Read The Navigator of New York Online
Authors: Wayne Johnston
It occurs to me now that I knew, I must have known, that she was risking more than I was. I was risking losing her. She was risking everything
.
Over and over, we said we loved each other. I asked her if she would marry me, and she said yes. I told her that when she returned to Manhattan, I would give her an engagement ring
.
I told her that she had to formally break off her engagement with her fiancé before we met again and make a public announcement of it in the papers, saying that the decision to end the engagement was wholly hers and not motivated by anything said or done by her fiancé, whose conduct, throughout the term of their acquaintanceship, had been above reproach. She would move to Manhattan and live with Lily, and we would then begin a courtship that would lead, without unseemly haste, to our engagement and eventual marriage. Until her prior engagement had been severed, we would say nothing to Lily—nor, though your mother said she was certain of her support no matter what the circumstances, would we ever tell her about our afternoon together
.
If we proceeded cautiously, there would be no scandal, I told her, only at worst some short-lived rumours as to how and when we met relative to the end of her first engagement
.
She said it would be best if I did not write to her
.
We parted. She went back home
.
I received letters from her, through Lily, sometimes two or three a day, unopened. Lily knew which letters addressed to her were for her and which for me because mine bore an X beside her name
.
The letters from your mother contained no news, only expressions of anticipation and impatience with herself for not having yet worked up the nerve to do what she knew had to be done. After one in which she wrote, “I will tell him very soon,” they stopped coming
.
I never heard from her again
.
After three weeks, Lily came to me to pass on, she said, a message from Amelia, who wanted me to know that she and her fiancé would soon be married
.
For a long time, I was so fretful I could neither eat nor sleep. She had changed her mind. She had fallen in love not with me, but with Manhattan, with the fantasy of leaving Newfoundland, with her dreams of nebulous escape—escape not just from a marriage to a man she did not love, but from everything she was disenchanted with. Or perhaps she really did love her fiancé. I found that thought especially intolerable
.
I know now, of course, that she did what she thought was best for everyone. I have known it since Francis Stead confided in me. She married the man who loved her, but whom she did not love. Spared me from scandal because she loved me, from having to choose between her and the good reputation that I had made clear to her I was determined I would have one day
.
The hosts of the party at which I met your mother took it upon themselves to better me. I became their protégé. They treated me as I am sure they would not have if they knew my secret. They invited me to help out at their annual party every year until I myself became a medical student. I dared not decline their invitations for fear that it would make them lose interest in me
.
At every party, I invented some excuse to go upstairs so that I could see the hallway where I met the woman with the strange accent who had said, “I am Amelia.”
The couple helped me earn my way through college, loaning me money first for a printing business and then to expand a small milk-and-cream company that I ran with my brothers. In 1887, they helped get me accepted to the College of Physicians and Surgeons at Columbia, convincing the college deans that as the son of a “physician,” I should have my matriculation fee reduced. The balance of it, they paid
.
I am friendly with them to this day, though when my family moved to another part of the city, making a commute to Columbia
impossible for me, I transferred to the New York University medical school and did not see my patrons as often as before
.
I do not go to their annual parties, which they still hold at their house. I am rarely in the city when these parties are held, but even when I am, I stay away, for the house contains too many memories for me, memories that have been unpleasant ones since the day Francis Stead confided in me
.
Devlin, I am, however indirectly, to blame for the deaths of both your mother and Francis Stead. She was so dazzled, so overwhelmed by New York that her better judgment was overthrown. I have no such excuse. When Francis told me of your mother’s death, I felt such shame, such guilt as I had never felt before—which, only days later, was compounded when he disappeared. For years, I have lived with the burden of this secret, trying to convince myself that I was not to blame, that however shamefully I acted when I took advantage of your mother, I could not possibly have foreseen the consequences
.
For years, I have tried without success not to think of you, the boy who was parentless because of me, the third and only surviving victim of my recklessness. The son of the woman who, though I knew her for but three weeks, I am still in love with. Recently, after my torment reached its height with such effects as I described to you in my first letter, I realized that I had to make myself known to this boy whom I alone knew to be my son. That and nothing else would do. That, it seemed to me, would be a first step towards redressing the harm I have done. A part of her lives on in you. I am done with pretending to myself that you do not exist
.
