The queer part was, he’d given hardly a thought to Miss Feeney since driving her to Manhattan Beach right after Thanksgiving. The crippled sister had haunted him a bit, her lustrous eyes above billowing scarves returning to him at odd times for perhaps a week. The healthy one, no. Yet glimpsing her tonight in that green dress had brought a tightness to his chest. He’d watched her through his hidden window and waited for it to pass. But the feeling only ratcheted as he formed his disapproval of the company she kept: that cokie girl, mistress to another woman’s husband, and the date: a fruit, he’d put money on it. Watching her in that dress, he’d found himself recalling Bitsy’s moans through the bathroom door.
As they crossed the Brooklyn Bridge, she told him she’d become a diver. She said it in a relaxed way—to break the silence, he supposed, and appreciated. It happened to be interesting, both the topic and the sensation of talking to the same girl in the same car, but with an entirely different object before them. He asked about the equipment, how she breathed underwater, whether she’d bumped up against any dead bodies. But they might have been saying anything.
As he followed the curved shore toward Bay Ridge, Dexter knotted his fingers with hers, which were slender and warm. She pushed her thumb into the flesh of his palm, and a sensation like lightning tore through him, as if her hand were inside his trousers. The air in the car rang and shook. There was one cure for this, and that was to exhaust it.
The old boathouse was an unlikely choice for a tryst, having been the site of a number of Dexter’s business dealings over the years, not all of them pleasant. But the same advantages recommended it in both cases: it was isolated, private, padlocked. Not a mile east of his home, it had so far been spared the Coast Guard’s wartime reconfigurations. Dexter wondered each time he approached whether he would find it razed to the ground.
He parked on an empty street, and the car clicked and sighed into stillness. The dark was absolute. He leaned over and kissed her for the first time, his mind emptying at the lush taste of her mouth. Apparently, she was the last girl in New York who didn’t smoke. He sensed appetite beating inside her like a second heart, larger and softer than her real one, and his impulse—adolescent, surely—was to begin right here, right now. But that was too dangerous. He opened his door and came around and opened hers.
“Let’s look,” she said, and he realized she meant the sea, noticing only then how loud it was. They walked to the dead end and looked out at a ghostly procession of waves, like rows of people in white hats holding hands as they dove into oblivion. Dexter did what he’d promised himself he wouldn’t do: kissed her in the wide open. If it were warmer, he’d have liked to pull her down right here, as he’d done under the Coney Island boardwalk with more than one girl of his youth, bathers’ feet dropping grains of sand over them through gaps between planks. But there was no rush. They’d left the club before one; War-Time sunrise was not until eight. Time enough to do all that needed to be done.
The boathouse was a block over, beside a short pier. Dexter opened the padlock with his key and shoved the sticky door, sensing immediately that the place had been occupied since his last visit a few months before. He struck a match on his shoe and lit the wick of the hurricane lamp that was always just inside the door. Its rippling light confirmed his hunch: a whiskey bottle, cigarette butts. This hardly touched him in his present state. He needed to warm the place up. There was no electricity, just a squat stove that heated efficiently once it got going. He shoved in wood. The kindling was gone, but he found a newspaper and lit that, realizing too late that he should have checked the date to get a notion of when exactly someone had been here without his knowledge or approval.
He turned from the blazing stove, half expecting her to have disappeared in the time he’d spent absorbed in that housekeeping. But she was still there, pulling pins from her dark hair. Its lavish weight spilled over his hands when he held her. He put aside further practical concerns: should they lie on their coats; climb into one of the rowboats suspended from brackets on the walls? He braided his hands under her backside and lifted her off the floor, carrying her to a table pushed against the wall behind the stove. He perched her on its edge. There was almost no light here. He kissed her mouth and neck, then opened her coat and peeled up her dress and slip, exposing hose and garters. He kicked off his trousers and flattened himself along her bare belly, logs cracking in the stove behind them.
“Do you want this?” he whispered.
“Yes,” she said, at which the dumb, blind part of his brain lunged forward like a hound at a foxhunt. He peeled aside her panties and eased himself inside her, hearing his own relieved gasp as if from across the room. Moments later, he shuddered as if he’d been shot, knees buckling as he mashed her to him and spent himself. His own ragged breathing filled the room. When he could walk, he tossed their coats in front of the stove, where the heat had begun to gather, and helped her out of her dress and long gloves. He unhooked her brassiere and garter belt and unrolled her stockings slowly. She looked very young in the firelight. She lay back against the coats and shut her eyes, and now it could really begin, without a word. He moved his mouth over her body until she seemed not to breathe. When he parted her legs, she tasted like the sea, which he heard even now, a beat of waves just beyond the walls. She climaxed like someone in a seizure, and he was inside her again before she’d finished.
