The Navigator of New York

by Wayne Johnston

  “Someone must have told him that with my brothers I ran a small milk business. Peary was himself born on a modest farm in Maine, though he has never liked to be reminded of it. He looked down at both of us and smiled. He walked past us down the hallway.

  “We saw Peary on one other occasion before your mother left Manhattan. Your mother and I, with Lily between us, were strolling through Central Park when we saw him walking towards us arm in arm with a woman whom I took to be his mother. Your mother and I exchanged a smile, the kind people exchange when they know they are thinking exactly the same thing. Here was the woman whom May Kilby’s friend had said was so glad to ‘have her Bertie back.’ How apt her pet name for her son seemed as they came towards us, the two of them solemn-faced, as if it was a Peary family characteristic to smile only when not to do so would seem rude. Peary stared hard at us, as if he had both recognized us and seen and guessed the meaning of the smile we exchanged. I thought he looked almost shocked to see me in your mother’s company. His suggestive remark about having found her in the arms of a milkboy from Brooklyn must have been just an insult in which he could not conceive of there being any truth.

  “Peary averted his eyes, and no one spoke as he and his mother went by.

  “It was years after this, Francis Stead said, that he moved from St. John’s to Brooklyn, where he met and, inasmuch as it was possible for anyone to do so, befriended Peary. Peary did not know of the connection between Francis Stead and the woman who had mocked him at the party years ago. At some point, Francis told Peary that he had a wife and son back home in St. John’s. He told him that the child was not his, and that he did not know whose it was, though he believed that the father lived somewhere in New York. He repeated to Peary Amelia’s story of having been taken advantage of while drunk, but he said that he did not believe it. When he told Peary his wife’s first name and maiden name, Peary recognized it. This woman, speaking in defence of me, had mocked him, slighted him, and Peary never forgot or forgave such things. He likewise remembered my name, the name of the boy whose abject wretchedness he saw as having been the cause of his embarrassment. He remembered us both, remembered seeing us in Central Park and the smile that passed between us when we saw him with his mother. He told Francis what he knew.

  “ ‘My dear Stead,’ Peary concluded, ‘there is no mystery here. The father of the boy your wife is passing off to all the world as your son is Dr. Frederick Cook. It is an open secret, Stead, what happened between Cook and your wife after they met at that drunken party in Manhattan. There are many who know that that boy back home is not your son. Even in St. John’s there are some who know it. Some who know that you are not his father. These people have been laughing at you behind your back for years. I tell you this as a friend who cannot stand to see you made a fool of any longer. I cannot prove what I have told you of Dr. Cook, of course, and I shall deny having told you any of this story should you repeat a word of it.’

  “ ‘Perhaps now,’ Francis said to me, ‘you understand why Peary treats me as he does. Otherwise friendless when I met him, I worshipped Peary. In public, though he did not reveal my secret, he would make fun of me, make jokes at my expense—ribald jokes that had a private meaning for him and me—order me about, have me run errands for him and for others. I became known as Peary’s whipping boy, and I took it all without complaint.’ “

  Dr. Cook looked at me. “Why, you may wonder, did Peary, having told Francis about me, appoint both of us to his expedition? In Peary’s estimation, Francis was an ineffectual cuckold who would never find the nerve to exact revenge on anyone who did him wrong. As for me, when I applied for the position of medical officer on the North Greenland expedition—having set aside my own distaste for Peary in order to gain some experience in polar exploration under a man I knew I could learn much from—and Peary accepted my application, I assumed that he, too, had put aside, for the good of the expedition, whatever animosity he still harboured against me. We did not mention our first meeting. I think Peary thought that to put Francis and me together on the same expedition would be amusing. That it would be amusing to watch Francis trying to summon up the courage to confront me. He might have believed that, at most, Francis would publicly accuse me of having fathered a child by his wife, and thereby humiliate me and possibly ruin my reputation. I’m sure he did not think Francis would act in any way that would jeopardize the expedition. Peary has never been a good judge of character.

