The Navigator of New York (60 page)

He and Mrs. Cook departed the day after I left the letter for him on his desk. I got up and went to his study, intending to say goodbye, to tell him I would be leaving the house that day, but he was not there. The doors of the drawing room were open, the fireplace cold, the sofa empty. There was a letter from him on my desk.

I hoped that he was still in the Cooks’. I went to their half of the house and found only empty rooms until I came upon a maid throwing dust covers on the furniture in the front parlour.

“They have gone away,” she said when she saw me. “No one knows where. No one knows how long. He left some money for you.” She handed me a thick sealed envelope.

They had left very early in the morning, dismissing all the servants on the spot, giving each of them an envelope like mine, which contained their pay.

“He asked us not to wake you,” she said. “He told me to wait for you so that the house would not be empty when you woke up. I am sorry, Mr. Stead.” She covered another chair. Soon the whole house would be like the Dakota.

It would later be discovered that, with their two children, Dr. Cook and Marie had sailed for South America, where they travelled under the pseudonyms of Dr. and Mrs. Craig.

I
T IS BEST THAT THE EPILOGUE OF THIS STORY PRECEDE THE ENDING
.

By the time the Cooks returned to New York, several months later, the Danish Konsistorium had met in Copenhagen to reconsider Dr. Cook’s claim to have reached the pole. Their verdict was that it was “unproven.”

“So is Peary’s claim unproven,” Dr. Cook told reporters, and he pointed out that the Danes had revoked none of the honours they had bestowed upon him. His supporters noted the “world of difference” between “unproven” and “false,” while Peary’s said the two words were synonymous and claimed victory.

Bill Barrill, with whom Dr. Cook claimed to have climbed McKinley, came forward and said that Dr. Cook had faked the climb with “clever photographs.” Other climbers set out for McKinley to see if this was true. They presented their case that Dr. Cook
had
faked the climbing of McKinley in magazine articles that were themselves attacked by the Bradley-led supporters of Dr. Cook.

Although the U.S. Navy, in 1911, verified Peary’s claim to have reached the pole, there were many who remained unconvinced, so many that Peary’s supporters found it necessary to continue their attempts to discredit Dr. Cook.

The many years of controversy that followed are well documented. Even if you read everything that has been written, you will only rarely come across my name.

I never granted another interview after I moved out of 670
Bushwick. I was besieged by reporters for a while, as were Lily and Kristine after Kristine and I announced our engagement. But they soon left us alone, the last public word on me being, as I had predicted, that I had left Dr. Cook because I knew his claim to be a hoax, that I had been “hoodwinked” and had no more idea than Etukishuk and Ahwelah where Dr. Cook had really taken us.

Not long after the Danes declared his claim to be “unproven,” I attempted one evening to visit Dr. Cook at his new house. The butler who answered the door went inside, and Mrs. Cook came out and told me that her husband did not wish to meet with me again. “Not ever,” she said and slammed the door.

I was certain we would, sooner or later, meet by chance. Until then, I would write to him. Perhaps we would write to each other. Live two miles apart and never communicate except by letter. Cross-river correspondents.

But my letters to him went unanswered, and we did not meet by chance. A few years after returning from South America, he left Brooklyn for good.

I wrote hundreds of letters to Dr. Cook, but he did not write back. It was as though I were reversing the order of the one-way correspondence by which he had drawn me to him, to New York from Newfoundland.

I wrote the letters as if I knew that he was reading them. I told him what was new since I had written last. I related my life to him—the life from which he had exiled himself.

I imagined him eagerly looking forward to the letters in the manner of a prisoner who can have no visitors. The meaning of my letters was that I forgave him. But perhaps believing that he did not deserve it, he would not accept forgiveness from me.

I kept writing to him after he left New York and went out west to explore for oil. I thought he might write back to me when Peary died in 1920, but he did not.

Peary had spent his last years at his Cape Cod refuge on Eagle
Island, off the coast of Maine, worn out, so the story went, from his efforts to prove his polar claim beyond all doubt. It was said that, knowing he would soon die, he had lain for days on a couch that was covered in muskox furs, looking out in silence across the bay.

I might have been content to wonder forever if Dr. Cook was reading my letters if not for a misfortune that befell him not long after Peary’s death.

He wound up an inmate of Leavenworth Prison in Kansas, having been sentenced to fourteen years in jail for oil-stock fraud in Wyoming. The polar controversy was still unresolved, and many felt that Dr. Cook was the victim of a malicious, or at least overly zealous, prosecution in which Peary’s supporters had had a hand.

By this time, 1923, Marie Cook had divorced her husband and he had not remarried. The thought of him alone in Leavenworth was more than I could bear, so I made a surprise journey to the prison in an attempt to see him. I was told that when he was informed that he had a visitor named Mr. Stead, he merely shook his head.

I returned to New York and began, in my letters, to implore him to reply, saying that I was greatly concerned about his health and state of mind.

He neither answered nor sent back my letters. Unable to stand it any longer, I wrote to the warden at Leavenworth, asking, as it had not occurred to me to do before, that someone ask Dr. Cook if he was reading my letters and if he wished me to go on writing to him.

I expected a reply from some prison official. Instead, six weeks after I wrote to the warden, I received an envelope that bore only my name and address, printed in pencil, the upper-left corner conspicuously blank. Inside the envelope was a single sheet of paper, blank but for one pencil-printed word in the middle of the page: YES.

This is the sole letter from Dr. Cook to me that still survives. It is pinned to the wall above my desk, a yellowed, fading affirmative, inscrutable to others.

Not long after Dr. Cook’s death in August 1940, I received, from Dr. Cook’s daughter, Helen, a letter telling me that he had died and thanking me “for being such a faithful correspondent all these years.”

