In Antarctica, on the Ross Ice Shelf, not far from where Captain Scott was stranded and died, Franklin Flyer kindled a charcoal fire beneath a full moon with a splinter of flint. In windblown flakes of snow he saw darting black and silver birds. Among the glittering stars the only constellation in that sky was the Octant, an eight-sided polygon. For six long hours, fighting to stay awake, Franklin connected and reconnected the Octant’s eight primary stars in every possible combination.
The cold was intense as fire. Beneath an oilskin cape, a fur-lined parka, the turtleneck sweater handknitted by a blind woman in Punta Arenas, and silk long johns, his skin felt like glass. On his feet he wore two pairs of waterproof socks and double-thickness boots with rubber insulation. On his head a leather cap with fat ear muffs. Tied around his face a woolen scarf. His mittens were a gift from the Inouek tribe, on the Isle of Desolation, where his ship, the Mariana, had put in during a terrible storm en route from New Zealand.
Even worse was the storm that tore up the ship two days later, killing twenty-eight of the thirty men onboard, as well as two teams of Canadian sled dogs, and a pair of parakeets who spoke Portuguese. Abandon ship, one of the parakeets had cried for nearly twenty minutes, as the broken hull slipped below the icy waves. Franklin had rescued the ship’s cat, a coppery Abyssinian with one white ear and a striped tail named Archimedes, who in his everyday dealings with the crew went by the name of Archie.
Curled inside Franklin’s parka, Archie waited patiently for the faint ringing of the ice cutter’s bell that would signal their rescue. Before leaping into a lifeboat with Archie and the boatswain named Forbes who would also survive the wreck, Franklin had run into the galley to snatch a bag of charcoal, a box of crackers, and six tins of salted mackerel. He had also grabbed his sketchbook, and with it the photograph of the woman on the stone bridge, which he carried with him always, and slipped them into his inside pocket. From the moment he discovered that photograph, he had been certain he would someday find the woman. Now he wasn’t so sure. After two days, he and Archie were down to a few more hours of charcoal, one tin of mackerel, and four crackers. Within an hour of their making land, Forbes had disappeared in a blizzard—his red woolen cap bobbing in the sheets upon sheets of white—and Franklin had given up hope of seeing him again.
The Mariana’s mission had been to test out a new gyrocompass in subzero temperatures and rough seas. The first Sperry designs, barely modified since 1913, had worked well in temperate and tropical waters, but then faltered on ships crossing the Arctic or Antarctic Circles. The three experimental gyrocompasses in the Mariana’s wheelhouse had been overseen by a man named Emmett Barnwell from the Sperry laboratory in the Brooklyn Navy Yard. Employing them separately or in tandem, the captain performed countless complex maneuvers, zigzagging down the coast of South America, through the labyrinthine channels of Tierra del Fuego, and around the Falkland and South Orkney Islands, due south into frigid waters.
Barnwell, whom Franklin had known professionally in New York City, had helped him secure his position as ship’s carpenter. Barnwell was a friend of Samuel Carstone, the inventor for whom Franklin worked as a lab assistant. A large, imposing man with a rumbling voice and an impatient manner, Carstone was famous for inventing, among other things, a foolproof airplane altimeter and the most powerful radio antenna to date, and—less sensational but better known to the general public—a ballpoint pen that could write underwater. On a freelance basis, he had put in some work on the Sperry gyrocompass with his old friend Barnwell.
Shipwrecked, Franklin did not even have a magnetic compass, much less a gyrocompass. From where he sat, on a plateau of dark blue ice, he watched moonlight flickering in a frozen pool and, far off the coast, slow-moving ice floes where he hoped to spot the lights of a ship. He calculated that if the depot on Beaufort Island had picked up his one radio signal the previous day at dawn, a ship could be within ten miles of the coast at that moment. Four miles closer, and he would spot it. He was adept at making such calculations in his head.
If the depot hadn’t picked up the signal, he would be dead— maybe in twelve hours, certainly within a day. This wasn’t how he had expected to go. But, then, he wasn’t the type to concoct scenarios around his own death. He was anything but a fatalist. And he wasn’t despairing now. Having survived a train wreck at birth, he had grown into a fearless child, never shying away from conflict, unflinching in the face of danger. Upon hearing the circumstances of Franklin’s birth, a fortune-teller in St. Augustine, Florida, told his mother that the boy would always be a wanderer, seeking in turmoil the enlightenment other men sought through introspection. Now, huddled and shivering, closing his eyes against the biting wind, he had no choice but to look inward. As the hours crawled by, a procession of shades out of his early life appeared before him: neighbors, friends, teachers, and finally the two women who had raised him, his mother and his aunt.
