She went silent and seemed to listen acutely. Dexter felt her awaiting his diagnosis much as Henry had. The trouble was, he hadn’t the first idea what was the matter with Bitsy. “. . . overwrought,” he finished disappointingly.
She gave a bitter laugh. “That’s what Henry says. You’ve grown like him, Dexter; I couldn’t have dreamed it. You and Hattie both. I suppose you were never as wild as you seemed.”
“It doesn’t wear well,” he said, but her remark had cut him. As he drove, its sting intensified, and he found himself arguing theoretically (while also flooring the gas pedal): a schoolmaster’s wife accusing him of insufficient wildness? Had she forgotten whom she was talking to? Christ!
They hardly spoke for the rest of the ride. Bitsy smoked Lucky Strikes—fourteen in all, but who was counting—and restored her face painstakingly with a compact. By the time Dexter parked outside the Naval Yard gate with three minutes to spare, he felt as if he’d smoked a packet himself. He was certain his upholstery had darkened a shade.
Four marines met them at the gate and divided them into touring cars. Dexter lost no time maneuvering Bitsy into a different car from his own. He rode with the old man, who sat in the front seat with Tabby and the marine driver. Tabby’s eagerness for this visit, which she’d mentioned excitedly several times, had restored Dexter’s faith in her gravitas. Comparisons were a sucker’s game, but he thought her every bit as impressive, with her grown-up roll of hair and sober, interested face, as Grady in his dress blues, sitting to Dexter’s right in the backseat.
They began at the Naval Yard hospital, where a line of men and girls waited outdoors to give blood. A shipfitter’s band played “Remember Pearl Harbor.” Dexter scanned the girls, wondering whether he might see the one he’d met at the club a few weeks back, but either she wasn’t here or he didn’t recall her well enough to pick her out. Next they left the cars to watch a hammerhead crane seize a gun turret the size of a streetcar, swing it over the water, and tweeze it onto the deck of a battleship floating below. Bitsy clung to the arm of George Porter, who had come without Regina, thank God. Let George take over Bitsy duty for a while.
“Graduation in what, three weeks?” Dexter asked Grady as they watched the crane.
“Yes, sir. Three and a half.”
“When you ‘sir’ me, Grades, I think I’ve an officer standing behind me.”
“I keep telling him that,” Cooper said giddily.
“Force of habit, s—” Grady stopped himself with a grin. He was tall and beautifully made, an impish sparkle to his wide-set eyes.
“Any idea when you might be shipping out?” Dexter asked.
“The sooner the better,” Grady said. “I’m fed up with writing essays on the Punic Wars when we’ve our own war to fight.”
“We’re in no hurry to see you go,” Cooper drawled, slinging an arm around his son’s shoulders, visibly broader than his own. “There will be plenty of war left to fight.”
Grady stiffened at his father’s touch. “It’s what I’ve been trained to do, Dad,” he said.
Building 128, their next stop, was a vast machine shop housing a gristle of pistons and turbines and pulleys all juddering toward some mysterious purpose. Wind tunneled through from the river, whirling a confetti of dry leaves. Tabby was shivering. Dexter hadn’t worn a topcoat, but Grady, who carried his grandfather’s coat over one arm (the old man being bizarrely impervious to weather), went to Tabby and tucked it around her shoulders. He seemed to linger there an extra moment, holding the coat around Tabby—holding Tabby—and she tipped her face to look up at him, a private smile at her lips. Dexter went very still, eyes on his daughter and nephew, machine sounds bludgeoning his ears. What am I seeing? he thought. An image of her Wish Box pin returned to him, lacquered red, a secret curled inside it.
Back in the car, he tried to put the question from his thoughts. Grady was nearly twenty-one, had lived away from home for the better part of seven years, since he’d left for Choate. He was effectively a man, whereas Tabby was a girl of barely sixteen. But they’d been together at Newport last summer, sailing on Cooper’s yacht, lounging at the club after tennis. What might have happened between them? Grady was dutiful, yes, but also mischievous—it was all part of his charm. Dexter struggled to pull himself out of this spiral of thought. Kissing cousins was nothing new, so long as kissing was the extent of it.
