Manhattan Beach

by Jennifer Egan

  “I owe Seamus a letter,” Anna told Lillian.

  “My brother thinks you’ll marry him if he comes back a hero,” Lillian said.

  “I will,” Anna said. “Anything for a hero.”

  Mrs. Feeney had organized the letter-writing project when Seamus enlisted, and now Anna found herself corresponding at length with neighborhood boys she’d hardly known when they were still home.

  “Mother wants us not to mention Stella’s engagement in our letters,” Lillian said, assuming one of those lockjawed moving-picture accents they often mimicked together. “Give the boys something to live for.”

  “We mustn’t rob a soldier of his dreams,” Anna said in the same tone, but halfheartedly.

  “Honestly, girls, you’ll make my head swell up like a great big balloon,” Stella drawled, but the routine fizzled, and they looked down at the street in silence.

  “Anything from your papa?” Lillian asked.

  Anna shook her head.

  “Awful for him not to know,” Stella murmured.

  “I think he must be dead,” Anna said.

  They turned to her, mystified. “Did you hear something?” Lillian asked.

  Anna searched for an answer. She’d hardly seen her friends in the months since she’d begun working at the Naval Yard—the war had made all of them so busy. It felt impossible to tell them about Dexter Styles or explain the change in her thinking. There were too many steps to retrace.

  “Why else would he not come back?” she said at last. “How could he just . . . forget?”

  Stella took her hand. Anna felt the new engagement ring like a sliver of ice against her friend’s warm skin.

  “He’s dead to you, is what you mean,” Stella said.

  * * *

  In the middle of the night, Anna’s mother shook her awake. “We don’t know Mr. Gratzky!” she hissed into Anna’s ear. “What if he’s not nice?”

  “He is nice,” Anna said groggily.

  “You’re taking Pearl’s word for it, but we haven’t met the man. He never left his bed!”

  “I met him once,” Anna said.

  Her mother was dumbfounded out of extremis. “You met Mr. Gratzky?”

  “He showed me his wound,” Anna said.

  * * *

  The next morning, a Monday, she pried herself awake in the War Time dark. The kitchen counter was strewn with Dizzy Swain cocktail napkins. Brianne had slept over, and Anna heard the raucous snores from her mother’s bed.

  Her limbs felt wobbly and peculiar as she boarded the streetcar, but by the time she joined the crowd outside the Sands Street gate, Anna felt stronger. The winter sunrise shearing into her eyes down Flushing Avenue and blasts of salty wind were fortifying. Lydia had never been to the Naval Yard. Apart from Mr. Voss and Rose, no one there knew of her existence.

  Returning home that evening, she found her key no longer fit the lock. Her mother let her in and gave her a new key flecked with metal filings. “If your father happens to return,” she said, “he is no longer welcome in this house.”

  Anna was incredulous. “Are you expecting him?”

  “Not anymore.”

  Her mother spent the next two days emptying the armoire and bureau of every piece of her father’s clothing. The exquisite suits Anna had helped tailor and adjust, the fine shoes and coats and painted neckties and silk handkerchiefs—all were folded ignominiously into boxes for H-O oats and Bosco chocolate-flavored syrup. Anna lifted a suit jacket from one of the boxes before her mother tied it shut. It had gone out of fashion, lacking the squared shoulders and military cut that everyone favored nowadays. Silvio carried the boxes to church for Father McBride to give to the poor.

  On the surface, Anna’s life hardly changed. She left for work in the dark (her mother still asleep) and returned in twilight. Christmas came and went, and the year turned to 1943. They sewed to keep busy at night: a housecoat with embroidered lapels for Stella’s wedding present; christening gowns for Anna’s eldest cousins—those muddy, rowdy boys from the farm, all in the service now—some of whose wives were already expecting. They listened to Counterspy, Manhattan at Midnight, Doc Savage. Neighbors brought food, which they warmed for supper. This routine formed a fragile, makeshift bridge across an abyss. Anna’s mother spent her days inside that abyss; there was a deadness about her, a torpor that Anna was frightened of feeling herself. What saved her from it was going to work. She performed her measurements in a state of hushed withdrawal. Everyone knew there had been a death in her family, and the marrieds were being nice to her again. But the unruly kid sister Anna had played with them before could not be resurrected.

