The Navigator of New York (46 page)

“I wouldn’t be surprised if Peary put Bridgman up to it.”

“What if Bridgman didn’t know that Peary had changed his mind? What if Peary didn’t know that you had seen his speech and Bridgman didn’t know that Peary had changed it? It might all have been completely innocent. An accident.”

“It was no accident,” he said.

In my mind, I saw Peary shuffle, slump-shouldered, across the stage towards his chair, where his wife was waiting for him. He had looked as if he had done what everyone expected him to do. He had looked done in. The ovation he received was exactly as I had imagined it would be. A roaring, raucous send-off for a man who, after surviving feat after feat of exploration, had just renounced his ultimate quest, just bequeathed it to a younger man. Minutes before Peary made his intentions known, I had seen Dr. Cook smiling and applauding as if, now that Peary was no longer a rival, there was no need for reserve, no reason not to join the others in this last salute to the grand old man of exploration. How nightmarishly close it had all been to what Bridgman had led us to expect.

I couldn’t help thinking how different things would be now if I had been a fraction of a second slower grabbing out for Peary when he fell. He would already be forgotten. Dr. Cook would long ago have been chosen to replace him. He—we—might have made it to the pole and back by now. Dr. Cook would have been president of the congress and guest of honour at the banquet. He, not Peary, would have won the first Hubbard Medal. He, not Peary, would have walked into the banquet room with Roosevelt.

I felt ashamed of myself for thinking such things. For Dr. Cook, I foresaw unhappiness that I felt helpless to prevent. I wondered what would become of him and me if he had to face up to the certainty of failure—what would sustain us through all the secrecy, all the pretence and collusion, if we ceased to be explorers. What would he feel for me
once he put aside the hope of redeeming his betrayal of my mother?

But how unfair of me it was to doubt him now.

“What must I do, Devlin?” Dr. Cook said. “We were to have undertaken polar expeditions together. I was to have taught you, prepared you to lead expeditions of your own. I can see no way now that this can happen. Marie cannot help us. Underwriting the cost of climbing Mt. McKinley is one thing, but a series of polar expeditions, even one expedition, is beyond her means. Perhaps you should apply for a place on other expeditions. I’m sure that Amundsen would take you with him on his next try for the South Pole if we asked him to.”

“I will not take part in any expeditions without you,” I said. “Perhaps both of us could go with Amundsen. You would greatly increase his chances of success. And if you were part of a successful try for the South Pole, the backers here would be impressed. You would be keeping your hand in the game. And I could learn from both of you.”

“I cannot go back to serving under someone else,” he said. “Not even Amundsen. Besides, if I was part of a
Norwegian
expedition that made it to the pole, I would be
persona non grata
in New York. My participation in the Belgian expedition did not win me any friends here.”

“Nothing has happened from which you cannot recover,” I said.

“We may never get there, Devlin,” he said. “In spite of what I promised you—”

“No one could be certain of keeping such a promise,” I said.

“Then you doubt me, too?” he said.

“No,” I said. “No, I just meant … it would not be as though you had broken your promise wilfully.”

“You mean,” he said, “it would not be as though I had betrayed you?”

“I was not thinking of betrayal.”

“I have devoted my life to fulfilling that promise.”

“Perhaps you have invested too much of yourself in me,” I said. “Your wife and … and your other children—”

He shook his head and winced, as if to say, “If you only understood, you would not mention
them.”

“I am meant to be destroyed by this,” he said. “As important as it is to Peary that he succeed, it is just as important to him that I fail.”

“Why?” I said. Then I added, when he did not answer, “Is
his
failure as important to you as
your
success?”

“Our success,” he said. “Yours and mine together. Never forget that. But no, I am not like him. I do not share his motives. He has done things I would never do.”

Eyes closed, he was silent for a long time. I thought he had fallen asleep.

“Devlin, there is something I must tell you. Perhaps I should have done so before, but I had hoped to spare you. Perhaps there is no other way, however, of making you understand why Peary must not be allowed to reach his goal.”

