Manhattan Beach

by Jennifer Egan

  “You’ll have more room in back.”

  “I want her to see.”

  “Suit yourself.” Her hurry had infected him, and he came around quickly to open the passenger door. She slipped in, and Dexter carefully placed the cripple in her arms. It was a tight fit, even in the Series 62. Only as he closed them inside did he realize how much he’d counted on retreating into the role of chauffeur rather than companion to these girls.

  A good deed needs no excuse. So his pop used to reassure Dexter when he would resist, embarrassed, carrying a covered dish of leftover meatballs to the bums and hoboes who haunted the carny houses near his restaurant. Dexter muttered the phrase to himself as he lifted the heavy folded chair into his trunk. A good deed needs no excuse.

  He drove away from the children and headed back toward Flatbush, enlivened by the thought that at this rate, he’d have no trouble reaching the Knickerbocker by lunchtime. He heard whispering across the seat. “Can she talk?” he asked.

  “She used to. Not talk, but repeat things.”

  “That’s talking, isn’t it? How much can she understand?”

  “We don’t really know.”

  We. The mother, presumably; how else could the healthy sister hold a job at the Naval Yard and turn up at Moonshine of an evening? A cripple like this would need constant care—would normally be in a home, he suspected. Recalling her hurry at the curb, he bit back an impulse to ask whether her mother was aware of today’s escapade. Not his lookout. He was as deep inside this family as he meant to go.

  They sped past Grand Army Plaza and alongside Prospect Park toward Ocean Avenue. Dexter’s mother hovered in his thoughts—as if, having been summoned by the bell, she was reluctant to sign off just yet. There had been a time when she was healthy, before his brother’s stillbirth, when Dexter was seven. It had damaged his mother’s heart, so that something once solid inside her became terribly fragile: a clock made from sugar. Her inner frailty distinguished her from other mothers, whose many squalling children they were often ignoring or backhanding across the face. She would have to leave him prematurely: this was the secret they both pretended not to know. She withdrew from the restaurant Dexter’s father had opened—his own, at long last—and saved herself for Dexter. Mostly, she slept. Dexter’s lunchtime was her dawn, and it broke with the sound of his shoes mauling the stairs as he ran up four flights to their apartment. Other children came home to bread and milk and ham left out, but Dexter enjoyed a full meal his father had brought from the restaurant the night before, warmed in the oven. His mother greeted him fresh and full of questions, laughing and kissing him until it was time for him to return to school, at which point she sank back into her bower, lined with pillows his father had had specially made for her, to renew herself for his return.

  Dexter had adored her to a degree that was unheard of among neighborhood boys. She was a person who might disappear at any time, yet she was always there: an enthralling blend of unattainability and complete possession. How had she done it? Witchcraft? Fairy dust? Later, he learned from his father that they’d been told her heart would not last a year past the stillbirth. Yet six years after, when Dexter turned thirteen, she was still there. He began to resent her, and stayed out playing stickball until after dark. He stole apples and peppermints and chalk: little acts of subterfuge that he feared she could actually see when she cupped his guilty face in her delicate hands. She declined with a merciless speed that seemed retroactive, as if the clock had already crumbled long before, and her body had only just realized.

  “Say, I never asked,” Anna said after a long silence. “Where are we going, exactly?”

  “Manhattan Beach,” he told her. “It’s near Coney Island but cleaner, private. My house is right on the water—in fact, you could take her on the back porch and avoid the sand altogether.”

  “That sounds swell,” Anna strained to say lightly. Returning to Manhattan Beach put an intolerable pressure on the question she’d been agonizing over since they had made their plan four days ago: should she tell Dexter Styles about the connection between them? At the last minute she’d decided not to; her goal was to gather information, not give it away. Hastily, she’d removed from the walls photographs of her mother and Brianne in their dancing costumes; her parents on their wedding day; a movie still from Let a Bullet Fly that showed Brianne cowering in a doorway as a man’s shadow fell across her.

