The Navigator of New York

by Wayne Johnston

  She had me stay home the next day. After school, she went to see Headmaster Gaines.

  When she returned, her cheeks were red with anger.

  “Well, that’s that,” she said. “There’ll be no more problems now. Headmaster Gaines said that among many other things, he would cane this Moses Prowdy. ‘Moses will leave Devlin alone,’ he said. ‘You have my word on it.’ It took some doing to get him to say it, but he said it.”

  Headmaster Gaines was right that Moses Prowdy had charisma. It was not long before the other boys, even the ones my age, were urging him to, as they put it, “hold forth on Stead,” crowding around him to hear what he would say next about me or my parents.

  “Devlin,” Moses said, “your mother once asked the bishop for an annulment on the grounds of desertion, but he said no because your father might have come back. An annulment means she wouldn’t have been married to your father any more, and if she’d wanted to, she could have married someone else. Desertion means—”

  “That’s not true,” I said, and knowing full well what my reward would be, I kicked him in the shins.

  He hopped about briefly on one foot. Too briefly for me to run away.

  I went home, nose bloodied and mouth on one side swollen and coloured like a plum. When Aunt Daphne admitted that what Moses had said was true, I asked her why she kept so many secrets from me.

  “I was waiting until you were old enough to understand them to tell you all those things,” she said. “I never imagined that a boy as much older than you as Moses Prowdy is would attach himself to you the way he has.”

  She went to Headmaster Gaines again, saying that because Moses was undeterred from disobedience by caning, he should be suspended. In the past, Gaines said, Moses had been suspended, but to little effect. Then, Aunt Daphne said, he should be expelled. To which Gaines replied that while they could expel Prowdy from school, they could not expel him from St. John’s. He would have no trouble finding me if he wanted to, and he would want to when he heard he’d been expelled because of me. The masters had long ago decided to keep him within the jurisdiction of the school for as long as possible, for everyone’s sake, including his. “We have not given up on Prowdy,” Headmaster Gaines said. “It is never foolish to be hopeful. Only he will be diminished if he proves us wrong.”

  I was soon coming home every day with fresh bruises, Moses no longer needing the provocation of a kick in the shins.

  “What will we do, Edward?” Aunt Daphne said one night. “That Prowdy boy will never stop, never. It will be at least four years until he graduates.”

  “I suspect,” Uncle Edward said, “that young Devlin could be more resilient if he wanted to. Schoolyard disputes should be settled on the schoolyard.”

  She talked about sending me to another school. “But they’d eat you alive there, too,” she said, “once they found out why you left the Feild. And Moses would still know how to find you.”

  At dinner, her food went cold on her plate as she sat there, head resting on her hand, tilted sideways, her thumb on her cheek, fingers splayed on her temple and her brow.

  By the time I went to bed that night, she had been silent for hours, staring at the fire.

  “Follow On Moses, they might as well have called that boy,” I heard Aunt Daphne say after they had gone to bed. “He will no more give up on Devlin than his grandfather would have given up on a herd of seals.”

  “You dote too much on Devlin,” I heard Uncle Edward say.

  “I can’t have that giant of a boy picking on my son.”

  “Your son? You see? You see how easily you can fool yourself? He is your nephew. He will never be your son. You’ve been to see Headmaster Gaines twice in one month. You baby him so much he can’t defend himself at school. Soon he’ll be afraid of cats.”

  “You and Francis had each other, Edward. Dev has no one.”

  “I’ve seen Prowdy. I faced up to boys as big as that and bigger when I was your nephew’s age.”

  “Oh, Edward, don’t be ridiculous. Francis was always protecting you from bullies. And none of them was half as big as Prowdy.”

  “You don’t know,” he said. “You weren’t there. I—”

  She laughed, not meanly but fondly, in spite of being in the middle of an argument, because he sounded so earnestly convinced that he was good at something that he was known all over to be hopeless at.

  “You sound as though you think I’m a coward, a weakling.”

  “I’m sorry I laughed. Really I am. I didn’t marry you because of how many boys you beat up at Bishop Feild.”

