DR. COOK AND I WERE FÊTED IN NEW YORK SOCIETY AS A TANDEM of heroes, Dr. Cook for rescuing Peary’s wife and child, and I for what became known as “Mr. Stead’s encounter with Lieutenant Peary.”
“There is no way to resist it,” said Dr. Cook. “They have chosen you to play a part. This is the sort of story they love: an unknown young man saving a famous old man’s life.”
“It’s being made to seem as if I am fond of Peary that I don’t like,” I said.
“Look,” he said, “you do not have to lie to them. Tell them about climbing the mast and standing in the pilot barrel. Tell them about the iceberg. Tell them about the fiords and the glaciers and what they sounded like at night. Tell them about the walrus and the narwhal. That is the sort of thing they want to hear. You cannot control the manner in which good fortune comes your way. But it would be foolish to refuse it.”
There came our way an invitation. We—that is, Dr. Cook, his wife and I—were invited to the Fall Ball, which took place every year at the Vanderbilts’ on the Hudson, where Frederick W. Vanderbilt and his wife lived in an Italian Renaissance mansion whose expansive grounds in Hyde Park overlooked the Hudson River.
Not only would every member of the Peary Arctic Club be there, Dr. Cook said, but they would be outshone by the other guests, “the absolute upper crust of New York society.”
Mrs. Cook, telling her husband that she did not wish to “spend time with people who will regard my every word and deed as confirmation of the opinion they held of me before we met,” asked him to decline the invitation on her behalf. He wrote the Vanderbilts that at the time of the Fall Ball, his wife would be visiting her sister in Washington.
Dr. Cook took me to a tailor and had me fitted for “white tie and accessories.” White tie, it turned out, really meant vanilla tie—vanilla so that it could be seen against the white background of the shirt. I was also fitted for a vanilla-coloured vest, and a milliner fashioned a removable white silk lining for my top hat. After the purchase of a long white silk scarf and a pair of white silk gloves, I was, sartorially speaking at least, ready to meet the Vanderbilts.
We drove to the house in Dr. Cook’s horse and carriage, Dr. Cook being loath to risk having the unreliable Franklin break down in the Vanderbilt driveway in front of all the other guests who owned motorcars but regarded them as toys.
We had a long time to talk as the pair of horses clopped along, the sound of their hoofs making our voices unintelligible, Dr. Cook assured me, to the driver, whom Dr. Cook had hired because, in the eyes of the people I was about to meet, it would not do for us to drive ourselves.
“It is well known that by the time of the North Greenland expedition, your parents were estranged,” Dr. Cook said. “No one will mention this to you. It is highly unlikely that anyone will mention your mother at all. They will expect, on this one matter at least, the same sort of tact from you. With your father, things are somewhat different. They will expect you not to mention your father until, by doing so themselves, they invite you to.
“It is, in part, the story behind your story—the story that will never appear in the papers and that they will not allude to in your presence—that fascinates them. They see you not only as the strong, quick-thinking, promising young man the papers make you out to be, but also as a somewhat mysterious, possibly ‘haunted’ young man with a tragic past. That you are following the vocation that brought so much unhappiness to your mother and father intrigues them. You are now among those whom they believe to be worth watching, as I once was. I do not mean that I am now regarded as uninteresting, but it is thought, in many quarters, that I am unlikely at this point to exceed my past accomplishments, unlikely to do anything surprising; that I will continue to distinguish myself in the second rank of exploration. I should add that I am not so regarded by other explorers or those who follow exploration closely.
“The front rank of American explorers is a front rank of one. It contains no one else’s name but Peary’s. No explorer in history has been more ‘backed’ than he has. The uninformed, by whom he is regarded as our explorer laureate, appointed to his position of pre-eminence for life, have given no thought to who should succeed him.
“That someone must soon succeed him—that he is, however unwillingly, about to step down—they do not know as yet. Nor should we so much as hint at it tonight. Do not say a word to them of Peary’s condition. If they ask you what you think his chances are of reaching the pole, tell them that if any man, after three years in the Arctic, still has strength enough to make it to the pole, that man is Peary.
“You should say nothing even faintly critical about him. We should seem to be Peary’s admiring rivals, his gentlemen competitors.