His mother, Zoë Everhart, was an itinerant actress; she had barely known his father—whom Franklin didn’t know at all. He didn’t even know what his father looked like—Zoë had no photos—but she claimed that Franklin greatly resembled his father: brown hair and eyes, slender, long-legged, with strong hands and handsome, but not overly fine, features. (And a shared peculiarity: a lobe more square than circular on his left ear.) Because she was unmarried, Zoë had been secretly delighted to learn that, after her baby was rescued unharmed from the wreck, he had been christened for her by the newspapers. Thus, instead of giving him her own surname—sure to make the child’s situation even more awkward—she had established “Franklin Flyer” as his legal name. Franklin lived with Zoë and her sister Vita in Isle of Palms, South Carolina, a large town on one of the barrier islands south of Charleston. Zoë was always on the road, usually performing in second-rate productions of Shakespeare or Shaw. When she came home—never for more than a few weeks at a time—and learned her lines, smoking cigarettes and sipping wine on the front porch, it was Franklin who read the other parts to prompt her. One of the few activities he shared with his mother, it left him with a close knowledge of Shakespeare. Even now, odd lines flitted through his mind from Julius Caesar and Coriolanus and The Tempest, with its famous shipwreck. He kept hearing Ariel’s song: Full fathom five thy father lies / Of his bones are coral made / Those are pearls that were his eyes…. “Zoë told Franklin his father had been a soldier of fortune—interested less in soldiering, she added, than in acquiring the fortune which constantly eluded him. The last she heard of him, he was hunting for sapphires in Mozambique. He, too, had been unable to stay in one place for long.
When Franklin was twelve, Zoë went on one of her extended tours. Late on her last night at home she had come into his room and sat at the foot of the bed. She thought he was asleep, but he had been lying awake for hours. He knew she cared about him, but even when he was younger he’d realized she could never give him the time and attention he craved. Still, whenever she went away, he couldn’t sleep. That night, her pretty features were paler than usual, her blue eyes heavy-lidded, her thin frame curved in on itself. Her blond hair haloed her head in wispy curls.
“Franklin?” she whispered, catching the gleam of his eyes. “I thought you might be awake.”
He nodded.
She took his hand. “I couldn’t sleep, either.” Her voice, once her strongest asset on the stage—rich and smooth—was rough now, punctuated by coughs. Cigarettes, cheap hotels, drafty theaters and train stations had all begun to catch up with her. “I never can sleep,” she added, “before I go away.”
She hadn’t told him this before. He had never imagined that, down the hall, she too was lying awake.
“I wasn’t cut out to stay in one place. I never was—not before you were born, not after. If I’d forced myself, I would’ve died.” She hesitated. “And I’m not going to lie to you: I still couldn’t do it. Not now, anyway. I wish I could’ve been a better mother, but it wasn’t something I knew how to do. It’s always been as if Vita was your real mother and I was your aunt.” She smiled crookedly. “Your irresponsible aunt who shows up out of nowhere and disappears the same way.”
“You’re not my aunt,” Franklin said, squeezing her hand. “And you don’t have to go.”
“No, I’m your mother,” she murmured, leaning down and kissing his cheek, “and I do love you. One day I won’t have to go anymore. Will you wait for me?”