  “But the Francis Stead who let himself be abused by Peary was not the same man who related his story to me on that bench of rock. Upon revealing that he knew me to be the man with whom his wife had betrayed him, he looked at me with undisguised contempt. I tried to keep my composure.

  “ ‘I did meet your wife, Dr. Stead,’ I said. ‘But ours was but a casual acquaintanceship. I was better acquainted with her cousin Lily.’

  “ ‘Cook,’ he said, ‘I joined this expedition with the intention of killing you. Many times I have had the opportunity, not only to do it, but to do it without detection. Being fellow medical officers, we have often been out of sight of the others, as we are now, sometimes in places where one missed step would mean the end. All I need have done was push you into some crevasse, then report to the others that there had been an accident. But I have been unable to bring myself to do it. My wife, some years after I left her, took her life. She is gone. I hold you responsible for that. Yet for some reason, I cannot bring myself to kill you. It seems, after all, that it was merely to do this that I signed on with the expedition: to take you aside and tell you everything. I no longer have any doubts that you are the father of my wife’s son. I know for certain now. And it would seem that knowing is enough.’

  “You must remember, Devlin, that I had just heard for the first time that Amelia was dead, and heard for the first time the manner of her death. Perhaps the pain he saw in my eyes was his revenge.

  “His voice was very calm, very deliberate. I should have known that he had but one thing left to do.

  “Hearing from him that at one time his intention had been to kill me set me trembling. His assurance that he had changed his mind was not of much comfort to me. That he would talk so openly about such things was an indication of how quickly he could change his mind again. I didn’t know what I should do, didn’t know exactly how far away the others were.

  “He seemed not to have a weapon on his person, but in each of our doctor’s kits there was a set of scalpels. He saw me look at the kits, which lay side by side on the ground between us, two burlap bundles tied with rope.

  “ ‘Don’t worry,’ he said, smiling as if he had been dwelling for years on such things as now occupied my mind. ‘If you promise to keep my secret, I will promise to keep yours.’ He took my silence as agreement. And that, indeed, was what it was.

  “He left the tolt of rock and went back to Redcliffe House. That night, he walked away from the house and was never seen again.

  “It was because of my supposed closeness with Francis Stead that Peary had me write that report that appeared in the papers.

  “When I got back to Brooklyn, I contacted the registry of births and deaths in St. John’s. They confirmed for me that Amelia Stead had died, though the cause of death was officially listed as accidental drowning.”

  Dr. Cook sighed as though his story was finished. But surely it could not be. Surely something more than this had been on his mind since my arrival in Brooklyn. It was a different version of events than he had set forth in his letters. But surely this was not what he had been referring to hours ago, when, his voice quavering with dread, he said that he had withheld things from me, things he could not bear to disclose except in private.

  “I don’t understand,” I said. “You need not have been afraid—”

  “I received one letter more from your mother after she returned to Newfoundland from New York than I admitted to,” he said.

  He reached into the pocket of his vest and withdrew a yellowed piece of paper, unfolded it an
d, hands suddenly trembling, extended it to me. It read:

  My dearest:

  I am with child, but my fiancé is not its father. Of these two things, I can assure you. All else seems uncertain, except my love for you. If you still wish to marry me, you have but to say so and I will meet you in New York. As I must have an answer from you soon, send me a telegram saying simply yes or no and sign it “Lily.” If you say no, or if I do not hear from you within a week, I will not write to you again. Nor could I bear it if, at some time in the future, you wrote to me. Please do not feel that you have anything to fear from me. I will speak your name to no one.

  All my love,

  Amelia

  When I looked up from reading the letter, I saw that he had covered his face with his hands.

  “So it was not her who ended it,” I said. “It was you.”

