Read The Navigator of New York Online
Authors: Wayne Johnston
My heart was pounding. I had never been spoken to like this before by any adult, let alone by Uncle Edward.
“Why does he want me to keep it secret from Aunt Daphne?” I said. “Does she know him—”
“You need not read it at all. You don’t have to. I can simply burn it if you like.” He looked briefly at the fireplace.
“I’m not promising to be discreet before I read it,” I said. Discreet. I had never used the word before, never spoken so formally to anyone. It seemed impossible, under the circumstances, not to imitate the way he spoke.
He shrugged. “Even if you did promise, you could change your mind. I’m simply acting here as a kind of postman for Dr. Cook. A go–between. When you have read the letter,
if
you read it, you can do as you see fit. I think I know what you will do, but of course I could be wrong.”
“I could just give it to Aunt Daphne,” I said, “and let her read it first.”
He shook his head. “I would hate to have you wish too late that you had opted for discretion. I think you should read it in my presence, then give it back to me.”
“All right,” I said. What harm would it do me or Aunt Daphne if I read the letter?
Why had Dr. Cook waited for four years after my father’s death to write to me about him? I assumed that his letter contained news about my father. I could think of no other reason for Dr. Cook to write to me. Perhaps he had things to tell me that he thought I was only now old enough to understand.
Uncle Edward opened the drawer of his desk and removed from
it a small, once white envelope that now was yellow, so flat and thin it looked as if it was empty. It was sealed, but there was nothing written on it but my name. It must have come inside another envelope that was addressed to Uncle Edward.
“I will step out onto the rear landing,” Uncle Edward said, rising and walking around his desk, extending the letter to me. “I will come back in ten minutes.” He went to a windowless door across the room from the one I came in by, slowly opened it, went outside and just as slowly closed it.
I broke the seal, tore a corner of the envelope, removed and gingerly unfolded the single page, which looked so old that if mishandled it would have crumbled into pieces. The layers were compressed as if they had been ironed or had lain for months beneath some flat and heavy object. The handwriting, which appeared on both sides of the paper, was minuscule, barely decipherable, the words extending to the bottom line of the second side, the final words crammed into the right-hand margin, as if their author had exhausted his supply of paper.
My dearest Devlin:
I think constantly of you. Strange words from a man whom you have never met. I feel strange writing them. But from where I am writing—where in the world, where in my life—everything seems strange
.
When I wrote your uncle Edward, I should have been well launched on my quest for the South Pole, not in the cabin of a ship that had yet to leave the dock, not in the swelter of Rio de Janeiro. Since I wrote that letter, I have not left the ship more than half a dozen times. Just before we were due to leave last spring, Devlin, a fear I had never known before took hold of me
.
I imagine Peary coming back in triumph from the North Pole. Newspapers whose headlines proclaim his accomplishment figure so often in my dreams that I have banned all papers from the ship
.
Peary, who has never acknowledged in public that your father and I saved his life on the North Greenland expedition. His leg was shattered in a storm by the ship’s tiller. Had he been attended to by lesser doctors, he would have died
.
Devlin, the most mundane things seem ominous. In part, I have worked myself into this state through debating whether it would be fair of me to confide in you
.
I find myself on all matters unresolved. I find even the simplest of decisions impossible to make. I have heard that Peary, in a letter to his mother that he wrote when he was twenty, said, “I must have fame. I must.” His advantage over me is that he will do anything to achieve his goal, whereas I … I lack the ruthlessness that I fear may be essential to the task
.
Devlin, no one knows what I am going through but you. I dare not tell others of my doubts. Who would back my expeditions, who would trust me to command them, if they knew my state of mind?
I have been waking up, drenched in sweat, from nightmares I cannot remember and during which, the captain of the ship informs me, I scream incomprehensibly, as though at some intruder in my room
.
