The Navigator of New York (20 page)

I could simply ignore his note and send him one asking him to meet me somewhere. But given that he had gone to such great lengths to contact me before I contacted him, I doubted that he would relent
and do things my way. I might, if I sent him a note, wait in vain for a second one from him.

I left the hotel and went to a cheap restaurant across the street for breakfast. On the wall beside my table was a poster advertising the “soon-to-be-completed subway,” the tunnels for which were now being dug. The poster showed illustrations of the inside of the subway cars. They looked like furnished tombs and the stations like the shafts of horizontal mines.

As I ate, I read a morning paper that was full of predictions, inventions and rumours of inventions. The imminent triumph of the “horseless carriage,” the obsolescence of horse-drawn vehicles. The day when every street of Manhattan would lead to a bridge and the ferry-filled East River would be reserved for pleasure boats. The filing of patents, one for a central cooling mechanism that would counter the heat of summer the way radiation did the cold of winter. I dearly hoped for its success. The subway would make most surface transit superfluous. One day soon, work would begin on the subway to Brooklyn. Trains would run on tracks laid in tunnels that were dug so deep beneath the riverbed that not a drop of water would make it through.

Between the restaurant and the el train station, I saw hundreds of signs advertising jobs. Most of them read: “If you can read this, the job is yours.” I could easily get a job if I had to.

I climbed a covered, winding staircase with landings every half-dozen steps on which older people rested, out of breath. There was a waiting room, but it was empty, everyone having proceeded outside to the covered platform, for the train was coming.

The el wound its way among buildings whose tops I could not see no matter how low I slumped down in my seat. The el. It seemed ironically named. It could not have been much more than forty feet above the ground.

From the el train I could see the Brooklyn Bridge, which we were due to reach in fifteen minutes. Traffic of all kinds on the bridge was ceaseless in both directions, as if the two boroughs were exchanging populations.

The train began to go upgrade, and soon the first cables of the bridge reared up outside the window, though land was still beneath us, the distant river barely visible at this angle through the struts and web of cables.

The valise, which now contained nothing but the portrait of my mother and Dr. Cook’s letters, including the one I found that morning, was on my lap. I had removed the rest of my scant belongings and left them in my room, unable to bring myself to leave the letters, let them out of my possession, or to think of a foolproof hiding place.

Again I was struck by the oddness of my mission. For a second, as though from some omniscient’s point of view, I saw myself: a young man just arrived from Newfoundland, bound for Brooklyn from Manhattan, riding the el train across the Brooklyn Bridge, propping on his lap a leather valise in which lay scrolled the letters of a Dr. Cook, who claimed to be his father—letters written not in the hand of Dr. Cook, but in that of the person to whom they were addressed, the young man himself, as if he were mad and the whole thing a concoction of which the climax, not the resolution but the dissolution, was fast approaching.

I was glad I had the portrait and the letters, glad I would not have to confront Dr. Cook empty-handed. They seemed like credentials of some kind. They made up a partial autobiography of Dr. Cook, an autobiography addressed to me. I imagined opening the bag, holding it out so he could see the heap of scrolls inside. And the picture of my mother.

It was probable that he did not have a picture of her. How accurately, after all this time, did he recall her face? I would take out the photograph and show it to him, give it to him, tell him he could keep it. I had thought of the moment many times since I left St. John’s. What more appropriate gift could I give him on the occasion of meeting him than a picture of my mother?

Countless levels of conveyance spanned the river to join the downtowns of Brooklyn and Manhattan. I knew that we were travelling beneath a wooden walkway, though I could not see it from the train, and that beneath us ran cable cars and streetcars, and below or
beside them horse-drawn vehicles and motor cars, the latter spooking the horses with whom they contended for space.

Farther below, steamers, ferries, barges drawn by tugboats, expensive sloops and smaller vessels made their way across the river. Below the water and, inconceivably, below the riverbed would someday run the subway.

