The Navigator of New York

by Wayne Johnston

  I thought about the expedition. There were parts of it that, despite the hoax, remained unspoiled for me. Most of it. I knew I would never see or do such things again. The time I spent recovering from fever in the box house. I lay there, languishing longer than I had to in my sleeping bag, revelling in aches and pains that I knew would not get worse, and that somehow added a coziness to my recovery. I had not been to the pole, but I had walked on the ever-moving surface of the polar sea. I had been farther north than where the Old Ice came from, the ice that flowed past Newfoundland each spring. I had risked death.

  There had been moments on the polar sea when I’m sure that even Dr. Cook forgot our purpose for being there—forgot that it was all a grand deception—so diverted was he by some sight like the parting of the ice, the crust ripping slowly to reveal, at the bottom of a jagged trench, the steaming apparition of green water.

  I knew that Dr. Cook would come back to Brooklyn, that this sudden flight from his house to parts unknown was just the prologue of a story that would peter out—a story in which it was possible for him to start again, to reinvent himself somewhere else where no one had ever heard of him. There was no such place, but neither, if there was, would he have stayed there.

  He would come back and live in Brooklyn in some house from which he could see Manhattan.

  Perhaps, from now on, Manhattan would remind him of me, for I had decided that I would live in the city where my parents met and where I was conceived. I was certain he would not insist that we remain apart forever.

  I would never again speak in public about the expedition.

  But I would not run from Peary and the members of his Arctic club. I would neither help nor hinder their ambitions. If they had me followed, if they came to visit me, if they insisted that I meet again with Peary or someone else, then so be it. I knew the whole truth now, and they would soon see that to pester me was pointless.

  I could go to some university or college. I had had enough of exploring, though I knew my reputation would help me find a job. I could all but see an item in the papers or a sign in a window naming as the new addition to some firm the young man who was a partner with Dr. Cook on his disputed expedition, and who years ago had saved the life of his enemy and rival, Robert Peary. It would not matter that I had ended my professional association with Dr. Cook, or that I preferred not to speak of my adventures. I could stand to be “the enigmatic Mr. Stead” for as long as people chose to think of me that way.

  I would prove myself, and though my part in all of it might never be forgotten altogether, it would fade and I would be allowed to make my way as Devlin Stead, who had had something to do with “that Cook and Peary business.” It was something to hope for anyway. It was not as if I had a choice. The fame and infamy would follow me no matter where I went.

  But for now, for today, I had no plans. I would wander through the streets of the Lower East Side, and among people who had never heard of me, who could not read the papers, who had seen Manhattan from a distance only once and had never crossed the Brooklyn Bridge and never would, I would think about my future for a while. My life with Kristine.

  I would go down to the Hudson Pier, perhaps, and watch the immigrants come ashore from the Ellis Island ferries. Or I might take the el train to its northern limit and see if any trace remained of the shanty towns.

  Most of what I knew about my mother happened here. I knew the story of those three weeks better than I knew the story of her life. She had known only happiness here.

  My mother as Lily remembered her.

  My mother as, in his first two letters, Dr. Cook remembered her.

  • CHAPTER FORTY-SEVEN •

  I KEPT MY PROMISE TO AUNT DAPHNE THAT I WOULD RETURN TO her someday. Lily and Kristine went with me. I wanted Lily, who was to have gone there thirty years earlier for my mother’s wedding, to see St. John’s at last. I wanted Kristine to see many things, but especially the sea from Signal Hill.

  For a while, our ship, which made port at Boston and Halifax, followed the coast, so that we stayed in sight of land. But from Halifax, we went northeast until we were in what Dr. Cook called the “true open sea.” Kristine, who had been to all the great seaboard cities of America and had gone west by train to San Francisco, had never been so far from the continent as to lose sight of it. Watching her stare landward from the deck long after land had disappeared—on her face that look of fear and wonder I had seen on the faces of so many others who were sea-surrounded for the first time—I felt a sudden surge of love for her well up in my throat. Nothing so reminds you like the sea that the enemy of life is not death but loneliness. I put my arm around her waist and drew her close to me. She rested her head against my cheek, her hair wet from a mist so fine I could neither see nor feel it in the air.

