Manhattan Beach

by Jennifer Egan

  He quoted Arthur Berringer knowingly; it pleased Dexter to feel adjacency between the two. He’d been too lowly at the time of his wedding to warrant Mr. Q.’s attendance; as far as he knew, his boss and father-in-law had never met. But he’d sensed in each an oblique curiosity about the other, and it was conceivable that their paths might have crossed without his knowledge. He rather liked the thought.

  “Mr. Stalin won’t . . . expect a reward?” Mr. Q. asked.

  “He’ll get it. But his country will be wrecked.”

  Mr. Q. lowered his chin, his version of a nod.

  “The Europeans,” Dexter went on. “Broke and broken. That leaves Uncle. I want us—you—to have a legitimate part in the victory. A seat at the table.”

  Mr. Q. roused himself for the Socratic rumble that inevitably followed, sometimes extending over a subsequent visit. “As long as we’ve . . . money in hand,” he said, “we’ll have our . . . seat.”

  “At the table,” Dexter said. “Not underneath it.”

  “The advantage?”

  “Power. Legitimate power.”

  “All power is . . . legitimate.”

  “All right, then, legitimacy. Which would let us use our power in ways we can’t now.”

  He was tempted to air his suspicion that a newly strengthened United States might use the rule of law to make their way of life extinct. Tammany had already gone—something no one had believed possible. But Mr. Q. didn’t like worries. And Dexter sensed the idea already working on him.

  “Lucky made a deal,” Mr. Q. said, meaning Luciano. “Helped Uncle seal . . . up the port.”

  “And it’ll likely get him sprung from Comstock.”

  “They came to him.”

  “We’ll go to them.”

  “And offer . . . what?”

  Here was the leap. Dexter took a long breath and leaned across the table. “We buy an issue of war bonds at a discount and resell them through every arm and leg of our business. Put everything liquid into the purchase. Sell off what we don’t want and put that in, too. Our business becomes the war bond business.”

  “We’re . . . a bank.”

  “In a manner of speaking, yes. Temporarily. When the war ends, our money is clean. We take it anywhere we want.”

  The pressure canner had begun to hiss, steam mounting behind a pin-size hole in the top. Mr. Q. tottered from his chair and clamped down a weight, sealing off this vent and anchoring the lid into place. A needle gauge on the side of the pot began to jump. He turned his soft brown eyes back to Dexter, who sensed that the moment had come to play his trump.

  “If you work for Uncle, boss, Internal Revenue can’t touch you. Probably ever again.” The sealed pot began to shudder on the stove directly behind Dexter’s head. “How long does it have to stay on?” he asked mildly.

  “Long enough to . . . kill the botulism spores,” Mr. Q. said. “Boiling isn’t enough. The jar has to . . . stand a certain pressure.” He remained upright, steadying the canner with a floral pot holder that was an artifact of Annalisa, his late wife.

  “You’re a . . . patriot,” Mr. Q. said, regarding Dexter fondly.

  “It’s the right thing to do,” Dexter said. “How often can we say that?”

  “Our interests and . . . Uncle’s are . . . aligned.”

  Dexter was surprised at how easy Mr. Q. was making this. Had he already been thinking along the same lines? The canner thrashed like a trapped squirrel against the cast-iron stove, threatening to wrest free of Mr. Q.’s quavering pressure. Dexter stood up, lest the pot disgorge its scalding contents over his head.

  “We all want to win,” Mr. Q. said softly amid the racket.

  Dexter found himself grinning, he couldn’t help it. And Mr. Q. grinned back. There was something wrong with his smile, something missing—teeth, was always one’s first thought, but he had his teeth; they were just very, very small. The result was a dark, asymmetrical void, more gash than face. Dexter’s own smile wilted at the sight of it.

  “Have you . . . spoken to . . . Uncle about this?” Mr. Q. asked.

  “Of course not,” Dexter exclaimed, grateful for the shrieking canner to mask his astonishment. Could Mr. Q. possibly think him stupid enough—disloyal or crazy enough—to talk to the feds without his blessing?

  Mr. Q. covered the flame, and the cacophony collapsed into silence so profound that it made Dexter want to pop his eardrums.

