The Navigator of New York (6 page)

In spite of the publication of Dr. Cook’s report and the pledge of silence taken by the crew, it was not long before rumours began to spread. On September 24, a story in
The New York Times
in which no sources were named suggested that a falling-out had taken place between my father and Lieutenant Peary. It was said that from the start of the expedition, my father had “pestered” Peary to let him stay up north so that he could better acquaint himself with the culture and language of the Eskimos. Peary, supposedly convinced that my father’s real reason for wanting to stay behind was to achieve a farthest north, and perhaps the pole, refused.

The
Times
wrote: “It is said that Dr. Stead wore American trousers and the scantiest kind of clothing, and that almost every day he would go naked into the water where holes had been cut in the ice. He would protest that he was not cold and did everything in his power to inure himself to the hardships of the climate. He went around with his shoes
torn, his bare feet making contact with the frozen ground, much to the amusement of the Eskimos.” The story said that at a reception held for him in Philadelphia, Peary had referred to my father as a deserter for whom neither the government nor the backers of the expedition were under any obligation to send out more searching parties. “Lieutenant Peary said that to search further would at any rate be pointless. Though he said he had no right to indulge in surmises, he gave the impression that he believed there was no chance that Dr. Stead was still alive.”

The thought that this description of my father’s comportment in the Arctic was being read by millions of people throughout the world distressed Aunt Daphne.

“I wouldn’t care if it
was
true,” she said. “It’s not fair of them to speak like that when he can’t defend himself. But I don’t believe it is true. Obviously I did not know him as well as I once thought I did, but I am sure he would never carry on that way.”

She wrote, and convinced Uncle Edward to be the sole signatory to, the following statement, which was sent to all the local papers, as well as to
The New York Times:
“I know my brother. I know that in his right mind, he would not have conducted himself in such a manner. It is obvious that owing to the rigours of the expedition, he suffered an imbalance of temperament that must surely have been apparent to both Dr. Cook and Lieutenant Peary. Why such precautions were not taken as would have prevented him from injuring himself is something that these two gentlemen must answer for, if not in this life, then in the next. My brother’s reputation has in no way been diminished by his disappearance, the real manner of which may yet come to light. Nor has his memory, in the eyes of those who truly knew him and from whose thoughts he has never long been absent, been besmirched.”

Other stories from America were reprinted in the local papers. When I came home from school one day, I found Aunt Daphne at the kitchen table, her hands all but covering her face as she looked through them at a copy of
The Telegram
, on the front page of which were illustrations of the interior of Redcliffe House, based on descriptions of it provided by members of the crew.

Peary’s wife, Josephine (Jo), had been, if not exactly a member, then a guest of the Greenland expedition. She had wintered with Peary and the crew in the grandly named Redcliffe House in McCormick Bay. The whole “house” was smaller than my bedroom. The walls, inside and out, were covered with tar paper and further insulated with red woollen blankets. There were two rooms, one with a bed for the Pearys and one with pallets for the crew, a half-dozen men, my father and Dr. Cook among them. The rooms were divided only by curtains that Jo Peary had made from two silk flags. The Pearys’ bedtable was a steamer trunk, and on it stood a bowl and pitcher. Along one wall were crude shelves containing books, the reading of which was their main pastime once the Arctic night began. “On the wall,” the story said, “Mrs. Peary hung pictures of her dear ones back home, whom she thought of constantly.” In the other room, where my father and the rest of the crew slept, there was a pot-bellied stove, a table and some makeshift chairs, and one bunk with a mattress made of carpet. The men took turns sleeping in the bunk and otherwise lay out on their pallets in a circle around the stove, their heads just inches from it. From this circle, my father had removed himself so quietly that he did not wake the others, his absence going unnoticed by them until hours later. I stared at the illustration as if it was a photograph, at the artist’s rendering of the crude wooden floor as if it depicted the very spot where my father had last been seen alive.