Was the whole thing a trick of his mind?
Eight hundred girls worked inside Building 4, a structural shop, their last stop. It was hard to separate them from the men—the welders especially, with their thick gloves and face shields. You had to go by stature, and as their group moved from bay to bay, Dexter got better at this. Girls holding blowtorches. Girls cutting metal into pieces; girls building molds of ship parts from wood. A matter-of-factness about even the pretty ones; look or don’t look. Scarves tied over their hair. Dexter often lamented the softness of modern-day girls, but these dames looked more than capable of packing a revolver. Hell, you could wear a shoulder holster under one of those jumpsuits without anyone the wiser.
“Impressive, eh?” he remarked to Tabby.
She turned, flushed. “What?”
“The girls. Wasn’t that what you wanted to see?” he asked pointedly. “Isn’t that the reason we’re all here today?” But they were empty words. He knew the answer: Tabby’s excitement had been to see Grady, not the Naval Yard. It had all been for him.
“I don’t remember, Daddy,” she said, touching her hair distractedly. “I thought you were the one who wanted to come.”
* * *
When Anna reached the front of the blood donation line, she heard Deborah, a married whom Rose had nicknamed “the faucet,” ask if there was a way to ensure that her blood would go directly to her husband.
“I’m sorry, that isn’t possible,” the nurse said. “Besides, you may not have the same blood type.”
“I have,” Deborah wailed. “I’m certain I have.”
“Thar she blows,” Rose whispered.
“Are you quite sure?” the nurse asked soothingly while inserting the needle into Deborah’s arm. “One thing you must never, ever do is give somebody the wrong type of blood. That would be terribly dangerous. Unless his type is AB, which can take any kind. Do you happen to know your husband’s blood type?”
Deborah’s answer was muffled in sobs. The nurse held her arm deftly as blood twirled from it through a clear plastic tube. The shipfitters’ band was playing “Don’t Sit Under the Apple Tree.”
“Five years of marriage,” Rose said softly to Anna. “She’ll stop her blubbering, I promise.” Rose was twenty-eight, older than most of the marrieds, and had the lush dark curls that everyone envied in Jewish girls. She spoke of her husband with eye rolls and wisecracks and said she was getting more sleep with him gone. She called Melvin, their little boy, “the nuisance,” but with such a smitten look that Anna understood she’d no choice but to make light of her feeling.
As Anna watched her own blood coil through the tube, she asked, “Is it supposed to be so red?”
The nurse laughed. “What other color would it be?”
“It’s very . . . bright.”
“That’s the oxygen. You wouldn’t want it any other way.”
Anna glanced along the row of chairs at identical scarlet skeins spiraling from arms of varying plumpness. She was looking for Nell. Her friend had disappeared without warning the week before. Anna waited beside Building 4 through five straight lunchtimes before going up to the mold loft to inquire. She was embarrassed not to know her friend’s last name, but everyone knew who Nell was. Mention of her prompted a crackling silence among the girls that was all too familiar to Anna from her own shop. The snapper said Nell hadn’t shown up for work that week. He wasn’t expecting her back.
There was nothing terribly surprising in this, but Anna couldn’t seem to get over it. Perhaps the bicycle had spoiled her. Now she felt trapped in the Yard’s brick alleys, angular sunlight b
arely clearing the rooftops even at lunchtime. Perhaps it was the dreariness of her own shop now that the marrieds had turned on her. With the exception of Rose, they treated her with bruised politeness, as if their husbands had whispered her name in their sleep. Anna consoled herself with the thought of escaping her shop and becoming a diver. Each evening, she ran to Pier C after work to look for the barge before the light failed. She wanted to ask Mr. Voss about volunteering to dive, but couldn’t think how to do it without seeming ungrateful.
When they’d given blood and had their mandatory rest, Anna and Rose boarded a bus back to the Sands Street gate. They were already in street clothes; girls were allowed to leave work for the day after donating blood. They were encouraged to drink fruit juice, and Rose had decided this meant she and Anna should have a glass of wine together over lunch. “It is fruit juice, fair and square,” she said.
