• CHAPTER THIRTEEN •

I read Dr. Cook’s letter several times over on the voyage from Halifax. The last I had received from him, it had reached me in June and had convinced me to put off no longer the flight from home that I had for so long been contemplating.

I regarded myself not as an immigrant to America, but as a native of the New World, Dr. Cook and I simply having been born in different parts of it. I fancied that at the sight of the strange spectacle he described, the arrival of the immigrants from eastern and southern Europe, I would feel as he had. But I knew I was mistaken when, from the porthole of my berth in second class, I first saw the featureless mass of North America.

We had been two nights at sea. That it was the continent, I did not realize until I had been staring at it for some time. At first I took it to be a small island, a disruption in the horizon so faint that it dissolved, reappearing only after I closed my eyes and opened them again. Soon it seemed that there were several small islands, then that they cohered into a single, larger one. It went on like this for some time, small islands slowly taking shape and then cohering, until it seemed there lay strung out in front of us a broken barrier that we would have to navigate to reach the continent.

Although nothing on the map as I remembered it corresponded with them, it still did not occur to me that these swelling and cohering shapes were our destination, for I did not feel that I had been long enough at sea to have come within sight of a place that had for so long seemed so far away.

The “islands” had assumed two massive shapes with a narrow channel in between before I could accept that even this last passageway would close by increments, and that what I was looking at, what seemed to be rearing up for the first time from beneath the sea, was North America. It was as if I had been for so long and so exclusively an islander that I clung to that mirage of shape-shifting islands until the illusion was so blatant that I had to let it go.

I had never, until this voyage, been far enough from Newfoundland to see it as an island. I had never really thought of it as one, had not really believed that if you followed the coast, you would come back to where you started.

I knew from how long it had taken for land to disappear after we departed from Halifax that we were still hours away from land now. We were not heading straight for the continent but travelling southwest, land on my right, and on my left, though I could not see it, endless open water.

I told myself that this featureless “land” would never resolve itself into shapes and lines and colours as long as I kept looking at it. I lay down on my bunk and, in spite of my excitement, dozed fitfully, half dreaming, half remembering, with images from the past few days passing haphazardly before my mind.

I recalled the strange finality of watching a porter wheel on board someone else’s steamer trunk in Halifax while I had nothing with me but a doctor’s bag.

I dreamed about the letters on the hull of the British steamship, which I was for some reason unable to decipher, though I knew they spelled out some word in English.

The passengers in steerage I had neither seen nor heard, though I knew them to be directly below the floor of my berth.

A steward whose English accent inspired in me a deference that I tried in vain to hide had shown me how to close the hatch on my porthole window so that I could keep my berth dark and sleep in until my accustomed hour. He then so discreetly paused for a tip that he was gone before I realized what I should have done. I rang for him again, asked directions to the dining room that he had pointed out to me the first time, then thrust a coin at him so soon after he was done that in taking it he flinched as though he thought I meant to strike him.

I walked through the dining room in search of an empty table, declining when an older couple invited me to join them, muttering that it seemed “my friend” was elsewhere.

I had got out of bed one night convinced that someone had woken me by knocking on my door. I stood in the darkness and heard nothing but the dull drone of the ship.

I had a dream in which I tried to contact Dr. Cook by telephone. I had never used a telephone before. Over and over I spoke into the mouthpiece, but there was no reply.

I came fully awake again. It sounded as though the ship was being hastily evacuated. From above and outside in the corridor came the sound of running footsteps and children shouting. From below came the first sounds I had heard from steerage, muffled cries of what sounded like alarm or even panic. Looking out the porthole, I got an oblique glimpse of what I thought was Manhattan but later learned was Staten Island.

I left my berth and joined a stream of others heading for the decks of second class. I did not realize until I was on deck and the sea breeze met my face how hot it was. The ship still contained the cool air of the mid-Atlantic, but up there it was stifling.

I went to the rail, where everyone was staring at the Statue of Liberty, of which people the world over had seen so many pictures that she was already a cliché, massive and heraldic though she was. The polyglot din of the passengers below in steerage fell to a hush. Some people stared back at the statue long after we had passed it, but most looked forward to the primary marvel of Manhattan.

I had seen photographs of Manhattan taken from this vantage point, the ramparts of the Battery looming like a vision in the mist, as if even greater wonders lay in the land beyond them. But the photographs had left me unprepared for this.

Here I must try to remember how the city looked, the impression it made on me before I knew the names of its buildings or had walked the streets that ran between them, before I knew from experience rather than from books that this solid frieze was merely an illusion of perspective, before I knew which pier the ship was headed for, before I knew it had a number, not a name. Things for which I had no name I did not see, or else I saw them all as one thing called Manhattan.

It looked not like many structures, but like one whose towers rose up from a single block of stone. I found myself trying to find the heart of it, the first structure to which the others had been joined. The strangest thing was that this city that I knew from Dr. Cook’s letter to be in a ceaseless state of growth and transformation looked so old, the buildings as ancient, as permanent, as the faces of the cliffs along the Hudson, which I had seen in books and magazines.

It was absurd to think that this, this should be anyone’s first experience of “elsewhere.” I was reminded of something I had once seen from the top of Signal Hill, a cluster of massive icebergs rearing up from out of nowhere like some city on an otherwise flat and empty plain.

It was my first sight of something artificially stupendous. There were not, to my knowledge, any other Newfoundlanders on board. It occurred to me that even including children, I was probably the least travelled person on the ship. Even those passengers who had spent all their lives in remote villages had, on some stage of the journey that was soon to end, seen some of the old cities of Europe, with their great towers, palaces, bridges and cathedrals, or the ruins of even older cities, the pillars of colossal temples. Even if they did not realize it, the city they were gaping at had its beginning in the ones they left behind.

Whereas I, I now realized, was of neither the Old World nor the New, but from a place so discrete, so singular that it required a periodic consultation of history books and maps to dispel the notion that human life there had begun independently of human life elsewhere. This in spirit was the city of these new arrivals, but in no way was it mine, not yet, and I could not help doubting that it would ever be.

It seemed to me that I was enlisting in history, their history, one phase of which they had left behind to start another. I had made a jump onto the deck of their ship as it was going by. I was a stowaway, more rootless than that portion of those in steerage who had made the crossing unaccompanied by family or friends.

But that would change, I told myself, for this was the world of the letters I was looking at, the one in which they were written, the one that they described. This, at last, was the world of Dr. Cook. And the place where I began.

For an instant, all the rest—my past, my mother, Francis Stead, Aunt Daphne, Uncle Edward, the house I grew up in, the city of St. John’s—seemed like the fast-fading remnants of a dream that I was waking from.

But then this feeling gave way to its opposite, and it was this New World that seemed unreal, remote. I felt that the instant I tried to take hold of it, or made to enter into it, the city would recede from me as all things did when you sought after them in dreams.

I envied the immigrants their lack of choices, these people whose decision to come here could never be reversed, for whom doubts and second thoughts and homesickness were so pointless they could revel in them, knowing that nothing would ever come of them. For them, at the first sight of the New World, it was certain that the old one was gone for good, that never again would they see it or the people they had left behind. It was so awful, yet so simple. It had an absoluteness about it that I longed for.

But my home was so much closer, at least in space, than theirs that I could not divest myself of one world by choosing the other. I could think of no way of choosing irrevocably, of ridding myself of all uncertainty and doubt.

How wrong I had been to think that I would survey my fellow immigrants with the same strange mixture of compassion and aloofness as Dr. Cook had.

The notion of my ever having received a letter from Dr. Cook, let alone my being his son, seemed suddenly illusory. The Dr. Cook who had grown up across the river from this city, who had grown up watching it grow up, who had ventured into it so often he as good as lived there, who sometimes sounded as if he had become so used to it that his life had come to seem pedestrian and nothing short of polar exploration could enliven it—this Dr. Cook had felt compelled to seek me out, to ask for my help, to plead with me to share his life?

