The Navigator of New York

by Wayne Johnston

  I felt as though I was hearing an argument between my mother and Francis Stead, as though I was back in their house on Devon Row, just an infant whom they thought could not understand what they were saying.

  “I told you before we were married that I would often be away—”

  “Being left alone when you are away is one thing. Being left alone when you are here is something else. Being ignored. Avoided. Having your excuses relayed to me by the servants as if we live in different houses.”

  “I have not had an assistant before. That is all that is different. It is only natural to spend time with one’s assistant.”

  “I wish it was only a question of how much time you spend with him. But your whole manner with me and the child has changed. You used to have a playfulness, a tenderness about you. Now you seem so formal, so cold. Going through the motions. I have always known that you would never love me as you loved the first Forbes girl—”

  “My darling Marie—”

  “But I believed that you felt a great affection for me that might one day turn into love.”

  “Marie—”

  “I do not know how this Mr. Stead has changed you so quickly for the worse. I know only that he has, however irrational that seems. I wish you had never met him. But all this can be fixed so easily. Find him a job, a place to live. Is that asking too much? Is that too much to do for the sake of your own wife and family?”

  “Marie, this is absurd. I will not have all of New York and half the world wondering why I so suddenly parted ways with my heroic protégé, as the papers like to call him. You know how I feel about you—”

  “Then why will you not prove it by doing what I ask? We will find you a new assistant, one who need not live with us—”

  “No. I will not dismiss a perfectly able young man. I will not deprive him of his preferred way of supporting himself just to indulge this strange jealousy of yours.”

  “I just don’t understand, Frederick. You have always been so indulgent of me in the past, even when I did not deserve it. But on this one matter you will not relent, even though it is clearly making me unhappy. Doesn’t my happiness matter to you any more?”

  “Of course it does. But I do not wish to start a precedent by indulging this irrational animosity of yours. I will not cast away from me everyone whom, on a whim, you find unsuitable or feel threatened by in some inscrutable way.”

  I felt sorry for her and guilty for the trouble my presence in the house was causing her. Libby Forbes, Dr. Cook’s dead first wife. She thought it was by the memory of Libby Forbes that he was haunted, that she had been his one true love.

  “Goodnight, Marie. We will speak more about this later if you insist, but for now—”

  He was still speaking when she left. The heavy door swung outward. She must have shoved it with both hands. If not for that door, she would have seen me. By the time I saw her, she was receding down the hallway, marching with head and shoulders thrown back in defiance, as if she believed that Dr. Cook was watching her.

  I waited until Mrs. Cook was out of sight, until I heard a distant door opening and closing.

  I went to the open door of the drawing room. Dr. Cook was sitting on the edge of the sofa, hunched over, his forearms on his thighs, a half-smoked cigar unlit in his left hand as he stared into the fire. He looked up irritably, perhaps thinking that his wife had returned, but smiled when he saw that it was me.

  I went into the room, closing the door behind me. I sat in the armchair in which Mrs. Cook must have sat, for it was still warm. I pictured her there, imploring him across the distance of several feet.

  “I overheard. By accident,” I said. “I saw that the door was open. When I realized that your wife was with you, I was afraid to go back to my room in case she heard me.”

  “I would have told you anyway,” he said. “Just in case she approached you. It might be best to keep your distance from her for a while.” The only way we would meet was if Mrs. Cook stopped keeping her distance from me, but I did not say so.

  “If my being in this house is making her unhappy—”

  He shook his head. “It wouldn’t make any difference now if you moved out. No difference to her, I mean. She would still think I was not the man she married. I would still be what she calls preoccupied. Which is, in part at least, a euphemism for something else.”

  Though I was fairly certain I knew what he meant, I said nothing.

  “I have been avoiding her,” he said. “I do not plan to do so forever, but for now …” He shrugged. “My mind is … I can think of no woman but your mother, Devlin. I can think of no thing but your mother and what might have been. For you. For me. For her.”

  “I think it is wrong,” I said, “unfair for you to blame yourself so much for what you did. You were young. Younger than I am now. I might have done the same thing. You had no way of knowing what the consequences would be. And you were not responsible for the actions of Francis Stead or my mother. Most people would have done what they did.”

  Dr. Cook stood up quickly, as if he could not bear to hear another word.

  “I don’t just blame myself. I also feel sorry for myself, pity myself for having to suffer the consequences of my actions. Your mother I cannot have. I have Marie, of whom I am fond but, were she not rich, would not have married.”

  “I don’t believe you mean that,” I said. “You can forgive everyone, make allowances for everyone, understand everyone except yourself. You speak with more contempt of yourself than you do of Peary. Two of the three people you betrayed are still alive. You and me. It is not too late for us. That you are my father means more to me than anything. It doesn’t matter that no one else knows that I am your son.”

  He shook his head.

  “It does matter,” he said. “Someday you will understand how much it matters.” He walked over to me and, with one hand, gripped me where my neck and shoulder met. “You are becoming more and more like her,” he said, then quickly left the room.

