The conversation left Dexter full of unease and a corresponding wish to speed along empty roads toward his home. A light supper of soup and toast, then Crime Drama, which they listened to all together, a Sunday ritual. And then sleep: a long, deep, annihilating sleep to compensate for the little he got all week.
He was hunting for Harriet when her younger sister, Bitsy, bolted from the library and flung the door shut, nearly colliding with Dexter as she ran past. Harriet and Regina emerged a moment later, looking shaken.
“She needs to be taken in hand,” Regina said. “Poor Henry can’t do it.”
“She’s volunteered to have dates with servicemen,” Harriet told Dexter.
“What?”
“You know, show them around town,” Regina said. “The sort of thing certain kinds of girls are doing at twenty. Not Westchester wives with four children!”
“We must find a way to stop her,” Harriet said.
It was strange to hear his wife clucking with her bossy older sister when, for so long, Harriet had been the one clucked about. She looked almost prim in her high-collared dress. It was not a thought he was accustomed to have about his wife.
“To the car,” he said.
Tabby, knitting wanly with Olive and Edith, leaped to her feet in eagerness to go. That left the twins, whom no one had seen for hours. Grandchildren joined in a search, tumbling through the house, prying open splotchy-mirrored armoires and peering under beds. “Phil-lip . . . John-Mar-tin . . .” It was entirely possible they were hiding, and Dexter half looked forward to the spanking he would give them if this proved to be the case.
On the top floor, he glanced out a back window at a tanker plying its way south from the Long Island Sound. Again he heard that nervous patter, like a panicked heartbeat. He hadn’t imagined it; it was a real sound. Dexter followed it to the front of the house and peered down through a round window at York Avenue.
There were the twins, faces vacant with concentration as they walloped small red balls attached to paddles.
Pat-a-pat-a-pat-a-pat-a-pat-a-pat-a-pat-a-pat-a . . .
They’d been jai-alai-ing all this time.
Despite himself, Dexter smiled.
CHAPTER EIGHT
* * *
As he drove toward his own house, the last and largest on a cul-de-sac ending at the sea, Dexter passed a worn-out Dodge coupe, dove gray, parked at the curb. A lone man sat at the wheel. It was not a car he knew.
He didn’t so much as turn his head or glance in the rearview mirror, but some part of Dexter recoiled instantly, tense and alert. Strange cars didn’t park on this block. Children didn’t play on this block. And no man visited Dexter’s home without bringing his family.
“What is it?” Harriet asked.
“Not a thing.”
Her reply was a single raised eyebrow. She didn’t turn, either.
Inside, Dexter went straight to his dressing room, unlocked the cabinet where he kept his gat, slipped it into his ankle holster, and secured the holster to his calf. Then he went back upstairs. The front door-pull would sound shortly, and he wanted to assemble a tableau of familial absorption to illustrate to the caller that this was neither the time nor the place for whatever business he’d brought.
The twins were building with Lincoln Logs on the parlor floor. Dexter settled hastily into an easy chair with the Journal-American and its fat sheaf of Sunday comics. “Boys, come here,” he said. “I’ll read you the funnies.”
They approached looking perplexed, and Dexter realized, as they loomed above his chair, that it had been quite a while since he’d read them funnies—possibly over a year. In that time they’d grown much larger, John-Martin especially. Well, it was only until the bell rang. Dexter pulled the boys onto him, and they toppled heavily against his chest, briefly depriving him of breath. It was difficult to hold both boys and the Journal-American; impossible to see the funnies once he’d managed it. But Dexter persisted, squinting at Prince Valiant through a keyhole between their necks. They began to squirm and snicker, the closed circuit of their hilarity irritating Dexter, as always. He ordered them quiet, then strained for a lively funnies-reading voice for Bringing Up Father. The twins went sullen, suffering him and no more. Dexter glanced at the front door, his ire at this interloper for encroaching upon his Sunday compounded by impatience at how long the man was taking to show.
At last the bell rang and Harriet answered, her timing and tone flawless. Dexter had the small satisfaction of presenting exactly the picture he’d wished to. It hardly mattered; even from the threshold, the man’s blinkered affect was manifest. The scene of paternal absorption was lost on him.