  “He’s not your son, you know. You make yourself look pathetic when you call him that. Pathetic. He is his irresponsible father’s son. He is his mad mother’s son. There is not a drop of your blood in him, and there never will be. There will never be a drop of your blood or mine in anyone.”

  I heard Aunt Daphne get out of bed and soon after go downstairs.

  “My aunt will make up a rhyme about you,” I foolishly said the next time Moses picked on me at school. “Like the one she made up about my uncle.”

  “I, too, can make up rhymes,” Moses said.

  Soon, copies of an anonymously written, printed-in-pencil rhyme called “Pilgrim’s Prowess” were being passed around among the boys. “The doctor married Mrs. Stead / And he with her did go to bed. / Alas for her he could not please / Though with his straw he made her sneeze.” Anonymously written but assumed to be the work of Moses Prowdy, who on the playground recited it by heart. The masters seized all the copies they could find, caning those boys who did not volunteer theirs, but many escaped detection and made their way into other schools, and from them into the hands of grown-ups, until there were few people in St. John’s who hadn’t read it or at least been told about it.

  After the circulation of that letter, it was, for most of the boys of the Feild, out of the question to associate with me, to be seen doing anything but ignoring me. Even the most unpopular, picked–upon boys kept their distance, not wanting to give their tormentors one more reason to torment them.

  Even for Moses, I ceased to be a target. I think I came to be regarded as a kind of mascot of the banished, looked upon almost fondly by the boys as the ultimate excommunicant.

  • CHAPTER FOUR •

  IT WAS FIVE YEARS SINCE MY FATHER HAD MOVED TO NEW YORK, and he was still unable to finance an expedition of his own. He signed on once again under someone else. He was one of two medical officers under Lieutenant Robert Peary on the North Greenland expedition. The purpose of this expedition was to discover what I overheard Aunt Daphne say “everyone was just dying to know”: was Greenland an island or a continent?

  In July 1892, a great fire destroyed much of St. John’s, though Devon Row, on the heights of the far east end, was spared. Uncle Edward and the other doctors of the city were pressed into duty at the hospitals. Aunt Daphne volunteered for numerous women’s committees and foundations for the relief of those affected by the fire. I was one of many schoolboys enlisted to help cart away what was left of people’s houses so that new ones could be built.

  All of us were still caught up in the relief effort when, unheard from for fifteen months, Peary’s ship, the Kite, docked in Philadelphia in September 1892, with Peary declaring his expedition an unqualified success. He told the reporters who swarmed him before he had a chance to disembark that the Greenland ice-cap ended just south of Victoria Inlet, and he claimed that by this discovery he had proved that Greenland was an island. He also relayed a piece of information that, in the papers, appeared in sidebars: alone of all the expeditionaries, Dr. Francis Stead had not returned.

  It was from the local papers, most of which were devoted to stories about the rebuilding of the city after the fire, that we first learned of my father’s disappearance—or rather, that Uncle Edward first learned of it. “DR. STEAD MISSING.” “DR. STEAD LEFT BEHIND.” “DR. STEAD’S WHEREABOUTS UNKNOWN.” These were the headlines of the papers that Uncle Edward found waiting
for him on the front porch of his surgery the morning after the Kite made port in Philadelphia. Word of my father’s disappearance had not reached local newsrooms until late the night before, too late for reporters (who assumed the Steads already knew about it) to contact family members for their reactions. It would not be until days later that Peary would telegraph his condolences to Uncle Edward, who was listed in the ship’s log as my father’s next of kin. Uncle Edward received no reply to a letter he sent to Peary rebuking him for not informing us through proper channels of my father’s disappearance.

  I heard of my father’s death from Aunt Daphne, who let me sleep until my usual hour before waking me. She was crying, and I knew, before she had a chance to tell me, that something had happened to my father. My father, of whom I had one probably false memory and one photograph, was dead, presumed dead, though all Aunt Daphne could bring herself to say was that the Kite had come back without him. Still “up there,” my father was. And perhaps he always would be. I had been certain that one day I would meet him, seek him out.

