Manhattan Beach

by Jennifer Egan

  “You pass this one with flying colors, too?” Bascombe asked, glancing in Anna’s general direction.

  “No, it’s my first time,” she said, sounding overly bubbly to herself. “And I wasn’t so very good in the dress. They’re just using me to needle you.”

  “I figured.”

  This irked her. “I did untie the knot.”

  A silence overtook the group as the air warmed and grew close. “Try to whistle,” Bascombe said.

  They all tried, including Anna, but no one could make a sound. “What the hell,” someone said.

  “It’s the pressure. Listen to our voices,” Bascombe said. “I promise mine ain’t always this squeaky.”

  Anna tested her own voice softly while the men drowned her out with impressions of Tweety Bird and Bugs Bunny. The more they were able to forget her, the easier they seemed.

  The recompression chamber reduced their overall ranks by four more—so reported a euphoric Lieutenant Axel before dismissing them at the end of the first day. Sacco and Mohele had ear pain; Hammerstein began to wheeze; and McBride “felt funny in the head” and was quickly removed.

  The next four days were spent in the classroom, where the lieutenant lectured them on diving physics, standard equipment and maintenance, air composition, and depth charts. For every hour spent at a depth of thirty-three feet or more, they would have to spend eight hours topside in order to be considered “clean” to dive again. “There’s no shortcut, boys,” he admonished them. “Don’t go playing the tough guy unless you want nitrogen bubbles coming out through your ears and eyes and nostrils until every soft tissue in your body is hemorrhaging. The longest you can spend at a depth of forty feet without recompression is two hours. At fifty feet it’s seventy-eight minutes. These shouldn’t be numbers you have to think about—they should be as familiar as your birthday, your anniversary, or December seventh, 1941.”

  There was a lesson on potential hazards. “As divers, you’ll earn two dollars and eighty-five cents an hour,” Lieutenant Axel said. “But I’ve noticed civilian divers sometimes forget that ‘hazard pay’ means the work is dangerous.” With the lip-smacking relish of a man reading off a dessert menu, he described fouled airlines; being dragged by a boat, “blowing up,” and flying to the surface like a cork; nitrogen narcosis; and of course, the infamous “squeeze.” Littenberg and Maloney, both married with several children, did not return the next morning. “Went home and spoke with their wives,” Lieutenant Axel gloated. “We lose a couple that way every time.”

  Then a troubling reflection passed visibly over his childish brow. “Say, Katz,” he said in an undertone. “How many have we left?”

  There was one Negro: a welder called Marle who looked close to Anna’s age and completed each challenge with ease. She was keenly aware of Marle but also eager to avoid him—a wish that shamed her, although she sensed Marle shared it. They sat at opposite corners of the classroom—Anna in back, where she wouldn’t feel watched from behind; Marle in front, where he took tiny, meticulous notes with his left hand. On the rare occasions when they crossed paths, recognition flared between them, and they both slid their eyes away.

  At the end of each day, the divers already trained returned to Building 569 from their jobs in Wallabout Bay or from working on the freshwater pipeline that ran from Staten Island to a navy monitoring center elsewhere in the harbor. Anna and the other trainees dispersed into the dusk, some through a small gate near the diving tank, others the long way, through the Sands Street gate. Anna always took the longer route to look for Nell, although she no longer really expected to find her.

  On the fifth night of diving school, she spotted Rose leaving the inspection building. They embraced and walked arm in arm out the Sands Street gate. “The shop isn’t the same without you,” Rose said. “All the girls say so.”

  “No one to gossip about,” Anna said.

  “They say Mr. Voss is pining. He looks pale and slightly thinner.”

  “Sounds like they’re the ones in love with him.”

  Rose chortled. Anna walked her to Flushing Avenue and waited with her for the streetcar, hoping her friend would ask her to supper. But when the crowded car arrived, Rose hopped aboard and seized an overhead strap, waving goodbye to Anna through the window.

