• CHAPTER FOUR •

IT WAS FIVE YEARS SINCE MY FATHER HAD MOVED TO NEW YORK, 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.

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.