The Navigator of New York

by Wayne Johnston

  “It must have been at his bench that he did his journal writing, for no one ever saw him write a word. He carried his journals with him everywhere he went, half a dozen swollen volumes with ragged edges and on top of them a fresh one whose pages were still blank. I imagined him scribbling away by moonlight with a fist-clenched pencil while he puffed on his cigars. All I ever saw him do in Redcliffe House was read his journals, looking as absorbed in them as if they had been written by someone else.

  “When it was three months since we had seen the sun, his state of mind was such that I doubted he would recover. The weather by then was so bad that even he did not venture out of doors. Redcliffe House was recessed on three sides into a hill, built in a cave-like excavation so that only the front of it was exposed.

  “There was a series of blizzards that lasted for weeks. It seemed impossible that the exposed wall would hold up against the wind. It buckled back and forth like a bed sheet. The door, though it had several layers, each one as thick as the entrance to a dungeon, rattled as though some giant were trying to force his way inside.

  “Verhoeff curled up in the corner farthest from the door, covered his face with his hands, cringing and whimpering as though someone were beating him. The Pearys stayed in their ‘room’ behind the curtain. Gibson sat at the table with his hands over his ears, unable to stand the shrieking of the wind. I tried to read, but I could not help looking at the wall to see if it was giving way.

  “Francis tacitly abdicated as medical officer, no longer dispensing criticisms or advice. He became so deeply despondent that he spoke to no one, not even me, not even when directly addressed, which seemed a welcome change at first. But the others were soon unsettled by the sight of him sitting against the wall all day long with his lower body in his sleeping bag, as motionless as a catatonic.

  “He showed no signs of noticing when, thinking some physical malady might be at the root of his condition, I examined him. But he was, if anything, healthier than some of the others, who were convinced that one morning they would wake up to find him dead.

  “The weather was still bad when the sun returned, but he came out of his trance-like state almost instantly when Verhoeff pointed out the light at the edges of the boarded windows. I thought his recovery suspiciously abrupt, but the improvement in all of us was dramatic at this sign of the sun’s return. We spoke of nothing but the coming of spring, the prospect of being picked up by the ship and taken home.

  “One day, when the ship was nearly due and he and I were returning across the scree, having examined two of the Eskimos who were ill, he asked me if he might confide in me. I said yes, and he led me to the tolt of rock.

  “He sat down and patted the bench to indicate that I should join him. I did so. I thought he had taken me aside to apologize. In the past few weeks, he had resumed his duties as medical officer and had seemed almost sheepishly disinclined to talk about the past few months.

  “It is not unusual, at the end of an expedition, for people to explain themselves to their commander or whichever member of the crew has held up best. The latter is usually the medical officer, if only because he alone, no matter what the circumstances, has a task he can perform, there being no better antidote to fear and gloom than purposeful work.

  “They meet with you in private, in part to find out what account of their behaviour will be offered to the world when they return, or even to influence that account, and in part to be reassured that they did not act cowardly or shamefully.

  “I decided I would give Francis a good dressing-down first and then advise him, with as much delicacy as possible, not to apply for membership on future expeditions.

  “Surveying the distant glacier, he sighed and settled his body into the rock again as though he were shifting his weight in a favourite chair, as if all he planned to do was watch the sunset and all he wanted me for was companionship. But then he leaned forward, drew in his legs and crossed his feet.

  “He told me that he had a wife and boy back home whom he had abandoned because the boy was not really his son. He said that his wife had told him she had been taken advantage of while drunk, but that he did not believe her. He said he had recently found out who the father was, but he did not say how.

  “During their engagement, he said, she had told him she was pregnant. There were fewer than twenty doctors in St. John’s, including several to whom she was related. She knew of none on whose discretion she could count.

  “And so she told him, in his surgery, after hours. She told him that because of having had so much to drink, she remembered nothing that had happened at a recent party from half an hour after getting there to just moments before she left. She said that she knew she had been with someone, but that she had no idea who it was.

  “His reaction was not what she had expected. She had thought he would assume that she had wilfully betrayed him. But he believed her, he said. She was not responsible for what had happened, and together they would deal with it.

  “Without uttering a word against the man who, when she was too drunk to help herself, had pressed himself upon her, he told her that he would examine her to make sure her suspicions were correct. She told him this was not necessary, but he insisted.

  “ ‘There, there,’ he kept saying throughout the examination, unaware of how much was already lost.

  “To determine if she was pregnant by another man, he examined the woman he had never more than kissed, whose body he had never seen or even touched before.

  “ ‘This changes nothing, not really,’ he told her. ‘It will be as if we adopted a child. We will tell those who need to know that I have made you pregnant. Let them react however they wish. We love each other. That is all that matters.’

  “He went on and on, unaware, he told me, that it might be himself he was trying to convince. This Francis Stead who would hold no grudge, who would cope and love his wife no matter what, was as much of a fiction as the Francis Stead who would be the first to reach the pole.

