The Navigator of New York (16 page)

I couldn’t believe she had said it. I rolled over onto my side so that she wouldn’t see how hard I was trying not to cry.

“I’m me, remember?” I said. “Remember what you said? I’m Devlin. I’m not the sum of my parents. Why did you tell me that if you don’t believe it? Why did you pretend? Did you think I’d feel worse if I
knew
I wasn’t normal?”

“But why did you go up there, Devvie, at night all by yourself? If you had told me you wanted to do that, I would have gone with you.”

“To keep me from harming myself?”

“To keep you company. And yes, to help you if you had an accident.”

“You didn’t ask me if I was thinking of having an accident. Doing harm to myself, that’s what you said.”

“Well, what would
you
think if
I
was gone all night?”

“I’d worry. I’d look for you. But I wouldn’t think what you thought. No matter what other people thought of you. Or what your parents were famous for.”

I had thought, as I lay on the bed waiting for her to return, that she would accept my explanation. I would say that I went up on the hill to listen to the ice and to see it in the moonlight, and had by accident lost my lantern and been forced to take shelter in the blockhouse. And she, and only she, would see nothing sinister in this, unlike those people to whom my every action was an omen.

“I should never have taken you up there when I did,” she said. “When you were still so young. Do you remember? I said, ‘It’s time you saw the sea,’ and we went up there and we talked about your mother. You told me how your mother’s horse waited there all night for her, how he was still there in the morning, waiting, when they found him. You never went up there again until this spring.”

She was
blaming
herself. She had to have thought something was wrong with me or else there’d be nothing to blame herself for. For how long had she felt this way? For how long had she held out before she admitted to herself that what people like Uncle Edward said was true, that she had been fooling herself?

“I worry so much about you, Devvie. I didn’t know what to think. Imagine me coming home to find the house empty. Imagine the hours passing and me knowing that it’s cold enough outside for you to freeze to death. I tried to think of where you could possibly be. You wouldn’t believe the things I hoped. I hoped that you had spent the night with some prostitute. I hoped that you had got drunk and fallen asleep somewhere indoors. If I didn’t trust you, I would never have left you alone in the house in the first place. You have to admit that what you did was dangerous.”

Even allowing that she knew nothing of what had happened to make me so caught up in Signal Hill, my having done a dangerous thing should not have led her to think what she had, to ask what she had. Would she have asked it of any boy, any young man who had done what I did?

“Never mind,” I said. “I won’t go up there again. I’ll stay away from danger. I’ll resist the urge to harm myself, to do what my parents did.”

“Devlin, I love you,” she said. “I love you so much. You believe that, don’t you? I’ve never told you so before. I should have.”

I knew that she loved me. I knew that I had been, just now, last night and often in the past, unfair to her. But I also knew that she no longer trusted me, that she had not really trusted me for quite some time. She was wondering already what came after danger, what came
after recklessness, what came after dead-of-night excursions to the top of Signal Hill. She would leave me alone in the house again, just to convince me that she trusted me, and all the while she was out, she would wonder if I would be there when she got back. She foresaw, without resentment or any expectation of reward, a lifetime of protecting me, from others, from myself.

I went up the hill one last time, in the afternoon, ignoring the other ice pilgrims, who gaped at me as if I was about to run straight down the hill into the water.

Weeks before, I had noticed that the northern horizon was straight again, no longer jagged. The end of the ice was coming. So far up the coast I couldn’t see it, there was open water. The end, the back edge of the ice. And I meant to see it, no matter what people thought or said.

From the top of the hill, the edge of the ice was even with my vantage point. I was at the juncture of four worlds, land, ice, sea and sky, each a perfect exclusion of the other.

Half the sea was solid ice and half was open water. Abruptly, in a line that extended all the way to the meeting point of sea and sky, the sea left off and the ice began.

“I’
M GOING TO
N
EW
Y
ORK TO MEET
D
R
. C
OOK,”
I
SAID
.

We were in Francis Stead’s surgery, Uncle Edward having told his nurse that he was going there to have his lunch, just as he did on our red-letter days. I had asked him to meet me there. It was early August. I had read in the newspapers that Dr. Cook had been unable to prepare an expedition, and so would spend the year in Brooklyn and, if all went well, leave next year for a try at the North Pole. I hoped that this time next year, he and I would be setting out for the pole together.

I had not asked Dr. Cook’s permission to visit him, I told Uncle Edward, or even informed him I was coming. I was planning simply to show up unannounced.

It was time to go where the letters were coming from, time to stop dreaming about that place and make it real, and to leave behind in fact the world that, in almost every other way, I had left behind already.

“You don’t have to say anything to him about the letters,” I said. “When I get there, he’ll stop sending them. If any arrive after I leave, you can send them on to me.”

“For God’s sake,” he said, glancing at the door. He could not argue with me here. Or anywhere, he must have realized. He must surely have foreseen, when Dr. Cook first wrote to him, when he first called me to his surgery, that something more would come of our “arrangement” than an endless succession of letters. Of course he had. He had foreseen to the point of dread some such culmination as he was faced
with now. But not knowing what form it would take, he had not been able to prepare for it. I could see that he was terrified.

He had done everything he could to forestall whatever it was that, on the whim of Dr. Cook, might happen. There was nothing, there never had been anything, that he wanted more than for those letters to stop coming, and for our arrangement to be concluded. But now that it seemed to be concluding, he was terrified.

Of what? I could not ask him, could not antagonize him now, just when I was on the verge of a departure that for all I knew he might, out of sheer spite, prevent. He did not know of Dr. Cook’s claim to be my father. I was sure of that. How he had been able to resist reading the letters I had no idea, nor did I have any as to why, in the first place, he had complied with Dr. Cook’s requests. Again, blackmail was all that I could think of. But what was it that Dr. Cook knew that Uncle Edward was afraid of?

