The Navigator of New York (25 page)

“Are you my father?” I whispered.

“Of course,” he said, looking startled, then nervously about. “Of course I am. I didn’t mean to make you think otherwise. I would never mislead you about that. It is something else entirely. Please, Devlin, you must not feel that you have anything to fear from me.”

I did not want him to see how relieved I was, how terrified I had been. It might have made him doubt my emotional stability. Even once reassured, I doubted it myself. I realized that I had let myself
become dangerously dependent on him, on his approval, on meeting his expectations and on him meeting mine, on the notion that we shared some tandem destiny. No one person should be so relied upon, let alone one whose nature was so elusive.

We sat on either side of the fire, the reflection of which flickered in the mirror above the mantelpiece and on the ornate gilded ceiling. He insisted on a fire, though it was warm outside, telling me that at night this room was always cold. We turned on no lights, though even in the darkness I could see the chandelier. Unlit but faintly luminous, the chains invisible that attached it to the ceiling, it seemed to hang suspended in the air.

We did not face the fire. He sat on a sofa from which he could see both doors. I did not share the sofa with him but drew up a chair beside it.

“Tell me,” he said. “What do you think you will do after I am gone? After those who would be most hurt by the truth are gone?”

“Some of them are gone already,” I said. “My mother. Francis Stead.”

“Are you concerned with how people will remember them? Remember me, my wife, my other children? Do you care how people will remember you?”

“I will never tell anyone you are my father,” I said. “No one else will ever know.
You
must not believe that you have anything to fear from me. You are my father.” My father. Father. At last I had said it. And he had winced at the word, at my having broken my pledge never to call him anything but Dr. Cook. Would he never do as much for me and say I was his son? He had often used the words
father
and
son
in his letters.

“I believe you,” he said. “If people were other than they are, no one would have cause to fear the truth. But people, if they knew
this
truth, would never understand it.

“I have weighed telling you against not telling you, vacillating back and forth. I have, since your arrival, been favouring the former. I hope I have chosen correctly.

“Francis Stead at one time loved your mother very much. More, perhaps, than I ever did.”

“He might have loved her,” I said. “But he must have hated me.”

“I knew him for the length of the North Greenland expedition. Eighteen months. Has anyone told you about him, what he was like?”

“No one ever spoke about him unless they had to,” I said.

“I will tell you first about Francis Stead. He had no idea what motivated people, good or bad; no idea how others saw him. He did not think of himself as having a transparent nature. He assumed that he was as inscrutable to others as they were to him.

“He was always telling me things about himself that he thought I never would have guessed. He would make these self-disclosures in such earnestness, almost gravely, as if it were a relief to him that finally someone else knew of this shortcoming that for years had been his shameful secret.

“ ‘I’m not very good at conversation,’ he said once, as if I had never seen him attempt conversation.

“I could never bring myself to tell him that the things he was forever confessing to were common knowledge. I am making him sound almost child-like, which in a way he was. But there was another side to him. If he saw or suspected that people were having fun at his expense, he got very angry, not at them, but at himself for having done or said something—he usually had no idea what it was—to make himself look foolish.

“People laughed at him, but it was usually good-natured laughter. His ‘story’ was partly known. We had heard that he had left his wife and child to take up exploration, and that in his absence, his wife had died, though the circumstances of her death were not known. We all assumed she had died from some illness. I had no idea then who this wife and child were, who
he
was. Amelia had only ever called him ‘my fiancé.’ Lily had never spoken of him.

“He was well liked among explorers, the only people, he said, who could understand why he had sacrificed so much. But explorers laughed at him, too—at his grandiose ambitions, his ever-changing
goals, which he talked about as if he had accomplished them already. One day it was the North Pole. The next day the South Pole. The next day the summit of the highest mountain in the world.

“He might have prospered had he known his place, had he understood that he was not cut out for greatness. But to hear him talk, great men
already
included him in their number. People could not help laughing at him.

“ ‘Why am I so often laughed at?’ he said on the North Greenland expedition.

“ ‘You’re not,’ I said.

“ ‘Damn it,’ he said. ‘I’m just so … why can’t I …’He would never finish such sentences, just go about kicking things, to everyone’s further amusement.

“He told me he felt that he was the ‘mascot’ of the expedition. He might have become the mascot by random choice for all the sense it made to him.

“It was clear, from the start of the expedition, that Peary had hired him so he could bully him about. Francis, who believed Peary to be his friend, indulged his every whim.

“During the early stages of the expedition, I felt sorry for him because of the way Peary treated him, having him perform the most menial tasks. It was as if Peary wanted to see if there was
anything
that Francis would not stoop to doing. Francis, a doctor, disposed of waste, swept the floor of Peary’s quarters, filled in when the cook was sick. It was said, among the crew and the paying passengers of the
Kite
, that there were not two doctors and one manservant on board, but two manservants and one doctor.

“But Francis gradually changed. By the time of the land march back to southern Greenland, and especially by the time we returned to McCormick Bay, he was openly defiant of Peary. He stared at Peary while Peary was preoccupied with other things. He looked as though he meant to confront him for treating him so poorly, though Peary was by this time ignoring Francis as much as he could. Sometimes, I would look up to see Francis staring at
me
, wearing the same expression as
when he stared at Peary. What he had against me—except that, from the start, Peary had preferred my medical advice to his—I had no idea.

“Francis became more and more of a nuisance to Peary. The pieces that appeared about him in the papers after his death were largely true. He sometimes left the ship or Redcliffe House dressed as though for a walk in Prospect Park. More than once, he shed all his clothing and went swimming in the frigid water, claiming he was insensitive to its effects. He let his hair grow long and kept himself clean-shaven in imitation of the Eskimos.

