The Navigator of New York (21 page)

“Devlin,” he said.

“Yes,” I said, wishing I could have answered my name with his. But “Dr. Cook” was no reply to “Devlin.” And it was far too soon to call him what I hoped I could someday.

“You know where I’m staying,” I said, not intending it to sound like an accusation. Nor did he seem to take it as one. Rather, he waved at me and smiled as if I had paid him a compliment that he did not
deserve. I could see him clearly now. He did not look much different than he had in his
Belgica
photographs. He was clean-shaven, but his hair was long and brushed back behind his ears. He was just as spare, his face as gaunt and full of hollows, as in the photographs. The only differences were that he was clean-shaven and well dressed in a white shirt with bands, a black vest and a pair of light black slacks.

He came forward suddenly and put his arms around me, the crook of his chin and throat hard against my neck as he hugged me to him. He was so strong, his hug so fervent, that I all but fell against him, arms limp, holding the leather valise, which crumpled audibly between us. Just as I let it go to reciprocate the hug, he released me and the bag fell to the floor. So, too, very nearly, did I.

“Are you feeling ill?” he said.

“It’s very hot outside,” I said. “I guess I’m not used to it.”

“You’re overdressed for it,” he said. “You’re soaking wet. Come in and I’ll get you a cold drink. There are some things I have to tell you before we can really talk.” With what I suspected seemed like peculiar haste, I snatched up the bag, then followed him from the vestibule down a hallway hung with a succession of oval mirrors to an enormous drawing room.

He directed me to one end of a sofa.

“I’ll be right back with a nice cool drink,” he said. The ceiling was so high that when he finished speaking, there was a prolonged “ping” of vibration in the air. I was vaguely aware of the room. Gilded ceiling. A rug from wall to wall. Black statuettes. Enormous vases with enormous handles. Ferns, fronds that might or might not have been real. A marble-topped writing table that bore a single prop-like book.

He soon returned with a large tumbler of crushed ice and orange juice. I was sitting with the valise on my lap, holding the handle with both hands. I removed one hand from the bag, took the glass and, momentarily unselfconscious, gulped greedily from it.

“That’s the trick,” he said as if I was ingesting in good humour some foul-tasting medicine that he’d prescribed. I drank until there was nothing left but ice.

“More?” he said, smiling.

I shook my head, certain I would burp if I attempted speech.

He drew up an armchair at right angles to the sofa and sat down.

“It’s so good to see you, Devlin. At long last to see you. I had no idea what you looked like. I have no photographs of you.” Yet he had recognized me when I debarked from the ship. There must have been no mistaking me, no one else who that furtive-looking, solitary young man could have been but Devlin Stead.

“Usually,” he said, “as you write to someone, you have an image of him in your mind. I found myself, as I wrote, thinking of your mother. I should be ashamed to say so, but I’m not. Even before I knew you were my son, I would often recall her face, which I remembered more vividly than any other.” Now, I realized, was not the time to present him with the photograph.

“It was hard for me, too,” I said. “Being written to. Reading your letters. Not being able to write you back.”

He nodded.
For reasons I cannot now explain
. I told myself it was foolish to expect that all my questions would be answered at our first meeting.

“Did you and Uncle Edward correspond a lot?” I said. He pursed his lips as if to say, “That depends on what you mean by a lot.”

“Your uncle and I wrote each other only as often as we had to, I suppose.”
Your uncle
. And Uncle Edward had called him “your correspondent.” Each, as far as the other was concerned, had no name.

“I’m surprised that Uncle Edward went along with it,” I said. “With any of it.”

“To tell you the truth,” he said, “I was somewhat surprised myself. But luckily for us, he did. I will tell you all about it when we have time.”

I nodded as if I had expected him to speak those very words.

“Also luckily for us,” Dr. Cook said, reaching out and removing my hat, the better to see my face, “you’re not my spitting image, though someone who had reason to look for a resemblance between us would have no trouble finding it.”

