The Navigator of New York

by Wayne Johnston

  I was anxious, for there was no telling when Peary might appear at my side, hand extended to shake mine a second time while all around us people gaped. I tried to prepare myself, knowing that if he took my hand, I would recall the first time when he all but crushed it in his, when he spoke about my mother and Francis Stead as though he was casting their curse on me. I had rehearsed a few pleasantries and was prepared to keep smiling for as long as our conversation lasted.

  The unmistakable sense in the room that something momentous was imminent grew more palpable as the time for the start of the banquet approached.

  “It is as Captain Cagni said,” Amundsen told us. “Peary plans to go out in such a way that it will never be forgotten. I dare say he is in the hotel somewhere, waiting until the last moment.” Amundsen examined Dr. Cook’s face closely, hoping that now, on the brink of the announcement, he would admit that the rumours were correct. Dr. Cook shook his head and smiled. “I think you and Peary must be in this together,” Amundsen said.

  A phalanx of trumpeters blaringly announced that the serving of dinner would soon commence. But there was still no sign of Peary.

  Herbert Bridgman went to the head table and announced from the dais that Commander Peary was unavoidably detained but had insisted that dinner proceed without him. There were many shouted protests, but soon the delegates and guests began to search out their seats at the tables.

  As dinner began, Dr. Cook sat there, unable to do anything but smile and nod when people spoke to him.

  “This is taking suspense too far,” said Cagni. “Peary is the congress president and the banquet’s guest of honour. What can he be up to, Dr. Cook?”

  Dr. Cook smiled as if all was going according to plan.

  The middle four settings of the head table were still unoccupied an hour later. The guests cast glances at the head table and at Bridgman, shaking their heads as if they were not only puzzled, but considered this behaviour of Peary’s to be bad form. And why were four settings unoccupied? Two were for Peary and his wife, but what about the other two? The president of the National Geographic Society and his wife were sitting to the right of the empty chairs, a senior senator and his wife to the left. It seemed that everyone but the Pearys was accounted for.

  Several delegates wandered up to the head table and passed a word with Herbert Bridgman, who faintly shook his head and was clearly trying not to show how mortified he was. He looked genuinely baffled.

  How, those people who were seated with Dr. Cook and me wondered, could the Hubbard Medal be presented without Peary? Speculation began that perhaps he really was sick—sicker even than those who had believed this explanation for his absence from the congress had imagined. I looked questioningly at Dr. Cook, who faintly shrugged.

  The last of the dessert dishes were being cleared and it seemed that most of the guests had resigned themselves to not setting eyes on Peary that night when the large front doors of the banquet hall were ceremoniously opened by two white-gloved butlers. A lone man dressed in scarlet livery stepped into the room.

  “Ladies and gentlemen,” he shouted, “the President of the United States of America and the First Lady, Mrs. Roosevelt.”

  As if it had followed the president to the hotel from the White House but was not allowed into the banquet room, an unseen brass band struck up “Hail to the Chief” somewhere outside the room.

  Like an apparition, Teddy Roosevelt and his wife appeared, walking arm in arm, encircled by aides and a two-man colour guard, the beefy president looking uncomfortably crammed into his tuxedo, the overhead lights reflecting in his monocle, which glittered like a brooch. His wife wore a long white dress that flared out slightly at the hem. Her ample form was contained by a tightly tucked bodice from which a slight pouch depended, and she wore around her shoulders a long white fur boa that extended almost to the floor. Her flat, dark hat looked like an extension of her hair, so that it seemed the hat had earflaps, as if she and the others had made the trip from Pennsylvania Avenue on foot through the snow.

