The Navigator of New York (23 page)

His desk was layered in maps, each of which traced out a different route from southern Greenland to the pole. He pored over these, making notes in his journals, consulting old journals and the writings of other explorers.

I could not see the walls for photographs, some of which were self-portraits of the sort that had run in
Century
. Beneath one, etched on a piece of wood enclosed in glass, was the unattributed phrase “A very young man who has the silent and unassuming manner of an older one.” An epithet, as if the man in the photograph was dead.

“Some of these relics belonged to Francis Stead,” he said. “They’re from the North Greenland expedition. Peary entrusted them to me. I contacted your uncle about them, but he said they were mine to do
with as I wished. He had no intention, he said, of cluttering his house with—what did he call them?—’the bric-a-brac of savages.’ “

Francis Stead’s relics did not include any photographs of him. There were knives and needles made of bone. A walrus tusk. Mittens made from caribou hide. A reindeer-skin sleeping bag.

Framed in wood and glass was a menu of what had been served for Christmas dinner at Redcliffe House in 1892. Salmon. Rabbit Pie. Venison. Plum Pudding. It was intricately illustrated and featured a caricature of Dr. Cook, showing him long-haired, hands on hips, appraising the body of a naked Eskimo woman. The tailpiece was a potion bottle on which was drawn a fiendish-looking skull and crossbones.

“Francis Stead drew that,” said Dr. Cook. “He made one for each of us. Each one was a parody. He even did one of himself, though I forget what it was.”

Dr. Cook appraising a naked woman. Surely he was not blind to the accidental irony, yet here was this picture on his wall.

Things that had once belonged to Francis Stead were everywhere. How, I felt like asking him, could he bear to look at them, be reminded by them of Francis Stead and my mother every time he looked up from his desk? Was it a form of penance, a never-ending making of amends?

One afternoon, I asked him if there were any polar expeditions now under way that he thought might be successful. He told me that Peary was up north, supposedly trying for the pole, but in fact prolonging an already failed expedition that in the eighteen months since it was put ashore in Greenland had made no progress because of injuries and bad weather. Peary was now stranded, he said, though his exact location was unknown.

I was surprised that, knowing Peary was trying, with however little chance of success, for the pole, Dr. Cook could be so sanguine, so complacent about it. Meanwhile, here
he
was in Brooklyn, merely making plans for future expeditions for which he had yet to raise the money—nebulous expeditions for which no dates had yet been set.

“Aren’t you worried that he’ll reach the pole?” I said.

“You don’t understand,” he said. “It’s not that, by now, Peary’s
chances of success are small. They are non-existent. They were from the start. He and his crew are stranded somewhere. The expedition was eighteen months old when they were last heard from, and that was months ago. They were still on the southernmost coast of Greenland, but were planning to head north when the snow returned. By the time it does, the expedition will be more than two years old. By then, Peary’s only real ambition will be to make it back alive. How long it will be before he
admits
defeat is the only question. There was word before he left that this was to be his last try. He is forty-five years old, will be at least forty-six before he gets back,
if
he gets back. These are not surmises. These are certainties. There will be no surprise headlines in the paper. Only the gullible are still waiting for word from Peary that he has reached the pole. Peary knows it. Every explorer in the world knows it. Some members of the Peary Arctic Club know it and are trying desperately to keep it from the press—and from the other members, the ones who skip the meetings of the PAC but put up all the money. I will not say this publicly, of course. I do not want to give a bad impression of a fellow explorer to people who, one or two years from now, will, I hope, be backing
my
attempt to reach the pole.”

He told me not to concern myself about Peary, sneering as he spoke the name, and reminded me that the success of any expedition depended on how well one prepared for it. “Better to make one good try for the pole,” he said, “than to make five from which nothing more will come than new material for lectures.”

Peary, he said, had been to Greenland several times since 1892, and each time he brought back with him something to impress the members of the club and draw attention away from his having failed yet again to reach the pole. He had brought back three meteorites, which he called star stones, and lent them to the American Museum of Natural History, whose president, Morris Jesup, was also the president of the Peary Arctic Club. He also brought back with him six Eskimos, four of whom, while under his care, perished of tuberculosis.

