The Navigator of New York

by Wayne Johnston

  But Peary took up the pages of his speech and began to shuffle back across the stage towards his chair, beside which Mrs. Peary was standing.

  I looked at Dr. Cook, who was staring at the tablecloth, his mouth slightly open, leaning on the table on the knuckles of his two clenched fists. I looked at Amundsen and saw that his eyes were filling with tears, which he left unchecked when they began to trickle down his face. Cagni was shaking his head in disbelief, looking at Dr. Cook as if he could not understand what was keeping him from falling to the floor. I looked around and saw that many people were looking at Dr. Cook, and at me—some with astonishment, some with undisguised pity, a few smiling.

  How could we have so profoundly misperceived everything? Absolutely nothing was what, mere seconds ago, it had seemed to be.

  I put my hand on Dr. Cook’s, and he responded by moving his hand and beginning to applaud, loudly, and at long intervals, as if he was the only person of the four hundred gathered to whom it had occurred that Peary’s speech had yet to be acknowledged.

  Suddenly, there was an ovation that caused the floor to shake beneath my feet. Cups rattled and spoons jumped as men pounded on the tables with their fists. The word “hurray” or something like it was shouted in many different languages. Old men stamped their feet and applauded with their hands above their heads.

  After a few dumbfounded seconds, I managed to join the others in applauding. “Without leaving any sense of injury or humiliation in its wake.” I was stung by the irony of Peary’s words.

  I wondered if the great effort I was making to control myself and conceal my disappointment was apparent to those around me. I felt as self-consciously foolish as if my every thought since arriving at the banquet had been heard by the other delegates.

  It occurred to me that in his announcement, Peary had slighted, if not Dr. Cook in particular, then that group of explorers who had done what Peary said he did not believe in doing: “shifting to a new object” before finishing “the one that has been begun.” Like Mt. McKinley. Like the South Pole. Peary’s ambition for the pole had been unswerving and remained so. Dr. Cook had been more versatile, more catholic in his pursuits. Now it seemed to me that he was being rewarded for his versatility by being lumped in with the gadflies of exploration.

  I wondered what had gone wrong, why Bridgman had spoken to Dr. Cook the way he had, what speech it was that he had shown Dr. Cook. Might the whole thing have been a hoax engineered by Bridgman? To what end?

  I knew that the man Dr. Cook had examined three years ago in Greenland would not, even if he regained all the strength it was possible for him to regain, reach the North Pole. How could anyone believe that the man who had hobbled and shuffled from his place at the head table to the podium would one day reach the pole? That the Arctic club members would unknowingly be wasting their money on Peary when they might have got the ultimate return for it from Dr. Cook and me was something I wished I could have stood up and shouted. I wished I could have told them all that Peary was in denial of what to all the explorers of the world was obvious. Yet Dr. Cook and I had been made to look like fools.

  While the ovation was still at its height, Dr. Cook stopped applauding and again rested his hands on the table, this time palms down, though his head was unnaturally erect, as if he were fighting the impulse of his body to assume a posture of dejection. He began to applaud again, then stopped, again leaned on his hands, perhaps resisting a wave of dizziness or nausea.

  The instant Peary made his announcement, Dr. Cook’s expectations, which everyone in that banquet hall had shared with him, seemed absurdly grandiose. Everyone had looked at him as if he had led them to believe that he would be taking Peary’s place—as if he had been spreading the rumour all week that he had been chosen to replace Peary, something that otherwise would never have occurred to them.

  Amundsen was now standing beside Dr. Cook, and the two of them, though not looking at each other, were speaking, Dr. Cook nodding and somehow managing to smile, to convey the impression that he and Amundsen were conferring about Peary’s announcement just like everybody else.

  As the ovation at last began to subside, I was able to hear what they were saying.

  “I know,” said Dr. Cook, “but the speech I have prepared is entirely inappropriate.”

  “Shall I tell them you are ill?” Amundsen said. “Shall I speak in your place?”

