The Navigator of New York

by Wayne Johnston

  There was a photograph of Jo Peary by which I was especially transfixed: Jo standing on the barren rocks of Greenland, dressed as though for a Sunday walk in a belted silk dress and matching waistcoat, and shielding herself from the sun with a large parasol. Her glance was downcast on an Eskimo family, over all of whom, even the parents, she towered like an adult over children. The Eskimos in their furs and skins, and Jo Peary wearing what might have been one of my mother’s dresses, so incongruous she might not really have been in the photograph but merely standing in front of one so large that all signs of civilization lay outside the frame.

  “She must be a remarkable woman,” Aunt Daphne said, though Uncle Edward would later say that according to a friend of his, she was “the laughing-stock of Philadelphia.”

  I looked at Jo Peary, eyes demurely downcast as she sheltered from the sun beneath her parasol. The cracked, creased faces of the Eskimos; their long, tangled hair. For the first time, I noticed the baby the woman carried on her back, its eyes peering out just above the brim of the papoose.

  There was a story about Peary’s family and with it a photograph of his little daughter’s room. It was full of souvenirs, polar souvenirs piled on the bed. Toy seals and shells and feathers and pieces from the meteorites that Peary had discovered in the Arctic, and that he called the star stones.

  The next day, in a butcher’s shop, a man who had seen Aunt Daphne and me come in but must not have known that I could hear him told another man, “He went insane or something. Walked off one night when the other men were sleeping. Never seen again.” There was in his tone the suggestion that the odd manner of my father’s death was somehow in keeping with the odd manner of my mother’s. This, I soon sensed, was the general view: that my father’s death was final confirmation of the oddness of Dr. Francis Stead and his wife, Amelia.

  Although, from the beginning, the prevailing view was that my father was an irresponsible, wanderlusting man whose desertion of his family was inexcusable, there had always been rumours, vague, source-less rumours that, as Uncle Edward seemed to think but would not have said in public, it was to escape my mother that my father took up exploration. I remembered what Moses had once asked me: “Why do you think it is, Devlin, that your father would rather do it with a squaw than with your mother?”

  Now it was as if it made sense that a man who had not so much chosen exploration as been driven to it would one day be driven mad by it. Or by his wife, by her, by that one with her odd ways, whom, even when he was in the Arctic, even after she was dead and he had not set eyes on her for years, he could not forget.

  What, people seemed to say as they looked at me, will become of this boy who was the issue of two such odd people as his parents?

  Just as he was preparing to go to New York to settle my father’s affairs, Uncle Edward received a letter from a man who described himself as an “associate of Dr. Stead’s” and said that my father had rented an almost unfurnished flat and, in between expeditions, worked for little compensation at a hospital for the indigent in Brooklyn. He died intestate, having at any rate but $140 in a bank and no personal effects besides clothing and books. The money, Aunt Daphne decided, would be kept in trust for me until I was twenty-one. Uncle Edward instructed my father’s associate to dispose of the clothing and books in whatever manner he saw fit, since it would cost more to transport them to Newfoundland than they were worth.

  A month passed in which nothing new about my father came to light. Uncle Edward said it would be pointless to wait until next June, when the whaler referred to by Dr. Cook in his report would go through the formality of putting in at McCormick Bay. Pointless, he meant, to wait until then to have a funeral service for my father. All the papers agreed with Peary that, given the circumstances, there was no chance that Dr. Stead was alive now, let alone that he would make it until June.

  Uncle Edward placed a notice in the papers that would have given to people who did not know my father no clue that he had ever deviated from the path the world expected him to follow all his life, no clue to how he had spent his last ten years or how he had died: “Passed away, August 17, 1892, Dr. Francis Stead, son of Dr. Alfred Stead and Elizabeth Stead, née Hudson, lately of St. John’s. Leaving to mourn his son, Devlin; his brother, Dr. Edward Stead; and his sister-in-law, Daphne Stead, née Jesperson. Predeceased by his wife, Amelia, née Jackman.”

  Beside my mother’s, a stone was erected in my father’s name in the family plot in the cemetery not far from the house. There was a short, private service presided over by a minister who had long been one of Uncle Edward’s patients. Aunt Daphne cried, though less for my father than for me, it seemed, for she kept looking at me and trying to smile. In Uncle Edward’s face, there was a shadow of the grief I had seen there the day we learned about my father, but more than that he either would not or could not show.

  My father’s headstone, token of his unmarked, unknown final resting place. There were other stones in the cemetery for people, most of them men who had died at sea, whose remains were never found.

  “Poor soul,” Aunt Daphne said, looking at the stone. Poor soul, I thought. The stone, the portraits in the house, the words poor soul, the picture of the room he once occupied at Redcliffe House, the accounts of his disappearance in the papers were to me the sum effects on the world of his existence. I tried to think of myself as an effect of his existence but could not.

  Aunt Daphne still read aloud in the evenings, sometimes downstairs, sometimes in my room.

