Read Online The Navigator of New York by Wayne Johnston - Free Book Online Page B

he came down for breakfast in the morning, he said, he would wear, in the pocket of his vest, a red paisley handkerchief, the one that Aunt Daphne disliked so much she would think it was for her sake that he wore it no more than once every few months—which was likely how often a letter would arrive. “Whenever I wear it, it will be your red-letter day,” he said, wincing ruefully, as if it was I who had punned at his expense. On that day, he would tell his nurse that he was going to have his lunch across the hall in his brother’s surgery, where he could relax in quiet with a book. I was to tell Aunt Daphne that because of choir practice, I would not come home for lunch. Making sure that none of the other boys saw me, I would go to his surgery, walk around to the iron gate by which one entered the secluded back garden, and which he would leave unlocked, and using the door marked “Doctor’sEntrance Only,” go slowly and quietly up the stairs to the landing. He would be sitting in a chair on the landing just outside my father’s surgery, the patient’s entrance to which was permanently bolted from the outside. There would, in other words, be no way I could come and go without him seeing me. I would arrive promptly at 12:30 and, saying not a word to him, go inside, where the letter would be waiting for me in the top drawer of the desk. I was not to turn the lights on in the office. By day, there would be light enough to read and copy out the letter. When I was done, I was to come out to the landing and, without speaking a word, hand him the original. Then both of us would go back inside, where I would watch him burn the letter in the fireplace and then leave. Upon arrival and departure, and throughout my time in my father’s surgery, I was not to say a word. If anyone saw me leave by the doctor’s door and asked what I was doing, I would say that I had been to see my uncle for a check-up. If it somehow got back to Aunt Daphne that I had been to see him, our story would be that it was to save her needless worry that we had not told her about the check-up.
    I did not go back to school after I left the surgery. Nor did I go straight home. I had to prepare myself before I saw Aunt Daphne, before she saw me and started asking what was wrong. She would not relent until I told her something. Fearing that even strangers would notice my distress, I took the shortest route to the woods, followed a path some distance, then left it and sat down against a tree, where no one passing by could see me.
    No wonder Dr. Cook could not imagine how his letter would affect me. Now that the original no longer existed, it was easy to imagine that it never had. Or that Dr. Cook had lost his mind, or even that the letter was from someone pretending to be him.
    But another one was coming, for I had written “Yes” on the envelope. How, having read the letter, could I have told him not to write to me again? My head was spinning. If the claims made by Dr. Cook were true, my father had gone from being a man whom I could not remember to one whom I had never met.
    My father had always been a stranger to me, in life, in death. And now, it seemed, in life again. Now this stranger had a different name and was still alive. Both my fathers were doctors turned explorers. There was little to distinguish one from the other except that one had written me a letter.
    I remembered phrases from it, not bothering to consult the copy in my pocket. “The cold blood of biology.” “How this can change, I am unable to foresee.” “You hold in your hands a document … that if made public could do me and mine great harm.” The original document could have done him great harm. My copy, as Uncle Edward had said, could harm no one but me were I to show it to others.
    Why had he written to me? If, as he hinted, we could never meet, never appear in public as father and son—if he did not even want me to write him back—why had he written to me? Why did he think