  “No, no,” Dr. Cook said. “I must speak. I must say something. Otherwise they will see, they will know. Though perhaps they have already seen.”

  “You are among friends, Dr. Cook,” Amundsen said fervently.

  The delegates sat down. Dr. Bell invited Dr. Cook to give the closing remarks. There was vigorous applause from which a few, including Amundsen and Cagni, tried to work up an ovation, but it petered out. Dr. Cook rose and made his way to the head table and the lectern.

  Eyes downcast, he acknowledged the head table, starting with President and Mrs. Roosevelt. He thanked Dr. Bell for his earlier tribute and thanked the National Geographic Society and the organizers of the congress. At last he looked up.

  “What an extraordinary evening this has been,” he said. “In this room are gathered or represented all the great explorers of the world. I myself have gone exploring with many of you. May I say what a privilege that has been. I shall not forget it. Nor shall I forget the camaraderie and fellowship that all of us have shared these past few days. Thank you, all of you. And until we meet again, goodbye.”

  This time there was polite, bemused applause that ended quickly when the unseen orchestra struck up the anthem, after which the Roosevelts and the Pearys began to make their way from the head table to the doors, though their path was soon blocked by well-wishers.

  When Dr. Cook took me by the arm and led me towards the back of the room, no one seemed to take much notice. I wound my way with him and Amundsen among the tables. Suddenly, our route became a gauntlet. Hands clasped Dr. Cook’s and mine, others thumped our backs. I heard myself addressed over and over but did not reply. It was all well meant, a sympathetic tribute of some sort. But I felt as though the whole assembly was extending its condolences to us. We might have been leaving the company of these people for good. I felt that at the age of twenty-six, I was being consoled for having failed.

  By the time I made it to the door, it seemed that my life depended on my getting out into the open air within the minute.

  I pulled myself away from Dr. Cook and Amundsen and, wearing only my hat and tails, hurried outside, where it was snowing heavily. I walked along the sidewalk at what, to observers, might have seemed to be a briskly cheerful pace.

  • CHAPTER THIRTY •

  ON THE TRAIN BACK TO BROOKLYN, WE SAT OPPOSITE EACH other in our berth. Dr. Cook might have been returning from what he knew was his last try at the pole, so desolate was his expression. Gone was the kind, indulgent, faintly amused look with which formerly he regarded even a landscape devoid of people.

  My mind was reeling. I had for hours been trying to raise his spirits. I would have been happy just to make him angry. But he merely stared out the window, watching as a succession of snow-covered towns went by, looking as if everything we passed was to blame for what had happened. To blame, yet irreproachable, remote, indifferent, oblivious to anything he said or did.

  “There is no point denying that what happened changes everything,” said Dr. Cook. “They saw me fall, laid low. They saw me as no man should ever let himself be seen by other men. So vulnerable. So defenceless against scorn and pity. I was completely fooled. I have always, even when all signs pointed to success, prepared myself for failure. ‘There is many a slip / ‘twixt the cup and the lip.’ That has been my motto. Never presume. Never celebrate too openly, lest you seem and feel all the more foolish when your hopes are dashed.

  “Yet I left myself open to be jilted in public, so certain did the outcome seem this time. There is something ominous about near triumph, Devlin. It is a rule of the universe that anyone who comes
this close and fails will never get a second chance. Everyone in that banquet room sensed it. In the eyes of the money-men, I am tainted with bad luck.

  “Even if Peary undertakes but one more expedition and, when he fails, gives up at last, I will not be chosen to succeed him. No one who was there last night will forget the way I looked. That I was in no way to blame for what happened, that I in no way brought it upon myself, will not matter. What will matter is that they saw me brought down from the height to which they had raised me.

  “Last night I told myself that I could bear it if someone else makes it to the pole before me or you, as long as that someone else is not Peary. Last night, in my room, I said out loud, over and over, ‘Anyone but Peary.’ How absurd it seems. I have been reduced to bargaining with destiny by a man whose efforts are foredoomed to failure. I know he will not reach the pole, yet I cannot help dreading that he will.”