I was filled with a sickening doubt. What if the idea that I was his son was a fiction that for him served some inscrutable purpose? It was not long after Francis Stead made New York his port that he blundered to his death. There was no telling how a man might be affected who had spent his whole life here.

I crossed over to the other side of the ship, where only a few people who must many times have seen the Statue of Liberty and the skyline of Manhattan stood leaning on the rails, staring vacantly across the way at Brooklyn, an air of irony about them as they chatted, now and then smiling at each other when a shout of excitement went up on the other side.

Brooklyn was itself an impressive sight. Had its cross-river rival been any city in America instead of the borough of Manhattan, it would have been Brooklyn that the passengers were gawking at. Along the shore, beyond the cluster of schooner masts that looked like a forest from whose trees all the branches and the bark had been removed, was a line of warehouses, arranged as haphazardly as the cars of two trains that had met head-on. Above the warehouses and the attenuated smokestacks of an endless sprawl of factories, on a rise of land that I could tell already was more steep than any to be found on the island of Manhattan, was a city that appeared to be laid out on a grid of parishes, each steeple staking claim to a part of Brooklyn. The steeples of churches and cathedrals rose everywhere above the houses and the trees and the buildings that in comparison with their fellows on the other side were small, though far larger than any I had seen before that day.

Once we cleared Governors Island, I could see the Brooklyn Bridge. It seemed, because of two cities’ worth of smoke and haze, to be hanging in the air without support. Dr. Cook lived at the corner of Bushwick and Willoughby, in a neighbourhood called Bushwick. But where this was in relation to the Brooklyn tower of the bridge, how far from it and in which direction, I had no idea.

I cursed the provinciality and introspective turn of mind that had made me hole up in my berth on the voyage from Halifax as if to be in the company of non-Newfoundlanders or strangers of any kind was either beneath me or beyond me. Whether it was pride or shame that held me back I could not say. But vowing that I had not come to New York to spend my time wondering what I was doing there, I went down to my berth for my belongings.

I collected the doctor’s bag that bore Francis Stead’s initials and contained Dr. Cook’s letters. I thought of them as my letters of introduction to Dr. Cook, even though they were written by him and copied in my hand.

I had planned, in preparation for transporting them, to combine all the letters in as few as half a dozen scrolls, but this had proved impossible, first because there were simply too many pages, and second because it was years since I had read some of the letters, years since they were last unscrolled, and I dared not disturb them for fear that they would fall apart.

My valise, therefore, as I went back up on deck, contained about three dozen scrolls, some tied with string, some with ribbon as if they were diplomas. To keep them from being crushed by the other articles, I had placed the scrolls on top, so it seemed that they were all the bag contained. It occurred to me what an odd sight the scrolls would make to anyone who looked inside the bag. They might have been some strange form of contraband, something that passengers were explicitly forbidden to take on board the ship. But I had no reason to think that anyone would look inside the bag. The men on the schooner that took me from St. John’s to Halifax had told me that first- and second-class passengers who showed no outward signs of being ill were allowed to disembark with only a cursory inspection.

The ship docked starboard to the pier, which jutted out three hundred feet from the waterfront. When it became clear that it would be some time before our disembarkment got under way, I walked along the rail of the ship until I encountered a wire-mesh barrier.

I was now on the port side, where a drama that seemed to be of no interest to anyone on starboard or onshore was taking place. Looking out around the barrier, I saw that steerage passengers were disembarking over several gangplanks onto ferries that bore the name of Ellis Island. Some passengers, who seemed to think that they were being turned away from America, tried to resist, sobbing and protesting as they were dragged along by implacable officials who, I guessed, were well used to such behaviour.

I knew that you could be refused admittance to America at Ellis Island if you showed signs of mental instability, an X scrawled in chalk on your shoulder or your back. My mother, had she travelled to America in steerage, might not have been admitted.

“No outward signs of being ill.” The mentally ill were easiest to spot. I wondered if, to the trained eye, to an expert in such things, I showed any “outward signs” of the illness that so many were convinced was in my blood. I did not feel ill, but then my mother had not seemed so to those who knew her either.

I could just imagine with what haste a man from steerage clutching to his chest a bag of paper scrolls would be deported, especially if some official went so far as to read the letters. I could not think of any explanation that would save me, not even the far-from-simple truth. Least of all the far-from-simple truth. The redhead on the schooner had told me that I should say, if asked, that my possessions had been sent on ahead of me in a steamer trunk. “Don’t tell them you have nothing but that little bag,” he had said.

Suddenly fearful of discovery, I felt wash over me a sense of the oddness of my mission. For a second I regarded myself as others would if they knew not only the contents of my bag, but the purpose of my trip. And in that second, it must be said, what an odd young man I seemed to myself to be.

I went back to starboard. The stewards asked us to form a line beginning about ten feet from the stairs that had been lowered from the ship. I was well back in the line and could not see the head of it, but I could hear that before each person disembarked, a man spoke so briefly he might have been extending to them some sort of official welcome.

It looked as if the entire city had turned out to meet the ship. At the front of the crowd was what I would have called a cordon of policemen had they in any way been acting in concert. They seemed randomly spaced at the head of the crowd, here a threesome of them, then a gap of a hundred feet where none was stationed. Some stood with their backs to the ship, but only so that they could chat with people at the head of the crowd; others stood with their backs to the crowd, hands in their trouser pockets, trying not to look as if they had no idea why they had been posted there.

Now and then, to the apparent amusement of the cops, little begrimed boys broke through the line of grown-ups at the front and ran straight at passengers who were just setting foot on land. They grabbed the handles of their bags and suitcases as if they meant to steal them. Some passengers gave up their bags without resistance and, as the fierce-faced boys disappeared into the crowd, ambled after them with an air of unconcern. Others held firm to theirs, and the boys, after a short, comical struggle, gave up and ran back into the crowd again.

When I saw that beyond the crush of people lay an army of conveyance vehicles and horses, I realized that the boys were freelance porters. I saw them climb up on hacks, hansom cabs and carriages. Standing beside the drivers, who in their tall black hats sat so motionless they might have been asleep, they waved to the people they had pressed into being customers, holding their bags aloft so they would know which vehicle was theirs. Once the customers and bags were aboard, the boys accepted payment from the drivers and ran back towards the ship again.

One man relinquished his bag to a boy who was running flat out, holding it about a foot from his body to make it easier for the boy, who came up from behind him to close both hands upon it. There was a smattering of applause, as much for the man as for the boy, it seemed to me, for the exchange had taken place as smoothly as if they had been practising for years. It might have been anything from a custom peculiar to this pier to one common throughout the harbours of America. It was neither forbidden nor encouraged by the cops, just wryly observed. There must have been a point at which they would have intervened, however, or why else were they there?

Everyone whose bags were not toted by a porter in uniform was expected to fend for himself when set upon by those little boys. People, even newcomers, would somehow sort themselves out and need not be interfered with by officials, the assumption seemed to be. I would have been more disposed to appreciate how entertainingly anarchic a spectacle it was had I not been about to make my descent into the luggage rats myself.

I decided I had no choice but to hold my bag with both arms against my chest just as I had pictured some poor immigrant doing, thereby giving himself no hope of passing inspection.

I would hold the bag in one hand until I made it past the man at the head of the line, who, as I heard someone in front of me say, was a doctor, though he was not even wearing a token stethoscope.

“Where are you from, young man?” he said when my turn came. He was bald, his face beet red and sweating. He was impeccably dressed and without a doubt well on his way on that early afternoon to being drunk.

“St. John’s, Newfoundland,” I said, but he had already shifted his gaze to the person behind me, as if my ability to speak English was proof enough that I carried no contagion.

