Manhattan Beach

by Jennifer Egan

  “I think so, too,” she said.

  I wanted you to see the sea. See the sea the sea the

  ishywarmenuf?

  Bird ree ree rawk reek rawk you know what birds are, remember the little birds that camrwindosill, remember?

  Cree cree Bird

  That wind is picking up.

  You can tell she’s watching

  Oh yes, she sees. She laughed a minute ago

  shelafdamingo. Flamingo. Bird cree cree.

  Kiss

  Oh, Liddy!

  Kiss

  My darling you haven’t done that in suchalontym. Look, she kisses me if I pull the blanket aside.

  Shekissississ.

  This is a kiss. Do you see?

  I suppose I do. Poor kid.

  Her lips are so soft.

  Anna

  Listen, she’s talking. She’s trying to talk. Being outside is making her well.

  Anna Papa Mama Liddy

  She’s talking to you. She’s looking at you.

  She hasn’t any idea who I am. Probably wondering who this stranger is.

  Whothistrangris Wholyam Papa

  “Thank you for bringing us, Mr. Styles,” Anna cried, suddenly overcome. No one had done this, ever—taken them to the beach together. “Thank you for bringing us. We’re so terribly grateful.” She clasped his hands and stood on tiptoe to kiss his cheek. But she only reached his jaw.

  “It’s nothing,” he muttered, though he felt strangely moved. The change in the crippled girl was extraordinary. He’d found her sprawled unconscious, as if she’d been dropped from a height, but now she sat up independently, holding her head away from the stand. The Landrace fell from her face as she confronted the sea, lips moving, like a mythical creature whose imprecations could summon storms and winged gods, her wild blue eyes fixed on eternity.

  He’d lost track of the time. Twelve-thirty. Not as late as he’d feared, but too late to meet the old man. Ah well. He didn’t really care—was glad not to have to hurry anywhere else. He stood beside the girls and watched the sea. It was never the same on any two days, not if you really looked. Smart, taking the poor kid to the beach. Good for anyone to breathe this air.

  Kiss Anna

  Bird Cree cree

  See the waves hrasha hrasha hrasha

  Seetheseatheseethesea

  Kiss Anna

  Blue Bird Shhh

  Breathe

  Faaaah laaaaah

  Seethseethseathsee thusea seethe

  I don’t want to . . . when will she babeltu

  Papa

  Wholyam Whothistrangris

  Kiss Anna

  Kiss Liddy

  Papa Whothistrangris

  Afraid to leave she might

  Hrasha hrasha hrasha

  In no hurry. Stay here as long as you like.

   PART FOUR

  The Dark

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  * * *

  Anna’s mother returned from her own Sunday expedition in the late afternoon. She flung open the door and ran to Lydia, her visible alarm leaving no doubt that she’d been informed, in the course of ascending five flights, of the car, the strange man, and the lengthy absence. Lydia sat by the window, watching a bird on the fire escape. She turned to their mother and smiled.

  “My Lord,” her mother cried, throwing her arms around her. “Where in heaven did you take her?”

  “Look,” Anna said.

  Her mother’s wonder at the change in Lydia made it easier to unpack, like crockery from a picnic basket, the untruths Anna had spent the ride home carefully assembling: that her supervisor, Mr. Voss, had made an unexpected visit in his car. That he’d taken them for a drive to Prospect Park, where Lydia (well bundled, of course) had sat outdoors. And then a flourish, appended spontaneously: Mr. Voss had a sister like Lydia! That was why he’d cared to come and see her, and why Anna had entrusted him to carry her downstairs.

  “It’s cold for the park,” their mother said, touching Lydia’s forehead. “But she seems so alert.”

  “Maybe she likes the cold.”

  Lydia’s gaze was full of perception—not just of the falsehoods Anna was uttering now, but of her broken resolve to disclose to Mr. Styles the connection between them. During the drive back from Manhattan Beach, he’d switched on the news. The scuttling of the French fleet in Toulon was overshadowed by a horrific conflagration the previous night in a Boston nightclub, the Cocoanut Grove, after an artificial palm tree caught fire. Mr. Styles seemed already to know of the disaster, but the details agitated him: three hundred dead, hundreds more in hospitals. All the result of panicked chorus girls and patrons stampeding toward blocked exits.

