WE MET IN THE DRAWING ROOM AFTER HE WENT TO THE COOKS’ to tell his wife that he and I had business to discuss. The largest room in the Dakota, it was the one in which we could sit farthest from the doors and walls, keeping to a minimum the chance that the sound of our voices might carry through them.
The room, the never-lived-in room that even with us in it still seemed unoccupied, served only to increase my sense of not belonging, of having made some terrible, irreversible mistake. Going back to Newfoundland would not reverse it. Nothing would. I had started down a path that I could not bear to double back from, a path that even if only in my mind I would follow to the end. Back home—knowing that what I had been looking forward to for years would never happen, that the person I thought I was had never been—I might well end up like my mother. And Francis Stead. Francis Stead’s son after all. Only in dreams had I ever felt such dread.
“Are you my father?” I whispered.
“Of course,” he said, looking startled, then nervously about. “Of course I am. I didn’t mean to make you think otherwise. I would never mislead you about that. It is something else entirely. Please, Devlin, you must not feel that you have anything to fear from me.”
I did not want him to see how relieved I was, how terrified I had been. It might have made him doubt my emotional stability. Even once reassured, I doubted it myself. I realized that I had let myself become dangerously dependent on him, on his approval, on meeting his expectations and on him meeting mine, on the notion that we shared some tandem destiny. No one person should be so relied upon, let alone one whose nature was so elusive.
We sat on either side of the fire, the reflection of which flickered in the mirror above the mantelpiece and on the ornate gilded ceiling. He insisted on a fire, though it was warm outside, telling me that at night this room was always cold. We turned on no lights, though even in the darkness I could see the chandelier. Unlit but faintly luminous, the chains invisible that attached it to the ceiling, it seemed to hang suspended in the air.
We did not face the fire. He sat on a sofa from which he could see both doors. I did not share the sofa with him but drew up a chair beside it.
“Tell me,” he said. “What do you think you will do after I am gone? After those who would be most hurt by the truth are gone?”
“Some of them are gone already,” I said. “My mother. Francis Stead.”
“Are you concerned with how people will remember them? Remember me, my wife, my other children? Do you care how people will remember you?”
“I will never tell anyone you are my father,” I said. “No one else will ever know. You must not believe that you have anything to fear from me. You are my father.” My father. Father. At last I had said it. And he had winced at the word, at my having broken my pledge never to call him anything but Dr. Cook. Would he never do as much for me and say I was his son? He had often used the words father and son in his letters.
“I believe you,” he said. “If people were other than they are, no one would have cause to fear the truth. But people, if they knew this truth, would never understand it.
“I have weighed telling you against not telling you, vacillating back and forth. I have, since your arrival, been favouring the former. I hope I have chosen correctly.
“Francis Stead at one time loved your mother very much. More, perhaps, than I ever did.”
“He might have loved her,” I said. “But he must have hated me.”
“I knew him for the length of the North Greenland expedition. Eighteen months. Has anyone told you about him, what he was like?”
“No one ever spoke about him unless they had to,” I said.
“I will tell you first about Francis Stead. He had no idea what motivated people, good or bad; no idea how others saw him. He did not think of himself as having a transparent nature. He assumed that he was as inscrutable to others as they were to him.
“He was always telling me things about himself that he thought I never would have guessed. He would make these self-disclosures in such earnestness, almost gravely, as if it were a relief to him that finally someone else knew of this shortcoming that for years had been his shameful secret.
“ ‘I’m not very good at conversation,’ he said once, as if I had never seen him attempt conversation.
“I could never bring myself to tell him that the things he was forever confessing to were common knowledge. I am making him sound almost child-like, which in a way he was. But there was another side to him. If he saw or suspected that people were having fun at his expense, he got very angry, not at them, but at himself for having done or said something—he usually had no idea what it was—to make himself look foolish.
“People laughed at him, but it was usually good-natured laughter. His ‘story’ was partly known. We had heard that he had left his wife and child to take up exploration, and that in his absence, his wife had died, though the circumstances of her death were not known. We all assumed she had died from some illness. I had no idea then who this wife and child were, who he was. Amelia had only ever called him ‘my fiancé.’ Lily had never spoken of him.
“He was well liked among explorers, the only people, he said, who could understand why he had sacrificed so much. But explorers laughed at him, too—at his grandiose ambitions, his ever-changing goals, which he talked about as if he had accomplished them already. One day it was the North Pole. The next day the South Pole. The next day the summit of the highest mountain in the world.
“He might have prospered had he known his place, had he understood that he was not cut out for greatness. But to hear him talk, great men already included him in their number. People could not help laughing at him.
“ ‘Why am I so often laughed at?’ he said on the North Greenland expedition.
“ ‘You’re not,’ I said.
“ ‘Damn it,’ he said. ‘I’m just so … why can’t I …’He would never finish such sentences, just go about kicking things, to everyone’s further amusement.
“He told me he felt that he was the ‘mascot’ of the expedition. He might have become the mascot by random choice for all the sense it made to him.