Holding my bag high and with both hands, I descended the stairs. Once on the ground, I veered away from a boy who came running at me as if he meant to knock me down, and was by him distracted long enough that I did not see the boy who came at me from the side and jumped half his height into the air to grab the handles of my bag with both hands. When he landed, he almost yanked the bag from my hands. I improved my grip.

“I can carry it myself,” I said. The boy, as if he had either not heard or not understood a word I said, looked not at me but at the bag, his face contorted with exertion, cheeks puffed, eyes squinted almost shut. I could not believe his strength. Exerting equal force, we began to go around in a circle, four feet scuffing on the cobblestones as though we were playing some sort of game. “You’ll break the bag,” I said, but still the bag was all he stared at. I glanced at the police, half hoping for, half dreading their intervention, wondering what would happen if the bag burst and the odd-looking scrolls spilled out.

Finally, afraid that if the struggle went on much longer the cops would intervene, I relented, releasing the handles so suddenly that the boy went flying backwards and lost his balance, skidding on his backside on the cobblestones but holding the bag clear of the ground.

He was still skidding as he turned and gained his feet. He ran off through the crowd towards the carriages, ran at full speed as the bag was all but weightless. I ran after him, trying to keep sight of him through the crowd, terrified that I might mistake some other boy for him and never see the scrolls again. I brushed up against scores of people and was glad that, on the advice of the redhead, I had moved my money from my wallet to the pockets of my slacks. Leg pockets were harder to pick, he said, and assured me that in New York, pickpockets were everywhere. “Two hundred in cash,” he said, shaking his head as he watched me transfer it from my wallet to my pocket. I had seen American money before but had never held it in my hand. “Put some in each pocket,” he said, “and once you’re squared away, put it in a bank or you won’t have it very long.”

I saw the boy jump onto the sideboard of a hansom cab. I grabbed my bag from him just as he held out his hand to receive the penny the driver was extending to him between thumb and forefinger. The driver, a beefy fellow with an ill-fitting bowler and a square moustache, closed his fist around the coin and looked at me.

“Do you want a cab or not, sir?” he said in what I took to be an Irish accent. I looked at the boy, whose eyes were glued on the driver’s fist, which held the penny he had earned but might not get, still as oblivious to me as when we had struggled for the bag.

“Yes,” I said, though I had planned, unladen as I was, to walk, exactly where I wasn’t sure. The driver dropped the penny. The boy was already in mid-stride when the penny hit his hand. He bolted back into the crowd towards the ship. I asked the driver to take me to some moderately priced hotel.

That night, I lay above the blankets in my sweltering room. I had opened both windows but could not sleep because of the noise, which even at that hour showed no sign of dying down.

How could the air, in a city so close to a river and the sea, be so still, I wondered. I longed for a breeze as the thirsty in the desert long for water. The curtains hung motionless. It had never been as warm indoors in St. John’s as it was outdoors in Manhattan at that moment.

When I closed my eyes, I saw the face of the boy who had fought me for the bag, and whom I doubted I would ever see again, though I was sure I would recognize him if a year from now I passed him in the street. A child as old as the city itself, he might have been; a Manhattan artifact on whom my existence had in no way registered. I wondered if he had been able to speak English.

I felt vaguely, obscurely, disappointed by what had seemed certain, this time yesterday, to be one of the great days of my life. What had I expected? Some feeling of momentousness, I supposed, at my first sight of the city in which I was conceived; perhaps even a sense of homecoming, of returning to the place where I began. It had often struck me, when I looked at photographs or postcards of Manhattan, that I was looking at the place of my conception. I suppose I had thought that what I felt when I saw these images of Manhattan I would feel with a thousand times the force when I saw the place for real. But it had not been so on the ship, nor as I drove in the hansom cab through the teeming streets, and I was not sure why.

All I could think was that this was the city where Francis Stead had gone to live when he could no longer stand to come back home and be reminded by the sight of me that he was not my father. It was not Brooklyn, not the city where my real father lived between one expedition and the next. But not even the sight of that city had moved me as I thought it would.

I wondered if each time he looked across the river at Manhattan, Dr. Cook was reminded of me, of the day he crossed over on the ferry and at that party met my mother. Of all the lofty thoughts that might come to mind as, from Brooklyn, one watched the sunlight sink lower on the buildings of Manhattan, could Dr. Cook’s have been “There, over there, is where my son was conceived”? Did he think of that day each time he crossed the Brooklyn Bridge into Manhattan?

I thought of Aunt Daphne and realized instantly that it was guilt that was smothering the exhilaration I ought to have been feeling—guilt at having deserted her the way I had, even more abruptly than Francis Stead had deserted my mother and me. This was my fourth night away from home, counting the night I left. I doubted she had slept for more than minutes at a time since finding the note I had left for her in the middle of my bed. She was alone again in that house with Uncle Edward, as she had not been for fourteen years. “Can you imagine what it was like when there were just the two of us?” she had joked when she told me the rhyme “Their plates wiped clean they sit and wait / While at the trough he ruminates.”

Her plate wiped clean she sits and waits. She had never said it out loud until she said it to me, I suspected.

Here I was in Manhattan and all I could think about was Newfoundland.

The next morning I vowed to make myself known to Dr. Cook that very day. The bellhop had told me when I checked in that I could take the el train across the Brooklyn Bridge.

I got out of bed and was headed for the bathroom when I saw an envelope on the floor just inches from the door. A message of some kind from the hotel, I presumed.

I picked it up. It was sealed, with nothing written on it, not even my name. I opened it and withdrew a single folded sheet of paper. Even before I unfolded it and saw the handwriting, I knew that Dr. Cook had somehow found me first.

There was no closing salutation or signature.

Uncle Edward, despite his promise, had to have told him I was coming. Dr. Cook, or someone acting on his behalf, had to have been there when my ship arrived and followed me to this hotel.

How long had the envelope been lying there? All night? Slipped soundlessly under the door while I was lying on the blankets, too hot to sleep? Or since sometime after sun-up?

I felt both cheated and relieved. Cheated out of my chance to, however discreetly, surprise him, drop from out of nowhere into his life as he had dropped into mine. Relieved because I had, as yet, been able to think of no way of discreetly surprising him. I had dreaded making myself known to him so clumsily that he would form an unfavourable first impression of me, or that I would so startle him that he would be loath to see me again.

It was not two years since the death of Anna Forbes. He had not mentioned in his letters that he was engaged again to be married. He had not mentioned Marie at all. I wondered why.

“I have thought of an arrangement that I believe will work.” Another arrangement of his devising. What would it be this time? More letters, only now he would allow me to reply? I had not come to New York merely to write to him.

Two-thirty. It was now eight o’clock. According to the bellhop, I could make it to Bushwick and Willoughby in ninety minutes, even less depending on the time of day I travelled. I could still surprise him, show up early when the servants, who might not know that I was coming, were still there. But he might not be there. Or he might be in his surgery, available only to those who had appointments. Or he might be somewhere else.

I could simply ignore his note and send him one asking him to meet me somewhere. But given that he had gone to such great lengths to contact me before I contacted him, I doubted that he would relent and do things my way. I might, if I sent him a note, wait in vain for a second one from him.

I left the hotel and went to a cheap restaurant across the street for breakfast. On the wall beside my table was a poster advertising the “soon-to-be-completed subway,” the tunnels for which were now being dug. The poster showed illustrations of the inside of the subway cars. They looked like furnished tombs and the stations like the shafts of horizontal mines.

As I ate, I read a morning paper that was full of predictions, inventions and rumours of inventions. The imminent triumph of the “horseless carriage,” the obsolescence of horse-drawn vehicles. The day when every street of Manhattan would lead to a bridge and the ferry-filled East River would be reserved for pleasure boats. The filing of patents, one for a central cooling mechanism that would counter the heat of summer the way radiation did the cold of winter. I dearly hoped for its success. The subway would make most surface transit superfluous. One day soon, work would begin on the subway to Brooklyn. Trains would run on tracks laid in tunnels that were dug so deep beneath the riverbed that not a drop of water would make it through.

