The Navigator of New York Read Free Page B

wear my best blazer. She dressed as though for some formal occasion. Beneath her wrap, she wore a close-fitting silk dress that might have been new, for I had never seen it before, striped black and green with bands of jet embroidery, complete with drapery and bustle.
    Uncle Edward wore a double-breasted frock coat with silk-faced lapels. His hair was slick with pomade, brushed back and parted down the middle.
    “So, Devlin,” Aunt Daphne said before we took our places at the table, “how are things with you?”
    Uncle Edward looked at her with amazement, as if it had notbefore occurred to him that when not in his presence, I continued to exist. But Aunt Daphne persisted. She wanted to know how everything was with me: school, sports, choir practice. I told her how things were while Uncle Edward made such a clatter cutting up his food that I had to raise my voice to make myself heard.
    When the subject of what was new with me was exhausted, there was silence. The wind was on the rise, and a sudden gust sprayed the window with particles of grit and stone. Uncle Edward stared at the fire behind me as if driven by one element into brooding contemplation of another. I looked at Aunt Daphne, who seemed so vulnerably hopeful in her finery. I imagined her preparing for this evening, choosing her outfit, making sure that everything looked just so, urging a reluctant Uncle Edward to do the same. There was something touching about the absence of all subtlety in her attempt to convey by her costume what she could not convey with words.
    It had been a rule of Father Stead’s that there be no talking at the dinner table until everyone had finished. This was Uncle Edward’s rule as well, though impossible to obey because he ate so slowly. He seemed to go into a trance while eating, eyes staring blankly while he chewed.
    “You’d think the two of us were bolters,” Aunt Daphne said. “We finish so far ahead of you.”
    At first, Uncle Edward ignored her, but when provoked several times in this fashion, he said, “You eat too fast.”
    “We would eat more slowly if you would speak from time to time,” she said, to no reaction from Uncle Edward.
    The meal was passed in this manner, protracted silences interrupted by remarks from Aunt Daphne and laconic, chastening retorts from Uncle Edward. When he emptied his plate but did not push it away, she got up and refilled it, glancing apologetically at me. When he was finished, he abruptly stood and went into the front room to have his brandy and cigar.
    “Can you imagine what it was like when there were just the two of us?” Aunt Daphne said, smiling. She leaned across the table towardsme and whispered: “Their plates wiped clean they sit and wait / While at the trough he ruminates.” It was as if she believed the specialness of the occasion called for the disclosure of a secret.
    By consulting the dictionary, I discovered what was meant by
ruminates
. I repeated the couplet at school, which in itself was harmless, since none of the children really understood it, perhaps because of how ineptly I explained it to them. But the couplet, its author and the couple about whom it was written became known to teachers at the school, and from them, by exactly what means I would never know, it got back to Uncle Edward.
    I found on my pillow one night when I went up to bed a note from Uncle Edward, which read: “I am told you go about repeating rhymes about my ‘ruminations.’ I am sorry that my hospitality does not inspire you to greater things.”
    Whenever there was mention in the paper of one of the expeditions on which my father served, Aunt Daphne would make some mischievous remark about it to Uncle Edward, not realizing I could hear her.
    “I know it is cold in Greenland,” she said. “I don’t need men to prove it by going there and coming back with frostbite.”
    “White men study Eskimos,” she said. “Do you think the day is coming soon, Edward, when a band of Eskimos sent to