The Navigator of New York
Page 1
The Navigator of New York
FINALIST FOR THE GILLER PRIZE
FINALIST FOR THE GOVERNOR GENERAL’S AWARD FOR FICTION
FINALIST FOR THE COMMONWEALTH WRITERS PRIZE FOR
BEST BOOK (CANADA & THE CARIBBEAN)
A GLOBE AND MAIL BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR
A NEW YORK TIMES NOTABLE BOOK OF THE YEAR, 2002
“Almost five hundred pages of effortless narrative, powered by indelible images of eternal polar ice and the birth of the twentieth century in teeming Manhattan, exert an inexorable pull.”
—Maclean’s
“A captivating narrative that delves into both the noble and the seedier aspects of the human need to discover and explore.… Johnston’s ability to illuminate historical settings and situations continues to grow with each book, and this powerful effort is his best to date.”
—Publishers Weekly (starred review)
“The sustenance offered by The Navigator of New York is not easily found in these thin and knowing days.”
—Ottawa Citizen
“Wayne Johnston’s new novel is chock-full of fine writing and intriguing historical detail.… Johnston has again proven himself a national treasure.”
—The London Free Press
“The book is an intricate blend of mystery, adventure and drama … a brilliant creative achievement … a compulsively readable work, rich in authentic details.”
—The Chronicle—Herald (Halifax)
“Material like this—with its tantalizing themes of truth, falsehood, ambition, envy, and the queasily shifting nature of reality—is pure gold for a fiction maker. In the hands of Newfoundland writer Wayne Johnston, it becomes a shape-shifting epic of magical proportions and dazzling complexity.… Some of the most powerful and imaginative writing being produced in English today.”
—Quill & Quire (starred review)
“The Navigator of New York is a morally complex novel that holds a telescope of themes: love and betrayal, honour and deception, truth and falsehood.… It is a major artistic achievement and confirms Johnston as one of the significant Canadian writers to mount the world literary stage in recent years.”
—The Record (Kitchener—Waterloo)
“Johnston has a gift for the vivid and meticulous recreation of lost times and places.… He navigates with the assurance of a born explorer.”
—The Vancouver Sun
“A huge and immensely readable novel about explorers of the landscape and the heart.”
—Elle Canada
“Beautiful [and] evocative.… Johnston is an accomplished storyteller, with a gift for both description and character, which he uses masterfully here.”
—Booklist (starred review)
“Better than about ninety per cent of most contemporary fiction. Johnston is a great novelist in the making”
—Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
“A remarkably good book.… It is a worthy successor to The Colony, and reinforces Johnston’s right to be considered one of the major figures in Canadian fiction.”
—The Independent (UK)
“Wayne Johnston … is redefining the historical novel.… [His] rendition of the obsession and self-serving dishonesty of the explorers, the sound and feel of life at the North Pole, a brand-new New York on the cusp of greatness, and a young man having his life revealed to him piece by piece makes for compelling reading. He just keeps getting better.”
—The Seattle Times
Also by Wayne Johnston
The Story of Bobby O’Malley
The Time of Their Lives
The Divine Ryans
Human Amusements
The Colony of Unrequited Dreams
Baltimore’s Mansion
VINTAGE CANADA EDITION, 2003
Copyright © 2002 1310945 Ontario Inc.
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer, who may quote brief passages in a review.
Published in Canada by Vintage Canada, a division of Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto. Originally published in hardcover in Canada by Alfred A. Knopf Canada, a division of Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto, in 2002.
Distributed by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto.
Vintage Canada and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House of Canada Limited.
National Library of Canada Cataloguing in Publication Data
Johnston, Wayne
The navigator of New York / Wayne Johnston
eISBN: 978-0-307-37542-1
I.Title.
PS8569.O3918N39 2003 C813′.54 C2003-902243-9
PR9199.3.J599N39 2003
www.randomhouse.ca
v3.1
For Rose
Contents
Cover
Other Books by This Author
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Book One Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Book Two Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Book Three Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Book Four Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-one
Chapter Twenty-two
Chapter Twenty-three
Chapter Twenty-four
Chapter Twenty-five
Chapter Twenty-six
Chapter Twenty-seven
Chapter Twenty-eight
Chapter Twenty-nine
Chapter Thirty
Chapter Thirty-one
Chapter Thirty-two
Book Five Chapter Thirty-three
Chapter Thirty-four
Chapter Thirty-five
Chapter Thirty-six
Chapter Thirty-seven
Chapter Thirty-eight
Chapter Thirty-nine
Book Six Chapter Forty
Chapter Forty-one
Chapter Forty-two
Chapter Forty-three
Chapter Forty-four
Chapter Forty-five
Chapter Forty-six
Chapter Forty-seven
Author’s Note
Acknowledgments
About the Author
BOOK ONE
• CHAPTER ONE •
IN 1881, AUNT DAPHNE SAID, NOT LONG AFTER MY FIRST birthday, my father told the family that he had signed on with the Hopedale Mission, which was run by Moravians to improve the lives of Eskimos in Labrador. His plan, for the next six months, was to travel the coast of Labrador as an outport doctor. He said that no matter what, he would always be an Anglican. But it was his becoming a fool, not a Moravian, that most concerned his family.
