The Navigator of New York (42 page)

I had written to Aunt Daphne of our plans to climb McKinley and wrote to her again upon returning to New York.

Dr. Cook spent fewer nights in the Dakota than he had before the
expedition to McKinley. One night, when he did come to the drawing room, he told me that his wife was four months pregnant.

Mrs. Cook gave birth to a healthy girl whom they called Helen. When she was two weeks old, I was, to my surprise, invited to the Cooks’ to see her. Mrs. Cook was in the parlour, the baby in a basket on her lap, a bundle of plaid within which Helen was sleeping, no part of her visible except her tiny, pinched red face.

“She’s very pretty,” I whispered.

I had spoken with real affection at this first sight of my first sibling, my half-sister. Helen. I had spoken so tenderly that Dr. Cook, as if by way of reminding me to be discreet, backed away and sat in a chair across the room. But Mrs. Cook smiled at me as she never had before.

“Who do you think she looks like?” said Mrs. Cook.

I might have said, “She looks like me.” The words sounded in my mind. She was too young, too small to look like anything except a baby, but I said I thought she looked more like her mother than her father. Mrs. Cook smiled warmly at me again.

“I
HAVE NOTICED SOMETHING UNUSUAL ABOUT YOU AND
D
R
. Cook,” Miss Sumner said.

I tried not to look as taken aback as I felt.

“There is a strange kind of awkwardness between you,” she said. “You seem uncomfortable in each other’s presence. You always stand slightly farther apart from each other than other people do. I have seen boys do this who wish to make it seem that they are unaccompanied, that it is pure coincidence that their mother or father is standing beside them. Yet when the two of you are separated, each of you is constantly looking about in search of the other. The strangest thing of all, however, is this: you do not
call
him anything. You just look at him and speak, as if you remember his face but not his name. And as if to compensate for this, he uses your name too frequently, sometimes saying it twice in a single sentence. Devlin, Devlin, Devlin. It sounds unnatural somehow. And each time you re-encounter one another, you look as though it is all you can do to keep from shaking hands.”

She had to have been attending to us very closely, or been uncommonly perceptive, to have noticed so much. There was a familiarity about her, an appealing presumptuousness that at gatherings seemed out of place. On this occasion, it disarmed me.

I did not know how to reply to her. By whom else, I wondered, were Dr. Cook and I being so closely scrutinized?

“I was not aware of any awkwardness between Dr. Cook and me, Miss Sumner,” I said. “Though perhaps I will be from now on.”

“Oh, dear,” Miss Sumner said. “I fear that I have spoken out of turn.”

“You mean, you
hope
you have,” I said.

She smiled and raised her eyebrows in a kind of mock tribute to my wit.

“You haven’t spoken out of turn,” I said. “It’s just that I think you’re mistaken. There really is no awkwardness between him and me.”

“I have a confession to make,” she said. “I have been watching you and Dr. Cook this evening. Because of something my mother said.”

She looked intently at me, as if she had hoped by her remark to provoke me into some sort of admission.

“You are blushing,” Miss Sumner said.

“I often blush,” I said. “As someone who watches me so closely ought to know.”

“I asked my mother if she had ever met Dr. Cook,” she said. “I did not tell her why I asked—that is, I did not tell her that
you
had once asked
me
if she had met him. I was, if you’ll forgive my saying so, a little more tactful, a little less blunt, in my approach than you were. I told her that she really had to meet you and Dr. Cook sometime, since she once knew your mother. ‘Of course,’ I said, ‘you may already have met Dr. Cook. He seems to know everyone you know. It hardly seems possible that your paths haven’t crossed.’ Then my mother said something very surprising. She said that she
had
met Dr. Cook, but that it had been before they started moving in the same social circles. She met him many years ago, she said, when he was, as she put it, ‘even younger than Amelia’s boy.’ She said that her encounter with him was such that even after all this time, she did not wish to repeat it. Now what do you make of that?”

“I cannot imagine,” I said, “why anyone, having once met Dr. Cook, would not wish to do so again. Perhaps your mother has mistaken him for someone else.”

