driven mad by it. Or by his wife, by her, by
that one
with her odd ways, whom, even when he was in the Arctic, even after she was dead and he had not set eyes on her for years, he could not forget.
What, people seemed to say as they looked at me, will become of this boy who was the issue of two such odd people as his parents?
Just as he was preparing to go to New York to settle my father’s affairs, Uncle Edward received a letter from a man who described himself as an “associate of Dr. Stead’s” and said that my father had rented an almost unfurnished flat and, in between expeditions, worked for little compensation at a hospital for the indigent in Brooklyn. He died intestate, having at any rate but $140 in a bank and no personal effects besides clothing and books. The money, Aunt Daphne decided, would be kept in trust for me until I was twenty-one. Uncle Edward instructed my father’s associate to dispose of the clothing and books in whatever manner he saw fit, since it would cost more to transport them to Newfoundland than they were worth.
A month passed in which nothing new about my father came to light. Uncle Edward said it would be pointless to wait until next June, when the whaler referred to by Dr. Cook in his report would go through the formality of putting in at McCormick Bay. Pointless, he meant, to wait until then to have a funeral service for my father. All the papers agreed with Peary that, given the circumstances, there was no chance that Dr. Stead was alive now, let alone that he would make it until June.
Uncle Edward placed a notice in the papers that would have given to people who did not know my father no clue that he had ever deviated from the path the world expected him to follow all his life, no clue to how he had spent his last ten years or how he had died: “Passed away, August 17, 1892, Dr. Francis Stead, son of Dr. Alfred Stead and Elizabeth Stead, née Hudson, lately of St. John’s. Leaving to mourn his son, Devlin; his brother, Dr. Edward Stead; and his sister-in-law, Daphne Stead, née Jesperson. Predeceased by his wife, Amelia, née Jackman.”
Beside my mother’s, a stone was erected in my father’s name in the family plot in the cemetery not far from the house. There was a short, private service presided over by a minister who had long been one of Uncle Edward’s patients. Aunt Daphne cried, though less for my fatherthan for me, it seemed, for she kept looking at me and trying to smile. In Uncle Edward’s face, there was a shadow of the grief I had seen there the day we learned about my father, but more than that he either would not or could not show.
My father’s headstone, token of his unmarked, unknown final resting place. There were other stones in the cemetery for people, most of them men who had died at sea, whose remains were never found.
“Poor soul,” Aunt Daphne said, looking at the stone. Poor soul, I thought. The stone, the portraits in the house, the words
poor soul
, the picture of the room he once occupied at Redcliffe House, the accounts of his disappearance in the papers were to me the sum effects on the world of his existence. I tried to think of myself as an effect of his existence but could not.
Aunt Daphne still read aloud in the evenings, sometimes downstairs, sometimes in my room.
I noticed that often, from the strain of reading night after night, her voice grew hoarse. She would drink frequently from a glass of water that she kept beside her chair, sipping after every page.
“Why don’t I read to you for a while?” I said one night.
From then on, we took turns reading to each other, handing a book back and forth two or three times a night. Sometimes she had to help me with a word, inclining her head to see which one I was pointing at. I learned the knack of pronouncing words I didn’t know the meanings of, and then the knack of guessing their meanings from the words around them.
“Why don’t you read to blind people?” Uncle Edward said.
that one
with her odd ways, whom, even when he was in the Arctic, even after she was dead and he had not set eyes on her for years, he could not forget.
What, people seemed to say as they looked at me, will become of this boy who was the issue of two such odd people as his parents?
Just as he was preparing to go to New York to settle my father’s affairs, Uncle Edward received a letter from a man who described himself as an “associate of Dr. Stead’s” and said that my father had rented an almost unfurnished flat and, in between expeditions, worked for little compensation at a hospital for the indigent in Brooklyn. He died intestate, having at any rate but $140 in a bank and no personal effects besides clothing and books. The money, Aunt Daphne decided, would be kept in trust for me until I was twenty-one. Uncle Edward instructed my father’s associate to dispose of the clothing and books in whatever manner he saw fit, since it would cost more to transport them to Newfoundland than they were worth.
A month passed in which nothing new about my father came to light. Uncle Edward said it would be pointless to wait until next June, when the whaler referred to by Dr. Cook in his report would go through the formality of putting in at McCormick Bay. Pointless, he meant, to wait until then to have a funeral service for my father. All the papers agreed with Peary that, given the circumstances, there was no chance that Dr. Stead was alive now, let alone that he would make it until June.
Uncle Edward placed a notice in the papers that would have given to people who did not know my father no clue that he had ever deviated from the path the world expected him to follow all his life, no clue to how he had spent his last ten years or how he had died: “Passed away, August 17, 1892, Dr. Francis Stead, son of Dr. Alfred Stead and Elizabeth Stead, née Hudson, lately of St. John’s. Leaving to mourn his son, Devlin; his brother, Dr. Edward Stead; and his sister-in-law, Daphne Stead, née Jesperson. Predeceased by his wife, Amelia, née Jackman.”
Beside my mother’s, a stone was erected in my father’s name in the family plot in the cemetery not far from the house. There was a short, private service presided over by a minister who had long been one of Uncle Edward’s patients. Aunt Daphne cried, though less for my fatherthan for me, it seemed, for she kept looking at me and trying to smile. In Uncle Edward’s face, there was a shadow of the grief I had seen there the day we learned about my father, but more than that he either would not or could not show.
My father’s headstone, token of his unmarked, unknown final resting place. There were other stones in the cemetery for people, most of them men who had died at sea, whose remains were never found.
“Poor soul,” Aunt Daphne said, looking at the stone. Poor soul, I thought. The stone, the portraits in the house, the words
poor soul
, the picture of the room he once occupied at Redcliffe House, the accounts of his disappearance in the papers were to me the sum effects on the world of his existence. I tried to think of myself as an effect of his existence but could not.
Aunt Daphne still read aloud in the evenings, sometimes downstairs, sometimes in my room.
I noticed that often, from the strain of reading night after night, her voice grew hoarse. She would drink frequently from a glass of water that she kept beside her chair, sipping after every page.
“Why don’t I read to you for a while?” I said one night.
From then on, we took turns reading to each other, handing a book back and forth two or three times a night. Sometimes she had to help me with a word, inclining her head to see which one I was pointing at. I learned the knack of pronouncing words I didn’t know the meanings of, and then the knack of guessing their meanings from the words around them.
“Why don’t you read to blind people?” Uncle Edward said.
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