Dr. Cook waved one hand as if to dismiss all thoughts of Peary from both our minds.

H
E WAS KNOWN TO EVERYONE IN
B
ROOKLYN
. I
WENT OUT
walking with him on Bushwick one Saturday afternoon. He carried his jacket on his left arm and in his right hand held his hat, lifting the latter in greeting to the doorman of a small hotel, who tipped his own hat in reply.

He raised his hat again, this time to a jeweller who stood in the doorway of his shop and then, when Dr. Cook had passed, went back inside, as if he had come out expressly to greet him.

He spoke briefly to people in the waiting rooms of the el trains on the Myrtle Line—people, I realized, who recognized him, but whom he did not know.

People were drawn to him by more than just his fame. He seemed to find no one uninteresting, no one less than fascinating, which flattered people, and which he managed to convey by listening intently while others spoke. He was not outgoing, but he projected such absolute self-assurance that when he smiled at people in that forthright way of his, they looked as if they had won the approval of a man who was uncommonly perceptive. It was as if each person’s life, each person’s job, was difficult or rewarding in some way that only he and they were able to appreciate.

In Brooklyn, when we were not walking or travelling by train, we drove about in the Franklin, which was greeted by the people of Bushwick like a one-vehicle parade, everyone waving as we passed, teasing him good-naturedly about his “horseless carriage,” which by
chance bore the name of a famously doomed Arctic expedition. Most of the teasing was about the unlikelihood of the Franklin taking him to the North Pole and back.

“You should have kept the Eskimos,” one man shouted from his horse as we sped by.

I was surprised when Dr. Cook explained that this was a reference to the dozen Eskimos he had brought back to Brooklyn with him from Labrador one year, housing them in two large tents that he set up in his own backyard. “I treated them better than Peary treated his,” he said, as if he had noticed my surprise. He said they had lived as much like Eskimos as it was possible to do in Brooklyn, all the while being gaped at by the locals through knotholes in the fence. In the winter, on the weekends, he and they drove about Bushwick on sleds drawn by teams of dogs, the huskies barking wildly as hundreds of astonished Brooklynites tried to keep up with the sleds on foot. He had complied with the Eskimos’ request to be returned to Labrador when, in spite of all his ministrations, one of their number died.

“I am famous in Brooklyn,” Dr. Cook said, “yet all but unknown in Manhattan.”

He said it was too much bother to take the Franklin into Manhattan, where the streets were so narrow and congested that cars and horses came too near each other for the horses’ liking.

The first time we made the crossing of the bridge together, I saw a horseless carriage send a dozen horses rearing up on their hind legs, spilling drivers, passengers and goods from their vehicles, their scissoring forelegs menacing pedestrians, who screamed at the driver of the car to “get a horse.”

Several times a week, we took the el train across the Brooklyn Bridge into Manhattan. If our destination was a part of the borough where the el trains did not run, we took his horse and carriage. He much preferred this to hiring cabs, he said, because cab drivers were notorious eavesdroppers and gossips.

He said it was so that I could see and get to know Manhattan that we made these excursions. And it did seem sometimes that I was
being tutored in the layout and makeup of the city, which he said I would need to know as well as I knew St. John’s in order to do my job properly.

“The avenues run vertically from north to south, the streets horizontally from east to west. The avenues are longer and farther apart from each other than the streets, which are more numerous. The streets are numbered, the avenues, in some cases, named
and
numbered …” But long after he stopped speaking, he went on driving, driving for hours as if he was scouring the city in search of something he had lost. It seemed that I was only there to keep him company.

We drove at a never-less-than-frenetic pace from east to west, west to east, all the while going north block by block, generally skirting the edge of Central Park unless we could use one of its roads as a shortcut. I wondered if it had been his habit before my arrival to spend his spare time like this. Perhaps, in spite of his urging me to be patient, it was a symptom of explorer’s restlessness. He was at home, not on an expedition as he would have liked, so he could not sit still.

