Anna was growing impatient. “What racketeer?”
“Dexter Styles. You ever come across him, Aggie?” her aunt asked. “He’s younger than we are.”
“I’m younger than you are,” Anna’s mother reminded her. “By eight years.”
“Fine, then. He’s your age, more or less. I’d a beau years ago who played trumpet at one of his clubs.”
“Dexter Styles,” her mother said, and shook her head.
“What does ‘racketeer’ mean, exactly?” Anna asked.
“Well, it used to mean you moved liquor,” Brianne said. “Now that’s a government racket.”
Anna’s mother rose and took the handles of Lydia’s chair. “I’ll get her to bed,” she told Anna. “You do supper.”
Her mother had made spare ribs and sauerkraut the night before and left them in the icebox under a towel. Anna turned on the oven and slipped the dish inside, then emptied two cans of green beans into a pan to warm. Speaking softly so her mother wouldn’t hear, she asked, “Did Papa know him?”
“Who—Styles? I doubt it.”
“They didn’t have business together? Something with the union?”
“The union, not a chance. They’re all micks, and Styles is a wop.”
“But his name. It’s—not Italian.” Anna felt a curious reluctance to say it.
Brianne laughed. “Styles is a wop, trust me. Or part wop. Names were made to be changed, dearie; haven’t I taught you that much? Although here’s what a dope I was: I didn’t want a mick name, and Brianne is more mick than Kerrigan. That’s the one I should have changed!”
“To what?”
“Betty. Sally. Peggy. One of those American names. Anna’s not bad, but Ann would be better—better still, Annie.”
“Ugh.”
“Say, why all these questions?”
Her aunt’s shrewd gaze gave an impression of having seen everything in the world at least once; it was purely a matter of recognizing it. Anna turned to check on the ribs. Facing the oven, she said, “I thought I’d heard of him.”
“He’s in the society columns,” Brianne said. “Styles is one of the four hundred, practically. But not really—people just want him to seat them near the picture stars.”
Anna’s mother returned, having changed into a shift without girdle or stockings. “Who’s this?”
“Careful, Aggie. Your daughter’s taken an interest in gangsters.” Anna’s mother laughed. “She does need a vice,” Brianne mused. “Beyond warmongering.”
Anna tried over dinner to reason through the ferment of her thoughts. Her father had known Dexter Styles—that was a fact. Yet neither her mother nor Brianne had been aware of the acquaintance, nor was there any obvious reason for it. That meant it must have been a secret. Why had they met?
Brianne dredged up a new tale of woe: the great Evelyn Nesbit was reduced to making clay pots in California. “What a comedown,” she groaned.
“Suppose she enjoys making clay pots,” Anna’s mother said.
“Aggie,” Brianne said, setting down her drink. “Evelyn Nesbit? The legendary beauty? The reason Harry Thaw murdered Stanford White? A potter?”
“It is a surprise.” Anna’s mother always said just enough to keep Brianne talking; she was the maypole around which Anna’s aunt braided the ribbons of her knowledge and gossip and ghoulish revelations.
“Someone must have turned out well,” Anna said. “Out of all those girls you danced with.”
“Adele Astaire is Lady Cavendish in Scotland now,” her mother said. “I imagine that’s fun.”
“I hear Scotland is cold and dark,” Brianne said, sucking a rib. “And the people are odd.”
“Well, there’s Peggy Hopkins Joyce. Doesn’t she get richer with every divorce?”
“Fat and desperate,” Brianne said happily. “Almost a prostitute.”
“Ruby Keeler married Al Jolson.”
“Divorced. Raising brats with a nobody.”
Her mother thought a moment while Brianne polished off the sauerkraut. “Say, aren’t Marion Davies and Bill Hearst still together?”
“In seclusion. Scandal hanging over them,” Brianne fairly sang.
The Lobster King, as her “special friend” was affectionately known, had allowed Brianne to give sums of money to Anna and her mother—if they were to believe her sworn promise that her beau knew and approved of these gifts. Wittingly or not, he had paid Anna’s fees at Brooklyn College and bought Lydia a new chair when she’d outgrown the last. Brianne offered more help than Anna’s mother would accept.