  Anna watched the streetcar slide east toward Clinton Hill. Only when she turned to walk toward her own streetcar stop on Hudson did solitude engulf her. In daylight it retreated; she’d tried in vain, during diving school, even to remember what it felt like. But at dusk it closed back around her with macabre comfort. It had a pulse and a heartbeat. Its clutch removed Anna from the realm of mothers pulling children by the hand, and men hurrying home with evening papers under their arms. She climbed onto her streetcar, accordion doors knocking shut behind her, and watched the night slide past outside the window. It quivered with a danger against which her lonely routine formed a last thin line of defense. But what was the threat?

  Supper awaited her, still warm, at Mr. Mucciarone’s grocery counter. As Anna took the covered dish from Silvio, a memory brushed her like a cat circling her shins: Lydia, whimpering in Silvio’s arms. In her own building, she opened the mail slot and found the usual letter from her mother, along with V-mails from two neighborhood boys. She climbed the stairs, mail in one hand and supper in the other, passing the Feeneys’ two apartments, which had been like an extension of her own when she was small. In her solitude, she couldn’t bring herself to knock. You mustn’t, she thought. They aren’t expecting you.

  The same thing happened when she imagined using the public telephone at White’s to call Stella or Lillian or Aunt Brianne. She’d gone to Casablanca with Brianne and skated with her friends at the Empire Roller Dome. But at the end of these interludes, the others returned to their homes and Anna to her isolation. No one could protect her from it.

  She bolted the apartment door, pulled down the shades, and turned on every light and the radio. First news, then music. She’d abandoned her favorites, Count Basie and Benny Goodman; their boiling sound was too suggestive of the city’s furrowed darkness. Instead, she turned the dial in search of Tommy Dorsey, Glenn Miller, even the Andrews Sisters, whose syrupy crooning used to gag her. Now it had the reassuring effect of whistling as you walked on a dark street. She read her mother’s letter. Her missives were short and stuck mostly to facts: the punishing Minnesota winter, the health of the cows and sheep, news of Anna’s cousins in training or overseas.

  In each letter, her mother seemed at one point to forget herself—or Anna—and wander into more introspective territory: I keep expecting to wake up one morning and know what to do, the way I knew to come to New York after high school. But any decision I make seems to last about twenty-four hours, if that.

  And another time:

  The boys of my youth are fat, balding, and in three cases dead (1 turned tractor, 1 riding accident, 1 throat cancer). I look at my face and see no real change; obviously I am kidding myself!

  And once:

  The moon out here is too bright.

  When she’d finished eating, Anna cleaned and dried Mrs. Mucciarone’s dish and set it aside to return the following morning. She began a letter to her mother, taking satisfaction in relaying details that would not have interested her had she been here. Tonight she wrote about Lieutenant Axel’s glee at frightening them. She wrote until she felt tired enough to sleep, then sealed the letter and turned off the radio and all of the lights except the one in her bedroom. She lay in her bed and hugged Lydia’s pillow. For as long as she could remember, there had been another creature nearby at night, breathing, radiating warmth. She clutched the pillow as if plugging a wound, and inhaled the faint essence of her sister that still clung to it.

  Last, she opened her Ellery Queen. For all their varied and exotic settings, mystery novels seemed to happen in a single realm—a landscape vaguely familiar to Anna from long ago. Finishing one always left her disappointed, as if something about it had been wrong, an expe
ctation unfulfilled. Her dissatisfaction accounted for the number of mysteries she read, often returning several to the library in a week. Since her mother’s departure, these novels had become trapdoors leading Anna to memories of accompanying her father as a little girl. Holding his hand on an elevator while an old man with mussed hair sleepily turned a crank. Walking beside him down an empty corridor lined with doors, gold lettering on pebbled glass panes, the sound of their footsteps twanging the walls. Looking down from a skyscraper window at yellow taxicabs buzzing like bees under greenish thunderclouds. Anna knew to keep her back turned until she heard the rustle of paper, the weight of a parcel sliding across a desk. A drawer whispering shut. Afterward there would be a rush of ease, everyone suddenly jolly.