It was clear that she thought he had been answering my letters, all of which he had saved and were now in her possession. They were full, she said, of “vague and cryptic references to unnamed persons and unspecified events” that she hoped I would one day explain to her. She still believed that he had reached the pole and presumed that I still thought so, too. She said she further hoped that despite my expressed intention never again to speak in public about the expedition—a reticence that she said she found mystifying—I would, as a co-expeditionary of Dr. Cook’s and the first man to set foot at the pole, join in her campaign to prove her father’s claim, a campaign that had been ongoing for years, but that she expected would gain “new life now from the recent developments of which you may have heard.”

I had. “DISGRACED EXPLORER RECEIVES DEATHBED PARDON FROM FDR,” read the headline of a story that had recently run on the front page of
The New York Times.
I had seen the story before I heard from Helen, and my first thought was that the president had pardoned Dr. Cook for pretending to have reached the pole. I had momentarily forgotten that Dr. Cook had admitted this pretence to no one but me. The pardon was for his stock-fraud conviction, however, which was by that time widely regarded as having been unjust. The story was a brief one, contained no mention of me and credited Dr. Cook with having perpetrated the most infamous hoax in the history of exploration. It concluded with the observation that this hoax, even though quickly discovered, had prevented the true discoverer of the North Pole, Comm. Robert Peary, from being accorded the full measure of credit and fame that he deserved. Other papers said the polar controversy was “still unresolved” or “unlikely to ever be resolved.”

Only the
New York Herald Tribune
maintained unequivocally that Dr. Cook and I had been the first to reach the pole, and the paper
chided Peary and the Peary Arctic Club for their lifelong campaign to discredit Dr. Cook.

I replied to Helen that while I wished her luck in her efforts to prove her father’s claim to have been the leader of an expedition that had reached the pole, I planned, for personal reasons, to maintain my silence on the matter. She returned to me, unopened, my last two letters to Dr. Cook, which had arrived too late for him to read. I never heard from her again.

O
F MY MOTHER
, D
R
. C
OOK SAID
, “N
OTHING IN HER LIFE WAS
undone by the manner of her death.”

Nor by the fact of it. Life is not undone by death—nor a single moment by all the moments that come after it.

I have no reason, then, even knowing what happened in “the end,” not to finish the story years before the end, not to write the ending as if I really do not know what happens next.

Later on the same day that my hosts and their children left Brooklyn under assumed names for parts unknown, I let myself out the door by which Dr. Cook had first admitted me to his house, a door I had not used since then.

For the first time, I descended the steps that I had climbed that day nine years before. It made me feel as though I had not left the house since the day that door seemed to open by itself and I stepped inside.

I looked at the spot on the other side of Bushwick where I had waited in the shade of nothing but my hat on that hot day in August 1900, dressed for the summer of the colder country from which I had come to Manhattan, to America, the day before. I would not have been surprised to see my successor standing there, a boy as terrified, as apprehensive, as I had been, conspicuously waiting, gripping with both hands and holding in front of him a valise that appeared to be a doctor’s bag.

I had decided to burn the scrolls of letters and leave my valise, bearing Francis Stead’s initials, behind. But I couldn’t do it.

I had fallen asleep fully dressed the night before, lying on the sofa in the drawing room. I was surprised that I had been able to sleep, and that I had had no dreams.

I decided, after leaving the house, that I would walk to Manhattan. I walked along the Myrtle line to the Brooklyn Bridge, in the shadow of the el tracks, weaving in and out among the beams, looking up when the train rumbled overhead.

At Myrtle and Willoughby, the triumphal arch bearing Dr. Cook’s likeness had been taken down, though the wooden scaffolding remained, as if repairs to the viaduct were soon to start.

People, most of whom I had never met, waved to me and said, “Good morning, Mr. Stead,” and asked me to pass on their good wishes to Dr. Cook.

I passed the winding wooden stairs to all the waiting rooms, the stairwells from which friendly strangers pointed at me. Some, noticing the commotion, looked furtively at me as if they thought they recognized me but could not remember why I was famous.

There were throngs of people on the boardwalk of the bridge—sightseers, most of them, who looked as if they were either making their first trip to New York or were New Yorkers who had never walked the bridge before. There was a deafening tumult of traffic below me. The el train, motor cars, the clopping hoofs of horses.

I thought of the day when I first rode the el train to Brooklyn from Manhattan and the passengers on both sides let their windows down when we reached the crest, so a fresh breeze blew through the car. I had smelled the ocean then as I did now.

Soon the wind was blowing so hard I could hear nothing else. Two young women, mouths open in soundless laughter, clung girlishly to one another and with their free hands held onto their hats.

When the ship from which my mother got her first look at New York came up the river, the two halves of the bridge had not yet met. The ship sailed between them as if a massive canal bridge had been raised to let it through.

I thought of Cape Sparbo, where it had seemed the wind would
roll the roof back like a rug, roll back the sod until nothing lay between us and the storm but sticks and bones.

A subway train now ran between the two boroughs, beneath the riverbed, just as the newspaper I had read on my first morning in Manhattan had predicted. It was said that on calmer days, as the subway train crossed beneath the river, its vibrations made a kind of path of agitation on the surface, so that you could see not only the progress of the train from side to side, but also its shape, as though it was casting a shadow upward on the water.

If anything, that newspaper, which had seemed to me so extravagant and naïve in its predictions, had been short-sighted and conservative. There were more things in New York in 1909 than had been dreamed of by anyone nine years before.

At the height of the walkway, I stopped and stood at the rail, looking up the river. My clothing flapped loudly in the wind, as if I was some flag marking the midway point of the Brooklyn Bridge.

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.