  My mother had gone back to St. John’s from New York on a ship like this. She must have thought her life was just beginning. And she was, without even knowing it, pregnant with me. How strange that seemed. That I had made that journey with her. That she had come to Manhattan alone and borne me back to Newfoundland.

  What might have been the clouds of a distant storm were the headlands of the southeast coast of Newfoundland.

  “There it is,” I said, and Kristine and Lily squinted dubiously, as if there lay out there nothing that remotely looked like land. Then Lily smiled and both of them pointed almost at once.

  The three of us stood at the rail of the foredeck as the ship approached the Narrows. “Signal Hill,” I said, pointing up and to the right. The stone tower on top of it, which had been under construction when I left, was now complete, dwarfing the blockhouse, from which several flags were flying, one of them signalling to the city that our ship was soon to dock.

  Kristine and Lily looked up momentarily, but they were drawn, as I was, to look at the base of the cliff where the waves were breaking. I guessed that they were looking for the ledge from which Francis Stead had thrown my mother to her death, but from this perspective, the face of the cliff seemed flat. The sky was cloudless, the water outside the Narrows the deep blue that I remembered from cold but sunny days. Though the seaward side of the hill was in the shade, it did not look like the setting of Francis Stead’s crime.

  We were too far from shore to hear the waves—the alternating surge and retreat of the sea through the fissures in the rock—a sound that had always made me think the hill was hollow, a great shell through whose unseen channels the sea ran like a river. Seagulls, likewise inaudible, swarmed the hilltop, hoping for scraps of food from people who were waving at the ship. I guessed that it was about a month since the last of the ice had drifted by.

  As we were docking, I saw Aunt Daphne before she saw me; she was surrounded by a multitude of people who were there to meet the ship but unmistakably alone. She was searching the rails of the ship for me. Her eyes passed over me several times without the slightest pause. Not even after I removed my hat and began to wave and shout her name did she recognize me. I realized how much I must have changed since she had seen me last. She had changed, too, but not so much because of age as because of the years of waiting, when not only was I up north, but my whereabouts were often unknown and she was not even sure if I was still alive. She had said, in her one letter to me, after Etah and my first encounter with Peary, that the people of St. John’s were now talking as if my sole imperfection was shyness. I wondered if they had come to regard her differently as well, or if she was still, had been for ten years, looked upon as the odd aunt of an odd nephew, in part to blame for my oddness and a bane to her husband, one of the two Stead doctors who were brought down by their wives.

  How concerned, how anxious she looked as her eyes darted about. It was as if in spite of the telegram I had sent her telling her that we were coming, she was all but certain that some mishap or misunderstanding would prevent it.

  Only now did I realize that many on shore were shouting my name, that more people than Aunt Daphne had turned out to meet me. Cards that bore the word “Pr
ess” protruded from hatbands. Photographers began to take my picture. There were small explosions of light and smoke along the dock. It was just such a homecoming as I had dreamed of when I lived here, almost surreally so, with signs and banners everywhere proclaiming my accomplishments and my countrymen chanting my name. “We believe in you, Devlin,” I heard them say. I momentarily forgot that it was for my part in the polar expedition that I was being celebrated. It was as if the people of the city had turned out en masse to admit that they had been wrong about me, to make amends for having regarded me as “the Stead boy.” I was tempted to give in, to acknowledge their adulation as if I was deserving of it, to act as Dr. Cook had done on his return to Brooklyn. I had no doubt that it was common knowledge here that I was adamant in my refusal to comment on the expedition. Perhaps the people were hoping, by this show of support, to change my mind—hoping that I would settle forever the question of whether one of their own had won the race for the pole. How strange it felt to be back among these people for whom Francis Stead would forever be my father, his death forever a mysterious suicide. For whom my mother would forever be the woman whose grief over his leaving her was such that she took her life.

