The Navigator of New York

by Wayne Johnston

  Henson helped him from the boat and onto the deck of the Erik. Peary turned to face us, slowly shifting his body and his head at the same time, as though he could not move his neck. He began to walk towards us, and when he and Dr. Cook were perhaps ten feet apart, Peary extended his hand. Dr. Cook withdrew his from my shoulder, stepped forward quickly as if to spare Peary the effort of walking those last few feet and took his hand.

  Peary smiled and, looking about, made an expansive gesture with one arm, but he said nothing. Anyone looking at a photograph of the scene would have assumed that the Erik had just arrived, that Peary had rowed out from shore to welcome Dr. Cook to Etah and they were now exchanging such pleasantries as were customary when two gentlemen met on board a ship so far from home.

  With Dr. Cook following Peary’s lead, they talked as if, after a long and unavoidable delay that they had tacitly agreed not to mention, they were meeting for the first time.

  “Summer in the Arctic,” Peary said. “We have not been here together, Dr. Cook, since 1892.” His voice, though powerful, quavered.

  “I have not been here at all since then,” said Dr. Cook.

  “I could not stand to be away from it for so long,” said Peary.

  Dr. Cook watched Peary closely. Peary still stood fully erect, head motionless, hands behind his back—the very model of composure, it seemed, until I saw that his eyes were darting about like those of a blind person, as if he were attending to a host of inner voices. The pain of standing on feet from which all but two toes had been removed, on stubs that he had never rested long enough for them to heal showed in his face, even in his glazed-over, darting eyes. But he did not wince or move his weight from foot to foot.

  “Have you changed your mind, sir? Will you be with us when we leave for home?” said Dr. Cook.

  “I am afraid not,” said Peary, flashing a smile that pulled the skin on his face so tight it shone like it was waxed. “Of course you will see to it that Jo and Marie are returned home safely.” At the mention of their names, I looked towards shore and saw that their boat had nearly reached them.

  Dr. Cook stepped forward and, looking up at Peary, spoke in a voice much lower and more tender than before. “Sir, I fear that unless you leave with us, they will suffer the permanent loss of a husband and a father.”

  “We will make one more dash for it,” said Peary. “If we do not succeed this time … well, there will be other times.”

  Dr. Cook looked appealingly at Henson, who neither spoke nor looked away, though there was no defiance in his eyes. I heard the boat bearing Mrs. Peary and Marie being pulled into the water.

  “I thought I had your loyalty, Dr. Dedrick. I foresaw you being my medical man on all my expeditions. Associates for life. I can’t think why such a small thing would have meant so much to you.”

  “Lieutenant Peary, I am not Dr. Dedrick.”

  “Indeed you are not,” Peary said, as if he had not said “Dedrick,” as if he had not for a second mistaken one doctor for the other. “Compared with Dedrick, you are a saint, Dr. Cook. The man is such a cur.”

  “I must be absolutely frank with you, Lieutenant Peary,” said Dr. Cook, his voice almost a whisper. “It is not the risk of death but the certainty of it that I am warning you against. Sir, you suffer from an illness for which you are not to blame, an illness that is preventing you from thinking clearly. No one is conspiring against you. No one wishes you any harm. We are here to help you. I know it is hard to let someone else be the judge of what is best for you, hard to know when you need to entrust yourself to someone else. But I ask you to try to honestly assess your present state, and having done so, to trust me, to trust your wife and all the men who have sacrificed so much for you on both these expeditions. Will you let us take you home?”

  As Dr. Cook spoke, Peary smiled, as if to say that mere words could not deceive him. He also smiled when he spoke, as if he believed that the real meaning of his words was lost on Dr. Cook.

  Dr. Cook and Peary continued in this fashion for some time, Dr. Cook speaking gently, Peary smiling.

  Dr. Cook stopped speaking when he heard Mrs. Peary’s boat being winched up on the far side of the Windward. Peary went on smiling, his head cocked, eyes darting about as if the inner voices had begun again.