“They will watch you, Devlin, not so much to see what you make of yourself as to see what life makes of you, to see what becomes of you.”
“I had hoped to make a new beginning here,” I said. “Now it seems that I am regarded in New York as I was in St. John’s: as being fated to wind up like my parents.”
“No, no, it is just the opposite. They do not know what you are fated for because most of them do not believe in fate, not really. Americans, even those who not only value social standing but believe it is fixed, immutable, do not like to think in terms of fate. There is, I know, a contradiction there, but they could not be bothered to acknowledge it. Americans like to think that anything is possible, that ours is a country of limitless opportunity for all. One cannot believe that and believe in fate.”
“I think you are exaggerating the degree of their interest in me.”
“I assure you that I am not. How long it remains at its current level to some extent depends on you. But they will always be watching now to see what becomes of you. They like to bring in people like you and me as guests—not just into their houses, but into their lives. But guests are all that we will ever be. It is important to remember that.”
“I would like it if, at some point in my life, I could just fit in somewhere, not seem like such an oddball,” I said.
“Well, do not try to fit in among these people. Do not try to act ‘properly.’ Do not be anxious because you do not know the rules of polite society. Among the people who wish to meet you, it is universally assumed that you do not know these rules. They would be disappointed if you did. The last thing they want you to be is one of them.”
“What do they want me to be?”
“Yourself.”
“But I am not what they think I am.”
“Perhaps not quite what they think you are. But you are rougher around the edges than you realize. You will soon see what I mean.”
“Now you have me terrified.”
“They will love your accent.”
“I didn’t think I had that much of one.”
“My dear fellow, you have a brogue so thick it would blunt a butcher’s knife.”
We drove up a well-lit driveway overhung by massive oaks and pulled up behind some other vehicles at the foot of a set of limestone stairs that fanned out widely at the bottom like the train of a wedding dress. We disembarked and, as our carriage was led away, ascended the stairs to a double-storeyed portico, on each side of which there were two massive fluted columns that supported an entablature whose centrepiece, though it reared above me, I could not make out.
We were relieved of our scarves, gloves and hats just inside the door, swarmed by taciturn footmen who simply waited to be handed articles of clothing. If not for Dr. Cook, I would not have known when to stop, what to give them and what to keep.
The moment I left the vestibule, I had to resist the urge to turn sharply right, to where I knew the business room to be.
We were led by a short, scarlet-complexioned butler through the vestibule into the entrance hall and then upstairs to the enormous reception hall, a circular room at the heart of the house from which a dozen doors, now closed, led off to other rooms. As we climbed the bronze-work stairs, I put my left hand on the balustrade, only to withdraw it when I saw that the rail was encased in velvet of which only the light side showed, as if it had never been touched, never brushed against the grain. I looked at the mark left by my hand, the only such blemish the whole length of the balustrade, and, resisting the urge to turn back and erase it, hurried on.
Dr. Cook and I joined a receiving line, in which, I was relieved to see, were Clarence Wyckoff and some of the other passengers from the rescue expedition.
We had been waiting a couple of minutes, the line moving slowly, when Wyckoff glanced over his shoulder and saw us.
“Dr. Cook and the doughty Mr. Stead,” Wyckoff said, and everyone in front of and behind him turned round to look. There was an outbreak of applause, led by Wyckoff, to which even Dr. Cook seemed unsure how to react. He smiled and bowed slightly, as if he believed Wyckoff was being playfully ironic. I did likewise.
“How is the arm, Mr. Stead?” Wyckoff said. The arm. The arm that saved Lieutenant Peary, the arm we have all read and heard so much about, he might have said by the way people looked at my arms, both of them, as if, now that I no longer wore a sling, they were unsure which was the special one.
“Much better,” I said. Instinctively, I flexed my right hand slightly, and now all eyes were on my right arm, people nodding and murmuring as if it was apparent to them, as it could never be to people who had not seen it with their own eyes, how such an arm could have saved Lieutenant Peary.
It seemed strange to think that at that moment Peary was still up north, somewhere in Greenland, facing such hardships and privations as none of us but Dr. Cook could even begin to understand. He was facing almost certain death, while there I was in Manhattan being celebrated for having saved what little remained of his life—there were we all, lining up to meet the Vanderbilts and partake of their lavish hospitality, speaking with such cheerful ease of Lieutenant Peary, who by that time, along with Matthew Henson and Charlie Percy, might have been dead.