  Aunt Daphne turned to a man beside her, who immediately pointed straight at me. For a moment, as our eyes met, she put her hand to her mouth, as if she didn’t want me to see how shocked she was by my appearance, for I looked ten years older than I was. I saw in her face that in spite of my having abandoned her, in spite of my having been so foolish as to think she doubted me, she had loved me unreservedly when I had no one else, and had loved me no less in my long absence from her life.

  She saw me. She dropped her hand and, smiling, began blowing kisses, even as she fought her way through the crowd towards the gangplank, which was just now being fixed in place. By the time, with Lily and Kristine behind me, I met her on the dock, tears were running freely down her face. As if she saw in my eyes that I was about to tell her I was sorry, she faintly shook her head. We hugged, broke apart, hugged again without a word, until at last, as if it was all she could manage, she exhaled my name.

  We were both crying when I introduced her to Lily and Kristine.

  “Devlin thinks so much of you,” Kristine said. “He’s been talking about you ever since we met.”

  “Hello, my dear,” Lily said, linking arms with Aunt Daphne.

  She and Uncle Edward, though he had refused to grant her a divorce, had been living apart for several years, ever since she had left him and become a tutor to the children of those few parents who had pledged her their support. Uncle Edward, calling her a “scandalous embarrassment,” had been offering her ever-increasing sums of money, trying to bribe her into leaving Newfoundland for good.

  “You’ll come back to New York with us, Daphne,” Lily said one evening at dinner. “We’ll all be so much happier that way.” Aunt Daphne looked about at the three of us as if she would not let herself believe that she had found happiness after having lived for so long without it.

  “New York would be such a change for me,” she said. “But yes, if you really want me to, I’ll go with you.”

  But she would not take a cent from Uncle Edward.

  Much of my week in St. John’s was spent dodging or merely ignoring reporters who followed me about, hoping for my exclusive account of the Bradley expedition, some saying they would pay me if I would just answer yes or no to the question “Did you reach the pole?”

  I was often recognized in the street, and although I’m sure that the polar controversy and my complete refusal to speak about it made people wonder if I had really changed as much as they had imagined, many of them shook my hand and congratulated me on having been the first to set foot at the pole, at which, always, I nodded noncommittally and smiled.

  We put flowers on my mother’s grave, arranged for fresh ones to be put there once a month and for the upkeep of the plot, which I was not sure that I would ever see again.

  Kristine and I drove up Signal Hill in Aunt Daphne’s cabriolet, the one in which my mother had passed Francis Stead as he made his way on foot towards the top the day she died.

  I wanted to show Kristine everything—the sea, the blockhouse where I was forced to spend the night, the place in the woods where I went to read Dr. Cook’s first letter.

  As we drove up Devon Row, I thought of dropping in to see Uncle Edward. No doubt he knew that I was in St. John’s. I wished that I could have surprised him as he came up the stairs one morning. “Hello, Uncle Edward,” I imagined myself saying as I looked up from the book on my lap. But we went on past his house and past his surgery. I glanced at the window of the room where I used to read and copy the letters while he waited, the still-unoccupied, unlit surgery of Francis Stead. In Uncle Edward’s rooms, the lights were on, but I could not see him.

  A couple of other vehicles, one of them a convertible motor car, faced seaward on the hilltop, their occupants at once wind-blown and spellbound by the view. Remembering the visit I had made here with Aunt Daphne as a child, I pointed out to Kristine the directions in which lay New York, London, Labrador and Greenland.