  Curiously, the apartment felt smaller without Lydia in it. Anna and her mother collided as they moved between rooms, both veering at once toward the icebox, the window, the sink. Some evenings she came home to find her mother still asleep, with no evidence that she’d risen from bed to do anything more than visit the hall toilet. Once her mother wasn’t at home, and Anna walked among the small rooms taking deep breaths, relieved to find herself alone, then guilty over her relief. It turned out her mother had been using the public telephone at White’s Drugstore to call her sisters in Minnesota. She began calling often, collecting coins in a coffee tin to satisfy the voracious operators.

  One night Anna noticed a few of her mother’s old dancing costumes spread out across the bed: a short skirt made of yellow feathers; a bodice with a pair of green wings; a red waistcoat spangled with sequins. By the next night, they were gone. “Pearl is going to sell them for me,” her mother said as they dined on Mrs. Mucciarone’s cannelloni and listened to Easy Aces. “They’ve value, apparently, now that the Follies are finished. Someone might put them in a museum.” She gave a disbelieving laugh.

  “Did you try them on?”

  “Too fat.”

  “You’d get thinner if you danced.”

  “At forty-one? Anyone can see I’m washed up.”

  There was a way Anna knew she should feel, beholding her mother’s anguish, a cloud of tenderness and pity that seemed to hover just beyond her reach. Instead, she recoiled. Her mother was weak, but Anna was not. In the mornings she rushed to work, welcoming the indifference that enfolded her as she passed through the Sands Street gate. She tried to forget the apartment and everything in it.

  In January, three weeks after her return to work, Mr. Voss called her into his office and asked if she was still interested in learning to dive.

  “Why, yes,” she said slowly. “Of course.”

  Lieutenant Axel needed more civilian volunteers; too many had failed to complete the training. “He remembered you,” Mr. Voss said. “You must have made an impression.”

  “I remember him,” Anna said.

  Climbing the stairs a few nights later, she smelled real cooking from behind her apartment door for the first time since early December. Opening it, she looked instinctively toward the front windows, where Lydia would have been. The empty chair was folded against a wall. Anna’s stomach clenched as if someone had kneed her.

  “Hello, Mama,” she called, but it came out a sob. Her mother wrapped Anna in her arms and held her a long time.

  She had prepared a feast: steak and mashed potatoes, carrots and string beans and grapefruit juice. “Our neighbors have been feeding us for so long, we’re swimming in ration coupons,” she said. “I brought some to the Feeneys and the Iovinos this afternoon.”

  “What’s happened, Mama?”

  “Let’s enjoy our meal first.”

  Eating in the warm kitchen made Anna sleepy. When they’d finished their canned cherries with vanilla ice cream, her mother set down her spoon and said, “I think it’s time we went back home.”

  “Home . . . ?”

  “Minnesota. Spend some time with my parents and sisters. And your cousins, of course.”

  “The farm?”

  “You’ve been carrying an enormous weight, Anna. I’m so grateful. But it’s time you had a chance to set it down. Let our fa
mily take care of us for a while. Not that there isn’t plenty to do on a farm,” she added under her breath.

  “You hate the farm!”

  “That was long ago. And you’ve always loved it.”

  “Why sure, to visit, but that’s— I can’t leave, Mama,” she said, clawing free of her sleepy contentment. “They’re going to let me dive.”

  “They’re what?”

  But Anna had never mentioned diving to her mother—to protect it from the chill of her indifference. “I can’t leave,” she said again.

  The appearance of an obstacle, even one she couldn’t identify, roused instant consternation in her mother. “I’ve spoken with everyone there,” she said in a high, thin voice. “They’re all very eager to have us.”

  “You go. I’ll stay here.”

  Her mother leaped to her feet, knocking her chair backward. “That is out of the question,” she said, and Anna understood that her dread of an objection was what underlay the steak and potatoes and cherries, perhaps even the long embrace.