Three weeks later, a letter arrived from a theater manager in Seattle, informing Vita that her sister had died of yellow fever. Franklin was devastated. For a week he cut school every day, taking the bus to Charleston, roaming the other nearby islands, Dewees and Capers, and even hitchhiking as far as Georgetown up the coast. He felt that if he allowed the rhythms of his daily life to flow unimpeded, it would finalize the fact of his mother’s death; if he broke them, he could put that moment off. Later, he would understand that wandering was also his way of mourning. When Vita found out what he was doing, she told him in no uncertain terms that he had to make peace with his mother’s death and move on. “I loved your mother, too, but you have your whole life before you. Abandon your responsibility to yourself and you lose everything.” This was part of her credo. From the start, Vita had managed his upbringing, but now she took him under her wing completely, as if he truly were her own child, which she never thought proper while Zoë was alive. Tall and big-boned, with short-cropped auburn hair and dark eyes, Vita was the physical opposite of her petite sister. She neither smoked nor drank. And she had put herself through Converse College for women in Spartanburg in three years. Until her own untimely death, Vita worked for nineteen years as a draftsman, then a manager, at a shipbuilding company. She was a professional woman, rare in that field at that time, and a suffragette, politically active. When he was thirteen, Franklin accompanied her to suffrage conventions in Atlanta and Richmond and, most memorably, in Seneca Falls, New York, to hear Elissa Baylor Stone speak. They lived in a house just beside the town’s black neighborhood and Vita socialized with blacks and whites. Franklin’s earliest playmates were black children. Vita had instilled her political beliefs deep in him. She also taught him how to draw, people as well as objects (since childhood he had filled dozens of sketchbooks). And Vita liked to tinker, conjuring household inventions—an automatic irrigation system for the garden, a fan with heated blades to dry clothes—that alleviated her busy schedule. Franklin admired Vita’s practicality, but himself was more of a dreamer. From the roof of their house, the sea was visible, and that’s where Vita usually found him, gazing at the horizon for hours.
The same sea, much farther south, fifty degrees colder, that now loomed before him. Pitch-black, endless, it was the last such expanse he might ever lay eyes on, he thought grimly.
Archie stirred within his parka and Franklin slipped him a shred of mackerel, stiff as cardboard. In the howling wind Franklin heard voices: first, a bass chorus, rumbling in disagreement; then a lone soprano voice climbing an impossible scale many octaves above middle C. In the basement of a church once, in Georgia, he had heard such singing as a hurricane approached. But this was even higher, and when he felt his eardrums being pierced as if by long cold needles, everything went black around him. Will you wait for me—his mother’s voice—was the last sound he heard.
Hours, or minutes, later, Archie was pushing up through the layers of insulation at Franklin’s chin. The swirling snow had thickened and Franklin could no longer make out the sea. From his plateau there was zero visibility on all sides. To spot a ship, he would have to get closer to shore. Time was running out: if he walked in the wrong direction, and a ship arrived, he would never see it. It was Vita’s voice he heard now, urging him, as she often had, to use his fear before it used him. Bending against the gales, clutching Archie close, he started out. He knew that most “blizzards” in Antarctica were in fact the icy equivalents of dust storms—that it rarely snowed near the South Pole, which is drier than the Sahara Desert. So long as the wind blew, the blizzard would never stop. A man could walk for hours in a circle or veer into oblivion in minutes.
It took him a long time to cover a short distance, and just as he felt he could walk no farther, Franklin came to the edge of an icy slope. Squinting through the snow, he made out an ice floe, sliding through the blackness. Then Archie popped his head out, ears erect, and cried out. A minute later, Franklin also heard the ice cutter’s bell, and he saw the ship’s lights, fiery as diamonds, rounding an iceberg.
The ice cutter’s flag was Norwegian. From the stern her first mate signaled through the darkness with a red lantern. Franklin waved his arms, which felt heavier than iron. He cried out and the wind swallowed his cry. He had no light, no mirror, nothing. In desperation, he sat down with his legs extended and, holding Archie closer than ever, made a toboggan of himself and slid down the slope, boots first, back upright. He stood waving his arms at the inlet’s edge, the vapor of his breath nearly solidifying in gusts off the freezing water. Finally they saw him.
The ice cutter was named the Sigrid. The first mate had a long beard, rust-colored from pipe smoking on the left side. He prepared a mug of tea and rum for Franklin and a saucer of heated milk for Archie.
"Merry Christmas,” he said to Franklin, who had lost track of the date.
As the captain turned the ice cutter back toward Beaufort Island, the crew began singing carols in Norwegian. A sailor lit a candle on the small table in the first mate’s cabin, and with Archie asleep in his lap, Franklin took the photograph of the woman on the bridge out of his sketchbook and propped it before him. She seemed so remote—more elusive than ever just then—that it only made him feel more helpless. The sketchbook itself he couldn’t bear to look at: in it he had drawn many of his shipmates in pencil and charcoal. Gazing out the porthole at the looming icebergs, he thought of those men he had lived with aboard the Mariana, all of them drowned, and the sled dogs and the parakeets, too, and Forbes’s red hat bobbing out of sight, and an icy tear ran down his cheek.