Dr. Cook, who had met the Vanderbilts before, stepped aside after a short exchange of pleasantries to introduce me. But before he could say my name, Mr. Vanderbilt put his hand on my left arm.
“This must be Mr. Stead,” he said, as if he had not heard Clarence Wyckoff’s butler-like announcement of Dr. Cook and me.
“How do you do, Mr. Vanderbilt?” I said, extending my hand, which he took in both of his, giving it a gentle squeeze.
“Very well, young man. Very well,” he said. “I can now tell my friends that I shook the hand to which Lieutenant Peary owes his life. It was a great thing you did, a great thing that will never be forgotten.”
“Thank you, sir,” I said.
He introduced me to his wife, who smiled and held out her gloved hand to me palm down. For a moment I was mystified, then I realized that I was meant to kiss it, which I did. I must have been looking elsewhere when Dr. Cook had done so. I had never kissed a woman’s hand in my life. Should I bend to kiss it or raise it to my mouth, or both? Both, I decided. That there were no gasps of disbelief or disconcerted looks, I knew to be no indication that I had done it properly.
“We are all very proud of you, Mr. Stead,” she said. “You might not have been born in New York, but when anyone who lives here does something great, we shamelessly claim him as our own.”
After exacting from us a promise that at some point during the evening Dr. Cook and I would tell them all about the rescue expedition, the Vanderbilts turned their attentions to the guests behind us.
Dr. Cook and I were admitted into the main chamber of the reception room.
The room was lit by a row of identical, evenly spaced, globe-like chandeliers. I would later count six of them, though from where we stood, they all blended into one, as if a massive, sparkling, horizontal beam of glass was hanging from the ceiling. Whatever furnishings the room normally held had been removed, except for the reproductions of several Greek busts and statues, each of which stood on a pedestal in a grotto-like recess in the walnut-panelled walls.
Along the walls innumerable armless chairs sat side by side, all with red plush seats and upright wooden backs. Most of the chairs were empty, but I imagined them all occupied, everyone sitting around the edges of the great room, solemnly surveying their fellows across the way as if the occasion was not a ball but a multitudinous assembly at which matters of great importance were to be discussed.
Each half of the room was a mirror image of the other. Anyone entering by the opposite door would have seen exactly what we had, including the double doors themselves, flanked by the same Ionic marble columns. The doors at the opposite end were closed, and on a slightly raised dais in front of them, an orchestra was gathering.
Dr. Cook inclined his head towards me, about to give me some instruction, I assumed, but before he could speak, a woman emerged from the teeming throng of people on the floor, holding out her gloved hand, which he kissed.
“How nice to see you, Dr. Cook,” she said.
“And you, Mrs. Frick,” he said.
I guessed that Mrs. Frick was in her mid-fifties. She wore a large green feather in her hair and the mock décolletage favoured by older women who thought the bare-shouldered style no longer flattering to them—an opaque, flesh-coloured mantle from which, at the height of her bosom, her black gown depended. After we were introduced, she took my arm.
“I wonder if I might borrow you, young man,” she said. “There will not be enough time for everyone to meet you both, though of course they would like to, so we have decided to split you up. I’m sure Dr. Cook can fend for himself?”
Dr. Cook smiled at her and nodded, and just as Mrs. Frick turned away, he smiled reassuringly at me.
Both hands on my upper arm, she led me along the edge of the guests, past punchbowls swimming with cherries and wedges of lemons and limes. We surveyed what might have been a foods-of-the-world display, including a sculpture of Neptune fashioned from whole salmon with jets of water spouting from their eyes. Somewhere beneath all those fish there had to have been a fountain, but I could not make it out.
She took me to the nearest available pair of chairs, where we sat down. Still holding my arm, sitting side-on to me and looking at the floor as if to do so helped her to formulate her words and to hear my answers, she said she expected that I had not often had to “endure” an event like this one. Before I could object to the word endure, she told me she planned to make the evening as painless for me as possible.
“I will take you around and introduce you to those people by whom you are least likely to be bored. Of course, no one will mind if you do not wish to dance—”
“But I would like to dance,” I said. “I would like it very much.”