Such has been my physical state these past few months that the captain is certain I have caught malaria. I have told him that I suffer from “transient debilitation” owing to the energies I expended raising money for this expedition. In three weeks, we are supposed to leave for Patagonia, from which, in July, we set out for the Southern Ice. But the captain and the others will not make for Patagonia until what they call my condition has improved. Nor will they let another spring go by without either heading for the pole or turning back. We have been stalled here now for seven months
.
I know the cause and therefore, I hope, the cure of my despair. It is a piece of information that I have been keeping to myself since just before your father disappeared. What you are about to read will surprise or even shock you, so prepare yourself before you read on
.
I could not imagine what sort of disclosure Dr. Cook was about to make. I felt so light-headed I almost fell from my chair.
Not long before he disappeared on the North Greenland expedition, your father took me aside and told me something that I dismissed at first as the delusion of a man who had for some time, owing to the rigours of Arctic exploration, been acting strangely. But he repeated what I would have called an accusation against his wife except that his tone was so deliberate, so calm. He said that you were not his son
.
In the hope of making him see how much the strain of the expedition was affecting him, I asked him what proof he had that he was not the father of the boy whom the rest of the world knew to be his son. He supplied certain details that convinced me his revelation was true. These details convinced me of something else, too, which I kept to myself. I have had few enough liaisons with women in my life to remember all of them. But even if I was a man of the world, I would remember my first time. It came to me, as your father told his story, that the boy he was speaking of could be no one’s son but mine
.
You have only my word that all of this is not complete invention on my part. Aside from having no reason to invent such a story, I am putting myself at great risk in confiding in you. You hold in your hands a document, in my handwriting, bearing my signature, that if made public could do me and mine great harm. You and your aunt and uncle would likewise suffer, and great harm would be done to the memory of your parents, your mother’s especially. My heart has never been so close to breaking as when I heard from your father—that is, from Francis Stead—the manner of your mother’s death
.
You are, Devlin, too young to understand how rare a thing true love is, how unlikely in this world to happen, and when it does, how unlikely to endure. And once it is lost, how hard to live without. I have tried “writing” to your mother, directing my thoughts to her, as
though she was still alive, but I derived no comfort from it. Finally, I realized that it was to you I should be writing
.
I write in the full understanding of how this letter will affect you. I cannot myself imagine receiving such news at your age. Only by blood now, the cold blood of biology, are you my son and I your father. How this can change, I am unable to foresee. I cannot, for obvious reasons, publicize the contents of this letter. (Your uncle will speak to you of this at greater length.)
Nevertheless, may I write to you again? In my next letter, I will provide you with such details as will convince you beyond all doubt that my claim is true. I have omitted to do so in this one not to whet your curiosity, but because I could not bear to relate the whole of my story to someone from whom I might never hear again
.
In your uncle’s presence, after he has finished speaking to you, I want you to write “Yes” or “No” on this envelope and give it to him. He will forward your answer to me. If your answer is yes, I will write to you and you will receive my letters by an arrangement of a sort that I suggested to your uncle. If your answer is no, I will not write to you again
.
Yours truly,
Dr. F.A. Cook
February 11, 1897
By the time I finished the letter, my mind was a riot of half-formed thoughts and questions. I jumped with fright when the door off the landing opened and Uncle Edward stepped inside. He looked composed until he saw how
I
looked. I did not realize how badly my hands were trembling, and with them the pages of the letter, until I saw that he was staring at them with a look of sheer dread in his eyes.
“It goes without saying,” he said, struggling to control his voice, “that Daphne would disapprove of your corresponding with Dr. Cook. If she were to find out about it, she would contact him and you
would never hear from him again. If you agree to receive letters from Dr. Cook, I will burn each one after you have read and copied it by hand, just as you will copy this one. You will stay and watch while the letter burns. We will meet from now on in your father’s surgery. Remember, it would be assumed that letters in your handwriting had been written by you, however advanced in style and content they might seem to be for a boy your age, so it would be foolish to show these copies to others, who would think that you were writing letters to yourself.”