  What had he been doing, exactly? Was it dangerous? Here was the mystery that seemed now to have been flashing coded signals at Anna from behind every Agatha Christie and Rex Stout and Raymond Chandler she’d read. Becoming aware of this deeper story made it burn through the allegorical surface of whatever plot she was reading until she found herself not reading at all, but holding the book and remembering. Puzzling. Mr. Styles was part of the mystery. But that Mr. Styles—who had known her father—seemed a different man from the one who had taken her with Lydia to Manhattan Beach. His act of kindness had left Anna with one of her happiest memories. Reverting to Mr. Styles the nightclub owner, the gangster—or former gangster—felt like forfeiting their exalted, mystical day. She refused. She returned to her book and read herself to sleep. In the middle of the night, she woke and turned out the light.

  * * *

  In class the next morning she heard a faint murmur, distinct from the voice of Lieutenant Axel. To her left, Bascombe sat looking straight ahead. His expression was blank, yet somehow Anna knew the murmuring issued from him. Was he talking to himself? The topic was rules and regulations—the importance of abstaining from beer twenty-four hours before a dive.

  “They tell you all kinds of bunk that ain’t true,” the patter continued. “Bubbles in the blood got nothing to do with bubbly drinks. Not that I give a damn—I’m a teetotaler.”

  She stared straight ahead, certain that Lieutenant Axel would hear him and blame her.

  “Don’t let ’em fill up your head with that crud. They think you’ll believe anything because you’re a girl. They’ve no intention of letting you dive, by the way.”

  “What do you mean?” Anna hissed despite herself.

  “They expect you’ll wash out when we get in the water next week,” he reported in a monotone. “Overheard ’em.”

  Anna’s pulse began to race. She stared at Lieutenant Axel and remembered their earlier meeting—the hopelessness of trying to persuade him even after she’d worn the dress. Did he still plan to thwart her?

  In her distraction, she forgot to put on her coat before leaving Building 569 to walk to the building ways cafeteria for lunch. Bascombe brought the coat and caught up with her. “Climbing the ladder in the wet dress is the hardest part,” he muttered as if still in the classroom, falling into step beside her. “Especially for lightweight divers.”

  “You’ve dived before?” she asked, keeping her own eyes forward.

  “Nah. I worked as a tender in Puget Sound.”

  “Canada?”

  “West Coast. Near Seattle, Washington. It was a body job: a contract diver was pulling corpses out of two carriers before they went into dry dock. January 1942. Yep, you’re thinking right, you’re thinking right: they’d towed ’em all the way from Hawaii.”

  She glanced at him, disbelieving.

  “Top-secret. Not one of us navy.”

  “Was there a second tender?”

  “No, ma’am. Just me. Diver taught me what to do. He bagged the bodies underwater, and I pulled ’em up. His air supply came direct from the dock.”

  Anna liked this way of talking: an exchange of information without having to witness the wet depth of another person’s gaze. “Is that why you want to dive?” she asked.

  “I suppose,” he said. “Keep trying to join the navy. Tried in Seattle, tried again in Frisco, then San Diego, but I can’t get my goddamn eyes to read those itty-bitty letters on the chart. They say if you’re good enough, you can cross over from civilian diving into navy.”

  Anna glanced at Bascombe’s face. For the first time, his scowling impatience and fuming concentration were legible as striving. “You came all the way out here,” she said.

  “You bet I came. No better place for civilian diving than New York City. We’ve had the Normandie belly-up at Pier 88 since she caught fire a year ago—that’s a thousand-foot-long training ground. They’ve opened up a whole salvage school to get her righted, and you know where she’ll come to be refitted when they finally do? This Naval Yard right here. And something else,” he added as they approached the entrance to Building 81. “Doesn’t make a damn bit of difference about your eyesight; you can’t see a thing underwater.” With that, he left her side so abruptly, it was as if they hadn’t been speaking at all.

  In their second week of training, some of the younger diving students began leaving the Yard together at day’s end. Anna heard them discussing bars—Leo’s, Joe Romanelli’s, the Oval Bar, and the Square Bar—the latter two kitty-corner from each other on Sands Street and owned by rival brothers. Now that the Germans had finally surrendered Stalingrad, morale was running high. Whenever a cluster of camaraderie began to form near Anna, she fell back, fading from the scene at just the moment when it might have seemed rude not to invite her. It was uncanny, given the distraction of her presence, how easily she could vanish. Marle, the Negro, had perfected this art. Though physically imposing, he’d a way of detaching himself from the general flow until it rushed on without him. Only Anna noticed, but she hid her awareness; an allegiance between her and Marle would jeopardize what slender ties fastened each of them to the larger group. And so the estrangement they had in common estranged them doubly from each other.