Francis Stead put forward sufficient proof to convince me that what he said was true, but you, being unfamiliar with the people and the places he named, may still have your doubts. I believe that, upon reflection, you will realize there exists no motive that would cause me to mislead you on this matter
.
To confess is to ask forgiveness, but it would be presumptuous of me to ask for yours so soon. Instead, I ask only that you renew
your promise of discretion, if you still think any request of mine to be worth honouring, and your permission to write to you again. (As before, write “Yes” or “No” on the envelope.)
I am not yet ready to meet you, but I hope that by the time I am, I will, in your judgment, have earned the right to do so, and that by then, you will find the idea of such a meeting as appealing as I do. I wait in hope for your reply
.
Yours truly
,
Dr. Frederick Cook
March 14, 1898
P.S. I must ask that you not write to me. For reasons I cannot now explain, it will be better for both of us if you do not
.
How many boys had ever been spoken to about their mothers as he, by way of proving that he was my father, had spoken to me about mine? Was ever a person given so detailed an account of the circumstances of his own conception? By anyone, let alone his father? How easily the most intimate details seemed to flow from the mind and the pen of Dr. Cook. All this he was relating to the son who had issued from his one encounter with my mother. I doubted that most men would have been anywhere near that forthcoming, even in a letter to a friend. Far from being offended, I was greatly flattered.
I wrote “Yes” on the envelope, then copied out the letter on blank pages that I withdrew from the pocket of my jacket, writing furiously, for I feared that sooner or later Uncle Edward would grow impatient, come inside and burn the original whether or not my copy was complete.
I copied Dr. Cook’s letter word for word, punctuation mark for punctuation mark. I as good as had the real thing with me when I left. I had no intention of showing it to anyone. I did not doubt my own ability to keep a secret or to keep a mere few pages hidden from the
world. (I put this letter, as I had done with the first one and would do with all the others that came after it, inside a bedpost in my room, the top of which, as I had discovered by accident when I was eight, unscrewed quite easily. I scrolled the letters, one inside the other, knowing they would last longer this way than if I folded them.)
I went out to the landing, handed the original and the envelope to Uncle Edward, who, receiving them silently, did not look up from his book as he rose from his chair. I followed him inside. I stood silently at the fireplace while he performed again the solemn ritual of burning the letter. He struck a match and lit the envelope, which he placed flame down in the grate between two bars. We watched it.
When it was burnt, he nodded almost imperceptibly. I left, descended the stairs slowly, closed the outer door behind me and hurried to the garden gate.
The letter left me with no doubt that Dr. Cook was my father. I thought he put far more blame on himself than he deserved. The line of causation was clear, that of culpability much less so. But I supposed that when it came to such things as guilt and shame, rationality and logic mattered no more to Dr. Cook than they did to me. For I realized now that I had believed what Moses Prowdy had only hinted at: that it had been because of me, an accidental, unhoped-for child, that my parents married, that my father deserted my mother, and that my mother, and then my father, died.
How strange it was reading about my mother, being made to see her from someone else’s point of view, that of a man who knew her when she was in no way defined by her relationship to me. The young woman in the letter was not the young woman in the photograph on which “Amelia, the wicked one” was written. She was posing in that photograph.
Poor Francis Stead. Even though she was pregnant by another man, he married her. Why? Because he loved her? Because she “implored him to keep her secret”? But once they were married, things must have changed.
I was glad that the man who disappeared on the North
Greenland expedition was not my father, not only because it restored my father to life, but because I was relieved to know that I was not the son of a man who had given in to desolation, a man whose death was a morbid enigma that those he left behind would never solve but would have hanging over them forever. I was still the son of just such a woman, but I, at least, was free of him. For me, the enigma of him was solved.
As for my mother, for six years she had harboured her shameful secret, keeping it from everyone, especially me, me the evidence of it, the ever-present reminder of it. All those years wondering if her husband would reveal their secret to someone else. Which in the end he did.
I would tell Aunt Daphne nothing, or else she would write to Dr. Cook, and that would almost certainly mean never hearing from Dr. Cook again. I felt guilty about deceiving her, but I told myself that by keeping silent, I would spare her feelings. She would not rest knowing there existed this Dr. Cook by whom she and Uncle Edward might be supplanted as my parents. I could not imagine telling her about an affair my mother had had when she was engaged, an affair of which I was the issue; could not imagine Aunt Daphne hearing from my lips that my mother had conceived me with a man she hardly knew, and that I bore to the man whom the world knew as my father no relation whatsoever. No, for my own sake and for hers, I would not tell her.