Dexter released his sons, who dispersed with relief, and went to greet his guest. The man was gaunt, almost skeletal, with an odd stretched-looking face that might have seemed more at home in clown makeup: a wide mouth and crescent-shaped eyes. Dexter placed him instantly.
“What an unfathomable surprise, Mr. Mackey,” he said in a tone that anyone who knew him would recognize as a reprimand and a warning. He shook Hugh Mackey’s heavy hand. “What could possibly have induced you to come without your wife?”
“She’s visiting her mother,” Mackey said with effort.
“We’ll be having our Sunday supper soon,” Dexter said coldly. “I don’t suppose you’d like to join us.”
Mackey gave him a strained, haunted glance—the look of a man whose desperation had trumped his ability to play along. He was still wearing his hat. “No, no, I can’t stay,” he said. “I just need a word. I tried to see you in the Manhattan club last week, but they stopped me at the door.”
Dexter’s only thought was of getting Mackey out of his house. The man’s very presence was a defilement—he might as well have been pissing on the parlor floor. “Say, I’ve promised my daughter a walk on the beach,” Dexter managed. “Why don’t you join us?”
Mackey regarded him balefully. His mournful rejection of the sleight of hand whereby the shadow world blended with the one everyone could see infuriated Dexter. Maintaining an appearance mattered as much—more—than what was underneath. The deeper things could come and go, but what broke the surface would be lodged in everyone’s memory.
He could put Mackey out; send him away like a scalded dog. Judging by the man’s woebegone aspect, he expected as much. But who knew what Hugh Mackey would do next. No. A walk was the best solution; get him away from the house. It was nearly sunset.
Dexter left him in the front room with Harriet and went upstairs to knock on Tabby’s bedroom door. She was seated at her new vanity, a sixteenth-birthday present. A ring of small electric lightbulbs surrounded its mirror, creating the impression of a Hollywood starlet in her dressing room. What better name for a device that encouraged all the wrong elements of the female personality?
“Tabby,” Dexter said brusquely. “Let’s take a walk.”
“I don’t care to, Daddy.”
He took a long breath, muzzled his impatience, and crouched beside her chair. Heat from the mirror bulbs magnified the dusty floral scent of the powder she’d received with the vanity: Charles of the Ritz, if he remembered correctly.
“I’m asking a favor,” he said. “I need your help.”
Her curiosity was a well whose waterline often seemed a long way down. But at the word “help,” Dexter heard the splash.
“There’s a gentleman here, an associate of mine, who’s—who’s sore about something. If you come with us to the beach, he won’t beef about it.”
“Because I’ll be there?”
“That’s it.”
She rose from her vanity and disappeared inside her closet—“dressing room,” as she’d taken to calling it. After several minutes she reappeared in a colorful patchwork skirt, cable-knit sweater, and sailor hat. Apparently, she presumed that comeliness would be part of her assignment.
They found Harriet and Hugh Mackey sitting in silence in the parlor, Mackey staring out the windows at the sea. “My daughter, Tabatha,” D
exter said, introducing them. Mackey trained upon Tabby a look of exhausted appraisal, as if sizing up a burden he’d no choice but to heft. He could not—would not—play his part.
They left the house and walked along the path toward the beach, Dexter taking care to keep Tabby positioned between himself and Mackey. The sand looked unusually white, almost lunar under the changing sky. Normally, Dexter would have remained on the path, but Tabby went nearer the sea, and he followed her onto the sand.
“Daddy, take off your shoes,” she said. “It’s not so cold.”
She’d slipped off her own, barely more than slippers, and Dexter realized that one of her goals in changing clothes had been to remove her wool stockings so she could go barefoot. It was the beach, after all. Her slender feet glowed a whiter shade of white against the sand, and seeing them sparked in Dexter a wish to take off his oxfords. Then he remembered the ankle holster. “That’s all right, Tabs,” he said. “I’ll leave mine on.”
Tabby didn’t suggest that Mackey remove his shoes; it was hard to believe, from his weary clown’s face, that Mackey had feet.