Dr. Cook had crossed that stretch of water to Manhattan in a ferry one afternoon more than twenty years ago. Because of that, one of his thousands of childhood journeys to Manhattan, I was now going the other way, across the river on the bridge to Brooklyn to see him face to face at last.

I tried to imagine him setting out that day for Manhattan: a boy too lightly dressed for a ferry crossing of the river so soon after winter, teeth chattering, shivering, hugging himself for warmth; a boy who has been working in Brooklyn with his brothers since the sun came up, and whose day, had it ended when theirs did, would still have been too long. He has been hired to “help out” at a party in Manhattan, and what that means he has no idea. All he has is an address that he will walk to if he can find it from the dock. He has made up some story for his mother, who would not approve of his earning money in this fashion, or of his going to Manhattan for any reason by himself.

He looks up as the ferry moves into the shadow of the uncompleted bridge. The shadow bridge, because of the angle of the sun, is bigger than the real one, and in the shadow, it is even colder. The boy looks at the shadow shape, in which everything is magnified to twice its size, then back up at the bridge again.

His mother, who has come to dread the completion of the bridge, says it will mean the end of Brooklyn as they know it.

They have been building this bridge since before he was born. His world has always been one in which “the bridge” was being built. It seems in the nature of bridges to be not quite finished. Though it looks to him like the bridge
is
finished. The last piece of the span will soon be put in place. The braided steel-and-iron cables thicker than a man’s body hang taut from the towers and the columns overhead.

The boy, whose glance includes that part of the bridge from which his son will look down at the water twenty years from now, feels no premonition, not of what is to happen in twenty years, nor of what is to happen in two hours. They are just docking at the pier when, up on the bridge, a series of electric arc lights come on all at once. Their light never flickers, not like the light from lamps that run on gas or kerosene. Flameless, unflickering, unnatural light.

Their coming on has for months been a signal to the people of both cities that the day is nearly over. They stay lit long after dark, for the push to complete the bridge is on.

They are still lit when he goes back to Brooklyn after midnight. By then, the licensed ferries have stopped, but he catches a ride for three times the legal fare from a man who runs an after-hours tug across the river, a tug that arrives and leaves at no appointed time. When the number of stranded has grown to the point where he deems a crossing to be worth his while, the tug driver collects his fares and sets out for the other shore. Until then, the boy waits on board, shivering, his mind blank with wonder as he stares down the river at the still-blazing arc lights on the bridge …

I roused myself from this revery. A lattice of shadow cast by the cables of the bridge lay over everything. It was coming on to noon, and the sun was beating down so fiercely that passengers closed their eyes as if in prayer and fanned themselves.

At the apex of the bridge, all I could see was a blinding sheen of sunlight from the water. And then the Brooklyn tower of the bridge came into view. I remembered Dr. Cook writing that the great arch had seemed to him like a sculpture, nearing the completion of which someone had by accident discovered that it could also be a bridge.

In each of the towers, there were two semi-ovals, pointed Gothic arches like massive church windows from which the glass had been removed. Rounded Roman arches had been proposed, but they were rejected in favour of the Gothic to appease the clergy, who were affronted by the cathedral-dwarfing bridge.

One arch admitted through the tower traffic that was headed east, the other traffic that was headed west.

Heading east, it was not until we passed through the tower that I felt I had left Manhattan and was truly on the bridge. It would not be until I passed through the semi-oval of the Brooklyn tower that I felt I was in Brooklyn. Between the towers, I felt a welcome sense of placelessness, a respite from the city. There was, suddenly, so much space.

I felt as if I was drawing my first breath since stepping off the ship the day before. As if the train had just passed a sign directing them to do so, the passengers opened their windows and there gushed across the car a cooling stream of air to which they turned their faces, eyes closed. The women put aside their fans, the men removed their hats. Clearly this was a local luxury born of bridges, this immersion in the breeze that came down the river from the ocean but was only at this altitude so free of smoke, so cool and so refreshing. The people looked the way that people in St. John’s did when they turned their faces to the sun on the first warm day of spring.

