Free The Navigator of New York by Wayne Johnston

that writing to me would restore his courage? He had more or less admitted, in the first few paragraphs, that he had nearly lost his mind.
    And my mother. To think that she had allowed, even encouraged, me to think that her absent husband was my father, all the time knowing he was not. Our short life together was not what she had made it seem. Every moment of it had been undercut by irony, by what she knew and I did not, a bit of knowledge that she must have planned to withhold from me forever.
    I started back towards home, wondering if I should tell Aunt Daphne. I had not, by the time of my arrival, made up my mind. When I opened the door, she was coming down the hall to meet me, all but running.
    “There you are,” she said. “My God, you’re so late getting home from school I was about to … Edward didn’t find anything wrong with you, did he? Devlin, what did he say?”
    I would have spoken, said no to prevent her from jumping to the wrong conclusion, but I did not trust my voice.
    “Devvie?”
    I shook my head and gulped hard to keep from crying.
    “Darling, you look … What did Edward say?”
    “He said I’m fine,” I said quickly. I gulped again.
    “But
something’s
wrong. What is it?”
    I doubted that I could make any explanation sound convincing.
    “It’s just something I don’t want to talk about, that’s all. Something Moses Prowdy said.”
    “You’re sure Edward found nothing wrong with you?”
    I nodded. “Ask him if you like.”
    I went upstairs to my room and lay down. Was it possible that
she
knew, that she, too, had misled me all my life? I decided I would hold off from telling her, at least until the next letter came.
    I thought of how it would be. Entering my father’s office by the door reserved for him. Opening the desk drawer. Reading the letter. Making my copy. Watching Uncle Edward burn the original.
    The day after my talk with my uncle, I half expected him to come downstairs for breakfast with a red handkerchief in his vest pocket. He wore a blue one instead, and a green one the day after that.
    It was hard to think about anything else knowing that a letter was on its way to me from Dr. Cook. Pointless to expect a letter any sooner than three months from now, Uncle Edward had said. Every morning for three months, I looked to see what colour handkerchief he wore, revelling in the day when he would come downstairs with the red one protruding from his pocket.
    When the three months was up, three months to the day from when Uncle Edward had called me to his office, his handkerchief was grey. What, I asked myself, were the chances that my uncle’s estimate of when the letter would arrive would be exact? It meant nothing that the letter had not come.
    How eagerly, from then on, I waited to see what he’d be wearing when he came downstairs. It was hard to hide my disappointment when there was either no handkerchief or one that wasn’t red. I ate my eggs and toast and gulped my tea with consolatory gusto. How strange it seemed that my mood depended on the colour of my uncle’s handkerchief.
    I went through the same thing every morning for the
next
three months. Finally, I began to wonder if something was wrong. Perhaps my uncle had changed his mind about acting as “postman” for Dr. Cook. Surely, if he had, he would break our agreement never to speak about the letters and not leave me wondering forever what was wrong. Or perhaps Dr. Cook had changed
his
mind, decided that he could not trust Uncle Edward after all, or that he would make no further revelations to me, a mere boy.
    I considered pretending I was sick so I could go to see Uncle Edward at his office, but I thought better of it. Around the house, he was careful that we were never alone together. In the company of Aunt Daphne, he looked at me and spoke to me as he always had.
    I remembered a paragraph from Dr. Cook’s official “report” on my father’s death: “Though it moves the mystery no closer to being