The Navigator of New York (38 page)

“And you, Mrs. Frick,” he said.

I guessed that Mrs. Frick was in her mid-fifties. She wore a large green feather in her hair and the mock décolletage favoured by older women who thought the bare-shouldered style no longer flattering to them—an opaque, flesh-coloured mantle from which, at the height of her bosom, her black gown depended. After we were introduced, she took my arm.

“I wonder if I might borrow you, young man,” she said. “There will not be enough time for everyone to meet you both, though of course they would like to, so we have decided to split you up. I’m sure Dr. Cook can fend for himself?”

Dr. Cook smiled at her and nodded, and just as Mrs. Frick turned away, he smiled reassuringly at me.

Both hands on my upper arm, she led me along the edge of the guests, past punchbowls swimming with cherries and wedges of lemons and limes. We surveyed what might have been a foods-of-the-world display, including a sculpture of Neptune fashioned from whole salmon with jets of water spouting from their eyes. Somewhere beneath all those fish there had to have been a fountain, but I could not make it out.

She took me to the nearest available pair of chairs, where we sat down. Still holding my arm, sitting side-on to me and looking at the floor as if to do so helped her to formulate her words and to hear my answers, she said she expected that I had not often had to “endure” an event like this one. Before I could object to the word
endure
, she told me she planned to make the evening as painless for me as possible.

“I will take you around and introduce you to those people by whom you are least likely to be bored. Of course, no one will mind if you do not wish to dance—”

“But I would like to dance,” I said. “I would like it very much.”

“Then you’ve danced before?” she said, still staring, as if the better to appraise me, at the floor.

“Yes,” I said. “Many times. I’m thought to be quite a good dancer.”

“That’s wonderful,” she said, though clearly she was wondering if I meant the same thing by
dance
as she did.

She introduced me to a great many people, never allowing me to stay long in one place, steering me away from people she said she had already introduced me to, though I could not remember having met them. Looking about the room, I could not remember having met anyone. But Mrs. Frick, I was certain, was keeping track and, even had there been five thousand guests in the room, would not have made the mistake of introducing me to the same one twice.

I was congratulated over and over for having saved Lieutenant Peary’s life.

A number of young women who looked to be unescorted stood
in a semi-circle near the wall, all talking at once, it seemed, though they stopped talking and smiled when they saw me staring at them.

Mrs. Frick led me over and introduced me to each of them in turn. Though they were my age, they had an assurance about them, an ease of manner, that even Mrs. Frick did not possess.

“Devlin Stead, the young man you have all heard so much about,” Mrs. Frick said.

“How do you do, Mr. Stead?” they said one after the other, and one after the other I kissed their gloved hands, which they offered to me until the repetition struck me as absurd, though they betrayed not the least embarrassment.

“Mr. Stead says he is thought to be quite a good dancer,” Mrs. Frick said. “Perhaps you should include him on your dance cards.”

There was a chorus of “Yes, indeeds,” and much scribbling on cards that seemed to appear from out of nowhere and just as quickly disappear.

Except for the colours of their evening gowns, the women at the Fall Ball were dressed almost as uniformly as the men. Their gowns were décolleté, cut very low to just above the cleavage, so that the bare necks, arms, shoulders and upper backs of women were distractingly everywhere.

It was as if they were all wearing the same form-fitting, ideally complected, skin-like fabric, chosen because it would show to best advantage beneath the chandeliers of the Vanderbilt ballroom.

Through it faintly showed the shapes of collar-bones and shoulder-blades, though
clavicles
and
scapulas
were the words that came to mind, delicate, fragile words better suited for describing the frames of girls like these than
bones
and
blades
.

Many of the women wore chokers that seemed to be pinned to them by brooches that fit snugly in the hollows of their throats. Almost all the women clasped, at waist height with both hands, small mesh bags made of tightly interwoven metal links. Some were silver, some gold. A couple of the women sported beau-catcher curls in the middle of their foreheads.

