The city, once it had been reined in, once this irresistible torrent of energy had run its course, would make allowances for everyone, even the street arabs, who, it now seemed to me, were quite cheerfully anarchic, mocking everything they saw so entertainingly that people stopped to listen to them.
I no longer saw, on the Lower East Side, the blank gazes I had seen before. I saw intent, purposeful faces, immigrants pursuing whatever dream they had chosen to pursue from among the millions on display.
I could not bring myself to resent the rich their houses or the other great structures of the city—the buildings, bridges, museums, train stations, monuments and statues that, with their money, had been raised up from the ground. It was impossible to rail against such things when the very sight of them filled you with such wonder. I felt sorry for the poor but did not hold their poverty against the rich.
• CHAPTER SIXTEEN •
“I BELIEVE,” DR. COOK TOLD ME, “THAT ROBERT PEARY WOULD number me among his friends. That I do not number him among mine, I think he knows but does not care. To Peary, friendship is a rank that he bestows on others. The question of reciprocation is, to him, irrelevant.
“I have never told you so before, but I am a member of the Peary Arctic Club. Think of that, Devlin. I am a member of a club whose sole reason for existence is to further Peary’s quest to reach the pole.”
He said that he had been invited to be a member and, for the sake of appearances, could not decline. He hoped that his own quest to reach the pole would one day become the club’s sole reason for existence, and therefore he had to remain on good terms with its members.
“I could not endure membership in the club if Peary lived in New York instead of Philadelphia—that is, if Peary was present at the meetings of the club. Thankfully, he is almost never there when we meet. I skip as many meetings as I can, short of making my record of attendance so unseemly that for me to resign would be less harmful to my reputation. When I do attend, I rarely contribute unless called upon.”
It was to the members of the Peary Arctic Club, most of whom were the “backers” Dr. Cook had so often spoken of in his letters, that I delivered messages, returning their replies and other correspondence to Dr. Cook.
He told me that I should say nothing to anyone of his ambitions, or mine. It was thought that he had no designs on the North Pole, that his goals were the South Pole and the climbing of Mt. McKinley, in Alaska, the highest peak on the continent. “The North Pole is the one true prize,” he said, a greater challenge than the South, which was a fixed point on an ice-covered continent. To reach the South Pole, you did not have to contend with an ever-shifting surface, with ocean currents, with ice that moved one way while you moved the other, so that you had to walk twenty miles to travel ten, a portion of that ten being undone while you slept or were delayed by weather.
“I do not want them to think,” he said, “that I am some sort of spy or saboteur among the members of the club. I am merely waiting for the club to realize what I have known for years: that Peary’s day is done; that the mantle must now pass to the man, the American, most capable of completing the quest that Peary has started. They may come to this realization when Peary returns from his present expedition, which his physical state doomed to failure from the start. Peary is the most ‘backed’ of all the explorers on earth. That, in spite of this, he has still not reached the pole has made some people doubt that anyone can reach it. I will have to assuage these doubts and, at the same time, gently lead the club members to the conclusion that Peary is no longer their best bet. All this will have to be done without unduly offending Peary and his most loyal supporters. It will take a very delicate touch.
“It is no secret that there was antipathy between Francis Stead and Commander Peary on the North Greenland expedition. There were even rumours that Peary was in some way responsible for the doctor’s disappearance. He was much criticized in some quarters for his apparent indifference to the fate of Dr. Stead.
“That you are now working for a member of the Peary Arctic Club may surprise some of the other members. They must not think that you bear a grudge against Peary, or that my hiring you hints at some animosity against him on my part. You must seem supportive of Peary and entirely convinced of the inevitability of his success. This will allay any concern they may have that your presence will stir up the controversy surrounding the North Greenland expedition or be an embarrassing reminder of it.
“Make no attempt to conceal who you are—whose son you supposedly are, that is. It would only make things worse for you. People would find out eventually, so tell them straight out. The backers won’t feel awkward about it if you show them that you don’t.”
It would only make things worse for you. He foresaw how difficult it would be for me to go on being Devlin Stead. “The Stead boy” was to me a fiction, but to others, he was very much alive. And this would always be the case.
I hated having to introduce myself as the son of Francis Stead to the members of the club. The son of a man remembered as a fool, a hapless explorer who had been disloyal to Peary and had killed himself. Most of them knew my “story,” all but the part about my happening to meet Dr. Cook by chance outside a Broadway beer garden one afternoon last August. They knew Dr. Stead’s story and that of his wife. Words like desertion and suicide hung in the air, unspoken.
“So you’re the boy,” one man said. The boy the ill-fated Steads were known to have left behind in Newfoundland.
Most of the backers moved on quickly from Dr. Stead to Dr. Cook, for which I was grateful. I always met them in their “business rooms,” which were just off to the right as you entered their enormous houses. Of those houses, those business rooms were all I saw, all that I expected I would ever see.
“So you just up and came to Manhattan from Newfoundland?” one man said, nodding approvngly.
