The Navigator of New York (14 page)

He had forbidden me to tell him yes? “YES,” I wished I could have written in large letters on the envelope. What would he do if I wrote “Yes”? Would it please him or make him wonder if I was so excitable that he could not count on me to be discreet? I wrote “Maybe,” wishing more fervently than I ever had before that I could write to him directly and tell him that any time he said the word, I would follow his instructions, whatever they might be. Next week, next month.

I felt no apprehension at the prospect of exploration. On the contrary, it was life as I would live it unless I went exploring that I dreaded, a life like Uncle Edward’s. To become a man who could take no joy in being married to such a woman as Aunt Daphne, that was what I dreaded.

Exploration. How appealing, in spite of all its dangers and its desolation, in spite of Francis Stead, it seemed to me. There
was
a lesson to be learned from the life of Francis Stead. It was not because of the rigours of life in the Arctic that he had walked out across the glacier that night. It was the rigours of the life he could not put behind him that made him do it. From the life and death of my mother, too, there was something, if not to be learned, then at least to be remembered: it was not because her husband took up exploration that she died.

To Dr. Cook and all others who wrote about it, no greater life could be imagined than that of an explorer. I was certain that the hardships and risks involved in it would not deter me. I would much rather have been on board the
Belgica
for thirteen months with him than home here fretting for the safety of a man I’d never met.

It didn’t matter that nothing in my life so far had prepared me for polar exploration, that I had yet to set foot on a boat or fire a gun or sleep outdoors. It didn’t matter that I had never seen a dog sled, let alone a team of dogs. Expeditionaries relied on their crews, their ships’ captains, their manservants, their native guides to perform the thankless task of keeping them safe so they could make their bids for glory.

How different was my upbringing from Dr. Cook’s, of whom I was half composed; he was a city man, as most explorers were, who, relatively speaking, came late to exploration. As Dr. Cook had learned from men like Peary, I would learn from Dr. Cook. “Even to those of us who know it best, it was once unknown.”

The wisdom, the reflectiveness, his sceptical but sympathetic view of life as it was lived in cities, the desire to accomplish something he would be remembered for and thereby set himself apart from the common run of men, but only if that something was truly worthwhile—all these qualities, I felt certain, he had acquired or refined since he took
up exploration. “Whoever reaches the pole first will do so in the name of humankind, cause a worldwide enlivenment of spirit, wonder, awe and fellowship,” he had written in a magazine article. I had believed it when I read it, but not like I believed it now.

“Will you go with me on my expeditions?” The instant I read those words, it seemed to me that I had been waiting for that invitation all my life, hoping for it. As Dr. Cook on the ice-trapped ship had awaited his deliverance, not knowing when or if it would ever come, so had I been waiting. I believed that I had as much cause as anyone to be sceptical of civilization. At the same time, I did not wish to renounce it altogether.

Civilization. Except by becoming an explorer or by doing what my mother had, one could not escape from it. Exploration was certainly the only escape that did not involve surrender or retreat. Men who simply ran away and spent their lives in service to a succession of masters accomplished nothing.

He had said nothing to me of how our association would come about, what we would tell others of how we came to
be
associates, what reasons he would give the public for conferring upon me, a stranger, an honour that many young men of his acquaintance would have eagerly accepted.

Most important, he had said nothing to me of
when
he would send for me, of how, without ever having met me, he would deem me “old enough and strong enough” for exploration. I was still drifting like the
Belgica
in the pack ice, still waiting for my deliverance, which though it seemed assured now, might not seem so six months or a year from now.

I
N ONE OF HIS LETTERS TO ME
, Dr. C
OOK WROTE THAT
F
RANCIS
Stead had told him that as a boy, he liked to go up on Signal Hill in the spring to “see the ice.” I knew of nowhere else to see it from, but I had not gone up there since I went with Aunt Daphne when I was a boy, because I did not want to be reminded of my mother’s fate.

“The ice” was pack ice drifting south from Labrador and bringing with it icebergs from the sea-level glaciers of Greenland. Its southward drift past the east coast of Newfoundland in spring was as regular as the changing of the leaves in fall.

