• CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE •

SOMETHING ABOUT THE DAKOTA UNSETTLED ME, SOMETHING beyond the obvious eeriness of all that shrouded furniture and all those empty rooms.

Late almost every night, I heard footsteps in the hallway. Several times, venturing out of my room, I found the doors of the drawing room closed. Sometimes I saw a light beneath the door, sometimes only what I knew to be the flickering light from the fireplace. Occasionally, though I smelled the smoke of Dr. Cook’s cigars, there was no light at all.

One night, the drawing-room door nearest to my room was closed, but the other was slightly open. There was a diagonal, flickering shaft of light on the floor of the hallway. I could hear the crackling of wood in the fireplace.

Remembering that Dr. Cook had told me that I should regard an open door as an invitation to join him, I was about to do so when I heard the voice of Mrs. Cook, her tone upbraiding, plaintive, though not until I went a few feet closer, where there was nothing to hide behind, could I make out what she was saying.

“When will Mr. Stead be moving out? I mean, he can’t live with us forever. He is a grown man. Should he not find a place of his own, a life of his own—”

“My dear, he comes from a place so unlike, so much smaller than, New York that he is not yet ready to strike out on his own.”

“When will he be ready?”

“I don’t know. You hardly see him from one month to the next, so I don’t see why—”

“I hardly see you from one month to the next. Because of him.”

“You’re exaggerating. You mustn’t blame Mr. Stead if you feel that I have been neglecting you.”

“If I feel it? It is like night and day,” she said. “You have not been yourself since he arrived.”

“That’s not true. I’ve always been preoccupied.”

“Since he arrived, you have acted like you are under a spell.”

“It has nothing to do with Mr. Stead. There was a lull in exploration that happened to end not long after Mr. Stead arrived. Sheer coincidence. You know what I’m like when I’m planning for an expedition or just back from one.”

“Planning expeditions. Away on expeditions. Recovering from expeditions. There is no time left for anything else, except gallivanting about with Mr. Stead.”

“Please, Marie, keep your voice down.”

“You are not the same man as you were. I feel that I no longer have a husband, that my child no longer has a father.”

I felt as though I was hearing an argument between my mother and Francis Stead, as though I was back in their house on Devon Row, just an infant whom they thought could not understand what they were saying.

“I told you before we were married that I would often be away—”

“Being left alone when you are away is one thing. Being left alone when you are here is something else. Being ignored. Avoided. Having your excuses relayed to me by the servants as if we live in different houses.”

“I have not had an assistant before. That is all that is different. It is only natural to spend time with one’s assistant.”

“I wish it was only a question of how much time you spend with him. But your whole manner with me and the child has changed. You used to have a playfulness, a tenderness about you. Now you seem so formal, so cold. Going through the motions. I have always known that you would never love me as you loved the first Forbes girl—”

“My darling Marie—”

“But I believed that you felt a great affection for me that might one day turn into love.”

“Marie—”

“I do not know how this Mr. Stead has changed you so quickly for the worse. I know only that he has, however irrational that seems. I wish you had never met him. But all this can be fixed so easily. Find him a job, a place to live. Is that asking too much? Is that too much to do for the sake of your own wife and family?”

“Marie, this is absurd. I will not have all of New York and half the world wondering why I so suddenly parted ways with my heroic protégé, as the papers like to call him. You know how I feel about you—”

“Then why will you not prove it by doing what I ask? We will find you a new assistant, one who need not live with us—”

“No. I will not dismiss a perfectly able young man. I will not deprive him of his preferred way of supporting himself just to indulge this strange jealousy of yours.”

“I just don’t understand, Frederick. You have always been so indulgent of me in the past, even when I did not deserve it. But on this one matter you will not relent, even though it is clearly making me unhappy. Doesn’t my happiness matter to you any more?”

“Of course it does. But I do not wish to start a precedent by indulging this irrational animosity of yours. I will not cast away from me everyone whom, on a whim, you find unsuitable or feel threatened by in some inscrutable way.”

I felt sorry for her and guilty for the trouble my presence in the house was causing her. Libby Forbes, Dr. Cook’s dead first wife. She thought it was by the memory of Libby Forbes that he was haunted, that she had been his one true love.

“Goodnight, Marie. We will speak more about this later if you insist, but for now—”

He was still speaking when she left. The heavy door swung outward. She must have shoved it with both hands. If not for that door, she would have seen me. By the time I saw her, she was receding down the hallway, marching with head and shoulders thrown back in defiance, as if she believed that Dr. Cook was watching her.

I waited until Mrs. Cook was out of sight, until I heard a distant door opening and closing.

I went to the open door of the drawing room. Dr. Cook was sitting on the edge of the sofa, hunched over, his forearms on his thighs, a half-smoked cigar unlit in his left hand as he stared into the fire. He looked up irritably, perhaps thinking that his wife had returned, but smiled when he saw that it was me.

I went into the room, closing the door behind me. I sat in the armchair in which Mrs. Cook must have sat, for it was still warm. I pictured her there, imploring him across the distance of several feet.

“I overheard. By accident,” I said. “I saw that the door was open. When I realized that your wife was with you, I was afraid to go back to my room in case she heard me.”

“I would have told you anyway,” he said. “Just in case she approached you. It might be best to keep your distance from her for a while.” The only way we would meet was if Mrs. Cook stopped keeping her distance from me, but I did not say so.