  We spent the morning at the kitchen table, on which Aunt Daphne laid out, along with a glass of milk, all the sweets she had on hand: half an apple pie, a piece of pound cake, a heaping mound of shortbread cookies. A gloom made worse by the extravagance, the incongruousness of a table spread with sweets at nine-thirty in the morning, hung heavy in the house. Uncle Edward spent most of the day upstairs, though I caught a glimpse of him from time to time and was surprised by what I saw.

  By the sorrow on his face and in his eyes, you would have thought that my father had never left, that Uncle Edward had last seen him just hours ago, that he had lived the life the Steads expected him to live until that very morning, when, on the way to his surgery, he had had some fatal mishap. I had thought it would seem to Uncle Edward that not much was different, that he had expected never to see his brother again and now his expectations were confirmed.

  “Your mother kept writing to him long after he moved to New York,” Aunt Daphne said. “Long after he stopped writing back. I’ve been trying to remember him. From before he went away. From when we met. But I can’t separate the younger Francis from the older one. I can’t picture that young man in my mind and pretend, even for a second, that I don’t know what became of him.”

  “I don’t remember him at all,” I said, in the foolish belief that it would be a comfort to her that my memory of him was even more wanting than hers.

  “I’m sorry, Devvie, for what was done to you,” she said.

  She looked at me as if she thought she ought to pronounce upon my father’s passing in some manner, sum up his life and death for me in a way that would make sense of them. But all she did was take me in her arms.

  The local papers, in the pieces they ran about my father’s death, made no explicit reference to the estrangement of my parents, only noting without comment that “Dr. Stead was based in Brooklyn,” and that his wife had “drowned” some years ago.

  Two days after the docking of the Kite, there appeared in the papers an official “report,” an account of my father’s disappearance that was written, at Lieutenant Peary’s request, by the expedition’s other medical officer, Dr. Frederick Cook, during the voyage from McCormick Bay, Greenland, to Philadelphia. Its purpose was to set out what its author called “the strange case of Dr. Stead,” and to preempt suggestions that Peary had in any way been negligent.

  This “report” by Dr. Cook contained all the official information that would ever be released about my father’s disappearance. The crew, as was usual on such expeditions, had signed a legal pledge of silence. Only Peary, who had sold the rights to his story in advance, was allowed to write about, or give interviews about, the expedition, and when he did, in the weeks and months to come, he made no mention of my father.

  September 9, 1892

  Aboard the S.S. Kite

  Regarding the manner of the disappearance of my colleague and companion Dr. Stead: On August 18, when we awoke at Redcliffe House, Dr. Stead was missing. His sleeping bag lay unrolled but empty on the floor. A thorough search was conducted. A reward of a rifle and ammunition was offered to the native who found the missing man. Some footprints, as well as the label from a can of corned beef, were found at the foot of a glacier, but nothing more.

  It was discovered that Dr. Stead had taken with him or hidden all his journals. Most of his clothing he had concealed in various places throughout the house, for what reason none of us could fathom.

  On the fifth day of the search, freezing weather set in, and Captain Pike informed Lieutenant Peary that if we did not leave soon, we might be forced to winter at McCormick Bay for another year.

  Just before the Kite set sail, Lieutenant Peary wrote and left at Redcliffe House a short note which we feared that Dr. Stead would never read, but which nevertheless informed him that in case he should return, the Eskimos would look after him until the following June, when a whaling ship would put in for him at McCormick Bay.

  I cannot arrive at a positive conclusion as to the peculiar, sad and mysterious disappearance of Dr. Stead. He had not seemed to me to be debilitated, mentally or physically, when I saw him last, which was the very night of his departure. Nor had he said anything to anyone about his plans to leave the house.

  Though it moves the mystery no closer to being solved, it seems worthwhile to point out that the strange case of Dr. Stead is by no means the strangest in the annals of Arctic exploration. Others have disappeared as surely as if, while sleepwalking, they attempted a crossing of the crevassed glaciers onto which not even the Eskimos will venture after dark.

  Whatever is or may have been his fate, I feel satisfied that his commander, his companions and the natives did all in their power to discover his whereabouts.

