The Navigator of New York (3 page)

F
OR TWO YEARS, DURING WHICH WE GOT NO ANSWERS TO THE
letters we sent to my father in New York, not even the one telling him about my mother, I lived with Uncle Edward and Aunt Daphne in my mother’s house, to which they had moved after a kind of will was discovered. It was a note, what Uncle Edward called “a pithy bequeathal”: “I leave everything to Daphne.” Mother Stead had died a year before my mother. For that year, Uncle Edward and Aunt Daphne had been the sole occupants of the Stead home. My mother’s house was smaller and more suited to a couple with one child. The Stead house had been sold.

The day, in the fall of 1888, when they were officially declared my guardians, the day the court ruled that they would remain so even should my father come back home, Aunt Daphne made a special dinner. She had me wear my best blazer. She dressed as though for some formal occasion. Beneath her wrap, she wore a close-fitting silk dress that might have been new, for I had never seen it before, striped black and green with bands of jet embroidery, complete with drapery and bustle.

Uncle Edward wore a double-breasted frock coat with silk-faced lapels. His hair was slick with pomade, brushed back and parted down the middle.

“So, Devlin,” Aunt Daphne said before we took our places at the table, “how are things with you?”

Uncle Edward looked at her with amazement, as if it had not
before occurred to him that when not in his presence, I continued to exist. But Aunt Daphne persisted. She wanted to know how everything was with me: school, sports, choir practice. I told her how things were while Uncle Edward made such a clatter cutting up his food that I had to raise my voice to make myself heard.

When the subject of what was new with me was exhausted, there was silence. The wind was on the rise, and a sudden gust sprayed the window with particles of grit and stone. Uncle Edward stared at the fire behind me as if driven by one element into brooding contemplation of another. I looked at Aunt Daphne, who seemed so vulnerably hopeful in her finery. I imagined her preparing for this evening, choosing her outfit, making sure that everything looked just so, urging a reluctant Uncle Edward to do the same. There was something touching about the absence of all subtlety in her attempt to convey by her costume what she could not convey with words.

It had been a rule of Father Stead’s that there be no talking at the dinner table until everyone had finished. This was Uncle Edward’s rule as well, though impossible to obey because he ate so slowly. He seemed to go into a trance while eating, eyes staring blankly while he chewed.

“You’d think the two of us were bolters,” Aunt Daphne said. “We finish so far ahead of you.”

At first, Uncle Edward ignored her, but when provoked several times in this fashion, he said, “You eat too fast.”

“We would eat more slowly if you would speak from time to time,” she said, to no reaction from Uncle Edward.

The meal was passed in this manner, protracted silences interrupted by remarks from Aunt Daphne and laconic, chastening retorts from Uncle Edward. When he emptied his plate but did not push it away, she got up and refilled it, glancing apologetically at me. When he was finished, he abruptly stood and went into the front room to have his brandy and cigar.

“Can you imagine what it was like when there were just the two of us?” Aunt Daphne said, smiling. She leaned across the table towards
me and whispered: “Their plates wiped clean they sit and wait / While at the trough he ruminates.” It was as if she believed the specialness of the occasion called for the disclosure of a secret.

By consulting the dictionary, I discovered what was meant by
ruminates
. I repeated the couplet at school, which in itself was harmless, since none of the children really understood it, perhaps because of how ineptly I explained it to them. But the couplet, its author and the couple about whom it was written became known to teachers at the school, and from them, by exactly what means I would never know, it got back to Uncle Edward.

I found on my pillow one night when I went up to bed a note from Uncle Edward, which read: “I am told you go about repeating rhymes about my ‘ruminations.’ I am sorry that my hospitality does not inspire you to greater things.”

Whenever there was mention in the paper of one of the expeditions on which my father served, Aunt Daphne would make some mischievous remark about it to Uncle Edward, not realizing I could hear her.

“I know it is cold in Greenland,” she said. “I don’t need men to prove it by going there and coming back with frostbite.”