“Please bring him to supper,” Anna’s mother implored while they ate their canned crushed pineapple. “I’ll make spare ribs again. Weren’t these nice?”
“He’s a fisherman,” Brianne said, as if that were demurral enough.
“Doesn’t ‘wholesale’ mean he doesn’t actually fish?” her mother asked.
“He smells like fish.” Brianne had always been sly about her beaus, disappearing with them on yachts and private railway cars and introducing them, years later, as “old friends.” “I promise, it’s all very ordinary,” she said. “Not the den of iniquity this one is picturing.” She meant Anna, of course.
“I’m not, Auntie.”
“Only because you’ve no idea what to picture!”
* * *
Before getting into bed, Anna lay beside Lydia in hers. From the kitchen, she could dimly hear her mother and aunt discussing Ann Pennington’s famous dimpled knees over fresh highballs. “. . . dead broke,” she heard her aunt murmur. “Lost everything at the racetrack, poor thing . . .”
“Liddy,” Anna said softly. “I’m going to take you to the beach.”
In the faint illumination that leaked around the window shade, she saw that her sister’s eyes were open. Her lips moved as if to reply.
“We’re going to see the sea,” Anna whispered.
See the sea the sea the sea the sea
A vibration seemed to flow from inside Lydia, as if she were a radio tuned to a distant frequency. She knew all of Anna’s secrets; Anna had dropped them into her ears like coins down a well. It was Lydia she’d turned to when their father first stopped bringing her with him on union business. Anna tried to force him to surrender with arguments and threats of misbehavior, but at night she clung to her sister and wept into her hair. She hated being stranded among the neighborhood children, with nowhere special to go anymore. At twelve, there was little of interest to do; the girls gaggled at the sidelines while the boys played stickball or stoopball or football (the “ball” being a block of wood tied inside newspaper). Anna used the excuse of Lydia to absent herself from these dull proceedings and waited for their father to come to his senses—to recognize that she was indispensable. She pretended not to care. And gradually, over months, then a year, she did care less.
Ringolevio—hide-and-go-seek with prisons and teams—was the one game that still united girls and boys on the block, even into high school. In March of her eighth-grade year, Anna was crouching among barrels of fall apples in someone’s cellar when she heard a whisper: “They’ll find you there.”
It came from inside a storage paddock with high wooden sides. The door was sealed with a padlock, but Anna managed to vault from a barrel over one of its sides onto what felt like a pile of logs but was actually—she knew by touch, it was too dark to see—a heap of rolled carpets.
“Shut up. They’re coming.”
It was a boy, she realized then. Peeking through a sliver between planks, Anna made out three members of the opposing team. One was Seamus, Lillian’s older brother, who was sweet on her. He went to the apple barrels where she’d been, then to the paddock where she was now. He felt the planks, looking for a way in. Anna smelled mothballs from his clothing and Juicy Fruit on his breath—and feared he could smell her, too. She lay rigid with alarm at being discovered with a boy in an enclosed space, fodder for merciless teasing. She had just turned fourteen. When the seekers moved to other parts
of the cellar, Anna breathed her relief. A thick silence fell. She waited for the boy to engineer their exit as he had their entrance. But the longer she lay still, the less urgent her departure seemed to be. It was rather nice to lie in the warm dark, hearing the distant thrum of the furnace and the boy breathing beside her.
Eventually, he took her hand. Anna waited, not wanting to overreact; then, not having withdrawn it, she thought it awkward to do so. Was she afraid to have her hand held? Obviously not. The boy’s warm grip pulsed around her fingers like a heart. I might not be here, Anna thought as he moved her hand to his trousers, where the fabric strained against the buttons. She could withdraw her hand, of course, but she waited, thinking, This might not be me. A boozy apple smell mingled with a dusty, wheaty scent from the carpets. As the boy moved her hand, Anna’s curiosity about what would happen became knowing what it was and wanting it. Eventually, he convulsed as though he’d touched an electric wire. He curled onto his side and seemed to think that would be the end of it. But there he was wrong, for whatever was at work between them had entered Anna, too. She took his hand and held it against her pleated skirt, moving over his warm fingers until a violent pleasure shuddered through her.