  The Roosevelts were followed by the Pearys, Peary in full navy uniform. Restored to what I took to be his normal weight, he looked almost nothing like he had at Etah. He carried his hat beneath his arm. His red hair and florid red moustache were newly coiffed. The front of his jacket was festooned with medals and ribbons, its back almost comically bare by comparison. Mrs. Peary’s expression seemed to say that at last exploration had yielded something of which she wholeheartedly approved. She wore a flowing dinner gown made of some filmy, gauze-like material, with a narrow frill of transparent lace at the neck and loose transparent sleeves. The skirt, which dragged the floor, was edged with several layers of lace flounces. The dress had a wide waistbelt with a chatelaine bag, a silver-chain purse and, hanging lowest of all from the belt, a thin lorgnette, as if she intended from the head table to examine the assembled guests as one might the cast of some expansive opera.

  Peary shuffled along like a man whose toes were bent beneath his feet. It might have been Peary’s peculiar, pathetic gait that broke the spell that had fallen over everyone as the foursome arrived, for at last the guests rose to their feet with much scraping of chairs to acknowledge the president, who, the expression on many faces seemed to say, really was here, however unlikely it seemed.

  Somewhere in the room there was a burst of applause that was taken up by the rest of us, “an ovation for the President and the First Lady, and for the President of the congress and his first lady,” one of the papers would later say.

  As we all clapped and watched the presidential procession make its way between the tables towards the dais, many eyes turned towards Dr. Cook and me. Otto Sverdrup, Amundsen, Cagni—all smiled as if to say that Roosevelt was here as much to honour Dr. Cook as to honour Peary. Roosevelt, after whom Peary had named his last ship and who had intervened with Congress to help raise funds for his most recent expedition, would witness and confer his blessing on the passing of the torch to Dr. Cook. It was plain that all of them were not only happy for Dr. Cook but far more fond of him than they were of Peary, whose farewell address they were eagerly awaiting.

  Dr. Cook’s colour rose as though every eye in the banquet hall was turned his way, as though he alone had just been announced by the butler and was the object of this thunderous ovation.

  It felt as if the announcement had already been made and all that remained was for Peary to place upon it the final flourish of an eloquent goodbye.

  Once the Roosevelts and the Pearys were seated, the president of the National Geographic Society, Willis Moore, went to the lectern and read an obviously rehearsed welcome to the newly arrived head-table guests. There was much nodding among the tables, as if everyone was saying they had known all along that Willis Moore knew what was keeping Peary, known all along that he would never allow his annual banquet to fall as flat as for a while it had seemed certain to do.

  Among the head-table guests was Dr. Alexander Graham Bell, upon whom Moore called to “say a few words.” Dr. Bell, he said, had been a founding member of the society and its second president, and was therefore better suited than anyone for the task he was about to perform.

  Dr. Bell had been speaking for some time before I realized that the subject of his address was Dr. Cook, whose colour was even higher than before; he really was the cynosure of all eyes.

  “We have with us, and are glad to welcome, Commander Peary, explorer of the Arctic regions, but in Dr. Cook we have one of the few Americans, if not perhaps the only American, who has explored both extremes of the world, the Arctic and the Antarctic regions. And now he has been to the top of the American continent and therefore, if I may presume to say so, to the top of the world.”

  There was a marked pause. “The top of the world.” Dr. Bell had said, the expression normally used to describe the North Pole.

  As if, all at once, the crowd decided that this unfortunate choice of words could be erased only one way, there followed an ovation louder and more vigorous than the on
e that had greeted the arrival of the president.

  Everyone stood, Dr. Cook included, and everyone applauded with the exception of Dr. Cook, who suddenly seemed quite composed, accepting the ovation by bowing to all corners of the room.

  Then, like an actor inviting the audience to acknowledge the brilliance of his co-star, Dr. Cook extended his hands as if to say, “I give you Mr. Stead.” The ovation rose in volume as I heard Amundsen and Cagni roaring, “Hear, hear.” Amundsen, as though he was a referee and I a triumphant boxer, raised my hand in the air and turned me once about in a circle, with his free hand exhorting everyone around us to cheer louder.

  As he did so, I looked up at the head table and saw Peary applauding but not looking my way, instead staring out above the crowd as though interested in something taking place at the back of the room.

