Read The Navigator of New York Online
Authors: Wayne Johnston
I did not go back to school after I left the surgery. Nor did I go straight home. I had to prepare myself before I saw Aunt Daphne, before she saw me and started asking what was wrong. She would not relent until I told her something. Fearing that even strangers would notice my distress, I took the shortest route to the woods, followed a path some distance, then left it and sat down against a tree, where no one passing by could see me.
No wonder Dr. Cook could not imagine how his letter would affect me. Now that the original no longer existed, it was easy to imagine that it never had. Or that Dr. Cook had lost his mind, or even that the letter was from someone pretending to be him.
But another one was coming, for I had written “Yes” on the envelope. How, having read the letter, could I have told him not to write to me again? My head was spinning. If the claims made by Dr. Cook were true, my father had gone from being a man whom I could not remember to one whom I had never met.
My father had always been a stranger to me, in life, in death. And now, it seemed, in life again. Now this stranger had a different name and was still alive. Both my fathers were doctors turned explorers. There was little to distinguish one from the other except that one had written me a letter.
I remembered phrases from it, not bothering to consult the copy in my pocket. “The cold blood of biology.” “How this can change, I am unable to foresee.” “You hold in your hands a document … that if made public could do me and mine great harm.” The original document could have done him great harm. My copy, as Uncle Edward had said, could harm no one but me were I to show it to others.
Why had he written to me? If, as he hinted, we could never meet, never appear in public as father and son—if he did not even want me to write him back—why had he written to me? Why did he think that writing to me would restore his courage? He had more or less admitted, in the first few paragraphs, that he had nearly lost his mind.
And my mother. To think that she had allowed, even encouraged, me to think that her absent husband was my father, all the time knowing he was not. Our short life together was not what she had made it seem. Every moment of it had been undercut by irony, by what she knew and I did not, a bit of knowledge that she must have planned to withhold from me forever.
I started back towards home, wondering if I should tell Aunt Daphne. I had not, by the time of my arrival, made up my mind. When I opened the door, she was coming down the hall to meet me, all but running.
“There you are,” she said. “My God, you’re so late getting home from school I was about to … Edward didn’t find anything wrong with you, did he? Devlin, what did he say?”
I would have spoken, said no to prevent her from jumping to the wrong conclusion, but I did not trust my voice.
“Devvie?”
I shook my head and gulped hard to keep from crying.
“Darling, you look … What did Edward say?”
“He said I’m fine,” I said quickly. I gulped again.
“But
something’s
wrong. What is it?”
I doubted that I could make any explanation sound convincing.
“It’s just something I don’t want to talk about, that’s all. Something Moses Prowdy said.”
“You’re sure Edward found nothing wrong with you?”
I nodded. “Ask him if you like.”
I went upstairs to my room and lay down. Was it possible that
she
knew, that she, too, had misled me all my life? I decided I would hold off from telling her, at least until the next letter came.
I thought of how it would be. Entering my father’s office by the door reserved for him. Opening the desk drawer. Reading the letter. Making my copy. Watching Uncle Edward burn the original.
The day after my talk with my uncle, I half expected him to come downstairs for breakfast with a red handkerchief in his vest pocket. He wore a blue one instead, and a green one the day after that.
It was hard to think about anything else knowing that a letter was on its way to me from Dr. Cook. Pointless to expect a letter any sooner than three months from now, Uncle Edward had said. Every morning for three months, I looked to see what colour handkerchief he wore, revelling in the day when he would come downstairs with the red one protruding from his pocket.
When the three months was up, three months to the day from when Uncle Edward had called me to his office, his handkerchief was grey. What, I asked myself, were the chances that my uncle’s estimate of when the letter would arrive would be exact? It meant nothing that the letter had not come.
How eagerly, from then on, I waited to see what he’d be wearing when he came downstairs. It was hard to hide my disappointment when there was either no handkerchief or one that wasn’t red. I ate my eggs and toast and gulped my tea with consolatory gusto. How strange it seemed that my mood depended on the colour of my uncle’s handkerchief.
