The Navigator of New York

by Wayne Johnston

  My mother and I did not go out often. Our one regular and unavoidable outing was Sunday service, where everyone’s lot in life was on conspicuous display. Nothing so invoked my absent father like the sight of my mother and me making our way up the centre aisle to the pew we shared with Edward and Daphne. A widow’s widowhood was never more apparent than when she appeared in church without her husband. Likewise our abandonment, my father’s delinquency. We would not have been more gawked at if, as we entered, we had been loudly announced as “Amelia and Devlin Stead, forsaken wife and son of the improvident explorer Dr. Stead.”

  Daphne could tell, from the way we were regarded in church and from things she overheard, that there was the feeling among some people that our isolation was contrived, that the two of us preferred to be left alone, that we were outsiders by nature, wilfully, even haughtily, aloof. When service was letting out, the men tipped their hats to Mother and the women nodded their acknowledgment and said good day in a way that forbade anything except a like response. One or two said, “How are you today, Mrs. Stead?” then looked at me for the answer. They smiled reassuringly at me when my mother told them she was fine. Otherwise, we were like rocks around which the congregation flowed.

  She kept her horse, whose name was Pete, in a small barn behind the house. “I’ve always taken care of my own horse,” she said. It was something she took pride in. The only thing she needed help with was hitching and unhitching Pete from what she called the carriage. It was a cabriolet with a maroon-coloured leather hood that folded back. When no one she knew was around, she would simply stand at the end of her driveway and wait until some man or boy whose assistance she could ask for came walking past.

  “I wish now that I had defied Edward and spent more time with her,” my aunt once told me.

  My mother and I became, as my father and Edward had once been, “the Steads,” a legendary pair, driving about in that cabriolet, sheltered by the hood, looking intent, preoccupied, as if hurrying home to resume some entirely unique, unprecedented way of passing time.

  She took me shopping with her, and once or twice Daphne went with us. For the first few seconds after we went into a store, all conversation stopped, then resumed at a more subdued level, as if to speak in normal tones in the presence of the Steads would be an intrusion on the privacy that they so famously preferred.

  “How are things with you, Mrs. Stead?” the butcher would say, and Mother would barely audibly reply to this relative torrent of conversation that things were well with her. He would wrap her purchases in brown paper, then tie them round and round with string, all the while looking at me and every few minutes winking, as if I shared with him some secret that we must not divulge in front of her.

  Mother once overheard the two of us being referred to by women whom we passed in our carriage as “a pair of hermits.”

  “A pair of hermits,” my mother said to Daphne, as if no path that she could make out led from what she had been to what other people thought she was.

  There came an expedition after which my father did not come home. From then on, in his letters to my mother and Edward, he kept up the pretence that he was forever being kept from returning by circumstances beyond his control. Delays because of heavy ice off Labrador. Emergencies. Mishaps. Requests to join rescue missions for fellow explorers that in all good conscience he could not refuse. Excuses that he did not even hope to fool us with, that he meant for us to see through and made only for form’s sake.

  “I am ill,” one letter read. “Not grievously so, but it is thought best for my recovery that I refrain from travelling.”

  In the spring of 1886, in a letter sent just before he went south from Battle Harbour, Labrador, on his way back from an expedition, my father wrote that he was moving to New York. In fact, he was going straight there and, when he found a house, would send for the two of us. He said he had made a “great decision.” He planned, as soon as possible, to lead a polar expedition of his own. For so long, he had taken direction from “lesser men,” obeyed commands that he knew were “ill-advised,” kept silent when he should have spoken up. He said he had spent “as much time in the polar regions as any man alive.” (Nothing to write home about, Edward said, even if it was true, which it wasn’t.) But as so many of the others had done, he must, for the time being, make New York his port. “New York is to explorers what Paris is to artists,” he said.