  “Yes,” he said. “ ‘I will speak your name to no one.’ I knew that she meant it, that she would keep her word no matter what. That my reputation, or my hopes to one day have one at least, would remain secure. She was willing to forsake almost everything so that she and I, and you, could be together. But I was not. And it did not take me a week to make up my mind. I did not even have the courage to send her a telegram containing that one word. No. I did not even tell her no, Devlin. I simply moved on as if we had never met, leaving her with no choice but to do the same. You cannot know how ashamed I am of what I did. How I regret it.

  “I convinced myself that no good would come to anyone if I said yes, that my treachery was justified. What sort of life, I asked myself, will the two of us and our child have if I say yes, if I lose my reputation and she loses hers, if she marries a man without prospects, if our child is raised in poverty and shame? I had ambitions, you see. I had told her about them, about growing up poor in Brooklyn, across the river from Manhattan, in tantalizing proximity to it. Yet I might as well have been a million miles from it, so unlikely had it seemed that there would ever be a place in it for me. As a young man, I was determined to make such a place for myself, to succeed on a grand scale at something, anything, just so long as I rose to a higher station in life than most men. I told myself that her fiancé would break off their engagement, that the pregnancy would be kept secret and the baby delivered and raised elsewhere, given up to someone else, with both mother and father standing a reasonable chance of happiness.

  “All this driving around that we’ve been doing—I’ve been remembering your mother, the endless drives we took with Lily just so we could be together. I’ve been taking you to all the places I took her. Most of them look nothing now like they did back then, but still they remind me of her, as you do. I’ve half been expecting to see her on some street or coming towards me in another cab with my younger self beside her.

  “I’ve felt her everywhere since you arrived. It’s never been like this before, not even when I spent time in Manhattan just after I received her letter, brooding, feeling sorry for myself in spite of what I’d done.

  “Amelia. Her name is on my lips halfway across the bridge, and after that … it might as well be written everywhere, I hear it so often in my mind.

  “This is what I gave her up for, I’ve been telling myself. So as not to lose my chance at this. So as not to be excluded from this, which now seems like nothing next to her.”

  I could not believe what I had heard.

  “When Libby Forbes died in childbirth,” he said, “and our baby girl soon after, I thought this was a judgment on all of us for my betrayal of your mother and her child. Libby and the baby died, but I was spared. Amelia and Francis died, but I was spared. My fiancée, Libby’s sister, Anna, died, but I was spared. Over and over, I was spared, allowed to survive. It seemed that my punishment was to bring misfortune down upon the ones I loved while being spared from it myself.

  “I think that when your mother wrote me that last letter, she knew she would never hear from me again. It reads like a pardon for what I was about to do.

  “I could not bring myself in my letters to tell you that I had betrayed her, or that I was, even more directly than I had let on, the cause of her death and the death of Francis Stead. I feared that if I told you, you would not want to hear from me again. It was my plan never to tell you. But now that we have met … I can see her in your eyes, Devlin. It is almost as if she has been returned to me as she was when we first met, when she was just your age and I was even younger.

  “As for not wanting you to write me back, I had several reasons. I had left your mother’s letter unanswered. It seemed only fitting that mine be left that way as well. But also, I could not bear to think of you formulating replies to letters that were misleading.

  “Devlin, you are the son of the only woman I have ever really loved. Marie I feel much affection for and did not marry for her money, but it is your mother’s face, her lovely, young woman’s face, that comes back to me in dreams. I would not blame you if you went back to Newfoundland, if you moved on and forgot me the way I did your mother.”

  The fire had burned down and I could barely make him out.

  I could not speak. I felt almost as wrenched from my former life as I had when I read his first letter. He and my mother were not who or what I thought they were.

  This man whose baby she could not stand to be away from for a second. My mother had loved me that much. Yet she had abandoned me.

  “My mother’s death,” I said, “was officially declared an accident. But Francis Stead was right. It is widely believed in St. John’s that she took her life.” I realized, too late, that it sounded like an accusation, as good as saying, “She took her life because of you.”

  “I think it might be best for you to go,” I said. “It is very late.”

  He rose from the sofa.