“White men study Eskimos,” she said. “Do you think the day is coming soon, Edward, when a band of Eskimos sent to study you and me will turn up on the sidewalks of St. John’s?”

She spoke of a recent publication that bore my father’s name, a dictionary of the language spoken by a small tribe of Eskimos in Greenland. “The Akkuk, they’re called,” she said. “No longer, Edward, must I remain mute in the company of Akkuks. No more shall dinner parties in St. John’s end in an argument about the spelling of some Akkuk word.”

“Just what I have always wanted,” she said one night, after she read aloud an account of a stranded, recently rescued expedition, “people to say, ‘There goes Daphne Stead, whose brother-in-law once kept himself alive for months by eating dogs.’ “

After they had gone to bed, Uncle Edward would retaliate by
holding forth to Aunt Daphne about my mother, his voice so loud he must have known it carried to my room.

“Small wonder,” he said, “that my brother, after two years of marriage to her, decided that the North Pole was a better bargain.”

Aunt Daphne said something in reply, but I couldn’t make it out.

“How many women are there, I wonder,” he said, “whose company makes the prospect of spending six months of darkness in bone-marrow-chilling cold seem irresistible?”

“Edward,” Aunt Daphne said, then went on in a remonstrating tone, clearly telling him to lower his voice, though again I could not hear the words.

“What I say about Francis, I say in jest,” she said. “But you—”

“Thank God the boy is only half composed of her,” he said. “The other half is Francis. At least there is that. There was much to admire in Francis at one time. Before he wound up with her.”

In a scene that might belong to memory, imagination or Aunt Daphne, I am walking down the hallway when my father emerges from his study and, seeing me, stoops down to my height and says something. All I can see is a shape that might be that of any man.

I had more memories of my mother, but they were all very much like the one I had of him. I remembered a featureless, peripheral presence that I knew was her. I remembered being in her company in different rooms of the house. Riding in the cabriolet with her beside me. Walking hand in hand with her along a street that I assumed was Devon Row. But I remembered nothing of what she wore, nothing of what she said or did or what our destinations were. I could not see her face.

I was six when my mother died. It made sense that I retained only that one vague, possibly counterfeit image of my father, given how young I was when he went away. But it seemed I should have had a few memories in which my mother was more than just a presence, someone whose only trait was her relationship to me.

It was as if my memory of my mother was joined to that of my father, as if my mother was being pulled under by my father, who had
sunk from sight. I could still see her, but she was at too great a depth to make her out in any detail. One day, just as he had, perhaps
because
he had, she would vanish altogether.

It was strange that two people about whom I remembered little could affect me so profoundly, two people who, it seemed to me, I had never known but yet were constantly with me. Others—Aunt Daphne, Uncle Edward—remembered them, were reminded of them when they looked at me. It was as though they stood on either side of me, visible to everyone but me.

There were a couple of photographs of my father in the house, discreetly, neutrally displayed. One, a small cameo daguerreotype, stood among an assortment of others on the sideboard in the hall, just at the foot of the stairs. The other was the third of four photographs arranged on the wall as you climbed the stairs, only just visible by the light from the lamp outside my bedroom. It was as if they were meant to seem to visitors more like acknowledgments than mementoes, the message being that we would not stoop to repaying his delinquency by denying his existence, but nor did he any longer play much on our minds. It wasn’t true, of course. There was never a time when I was not fascinated by those images of my absent father. Hair slicked close to his skull and parted down the middle. A large moustache that scrolled upward on both ends. As with all eyes in daguerreotype portraits, his seemed to be lit from within. I didn’t know this was an effect of the photographing process.

In the front room, there was a daguerreotype of my mother, on the back of which was scribbled, in what Aunt Daphne said was my mother’s hand, “Amelia, the wicked one.” Aunt Daphne said the picture was taken not long after their engagement. She was standing, hands on hips, lips pursed, eyebrows lifted, perhaps in amusement at the very idea that by having this new-fangled gadget called a camera aimed at her, she could be made to lose her poise.