I was immensely pleased to hear it, and wondered why, when I had compared our photographs, I had been unable to detect this resemblance. He had done so without benefit of an image of himself to compare to me. I supposed he had so often photographed himself that he was able to objectively imagine his appearance, which I could not do. My image in the mirror or in photographs always surprised me. I looked at him, trying to see in his face what he had seen in mine.

I imagined how it must have been for my mother, watching me change, as if she had no idea who my father was, no idea from whom I had inherited the half of me that wasn’t hers, no idea whose features those were that began to show themselves as I grew older—features that she, like Dr. Cook but unlike me, was able to detect. I imagined her scrutinizing my face, my complexion, my eyes, my mouth, trying to discern in that blending of two natures which features were his. There he was, this stranger, this man she had known for but three weeks, staring out at her from her son’s face. Why was I blind to what was so obvious to Dr. Cook?

“This is really quite a marvellous house,” I said. Reared up on the spoils of exploration, I presumed, thinking that, in his letters, he had exaggerated his need for “backers.” But the smile he had been wearing since my arrival vanished.

“Yes, a marvellous house. A wastefully lavish one, I’m afraid. I tell Marie the house is so large that each room has a different climate. The house built by beer and bought by Mrs. Cook, they call it. Many houses on Bushwick were built by beer, and are still lived in by beer. Beer barons, that is. German brewers. As you know, my parents were born in Germany, but my father was a doctor, not a beer baron. This house is also known in the neighbourhood as the house with eighty windows, though in fact it has eighty-four. It was designed and built by Theobald Englehardt for a man named Claus Lipsius, who is remembered as having ‘built’ it because his money paid for it. I terrify Marie by claiming to have seen his ghost, whom I call the elusive Lipsius. This place is so large that a ghost could haunt it undetected for centuries. I believe that I am looked upon by some as a kept husband,
though perhaps it is only because I sometimes feel kept that I suspect others of regarding me that way. Most of Marie’s money is in this house. She is nowhere near so rich that she can entirely fund my expeditions. But with her money, I have been able to forsake my white horse and one-lunger for a four-cylinder Franklin. I make my rounds in it. I feel like a boy whose mother has bought for him a toy that no one else’s mother could afford. I turn the corners of streets on two wheels. I have also, with Marie’s money, bought a roentgen-ray machine. Very few doctors have them, and it is at least of use to someone other than me. I feel, unfairly to myself perhaps, that I have caused the Forbes family much grief. But they, the two remaining daughters and their mother, have told me that they are happy for Marie and me. I had thought that happiness through marriage—that marriage itself—was not for me, until I met Marie. It is for her a second marriage as well, her first having ended with the death of her husband, Willis Hunt, a homeopathic doctor of some renown who left Marie a wealthy woman.

“A fellow physician, upon hearing of my marriage, wrote that he lamented the world’s loss of me ‘as one of her most enthusiastic, able and determined explorers.’ He added, ‘But there is no doubt that you have chosen the happier lot.’ You’d think that by announcing my marriage, I had announced the end of my career. Has Peary’s having a wife and children slowed him down or disqualified him from the ranks? I fear that my friend’s remarks arise in part from Marie’s inherited wealth. I am looked upon as gentrified. Nothing could be more untrue. Marie insisted, when I asked for her hand, that I continue on with exploration, and she has even hinted at a Jo Peary–like willingness to be my companion in exploration, so far as circumstances will permit.”

He stopped speaking and, as if to say that he was sorry for having got carried away, looked at me and smiled.

He leaned his forearms on his thighs, clasped his hands.

“You really should be enrolled in some course of study,” he said. “What profession have you chosen?”

“I haven’t made up my mind yet. ‘All the remaining challenges of exploration will be met in the next ten years,’ you said in
Century
. If I enrol in something now, there might be nothing left to accomplish by the time I graduate.”

“That’s possible. But it’s partly to loosen the purse-strings of the backers that explorers speak the way I did. It’s also possible that I’m wrong, that ten years from now all those challenges will still be there. Unmet. Never to be met, perhaps. And you will have no paying profession. No status in society.”

“The universities and colleges will still be there,” I said.