“Then you’ve danced before?” she said, still staring, as if the better to appraise me, at the floor.
“Yes,” I said. “Many times. I’m thought to be quite a good dancer.”
“That’s wonderful,” she said, though clearly she was wondering if I meant the same thing by dance as she did.
She introduced me to a great many people, never allowing me to stay long in one place, steering me away from people she said she had already introduced me to, though I could not remember having met them. Looking about the room, I could not remember having met anyone. But Mrs. Frick, I was certain, was keeping track and, even had there been five thousand guests in the room, would not have made the mistake of introducing me to the same one twice.
I was congratulated over and over for having saved Lieutenant Peary’s life.
A number of young women who looked to be unescorted stood in a semi-circle near the wall, all talking at once, it seemed, though they stopped talking and smiled when they saw me staring at them.
Mrs. Frick led me over and introduced me to each of them in turn. Though they were my age, they had an assurance about them, an ease of manner, that even Mrs. Frick did not possess.
“Devlin Stead, the young man you have all heard so much about,” Mrs. Frick said.
“How do you do, Mr. Stead?” they said one after the other, and one after the other I kissed their gloved hands, which they offered to me until the repetition struck me as absurd, though they betrayed not the least embarrassment.
“Mr. Stead says he is thought to be quite a good dancer,” Mrs. Frick said. “Perhaps you should include him on your dance cards.”
There was a chorus of “Yes, indeeds,” and much scribbling on cards that seemed to appear from out of nowhere and just as quickly disappear.
Except for the colours of their evening gowns, the women at the Fall Ball were dressed almost as uniformly as the men. Their gowns were décolleté, cut very low to just above the cleavage, so that the bare necks, arms, shoulders and upper backs of women were distractingly everywhere.
It was as if they were all wearing the same form-fitting, ideally complected, skin-like fabric, chosen because it would show to best advantage beneath the chandeliers of the Vanderbilt ballroom.
Through it faintly showed the shapes of collar-bones and shoulder-blades, though clavicles and scapulas were the words that came to mind, delicate, fragile words better suited for describing the frames of girls like these than bones and blades.
Many of the women wore chokers that seemed to be pinned to them by brooches that fit snugly in the hollows of their throats. Almost all the women clasped, at waist height with both hands, small mesh bags made of tightly interwoven metal links. Some were silver, some gold. A couple of the women sported beau-catcher curls in the middle of their foreheads.
“Step-step-close, step-step-close,” I kept repeating to myself. What a fool I had been to boast of my proficiency at something I had not done in years. It had been second nature to me at one time, requiring little more effort, little more concentration, than walking. For all I knew, the sort of dancing that Aunt Daphne had taught me had gone out of fashion everywhere but Newfoundland a hundred years ago. What if, in this time of invention, someone had dreamed up a new kind of dancing?
To my relief, the orchestra, when it began to play, did so in my accustomed three-quarter time.
One of the young women Mrs. Frick had introduced me to approached us.
“Mr. Stead,” she said.
“Miss Sumner,” said Mrs. Frick.
“Thank you, Mrs. Frick,” Miss Sumner said. “I have only a few new names to remember. Poor Mr. Stead has hundreds.” She held out her arms to me. I took her hand, and we began to dance.
Miss Sumner. Having for so many years been deprived of fellowship, I was almost overwhelmed now to be faced with this open-armed young woman, who might have been appointed to dance with me as a gesture of propitiation. The meaning of her smile might have been that, though I had been wronged, I should regard the past as past, there being no remedy for it but to keep it from determining my future.
In one way, I had broken free into the world the instant I leapt into that rowboat at the foot of Signal Hill, had been making my way further and further into it since then. But here, it seemed, was my official, ceremonial welcomer—not Dr. Cook, not Clarence Wyckoff or the Vanderbilts, but this young woman whose first name I did not know and who had no idea, any more than did the other guests, perhaps including Dr. Cook, how momentous an event this was for me. It was as though I was being exonerated of a crime of which I had been presumed guilty for so long that I had come to feel that I was guilty of it. I felt so many things at once—relief, self-pity, gratitude, resentment, curiosity, arousal—that there rose up in me what I was almost too late in realizing was the urge to cry. I hoped that the struggle to suppress it did not show.