  “It is not over for us,” I said. “If it is not yet over for Peary, think how much remains for us to do.”

  He shook his head.

  “Not everything is lost,” I insisted, fighting back tears, as I had been doing for hours, though I had let them flow freely in my room the night before. When we met in the morning, my swollen eyes made it so plain to Dr. Cook how I had spent the night that for a moment he took me in his arms. “We may have to do things some other way than we had planned,” I said. “That’s all.”

  “I am sorry for what has happened to you because of me,” he said.

  “Not because of you,” I said. “Because of … I don’t know who to blame.”

  “You should know,” he said. “Who do you think started that rumour? By whom was I misled?”

  “You might not have been misled,” I said. “Some people say that the rumour was well founded, that the speech Bridgman showed you was not a forgery, but that Peary changed his mind at the last second, in part because he was urged to do so by the president.”

  “When do they say that Peary changed his mind? Are these the same people who started the rumour in the first place?”

  “They say that he changed his mind just minutes before he arrived. That even Jo Peary, as she sat there listening, did not know what he planned to say. You heard the speech. Right up to the end, it sounded like he was saying goodbye. Perhaps all he did was change the last few words.”

  “I wouldn’t be surprised if Peary put Bridgman up to it.”

  “What if Bridgman didn’t know that Peary had changed his mind? What if Peary didn’t know that you had seen his speech and Bridgman didn’t know that Peary had changed it? It might all have been completely innocent. An accident.”

  “It was no accident,” he said.

  In my mind, I saw Peary shuffle, slump-shouldered, across the stage towards his chair, where his wife was waiting for him. He had looked as if he had done what everyone expected him to do. He had looked done in. The ovation he received was exactly as I had imagined it would be. A roaring, raucous send-off for a man who, after surviving feat after feat of exploration, had just renounced his ultimate quest, just bequeathed it to a younger man. Minutes before Peary made his intentions known, I had seen Dr. Cook smiling and applauding as if, now that Peary was no longer a rival, there was no need for reserve, no reason not to join the others in this last salute to the grand old man of exploration. How nightmarishly close it had all been to what Bridgman had led us to expect.

  I couldn’t help thinking how different things would be now if I had been a fraction of a second slower grabbing out for Peary when he fell. He would already be forgotten. Dr. Cook would long ago have been chosen to replace him. He—we—might have made it to the pole and back by now. Dr. Cook would have been president of the congress and guest of honour at the banquet. He, not Peary, would have won the first Hubbard Medal. He, not Peary, would have walked into the banquet room with Roosevelt.

  I felt ashamed of myself for thinking such things. For Dr. Cook, I foresaw unhappiness that I felt helpless to prevent. I wondered what would become of him and me if he had to face up to the certainty of failure—what would sustain us through all the secrecy, all the pretence and collusion, if we ceased to be explorers. What would he feel for me once he put aside the hope of redeeming his betrayal of my mother?

  But how unfair of me it was to doubt him now.

  “What must I do, Devlin?” Dr. Cook said. “We were to have undertaken polar expeditions together. I was to have taught you, prepared you to lead expeditions of your own. I can see no way now that this can happen. Marie cannot help us. Underwriting the cost of climbing Mt. McKinley is one thing, but a series of polar expeditions, even one expedition, is beyond her means. Perhaps you should apply for a place on other expeditions. I’m sure that Amundsen would take you with him on his next try for the South Pole if we asked him to.”

  “I will not take part in any expeditions without you,” I said. “Perhaps both of us could go with Amundsen. You would greatly increase his chances of success. And if you were part of a successful try for the South Pole, the backers here would be impressed. You would be keeping your hand in the game. And I could learn from both of you.”

  “I cannot go back to serving under someone else,” he said. “Not even Amundsen. Besides, if I was part of a Norwegian expedition that made it to the pole, I would be persona non grata in New York. My participation in the Belgian expedition did not win me any friends here.”