  Had Anna ever known of an unmarried girl living alone, not counting old maids like Miss DeWitt, on two, whom the children believed was a witch? No, she hadn’t, because unmarried girls didn’t live alone—unless they were a different sort of girl, which Anna was not. What would the neighbors think? Who would meet her at the end of each day? Fix her breakfast and supper? Suppose an intruder climbed in from the fire escape? Suppose she fell sick or got hurt? Anna pointed out that she could move into a women’s hotel, as her mother had done when she came to New York. Yes, but those were different times; now the Germans might begin a blitz, and how would Anna escape? Suppose there was a sea invasion—hadn’t the harbor been closed over some scare last November? Hadn’t Germans landed on Amagansett Beach just last summer? And besides, more went on in those women’s hotels than you might think.

  Because her mother was desperate to go and Anna determined to stay, the outcome of the debate was never in serious doubt. Anna perceived this from the outset, and it made her sufficiently calm to reassure her mother on every count: she had the Feeneys on three, the Iovinos and Mucciarones down the block, Pearl Gratzky near Borough Hall, and Lillian Feeney in Manhattan. She could leave a message for Aunt Brianne in her apartment house in Sheepshead Bay. Her supervisor, Mr. Voss, would help if she needed help. Diving would mean longer days; she would come home mostly to sleep. And anyway, Brooklyn was full of girls with husbands overseas—how was Anna living alone any different?

  And so, on a Sunday afternoon in late January, five weeks after burying Lydia, Anna helped her mother load two suitcases into a taxi. She would take the Broadway Limited overnight to Chicago and transfer to the 400 (a splurge courtesy of the Lobster King) to Minneapolis late the next day.

  Pennsylvania Station swarmed with soldiers carrying identical brown duffels. Anna welcomed the din of their voices and the whorls of their cigarette smoke. She sat beside her mother in the Grand Hall and watched pigeons flapping against the honeycombed ceiling. There was something they should say to each other, Anna felt, but everything she thought of seemed to go without saying. They lingered, both waiting, then had to hurry into the drafty concourse where stairs led down to the platforms. Two soldiers carried their suitcases. Anna followed them down with mounting anticipation, as if she, too, were about to board a train. Did she want to go to Minnesota after all? No. She wanted her mother to go.

  Agnes, too, craved some meaningful exchange—it was the reason she’d said goodbye to Pearl and Brianne the night before and come to the station just with Anna. “I can’t bear to think of you lonely,” she fumbled on the platform.

  “I won’t be,” Anna said, and it was hard to imagine her lonely; she was so self-contained.

  “I’ll write every day. I’ll post the first letter tomorrow, from Chicago.”

  “All right, Mama.”

  “Telephone any time; I’ve left the can full of coins. The telephone is in the main house, but they’ll ring the bell if I’m not there.”

  “I remember.”

  None of this was right, but Agnes couldn’t seem to stop. “Mrs. Mucciarone is more than pleased to cook for you. I’ve already paid for this week. You can pick up the dish on your way home tomorrow.”

  “Fine, Mama.”

  “And return it in the morning.”

  “Yes.”

  “You must give her your ration coupons.”

  “Of course.”

  “And you’ll visit Lydia?”

  “Every Sunday.”

  The train’s whistle blew. Agnes felt her daughter’s impatience that she go, and it made her want to cleave, as if holding Anna would somehow awaken in her daughter the need to be held. Agnes clasped her fiercely, trying through sheer force to open the folded part of Anna, so deeply recessed. For a hallucinatory moment, the sinewy shoulders she held seemed to be Eddie’s. Agnes was hugging goodbye the whole of her life: husband, daughter, and fragile younger daughter whom she’d loved the most. She climbed aboard the second-class sleeper and waved to Anna from the window. The train began to move, raising a flock of flapping arms. It came to Agnes that this was the very station—perhaps the very platform—where she had arrived, at seventeen, to seek her fortune. As she waved, she thought, This is the end of the story.