  Mrs. Peary and Marie stepped onto the deck of the Windward. Marie, after a brief glance at her father, went straight below deck. Mrs. Peary crossed over from the Windward to the Erik, ignoring the rope rails of the gangplank. Dr. Cook looked at her entreatingly, then glanced sideways at Peary. “Mrs. Peary—” he began.

  “Bert knows how I feel,” she said softly. But then she stepped forward and, standing on tiptoe, as though to kiss her husband’s cheek, whispered something in his ear.

  Peary bowed his head slightly, as if he might relent or were trying not to cry. But then, as though rousing himself from a spell of dizziness, he drew himself to full height again and shook his head.

  “All else but this criminal foolishness I can forgive,” said Mrs. Peary. “Come home with me and Marie, and when you have got your strength back, you can try again.”

  “I have merely had a fever, Dr. Cook,” Peary said, “a fever that has now passed and my comportment during which no fair-minded man would hold against me, especially as I am unable to remember it.”

  “You have not had a fever, sir,” Dr. Cook said, at last losing his patience. “Nor has your affliction passed. You have pushed your mind and body beyond their limits. Both have broken down. I have been sent here by the club to bring you home.”

  “Yes. By the Peary Arctic Club. Not, unfortunately for you, the Cook Arctic Club. Not yet, anyway. You must first rescue me before you can succeed me. Who better to succeed Peary than the man who saved him, the man who did what Peary could not do—brought Peary home.” The exact words he had spoken before. He must have memorized the speech and forgotten he had already delivered it.

  Perhaps he wanted to be rescued by force. Perhaps it had occurred to him that if Dr. Cook were to rescue him by force, all his problems would be solved. Perhaps, even now, he was waiting for Dr. Cook to order the crew members to seize him and confine him to his quarters. It might have been for this reason that he had insisted on meeting with Dr. Cook on the Erik instead of on shore. How easy it would be, here, to bring all this to a head at last, to tempt Dr. Cook to have him taken below with a minimum of embarrassment for everyone. Far preferable to the scene—the spectacle—that would take place if he had to be removed from his tent against his will and rowed out from shore, humiliated in front of everyone, including the Eskimos.

  “Dr. Cook,” Peary said, “I intend to win for myself and for my countrymen a fame that will last as long as human life exists upon the globe. The winning of the pole is for all time.”

  He turned to Mrs. Peary.

  “Jo, my dear, will you place a rose for me on Mother’s grave?”

  She turned away from him and walked back to the Windward, where, without so much as a backwards glance, she went below.

  I looked at Dr. Cook, wondering if he would relent and relieve Peary not only of command of the expedition, but of responsibility for his life and death.

  Dr. Cook extended his hand.

  “Good luck, sir,” he said, raising his voice almost to a shout.

  Peary slowly raised his hand and shook Dr. Cook’s. He looked grimly resigned, whether because he had failed to unnerve Dr. Cook or simply because the matter of his fate had been resolved at last I couldn’t tell.

  Captain Bartlett came forward and held out his hand, and Captain Blakeney after him, both wishing him good luck. In no time, the crews of both ships were queueing up to shake Peary’s hand. It was a moving sight, one which, I noticed, his daughter was watching from the deck of the Windward, to which she had returned without her mother. Like the relatives of a man who the next day was to undergo an operation that it was almost certain he would not survive, they filed past, saying, “God bless and good luck, sir,” many of them,
like me, not having set eyes on him until just minutes before. Henson looked at Peary and then at the long line of men. He must have doubted that Peary could stay on his feet long enough to shake every hand.

  When all the others had shaken Peary’s hand and, except for the two who began preparing the rowboat for Peary’s return to shore, had gone below deck, Dr. Cook, his hand in the crook of my arm, led me forward.

  “Lieutenant Peary, this is Devlin Stead,” said Dr. Cook. At that instant, Marie called out to Dr. Cook, and Dr. Cook turned away from us and hurried to the Windward, where the little girl still stood, unattended by anyone.

  “Stead’s boy,” Peary said as he took my hand and so abruptly pulled me towards him that I almost fell. His eyes stopped moving. Neither a Stead nor a boy, his tone made me feel like saying. He must have seen that flash of defiance in my eyes.

