• CHAPTER TWELVE •
“I’M GOING TO NEW YORK TO MEET DR. COOK,” I SAID.
We were in Francis Stead’s surgery, Uncle Edward having told his nurse that he was going there to have his lunch, just as he did on our red-letter days. I had asked him to meet me there. It was early August. I had read in the newspapers that Dr. Cook had been unable to prepare an expedition, and so would spend the year in Brooklyn and, if all went well, leave next year for a try at the North Pole. I hoped that this time next year, he and I would be setting out for the pole together.
I had not asked Dr. Cook’s permission to visit him, I told Uncle Edward, or even informed him I was coming. I was planning simply to show up unannounced.
It was time to go where the letters were coming from, time to stop dreaming about that place and make it real, and to leave behind in fact the world that, in almost every other way, I had left behind already.
“You don’t have to say anything to him about the letters,” I said. “When I get there, he’ll stop sending them. If any arrive after I leave, you can send them on to me.”
“For God’s sake,” he said, glancing at the door. He could not argue with me here. Or anywhere, he must have realized. He must surely have foreseen, when Dr. Cook first wrote to him, when he first called me to his surgery, that something more would come of our “arrangement” than an endless succession of letters. Of course he had. He had foreseen to the point of dread some such culmination as he was faced with now. But not knowing what form it would take, he had not been able to prepare for it. I could see that he was terrified.
He had done everything he could to forestall whatever it was that, on the whim of Dr. Cook, might happen. There was nothing, there never had been anything, that he wanted more than for those letters to stop coming, and for our arrangement to be concluded. But now that it seemed to be concluding, he was terrified.
Of what? I could not ask him, could not antagonize him now, just when I was on the verge of a departure that for all I knew he might, out of sheer spite, prevent. He did not know of Dr. Cook’s claim to be my father. I was sure of that. How he had been able to resist reading the letters I had no idea, nor did I have any as to why, in the first place, he had complied with Dr. Cook’s requests. Again, blackmail was all that I could think of. But what was it that Dr. Cook knew that Uncle Edward was afraid of?
“I’ll make a bargain with you,” he said, his voice breaking on bargain. I waited. “If you don’t tell Daphne you’re leaving, I won’t tell your correspondent of your plans. Agreed? You can surprise him, or whatever it is you want to do. Just don’t tell Daphne you’re leaving.”
“You won’t tell him I’m coming?” I said.
“I won’t tell him anything.”
Would he send to me in New York, at the address I would give him once I found a place to live, any further letters he received?
“I’ll have to think about that,” he said. “The best way of doing it, I mean. The safest way. For both of us. Remember: not a word to Daphne.”
I was right to have blurted out my decision to Uncle Edward. I could not stand the thought of my one-sided correspondence with Dr. Cook dragging on for still more years. Nothing but living in the same city as him made any sense now that I knew I would be his protégé “someday.”
I had become worried that, despite his invitation, he would have been satisfied to go on writing to me forever. It would not satisfy me. I would tire of the letters if they ceased to be a prelude to something more. If I left it up to him, I might still be receiving them when I was thirty.
It seemed strange to think that I would at long last meet him. I thought he would probably let me go with him at least part of the way on his next expedition, whatever misgivings he might have about my age. I had pledged to one day be his protégé in Arctic exploration. I could see no reason why that day should not come soon. I had graduated from school in June. I was twenty.
When I got to New York, I would seek him out and, when he was alone, surprise him. As quickly as possible after telling him who I was, I would assure him that my purpose in coming to New York was not to unmask him as my father or to cause him any embarrassment in public.
I wanted to surprise Dr. Cook as he, in his first letter, had surprised me.
I did not want to think it all through too clearly, for fear of encountering obstacles that would make me lose my nerve. I wanted only to get away, to go to New York, to Brooklyn, to the corner of Bushwick and Willoughby, where he lived and practised, to introduce myself to him. What would happen after that I didn’t know. I felt that like Dr. Cook, I was in a race—that if he made it to the pole, or if Peary or someone else beat him to it, I might never hear from him again.
How could he, how could we, contrive a reason to associate with one another except on the most casual basis? In society, there would be no place for us. Only outside it, apart from it—only as fellow explorers—could we be anything like father and son.
Following Uncle Edward once again into my father’s surgery, I was reminded of the first time I had gone to see him there. He had motioned for me to sit down, then made a cage of his fingers and looked at me through it.
It was apparent that since our last meeting, he had regained his equanimity. He had had time to think, to make plans. I prayed he had not found a way out of our agreement.
New York. For my mother, even for Francis Stead, it had been a synonym for calamity, dashed hopes, the end of youth.
“I’ve been reading about it,” I said. “Everyone who goes there says it will soon be the greatest city in the world. Some people think it is already.”
He smiled.
“What was it your father said in that letter? ‘Brooklyn is to explorers what Paris is to artists.’ “
I nodded, though Francis Stead had said “New York,” not “Brooklyn.”
“Do you think that for your father, leaving home, leaving you and your mother behind, was some great sacrifice in the service of some cause?”
I remembered Dr. Cook’s dedication in those Century articles. “He laboured in the service of mankind.” It sounded as though Uncle Edward had read them, too.