I went through the same thing every morning for the
next
three months. Finally, I began to wonder if something was wrong. Perhaps my uncle had changed his mind about acting as “postman” for Dr. Cook. Surely, if he had, he would break our agreement never to speak about the letters and not leave me wondering forever what was wrong. Or perhaps Dr. Cook had changed
his
mind, decided that he could not trust Uncle Edward after all, or that he would make no further revelations to me, a mere boy.
I considered pretending I was sick so I could go to see Uncle Edward at his office, but I thought better of it. Around the house, he was careful that we were never alone together. In the company of Aunt Daphne, he looked at me and spoke to me as he always had.
I remembered a paragraph from Dr. Cook’s official “report” on my father’s death: “Though it moves the mystery no closer to being solved, it seems worthwhile to point out that the strange case of Dr. Stead is by no means the strangest in the annals of Arctic exploration. Others have disappeared as surely as if, while sleepwalking, they attempted a crossing of the crevassed glaciers onto which not even the Eskimos will venture after dark.” This man from whom I was waiting to receive a letter about my father might easily be dead.
As I lay in my warm bed, as I watched Aunt Daphne pile up heaping helpings on my dinner plate, I wondered where at that moment Dr. Cook was, wondered about his safety as I never had about my father’s.
N
EARLY SIX MONTHS AFTER OUR MEETING, BY WHICH TIME
I
HAD
almost given up hope of hearing from Dr. Cook, Uncle Edward came downstairs for breakfast wearing the red paisley handkerchief. How conspicuous it seemed. It seemed impossible that Aunt Daphne would not guess why he was wearing it. As hard as it had been to hide my succession of disappointments, hiding my elation now was all but impossible. I was sure that my face matched the colour of the handkerchief, at which I could not stop staring. My heart was pounding. Uncle Edward was his usual impassive self. Not even I, who knew what he must be thinking, how anxious he must be that I do or say nothing to make his wife suspicious, could detect in his face anything unusual. How would I make it through a morning of school?
Somehow I did, and at lunchtime I went to Devon Row, crossed the street, stopped. A hansom cab went by, but there were no pedestrians. I went around to the back, opened the gate, let myself in through the door marked “Doctor’s Entrance Only,” closed it quietly behind me, then tiptoed up the stairs.
Uncle Edward was sitting in a chair on the landing, far enough from the window that he could not be seen from the outside. He was no longer wearing the red handkerchief. (But he was wearing it later, when he came home from work.) On the upper of his crossed legs was a book from which he glanced just long enough to put a finger to his lips. With a shooing motion of his hand, he indicated that I should not stop but go straight into the office.
The rear door of it was wide open, left that way by him, no doubt, so that his nurse and his patients across the hall would not hear me. I pictured him sitting there on the landing the past few minutes, dreading my audible arrival. I went inside. I had been there once or twice before, but never by myself. I could hear murmuring from across the hall. A shadow fell across the frosted glass of my father’s door. A man putting on his hat. On the desk, there was nothing but a blotter and the pen my father had used to write prescriptions and referral letters, attached to the metal holder in which it stood by a gleaming silver chain. And his beach-rock paperweight, which rested on the far right corner of the blotter. The only wall-hanging was his Edinburgh diploma. There was an empty bookcase with glass doors, a dark brown leather sofa whose armrests were scrolled with studs of brass.
The top drawer of the desk was open. Another precaution. It was as if Uncle Edward was sitting there in the gloom with his finger to his lips. Looking up at me from the otherwise empty drawer of the desk was an envelope that bore my name. DEVLIN. Only that. No doubt mailed like the first one, I thought, inside another envelope addressed to Uncle Edward. It bore no postmark, no return address. It was slit open. I took from inside it a note that read: “Just a rehearsal. No letter yet.” I replaced it in the envelope.