“He told Peary he would not be returning with the rest of the expedition come the spring but would stay behind to live with the Eskimos, whose ways he preferred. Peary was furious, even though Francis was clearly no threat to reach the pole or even a farthest north.

“The rest of us told Peary that Francis was either ‘going Native,’ as many explorers have done, or else suffering from what the Eskimos call
piblocto, a
form of Arctic madness that would pass. I told Peary that it was best to indulge Francis until he was himself again, but Peary denounced his every utterance and action, which only made Francis worse.

“When the polar night set in, it became his habit to go outside alone to a tolt of rock. He would sit on the side that faced away from Redcliffe House, in the lee of the wind and out of sight. There was a kind of bench in it, a ledge that he sat on, though it was only a foot off the ground, so he had to extend his legs straight out to keep from squatting. I went out there once or twice myself when he was elsewhere. On the rock and the snow in front of it there were cigar butts and little mounds of half-burnt pipe tobacco.

“It was easy to picture him there in the darkness, bundled in furs, puffing on his pipes and his cigars, brooding on the terms of his existence, dreaming of the day when he would be acknowledged as a great explorer. Perhaps he believed that because he understood the effects that prolonged darkness could have on the mind and body, he was immune to them.

“We all, to some degree, shunned the company of others. The long
night made morbid introspection irresistible. But he was fooled by the gloom into thinking that to socialize would be a waste of precious energy. Each day, as he left the house, he told us he was going outside to pursue his own strategy for survival. Everything we did he regarded as a symptom, evidence of some delusion that might be contagious.

“Soon he was finding fault with everything I prescribed for the other members of the expedition. In their debilitated states, they didn’t know which of us they should listen to. He said that Peary was getting too much exercise, and that it was best that Mrs. Peary get none at all (the best for women being always opposite to what was best for men). He said that Verhoeff was reading too much. Gibson was getting too much sleep, Henson not enough. We should eat cooked canned meat, not raw fresh meat. A day later, though no one but me seemed to notice, he was saying just the opposite, or had shuffled his criticisms so that now it was Verhoeff’s regimen of sleep and Mrs. Peary’s reading habits that he found fault with.

“I had to overrule him constantly. The others, who when healthy would not have taken him seriously, were filled with doubt and dread because of this disagreement between the two medical officers. They argued as much with me as they did with him—even Peary, who when I warned him against adding more canned meat to his diet told me that Dr. Stead had said that by increasing his intake of canned meat, he would improve his circulation.

“I would have suspected Francis of trying to sabotage the expedition with bad medical advice except that he was so nearly deranged, so agitated, that I doubted he was capable of devising any sort of plan and sticking to it, even one as pointlessly sinister as that.

“Every morning our rounds would end in an argument, the two of us shouting at each other in front of our disconcerted patients until at last he would storm off, leaving Redcliffe House and not returning for hours. I had to keep the most credulous or most debilitated of the crew from going outside with him.

“When asked for advice upon his return, he would reply that he was sure that Dr. Cook’s was just as good, or that people who would
not listen to him in the morning ought not to seek advice from him at night.

“It must have been at his bench that he did his journal writing, for no one ever saw him write a word. He carried his journals with him everywhere he went, half a dozen swollen volumes with ragged edges and on top of them a fresh one whose pages were still blank. I imagined him scribbling away by moonlight with a fist-clenched pencil while he puffed on his cigars. All I ever saw him do in Redcliffe House was
read
his journals, looking as absorbed in them as if they had been written by someone else.

“When it was three months since we had seen the sun, his state of mind was such that I doubted he would recover. The weather by then was so bad that even he did not venture out of doors. Redcliffe House was recessed on three sides into a hill, built in a cave-like excavation so that only the front of it was exposed.

“There was a series of blizzards that lasted for weeks. It seemed impossible that the exposed wall would hold up against the wind. It buckled back and forth like a bed sheet. The door, though it had several layers, each one as thick as the entrance to a dungeon, rattled as though some giant were trying to force his way inside.

“Verhoeff curled up in the corner farthest from the door, covered his face with his hands, cringing and whimpering as though someone were beating him. The Pearys stayed in their ‘room’ behind the curtain. Gibson sat at the table with his hands over his ears, unable to stand the shrieking of the wind. I tried to read, but I could not help looking at the wall to see if it was giving way.

“Francis tacitly abdicated as medical officer, no longer dispensing criticisms or advice. He became so deeply despondent that he spoke to no one, not even me, not even when directly addressed, which seemed a welcome change at first. But the others were soon unsettled by the sight of him sitting against the wall all day long with his lower body in his sleeping bag, as motionless as a catatonic.

“He showed no signs of noticing when, thinking some physical malady might be at the root of his condition, I examined him. But he
was, if anything, healthier than some of the others, who were convinced that one morning they would wake up to find him dead.

“The weather was still bad when the sun returned, but he came out of his trance-like state almost instantly when Verhoeff pointed out the light at the edges of the boarded windows. I thought his recovery suspiciously abrupt, but the improvement in all of us was dramatic at this sign of the sun’s return. We spoke of nothing but the coming of spring, the prospect of being picked up by the ship and taken home.

“One day, when the ship was nearly due and he and I were returning across the scree, having examined two of the Eskimos who were ill, he asked me if he might confide in me. I said yes, and he led me to the tolt of rock.

“He sat down and patted the bench to indicate that I should join him. I did so. I thought he had taken me aside to apologize. In the past few weeks, he had resumed his duties as medical officer and had seemed almost sheepishly disinclined to talk about the past few months.

“It is not unusual, at the end of an expedition, for people to explain themselves to their commander or whichever member of the crew has held up best. The latter is usually the medical officer, if only because he alone, no matter what the circumstances, has a task he can perform, there being no better antidote to fear and gloom than purposeful work.