I felt the same dread as I had when we first met in the drawing room.

“I told you that on the North Greenland expedition, Francis Stead took me aside one morning and told me his story, including what Peary had told him: that I was the man with whom his wife betrayed him, the father of her son. But he also told me something else.

“We sat on the ‘bench,’ the ledge on the back of the tolt of rock some distance from Redcliffe House. As we spoke, he puffed on his cigars. It all happened just as I described to you before. He told me that when he and his wife had been married nearly two years, he had abandoned her and gone to Brooklyn.”

Under a pseudonym, Francis Stead booked passage on a steamer to St. John’s. He wore a disguise that he bought at an auction. The props of a play that had closed were being sold off: muttonchop whiskers, thick eyebrows, a florid moustache and heavy burnsides, and a suit of clothing of a style that had been in fashion twenty years earlier. He had no need of makeup, for his face, even then, was leathered from the time he’d spent up north.

This was in late March. There was a channel through the ice, barely enough for the steamer to make it to the Narrows, just inside
of which it docked, for all the berths in the harbour were either occupied or crammed with ice. It was not far from where the ship docked to Devon Row.

Francis Stead tipped his hat to the one or two people he passed along the way to the nearest hotel. St. John’s is a seaport. There are always strangers, strange-looking strangers, on the street. No one paid him much attention.

After checking in under his pseudonym, he went straight to the house. It was about one-thirty in the afternoon. He knew that the boy was of school age and would not yet be home. They had never had servants. It was likely that his wife had none now. There were no vehicles about except the cabriolet, which he recognized as hers, and that meant she was unlikely to be having visitors. Either she was alone in the house or it was empty. If someone other than her answered the door, he would pretend he had the wrong address and leave to find some other way of contacting her.

He struck the knocker several times. The door opened, and there she was. It seemed to him that she looked exactly the same as she had when he left, that she was even dressed the same. She did not recognize him, not even when he said her name. “It’s me,” he said. She looked at him for a long time, then walked backwards, holding the door with both hands as if to keep it between them, to shield herself with it. It seemed that for a few seconds, she did not realize he was wearing a disguise. She seemed to take his appearance as the measure of how long they had been apart.

She said nothing at first, only sat on the edge of a chair in the front room, looking at the fire. He wondered what she thought, his showing up like this on the doorstep after all this time. Done up like this.

“Devlin will soon be coming home from his aunt’s house,” she said.

He asked her if they might make their separate ways to Signal Hill, where they would have some privacy. “I believe you are as anxious as I am that no one know I came to visit you,” he said. She said nothing. He assured her that she would not keep the boy and his aunt waiting long.

“What is it that you want to speak to me about?” she said.

He asked her if he might wait to explain himself until they met on Signal Hill.

She went upstairs, changed for the outdoors, came back down. He told her to wait for twenty minutes, then take the cabriolet to the top of the hill. He asked her to pretend, if they were approached by anyone on the hill or if someone later asked her who he was, that he was a visiting relative or an acquaintance of her husband’s from New York. He took her silence for agreement.

He went outside and strode briskly up the road. A raw cutting wind was blowing from the west, but his exertions kept him warm. She passed him when he was near the top of the hill. She looked at him, but he looked straight ahead.

She had been waiting perhaps five minutes in the cab by the time he reached the crest. There was no one else about. They could not be seen from the blockhouse, though he could tell by the smoke that spewed out along the ridge that it was occupied.

He joined her in the cab.

“Even Pete does not remember you,” she said. It was true. The horse, had he recognized his voice or scent, would have been tossing his head about by now, in greeting or in protest. “What do you want, Francis?” she said. “Obviously you do not mean to stay or you would not be dressed the way you are.”

For a trace of a second, she smiled in a way that infuriated him. “Dressed the way you are.” On the occasion of seeing him for the first time in years, she was trying not to laugh at how he looked.