Bitter with disappointment, I went back out to the landing. Uncle Edward extended his hand. I gave him the envelope. We went back inside. He struck a match, held it to the envelope, which he stood flame down in the grate of the fireplace so that in seconds there was nothing left but a wisp of glowing ash. Eyes fixed on it, he motioned with his hand for me to leave. I walked down the stairs slowly, as per his instructions.
Only a few days later, he wore the red handkerchief again. I suspected another gratuitous rehearsal.
Again he was in the chair on the landing, with what looked like the same book as before on his lap. I went straight into my father’s surgery.
Again Uncle Edward had opened the envelope, slit it so cleanly he
might have used a scalpel. But it looked to me as if he had not removed the letter from inside. He had opened it as a precaution, to reduce the rustle and ripping of paper. I eased a sealed letter from the envelope, broke the seal, which was made of red wax and bore the imprint of a sailing ship. There was not just a single page as before, but several, tightly folded. I eased them open and began to read.
My dearest Devlin:
When Francis Stead took me aside on the North Greenland expedition, he said that twelve years before, in 1880, his wife had attended a party thrown for the graduates of the College of Physicians and Surgeons at Columbia University. He correctly named the man and woman at whose house the party was held. Your mother told Francis Stead that at this party, she had got drunk and been taken advantage of by someone about whom she remembered nothing, not even his face or name. She could remember nothing of the party, she said, but the first half-hour. Her next memory was of waking up just before dawn, alone, in one of the many bedrooms of a strange house. As a result of this encounter, she was pregnant
.
Your mother, when we met, had told me neither the first nor the last name of her fiancé, so I had, up to the point where Francis began his story, no idea what my fellow medical officer and I had in common
.
He was in mid-story when I realized who he was, who I was, that the supposedly nameless, faceless man she had met at that party was me. “Amelia.” Not even when he first said her name did I suspect a thing, though of course I noted the coincidence. Bit by excruciating bit, I learned the truth. I had fathered a boy whose name was Devlin Stead, and who was being raised by his aunt and uncle. I could barely keep from crying when Francis told me that his wife was dead, when it hit me that the woman whom he said had accidentally drowned was my Amelia
.
I am the cause of all of it, I thought as he kept on talking, all
that has taken place without my knowledge. His abandonment of you and her, the ruination of his life, the awful state of mind he was in. Even, in a way, the death of my Amelia, who, had she never met me, would have been led by the dictates of chance away from the accident that took her life. And later I would blame myself for the death of Francis Stead
.
It took a great deal of effort to keep my composure. I sat there listening, one of the characters in his tale, but acting as though I was waiting to hear what would happen next. Had a third man been present, I’m sure he would have noticed the effect Francis Stead’s story had on me. But Francis was too absorbed in the telling of his story to notice
.
“I was not with her before we married,” Francis said to me. He looked at me to be sure I knew what he meant by “with her.” I nodded
.
He said that your mother implored him to keep her secret, which there were two ways of doing. He and your mother chose the more honourable one: they told their families that she was pregnant by him. Their wedding soon after followed
.
“Nor was I with her after our marriage,” Francis Stead said as he walked away from me
.
A few nights later, he disappeared from Redcliffe House. Most of what I wrote in the report that appeared in the papers is true, as is what was written later in
The New York Times. Francis
Stead, long before he confided in me, did have a falling-out with Peary and did ask for permission to remain up north after the rest of us had left for home. His interest in the Eskimos exceeded even my own, which is considerable
.
Peary forbade him to stay behind, and they did not speak for months. Although I do not wish to imply that Peary was in part to blame for Francis Stead’s death—I myself, as I have said, must bear the blame—I can tell you that I will never again be a member of an expedition led by Peary. I will have no more to do with the man and so will say no more about him
.
What follows is the full story of what happened in Manhattan eighteen years ago
.
Your mother had a cousin named Lily in Manhattan. Her mother and Lily’s had been close sisters. Now Amelia’s mother was dead and Lily’s a widow who had remarried
.
They had decided by correspondence that although they had never met, Lily would be the maid of honour at Amelia’s wedding, which would take place in St. John’s. To Amelia, it was a way of honouring her mother’s memory, to name as her maid of honour the daughter of the woman her mother had been closest to
.
