The Navigator of New York (5 page)

Moses. “Stead wouldn’t know his father if he met him on the street.” Included now among his audience were the younger boys who had once hung on my every word. “Nor would the great explorer know his son. Stead has no more idea where his father is than do we who read the papers. His father never writes to him or to his aunt and uncle. The great explorer has disowned them.”

He walked home with me again. He put his hand on my far shoulder, inclined his head towards me.

“Why do you think it is, young Devlin,” he said, lowering his voice, “that your father would rather do it with a squaw than with your mother?” I knew what “it” was, the mechanics of it and its biological purpose at least. “I pity your poor mother,” he said. “She was left to a widow’s consolation even though her husband was still alive. Do you know what a widow’s consolation is? No? You should ask your aunt and uncle, then.”

With that, to my great relief, he walked on ahead of me.

But it was the same the next day.

“Now
do you know what a widow’s consolation is?” he asked.

I shook my head.

“They wouldn’t tell you? Well, I’m not surprised—”

“I didn’t ask them,” I said as neutrally as possible.

“A delinquent father, a dead mother and guardians who ignore you. You poor fellow. Well, let me help you, then. A widow’s consolation. I must put it in some way that won’t upset you. You see, when you were at school, men went by your mother’s house. She took them upstairs to her room. They paid her money. The house you live in used to be a whorehouse. Everyone knows about it.”

When I reported this latest “revelation” to Aunt Daphne and asked her if it was true, she said that she had had enough.

She had me stay home the next day. After school, she went to see Headmaster Gaines.

When she returned, her cheeks were red with anger.

“Well, that’s that,” she said. “There’ll be no more problems now. Headmaster Gaines said that among many other things, he would cane this Moses Prowdy. ‘Moses will leave Devlin alone,’ he said. ‘You have my word on it.’ It took some doing to get him to say it, but he said it.”

Headmaster Gaines was right that Moses Prowdy had charisma. It was not long before the other boys, even the ones my age, were urging him to, as they put it, “hold forth on Stead,” crowding around him to hear what he would say next about me or my parents.

“Devlin,” Moses said, “your mother once asked the bishop for an annulment on the grounds of desertion, but he said no because your father might have come back. An annulment means she wouldn’t have been married to your father any more, and if she’d wanted to, she could have married someone else. Desertion means—”

“That’s not true,” I said, and knowing full well what my reward would be, I kicked him in the shins.

He hopped about briefly on one foot. Too briefly for me to run away.

I went home, nose bloodied and mouth on one side swollen and coloured like a plum. When Aunt Daphne admitted that what Moses
had said was true, I asked her why she kept so many secrets from me.

“I was waiting until you were old enough to understand them to tell you all those things,” she said. “I never imagined that a boy as much older than you as Moses Prowdy is would attach himself to you the way he has.”

She went to Headmaster Gaines again, saying that because Moses was undeterred from disobedience by caning, he should be suspended. In the past, Gaines said, Moses had been suspended, but to little effect. Then, Aunt Daphne said, he should be expelled. To which Gaines replied that while they could expel Prowdy from school, they could not expel him from St. John’s. He would have no trouble finding me if he wanted to, and he
would
want to when he heard he’d been expelled because of me. The masters had long ago decided to keep him within the jurisdiction of the school for as long as possible, for everyone’s sake, including his. “We have not given up on Prowdy,” Headmaster Gaines said. “It is never foolish to be hopeful. Only he will be diminished if he proves us wrong.”

I was soon coming home every day with fresh bruises, Moses no longer needing the provocation of a kick in the shins.

“What will we do, Edward?” Aunt Daphne said one night. “That Prowdy boy will never stop, never. It will be at least four years until he graduates.”

“I suspect,” Uncle Edward said, “that young Devlin could be more resilient if he wanted to. Schoolyard disputes should be settled on the schoolyard.”

She talked about sending me to another school. “But they’d eat you alive there, too,” she said, “once they found out why you left the Feild. And Moses would still know how to find you.”