“Did my mother ever take a trip away from Newfoundland?” I could not resist asking Aunt Daphne one night at dinner when Uncle Edward was working late. I searched her face but saw nothing.
“Once,” she said. “She went to New York. She had a cousin there named—what?—Lily, I think. Your second cousin. She invited her. Your mother was getting married soon. Lily told her she should see the world, a bit of it anyway, before she settled down.”
“Did she say what New York was like?” I said.
“Oh, she said it was exciting. Lots of people.” I searched her face again. Still nothing. It was something that hadn’t crossed her mind in years.
My mother had gone to Francis Stead and told him she was
pregnant. I could not imagine what sort of exchange must have taken place between them.
Being a doctor, he could, if she was willing to go along with it, have chosen what Dr. Cook, by implication, called the less honourable option. I wondered if they had talked about it, the simple procedure that would have cut me off in pre-existence. “Nor was I with her
after
we were married.” What a lonely marriage it must have been for both of them.
In my room at night, by the light of a candle, I read the letter over many times. How unlike any man I knew was Dr. Cook. He had written me a letter asking me for my forgiveness, my absolution. He seemed to think his sanity, his very life, depended on it. How much I would never have known if not for that letter, which, for all I knew about its author, might have fallen from the sky.
Another letter came.
My dearest Devlin:
I cannot tell you how happy you have made me. Your “Yes” has renewed my spirits and my courage. I did not, until hearing from your uncle Edward, quite believe that you were real
.
My first marriage was to Libby Forbes, who died after giving birth to a child who lived but a few hours. A double sorrow from which, for a time, it seemed I would not recover. Anna Forbes, my fiancée, is Libby’s sister. Anna, when I last saw her in New York, was ill, in part from fretting about what might happen to me on this voyage. All this is by way of saying that as yet I have no children except for you
.
I am happy, Devlin. Or at least, for the first time in ages, I believe in the possibility of happiness. How differently you see the world, knowing, as I never really have done until now, that there exists in it a child of your creation, a person half composed of you
.
In two days, we set out for Patagonia. Tomorrow I will write
and send to you another letter. By the time you read it, I will have arrived in Patagonia. My soul is on the move again. The world, for so long stalled, has lurched into motion
.
I am headed, once again, for the Old Ice. Those of us who have been there cannot even tell each other how we feel about it. But I know of no one who, having been there once, has not wished to go again, no one who, by the mere sight of it, was not profoundly changed
.
An opaque, impenetrable wall divides those who have travelled in the polar regions from those who have not. The first have seen not only the best but also the worst of human nature. That polar exploration brings out the “best” in men you will have often heard it said. That it brings out the worst, never, unless in my letters to you I have hinted at it. I daresay you believe that you understand what, in the context of exploration, is meant by those two words, best and worst. You do not, however, and nothing I could write would make you understand. I have seen and done things that make it impossible for me ever again to take seriously the great game known as society. I should add that not taking a game seriously often makes one quite adept at playing it. Such is the case with both me and Peary. The motives, the supposedly secret longings of the non-explorer seem as transparent to me as those of children. I am no longer misled or confused by language. The eyes, the face, the colour of a man’s complexion and the carriage of his body are as revealing to me of his real self, whether I meet him on a Brooklyn street, on the Old Ice or in some port in Patagonia. I once had my ear bent for hours by a man whose measure I took in a few seconds by the simple sound of his voice, a sound independent of, and usually at odds with, the meaning of the words he spoke. This is one of the reasons I have asked that you not write back to me. By writing, you would, without intending to, either cause me to see you as someone you are not or, more likely, try to create what was so obviously a posture that it would dispose me against you. You may think you have caught me at a double standard, may wonder why, if
I am so distrustful, even disdainful, of language as to forbid you to write to me, I am writing to you. It has for obvious reasons been impossible for us to meet, but even if it had been possible, it would have been unwise. You are on the other side of the wall I spoke of earlier. I have been lobbing messages to you in the only language that you understand by the only means available to us
.
Goodbye for now.
Yours truly,
Dr. F.A. Cook
April 13, 1898