The Navigator of New York

by Wayne Johnston

  The city never failed to set Dr. Cook going, talking, expostulating. It was now the fashion, he said, owing to Peary’s futile four-year expedition to the Arctic, to believe that the North Pole could not be reached.

  As no one but Peary was legally allowed to write about the expedition, no one knew just how little it had accomplished, which Dr. Cook said was just as well. If it was known just how complete a failure it was, no one would ever put another cent towards an expedition to the North.

  Now all the talk was of the South Pole, which Dr. Cook said no longer interested him. It had been established that it was a fixed point in the middle of a great landmass, an ice-covered continent, and therefore would be easier to reach than its ever-moving opposite “atop” the world.

  Much was being made of the duration of Peary’s expedition. “Four years,” people said. “Not even in four years could Peary make it to the pole.” As if to say that if Peary could not do it, no one could.

  “I have always known that his success would mean my failure,” Dr. Cook said. “But now it seems that even his failure means my failure. Four years. If only they knew how much of that time he spent trying for the pole and how much he spent huddled in tents and huts and tupiks and igloos in a state of such despair that he was indifferent as to which of death or rescue found him first.

  “Now that he is out of the running, Peary is eager to promote the idea that the pole cannot be reached. He seems to have settled for the consolation prize of being remembered as the man who proved it was unreachable.

  “Not even as much money as I would be willing to accept from Marie could outfit me for an expedition to the pole. The backers have lost interest in the North for now. It seems there is not one of them who does not already have his name on some cape or bay or inlet that Peary blundered onto in his quest to reach the pole. I tell myself that in time they will want something new named after them, and their interest in the North will be revived.

  “I know how bitter, how cynical, that sounds. But as I said at the Vanderbilts’, to turn away forever from the pole, to content myself with simply knowing that it’s there, eternally, affrontingly unreachable, but there, to join with Peary in setting for the cause of exploration such a precedent of failure and defeat—all this seems unthinkable. The compass of fashion will spin round for us again. The needle will be dead on north again someday, Devlin.

  “For the moment, I have found for us a lesser but still intriguing goal, one that will keep us fit for polar travel and our names in the papers and before the backers. Not long ago, a mountain in Alaska was surveyed at 20,300 feet, the highest point of land in North America. I am going to climb it with your help. I am going to be the first man to reach the summit of Mt. McKinley. It can be done in a single season and will not keep me apart from Marie for as long as a polar expedition would, which should placate her somewhat. And we may learn something from it that will make our achievement of the greater goal more likely.”

  Dr. Cook and I were invited to other society balls and gatherings. Each time, he had to make up some excuse for the absence of Marie. None of these functions seemed to me to be quite as splendid as the Vanderbilts’ had been, perhaps because I was growing accustomed to socializing, taking for granted both my desirability as a guest and the company of others, as if I had never craved companionship, never in my life been bereft of it.

  I was disappointed by any gathering that Kristine did not attend. Whenever she spotted me, she smiled and we made our way towards each other. We spent entire evenings dancing and talking, so that Kristine was often teased for monopolizing me. “She is quite fond of you, Mr. Stead,” Clarence Wyckoff said. He peered closely at me. “My God,” he said. “I’ve never seen anyone turn so red in my life.”

  I was invited out so frequently that I began to encounter other people I had met before, old men and women, young men and women, all of whom seemed no less pleased to see me than they had been the first time.

  If they felt that Peary’s letter was lacking in graciousness or gratitude, or that its tone was in any way inappropriate, they did not say so. What an honour for me it was, they said, to have such a man as Lieutenant Peary thank me in public for having saved his life. And what a pity it was that Lieutenant Peary did not live in New York but was bound by his naval career to “horrid” Washington. How marvellous it would have been for him and me to appear together in public.

  When asked what “adventure” Dr. Cook and I were planning next, I told them we were going to attempt to climb Mt. McKinley in Alaska—the tallest peak in North America—no serious assault of which had yet been made, since it had only recently been “discovered” and surveyed, though the natives of Alaska had known of it for centuries.

