Manhattan Beach

by Jennifer Egan

  After bowls of peach melba, the commandant’s wife offered a tour of the house, where Commodore Perry had lived a hundred years before. Tabby and Grady accepted, along with several others. Dexter meant to join but changed his mind when Cooper rose; more preening over Grady he could live without. The commandant broke out brandy and cigars, and the talk returned to quashing the Philippine uprising, several guests making an avid audience.

  Dexter was logy from the heavy lunch; he wanted to splash cold water on his face. An elderly Negro steward showed him to a powder room that proved occupied; then to a second one farther away, near the kitchen. When that door proved to be locked as well, Dexter told the steward he would wait. He was about to push open a pair of casement doors leading outside to the greenhouse when he heard noises behind him. He moved back to the bathroom door and stood near it, listening. Whispers, groans, sighs—there was no mistaking what was taking place behind that door. His first thought—of his daughter and Grady—made the blood drain from his skull.

  “Ohhh . . . ohhhh . . . ohhh . . .”

  Rhythmic female moans rose in volume and urgency from inside the bathroom. Dexter lurched away and staggered through the casement doors onto the dry grass. Vertigo made a fun-house riot of the Naval Yard below, and he sagged against the greenhouse, gasping. At last he bent over, elbows on his knees, and let the blood flow back into his head. He’d come close to passing out.

  “Daddy?”

  He straightened up hastily, blinking. Tabby’s voice had come from above, and he threw back his head to look up. There she was, waving from a window at the uppermost part of the house. The intensity of Dexter’s relief induced a fresh wave of faintness. His knees felt watery. Something must be wrong with him to have thought such a hideous thing.

  “Daddy, what’s the matter?”

  “Nothing,” he called weakly. “I’m right as rain.”

  “Come look. The view goes all the way ’round.”

  “I shall,” he cried, and bounded back inside at the same moment that the bathroom door opened and George Porter emerged half-smiling, adjusting his waistcoat with hands still damp from washing. He looked as startled as Dexter was. Hastily George shut the bathroom door, the woman presumably still inside. Dexter suddenly knew that it was Bitsy—as if he’d recognized the timbre of her hysterics in those moans he’d heard through the door. His violent astonishment was impossible to hide, and George saw it. He smiled uneasily and Dexter smiled back, straining for the hale neutrality he’d always brought to his brother-in-law’s indiscretions. As they walked in silence toward the dining room, Dexter felt a need to say something to blunt the appalling thing he’d witnessed. Nothing came to mind.

  They sat apart. A while later Bitsy reappeared, looking peaceful for the first time all day. She sat beside her father and put her arm around him, resting her cheek on the old man’s shoulder. Gradually, Dexter’s woozy relief over Tabby’s innocence yielded to foreboding. For George to betray their father-in-law in this way—to compromise the eldest and youngest daughters right under his nose, in the home of an admiral who’d made him the guest of honor—was a transgression so egregious that it seemed to imperil all of them. What would happen if Arthur Berringer found out? How would he not find out, when he’d known of the North African landings weeks before they took place? And the thought came to Dexter that George Porter was a dead man.

  But he was mixing up his realms. Only in the shadow world did men die for such things. Not in the old man’s sphere—except perhaps metaphorically. Yet Dexter couldn’t shake the sense of a menace near at hand. He remembered the moans he’d heard through the bathroom door. To his shame and confusion, their cadence aroused him now, and he found himself calling it to mind again and again: a pleasure so explosive, so transporting, that it justified even the risk of annihilation.

  Dexter knew the danger of chasing a forbidden pleasure. A woman on a train to St. Louis had taught him, which was to say that he hadn’t learned it yet eight years ago, when she tapped very lightly on the door to his first-class sleeper after midnight. They had noticed each other in the dining car, exchanged a few words in the corridor. She wore a wedding ring (as did he) and a small gold cross at her neck, but a current of wayward sensuality had been unmistakable in her, making these symbols seem apotropaic. Her nocturnal visit launched an interval of debauchery that extended into the following day—fused in Dexter’s memory with the frozen farmland slipping past outside the parted window curtains. Even now, driving in January through New Jersey or Long Island, he often found himself stirred by the flickering vanishing points of the frosted fields.