  “Trouble is,” Mr. Q. breathed, “you open a channel . . . now it exists. Hard to regulate what . . . passes through or . . . what direction it . . . moves.”

  Dexter said nothing. What the hell was he getting at?

  “This may be your . . . blind spot.”

  Kerrigan. It was the first allusion Mr. Q. had made to that mistake since assuring Dexter it had been forgotten. Apparently, it was not forgotten.

  And now his boss was holding Dexter’s cheeks, his hands soft and clumsy and full of blood. “We have many plans in our future,” he said. “Many, many plans.”

  Dexter went rigid. There was a code to Mr. Q.’s utterances: repetition invoked a law of opposites. “Many plans,” uttered twice, meant: not this plan.

  “Many plans,” Mr. Q. said again, drawing out the words as he gazed tenderly into Dexter’s eyes.

  No plans.

  Meetings with Mr. Q. hewed to a stealthy efficiency, and Dexter found himself outside the front door just moments later. His boss embraced him as when he’d first arrived, affection undiminished—magnified, even. He favored Dexter, adored him. Dexter knew this.

  “Ah! Slipped my . . . mind,” Mr. Q. said, knocking his forehead with the hull of his hand. “How many . . . ripe tomatoes you . . . had this week?”

  “They haven’t any taste,” Dexter mouthed. He was trying to absorb what had just happened. He stood on the porch while his boss disappeared back inside the house. Weak sunlight glistened on piles of shoveled snow. The local children played far away from this block; aside from the bawling of Mr. Q.’s livestock, there was no sound but distant harbor noises. Mr. Q.’s horse cart was parked at the curb. He still used it to deliver produce to his store—a rarity nowadays except for milkmen, who’d yet to find an automobile that would advance to their next stop while they delivered bottles at the last.

  Eventually, Mr. Q. returned and pressed a small brown bag full of ripe tomatoes into Dexter’s hands, along with a jar of peach jam, unlabeled. If Dexter wasn’t mistaken, it was the very jam he’d helped his boss scoop into jars years before. Christ, how long did botulism prevention last? “Thank you, boss,” he said.

  “Good to see you, son,” Mr. Q. wheezed. He leaned in the doorframe, gasping from his errand. It seemed to Dexter he’d declined markedly in the months since his last visit. In the bald winter light, he looked almost pale. “You should visit . . . more often. Come more . . . often. Don’t . . . leave an old man alone.”

  Meaning: he’d exhausted his time with Mr. Q. for several months. Dexter took the fruit and preserves, kissed his boss on both cheeks, and walked to his car.

  He drove with little idea where he was going. He wanted to think, but his need to move—to act—made it difficult to think unless he was driving. He was dumbfounded that Mr. Q. had rejected his idea out of hand. Had he really? Was that entirely clear? Was a wait of several months—the soonest he could conceive of returning unless asked—the same as a rejection? Had Mr. Q. fully understood what he was proposing?

  He soon found himself at Coney Island, everything closed for winter, the clam and hot dog joints shuttered over. As a kid, Dexter had liked this time of year best; no more day-trippers. Just the people who lived here—or came, from all over, to eat at his pop’s restaurant.

  He parked and climbed onto the deserted boardwalk. Coast Guard sentries patrolled the waterfront. Muddy brown waves shoved in from the Lower Bay against the snowy sand. He thought of his pop: a man with a passion to cook—to serve. Dexter had revered him until around the time his mother died, when he was fourteen. At that poin
t his adulation had reversed itself without warning, yielding a caricature of his father as cringing and servile. Dexter couldn’t dispel it.

  He’d said nothing to his pop about his first visit to Mr. Q.’s yellow house, but the memory of it lived in Dexter’s belly like a snake, luxuriantly rearranging its coils. When his pop had learned of it some months later, he’d yanked Dexter by the ear into his office, although by then Dexter was sixteen and bigger than his pop. His father stared at him, nostrils flaring. “This is the single thing on God’s earth I’ve most feared,” he said.

  “More than Ma dying?” Dexter countered, wriggling his feet in the stiff new spats he’d been flush enough to buy.

  “More.”

  “More than going broke?”

  “More. You take money from that man, you belong to him for life.”

  “I’d rather take his money than give him mine.”

