• CHAPTER SIXTEEN •

“I BELIEVE,” DR. COOK TOLD ME, “THAT ROBERT PEARY WOULD number me among his friends. That I do not number him among mine, I think he knows but does not care. To Peary, friendship is a rank that he bestows on others. The question of reciprocation is, to him, irrelevant.

“I have never told you so before, but I am a member of the Peary Arctic Club. Think of that, Devlin. I am a member of a club whose sole reason for existence is to further Peary’s quest to reach the pole.”

He said that he had been invited to be a member and, for the sake of appearances, could not decline. He hoped that his own quest to reach the pole would one day become the club’s sole reason for existence, and therefore he had to remain on good terms with its members.

“I could not endure membership in the club if Peary lived in New York instead of Philadelphia—that is, if Peary was present at the meetings of the club. Thankfully, he is almost never there when we meet. I skip as many meetings as I can, short of making my record of attendance so unseemly that for me to resign would be less harmful to my reputation. When I do attend, I rarely contribute unless called upon.”

It was to the members of the Peary Arctic Club, most of whom were the “backers” Dr. Cook had so often spoken of in his letters, that I delivered messages, returning their replies and other correspondence to Dr. Cook.

He told me that I should say nothing to anyone of his ambitions, or mine. It was thought that he had no designs on the North Pole, that his goals were the South Pole and the climbing of Mt. McKinley, in Alaska, the highest peak on the continent. “The North Pole is the one true prize,” he said, a greater challenge than the South, which was a fixed point on an ice-covered continent. To reach the South Pole, you did not have to contend with an ever-shifting surface, with ocean currents, with ice that moved one way while you moved the other, so that you had to walk twenty miles to travel ten, a portion of that ten being undone while you slept or were delayed by weather.

“I do not want them to think,” he said, “that I am some sort of spy or saboteur among the members of the club. I am merely waiting for the club to realize what I have known for years: that Peary’s day is done; that the mantle must now pass to the man, the American, most capable of completing the quest that Peary has started. They may come to this realization when Peary returns from his present expedition, which his physical state doomed to failure from the start. Peary is the most ‘backed’ of all the explorers on earth. That, in spite of this, he has still not reached the pole has made some people doubt that anyone can reach it. I will have to assuage these doubts and, at the same time, gently lead the club members to the conclusion that Peary is no longer their best bet. All this will have to be done without unduly offending Peary and his most loyal supporters. It will take a very delicate touch.

“It is no secret that there was antipathy between Francis Stead and Commander Peary on the North Greenland expedition. There were even rumours that Peary was in some way responsible for the doctor’s disappearance. He was much criticized in some quarters for his apparent indifference to the fate of Dr. Stead.

“That you are now working for a member of the Peary Arctic Club may surprise some of the other members. They must not think that you bear a grudge against Peary, or that my hiring you hints at some animosity against him on my part. You must seem supportive of Peary and entirely convinced of the inevitability of his success. This will allay any concern they may have that your presence will stir up the controversy surrounding the North Greenland expedition or be an embarrassing reminder of it.

“Make no attempt to conceal who you are—whose son you supposedly are, that is. It would only make things worse for you. People would find out eventually, so tell them straight out. The backers won’t feel awkward about it if you show them that you don’t.”

It would only make things worse for you. He foresaw how difficult it would be for me to go on being Devlin Stead. “The Stead boy” was to me a fiction, but to others, he was very much alive. And this would always be the case.

I hated having to introduce myself as the son of Francis Stead to the members of the club. The son of a man remembered as a fool, a hapless explorer who had been disloyal to Peary and had killed himself. Most of them knew my “story,” all but the part about my happening to meet Dr. Cook by chance outside a Broadway beer garden one afternoon last August. They knew Dr. Stead’s story and that of his wife. Words like desertion and suicide hung in the air, unspoken.

“So you’re the boy,” one man said. The boy the ill-fated Steads were known to have left behind in Newfoundland.

Most of the backers moved on quickly from Dr. Stead to Dr. Cook, for which I was grateful. I always met them in their “business rooms,” which were just off to the right as you entered their enormous houses. Of those houses, those business rooms were all I saw, all that I expected I would ever see.

“So you just up and came to Manhattan from Newfoundland?” one man said, nodding approvngly.

These men, it seemed to me, didn’t care that I was Francis Stead’s son, didn’t think my being his son predisposed me to anything. I had come to the city where the past was beside the point, where there was no past, where everyone came to begin again, not only me. Most of them liked it that I had bypassed college, though they insisted on college for their own sons. I was told many times how fortunate I was to be a young man in Manhattan at the start of what was certain to be the greatest century in history.

I wished I could tell them the simple truth: that it was as my real father’s delegate that I was here. I wanted them to know that it was not because he felt sorry for me or out of a sense of obligation to a fallen colleague that Dr. Cook had hired me or invited me into his home.

“It is especially important that you make a good impression on Herbert Bridgman,” Dr. Cook said. Bridgman was the secretary of the Peary Arctic Club, a very powerful man, though neither high-born nor wealthy. He was powerful because the backers trusted him to make decisions on their behalf. The club members trusted him to tell them when Peary was asking for more money than he absolutely needed. They trusted him to tell them what amendment of Peary’s plans would increase his chances of success. They then proposed that amendment to Peary as if they had thought of it themselves. But Bridgman was also Peary’s pitch man. Peary needed Bridgman to convince the backers that his expeditions were worth investing in. Everything necessary to them but not including the expeditions themselves Bridgman organized on behalf of Peary—the raising of funds, publicity, lecture tours, the recruitment of crew members, the purchasing of all supplies (including an ice-breaking vessel should a new one be needed, as it almost always was). Bridgman also negotiated agreements between Peary and the club members as to how the spoils of each expedition would be shared—things like minerals, furs, narwhal and walrus tusks, relics, exhibits (including live Eskimos and animals like polar bears). Bridgman, in short, was trusted by both sides. Everything he did for Peary, Dr. Cook hoped he would one day do for him.

“We are good friends. I have known him since he was the business manager of the Brooklyn Standard Union. I believe he knows that I see myself as Peary’s successor, though of course we have not spoken openly about it. I am certain that once Peary is no longer a contender for the pole, I can convince Bridgman that no American is more qualified to succeed him than I am.”

I guessed that Bridgman was fifty. He was bald, his scalp as smooth, as unblemished, as if it had not grown hair since he was twenty. He had, as if for compensation, a florid moustache that, directly beneath his nose, had begun to grey. His eyes, even had he not been bald, would have been his most prominent feature, but his baldness drew attention to them, made them seem even smaller than they were and his stare of appraisal that much more difficult to meet.

“You must have been quite young when your father took up exploration,” he said.

“Yes sir, I was,” I said. “I don’t really remember him.”

“I remember him very well,” Bridgman said, but he gave no sign that he intended to elaborate. How, his eyes seemed to ask, do you feel about what he did to you and your mother? What are you doing with that doctor’s bag that bears his initials? As if I was as deluded about my father as he had been about himself. Did I have no better sense than to see him as some sort of hero whose life was worth emulating?

“So you’re working with Dr. Cook,” Bridgman said.

“I’m working for him, yes sir,” I said.

I could see his mind working. Does this boy think that by consorting with explorers, he will come to some understanding of his father? Establish some sort of connection with him?

More than under anyone else’s gaze, I felt, under Bridgman’s, like an apologist for Francis Stead, his delegate, his representative.