OF MY MOTHER, DR. COOK SAID, “NOTHING IN HER LIFE WAS undone by the manner of her death.”
Nor by the fact of it. Life is not undone by death—nor a single moment by all the moments that come after it.
I have no reason, then, even knowing what happened in “the end,” not to finish the story years before the end, not to write the ending as if I really do not know what happens next.
Later on the same day that my hosts and their children left Brooklyn under assumed names for parts unknown, I let myself out the door by which Dr. Cook had first admitted me to his house, a door I had not used since then.
For the first time, I descended the steps that I had climbed that day nine years before. It made me feel as though I had not left the house since the day that door seemed to open by itself and I stepped inside.
I looked at the spot on the other side of Bushwick where I had waited in the shade of nothing but my hat on that hot day in August 1900, dressed for the summer of the colder country from which I had come to Manhattan, to America, the day before. I would not have been surprised to see my successor standing there, a boy as terrified, as apprehensive, as I had been, conspicuously waiting, gripping with both hands and holding in front of him a valise that appeared to be a doctor’s bag.
I had decided to burn the scrolls of letters and leave my valise, bearing Francis Stead’s initials, behind. But I couldn’t do it.
I had fallen asleep fully dressed the night before, lying on the sofa in the drawing room. I was surprised that I had been able to sleep, and that I had had no dreams.
I decided, after leaving the house, that I would walk to Manhattan. I walked along the Myrtle line to the Brooklyn Bridge, in the shadow of the el tracks, weaving in and out among the beams, looking up when the train rumbled overhead.
At Myrtle and Willoughby, the triumphal arch bearing Dr. Cook’s likeness had been taken down, though the wooden scaffolding remained, as if repairs to the viaduct were soon to start.
People, most of whom I had never met, waved to me and said, “Good morning, Mr. Stead,” and asked me to pass on their good wishes to Dr. Cook.
I passed the winding wooden stairs to all the waiting rooms, the stairwells from which friendly strangers pointed at me. Some, noticing the commotion, looked furtively at me as if they thought they recognized me but could not remember why I was famous.
There were throngs of people on the boardwalk of the bridge—sightseers, most of them, who looked as if they were either making their first trip to New York or were New Yorkers who had never walked the bridge before. There was a deafening tumult of traffic below me. The el train, motor cars, the clopping hoofs of horses.
I thought of the day when I first rode the el train to Brooklyn from Manhattan and the passengers on both sides let their windows down when we reached the crest, so a fresh breeze blew through the car. I had smelled the ocean then as I did now.
Soon the wind was blowing so hard I could hear nothing else. Two young women, mouths open in soundless laughter, clung girlishly to one another and with their free hands held onto their hats.
When the ship from which my mother got her first look at New York came up the river, the two halves of the bridge had not yet met. The ship sailed between them as if a massive canal bridge had been raised to let it through.
I thought of Cape Sparbo, where it had seemed the wind would roll the roof back like a rug, roll back the sod until nothing lay between us and the storm but sticks and bones.
A subway train now ran between the two boroughs, beneath the riverbed, just as the newspaper I had read on my first morning in Manhattan had predicted. It was said that on calmer days, as the subway train crossed beneath the river, its vibrations made a kind of path of agitation on the surface, so that you could see not only the progress of the train from side to side, but also its shape, as though it was casting a shadow upward on the water.
If anything, that newspaper, which had seemed to me so extravagant and naïve in its predictions, had been short-sighted and conservative. There were more things in New York in 1909 than had been dreamed of by anyone nine years before.
At the height of the walkway, I stopped and stood at the rail, looking up the river. My clothing flapped loudly in the wind, as if I was some flag marking the midway point of the Brooklyn Bridge.
I thought about the expedition. There were parts of it that, despite the hoax, remained unspoiled for me. Most of it. I knew I would never see or do such things again. The time I spent recovering from fever in the box house. I lay there, languishing longer than I had to in my sleeping bag, revelling in aches and pains that I knew would not get worse, and that somehow added a coziness to my recovery. I had not been to the pole, but I had walked on the ever-moving surface of the polar sea. I had been farther north than where the Old Ice came from, the ice that flowed past Newfoundland each spring. I had risked death.
There had been moments on the polar sea when I’m sure that even Dr. Cook forgot our purpose for being there—forgot that it was all a grand deception—so diverted was he by some sight like the parting of the ice, the crust ripping slowly to reveal, at the bottom of a jagged trench, the steaming apparition of green water.
I knew that Dr. Cook would come back to Brooklyn, that this sudden flight from his house to parts unknown was just the prologue of a story that would peter out—a story in which it was possible for him to start again, to reinvent himself somewhere else where no one had ever heard of him. There was no such place, but neither, if there was, would he have stayed there.
He would come back and live in Brooklyn in some house from which he could see Manhattan.
Perhaps, from now on, Manhattan would remind him of me, for I had decided that I would live in the city where my parents met and where I was conceived. I was certain he would not insist that we remain apart forever.
I would never again speak in public about the expedition.
But I would not run from Peary and the members of his Arctic club. I would neither help nor hinder their ambitions. If they had me followed, if they came to visit me, if they insisted that I meet again with Peary or someone else, then so be it. I knew the whole truth now, and they would soon see that to pester me was pointless.
I could go to some university or college. I had had enough of exploring, though I knew my reputation would help me find a job. I could all but see an item in the papers or a sign in a window naming as the new addition to some firm the young man who was a partner with Dr. Cook on his disputed expedition, and who years ago had saved the life of his enemy and rival, Robert Peary. It would not matter that I had ended my professional association with Dr. Cook, or that I preferred not to speak of my adventures. I could stand to be “the enigmatic Mr. Stead” for as long as people chose to think of me that way.
I would prove myself, and though my part in all of it might never be forgotten altogether, it would fade and I would be allowed to make my way as Devlin Stead, who had had something to do with “that Cook and Peary business.” It was something to hope for anyway. It was not as if I had a choice. The fame and infamy would follow me no matter where I went.
But for now, for today, I had no plans. I would wander through the streets of the Lower East Side, and among people who had never heard of me, who could not read the papers, who had seen Manhattan from a distance only once and had never crossed the Brooklyn Bridge and never would, I would think about my future for a while. My life with Kristine.
I would go down to the Hudson Pier, perhaps, and watch the immigrants come ashore from the Ellis Island ferries. Or I might take the el train to its northern limit and see if any trace remained of the shanty towns.
Most of what I knew about my mother happened here. I knew the story of those three weeks better than I knew the story of her life. She had known only happiness here.
My mother as Lily remembered her.
My mother as, in his first two letters, Dr. Cook remembered her.