“My mother is barely fifty,” Miss Sumner said. “Not nearly old enough, I should think, to make a mistake like that.”

“I cannot answer for your mother,” I said. “I am sorry that she somehow formed the wrong impression of Dr. Cook.”

“She said,” Miss Sumner said, “that they still move in the same social circles, but that each of them makes sure not to cross paths with the other. She said that given how devoted you are to Dr. Cook, it might be best if she not cross paths with you as well. Then she absolutely refused to say anything more on the subject. Can you imagine? She … she incites my curiosity and then absolutely refuses to say another word. ‘If you did not intend to finish your story, Mother,’ I said, ‘then why did you begin it in the first place?’ Then she drew in her horns. She said that she had spoken foolishly, that she had been exaggerating. ‘I want you to forget that we ever spoke about this matter,’ she said. ‘And please don’t speak to Amelia’s boy about it.’ Can you imagine? ‘I want you to forget.’ As if I could. As if such a thing were possible. When she was speaking of her ‘encounter’ with Dr. Cook, she became quite animated. If I didn’t know better—if I wasn’t certain that my mother’s parents would never have allowed it—I would have sworn that they had once been sweethearts or something, and that he had thrown her over for another woman. There must once have been some unpleasantness between them. I don’t suppose you know what it was.”

I shook my head but could not look her in the eye.

“What with your strange question on the one hand and her strange answer to mine on the other,” Kristine said, “the two of you have driven me to distraction. And now here you are standing in front of me, turning all sorts of colours, which you would presumably not be doing unless you were withholding something from me.”

Surprised by her sudden change in tone and the volume of her voice, the abrupt switch from coy playfulness to exasperation, I realized that she was genuinely distressed. I looked about to see if anyone had noticed when she raised her voice. A few people were looking our way, but I did not see Dr. Cook.

“I can’t imagine,” she said, “what it can be that I have stumbled upon, why you and my mother insist on being so mysterious, as if
there is something, some knowledge, from which I need to be protected.”

“Really,” I said, “I know of nothing from which you need to be protected. There
is
nothing. I know nothing about any sort of ‘encounter’ between your mother and Dr. Cook. I asked you that silly question at the Vanderbilts’ because I was stuck for something to say, that’s all. I might just as easily have asked you if your mother knew Lieutenant Peary. Or General Armstrong Custer.”

She laughed.

“I do not believe you, Mr. Stead,” she said, “though it is true that you are often at a loss for words. Let’s not talk any further about such things. If you are not too terribly annoyed with me, I would very much like it if you asked me to dance with you again.”

We danced, and I was not annoyed with her. I reminded myself of what Dr. Cook had advised me to remember—that I was merely visiting this world of hers. Could it be that I was merely visiting Miss Sumner, merely visiting her arms, her hand, which it seemed to me was holding mine more tightly than usual? My hand was merely visiting her back. My eyes merely visiting her eyes. I wondered what it would be like if my lips paid hers a visit.

I did not tell Dr. Cook what she said to me, what her mother had said about him. Just why her mother had said what she had I could not understand. According to Dr. Cook, she believed that it was my mother who had ended their romance. What could so have turned her against Dr. Cook? Perhaps she had disapproved of his courting a woman who was engaged to be married, but then it was she who had helped them cover up their courtship. Perhaps she was ashamed now of the part she had played and did not wish to be reminded of it by meeting Dr. Cook again.

S
CEPTICISM ABOUT THE VALUE OF POLAR EXPLORATION WAS STILL
rampant after our attempt at Mt. McKinley. The one explorer who seemed to be exempt from it was Peary, who had risen to his new rank of commander on the basis of seniority, the openly hostile navy admirals being scornful of the notion that polar exploration could be construed as service to either the navy or the country.

Peary, Dr. Cook learned at a meeting of the Peary Arctic Club, had been voted the backing for yet another ship, and he would try for the North Pole again starting in the summer of 1905. “You’d think,” Dr. Cook said, “that all that had kept him from succeeding the last time was the
Windward.”
But he appeared to take the news of what seemed to me to be a major setback for him surprisingly well.