The boy was Leon, she realized then. Perhaps had known all along. “I’ll go out first,” he said.
They rejoined the game separately. He was sixteen. That would be the end of it, Anna thought. But it was not.
Leon worked for his father carving tombstones after school, but business stank, as everywhere, and often he could get away. Occasionally, Anna would notice him missing from a game he’d been playing outside just moments before, and find him waiting in the paddock. Sometimes she would wait in vain or learn that he had. Once inside it, they moved with the stealthy rapacity of burglars—initially, to repeat the raptures of their first encounter. But soon enough, layers of clothing began to yield to the marvel of bare flesh. Leon stole a feather blanket from his mother’s linen chest and spread it over the carpets. After each small advance, Anna promised herself they had done enough; now they would merely repeat. But the greater logic they were yielding to contained an inexorable will to progress. Anna couldn’t picture what they were doing: proof of her innocence. Even as she spent her days aching to renew their dark dream, she felt as if it were happening somewhere else, to a different girl. In the dark paddock, she slipped from her life like a pin dropping between floorboards. I don’t know what you mean, I haven’t done those things, she imagined saying, truthfully, to a faceless accuser. I don’t even know what they are.
There were close calls, inconvenient visits to the cellar by the building landlord; by a washerwoman; by members of the Italian family whose apples were stored in the barrels to make fruit wine. But the very extremity of what they were doing made it relatively easy to conceal; no one would have fathomed it. There had been gropings on the block, kisses stolen and coerced, three boys and two girls in a closet at Michael Fasso’s—an interlude no one stopped talking about for weeks. There were sweethearts monitored by wary parents, not left alone for a minute. But planned assignations over months; lying fully naked in the summer heat? It was unthinkable. Had Anna tried to tell Lillian and Stella, they would have thought she was lying or loony. She told only Lydia.
The day she lost her virginity, Anna brought along a ruler. She knew from Stella, who had it from her married sister, that it hurt like the devil. When the pain began, she fastened the ruler in her mouth like a dog and let her molars cut into the wood. She never made a sound.
He knew to pull out, of course. All boys knew that.
At times her secret clanged inside her so loudly that she wanted to cover her ears and scream. Her father would disown her. Anna sensed him watching her with wary attention and feared he might somehow have guessed. But he couldn’t know. His work consumed him, often taking him away overnight. Occasionally, he tried to talk to Anna in their old way, but she’d lost the habit of talking with her father and no longer wanted to. She felt his disappointment but couldn’t help it. He’d disappointed her first.
When he vanished, Anna felt only relief. And a week or two later, when the gravity of his absence began to press upon her in queasy bouts, she went to the paddock with Leon to forget it.
There were rumors at the high school of girls who’d had to depart suddenly to “live with relations.” One of these, Loretta Stone, was now a year behind her peers: a chastened solitary girl whose alleged ruin was a succulent dish the other children feasted upon. But Anna was lucky: she was the only one of her friends not to have the curse yet.
In November, eight months after her first visit to the paddock, the landlord brought in a brigade of cousins to dig out that cellar and make way for a saloon—the only way left to make money, he said. They filled sheets of burlap with stones and soil and broken barrels and parts of coal stoves and carried them into the street. Anna watched with the other children who happened to be outdoors. In the unforgiving daylight, she saw a pile of moth-infested carpets crowned by a filthy bloodstained coverlet. She walked into her building, latched herself inside a first-floor toilet, and vomited.
She and Leon were beset by the cringing intimacy of strangers who had appeared in each other’s dreams. She noticed his dirty fingernails, the gaps between his teeth. Her father had been gone two months by then, but Anna couldn’t shake the feeling that Leon would appall him. They never touched again. Rather, they continued not to know each other, and the following year Leon’s father moved the family west.
The saloon was never built.