I had “seen” it before, glimpsed it through the Narrows from some height on the north side of the city, seen it in the harbour after it had been forced in through the Narrows by a storm, filth-ridden after bobbing there among the soot and bilge for weeks. These, I thought, these all-but-black bobbing chunks of matter, were what people meant when they talked about “the ice.”

For weeks after reading of Francis Stead’s sojourns to see the ice, I watched the horizon, knowing the ice was coming, waiting for a change in the line where the sea met the sky. Finally, one morning, I saw it from the window off the landing, saw what might have been the teeth of a jagged, uneven saw blade. The leading edge was still fifty or sixty miles away.

It was another two weeks before I made the ascent, sharing the road one Sunday afternoon with other pedestrians and people in carriages,
other pilgrims, as Uncle Edward called anyone who thought the ice “worth gaping at.”

When the ice was in this close, there was not much shipping. Today, no flag flew from the signal pole. A stream of smoke made almost horizontal by the wind poured from the chimney of the blockhouse.

Even had I been with someone else when I got my first look at the ice, I could not have spoken. Not even the sight of the sea had brought home to me the existence of “elsewhere” or stirred in me the urge to travel as the ice did. The ocean disappeared as if the ice extended all the way to England. Pack ice, slob ice, raftered ice—all of it was crammed and smashed together. I went up there often between that day and early summer, and the only indication that there was water underneath the ice was the change in the location of the icebergs, whose southward drift was imperceptible except at intervals of days or weeks.

This ice was nothing like the inshore ice, the “young ice,” which was clean, thin, flat, almost transparent. This Old Ice
looked
old, a jagged scree of pieces many feet thick, as if a vast field of wreckage from some world-altering catastrophe was floating by. It was hard to believe that all that caused what lay before me was the start of spring, the warming of the air and the water by a few degrees, the lengthening of days.

Hard to the coast from which the snow was long gone, where the grass was bright green and the trees were thickening with buds and even leaves, was pressed this other world, where abruptly, it was winter—where everything was so white that on clear days the ice shone like a second sun. It was hard, in that ice-field, to distinguish one shape of ice from another. Even the icebergs were hard to make out, except the ones so far from land that they stood out like clouds against the sky. From the scree of ice, a berg so large its underside must have been ploughing the seabed ahead of it like snow reared up, vast, incongruous. This was not winter as I knew it but some absolute of winter. The snow of which this ice was made had not fallen from the sky but was ancient and prevailed like stone. It was as though all of Greenland had broken up. It was hard to believe that the whole thing would be
repeated the following year, that there was any ice left where this ice had come from.

I went up on the hill to see the ice as often as I could. I felt as though I was standing on the brink of the new life I was soon to begin with Dr. Cook. I imagined myself down there on the ice, side by side with Dr. Cook on the runners of a sled pulled by a team of dogs. I could think of no greater thing than to be an explorer, the epitome of my most cherished belief, which was that a man’s fate was not determined by the past.

But word was soon going round that I was paying some sort of obsessive tribute to my mother, whose body had been found at the edge of just such ice as I was looking at, a mere few hundred feet below. It was said, I overheard it said, that I was keeping some sort of delusional vigil for her and for my father.

I was looked upon as the son of parents whose sheer oddness had brought about their deaths, a boy who had inherited that oddness and was probably doomed by it to a fate much like theirs.

“Right there where he is standing now, that’s where they found the horse and carriage,” one man who stood right beside me told another one day. It was as if he believed that because he was not speaking to me, I could not hear him. “She started down the hill right there. He stands there every day, just staring.” The two men seemed to believe I was oblivious to scrutiny, that the riddle of Amelia and Francis Stead could be solved by a close examination of my face.

I came downstairs one night when I heard my aunt and uncle talking. I stopped outside the front room, assuming that they had heard me, and that Aunt Daphne would soon ask me what I wanted. But they went on talking.

“Taking after his parents, people are saying,” Uncle Edward said.

“Oh, they’ve been saying that for years,” Aunt Daphne said.