“It was clear, from the start of the expedition, that Peary had hired him so he could bully him about. Francis, who believed Peary to be his friend, indulged his every whim.
“During the early stages of the expedition, I felt sorry for him because of the way Peary treated him, having him perform the most menial tasks. It was as if Peary wanted to see if there was anything that Francis would not stoop to doing. Francis, a doctor, disposed of waste, swept the floor of Peary’s quarters, filled in when the cook was sick. It was said, among the crew and the paying passengers of the Kite, that there were not two doctors and one manservant on board, but two manservants and one doctor.
“But Francis gradually changed. By the time of the land march back to southern Greenland, and especially by the time we returned to McCormick Bay, he was openly defiant of Peary. He stared at Peary while Peary was preoccupied with other things. He looked as though he meant to confront him for treating him so poorly, though Peary was by this time ignoring Francis as much as he could. Sometimes, I would look up to see Francis staring at me, wearing the same expression as when he stared at Peary. What he had against me—except that, from the start, Peary had preferred my medical advice to his—I had no idea.
“Francis became more and more of a nuisance to Peary. The pieces that appeared about him in the papers after his death were largely true. He sometimes left the ship or Redcliffe House dressed as though for a walk in Prospect Park. More than once, he shed all his clothing and went swimming in the frigid water, claiming he was insensitive to its effects. He let his hair grow long and kept himself clean-shaven in imitation of the Eskimos.
“He told Peary he would not be returning with the rest of the expedition come the spring but would stay behind to live with the Eskimos, whose ways he preferred. Peary was furious, even though Francis was clearly no threat to reach the pole or even a farthest north.
“The rest of us told Peary that Francis was either ‘going Native,’ as many explorers have done, or else suffering from what the Eskimos call piblocto, a form of Arctic madness that would pass. I told Peary that it was best to indulge Francis until he was himself again, but Peary denounced his every utterance and action, which only made Francis worse.
“When the polar night set in, it became his habit to go outside alone to a tolt of rock. He would sit on the side that faced away from Redcliffe House, in the lee of the wind and out of sight. There was a kind of bench in it, a ledge that he sat on, though it was only a foot off the ground, so he had to extend his legs straight out to keep from squatting. I went out there once or twice myself when he was elsewhere. On the rock and the snow in front of it there were cigar butts and little mounds of half-burnt pipe tobacco.
“It was easy to picture him there in the darkness, bundled in furs, puffing on his pipes and his cigars, brooding on the terms of his existence, dreaming of the day when he would be acknowledged as a great explorer. Perhaps he believed that because he understood the effects that prolonged darkness could have on the mind and body, he was immune to them.
“We all, to some degree, shunned the company of others. The long night made morbid introspection irresistible. But he was fooled by the gloom into thinking that to socialize would be a waste of precious energy. Each day, as he left the house, he told us he was going outside to pursue his own strategy for survival. Everything we did he regarded as a symptom, evidence of some delusion that might be contagious.
“Soon he was finding fault with everything I prescribed for the other members of the expedition. In their debilitated states, they didn’t know which of us they should listen to. He said that Peary was getting too much exercise, and that it was best that Mrs. Peary get none at all (the best for women being always opposite to what was best for men). He said that Verhoeff was reading too much. Gibson was getting too much sleep, Henson not enough. We should eat cooked canned meat, not raw fresh meat. A day later, though no one but me seemed to notice, he was saying just the opposite, or had shuffled his criticisms so that now it was Verhoeff’s regimen of sleep and Mrs. Peary’s reading habits that he found fault with.
“I had to overrule him constantly. The others, who when healthy would not have taken him seriously, were filled with doubt and dread because of this disagreement between the two medical officers. They argued as much with me as they did with him—even Peary, who when I warned him against adding more canned meat to his diet told me that Dr. Stead had said that by increasing his intake of canned meat, he would improve his circulation.
“I would have suspected Francis of trying to sabotage the expedition with bad medical advice except that he was so nearly deranged, so agitated, that I doubted he was capable of devising any sort of plan and sticking to it, even one as pointlessly sinister as that.
“Every morning our rounds would end in an argument, the two of us shouting at each other in front of our disconcerted patients until at last he would storm off, leaving Redcliffe House and not returning for hours. I had to keep the most credulous or most debilitated of the crew from going outside with him.
“When asked for advice upon his return, he would reply that he was sure that Dr. Cook’s was just as good, or that people who would not listen to him in the morning ought not to seek advice from him at night.
“It must have been at his bench that he did his journal writing, for no one ever saw him write a word. He carried his journals with him everywhere he went, half a dozen swollen volumes with ragged edges and on top of them a fresh one whose pages were still blank. I imagined him scribbling away by moonlight with a fist-clenched pencil while he puffed on his cigars. All I ever saw him do in Redcliffe House was read his journals, looking as absorbed in them as if they had been written by someone else.
“When it was three months since we had seen the sun, his state of mind was such that I doubted he would recover. The weather by then was so bad that even he did not venture out of doors. Redcliffe House was recessed on three sides into a hill, built in a cave-like excavation so that only the front of it was exposed.
