• CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE •

THE NEW YORK PAPERS DID NOT REPORT DR. COOK’S humiliation as fully as we had feared they would. Since there had been no mention of Dr. Cook in the stories about Peary’s plan to “abdicate,” there was also no explicit mention of the effect of Peary’s change of heart on Dr. Cook. The New York Times said that Peary had “unambiguously declared his intention to keep trying for the pole,” that he had expressed the fervent hope that he would succeed while Roosevelt was in the White House, and that his announcement had taken many by surprise, “including the evening’s alternative guest of honour, the mountain climber Dr. Frederick Cook.”

Still, I wondered how we would be received by Manhattan society. I had no doubt that it was widely known that the congress of explorers had all but thrown Dr. Cook a parade in advance of Peary’s speech, that he and I and countless others had assumed that we would return from Peary’s city to our own in triumph, Dr. Cook wearing the mantle that Peary had discarded.

“Perhaps we should wait a while before accepting any invitations,” Dr. Cook said. I told him that would only make things more awkward when we did accept one.

At first, it seemed to me that we were not regarded much differently than before. No one mentioned what took place in Washington. And therefore it seemed to be invoked by every word.

I wondered if I should talk about Washington, enough to give the impression at least, however transparently untrue it might be, that no great harm had come of what had happened, that we had merely suffered a rough knock of the sort to which, as explorers, we were well-accustomed. We had come out the worse, I might imply, but our friendly rivalry with Peary was far from settled. But I was not sure I could bring it off.

“They hardly seem to care about what happened,” I said one night as we were heading home from a Christmas party.

“Of course they care,” said Dr. Cook. “Everyone knows and cares. We are, if anything, even more interesting to them than before. A highly interesting chapter has just concluded, but it is still too soon, because of you, to guess how the book will end. I believe I would no longer be invited out if not for you.”

I told him that this was nonsense, that it was clearly his company they valued more. He said nothing, as if I had protested so lamely that I had proved his point.

“I think I would prefer it if they simply let me be,” he said. “There really is no reason why you cannot attend these functions by yourself. They believe that you are still worth watching. But they will soon see that I am not.”

This seemed to me to be an unfair assessment of the people at whose homes we were dining every other night and attending balls and parties. Most of them seemed to me to be far more sympathetic to us than he made them out to be.

“I am like a match,” he said. “They use me to start a conversation and then discard me.”

I demurred, but I soon realized that there was some truth in what he said.

Not that he was avoided or ignored. If anything, he was approached, addressed, even more often than before.

One evening, a woman asked him which of the poles he thought would be discovered first.

“The South,” said Dr. Cook. “In the Antarctic, there is a landmass beneath the ice and snow, so one does not have to deal with ocean currents. You see, there is no fixed North Pole per se, for the ice is always moving. The north polar explorer seeks after what is merely an illusion.”

This was followed by many disapproving murmurs and much shaking of heads.

“But surely, Dr. Cook,” said a man whose family had made its fortune in the manufacture of steel rivets, “those same ocean currents could be used to one’s advantage if one knew what one was doing. If, instead of travelling against the currents, one travelled with them, one would make up time, not lose it, would one not?” But he looked for a reply not to Dr. Cook but to a young man who sat across from him and nodded vigorously before elaborating on the other man’s suggestion. Neither of them had the faintest idea what he was talking about, but it was clear that Dr. Cook’s appraisal of their ideas would not be welcomed. He could, if he wished, have been just one of many disputants at the table, but this was not in his nature. He sat there in silence.

In this way, throughout dinner, were started conversations from which, after making a few contributions, he wound up being excluded, or excluding himself. No longer consulted, no longer inclined to offer his opinion, he sat there expressionless.

It was clear that everyone felt a great deal more sympathy for me than they did for him.

It seemed to me that at our first few gatherings after the congress, the men gave my hand an extra, encouraging squeeze and everyone’s tone was more solicitous than usual, as if they wanted me to know, without embarrassing me by a direct allusion to it, that they thought that what happened to me in Washington was a bit of bad luck that could have befallen anyone who happened to be seated next to Dr. Cook, and that no one thought any less of me because of it.

It seemed to have become the collective mission of Manhattan society to salvage me from the wreck of Dr. Cook. Clearly, people were concerned about my being fastened to someone whose star was falling. I even sometimes suspected that those little extra squeezes of my hand were meant to tell me something, perhaps that I should consider whether it would be best for me to strike out on my own, as Dr. Cook himself had come close to suggesting.

I saw Kristine two weeks after I came back from Washington. I began to ask her if she had heard of what happened, but, as if she hadn’t heard a word I said, she wondered if it might not be time for us to start calling each other by our first names. “Or should I just be grateful,” she said, “that you call me something instead of just looking at me when you speak as you do with Dr. Cook?” I told her that first names would be fine.

“Then I will say yours first,” she said. “That way, it may take you less than five years to get around to saying mine. What do you think of that, Devlin?”

“That’s fine with me,” I said, and paused until she prompted me by raising her eyebrows expectantly. “That’s fine with me, Kristine.”

“There,” she said, “that wasn’t so difficult, was it? That’s what names are for, you see, Devlin. They’re a way of letting people know that you remember having met them before, that you aren’t mistaking them for someone else or that you don’t believe that everyone who is not you goes by the name of ‘you.’ They help us sort out who is talking to whom and who it is we are talking about. They help us avoid confusion such as you might have if ten people answered the same question all at once. Names make it possible to get someone’s attention from a distance, rather than getting everyone’s attention and then having to point and say, ‘No, not you, you’ a lot. Am I teasing you too much? The truth is, I love names. I love to say them and hear mine being said. You can tell a lot by how people say each other’s names. You can’t let someone know you like them without calling them by name, can you?”

“Kristine,” I said. “Kristine, Kristine, Kristine.”