  They disembarked that afternoon in Angel, Indiana, intending—what? Intending to continue. They checked into a grand old hotel near the station as Mr. and Mrs. Jones. Immediately, Dexter felt a change: now that the bleak winter landscape was all around him, rather than sliding picturesquely past, he liked it less. Other irritants followed: a sudden dislike of her perfume; a sudden dislike of her laugh, the dry pork chop he was served in the hotel restaurant, a cobweb dangling from the light fixture above the bed. After making love, she fell into a torporous sleep. But Dexter lay awake, listening to the howling dogs, or was it wolves, wind clattering the loose windowpanes. Everything he knew seemed irrevocably distant: Harriet, his children, the business he’d been charged to transact for Mr. Q.—too far gone for him ever to reclaim them. He felt how easily a man’s life could slip away, separated from him by thousands of miles of empty space.

  In the shorn light of predawn, he dressed, buckled his suitcase, and quietly closed the door to the hotel room. He walked to the station under drooping telephone lines and swinging traffic lights and bought a ticket for the next train. It was going the wrong direction, toward Cincinnati, but he got on anyway. He’d left a twenty-dollar bill on the bureau, a move he regretted by the time he reached the street and regretted still when he thought of it. She wasn’t a prostitute. She was someone like him.

  When he’d arrived in St. Louis, nearly two days late, he found urgent telegrams from Harriet: Phillip had nearly died from appendicitis. Mr. Q.’s associate had come and gone without finding him; the trip was in vain. Dexter pleaded a sudden high fever: hallucinations on the train, unconsciousness, removal to a hospital. It was the sort of story you might get away with once in your life, at long distance, if no one had any reason to doubt you. In fact, he reflected later, it wasn’t far from the truth.

  * * *

  Marines in touring cars waited in the circular driveway of the commandant’s residence to ferry guests back to the gate ahead of the shift change. Ships bore down blankly from the piers. Bitsy had decided to spend the night at Sutton Place, meaning that Dexter was free of her, thank God. Of course, George and Regina lived just a few doors down from the old man—that would be convenient. You’ve grown like Henry, Bitsy had said. Perhaps he had.

  Tabby wanted to go to Sutton Place and bake for tomorrow’s Thanksgiving feast. Dexter readily agreed and kissed her goodbye. Her flirtation with Grady seemed so innocent now—wholesome, compared with what he’d just witnessed—that he felt a kind of fondness for it.

  Standing alone outside the Sands Street gate, Dexter had a need to unburden himself. He decided to telephone Harriet before driving to the club, and ducked inside Richard’s Bar and Grill, on the corner. A sailor was feeding nickels into the telephone, pleading for a date. Dexter fidgeted, looking out through a window. All at once, a mass of humanity surged from the gates: thousands of men in work clothes and the occasional girl in a dress thronging Sands Street like fans leaving Ebbets Field after a game. Dexter watched invisibly, envying their camaraderie. They were working on the war. An awareness of this fact was visible in the loose, easy way they walked. Perhaps they sensed the shimmering future the old man had described at lunch, felt their part in it.

  As quickly as the crowd had amassed, it scattered. The sailor was gone, the telephone liberated. But Dexter’s wish to speak with his wife had passed. Harriet had a cool head—ba
ck in his rum-running days, she’d crouched in his automobile giggling through exchanges of gunfire. But telling her about Bitsy and George would force her to keep a monstrous secret or spill its poison. No. Telling Harriet was exactly the wrong thing—what in Christ had he been thinking? Tell no one. Let the affair run its course and hope it ended soon, without excess cuts or bruises on either side. Dexter was well accustomed to keeping secrets.

  Dusk was falling when he left the bar. As he approached his car, a familiar girl passed on the sidewalk, walking quickly in the other direction. “Miss Feeney,” he called after her. It was the girl he’d been looking for, the one who had told him about the Naval Yard in the first place.

  She spun around, looking spooked.

  “Dexter Styles,” he said. “Are you going to work?”

  “No,” she said, smiling at last. “I gave blood and left early.”

