The Navigator of New York (57 page)

I had not seen Mrs. Peary since Washington. I thought I detected in her a change that corresponded to the one I saw in Peary. There would be no life for them after exploration, the look in her eyes seemed to say. I think that she had always assumed there would be, that he would accomplish or renounce his goal when he was still a young man and then their real life would begin. But he had spent the better part of his life trying to reach the pole, and he would spend the balance of it trying to prove that he had done so.

Mrs. Peary looked at me.

“Perhaps you ought to leave, Mr. Stead,” she said. She smiled slightly at me, a smile of goodbye in which I could find no malice or unkindness. Yet surely she knew what her husband knew: that Dr. Cook was my father. She looked and sounded so detached. I saw that she would hold a part of herself in reserve from him for the rest of their life together. She would not, any longer, let him have all of her. Her happiness would not depend on his. It would no longer be her purpose to make him happy, for that could not be done. She would stay with him, support him, commiserate with him, but she would have this other inner life that she would keep apart from his.

You have been duped
 … 
That is where we all met
 … 
There are things about Dr. Cook that you do not know
 … 
Tell Cook that if he does not tell you what I mean, I will
.

Those words, which I kept telling myself were just the ravings of a broken man, kept running through my mind as I rode the el train back across the bridge to Brooklyn. Peary had had me followed just so he could say those words to me and tell me to repeat them to Dr. Cook.

A few nights later, after Dr. Cook had returned from Boston, he and I sat in the drawing room of the Dakota, staring at the fire. He had shaken so many hands in Boston that, just as in Copenhagen, his right hand was a swollen mass for which he had fashioned a bandage and a sling. He sat there, his bandaged hand removed from the sling and resting palm up on the arm of the sofa.

He had been so exhausted upon arriving home that I had not expected him to visit the drawing room. But I had listened for him anyway and thought it was just my imagination when I heard the sound of creaking floorboards. Upon getting up and peering out into the hallway, I saw that the doors of the drawing room were open.

I found him slumped on the sofa, his eyes closed, looking almost as haggard as he had just after his emergence from the Arctic. He opened his eyes when he heard me, asked me to close both sets of doors, which I did before joining him on the sofa.

“I am told that support for me over Peary is thirty-five to one among the public,” he said.

“That’s wonderful,” I said.

He shrugged. “I am leading because I staked my claim first, and because I made it back to New York ahead of Peary. I was the first to be celebrated. That, at least, is something that cannot be changed. It is unlikely now that Peary will even have a parade. He will certainly not have one in New York. It would seem absurd—”

“I met with Peary,” I said, unable to wait any longer.

“Why on earth would you do that?” he said.

“I should say that he tricked me into meeting with him.” I told him of meeting Dunkle on the bench in Union Square. “Peary said that he knows you’re my father. When he saw that I was not surprised, he told me there were things about you that I did not know. He said that if you did not tell me what he meant by this, he would.”

Dr. Cook sat forward as suddenly as if he had had a seizure. He stood up and grabbed the back of his neck with his left hand while allowing the bandaged one to drop as if he had forgotten it was injured.

“I was certain it would never come to this,” he said.

“What do you mean?” I said.

“How desperate he must be. Devlin … Oh, Christ, I was certain it would never come to this.”

“Certain what would never come to this? I don’t understand.”

“Do you remember, just a few nights ago, you said that no one would turn against me?”

I nodded.

“You are wrong,” he said. “Many people will. Some who are very close to me will turn against me. You have promised to believe in me no matter what, but even you may turn against me.”

“I would never do so,” I said. “Never. No matter what.”

“No matter what?”

“No, but—”

“Then you must let me tell you everything. And this time, it will be everything. There will be no secrets between us any more. What a great relief that will be. If you will just hear me out, Devlin. It may be that once you have heard the whole story, you will understand.”

He sounded so unconvinced that I felt a dread greater than any I had felt at any time on our expedition to the pole.
There are things about Dr. Cook that you do not know
. I felt as I had long ago, when I thought he was about to tell me that he had deceived me, that he was not really my father.