  “I will keep my mother’s letter,” I said. “For now. I will return it to you soon.”

  “Goodnight,” he said and made his way in silence to the near door, which he did not close behind him.

  I sat there for some time after the fading of his footsteps. I thought of the scrolled letters, saw them now in a different, tainted light. I recalled a phrase from his second letter: “I believe that, upon reflection, you will realize that there exists no motive that would cause me to mislead you on this matter.”

  I left the drawing room and went back to my bedroom. I lay down and tried to sleep.

  Though it seemed strange, I felt elated. Also disappointed and betrayed. But elated, most of all. For it seemed to me that the toll his story had taken on him was the measure of his feeling for me. How fearful he was that I would turn away from him. He had seemed, until now, so remote, as if he might be having second thoughts about his promise to include me in his life. Now he was a new, in some ways lesser, Dr. Cook. The ideal, flawless man of the letters and the past few weeks did not exist. No such men existed anywhere. But tonight he had poured out to me his most shameful secrets. And now he was lying awake in bed wondering what I would do.

  I would stay.

  I still believed in him, still trusted him.

  Despite that, however, I compared the handwriting in my mother’s letter to that of the handwriting on the back of the portrait photograph of her. In particular, I compared the two signatures, the “Amelia” on the letter and the “Amelia” on the back of her photograph, where she had written “Amelia, the wicked one.” They were, as far as I could tell, exactly the same. The paper the letter was written on was creased with age. There was no doubt that my mother had written the letter twenty years ago.

  I looked in the mirror on the wall beside my bed. “I can see her in your eyes,” he’d said. But as yet I could see no one in my eyes.

  I went by the study the next day after he came back from his rounds. It would be even harder now to call him Dr. Cook.

  “I want to assure my aunt that I am well,” I said, “without revealing to her where I am.” It was more of a demand than a statement. But implicit in it was the answer he was hoping for.

  “That can easi
ly be arranged,” he said. It was the first time he had not looked me in the eye while speaking to me. He looked elated, relieved, abashed, scolded. I think that at that moment, I could have got his consent to almost anything.

  “How can it be done?” I said, though I knew how.

  “I think I could impose upon your uncle one last time. Send him an unmarked envelope from you. Have him tell her it was pressed upon him in the street by a man he did not know.”

  “All right,” I said.

  I imagined Uncle Edward’s reaction at the sight of another envelope from Dr. Cook, who had assured him there would be no more. And then his reaction when he saw what the envelope contained. And there would be not just this one last imposition. I owed it to Aunt Daphne to keep assuring her that I was safe.

  Dear Aunt Daphne:

  This is to let you know that I am well, and that you need not be afraid for me. I want for nothing except your company, which I greatly miss but must do without for now. I hope that these past few weeks have not been too difficult for you, and that you think no less of me for what I’ve done. One day, I will tell you why I went away, though there are some things that I must leave forever unexplained. I hope this brief letter finds you and Uncle Edward in good health.

  Love,

  Devlin

  This was the letter I gave to Dr. Cook. Also, I gave back to him the letter from my mother.

  “We have begun, Devlin,” he said as he took the letters from me. “There are no obstacles between us now.”

  In the winter, I began to venture out into Brooklyn and Manhattan on my own, delivering messages for Dr. Cook, bringing others back to him. What I was really doing, he assured me, was meeting the people I needed to know.

  I went on using Francis Stead’s valise. I found a hiding place for the letters: the desk in the library, to which I alone had a key.

  Most of my errands took me to Manhattan. I felt as though I were seeing the city with my own eyes for the first time. I saw hope in every face, the faces of the rich and the faces of the poor. In the papers it said that the rich were getting richer and the poor less poor every day. “Why pity a woman, or even a child, schlepping garments through the streets,” one paper asked, “when only a year ago these same people were caught up in wars, famine and disease?” The paper said that the lightless, unventilated, suffocating tenements would soon, by an order of the city, be renovated or replaced with better ones.