  Such bald disrespect normally would have earned Dexter a cuff. But his pop leaned toward him urgently. “You’re not of age,” he said. “If you pull away now, he’ll let you go.”

  “Pull away!”

  “Do it now and do it clean. Put the blame on me.”

  Dexter saw that his father was frightened—for him. And out of some crude wish to reassure him, he said, “Mr. Q. is an old man, Pop. He won’t live forever.”

  His father slapped his face with such force that tears sprayed from Dexter’s eyes like juice from an apple smashed between the jaws of a horse.

  “I’m not going to say don’t talk that way,” his pop said very softly. “Don’t think that way. Or he’ll guess it. He’ll sniff you out.”

  “You don’t know him, Pop.” His voice shook.

  “Mr. Q. has been around here a long time. I’ve seen people disappear like they were never born. One day to the next. You think I’m kidding? You think he’s an old man, helping his wife can the fresh fruit? Hah!”

  “You’ve never met him.”

  “One day to the next. And no one mentions their name. Like God never made them.”

  “Maybe you should be careful.”

  “I don’t take his money.”

  “He might read your thoughts.”

  “I’d tell him to his face.”

  “You might disappear, Pop. You ever thought about that?”

  He wanted his father to feel the magnitude of Mr. Q.’s power, his own comparative frailty. But his pop’s fear had gone, leaving only disgust. “Get out.”

  Dexter left the restaurant and in some sense never returned, although of course he came and went. And those were mythical years to work for Mr. Q., thanks to Congressman Andrew Volstead of Minnesota and his ilk, who believed that drink would bring ruination upon the United States. Dexter was barely nineteen when the legislation passed, and defying it was a delirious kick. He loved driving fine automobiles on country roads and was good at giving chase. In the worst case, there were always woods, and he could run like hell. Flattening himself by a brook to mask the sound of his panting, smelling moss and pine and ash, a splatter of stars overhead—beauty and exhilaration beyond anything he could have fathomed.

  Dexter got back in his automobile and drove a few blocks north, to the corner of Mermaid and West Nineteenth. The restaurant had closed in ’34. Dexter could have saved it, but his pop would accept no more than relief from his own protection payments. The cancer got him at fifty-eight, although Dexter had never really heard him cough before the bank took his restaurant away.

  It had been years since he’d stood on this corner, yet the place looked eerily unchanged: the cockeyed window shades and dusty bar, the gold lettering of his own unpronounceable name flaking away inside the window glass. A single broken table, upended. Dexter must have served his father’s famous pescatore at that table, a white linen napkin hung crisply over his forearm as he poured the wine. Electrified by the invisible landscape he’d discovered: a latticework of codes and connections that shrank the everyday world into nonexistence. At times he’d thought he could actually hear Mr. Q.’s power pulsing through ordinary life inaudibly as a dog whistle. Nothing could have stopped him from finding his way to its source.

  “What I want for you, Dexter,” Mr. Q. had told him on that first visit, “is that you be your own man. Your own man.” Cupping Dexter’s peach-fuzzed cheeks in his hot, heavy hands, gazing into his lovestruck eyes: “Your own man, you understand?”

  Dexter had understood his words and believed them. Only now, reading the code of repetitions and opposites, did he know what Mr. Q. had really meant.

  He’s an old man, Dexter thought, recalling his boss’s labored breathing on the stoop this afternoon. He won’t live forever. And felt again the sting of his father’s slap, the wet ache in his eyes.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  * * *

  Lieutenant Axel’s reason for calling Anna back became clear on the first morning of training, when he hollered at the group of thirty-five volunteers, “The dress weighs two hundred pounds. The hat alone weighs fifty-six. The shoes together are thirty-five. Now, before you start rolling your eyes about carrying all that weight, you should know that that girl standing over there—she’s on the tall side, but she’s no Sherman tank, like a lot of the females you see around here—she not only wore the dress without bellyaching, walked in the dress without bellyaching, but she also untied a bowline on a bight wearing three-fingered gloves. How many of you gents can even tie a bowline on a bight?”