“Step-step-close, step-step-close,” I kept repeating to myself. What a fool I had been to boast of my proficiency at something I had not done in years. It had been second nature to me at one time, requiring little more effort, little more concentration, than walking. For all I knew, the sort of dancing that Aunt Daphne had taught me had gone out of fashion everywhere but Newfoundland a hundred years ago. What if, in this time of invention, someone had dreamed up a new kind of dancing?

To my relief, the orchestra, when it began to play, did so in my accustomed three-quarter time.

One of the young women Mrs. Frick had introduced me to approached us.

“Mr. Stead,” she said.

“Miss Sumner,” said Mrs. Frick.

“Thank you, Mrs. Frick,” Miss Sumner said. “I have only a few new names to remember. Poor Mr. Stead has hundreds.” She held out her arms to me. I took her hand, and we began to dance.

Miss Sumner. Having for so many years been deprived of fellowship, I was almost overwhelmed now to be faced with this open-armed young woman, who might have been appointed to dance with me as a gesture of propitiation. The meaning of her smile might have been that, though I had been wronged, I should regard the past as past, there being no remedy for it but to keep it from determining my future.

In one way, I had broken free into the world the instant I leapt into that rowboat at the foot of Signal Hill, had been making my way further and further into it since then. But here, it seemed, was my official, ceremonial welcomer—not Dr. Cook, not Clarence Wyckoff or the Vanderbilts, but this young woman whose first name I did not know and who had no idea, any more than did the other guests, perhaps including Dr. Cook, how momentous an event this was for me. It was as though I was being exonerated of a crime of which I had been presumed guilty for so long that I had come to
feel
that I was guilty of it. I felt so many things at once—relief, self-pity, gratitude, resentment, curiosity, arousal—that there rose up in me what I was
almost too late in realizing was the urge to cry. I hoped that the struggle to suppress it did not show.

I was not used to being watched while I danced, let alone surrounded by other dancers, but I soon grew accustomed to it. At first, Miss Sumner felt like an annoyingly altered version of Aunt Daphne. Everything about her seemed slightly off, but she seemed not to notice my annoyance and gradually it passed. I had never been this close to any woman but Aunt Daphne before, had never been allowed so close a look at any woman’s bare arms, neck, shoulders and back before. I spoke only when she spoke to me, or rather only when she asked a question, which she did repeatedly, as if word had gone out from Mrs. Frick that nothing less than a question would draw any sort of response from me. I felt like I was being interviewed. Not that I minded. I tried to answer such unanswerable questions as “What is Greenland like?” To elaborate beyond yes or no my replies to such questions as “Did it hurt when you broke your arm?”

The second woman I had danced with in my life and the first one not related to me. The first one of the latter kind to whom, under any circumstances, I had been this close. It seemed a miracle, this young woman’s face, her eyes, her nose, her lips almost touching mine. The smell of her perfume. The smell of her hair. The soft, pliant feel of her upper back beneath my hand, the part of her back that exactly corresponded to her left breast. The wonder of moving in concert with a woman, her body moving in willing sympathy with mine.

She seemed impossibly poised. Nowhere on all the bare parts of her was there so much as a hint of high colour. I had always, when aroused, felt as though my own body was mocking me, mocking the idea that for me women would ever be anything more than things to be gawked at from afar, material for fantasies of which I could never bring myself to make practical use, knowing how I was regarded by the girls and women who inspired them.

Fresh from my long-imposed solitude, I could not believe that after Miss Sumner, another woman would dance with me, and after her another—that I was being sought after.

I felt that I had spent my life in a cell, and that, though it still contained me, though I was not yet free to leave it, I was at last being allowed visitors, a steady stream of whom were filing through to meet me.

I was soon able to gauge in seconds the distinctive rhythm of each woman. There were some good dancers among them, but most of them danced as though performing by rote some necessary and painstakingly acquired social skill.

It seemed to me that there was something frank, generous, almost wanton in the way the young women held open their arms as they prepared to receive me.