At dinner, her food went cold on her plate as she sat there, head resting on her hand, tilted sideways, her thumb on her cheek, fingers splayed on her temple and her brow.

By the time I went to bed that night, she had been silent for hours, staring at the fire.

“Follow On Moses, they might as well have called that boy,” I
heard Aunt Daphne say after they had gone to bed. “He will no more give up on Devlin than his grandfather would have given up on a herd of seals.”

“You dote too much on Devlin,” I heard Uncle Edward say.

“I can’t have that giant of a boy picking on my son.”

“Your son? You see? You see how easily you can fool yourself? He is your nephew. He will never be your son. You’ve been to see Headmaster Gaines twice in one month. You baby him so much he can’t defend himself at school. Soon he’ll be afraid of cats.”

“You and Francis had each other, Edward. Dev has no one.”

“I’ve seen Prowdy. I faced up to boys as big as that and bigger when I was your nephew’s age.”

“Oh, Edward, don’t be ridiculous. Francis was always protecting you from bullies. And none of them was half as big as Prowdy.”

“You don’t know,” he said. “You weren’t there. I—”

She laughed, not meanly but fondly, in spite of being in the middle of an argument, because he sounded so earnestly convinced that he was good at something that he was known all over to be hopeless at.

“You sound as though you think I’m a coward, a weakling.”

“I’m sorry I laughed. Really I am. I didn’t marry you because of how many boys you beat up at Bishop Feild.”

“He’s not your son, you know. You make yourself look pathetic when you call him that. Pathetic. He is his irresponsible father’s son. He is his mad mother’s son. There is not a drop of your blood in him, and there never will be. There will never be a drop of your blood or mine in anyone.”

I heard Aunt Daphne get out of bed and soon after go downstairs.

“My aunt will make up a rhyme about you,” I foolishly said the next time Moses picked on me at school. “Like the one she made up about my uncle.”

“I, too, can make up rhymes,” Moses said.

Soon, copies of an anonymously written, printed-in-pencil rhyme called “Pilgrim’s Prowess” were being passed around among the boys.
“The doctor married Mrs. Stead / And he with her did go to bed. / Alas for her he could not please / Though with his straw he made her sneeze.” Anonymously written but assumed to be the work of Moses Prowdy, who on the playground recited it by heart. The masters seized all the copies they could find, caning those boys who did not volunteer theirs, but many escaped detection and made their way into other schools, and from them into the hands of grown-ups, until there were few people in St. John’s who hadn’t read it or at least been told about it.

After the circulation of that letter, it was, for most of the boys of the Feild, out of the question to associate with me, to be seen doing anything but ignoring me. Even the most unpopular, picked–upon boys kept their distance, not wanting to give their tormentors one more reason to torment them.

Even for Moses, I ceased to be a target. I think I came to be regarded as a kind of mascot of the banished, looked upon almost fondly by the boys as the ultimate excommunicant.

I
T WAS FIVE YEARS SINCE MY FATHER HAD MOVED TO
N
EW
Y
ORK
, and he was still unable to finance an expedition of his own. He signed on once again under someone else. He was one of two medical officers under Lieutenant Robert Peary on the North Greenland expedition. The purpose of this expedition was to discover what I overheard Aunt Daphne say “everyone was just dying to know”: was Greenland an island or a continent?

In July 1892, a great fire destroyed much of St. John’s, though Devon Row, on the heights of the far east end, was spared. Uncle Edward and the other doctors of the city were pressed into duty at the hospitals. Aunt Daphne volunteered for numerous women’s committees and foundations for the relief of those affected by the fire. I was one of many schoolboys enlisted to help cart away what was left of people’s houses so that new ones could be built.

