The Navigator of New York (39 page)

“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.

S
OMETHING ABOUT THE
D
AKOTA UNSETTLED ME, SOMETHING
beyond the obvious eeriness of all that shrouded furniture and all those empty rooms.

Late almost every night, I heard footsteps in the hallway. Several times, venturing out of my room, I found the doors of the drawing room closed. Sometimes I saw a light beneath the door, sometimes only what I knew to be the flickering light from the fireplace. Occasionally, though I smelled the smoke of Dr. Cook’s cigars, there was no light at all.

One night, the drawing-room door nearest to my room was closed, but the other was slightly open. There was a diagonal, flickering shaft of light on the floor of the hallway. I could hear the crackling of wood in the fireplace.

Remembering that Dr. Cook had told me that I should regard an open door as an invitation to join him, I was about to do so when I heard the voice of Mrs. Cook, her tone upbraiding, plaintive, though not until I went a few feet closer, where there was nothing to hide behind, could I make out what she was saying.

“When will Mr. Stead be moving out? I mean, he can’t live with us forever. He is a grown man. Should he not find a place of his own, a life of his own—”

“My dear, he comes from a place so unlike, so much smaller than, New York that he is not yet ready to strike out on his own.”

“When
will
he be ready?”

“I don’t know. You hardly see him from one month to the next, so I don’t see why—”