“If my being in this house is making her unhappy—”

He shook his head. “It wouldn’t make any difference now if you moved out. No difference to her, I mean. She would still think I was not the man she married. I would still be what she calls preoccupied. Which is, in part at least, a euphemism for something else.”

Though I was fairly certain I knew what he meant, I said nothing.

“I have been avoiding her,” he said. “I do not plan to do so forever, but for now …” He shrugged. “My mind is … I can think of no woman but your mother, Devlin. I can think of no thing but your mother and what might have been. For you. For me. For her.”

“I think it is wrong,” I said, “unfair for you to blame yourself so much for what you did. You were young. Younger than I am now. I might have done the same thing. You had no way of knowing what the consequences would be. And you were not responsible for the actions of Francis Stead or my mother. Most people would have done what they did.”

Dr. Cook stood up quickly, as if he could not bear to hear another word.

“I don’t just blame myself. I also feel sorry for myself, pity myself for having to suffer the consequences of my actions. Your mother I cannot have. I have Marie, of whom I am fond but, were she not rich, would not have married.”

“I don’t believe you mean that,” I said. “You can forgive everyone, make allowances for everyone, understand everyone except yourself. You speak with more contempt of yourself than you do of Peary. Two of the three people you betrayed are still alive. You and me. It is not too late for us. That you are my father means more to me than anything. It doesn’t matter that no one else knows that I am your son.”

He shook his head.

“It does matter,” he said. “Someday you will understand how much it matters.” He walked over to me and, with one hand, gripped me where my neck and shoulder met. “You are becoming more and more like her,” he said, then quickly left the room.

The Dakota. These were the empty rooms of the life that might have been, the alternative life that Dr. Cook visited from time to time. It seemed that my mother was in the Dakota—there by the investiture of Dr. Cook, there even when neither Dr. Cook nor I was there, pursuing by herself some ghost version of the life she might have led.

I felt this most strongly whenever I returned to the Dakota. It was as if she was in a parallel, not quite perceptible Dakota, a much lived-in one in which there were no sheets on the furniture and the rooms were filled with voices—hers, Dr. Cook’s, mine and those of the other children they might have had.

At night, when Dr. Cook was in the drawing room and I was in my bedroom, it seemed that two-thirds of the cast of this other life had been assembled—that the Dakota was occupied by an impaired, adulterated version of this other life, an almost mockingly disfigured fragment of it, a marred and silent simulacrum.

I could not help feeling sometimes that it only seemed that I had come here of my own accord; that, in fact, I had been brought here to play the very role that I was playing; that Dr. Cook had had this very thing in mind when he first wrote to me, had foreseen these nights in the Dakota, this simulacrum of the life he had turned away from. Me, a grown man, sleeping in the room down the hall from the one in which he stayed up late, forbidden, as though I was a child, to knock on the doors of the drawing room if they were closed. I was a constant reminder to him of her absence. She was never more palpably absent than when he and I were together.

There were times when I heard his voice and thought he was again arguing with Mrs. Cook, only to find upon opening my door that both of the doors to the drawing room were closed. His tone was mildly disputatious, but he spoke at too low a volume for me to make out what he was saying.

“I heard you talking the other night when the doors were closed,” I said one day.

“Just thinking some things through,” he said. “I find I think better when I think out loud.” He smiled. “Though of course other people find it off-putting. I’ll try not to raise my voice from now on.”

“What were you thinking about?” I said.

“Oh,” he said. “Expeditions, mapping routes, supplies, that sort of thing.”

That sort of thing. I knew he did that sort of thing in silent, intense absorption in his study, poring over maps and charts and logs that he was unlikely to remove from his study, and that he could not have spread out properly in the drawing room as there were no large desks in it, draped with sheets or otherwise. But I said nothing.

I at first fancied that these drawing-room monologues were addressed to my mother, but I soon realized that the tone did not seem right. Always he spoke in that same, faintly disputatious way as when I had first heard him, not the tone you would take with a lost lover from whom you hoped for solace, guidance or forgiveness. It seemed that he was arguing both sides of some question—perhaps, as he said, thinking things through, playing devil’s advocate to himself. Or rehearsing a momentous meeting with the backers, with Morris Jesup, with Herbert Bridgman and the members of the Peary Arctic Club.

One night, his voice rose every few minutes to a shout, as if he were giving himself a good dressing-down, enumerating his misdeeds, castigating himself, shouting with exasperation as you might at someone who committed the same misdeed over and over.

He often spent the entire night on the sofa. “Dozed off,” he’d say whenever I encountered him as he left the drawing room, as if it was never his intention to stay there longer than it took to “think things through.”

Still wearing his clothes from the day before, he looked dishevelled, sheepish, his shirt rumpled, his hair standing on end. He would hurry to the Cooks’ for a quick bath and a change of clothes, and half an hour later, he would begin receiving patients in his surgery.

Sometimes, when I was on my way from the Dakota to my office in the Cooks’, I saw the little girl, Ruth. She would stare solemnly at me from the doorway of the other drawing room until I waved to her or said hello, at which point she would run from the room and down the hallway.

What she thought of the continuing presence in her own house of someone her mother regarded with such dread and disapproval, I could not begin to imagine. Her mother did not want me there, and yet I remained. Her father insisted that I stay and spent more time in my side of the house than he did in theirs, more time with me than he did with her. What, she must have wondered, could this mean?