The Navigator of New York (24 page)

He pointed out to me groups of children he said were “street arabs.” Born in tenements from which they had been crowded out when their parents could not pay the rent, they now lived on the streets. They looked as if they had just emerged from coal mines, their faces and clothing were so filthy.

He said he had thought of childhood as a stage of life when everyone
was disposed to hopefulness no matter what their circumstances, until he set eyes on these boys and girls. “I would look at them and think of you,” he said.

They were not children, he said. They could not remain children in this city and survive. So it was as if some whole new stage of life had been invented for them, by them. Only by night did they look like children, when they lay down in the doorways and the stairwells, three or four of them huddled so closely together, so entwined, you could not tell whose feet were whose, whose arms and legs were whose. Sometimes all you saw were bundles of coats and caps and shoes.

“But I should warn you,” he said. “You will encounter them as you go about your job. They will see that you are new here, and if they sense that you feel sorry for them, they will take advantage of you. They smell pity the way dogs smell fear. They will tell you that their mother or father or sister needs help, that no one but you has been kind enough to listen to them. Once they have convinced you of how much they value kindness and how exceptional you are, they will lead you down a side street, where the hoodlums they work for will be waiting for you.”

We went to the Upper East Side, drove from Murray Hill at Thirty-fourth Street to Ninety-first Street, past mansions that made Mrs. Cook’s look like a guest house. Even close up, they looked more like hotels or banks than homes, sprawling over entire city blocks. They had no yardage, front or back or on the sides.

“There is no room in this part of Manhattan for yards,” he said. “Not if you want to have houses the size of these. But they have other houses, in the country or at the seashore, as large or larger than these, surrounded by acres of land.”

He pointed out the Vanderbilt residence at Fifth Avenue and Fifty-second Street, the Astor residence at Fifth Avenue and Sixty-fifth Street, the Carnegies’ at Fifth and Ninety-first.

We toured the Upper West Side, drove along Riverside Drive, where the newest mansions were, some of them still under construction, draped in canvas hung on scaffolding as if they were soon to be unveiled.

We went to the apartment building after which he had named the west side of his house, the Dakota Apartments at Central Park West and Seventy-second Street. Eight storeys high, with gabled columns topped by minarets like those of Ellis Island on its front façade and a sixth-floor railing on which were propped Zeuses and griffins made of marble, it was, he said, his favourite building in Manhattan.

“They say that looking north from the upper storeys, you can still see the fires of the shanty camps at night. See how it looms up out of nowhere, with nothing but the sky behind it? It is perfectly square, eleven rows of windows on each side. See. They haven’t even paved the streets here yet, seventeen years since the cornerstone was laid. The people who live here want them left unpaved. It discourages visitors, developers. Rich people rent here, those who make their money in the arts, publishers of books and music. Theodor Steinway used to live here. That was in the 1880s, when it was the last western outpost of the city. From its north-facing windows, all you could see then were trees and farms and shanty towns. They say that men shot small game from those upper windows. Imagine it: hunting without having to step outdoors or even go downstairs. When the shooting stopped, the shanties would come out of the woods and gather up the game, rabbits, foxes, and cook them over open fires.”

He said that the men who had lived on the lower floors rode the elevators with their rifles to the roof gardens. Elevators were new then, to ride one a novelty in itself. I could just see those men pouring like a posse from the elevators, rushing to the rail to get the best spots. I imagined people watching the Dakota from a distance, hearing the sounds of rifle shots, seeing the puffs of smoke from the upper storey, from the battlements, as if its residents were nightly required to defend this fortress from invaders.

It really did rear up from out of nowhere like a castle, as though it were all that remained of a city of which it once had been the centrepiece, a city razed to the ground, the land it once stood on now being claimed back by the wilderness. It was like a bulwark against the northern horde. I thought of the tenants on the roof and
at the windows of the floor below, sniping at the shanties as they readied to invade.

There was nothing homiletic in his tone of voice, though it seemed clear from
what
he said that to him the Dakota was a monumental point of demarcation between the old and the new, the wilderness and the city, the poor and the rich.

On the Uppers, as Dr. Cook called the most northerly settled parts of the island, lived the backers, the very men, the “hundred millionaires” of the Peary Arctic Club, who had backed Peary’s most recent bid to reach the pole, a bid they thought might still succeed. What would they think, he wondered, if they knew that all they were paying for was a pointlessly protracted, face-saving sojourn in Greenland?

“There are many kinds of wealth, just as there are many kinds of poverty,” said Dr. Cook. “The people in these houses, who are so looked down upon by the few aristocrats in England who have heard of them, do not associate with the beer barons of Bushwick, nor do the beer barons associate with the physicians, nor the physicians with the homeopaths. I tell Marie that it is because our ghost, the elusive Lipsius, is such a snob that he never shows himself. Some of our neighbours do not approve of the woman to whom the Lipsius family sold its house. They resent the presence among them of a widow whose first husband made his money selling quack remedies to hypochondriacs. They approve of explorers, but not so much that they boast about having one next door.”

He spoke as if these were the objective observations of a sociologist, in no way revealing of his own biases or character.

I saw, I had to see, the city through his eyes, for my own could make no sense of it. It was too far beyond anything I had ever seen before, too expansive, too diverse in both its plenitude and scarcity, extravagance and deprivation, to register on my perception as anything but chaos.

He agreed that it was stupefying, but there was also, he said, something naively futuristic about it, a sense of faddishness, as if all these
so-called advancements might one day be abandoned, and those who had fallen for them, invested in them, would be laughed at. As if the city might be going through a phase that people in the future would recall with fond amusement. History might record turn-of-the-century Manhattan as no more than an exemplar of the excesses to which gullibility could lead.

