The Navigator of New York (55 page)

“The other pole,” he said, “the unscaled peaks of other continents, all the yet-to-be-accomplished feats of exploration and discovery seem
pointless to me now. I have fulfilled my life’s dream, though it seems an
ignis fatuus
. I suppose there remains only for me to collect on my achievement, which I must do, for I owe it to those who, because of my absence, have endured so much. Prizes, book contracts, a year, at most two, lecturing around the world, and then it will be back to Brooklyn for us for good. I can hardly stand to think of spending that much time among so many people after so much time up north.

“I will never forget it, Devlin, living with you in that cave. One hundred nights we spent in that wretched dwelling at Cape Sparbo.

“It is hard to explain to you, Devlin, what I am feeling and why. I have a strange, foreign feeling of being native to nowhere, of being, no matter where I go, exotic.”

“I feel the same,” I said.

“We have been to the white/dark desert of the Arctic. It is as devoid of features as the sea. Yet it exerts on the soul a greater pull than all the marvels, all the wonders of New York.

“One day, as I lay there in that cave by myself, waiting for you and the Eskimos to come back from checking the traps, I felt the presence of your mother.”

“I felt it, too,” I said.

He seemed not to have heard me. “And I was suddenly, and for the first time ever, certain that we would not make it back alive. I was certain that we would die. I felt that I had betrayed her yet again. Betrayed you. How can I step back into the world without your help, Devlin?”

“You will have my help,” I said.

“It seems as though something has happened in the world since we stopped attending to it. Even Copenhagen seemed always to be on the brink of some—it is hard to say just what—some culmination. Something in Copenhagen was stirring that I fear is roaring in New York. How long has it been since we were there?”

I began to wonder if he was having some sort of breakdown. “Twenty-eight months,” I said. “We left in the summer of 1907.”

“The summer of 1907,” he said. “And now it is the fall of 1909. So long.”

O
N
S
EPTEMBER
20,
AT THREE IN THE AFTERNOON, THE
Oscar II
dropped anchor off Fire Island in Upper New York Bay. The American Arctic Club, which, unlike the Peary Arctic Club, had accepted Dr. Cook’s claim to have reached the pole, had asked that the ship not proceed up the East River until the next morning so that plans for Dr. Cook’s reception could be finalized. The ship had already, at the club’s request, spent the previous night anchored off Sandy Hook, off Boston Harbor, for the same reason. Mrs. Cook had sent word that, because she was not feeling well, she would wait until the morning to see her husband.

Ships that had assembled from all over the world for a naval review were moored on the Manhattan side of the river, the shape of each ship traced out in coloured lights, but the Brooklyn docks were as desolate and silent as they always were after dark, in contrast to the ceaseless clamour that rose up from them by day.

Several celebrations were converging on the city all at once. It was three hundred years since Henry Hudson had “discovered” the river that ever since had borne his name. It was the one-hundredth anniversary of the invention of the steamboat by Robert Fulton. Millions of electric lights had been strung throughout the streets of the boroughs of New York, most of them in Brooklyn and Manhattan. It was said that Wilbur Wright was going to fly his new machine from Governor’s Island to the Statue of Liberty and back again. It was predicted that, over the next couple of weeks, millions of visitors would come to
New York. And into the middle of all of this, Dr. Cook and I were soon to sail on the
Oscar II
.

Dr. Cook sent for me. I was shown by a ship’s officer to his cabin. Somewhere inside the ship, an orchestra was playing, and passengers bearing champagne-filled glasses strolled about the decks.

The officer, a Dane not much older than me who spoke fluent but heavily accented English, rapped twice, loudly, on the door of Dr. Cook’s cabin.

“You may go in, sir,” he said, “but you are to close the door behind you.” He then tipped his hat to me and strode away as if he were following very specific orders.

I opened the door and thought at first that the cabin was empty. It was quite spacious and unlit except for two oil lamps that flanked a row of porthole windows.

I could dimly make out the lavish furnishings: six plush chairs around what might have been a card table, two sofas at right angles, a revolvable mirror in a wooden frame. I saw that a door on my left led to another large room. I slowly made for it and was about to say Dr. Cook’s name when he said mine.

He was seated on an armless chair that was positioned in a direct line from the door, his legs stretched out so that the chair was resting on its back legs, his hands clasped behind his head, which he leaned against the wall. He said my name as though he were wearily relieved that I had come. His reflective, stock-taking posture, and the gloom of the cabin gave me the momentary sense that I had been taken to visit a well-accommodated prisoner whose guard was standing just outside the door. Slowly, deliberately, he let the chair fall forward, unclasped his hands, rose to his feet and sighed in the manner of someone who, though glad to see me, wished we were meeting under other circumstances. His face was thinner than when we left Copenhagen, every hollow and shadow, every feature, more pronounced. He had, several days before, admitted to me that he was so in dread of our arrival in New York that he could not bear to eat.

His posture and his expression affected me in some way for which
I would not find the words until after I had left the cabin. It was as though he had at last become the man I imagined him to be before we met. His were the eyes of a man humbly and indulgently resigned to the loneliness of greatness, a man who, though he knew he would never meet his equal, had a gentle, all-forgiving view of humankind. But at the same time, there was that barely perceptible look of amused disdain, a universal dismissiveness, an inclination to regard all things, himself included, as ultimately inconsequential.

He stood up, put his hands on my shoulders and held me at arm’s length as if to gauge how much I had changed since we left New York more than two years earlier. I never felt more urgently the need to address him by some name, call him
something,
but I could not, especially not now, bring myself to call him Dr. Cook. Father. The word was in my mind. On my tongue. Perhaps he sensed this, for he turned me about and, with a hand on the small of my back, led me to one of the sofas.