  “You have yet to see the Arctic, Mr. Stead,” he said. “Do not let yourself be drawn to it by the few weeks of idleness you have spent here in the summer.”

  I could think of no response.

  “I know the sort of stuff that you are made of, Mr. Stead,” he said, lowering his voice, and I was convinced he was about to tell me that he knew of my relationship to Dr. Cook. “Stay home, boy. Stay home, or someday you will wind up like your fool of a father.”

  Peary adjusted his grip on my hand, which in size was like a child’s compared with his, and squeezed it with such force I thought that he was using me to keep his balance, to keep from falling forward, and that it was only by coincidence that he had brought his face so near to mine. I pushed back in an attempt to steady him, but Peary, whom I must have outweighed by forty pounds, did not budge. He gripped my hand still tighter, pushed his own farther back on mine, on one side past the thumb, on the other almost to my wrist, so that neither our fingers nor the palms of our hands were touching and my hand lost all ability to return his grip. Determined not to cry out or pull away, or to ask for the help of Henson, who appeared to be watching the crewmen prepare the rowboat, I felt as though my hand would break, as though its bones, in the vise of his, would shatter like a pouch of icicles. Even this close up, his eyes were glazed over as though he were focused inward on some thought or image goaded on by which he was squeezing what he no longer realized was another person’s hand. His cherry-coloured skin was uniformly calloused. It was the closest I had ever been to another man’s face. His breath, which I feared would be unpleasant, smelled of peppermint.

  “Your mother,” he said, “was buried in the clothes she was wearing when they found her, buried dripping wet in a graveyard in St. John’s. Your father lies entombed, preserved in ice, not far from here, where he will go on smiling his idiot smile long after his hell-dwelling soul has ceased to burn.” My legs went weak as Peary, groaning from the strain, squeezed even harder.

  Dr. Cook suddenly appeared and brought his forearm down like an axe on Peary’s.

  It seemed that at the sudden severance of our hands, Peary completely lost consciousness. He did not drop to his knees. His legs did not buckle beneath him. He simply began to fall forward, his head making a top-heavy pillar of his body, his arms limp at his sides. I saw that as he was facing a set of steps that went below, he would have to go well past the horizontal, would have to fall more than his own height of six-foot-three, before, face first, he hit one of the wooden ledges.

  Several things happened at once. Dr. Cook lurched forward, intending, it seemed to me, to interpose himself between Peary and the deck. Henson, as if he thought Dr. Cook’s intention was to attack Peary, hurled himself at Dr. Cook, hitting him with a force that sent them both reeling deckwards in opposite directions. I stepped in front of Peary just in time to have him land on me, just in time to see his head bearing down on mine, which I turned away so that the underside of his chin fit quite nicely on my shoulder, and for a while there was nothing but that holding him up. I tried to hold him under the arms, but my right hand hurt so much I couldn’t grip him with it. I threw my arms around his waist, pinning his arms to his sides, and tried to support his weight by digging into the deck with my feet, my left one planted at an angle behind me, my right one forward. The left foot slipped, gave way, so that I was forced to walk in reverse to keep from falling. In this manner—pedalling backwards across the deck, hugging Peary to me, his feet dragging, toes down—I travelled perhaps twenty feet, impelled by Peary’s dead weight until I fell at last, brought up against the gunwale shoulders first, my head snapping back, Peary on top of me, laid out prostrate on me in a lifeless bundle as if we had been dancing and had dozed off in each other’s arms.

  I thought that would be the end of it, but as I tried to move Peary forward, move away from the gunwale, something snapped in my already injured right hand. Instinctively, I withdrew it, whereupon I lost my hold on Peary, who, being so tall, struck the gunwale at waist height and pitched forward in a perfect somersault. Again instinctively, I grabbed at him with my right hand, caught hold of the heavy collar of his watchcoat and, with my left hand and my legs braced against the gunwale, kept him from pulling me over with him. He was dangling, still unconscious, between the two ships, just off to one side of the gangplank. If I released him, he would fall forty feet into the water, probably striking one or both of the hulls on the way down, and then would sink beneath the hulls, where it would be impossible to rescue him.