They slept fitfully, Dexter rising now and then to add wood to the stove. At some dark hour she woke him with her hands, touching him in the faint reddish light with such potency that he thought she must be on both sides of his skin, inhabiting him—how else could she know what he felt at each move she made? Her eyes were closed and he shut his own, drifting in a sweet agony that seemed to last hours. When at last she allowed him to finish, he left himself entirely, returning to his senses only to fall into laughter: in forty-one years of life, it had never been better than that. And all the while, another part of him was measuring the approach of dawn, eager to be done before it came. How much more would it take? She’d climbed on top of him, quivering like a bowstring for his touch, and he felt himself grow hard again. There would be no end, he thought—nothing but this, ever again. But he knew better than to believe it.
* * *
“Anna.”
The whisper pierced layers of filmy sleep and dropped sharply into her ear. She opened her eyes. Dull light leaked through the shuttered windows. The stove contained only embers. She was cold and needed to pee. He’d covered them with a coarse blanket, and she felt his bare flesh touching hers underneath it. “Anna,” he whispered, close to her ear. “I need to take you home.”
She held very still, her eyes barely open. She felt afraid to move. A memory of Nell’s date came to her from the night before: his unnatural stillness. Now she felt it, too: inertia to stave off disaster.
“Are you all right?” he asked.
“Yes,” she said. “Yes, I’m fine.” But she was not. The dawn, which normally brought relief from the misery of her nights, now threatened a catastrophic exposure. Her heart beat spasmodically, and her ears rang.
He rose and crossed the room, the first naked man she had ever seen: a towering stranger with coils of dark hair that seemed to pour from his chest down his torso and pool around an assemblage of private parts that brought to mind a pair of boots dangling by their laces from a lamppost. Anna had never experienced the aftermath of passion, arriving in secret to the basement hideout and sneaking away separately from Leon. There had been no gathering of clothing in daylight, no retrieval of a gun, which hung in its holster from the back of a chair. The depravity of what had transpired between herself and this gangster appalled her. Had she been drunk? Out of her mind? She tried to reason away panic: her mother would never know; it was her day off from the Naval Yard—she wasn’t truant or even tardy. But how would she get back inside her building in last night’s clothes without giving herself away? She needed to get out of here now, before it was fully light; to pee, bathe
, and fall asleep in her own bed before the new day properly began. She needed right now to be the last phase of a night already on its way to being erased.
She waited until he had his trousers on before rising unsteadily to her feet. With her back turned, she pulled on her panties, fastened her brassiere, and shimmied into her slip. She was still wearing her jewelry. One of her nylon stockings had caught on the stove and shriveled in the heat. She left her legs bare and stepped into her dress, signaling with her retreating posture that she wanted no assistance. Not that he was offering any. He seemed as distracted as she, squinting at the label on an empty liquor bottle. He picked up two cigarette butts from the floor, examined them, and let them drop. Anna buttoned her beaded cloak to the neck and pulled on her hat. Her bare legs were covered in gooseflesh.
She waited by the door while he checked his pockets. Now that they were two people in coats and hats, she felt calmer. When he joined her at the door, she smiled up at him, relieved. He held her chin in his fingers and gave her a perfunctory kiss—a kiss goodbye—before unbolting the door. Then he kissed her again, more deeply, and Anna felt a window fall open inside her despite everything—a wish to start again, even with sunrise approaching. The hunger he’d wakened in her banished every scruple—she would think about them later. And reentering the dream made her shame of minutes ago melt away.
He shot the bolt, took off his hat, and began to unbutton her coat. Anna felt how easily this could go on. On and on. How she wanted it to!
“We’ve met before,” she said, feeling the impact of these words only as they wandered from her mouth. “You don’t remember, I think.”
“In the club?” he murmured.
“No. Your house.”
She had his attention. His hands paused on her buttons. And even as Anna longed for him to continue, she knew she’d stopped it.
“My house.”
“Years ago. I was a little girl.”
He shook his head slowly, eyes on hers. “How is that possible?”
“I came with my father,” she said. “Edward Kerrigan. I think he might have worked for you.”
The name filled the room as if she’d sung it out. Or as if someone else had. For hearing it—her father’s name—seemed to vault Anna instantly outside her debauched circumstances. Her father was Eddie Kerrigan. Everything that had happened between her and Dexter Styles seemed now to have been leading her to this revelation.