  I noticed that often, from the strain of reading night after night, her voice grew hoarse. She would drink frequently from a glass of water that she kept beside her chair, sipping after every page.

  “Why don’t I read to you for a while?” I said one night.

  From then on, we took turns reading to each other, handing a book back and forth two or three times a night. Sometimes she had to help me with a word, inclining her head to see which one I was pointing at. I learned the knack of pronouncing words I didn’t know the meanings of, and then the knack of guessing their meanings from the words around them.

  “Why don’t you read to blind people?” Uncle Edward said. “At least then it would make sense to read out loud.”

  “It’s a way for two people to read the same book at the same time,” Aunt Daphne said. “Or three people, for that matter.”

  But as soon as we began to read, he went upstairs to listen to his Victrola.

  I liked the tandem journey through a book. It was different from co-witnessing a real event, even if that real event was a performance like the concerts and plays she took me to. Reading aloud to each other was like collaborating on some endlessly evolving secret. By tacit understanding, we never talked about the books we read, as if we did not want to know if or how our impressions of them differed. I liked the idea, even if it was just illusory, that for a while each day my mind mirrored hers.

  “I want you to understand something,” she said one evening, after we had finished reading. “Just because something happened to your parents doesn’t mean that it will happen to you. You are not the sum of your parents. You are you. Devlin. Do you understand?”

  I nodded. I was relieved, grateful to her for having said it, for having guessed not only that I needed reassurance that I would not end up like my parents, but that I lived in such dread of the possibility that I could not bring myself to speak to her about it. That she had sounded, just faintly, as if it were herself as much as me that she was trying to convince didn’t matter. She, too, needed reassurance, could not help having doubts, however transient they might be.

  • CHAPTER FIVE •

  THE WINTER I TURNED SEVENTEEN, UNCLE EDWARD SUGGESTED to Aunt Daphne that I go to his surgery for a check-up. He said that he thought I was not looking my usual self, and that, although it was probably nothing, it was best not to take any chances.

  I went the next day after school, glancing at the shingle that no longer bore my father’s name, or Father Stead’s, only U
ncle Edward’s. Inside, I glanced at the door across from Uncle Edward’s. It remained unchanged. “Dr. Francis Stead.” Uncle Edward no longer even pretended to be looking for another partner.

  There were several patients ahead of me in his waiting room, but when the patient he was with came out, he called me in.

  “Sit down, Devlin,” he said, motioning to the chair opposite his at the desk.

  “You think there might be something wrong with me?” I said.

  He shook his head.

  “This is the best place for us to meet,” he said. “The safest place.” For a few seconds, his elbows on the desk, his fingertips touching so that his fingers formed a cage, he was silent, as though he was deliberating, trying to foresee what my reaction would be to what he was about to say. He sat back in his chair and turned it so that he faced away from me.

  “I have had a letter,” he said. “A letter from Dr. Frederick Cook, the man whose account of your father’s disappearance was published in all the papers. Do you remember?”

  I nodded.

  “The letter is for you. He did not send it directly to you because he did not want Daphne to see it. I have, at Dr. Cook’s suggestion, not read it, but I believe that it contains … no falsehoods. I have decided that I will speak about this matter to no one but you. I believe that once you have read the letter, you too will see the wisdom of discretion.”

  My heart was pounding. I had never been spoken to like this before by any adult, let alone by Uncle Edward.

  “Why does he want me to keep it secret from Aunt Daphne?” I said. “Does she know him—”

  “You need not read it at all. You don’t have to. I can simply burn it if you like.” He looked briefly at the fireplace.

  “I’m not promising to be discreet before I read it,” I said. Discreet. I had never used the word before, never spoken so formally to anyone. It seemed impossible, under the circumstances, not to imitate the way he spoke.

  He shrugged. “Even if you did promise, you could change your mind. I’m simply acting here as a kind of postman for Dr. Cook. A go–between. When you have read the letter, if you read it, you can do as you see fit. I think I know what you will do, but of course I could be wrong.”

  “I could just give it to Aunt Daphne,” I said, “and let her read it first.”

  He shook his head. “I would hate to have you wish too late that you had opted for discretion. I think you should read it in my presence, then give it back to me.”

  “All right,” I said. What harm would it do me or Aunt Daphne if I read the letter?

  Why had Dr. Cook waited for four years after my father’s death to write to me about him? I assumed that his letter contained news about my father. I could think of no other reason for Dr. Cook to write to me. Perhaps he had things to tell me that he thought I was only now old enough to understand.

  Uncle Edward opened the drawer of his desk and removed from it a small, once white envelope that now was yellow, so flat and thin it looked as if it was empty. It was sealed, but there was nothing written on it but my name. It must have come inside another envelope that was addressed to Uncle Edward.

  “I will step out onto the rear landing,” Uncle Edward said, rising and walking around his desk, extending the letter to me. “I will come back in ten minutes.” He went to a windowless door across the room from the one I came in by, slowly opened it, went outside and just as slowly closed it.