“He goes up on the hill and stands for hours every afternoon looking at the ice. Other people go up there once a year. With him, it’s every day. No matter how cold it is, no matter how hard the wind is
blowing, there he is, as still as a statue, looking out across the ice. Obsessed, they’re saying. With where his mother … fell in. They say he has told people that his father is not really dead, that someday the ice will bring him safely home, that he will walk ashore from it and everything will be the way it was before he left.”

“Whoever said that made it up,” Aunt Daphne said. “He never speaks to anyone about his parents. Not even me. It’s perfectly normal for him to think more about his parents than he used to. It will pass. He’s only now really beginning to understand what happened to them. Or to realize that he may never understand it.”

How guilty it made me feel to hear so much sympathy and understanding in her voice. I wondered how Uncle Edward felt, having to feign ignorance of what he knew, being unable to tell her that her sympathy and understanding were misplaced, that I was undeserving of them. And he knew only that it was Dr. Cook’s letters that had set me to keeping vigil on the hill. He did not know what was in the letters, and not knowing was working on his mind. Not knowing the contents of the letters, he had no way of predicting what I might do, what Dr. Cook might do.

His state of preoccupation rivalled mine. Yet he couldn’t resist telling her about the gossip, even at the risk of making her pay closer attention to me, which I was sure she would.

One night, after I went to bed, I noticed that the moon was full and saw a faint glow from the ice between the Narrows. I remembered the photograph of the
Belgica
, the ship moonlit, haloed and white with frost. Dr. Cook had often spoken, in his letters, of the endless Arctic night. I had so far seen the ice only by day, only as, in the Arctic, it looked for half the year. I had yet to see how it looked during the other half, the half that took the greater toll on expeditionaries, especially their minds. I went to my stash of letters and searched through them for the one in which Dr. Cook had written about what he called “night never-ending.”

“Imagine,” Dr. Cook wrote. “The sun goes down, and though
you know it will not rise again for ninety days, you cannot help hoping each ‘morning’ that it will.” His putting
morning
in quotation marks made the hair stand up on the nape of my neck. Three months without mornings. Three months during which morning exists nowhere but on your pocket watch and in your mind. “Temporal disorientation is not uncommon,” wrote Dr. Cook. “For a few days, there is zodiacal light, the blue corolla that traces the horizon after sunset and before sunrise. And after that, the most you can hope for by way of light is what I call illumoonation. If there happens not to be a moon, you are left with the feeble light of stars. And should there be an overcast, not even that …”

Another section of the letter: “You have not really heard the ice until you hear it late at night. There is no room for the ice to expand, but expand it must and so it seems that the whole mass of it begins to stir. I once heard what I would have sworn was the weary tramp of footsteps, the slow going-round of wooden wheels and the clopping hoofs of horses. I had been reading
War and Peace
and so was ‘hearing,’ out on the ice, the French plodding west across the frozen mass of Russia after their defeat outside of Moscow. There is no end to the tricks the ice plays on the ears at night.… ”

I realized that I did not have to wait to see and hear such things as he described in this letter.

The next night, a Friday, Aunt Daphne and Uncle Edward went to a charity ball, a benefit for the still-ongoing rebuilding of the parts of the city that in the fire of 1892 had been destroyed. They told me they would not be home until late.

There would be no one else on the hill at such an hour at this time of year. And I could easily be back home before Uncle Edward and Aunt Daphne. I prayed, looking out the window as I waited for them to leave, that the sky that now was clear would stay that way.

After they had left, I waited until twilight. Up north, in summer, this was how it looked at the twin times of least light, at the nadirs of the morning and the midnight suns.

In the pantry, on the bottom shelf, there were two oil lanterns that
had not been used in years, lanterns Francis Stead had hung on his hansom cab when he went out making house calls after dark. I filled one of them with seal oil, the oil of last resort, which Aunt Daphne kept for emergencies in metal cans in the shed behind the house. I quickly skirted the city streets just after dark and, the lantern lighting my way, followed the narrow road up Signal Hill.