The Navigator of New York (2 page)

Even without Father Stead, the family practice thrived. When asked who their doctor was, people said “the Steads,” as if my father and
Edward did everything in tandem: examinations, diagnoses, treatments. When they arrived at reception, new patients were not asked which of the brothers they wished to see—nor, in most cases, did they arrive with their minds made up. Patients were assigned on an alternating basis. To swear by one of the brothers Stead was to swear by the other.

But with the departure of my father, the Steads were no longer the Steads, and for a while the practice faltered. And no wonder, Edward said, what with one of them having gone off, apparently preferring first the company of Eskimos and Moravians to that of his own kind, and now the profession of nursemaid to a boatload of social misfits to that of doctor. If one of them would do that, what might the other do?

The family itself dropped a notch in the estimation of its peers. It was as if some latent flaw in the Stead character had shown itself at last. My father’s patients did not go across the hall to Edward. They went to other doctors. Some of Edward’s patients did likewise. He had no choice but to accept new ones from a lower social circle.

My father, in letters home, insisted that he would take up his practice again one day. He promised Edward he would pay him the rent that his premises would have fetched from another doctor, but he was unable to make good on the promise, having forsaken all income.

Rather than find another partner, rather than take down the family shingle and replace it with one that bore a stranger’s name, Edward left my father’s office, and everything in it, exactly as it was.

That door. The door of the doctor who was never in but which still bore his name. It must have seemed to his patients that Edward was caught up in some unreasonably protracted period of mourning for his absent brother whose effects he could not bear to rearrange, let alone part with. Every day that door, his brother’s name, the frosted dark green glass bearing all the letters his did except for one. He could not come or go without being prompted by that door to think of Francis.

The expedition “to the North,” he said, immeasurably improved the map of the world, adding to it three small, unpopulated islands.

Soon, my father’s life was measured out in expeditions. When he
came back from one, it was weeks before he no longer had to ask what month or what day of the week it was. He would go to his office, turn upside down the stack of newspapers left there for him by Edward and read about what had happened in the world while he was absent from it. He searched out what had been written about the expeditions he had served on, the records they had set. As my father had yet to command an expedition, none of these records was attributed to him. Rarely, these records were some “first” or “farthest.” But most of them were records of endurance, feats made necessary by catastrophes, blunders, mishaps. Declaring a record was usually a way of putting the best face on failure. “First to winter north of latitude …” was a euphemism for “Polar party stranded for months after ship trapped in ice off Greenland.”

He was no sooner up to speed than he was gone again. Once the circumstances were right, once the backing for the next expedition had been raised by its commander and his application accepted, he was off.

He was never able to tell my mother the exact date of his arrivals home, only that his ship would dock sometime in the spring. He made almost random visitations. As my mother recalled those times, he seems to have been not so much present as less absent, known to be at home but rarely seen. She said we spent our dinnertimes in awkward silence. Otherwise, he holed up in his study, preparing, she presumed, for his next expedition, reading, poring over maps and charts. He kept the door of his study closed when he was in there and locked when he was not.

In my father’s absence, we rarely had visitors or invited people over, and my mother received few invitations.

Edward and Daphne came to visit, though only, at Edward’s insistence, infrequently.

According to Daphne, Edward, rotating his bowler hat by the brim, would sit on the edge of a chair in the front room, looking from the moment he arrived like he was on the verge of leaving. That was Edward, she said. No matter who they were visiting, his hat was always either on his head or in his hands. His back never made contact with
a chair. After perhaps fifteen minutes, during which my mother and Edward rarely spoke, they were gone again.

“People feel embarrassed if they say ‘husband’ or ‘father’ or ‘doctor’ or ‘son’ in front of me,” Mother told Daphne. “At least I think they do. I feel embarrassed, so I avoid those words, too, along with about half the others in the dictionary. People don’t think of Francis only when I’m around or when Devlin is with me, you see, because there are always stories about him in the papers.”

These stories, Daphne reminded her, were not about my father
per
se. They were about the expeditions he took part in. They were picked up from foreign papers by the local ones, which tacked on to them a paragraph about my father.

“Still,” my mother said, “with his name so often in the paper, I’m sure that people talk about him a lot. Dr. Stead the explorer. Even if he came home between expeditions like other explorers, they’d talk about him. But he doesn’t, so they talk about him even more. Explorer
and
delinquent husband and father. Which makes it impossible for them to act as if they’ve never heard of him in front of me. Impossible not to be transparent about it anyway, though I pretend not to notice. So much tactfulness. Everyone so ill at ease, including me. I can stand only so much of it. I don’t know …”

“Don’t worry about your husband, Amelia,” Mother Stead told her once in the evening, when all the Steads were congregated in the front room of her house. “One day, he’ll realize how much he misses us. He’ll come home, and he’ll never go away again.”

“It is marriage he is running from,” she said another time. “Not you and the boy. Marriage. Responsibility and its confinements.” She spoke in the same tone as she did when predicting his return, her voice as flat as though she was reading from a prayer book.

Mother was an only child whose father died when she was eighteen and her mother soon after, leaving her the house that she and I lived in and a considerable sum of money that, despite the absence of any contribution from my father, would have been enough to sustain us both for life if wisely used.

But it was with part of her inheritance that my father set up his practice, and with her money and without consulting her that he bought his way onto his first expedition.

Father Stead had left everything to Edward, even though my father was the older brother, with Mother Stead, as was the custom with widows who had sons, getting nothing, not even the house she lived in.

Edward made me and my mother the conspicuous measure of his generosity and sense of family honour. My mother had only, in front of him and a witness, to make casual mention of something she didn’t have and that something would so soon after be delivered to our door it was like an accusation, the suggestion being that haste was necessary to prevent my mother from complaining or speaking badly of him to others. He affected the air of a good, generous-to-a-fault, easily imposed-on man, harried by his spendthrift sister-in-law, the wife of his delinquent brother, whose ultimate intention was to milk him dry.