“There was a series of blizzards that lasted for weeks. It seemed impossible that the exposed wall would hold up against the wind. It buckled back and forth like a bed sheet. The door, though it had several layers, each one as thick as the entrance to a dungeon, rattled as though some giant were trying to force his way inside.
“Verhoeff curled up in the corner farthest from the door, covered his face with his hands, cringing and whimpering as though someone were beating him. The Pearys stayed in their ‘room’ behind the curtain. Gibson sat at the table with his hands over his ears, unable to stand the shrieking of the wind. I tried to read, but I could not help looking at the wall to see if it was giving way.
“Francis tacitly abdicated as medical officer, no longer dispensing criticisms or advice. He became so deeply despondent that he spoke to no one, not even me, not even when directly addressed, which seemed a welcome change at first. But the others were soon unsettled by the sight of him sitting against the wall all day long with his lower body in his sleeping bag, as motionless as a catatonic.
“He showed no signs of noticing when, thinking some physical malady might be at the root of his condition, I examined him. But he was, if anything, healthier than some of the others, who were convinced that one morning they would wake up to find him dead.
“The weather was still bad when the sun returned, but he came out of his trance-like state almost instantly when Verhoeff pointed out the light at the edges of the boarded windows. I thought his recovery suspiciously abrupt, but the improvement in all of us was dramatic at this sign of the sun’s return. We spoke of nothing but the coming of spring, the prospect of being picked up by the ship and taken home.
“One day, when the ship was nearly due and he and I were returning across the scree, having examined two of the Eskimos who were ill, he asked me if he might confide in me. I said yes, and he led me to the tolt of rock.
“He sat down and patted the bench to indicate that I should join him. I did so. I thought he had taken me aside to apologize. In the past few weeks, he had resumed his duties as medical officer and had seemed almost sheepishly disinclined to talk about the past few months.
“It is not unusual, at the end of an expedition, for people to explain themselves to their commander or whichever member of the crew has held up best. The latter is usually the medical officer, if only because he alone, no matter what the circumstances, has a task he can perform, there being no better antidote to fear and gloom than purposeful work.
“They meet with you in private, in part to find out what account of their behaviour will be offered to the world when they return, or even to influence that account, and in part to be reassured that they did not act cowardly or shamefully.
“I decided I would give Francis a good dressing-down first and then advise him, with as much delicacy as possible, not to apply for membership on future expeditions.
“Surveying the distant glacier, he sighed and settled his body into the rock again as though he were shifting his weight in a favourite chair, as if all he planned to do was watch the sunset and all he wanted me for was companionship. But then he leaned forward, drew in his legs and crossed his feet.
“He told me that he had a wife and boy back home whom he had abandoned because the boy was not really his son. He said that his wife had told him she had been taken advantage of while drunk, but that he did not believe her. He said he had recently found out who the father was, but he did not say how.
“During their engagement, he said, she had told him she was pregnant. There were fewer than twenty doctors in St. John’s, including several to whom she was related. She knew of none on whose discretion she could count.
“And so she told him, in his surgery, after hours. She told him that because of having had so much to drink, she remembered nothing that had happened at a recent party from half an hour after getting there to just moments before she left. She said that she knew she had been with someone, but that she had no idea who it was.
“His reaction was not what she had expected. She had thought he would assume that she had wilfully betrayed him. But he believed her, he said. She was not responsible for what had happened, and together they would deal with it.
“Without uttering a word against the man who, when she was too drunk to help herself, had pressed himself upon her, he told her that he would examine her to make sure her suspicions were correct. She told him this was not necessary, but he insisted.
“ ‘There, there,’ he kept saying throughout the examination, unaware of how much was already lost.
“To determine if she was pregnant by another man, he examined the woman he had never more than kissed, whose body he had never seen or even touched before.
“ ‘This changes nothing, not really,’ he told her. ‘It will be as if we adopted a child. We will tell those who need to know that I have made you pregnant. Let them react however they wish. We love each other. That is all that matters.’
“He went on and on, unaware, he told me, that it might be himself he was trying to convince. This Francis Stead who would hold no grudge, who would cope and love his wife no matter what, was as much of a fiction as the Francis Stead who would be the first to reach the pole.
“He said he should have talked her into considering a second option, should have reminded her that because he was a doctor, they were in the position of keeping her pregnancy a secret forever. No one but the two of them need ever know.
“But they did not speak of this second option. He convinced himself that they would marry and remain married, no matter what.
“ ‘It was for the child’s sake that she married me,’ he said. ‘I know that now. And for the child’s sake that she tried to make our marriage work.’
“Her family, what was left of it, aunts and uncles, and his family, the Steads, were told. The Steads received the news exactly as he said he knew they would. That he had made her pregnant, his family had no trouble believing. But they did not for a moment have the slightest doubt about who was to blame.
“They allowed it to become an open secret that she was pregnant. The wedding date was changed at such short notice that many who were invited could not come. His sister-in-law, whom he and his fiancée hardly knew, was the maid of honour.