Aunt Daphne took a great deal of pleasure in spoiling me, though Uncle Edward seemed to take none in watching her do so. I think that when he looked at me, he was reminded of his brother, so
undeservedly blessed with a child whom he hadn’t bothered to see in years.

At Christmas, on my birthday, he sat watching from a distance while Aunt Daphne joined me on the floor as I tore the ribbon and wrapping from my presents. Each time I let out a shout of delight or surprise, she would look at Uncle Edward and smile, and he, unable or unwilling to pretend that he was not merely doing it for her sake, would smile back, the tight-lipped smile that one would give a child whose belief in the possibility of happiness might as well be indulged.

I thought that perhaps this was how men were with children—reserved, disinterested—my father having taken to extremes an attitude typified by Uncle Edward. Uncle Edward seemed generally aloof, sceptical, as if his vocation and his character had blended, and he viewed all things with diagnostic objectivity, forever watching and keeping to himself a horde of observations, his expression hinting at a shrewdness he could not be bothered demonstrating.

Aunt Daphne went with me when I fished for trout in the ponds and streams around which the city had grown up. For bait, I used night crawlers, large earthworms that came up on the grass at night, and that, even with a lantern, were very hard to see, let alone catch. The grass in the yard behind the house was not very high and so was perfect for night crawlers.

“It’s time for Spotters and Grabbers,” Aunt Daphne would say when it was dark. The spotter held the bucket and the flashlight, and the grabber crept up on the worm and, before it could dart back underground, grabbed it with both hands. I was usually the grabber, but Aunt Daphne would help me if a worm I had hold of was partway underground. She would put down the lantern and the two of us would kneel, hunching over the worm like a pair of surgeons. Using all four hands, we would ease it bit by bit from the ground, she with her face averted in case the worm broke in half. Uncle Edward watched from the kitchen window. When Aunt Daphne waved to him, he would turn away.

“We used to play Spotters and Grabbers, didn’t we, Edward?” I
heard her say once after I had gone to bed. “We had our own version. It was very different from Dev’s, wasn’t it?” It sounded like she was standing at the bottom of the stairs. There was no answer. “Well,” she said more tenderly, “we still have our games.” He made some inaudible reply.

Because of a high hill on the south side of the city called the Brow, you could see the harbour but not the sea from most parts of St. John’s. It was easy to pretend that the harbour was a lake, and that nothing lay beyond the Brow but still more lakes and hills. Only from a certain place could you see out through the Narrows, at the mouth of which the sea abruptly changed, churned up by the wind that one foot the other way you couldn’t feel, the harbour and the sea in such opposing states of agitation it was hard to believe that both were water.

“It’s time you really saw the sea,” Aunt Daphne said one day.

She and I drove in my mother’s cabriolet, pulled by Pete, to the top of Signal Hill. As we ascended, I looked behind me at the city, which from that height assumed the shape it had on maps. We lived on the edge of civilization. North of St. John’s there were settlements with names, but you could not call them towns. St. John’s was on the edge of a frontier that had not changed since it was fixed four hundred years ago. I imagined what it looked like from the sea, the last light on the coast as you went north, the last one worth investigating anyway. The forest behind the outlying houses was as dense as the forest in the core. In the woods between neighbourhoods, men set snares for rabbits, hunted birds with rifles within a hundred feet of schoolyards. Not outside the city but at some impossible-to-pinpoint place inside it, civilization left off and wilderness began.

Halfway up the hill, the road reached a plateau on which there were two hospitals, both strictly quarantined, one for diphtheria and fever, and one for smallpox. The road gave them as wide a berth as was permitted by the tolts of rock. I looked up at the blockhouse, from which mercantile flags were hoisted whenever ships making for St. John’s came into view. The purpose of the flags was to alert waterfront
firms that their ships were coming, giving them time to prepare for docking and unloading.

“I saw the sea for the first time when I was twelve years old,” Aunt Daphne said. She described how one day, in defiance of her parents and her teachers, she first went up on Signal Hill. It was not to see the sea, she said. She went with some other girls, whose real goal was to see the gallows, about which they had heard so many stories. But they went off course and wound up on the summit of the hill.