He smiled, nodded his head, then moved it even closer to mine, as if, were he to say them too loudly, the words would still be in the air when his wife returned.

“I have told Marie about you, that you are the son of a former friend and colleague of mine, now deceased, Dr. Francis Stead, who, as she remembers, met such a tragic end on the North Greenland expedition. I told her that we met by chance in Manhattan, and that you wish to spend some time in New York, to gain some experience of real life, before completing your education. I said that you were just off the boat, looked quite hopelessly out of your element, and that if someone did not soon take you under his wing, there was no telling what might happen to you. I suggested to Marie that, what with my practice on the one hand and my exploration on the other, it might not be a bad idea if I hired someone, possibly you, as my assistant. I also suggested that given the size of this house and the necessity of having my assistant near at hand, it would make sense if you lived here. She agreed with me.”

I must have looked as incredulous as I felt, for he laughed softly. My doubts about him vanished. I felt guilty for ever having had them, and for resenting him for pre-empting my surprise arrival, which I now saw would have been imprudent no matter what sort of “arrangement” I devised. Clearly, the making of arrangements should be left to him. I looked at the valise. The letters no longer had about them the whiff of fiction. He had meant every word he wrote to me.
He was, at that very moment, doing what he had said that he would do “someday.” I had come to think of it as some nebulous, forever-in-the-future day because of my impatience. Despite my not having waited for him to formally extend his invitation, despite my having set out to surprise him by showing up from out of nowhere in New York, he was offering to bring me into his life, had already prepared a place in it for me.

“Well?” he said. “Would you
like
to be my assistant and live here with us in this house?”

What he proposed was so appealing to me, so exactly what I wanted, that it had not occurred to me that it
was
a proposition, that he could imagine anything from me but grateful compliance.

“Yes,” I managed to say. “I would like that very much.”

Again he laughed. I might have been a child whose response to a gift was so exactly what he imagined it would be that he could not help being amused.

“Marie assumes that your aunt and uncle know where you are. You should say nothing to make her think otherwise. In fact, it might be best if you don’t speak about your aunt and uncle unless she does, which she probably won’t. Marie has told the servants about you. I will introduce you to people, and you will introduce yourself to anyone you meet, as the son of a former colleague of mine who is now employed as my assistant and, for our mutual convenience, staying at my house. As for you and I, we will talk openly only when we are certain, as we are now, that we cannot be overheard. You must be careful not to leave lying about any written material of a private nature.”

I nodded, though I felt like telling him that he needn’t worry, that I was well practised at the art of deception at close quarters, at withholding from one member of the household I belonged to information that I shared with another.

I saw that my new situation would be eerily congruent with the one I’d left. It was as if I had exchanged Uncle Edward and Aunt Daphne for Dr. Cook and his wife, Marie. Again conspiring with the husband of the house against the wife, maintaining the same pretence
as before; again forbidden to talk about it with the husband unless invited to by him. Again a guest in someone else’s house. Adopted for the second time, this time by my father.

But I vowed that I would feel no guilt at deceiving Mrs. Cook. It was as much for other people as for ourselves that Dr. Cook and I had to be discreet. Who would benefit by knowing what we knew? Who would not be hurt by it?

“I have been thinking of what you should call me when we are alone. And I have been able to think of nothing but ‘Dr. Cook.’ If you were to call me anything else, you might inadvertently do so when we were
not
alone. Do you see what I mean? Such a slip would give nothing away, of course, but it might cause both of us some awkwardness.”

I nodded.

“We will tell Marie that it appears that your steamer trunk was stolen out of storage at the pier. Such things happen all the time.” He knew that the valise was all the luggage I had. I guessed that the manner of my leaving St. John’s had been dictated by him to Uncle Edward, right down to the last detail of how much luggage I should take.

Not even while alluding to my non-existent trunk did he look at my valise. He had yet to look at it as far as I could tell. All the while he spoke, I had sat there with the bag on my lap, wishing that I had been able to think of somewhere safe to put it, wishing that I had not brought it into the house, teeming as it was with all that I had just pledged to keep concealed and not be careless with.