“Francis said he could not help feeling that their real secret was common knowledge, that all of St. John’s knew the baby she carried was not his.
“For a young woman to become pregnant by her fiancé was no great shame. The rumours that she had done so would not have bothered him if they had been true.
“For a while after the boy was born, it had seemed possible to Francis that the three of them could be a family. But he could not forget that the boy was another man’s son, not his. No one knew this but him and his wife. He said he did not even tell his brother. But still he could not rid himself of the feeling that the whole world knew. It seemed to him that, all along, people had laughed at him because they sensed that he would land himself in some such fix as this, and that they were laughing even harder now because his very determination to prove them wrong, to do what was right, had borne out their prediction.
“He told me he felt foolish for not seeing that when it met its first real test, what he called his ‘innocence’ would crumble. He did not know, as the days went by, which pained him more, he said—the sight of the baby or the sight of his wife. He felt things he had never felt before: resentment, malice, hatred. These, until now, had been mere words.
“He avoided both of them as much as he could, having his dinner sent up to his study, where, he told his wife, he was reading for some case that was proving difficult to diagnose. In the morning, he would claim to have fallen asleep while working.
“This ‘case’ went undiagnosed for months. Once, she joked that the disease he was trying to diagnose was obviously contagious, for surely the first person who had contracted it was dead by now. He looked at her as if to say that only the person who had wronged him as she had could joke about such things.
“She, he now told her, had betrayed him with another man, fooled him into marriage and into thinking he was capable of raising another man’s child as if it was his. She had what she wanted, and that was her child, so what was the point of pretending she cared for him?
“He said nothing else to her for months other than what their sharing the same house required him to say.
“He did not, would not, after that first outburst, get angry with her.
“No matter what she said—and she said many things to convince him that she loved him, and that their marriage could still work—he would not answer, or even show any sign that he had heard her, other than to simply leave the room with the air of one who had become accustomed to such unprovoked attacks.
“Then finally he did speak to her, told her that this could not go on, as if it had been at her insistence that it had been going on.
“ ‘I have been thinking for some time now,’ he said, ‘that I should change my life.’ Then he turned about and went up to his study.
“He had decided that he would leave her and the boy. But he could not bring himself to simply disappear, to go to some other country and begin again. He pored over the atlas. Considered England, Scotland, Ireland, Australia, South Africa. But he could not picture himself alone in one of these countries, inventing for himself some less humiliating past, one that would make people feel sorry for him or admire him. These were just fantasies.
“Another possibility occurred to him. In the weeks that followed, he spoke politely to her and even looked at her and the baby with what she mistook for fondness from time to time.
“One night, after the baby had gone to sleep and she was reading in the front room, he came downstairs from his study, stood facing the fire and began to speak.
“ ‘I think it would be best if I went up north,’ he said.
“Having no idea what he meant by this, she waited.
“ ‘The Hopedale Mission in Labrador is badly in need of doctors,’ he said. ‘I have volunteered to join and have been accepted. It is for only six months. And perhaps for another six months after that. It will give me time to think. I have often wondered what it’s like up there.’
“ ‘The way she looked told me two things,’ he said. ‘That she was in love with someone else, and that she had never been in love with me.
“ ‘And where was this other man?’ Francis wondered. ‘Whose baby she could not stand to be away from for a second? Did he know about the child? Had he turned his back on her, in spite of which she loved him anyway?’
“Francis did not bother asking her these questions. He knew that at this point, she would not relent. It was too late for her to tell the truth. He could not bear to speak to her, to look at her or at the boy, whose father, it seemed to him, might be anyone.
“So he became a missionary, then an explorer. He told me he did not want to be forgotten or to have people think badly of him. Better they think he had forsaken the vocation of marriage for the more romantic one of exploration; that only with reluctance had he left his wife and son, having discovered, alas too late for them, that he was meant for greater things.
“He joined the Hopedale Mission for a year. When he came back home and told her he was giving up his practice in favour of polar exploration, she gave up on him.
“But he did not give up on her. She and the man whose name he did not know were all he thought about, he said.”
Dr. Cook turned away from the fire and looked at me.
“It was at this point in his story that he told me that he knew about me and Peary and his wife. As suddenly as that. Up to that point, I had been feeling uncomfortable, but only because of what seemed to me to be a mere coincidence. While engaged to him, his wife had become pregnant by another man. I had made an engaged woman pregnant. It unsettled me to hear him talk about his situation, but nothing more. And then suddenly he said: ‘I know about you and Peary and my wife.’
“He knew that the man his wife had betrayed him with was me. He knew what I had done. Had known it, perhaps, since before the expedition left New York, unless Peary had told him more recently.
“What he meant by his reference to Peary, what he need not have bothered recounting, since he had finally sprung his surprise on me, was that he knew that at the party in Manhattan where I met your mother, I also, in a manner of speaking, met Robert Peary. But Francis related this part of the story to me, the part I knew far better than he did, in the same tone he had used so far, as if, though I was now a character in his story, I had no idea what would happen next.”
“What did Peary have to do with you and my mother?” I asked Dr. Cook.