There was a photograph of Jo Peary by which I was especially transfixed: Jo standing on the barren rocks of Greenland, dressed as though for a Sunday walk in a belted silk dress and matching waistcoat, and shielding herself from the sun with a large parasol. Her glance was downcast on an Eskimo family, over all of whom, even the parents, she towered like an adult over children. The Eskimos in their furs and skins, and Jo Peary wearing what might have been one of my mother’s dresses, so incongruous she might not really have been in the photograph but merely standing in front of one so large that all signs of civilization lay outside the frame.

“She must be a remarkable woman,” Aunt Daphne said, though
Uncle Edward would later say that according to a friend of his, she was “the laughing-stock of Philadelphia.”

I looked at Jo Peary, eyes demurely downcast as she sheltered from the sun beneath her parasol. The cracked, creased faces of the Eskimos; their long, tangled hair. For the first time, I noticed the baby the woman carried on her back, its eyes peering out just above the brim of the papoose.

There was a story about Peary’s family and with it a photograph of his little daughter’s room. It was full of souvenirs, polar souvenirs piled on the bed. Toy seals and shells and feathers and pieces from the meteorites that Peary had discovered in the Arctic, and that he called the star stones.

The next day, in a butcher’s shop, a man who had seen Aunt Daphne and me come in but must not have known that I could hear him told another man, “He went insane or something. Walked off one night when the other men were sleeping. Never seen again.” There was in his tone the suggestion that the odd manner of my father’s death was somehow in keeping with the odd manner of my mother’s. This, I soon sensed, was the general view: that my father’s death was final confirmation of the oddness of Dr. Francis Stead and his wife, Amelia.

Although, from the beginning, the prevailing view was that my father was an irresponsible, wanderlusting man whose desertion of his family was inexcusable, there had always been rumours, vague, source-less rumours that, as Uncle Edward seemed to think but would not have said in public, it was to escape my mother that my father took up exploration. I remembered what Moses had once asked me: “Why do you think it is, Devlin, that your father would rather do it with a squaw than with your mother?”

Now it was as if it made sense that a man who had not so much chosen exploration as been driven to it would one day be driven mad by it. Or by his wife, by her, by
that one
with her odd ways, whom, even when he was in the Arctic, even after she was dead and he had not set eyes on her for years, he could not forget.

What, people seemed to say as they looked at me, will become of this boy who was the issue of two such odd people as his parents?

Just as he was preparing to go to New York to settle my father’s affairs, Uncle Edward received a letter from a man who described himself as an “associate of Dr. Stead’s” and said that my father had rented an almost unfurnished flat and, in between expeditions, worked for little compensation at a hospital for the indigent in Brooklyn. He died intestate, having at any rate but $140 in a bank and no personal effects besides clothing and books. The money, Aunt Daphne decided, would be kept in trust for me until I was twenty-one. Uncle Edward instructed my father’s associate to dispose of the clothing and books in whatever manner he saw fit, since it would cost more to transport them to Newfoundland than they were worth.

A month passed in which nothing new about my father came to light. Uncle Edward said it would be pointless to wait until next June, when the whaler referred to by Dr. Cook in his report would go through the formality of putting in at McCormick Bay. Pointless, he meant, to wait until then to have a funeral service for my father. All the papers agreed with Peary that, given the circumstances, there was no chance that Dr. Stead was alive now, let alone that he would make it until June.

Uncle Edward placed a notice in the papers that would have given to people who did not know my father no clue that he had ever deviated from the path the world expected him to follow all his life, no clue to how he had spent his last ten years or how he had died: “Passed away, August 17, 1892, Dr. Francis Stead, son of Dr. Alfred Stead and Elizabeth Stead, née Hudson, lately of St. John’s. Leaving to mourn his son, Devlin; his brother, Dr. Edward Stead; and his sister-in-law, Daphne Stead, née Jesperson. Predeceased by his wife, Amelia, née Jackman.”

