The Navigator of New York (18 page)

I read Dr. Cook’s letter several times over on the voyage from Halifax. The last I had received from him, it had reached me in June and had convinced me to put off no longer the flight from home that I had for so long been contemplating.

I regarded myself not as an immigrant to America, but as a native of the New World, Dr. Cook and I simply having been born in different parts of it. I fancied that at the sight of the strange spectacle he described, the arrival of the immigrants from eastern and southern Europe, I would feel as he had. But I knew I was mistaken when, from the porthole of my berth in second class, I first saw the featureless mass of North America.

We had been two nights at sea. That it was the continent, I did not realize until I had been staring at it for some time. At first I took it to be a small island, a disruption in the horizon so faint that it dissolved, reappearing only after I closed my eyes and opened them again. Soon it seemed that there were several small islands, then that they cohered into a single, larger one. It went on like this for some time, small islands slowly taking shape and then cohering, until it seemed there lay strung out in front of us a broken barrier that we would have to navigate to reach the continent.

Although nothing on the map as I remembered it corresponded with them, it still did not occur to me that these swelling and cohering shapes were our destination, for I did not feel that I had been long enough at sea to have come within sight of a place that had for so long seemed so far away.

The “islands” had assumed two massive shapes with a narrow channel in between before I could accept that even this last passageway would close by increments, and that what I was looking at, what seemed to be rearing up for the first time from beneath the sea, was North America. It was as if I had been for so long and so exclusively an islander that I clung to that mirage of shape-shifting islands until the illusion was so blatant that I had to let it go.

I had never, until this voyage, been far enough from Newfoundland to see it as an island. I had never really thought of it as
one, had not really believed that if you followed the coast, you would come back to where you started.

I knew from how long it had taken for land to disappear after we departed from Halifax that we were still hours away from land now. We were not heading straight for the continent but travelling southwest, land on my right, and on my left, though I could not see it, endless open water.

I told myself that this featureless “land” would never resolve itself into shapes and lines and colours as long as I kept looking at it. I lay down on my bunk and, in spite of my excitement, dozed fitfully, half dreaming, half remembering, with images from the past few days passing haphazardly before my mind.

I recalled the strange finality of watching a porter wheel on board someone else’s steamer trunk in Halifax while I had nothing with me but a doctor’s bag.

I dreamed about the letters on the hull of the British steamship, which I was for some reason unable to decipher, though I knew they spelled out some word in English.

The passengers in steerage I had neither seen nor heard, though I knew them to be directly below the floor of my berth.

A steward whose English accent inspired in me a deference that I tried in vain to hide had shown me how to close the hatch on my porthole window so that I could keep my berth dark and sleep in until my accustomed hour. He then so discreetly paused for a tip that he was gone before I realized what I should have done. I rang for him again, asked directions to the dining room that he had pointed out to me the first time, then thrust a coin at him so soon after he was done that in taking it he flinched as though he thought I meant to strike him.

I walked through the dining room in search of an empty table, declining when an older couple invited me to join them, muttering that it seemed “my friend” was elsewhere.

I had got out of bed one night convinced that someone had woken me by knocking on my door. I stood in the darkness and heard nothing but the dull drone of the ship.

I had a dream in which I tried to contact Dr. Cook by telephone. I had never used a telephone before. Over and over I spoke into the mouthpiece, but there was no reply.

I came fully awake again. It sounded as though the ship was being hastily evacuated. From above and outside in the corridor came the sound of running footsteps and children shouting. From below came the first sounds I had heard from steerage, muffled cries of what sounded like alarm or even panic. Looking out the porthole, I got an oblique glimpse of what I thought was Manhattan but later learned was Staten Island.

I left my berth and joined a stream of others heading for the decks of second class. I did not realize until I was on deck and the sea breeze met my face how hot it was. The ship still contained the cool air of the mid-Atlantic, but up there it was stifling.

I went to the rail, where everyone was staring at the Statue of Liberty, of which people the world over had seen so many pictures that she was already a cliché, massive and heraldic though she was. The polyglot din of the passengers below in steerage fell to a hush. Some people stared back at the statue long after we had passed it, but most looked forward to the primary marvel of Manhattan.

I had seen photographs of Manhattan taken from this vantage point, the ramparts of the Battery looming like a vision in the mist, as if even greater wonders lay in the land beyond them. But the photographs had left me unprepared for this.

Here I must try to remember how the city looked, the impression it made on me before I knew the names of its buildings or had walked the streets that ran between them, before I knew from experience rather than from books that this solid frieze was merely an illusion of perspective, before I knew which pier the ship was headed for, before I knew it had a number, not a name. Things for which I had no name I did not see, or else I saw them all as one thing called Manhattan.

It looked not like many structures, but like one whose towers rose up from a single block of stone. I found myself trying to find the heart
of it, the first structure to which the others had been joined. The strangest thing was that this city that I knew from Dr. Cook’s letter to be in a ceaseless state of growth and transformation looked so old, the buildings as ancient, as permanent, as the faces of the cliffs along the Hudson, which I had seen in books and magazines.

It was absurd to think that this,
this
should be anyone’s first experience of “elsewhere.” I was reminded of something I had once seen from the top of Signal Hill, a cluster of massive icebergs rearing up from out of nowhere like some city on an otherwise flat and empty plain.

It was my first sight of something artificially stupendous. There were not, to my knowledge, any other Newfoundlanders on board. It occurred to me that even including children, I was probably the least travelled person on the ship. Even those passengers who had spent all their lives in remote villages had, on some stage of the journey that was soon to end, seen some of the old cities of Europe, with their great towers, palaces, bridges and cathedrals, or the ruins of even older cities, the pillars of colossal temples. Even if they did not realize it, the city they were gaping at had its beginning in the ones they left behind.