There was no such thing as silence on a beach; wind, gulls, and splashing waves filled the void of conversation. Ships were visible toward Breezy Point, their lights already snuffed. Dexter began to relax. He sensed Mackey longing for some way to begin, but the obstacle of Tabby prevented him. They walked east, toward the dusk. Tabby skipped a little, which took her a few paces ahead.
Mackey seized his chance. “My position has become quite difficult, Mr. Styles,” he said in a high, peevish voice.
“I’m sorry to hear it.”
Tabby paused to wait, and Dexter hastened to rejoin her. He could feel Mackey straining to channel the enormity of his discontent into language that would not disturb the placid surface of this beach walk. That effort, at least, he was making.
“I don’t see that things can continue this way, Mr. Styles,” he began again in a pleasanter tone, this time in full hearing of Tabby.
“I should say not,” Dexter rejoined.
“I’m telling you,” Mackey said. “They cannot.”
Dexter was briefly silenced by this affront. With Tabby there, he’d no choice but to respond in the same affable tone Mackey had used. “I’m afraid it’s out of my hands, Mr. Mackey,” he said. “You and Mr. Healey must sort this out.”
“Mr. Healey and I don’t understand each other.”
His voice, at once wheedling, injured, and menacing, revolted Dexter. “I’ve known Mr. Healey for twenty years,” he said. “And he’s never—not once, in all that time—turned up at my house on a Sunday.”
“What else could I do?”
The exchange had an offhand quality, as if they were discussing baseball scores. Dexter moved between his daughter and Mackey and said, in a hard clear tone intended to end the discussion, “I can’t help you, Mr. Mackey.”
“It might be worth your while to try,” Mackey said. “To save yourself trouble later on.”
“Trouble?” Dexter asked lightly. Tabby had taken his hand. It felt cool and delicate as a bracelet.
“I know what I know,” Mackey said. “But I don’t know what other people might say if they knew it, too.”
The man’s sheepish, hooded eyes were fixed straight ahead, to the east, where darkness was falling. Dexter’s ears began to ring. He had an urge to spit into the sand. Through the twilight, he saw the dregs of sunset glittering on the fences of the Coast Guard training station. He understood then what would have to happen.
“I’ll see what I can do,” he managed to say.
“Why, I’m glad to hear that. I’m—relieved,” Mackey said. “Thank you, Mr. Styles.”
“Don’t mention it.” Dexter, too, was relieved. The only difficulty now was finding himself still on the beach with Mackey. Had he foreseen this outcome, he would have handled the matter differently. He never would have involved Tabby.
“Look what I found,” she said, holding up a scallop shell. It was pale orange. She positioned it against the sky and examined its ruffled edge in silhouette.
“Say, that’s a beauty,” Mackey said.
“Let’s turn back,” Dexter said.
Reversing directions, they confronted wild celebration in the western sky: streaks of gaudy pink like the delayed aftermath of a fireworks show. The sand was pink, too, as if it had absorbed the sunset and was releasing it slowly.
“Son of a gun, would you look at that,” Mackey said to the sky. He seemed a different man now that he’d unburdened himself and been reassured.
“Isn’t it grand?” Tabby cried.
Dexter tried to move between them. He no longer wished them to speak. But Tabby stuck to Mackey, seeming heartened by his improved spirits.
“Have you children, Mr. Mackey?” she asked.
“I’ve a daughter, Liza, she’s around your age,” he said. “She likes Tyrone Power. He’s got a new picture coming soon, The Black Swan, I promised I’d take her to see. You like Tyrone Power?”
“Sure I do,” Tabby said. “And Victor Mature has a new one opening this month, Seven Days’ Leave. He made it right before he joined the Coast Guard.”
Dexter listened as if from a great distance, his eyes on the eerie, festive sky. Mackey’s mention of a daughter elicited no pity from him—the opposite. A family man was doubly reckless to have broken rules that everyone in the shadow world knew like a catechism. There were no exceptions. Amazing what trouble men had, believing that. Everyone thought he was the exception.