For the rest of high school and during her year at Brooklyn College, Anna tried to impersonate a girl who knew nothing. How would that girl react when a boy backed her against a wall and tried to kiss her? Would she be frightened when he ran his palms over her breasts through her sweater-blouse? The breadth of her experience was perilous; if boys had an inkling of all she’d done, she would be cast out like Loretta Stone. So much caution made Anna stiff, and boys called her cold, even frigid. “I can see you’re scared, but I won’t hurt you,” said one of her dates. “I just want to give you your first real kiss.” But a real kiss, Anna knew, could unleash so much. These encounters often ended with the boy stalking away mad. Long after she’d given up on her father’s return, Anna still occasionally invoked him: an abstract witness to her virtue. See? she would say. I’m not a floozy after all.
But her only real witness, then and now, was Lydia. And her sister could only listen. She could not advise, or answer the questions that troubled Anna most: When would she be allowed to know what she knew? Or when would she have forgotten it?
CHAPTER TEN
* * *
The Wednesday morning before Thanksgiving, Dexter waited with Henry Foster under the balding trees of Alton Academy. Boys’ voices jingled in the air, although none was in sight. “Sorry for the wait,” his brother-in-law said, glancing nervously at his ramshackle wood-frame house on its modest lawn, surrounded by dormitories. “Bitsy has been taking longer than usual with her toilette.”
Like most of his Protestant brethren, Henry was constitutionally unable to express feeling. But Dexter saw from his pained expression that things hadn’t improved at home. “Don’t give it a thought,” he said, patting Henry’s shoulder while surreptitiously checking his watch. The old man had been quite clear: the Naval Yard commandant must not be kept waiting. “How is the baby?”
“Beautiful little thing,” Henry said. “She cries a lot. Bitsy can’t bear it.” Dexter noticed the schoolmaster’s shaking hands.
“It will all come right,” he said.
“Do you think so?” Henry’s gentle blue eyes fixed upon Dexter with unusual energy, as if he hung on the reply.
“Of course,” Dexter said.
At last Bitsy emerged in a getup that—were she Tabby—would have had Dexter marching her back indoors to change. Her low-cut angora sweater and ruffled silk skirt made her look like a stenographer having an affair with the boss, or hoping to. She’d the same rus
set hair and catlike eyes as Harriet, but Bitsy’s fastidiousness had always prevented the sisters from looking alike. Now her hair spilled, unpinned, from under a small hat. Dexter exchanged a look with Henry—poor, prudish Henry—in which he tried both to acknowledge Bitsy’s impropriety and reassure him that he couldn’t care less. Why should he? They were meeting the old man; let him discipline his daughter if he saw fit.
The bitter musk of Bitsy’s perfume half choked Dexter when the Cadillac’s doors were shut. As he sped along the parkway trying to make up the time they’d lost, she stupefied him by lighting a cigarette. Were she a man, Dexter would have plucked it from her mouth and flicked it straight out the window. You didn’t light up in a man’s automobile without permission, certainly not a new Series 62 with cream-colored lambskin upholstery. He shook his head curtly when she offered the packet.
“You’ve quit?” She sounded disappointed.
“Years ago.”
“You disapprove. Henry has spoken to you.”
“Not a word.”
“I suppose he wouldn’t.”
“Henry adores you, you know.”
“He deserves better,” she said, sighing out a cloud of smoke.
“Then why not give it to him?”
Bitsy made no reply. When Dexter glanced at her, he was taken aback to see tears running from her eyes, staining her face with mascara. “Bitsy,” he said.
“I’ve spoiled everything.”
“Don’t be silly.”
“I’m a horrid mother. All I want is to be left alone. I wish I could run away and start over again as someone else.”
She began to sob. Dexter heard a trill of hysterics in her weeping and wanted to pull off the parkway and try to calm her. But they hadn’t the time. When the crying failed to abate after several minutes, he said sternly, “Listen to me, Bitsy. You must pull yourself together and try to think clearly. You’re a marvelous girl; you’ve the world by the tail. You’re just . . .”
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