  He must go to New York, where he could choose, from among the many men who went there in the hope of signing on with a polar expedition, the best crew yet assembled. Where he could get to know the great men of industry, the financiers who thought they had everything until they met a man like him, and who, for merely vicarious glory, were willing to underwrite the cost of adventures they dared not embark upon themselves. Great contests were under way, races for the North Pole and the South Pole, and no one who did not live in some great city like New York was considered a serious contender. He claimed that by moving to New York, he would make enough money that he could send some home.

  “It is even likely, my dear wife,” he wrote, “that one day, these lonely wanderings of mine will make us rich.”

  New York. That it is the best place from which to set out for the Arctic is not for most people the main attraction of that city.

  My father never did send for us. It was the last letter my mother received from him.

  I don’t know exactly where Aunt Daphne’s version of my life leaves off and mine begins, but I often think it might be here:

  One day, when I was in the first grade, I came home from school to find the house empty. The barn out back was empty, too, the horse and carriage gone. Assuming my mother was out on some errand, I waited for her to return. I waited until after five, when it was almost dark. Then I walked up Devon Row to Uncle Edward’s. He was not home yet from his surgery, which was farther up the street. I asked Aunt Daphne if she had seen my mother.

  The next day, the horse and carriage were found on top of Signal Hill. Her death was officially declared to be an accidental drowning. But the story, which some children were only too glad to let me overhear, was that she had climbed down the steep slope that faced the sea, down to a grassy ledge, from which she jumped into a narrow channel of water between the shore and the ice that stretched off to the meeting place of sea and sky.

  • CHAPTER TWO •

  FOR TWO YEARS, DURING WHICH WE GOT NO ANSWERS TO THE letters we sent to my father in New York, not even the one telling him about my mother, I lived with Uncle Edward and Aunt Daphne in my mother’s house, to which they had moved after a kind of will was discovered. It was a note, what Uncle Edward called “a pithy bequeathal”: “I leave everything to Daphne.” Mother Stead had died a year before my mother. For that year, Uncle Edward and Aunt Daphne had been the sole occupants of the Stead home. My mother’s house was smaller and more suited to a couple with one child. The Stead house had been sold.

  The day, in the fall of 1888, when they were officially declared my guardians, the day the court ruled that they would remain so even should my father come back home, Aunt Daphne made a special dinner. She had me wear my best blazer. She dressed as though for some formal occasion. Beneath her wrap, she wore a close-fitting silk dress that might have been new, for I had never seen it before, striped black and green with bands of jet embroidery, complete with drapery and bustle.

  Uncle Edward wore a double-breasted frock coat with silk-faced lapels. His hair was slick with pomade, brushed back and parted down the middle.

  “So, Devlin,” Aunt Daphne said before we took our places at the table, “how are things with you?”

  Uncle Edward looked at her with amazement, as if it had not before occurred to him that when not in his presence, I continued to exist. But Aunt Daphne persisted. She wanted to know how everything was with me: school, sports, choir practice. I told her how things were while Uncle Edward made such a clatter cutting up his food that I had to raise my voice to make myself heard.

  When th
e subject of what was new with me was exhausted, there was silence. The wind was on the rise, and a sudden gust sprayed the window with particles of grit and stone. Uncle Edward stared at the fire behind me as if driven by one element into brooding contemplation of another. I looked at Aunt Daphne, who seemed so vulnerably hopeful in her finery. I imagined her preparing for this evening, choosing her outfit, making sure that everything looked just so, urging a reluctant Uncle Edward to do the same. There was something touching about the absence of all subtlety in her attempt to convey by her costume what she could not convey with words.

  It had been a rule of Father Stead’s that there be no talking at the dinner table until everyone had finished. This was Uncle Edward’s rule as well, though impossible to obey because he ate so slowly. He seemed to go into a trance while eating, eyes staring blankly while he chewed.

  “You’d think the two of us were bolters,” Aunt Daphne said. “We finish so far ahead of you.”