These men, it seemed to me, didn’t care that I was Francis Stead’s son, didn’t think my being his son predisposed me to anything. I had come to the city where the past was beside the point, where there was no past, where everyone came to begin again, not only me. Most of them liked it that I had bypassed college, though they insisted on college for their own sons. I was told many times how fortunate I was to be a young man in Manhattan at the start of what was certain to be the greatest century in history.
I wished I could tell them the simple truth: that it was as my real father’s delegate that I was here. I wanted them to know that it was not because he felt sorry for me or out of a sense of obligation to a fallen colleague that Dr. Cook had hired me or invited me into his home.
“It is especially important that you make a good impression on Herbert Bridgman,” Dr. Cook said. Bridgman was the secretary of the Peary Arctic Club, a very powerful man, though neither high-born nor wealthy. He was powerful because the backers trusted him to make decisions on their behalf. The club members trusted him to tell them when Peary was asking for more money than he absolutely needed. They trusted him to tell them what amendment of Peary’s plans would increase his chances of success. They then proposed that amendment to Peary as if they had thought of it themselves. But Bridgman was also Peary’s pitch man. Peary needed Bridgman to convince the backers that his expeditions were worth investing in. Everything necessary to them but not including the expeditions themselves Bridgman organized on behalf of Peary—the raising of funds, publicity, lecture tours, the recruitment of crew members, the purchasing of all supplies (including an ice-breaking vessel should a new one be needed, as it almost always was). Bridgman also negotiated agreements between Peary and the club members as to how the spoils of each expedition would be shared—things like minerals, furs, narwhal and walrus tusks, relics, exhibits (including live Eskimos and animals like polar bears). Bridgman, in short, was trusted by both sides. Everything he did for Peary, Dr. Cook hoped he would one day do for him.
“We are good friends. I have known him since he was the business manager of the Brooklyn Standard Union. I believe
he knows that I see myself as Peary’s successor, though of course we have not spoken openly about it. I am certain that once Peary is no longer a contender for the pole, I can convince Bridgman that no American is more qualified to succeed him than I am.”
I guessed that Bridgman was fifty. He was bald, his scalp as smooth, as unblemished, as if it had not grown hair since he was twenty. He had, as if for compensation, a florid moustache that, directly beneath his nose, had begun to grey. His eyes, even had he not been bald, would have been his most prominent feature, but his baldness drew attention to them, made them seem even smaller than they were and his stare of appraisal that much more difficult to meet.
“You must have been quite young when your father took up exploration,” he said.
“Yes sir, I was,” I said. “I don’t really remember him.”
“I remember him very well,” Bridgman said, but he gave no sign that he intended to elaborate. How, his eyes seemed to ask, do you feel about what he did to you and your mother? What are you doing with that doctor’s bag that bears his initials? As if I was as deluded about my father as he had been about himself. Did I have no better sense than to see him as some sort of hero whose life was worth emulating?
“So you’re working with Dr. Cook,” Bridgman said.
“I’m working for him, yes sir,” I said.
I could see his mind working. Does this boy think that by consorting with explorers, he will come to some understanding of his father? Establish some sort of connection with him?
More than under anyone else’s gaze, I felt, under Bridgman’s, like an apologist for Francis Stead, his delegate, his representative.
BOOK THREE
• CHAPTER SEVENTEEN •
DR. COOK CALLED ME TO THE DAKOTA DRAWING ROOM ONE DAY to tell me that he had been asked by the Peary Arctic Club to lead a “relief expedition” for Peary. It was by then almost thirty months since Peary had set off from Philadelphia with two other Americans—and more than a year since I had arrived in New York.
“The club tells me, ‘Peary is lost somewhere in the Arctic. We need the benefit of your judgment,’ an admission that Peary himself would never make and, if he is found alive, will rebuke his backers for making, even if my intervention saves his life. I feel that as a fellow explorer, I cannot refuse their request. As you know, I have been north only once since the expedition on which Francis Stead was lost. The prospect of going again appeals to me.”
Dr. Cook said that aside from the unwritten code among explorers that obliged him to do all he was able to bring about Peary’s rescue, two other considerations inclined him to accede to the Arctic club’s request. One was that Peary was unaware that, in his absence, his mother and his infant daughter had passed away.
The other consideration was that Jo Peary and her daughter, Marie, were also missing in the North, unheard from since departing Godhavn, Greenland, on August 24 of last year. Mrs. Peary had left Maine with her surviving child when she received a letter from Peary that was meant to reassure her that he was healthy, but had just the opposite effect. She told the Peary Arctic Club that she was going to “fetch” her husband back. It was uncertain if she and her daughter were now with Peary. Mrs. Peary had planned to go as far north as safety and comfort would allow; if by then she had still not found Peary, she would stay put and wait for his return.
“Therefore I must break the vow I made to have no more to do with Peary,” Dr. Cook said.
“When will you leave?” I said.
“Very soon. As this expedition will be a short one and will take place in the summer, I was able to convince Bridgman to let you come along with me. I assume that you would like to.” He smiled at me, then laughed when he saw how pleased I was by this surprise. Before I had time to stammer out an acceptance of his invitation, he began to tell me what needed to be done before we left.
“Suppose you don’t come back?” I overheard Mrs. Cook say to her husband one morning when she went to see him in his office.