Going by the surgery, Aunt Daphne would look at Edward’s name just below my father’s on the shingle. There he was, the shingle seemed to say, the last in the line of succession; the inheritor not just of his brother’s practice, but of his debts and obligations, all of it trickling down to him like the raindrops on the sign.

My mother and I did not go out often. Our one regular and unavoidable outing was Sunday service, where everyone’s lot in life was on conspicuous display. Nothing so invoked my absent father like the sight of my mother and me making our way up the centre aisle to the pew we shared with Edward and Daphne. A widow’s widowhood was never more apparent than when she appeared in church without her husband. Likewise our abandonment, my father’s delinquency. We would not have been more gawked at if, as we entered, we had been loudly announced as “Amelia and Devlin Stead, forsaken wife and son of the improvident explorer Dr. Stead.”

Daphne could tell, from the way we were regarded in church and from things she overheard, that there was the feeling among some people that our isolation was contrived, that the two of us preferred to
be left alone, that we were outsiders by nature, wilfully, even haughtily, aloof. When service was letting out, the men tipped their hats to Mother and the women nodded their acknowledgment and said good day in a way that forbade anything except a like response. One or two said, “How are you today, Mrs. Stead?” then looked at me for the answer. They smiled reassuringly at me when my mother told them she was fine. Otherwise, we were like rocks around which the congregation flowed.

She kept her horse, whose name was Pete, in a small barn behind the house. “I’ve always taken care of my own horse,” she said. It was something she took pride in. The only thing she needed help with was hitching and unhitching Pete from what she called the carriage. It was a cabriolet with a maroon-coloured leather hood that folded back. When no one she knew was around, she would simply stand at the end of her driveway and wait until some man or boy whose assistance she could ask for came walking past.

“I wish now that I had defied Edward and spent more time with her,” my aunt once told me.

My mother and I became, as my father and Edward had once been, “the Steads,” a legendary pair, driving about in that cabriolet, sheltered by the hood, looking intent, preoccupied, as if hurrying home to resume some entirely unique, unprecedented way of passing time.

She took me shopping with her, and once or twice Daphne went with us. For the first few seconds after we went into a store, all conversation stopped, then resumed at a more subdued level, as if to speak in normal tones in the presence of the Steads would be an intrusion on the privacy that they so famously preferred.

“How are things with you, Mrs. Stead?” the butcher would say, and Mother would barely audibly reply to this relative torrent of conversation that things were well with her. He would wrap her purchases in brown paper, then tie them round and round with string, all the while looking at me and every few minutes winking, as if I shared with him some secret that we must not divulge in front of her.

Mother once overheard the two of us being referred to by women whom we passed in our carriage as “a pair of hermits.”

“A pair of hermits,” my mother said to Daphne, as if no path that she could make out led from what she had been to what other people thought she was.

There came an expedition after which my father did not come home. From then on, in his letters to my mother and Edward, he kept up the pretence that he was forever being kept from returning by circumstances beyond his control. Delays because of heavy ice off Labrador. Emergencies. Mishaps. Requests to join rescue missions for fellow explorers that in all good conscience he could not refuse. Excuses that he did not even hope to fool us with, that he meant for us to see through and made only for form’s sake.

“I am ill,” one letter read. “Not grievously so, but it is thought best for my recovery that I refrain from travelling.”

In the spring of 1886, in a letter sent just before he went south from Battle Harbour, Labrador, on his way back from an expedition, my father wrote that he was moving to New York. In fact, he was going straight there and, when he found a house, would send for the two of us. He said he had made a “great decision.” He planned, as soon as possible, to lead a polar expedition of his own. For so long, he had taken direction from “lesser men,” obeyed commands that he knew were “ill-advised,” kept silent when he should have spoken up. He said he had spent “as much time in the polar regions as any man alive.” (Nothing to write home about, Edward said, even if it was true, which it wasn’t.) But as so many of the others had done, he must, for the time being, make New York his port. “New York is to explorers what Paris is to artists,” he said.

He must go to New York, where he could choose, from among the many men who went there in the hope of signing on with a polar expedition, the best crew yet assembled. Where he could get to know the great men of industry, the financiers who thought they had everything until they met a man like him, and who, for merely vicarious glory, were willing to underwrite the cost of adventures they dared not
embark upon themselves. Great contests were under way, races for the North Pole and the South Pole, and no one who did not live in some great city like New York was considered a serious contender. He claimed that by moving to New York, he would make enough money that he could send some home.

“It is even likely, my dear wife,” he wrote, “that one day, these lonely wanderings of mine will make us rich.”

New York. That it is the best place from which to set out for the Arctic is not for most people the main attraction of that city.

My father never did send for us. It was the last letter my mother received from him.

I don’t know exactly where Aunt Daphne’s version of my life leaves off and mine begins, but I often think it might be here:

One day, when I was in the first grade, I came home from school to find the house empty. The barn out back was empty, too, the horse and carriage gone. Assuming my mother was out on some errand, I waited for her to return. I waited until after five, when it was almost dark. Then I walked up Devon Row to Uncle Edward’s. He was not home yet from his surgery, which was farther up the street. I asked Aunt Daphne if she had seen my mother.

The next day, the horse and carriage were found on top of Signal Hill. Her death was officially declared to be an accidental drowning. But the story, which some children were only too glad to let me overhear, was that she had climbed down the steep slope that faced the sea, down to a grassy ledge, from which she jumped into a narrow channel of water between the shore and the ice that stretched off to the meeting place of sea and sky.