Between the restaurant and the el train station, I saw hundreds of signs advertising jobs. Most of them read: “If you can read this, the job is yours.” I could easily get a job if I had to.

I climbed a covered, winding staircase with landings every half-dozen steps on which older people rested, out of breath. There was a waiting room, but it was empty, everyone having proceeded outside to the covered platform, for the train was coming.

The el wound its way among buildings whose tops I could not see no matter how low I slumped down in my seat. The el. It seemed ironically named. It could not have been much more than forty feet above the ground.

From the el train I could see the Brooklyn Bridge, which we were due to reach in fifteen minutes. Traffic of all kinds on the bridge was ceaseless in both directions, as if the two boroughs were exchanging populations.

The train began to go upgrade, and soon the first cables of the bridge reared up outside the window, though land was still beneath us, the distant river barely visible at this angle through the struts and web of cables.

The valise, which now contained nothing but the portrait of my mother and Dr. Cook’s letters, including the one I found that morning, was on my lap. I had removed the rest of my scant belongings and left them in my room, unable to bring myself to leave the letters, let them out of my possession, or to think of a foolproof hiding place.

Again I was struck by the oddness of my mission. For a second, as though from some omniscient’s point of view, I saw myself: a young man just arrived from Newfoundland, bound for Brooklyn from Manhattan, riding the el train across the Brooklyn Bridge, propping on his lap a leather valise in which lay scrolled the letters of a Dr. Cook, who claimed to be his father—letters written not in the hand of Dr. Cook, but in that of the person to whom they were addressed, the young man himself, as if he were mad and the whole thing a concoction of which the climax, not the resolution but the dissolution, was fast approaching.

I was glad I had the portrait and the letters, glad I would not have to confront Dr. Cook empty-handed. They seemed like credentials of some kind. They made up a partial autobiography of Dr. Cook, an autobiography addressed to me. I imagined opening the bag, holding it out so he could see the heap of scrolls inside. And the picture of my mother.

It was probable that he did not have a picture of her. How accurately, after all this time, did he recall her face? I would take out the photograph and show it to him, give it to him, tell him he could keep it. I had thought of the moment many times since I left St. John’s. What more appropriate gift could I give him on the occasion of meeting him than a picture of my mother?

Countless levels of conveyance spanned the river to join the downtowns of Brooklyn and Manhattan. I knew that we were travelling beneath a wooden walkway, though I could not see it from the train, and that beneath us ran cable cars and streetcars, and below or beside them horse-drawn vehicles and motor cars, the latter spooking the horses with whom they contended for space.

Farther below, steamers, ferries, barges drawn by tugboats, expensive sloops and smaller vessels made their way across the river. Below the water and, inconceivably, below the riverbed would someday run the subway.

Dr. Cook had crossed that stretch of water to Manhattan in a ferry one afternoon more than twenty years ago. Because of that, one of his thousands of childhood journeys to Manhattan, I was now going the other way, across the river on the bridge to Brooklyn to see him face to face at last.

I tried to imagine him setting out that day for Manhattan: a boy too lightly dressed for a ferry crossing of the river so soon after winter, teeth chattering, shivering, hugging himself for warmth; a boy who has been working in Brooklyn with his brothers since the sun came up, and whose day, had it ended when theirs did, would still have been too long. He has been hired to “help out” at a party in Manhattan, and what that means he has no idea. All he has is an address that he will walk to if he can find it from the dock. He has made up some story for his mother, who would not approve of his earning money in this fashion, or of his going to Manhattan for any reason by himself.

He looks up as the ferry moves into the shadow of the uncompleted bridge. The shadow bridge, because of the angle of the sun, is bigger than the real one, and in the shadow, it is even colder. The boy looks at the shadow shape, in which everything is magnified to twice its size, then back up at the bridge again.

His mother, who has come to dread the completion of the bridge, says it will mean the end of Brooklyn as they know it.

They have been building this bridge since before he was born. His world has always been one in which “the bridge” was being built. It seems in the nature of bridges to be not quite finished. Though it looks to him like the bridge is finished. The last piece of the span will soon be put in place. The braided steel-and-iron cables thicker than a man’s body hang taut from the towers and the columns overhead.

The boy, whose glance includes that part of the bridge from which his son will look down at the water twenty years from now, feels no premonition, not of what is to happen in twenty years, nor of what is to happen in two hours. They are just docking at the pier when, up on the bridge, a series of electric arc lights come on all at once. Their light never flickers, not like the light from lamps that run on gas or kerosene. Flameless, unflickering, unnatural light.

Their coming on has for months been a signal to the people of both cities that the day is nearly over. They stay lit long after dark, for the push to complete the bridge is on.

They are still lit when he goes back to Brooklyn after midnight. By then, the licensed ferries have stopped, but he catches a ride for three times the legal fare from a man who runs an after-hours tug across the river, a tug that arrives and leaves at no appointed time. When the number of stranded has grown to the point where he deems a crossing to be worth his while, the tug driver collects his fares and sets out for the other shore. Until then, the boy waits on board, shivering, his mind blank with wonder as he stares down the river at the still-blazing arc lights on the bridge …

I roused myself from this revery. A lattice of shadow cast by the cables of the bridge lay over everything. It was coming on to noon, and the sun was beating down so fiercely that passengers closed their eyes as if in prayer and fanned themselves.

At the apex of the bridge, all I could see was a blinding sheen of sunlight from the water. And then the Brooklyn tower of the bridge came into view. I remembered Dr. Cook writing that the great arch had seemed to him like a sculpture, nearing the completion of which someone had by accident discovered that it could also be a bridge.

In each of the towers, there were two semi-ovals, pointed Gothic arches like massive church windows from which the glass had been removed. Rounded Roman arches had been proposed, but they were rejected in favour of the Gothic to appease the clergy, who were affronted by the cathedral-dwarfing bridge.

One arch admitted through the tower traffic that was headed east, the other traffic that was headed west.

Heading east, it was not until we passed through the tower that I felt I had left Manhattan and was truly on the bridge. It would not be until I passed through the semi-oval of the Brooklyn tower that I felt I was in Brooklyn. Between the towers, I felt a welcome sense of placelessness, a respite from the city. There was, suddenly, so much space.

I felt as if I was drawing my first breath since stepping off the ship the day before. As if the train had just passed a sign directing them to do so, the passengers opened their windows and there gushed across the car a cooling stream of air to which they turned their faces, eyes closed. The women put aside their fans, the men removed their hats. Clearly this was a local luxury born of bridges, this immersion in the breeze that came down the river from the ocean but was only at this altitude so free of smoke, so cool and so refreshing. The people looked the way that people in St. John’s did when they turned their faces to the sun on the first warm day of spring.

Also admitted to the train when the windows went down were the sounds of the outside world, the clatter of the wheels and the humming of the span beneath them, the eerie buzzing of the cables. No sooner had we passed through the Brooklyn tower than the windows were raised again.

Below, and stretching along the shore on both sides as far as I could see, were the warehouses that from the ship had seemed to form a solid wall along the waterfront. Docks, dry docks, grain elevators, freight terminals, the sugar refineries in the shadow of which Dr. Cook had spent his childhood. It looked as if everything needed to sustain all five boroughs of New York was shipped through Brooklyn.

The streets of this part of Brooklyn were wider than those of Manhattan, as were the sidewalks, so both were less congested. There were far more motor cars than in Manhattan, though they were still greatly outnumbered by horse-drawn vehicles. A gleaming barouche with its hood raised to shield its owners from the sun went by, drawn by two horses as well groomed as the driver, who was standing at the reins as if to signal the priority of his vehicle over all the rest.