“He had just joined the U.S. Navy at the rank of lieutenant,” he said, “because of his training as a civil engineer. He was alone and in full uniform at the party, which, as I told you in my letters, was thrown in honour of the graduates of the Columbia medical school. Peary’s mother was acquainted with the woman of the house. It seems that out of politeness to his mother’s friend, Peary accepted an invitation to the party.
“He looked quite smart in his uniform, what with his height and build and that striking combination of red hair and blue eyes. But he seemed very ill at ease, as if he hated being conspicuous, took no pleasure in the effect of his appearance on others, on women especially. The only person there who looked more ill at ease than Peary did was me. One of four prospective medical students who were acting as waiters and bartenders at the party, I felt hopelessly out of place.
“There was some sort of near altercation at the party between Peary and one of the graduating doctors. It seems that Peary had recently, and abruptly, broken off an engagement with a young woman whom he was said to have treated shabbily. Either the young doctor said something about this matter or Peary misconstrued something he overheard. Peary shouted something at the young man, who at first looked mystified and then became quite belligerent, having to be separated from Peary by his friends.
“Peary moved off to the bar, where I was serving drinks. He stood there in silence for several minutes while I served the other guests, until I realized that he was regarding me with an undisguised look of scorn.
“ ‘They say that you plan to be a doctor one day,’ he said when our eyes met. He spoke with a slight lisp of which he has since rid himself. I could see that he was painfully self-conscious of it. I told him that, yes, I planned to become a doctor. He laughed as if he had never seen a more hopeless candidate for medicine, as if he was imagining just how inept a doctor I would be, I who, with my hands that would not stop shaking, was spilling drinks and ice and breaking glasses.
“I fancied he knew that I was more or less being sponsored to medical school by the hosts of the party, who had taken pity on me. I could think of nothing to say. His jaws clamped shut loudly when he stopped laughing, his back teeth clicking together. I believe he was about to address me again in the same manner when a young woman who was standing some feet from Peary, waiting to be served, intervened. Craning her neck around the people between her and Peary, she spoke up loudly.
“ ‘I am surprised to see you laughing, Lieutenant Peary,’ she said.
“ ‘I cannot imagine why,’ Peary said, looking startled, his voice raised to match hers. ‘Especially as, to my knowledge, we have never met.’
“In the near vicinity, all conversation stopped. All eyes were on this brash young woman.
“ ‘Perhaps you are laughing,’ she said, ‘because you are happier now that it is once again just you and your mother. They say that your mother is very happy to have her Bertie back.’
“Peary laughed again—even more unconvincingly than before—his jaws again clamping shut audibly when he was finished, as if his mouth were some mechanical device whose operation he had yet to master.
“ ‘You are drunk, miss,’ he said. ‘That, I believe, is obvious to everyone.’
“ ‘May Kilby says you never laugh,’ the woman said. ‘In fact, she says you smile only when you think that not to do so would be rude.’
“It was clear that this Miss Kilby was the woman to whom Peary had been engaged. The remark was met with an uproar of laughter because it seemed to sum Peary up so perfectly. Everyone looked at Peary as if to measure him against this estimation of him by the woman to whom he had been engaged, and which had just been repeated in public by this other woman, who seemed to be unaccompanied.
“The laughter grew louder. Peary, red-faced, strode off through the guests to a room to which news of his embarrassment had not yet spread.
“The woman who spoke up for me, the woman who embarrassed him, was your mother. Her first cousin, Lily, had told her about Peary and May Kilby.
“I did not see Peary again until, having helped your mother up the stairs hours later, when it really was obvious that she had had too much to drink, he happened upon us as I was crouching on one knee beside her after she had stumbled and fallen.
“ ‘If only those who found your little joke so amusing could see you now,’ said Peary.
“ ‘She has had only a little too much to drink, sir,’ I said. ‘That’s all.’
“Peary shook his head as though in disbelief. ‘She, a stranger, berates me for my treatment of my fiancée. And here she lies on the floor with an engagement ring on her finger and a milkboy from Brooklyn in her arms.’
“Someone must have told him that with my brothers I ran a small milk business. Peary was himself born on a modest farm in Maine, though he has never liked to be reminded of it. He looked down at both of us and smiled. He walked past us down the hallway.
“We saw Peary on one other occasion before your mother left Manhattan. Your mother and I, with Lily between us, were strolling through Central Park when we saw him walking towards us arm in arm with a woman whom I took to be his mother. Your mother and I exchanged a smile, the kind people exchange when they know they are thinking exactly the same thing. Here was the woman whom May Kilby’s friend had said was so glad to ‘have her Bertie back.’ How apt her pet name for her son seemed as they came towards us, the two of them solemn-faced, as if it was a Peary family characteristic to smile only when not to do so would seem rude. Peary stared hard at us, as if he had both recognized us and seen and guessed the meaning of the smile we exchanged. I thought he looked almost shocked to see me in your mother’s company. His suggestive remark about having found her in the arms of a milkboy from Brooklyn must have been just an insult in which he could not conceive of there being any truth.