  I broke the seal, tore a corner of the envelope, removed and gingerly unfolded the single page, which looked so old that if mishandled it would have crumbled into pieces. The layers were compressed as if they had been ironed or had lain for months beneath some flat and heavy object. The handwriting, which appeared on both sides of the paper, was minuscule, barely decipherable, the words extending to the bottom line of the second side, the final words crammed into the right-hand margin, as if their author had exhausted his supply of paper.

  My dearest Devlin:

  I think constantly of you. Strange words from a man whom you have never met. I feel strange writing them. But from where I am writing—where in the world, where in my life—everything seems strange.

  When I wrote your uncle Edward, I should have been well launched on my quest for the South Pole, not in the cabin of a ship that had yet to leave the dock, not in the swelter of Rio de Janeiro. Since I wrote that letter, I have not left the ship more than half a dozen times. Just before we were due to leave last spring, Devlin, a fear I had never known before took hold of me.

  I imagine Peary coming back in triumph from the North Pole. Newspapers whose headlines proclaim his accomplishment figure so often in my dreams that I have banned all papers from the ship.

  Peary, who has never acknowledged in public that your father and I saved his life on the North Greenland expedition. His leg was shattered in a storm by the ship’s tiller. Had he been attended to by lesser doctors, he would have died.

  Devlin, the most mundane things seem ominous. In part, I have worked myself into this state through debating whether it would be fair of me to confide in you.

  I find myself on all matters unresolved. I find even the simplest of decisions impossible to make. I have heard that Peary, in a letter to his mother that he wrote when he was twenty, said, “I must have fame. I must.” His advantage over me is that he will do anything to achieve his goal, whereas I … I lack the ruthlessness that I fear may be essential to the task.

  Devlin, no one knows what I am going through but you. I dare not tell others of my doubts. Who would back my expeditions, who would trust me to command them, if they knew my state of mind?

  I have been waking up, drenched in sweat, from nightmares I cannot remember and during which, the captain of the ship informs me, I scream incomprehensibly, as though at some intruder in my room.

  Such has been my physical state these past few months that the captain is certain I have caught malaria. I have told him that I suffer from “transient debilitation” owing to the energies I expended raising money for this expedition. In three weeks, we are supposed to leave for Patagonia, from which, in July, we set out for the Southern Ice. But the captain and the others will not make for Patagonia until what they call my condition has improved. Nor will they let another spring go by without either heading for the pole or turning back. We have been stalled here now for seven months.

  I know the cause and therefore, I hope, the cure of my despair. It is a piece of information that I have been keeping to myself since just before your father disappeared. What you are about to read will surprise or even shock you, so prepare yourself before you read on.

  I could not imagine what sort of disclosure Dr. Cook was about to make. I felt so light-headed I almost fell from my chair.

  Not long before he disappeared on the North Greenland expedition, your father took me aside and told me something that I dismissed at first as the delusion of a man who had for some time, owing to the rigours of Arctic exploration, been acting strangely. But he repeated what I would have called an accusation against his wife except that his tone was so deliberate, so calm. He said that you were not his son.

  In the hope of making him see how much the strain of the expedition was affecting him, I asked him what proof he had that he was not the father of the boy whom the rest of the world knew to be his son. He supplied certain details that convinced me his revelation was true. These details convinced me of something else, too, which I kept to myself. I have had few enough liaisons with women in my life to remember all of them. But even if I was a man of the world, I would remember my first time. It came to me, as your father told his story, that the boy he was speaking of could be no one’s son but mine.

  You have only my word that all of this is not complete invention on my part. Aside from having no reason to invent such a story, I am putting myself at great risk in confiding in you. You hold in your hands a document, in my handwriting, bearing my signature, that if made public could do me and mine great harm. You and your aunt and uncle would
likewise suffer, and great harm would be done to the memory of your parents, your mother’s especially. My heart has never been so close to breaking as when I heard from your father—that is, from Francis Stead—the manner of your mother’s death.

  You are, Devlin, too young to understand how rare a thing true love is, how unlikely in this world to happen, and when it does, how unlikely to endure. And once it is lost, how hard to live without. I have tried “writing” to your mother, directing my thoughts to her, as though she was still alive, but I derived no comfort from it. Finally, I realized that it was to you I should be writing.

  I write in the full understanding of how this letter will affect you. I cannot myself imagine receiving such news at your age. Only by blood now, the cold blood of biology, are you my son and I your father. How this can change, I am unable to foresee. I cannot, for obvious reasons, publicize the contents of this letter. (Your uncle will speak to you of this at greater length.)

  Nevertheless, may I write to you again? In my next letter, I will provide you with such details as will convince you beyond all doubt that my claim is true. I have omitted to do so in this one not to whet your curiosity, but because I could not bear to relate the whole of my story to someone from whom I might never hear again.

  In your uncle’s presence, after he has finished speaking to you, I want you to write “Yes” or “No” on this envelope and give it to him. He will forward your answer to me. If your answer is yes, I will write to you and you will receive my letters by an arrangement of a sort that I suggested to your uncle. If your answer is no, I will not write to you again.