The Navigator of New York

by Wayne Johnston

  “We will have long lives, Devlin,” she said. “And we will never be apart.”

  Kristine removed from around her neck a large locket that had been a gift from me, and that at one time had contained our photographs, miniature cameos as though on opposing pages of a book.

  Now it contained something else.

  “We’ll hold it together,” she said.

  We each held one side of the chain and lowered it as close to the water as we could. At first, the locket swayed from side to side.

  “Wait for the wave to go out,” she said. We were again engulfed by water. All I could see was white. My forehead ached as if a block of ice was being held against it. Then the white water fell back into the sea and the wave, as it withdrew, went black.

  “NOW,” Kristine said.

  We let the locket fall. It dropped, chain extended as though someone was still holding it. The locket entered the water first, and then, link by link, the chain.

  We watched it sink, the golden gleam of it fading as it descended, until, for a while, I thought we would still be able to see it as it rested on the bottom. But then, abruptly, it was gone, falling for who knows how much longer.

  In the locket, folded tightly to make it fit, was Dr. Cook’s last letter to me, the one that was on the desk of his study the morning I woke up to find him gone.

  My dearest Devlin:

  I have been thinking about your mother’s letter. “You have only to say yes or no …“ My choice was no, but I could not bring myself to say it. I suppose it seemed less shameful to say nothing. “If I do not hear from you, I will not write to you again.” I used to think that she offered me that third choice because she knew I would take it whether she offered it or not.

  I once described her letter as “forgiveness in advance.” But I was wrong. If she had known what my answer would be, she would never have told me about the child. She would have told me that she had changed her mind, chosen her fiancé instead of me.

  I think she dreaded not hearing back from me even more than she did my saying no. I think she mentioned that third choice to warn me away from it, because she foresaw what its effect on me would be. Perhaps, when I did not write back, she regretted having presented me with a choice I could not stand to make, let alone live with.

  But I doubt it. Your mother did not believe, as I have come to believe, that the odds are always in favour of unhappiness. She thought it most likely that my answer would be yes, that I would see, as she had, that we would be happier together than apart, no matter what the circumstances.

  I might have saved your life, but it was not only to protect you that I murdered Francis Stead. As I walked through the snow towards him, I had an intolerable thought.

  My renunciation of her, her marriage to Francis Stead, his abandonment of her, her struggle with him on that ledge, her final moments, when she knew beyond all hope that she would die—what if even she could not withstand such things? What if there had come a moment when she felt forsaken, tempted beyond even her powers of resistance by despair? Could a nature such as hers be in its very essence overthrown, transformed so entirely that even of its past existence, no evidence remained?

  I have said that nothing in her life was undone by the manner of her death, but I did not believe it the night I murdered Francis Stead. And there have been many times since when I did not believe it.

  I think it would be best for you if we do not meet again and that this be our last communication. Even if I was able to follow your example and turn away from Peary and the pole, it would be best for you to have nothing more to do with me. I would not have you be my partner in disgrace.

  But at any rate, I cannot turn away from Peary and the pole. What I have begun with Peary must be played out to the end, but not at the cost of your happiness. I fear that, were we to continue our association, you would change for the worse in ways that nothing could repair.

  You have it in you to be happy. You have inherited my blood, but not my history. I believe that I am unhappy neither by nature nor by circumstance. What I have done, I have done of my own free will. In you runs a half-measure of your mother’s blood and a half-measure of that of the man with whom she fell in love.

  It seems hard to believe that I was ever such a man, but I must have been. It has been over thirty years since I last saw her face. I have no photographs of her. Nothing of hers but that one brief letter, a single yellowed square of paper that I have not read since I showed it to you for fear that, with one more unfolding, it would fall to pieces.

  Of course, I know it by heart. There are times when the whole letter runs through my mind like a prayer learned in childhood.

  Sentences, phrases from it, crop up in my daily train of thought, non sequiturs that recur like punctuation marks.

  “You have nothing to fear from me.” Sometimes, when I wake up, it seems as though she has just stopped speaking those words, as though I hear them while coming up from sleep, as though the last one, when I surface, is still ringing in the air. “Me.” I am for a few seconds certain that she is in the room, has asked me a question whose last word was me. “Do you love me?”

  Were she still alive, I might pass her in the street and not recognize her face. Who did Francis Stead prevent her from becoming? What would she look like, my Amelia, who would be fifty now? I knew her for just three weeks. Guilt, regret, shame, none of these afflicts me as much as simple sorrow does.

  The day before we met, I watched you disembark from the ship. Even had your uncle not sent me a photograph, I would have known that it was you. I followed you to your hotel and hours later slipped that note beneath your door. It seemed right that I not meet you in Manhattan, where I met your mother.

  The next day, I watched you from one of the upstairs windows while you waited on the other side of Bushwick in the heat. I would have called you in, but there were still servants who had yet to leave. There you stood, on the brink of entering my life, like someone conjured up by the letters I had written.

  How unreal it all seemed at first, you standing there so motionless, staring straight ahead, incongruous in those heavy clothes. But then, for a few seconds, you removed your hat, and there you were. I saw your hair, your face, at which you dabbed with your handkerchief.

  “My son,” I said, as if it had not occurred to me that the young man I had seen the day before and had been watching for the past few minutes was my son. You became my son while I was looking at you, passed from strange to familiar in an instant. And now it seemed that I had always known you. The stranger in you was beyond recall.

  “Devlin,” I said. And you, as if my saying your name had prompted you, looked at your watch, dropped it back in your pocket, then made your way across the street.

  “My son,” I said again as you passed from view beneath the window and I hurried down the stairs to let you in.

  I have never told you of my last moments with your mother.

  After emerging separately from our hotel, we met again at a preappointed place just up the street, a tearoom where, for a while, we sat and talked, lingering, not wanting the afternoon to end.

  When we left, it was getting dark. I had to make my way by ferry back to Brooklyn, while she was already long overdue at Lily’s house and would soon have to hail a northbound horse and cab.

  She said that she wished the bridge was finished so that she could walk with me to the midpoint and turn back. I told her that years from now, we would walk across it with our children on Sunday afternoons.

  She took a foolish chance and, right there on the sidewalk, while the lamps were being lit, kissed me on the lips.

  I have often imagined myself as she must last have seen me from the cab, as I made my way on foot towards the river, my hand on my hat lest I lose it in the wind that funnelled up between the buildings from the water.

  We were young. We did not doubt that we would meet again.

  Remember, Devlin.

  In the language of the people who live where yo
u and I have lived, there is no word for goodbye.

  Love,

  Your father

  Brooklyn

  October 26, 1909

  • AUTHOR’S NOTE •

  This is a work of fiction. At times, it places real people in imaginary space and time. At others, imaginary people in real space and time. While it draws from the historical record, its purpose is not to answer historical questions or settle historical controversies.

  • ACKNOWLEDGMENTS •

  Many thanks to my friend and editor, Diane Martin. Just as many to Louise Dennys, my publisher, for steering me through the shoals, in fiction and in life. Most of the people who make books possible these days are women. In the case of Navigator, they include Sharon Klein, Deirdre Molina, Astrid Otto, Susan Roxborough, and many more, including my agent, Anne McDermid, and her sidekick, Kelly Dignan.

  WAYNE JOHNSTON IS THE AUTHOR OF The Story of Bobby O’Malley, The Time of Their Lives, The Divine Ryans, Human Amusements, and The Colony of Unrequited Dreams, all novels, and of Baltimore’s Mansion, a memoir. He lives in Toronto.