The Navigator of New York Read Free Page A

he did not even hope to fool us with, that he meant for us to see through and made only for form’s sake.
    “I am ill,” one letter read. “Not grievously so, but it is thought best for my recovery that I refrain from travelling.”
    In the spring of 1886, in a letter sent just before he went south from Battle Harbour, Labrador, on his way back from an expedition, my father wrote that he was moving to New York. In fact, he was going straight there and, when he found a house, would send for the two of us. He said he had made a “great decision.” He planned, as soon as possible, to lead a polar expedition of his own. For so long, he had taken direction from “lesser men,” obeyed commands that he knew were “ill-advised,” kept silent when he should have spoken up. He said he had spent “as much time in the polar regions as any man alive.” (Nothing to write home about, Edward said, even if it was true, which it wasn’t.) But as so many of the others had done, he must, for the time being, make New York his port. “New York is to explorers what Paris is to artists,” he said.
    He must go to New York, where he could choose, from among the many men who went there in the hope of signing on with a polar expedition, the best crew yet assembled. Where he could get to know the great men of industry, the financiers who thought they had everything until they met a man like him, and who, for merely vicarious glory, were willing to underwrite the cost of adventures they dared notembark upon themselves. Great contests were under way, races for the North Pole and the South Pole, and no one who did not live in some great city like New York was considered a serious contender. He claimed that by moving to New York, he would make enough money that he could send some home.
    “It is even likely, my dear wife,” he wrote, “that one day, these lonely wanderings of mine will make us rich.”
    New York. That it is the best place from which to set out for the Arctic is not for most people the main attraction of that city.
    My father never did send for us. It was the last letter my mother received from him.
    I don’t know exactly where Aunt Daphne’s version of my life leaves off and mine begins, but I often think it might be here:
    One day, when I was in the first grade, I came home from school to find the house empty. The barn out back was empty, too, the horse and carriage gone. Assuming my mother was out on some errand, I waited for her to return. I waited until after five, when it was almost dark. Then I walked up Devon Row to Uncle Edward’s. He was not home yet from his surgery, which was farther up the street. I asked Aunt Daphne if she had seen my mother.
    The next day, the horse and carriage were found on top of Signal Hill. Her death was officially declared to be an accidental drowning. But the story, which some children were only too glad to let me overhear, was that she had climbed down the steep slope that faced the sea, down to a grassy ledge, from which she jumped into a narrow channel of water between the shore and the ice that stretched off to the meeting place of sea and sky.

• C HAPTER T WO •
    F OR TWO YEARS, DURING WHICH WE GOT NO ANSWERS TO THE letters we sent to my father in New York, not even the one telling him about my mother, I lived with Uncle Edward and Aunt Daphne in my mother’s house, to which they had moved after a kind of will was discovered. It was a note, what Uncle Edward called “a pithy bequeathal”: “I leave everything to Daphne.” Mother Stead had died a year before my mother. For that year, Uncle Edward and Aunt Daphne had been the sole occupants of the Stead home. My mother’s house was smaller and more suited to a couple with one child. The Stead house had been sold.
    The day, in the fall of 1888, when they were officially declared my guardians, the day the court ruled that they would remain so even should my father come back home, Aunt Daphne made a special dinner. She had me