My hand still warm from the last hand I had held, I took hold of another—my shoulder still warm from the last hand that had rested there, another one was placed upon it—and the whole thing began again, a new pair of eyes to look into, a new face close to mine, a new voice issuing from lips that I could not stop staring at or wishing I could kiss. Men and women could not touch like this in public, could not converse at such close quarters except when they were dancing. Hurray for dancing, which conveyed this strange but wonderful exemption.

Sometimes, if I looked long enough at the other dancers, all I saw were the bared upper bodies of the women, a teeming fleet of marble busts, as if the sculptures in the hollows of the walls, having left their pedestals, were gliding about in perilous proximity.

The women seemed to find it both charming and also faintly amusing that someone so uncultivated, someone who looked like he could not have
named
the other social graces, had become so masterful at one of them. I saw that they were intrigued, but that they could think of no way of asking me to satisfy their curiosity that would not offend me.

An account of the Fall Ball and my part in it would appear the next day in the society pages of the papers under the bylines of people who had attended the event and whom I had taken to be guests, among them Mrs. Frick, who listed, in the order in which I danced
with them, every one of my partners, pointing out whose daughters they were and to whom of note they were otherwise related. Me she would describe as “taciturn but self-composed, a trait he seems to have learned from Dr. Cook; a marvellous dancer, his manner of becoming which was the subject of much debate among his charming partners; deceptively frail-looking, almost delicate, except for his eyes, which are those of a young man well used to roughing it.”

Between dances, I could think of nothing to say to the young women who surrounded me. I tried to affect an air of laconic modesty, as if I was not tongue-tied but was staying silent merely to impress upon my admirers that altogether too much fuss was being made over me for having saved Lieutenant Peary’s life.

I soon realized that it didn’t really matter what I said or did, so eager were they to meet an explorer, so determined to find him interesting and thus make it a greater distinction to have been among the first to meet him. They spoke as if I had been an explorer before the rescue expedition, had merely come to prominence by rescuing Lieutenant Peary—that being my most significant accomplishment, but by no means my first.

From time to time, I saw Dr. Cook watching me, taking time out from conversations with men I assumed to be backers to throw my way a worried glance, which, when our eyes met, turned into a smile. He was not dancing, no doubt because it was primarily the men he was hoping to impress.

“Explorers are so often in peril that for one of them to save another’s life is commonplace,” I heard myself saying. This was met with a chorus of protest led by Mrs. Frick, who sounded mortified that I had committed this social gaffe while in her custody.

“There is nothing commonplace about a man your age saving the life of a man like Lieutenant Peary,” loudly said an especially distinguished-looking middle-aged man who until now had been watching from the margins of the group that surrounded me.

“I am Morris Jesup,” he said. The others parted as he extended his hand to me. “President of the Peary Arctic Club. Young man, you
performed a service not only for Lieutenant Peary and his family, but for all of us and for this country, too. Lieutenant Peary is a national treasure whom, if not for you, we would have lost. There is every reason to believe that you will be officially rewarded for your actions. By way of recommending you for the Harding Medal, I have sent to the navy the testimony of several men who witnessed what you did. The Harding is one of the highest honours the navy can bestow for service to this country.”

Everyone within earshot burst into applause as if Jesup had just pinned the Harding Medal to my chest. There were further eruptions as news of what Jesup had said moved from group to group throughout the hall.

Jesup looked at me, as if to say that to belittle my heroism was to belittle the object of it.

I looked around in search of Dr. Cook, but he was nowhere to be seen. I felt foolish for having tried to speak like the seasoned explorer they were all pretending to believe I was—for having spoken with such transparently false modesty in front of a man as important as Jesup was to Dr. Cook’s ambitions, a man in a position to be even more aware than the others how absurd it was for me to have held forth as though I was a representative member of the fraternity of explorers, who daily saved each other’s lives as matter-of-factly as they put on their hats and coats.