There was a station stop at Myrtle Avenue. There I asked one of the passengers who disembarked with me how to get to Bushwick and Willoughby. “You should have stayed on,” he said. “There’s a stop there, too.” He indicated the way.

I walked along Bushwick, through block after block of stolid, freestanding mansions made of brick. With their unremarkable façades, they looked more like fortresses than dwellings.

Dr. Cook’s was no exception. It was three storeys high, with a five-storey turret in the middle. There were gabled windows on the upper storey, and on the lower storeys recessed windows with Roman arches. It was enclosed by a fence of iron spikes, though there was no front yard. I could, by extending my arm through the rails, have touched the house. The front door opened almost directly onto the sidewalk. Nothing intervened but a rise of concrete steps. The entrance was recessed with a layered arch of black marble that ended in two inlaid white marble pillars that flanked the door. Nowhere did the name of Dr. Cook appear, nor anything to suggest that the premises were those of a physician, let alone that they contained a surgery. Only upon looking closely did I see that the door was monogrammed just above the mail slot. In small silver letters, the initials F.A.C.

I considered knocking but could imagine no outcome from doing so that would not embarrass both of us. There was no telling who else might be inside. Friends. Associates. Patients. I could not identify myself to him in front of others. Just standing there, I risked being seen by him or someone else from the windows. Or he might come out or appear in the doorway to bid someone goodbye.

I took my watch from my pocket. Half past twelve. I had made the trip in half the time the bellhop had predicted. I walked around the neighbourhood for an hour, moving from one place to another, seeking shade, of which there was little. There was no park, no stores I could take shelter in, just an endless succession of mansions.

I stood, across the street from the house and one block down, in the semi-shade of some overhanging leaves, holding my valise in front of me, hands crossed, as if the valise somehow made it more reasonable that I should stand there motionless for so long.

Through a swarm of hacks, coaches, hansom cabs and motor cars, I watched the house. One after another, servants left by a door near the back.

By two-thirty I was dizzy from the heat, my clothing drenched in perspiration. But I could not bear to go back to Manhattan for the night without first meeting him, the day’s momentousness unconsummated, so that when next I crossed from Manhattan to Brooklyn, whenever that might be, I would feel foolish and the whole thing would be spoiled.

I crossed the street. The front door was at the base of the massive middle turret. Barely able to see the knocker, I lifted and dropped it several times. The door was opened by someone who walked backwards with it, so it seemed that it had opened by itself.

“Please come in,” a man said, so loudly and formally I assumed he was a servant, one who had somehow avoided being sent away or had come back early, one whom Dr. Cook could trust with any secret.

I stepped inside. Coming from the daylight into this windowless vestibule, I could barely see. As I turned to face the doorman, he turned to face the door, on which he placed both hands, one on the handle, the other palm-flat on the wood, so that he eased it shut without a sound.

He faced round and leaned back against the door, rested his head against it as if he had just ejected someone he was glad to be rid of. I could not make out his face, but I knew the profile from the many photographs I had seen.

“Devlin,” he said.

“Yes,” I said, wishing I could have answered my name with his. But “Dr. Cook” was no reply to “Devlin.” And it was far too soon to call him what I hoped I could someday.

“You know where I’m staying,” I said, not intending it to sound like an accusation. Nor did he seem to take it as one. Rather, he waved at me and smiled as if I had paid him a compliment that he did not deserve. I could see him clearly now. He did not look much different than he had in his Belgica photographs. He was clean-shaven, but his hair was long and brushed back behind his ears. He was just as spare, his face as gaunt and full of hollows, as in the photographs. The only differences were that he was clean-shaven and well dressed in a white shirt with bands, a black vest and a pair of light black slacks.

He came forward suddenly and put his arms around me, the crook of his chin and throat hard against my neck as he hugged me to him. He was so strong, his hug so fervent, that I all but fell against him, arms limp, holding the leather valise, which crumpled audibly between us. Just as I let it go to reciprocate the hug, he released me and the bag fell to the floor. So, too, very nearly, did I.

“Are you feeling ill?” he said.

“It’s very hot outside,” I said. “I guess I’m not used to it.”

“You’re overdressed for it,” he said. “You’re soaking wet. Come in and I’ll get you a cold drink. There are some things I have to tell you before we can really talk.” With what I suspected seemed like peculiar haste, I snatched up the bag, then followed him from the vestibule down a hallway hung with a succession of oval mirrors to an enormous drawing room.

He directed me to one end of a sofa.

“I’ll be right back with a nice cool drink,” he said. The ceiling was so high that when he finished speaking, there was a prolonged “ping” of vibration in the air. I was vaguely aware of the room. Gilded ceiling. A rug from wall to wall. Black statuettes. Enormous vases with enormous handles. Ferns, fronds that might or might not have been real. A marble-topped writing table that bore a single prop-like book.

He soon returned with a large tumbler of crushed ice and orange juice. I was sitting with the valise on my lap, holding the handle with both hands. I removed one hand from the bag, took the glass and, momentarily unselfconscious, gulped greedily from it.

“That’s the trick,” he said as if I was ingesting in good humour some foul-tasting medicine that he’d prescribed. I drank until there was nothing left but ice.

“More?” he said, smiling.

I shook my head, certain I would burp if I attempted speech.

He drew up an armchair at right angles to the sofa and sat down.

“It’s so good to see you, Devlin. At long last to see you. I had no idea what you looked like. I have no photographs of you.” Yet he had recognized me when I debarked from the ship. There must have been no mistaking me, no one else who that furtive-looking, solitary young man could have been but Devlin Stead.

“Usually,” he said, “as you write to someone, you have an image of him in your mind. I found myself, as I wrote, thinking of your mother. I should be ashamed to say so, but I’m not. Even before I knew you were my son, I would often recall her face, which I remembered more vividly than any other.” Now, I realized, was not the time to present him with the photograph.

“It was hard for me, too,” I said. “Being written to. Reading your letters. Not being able to write you back.”

He nodded. For reasons I cannot now explain. I told myself it was foolish to expect that all my questions would be answered at our first meeting.

“Did you and Uncle Edward correspond a lot?” I said. He pursed his lips as if to say, “That depends on what you mean by a lot.”

“Your uncle and I wrote each other only as often as we had to, I suppose.” Your uncle. And Uncle Edward had called him “your correspondent.” Each, as far as the other was concerned, had no name.

“I’m surprised that Uncle Edward went along with it,” I said. “With any of it.”

“To tell you the truth,” he said, “I was somewhat surprised myself. But luckily for us, he did. I will tell you all about it when we have time.”

I nodded as if I had expected him to speak those very words.

“Also luckily for us,” Dr. Cook said, reaching out and removing my hat, the better to see my face, “you’re not my spitting image, though someone who had reason to look for a resemblance between us would have no trouble finding it.”

I was immensely pleased to hear it, and wondered why, when I had compared our photographs, I had been unable to detect this resemblance. He had done so without benefit of an image of himself to compare to me. I supposed he had so often photographed himself that he was able to objectively imagine his appearance, which I could not do. My image in the mirror or in photographs always surprised me. I looked at him, trying to see in his face what he had seen in mine.

I imagined how it must have been for my mother, watching me change, as if she had no idea who my father was, no idea from whom I had inherited the half of me that wasn’t hers, no idea whose features those were that began to show themselves as I grew older—features that she, like Dr. Cook but unlike me, was able to detect. I imagined her scrutinizing my face, my complexion, my eyes, my mouth, trying to discern in that blending of two natures which features were his. There he was, this stranger, this man she had known for but three weeks, staring out at her from her son’s face. Why was I blind to what was so obvious to Dr. Cook?

“This is really quite a marvellous house,” I said. Reared up on the spoils of exploration, I presumed, thinking that, in his letters, he had exaggerated his need for “backers.” But the smile he had been wearing since my arrival vanished.