I was not used to being watched while I danced, let alone surrounded by other dancers, but I soon grew accustomed to it. At first, Miss Sumner felt like an annoyingly altered version of Aunt Daphne. Everything about her seemed slightly off, but she seemed not to notice my annoyance and gradually it passed. I had never been this close to any woman but Aunt Daphne before, had never been allowed so close a look at any woman’s bare arms, neck, shoulders and back before. I spoke only when she spoke to me, or rather only when she asked a question, which she did repeatedly, as if word had gone out from Mrs. Frick that nothing less than a question would draw any sort of response from me. I felt like I was being interviewed. Not that I minded. I tried to answer such unanswerable questions as “What is Greenland like?” To elaborate beyond yes or no my replies to such questions as “Did it hurt when you broke your arm?”
The second woman I had danced with in my life and the first one not related to me. The first one of the latter kind to whom, under any circumstances, I had been this close. It seemed a miracle, this young woman’s face, her eyes, her nose, her lips almost touching mine. The smell of her perfume. The smell of her hair. The soft, pliant feel of her upper back beneath my hand, the part of her back that exactly corresponded to her left breast. The wonder of moving in concert with a woman, her body moving in willing sympathy with mine.
She seemed impossibly poised. Nowhere on all the bare parts of her was there so much as a hint of high colour. I had always, when aroused, felt as though my own body was mocking me, mocking the idea that for me women would ever be anything more than things to be gawked at from afar, material for fantasies of which I could never bring myself to make practical use, knowing how I was regarded by the girls and women who inspired them.
Fresh from my long-imposed solitude, I could not believe that after Miss Sumner, another woman would dance with me, and after her another—that I was being sought after.
I felt that I had spent my life in a cell, and that, though it still contained me, though I was not yet free to leave it, I was at last being allowed visitors, a steady stream of whom were filing through to meet me.
I was soon able to gauge in seconds the distinctive rhythm of each woman. There were some good dancers among them, but most of them danced as though performing by rote some necessary and painstakingly acquired social skill.
It seemed to me that there was something frank, generous, almost wanton in the way the young women held open their arms as they prepared to receive me.
My hand still warm from the last hand I had held, I took hold of another—my shoulder still warm from the last hand that had rested there, another one was placed upon it—and the whole thing began again, a new pair of eyes to look into, a new face close to mine, a new voice issuing from lips that I could not stop staring at or wishing I could kiss. Men and women could not touch like this in public, could not converse at such close quarters except when they were dancing. Hurray for dancing, which conveyed this strange but wonderful exemption.
Sometimes, if I looked long enough at the other dancers, all I saw were the bared upper bodies of the women, a teeming fleet of marble busts, as if the sculptures in the hollows of the walls, having left their pedestals, were gliding about in perilous proximity.
The women seemed to find it both charming and also faintly amusing that someone so uncultivated, someone who looked like he could not have named the other social graces, had become so masterful at one of them. I saw that they were intrigued, but that they could think of no way of asking me to satisfy their curiosity that would not offend me.
An account of the Fall Ball and my part in it would appear the next day in the society pages of the papers under the bylines of people who had attended the event and whom I had taken to be guests, among them Mrs. Frick, who listed, in the order in which I danced with them, every one of my partners, pointing out whose daughters they were and to whom of note they were otherwise related. Me she would describe as “taciturn but self-composed, a trait he seems to have learned from Dr. Cook; a marvellous dancer, his manner of becoming which was the subject of much debate among his charming partners; deceptively frail-looking, almost delicate, except for his eyes, which are those of a young man well used to roughing it.”
Between dances, I could think of nothing to say to the young women who surrounded me. I tried to affect an air of laconic modesty, as if I was not tongue-tied but was staying silent merely to impress upon my admirers that altogether too much fuss was being made over me for having saved Lieutenant Peary’s life.
I soon realized that it didn’t really matter what I said or did, so eager were they to meet an explorer, so determined to find him interesting and thus make it a greater distinction to have been among the first to meet him. They spoke as if I had been an explorer before the rescue expedition, had merely come to prominence by rescuing Lieutenant Peary—that being my most significant accomplishment, but by no means my first.