Beside my mother’s, a stone was erected in my father’s name in the family plot in the cemetery not far from the house. There was a short, private service presided over by a minister who had long been one of Uncle Edward’s patients. Aunt Daphne cried, though less for my father
than for me, it seemed, for she kept looking at me and trying to smile. In Uncle Edward’s face, there was a shadow of the grief I had seen there the day we learned about my father, but more than that he either would not or could not show.

My father’s headstone, token of his unmarked, unknown final resting place. There were other stones in the cemetery for people, most of them men who had died at sea, whose remains were never found.

“Poor soul,” Aunt Daphne said, looking at the stone. Poor soul, I thought. The stone, the portraits in the house, the words
poor soul
, the picture of the room he once occupied at Redcliffe House, the accounts of his disappearance in the papers were to me the sum effects on the world of his existence. I tried to think of myself as an effect of his existence but could not.

Aunt Daphne still read aloud in the evenings, sometimes downstairs, sometimes in my room.

I noticed that often, from the strain of reading night after night, her voice grew hoarse. She would drink frequently from a glass of water that she kept beside her chair, sipping after every page.

“Why don’t I read to you for a while?” I said one night.

From then on, we took turns reading to each other, handing a book back and forth two or three times a night. Sometimes she had to help me with a word, inclining her head to see which one I was pointing at. I learned the knack of pronouncing words I didn’t know the meanings of, and then the knack of guessing their meanings from the words around them.

“Why don’t you read to blind people?” Uncle Edward said. “At least then it would make sense to read out loud.”

“It’s a way for two people to read the same book at the same time,” Aunt Daphne said. “Or three people, for that matter.”

But as soon as we began to read, he went upstairs to listen to his Victrola.

I liked the tandem journey through a book. It was different from co-witnessing a real event, even if that real event was a performance
like the concerts and plays she took me to. Reading aloud to each other was like collaborating on some endlessly evolving secret. By tacit understanding, we never talked about the books we read, as if we did not want to know if or how our impressions of them differed. I liked the idea, even if it was just illusory, that for a while each day my mind mirrored hers.

“I want you to understand something,” she said one evening, after we had finished reading. “Just because something happened to your parents doesn’t mean that it will happen to you. You are not the sum of your parents. You are you. Devlin. Do you understand?”

I nodded. I was relieved, grateful to her for having said it, for having guessed not only that I needed reassurance that I would not end up like my parents, but that I lived in such dread of the possibility that I could not bring myself to speak to her about it. That she had sounded, just faintly, as if it were herself as much as me that she was trying to convince didn’t matter. She, too, needed reassurance, could not help having doubts, however transient they might be.

T
HE WINTER
I
TURNED SEVENTEEN
, U
NCLE
E
DWARD SUGGESTED
to Aunt Daphne that I go to his surgery for a check-up. He said that he thought I was not looking my usual self, and that, although it was probably nothing, it was best not to take any chances.

I went the next day after school, glancing at the shingle that no longer bore my father’s name, or Father Stead’s, only Uncle Edward’s. Inside, I glanced at the door across from Uncle Edward’s. It remained unchanged. “Dr. Francis Stead.” Uncle Edward no longer even pretended to be looking for another partner.

There were several patients ahead of me in his waiting room, but when the patient he was with came out, he called me in.

“Sit down, Devlin,” he said, motioning to the chair opposite his at the desk.

“You think there might be something wrong with me?” I said.

He shook his head.

“This is the best place for us to meet,” he said. “The safest place.” For a few seconds, his elbows on the desk, his fingertips touching so that his fingers formed a cage, he was silent, as though he was deliberating, trying to foresee what my reaction would be to what he was about to say. He sat back in his chair and turned it so that he faced away from me.

“I have had a letter,” he said. “A letter from Dr. Frederick Cook, the man whose account of your father’s disappearance was published in all the papers. Do you remember?”

I nodded.

“The letter is for you. He did not send it directly to you because he did not want Daphne to see it. I have, at Dr. Cook’s suggestion, not read it, but I believe that it contains … no falsehoods. I have decided that I will speak about this matter to no one but you. I believe that once you have read the letter, you too will see the wisdom of discretion.”