“Yes, a marvellous house. A wastefully lavish one, I’m afraid. I tell Marie the house is so large that each room has a different climate. The house built by beer and bought by Mrs. Cook, they call it. Many houses on Bushwick were built by beer, and are still lived in by beer. Beer barons, that is. German brewers. As you know, my parents were born in Germany, but my father was a doctor, not a beer baron. This house is also known in the neighbourhood as the house with eighty windows, though in fact it has eighty-four. It was designed and built by Theobald Englehardt for a man named Claus Lipsius, who is remembered as having ‘built’ it because his money paid for it. I terrify Marie by claiming to have seen his ghost, whom I call the elusive Lipsius. This place is so large that a ghost could haunt it undetected for centuries. I believe that I am looked upon by some as a kept husband, though perhaps it is only because I sometimes feel kept that I suspect others of regarding me that way. Most of Marie’s money is in this house. She is nowhere near so rich that she can entirely fund my expeditions. But with her money, I have been able to forsake my white horse and one-lunger for a four-cylinder Franklin. I make my rounds in it. I feel like a boy whose mother has bought for him a toy that no one else’s mother could afford. I turn the corners of streets on two wheels. I have also, with Marie’s money, bought a roentgen-ray machine. Very few doctors have them, and it is at least of use to someone other than me. I feel, unfairly to myself perhaps, that I have caused the Forbes family much grief. But they, the two remaining daughters and their mother, have told me that they are happy for Marie and me. I had thought that happiness through marriage—that marriage itself—was not for me, until I met Marie. It is for her a second marriage as well, her first having ended with the death of her husband, Willis Hunt, a homeopathic doctor of some renown who left Marie a wealthy woman.

“A fellow physician, upon hearing of my marriage, wrote that he lamented the world’s loss of me ‘as one of her most enthusiastic, able and determined explorers.’ He added, ‘But there is no doubt that you have chosen the happier lot.’ You’d think that by announcing my marriage, I had announced the end of my career. Has Peary’s having a wife and children slowed him down or disqualified him from the ranks? I fear that my friend’s remarks arise in part from Marie’s inherited wealth. I am looked upon as gentrified. Nothing could be more untrue. Marie insisted, when I asked for her hand, that I continue on with exploration, and she has even hinted at a Jo Peary–like willingness to be my companion in exploration, so far as circumstances will permit.”

He stopped speaking and, as if to say that he was sorry for having got carried away, looked at me and smiled.

He leaned his forearms on his thighs, clasped his hands.

“You really should be enrolled in some course of study,” he said. “What profession have you chosen?”

“I haven’t made up my mind yet. ‘All the remaining challenges of exploration will be met in the next ten years,’ you said in Century. If I enrol in something now, there might be nothing left to accomplish by the time I graduate.”

“That’s possible. But it’s partly to loosen the purse-strings of the backers that explorers speak the way I did. It’s also possible that I’m wrong, that ten years from now all those challenges will still be there. Unmet. Never to be met, perhaps. And you will have no paying profession. No status in society.”

“The universities and colleges will still be there,” I said.

He smiled, nodded his head, then moved it even closer to mine, as if, were he to say them too loudly, the words would still be in the air when his wife returned.

“I have told Marie about you, that you are the son of a former friend and colleague of mine, now deceased, Dr. Francis Stead, who, as she remembers, met such a tragic end on the North Greenland expedition. I told her that we met by chance in Manhattan, and that you wish to spend some time in New York, to gain some experience of real life, before completing your education. I said that you were just off the boat, looked quite hopelessly out of your element, and that if someone did not soon take you under his wing, there was no telling what might happen to you. I suggested to Marie that, what with my practice on the one hand and my exploration on the other, it might not be a bad idea if I hired someone, possibly you, as my assistant. I also suggested that given the size of this house and the necessity of having my assistant near at hand, it would make sense if you lived here. She agreed with me.”

I must have looked as incredulous as I felt, for he laughed softly. My doubts about him vanished. I felt guilty for ever having had them, and for resenting him for pre-empting my surprise arrival, which I now saw would have been imprudent no matter what sort of “arrangement” I devised. Clearly, the making of arrangements should be left to him. I looked at the valise. The letters no longer had about them the whiff of fiction. He had meant every word he wrote to me. He was, at that very moment, doing what he had said that he would do “someday.” I had come to think of it as some nebulous, forever-in-the-future day because of my impatience. Despite my not having waited for him to formally extend his invitation, despite my having set out to surprise him by showing up from out of nowhere in New York, he was offering to bring me into his life, had already prepared a place in it for me.

“Well?” he said. “Would you like to be my assistant and live here with us in this house?”

What he proposed was so appealing to me, so exactly what I wanted, that it had not occurred to me that it was a proposition, that he could imagine anything from me but grateful compliance.

“Yes,” I managed to say. “I would like that very much.”

Again he laughed. I might have been a child whose response to a gift was so exactly what he imagined it would be that he could not help being amused.

“Marie assumes that your aunt and uncle know where you are. You should say nothing to make her think otherwise. In fact, it might be best if you don’t speak about your aunt and uncle unless she does, which she probably won’t. Marie has told the servants about you. I will introduce you to people, and you will introduce yourself to anyone you meet, as the son of a former colleague of mine who is now employed as my assistant and, for our mutual convenience, staying at my house. As for you and I, we will talk openly only when we are certain, as we are now, that we cannot be overheard. You must be careful not to leave lying about any written material of a private nature.”

I nodded, though I felt like telling him that he needn’t worry, that I was well practised at the art of deception at close quarters, at withholding from one member of the household I belonged to information that I shared with another.

I saw that my new situation would be eerily congruent with the one I’d left. It was as if I had exchanged Uncle Edward and Aunt Daphne for Dr. Cook and his wife, Marie. Again conspiring with the husband of the house against the wife, maintaining the same pretence as before; again forbidden to talk about it with the husband unless invited to by him. Again a guest in someone else’s house. Adopted for the second time, this time by my father.

But I vowed that I would feel no guilt at deceiving Mrs. Cook. It was as much for other people as for ourselves that Dr. Cook and I had to be discreet. Who would benefit by knowing what we knew? Who would not be hurt by it?

“I have been thinking of what you should call me when we are alone. And I have been able to think of nothing but ‘Dr. Cook.’ If you were to call me anything else, you might inadvertently do so when we were not alone. Do you see what I mean? Such a slip would give nothing away, of course, but it might cause both of us some awkwardness.”

I nodded.

“We will tell Marie that it appears that your steamer trunk was stolen out of storage at the pier. Such things happen all the time.” He knew that the valise was all the luggage I had. I guessed that the manner of my leaving St. John’s had been dictated by him to Uncle Edward, right down to the last detail of how much luggage I should take.

Not even while alluding to my non-existent trunk did he look at my valise. He had yet to look at it as far as I could tell. All the while he spoke, I had sat there with the bag on my lap, wishing that I had been able to think of somewhere safe to put it, wishing that I had not brought it into the house, teeming as it was with all that I had just pledged to keep concealed and not be careless with.

He had not offered in the vestibule to take it from me. Perhaps he knew by how I held it that I would not have wanted to part with it. He might even, from that, have guessed its contents. If so, he had perfectly disguised any uneasiness he felt about it.

I was suddenly aware of how I looked, what an odd pose I had struck and maintained since I sat down. I saw myself dimly reflected in the window of a cabinet that held a display of silver plates. Shoulders hunched, knees primly together, feet flat on the floor, holding the bag on my lap with both hands as women hold their purses.