“There is a general feeling,” he said, “that it would not be right if his disastrous four-year expedition proved to be his last. He is being allowed one last chance, not to make it to the pole, but to save face, to go out on the proper note. He has fooled the money-men again. And he has named his ship the
Roosevelt. The
president believes Peary to be as fine an example of American manhood and the ‘hardy virtues’ as can be found—next to himself, of course. While Peary is failing yet again to reach the pole, I will be making my way to the top of Mt. McKinley. And when my success is set beside Peary’s failure, there will be no question as to which of us is America’s foremost explorer.” It sounded hollow, almost desperate.

In the summer of 1905, Peary steamed from Smith Sound to Cape Sheridan in the hopes of making it to the northernmost tip of Grant
Land before proceeding from there by sled to the pole. He was soon beyond the range of the farthest-flung telegraph station, so there was no telling how much progress, if any, he was making.

Dr. Cook began making plans for his second try at Mt. McKinley, which was to take place in the summer of 1906, almost exactly a year from the date of Peary’s departure for the pole.

Peary’s exact whereabouts were unknown when Dr. Cook and I set out for Mt. McKinley with an entirely different climbing party than before, including one highly experienced climber named Herschel Parker, a physics professor from Columbia University. This second attempt was again being funded by Mrs. Cook, and by an advance from
Harper’s Monthly
magazine for the exclusive rights to our story, which Dr. Cook had been asked to write.

We again crossed the American continent northwest by train—again travelled the same Klondike boat route to Tyonek, endured the same hardships, overcame the same obstacles as before, so that I could not help thinking of the backer who was quoted in the papers as having asked what the point was of “giving money to explorers to enable them to re-enact their failures.”

We travelled on slush-thick streams that were fed by melting glaciers. We completed the same steep hike to about seven thousand feet as before, at which point the real mountain climbing began and it became apparent who the real mountain climbers were.

I was not much interested in McKinley, and so was not disappointed when Dr. Cook told me that I would not be among those to attempt the summit.

One of our group, William Armstrong, at the first sight of snow on Mt. McKinley, declared that he would “rather jump from the Brooklyn Bridge than climb McKinley above the snow line.”

Informed by Dr. Cook that the chances of anyone making it even close to the summit were slim, Professor Parker also turned back. The rest of us were still on the mountain when he was halfway to New York on the eastbound continental.

Dr. Cook chose from among the remaining members of the party a man named William Barrill to be his lone companion on the climb from the snowline to the summit. They left base camp on August 27, fully expecting to fail, and returned on September 22 with the news that they had reached the top. A photograph, taken by Dr. Cook, of Barrill standing at the end of an upward-sloping set of footprints in the snow and holding the American flag on the summit of Mt. McKinley was printed in
Harper’s
shortly after we returned to Brooklyn in the fall. Herschel Parker dismissed Dr. Cook’s accomplishment as “merely a feat of endurance having no scientific value.”

But Dr. Cook was otherwise celebrated as a hero. Peary, his exact whereabouts unknown, was still up north.

Dr. Cook was suddenly in great demand as a lecturer and dinner guest, as was I suddenly in great demand as what the papers called his “precocious sidekick.” Wherever he spoke, wherever we went, he said he could not have reached the summit of McKinley if not for me, the only member of the climbing party, including Barrill, who had never doubted him.

As before, I felt that I had merely taken part in an extended camping trip. But I knew that it would diminish his accomplishment to make light of my own contribution to it, so I accepted his compliments with what was taken to be my “characteristically laconic modesty,” even though I suspected myself capable of getting lost in Central Park, my promised tutelage at the hands of Dr. Cook having not yet begun.

I was eager to begin what I considered to be our real quest, a quest on which, as it would involve no climbing, Dr. Cook would have the time to explain his methods and strategy to me, and I could be of real assistance to him.

Peary returned after yet another failed attempt to reach the pole, the
Roosevelt
so badly damaged that it had to be moored in Philadelphia for fear it would sink on its way back to its home port of New York.