  The Dakota. These were the empty rooms of the life that might have been, the alternative life that Dr. Cook visited from time to time. It seemed that my mother was in the Dakota—there by the investiture of Dr. Cook, there even when neither Dr. Cook nor I was there, pursuing by herself some ghost version of the life she might have led.

  I felt this most strongly whenever I returned to the Dakota. It was as if she was in a parallel, not quite perceptible Dakota, a much lived-in one in which there were no sheets on the furniture and the rooms were filled with voices—hers, Dr. Cook’s, mine and those of the other children they might have had.

  At night, when Dr. Cook was in the drawing room and I was in my bedroom, it seemed that two-thirds of the cast of this other life had been assembled—that the Dakota was occupied by an impaired, adulterated version of this other life, an almost mockingly disfigured fragment of it, a marred and silent simulacrum.

  I could not help feeling sometimes that it only seemed that I had come here of my own accord; that, in fact, I had been brought here to play the very role that I was playing; that Dr. Cook had had this very thing in mind when he first wrote to me, had foreseen these nights in the Dakota, this simulacrum of the life he had turned away from. Me, a grown man, sleeping in the room down the hall from the one in which he stayed up late, forbidden, as though I was a child, to knock on the doors of the drawing room if they were closed. I was a constant reminder to him of her absence. She was never more palpably absent than when he and I were together.

  There were times when I heard his voice and thought he was again arguing with Mrs. Cook, only to find upon opening my door that both of the doors to the drawing room were closed. His tone was mildly disputatious, but he spoke at too low a volume for me to make out what he was saying.

  “I heard you talking the other night when the doors were closed,” I said one day.

  “Just thinking some things through,” he said. “I find I think better when I think out loud.” He smiled. “Though of course other pe
ople find it off-putting. I’ll try not to raise my voice from now on.”

  “What were you thinking about?” I said.

  “Oh,” he said. “Expeditions, mapping routes, supplies, that sort of thing.”

  That sort of thing. I knew he did that sort of thing in silent, intense absorption in his study, poring over maps and charts and logs that he was unlikely to remove from his study, and that he could not have spread out properly in the drawing room as there were no large desks in it, draped with sheets or otherwise. But I said nothing.

  I at first fancied that these drawing-room monologues were addressed to my mother, but I soon realized that the tone did not seem right. Always he spoke in that same, faintly disputatious way as when I had first heard him, not the tone you would take with a lost lover from whom you hoped for solace, guidance or forgiveness. It seemed that he was arguing both sides of some question—perhaps, as he said, thinking things through, playing devil’s advocate to himself. Or rehearsing a momentous meeting with the backers, with Morris Jesup, with Herbert Bridgman and the members of the Peary Arctic Club.

  One night, his voice rose every few minutes to a shout, as if he were giving himself a good dressing-down, enumerating his misdeeds, castigating himself, shouting with exasperation as you might at someone who committed the same misdeed over and over.

  He often spent the entire night on the sofa. “Dozed off,” he’d say whenever I encountered him as he left the drawing room, as if it was never his intention to stay there longer than it took to “think things through.”

  Still wearing his clothes from the day before, he looked dishevelled, sheepish, his shirt rumpled, his hair standing on end. He would hurry to the Cooks’ for a quick bath and a change of clothes, and half an hour later, he would begin receiving patients in his surgery.

  Sometimes, when I was on my way from the Dakota to my office in the Cooks’, I saw the little girl, Ruth. She would stare solemnly at me from the doorway of the other drawing room until I waved to her or said hello, at which point she would run from the room and down the hallway.

  What she thought of the continuing presence in her own house of someone her mother regarded with such dread and disapproval, I could not begin to imagine. Her mother did not want me there, and yet I remained. Her father insisted that I stay and spent more time in my side of the house than he did in theirs, more time with me than he did with her. What, she must have wondered, could this mean?

  • CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR •

  LIEUTENANT PEARY, ALONG WITH MATTHEW HENSON, CHARLIE Percy and Dr. Dedrick, returned from Greenland in the summer of 1902.

  Peary, refusing all requests for interviews, ignoring, in public at least, Dr. Dedrick’s accusations that he had withheld food and medicine from the Eskimos in his employ, some of whom as a result did not survive the winter, went to Washington, where he was assigned to the Navy Yard. It was widely believed that in its quarters he would spend the rest of his career, scuffing about, barely able to walk, let alone try again to reach the pole.

  It was said that he planned to spend his summers away from the heat of Washington in a Cape Cod house on Eagle Island, off the coast of Maine. He renewed my modest fame when he published in the Eastern Seaboard papers a note of thanks, a copy of which he sent directly to me.

  Mr. Stead:

  I wish to thank you for the part you played in minimizing the effects of the accident I suffered last summer in Greenland on the rescue vessel that was sent to retrieve my wife and child.

  I confess that, having fainted because of some passing malady, I remember nothing of the incident except what others have told me. By their account, you acted without hesitation, lending me assistance at some risk to yourself and incurring a minor injury, which I am told has healed.

  I will be forever grateful to you and wish you well in your own endeavours. I am told that you have chosen exploration as your field. There is no greater one. It may be that our paths will cross again.