Lily invited your mother to spend a few weeks in New York with her so that they could get to know each other before the wedding. She in turn would spend the few weeks immediately before the wedding in St. John’s. It would be a chance for your mother to spend time away from Newfoundland, which she had never done and, life being what it was, might never do if she waited until after she was married
.
The two of them attended a graduation party for Columbia medical students
.
There was a great deal of drinking done by the young men and women. Among the latter was your mother who, like the other young women, was not so used to drinking as the men were. Perhaps she had never had more than a glass or two before
.
I was not a guest at the party. I was just sixteen years old. I had a weekday job as an office boy, and on the weekends, I did whatever odd jobs I could find. The couple, both doctors, the man a professor of medicine at Columbia, the woman a homeopath, hired four boys about my age to help out at the party, a notorious annual event that no serving girl, no matter how needful of work, would have had anything to do with. We fixed and served drinks, served food, cleaned up discarded plates and glasses to make way for others
.
Even in being hired as a servant for this party, I was above my station. The other three boys were the sons of doctors, semi-guests for whom helping out at the party was a rite of passage to Columbia
.
The real-estate agency for which I collected rent was owned by the couple who threw the party but managed by someone else. The couple made one of their rare visits to the office at a time when I happened to be there. They engaged me in conversation. When I told them that my deceased father had been a doctor, they became very interested in me. The woman, one of the few women doctors of any kind in the country, wanted to know where my father had “gone to school.” All I knew was that it had been somewhere in Germany—Hamburg, I thought
.
I remember the expression on the woman’s face when I said “Hamburg.” It was not unkind or condescending, but knowing. She knew my family story in an instant. My parents were immigrants from Germany, where my father had been not a doctor but a “doctor.” Dr. Koch. He had somehow gained enough knowledge of medicine that the people of the small town where he came from, and where he “practised,” called him Doctor. His patients, having no money, paid him with what they grew or raised on their farms. The same was true of the people of the small town in New York State to which he immigrated, and where, despite being a doctor, he died of a disease, pneumonia, to which the New World poor were prone, leaving us to eke out an existence like any immigrant family. (Like you, Devlin, I grew up without a father.) My family moved from Port Jervis to New York. I pitched in with my three brothers to help support the family when I was old enough to work. I saw that this woman saw all this, and perhaps she detected in my face some measure of humiliation or resentment. At any rate, she invited me to be a servant at their party. I eagerly accepted
.
Although I had told no one, I wanted to be a doctor because my father had been one. How serving sandwiches and drinks to medical students and professors would bring me closer to that goal I didn’t know, but I sensed it would. I told my mother on Saturday morning that, as I often did, I was going over to Manhattan to see if someone would hire me to do chores at Fulton Market. Instead,
after killing time in Manhattan, I went at five o’clock to the address they had given me
.
The eldest of us four boys was drunk before the party was an hour old. When they saw that no one seemed to notice, the other boys sipped from every drink they made before they served it
.
I had never been at such an event before. The house was so crowded that the guests had to keep their drinks up in the air to keep their glasses from being crushed
.
I assumed it was a typical New York party. There was enough food there to feed my family of six for a year. Everywhere there were sandwiches that had been nibbled and then put aside; the same with helpings of smoked salmon, chunks of watermelon, wedges of grapefruit. There were such things as pâté, caviar, aspic, which I had never seen before, did not know the names of or how they should be served. These nameless dishes, too, went uneaten, were barely picked at. I thought the food had to have something wrong with it. I would not have eaten a morsel anyway, though I was starving, for the other three boys showed no interest in the food, and being naïve enough not to realize that my clothes gave me away, I wanted those boys to think I was just like them
.