  “Can I drive you home?” He was eager for the company.

  Anna looked up at Dexter Styles. She’d thought of him so often since their last meeting that he seemed eerily familiar, imbued with dark significance. He stood beside his gangster’s car.

  “Thanks just the same. I need to speak with my supervisor,” she said, grateful for an excuse that also happened to be true. She was going to ask Mr. Voss about volunteering to dive. She’d been waiting for the shift change.

  “Don’t mention it. Good evening, Miss Feeney.”

  As he tipped his hat, Anna was impelled by a sudden, visceral wish to keep him in her sights. “Would it be possible,” she blurted, “to accept your offer at another time?”

  Dexter nearly groaned aloud. Being in possession of a healthy automobile he insisted on driving himself meant that he often was called into service nowadays. He’d driven a neighbor’s boy with toothache to a dentist; taken Heels to an all-night pharmacy when his mother needed blood pressure pills. Once a request had been made he found it difficult to refuse; he needed to feint at an earlier point. “Why, certainly, I’d be happy to if we meet again,” he said, preparing to open his door.

  “My sister isn’t well. I’ve promised to take her to the beach.”

  “Best wait until spring, if she’s sickly.”

  “Not ill. Crippled. There’s a boy who carries her downstairs.”

  Cripple. Boy. Stairs. Dexter felt the elements of this dreary tale falling around him like stones. Miss Feeney wore a plain wool coat, frayed at the cuffs. It was a weakness in him, this awareness of others’ misfortunes.

  “When were you hoping to do this?” he asked heavily.

  “Sunday. Any Sunday. I’ve that day off.” Her mother had been spending Sundays out, leaving Anna on her own with Lydia.

  Dexter’s mind was already working: if they helped the cripple in lieu of church, he could avoid the new deacon (now hitting him up for pew repairs) and still be done in time for lunch. And helping a cripple might be just the thing to remind his spoiled children of their own good luck.

  “How about this Sunday?” he said. “Before winter sets in.”

  “Perfect!” she said. “We haven’t a telephone, but if you’ll tell me what time, I can have the boy ready to carry her down.”

  “Miss Feeney,” he said chidingly, and waited.

  She looked up at him, but his silhouette blocked the streetlamp, leaving his face in shadow.

  “Do I look like I need a boy to carry her down?”

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  * * *

  “You’re interested,” Lieutenant Axel said, gazing up at Anna as she stood before his desk. He’d not risen when the marine had shown her into his office.

  “Yes, sir,” she said. “Extremely interested.”

  “And what gave you the impression that diving would be interesting?”

  She hesitated, not entirely sure. “I’ve watched divers on the barge,” she said. “From Pier C. At lunchtime. And after my shift.” She followed each utterance with a pause, awaiting some indication that he had understood.

  “You’ve watched the divers at lunchtime,” he finally said.

  As this was not a question, and as her words, reverberated through Lieutenant Axel, had a way of sounding ridiculous, Anna remained quiet. In that silence, she became aware that she was looking down at the lieutenant. Perhaps he felt this, too, for he rose suddenly to his feet: a petite barrel-chested man in naval uniform, his face both weather-beaten and strangely boyish, with no suggestion of a beard. “If you don’t mind my asking, Miss Kerrigan, whose idea was this?”

  “Mine,” she said. “Entirely mine.”

  “Entirely yours. But entirely your idea didn’t get the commandant to telephone me yesterday and ask me to see you.”

  “My supervisor, Mr. Voss—”

  “Ah. Your supervisor. Mr. . . . Voss.” He drew out the name as though its syllables were the last bits of meat he was sucking from a bone. Then he grinned. “I imagine he’s just as eager to please you as you are to please him.”

  The mockery blindsided Anna, but the crude power of the insult expressed itself more slowly, like a burn. It made the lieutenant seem unhinged. She noticed an unnatural hush quivering around them in the small building, and wondered if he was performing for a hidden audience.

  Coldly, she said, “Is there a test you give people to see if they can dive?”

  “No test. Just the dress. Let’s try it on for size.”

  “On me?”

  “No, on that Eskimo over there.”