“Before I tell you what Peary meant, I must tell you something else. It turns out that I was wrong about something. I was wrong and Peary was right.”

“I don’t know what you mean—” I said. He put up his hand.

“I have known it for some time,” he said, “long before I went to meet with Bradley about the slaughter charter. It was only when I met with Bradley that I made up my mind.”

“About what?”

“We were never there, Devlin. We never made it to the pole.”

“No,—” I said.

I pulled away from him as he reached his hand towards me. He drew up to full height again.

“I decided that, to quote Peary, I was a man who knew what he was doing. Remember, in the tent at Etah? ‘A man who knew what he was doing could get away with it.’ I think you know what I am saying.”

“But I was with you,” I said. “
We
were with you. The four of us. We did it together. We risked everything, and we did what no one else has ever done. You asked us if we wanted to turn back, and we said no. I know you. You would never do what Peary did.”

“Devlin,” he said, “it was Peary who did what I did. McKinley was a kind of test case. You see, Devlin, I never reached the top of Mt. McKinley. I pretended to in such a way that if it was discovered that I had not reached the top, it would seem that I had made an honest mistake, that I honestly thought I had made it and had not set out to wilfully commit a hoax. But it was not discovered. My claim to have climbed McKinley was accepted. And it was then that I began to wonder if Peary might be right about the pole. I thought about it for a long time, especially after Washington. I tried to work out in my head if it could be done. Right here in this drawing room, night after night. If
only we had been able to get back to civilization sooner than we did.”

“You risked the lives of three other people,” I said, “to accomplish what you knew to be a hoax?” I stood and gave in to the urge to cry, turning my back to him.

“I did not mean to risk anyone’s life. According to all my planning, there ought not to have been any great risk. But the ocean currents were not what I had had every reason to expect. Dozens of other explorers all reported the same currents on the route we took. It seems impossible that so many men could have misread them in the same way. And yet they did.”

“Why did you ever write to me?” I said. “What did you want from me?”

“I told you that if you heard me out, you might understand. Will you wait until the end to pass judgment on me?”

I could not speak.

“You must not think that what I have done rests lightly on my mind. If there was any other way, I would not have chosen this one. I could not let a man like Peary prevail.

“What a torment these past few weeks have been, I could never make you understand. Every time an honour was bestowed upon me, every time I was embraced, every time someone shook my hand or professed his faith in me, it seemed that the magnitude of my betrayal grew. That it was necessary to my real purpose that I betray the trust of so many people did not make it any easier for me to do it. And the worst still lies ahead for me. Some of the people who at first supported me have already turned against me. Peary has far more money and power behind him. Every attempt will be made to discredit me. But it will be enough for me if this controversy is never settled. Like me, Peary will always have his detractors, people who will do all they can to prove that he was never at the pole.”

He was speaking at a frenzied pace, in the manner and tone of someone declaiming in solitude as he had so often done in this room while I lay in bed across the hall. I clung to the perverse hope that he was mad, that every word he was saying was the product of exhaustion.

“Peary says he must have fame. Well, I have followed my own imperatives. One has been that you must have happiness. Another that Peary must
not
have fame. Just why this last imperative is so important, you do not fully understand yet. It is not only because Peary gave my name to Francis Stead.”

“Why have you done this?” I said. I was still crying. “You did not need to do this. You are not that sort of man. You are a kind, honest man to whom others are drawn, whom others admire. You are a doctor to whom people come for help when they are sick. Everyone who knows you, who really knows you, would vouch for you absolutely. You treated the Eskimos no differently than you do the patients who come to see you here in Brooklyn. You have done so much for me. More than I have told you. I don’t understand it. I don’t believe it. What you are saying can’t be true.”

“Devlin, listen to me. You think that I have betrayed you as I betrayed your mother. But the very opposite is true. I left your mother’s last words to me unanswered. But I have not turned away from you. All that I have done, I have done
for
you and
for
your mother.”