  Yours sincerely,

  Lt. Robert Peary

  “It is pure Peary,” said Dr. Cook in the drawing room, holding a newspaper copy of Peary’s letter in his hand. “He wisely waited until he was fully lucid to write it. Does he really think people will believe that in four years in the Arctic, he suffered nothing worse than a ‘passing malady’? He remembers nothing and is therefore not obliged to describe what happened. He has thanked you only because he had to. He has heard of how you were celebrated in New York and elsewhere during his absence. He has to thank you publicly. He would seem churlishly ungrateful otherwise. He wishes people to think that this is how explorers write to one another. That they are men of action, and therefore men of few words, not given to effusiveness no matter what the circumstances. Just as stoically as they endure, so do they stoically give thanks. By way of thanking you, he implies that he will lead further expeditions to the Arctic, that his days as an explorer are far from over. Well, the public may believe it, but those in the know will not. Peary will never officially declare that his day is done. Nor will anyone else presume to do so on his behalf. Not until after it has happened will most people notice that the torch has been passed. To see this letter in the paper, to know that people are reading it and being taken in by it, and to be unable to answer it—”

  He stopped speaking and faced the fire. I was surprised to see him so upset.

  “I don’t think anyone will be fooled by this letter,” I said.

  Dr. Cook did not reply. He slowly tore up the paper he held in his hand and fed it to the fire piece by piece, as if he was burning the only existing copy of Peary’s letter, as if this ritual burning of it would somehow prevent readers from being taken in by it.

  I replied in private to Peary. At Dr. Cook’s urging, I wrote as euphemistically as Peary did, saying that it was an honour to have “helped” him, especially as he and Francis Stead had once been “colleagues.”

  • CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE •

  SOMETIMES AS WE CROSSED THE BRIDGE THE WIND SMELLED faintly of the open sea, reminding me of my first crossing from Newfoundland to Nova Scotia, of a childhood that seemed more unreal as each day passed.

  I began to notice the city again, having stopped doing so for some time, so caught up was I in my new-found popularity.

  It seemed that there were no locals in Manhattan, no one who was so accustomed to the city that he didn’t stop to gawk at it. Everyone gawked as though they had just arrived from somewhere else, which in a way they had, given the pace at which the city was remaking itself.

  It was not just one makeover that was taking place. Manhattan was not just one city but dozens of overlapping ones. Just when the barest glimpse had begun to take shape in your mind of what one of these cities would look like a year from now, the plans for that city were discarded in favour of new ones. Half-finished buildings were demolished. Builders of one block looked as if they had no idea what would rear up from the rubble of the one beside it.

  The men who walked the iron beams high above the ground stood staring off into space, dangerously transfixed by the progress of a building greater than theirs that was going up many blocks away, too far for them to make out the men or even the machines that were making it, so that it must have seemed to be climbing skyward by some means of self-construction.

  Week by week, month by month, the frieze of Manhattan, of which we had so fine a view from Brooklyn, changed. A partial view of a building, a conspicuous sliver of yellowed stone that I had grown accustomed to, was there one day and gone the next, the gap it left soon filled in with a different colour. The silhouette of the skyline changed as though a child was rearranging it at random, moving and removing building blocks, topping them with attenuated steeples that rose up so far they stood out by themselves against the sky.

  At night, Dr. Cook and I drove past building sites where steam-powered cranes stood immobilized like mechanical giraffes, where massive steam-shovels sat in silence. From some of the cranes, iron girders that, when work stopped, had been on t
heir way to outstretched hands hung suspended in the air, high above us. Some of the shovels were crammed with debris. It was as if the city, in the morning, would not slowly come to life, but would reanimate abruptly. Everything and everyone that had stopped in mid-motion would, as though at the flick of an electric switch, resume their motions. All that dispelled this illusion was the absence from the machines of their operators, an absence that at this time of night could only be inferred, since it was too dark to see inside the cabs.

  It seemed that the streets were still faintly ringing with the din that had died down hours ago and would soon start up again. To the city, Dr. Cook said, darkness was a recurring, cyclical inconvenience, an imposed respite from activity and progress, a problem that no doubt would soon be solved by some invention. As he explained to me how steel-frame construction had revolutionized architecture and transformed the look of cities, how steel frames and elevators were making it possible to erect buildings three and four times taller than the tallest ever built before, I stopped listening.

  It seemed that everything that before had made me uneasy about the city reassured me now. The ongoing erasure of the past, the prospect of an unknown, unfixed future, appealed to me. Perhaps it was because I had seen the people who were behind it all—men who seemed to know what they were doing, and who, after all, were merely men, boyishly impressed by explorers and adventurers, not the sinister-seeming tyrants whose caricatures appeared in all the papers, not the poor-exploiting, arch-villainous tycoons in some editorials and printed sermons.

  Now when I ran my errands for Dr. Cook, I was not directed to the “rooms on the right” just inside the front doors, the business rooms of the great houses of Manhattan. I was invited into the parlours, and sometimes the libraries and the drawing rooms, of the members of the Peary Arctic Club, who seemed to want to do little more than beam at me approvingly.