Mackey was a louse. His family was better off without him, for all the care he’d taken to protect them. Dexter would leave this one to Heels and his boys. His own distance from what would follow made it seem as though it had already happened. It had happened the moment he’d decided it would.
“I’ve a cousin, Grady, at the Naval Academy,” Tabby was saying.
“Ho, college boy. My son is in the army.”
“He was supposed to graduate next June, but now it’s moved to December. Because the navy needs more officers.”
“Why, sure they do, all those boys in the Solomons.”
Dexter wanted Tabby away from this terrible, prattling man. The house was still at a maddening distance. Harriet had closed the blackout curtains, and it looked as though nobody lived there.
“Say, you know what I’ll do?” Mackey said suddenly to Tabby. “I think I’ll take off my shoes, too.”
“Oh, yes!” Tabby cried, clapping her hands.
“We need to get back,” Dexter muttered, but his daughter and Mackey had formed an alliance he couldn’t breach.
Mackey sat down on the sand and rolled up his trouser legs, then unrolled his socks carefully, methodically, as if stalling for time. Tabby grinned at Dexter. She must have thought she’d succeeded brilliantly, for there had been no argument.
In the long minutes Mackey spent unrolling his socks, the pink streaks faded from the sky as if someone had brushed them from a table. What remained was an aquamarine so glassy and pure it looked as though it would chime if you tapped it with a spoon.
“I haven’t done this sort of thing enough,” Mackey said with a sigh. He looked up at Dexter with his spent clown’s face. “Have you, Mr. Styles?”
It wasn’t clear what he meant. The shoes? The beach?
“Probably not,” Dexter allowed.
Mackey stood, shoes dangling from one hand, the other holding his hat to his head. His big white feet splayed obscenely against the sand. Dexter couldn’t look.
“Let’s run, Mr. Mackey,” Tabby said. “Let’s run in the sand.”
“Goodness, run?” Mackey asked, and then he laughed—a light, hollow sound that landed in Dexter’s ears like a death rattle. “All right, if you say so. We’ll run in the sand. Why not?”
And they ran, kicking up sprays of white, sending up a shout as they faded into the twilight.
PART THREE
See the Sea
CHAPTER NINE
* *
*
It took Anna and her mother both to wrestle Lydia into a floral-print tea dress with a Peter Pan collar and a neckerchief to camouflage her drooping spine. Dressing up for Dr. Deerwood was a matter of tradition and pride—Park Avenue women bought made-to-order dresses at Bergdorf’s and $125 shoes at Lieberman’s. But Lydia chafed against women’s clothing, and her mute resistance to the brassiere and slip and stockings and garters seemed to Anna to express what all of them felt.
Inspired by Nell, Anna had pinned her sister’s curls while she slept. Now she combed the golden hair so it fell across Lydia’s face peekaboo-style from under a blue beret. “Oh, Anna, that’s wonderful,” her mother said, dabbing Mille Fleurs behind Lydia’s ears. “She looks just like Veronica Lake.”
Children from the block played carefully on the sidewalk in their church outfits as Anna walked to Fourth Avenue to hail a taxi. Riding back, she stopped at Mr. Mucciarone’s grocery to pick up Silvio, who waited with hair combed and sleeves rolled. Silvio was simpleminded, couldn’t even make change at his father’s cash register. With a look of devout concentration, he carried Lydia down the six flights from their apartment. Most of his expression resided in his biceps, which trembled above his rolled sleeves as Lydia moaned and kicked. She hated being carried by Silvio. Anna suspected the problem was his smell: oniony, mineral, more pronounced at each turn of the stairs. It was the smell of a sixteen-year-old boy—the only one who had ever held Lydia, or likely would.
The children pecked like pigeons around Silvio’s legs when he emerged from the building with Lydia and placed her inside the taxi. Anna had run ahead and installed herself in the backseat to ensure that the cabbie couldn’t flee. Her mother anchored Lydia from the other side while the cabbie placed her folded chair in the trunk. A perfect mid-November day. The taxi crossed the Brooklyn Bridge and turned up the East River Drive, and there was Wallabout Bay across the river—ships and smokestacks and hammerhead crane. “Mama, look!” Anna cried. “It’s the Naval Yard!”
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