They were sheltered from the wind and the noise it made by the hood of the cab. He told her about Peary, said that Peary had given him the name of the boy’s father. At this she gave a start and looked at him, but then she turned away again, as if she thought he might be trying to fool her into revealing the man’s identity. As he continued, she listened, her face expressionless, he thought, until he realized that she was mute with fear, realized that he was shouting, screaming at her.

He tried to calm himself.

“If you will just admit that you lied to me,” he said, “if you will just admit that much, that would be enough. I will not insist on your telling me his name or how you met, or anything else. If you will admit that you lied, I will not even ask you why.” If she had spoken up then … But it seemed to him that despite her fear, she could not bring herself to take him seriously.

“I told you the truth,” she said, “and I will not speak of it again.” She said it with such finality he knew that further questions would be pointless. He took her by the upper arm, put his face close to hers and tried to kiss her.

She pulled away from him and jumped from the carriage, began to run towards the road that led down to the city. He ran after her, blocked her way. She turned again and ran towards the blockhouse. Again he caught her, blocked her path, though he did not touch her.

“What are you doing?” he said.

She screamed something, but the wind carried the sound away from the hill.

Seeming to know just what she was doing, seeming to think it led to safety, she began to run down the hill towards the sea. She must have misremembered, miscalculated something, thought she knew of a path but, in her panic, was unable to find it. It was a very great distance to the bottom, but the grassy slope was so steep that he could run no faster than she could. On this, the side of the hill that in the spring faced the wind and rain, there was no snow left. When she could go no farther without plunging off the grassy ledge above the ice, she ran a little to the side, then stopped. She shouted something, seeming to have realized what a blunder she had made by running down the hill.

She turned to face him. Both of them were gasping for breath. “It crossed my mind,” she said, “down at the house. Just for a second, it crossed my mind that this was your intention. But I told myself you would never do such a thing. Yet it was only that you could not bring yourself to do it in that house. Francis, please think about the boy. The boy has no one else but me.”

“What do you mean?” he said. “What is it that you think I have brought you here to do?”

He had never seen such fear in a person’s eyes before. Behind her, perhaps fifteen feet below her, wave after wave of slushy water shrugged itself ashore from the edge of the ice.

“If you tell me his name, I will let you go,” he said.

She tried to get past him, but he caught her around the waist and dragged her to the edge. “Tell me his name,” he said, “or it will be your son’s turn next.”

“All right,” she said. “All right.”

“Do not lie to me,” he said. “If I find that you have lied to me, I will come back for the boy.”

She spoke the name.

“Let me go,” she said.

He could not believe how strong, how wild she was. She got loose from him two or three times, punching, biting, clawing at his face. A smaller man would have been no match for her. He believed that if she got by him, he could not have caught her going up that hill.

He grabbed her around the waist from behind and threw her over. She made no sound. She disappeared beneath the water and did not come up. Not once.

He climbed the slope, then descended the other side of the hill on foot. He met no one on the road. He did not really expect to get away with it. Though he had taken pains to avoid detection, he felt almost certain they would fail. He felt as though he didn’t care one way or the other.

He went back to his hotel and stayed there, waiting for the knock on the door that never came. He read in the paper the next day that her empty horse and carriage had been found on Signal Hill and her body in the water at the bottom. He was startled when he saw his name, thinking that he had been found out: “Wife of the explorer Francis Stead, who for the past few years has lived in Brooklyn, New York.” That was all it said about him, the words seeming to imply that, deserted by her husband, abandoned, she had died by her own hand. “Cause of death as yet unknown,” it said.

He booked passage out on a ship that would make port in two days. By the time the ship arrived, the whole city was talking about “poor Mrs. Stead who drowned herself,” though the official cause of death was accidental drowning. It had never occurred to him that suicide would be suspected. More than suspected—assumed. Apparently, she had long been regarded as “odd,” “peculiar,” something of a hermit, people said.