The Navigator of New York

by Wayne Johnston

  In this way, throughout dinner, were started conversations from which, after making a few contributions, he wound up being excluded, or excluding himself. No longer consulted, no longer inclined to offer his opinion, he sat there expressionless.

  It was clear that everyone felt a great deal more sympathy for me than they did for him.

  It seemed to me that at our first few gatherings after the congress, the men gave my hand an extra, encouraging squeeze and everyone’s tone was more solicitous than usual, as if they wanted me to know, without embarrassing me by a direct allusion to it, that they thought that what happened to me in Washington was a bit of bad luck that could have befallen anyone who happened to be seated next to Dr. Cook, and that no one thought any less of me because of it.

  It seemed to have become the collective mission of Manhattan society to salvage me from the wreck of Dr. Cook. Clearly, people were concerned about my being fastened to someone whose star was falling. I even sometimes suspected that those little extra squeezes of my hand were meant to tell me something, perhaps that I should consider whether it would be best for me to strike out on my own, as Dr. Cook himself had come close to suggesting.

  I saw Kristine two weeks after I came back from Washington. I began to ask her if she had heard of what happened, but, as if she hadn’t heard a word I said, she wondered if it might not be time for us to start calling each other by our first names. “Or should I just be grateful,” she said, “that you call me something instead of just looking at me when you speak as you do with Dr. Cook?” I told her that first names would be fine.

  “Then I will say yours first,” she said. “That way, it may take you less than five years to get around to saying mine. What do you think of that, Devlin?”

  “That’s fine with me,” I said, and paused until she prompted me by raising her eyebrows expectantly. “That’s fine with me, Kristine.”

  “There,” she said, “that wasn’t so difficult, was it? That’s what names are for, you see, Devlin. They’re a way of letting people know that you remember having met them before, that you aren’t mistaking them for someone else or that you don’t believe that everyone who is not you goes by the name of ‘you.’ They help us sort out who is talking to whom and who it is we are talking about. They help us avoid confusion such as you might have if ten people answered the same question all at once. Names make it possible to get someone’s attention from a distance, rather than getting everyone’s attention and then having to point and say, ‘No, not you, you’ a lot. Am I teasing you too much? The truth is, I love names. I love to say them and hear mine being said. You can tell a lot by how people say each other’s names. You can’t let someone know you like them without calling them by name, can you?”

  “Kristine,” I said. “Kristine, Kristine, Kristine.”

  • CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO •

  EVERY NIGHT, I HEARD HIS FOOTSTEPS IN THE HALLWAY AS HE made his way to the drawing room. He no longer turned on any lights, no longer spoke out loud or paced about. All I saw beneath the door was the faint, wavering glow from the fireplace. All I heard were the sounds of the fire.

  Some mornings when I left my room, the doors of the drawing room were still closed. I believe that he would have stayed in there past the start of his office hours had I not woken him by knocking. “I’m up, I’m up,” he’d shout in weary protest, and I would hurry away to spare him the embarrassment of being seen.

  This went on throughout a perfunctory celebration of Christmas, including Christmas Day, when Mrs. Cook invited me for dinner and I met my half-sister, Helen, for the second time.

  Mrs. Cook, now that she could attribute her husband’s unhappiness to the events in Washington and now that it seemed possible that his days of exploration were over, was not so resentful of my presence in her house.

  If not for the sullen silence of Dr. Cook, we might have passed the day quite pleasantly. I felt him watching as Mrs. Cook and I chatted amiably and took turns noticing what Ruth and little Helen were doing.

  “A Mr. John Bradley has asked to meet with me,” said Dr. Cook one day after reading the mail that I had brought him. “He wishes me to take him up north on a hunting expedition. He wants to shoot walrus and, if possible, a polar bear.”

  Dr. Cook was often asked to lead what he called “a slaughter charter” to the North. But he seemed unaccountably excited at having received an offer from this particular trophy hunter.