Dr. Cook crouched down in front of me, as if I was a child to whom he was about to reveal something that he doubted he could make me understand.

“On the afternoon of the day Francis Stead confessed to Peary and, later, to me …”

Peary asked Dr. Cook to join him in a search for a star stone about which he said the Eskimos had told him. They set out from Redcliffe House on snowshoes, walking in silence for several miles up the coast from McCormick Bay.

Quite abruptly, Peary stopped and looked out across the ice.

“Stead spoke to you,” he said.

“Yes,” Dr. Cook said.

“When Stead returns to New York,” Peary said, “he will tell others that he killed his wife, and why. You and I will both be ruined. No backer will ever again have anything to do with us. And that is not an
exaggeration. My chief backer, Morris Jesup, is known as a pillar of society. He is a member of the New York City Mission and Travel Society, vice-president of the American Sunday School Union, one of the leaders of the Crusade for the Suppression of Vice and Obscenity. Can you imagine how a man like that would regard me if Stead repeated to the authorities what he said to us? Stead convinced me that he can prove he killed his wife. He can tell the police what she was wearing when she died, give them the pseudonym he used to book passage to Newfoundland and register in his hotel. Things that can be verified, and that no one else could know. Also, there are certain letters. I live in Philadelphia. Stead and I sometimes correspond. If, in the context of his murder of his wife, my letters to him were made public … ‘You will never have a moment’s peace until you confront her with the truth,’ I once wrote to him. He is such an amusing fool that it never occurred to me he would do anything. Besides, I took precautions. I never mentioned names in my letters. You, for instance, I referred to only as “the doctor” or “the father of the boy.” I destroyed his letters after I finished reading them. But Francis, without my knowledge, made carbon copies of his letters, in which your name and others were often mentioned. And since my letters are obviously replies to his, the whole thing, under the circumstances, leaves me somewhat compromised.”

“You speak as if her death is nothing but an inconvenience to you,” said Dr. Cook.

“I did not know the woman as well as you did,” Peary said. “I am guilty of nothing but misjudging Stead.”

Dr. Cook began to walk away.

“Is the boy’s safety of any concern to you?” Peary shouted. Dr. Cook came back.

“What did Stead say about the boy?”

“He told me that he planned to pay him a visit,” Peary said. “He told me some other things, too.”

Peary and Cook spoke for some time.

Later, at Redcliffe House, the members of the expedition had their customary after-dinner brandy and cigars.

Francis Stead slept beside Dr. Cook on the floor of Redcliffe House that night, as he had on every other night of the expedition. It was as if their conversation of that morning had never taken place.

In the middle of the night, Dr. Cook woke up from a fitful sleep and saw that Francis Stead’s sleeping bag was empty. Certain that Stead was standing over him, he rolled over onto his back and crossed his arms in front of his face, expecting to see the muzzle of a rifle pointed at him or an axe upraised to strike him. He almost cried out for help. But there was no one standing over him, no sound in the house but that of the breathing of the others, who seemed to be deeply asleep.

He looked towards the other “room” and saw Peary, paraffin pot in hand, standing fully clothed at one end of the curtain, his torso and face lit up by the tiny blue flame that flickered from the pot. Dr. Cook opened his mouth to speak, but Peary put his finger to his lips. Peary did not go back inside, did not draw the curtain. He looked at Francis Stead’s empty sleeping bag, then at Dr. Cook. He nodded ever so slightly, almost imperceptibly. Then he looked away and withdrew behind the curtain.

As quietly as he could, Dr. Cook got up, put on his moccasins, took his parka from the wall. The door was unbolted. As he was about to open it, he heard a rustling of the curtain that divided the crew’s quarters from those of the Pearys.

Taking a lantern, Dr. Cook opened the door as silently as he could. No draught swept in, as the night was calm. But he saw when he lit his lantern that it was snowing heavily, the flakes falling straight down. He went outside and closed the door. As they had to have done when Francis Stead went out, the dogs sprang up, but when they saw that he had no food for them, they lay down again.