This was not my world. I had for hours been moving about in a world that, before that day, I had got only glimpses of. I had walked along the city streets at night, taking home from work shortcuts that wound through neighbourhoods like this one. I had looked in through the large windows from across the street, the best vantage point from which to see into such houses, since it was impossible from the near sidewalk to see anything above the level of the windowsills but chandeliers. In the brightly lit rooms of these houses, I had seen briefly, not daring to stop and stare for long, groups of men and women in what I now know was evening dress sitting down to dinner, waited on by maids and butlers who, for all the attention that was paid them, might as well have been invisible. I had seen young families, a man and a woman watching from their chairs as their children ran about. My family, the six of us, lived in
two rooms in a section of Brooklyn known as Williamsburg. We were a stone’s throw from the East River and forever in the shadow of what we called the sugar towers, a sugar refinery whose days were longer than my mother’s, and from which the noise of men and machines and the sickly smell of liquid sugar issued ceaselessly
.
Now, this day, I was in one of these very houses, had spoken to people who lived in others like it, had served liquor and carried trays of food such as I had never seen before
.
They kept on drinking, the other three boys, not even bothering to hide what they were doing, for after a while the party guests began to serve themselves
.
There were a pair of fiddlers in one room, playing reels that Lily, announcing your mother’s “Irish” heritage, insisted Amelia dance to. She had done quite a lot of step-dancing as a child and was soon alone in the middle of the room while the others clapped along
.
It was a warm spring, much warmer in New York than she was used to. She removed her jacket. She was wearing a plain bodice with a row of buttons down the front, a flounced skirt with drapes, stockings and buttoned boots. The skirt came barely to her knees, so it was good for dancing
.
Whenever she declared that she was thirsty I was called for, and there was much amusement as, with the guests urging me to work faster, I fixed her a drink and brought it to her. If not for the dancing, I think she would have been sick
.
The point came when she could dance no longer. As soon as she stopped, she fainted, or began to. I caught her. There was a great outburst of applause and cheers, which was so loud that they revived her somewhat and I managed with Lily’s help to get her to her feet, though she kept saying that the room was spinning
.
Lily said it might be best if they went home, but your mother was adamant that both she and Lily would stay. She said that if she could lie down for a short time, she would be all right. Lily, whom I could tell was reluctant to leave such a lively party, agreed
that a lie-down might be just the thing. There would be no harm in it if your mother fell asleep. We led her to the stairs, at the foot of which she stopped and said that she could go the rest of the way herself. She went up the stairs quite briskly, God knows how, and Lily turned back to the party
.
I followed her up the stairs. On the landing, she made for a door and either tripped on something or fainted again. She fell forward and instinctively threw out her arms to break her fall
.
“Are you all right, miss?” I said
.
She turned her head and looked up at me. She had the most remarkably large, round eyes, blue though her hair was black
.
“I hope you haven’t hurt yourself,” I said. “I think there is altogether too much drinking being done. You are not used to it. Not like the others seem to be. The last two drinks I gave you were water, and you didn’t seem to notice.”
“What’s your name?” she said, and I detected what I thought was an English accent. I assumed that any accent I had never heard before was English
.
“Fred,” I said. It seemed absurdly short, too abrupt to be a name, an impression she confirmed when she said, “I am Amelia.” Six syllables, four of them her name. I am Amelia. I could not have said, “I am Frederick,” without sounding ridiculous, but she sounded as if Amelia was not just her name but what she was
.
I crouched down on one knee, one foot on the floor. Our eyes were level and inches apart. “Where do you live?” she said
.
“Brooklyn,” I said. “Where do you live?”
“Newfoundland,” she said. “But I’ve been telling people I’m from Ireland just so I don’t have to explain where Newfoundland is.”
“Ships on their way from England and on their way up north stop off in Newfoundland,” I said. “I’ve never been there. I’ve never been anywhere except Brooklyn and Manhattan.”
“Who would need to go anywhere else if they lived here?” she said
.
I saw that she was looking at my clothes
.
“Each thing belongs to someone different,” I said. “My brother”; I pointed at my trousers. “My uncle; I pointed at my vest. Not even my shoes were mine, I said, explaining that they had belonged to my father, who had died some years ago
.