Suddenly, even allowing for physical weariness and his usually reserved manner in private, he seemed quite sombre. Perhaps, I thought, this is how you feel in the wake of some great accomplishment to which you have dedicated your entire life. Once the day you have so long looked forward to has come, what then? What next?

I wondered if my being there was affecting his mood, if he was inhibited by the presence beside him of an impostor, of someone about whom he had fooled the world just as, some were saying, he was trying to fool it now with his claim of having reached the pole. How completely discredited his claim would be if it became known how we two were related.

“I fear the coming months will be unbearable,” he said, “unless someone I can trust is at my side.”

“Someone you can trust
is
at your side,” I said. “You must not doubt it for a moment.”

He nodded but said nothing.

“You mustn’t worry,” I said. “On the ship, they say that almost everyone in New York believes you. Almost everyone in America. Far
more than believe Peary. It is only those who backed Peary who have their doubts about you. Or claim to. They know that you were at the pole a year before Peary got there, if he ever did. They know it.”

He nodded and smiled. “Unless I am very mistaken,” he said, “you suspect there are still some things that I have kept from you.”

I began to protest, but he raised his hand.

“Listen to me. There
is
something.”

I did not feel the sort of dread I had felt on previous occasions when he had made this admission. I was his son. Together we had made it to the pole. The possibility of catastrophe had passed.

“At Etah, Devlin, shortly before we arrived on the rescue expedition, Henson told Peary that he was saying some things during his bouts of delirium that he would not want others to hear. Peary told Henson to keep everyone away from him until he was well again. But Henson was so concerned that, without medical assistance, Peary would die.

“The first thing Peary said to me was that he knew I could be trusted to keep to myself anything he said while I examined him. This is how Peary asks for something, by telling you that he knows you will give it to him. I told him I would be discreet. And I have been, all these years.”

“What did Peary say?” I said.

“He said, ‘It can be done, Dr. Cook. I have thought it through, and I am sure it can be done.’ “

“The North Pole,” I said.

Dr. Cook nodded. “That’s what I thought he meant. That he was sure he could make it. And that therefore I should take his wife and child back home but leave him behind. But there were times, over the next few days, when he seemed to be saying just the opposite. ‘I see now that it can’t be done, Dr. Cook,’ he said. ‘It simply cannot be done.’ I thought he was uncertain, wavering. So whenever he said, ‘I see now that it can’t be done,’ I told him he was right. When he said that he had thought it through and was sure it
could
be done, I disagreed with him and urged him to leave with us and thereby save himself.

“This went on for days, until one afternoon, when he was seemingly lucid but really more delirious than ever, I realized that I had been mistaken all along. I had misunderstood him. When he had said, ‘I see now that it can’t be done,’ he meant that he had come to the conclusion that to reach the North Pole under any circumstances was impossible. ‘The pole will not be reached,’ he said. ‘Not by me. And therefore not by anyone.’

“When he had said, ‘I have thought it through, and I am sure it can be done,’ he meant that it was possible to fool people into thinking you had reached the pole. ‘A man who knew what he was doing could get away with it,’ he said. ‘It is just the sickness, Dr. Cook,’ Henson said. I nodded and said no more about it.

“But I was sure that Peary, when he was lucid, really had thought things through and come to those conclusions. How long ago, I had no way of telling. Nor did I know if he would ever bring himself to act upon them. There would be so much risk involved.”

“But on this last expedition … I said. “You think he—”

“I am certain of it,” said Dr. Cook. “Just as I am sure that he remembers, has remembered all along, what he told me in that tent. If not, then Henson told him. But I think that when he was lucid, he remembered what he said when he was not. Perhaps he merely saw it in my eyes, saw that I
knew. I
saw fear in
his
eyes. Fear of me, fear of the consequences of what he had let slip in his delirium.”

“You have always seemed so certain that he would not reach the pole,” I said. “You have always seemed so unconcerned about it. How could you stand it, knowing it was possible that before you could get to the pole yourself, he would pretend—”

“I believed that if he faked the pole, I could
prove
he had faked it. I believed that he would not dare to fake it knowing how closely I, who had heard him say it could be done, would scrutinize his records, his proofs, his account of his great deed.”

“So you will prove it now,” I said. “And then everyone will know that you alone have made it to the pole.”

He smiled, almost sadly, and shook his head. But then he nodded.

“Exactly,” he said. “When the time is right, that is exactly what I will do.”

“When—”

“It is late,” he said. “You must be going.”

I sensed that there was more, but that he had lost the nerve to make a full disclosure.

“The organizers of my reception are soon to board the ship,” he said. “I have agreed to meet with them. In a few hours, I will make my first public appearance in America since returning from the pole. Already, thousands have gathered to witness my arrival. I dread it, Devlin. I fear a repetition of the scenes in Copenhagen. I will smile gratefully and wave at people who think of me as some sort of persecuted saint. Well, I will do what I have to do. We will both do what must be done. Try to get some sleep.”

At nine o’clock, when there was still a thin mist on the water and we were just off Bedloe’s Island, we were transferred by tugboat from the
Oscar II
to the
Grand Republic, a
side-wheeler that had been chartered by the American Arctic Club and was all decked out in flags from bow to stern, American and Danish flags. In some cases, pairs of them had been intertwined to form one hybrid flag, one-half composed of the Stars and Stripes, the other of the white cross on a field of red. On the foredeck was a large banner bearing Dr. Cook’s name and some other words that, in the morning mist, I could not make out.