Anna proposed Sands Street, whose sailor haunts intrigued her, but Rose subscribed to the general view that nice girls could not walk there safely, even in daylight. They took a streetcar to the Hotel St. George, on Henry Street, and rode an elevator to the Bermuda Terrace, which overlooked all of Brooklyn and had dancing at night. They ordered plates of spaghetti—the cheapest item—and a small carafe of red wine. Anna disliked the wine she’d tasted at Stella Iovino’s, but she sensed that drinking some with Rose might make a different sort of conversation possible. Sure enough, when the waiter topped off their glasses, Rose said, “You must know what the girls are saying. About you and Mr. Voss.”
“I guess I can imagine.”
“They say he’s left his wife and you’re the reason why.”
“He hasn’t any ring.”
“He did at first—that’s what they say. I never noticed. Is it true, Anna?”
“Of course not.”
“I knew it! I told them: ‘She isn’t that kind of a girl.’ ”
“I wonder if Mr. Voss knows about the rumors,” Anna said.
“He’s done everything to cause them!”
“Could they get him in trouble?”
Rose stared at her in a way that made Anna feel both naive and disingenuous. “You’re the one who’s likely to get in trouble, Anna,” she said. “Calling you into his office, sending you on special errands; it won’t stop there. He’ll expect something in return—I’m surprised it hasn’t already come to that. I heard this same story a dozen times when I worked for the telephone company: sooner or later he’ll want his reward, and then you’ll be in an awful fix. If you turn him down, he’ll be sore—he might dismiss you or start some nasty rumors of his own. And if you give in, well. Then you’re a different kind of girl.”
“How can the rumors hurt me if they aren’t true?”
Rose looked shocked. “It doesn’t matter whether they’re true or not,” she said. “If a girl gets a reputation, nice boys won’t want her.”
“Because they’ll think she’s sinned?”
“In your words, yes, I suppose. Oh, this is hard to talk about, Anna.”
“I’ll look the other way.” She turned to the windows, where the crowded East River was mute from this height. There was something she wanted to tell Rose, but she couldn’t think how to say it without sounding dangerously experienced or hopelessly dimwitted. Mr. Voss wasn’t interested in her that way. There was none of that feeling between them; Anna was certain of this.
“If a girl isn’t nice, people will think she’s trouble,” came Rose’s soft voice as Anna watched the river. “They’ll look at the two of them and think: He’s married trouble. No self-respecting man will stand for that.”
“But practically all the men are away in the service,” Anna said. “How will anyone remember who’s supposedly nice and not nice when it’s all over?”
“A reputation lasts,” Rose said. “It follows you. It can interfere when you least expect, and there’s no way to erase it. After the war, the world will be small again. Everyone will know everything, just like before.”
Their gazes had drifted back together. Anna saw earnestness and effort in Rose’s face and felt a deep pull of affection for her. “You mustn’t worry,” she said. “I already have a nice boy.”
“Oh!”
“From my neighborhood,” Anna went on. “We went to school together. It’s been clear between us for a long time.”
“Oh, Anna. You never mentioned him.”
It had been years since she’d fabricated a story from whole cloth. It brought a sense of returning to an earlier time when she was questioned more often and had fewer evasions at her disposal. Besides, she thought, looking into Rose’s relieved and joyful face, people practically told you the lies they wanted to hear.
“He must be overseas,” Rose said, and Anna nodded, on the verge of adding “Navy” when her throat tightened and her eyes inexplicably ached. She fastened them to the single red carnation on their table and watched it smear.
“You’re private about him, I can see that,” Rose said, taking Anna’s hand. “I won’t say a word to the other girls.”
She excused herself to the ladies’, and Anna hastily dabbed at her eyes with her napkin, mystified by that rise of emotion. The wine, it must be.
They waited for a streetcar to Rose’s apartment so that Anna could meet little Melvin. During the ride, she thought about Mr. Voss. He’d made a point of singling her out, but not for the reason everyone thought. What was the real reason? As Anna turned this question over, it came to her that the answer made no difference. He wanted something from her. And she wanted something from him.