  “He said he should have talked her into considering a second option, should have reminded her that because he was a doctor, they were in the position of keeping her pregnancy a secret forever. No one but the two of them need ever know.

  “But they did not speak of this second option. He convinced himself that they would marry and remain married, no matter what.

  “ ‘It was for the child’s sake that she married me,’ he said. ‘I know that now. And for the child’s sake that she tried to make our marriage work.’

  “Her family, what was left of it, aunts and uncles, and his family, the Steads, were told. The Steads received the news exactly as he said he knew they would. That he had made her pregnant, his family had no trouble believing. But they did not for a moment have the slightest doubt about who was to blame.

  “They allowed it to become an open secret that she was pregnant. The wedding date was changed at such short notice that many who were invited could not come. His sister-in-law, whom he and his fiancée hardly knew, was the maid of honour.

  “Francis said he could not help feeling that their real secret was common knowledge, that all of St. John’s knew the baby she carried was not his.

  “For a young woman to become pregnant by her fiancé was no great shame. The rumours that she had done so would not have bothered him if they had been true.

  “For a while after the boy was born, it had seemed possible to Francis that the three of them could be a family. But he could not forget that the boy was another man’s son, not his. No one knew this but him and his wife. He said he did not even tell his brother. But still he could not rid himself of the feeling that the whole world knew. It seemed to him that, all along, people had laughed at him because they sensed that he would land himself in some such fix as this, and that they were laughing even harder now because his very determination to prove them wrong, to do what was right, had borne out their prediction.

  “He told me he felt foolish for not seeing that when it met its first real test,
what he called his ‘innocence’ would crumble. He did not know, as the days went by, which pained him more, he said—the sight of the baby or the sight of his wife. He felt things he had never felt before: resentment, malice, hatred. These, until now, had been mere words.

  “He avoided both of them as much as he could, having his dinner sent up to his study, where, he told his wife, he was reading for some case that was proving difficult to diagnose. In the morning, he would claim to have fallen asleep while working.

  “This ‘case’ went undiagnosed for months. Once, she joked that the disease he was trying to diagnose was obviously contagious, for surely the first person who had contracted it was dead by now. He looked at her as if to say that only the person who had wronged him as she had could joke about such things.

  “She, he now told her, had betrayed him with another man, fooled him into marriage and into thinking he was capable of raising another man’s child as if it was his. She had what she wanted, and that was her child, so what was the point of pretending she cared for him?

  “He said nothing else to her for months other than what their sharing the same house required him to say.

  “He did not, would not, after that first outburst, get angry with her.

  “No matter what she said—and she said many things to convince him that she loved him, and that their marriage could still work—he would not answer, or even show any sign that he had heard her, other than to simply leave the room with the air of one who had become accustomed to such unprovoked attacks.

  “Then finally he did speak to her, told her that this could not go on, as if it had been at her insistence that it had been going on.

  “ ‘I have been thinking for some time now,’ he said, ‘that I should change my life.’ Then he turned about and went up to his study.

  “He had decided that he would leave her and the boy. But he could not bring himself to simply disappear, to go to some other country and begin again. He pored over the atlas. Considered England, Scotland, Ireland, Australia, South Africa. But he could not picture himself alone in one of these countries, inventing for himself some less humiliating past, one that would make people feel sorry for him or admire him. These were just fantasies.

  “Another possibility occurred to him. In the weeks that followed, he spoke politely to her and even looked at her and the baby with what she mistook for fondness from time to time.

  “One night, after the baby had gone to sleep and she was reading in the front room, he came downstairs from his study, stood facing the fire and began to speak.

  “ ‘I think it would be best if I went up north,’ he said.

  “Having no idea what he meant by this, she waited.

  “ ‘The Hopedale Mission in Labrador is badly in need of doctors,’ he said. ‘I have volunteered to join and have been accepted. It is for only six months. And perhaps for another six months after that. It will give me time to think. I have often wondered what it’s like up there.’

  “ ‘The way she looked told me two things,’ he said. ‘That she was in love with someone else, and that she had never been in love with me.

  “ ‘And where was this other man?’ Francis wondered. ‘Whose baby she could not stand to be away from for a second? Did he know about the child? Had he turned his back on her, in spite of which she loved him anyway?’

  “Francis did not bother asking her these questions. He knew that at this point, she would not relent. It was too late for her to tell the truth. He could not bear to speak to her, to look at her or at the boy, whose father, it seemed to him, might be anyone.

  “So he became a missionary, then an explorer. He told me he did not want to be forgotten or to have people think badly of him. Better they think he had forsaken the vocation of marriage for the more romantic one of exploration; that only with reluctance had he left his wife and son, having discovered, alas too late for them, that he was meant for greater things.

  “He joined the Hopedale Mission for a year. When he came back home and told her he was giving up his practice in favour of polar exploration, she gave up on him.

  “But he did not give up on her. She and the man whose name he did not know were all he thought about, he said.”

  Dr. Cook turned away from the fire and looked at me.