  Yet riding in Dexter Styles’s automobile to the very place where she’d met him years ago was a duplicity too egregious to sustain. She wanted to tell him, to have it out in the open. But that wasn’t true—she dreaded telling him. What she wanted was already to have told him.

  She held Lydia’s slender body against her own, hands around her sister’s midriff, where the heart nudged the soft bones of her chest. Lydia’s eyes were open. She seemed to look through the window at the spiky gray trees of Prospect Park. Anna felt her sister’s alertness, and it roused in her a rush of anticipation: They were going to the sea! They would see it together! She had made the request of Dexter Styles unthinkingly, snatching at any excuse to keep him in sight. But now that they were underway, her mother and Brianne out for a day of shopping and Schrafft’s and a matinee of Star and Garter, she felt the richness of what she’d set in motion. She must not jeopardize it. That meant not telling him who she was until their day had ended.

  “How do you like working at the Naval Yard?” Mr. Styles asked suddenly. “What exactly do you do?”

  “I measure tiny parts that go on ships,” Anna began, every word threatening to burst under the pressure of all she was withholding. But he seemed interested, or perhaps just tired of driving in silence. The longer she talked, the more natural it came to seem. She told him about her hatred of measuring, her wish to become a diver. Eventually, prodded by his questions, she found herself recounting what had happened with Lieutenant Axel the evening before.

  “That crumbum,” he said, sounding genuinely angry. “What a bunch of screwballs. Tell them to jump in the river.”

  “Then I wouldn’t have a job.”

  “To hell with their lousy job. Come work for me.”

  Anna held very still, her arms around Lydia, who seemed also to be listening. “Quit the Naval Yard?”

  “Why not? I’d pay you better than they do.”

  “I make forty-two a week before overtime.”

  He seemed impressed. “Well, I’d match it.”

  Anna felt a sudden uncanny proximity to her father. Not that she pictured him, exactly—she still couldn’t call him to mind. It was more like standing in a station she knew he’d passed through at an earlier point, trying to guess which train he had boarded. For the first time in years, the air was enlivened by a faint tingling trace of him.

  “What do people do? Who work for you,” she asked carefully.

  “Well, I’ve many businesses. One of them you’ve seen, the nightclub, and there are more in that line here and in other cities. And then there are businesses that . . . interact with those. Flow through them, you might say.”

  “I see,” Anna said, though she didn’t.

  “Not all of those businesses are legal, in the strictest sense of that word. I’m of a mind that people should decide for themselves how they like to be amused, rather than have the law decide for them. You may feel differently, of course. Not everyone has the stomach for that sort of thing.”

  “I’ve a strong stomach,” Anna said. She felt like Alice in Wonderland, fitting herself through smaller and smaller doors with no idea where they might lead.

  “That’s why I made the offer,” he said. “Consider it a standing offer. If you’re interested, I’ll work you in.”

  * * *

  Anna remembered Mr. Styles’s home as a castle on an outcropping of cliff surrounded by snow and sea. What she saw when he parked his car was a city block lined with freestanding homes—grand, yes, but no grander than houses she’d seen near Brooklyn College. She felt a dig of disappointment.

&n
bsp; “I’ll bring the chair,” he said. The car rocked as he lifted it from the trunk.

  “We’re here, Liddy,” Anna said softly. “We’re almost at the sea.”

  The car door swung wide, and Mr. Styles lifted Lydia from her arms. Anna stepped out of the car. At the end of the street, under a gray expanse of sky, she sensed the ocean, like someone asleep. Wind yanked pins from her rolled hair, and they twinkled onto the pavement. Carrying the chair, she followed Mr. Styles to his house. He turned the front door handle, Lydia still in his arms, and pushed open the door.

  The cripple lay quietly against him while her sister opened and prepared the wheeled chair in the front hall. Dexter was growing accustomed to the contortion of her face, her unblinking stare. When the chair was ready, he placed her in it, and the sister anchored her with belts and straps. There was a U-shaped stand to hold her head upright. Her hands were bent and folded at the wrists; he’d a powerful urge to press them flat. “How did she become this way?” he asked.

  “It happened when she was born.”

  “I’m asking what caused it.”

