The Navigator of New York (59 page)

“I’m very pleased to meet you, Mrs. Sumner,” I said.

“I want you to call me Lily,” she said.

A woman as old as my mother would be now.

I was relieved. I could not even think of her as Mrs. Sumner, since I had for so long thought of her, and heard her referred to by Dr. Cook, as Lily. Her eyes darted about as she examined my face.

“You have your mother’s eyes,” she said. “You have your mother’s kindness in your eyes. Unmistakably.”

“Thank you,” I said.

I looked into
her
eyes to see if I could tell how much she knew of me and Dr. Cook. She smiled slightly, as if to say she knew precisely what I was looking for.

“Your mother and I began writing to each other when we were schoolgirls,” she said. “Me telling her about Manhattan, her telling me about St. John’s.” I thought of how it must have been for my mother
when she was about to make her own first visit to New York, to meet at last her own long-time correspondent.

“Devlin, I know that Francis Stead was not your father,” she said. “And I believe that you know about your mother and Dr. Cook. I assume he told you.”

I nodded.

“I thought so,” she said. “I could think of no other explanation for your coming to New York. You are not only his son—you are all that remains of Amelia for Dr. Cook.”

“Yes,” I said. “He has often said so.”

“I should not have taken her to so many parties when she came to visit me. She had never had a drink before she visited Manhattan. But she was so rarely out of my sight. I have always felt responsible, you see. I think about it often: what might have been if I had been more careful, taken better care of her. How overwhelmed by New York she was.”

“You are not to blame for anything,” I said.

“Your mother wrote to me frequently after she went back to St. John’s,” she said, “just as she did before she came to New York. We had an epistolary friendship for years before we met. I loved her letters. She told me that she loved mine. We were already well acquainted by the time we met. Already best friends.”

“You don’t like Dr. Cook, do you?” I said.

“I loved your mother,” Lily said. “How, knowing what he did to her, could I go on liking him? Because yes, I did like him once. Perhaps only because Amelia loved him. I’m not sure.”

“He was really just a boy back then,” I said. “He’s different now. He regrets not answering my mother’s letter to him. He calls it the great mistake of his life.”

I saw Lily’s face fill with emotion, which at first I thought was anger. Her eyes welled up with tears that might not have spilled out had she not smiled.

“They were
so
much in love,” she said. “Perhaps that’s why I can’t forgive him for what he did. I have never been in love like that. It was
so strange being with them. Wonderful, in a way. It was as if they spoke different languages and needed me to translate for them. But sometimes they went for hours without speaking, to each other or to me. I did almost all the talking. I talked about people we saw in the park, about my parents, about how fast New York was changing. Small talk. But it was as though I was speaking in code. Telling her what he felt. Telling him what she felt. Helping them conspire. Make plans. He was very soft-spoken. Your mother was shy, with Dr. Cook at least. Perhaps it was guilt more than shyness. We often spoke about her fiancé. As for me … well, I was said to be vivacious. A polite term for a chatterbox, perhaps.

“I was so drained by the end of every day. Exhausted. The instant he left us, your mother would want to talk. About him. About Francis Stead. Should she break off her engagement with him if Dr. Cook asked her to? Did I think he
would
ask? All I could bear to do was listen. For three weeks, this went on. I don’t know how he got away from work so often. He said he sold milk. Delivered messages. Worked as a clerk in an office—real estate, I think it was. He seemed to be holding down half a dozen jobs at once. Yet somehow he made time for her. For us. Perhaps, if it had been possible for them to spend some time alone each day, they would have felt, by the end of your mother’s visit, that they were committed to each other, that no … no physical pledge was necessary.”

Physical pledge
. She had all but gestured to me when she said these words. She winced when she saw my reaction.

“I did not mean to speak with such regret,” she said. “I can assure you that where you were concerned, your mother had none.”

“What were my mother’s letters like?” I said. “The ones she wrote to you after she was married. After I was born.”

“They were always about you,” she said. “She wrote very little about Francis. I was not surprised when she told me that he had found some excuse to live away from home and still remain married to her. I never met him. Even before she came to New York, she did not often mention him. I could tell, from what little she did say, that she didn’t love him. But that wasn’t unusual. Women often marry men
they do not love. And vice versa, I suppose. Though Francis loved her. At first, at least.

“But as I was saying, she often wrote of you. How fast you were growing. How the colour of your eyes was changing. You made her happy. She wrote almost every day. I felt guilty for writing her only every other day. She sometimes mentioned Dr. Cook in passing, often by way of comparing you to him. It was sadder than if she had written ten pages telling me how much she missed him.

“I had to be so careful with her letters. I never spoke of him in mine. But there, in hers, from time to time, would be his name. It was the first thing I noticed when I opened her letters, even before I read them. I would scan each page, looking for that name. Frederick. It stood out like it was written in different-coloured ink than the words around it.

“She was the sort of person who would not give in to sorrow. That’s why I have never believed the rumours about her death. She would never have done that. I know that is often said of suicides, but I have not the slightest doubt. When your uncle Edward wrote to me to say that Amelia had drowned accidentally, the other possibility never occurred to me.

“But my mother somehow heard the rumours. I overheard her speaking to my father about Amelia. I rushed into the parlour and asked them how they could repeat such things, believe such things about Amelia. I have
never
believed it.