  He told me that Bradley was the millionaire owner of the Beach Club gambling house in Palm Beach. “But he has an apartment in Manhattan,” said Dr. Cook. “West Sixty-seventh Street. Very elegant.”

  “You’ve been there?” I said.

  “No, no,” said Dr. Cook. “I just meant that part of Manhattan.”

  When he got back, he told me nothing of his meeting with Bradley except what Bradley looked like. He had lunched alone with the flashily dressed Mr. Bradley, who had the square-shouldered, smooth-waisted look of the dandies we so often gawked at in the streets, though he was much older than they were.

  His hair was parted down the middle, and except for a trim moustache, he was clean-shaven. He must have been on his way to some formal event after lunch, Dr. Cook said, for he was wearing a very high, stiff collar that made it impossible for him to lower his chin even slightly. He also wore a stiff-bosomed shirt that further restricted his movement, so that he had to all but stand to look behind him.

  A few days later, as we were taking the Third Avenue el train back from Manhattan to the Brooklyn Bridge, where we would change trains for Bushwick, he made an announcement.

  “I have decided to accept Mr. Bradley’s offer,” Dr. Cook said. “It is quite a generous one. The money I will make I can put to good use someday.”

  “When will we leave?” I said, trying to sound excited at the prospect of going north as the employee of a man like Bradley.

  “In the spring,” he said. “You will learn something, even from an expedition of this kind. But I should warn you that there is no ‘hunting’ to be done up north. It will just be target practice with live four-legged targets. Not even that. The muskoxen, for instance, will not even walk away if you approach them. There will be a bloody slaughter, a slaughter in which I will be expected to take part. But you will not.”

  His tone of voice was completely at odds with the words he was speaking. He sounded almost euphoric.

  As we crossed the river, I was reminded of the day I crossed over from Manhattan for my first meeting with Dr. Cook, the scrolled letters in the doctor’s bag, which I held on my lap with both hands, so conspicuously fearful that someone would steal it.

  Dr. Cook was staring out the windows of the train as if this was his first crossing of the bridge to Brooklyn, gazing dreamily at the water, which on the west side was in the shade of the riverside factories and warehouses. He turned in his seat, glanced over his shoulder at the skyline of Manhattan, the palisade of buildings lit aslant by the pink cast of mid-winter twilight.

  I felt a sudden rush of affection for him. If not for me, I told myself, this man—who is my father, but for whom I have no name that I can bring myself to say or that he can stand to hear—would be alone. More alone than I have ever been.

  The number of people by whom we were surrounded—in the train, on that bridge between the two great boroughs of Brooklyn and Manhattan—seemed to be the measure of his loneliness. I felt an urge to link my arm in his and assure him, son to father, that even if he spent the rest of his days leading slaughter charters to the Arctic, everything would somehow be all right.

  On behalf of his employer, Dr. Cook purchased a fishing schooner that he found in Gloucester, Massachusetts, and renamed the Bradley. It weighed 111 tons after it was overhauled. It was braced fore and aft, its bow and stern sheathed with steel plates and its sides with interlocking blocks of oak. The rigging and the sails were replaced and a fifty-five horsepower Lozier gasoline engine installed.

  It was no Roosevelt, said Dr. Cook, but “it will g
et us as far as we need to go.”

  Cabins were built for the captain, the mate, Bradley, Dr. Cook and me. He and I would have one each this time, unlike on the rescue expedition. There was hammock space for five sailors and a cook. The captain was Moses Bartlett, a relation of the Bartletts who had manned the Windward.

  When Dr. Cook returned from Gloucester, he left the doors of the drawing room open almost every night. We sat for hours in front of the fire. He was full of what I took to be false bluster, eager to talk, to be listened to.

  “They say that Peary will leave again for the North a year from now,” I said, when I had a chance to interject. “They say that he has been pledged well over a hundred thousand dollars—”

  “We, too, will be leaving for the North next year,” he said. “We will finance our expedition with the money we make from Bradley’s slaughter charter. Peary will be livid, thinking that we are trying to steal his thunder. We will have to stay out of his way, which we can easily do since the route I plan to take is very different from his.”