  “But what about the Arctic poles?” some of them asked. “Is it true that they cannot be reached?” I assured them that Dr. Cook and I had not abandoned our quest to reach one or both of the poles, but the climbing of McKinley could be accomplished in one season, one summer, such as the one that we had spent in Greenland. It would, Dr. Cook had said, be good training for me, better than embarking so soon in my career on a polar quest that might last for years, and for which I might not be physically or psychologically prepared.

  Had I done any mountain climbing before? Just the normal amount required of anyone who lived in Newfoundland, I joked, but I was taken seriously, everyone nodding as if they knew just what I meant, just how skilled a climber I had to be from the simple fact of having grown up where I had.

  I told them that I would climb as much of McKinley as Dr. Cook would let me, or as much of it as I was able, whichever came first. “The climbing of McKinley,” I said, quoting Dr. Cook, “is just a temporary detour on the way to the greatest prize of all.”

  I received looks of wonder and admiration as I described the preparations Dr. Cook had made. I did not mention that his main backer for this expedition was his wife, or that the American Geographical Society, of which Peary was the president, had been among the many bodies that had refused his request for funding. Or that the Peary Arctic Club had made only the token contribution of an aneroid barometer that measured altitude and a pocket sextant.

  We travelled by train to the Pacific Northwest, leaving New York on May 26, 1903, accompanied by several of the usual “gentlemen adventurers” whose fathers paid Dr. Cook to take them with him.

  I saw, for the first time, the great expanse of America, most of which was still unsettled and was thought likely to remain that way forever. On a steamer called the Santa Ana, we sailed up past Vancouver Island, entering the Inner Passage, negotiating the desolate islands of Alaska, stopping at Juneau, Sitka, Yakutat. It was the route taken by those who had travelled to the Klondike in search of gold, said Dr. Cook.

  We reached Tyonek on June 23, there debarking with our pack-horses, which were left to swim ashore to Cook Inlet, after which they were so exhausted as to be of almost no use to us.

  Not until August 21 did we establish a base camp at the foot of Mt. McKinley, after two months of sometimes dangerous but mostly tedious travel through the dense, mosquito-infested bush of the Alaskan wilderness.

  The climb itself seemed anti-climactic, would have seemed so even had it been successful. For two weeks, the seven of us completed what was little more than a steep walk to an elevation of about seven thousand feet, just above which the largest of McKinley’s glaciers began. From there, Dr. Cook and a journalist named Robert Dunn went on alone, reaching a height of 11, 300 feet before they were forced by unscalable walls of ice to head back down.

  Dr. Cook and I were back in Brooklyn by the end of December, with Dr. Cook telling reporters that he would have another go at Mt. McKinley, perhaps the following summer.

  For me, it had been little more than a long, if arduous, camping trip. Compared to polar exploration, mountain climbing seemed to me a waste of time and money. When I said as much to Dr. Cook, he merely urged me to be patient.

  We were celebrated in the Brooklyn and Manhattan papers for
our attempt at McKinley. Dr. Cook convinced me not to belittle the expedition or my part in it. Robert Dunn published a frank, unvarnished account of our adventure in a magazine called Outings, highlighting the petty bickering that had taken place among the members of the climbing party.

  Dr. Cook was at first convinced that his reputation was ruined, but all that the public cared about and fastened upon were the hardships we endured and the obstacles we overcame. A trip by raft down an uncharted glacial river was the highlight. While Dr. Cook and Dunn piloted the raft, the rest of us took turns pulling from the water men who had fallen overboard. I was plucked out twice, gasping for breath because of how cold the water was. Several times, I helped pull others out. Whenever I remembered my two plunges into that icy green water, I thought of my mother and fancied I had some idea of what her final moments had been like.

  Dunn did not make me out to be any more or less heroic than the others, only describing me as “slavishly devoted to Dr. Cook, whose side he took in all disagreements and whose orders he obeyed no matter how foolish they appeared to the rest of us to be.”

  I had written to Aunt Daphne of our plans to climb McKinley and wrote to her again upon returning to New York.