  “Idiots,” he muttered. “Criminals. Christ, who needs the Krauts when we’re burning our own people alive?”

  “Was it one of your nightclubs?” Anna asked.

  He replied with a withering look. “No one has ever died in one of my clubs,” he said.

  After carrying Lydia upstairs, he’d seemed in a hurry to go. And so Anna had said nothing about their father. She’d no regrets—was proud, in fact, of having given nothing away. Still Lydia watched her. She didn’t feel embarrassment, like other people; it was up to Anna to look away. Finally, she did, waiting for her sister’s attention to wander. When she looked back, Lydia was still watching her.

  On that Monday and Tuesday, while Anna was at work, Silvio carried Lydia downstairs, and their mother pushed her all the way to Prospect Park and back—a sojourn of hours in brisk and windy weather, she reported. At night, Lydia maintained a steady patter about birds and kisses and Anna and Mama. “She keeps mentioning the sea,” their mother said. “I wonder what she means by it.” Anna and Lydia exchanged a smile.

  On Wednesday, Anna returned from work to find her mother and Aunt Brianne drinking highballs in the front room with a man called Walter Lipp, whom Brianne introduced as an “old friend.” His sallow complexion and pencil mustache reminded Anna of Louie, Nell’s friend at the Moonshine Club. It emerged that Walter Lipp had driven Agnes, Brianne, and Lydia in his Ford sedan to a picnic spot under the George Washington Bridge. Lydia had sat up in her chair, muffled in coats, and watched a brisk parade of boat traffic. She had laughed and prattled and eaten most of a sweet potato from a stand. Walter Lipp listened with grave attention while Anna’s mother described these events, nodding occasionally as if squaring her account with his own. He lacked the celebratory air of most of Brianne’s “old friends,” and left his highball unfinished.

  “Not a moment too soon,” Brianne stage-whispered as Walter Lipp’s steps faded down the stairs.

  “I liked him,” her mother said. “He’d a quiet sense of humor.”

  “That’s like saying, What a terribly interesting girl.”

  “Why did you invite him?” Anna asked.

  Men who were the best company were the worst drivers, her aunt explained. “Now, with the war, they can’t get new whitewalls, so they’re patching their old ones.” Walter was a man she could depend upon not to wreck his car with Lydia in it.

  Lydia sat in her chair in a state of lively bloom. Clearly, her second waterfront visit had agreed with her. They stayed up very late, all four of them, the windows open to the December chill, the dim, smoldering city sidling in alongside Benny Goodman’s snaking clarinet. Lydia craved stimulation, that was clear; now it was a matter of sustaining it. Brianne had other snores and pills in mind for further chauffeuring. They spoke of what might be possible if things continued in this vein: Suppose Lydia could learn to walk and to talk? Suppose she could marry and have children? Anna watched her aunt, wondering if she really believed these things, then wondering why she wondered. The answer came to her gradually: she and her mother were the ones imagining and elaborating, while Brianne said just enough to spur them on. Her aunt had become the maypole. She believed in having fun, and they were having it.

  Lydia had retreated a little by the next morning, a
nd Anna and her mother agreed they’d let her stay up too late. No more of that! But when Anna arrived home from work that evening, her sister was even more lethargic; they had trouble coaxing her to eat. She didn’t cough or shiver or sneeze. She hadn’t a fever. She was just still, far away.

  “I’m afraid,” her mother said. “She doesn’t seem right.”

  “Why don’t you take her out tomorrow?”

  “I’m afraid we’ve hurt her, doing that.”

  “She isn’t hurt, Mama.” But a feather of panic tickled Anna’s heart.

  The next morning Lydia was difficult to wake. At the Yard, Anna was too anxious to go out at lunchtime; even the barbed familiarity of the marrieds felt less foreboding than eating alone among the long December shadows. She hurried home after work, uttering feverish prayers that her mother would meet her with a smile; that Lydia would be back in her chair, smiling, too. But before she’d reached the last turn of stairs, the door flew open and her mother ran into the hall. “She’s worse,” she hissed at Anna over the railing. “I don’t know what to do!”

  Anna’s heart clenched. But she managed to say calmly, once they were inside their apartment, “We must call Dr. Deerwood.”

  “He doesn’t make house calls to Brooklyn,” her mother shrieked.