The question kept running through my mind.
But I looked forward to the coming expedition with far more excitement than dread. Death, to me, was my mother’s death, and Francis Stead’s. My own did not really seem possible. Was I a fool to be subjecting myself to the certain suffering of a polar expedition, even one that it was expected we would return from before winter set in? I did not feel like one. I felt fortunate, as though I had been chosen at random to receive some honour I did not deserve.
Dr. Cook and I took the Intercolonial Railroad to North Sydney, Nova Scotia, where we boarded the Erik. Already on board were several young men whose fathers were members of the Peary Arctic Club. Paying guests whose fees covered roughly half the cost of the expedition, most of them would be dropped off in Labrador and southern Greenland, where they would spend their time trophy hunting until the ship returned. They had their own compartment, a bunkhouse whose cramped dimensions they complained about incessantly, especially when they learned that I, who was younger than most of them and had no social standing, would be sharing Dr. Cook’s less Spartan quarters.
Dr. Cook put an end to their complaining by telling them “my story.” Soon, all of them believed that this would be my one and only visit to the Arctic, a visit I was undertaking to satisfy a lifelong yearning to set eyes on the land where my father disappeared and from which his body had never been recovered. Now the other young men regarded me with a mixture of sympathy and awe. They kept their distance from me, as if they wanted neither to intrude upon my pilgrimage nor to allow my presumably solemn mood to dampen theirs.
Dr. Cook and I shared the captain’s cabin at the aft of the ship, a grandly named, sparsely furnished, low-ceilinged room not much larger than the pantry at 670 Bushwick. A bunk was built for me along the wall opposite the one to which Dr. Cook’s bed was attached. The bunk was like a large dresser drawer whose sides would keep me from spilling out onto the floor in rough weather. Everything in the cabin was tied or bolted down. An oak desk and a chair without arms were bolted to the floor. You had to squeeze into the chair, which was permanently drawn up to what for someone had been an ideal distance from the desk but was for Dr. Cook a touch too far, so that he had to sit on the edge of the chair as he wrote or read.
Dr. Cook had brought along hundreds of books, which he crammed into what little shelf space there was in the cabin; all the shelves had detachable wooden bars across them to keep the books from falling out. “You will have a lot of spare time,” he said. “More than most people ever have. It will give you a chance to read these books. No one who hasn’t read them can claim to be educated.” He had read them all, he said, and was working his way through them for a second time, more slowly. If not for these books, he said, he might not have survived the thirteen months he spent aboard the ice-trapped Belgica as it drifted back and forth across the Antarctic Ocean. I scanned the spines of the books: Herodotus, Thucydides, Plato, Aristotle, St. Augustine, Pascal, Hobbes, Sterne, Fielding, Melville, Darwin, Tolstoy. At college, Dr. Cook had studied only medicine and other sciences. He was otherwise self-educated, having figured out for himself which books were worth his time, and having made his way through them without guidance of any kind.
The Erik was an enormous black sealing ship from Newfoundland, recently salvaged from a wreck, whose hull was now reinforced with squares of oak planking fourteen inches thick. It was hoped it would hold up against whatever ice we would encounter. The chunky ship, with its distinctive, overlarge sealer’s bowsprit jutting out a third of the ship’s length from the nose, looked like a teapot with a straight, elongated spout.
Attached to her aft masts, a hundred feet above the deck, and a good thirty feet above the height of most crow’s-nests, were two barrels in which would be stationed “ice spotters” who would have to scan the sea ahead of us through billowing black smoke from the stack in front of them.
We left North Sydney on July 14, crossed the Gulf of St. Lawrence, followed the northwest coast of Newfoundland
to the Straits of Belle Isle. On July 21, we rounded Cape Ray Light, on the south coast of Labrador, and, after putting some of the hunters ashore, set out for Greenland’s Cape Farewell, across the ice-strewn Sea of Labrador.
On the south coast of Greenland, we put in at Godhavn, where the rest of the hunters went ashore and the Danish governor told Dr. Cook he had no news of Peary. Some Eskimos there said that Peary and his ship, the Windward, were lost, but Mrs. Peary and her little girl were safe at Upernavik.
To reach Upernavik, we had to cross the Umanak Fiord. As there was almost no chance that we would encounter ice of any thickness in the fiord, the ice pilots came down from their masts. At my request, Dr. Cook convinced Captain Blakeney to let us climb up and stand in the barrels. Only because the water was so calm would he allow it, he said, though my impression was that he would have taken any request of Dr. Cook’s as an order. A Canadian, he had been hired on short notice, having spent the past ten years painting houses, a vocation he discovered when he was fired from the navy.
Dr. Cook and I ascended the mast ladders together, Dr. Cook waiting for me when I lagged behind. On his instructions, I stared at the rungs and at my hands to keep from getting dizzy. Even though there was no wind, the ship rolled some from side to side on a tidal swell that on deck I had barely noticed—rolled more and more, it seemed, the higher up we went, the cross spars creaking from the weight of the furled sails, my mast swaying like the tree it once was until it seemed certain it would snap off beneath my feet and fall with me still climbing it, still riding on the rungs.
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