In what little time they had before he was due to leave, they, my mother and the Steads, including Edward, tried to talk him out of it. They could not counter his reasons for going, for he gave none. He would not counter the reasons they gave for why he should stay, instead meeting their every argument with silence. It would be disgraceful, Mother Stead told him; him off most of the time like the men who worked the boats, except that they at least sent home for the upkeep of their families what little money they didn’t spend on booze. This
was not how a man born into a family of standing, and married into one, should conduct himself. Sometimes, on the invitation of Mother Stead, a minister would come by and join them in dressing down my father. He endured it all in silence for a while, then excused himself and went upstairs to his study. It was as though he was already gone, already remote from us.
Perhaps the idea to become an explorer occurred to him only after he became an outport doctor. Or he might have met explorers or heard about some while travelling in Labrador. I’m not sure.
At any rate, he had been with the Hopedale Mission just over a year, was at home after his second six-month stint, when he answered an ad he saw in an American newspaper. Applying for the position of ship’s doctor on his first polar expedition, he wrote: “I have for several years now been pursuing an occupation that required arduous travel to remote places and long stretches of time away from home.” Several years, not one. He said that for would-be expeditionaries, such embellishments were commonplace.
He signed on with his first expedition in 1882. A ship from Boston bound for what he simply called “the North” put in at St. John’s to take him on.
First a missionary, now an explorer. And him with a wife and a two-year-old son, and a brother whose lifetime partner he had pledged to be. My aunt’s husband, my uncle Edward.
Father Stead had been a doctor, and it was his wish, which they obliged, that his two sons “share a shingle” with him. My father, older by a year, deferred his acceptance at Edinburgh so that he and Uncle Edward could enrol together. The brothers Stead came back the Doctors Stead in 1876. In St. John’s, Anglicans went to Anglican doctors, whose numbers swelled to nine after the return home of Edward and my father. On the family shingle were listed one-third of the Anglican doctors in the city. It read, “Dr. A. Stead, Dr. F. Stead and Dr. E. Stead, General Practitioners and Surgeons,” as if Stead was not a name, but the initials of some credential they had all earned, some society of physicians to which all of them had been admitted.
Three years after their graduation from Edinburgh, Father Stead died, but the shingle was not altered. Until his death, the two brothers had shared a waiting room, but afterwards my father moved into his father’s surgery, across the hall. From the door that had borne both brothers’ names, my father’s was removed. It was necessary to make only one small change to the green-frosted window of Grandfather’s door: the initial A was removed and the initial F put in its place. F for Francis.
Even without Father Stead, the family practice thrived. When asked who their doctor was, people said “the Steads,” as if my father and Edward did everything in tandem: examinations, diagnoses, treatments. When they arrived at reception, new patients were not asked which of the brothers they wished to see—nor, in most cases, did they arrive with their minds made up. Patients were assigned on an alternating basis. To swear by one of the brothers Stead was to swear by the other.
But with the departure of my father, the Steads were no longer the Steads, and for a while the practice faltered. And no wonder, Edward said, what with one of them having gone off, apparently preferring first the company of Eskimos and Moravians to that of his own kind, and now the profession of nursemaid to a boatload of social misfits to that of doctor. If one of them would do that, what might the other do?
The family itself dropped a notch in the estimation of its peers. It was as if some latent flaw in the Stead character had shown itself at last. My father’s patients did not go across the hall to Edward. They went to other doctors. Some of Edward’s patients did likewise. He had no choice but to accept new ones from a lower social circle.
My father, in letters home, insisted that he would take up his practice again one day. He promised Edward he would pay him the rent that his premises would have fetched from another doctor, but he was unable to make good on the promise, having forsaken all income.
Rather than find another partner, rather than take down the family shingle and replace it with one that bore a stranger’s name, Edward left my father’s office, and everything in it, exactly as it was.
That door. The door of the doctor who was never in but which still bore his name. It must have seemed to his patients that Edward was caught up in some unreasonably protracted period of mourning for his absent brother whose effects he could not bear to rearrange, let alone part with. Every day that door, his brother’s name, the frosted dark green glass bearing all the letters his did except for one. He could not come or go without being prompted by that door to think of Francis.