  As I was speaking, she removed her hat and stowed it behind the seat, then she began to pull out the pins that held up her hair, which was soon streaming out behind her, horizontal in the onshore gale. Before I could move to help her, she got down from the carriage and, hiking her dress, ran to one of the paths that led down to the sea. I sat and watched her, thinking she just wanted to get a better view. But she did not stop, just went running down the path until I lost sight of her. By the time I got down from the carriage and reached the path, she was well on her way down the hill.

  “Kristine,” I shouted as I ran to catch her. The slope was so steep that I could descend no faster than she could, and so could gain no ground on her. I thought I might catch her on the upslope of the second, lower hill, but she was already on the far side of it and out of sight again by the time I reached it.

  “Watch out for the ledge,” I shouted.

  When I topped the second hill, I saw that she had stopped and was looking about as if trying to decide which direction she should take now that the path had petered out. Soon she was off again, lost behind the last ridge. “Kristine,” I shouted, wondering if she would still be there when I cleared that ridge myself.

  I saw her standing directly below me, saw the top of her head, her shoulders, her chest heaving as, with her back to the cliff, she tried to catch her breath. I climbed down and stood beside her, still gasping for air when her breathing had returned to normal.

  “This is the ledge?” she said.

  I nodded.

  “I knew you would come here,” she said. “And I wanted to make sure you didn’t come here by yourself. You could not have gone back to New York without coming here again. In the daylight. Knowing what you didn’t know when you were here before.” I hadn’t set aside a time to come here, hadn’t really thought about this pilgrimage, but I knew she was right. I would have come here by myself and might never have told her about it.

  It was later in the year than when my mother and Francis Stead had struggled here. Bright green, treacherously slick grass grew on the ledge, which angled slightly downward. The water was not so much crashing in waves below us as rising and falling, flooding the ledge a little more each time it rose. Here it had happened, on this ledge, which bore no trace of that event or any other, which was as it had been for a thousand years and as it would be for a thousand more.

  The chase down the hill had seemed, eerily, like a re-enactment of Francis Stead’s story, Kristine preceding me down the hill, fleeing from me while I called her name as Francis Stead must have called my mother’s. “Amelia,” I had half expected to hear. Half expected to see my mother, her husband in pursuit, on one of the other paths that led down to the water.

  “The tide is coming in,” I said.

  “So close to shore,” Kristine said, though she spoke as if an infinite gap lay between us and the water. We w
ere ten feet above the sea one second and almost awash in it the next, well within reach of a rogue wave, for any sign of which I scanned the water farther out. Froth lopped onto the ledge, and the wind, as the water peaked, blew the spray against us, lightly spattering our clothes and faces. I tasted salt, the brine of the sea, which always took me by surprise, for I found it hard to think of water that looked like that as being anything but wet and cold. In just such water by which I was being drenched and whose taste was in my mouth, my mother drowned. An unambiguous death. His crime as unambiguously motivated as her sacrifice. With my face already dripping with salt water, I began to cry.

  Kristine knelt gingerly, then lay down on her stomach, her head just out over the ledge. When she patted the ground, I lay down beside her on her right.

  We looked at the sea. It was as though it was the ledge that was rising and falling. Each time the water rose, I felt certain that we would be submerged. But the rising black water turned white when it struck the rocks, spouting up to our faces like some roaring fountain, so cold it left us gasping. Kristine’s hair hung down in long, dark, dripping strands, water streaming from her brow, her nose and chin as it had to have been from mine. She unbuttoned the left sleeve of her dress and rolled it up. She dipped the tips of her fingers in the water, then her whole hand, at which she gasped so loudly that I reached out for her arm. But she pushed me away with her free one.

  “My God,” she said, “I never knew water could be so cold.”

  She lowered her arm farther, to the elbow, as the water crested. She closed her eyes for a while, then suddenly withdrew her arm as if she could not have kept it immersed for a fraction of a second longer, as if her whole body was surfacing for air. She stood up, cradling her arm in her left hand as if it was broken.

  “We are older now than she ever was,” she said.

  We kissed. Like mine, her lips were chattering. Our mouths were salty from the sea.