The Navigator of New York (9 page)

“You are a very kind young man,” she said. When she smiled at me, I looked away for a moment, then met her eyes again
.

“You should go home,” I said. “I’ll get your friend.”

“Cousin,” she said. “Cousin and dear friend. But I’m all right.”

“You’re a good dancer,” I said
.

“It’s been years since I danced like that. When I was a girl. It’s funny, dancing by yourself. I’d never do it back home in St. John’s, now that I’m grown up. I don’t know why they taught us if they wanted us to stop once we grew up.”

“You’re getting married soon,” I said, looking at her engagement ring
.

“Yes,” she said, also looking at the ring. “Eighteen and engaged to be married. He’s a doctor.” She fell silent
.

“Do you like New York?”

“It’s so much bigger than St. John’s. But yes, I do like it. I wonder what sort of person I’d be if I had lived here all my life.”

“My mother’s never come across the river to Manhattan,” I said. “She says she doesn’t like the look of it from Brooklyn.”

She laughed
.

“Someday,” I told her, “you’re going to be very happy.” She looked at me, wondering, I think, if her unhappiness was as obvious to everyone as it was to me. She smiled, as if to assure me that she was not universally regarded as unhappy. A young man born into poverty feeling sympathy for her. Any other such man she would have resented perhaps, dismissed his sympathy as presumptuous. But she said later that she could see that I did not begrudge the privileges conferred on the people at that party by accidents of birth. She said she believed that to inquire into the natures of other people
was the main pleasure of my life. Which in part was true
.

“It’s just that I feel a little out of place,” she said, but she looked as though she were pondering some deeper discontent
.

“Playing marbles, are we?” a voice behind us said. It was Lily, at last come to see how your mother was doing
.

“She just tripped,” I said
.

Lily and I helped your mother to her feet
.

“I’ll take it from here,” Lily said, and led her off to a room down the hallway. I went back downstairs
.

She said she thought of me often the next day, how I seemed to know how coming to New York had made her feel, knew the doubts she had about her fiancé, the many times she thought about escaping, walking away from her life, losing Lily in the crowd, losing herself in the limitless swarms of Manhattan rather than returning to Newfoundland
.

She asked Lily to arrange for us to meet again. Lily knew right from the start that your mother was taken with me. She, too, knew that your mother was unhappy. It was obvious that your mother had told her so, perhaps in a letter. It might have been for this reason that Lily invited her to New York. I think Lily saw me not as a marriage prospect, a replacement fiancé, but as the first of many steps your mother needed to take to extricate herself from her situation back home
.

With Lily’s help, we met almost every day for the duration of your mother’s stay in Manhattan. The three of us went to pleasure palaces—amusement parks, we call them now—panoramas, museums, vaudeville shows at Tammany Hall, art galleries, theatres. We walked about in Long Acre Square, a neighbourhood built by a rich family called the Astors. They call it Times Square now. It has become famous for its high-class “houses,” which are known as silkhat brothels
.

Lily was our chaperone, our alibi, our disguise. So that your mother and I could link ours, we all three linked arms, Lily and your mother on either side of me as we strolled down Broadway,
looking at the stores. To observers, we hoped, Lily would appear to be “with” your mother as much as I did, and Lily as much with me as your mother did. Lily walked with us, hardly saying a word as your mother and I talked, sometimes trailing slightly behind when she sensed that we would like some time alone
.

Your mother and I sat on benches in the parks while Lily idled up and down in front of us beneath her parasol
.

We went to the largest of the pushcart markets, the one on the Lower East Side. The city has changed much since your mother was there, but even then the Lower East Side seemed to her so dense with people and with buildings that she found herself gasping for breath, clinging to Lily or me as we walked unmindfully along
.

There were markets everywhere, in most parts of the city, sudden swarms of people in the distance that always made your mother think an accident had happened or a fight was taking place—the usual reasons, she said, for which crowds gathered outdoors in St. John’s
.

I told her that more than half a million people lived on the island of Manhattan. More than two million people live there now. That New York seems to me like nothing next to this one
.

To think, she said, that on an island thirteen miles long and two miles wide, not all of which was inhabited, there were five times as many people as lived in all of Newfoundland. She was overwhelmed by the density and clamour
.

The Brooklyn Bridge was not quite finished, but you could see it from almost everywhere in Brooklyn or Manhattan, arching off into space at such an angle that from one side of it you couldn’t see the other. It was being built from both sides and would be joined in the middle. As the middle span was not in place, each half seemed suspended in mid-air, as if the span that joined the arches had collapsed. It was such a spectacle, she said, seemed so perfect as it was, that she forgot it would soon have a practical purpose
.

There were so many vessels in the river you could barely see the water. We crossed from shore to shore on ferries just to feel the cooling East River breeze
.

Lily and I took her to see Trinity Church, then the highest structure in Manhattan, a towering Gothic Revival at Broadway and Wall Street
.

We took cable cars and elevated trains throughout Manhattan. The latter were very popular because, the joke went, the only way to avoid the red-hot cinders, oil and coal ash that rained down from the steam-powered el was to ride the wretched thing. Cinders burnt holes in the awnings that stretched out above the sidewalks, landed on horses and pedestrians, the latter examining their hats for damage and choking on the dust as the train rattled overhead. Everyone cursed the el except its passengers. It was great fun. Most of the lines are electrified now, not as much of a nuisance as before
.

Manhattan filled your mother with all sorts of conflicting feelings: on the one hand a craving for privacy and space, on the other a yearning to feel at home as Lily did, as she thought I did
.

It made her miss her fiancé, she said, and it made her wish that they had never met. (Neither she nor Lily ever spoke the first or last name of Francis Stead.) One moment, she wanted to leave for home as soon as possible, and the next, she could not imagine ever living in St. John’s again
.