“Peary averted his eyes, and no one spoke as he and his mother went by.
“It was years after this, Francis Stead said, that he moved from St. John’s to Brooklyn, where he met and, inasmuch as it was possible for anyone to do so, befriended Peary. Peary did not know of the connection between Francis Stead and the woman who had mocked him at the party years ago. At some point, Francis told Peary that he had a wife and son back home in St. John’s. He told him that the child was not his, and that he did not know whose it was, though he believed that the father lived somewhere in New York. He repeated to Peary Amelia’s story of having been taken advantage of while drunk, but he said that he did not believe it. When he told Peary his wife’s first name and maiden name, Peary recognized it. This woman, speaking in defence of me, had mocked him, slighted him, and Peary never forgot or forgave such things. He likewise remembered my name, the name of the boy whose abject wretchedness he saw as having been the cause of his embarrassment. He remembered us both, remembered seeing us in Central Park and the smile that passed between us when we saw him with his mother. He told Francis what he knew.
“ ‘My dear Stead,’ Peary concluded, ‘there is no mystery here. The father of the boy your wife is passing off to all the world as your son is Dr. Frederick Cook. It is an open secret, Stead, what happened between Cook and your wife after they met at that drunken party in Manhattan. There are many who know that that boy back home is not your son. Even in St. John’s there are some who know it. Some who know that you are not his father. These people have been laughing at you behind your back for years. I tell you this as a friend who cannot stand to see you made a fool of any longer. I cannot prove what I have told you of Dr. Cook, of course, and I shall deny having told you any of this story should you repeat a word of it.’
“ ‘Perhaps now,’ Francis said to me, ‘you understand why Peary treats me as he does. Otherwise friendless when I met him, I worshipped Peary. In public, though he did not reveal my secret, he would make fun of me, make jokes at my expense—ribald jokes that had a private meaning for him and me—order me about, have me run errands for him and for others. I became known as Peary’s whipping boy, and I took it all without complaint.’ “
Dr. Cook looked at me. “Why, you may wonder, did Peary, having told Francis about me, appoint both of us to his expedition? In Peary’s estimation, Francis was an ineffectual cuckold who would never find the nerve to exact revenge on anyone who did him wrong. As for me, when I applied for the position of medical officer on the North Greenland expedition—having set aside my own distaste for Peary in order to gain some experience in polar exploration under a man I knew I could learn much from—and Peary accepted my application, I assumed that he, too, had put aside, for the good of the expedition, whatever animosity he still harboured against me. We did not mention our first meeting. I think Peary thought that to put Francis and me together on the same expedition would be amusing. That it would be amusing to watch Francis trying to summon up the courage to confront me. He might have believed that, at most, Francis would publicly accuse me of having fathered a child by his wife, and thereby humiliate me and possibly ruin my reputation. I’m sure he did not think Francis would act in any way that would jeopardize the expedition. Peary has never been a good judge of character.
“But the Francis Stead who let himself be abused by Peary was not the same man who related his story to me on that bench of rock. Upon revealing that he knew me to be the man with whom his wife had betrayed him, he looked at me with undisguised contempt. I tried to keep my composure.
“ ‘I did meet your wife, Dr. Stead,’ I said. ‘But ours was but a casual acquaintanceship. I was better acquainted with her cousin Lily.’
“ ‘Cook,’ he said, ‘I joined this expedition with the intention of killing you. Many times I have had the opportunity, not only to do it, but to do it without detection. Being fellow medical officers, we have often been out of sight of the others, as we are now, sometimes in places where one missed step would mean the end. All I need have done was push you into some crevasse, then report to the others that there had been an accident. But I have been unable to bring myself to do it. My wife, some years after I left her, took her life. She is gone. I hold you responsible for that. Yet for some reason, I cannot bring myself to kill you. It seems, after all, that it was merely to do this that I signed on with the expedition: to take you aside and tell you everything. I no longer have any doubts that you are the father of my wife’s son. I know for certain now. And it would seem that knowing is enough.’
“You must remember, Devlin, that I had just heard for the first time that Amelia was dead, and heard for the first time the manner of her death. Perhaps the pain he saw in my eyes was his revenge.
“His voice was very calm, very deliberate. I should have known that he had but one thing left to do.
“Hearing from him that at one time his intention had been to kill me set me trembling. His assurance that he had changed his mind was not of much comfort to me. That he would talk so openly about such things was an indication of how quickly he could change his mind again. I didn’t know what I should do, didn’t know exactly how far away the others were.
“He seemed not to have a weapon on his person, but in each of our doctor’s kits there was a set of scalpels. He saw me look at the kits, which lay side by side on the ground between us, two burlap bundles tied with rope.
“ ‘Don’t worry,’ he said, smiling as if he had been dwelling for years on such things as now occupied my mind. ‘If you promise to keep my secret, I will promise to keep yours.’ He took my silence as agreement. And that, indeed, was what it was.
“He left the tolt of rock and went back to Redcliffe House. That night, he walked away from the house and was never seen again.
“It was because of my supposed closeness with Francis Stead that Peary had me write that report that appeared in the papers.