  Respectfully submitted,

  F.A. Cook, M.D.

  Surgeon and Ethnologist

  North Greenland Expedition

  Lt. R. E. Peary

  Commanding

  In spite of the publication of Dr. Cook’s report and the pledge of silence taken by the crew, it was not long before rumours began to spread. On September 24, a story in The New York Times in which no sources were named suggested that a falling-out had taken place between my father and Lieutenant Peary. It was said that from the start of the expedition, my father had “pestered” Peary to let him stay up north so that he could better acquaint himself with the culture and language of the Eskimos. Peary, supposedly convinced that my father’s real reason for wanting to stay behind was to achieve a farthest north, and perhaps the pole, refused.

  The Times wrote: “It is said that Dr. Stead wore American trousers and the scantiest kind of clothing, and that almost every day he would go naked into the water where holes had been cut in the ice. He would protest that he was not cold and did everything in his power to inure himself to the hardships of the climate. He went around with his shoes torn, his bare feet making contact with the frozen ground, much to the amusement of the Eskimos.” The story said that at a reception held for him in Philadelphia, Peary had referred to my father as a deserter for whom neither the government nor the backers of the expedition were under any obligation to send out more searching parties. “Lieutenant Peary said that to search further would at any rate be pointless. Though he said he had no right to indulge in surmises, he gave the impression that he believed there was no chance that Dr. Stead was still alive.”

  The thought that this description of my father’s comportment in the Arctic was being read by millions of people throughout the world distressed Aunt Daphne.

  “I wouldn’t care if it was true,” she said. “It’s not fair of them to speak like that when he can’t defend himself. But I don’t believe it is true. Obviously I did not know him as well as I once thought I did, but I am sure he would never carry on that way.”

  She wrote, and convinced Uncle Edward to be the sole signatory to, the following statement, which was sent to all the local papers, as well as to The New York Times: “I know my
brother. I know that in his right mind, he would not have conducted himself in such a manner. It is obvious that owing to the rigours of the expedition, he suffered an imbalance of temperament that must surely have been apparent to both Dr. Cook and Lieutenant Peary. Why such precautions were not taken as would have prevented him from injuring himself is something that these two gentlemen must answer for, if not in this life, then in the next. My brother’s reputation has in no way been diminished by his disappearance, the real manner of which may yet come to light. Nor has his memory, in the eyes of those who truly knew him and from whose thoughts he has never long been absent, been besmirched.”

  Other stories from America were reprinted in the local papers. When I came home from school one day, I found Aunt Daphne at the kitchen table, her hands all but covering her face as she looked through them at a copy of The Telegram, on the front page of which were illustrations of the interior of Redcliffe House, based on descriptions of it provided by members of the crew.

  Peary’s wife, Josephine (Jo), had been, if not exactly a member, then a guest of the Greenland expedition. She had wintered with Peary and the crew in the grandly named Redcliffe House in McCormick Bay. The whole “house” was smaller than my bedroom. The walls, inside and out, were covered with tar paper and further insulated with red woollen blankets. There were two rooms, one with a bed for the Pearys and one with pallets for the crew, a half-dozen men, my father and Dr. Cook among them. The rooms were divided only by curtains that Jo Peary had made from two silk flags. The Pearys’ bedtable was a steamer trunk, and on it stood a bowl and pitcher. Along one wall were crude shelves containing books, the reading of which was their main pastime once the Arctic night began. “On the wall,” the story said, “Mrs. Peary hung pictures of her dear ones back home, whom she thought of constantly.” In the other room, where my father and the rest of the crew slept, there was a pot-bellied stove, a table and some makeshift chairs, and one bunk with a mattress made of carpet. The men took turns sleeping in the bunk and otherwise lay out on their pallets in a circle around the stove, their heads just inches from it. From this circle, my father had removed himself so quietly that he did not wake the others, his absence going unnoticed by them until hours later. I stared at the illustration as if it was a photograph, at the artist’s rendering of the crude wooden floor as if it depicted the very spot where my father had last been seen alive.