Once, when I went by the study prior to yet another evening excursion, Mrs. Cook, wrapped, though it was still September, in a bundle of sweaters and blankets, was just leaving. Though I had been living in her house for weeks, I had yet to meet her for a second time. Dr. Cook referred to her only occasionally, usually to pass on her regrets that her “condition” prevented her from spending time with me.

I said hello and she muttered some reply, sounding exasperated with me, as if she thought it was at my instigation that her husband was neglecting her so much.

I had yet to address him as “Dr. Cook” when we were alone. I could not bring myself to do it, though I saw the sense of not addressing him as “Father.” To call him “Dr. Cook,” for us to maintain that pretence in private, did not seem right to me. I called him “you,” which was awkward, especially as he used my name so frequently. He said it differently when we were alone than when we were not, though it was hard to put that difference into words.

He spoke of Manhattan as if it had been built not for the people
who lived there, but for those who came to visit. We might have been making our way through a vast museum called Manhattan, in which all the peoples and cultures of the world were on display—a live exhibit showing all levels and sub-levels of society; the latest advancements in technology; all known occupations, modes of dress, forms of art and entertainment; all known languages. I half expected him to point out two men in a carriage, one middle-aged, one young, two representative visitors from Brooklyn, the older of whom would be pointing directly back at us.

I put it down at first to Brooklynite defensiveness, the aloof, dismissive pose that all residents of the supposedly lesser of the cross-river rivals seemed to feel the need to affect while in Manhattan. But there was more to it than that. Scepticism. Ambivalence. It was as though he was assessing the city for some purpose he was not sure it could serve. Chronically unsure. At the end of each journey, as we returned to Brooklyn by way of the bridge, he fell silent and took on a look of wistful dissatisfaction.

We went to vaudeville shows, and though he would smile at the onstage antics, he spent as much time observing the audience as he did the performers, wearing the same evaluative look no matter where his attention lay.

Late one afternoon, he came by the library, where I was reading
Moby Dick
, which he had recommended to me as a book that might help me understand the “nature of his quest”

“I have to get out of this house,” he said, scratching the back of one hand, his fingernails rasping on his skin.

We took his hansom across the bridge. We went to the Lower East Side, to Hester Street, which was home to throngs of Jews and the site of pushcart markets that even at this time of the afternoon were so crowded I could not tell the vendors from the customers. A mass of dark-haired, dark-eyed, dark-bearded men in felt hats and heavy overcoats broke ranks to let us through, their eyes blank, as if they did not so much see as sense the obstacles in front of them.

“They are all Jews,” Dr. Cook said. “But they are not all from the
same country. They speak different languages. That is why they must learn English.”

“Schleppers,” he said, pointing as though at a species of tree that did not grow in Newfoundland. Men, women and children toting heaps of unfinished garments from one sweatshop to another struggled by, bent double by their loads. It seemed that everything was being rebuilt in the aftermath of some disaster, people working at this pace for what they knew would be a finite length of time. “But it never ends,” said Dr. Cook. A woman wearing a shawl tied in a bow beneath her chin staggered by beneath a massive mound of men’s garters bound up with string. Another carried above her head a huge wooden box that Dr. Cook assured me was empty and would be used for kindling.

Only a few blocks away began Little Italy, Mulberry Bend. There were Italians now from Broadway to the Bowery, said Dr. Cook.

Above Fifty-ninth, on both the east and west sides, lived the Irish, and with them, he told me, most of the Newfoundlanders who had forsaken their massive, empty island for this crammed and tiny one. I told him I would rather not tour the Irish neighbourhoods, for fear of being recognized by someone from St. John’s. He nodded as if he knew exactly what I meant, knew what Aunt Daphne would do if she found out where I was.

We took the long way round to San Juan Hill, to Amsterdam Avenue between Sixtieth and Sixty-fourth streets, to Seventh Avenue near the future site of Pennsylvania Station. In these areas lived the city’s small black population. Conveyanceville, Dr. Cook called it, because all the employed black men conveyed either people or goods throughout the city. They were draymen, hackmen, teamsters, porters, packers, messengers.