  When Amundsen released my hand and clapped me on the back, Dr. Bell began to speak again and the guests sat down. My pulse was racing, the blood pounding at my temples. I looked at Dr. Cook, who warmly smiled at me. It was to be our night, not just his.

  “I would ask Dr. Cook and Mr. Stead to speak,” said Dr. Bell, “except that I have been told that a more appropriate moment for them to do so is still to come.” At these words, knowing looks were universally exchanged.

  When Dr. Bell finished speaking, Willis Moore called on President Roosevelt to award the Hubbard Medal to Peary.

  The president, who either was extemporizing or had memorized his speech, began. “Civilized people,” he said, surveying the guests with a glance that seemed to say that they were the epitome of civilized people, “live under conditions of life so easy that there is a certain tendency to atrophy of the hardier virtues. But Commander Peary is proof that, in some of the race at least, there has been no loss of the hardier virtues.”

  I looked at Jo Peary. How much healthier she was than when I had seen her last. I remembered the narrow, furrowed nape of her neck; her cropped hair hidden by her cap, so that it seemed she might be bald beneath it. Despite how she and her husband had parted at Etah, they had somehow reconciled and here she was, publicly supporting him. More forbearing than Mrs. Cook, it seemed.

  I don’t know how long I was looking at Jo Peary before I realized that she was looking back at me. She smiled, which at first I took to be an acknowledgment of what we both knew—of the announcement Peary was about to make, from which Dr. Cook and I would benefit. But then I saw that the smile meant something else. It said, How far we are, Mr. Stead, from the place where we met. How different that world is from this one, and how oblivious to that other world all these people are. It was as though we were sharing a joke. I smiled back, and after a second or two she looked away, still smiling.

  “The basis of a successful national character must rest upon the great fighting virtues,” President Roosevelt said, “which can be shown quite as well in peace as in war. For months in and months out, Commander Peary, year in and year out, you have faced perils and overcome the greatest risks and difficulties while having to show, in circumstances that were surely like those of war, the moral and compassionate qualities of peace. You bore, in short, the burdens of both war and peace, and even so nearly made it to the pole, came closer to doing so than any other man who ever lived. You have, if I may say so, led your Roughriders up the San Juan Hill of exploration. I present you with this, the first Hubbard Medal, in recognition of the great deed you have done for your country, for the world and for all mankind.”

  There was an enthusiastic but not riotous ovation, as if that were being saved for the last note of Peary’s swan song.

  Peary, with assistance from his wife and Willis Moore, rose and scuffed to the podium like some slipper-shod invalid. He shook the hand of President Roosevelt and fought to keep his balance when the president embraced him.

  I felt sorry for him. I could summon up no malice for him now, not because of the injury he did my hand, the words he whispered to me or his niggardly acknowledgment of the debt he owed me. Why should I hold anything against him, I asked myself, now that his day had come and gone, now that he was on the verge of saying so?

  While he had been seated, he had forever stroked his moustache, but standing, he could not do so because to keep his balance while not moving he had to cling to something. When the president released him, he all but lurched to the lectern, which he grabbed with both hands.

  For several seconds he stood there, the lectern wobbling as though he was trying to subdue it but could not. His face, for a few moments, took on the ghastly expression it had worn while he hung from my hand between the Erik and the Windward. Now and then his right hand twitched, as though he wished he could raise it to his face to stroke his moustache.

  Peary, I realized, was trying to find some way of standing that would make bearable the pain in his feet. He was wearing formal leather shoes, as round in the toe as the occasion would allow. That his weight was restored to its normal two hundred pounds boded well for the health of everything except his feet, which had to bear that weight, and which, only a few months ago, had somehow sustained him through the rigours of his farthest north. There had been rumours that he had stayed on his dog-pulled sled the entire time, while Matthew Henson, who was not in attendance at the banquet, did the driving, often pushing the sled over great obstacles of snow and ice.