  Trembling, Anna went to her bedroom, where Lydia lay. Their mother wavered briefly in the doorway, then retreated. Anna heard her sobbing. She lay beside Lydia as she had so many nights—thousands of nights since they were little girls. “Liddy,” she whispered. “You must wake up.”

  Lydia’s eyes opened halfway. They had a lazy glow. She seemed unnaturally still, as if her breathing and heartbeat had slowed.

  “Liddy,” Anna said with quiet urgency. “Mama needs you and I need you.”

  Every word rang with her panicked awareness that whatever had gone wrong was her fault. She felt close to vomiting from fear. But Lydia was alive. She was breathing, her heart was beating. Anna curled around her sister and concentrated on the life moving inside her as if she were anchoring it in place—absorbing Lydia, or being absorbed by her. She drifted among memories: their grandparents’ farm in Minnesota, where she and their mother had taken Lydia twice in summer while their father stayed behind. A rabble of boy cousins had shrunk from her as from a freakish curiosity, and Anna had felt marooned with Lydia while they chased each other through the woods, whooping like Indians. They seemed to exist in the plural: addressed as one, scolded and whipped and rewarded collectively, at which point they had to fight each other for the reward itself. They pushed close to Lydia as one mass, studying her hair, the lace collar Anna had sewn on her dress. “Does she do anything?” they asked.

  “No,” Anna said, hating her sister. “She doesn’t do anything at all.”

  But in the following weeks, an unexpected thing began to happen: individual boys separated themselves from the group, as if for the first time, and came to sit quietly with Lydia. They begged for extra time, and Anna began to feel important, arranging these visits. The boys claimed that Lydia had told them things: she liked pie; was afraid of spiders; loved rabbits best of all animals. No, goats. Chickens. Horses. Pigs. She’s never even seen a pig, you oaf!

  “She misses her home,” said Freddie, the smallest boy, after holding Lydia’s hand for a quarter of an hour.

  “What does she miss?” Anna asked, and waited for Freddie to say, Her papa. But although Freddie lived fifty miles from the nearest lake, he said, “She misses the sea.” It was the first time Anna realized that her sister had never seen it.

  Anna’s mother ran a bath that night, and Anna washed Lydia’s hair. They hoped the pleasure of the warm water would jolt her into awareness, but it was the opposite: Lydia floated with eyes shut, the faintest smile on her lips. Anna had an eerie impression that the crumpled body she was holding no longer contained her sister, or not entirely. It was as if Lydia were fading into the mystery she had always partly inhabited, as if its pull were too great to resist.

  The next morning Anna overslept and had to rush to get to her shop before eight o’clock. The sight of Lydia unmoving in bed haunted her through the day. She measured parts in a state of trancelike absorption very like prayer, dread and hope twining in a burning nimbus around her heart. Please let today be a turning point. Please let her get better today.

  She arrived home to find an unfamiliar coat and hat hanging inside the apartment door, a walking stick poised against the wall. Anna set down her purse, slipped off her shoes, and went quietly into her bedroom in stocking feet. Dr. Deerwood sat on a kitchen chair just inside the door. Her mother sat on Anna’s bed. Lydia lay in her own bed, her body unnaturally straight. There was a new hollowness around her closed eyes. The blanket rose and fell on her chest like a pendulum swinging very, very slowly.

  Dr. Deerwood stood up from his chair and shook Anna’s hand. Removed from his opulent office, he looked like any doctor making a house call. Although his stiff black bag was closed and nothing especially doctorly was taking place, his presence imparted a sense of order and safety. Anna’s faith in him was instantly restored. Nothing could go wrong while the doctor was present.

  She knelt in the narrow space between the beds and laid her head beside Lydia’s, breathing the flowery scent of last night’s shampoo.

  “I should never have taken her out,” her mother said. “There was too much wind.”

  “Nonsense,” Dr. Deerwood said.

  “It’s made her worse.”

  “You must put that thought from your mind, Mrs. Kerrigan,” he said with quiet authority. “It is not just wrong but damaging. You’ve given Lydia one more pleasant experience in a life that has been full of them.”

  “How do you know?” her mother pressed. “How can you tell?”

  “Look at her,” the doctor said, and they did, Anna lifting her head to take in her sister’s radiant flesh, the delicate bones of her face, her luxuriant hair. Her eyes seemed to flicker under their long lashes as if she were watching them through the silken drapery of her lids.