  Peary swung slowly back and forth, insensible to his predicament, eyes closed, mouth slightly open. Just as it occurred to me how strange it would be if he awoke while hanging in mid-air like that, awoke to find himself no longer on deck, no longer squeezing my hand, but suspended between the two ships, between life and death, he did just that.

  There was a fluttering behind his eyes and then they opened. At first, all they registered was a look of dazed confusion, as if he knew that something was wrong, that he had never, upon waking, felt like this before. And then there was a sudden look of alarm as it dawned on him that he was hanging in mid-air above the water. As yet, I think, he did not realize that it was a man’s arm he was hanging from, let alone whose arm it was.

  Finally, his eyes focused on my hand, which was above him, for his coat was pulled up so far that he wore it like a cowl and anyone watching from either side of me would not have known who the coat contained, who it was that was hanging from my hand like a drowned man whose water-weighted body I had fished up from the sea. He looked at me as if he thought I was in the act of throwing him overboard. He had woken up not from a nightmare, but into one. He brought up his hands and grabbed hold of my coat collar as if he meant to pull me over with him, though the only effect of this was to lessen the strain on my arm.

  Then the manner of his struggling changed. He seemed to be trying not to pull me in with him, but merely to free himself. He tried with both his hands to pry himself loose from the single hand that held him by the collar of his coat. I would not have been able to hold onto him if it had gone on much longer.

  Henson, Dr. Cook and the two crewmen all at once surrounded me, and there followed some flurry of commotion to which I was too exhausted to attend. “It’s all right, Devlin,” I heard Dr. Cook say, but unsure of what this meant, I did not release my grip on Peary’s coat. I might have passed out momentarily. I heard the passengers and crew. Later, I would imagine what they saw: Henson and Dr. Cook bent over me as I lay beneath Peary, who might have tackled me in full stride. Henson and Dr. Cook trying to pry the still-limp Peary from the grip of both my hands. When I realized that Peary and I were safe, that the other two men had hoisted him over the rail only to have me pull him down on top of me, I let him go.

  Of what could this scene possibly be the aftermath? The others must have wondered. Peary’s head was beside mine, his forehead on the deck, nestled into it as though he was peacefully napping. At some point, his hat had come off. It was probably floating on the water between the ships. All I could see was the blue sky, though I heard, from every direction, the hubbub of voices.

  “What
happened? Who’s hurt?”

  Peary began to stir, muttering something unintelligible as though whispering some parting insult in my ear. As he supported himself on one arm, Henson, Dr. Cook and several others helped him off me.

  “You should not stand up so soon, sir,” Henson said, but Peary, shaking his head, rose to full height as others began to help me up. I was winded and my right hand was of no use it hurt so much. I saw Peary shake free of the hand Henson held beneath his elbow.

  I tried to open my hand to flex the fingers and see if anything was broken, but the pain, a deep bone pain pulsing from my shoulder to the tips of my fingers, was such that I could not. I cradled my right arm in my left, which focused the pain in my forearm. My legs still unsteady, I thought I would be sick.

  Peary gripped his right forearm where Dr. Cook had struck it, closed his eyes. I looked at Dr. Cook, who seemed to be preparing himself to have it all out. He stared at Peary, who looked as though he might faint again.

  “What happened here?” Captain Bartlett said as the others crowded round.

  “Lieutenant Peary—” Dr. Cook said, drawing a deep breath, but Matthew Henson cut him off.

  “Lieutenant Peary fainted,” Henson said. “And as he went over the side of the ship, Mr. Stead here caught him and held him with one hand until Dr. Cook and I could pull him in.”

  Captain Bartlett looked at Peary, who remained as before, swaying slightly, eyes closed. There was no chance that the captain was going to ask Peary to explain himself. He looked at Dr. Cook.

  “We—Henson and me—we stumbled over each other trying to get to Lieutenant Peary,” Dr. Cook said. “Devlin got there first and grabbed him by the coat as he was falling, and he held onto him until we could help him pull Lieutenant Peary back on deck.”

  “Is that what happened, Mr. Stead?” said Captain Bartlett.