  Mr. Voss had tried to dissuade her from coming. “They don’t want you,” he’d said after telephoning the commandant. “I’m afraid it won’t be pleasant.” Anna had assumed, stupidly, that he didn’t want to lose her.

  She followed the lieutenant down a hallway pocked with doors suggestively canted, and then outside. Building 569 was wedged against a perimeter wall to the west of the building ways, part of the Yard she hadn’t seen, even on the bike. The Edison plant was directly overhead, its five stacks disgorging wet-looking smoke.

  Lieutenant Axel led the way to a bench at the top of the West Street Pier, where a diving suit lay folded. Its bulk and stiffness made it appear sentient, like a person doubled over. Anna quickened at the sight of it.

  “Mr. Greer and Mr. Katz will be your tenders,” Lieutenant Axel said, indicating two men who idled nearby with marked nonchalance, having likely dashed from their eavesdropping posts just moments ahead of the lieutenant. “Gentlemen, Miss Kerrigan is interested in diving. Please get her dressed.”

  The directive sounded perfectly straightforward, yet something about the terms—tenders, dress—made Anna wonder whether they were genuine or coined purely to confuse her. She was relieved when Lieutenant Axel went back indoors.

  “We’ll put the dress right over what you’re wearing now, dear,” said the man called Greer. He was slight and weak-chinned, with thinning hair and a wedding band. “Just take off your shoes.”

  The other man, Katz, had a swaggering aspect. “Is this a one?” he asked as they held up the diving suit in front of Anna, now in her stocking feet. “What do you know, Greer? She wears the same size as you.”

  Greer rolled his eyes. The rubberized canvas gave off a grainy smell tinged with an earthen sourness that made Anna think of her grandparents’ farm in Minnesota. She stepped through the wide black rubber collar and pushed her feet along the stiff legs into socklike shapes at the bottoms. She had to hold on to the men in order to do this, an awkward business that Katz and Greer seemed to take as a matter of course. They hoisted the rubber collar over her torso and shoulders, and she shimmied her arms through the sleeves, which ended in attached three-fingered gloves. They buckled narrow leather straps around her wrists.

  “Straps should be tighter,” Katz remarked. “Her wrists are so small the gloves might still blow off. Although you seem to manage, Greer, with those ladylike hands of yours.”

  “Mr. Katz is proud of his stature,” Greer told Anna conspiratorially. “Makes him feel better about being 4-F.”

  Anna was hor
rified, but Katz faltered only briefly. “Greer likes to mention that. He envies my chin.”

  “Even with the chin, he can’t find a girl who’ll marry him,” Greer retorted.

  “If you saw how henpecked Greer is, you’d know why I’m taking my time.”

  Anna tried to look cheerful amid this volley of insults, but the men hardly seemed to notice. They were behind her, pulling tight the laces that ran along the back of each canvas leg. “Why are you 4-F, by the way?” Greer asked Katz.

  “Busted eardrum. Teacher boxed my ears in the second grade.”

  “Talked too much then, too, eh?”

  “That’s awful,” Anna said, but sensed immediately that she shouldn’t have spoken. For the first time, Katz looked ashamed. “It’s an advantage for diving,” he said after a moment. “No pressure on that side.”

  They guided Anna’s feet into “shoes”: blocks of wood and metal and leather. There was an intimacy to their utilitarian touch; Katz actually went on his hands and knees to fasten buckles over one of the laced shoes. “The shoes weigh thirty-five pounds,” he told Anna. “The whole dress weighs two hundred. How much do you weigh?”

  “No wonder you can’t get a girl,” Greer muttered, shaking his head.

  “Half that, I’m guessing,” Katz went on, ignoring his partner. “Give you an idea, I weigh two forty, and I can barely walk in the dress.”

  “You’ve rotten balance,” Greer said. “Must be that eardrum.”

  “I weigh well over a hundred pounds, actually,” Anna said, but it sounded fussy, and again she regretted speaking. She was sitting down. The men lifted a copper breastplate over her head, its sharp edges digging into the soft tissue between her shoulders and neck.

  “Uh-oh,” Greer said. “We didn’t give her . . .”

  An evil grin glittered on Katz’s face. “What’s that?”