Whereas I, I now realized, was of neither the Old World nor the New, but from a place so discrete, so singular that it required a periodic consultation of history books and maps to dispel the notion that human life there had begun independently of human life elsewhere. This in spirit was the city of these new arrivals, but in no way was it mine, not yet, and I could not help doubting that it would ever be.

It seemed to me that I was enlisting in history, their history, one phase of which they had left behind to start another. I had made a jump onto the deck of their ship as it was going by. I was a stowaway, more rootless than that portion of those in steerage who had made the crossing unaccompanied by family or friends.

But that would change, I told myself, for this was the world of the letters I was looking at, the one in which they were written, the one that they described. This, at last, was the world of Dr. Cook. And the place where I began.

For an instant, all the rest—my past, my mother, Francis Stead, Aunt Daphne, Uncle Edward, the house I grew up in, the city of St. John’s—seemed like the fast-fading remnants of a dream that I was waking from.

But then this feeling gave way to its opposite, and it was this New World that seemed unreal, remote. I felt that the instant I tried to take hold of it, or made to enter into it, the city would recede from me as all things did when you sought after them in dreams.

I envied the immigrants their lack of choices, these people whose decision to come here could never be reversed, for whom doubts and second thoughts and homesickness were so pointless they could revel in them, knowing that nothing would ever come of them. For them, at the first sight of the New World, it was certain that the old one was gone for good, that never again would they see it or the people they had left behind. It was so awful, yet so simple. It had an absoluteness about it that I longed for.

But my home was so much closer, at least in space, than theirs that I could not divest myself of one world by choosing the other. I could think of no way of choosing irrevocably, of ridding myself of all uncertainty and doubt.

How wrong I had been to think that I would survey my fellow immigrants with the same strange mixture of compassion and aloofness as Dr. Cook had.

The notion of my ever having received a letter from Dr. Cook, let alone my being his son, seemed suddenly illusory. The Dr. Cook who had grown up across the river from this city, who had grown up watching
it
grow up, who had ventured into it so often he as good as lived there, who sometimes sounded as if he had become so used to it that his life had come to seem pedestrian and nothing short of polar exploration could enliven it—this Dr. Cook had felt compelled to seek
me
out, to ask for
my
help, to plead with
me
to share his life?

I was filled with a sickening doubt. What if the idea that I was his son was a fiction that for him served some inscrutable purpose? It was not long after Francis Stead made New York his port that he blundered
to his death. There was no telling how a man might be affected who had spent his whole life here.

I crossed over to the other side of the ship, where only a few people who must many times have seen the Statue of Liberty and the skyline of Manhattan stood leaning on the rails, staring vacantly across the way at Brooklyn, an air of irony about them as they chatted, now and then smiling at each other when a shout of excitement went up on the other side.

Brooklyn was itself an impressive sight. Had its cross-river rival been any city in America instead of the borough of Manhattan, it would have been Brooklyn that the passengers were gawking at. Along the shore, beyond the cluster of schooner masts that looked like a forest from whose trees all the branches and the bark had been removed, was a line of warehouses, arranged as haphazardly as the cars of two trains that had met head-on. Above the warehouses and the attenuated smokestacks of an endless sprawl of factories, on a rise of land that I could tell already was more steep than any to be found on the island of Manhattan, was a city that appeared to be laid out on a grid of parishes, each steeple staking claim to a part of Brooklyn. The steeples of churches and cathedrals rose everywhere above the houses and the trees and the buildings that in comparison with their fellows on the other side were small, though far larger than any I had seen before that day.

Once we cleared Governors Island, I could see the Brooklyn Bridge. It seemed, because of two cities’ worth of smoke and haze, to be hanging in the air without support. Dr. Cook lived at the corner of Bushwick and Willoughby, in a neighbourhood called Bushwick. But where this was in relation to the Brooklyn tower of the bridge, how far from it and in which direction, I had no idea.

I cursed the provinciality and introspective turn of mind that had made me hole up in my berth on the voyage from Halifax as if to be in the company of non-Newfoundlanders or strangers of any kind was either beneath me or beyond me. Whether it was pride or shame that held me back I could not say. But vowing that I had not come to New
York to spend my time wondering what I was doing there, I went down to my berth for my belongings.

I collected the doctor’s bag that bore Francis Stead’s initials and contained Dr. Cook’s letters. I thought of them as my letters of introduction to Dr. Cook, even though they were written by him and copied in my hand.

I had planned, in preparation for transporting them, to combine all the letters in as few as half a dozen scrolls, but this had proved impossible, first because there were simply too many pages, and second because it was years since I had read some of the letters, years since they were last unscrolled, and I dared not disturb them for fear that they would fall apart.

My valise, therefore, as I went back up on deck, contained about three dozen scrolls, some tied with string, some with ribbon as if they were diplomas. To keep them from being crushed by the other articles, I had placed the scrolls on top, so it seemed that they were all the bag contained. It occurred to me what an odd sight the scrolls would make to anyone who looked inside the bag. They might have been some strange form of contraband, something that passengers were explicitly forbidden to take on board the ship. But I had no reason to think that anyone would look inside the bag. The men on the schooner that took me from St. John’s to Halifax had told me that first- and second-class passengers who showed no outward signs of being ill were allowed to disembark with only a cursory inspection.

The ship docked starboard to the pier, which jutted out three hundred feet from the waterfront. When it became clear that it would be some time before our disembarkment got under way, I walked along the rail of the ship until I encountered a wire-mesh barrier.