“Something he would rather not have done, but had to do for the greater good? The greater good of what?”
“I don’t know,” I said.
He smiled. He dropped his hands flat on his desk so suddenly that it startled me.
“Well. As to the first of your requests, I will not tell your correspondent that you are coming. As to your second request, I am going to destroy any letters that arrive in your absence, because neither I nor your correspondent wants you to have originals.”
I shrugged.
“You have grown up without the guidance of a father, or even a father figure—the latter office I would gladly have performed, but you made it clear from the start that you did not want me to.”
He paused and it seemed for a while that he was finished. I thought of telling him that my father had been writing me for years. He swivelled his chair until he almost faced the window.
“Have you ever tried to imagine my side of it? A grown man running secret errands for his nephew. I have felt like a messenger boy, delivering to the leading man scripts that I was not allowed to read.”
“You could have read them if you wanted to,” I said.
“Pawing through the post at my surgery each morning, looking for a letter, an envelope of the right kind and colour. Hiding it in my desk. Wearing that stupid red handkerchief. Climbing to your father’s surgery, putting the envelope in the drawer, sitting in that chair, waiting for you to arrive, keeping guard outside while you read your precious letter. Burning the letter.”
In truth, I had not tried to imagine his side of it.
“The story of how I found the courage to approach you in the first place must remain untold. I risked a great deal more than you can guess by acting as a go-between for you and your correspondent. I noticed the change that came over you not long after those letters began to arrive. I am not unable to appreciate the yearning for adventure, though I believe it irresponsible to indulge it to the point where it becomes one’s main profession. However, you are very much your father’s son and will, I am sure, do what you want to do, regardless of how it might affect others.”
My face burned with shame. He was right.
“It has occurred to me that you are going to New York not just to see your correspondent, but to someday join him on his expeditions. It has further occurred to me that he is fool enough to take you on. If Daphne knew of your plans, she would never have another minute’s peace. Did you know that she wants you to article in law so that you will never have to leave St. John’s? She has already made inquiries.”
She had said nothing to me about this. She had already begun the business of protecting me from me.
“Have you thought about how you’re going to leave without Daphne’s knowledge?” he said.
I shook my head. I had put off thinking about it. About what it would do to her.
“You see, she would never let you go to New York by yourself. She would try to talk you out of going, and when that didn’t work, she would insist on going with you. She’ll never let you out of her sight if she can help it.”
There was no question of my arriving in New York and meeting Dr. Cook with Aunt Daphne either by my side or showing up soon after. It might so unsettle him that he would have nothing more to do with me.
Uncle Edward leaned towards me across the desk.
“The best thing you can do for her and for yourself,” he said, almost whispering, “is simply disappear. Tell her nothing. Leave a note, but do not tell her where you’ve gone or why.”
The best thing for him, most of all, though he would not say it.
“She’ll find out where I went eventually,” I said. “And why. My name might be in the papers someday.” I had pictured this already. A photograph of me in the local papers, and in the New York papers. “Among the expeditionaries is Devlin Stead, the son of Dr. Francis Stead, who served with Dr. Cook …”
“You will be older then. Perhaps much older. Daphne will be less inclined to interfere, and you better able to resist her. And she’ll have got used to your absence by then.”
“But if I just up and leave—”
“She’ll worry. But not as much as she would if she knew of your decision to follow in your father’s footsteps. Let’s not forget where those footsteps led or what they left behind. She may adjust to your absence more quickly than you think. There was a time when she had no trouble getting by without you. Such a time may come again. Two–thirds of the threesome disappeared, and we got along without them. We have grown quite used to disappearances. That, with you gone, my brother’s whole family will have disappeared may one day seem to her quite natural.”
No doubt he thought, or was hoping, that nothing much would come of my meeting Dr. Cook, and that, finally free to forget my childhood, I would, in the immigrant tradition, start all over in America, where it would be easy to believe that my past in Newfoundland had never been.
I never want to see you again, he might as well have said. “My brother’s family.” He had never thought of me as part of his. I had been merely a guest, and now my stay was over. Soon his arrangement with Dr. Cook would end, those letters would stop coming and his torment, whatever it proceeded from, would be removed. Go, go and don’t come back. Ever. Don’t write. Allow us to forget that you exist. I had no affection for him, but I could not help feeling the sting of his contempt for me.
“I will buy you a second-class ticket to New York,” he said, “and give you as much money as there is in the trust account that Daphne established for you with the money your father left behind. I cannot, for obvious reasons, withdraw money from that account, nor can you without approaching Daphne. I will top up the amount to two hundred dollars. That should set you nicely on your way.”
It sounded so much like a bribe, so much like Judas money, that I felt like declining it. But I could not afford to. The question of how I would get to New York had been much on my mind.
“If you want to keep your destination secret from Daphne, you will have to keep it secret from everyone. You cannot be seen boarding a passenger ship that all of St. John’s knows is going to New York. I will arrange something and get back to you about it.”