From time to time, I saw Dr. Cook watching me, taking time out from conversations with men I assumed to be backers to throw my way a worried glance, which, when our eyes met, turned into a smile. He was not dancing, no doubt because it was primarily the men he was hoping to impress.
“Explorers are so often in peril that for one of them to save another’s life is commonplace,” I heard myself saying. This was met with a chorus of protest led by Mrs. Frick, who sounded mortified that I had committed this social gaffe while in her custody.
“There is nothing commonplace about a man your age saving the life of a man like Lieutenant Peary,” loudly said an especially distinguished-looking middle-aged man who until now had been watching from the margins of the group that surrounded me.
“I am Morris Jesup,” he said. The others parted as he extended his hand to me. “President of the Peary Arctic Club. Young man, you performed a service not only for Lieutenant Peary and his family, but for all of us and for this country, too. Lieutenant Peary is a national treasure whom, if not for you, we would have lost. There is every reason to believe that you will be officially rewarded for your actions. By way of recommending you for the Harding Medal, I have sent to the navy the testimony of several men who witnessed what you did. The Harding is one of the highest honours the navy can bestow for service to this country.”
Everyone within earshot burst into applause as if Jesup had just pinned the Harding Medal to my chest. There were further eruptions as news of what Jesup had said moved from group to group throughout the hall.
Jesup looked at me, as if to say that to belittle my heroism was to belittle the object of it.
I looked around in search of Dr. Cook, but he was nowhere to be seen. I felt foolish for having tried to speak like the seasoned explorer they were all pretending to believe I was—for having spoken with such transparently false modesty in front of a man as important as Jesup was to Dr. Cook’s ambitions, a man in a position to be even more aware than the others how absurd it was for me to have held forth as though I was a representative member of the fraternity of explorers, who daily saved each other’s lives as matter-of-factly as they put on their hats and coats.
“Mr. Stead. I believe we are third cousins. Or something. I’ve never understood how such things work, have you?”
“I don’t believe we’ve met,” was all that I could think to say to the young woman with whom I was dancing.
She smiled. “Of course we have,” she said. “This is our second dance.”
It was Miss Sumner, the first woman with whom I had danced.
“Miss Sumner,” I said. “I’m sorry, I—”
“Kristine Sumner,” she said. “Lily Dover’s daughter? Dover was her name before she married.”
For a moment, it was as though I was dancing with the Lily of Dr. Cook’s letters and conversations, the Lily because of whom my mother and Dr. Cook had met. The Lily who, while they were falling in love, had been their chaperone, the third whose constant, patient presence had been a diversion, keeping people from noticing the courtship that was taking place beside her. For a moment, it was as if my mother was close by—as if, were I to look around, I would see her standing next to Dr. Cook, the two of them not touching, watching while I danced with Lily’s daughter, their secret safe.
“You seem distressed, Mr. Stead,” Miss Sumner said. “I would hate it if, having danced so well with all the others, you fell on your face while dancing with me. Everyone would think it was my fault.”
“I’m sorry,” I said. “I was not expecting to meet … a relative tonight.”
She laughed, as if some trait that I was amusingly unaware of had just shown itself. It was a wonderful, unselfconscious laugh. Kristine. A name at last.
“My mother came to visit yours,” I said. “Here, in Manhattan.”
“Oh, I know all about it,” Miss Sumner said. “She was engaged, soon to be married, and my mother insisted that she come and see Manhattan before she settled down.”
I waited to hear what else she knew. Despite Dr. Cook’s assurances that Lily did not know I was his son—that my mother had written to her saying that she had changed her mind about Dr. Cook and would marry Dr. Stead as planned, only sooner—I had often wondered if Lily Dover had guessed the truth, guessed it when the wedding was moved up and my mother so soon after announced that she was pregnant. Had she guessed what she had no way of proving, and what my mother, if she wrote to her about it, had denied? Probably not. If Lily jumped to any conclusion, it would have been that my mother had consummated her marriage in advance, conceived a child with whom she was already, if unknowingly, pregnant when she met Dr. Cook. Dr. Cook had never seemed concerned about Lily, about what she might know or suspect.
I wondered if Miss Sumner knew, if her mother had told her, about my mother and Dr. Cook and the part she had played in their short-lived and secret romance.