  Two hands rose. The other men glanced warily at Anna. She felt herself blush—from embarrassment but also from false pretenses. She hadn’t known the name of the knot she’d untied, much less how to tie one. Nor had any of these volunteers—mostly from the trades, by the burly look of them—appeared to cower at the prospect of shouldering two hundred pounds. Lieutenant Axel was a man who rejoiced in discomfiting others; with his wizened, beardless face, he brought to mind a sadistic child. In the course of that day, he managed to call attention to DelBanco’s fatness, Greer’s slightness, Hammerstein’s asthma, Majorne’s “four eyes,” Karetzky’s flat feet, Fantano’s slight limp, McBride’s poor balance, Hogan’s flatulence, and so on. Most of the men were too old for the service, but to Lieutenant Axel, a master naval diver at the time of his retirement, they might as well have been 4-F. And what better way to rattle them than with the threat of failing where a girl had succeeded?

  Everyone except Anna had to wear the dress. For each wearer there were two tenders, just as Katz and Greer had been for her. Lieutenant Axel stood on a bench, bellowing instructions into a snowfall outside Building 569. Anna was back tender to a machinist called Olmstead, whose wrists were almost too bulky for the straps to buckle around the sleeves of his size-three dress. When at last Anna managed to fasten one, Olmstead brayed an ostentatious groan of relief, followed by a sly look. She kept her head down and feigned oblivion, relieved that the other tender—fair-haired, with a blank, dyspeptic face—seemed genuinely oblivious. Together he and Anna buckled the belt onto Olmstead, who then stood to be “jocked up.”

  “Tighter, darlin’,” Olmstead crooned as Anna hiked the straps under his groin for the other tender to fasten to the front of the belt. “One more good pull. Ohhh, there you go, darlin’. That’s it, just a little . . . uh . . .”

  “Call me ‘darlin’, one more time, pal,” said the front tender in an inflectionless drawl, “you’ll get it in the puss.”

  “Not you! Her!” Olmstead was mortified.

  “It ain’t her pulling.” The tender’s eyes were narrow and metallic, like fishhooks. He never glanced at Anna.

  Olmstead spat on the pier and fell silent. When Anna and the other tender hoisted the enormous helmet to lower it over his head, he said, “Wait.” Turning to Anna, he asked, “Can I breathe inside there?”

  “Of course,” she said coolly, fighting a tremble in her arms as she and the front tender held the helmet aloft. “It’s a little musty, but you’ll breathe just fine.”

  “Wait,” Olmstead said again.
/>   “We’re falling behind,” the front tender said. “On it goes.”

  They lowered the helmet, matching its threads to those in the breastplate collar and screwing it on. The front tender tapped the top of the helmet, meaning that Olmstead should stand and be inspected by Lieutenant Axel. He rose from the bench and began to thrash. The dress baffled his movements and the shoes rooted him to the pier, giving the impression of a tree harried by a gale. Only when the front tender managed to open his faceplate did a roar yaw through the premises: “I can’t breathe. Get me out! I can’t breathe in here!”

  Lieutenant Axel was there with Greer a moment later, expertly removing the helmet, releasing Olmstead from the belt, collar, shoes, and dress. The machinist slunk away from the pier. With pleasure verging on glee, Lieutenant Axel informed the group, “That, gentlemen, was what they call claustrophobia: fear of enclosed spaces. There’s usually one claustrophobic in every group, and I like to flush him out early. Such men have no business trying to become divers.”

  “What a bum,” the front tender muttered—to himself, Anna supposed, since he seemed unaware of her. “We dressed him perfect, and we’ve no credit for it.”

  A second test involved the recompression chamber, whose purpose was to simulate the pressure of being underwater. Men whose eustachian tubes were blocked by ear damage or infection would have trouble equalizing the pressure on their eardrums. These unfortunates would experience piercing pain and even ruptured eardrums, should they decide to “play the hero” (the lieutenant warned, chuckling) and suffer in silence. Those with lung problems might just find themselves unable to breathe inside the tank. And then there were the men whose bodies responded to pure oxygen under pressure by going into seizures, no one quite knew why.

  When they were suitably jittery, Lieutenant Axel admitted them to the recompression chamber in groups of six. It was a room-size cylinder divided into sections, the largest of which contained a bench where five men crammed together like pigeons on a wire to leave space around Anna. The expressionless front tender was among them; Paul Bascombe, she learned when all of them introduced themselves.