We met again, days later, and he told me that he had arranged passage for me on a schooner bound for Halifax, where I could catch a passenger ship from England that, not having stopped off at St. John’s, would have on it no one who knew me. I would board the schooner not from the waterfront, where I was certain to be seen, but outside the Narrows, sometime after dark, probably very early in the morning, when it was least likely there would be witnesses to the temporary deviation of the schooner’s course.
“They will anchor and send a rowboat in to get you,” he said. “It’s summer. A few hours outdoors at night will do you no harm. This time.”
“What about my trunk?” I said.
“You will take no more with you than you can fit in this,” he said, handing me a doctor’s bag that Francis Stead had once used, and that still bore his initials, F below one clasp, S below the other.
“You may, when you get to New York, want to use a different name,” he said. “See what your correspondent thinks.”
Leave her a note. A mere note to the woman who loved me as if I was her son.
Dear Aunt Daphne:
It is not because of anything you said or did that I am leaving. I am going away, but not forever. To where, I cannot tell you. For how long, I do not know. I know now that there is nothing wrong with me. I will make my own fate. If you can bring yourself to believe that, you will not fret too much for me or doubt that we will meet again. “I leave everything to Daphne,” my mother said. She knew you could do what she could not. You made me happy. I wish I could have done the same for you. I hope that when we meet again, I will be a more worthy object of your affection. You will always be the object of mine.
All my love,
Devlin
It was so much less than she deserved that I wondered if it might be better to leave no note at all. But anything I wrote would be so much less than she deserved. What would she think when she read it? Despite my assurances, that she was to blame, that I was leaving because she had asked me if I had thought about doing myself harm. That it was to do myself harm, to do myself harm in some place where she would never know about it, that I was leaving. If the former, she would be partly right. If the latter, she had even less faith in me than I’d imagined. I vowed that I would somehow, as soon as possible, in some way that would not jeopardize my relationship with Dr. Cook, put her mind to rest.
Holding a lantern in one hand and the doctor’s bag that was once Francis Stead’s in the other, I made my way down the steep path towards the sea. I had been walking downhill for ten minutes when the slope inclined upward again. I was almost literally following in my mother’s footsteps. She would not have taken quite the same route, however, having descended this hill in mid-spring, when there might still have been snow on the ground and the path was hard to find. Nor did anyone know if she had waited until after dark to make her way downhill to the water. I tried not to think about her. I wondered if Uncle Edward had intended this perverse congruity, mother and son “leaving” by the same route. Perhaps there really was no other place that a schooner could wait at anchor unseen from the harbour. I knew of none.
“The Stead boy is gone.” It would be all over town by the next morning. Gone for good this time. Left a note in which he did little more than bid his poor aunt goodbye. Aunt Daphne, thinking it might not be too late to catch me, would insist on some sort of search, an investigation. Uncle Edward would go along with it, do everything he could to help, then console her when it turned up nothing.
I topped the second hill and saw the lights of the schooner three hundred feet from shore. I waved my lantern. One of the lights on the schooner swayed back and forth. I descended the hill and saw, just up the rocky shore, another light, that of the rowboat, I presumed.
There was no beach. The land fell off abruptly on my right and the going was treacherous. As I neared the light, I spotted a dry creek bed and followed it until I was just above the rowboat, which was bobbing on the water, kept in place by an anchor and a massive man, who with both hands was clinging to a knob of rock. “Good thing it’s not rough,” he said. The boat was still at least ten feet below where I was standing.
“How do I get in?” I said.
“You turn down that lantern, then hand it to me along with that bag. And then you jump.”
“I’ll keep the bag,” I said. It contained, along with my personal effects, the portrait photograph of my mother and the collected correspondence of Dr. Cook, the tightly rolled scrolls of paper that for years had been hidden in my bedpost.
“Suit yourself,” he said. I reached the lantern down to him. When he removed one hand to take it, the bobbing of the boat increased. He put the lantern as far behind him as he could without losing his grip on the rock.
“All right,” he said. “Jump.”
I hesitated. I thought of my mother again. They had found her about as far from shore as the boat was now. Even at this time of year, that water would be frigid. The jolting cold, a sudden intake of breath, a great gasp before my head went under. If I was found in the very place where she had been found, how eerily but suitably congruent that would seem.
I felt a spurt of panic. If I was found washed up against the very rocks my mother had leapt from fifteen years ago, who would doubt that I had died by my own hand? I told myself that I was being absurd. Uncle Edward was surely incapable of doing such a thing, and surely not that desperate to remove me from his life.
I jumped. As he caught me, the man somehow kept his balance in the lurching boat, his hands beneath my armpits, all but enclosing them, it felt like, his thumbs all but touching his fingers. Even as he held me in mid-air, I wondered if he was about to lower me over the side and hold me under. How easily he could have done it and not left a mark on me. He put me down slowly, sat me down so that I faced him. He sat, pulled up the anchor, put the oars in the oarlocks. With the first stroke, the boat rose on the water. Soon we were skimming along as if we were being towed by a steamship.
I could see him clearly now by the light of the lantern. He was wearing a tattered watchcap, through which showed tufts of thick red hair. As unlikely an associate of Uncle Edward’s as could be imagined.
Uncle Edward. Aunt Daphne.
I might be leaving her alone with him for life.