  “She hadn’t enough air.”

  “But why? Why hadn’t she enough?” He could not repress his impatience. Problems he couldn’t solve made him angry.

  “No one knows.”

  “Someone knows. You can be certain of that. She must have a doctor.”

  “The same one for years.” She was doing the very thing he’d wanted to do: straightening out those bent wrists enough to cuff them to the chair, her touch brisk and gentle at once.

  “Has he helped her? This doctor?”

  “There’s no cure.”

  “What kind of doctor accepts that his patient will get worse?”

  “I suppose he makes us feel better.”

  “Nice work if you can get it,” he muttered, and saw her start. These must be old arguments.

  “Can we take her outdoors?” she asked.

  “Yes, of course,” he said, chastened. “The porch is right over here.”

  He led her into the front room, toward the porch door. Beyond the windows, the sea was a flat gray iridescence. It appeared calm, but the moment he opened the door, a rigid wind assailed them. The cripple jolted in the chair as if she’d been slapped.

  “It’s too cold,” cried the sister, stricken. “I didn’t dress her warmly enough.”

  “Relax. We’ve plenty of blankets.”

  He wasn’t entirely sure where Milda kept them. As always, she’d gone to spend Sunday with her family in Harlem, from whence she would return in time to fix their breakfast Monday morning. As he swung open closets and riffled through drawers in search of blankets, he experienced a moment of appreciation that his family was not at home. The situation was too painful, Lydia too troubling. He didn’t want his children exposed to her.

  He’d been unaware of the existence of a second-floor linen closet, but there it was, blankets folded neatly within. He saw the enormous Landrace wool that George Porter had brought them as a gift after a hunting trip to Lapland. He seized that, along with four others, and sprinted back downstairs. He and the sister set to tucking blankets tightly around Lydia. Her hat was laughably insufficient—Dexter wrapped one of the smaller blankets around her shoulders and used the Landrace to swaddle her head, hat and all. In order to do this, he had to lift her head from its stand and hold it in his hands. It had that surprising weight of all heads, her hair impossibly soft, the skull inside it knobby and raw. Holding her head, Dexter felt the protesting part of himself—angry, eager to be done—slide abruptly away. He settled into the project of providing this accursed creature an experience of the sea. He absorbed the importance of it, the singleness of the task. It was a relief.

  When Lydia was fully bundled, Anna wheeled her onto the porch for the second time. Her sister’s eyes snapped open at the first blast of wind. Anna leaned down so their heads were level and looked out, tethering her gaze to her sister’s. Water and sky were all she saw. No convergence of ocean with land; the stone-and-concrete barrier was too far below. No beach, in other words.

  “Mr. Styles,” she said, “I’d like to take her onto the sand, if that’s all right. I can do it alone.”

  “Nonsense. There’s a path at the bottom of these steps that leads to a private beach.”

  They each took half of Lydia’s chair and carried it down the steps. The path was pressed gravel, wide and well maintained enough that Anna could push the chair along it easily. Her sister’s eyes were shut—perhaps she’d gone to sleep. Anna wondered if, after all this effort, Lydia would even be able to take in the beach; whether she would drift through the interlude in the drowsy limbo where she spent so much of her time. Anna experienced a throe of frustration: a wish that her sister would do more, be more.

  Several steps led from the path down to the sand. Dexter lifted the chair and carried it, taking big draws of sea air. The chair was heavy and cumbersome with Lydia in it, but he liked having his muscles tested. The sand was the gray-white of bones. It seemed to rise up, encompassing the bottoms of the wheels when he set down the chair. “I’ll take half,” she said, although he doubted she could carry it far in the sand. The water was some distance away. She did, though. He was impressed by her physical strength.

  Anna called for him to wait and took off her pumps, setting them side by side in the sand. Her hat was useless; she anchored it under her shoes. Quickly, she plaited her hair and slipped the plait inside the collar of her coat. She felt the cold gritty sand through her stocking feet as they resumed their march. The wind teased and bludgeoned, as if daring them to continue.