“When I got back to Brooklyn, I contacted the registry of births and deaths in St. John’s. They confirmed for me that Amelia Stead had died, though the cause of death was officially listed as accidental drowning.”
Dr. Cook sighed as though his story was finished. But surely it could not be. Surely something more than this had been on his mind since my arrival in Brooklyn. It was a different version of events than he had set forth in his letters. But surely this was not what he had been referring to hours ago, when, his voice quavering with dread, he said that he had withheld things from me, things he could not bear to disclose except in private.
“I don’t understand,” I said. “You need not have been afraid—”
“I received one letter more from your mother after she returned to Newfoundland from New York than I admitted to,” he said.
He reached into the pocket of his vest and withdrew a yellowed piece of paper, unfolded it and, hands suddenly trembling, extended it to me. It read:
My dearest:
I am with child, but my fiancé is not its father. Of these two things, I can assure you. All else seems uncertain, except my love for you. If you still wish to marry me, you have but to say so and I will meet you in New York. As I must have an answer from you soon, send me a telegram saying simply yes or no and sign it “Lily.” If you say no, or if I do not hear from you within a week, I will not write to you again. Nor could I bear it if, at some time in the future, you wrote to me. Please do not feel that you have anything to fear from me. I will speak your name to no one.
All my love,
Amelia
When I looked up from reading the letter, I saw that he had covered his face with his hands.
“So it was not her who ended it,” I said. “It was you.”
“Yes,” he said. “ ‘I will speak your name to no one.’ I knew that she meant it, that she would keep her word no matter what. That my reputation, or my hopes to one day have one at least, would remain secure. She was willing to forsake almost everything so that she and I, and you, could be together. But I was not. And it did not take me a week to make up my mind. I did not even have the courage to send her a telegram containing that one word. No. I did not even tell her no, Devlin. I simply moved on as if we had never met, leaving her with no choice but to do the same. You cannot know how ashamed I am of what I did. How I regret it.
“I convinced myself that no good would come to anyone if I said yes, that my treachery was justified. What sort of life, I asked myself, will the two of us and our child have if I say yes, if I lose my reputation and she loses hers, if she marries a man without prospects, if our child is raised in poverty and shame? I had ambitions, you see. I had told her about them, about growing up poor in Brooklyn, across the river from Manhattan, in tantalizing proximity to it. Yet I might as well have been a million miles from it, so unlikely had it seemed that there would ever be a place in it for me. As a young man, I was determined to make such a place for myself, to succeed on a grand scale at something, anything, just so long as I rose to a higher station in life than most men. I told myself that her fiancé would break off their engagement, that the pregnancy would be kept secret and the baby delivered and raised elsewhere, given up to someone else, with both mother and father standing a reasonable chance of happiness.
“All this driving around that we’ve been doing—I’ve been remembering your mother, the endless drives we took with Lily just so we could be together. I’ve been taking you to all the places I took her. Most of them look nothing now like they did back then, but still they remind me of her, as you do. I’ve half been expecting to see her on some street or coming towards me in another cab with my younger self beside her.
“I’ve felt her everywhere since you arrived. It’s never been like this before, not even when I spent time in Manhattan just after I received her letter, brooding, feeling sorry for myself in spite of what I’d done.
“Amelia. Her name is on my lips halfway across the bridge, and after that … it might as well be written everywhere, I hear it so often in my mind.
“This is what I gave her up for, I’ve been telling myself. So as not to lose my chance at this. So as not to be excluded from this, which now seems like nothing next to her.”
I could not believe what I had heard.
“When Libby Forbes died in childbirth,” he said, “and our baby girl soon after, I thought this was a judgment on all of us for my betrayal of your mother and her child. Libby and the baby died, but I was spared. Amelia and Francis died, but I was spared. My fiancée, Libby’s sister, Anna, died, but I was spared. Over and over, I was spared, allowed to survive. It seemed that my punishment was to bring misfortune down upon the ones I loved while being spared from it myself.
“I think that when your mother wrote me that last letter, she knew she would never hear from me again. It reads like a pardon for what I was about to do.
“I could not bring myself in my letters to tell you that I had betrayed her, or that I was, even more directly than I had let on, the cause of her death and the death of Francis Stead. I feared that if I told you, you would not want to hear from me again. It was my plan never to tell you. But now that we have met … I can see her in your eyes, Devlin. It is almost as if she has been returned to me as she was when we first met, when she was just your age and I was even younger.
“As for not wanting you to write me back, I had several reasons. I had left your mother’s letter unanswered. It seemed only fitting that mine be left that way as well. But also, I could not bear to think of you formulating replies to letters that were misleading.
“Devlin, you are the son of the only woman I have ever really loved. Marie I feel much affection for and did not marry for her money, but it is your mother’s face, her lovely, young woman’s face, that comes back to me in dreams. I would not blame you if you went back to Newfoundland, if you moved on and forgot me the way I did your mother.”
The fire had burned down and I could barely make him out.