The expedition “to the North,” he said, immeasurably improved the map of the world, adding to it three small, unpopulated islands.
Soon, my father’s life was measured out in expeditions. When he came back from one, it was weeks before he no longer had to ask what month or what day of the week it was. He would go to his office, turn upside down the stack of newspapers left there for him by Edward and read about what had happened in the world while he was absent from it. He searched out what had been written about the expeditions he had served on, the records they had set. As my father had yet to command an expedition, none of these records was attributed to him. Rarely, these records were some “first” or “farthest.” But most of them were records of endurance, feats made necessary by catastrophes, blunders, mishaps. Declaring a record was usually a way of putting the best face on failure. “First to winter north of latitude …” was a euphemism for “Polar party stranded for months after ship trapped in ice off Greenland.”
He was no sooner up to speed than he was gone again. Once the circumstances were right, once the backing for the next expedition had been raised by its commander and his application accepted, he was off.
He was never able to tell my mother the exact date of his arrivals home, only that his ship would dock sometime in the spring. He made almost random visitations. As my mother recalled those times, he seems to have been not so much present as less absent, known to be at home but rarely seen. She said we spent our dinnertimes in awkward silence. Otherwise, he holed up in his study, preparing, she presumed, for his next expedition, reading, poring over maps and charts. He kept the door of his study closed when he was in there and locked when he was not.
In my father’s absence, we rarely had visitors or invited people over, and my mother received few invitations.
Edward and Daphne came to visit, though only, at Edward’s insistence, infrequently.
According to Daphne, Edward, rotating his bowler hat by the brim, would sit on the edge of a chair in the front room, looking from the moment he arrived like he was on the verge of leaving. That was Edward, she said. No matter who they were visiting, his hat was always either on his head or in his hands. His back never made contact with a chair. After perhaps fifteen minutes, during which my mother and Edward rarely spoke, they were gone again.
“People feel embarrassed if they say ‘husband’ or ‘father’ or ‘doctor’ or ‘son’ in front of me,” Mother told Daphne. “At least I think they do. I feel embarrassed, so I avoid those words, too, along with about half the others in the dictionary. People don’t think of Francis only when I’m around or when Devlin is with me, you see, because there are always stories about him in the papers.”
These stories, Daphne reminded her, were not about my father per se. They were about the expeditions he took part in. They were picked up from foreign papers by the local ones, which tacked on to them a paragraph about my father.
“Still,” my mother said, “with his name so often in the paper, I’m sure that people talk about him a lot. Dr. Stead the explorer. Even if he came home between expeditions like other explorers, they’d talk about him. But he doesn’t, so they talk about him even more. Explorer and delinquent husband and father. Which makes it impossible for them to act as if they’ve never heard of him in front of me. Impossible not to be transparent about it anyway, though I pretend not to notice. So much tactfulness. Everyone so ill at ease, including me. I can stand only so much of it. I don’t know …”
“Don’t worry about your husband, Amelia,” Mother Stead told her once in the evening, when all the Steads were congregated in the front room of her house. “One day, he’ll realize how much he misses us. He’ll come home, and he’ll never go away again.”
“It is marriage he is running from,” she said another time. “Not you and the boy. Marriage. Responsibility and its confinements.” She spoke in the same tone as she did when predicting his return, her voice as flat as though she was reading from a prayer book.
Mother was an only child whose father died when she was eighteen and her mother soon after, leaving her the house that she and I lived in and a considerable sum of money that, despite the absence of any contribution from my father, would have been enough to sustain us both for life if wisely used.
But it was with part of her inheritance that my father set up his practice, and with her money and without consulting her that he bought his way onto his first expedition.
Father Stead had left everything to Edward, even though my father was the older brother, with Mother Stead, as was the custom with widows who had sons, getting nothing, not even the house she lived in.
Edward made me and my mother the conspicuous measure of his generosity and sense of family honour. My mother had only, in front of him and a witness, to make casual mention of something she didn’t have and that something would so soon after be delivered to our door it was like an accusation, the suggestion being that haste was necessary to prevent my mother from complaining or speaking badly of him to others. He affected the air of a good, generous-to-a-fault, easily imposed-on man, harried by his spendthrift sister-in-law, the wife of his delinquent brother, whose ultimate intention was to milk him dry.
Going by the surgery, Aunt Daphne would look at Edward’s name just below my father’s on the shingle. There he was, the shingle seemed to say, the last in the line of succession; the inheritor not just of his brother’s practice, but of his debts and obligations, all of it trickling down to him like the raindrops on the sign.