  At first, Uncle Edward ignored her, but when provoked several times in this fashion, he said, “You eat too fast.”

  “We would eat more slowly if you would speak from time to time,” she said, to no reaction from Uncle Edward.

  The meal was passed in this manner, protracted silences interrupted by remarks from Aunt Daphne and laconic, chastening retorts from Uncle Edward. When he emptied his plate but did not push it away, she got up and refilled it, glancing apologetically at me. When he was finished, he abruptly stood and went into the front room to have his brandy and cigar.

  “Can you imagine what it was like when there were just the two of us?” Aunt Daphne said, smiling. She leaned across the table towards me and whispered: “Their plates wiped clean they sit and wait / While at the trough he ruminates.” It was as if she believed the specialness of the occasion called for the disclosure of a secret.

  By consulting the dictionary, I discovered what was meant by ruminates. I repeated the couplet at school, which in itself was harmless, since none of the children really understood it, perhaps because of how ineptly I explained it to them. But the couplet, its author and the couple about whom it was written became known to teachers at the school, and from them, by exactly what means I would never know, it got back to Uncle Edward.

  I found on my pillow one night when I went up to bed a note from Uncle Edward, which read: “I am told you go about repeating rhymes about my ‘ruminations.’ I am sorry that my hospitality does not inspire you to greater things.”

  Whenever there was mention in the paper of one of the expeditions on which my father served, Aunt Daphne would make some mischievous remark about it to Uncle Edward, not realizing I could hear her.

  “I know it is cold in Greenland,” she said. “I don’t need men to prove it by going there and coming back with frostbite.”

  “White men study Eskimos,” she said. “Do you think the day is coming soon, Edward, when a band of Eskimos sent to study you and me will turn up on the sidewalks of St. John’s?”

  She spoke of a recent publication that bore my father’s name, a dictionary of the language spoken by a small tribe of Eskimos in Greenland. “The Akkuk, they’re called,” she said. “No longer, Edward, must I remain mute in the company of Akkuks. No more shall dinner parties in St. John’s end in an argument about the spelling of some Akkuk word.”

  “Just what I have always wanted,” she said one night, after she read aloud an account of a stranded, recently rescued expedition, “people to say, ‘There goes Daphne Stead, whose brother-in-law once kept himself alive for months by eating dogs.’ “

  After they had gone to bed, Uncle Edward would retaliate by holding forth to Aunt Daphne about my mother, his voice so loud he must have known it carried to my room.

  “Small wonder,” he said, “that my brother, after two years of marriage to her, decided that the North Pole was a better bargain.”

  Aunt Daphne said something in reply, but I couldn’t make it out.

  “How many women are there, I wonder,” he said, “whose company makes the prospect of spending six months of darkness in bone-marrow-chilling cold seem irresistible?”

  “Edward,” Aunt Daphne said, then went on in a remonstrating tone, clearly telling him to lower his voice, though again I could not hear the words.

  “What I say about Francis, I say in jest,” she said. “But you—”

  “Thank God the boy is only half composed of her,” he said. “The other half is Francis. At least there is that. There was much to admire in Francis at one time. Before he wound up with her.”

  In a scene that might belong to memory, imagination or Aunt Daphne, I am walking down the hallway when my father emerges from his study and, seeing me, stoops down to my height and says something. All I can see is a shape that might be that of any man.

  I had more memories of my mother, but they were all very much like the one I had of him. I remembered a featureless, peripheral presence that I knew was her. I remembered being in her company in different rooms of the house. Riding in the cabriolet with her beside me. Walking hand in hand with her along a street that I assumed was Devon Row. But I remembered nothing of what she wore, nothing of what she said or did or what our destinations were. I could not see her face.

  I was six when my mother died. It made sense that I retained only that one vague, possibly counterfeit image of my father, given how young I was when he went away. But it seemed I should have had a few memories in which my mother was more than just a presence, someone whose only trait was her relationship to me.