He said he saw it in the faces of the people we passed, and felt it, just barely, beneath all the optimism and excitement. He believed that each time they heard of some new invention, some new and better way of doing things, the people of this city felt a little foolish. Or rather, some of the people felt this way, those whom one might call the marks of this society.

“Do you know who the marks are?” he said.

“No,” I said.

Not the rich, he said; not the entrepreneurs, or the inventors, or the poor, who built the city with their hands, or the destitute.

“Then who?” I said.

“You and me,” he said. “The middle mass of men.” That portion of society on whom, on whose gullibility and guilelessness, all of the above relied for their survival. We were the ones the new city was intended to impress. Did I think it was intended to impress the street arabs or the unseen occupants of tenements that were home to more people than every settlement in Newfoundland except St. John’s? Did I think I would ever live to see a man like Jacob Astor gaping at the Brooklyn Bridge? No, the city was intended to captivate us, the ones who, it was hoped, would partake of things we played no part in making, things that, although we could afford them, were beyond our understanding and control.

“Yes, people like me,” he said. “At least, people of my station before I fell in love with someone who happened to be rich.”

I had only the faintest notion of what he meant, and none at all of why he was getting so worked up.

He pointed out men wearing Homburg hats, men with walking sticks who watched as steam shovels lurched about in excavation sites,
gawked in befuddlement at the demolition of a building twice their age of whose imminent demise they appeared to have known nothing until this very moment. This middle class of men, Dr. Cook said, was an invention more profound than all the others put together.

We followed the eastern edge of Central Park, went west for a few blocks, then south until once again the streets were jammed with people and conveyances.

“The noise seems to be part of what drives the city,” he said. “As does the lack of light and space and air. Perhaps it has been determined that for New York to grow at its present pace, exactly these conditions must prevail.”

Most streetcar lines and el trains were electrified. Overhead there were so many wires it was as though a loosely woven fragment had been draped above the city. “But at least,” he said, “soot and cinders do not rain down from above as they did when Amelia was here.”

At this mention of my mother, I asked him if the house where he had met her was still standing.

“Almost nothing from twenty years ago is still standing,” he said.

After a long interval of silence, he added, “I believe it is still there. It’s been more than fifteen years since I went by it. I haven’t even seen it from the outside since the last time I waitered there. The doctors who once owned it moved out long ago. I’ve gone out of my way to avoid them
and
their house. I don’t know who lives there now.”

“Will you take me there?” I said.

“If you would like to see it, you will have to go alone. I will tell you where it is, but I could not bear to go with you.”

“I just want to see it,” I said. “I don’t want to go inside. I don’t see why you can’t go with me.”

“I don’t know why you want me to.”

“It will seem less like a secret then, our being related. I know it has to be one, but not between us. It’s like your wanting me to call you Dr. Cook even when there’s no one else around.”

“Going by that house would stir up painful memories for me. Shameful ones.”

“Then you must have those memories when you look at me.”

“It’s not the same, Devlin.”

“It feels the same to me. Your not wanting to go makes
me
feel ashamed.”

“The more we talk about this in private, the harder it will be to pretend in front of other people.”

“Francis Stead and my mother didn’t die because of you. All that happened because of you was
me.”

“I’m sorry. I can’t go with you. I will give you the address; you can go there in a cab and meet me—”

“No,” I said. “I’m tired of sneaking about all the time. If, someday, you change your mind, we’ll go together.”

He said nothing.

On we drove. After a while, I noticed that we were headed for the bridge. The streets were nowhere near as crowded as before. The sky above Brooklyn was no longer blue. The light was fading fast.

“Not everything I wrote to you in my letters is true,” he said, staring straight ahead, as expressionless as if I were a paying passenger.

I felt a spurt of panic. What was I about to hear? Anything seemed possible, here in this city where being unable to speak English would not have made me feel more out of place than I felt already. What a fool I was to think I could simply enlist in a history that wasn’t mine. His history, this city’s, this country’s—none of them was mine.

“What do you mean?” I said, expecting him to reveal nothing less than that, after all, he was not my father; that all my worst fears were justified; that the notion that I was his son was a fiction that for him served some inscrutable purpose that, now that I had stepped out of my life and into his, he was about to own up to to be rid of me. I was not who I thought I was, not his son but Francis Stead’s after all, back to being Francis Stead’s. I broke into a sweat and felt so weak he had to take my arm to keep me from pitching from the cab.

“I cannot tell you here,” he said, half shouting, half whispering. “I thought that driving about the city would divert me from the urge to tell you. Perhaps I should have gone out driving by myself.”

I have no proof, I told myself. He has no proof. No proof is possible. I took the word of a man I had never met. Who is he, after all? What, besides what
he
has told me, do I know about him? I had been unable to resist those letters because I
wanted
to believe they were true. How circumscribed the world had seemed, how predictable the future, before the first one came.

“Dr. Cook—”

“We will meet in the Dakota, and I will tell you there.”

W
E MET IN THE DRAWING ROOM AFTER HE WENT TO THE
C
OOKS’
to tell his wife that he and I had business to discuss. The largest room in the Dakota, it was the one in which we could sit farthest from the doors and walls, keeping to a minimum the chance that the sound of our voices might carry through them.

The room, the never-lived-in room that even with us in it still seemed unoccupied, served only to increase my sense of not belonging, of having made some terrible, irreversible mistake. Going back to Newfoundland would not reverse it. Nothing would. I had started down a path that I could not bear to double back from, a path that even if only in my mind I would follow to the end. Back home—knowing that what I had been looking forward to for years would never happen, that the person I thought I was had never been—I might well end up like my mother. And Francis Stead. Francis Stead’s son after all. Only in dreams had I ever felt such dread.