The Navigator of New York Read Free

whose ultimate intention was to milk him dry.
    Going by the surgery, Aunt Daphne would look at Edward’s name just below my father’s on the shingle. There he was, the shingle seemed to say, the last in the line of succession; the inheritor not just of his brother’s practice, but of his debts and obligations, all of it trickling down to him like the raindrops on the sign.
    My mother and I did not go out often. Our one regular and unavoidable outing was Sunday service, where everyone’s lot in life was on conspicuous display. Nothing so invoked my absent father like the sight of my mother and me making our way up the centre aisle to the pew we shared with Edward and Daphne. A widow’s widowhood was never more apparent than when she appeared in church without her husband. Likewise our abandonment, my father’s delinquency. We would not have been more gawked at if, as we entered, we had been loudly announced as “Amelia and Devlin Stead, forsaken wife and son of the improvident explorer Dr. Stead.”
    Daphne could tell, from the way we were regarded in church and from things she overheard, that there was the feeling among some people that our isolation was contrived, that the two of us preferred tobe left alone, that we were outsiders by nature, wilfully, even haughtily, aloof. When service was letting out, the men tipped their hats to Mother and the women nodded their acknowledgment and said good day in a way that forbade anything except a like response. One or two said, “How are you today, Mrs. Stead?” then looked at me for the answer. They smiled reassuringly at me when my mother told them she was fine. Otherwise, we were like rocks around which the congregation flowed.
    She kept her horse, whose name was Pete, in a small barn behind the house. “I’ve always taken care of my own horse,” she said. It was something she took pride in. The only thing she needed help with was hitching and unhitching Pete from what she called the carriage. It was a cabriolet with a maroon-coloured leather hood that folded back. When no one she knew was around, she would simply stand at the end of her driveway and wait until some man or boy whose assistance she could ask for came walking past.
    “I wish now that I had defied Edward and spent more time with her,” my aunt once told me.
    My mother and I became, as my father and Edward had once been, “the Steads,” a legendary pair, driving about in that cabriolet, sheltered by the hood, looking intent, preoccupied, as if hurrying home to resume some entirely unique, unprecedented way of passing time.
    She took me shopping with her, and once or twice Daphne went with us. For the first few seconds after we went into a store, all conversation stopped, then resumed at a more subdued level, as if to speak in normal tones in the presence of the Steads would be an intrusion on the privacy that they so famously preferred.
    “How are things with you, Mrs. Stead?” the butcher would say, and Mother would barely audibly reply to this relative torrent of conversation that things were well with her. He would wrap her purchases in brown paper, then tie them round and round with string, all the while looking at me and every few minutes winking, as if I shared with him some secret that we must not divulge in front of her.
    Mother once overheard the two of us being referred to by women whom we passed in our carriage as “a pair of hermits.”
    “A pair of hermits,” my mother said to Daphne, as if no path that she could make out led from what she had been to what other people thought she was.
    There came an expedition after which my father did not come home. From then on, in his letters to my mother and Edward, he kept up the pretence that he was forever being kept from returning by circumstances beyond his control. Delays because of heavy ice off Labrador. Emergencies. Mishaps. Requests to join rescue missions for fellow explorers that in all good conscience he could not refuse. Excuses that