  “Will we really be able to afford it?” I said.

  “With the money from Bradley,” said Dr. Cook, “with a contribution from Marie and from some other sources who have promised they will help, we should be able to mount a solid expedition of our own. It is not necessary to spend what Peary plans to spend to reach the pole. I know how it should be done, Devlin. Explorers have been going about it the wrong way for years. We will reach the pole the way we reached the top of Mt. McKinley. Once we were past a certain height, Bill Barrill and I climbed and kept climbing, sleeping only when we had to. That way, you see, we did not weigh ourselves down with equipment and supplies. Beyond a certain point, such things are just nuisances that slow you down.”

  I had no idea how much wisdom there was in all of this. I had yet to do any polar travelling, yet to spend a winter in the Arctic. I had no idea what was possible and what was not, what recommended one strategy over another. But I could not help being excited just at the thought of trying next spring for the pole, however unlikely it was that we really could afford to make a bid for it that soon.

  “Please do not speak to Marie about this hunting expedition. I have told her that I am going along with Bradley to study and photograph the Eskimos. She knows of Bradley and does not approve of my association with him. Nor should she, I suppose. Even though she knows that I will be back in September, the mere fact that I am going north upsets her. She thinks I am not yet fully recovered from climbing Mt. McKinley. She keeps asking, as she has asked me before all my other expeditions, ‘Well, suppose you don’t come back?’ What can I do except remind her that she knew what I was when she married me? And I tell her, of course, that I will come back. I tell her that we will rarely have occasion to leave the ship, and that when we do, we will always have dry land beneath our feet. You have been to the Arctic in the summer, Devlin. This trip will be even less hazardous than that one was. Like summering on Signal Hill.”

  BOOK FIVE

  • CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE •

  WE SET SAIL FROM GLOUCESTER ON JULY 3, 1907, DR. COOK having said his goodbyes to Marie and the children in New York. I said goodbye to Kristine while walking with her in Prospect Park, where she had agreed to meet with me when I told her I was going north again. It was the first such meeting we had ever had. “I wish you weren’t going,” she said after we had walked in silence for some time and had doubled back to our el train station, where she would go one way and I the other. She kissed me so quickly on the lips there was no time to kiss her back. “There,” she said. “Don’t say goodbye.” She ran up the stairs to her station platform.

  Dr. Cook had arranged for four months’ supply of food, plus another year’s allowance in case of stranding or shipwreck. He ordered five thousand gallons of gasoline. He issued all the orders for equipment, overseeing everything down to the smallest detail.

  We were not a week gone when I was wishing that I could go to sleep and wake up to find that two months had passed and we were headed home again, home to Kristine. I wished this was a polar expedition, the expedition on which he had years ago invited me to join him.

  When the hunting trip was almost over, Dr. Cook gave to Bradley a letter for Mrs. Cook, which she would receive in about a month, and which, by way of breaking the news to me, he let me read.

  My dearest Marie:

  I have wonderful news, though I fear that it may be some time before you are able to fully share in my excitement. I find that I have here a good opportunity to try for the North Pole and therefore plan to stay here for the year.

  She would be unable to believe what she had read. I sat down and read it again, and still could not believe it. I had thought we were leaving for home in a week. I had been looking forward to it, but I was anything but disappointed now. We were trying for the pole. Not next year. This year, just as in my pipe dreams I had hoped. I hugged Dr. Cook, who laughed and clapped me on the back with both hands.

  I have never known the game to be more plentiful. The Eskimos tell me it has been the best hunting season that even the oldest of them can remember. They predict that next year will not be nearly so good. They also predict that once the Arctic night has passed, conditions for travelling by dogs and sled will be ideal. If we winter here, with so much fresh meat to sustain us, I think we will be strong enough when the sun comes back to make it to the pole.