  Finally, he stopped shifting his weight from one foot to the other and, grimacing, began to speak. The flow, the rhythm of the words, seemed to ease or distract him from the pain. About once every fifteen seconds, between sentences, he clenched his teeth, his face as red as if he were enraged. He spoke as if he were enraged, as if only at a wrathful shout could his voice be trusted not to break.

  He recited a retrospective of his accomplishments. It was a suspenseful moment each time he had to remove one hand from the lectern to put aside the page that he had just read. He teetered to the point that I wondered if he ought not to have someone beside him to move the pages for him, or if he ought not to have opted to give his speech while sitting down.

  Each item in his inventory of accomplishments was met with some applause, in which, following Dr. Cook’s lead, I took part. Peary mentioned the North Greenland expedition of 1892, on which the man thought by the world to be my father had disappeared. I applauded. Even for what I suspected were embellished stories about his last failed attempt to reach the pole, I applauded.

  No one unfamiliar with his history could have guessed that he was only fifty years old. His skin was like that of a man who, just the night before, had stepped off a ship from Greenland after two years in the Arctic. He was but ten years Dr. Cook’s senior, but he could have passed for his father. His face did not revert to normal between expeditions, like those of other explorers. He had got to the point where the leathering of skin that derives from long exposure to sun, wind and cold was permanent.

  There was something grand, almost noble, it seemed to me again, as it had in Etah, in his physical ruination. There was about him the splendour of a monument whose installation no one could remember. I felt more magnanimous towards him, more willing to forgive his many wrongs, than I ever had before. Lear, at the end, was more to be pitied than blamed, and Prospero, through whom Shakespeare bade to the world his own farewell, bowed out with a wistful grace born of old age and experience. Such were the thoughts I was having, thoughts that seemed appropriate to the occasion.

  Finally, Peary began to sound as though he was leading up to his great pronouncement. He said that between 1903 and 1905 he had, for the first two consecutive years since 1891, not been north of the Arctic Circle.

  “How I missed the Arctic only those of you who have been there can understand. And yet, I felt stirring within me memories of what my life was like before I set foot in the Arctic, what it was like not only to live normally, but to have normal expectations, to not be hounded forever by the knowledge of a task not yet completed—a task many times undertaken which must be taken up again, which would not let me rest, no matter how I l
onged to be rid of it, to be free of it forever. Again, my fellow explorers will understand.”

  He paused and drew a great breath, as though to stifle the urge to weep.

  “Which brings me to the present,” Peary said and paused again.

  There was a stir in the banquet hall. Here at last was the great pronouncement.

  “Let no one doubt,” Peary said, “that I believe in doing the thing that has been begun, and that it is worth doing before shifting to a new object.”

  There was much nodding and some applause. Then people throughout the hall began to stand. Soon everyone was standing in silent tribute and anticipation.

  “The true explorer does his work,” Peary said, “not for any hope of rewards or honour. The fact that such names as Abruzzi, Cagni, Nansen, Greely and Peary are indelibly inscribed upon the white disc close to the pole shows that the polar quest is the most manly example of friendly international rivalry that exists. It is a magnificent galaxy of flags that has been planted around the pole, and when eventually some one of them shall reach the pole itself, it will add to its own lustre without in any way detracting from the lustre of the others or leaving any sense of injury or humiliation in its wake.

  “But tonight, Mr. President, the Stars and Stripes stand nearest to the mystery, pointing and beckoning. God willing, I hope that your administration may yet see those Stars and Stripes planted at the pole itself.”

  I assumed that this was the prelude to his abdication.

  “This is a thing which should be done for the honour and the credit of this country.” He paused, looked up from his speech and surveyed the mass of delegates before him from around the world.

  “This is the thing which it is intended that I should do,” he shouted. “It is the thing that I must do. It is the thing that I will do.”

  There was perfect silence in the hall. I think we believed that we had misheard him, that he would yet say something to correct himself, to sweep aside the misunderstanding he had caused.