“I’ll make a bargain with you,” he said, his voice breaking on
bargain
. I waited. “If you don’t tell Daphne you’re leaving, I won’t tell your correspondent of your plans. Agreed? You can surprise him, or whatever it is you want to do. Just don’t tell Daphne you’re leaving.”

“You won’t tell him I’m coming?” I said.

“I won’t tell him anything.”

Would he send to me in New York, at the address I would give him once I found a place to live, any further letters he received?

“I’ll have to think about that,” he said. “The best way of doing it, I mean. The safest way. For both of us. Remember: not a word to Daphne.”

I was right to have blurted out my decision to Uncle Edward. I could not stand the thought of my one-sided correspondence with Dr. Cook dragging on for still more years. Nothing but living in the same city as him made any sense now that I knew I would be his protégé “someday.”

I had become worried that, despite his invitation, he would have been satisfied to go on writing to me forever. It would not satisfy me. I would tire of the letters if they ceased to be a prelude to something
more. If I left it up to him, I might still be receiving them when I was thirty.

It seemed strange to think that I would at long last meet him. I thought he would probably let me go with him at least part of the way on his next expedition, whatever misgivings he might have about my age. I had pledged to one day be his protégé in Arctic exploration. I could see no reason why that day should not come soon. I had graduated from school in June. I was twenty.

When I got to New York, I would seek him out and, when he was alone, surprise him. As quickly as possible after telling him who I was, I would assure him that my purpose in coming to New York was not to unmask him as my father or to cause him any embarrassment in public.

I wanted to surprise Dr. Cook as he, in his first letter, had surprised me.

I did not want to think it all through too clearly, for fear of encountering obstacles that would make me lose my nerve. I wanted only to get away, to go to New York, to Brooklyn, to the corner of Bushwick and Willoughby, where he lived and practised, to introduce myself to him. What would happen after that I didn’t know. I felt that like Dr. Cook, I was in a race—that if he made it to the pole, or if Peary or someone else beat him to it, I might never hear from him again.

How could he, how could we, contrive a reason to associate with one another except on the most casual basis? In society, there would be no place for us. Only outside it, apart from it—only as fellow explorers—could we be anything like father and son.

Following Uncle Edward once again into my father’s surgery, I was reminded of the first time I had gone to see him there. He had motioned for me to sit down, then made a cage of his fingers and looked at me through it.

It was apparent that since our last meeting, he had regained his equanimity. He had had time to think, to make plans. I prayed he had not found a way out of our agreement.

“New York,” he said.

New York. For my mother, even for Francis Stead, it had been a synonym for calamity, dashed hopes, the end of youth.

“I’ve been reading about it,” I said. “Everyone who goes there says it will soon be the greatest city in the world. Some people think it is already.”

He smiled.

“What was it your father said in that letter? ‘Brooklyn is to explorers what Paris is to artists.’ “

I nodded, though Francis Stead had said “New York,” not “Brooklyn.”

“Do you think that for your father, leaving home, leaving you and your mother behind, was some great sacrifice in the service of some cause?”

I remembered Dr. Cook’s dedication in those
Century
articles. “He laboured in the service of mankind.” It sounded as though Uncle Edward had read them, too.

“Something he would rather not have done, but had to do for the greater good? The greater good of what?”

“I don’t know,” I said.

He smiled. He dropped his hands flat on his desk so suddenly that it startled me.

“Well. As to the first of your requests, I will not tell your correspondent that you are coming. As to your second request, I am going to destroy any letters that arrive in your absence, because neither I nor your correspondent wants you to have originals.”

I shrugged.

“You have grown up without the guidance of a father, or even a father figure—the latter office I would gladly have performed, but you made it clear from the start that you did not want me to.”

He paused and it seemed for a while that he was finished. I thought of telling him that my father had been writing me for years. He swivelled his chair until he almost faced the window.

“Have you ever tried to imagine my side of it? A grown man
running secret errands for his nephew. I have felt like a messenger boy, delivering to the leading man scripts that I was not allowed to read.”

“You could have read them if you wanted to,” I said.

“Pawing through the post at my surgery each morning, looking for a letter, an envelope of the right kind and colour. Hiding it in my desk. Wearing that stupid red handkerchief. Climbing to your father’s surgery, putting the envelope in the drawer, sitting in that chair, waiting for you to arrive, keeping guard outside while you read your precious letter. Burning the letter.”

In truth, I had not tried to imagine his side of it.

“The story of how I found the courage to approach you in the first place must remain untold. I risked a great deal more than you can guess by acting as a go-between for you and your correspondent. I noticed the change that came over you not long after those letters began to arrive. I am not unable to appreciate the yearning for adventure, though I believe it irresponsible to indulge it to the point where it becomes one’s main profession. However, you are very much your father’s son and will, I am sure, do what you want to do, regardless of how it might affect others.”

My face burned with shame. He was right.

“It has occurred to me that you are going to New York not just to see your correspondent, but to someday join him on his expeditions. It has further occurred to me that he is fool enough to take you on. If Daphne knew of your plans, she would never have another minute’s peace. Did you know that she wants you to article in law so that you will never have to leave St. John’s? She has already made inquiries.”

She had said nothing to me about this. She had already begun the business of protecting me from me.

“Have you thought about how you’re going to leave without Daphne’s knowledge?” he said.

I shook my head. I had put off thinking about it. About what it would do to her.

“You see, she would never let you go to New York by yourself. She would try to talk you out of going, and when that didn’t work, she
would insist on going with you. She’ll never let you out of her sight if she can help it.”

There was no question of my arriving in New York and meeting Dr. Cook with Aunt Daphne either by my side or showing up soon after. It might so unsettle him that he would have nothing more to do with me.