* * *
Lunch was served in the oval dining room of the commandant’s quarters, a grand yellow colonial and greenhouse set upon a grassy hill that once must have overlooked a pristine shore and now afforded a lavish vista of churning smokestacks. Sliced lemon in the water pitchers, curls of butter on ice, individual saltcellars: the navy brass knew how to throw a lunch. Arthur Berringer sat at the commandant’s right; they’d served together in the Philippines in ’02. Every word of their conversation was aimed outward for the edification of the twenty-odd luncheon guests: a smattering of bankers and state officials and a few wives.
“Say, it would be nice to have those islands back again,” the old man said with a chuckle. He meant the Philippines.
“Oh, I trust we shall,” the commandant said. He was a rear admiral recalled from retirement, voluble and rotund. Dexter noted that his vast new responsibilities hadn’t dampened his ability to enjoy a capon.
“General MacArthur rarely takes no for an answer, it’s true,” the old man rejoined.
Dexter and George Porter exchanged a glance. Both knew that their father-in-law disdained MacArthur, whom he’d been referring to as “Dugout Doug” since the Japs had sent him packing from the Philippines last March.
Tabby and Grady sat across from Dexter, ignoring each other a bit too pointedly. He suspected their feet were intertwined under the table and considered dropping his napkin for a look, like a man in a comedy.
“November has been the Allies’ best month yet, thanks in large part to boys like this one,” the commandant said, raising his glass to Grady. “We’ve an encirclement in Stalingrad and landings in North Africa. Our enemies have begun to suffer in earnest: twenty thousand Japs dead on the Kokoda Trail in New Guinea! Malaria, jungle rot . . . that putrid flesh swells so they can’t even pull on their boots. They’re marching barefoot through the mud.”
“Mud is a petri dish for parasites,” said George Porter, offering his surgeon’s perspective. “Bacteria enters through a tiny opening in the skin, and before you know it, you’ve dysentery, tapeworm . . .”
Several guests set down their forks, but the old man added with relish, “How about those biting flies in Tobruk? The Krauts are used to forests; they’ve never seen a desert fly. The bites become infected, and pretty soon they’re dragging gangrenous limbs across the sand!”
“Winter in Russia,” boomed the commandant, waving for another capon. “Th
e Krauts’ frostbitten fingers are snapping off like plaster of paris!”
Mrs. Hart, one of the few ladies present, had gone very white. Sensing the need of a fresh topic, Dexter said, “Say, I was pleased to see so many girls at work in your Naval Yard, Admiral.”
“Ah, I’m glad you noticed,” the commandant said. “The girls have surpassed our highest expectations. You’d be surprised—I know I was—they actually have some advantages. They’re smaller, more limber; they can fit inside spaces the men can’t. And housework makes them dexterous, all that knitting and sewing, darning socks, mincing vegetables . . .”
“We treat our girls too gently, that’s a fact,” declared a dyspeptic-looking man at the far end of the table. “In the Red Army, girls work as medics—they carry the wounded off the battlefields on their backs.”
“They fly planes, too,” someone said. “Bombers.”
“Is that true?” Tabby asked.
The old man chuckled. “Soviet girls have been raised a little differently from you, Tabatha.”
“Let’s not forget,” said the commandant, “the Red Army has a whole division whose job is to stand behind the soldiers and shoot them if they try to desert. These are not gentle people.”
“I hope you don’t let girls do everything the men do, Admiral,” Cooper said.
“Of course not,” the commandant said. “Jobs requiring physical strength or sustaining of extreme conditions, those are all off-limits. In the trades the girls are what we call ‘helpers’—they assist a man senior to them. And we keep them off the ships.”
Bitsy, who hadn’t uttered a word so far, suddenly spoke up. “Girls can’t go on ships?” she asked. “Is that a rule?”
“Oh yes. We’re quite firm about that.”
“Girls can’t go on ships in a naval yard?”
Everyone turned to look at Bitsy. With her high color and windblown hair, she looked beautiful, as if her restless unhappiness had amplified some fire in her. Dexter watched the old man, wondering if he would rein her in, but Arthur looked on impassively while the commandant sputtered about close quarters and tight spaces. “You understand,” he said more than once, to which his guests—all except Bitsy, who regarded him bitterly—wagged their heads like jack-in-the-boxes.
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