“What did your mother tell you about mine?” I said. “I was so young when my mother died that I hardly remember her. All I know about her is what other people tell me.”
“She talks about her a lot,” Miss Sumner said. “Especially now, what with you having become so famous. ‘Amelia’s boy,’ she calls you, as if you are nine years old. ‘There’s another story in the paper about Amelia’s boy,’ she says.”
Lily. Amelia. I remembered Dr. Cook recounting his story by the fire in the drawing room, saying their names. Again, it was as if my mother was close by, as if she was at the Fall Ball as Lily’s guest, as was Dr. Cook. A seemingly innocent threesome, with Dr. Cook taking turns dancing with the two women—of whom Lily, having no engagement ring, was the eligible one, the one in whom it was presumed that Dr. Cook was interested.
I was startled from this reverie when I noticed that Dr. Cook was looking at me from across the room. He nodded but this time did not smile, which made me suspect that he knew whom I was dancing with.
“Has your mother ever met Dr. Cook?” I said, regretting it instantly.
“Not to my knowledge,” Miss Sumner said. “Why do you ask?”
“Oh, no reason really,” I said. “Dr. Cook was … Dr. Cook lived in Brooklyn at the time.”
“Not everyone who lives in Manhattan knows everyone who lives in Brooklyn,” Miss Sumner said, looking appraisingly ironic.
“No, of course not,” I said. “I was thinking of the way it is in St. John’s. Where everyone knows everyone, I mean.”
Miss Sumner nodded and smiled quizzically.
I imagined Miss Sumner telling her mother, telling Lily, about my odd question. Would Lily guess that Dr. Cook had told me everything? She might already have assumed he had from the mere fact of our being associates.
“Is something wrong, Mr. Stead?” Miss Sumner said.
“I’m a little tired,” I said.
“You do look tired,” she said. “And people are starting to leave anyway.”
We drew apart.
“I hope I see you again,” I said.
She smiled and seemed to suffer a rare loss of composure. “Yes. I hope so, too,” she said.
I rejoined Mrs. Frick. We searched for Dr. Cook and found him near the wall surrounded by a semi-circle of young men and women.
“Some say that the age of exploration is nearly over,” a woman was saying as I walked up to them. “They say that the parts of the world that have yet to be reached cannot be reached, and that there is therefore nothing left to be discovered.”
“I cannot imagine any quest, no matter how challenging, being abandoned for good,” said Dr. Cook. “I cannot imagine that mankind will be content to leave some parts of the globe forever undiscovered, forever known to be there but never seen, never walked upon.”
There was a murmur of assent among those who were gathered round, the young women nodding and smiling at each other as if Dr. Cook had just said, with unusually fine eloquence, something they had long believed.
Upon seeing me, Dr. Cook bade his audience good night.
“Come, Devlin,” he said. “Let us join the leaving line.”
As I walked beside him, he took my arm and inclined his head.
“Are you all right, Devlin?” he whispered.
“I’m fine,” I said, looking at him as if to prove it. He did not look at all reassured. I remembered that, between waltzes, Mrs. Frick had seemed concerned about something that delicacy forbade her from mentioning, but the nature of which she seemed to think I would eventually guess from the way she looked at me. I had been unable to imagine what it was. Now I knew.
I suddenly realized, suddenly felt, the state I was in. I hoped it was only now that this unprecedented evening was ending that my body was beginning to deal with its effects, only now that I was coursing with relief at having made it through without catastrophe that my body, too, was letting down its guard, having up to this point been perfectly concealing its distress. But I feared that this was not the case. I feared that for hours I had looked as awful as, judging by the way I felt, I had to be looking now. My head was pounding as if my heart had switched places with my brain. My whole body was throbbing. Dr. Cook could have taken my pulse by touching me anywhere. All of me throbbing and faintly trembling the way my arms did sometimes after I had carried something heavy. Drops of sweat trickled down through the hair on my temples onto the sides of my face and others made their long, cool way down my back and chest, so that I knew that if I leaned against anything, my shirt and jacket would be soaked.