He motioned to the pen and inkwell on his desk.
“Write your answer,” he said.
I went to the desk, wrote “Yes” on the envelope, then handed it to him.
He looked at the word I had written. He sighed, with resignation, relief, regret, it was hard to tell.
“Copy the letter,” he said, handing me two blank sheets of paper. “And be quick about it.” I copied out the letter as fast as I could, Uncle Edward standing, arms folded, with his back to me, as if to ensure that he did not see a single word.
“I’m finished,” I said.
“Put your copy in your jacket pocket,” he said. When I had done so, he turned around.
“The original letter,” he said. “Fold it first.”
I did and held it out to him. He took it. Holding it at arm’s length between his thumb and index finger, as if he wanted as little to do with it as possible, he spun it into the fire.
“Uncle Edward—” I said, but he raised his hand. He was as deeply into this subterfuge as he cared to go, his expression seemed to say. Why had he ventured even this far into it? He had seemed very anxious that I should correspond with Dr. Cook. What did he have to gain if I said yes or lose if I said no? No doubt he liked the idea of my going behind Aunt Daphne’s back, perhaps foresaw the whole thing driving us apart someday. He was jealous of me, as absurd as that seemed, believed she was fonder of me than she was of him. Perhaps he saw
these letters as his one hope of not spending the rest of his life second to me in her affections. But that, surely, could not be why he was acting as Dr. Cook’s “postman.”
No doubt he thought that with him as go-between, there was less chance that yet another scandal would be put against the name of Stead. That Dr. Cook’s letter to me was of a scandalous nature he knew. That was clear from the way he was acting. He knew that Dr. Cook had asked me to write my “answer” on the envelope. But he really seemed not to have read the letter—it was still sealed when he gave it to me, and he had told me in advance that he would burn it when I gave it back to him, as if it was necessary that I see him burn it, be witness to the fact that he had never read it. Uncle Edward went to his desk and sat down, reversing his chair so that it faced the window.
“I don’t know when Dr. Cook will write again, or when his letter will arrive. He must wait to hear from me before he sends it. Coming from”—he gestured vaguely at the ceiling—”from God knows where, it may take a very long time. I therefore tell you in advance that you must be patient. I doubt it will get here any sooner than December.”
Three months from now.
“This is how you will know that a letter has arrived.” When he came down for breakfast in the morning, he said, he would wear, in the pocket of his vest, a red paisley handkerchief, the one that Aunt Daphne disliked so much she would think it was for her sake that he wore it no more than once every few months—which was likely how often a letter would arrive. “Whenever I wear it, it will be your red-letter day,” he said, wincing ruefully, as if it was I who had punned at his expense. On that day, he would tell his nurse that he was going to have his lunch across the hall in his brother’s surgery, where he could relax in quiet with a book. I was to tell Aunt Daphne that because of choir practice, I would not come home for lunch. Making sure that none of the other boys saw me, I would go to his surgery, walk around to the iron gate by which one entered the secluded back garden, and which he would leave unlocked, and using the door marked “Doctor’s
Entrance Only,” go slowly and quietly up the stairs to the landing. He would be sitting in a chair on the landing just outside my father’s surgery, the patient’s entrance to which was permanently bolted from the outside. There would, in other words, be no way I could come and go without him seeing me. I would arrive promptly at 12:30 and, saying not a word to him, go inside, where the letter would be waiting for me in the top drawer of the desk. I was not to turn the lights on in the office. By day, there would be light enough to read and copy out the letter. When I was done, I was to come out to the landing and, without speaking a word, hand him the original. Then both of us would go back inside, where I would watch him burn the letter in the fireplace and then leave. Upon arrival and departure, and throughout my time in my father’s surgery, I was not to say a word. If anyone saw me leave by the doctor’s door and asked what I was doing, I would say that I had been to see my uncle for a check-up. If it somehow got back to Aunt Daphne that I had been to see him, our story would be that it was to save her needless worry that we had not told her about the check-up.