  Dr. Cook spent fewer nights in the Dakota than he had before the expedition to McKinley. One night, when he did come to the drawing room, he told me that his wife was four months pregnant.

  Mrs. Cook gave birth to a healthy girl whom they called Helen. When she was two weeks old, I was, to my surprise, invited to the Cooks’ to see her. Mrs. Cook was in the parlour, the baby in a basket on her lap, a bundle of plaid within which Helen was sleeping, no part of her visible except her tiny, pinched red face.

  “She’s very pretty,” I whispered.

  I had spoken with real affection at this first sight of my first sibling, my half-sister. Helen. I had spoken so tenderly that Dr. Cook, as if by way of reminding me to be discreet, backed away and sat in a chair across the room. But Mrs. Cook smiled at me as she never had before.

  “Who do you think she looks like?” said Mrs. Cook.

  I might have said, “She looks like me.” The words sounded in my mind. She was too young, too small to look like anything except a baby, but I said I thought she looked more like her mother than her father. Mrs. Cook smiled warmly at me again.

  • CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX •

  “I HAVE NOTICED SOMETHING UNUSUAL ABOUT YOU AND DR. Cook,” Miss Sumner said.

  I tried not to look as taken aback as I felt.

  “There is a strange kind of awkwardness between you,” she said. “You seem uncomfortable in each other’s presence. You always stand slightly farther apart from each other than other people do. I have seen boys do this who wish to make it seem that they are unaccompanied, that it is pure coincidence that their mother or father is standing beside them. Yet when the two of you are separated, each of you is constantly looking about in search of the other. The strangest thing of all, however, is this: you do not call him anything. You just look at him and speak, as if you remember his face but not his name. And as if to compensate for this, he uses your name too frequently, sometimes saying it twice in a single sentence. Devlin, Devlin, Devlin. It sounds unnatural somehow. And each time you re-encounter one another, you look as though it is all you can do to keep from shaking hands.”

  She had to have been attending to us very closely, or been uncommonly perceptive, to have noticed so much. There was a familiarity about her, an appealing presumptuousness that at gatherings seemed out of place. On this occasion, it disarmed me.

  I did not know how to reply to her. By whom else, I wondered, were Dr. Cook and I being so closely scrutinized?

  “I was not aware of any awkwardness between Dr. Cook and me, Miss Sumner,” I said. “Though perhaps I will be from now on.”

  “Oh, dear,” Miss Sumner said. “I fear that I have spoken out of turn.”

  “You mean, you hope you have,” I said.

  She smiled and raised her eyebrows in a kind of mock tribute to my wit.

  “You haven’t spoken out of turn,” I said. “It’s just that I think you’re mistaken. There really is no awkwardness between him and me.”

  “I have a confession to make,” she said. “I have been watching you and Dr. Cook this evening. Because of something my mother said.”

  She looked intently at me, as if she had hoped by her remark to provoke me into some sort of admission.

  “You are blushing,” Miss Sumner said.

  “I often blush,” I said. “As someone who watches me so closely ought to know.”

  “I asked my mother if she had ever met Dr. Cook,” she said. “I did not tell her why I asked—that is, I did not tell her that you had once asked me if she had met him. I was, if you’ll forgive my saying so, a little more tactful, a little less blunt, in my approach than you were. I told her that she really had to meet you and Dr. Cook sometime, since she once knew your mother. ‘Of course,’ I said, ‘you may already have met Dr. Cook. He seems to know everyone you know. It hardly seems possible that your paths haven’t crossed.’ Then my mother said something very surprising. She said that she had met Dr. Cook, but that it had been before they started moving in the same social circles. She met him many years ago, she said, when he was, as she put it, ‘even younger than Amelia’s boy.’ She said that her encounter with him was such that even after all this time, she did not wish to repeat it. Now what do you make of that?”

  “I cannot imagine,” I said, “why anyone, having once met Dr. Cook, would not wish to do so again. Perhaps your mother has mistaken him for someone else.”

  “My mother is barely fifty,” Miss Sumner said. “Not nearly old enough, I should think, to make a mistake like that.”