For how long had I been like this? My very wrists were flushed deep red. So must my neck and throat have been. As for my face, I dared not glance at a mirror. I could all too easily imagine that startled, furtive moment of self-recognition as I realized that the unfamiliar, blood-gorged face with the swollen, sunken eyes and the glistening, livid cheekbones looking back at me was mine. I did not want to see what other people saw, had been seeing all evening when they looked at me, or would see in the eternity that would pass from now until we left. I looked at my hands. They were so damp I must have stained the gloves and gown of every woman I had danced with. Yet Miss Sumner had danced a second with me and had said with such sympathy that I looked tired. A kind understatement.
“Let’s get you home,” said Dr. Cook. I looked at him. He sounded concerned not with what others might think of my appearance or with what sort of impression I had made, only with taking proper care of me. I could not imagine ever being clear-headed or normally complected again.
“You poor man, Mr. Stead,” said Mrs. Vanderbilt. “What an ordeal I have put you through. You look as though my hospitality has taken a greater toll on you than all the months you spent in Greenland. How like an explorer to be more at home in the Arctic than in some fancy Hyde Park house.”
“Oh no, I enjoyed myself immensely, Mrs. Vanderbilt,” I said, so fervently that she laughed, as if here at last was the guileless enthusiasm she had been expecting from me.
“I hope you will not consider it too much of an imposition if we send you yet another invitation sometime soon,” she said.
“I would love to come again,” I said.
She turned to Dr. Cook, said something to which he replied at length, though I could not make out a word.
As I descended the winding, velvet staircase with Dr. Cook, it briefly crossed my mind that I was walking away from a world of which I had had my single, token glimpse, a world that from then on I would know was there but would be barred from, this evening having been a kind of prize that I could win but once.
To the others who were strolling down the staircase with us, such events as the Fall Ball were customary. Here were Dr. Cook and I, affecting the manner of people who had no reason to think that invitations to such events would ever cease to come their way. There, waiting for us behind the servants who held our gloves and scarves, was the open door through which we would walk as casually as those who knew they would soon have occasion to walk through it again, as if there stretched before us an endless number of descents down the stairway of this house and others like it. I looked at Dr. Cook, but clearly no such thoughts were on his mind.
“The evening went very well,” he said. “More people know the truth about Peary than I realized. Some of it, anyway. They know that this expedition is his last, even if they still believe it might succeed. I was many times asked about my own plans. One member of the Peary Arctic Club referred to me as the ‘prince regent of American explorers.’ Some of the others heard him and did not look displeased. It would seem that all that is required of us now is patience. We need not even pick the apple. We need but let it fall into our hands.”
It heartened me to hear him so exhilarated and speaking with such calm conviction about the future, his mind perhaps free of all the doubts and torments he had poured out to me in his letters and in person.
The evening had gone very well. Kristine. Should I have called her by her name after she told me what it was? I had not told her that my name was Devlin. Doubtless she knew, but that was not the point. I thought of Dr. Cook crossing back to Brooklyn after his first meeting with my mother, thinking about how strange and wonderful it was that at a posh party for graduating doctors to which he had dreaded going, he had fallen in love.
“It was wonderful,” I said. “I had no idea what it would be like.”
“Remember what I told you,” he said. “In that world, we are only visitors, only guests. It is not just a matter of money.”
“I danced with Lily’s daughter,” I said. “Miss Sumner.”
“Kristine Sumner,” Dr. Cook said. “She is a marvellous young woman. Much like her mother.”
“I might have made a mistake,” I said. “I wondered if she knew that you had met my mother. And so I asked her if her mother had ever met you.”
Dr. Cook was silent for a while, as if he was thinking through the possible consequences of my question.
“No harm done, I’m sure,” he said. “I would forget all about it if I were you.”
But he did not speak again as we drove home.
I could still feel the women I had danced with, still feel an extra warmth where they had touched me, a memory of them in my hands and on my shoulder that I hoped would never fade.
Later, when I got into bed and lay down, it felt as if a gloved hand was clasping mine and another resting lightly on my shoulder. And then, when I closed my eyes, it seemed that I was dancing, as if that oft-repeated motion was so imprinted on my mind it must continue in defiance of my body, which I kept completely still, hoping my mind would follow its example. I thought of Kristine, my hands on her and hers on me. I danced faster and faster, the room—the world—spinning about as though I had had too much to drink, though I had not drunk at all. I had to open my eyes and sit up in bed to make it stop.