  “It was at this point in his story that he told me that he knew about me and Peary and his wife. As suddenly as that. Up to that point, I had been feeling uncomfortable, but only because of what seemed to me to be a mere coincidence. While engaged to him, his wife had become pregnant by another man. I had made an engaged woman pregnant. It unsettled me to hear him talk about his situation, but nothing more. And then suddenly he said: ‘I know about you and Peary and my wife.’

  “He knew that the man his wife had betrayed him with was me. He knew what I had done. Had known it, perhaps, since before the expedition left New York, unless Peary had told him more recently.

  “What he meant by his reference to Peary, what he need not have bothered recounting, since he had finally sprung his surprise on me, was that he knew that at the party in Manhattan where I met your mother, I also, in a manner of speaking, met Robert Peary. But Francis related this part of the story to me, the part I knew far better than he did, in the same tone he had used so far, as if, though I was now a character in his story, I had no idea what would happen next.”

  “What did Peary have to do with you and my mother?” I asked Dr. Cook.

  “He had just joined the U.S. Navy at the rank of lieutenant,” he said, “because of his training as a civil engineer. He was alone and in full uniform at the party, which, as I told you in my letters, was thrown in honour of the graduates of the Columbia medical school. Peary’s mother was acquainted with the woman of the house. It seems that out of politeness to his mother’s friend, Peary accepted an invitation to the party.

  “He looked quite smart in his uniform, what with his height and build and that striking combination of red hair and blue eyes. But he seemed very ill at ease, as if he hated being conspicuous, took no pleasure in the effect of his appearance on others, on women especially. The only person there who looked more ill at ease than Peary did was me. One of four prospective medical students who were acting as waiters and bartenders at the party, I felt hopelessly out of place.

  “There was some sort of near altercation at the party between Peary and one of the graduating doctors. It seems that Peary had recently, and abruptly, broken off an engagement with a young woman whom he was said to have treated shabbily. Either the young doctor said something about this matter or Peary misconstrued something he overheard. Peary shouted something at the young man, who at first looked mystified and then became quite belligerent, having to be separated from Peary by his friends.

  “Peary moved off to the bar, where I was serving drinks. He stood there in silence for several minutes while I served the other guests, until I realized that he was regarding me with an undisguised look of scorn.

  “ ‘They say that you plan to be a doctor one day,’ he said when our eyes met. He spoke with a slight lisp of which he has since rid himself. I could see that he was painfully self-conscious of it. I told him that, yes, I planned to become a doctor. He laughed as if he had never seen a more hopeless candidate for medicine, as if he was imagining just how inept a doctor I would be, I who, with my hands that would not stop shaking, was spilling drinks and ice and breaking glasses.

  “I fancied he knew that I was more or less being sponsored to medical school by the hosts of the party, who had taken pity on me. I could think of nothing to say. His jaws clamped shut loudly when he stopped laughing, his back teeth clicking together. I believe he was about to address me again in the same manner when a young woman who was standing some feet from Peary, waiting to be served, intervened. Craning her neck around the people between her and Peary, she spoke up loudly.

  “ ‘I am surprised to see you laughing, Lieutenant Peary,’ she said.

  “ ‘I cannot imagine why,’ Peary said, loo
king startled, his voice raised to match hers. ‘Especially as, to my knowledge, we have never met.’

  “In the near vicinity, all conversation stopped. All eyes were on this brash young woman.

  “ ‘Perhaps you are laughing,’ she said, ‘because you are happier now that it is once again just you and your mother. They say that your mother is very happy to have her Bertie back.’

  “Peary laughed again—even more unconvincingly than before—his jaws again clamping shut audibly when he was finished, as if his mouth were some mechanical device whose operation he had yet to master.

  “ ‘You are drunk, miss,’ he said. ‘That, I believe, is obvious to everyone.’

  “ ‘May Kilby says you never laugh,’ the woman said. ‘In fact, she says you smile only when you think that not to do so would be rude.’

  “It was clear that this Miss Kilby was the woman to whom Peary had been engaged. The remark was met with an uproar of laughter because it seemed to sum Peary up so perfectly. Everyone looked at Peary as if to measure him against this estimation of him by the woman to whom he had been engaged, and which had just been repeated in public by this other woman, who seemed to be unaccompanied.

  “The laughter grew louder. Peary, red-faced, strode off through the guests to a room to which news of his embarrassment had not yet spread.

  “The woman who spoke up for me, the woman who embarrassed him, was your mother. Her first cousin, Lily, had told her about Peary and May Kilby.

  “I did not see Peary again until, having helped your mother up the stairs hours later, when it really was obvious that she had had too much to drink, he happened upon us as I was crouching on one knee beside her after she had stumbled and fallen.

  “ ‘If only those who found your little joke so amusing could see you now,’ said Peary.

  “ ‘She has had only a little too much to drink, sir,’ I said. ‘That’s all.’

  “Peary shook his head as though in disbelief. ‘She, a stranger, berates me for my treatment of my fiancée. And here she lies on the floor with an engagement ring on her finger and a milkboy from Brooklyn in her arms.’