  Most nights, a girl with thin blond hair awaited Bascombe outside the Sands Street gate. Anna gleaned from his conversation with the other divers that she was his fiancée, Ruby, whom he’d met after arriving in Brooklyn last summer. For a Brooklyn girl, Ruby was bizarrely ill-equipped for winter, shivering in a thin coat, then lassoing Bascombe in a lariat of sinewy arms and hanging at his neck, her forehead pressed to his. Anna liked Bascombe, which was partly to say that she liked herself in his company. Their flat, unvalenced exchanges were the closest she had ever come to feeling like a man. Bascombe in the grip of those greedy arms would be another matter, but Anna felt no envy. She had the Bascombe she wanted.

  * * *

  On the morning of their first dive, twelve divers loaded up the barge, and Lieutenant Axel steered it around the building ways, jostling waxy-looking ice cakes and hugging the piers to avoid boat traffic. Men watched from the piers, just as Anna had once done. She was nervous, knowing that Lieutenant Axel expected her to fail. But then he wanted all of them to fail. That was no secret.

  Lieutenant Axel anchored the barge off the foot of Dry Dock 1. Two divers would go down at once, he explained, each with two tenders, while the rest would turn the massive flywheels on the two air compressors, one supplying air to each diver. They would rotate positions through the day until everyone had dived.

  With a show of randomness, he chose Anna and Newmann to go down first. But Anna had spent enough time studying his baby ancient’s face to recognize mischief spidering across it. The lieutenant was up to something. Perhaps her job would be to shame the others, as before—Anna half hoped for this, since it meant succeeding. He selected Bascombe and Marle, the Negro, to be her tenders. Only then did Anna catch something amiss: Marle, a welder, should not have been on the barge at all. Welders and burners were making their first dives back on the West Street Pier in the new diving tank: a twenty-by-seventeen-foot cylinder with portholes for Katz and Greer to look in. Now she understood. The devilry lay in forcing proximity upon herself and Marle, the
two outsiders who had worked so hard to stay apart. The intent was to rattle them and thereby worsen their chances.

  Anna saw her own disquiet reflected in Marle’s face. Bascombe’s expression yielded nothing, but his jaw muscles flexed like the gills of a gasping fish. Failure was Bascombe’s enemy; he wanted no part of it. An agony of unease engulfed all three of them as the men held the canvas envelope for Anna and she stepped gingerly inside, trying not to touch them. A tender’s job was to hold and guide the diver, but being handled by these men, one a Negro, awakened in Anna a balking shyness she was certain they could detect. All of them lurched through the early steps: wrist straps and shoes and tightening of leg laces. But as Bascombe and Marle were pulling the rubber collar over the brass studs, routine began to neutralize discomfort. They tightened wing nuts over the studs, calling back and forth across Anna’s shoulders. At last they lifted the hat over her head, and she was surrounded by its tinny odor. Two hundred pounds bore down upon her when she stood. She’d remembered the fact of this weight but not the brutal sensation of being crushed by it. Could she sustain it? She could. And now? Yes. It was like someone knocking continually at a door, awaiting a new reply. And now?

  Bascombe glanced through the faceplate, as pleased as she’d ever seen him—which was to say not frowning. “Under five minutes,” he said. “Newmann’s collar ain’t even fully sealed.”

  Trying not to stagger, Anna shuffled toward the diving ladder. Marle checked her umbilical cord—air hose and lifeline, bound together—and she heard the hiss of air entering the helmet. At the ladder, they turned her around so her back was to the water. Marle looked in at her, his eyes engaging Anna’s with a lively, antic gaze. “Pleasure to meet you, Miss Kerrigan.”

  “Likewise, Mr. Marle.”

  “Good luck down there.”

  “Why, thank you.”

  Marle closed the faceplate and sealed it. They’d had their first conversation.