I could not speak. I felt almost as wrenched from my former life as I had when I read his first letter. He and my mother were not who or what I thought they were.
This man whose baby she could not stand to be away from for a second. My mother had loved me that much. Yet she had abandoned me.
“My mother’s death,” I said, “was officially declared an accident. But Francis Stead was right. It is widely believed in St. John’s that she took her life.” I realized, too late, that it sounded like an accusation, as good as saying, “She took her life because of you.”
“I think it might be best for you to go,” I said. “It is very late.”
He rose from the sofa.
“I will keep my mother’s letter,” I said. “For now. I will return it to you soon.”
“Goodnight,” he said and made his way in silence to the near door, which he did not close behind him.
I sat there for some time after the fading of his footsteps. I thought of the scrolled letters, saw them now in a different, tainted light. I recalled a phrase from his second letter: “I believe that, upon reflection, you will realize that there exists no motive that would cause me to mislead you on this matter.”
I left the drawing room and went back to my bedroom. I lay down and tried to sleep.
Though it seemed strange, I felt elated. Also disappointed and betrayed. But elated, most of all. For it seemed to me that the toll his story had taken on him was the measure of his feeling for me. How fearful he was that I would turn away from him. He had seemed, until now, so remote, as if he might be having second thoughts about his promise to include me in his life. Now he was a new, in some ways lesser, Dr. Cook. The ideal, flawless man of the letters and the past few weeks did not exist. No such men existed anywhere. But tonight he had poured out to me his most shameful secrets. And now he was lying awake in bed wondering what I would do.
I would stay.
I still believed in him, still trusted him.
Despite that, however, I compared the handwriting in my mother’s letter to that of the handwriting on the back of the portrait photograph of her. In particular, I compared the two signatures, the “Amelia” on the letter and the “Amelia” on the back of her photograph, where she had written “Amelia, the wicked one.” They were, as far as I could tell, exactly the same. The paper the letter was written on was creased with age. There was no doubt that my mother had written the letter twenty years ago.
I looked in the mirror on the wall beside my bed. “I can see her in your eyes,” he’d said. But as yet I could see no one in my eyes.
I went by the study the next day after he came back from his rounds. It would be even harder now to call him Dr. Cook.
“I want to assure my aunt that I am well,” I said, “without revealing to her where I am.” It was more of a demand than a statement. But implicit in it was the answer he was hoping for.
“That can easily be arranged,” he said. It was the first time he had not looked me in the eye while speaking to me. He looked elated, relieved, abashed, scolded. I think that at that moment, I could have got his consent to almost anything.
“How can it be done?” I said, though I knew how.
“I think I could impose upon your uncle one last time. Send him an unmarked envelope from you. Have him tell her it was pressed upon him in the street by a man he did not know.”
“All right,” I said.
I imagined Uncle Edward’s reaction at the sight of another envelope from Dr. Cook, who had assured him there would be no more. And then his reaction when he saw what the envelope contained. And there would be not just this one last imposition. I owed it to Aunt Daphne to keep assuring her that I was safe.
Dear Aunt Daphne:
This is to let you know that I am well, and that you need not be afraid for me. I want for nothing except your company, which I greatly miss but must do without for now. I hope that these past few weeks have not been too difficult for you, and that you think no less of me for what I’ve done. One day, I will tell you why I went away, though there are some things that I must leave forever unexplained. I hope this brief letter finds you and Uncle Edward in good health.
Love,
Devlin
This was the letter I gave to Dr. Cook. Also, I gave back to him the letter from my mother.
“We have begun, Devlin,” he said as he took the letters from me. “There are no obstacles between us now.”
In the winter, I began to venture out into Brooklyn and Manhattan on my own, delivering messages for Dr. Cook, bringing others back to him. What I was really doing, he assured me, was meeting the people I needed to know.
I went on using Francis Stead’s valise. I found a hiding place for the letters: the desk in the library, to which I alone had a key.
Most of my errands took me to Manhattan. I felt as though I were seeing the city with my own eyes for the first time. I saw hope in every face, the faces of the rich and the faces of the poor. In the papers it said that the rich were getting richer and the poor less poor every day. “Why pity a woman, or even a child, schlepping garments through the streets,” one paper asked, “when only a year ago these same people were caught up in wars, famine and disease?” The paper said that the lightless, unventilated, suffocating tenements would soon, by an order of the city, be renovated or replaced with better ones.
The city, once it had been reined in, once this irresistible torrent of energy had run its course, would make allowances for everyone, even the street arabs, who, it now seemed to me, were quite cheerfully anarchic, mocking everything they saw so entertainingly that people stopped to listen to them.
I no longer saw, on the Lower East Side, the blank gazes I had seen before. I saw intent, purposeful faces, immigrants pursuing whatever dream they had chosen to pursue from among the millions on display.
I could not bring myself to resent the rich their houses or the other great structures of the city—the buildings, bridges, museums, train stations, monuments and statues that, with their money, had been raised up from the ground. It was impossible to rail against such things when the very sight of them filled you with such wonder. I felt sorry for the poor but did not hold their poverty against the rich.