She had always suspected that, in the greater world, families like hers were “insignificant” or “unimportant.” But these words, she now saw, were inadequate. She was witnessing the collective pursuit of something for which its pursuers had no name, for which no one knew the grand design, though everyone acted as if there was one. Newfoundland’s complete obliteration would not have made one person in this city pause, she said. If Newfoundland were to vanish from the earth, it would not slow down the progress of the Brooklyn Bridge
.

“Some of the men building the bridge are from Newfoundland,” I said
.

“The replaceable ones,” she said. “The ones who are interchangeable with all the other men who have come from far away to build that bridge.”

She said that Lily’s “crowd” seemed limitless. At a succession of dinners and parties, she had not seen the same face twice. She wondered what Lily’s impression of St. John’s would be. For the first time in her life, she felt insecure, inadequate in social situations
.

She told a woman that she was from Newfoundland. “Oh, yes,” the woman said. “I’ve heard of it, I think. Where did you learn English?”

There were times, she said, when it occurred to her how easy it would be here to escape. She would look at the Manhattan span of the great bridge arching off into the sky like some monument to opportunity, and it would occur to her that if she wanted to, she could simply disappear. Unlike in St. John’s, it would take no effort. She could simply walk away. She pictured herself boarding a ferry and sitting alone as it made its way across the Hudson River to New Jersey. That was as far as her imagination took her. Where she was headed, what her plans were, how she would support herself, she stopped short of considering. All she wanted was to escape
.

Escape. Escape from what? I asked her. She merely shrugged
.

The three of us took a hansom cab one evening along Madison Avenue, which was a residential street for the well-off but not quite rich, and then we turned off into Central Park. The windows were open, the canvas top was rolled back. Your mother said she had not looked up at the night sky since coming to New York. It was clear, but the stars were not as bright as in the sky above St. John’s
.

“They say that at night, from the high point of the Brooklyn Bridge, Manhattan looks like the sky,” she said. “Constellations of lights with nothing but darkness in between them. Don’t you think that’s wonderful?”

I told her I thought it was. Central Park at night. A wilderness within the city, enclosed by the city. It no longer seems quite so wild as it once did. That descent into the park conferred upon those who made it some sort of exemption from inhibition. It was like bathing at the seashore or being at the seashore after dark. This, it seemed, was the purpose of the park: to allow the furtive expression of things
that people of a certain class must otherwise pretend do not exist. The clopping of horses’ hoofs. The murmured conversations that would stop as you went past, then resume again. The unlit parts of the path between one gas lamp and the next. The grass a silver sheen of dew down where it was cooler. The smell of the water through the trees. You could faintly hear the treetop breeze, though on the ground the air was still. Things were said there that could not be said elsewhere, desires admitted to, secret fears and hopes acknowledged. You were never unaware that you were hemmed in by the unseen city. The knowledge that none of this would last was necessary to the effect. It cast over everything an elusive, wistful, enjoyable sadness. To leave the park, to go back up into the city, was like waking from a dream. No one ever spoke of the dream, and most of it was soon forgotten
.

Poor discreet and patient Lily, pretending that we were not whispering, that my arm was not around your mother’s waist, that she was unaffected by the park, that she alone was able to resist its spell
.

“They say that by 1900, every inch of Manhattan will be so lit up the stars will be invisible,” your mother said. By 1900. Not long from now. She had every reason to think that she would live to see if this was true. It is not. You can still, in Manhattan, see the stars
.

She told me, as we sat the next day in Madison Square Park and Lily, as if by prearrangement, walked farther from us than usual, that she was engaged to a man she did not love and did not wish to marry
.

At first, I did not know what to say
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“He is very kind,” she said. “He comes from a good family, as do I, though my parents are deceased. We are said to be a ‘good match.’ Many good matches make good marriages. But this one will not. I should have declined his proposal. Now it seems to be too late.”

“It is not too late,” I said. “You are not yet married. You should not make yourself unhappy just because of how it would look if you changed your mind. Perhaps you are not cut out for
marriage. Or is it that you think marriage to some other man would make you happy?”

She looked at me
.

“I have met the man who would make me happy,” she said
.

“I believe you have,” I said
.

On her second-last day in New York, knowing that she would be expected to spend the last day with Lily’s family, we met one final time, without Lily’s help or knowledge
.

We intended only to have one afternoon completely to ourselves, to say what, in the company or near proximity of Lily, we dared not say. But we found that even without Lily, we could not speak as intimately as we wished to, not in public. She said she felt as though she was in St. John’s and everyone was watching us. I said that, as large and crowded as Manhattan was, I had sometimes encountered acquaintances by accident while walking in the street
.

We agreed that we should find somewhere private where we could talk. When I told her that I knew of a cheap but respectable hotel on lower Broadway, she nodded and looked briefly at me in a way that I knew I would never forget. How beautiful she was. “I love you,” I whispered
.

We took separate cabs there, arrived separately and rented separate rooms. We would not have been allowed to register together without proof that we were married—nor, even had we been allowed, could we have endured the awkwardness and embarrassment of doing so. For a young woman to register alone was embarrassment enough
.

I registered first, then read a paper in the lobby until she arrived. She held her key so that I could see the number, then went upstairs. Fifteen minutes later, I joined her in her room
.

Alone, secretly alone at last. Soon to part, soon to be a thousand miles apart, but together now. For hours, together in that room into which sounds drifted from the outside world, from the oblivious swarm of people passing on the street below. It did not seem possible to me, as we lay there in each other’s arms, that anyone else had
ever been in love. For a short while she slept, her forehead against my cheek, her warm breath on my neck
.