All of us were still caught up in the relief effort when, unheard from for fifteen months, Peary’s ship, the
Kite
, docked in Philadelphia in September 1892, with Peary declaring his expedition an unqualified success. He told the reporters who swarmed him before he had a chance to disembark that the Greenland ice-cap ended just south of Victoria Inlet, and he claimed that by this discovery he had proved that Greenland was an island. He also relayed a piece of information that, in the papers, appeared in sidebars: alone of all the expeditionaries, Dr. Francis Stead had not returned.

It was from the local papers, most of which were devoted to
stories about the rebuilding of the city after the fire, that we first learned of my father’s disappearance—or rather, that Uncle Edward first learned of it. “DR. STEAD MISSING.” “DR. STEAD LEFT BEHIND.” “DR. STEAD’S WHEREABOUTS UNKNOWN.” These were the headlines of the papers that Uncle Edward found waiting for him on the front porch of his surgery the morning after the
Kite
made port in Philadelphia. Word of my father’s disappearance had not reached local newsrooms until late the night before, too late for reporters (who assumed the Steads already knew about it) to contact family members for their reactions. It would not be until days later that Peary would telegraph his condolences to Uncle Edward, who was listed in the ship’s log as my father’s next of kin. Uncle Edward received no reply to a letter he sent to Peary rebuking him for not informing us through proper channels of my father’s disappearance.

I heard of my father’s death from Aunt Daphne, who let me sleep until my usual hour before waking me. She was crying, and I knew, before she had a chance to tell me, that something had happened to my father. My father, of whom I had one probably false memory and one photograph, was dead, presumed dead, though all Aunt Daphne could bring herself to say was that the
Kite
had come back without him. Still “up there,” my father was. And perhaps he always would be. I had been certain that one day I would meet him, seek him out.

We spent the morning at the kitchen table, on which Aunt Daphne laid out, along with a glass of milk, all the sweets she had on hand: half an apple pie, a piece of pound cake, a heaping mound of shortbread cookies. A gloom made worse by the extravagance, the incongruousness of a table spread with sweets at nine-thirty in the morning, hung heavy in the house. Uncle Edward spent most of the day upstairs, though I caught a glimpse of him from time to time and was surprised by what I saw.

By the sorrow on his face and in his eyes, you would have thought that my father had never left, that Uncle Edward had last seen him just hours ago, that he had lived the life the Steads expected him to live until that very morning, when, on the way to his surgery, he had had
some fatal mishap. I had thought it would seem to Uncle Edward that not much was different, that he had expected never to see his brother again and now his expectations were confirmed.

“Your mother kept writing to him long after he moved to New York,” Aunt Daphne said. “Long after he stopped writing back. I’ve been trying to remember him. From before he went away. From when we met. But I can’t separate the younger Francis from the older one. I can’t picture that young man in my mind and pretend, even for a second, that I don’t know what became of him.”

“I don’t remember him at all,” I said, in the foolish belief that it would be a comfort to her that my memory of him was even more wanting than hers.

“I’m sorry, Devvie, for what was done to you,” she said.

She looked at me as if she thought she ought to pronounce upon my father’s passing in some manner, sum up his life and death for me in a way that would make sense of them. But all she did was take me in her arms.

The local papers, in the pieces they ran about my father’s death, made no explicit reference to the estrangement of my parents, only noting without comment that “Dr. Stead was based in Brooklyn,” and that his wife had “drowned” some years ago.

Two days after the docking of the
Kite
, there appeared in the papers an official “report,” an account of my father’s disappearance that was written, at Lieutenant Peary’s request, by the expedition’s other medical officer, Dr. Frederick Cook, during the voyage from McCormick Bay, Greenland, to Philadelphia. Its purpose was to set out what its author called “the strange case of Dr. Stead,” and to preempt suggestions that Peary had in any way been negligent.

This “report” by Dr. Cook contained all the official information that would ever be released about my father’s disappearance. The crew, as was usual on such expeditions, had signed a legal pledge of silence. Only Peary, who had sold the rights to his story in advance, was allowed to write about, or give interviews about, the expedition, and
when he did, in the weeks and months to come, he made no mention of my father.