  “Nothing has happened from which you cannot recover,” I said.

  “We may never get there, Devlin,” he said. “In spite of what I promised you—”

  “No one could be certain of keeping such a promise,” I said.

  “Then you doubt me, too?” he said.

  “No,” I said. “No, I just meant … it would not be as though you had broken your promise wilfully.”

  “You mean,” he said, “it would not be as though I had betrayed you?”

  “I was not thinking of betrayal.”

  “I have devoted my life to fulfilling that promise.”

  “Perhaps you have invested too much of yourself in me,” I said. “Your wife and … and your other children—”

  He shook his head and winced, as if to say, “If you only understood, you would not mention them.”

  “I am meant to be destroyed by this,” he said. “As important as it is to Peary that he succeed, it is just as important to him that I fail.”

  “Why?” I said. Then I added, when he did not answer, “Is his failure as important to you as your success?”

  “Our success,” he said. “Yours and mine together. Never forget that. But no, I am not like him. I do not share his motives. He has done things I would never do.”

  Eyes closed, he was silent for a long time. I thought he had fallen asleep.

  “Devlin, there is something I must tell you. Perhaps I should have done so before, but I had hoped to spare you. Perhaps there is no other way, however, of making you understand why Peary must not be allowed to reach his goal.”

  I felt the same dread as I had when we first met in the drawing room.

  “I told you that on the North Greenland expedition, Francis Stead took me aside one morning and told me his story, including what Peary had told him: that I was the man with whom his wife betrayed him, the father of her son. But he also told me something else.

  “We sat on the ‘bench,’ the ledge on the back of the tolt of rock some distance from Redcliffe House. As we spoke, he puffed on his cigars. It all happened just as I described to you before. He told me that when he and his wife had been married nearly two years, he had abandoned her and gone to Brooklyn.”

  Under a pseudonym, Francis Stead booked passage on a steamer to St. John’s. He wore a disguise that he bought at an auction. The props of a play that had closed were being sold off: muttonchop whiskers, thick eyebrows, a florid moustache and heavy burnsides, and a suit of clothing of a style that had been in fashion twenty years earlier. He had no need of makeup, for his face, even then, was leathered from the tim
e he’d spent up north.

  This was in late March. There was a channel through the ice, barely enough for the steamer to make it to the Narrows, just inside of which it docked, for all the berths in the harbour were either occupied or crammed with ice. It was not far from where the ship docked to Devon Row.

  Francis Stead tipped his hat to the one or two people he passed along the way to the nearest hotel. St. John’s is a seaport. There are always strangers, strange-looking strangers, on the street. No one paid him much attention.

  After checking in under his pseudonym, he went straight to the house. It was about one-thirty in the afternoon. He knew that the boy was of school age and would not yet be home. They had never had servants. It was likely that his wife had none now. There were no vehicles about except the cabriolet, which he recognized as hers, and that meant she was unlikely to be having visitors. Either she was alone in the house or it was empty. If someone other than her answered the door, he would pretend he had the wrong address and leave to find some other way of contacting her.

  He struck the knocker several times. The door opened, and there she was. It seemed to him that she looked exactly the same as she had when he left, that she was even dressed the same. She did not recognize him, not even when he said her name. “It’s me,” he said. She looked at him for a long time, then walked backwards, holding the door with both hands as if to keep it between them, to shield herself with it. It seemed that for a few seconds, she did not realize he was wearing a disguise. She seemed to take his appearance as the measure of how long they had been apart.

  She said nothing at first, only sat on the edge of a chair in the front room, looking at the fire. He wondered what she thought, his showing up like this on the doorstep after all this time. Done up like this.

  “Devlin will soon be coming home from his aunt’s house,” she said.

  He asked her if they might make their separate ways to Signal Hill, where they would have some privacy. “I believe you are as anxious as I am that no one know I came to visit you,” he said. She said nothing. He assured her that she would not keep the boy and his aunt waiting long.