Of course I am. I didn’t mean to make you think otherwise. I would never mislead you about that. It is something else entirely. Please, Devlin, you must not feel that you have anything to fear from me.”

  I did not want him to see how relieved I was, how terrified I had been. It might have made him doubt my emotional stability. Even once reassured, I doubted it myself. I realized that I had let myself become dangerously dependent on him, on his approval, on meeting his expectations and on him meeting mine, on the notion that we shared some tandem destiny. No one person should be so relied upon, let alone one whose nature was so elusive.

  We sat on either side of the fire, the reflection of which flickered in the mirror above the mantelpiece and on the ornate gilded ceiling. He insisted on a fire, though it wa
s warm outside, telling me that at night this room was always cold. We turned on no lights, though even in the darkness I could see the chandelier. Unlit but faintly luminous, the chains invisible that attached it to the ceiling, it seemed to hang suspended in the air.

  We did not face the fire. He sat on a sofa from which he could see both doors. I did not share the sofa with him but drew up a chair beside it.

  “Tell me,” he said. “What do you think you will do after I am gone? After those who would be most hurt by the truth are gone?”

  “Some of them are gone already,” I said. “My mother. Francis Stead.”

  “Are you concerned with how people will remember them? Remember me, my wife, my other children? Do you care how people will remember you?”

  “I will never tell anyone you are my father,” I said. “No one else will ever know. You must not believe that you have anything to fear from me. You are my father.” My father. Father. At last I had said it. And he had winced at the word, at my having broken my pledge never to call him anything but Dr. Cook. Would he never do as much for me and say I was his son? He had often used the words father and son in his letters.

  “I believe you,” he said. “If people were other than they are, no one would have cause to fear the truth. But people, if they knew this truth, would never understand it.

  “I have weighed telling you against not telling you, vacillating back and forth. I have, since your arrival, been favouring the former. I hope I have chosen correctly.

  “Francis Stead at one time loved your mother very much. More, perhaps, than I ever did.”

  “He might have loved her,” I said. “But he must have hated me.”

  “I knew him for the length of the North Greenland expedition. Eighteen months. Has anyone told you about him, what he was like?”

  “No one ever spoke about him unless they had to,” I said.

  “I will tell you first about Francis Stead. He had no idea what motivated people, good or bad; no idea how others saw him. He did not think of himself as having a transparent nature. He assumed that he was as inscrutable to others as they were to him.

  “He was always telling me things about himself that he thought I never would have guessed. He would make these self-disclosures in such earnestness, almost gravely, as if it were a relief to him that finally someone else knew of this shortcoming that for years had been his shameful secret.

  “ ‘I’m not very good at conversation,’ he said once, as if I had never seen him attempt conversation.

  “I could never bring myself to tell him that the things he was forever confessing to were common knowledge. I am making him sound almost child-like, which in a way he was. But there was another side to him. If he saw or suspected that people were having fun at his expense, he got very angry, not at them, but at himself for having done or said something—he usually had no idea what it was—to make himself look foolish.

  “People laughed at him, but it was usually good-natured laughter. His ‘story’ was partly known. We had heard that he had left his wife and child to take up exploration, and that in his absence, his wife had died, though the circumstances of her death were not known. We all assumed she had died from some illness. I had no idea then who this wife and child were, who he was. Amelia had only ever called him ‘my fiancé.’ Lily had never spoken of him.

  “He was well liked among explorers, the only people, he said, who could understand why he had sacrificed so much. But explorers laughed at him, too—at his grandiose ambitions, his ever-changing goals, which he talked about as if he had accomplished them already. One day it was the North Pole. The next day the South Pole. The next day the summit of the highest mountain in the world.

  “He might have prospered had he known his place, had he understood that he was not cut out for greatness. But to hear him talk, great men already included him in their number. People could not help laughing at him.

  “ ‘Why am I so often laughed at?’ he said on the North Greenland expedition.

  “ ‘You’re not,’ I said.

  “ ‘Damn it,’ he said. ‘I’m just so … why can’t I …’He would never finish such sentences, just go about kicking things, to everyone’s further amusement.

  “He told me he felt that he was the ‘mascot’ of the expedition. He might have become the mascot by random choice for all the sense it made to him.

  “It was clear, from the start of the expedition, that Peary had hired him so he could bully him about. Francis, who believed Peary to be his friend, indulged his every whim.