  They stopped once more, to rest. Dexter wrapped the Landrace more securely around Lydia’s lower face, so that only her eyes met the wind. They were open but empty-looking, like the windows of a house no one lived in.

  At last they set down the chair near the water. Panting from the walk, Anna leaned her head against her sister’s and watched a long wave form, stretching until it achieved translucence, then somersaulting forward and collapsing into creamy suds that eked toward them over the sand, nearly touching the wheels of Lydia’s chair. Then another wave gathered, reaching, stretching, a streak of silver dashing along its surface where the weak sunlight touched it. The strange, violent, beautiful sea: this was what she had wanted Lydia to see. It touched every part of the world, a glittering curtain drawn across a mystery. Anna wrapped her arms around her sister. “Liddy,” she said, speaking into the blankets where she thought her sister’s ear must be. “Can you see the sea? Can you hear it? It’s right in front of you—this is your chance. Now, Liddy. Now!”

  See the sea the sea

  Rinfronyoo. Liddy! Liddy!

  Canyeerit?

  Hrasha Hrasha Hrasha the sea

  “Look at that ship,” Mr. Styles said, gesturing at the water. “Look at the size of her.”

  Still holding her sister, Anna looked. She saw the usual tugs and lighters, a few freighters and tankers that appeared to be stationary. And behind them, on such a scale that her eye didn’t register it at first, a mammoth ship, pale gray, moving with fantastic speed past Breezy Point. Anna was certain it hadn’t been there a minute before. “What is it?” she asked.

  “Troopship,” he said. “A liner. The Queen Mary, is my guess. They covered up all that fancy woodwork and packed her full of soldiers. Fifteen thousand she can hold, a whole division.”

  He’d crossed the Atlantic in the Queen Mary with Harriet after their wedding—steamed to Southampton in three days to meet the old man, whose aunt, Lady Hewitt, bred racehorses in Kent. Dexter’s job had been to win her blessing, and he’d done it.

  “She’s too fast for convoy,” he went on, although she must know these things, working at the Naval Yard. He wanted to explain it—to talk about the liner while she was still in sight. “Convoys have to sail at the speed of the slowest ship: that means eleven knots if it includes a Liberty, even slower for coal burners. But the Queen Mary can make thirty knots. T
he Gray Ghost, they call her. U-boats can’t catch her.”

  He felt an odd yearning toward the ship, as if wishing himself on board. Not with soldiers, though. Before the war? But that wasn’t it, either. Perhaps with soldiers after all.

  “Are your businesses doing any war work?” she asked after the ship had steamed out of sight.

  “If you include keeping the brass amused and easing the pain of rationing, we’re doing more than our share,” he said.

  She laughed. “You’re a profiteer,” she said, apparently without judgment. But he didn’t like the word.

  “I prefer ‘morale booster,’ ” he said. “I keep people’s spirits up, despite the war.”

  “Would you like to do more?”

  It appeared to be that rare thing: a genuine question asked from curiosity, nothing else. She stood straight, hands on her sister’s shoulders, and watched him from under those arched eyebrows. Her gaze was bright and clear.

  “Yes,” he said. “Yes, I would like that.” It seemed to him now that this wish was long-standing. He was filled with impatience at not yet having achieved it.

  Anna felt a jolt under her hands, like a drawer slamming shut. Alarmed, she looked into Lydia’s face and found her sister’s eyes wide-open, registering the rise and fall of the waves. “Liddy,” she cried. “Do you know where you are?”

  See the sea. Sea the sea the sea the sea

  “She’s talking,” Anna cried. “Listen!”

  Dexter had briefly forgotten Lydia, lost in the question her sister had posed about war work. Now he looked again at Lydia. With just her blue eyes showing above the Landrace, a few strands of hair whirling from its folds, she looked like a veiled beauty, a woman of mystery. He leaned close and heard murmuring through the wool.

  “I felt her wake up,” her sister said. “She started, as if someone had shaken her.”

  Dexter looked out at the silvery swells. Wind lashed his overcoat and gulls cried overhead. “It is beautiful,” he said. “No wonder she’s paying attention. Everyone should see this once in their lives.”