Also admitted to the train when the windows went down were the sounds of the outside world, the clatter of the wheels and the humming of the span beneath them, the eerie buzzing of the cables. No sooner had we passed through the Brooklyn tower than the windows were raised again.

Below, and stretching along the shore on both sides as far as I could see, were the warehouses that from the ship had seemed to form a solid wall along the waterfront. Docks, dry docks, grain elevators, freight terminals, the sugar refineries in the shadow of which Dr. Cook had spent his childhood. It looked as if everything needed to sustain all five boroughs of New York was shipped through Brooklyn.

The streets of this part of Brooklyn were wider than those of Manhattan, as were the sidewalks, so both were less congested. There were far more motor cars than in Manhattan, though they were still greatly outnumbered by horse-drawn vehicles. A gleaming barouche with its hood raised to shield its owners from the sun went by, drawn
by two horses as well groomed as the driver, who was standing at the reins as if to signal the priority of his vehicle over all the rest.

There was a station stop at Myrtle Avenue. There I asked one of the passengers who disembarked with me how to get to Bushwick and Willoughby. “You should have stayed on,” he said. “There’s a stop there, too.” He indicated the way.

I walked along Bushwick, through block after block of stolid, freestanding mansions made of brick. With their unremarkable façades, they looked more like fortresses than dwellings.

Dr. Cook’s was no exception. It was three storeys high, with a five-storey turret in the middle. There were gabled windows on the upper storey, and on the lower storeys recessed windows with Roman arches. It was enclosed by a fence of iron spikes, though there was no front yard. I could, by extending my arm through the rails, have touched the house. The front door opened almost directly onto the sidewalk. Nothing intervened but a rise of concrete steps. The entrance was recessed with a layered arch of black marble that ended in two inlaid white marble pillars that flanked the door. Nowhere did the name of Dr. Cook appear, nor anything to suggest that the premises were those of a physician, let alone that they contained a surgery. Only upon looking closely did I see that the door was monogrammed just above the mail slot. In small silver letters, the initials
F.A.C
.

I considered knocking but could imagine no outcome from doing so that would not embarrass both of us. There was no telling who else might be inside. Friends. Associates. Patients. I could not identify myself to him in front of others. Just standing there, I risked being seen by him or someone else from the windows. Or he might come out or appear in the doorway to bid someone goodbye.

I took my watch from my pocket. Half past twelve. I had made the trip in half the time the bellhop had predicted. I walked around the neighbourhood for an hour, moving from one place to another, seeking shade, of which there was little. There was no park, no stores I could take shelter in, just an endless succession of mansions.

I stood, across the street from the house and one block down, in
the semi-shade of some overhanging leaves, holding my valise in front of me, hands crossed, as if the valise somehow made it more reasonable that I should stand there motionless for so long.

Through a swarm of hacks, coaches, hansom cabs and motor cars, I watched the house. One after another, servants left by a door near the back.

By two-thirty I was dizzy from the heat, my clothing drenched in perspiration. But I could not bear to go back to Manhattan for the night without first meeting him, the day’s momentousness unconsummated, so that when next I crossed from Manhattan to Brooklyn, whenever that might be, I would feel foolish and the whole thing would be spoiled.

I crossed the street. The front door was at the base of the massive middle turret. Barely able to see the knocker, I lifted and dropped it several times. The door was opened by someone who walked backwards with it, so it seemed that it had opened by itself.

“Please come in,” a man said, so loudly and formally I assumed he was a servant, one who had somehow avoided being sent away or had come back early, one whom Dr. Cook could trust with any secret.

I stepped inside. Coming from the daylight into this windowless vestibule, I could barely see. As I turned to face the doorman, he turned to face the door, on which he placed both hands, one on the handle, the other palm-flat on the wood, so that he eased it shut without a sound.

He faced round and leaned back against the door, rested his head against it as if he had just ejected someone he was glad to be rid of. I could not make out his face, but I knew the profile from the many photographs I had seen.