“But I worried about how the rumours might one day affect you. I didn’t want you to think, you see … to feel guilty about what happened to her. I was worried you might someday think she took her life because of you.

“No one who loved her child as she loved you could have lost hope so completely. She did not think of herself or the man she loved in tragic terms. She planned to go on with her life, as she assumed he would. She still loved him, and she hoped he would be happy. If the thought of him finding happiness without her tormented her, she showed no sign of it.

“She was a woman of great resilience. One of her few flaws was that she believed others were just as resilient. She had to have thought that Francis was. I doubt that when she decided to break off her engagement with him, she realized how badly, how permanently, that would have wounded him. And when, after she did not hear from Dr. Cook, she changed her mind, she had to have thought that Francis could bear to raise as his own a child his wife had conceived with another man. He could bear it, she believed, because she knew that she could if she had to.

“I thought of writing to you and assuring you that the rumours were untrue, or of writing to your uncle and asking him to tell you what I said, but then I thought how strange it would be for a child to receive such a letter. A letter denying awful rumours about your mother that you might not even have heard. And I could not bring myself to reassure you about your mother while at the same time withholding so much from you.”

“I received stranger letters as a child,” I said. “Letters from Dr. Cook in which he told me he was my father.”

“Your aunt and uncle knew about those letters?”

I shook my head.

“I can’t imagine Dr. Cook taking such a risk, writing such letters to a boy. If people had found out that although she was engaged, he asked her to marry him—”

“You’re right about my mother,” I said.

“I’m so glad you think so, Devlin.”

“I have something to tell you, Lily, and it will come as quite a shock to you. My mother, as you say, did not take her life. She was murdered.”

Lily put her hand on her throat as if I had told her that my mother had been choked to death.

“Oh no,” she said. “The poor, sweet thing. I hoped that somehow … You see, Devlin, I have often thought it likely that someone did her harm. Because of the circumstances, I mean. I have long thought it could not have been by accident that she wound up in
that water so far from where she left her horse and cart, so far down that hill.”

“Francis Stead killed her,” I said.

Lily covered her face with her hands, covered everything except her eyes, with which she looked at me as if
I
was Francis Stead and had just confessed.

“How do you know this?” she said.

“Francis Stead confessed to Dr. Cook,” I said. “On the North Greenland expedition. Francis said he would let her go if she told him who my father was. He said that if she lied to him, made up some name, he would come back and kill not only her but me as well.”

“Oh, my God,” Lily said. “How could anyone do such a thing? Oh, my poor Amelia. My poor dear friend. I have thought for so long that someone might have killed her, but I never suspected it was Francis—in part because he lived in Brooklyn then, and in part because I pictured him as being so, I don’t know, so inconsequential. And if he had suddenly turned up in St. John’s, people would have noticed, remembered having seen him when they heard that she was dead. Oh, my God, Devlin, I feel like I did when I first heard that she was gone.”

“I’m sorry,” I said. “Perhaps I should not have told you.”

She got up and came around the table to me, reaching out her hands. I rose and took her in my arms, thinking she had come to me for comfort until I realized something that she had already seen in my eyes: that it was I who needed comforting.

Hearing Lily talk about my mother as no one else ever had, not even Dr. Cook, had brought her to life for me at last. I had just told Lily of the death of my mother, not of the death of Dr. Cook’s Amelia or Francis Stead’s Amelia, not even of the death of Lily’s cousin. For something in the way Lily spoke about her made me feel that I remembered her, made her seem familiar, as though I had recognized something of myself in the woman she described, the part of her in me surfacing at last.

I cried. Lily cried.

“Don’t tell Kristine,” I said. “I would like to tell her myself.”
I told Kristine when she came back to Manhattan. I was worried that my strange story, the story of the letters from Dr. Cook and the murder of my mother, would put her off. I told her
everything
, just as I had told Lily everything. I related the death of Francis Stead at Dr. Cook’s hand and Dr. Cook’s admission that we had never reached the pole. I spoke of Peary. I did not ask either Kristine or Lily to be discreet. I knew they would be. I was determined that, between us, there would be no secrets. Kristine hugged me so fervently when I finished speaking that it was some time before I realized that, in between sobs that she struggled to suppress, she was whispering my name.

I told her about “the Stead boy,” about Aunt Daphne. I told her about the night I spent in the blockhouse on Signal Hill. My foolish falling-out with Aunt Daphne, who I believed no longer had faith in me but had, like everyone else, come to regard me as the Stead boy. My flight from St. John’s, my journey to New York to meet Dr. Cook. I told her of my life in the Dakota, half of that sad house in Brooklyn. The furniture shrouded in dust covers. Dr. Cook and I talking by the fire in the drawing room at night. Etah. Peary. Washington. Copenhagen. Dr. Cook’s confessions.

I went to the Sumners’ frequently. I tried not to think of Dr. Cook. We almost never spoke of him.

Once while I was having dinner with them, Lily kept making up excuses to go upstairs, to leave us alone. She would be gone for minutes at a time, then she would descend and offer no explanation of her absence.

When Lily was upstairs for perhaps the fifth time, Kristine moved her chair closer to mine so that our thighs were touching. With her hands in her lap, she looked at me.

“How often are you going to let my mother climb those stairs before you ask me to marry you?” she said.