  Something broke in Anna’s mother. She doubled over and began to howl like an animal. Anna had never heard her make such a sound, and it terrified her—as if her mother might go mad or throw herself out the window. Panic sprang up in her; she had done this! But no, she’d done nothing wrong. The doctor had said so, and his presence made it true.

  Dr. Deerwood took her mother’s hands in both of his. He’d large hands, broad and worn like a workingman’s. Anna watched them in fascination—how had she never noticed those oversize hands?

  “You must believe me, Mrs. Kerrigan,” he said. “You’ve done everything it is possible to do.”

  “It isn’t enough,” her mother wept.

  “It was more than enough.”

  His words hung in the air like an echo. Even when he’d forgone the usual cup of coffee that followed a house call and taken up his coat and hat and stick, Anna seizing upon the unruliness of his silver eyebrows; when he’d shaken their hands, all of them understanding they would not meet again, and the sound of his tread had faded downstairs; when Anna and her mother were back in the bedroom watching over Lydia, still she could hear the doctor’s voice: It was more than enough.

  Her mother wore a vacant expression. “He never opened his bag,” she said.

  * * *

  The funeral took place on a cold Sunday the week before Christmas. Anna sat in a front pew between Stella Iovino and Lillian Feeney; her mother between Aunt Brianne and Pearl Gratzky, who had become more friend than boss since Mr. Gratzky’s passing two years before. It was Pearl who had purchased the arrangement of white lilies for the altar. Their smell peppered the air as Father McBride likened Lydia to lambs and angels and other deserving innocents.

  A merciful numbness had engulfed Anna since her sister’s death, enabling her to fulfill the many logistical tasks that had followed: taking a short leave from the Naval Yard; arranging the funeral, burial, and lunch to follow; purchasing a coffin and a plot. The
question of where Lydia should rest had briefly paralyzed Anna and her mother. Her mother’s people were all buried in Minnesota, and the thought of Lydia alone here among strangers was intolerable. As a last resort they chose New Calvary, where Pearl Gratzky bequeathed to Lydia the plot she had purchased beside her husband, and where there was extra room on both sides for Agnes and Anna. Pearl was euphoric at this arrangement. “They can visit together,” she cried, with the greedy relief of one who believed she had thereby extended her own earthly tenure.

  As they followed Lydia’s coffin from the church, Anna was amazed to see how crowded the pews had become during the Mass. Who were all of these people? She’d expected a handful, the Mucciarones, the Iovinos, the Feeneys, but there were dozens of other faces, familiar but hard to place. The old ladies from the building across the street who rested their elbows on bath towels to spy down on the block. Neighbors Anna knew only to say good morning. Silvio Mucciarone sobbed in his mother’s arms. Mr. White, the druggist, wept unabashedly into a handkerchief. Dozens of women lifted the netting from their church hats and blotted their eyes. The neighborhood boys were absent, of course, enlisted or called up, and a great many fathers were traveling for war work or taking Sunday shifts. Standing under the gray sky among so many women, Anna began to understand the collective grief: Lydia had been a last still point amid so much wrenching change.

  Brianne oversaw the funeral lunch, arranging covered dishes brought by neighbors and doling out liberal amounts of beer and whiskey she’d brought herself. Guests overflowed the apartment into the hall and down the stairs, holding food in paper cocktail napkins Brianne had apparently filched from a bar in Sheepshead Bay called the Dizzy Swain. Each napkin was emblazoned with a cartoon shepherd: hearts in his eyes, sheep at his feet, a crook in one hand, and a cocktail shaker in the other.

  Anna climbed onto the fire escape with Lillian and Stella, all of them huddling together in their coats and hats on the freezing iron grille. It felt good to be squeezed between her old friends, with whom she’d hidden in cupboards and shared a single mattress on hot nights when their families took to the roofs. They had braided each other’s hair and administered Toni Home Permanent waves and used Mr. Iovino’s razor to shave one another’s underarms. Lillian, whose round freckled face made her look fourteen, was working as a stenographer and living with an aunt in Manhattan. Stella, the beauty, had just become engaged. She kept stretching out her long fingers to admire the tiny tear-shaped diamond her fiancé had presented, on bended knee, before departing for boot camp.