  It was as if my memory of my mother was joined to that of my father, as if my mother was being pulled under by my father, who had sunk from sight. I could still see her, but she was at too great a depth to make her out in any detail. One day, just as he had, perhaps because he had, she would vanish altogether.

  It was strange that two people about whom I remembered little could affect me so profoundly, two people who, it seemed to me, I had never known but yet were constantly with me. Others—Aunt Daphne, Uncle Edward—remembered them, were reminded of them when they looked at me. It was as though they stood on either side of me, visible to everyone but me.

  There were a couple of photographs of my father in the house, discreetly, neutrally displayed. One, a small cameo daguerreotype, stood among an assortment of others on the sideboard in the hall, just at the foot of the stairs. The other was the third of four photographs arranged on the wall as you climbed the stairs, only just visible by the light from the lamp outside my bedroom. It was as if they were meant to seem to visitors more like acknowledgments than mementoes, the message being that we would not stoop to repaying his delinquency by denying his existence, but nor did he any longer play much on our minds. It wasn’t true, of course. There was never a time when I was not fascinated by those images of my absent father. Hair slicked close to his skull and parted down the middle. A large moustache that scrolled upward on both ends. As with all eyes in daguerreotype portraits, his seemed to be lit from within. I didn’t know this was an effect of the photographing process.

  In the front room, there was a daguerreotype of my mother, on the back of which was scribbled, in what Aunt Daphne said was my mother’s hand, “Amelia, the wicked one.” Aunt Daphne said the picture was taken not long after their engagement. She was standing, hands on hips, lips pursed, eyebrows lifted, perhaps in amusement at the very idea that by having this new-fangled gadget called a camera aimed at her, she could be made to lose her poise.

  Aunt Daphne took a great deal of pleasure in spoiling me, though Uncle Edward seemed to take none in watching her do so. I think that when he looked at me, he was reminded of his brother, so undeservedly blessed with a child whom he hadn’t bothered to see in years.

  At Christmas, on my birthday, he sat watching from a distance while Aunt Daphne joined me on the floor as I tore the ribbon and wrapping from my presents. Each time I let out a shout of delight or surprise, she would look at Uncle Edward and smile, and he, unable or unwilling to pretend th
at he was not merely doing it for her sake, would smile back, the tight-lipped smile that one would give a child whose belief in the possibility of happiness might as well be indulged.

  I thought that perhaps this was how men were with children—reserved, disinterested—my father having taken to extremes an attitude typified by Uncle Edward. Uncle Edward seemed generally aloof, sceptical, as if his vocation and his character had blended, and he viewed all things with diagnostic objectivity, forever watching and keeping to himself a horde of observations, his expression hinting at a shrewdness he could not be bothered demonstrating.

  Aunt Daphne went with me when I fished for trout in the ponds and streams around which the city had grown up. For bait, I used night crawlers, large earthworms that came up on the grass at night, and that, even with a lantern, were very hard to see, let alone catch. The grass in the yard behind the house was not very high and so was perfect for night crawlers.

  “It’s time for Spotters and Grabbers,” Aunt Daphne would say when it was dark. The spotter held the bucket and the flashlight, and the grabber crept up on the worm and, before it could dart back underground, grabbed it with both hands. I was usually the grabber, but Aunt Daphne would help me if a worm I had hold of was partway underground. She would put down the lantern and the two of us would kneel, hunching over the worm like a pair of surgeons. Using all four hands, we would ease it bit by bit from the ground, she with her face averted in case the worm broke in half. Uncle Edward watched from the kitchen window. When Aunt Daphne waved to him, he would turn away.

  “We used to play Spotters and Grabbers, didn’t we, Edward?” I heard her say once after I had gone to bed. “We had our own version. It was very different from Dev’s, wasn’t it?” It sounded like she was standing at the bottom of the stairs. There was no answer. “Well,” she said more tenderly, “we still have our games.” He made some inaudible reply.