  The train rounded a corner, and everyone’s arms dropped as though a string holding them aloft had been cut. People left quickly to make room for new travelers boarding the train across the platform, new loved ones sending them off. Anna stayed where she was, watching the empty track. At last she climbed the steps to the concourse, turning sideways to let soldiers and families rush past. A novel awareness began to assert itself: there was nowhere she needed to be. Just minutes ago, she’d been rushing like the people on those steps, but now she’d no reason to rush or even to walk. The weirdness of this sensation strengthened when Anna found herself back on Seventh Avenue. She stood in the twilight, wondering whether to turn left or right. Uptown or downtown? She’d money in her pocketbook; she could go wherever she wanted. How she’d craved the freedom of not having to worry about her mother! Yet it arrived as a kind of slackness, like the fall of those waving arms when the train turned.

  She began walking north, toward Forty-second Street, resolved to see a picture at the New Amsterdam. Shadow of a Doubt was only ten minutes in when she reached the theater; she could sit in the very hall—perhaps the very seat—where, as a little girl, she’d watched her mother dance. But Anna no longer wanted to sit and watch a scary picture. She wanted to mirror the purpose that seemed to fuel everyone else on Forty-second Street: clutches of laughing sailors; girls with hair pinned and sprayed; elderly couples, the ladies in fur, all moving in haste through the murky half-light. Anna watched them searchingly. How did they know where to go?

  She decided to head back home. Walking toward the IND on Sixth Avenue, she passed a flea circus, a chow-meinery, a sign advertising lectures on what killed Rudolph Valentino. Gradually she began to notice other solitary figures lingering in doorways and under awnings: people with no obvious place they needed to be. Through the plate-glass window of Grant’s at the corner of Sixth, she saw soldiers and sailors eating alone, even a girl or two. Anna watched them through the glass while, behind her, newspaper vendors bawled out the evening headlines: “Tripoli falls!” “Russians gaining on Rostov!” “Nazis say the Reich is threatened!” To Anna, these sounded like captions to the solitary diners. The war had shaken people loose. These isolated people in Grant’s had been shaken loose. And now she, too, had been shaken loose. She sensed how easily she might slide into a cranny of the dimmed-out city and vanish. The possibility touched her physically, like the faint coaxing suction of an undertow. It frightened her, and she hurried toward the subway entrance.

  But when she reached the stairs to the IND, curiosity about her new state kept Anna from descending just yet. She continued to Fifth Avenue, where faint streetlights smoldered along its dusky cavern. The public library hulked like a morgue. H
er father had watched that library being built on the site of a reservoir when he was a boy. This fact returned to Anna a moment ahead of her father’s voice, which murmured so casually that it seemed always to have been there: Top hats up and down the street . . . pampered horses too good for a carrot if you held one up . . . a single mansion where the whole Plaza Hotel is now, can you feature that? His voice: offhand, confiding, dry from weariness and smoke. His voice in the car, even when she wasn’t listening.

  After years of distance, Anna’s father returned to her. She couldn’t see him, but she felt the knotty pain of his hands in her armpits as he slung her off the ground to carry her. She heard the muffled jingle of coins in his trouser pockets. His hand was a socket she affixed hers to always, wherever they went, even when she didn’t care to. Anna stopped walking, stunned by the power of these impressions. Without thinking, she lifted her fingers to her face, half expecting the warm, bitter smell of his tobacco.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  * * *

  One of the queer facts of Dexter’s long association with Mr. Q.—nearly thirty years, if you counted from when he first become enamored of the minions in his father’s restaurant—was how rarely he saw the man. Four times a year at most, unless there was trouble. Yet Mr. Q. was omnipresent: the silent partner and primary investor in all of Dexter’s schemes, the first to profit from them. The transit of money between them was ongoing and intricate. It took the form of legitimate checks and surreptitious bundles that moved in both directions—Dexter’s ultimate job being the protection of his boss’s gargantuan illegal earnings from the arachnid appetite of the Bureau of Internal Revenue. No man had the power to intimidate Mr. Q., but the mechanistic forces of taxation and audit were another story. Even the great Al Capone had succumbed. It was the syndicate no syndicate could beat.