The oddball I had been I would be no longer, I vowed. I was starting over. No one in New York knew anything about “the Stead boy,” who in any case did not exist except in the minds of people I might never see again. In New York, people would have cause to think of me only as Dr. Cook’s assistant. “I will introduce you … you will introduce yourself to anyone you meet …” I had no idea how to socialize, what the rules and norms of interaction were. I foresaw, though not clearly, a series of catastrophes, followed by a quick retreat and a reappraisal of my possibilities by Dr. Cook.

I put the valise on the sofa beside me, right beside me, within easy grasping distance should any of the people who were absent from the house suddenly return. I put my hands palms down on my thighs, where, clammy as they were, they adhered to my trousers.

“Someday, Devlin,” Dr. Cook said, “you’re going to be very happy.” He had, I remembered from his second letter, said that very thing to my mother the day they met. I looked at him, wondering if my unhappiness was that obvious to him. I hoped that he knew next to nothing about “the Stead boy.” He smiled reassuringly. I felt a great rush of emotion I could not name, and my eyes welled up with tears.

“I am placing all my trust in you,” he said. “I am entrusting everything to you. All I have and hope to have. Everything I am and hope to be.”

Dr. Cook introduced me to Marie when she came home as “the young man I’ve been telling you about.” Nothing about him suggested that anything more momentous was taking place than the meeting of his wife and his new assistant, the son of a deceased colleague and friend.

She had a small, pretty face but was otherwise a good deal on the heavy side. Clinging to her hand, with the fingers of her free hand in her mouth, was a little girl, perhaps three years old, whom she introduced to me as Ruth, the only child of her first marriage. I saw in Mrs. Cook’s eyes a protracted fatigue, as well as a general wariness, as if she were forever having to fend off impositions, this young man in front of her clearly being one that she had been unable to fend off. She was very polite with me, pointedly so, no doubt to make it clear that though I was joining the household, I was doing so merely as an employee.

“You’ve had a long journey, Mr. Stead,” she said. “You must be very tired.”

“A little,” I said. Can she see the resemblance? I wondered. Not that it mattered. Even if she thought that in some ways her husband and I looked alike, she would think nothing of it.

“You’re all that my husband has talked about since yesterday. ‘Dr. Stead’s son will soon be here.’ He must have said it twenty times. I understand that he and your father were good friends. Explorers come back from expeditions either the closest of friends or arch-enemies for life. And some, of course, do not come back, a fact of which I know you are painfully aware. I am sorry about your father. I hope you do not catch the polar fever from my husband. There is adventure enough, exploration enough, to be done, if explore one must, in Prospect Park.”

This was hardly evidence of a “Jo Peary–like willingness” to be his companion in exploration, but I resisted the urge to look at Dr. Cook. Happiness through marriage.

“My further advice to you is to stay on this side of the river and have nothing more to do with Manhattan than you have to. But I suspect that instead of my advice, you will follow the example of my husband. Well, I’m sure you will prove an invaluable assistant to him. I hope you enjoy your stay in Brooklyn.” She spoke these last two sentences as if she doubted that our paths would ever cross again. She turned abruptly and walked off down the hall.

Dr. Cook told me my room was in an unoccupied wing of the house that was so remote he referred to it as the Dakota, an entire block of rooms on the west side that were never used. It was, as he put it, “simply there.” The house minus the Dakota was referred to as the Cooks’.

He told me he had named the Dakota after an apartment building constructed in 1884 on the Upper West Side, at that time so remote a location that the name had seemed appropriate—which it still did. “The city hasn’t really pushed that far west yet,” he said.

The Dakota. It sounded like not one structure but many. Or rather, like a territory on which a number of dwellings had been built and were being maintained in pristine condition in anticipation of a wave of people who might never come. A ghost town in reverse, never lived in but forever ready to be occupied.

“You are to be its first resident,” said Dr. Cook, “and the only resident for now, although I visit it sometimes. It really is quite absurdly huge.”

“I hope my being here has not upset Mrs. Cook,” I said.

“She is tired,” Dr. Cook said. “Anaemic. Otherwise she would be happy to have you stay in the Cooks’. The prospect of getting worse and being pent up indoors by illness has her on edge.”

My room was enormous, the ceiling as high as in the main part of the house, the furnishings as lavish. Because of the height of the ceiling and two large revolving fans, the room was cool. I had my own bathroom, my own icebox, which had been fitted with a new block of ice that morning and stocked with soft drinks and fruit. The servants, Dr. Cook said, would keep it stocked and maintain it for me. My only tasks would be the ones he assigned me.

“It’s so much,” I said. “This is so generous of you and Mrs. Cook.”

“It’s your salary,” he said. “Of course I will pay you something on top of your expenses, but you should think of all this as your salary.”

He asked me if I had left anything at my hotel. “A change of clothes and some toiletries,” I said.

“I’ll have them sent for,” he said. “You move in as of this moment.” Still he did not so much as look at the valise, which I had put down on the bed. “You will not be having dinner with us most nights, I’m afraid. At least not for a while.”

He said that his study and his surgery were at opposite ends of the house, roughly equidistant from the Dakota. A small room just down the hallway from his study would be my office. Exactly what I would do in this office, exactly what being his assistant would entail, he said he would tell me once I was settled in.

He left me to explore the rest of the Dakota. The house, he said, had been designed to accommodate an extended family, but the Lipsians, though they extended, wound up in various residences, and so the Dakota was never used, not even by them.

In the whole house, there had been at least two, and in some cases three, of everything when they moved in—two or three dining rooms, drawing rooms, living rooms, libraries, etc. Some of these rooms they had converted to other purposes, but the Dakota had remained untouched.

In the otherwise dormant Dakota, a few rooms had been revived for me: the bedroom, the bathroom closest to it and the relatively small and cozy library, a room that shared all its walls with other rooms, and thus had no windows. I would take my meals in there at the reading table, Dr. Cook said, the thought of my doing so at a dining-room table whose remaining thirty-nine chairs would be empty being unbearable to him. By pushing a button on the wall outside the dining room, I could summon someone from the kitchen anytime between seven in the morning and eight at night.

I walked through the rooms several times, the last time after dark, switching on lights as I went. Not for a long time had these rooms been lit, I suspected—except by someone checking to see that the lights still worked—though they were cleaned twice weekly. There were not even cobwebs in the corners of the ceilings. The gilded ceilings, panelled walls, and floors and parts of floors that were not covered with rugs gleamed as if the Dakota had been abandoned, the sheets thrown over the furniture, just the day before. All the major pieces of furniture were covered with white sheets. Some of the covered pieces looked like faceless statues, with the faint suggestion of bodies beneath folds and layers of marble garments. It was generally possible, by the shape of a sheet, to guess what lay beneath it.

I had expected that aside from my revived rooms, the rooms in the Dakota would be unfurnished, mere enclosures of empty space, nothing but wainscoted walls and hardwood floors. But if not for the sheets, there would have been little except for the pristine fireplaces and the complete lack of any odours to indicate that no one lived there. There were rugs, tassel-tied draperies, expansive tapestries; peeking beneath the sheets, I saw paintings, man-sized vases, gleaming tables, upholstered chairs and sofas, ottomans, glass lamps, fully stocked china cabinets, hutches of crystalware and silverware. The Cooks could have taken up residence in the Dakota without any sacrifice of comfort, without having to move anything except for toiletries and clothing. Everything the Cooks’ had the Dakota had.

It had been designed to accommodate not just one-half of an extended family, but scores of invited guests as well; designed for parties, receptions, seasonal gatherings, annual gatherings of the sort that I presumed took place in the Cooks’ while its alternate lay empty.

It had about it an air that reminded me of Francis Stead’s surgery, as if it was being maintained for someone whose return was doubtful or no longer possible, no longer believed in by anyone, or as if the doctor and his wife had had in mind for it some purpose, their abandonment of which they could not bear to acknowledge. I could not help asking, as I went from room to room, “What is it for?”