  “During the early stages of the expedition, I felt sorry for him because of the way Peary treated him, having him perform the most menial tasks. It was as if Peary wanted to see if there was anything that Francis would not stoop to doing. Francis, a doctor, disposed of waste, swept the floor of Peary’s quarters, filled in when the cook was sick. It was said, among the crew and the paying passengers of the Kite, that there were not two doctors and one manservant on board, but two manservants and one doctor.

  “But Francis gradually changed. By the time of the land march back to southern Greenland, and especially by the time we returned to McCormick Bay, he was openly defiant of Peary. He stared at Peary while Peary was preoccupied with other things. He looked as though he meant to confront him for treating him so poorly, though Peary was by this time ignoring Francis as much as he could. Sometimes, I would look up to see Francis staring at me, wearing the same expression as when he stared at Peary. What he had against me—except that, from the start, Peary had preferred my medical advice to his—I had no idea.

  “Francis became more and more of a nuisance to Peary. The pieces that appeared about him in the papers after his death were largely true. He sometimes left the ship or Redcliffe House dressed as though for a walk in Prospect Park. More than once, he shed all his clothing and went swimming in the frigid water, claiming he was insensitive to its effects. He let his hair grow long and kept himself clean-shaven in imitation of the Eskimos.

  “He told Peary he would not be returning with the rest of the expedition come the spring but would stay behind to live with the Eskimos, whose ways he preferred. Peary was furious, even though Francis was clearly no threat to reach the pole or even a farthest north.

  “The rest of us told Peary that Francis was either ‘going Native,’ as many explorers have done, or else suffering from what the Eskimos call piblocto, a form of Arctic madness that would pass. I told Peary that it was best to indulge Francis until he was himself again, but Peary denounced his every utterance and action, which only made Francis worse.

  “When the polar night set in, it became his habit to go outside alone to a tolt of rock. He would sit on the side that faced away from Redcliffe House, in the lee of the wind and out of sight. There was a kind of bench in it, a ledge that he sat on, though it was only a foot off the ground, so he had to extend his legs straight out to keep from squatting. I went out there once or twice myself when he was elsewhere. On the rock and the snow in front of it there were cigar butts and little mounds of half-burnt pipe tobacco.

  “It was easy to picture him there in the darkness, bundled in furs, puffing on his pipes and his cigars, brooding on the terms of his existence, dreaming of the day when he would be acknowledged as a great explorer. Perhaps he believed that because he understood the effects that prolonged darkness could have on the mind and body, he was immune to them.

  “We all, to some degree, shunned the company of others. The long night made morbid introspection irresistible. But he was fooled by the gloom into thinking that to socialize would be a waste of precious energy. Each day, as he left the house, he told us he was going outside to pursue his own strategy for survival. Everything we did he regarded as a symptom, evidence of some delusion that might be contagious.

  “Soon he was finding fault with everything I prescribed for the other members of the expedition. In their debilitated states, they didn’t know which of us they should listen to. He said that Peary was getting too
much exercise, and that it was best that Mrs. Peary get none at all (the best for women being always opposite to what was best for men). He said that Verhoeff was reading too much. Gibson was getting too much sleep, Henson not enough. We should eat cooked canned meat, not raw fresh meat. A day later, though no one but me seemed to notice, he was saying just the opposite, or had shuffled his criticisms so that now it was Verhoeff’s regimen of sleep and Mrs. Peary’s reading habits that he found fault with.

  “I had to overrule him constantly. The others, who when healthy would not have taken him seriously, were filled with doubt and dread because of this disagreement between the two medical officers. They argued as much with me as they did with him—even Peary, who when I warned him against adding more canned meat to his diet told me that Dr. Stead had said that by increasing his intake of canned meat, he would improve his circulation.

  “I would have suspected Francis of trying to sabotage the expedition with bad medical advice except that he was so nearly deranged, so agitated, that I doubted he was capable of devising any sort of plan and sticking to it, even one as pointlessly sinister as that.

  “Every morning our rounds would end in an argument, the two of us shouting at each other in front of our disconcerted patients until at last he would storm off, leaving Redcliffe House and not returning for hours. I had to keep the most credulous or most debilitated of the crew from going outside with him.

  “When asked for advice upon his return, he would reply that he was sure that Dr. Cook’s was just as good, or that people who would not listen to him in the morning ought not to seek advice from him at night.