  “I cannot answer for your mother,” I said. “I am sorry that she somehow formed the wrong impression of Dr. Cook.”

  “She said,” Miss Sumner said, “that they still move in the same social circles, but that each of them makes sure not to cross paths with the other. She said that given how devoted you are to Dr. Cook, it might be best if she not cross paths with you as well. Then she absolutely refused to say anything more on the subject. Can you imagine? She … she incites my curiosity and then absolutely refuses to say another word. ‘If you did not intend to finish your story, Mother,’ I said, ‘then why did you begin it in the first place?’ Then she drew in her horns. She said that she had spoken foolishly, that she had been exaggerating. ‘I want you to forget that we ever spoke about this matter,’ she said. ‘And please don’t speak to Amelia’s boy about it.’ Can you imagine? ‘I want you to forget.’ As if I could. As if such a thing were possible. When she was speaking of her ‘encounter’ with Dr. Cook, she became quite animated. If I didn’t know better—if I wasn’t certain that my mother’s parents would never have allowed it—I would have sworn that they had once been sweethearts or something, and that he had thrown her over for another woman. There must once have been some unpleasantness between them. I don’t suppose you know what it was.”

  I shook my head but could not look her in the eye.

  “What with your strange question on the one hand and her strange answer to mine on the other,” Kristine said, “the two of you have driven me to distraction. And now here you are standing in front of me, turning all sorts of colours, which you would presumably not be doing unless you were withholding something from me.”

  Surprised by her sudden change in tone and the volume of her voice, the abrupt switch from coy playfulness to exasperation, I realized that she was genuinely distressed. I looked about to see if anyone had noticed when she raised her voice. A few people were looking our way, but I did not see Dr. Cook.

  “I can’t imagine,” she said, “what it can be that I have stumbled upon, why you and my mother insist on being so mysterious, as if there is something, some knowledge, from which I need to be protected.”

  “Really,” I said, “I know of nothing from which you need to be protected. There is nothing. I kno
w nothing about any sort of ‘encounter’ between your mother and Dr. Cook. I asked you that silly question at the Vanderbilts’ because I was stuck for something to say, that’s all. I might just as easily have asked you if your mother knew Lieutenant Peary. Or General Armstrong Custer.”

  She laughed.

  “I do not believe you, Mr. Stead,” she said, “though it is true that you are often at a loss for words. Let’s not talk any further about such things. If you are not too terribly annoyed with me, I would very much like it if you asked me to dance with you again.”

  We danced, and I was not annoyed with her. I reminded myself of what Dr. Cook had advised me to remember—that I was merely visiting this world of hers. Could it be that I was merely visiting Miss Sumner, merely visiting her arms, her hand, which it seemed to me was holding mine more tightly than usual? My hand was merely visiting her back. My eyes merely visiting her eyes. I wondered what it would be like if my lips paid hers a visit.

  I did not tell Dr. Cook what she said to me, what her mother had said about him. Just why her mother had said what she had I could not understand. According to Dr. Cook, she believed that it was my mother who had ended their romance. What could so have turned her against Dr. Cook? Perhaps she had disapproved of his courting a woman who was engaged to be married, but then it was she who had helped them cover up their courtship. Perhaps she was ashamed now of the part she had played and did not wish to be reminded of it by meeting Dr. Cook again.

  • CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN •

  SCEPTICISM ABOUT THE VALUE OF POLAR EXPLORATION WAS STILL rampant after our attempt at Mt. McKinley. The one explorer who seemed to be exempt from it was Peary, who had risen to his new rank of commander on the basis of seniority, the openly hostile navy admirals being scornful of the notion that polar exploration could be construed as service to either the navy or the country.

  Peary, Dr. Cook learned at a meeting of the Peary Arctic Club, had been voted the backing for yet another ship, and he would try for the North Pole again starting in the summer of 1905. “You’d think,” Dr. Cook said, “that all that had kept him from succeeding the last time was the Windward.” But he appeared to take the news of what seemed to me to be a major setback for him surprisingly well.