In the Dakota alone, a large family could have lived in spacious luxury. It was just as well that everything was covered in sheets. In no way would it have been possible for me to “live” in more than a fraction of it. I would have felt absurd sitting alone in one of those cavernous rooms night after night, reading or listening to music on the gramophone.

Hanging from the ceiling of the drawing room was a chandelier so massive that when it started up, I could hear it hum to life and for a second feel the floor vibrate beneath my feet. It was a great bowl from which depended what looked to me like a vast symmetry of icicles, each one lit from within and casting its reflection on the others, the whole thing a teeming concavity of light, an inverted igloo.

And one part of the otherwise dormant, enormous drawing room had some time ago been revived for Dr. Cook. This was the part he had alluded to when he said that he visited the Dakota sometimes: his “spot,” he called it, the place he came when he needed absolute solitude in which to think. It was the far edge of the room, a little semi-circle of unsheeted furniture near the fire. He liked to go there at night and sit by himself on the sofa or in the armchair. Even with me in the Dakota, he would go on doing so, he said, so I ought not to be alarmed if I heard something in the drawing room or saw that the doors were closed and a light was on inside. He said that he wished not to be interrupted when the doors were closed, but that I should take their being open as an invitation to join him.

My main task, said Dr. Cook, would be to “cull the mail.” He received, as I soon discovered, an enormous amount of correspondence every day, and he found it a nuisance separating the small portion of it that was worth reading from the much larger portion that was not. Among the latter was an avalanche of correspondence from inventors imploring him to use, and thereby publicize and prove the effectiveness of, some new invention of theirs on his next expedition.

“Invention is the national pastime,” said Dr. Cook. He was asked to experiment with outerwear made from some material that was “thermally superior to fur and completely waterproof.” Snow goggles that doubled as binoculars. A “foldable, feather-light auger that will cut through ice better than augers made of steel.” A sled that was lighter, stronger and faster because its blades were made from some “friction-less alloy.” Longer-lasting candles. A miniature stove that required “no fuel but water.” A “skin-restorer that can undo the ravages of frostbite.” Eye-drops “guaranteed to prevent and cure snow-blindness.” Frostbite-proof moccasins. “A never-tiring breed of dog that will put at a disadvantage all who insist on using huskies and the like.”

My job was to reply to all these pitches, politely decline them on his behalf, explaining that “Dr. Cook prefers to use equipment of his own design.”

“Nothing galls people like having their letters to the famous go unacknowledged,” he said.

All letters to him were to be acknowledged, except “crank” letters, of which I should dispose.

There were many letters from people recommending themselves as members of his next expedition—hunters, photographers, journalists, novelists, businessmen, physicians—or offering to pay him to take them or their sons to the Arctic. I was to write them, telling them that he was no longer for hire as an Arctic guide and now took with him on his expeditions only people he had travelled with before.

He was no longer for hire, he forthrightly told me, because of his wife’s money, which it would be pointless of him to refuse just to prove to the bloody-minded that he had not married for money.

He gave me a list of “legitimate explorers,” men from all over the world, but mostly from America, Canada, Scandinavia and Europe. All correspondence from these men I was to forward to him unopened. Many of the names—Peary, Amundsen, Dedrick, Cagni, Astrup, Bartlett, Wellman—were familiar to me.

I would, once I knew the city well enough, deliver messages and packages from him to people all over Brooklyn and Manhattan.

His study was cluttered with a decade’s worth of polar relics. Sextants and globes. Bird feathers. Snowshoes. Patagonian mementoes. A dictionary of a Patagonian tribe known as the Yahgans. Flinthead spears. Mounted on the wall was a small wooden sled. Even its runners were made of wood.” Ash,” said Dr. Cook.” It weighs thirteen pounds. It carried five hundred. Nearly forty pounds for every pound it weighs. I designed it myself.”

His desk was layered in maps, each of which traced out a different route from southern Greenland to the pole. He pored over these, making notes in his journals, consulting old journals and the writings of other explorers.

I could not see the walls for photographs, some of which were self-portraits of the sort that had run in Century. Beneath one, etched on a piece of wood enclosed in glass, was the unattributed phrase “A very young man who has the silent and unassuming manner of an older one.” An epithet, as if the man in the photograph was dead.

“Some of these relics belonged to Francis Stead,” he said. “They’re from the North Greenland expedition. Peary entrusted them to me. I contacted your uncle about them, but he said they were mine to do with as I wished. He had no intention, he said, of cluttering his house with—what did he call them?—’the bric-a-brac of savages.’ “

Francis Stead’s relics did not include any photographs of him. There were knives and needles made of bone. A walrus tusk. Mittens made from caribou hide. A reindeer-skin sleeping bag.

Framed in wood and glass was a menu of what had been served for Christmas dinner at Redcliffe House in 1892. Salmon. Rabbit Pie. Venison. Plum Pudding. It was intricately illustrated and featured a caricature of Dr. Cook, showing him long-haired, hands on hips, appraising the body of a naked Eskimo woman. The tailpiece was a potion bottle on which was drawn a fiendish-looking skull and crossbones.

“Francis Stead drew that,” said Dr. Cook. “He made one for each of us. Each one was a parody. He even did one of himself, though I forget what it was.”

Dr. Cook appraising a naked woman. Surely he was not blind to the accidental irony, yet here was this picture on his wall.

Things that had once belonged to Francis Stead were everywhere. How, I felt like asking him, could he bear to look at them, be reminded by them of Francis Stead and my mother every time he looked up from his desk? Was it a form of penance, a never-ending making of amends?

One afternoon, I asked him if there were any polar expeditions now under way that he thought might be successful. He told me that Peary was up north, supposedly trying for the pole, but in fact prolonging an already failed expedition that in the eighteen months since it was put ashore in Greenland had made no progress because of injuries and bad weather. Peary was now stranded, he said, though his exact location was unknown.

I was surprised that, knowing Peary was trying, with however little chance of success, for the pole, Dr. Cook could be so sanguine, so complacent about it. Meanwhile, here he was in Brooklyn, merely making plans for future expeditions for which he had yet to raise the money—nebulous expeditions for which no dates had yet been set.

“Aren’t you worried that he’ll reach the pole?” I said.

“You don’t understand,” he said. “It’s not that, by now, Peary’s chances of success are small. They are non-existent. They were from the start. He and his crew are stranded somewhere. The expedition was eighteen months old when they were last heard from, and that was months ago. They were still on the southernmost coast of Greenland, but were planning to head north when the snow returned. By the time it does, the expedition will be more than two years old. By then, Peary’s only real ambition will be to make it back alive. How long it will be before he admits defeat is the only question. There was word before he left that this was to be his last try. He is forty-five years old, will be at least forty-six before he gets back, if he gets back. These are not surmises. These are certainties. There will be no surprise headlines in the paper. Only the gullible are still waiting for word from Peary that he has reached the pole. Peary knows it. Every explorer in the world knows it. Some members of the Peary Arctic Club know it and are trying desperately to keep it from the press—and from the other members, the ones who skip the meetings of the PAC but put up all the money. I will not say this publicly, of course. I do not want to give a bad impression of a fellow explorer to people who, one or two years from now, will, I hope, be backing my attempt to reach the pole.”

He told me not to concern myself about Peary, sneering as he spoke the name, and reminded me that the success of any expedition depended on how well one prepared for it. “Better to make one good try for the pole,” he said, “than to make five from which nothing more will come than new material for lectures.”

Peary, he said, had been to Greenland several times since 1892, and each time he brought back with him something to impress the members of the club and draw attention away from his having failed yet again to reach the pole. He had brought back three meteorites, which he called star stones, and lent them to the American Museum of Natural History, whose president, Morris Jesup, was also the president of the Peary Arctic Club. He also brought back with him six Eskimos, four of whom, while under his care, perished of tuberculosis.

Dr. Cook waved one hand as if to dismiss all thoughts of Peary from both our minds.