  I know how surprised and disappointed you must be. But the opportunity is here, and I feel that I must take it. The conditions may never be more favourable. I will not be alone. Devlin is with me. It is important that you tell Bridgman as soon as possible that I am trying for the pole before he hears it unofficially from Bradley or one of the others. The news will cause quite a stir. I hope that whatever animus you hold against me now as you read these words will pass, and that you will do what you can on your end to help me. Please assure everyone that I left Gloucester with the intention of returning to Brooklyn in September and decided to try for the pole only because of how unforeseeably favourable to success I found all things to be in Greenland.

  Please do not think badly of me. I know that if you think things through with an open heart, you will see that this is something I must do. Kiss Helen and Ruth for me.

  Your loving husband,

  Frederick

  The young man who on the voyage had served as our cook, a German from Brooklyn named Rudolph Franke, accepted Dr. Cook’s invitation to join us on the expedition.

  I wrote and gave to Bradley a short letter for Aunt Daphne, telling her that our plans had changed, that we were trying for the pole and would be away for longer than the expected four months. I also gave him one for Kristine. “I think constantly of you,” I wrote. “Perhaps I ought not to say so for the first time in a letter, but I love you.”

  A few days before the ship departed, Dr. Cook, impressing upon me the need to be discreet, admitted that he and Bradley had been preparing for a polar expedition since long before the ship left Gloucester.

  “Bradley agreed to back the expedition the day we met,” said Dr. Cook.

  They had been partway through their lunch, Dr. Cook said, when he put down his knife and fork. “Why not try for the pole?” he asked Bradley. “It would cost only eight or ten thousand dollars more than you plan to spend.”

  “Not I,” Bradley said. “Would you like to try for it yourself?”

  Dr. Cook said he did not know which surprised him more, hearing himself blurt out the question or receiving Bradley’s instant agreement to back an expedition.

  “We’ll fit you for the pole,” Bradley told him, “but we’ll say nothing to anyone about it. We don’t want the papers getting at it. Peary is waiting to go. We don’t want him to get to Etah first and take all the best dogs for himself. And I want to shoot on the way up, so I don’t want to be in a hurry. Look at it this way. If we get to Etah and the Eskimos are sick or there aren’t enough dogs or something else is wrong, we can say it was just a hunting trip and come
back home.”

  Dr. Cook said that Bradley wrote him out a cheque on the spot for ten thousand dollars. “This is for the pole,” he said, handing it to Dr. Cook. Then he wrote out another, larger cheque. “And this is for my part of the expedition.”

  Bradley asked him about Mrs. Cook, and about me.

  “I will put off telling them the truth for as long as possible,” Dr. Cook said. “After all, we may not try for the pole, in which case all my wife’s worry will have been unnecessary. It is a harmless lie that may spare her a few months of fretting and Devlin some disappointment.”

  “Get there and get back,” Bradley said just as the ship left with its cargo of furs and tusks. Bradley, his hands on Dr. Cook’s shoulders, winked at me.

  Bradley’s demeanour made Dr. Cook’s bid for the pole sound like a shady business venture from which, though Dr. Cook would take the risks, Bradley hoped to profit. In this, he was not unlike any backer of a polar expedition. Something about him, however, about the way he kept looking appraisingly at both of us, unsettled me.

  “You might make it. Who knows,” Bradley said, laughing, as if he had bought a lottery ticket in aid of some worthwhile but amusing cause.

  “How does Dr. Cook plan to make it to the pole without proper equipment or a ship?” Captain Bartlett asked me, having failed, he said, to get a satisfactory answer from Dr. Cook. I told him that I did not know what Dr. Cook’s strategy was.

  “Even though your life depends on him?” said Captain Bartlett.

  “I’m sure he knows what he is doing,” I said.

  “No one starts for the pole from this far south in Greenland,” Captain Bartlett said. “Your ship should take you hundreds of miles north of Etah before it turns back. Dr. Cook will have to sledge all those extra hundreds of miles. It makes no sense. It can’t be done.”