He’d no visible reaction to the name, as if he hadn’t heard or didn’t recognize it. He turned a gold ring on his finger, straightened the lapels of his coat. But Anna recognized in his stillness the very dread and caution she’d felt herself, on first awakening. “Why didn’t you tell me before?” he asked softly.
“I couldn’t find a way.”
“You said your name was Feeney.” He seemed less accusing than confused, as if patting his pockets for something he’d missed.
“He disappeared,” Anna said. “Five and a half years ago.”
Dexter Styles replaced his hat, checked his watch, cracked a shutter to look outside. “We need to get out of here,” he said.
They walked to the car a distance apart. The dawn was a cold, sparkling blue. He opened the passenger door, and Anna slipped inside the fragrant interior. He shut his own door, hard, and pulled away. After several minutes of silent driving, he said, “It puts me in an uncomfortable position. Learning this now.”
“Then you did know him,” Anna said. “He did work for you.” She realized that she had never fully believed this. The memory had too much the quality of a dream or a wish.
“I’d have told you any time you’d asked.”
“Do you remember when he brought me to your house?”
“No.”
“It was winter, like this. I took off my shoes.”
“You can be absolutely certain,” he said, “if I’d remembered any of that, we would not be sitting together in this car.”
“Do you know what happened to him?” she asked. “To Eddie Kerrigan?”
“I haven’t the slightest idea.”
Anna watched him, waiting for him to look back at her, but he stared fixedly at the road. “I don’t believe you,” she said.
He braked so suddenly that the tires made a little shriek, pinching the curb of a quiet street lined with houses. He turned on her, white-faced. “You don’t believe me?”
“I’m sorry,” she stammered.
“You’re the one who’s been lying through your teeth. I’ve no idea who you are—what you are. Are you a hooker? Did someone pay you to fuck me and say these things?”
She belted him across the face, her mind a half second behind her hand, which left a red slash on his cheek. “I’ve told you who I am,” she said, her voice shaking. “I’m Anna Kerrigan, Eddie Kerrigan’s daughter. That’s who I’ve been all this time.”
She thought he might hit her back. The hands clutching the steering wheel were scarred, like a boxer’s. He took a long breath. At last he turned to her. “What is it that you want? Money?”
She nearly hit him again. But the rage flashed through her and left her calm, more lucid than she’d felt in weeks.
“I want to know where he went,” she said. “Or if he’s alive.”
“I can’t help with any of that.”
“Wouldn’t you want your daughter to look for you if you disappeared?” she asked. “Wouldn’t you expect it?”
“It’s the very last thing I would want.”
She was taken aback. “Why?”
“I’d want her to stay as far away as possible,” he said. “To keep her safe.”
He was looking straight ahead. Anna watched his pugilist’s hands on the steering wheel and felt his words move through her. She threw open the door and sprang from the car with no idea where she was. She began walking down the block ahead of the car, half expecting it to pull up alongside her, to hear his voice. But Dexter Styles drove past without turning his head.
PART FIVE
The Voyage
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
* * *
Five weeks earlier
On New Year’s Day 1943, Eddie Kerrigan climbed Telegraph Hill to Coit Tower—or as close as the soldiers standing guard would let him go—to look down at the Embarcadero Piers. He made out three Liberty ships taking on cargo. They were identical, of course, but he knew that the middle one was the Elizabeth Seaman, where he was expected to report for duty in under an hour. Eddie dreaded this. In fact, he’d climbed Telegraph Hill in hopes that elevation, with its attendant perspective, would help to shrink his reluctance.
He’d taken the third mate’s examination the previous week, over five consecutive days, in San Francisco’s vast columned Custom House. Just walking up those steps—as if to a library or a city hall—had cowed him. He’d had so little schooling, read nothing but newspapers before going to sea. But everyone read aboard ships—there wasn’t much else to do if you didn’t play cards or cribbage. Tentatively, Eddie had begun to read, and found that it suited him. He still read slowly, but his mind proved to be like a dog waiting for someone to throw a stick so it could tumble and pant to retrieve it. He’d memorized whole portions of the Merchant Marine Officers’ Handbook and had a nearly perfect mark on his third mate’s exam.
He scrutinized the Elizabeth Seaman as best he could without binoculars. Booms were lowering large crates into the number two hold: aircraft, he guessed. As he watched, he was troubled by an unfamiliar vigilance—a readiness to be galled by missteps, as though he were already responsible for this ship he hadn’t set foot on, even at a half-mile’s distance. He chided himself: the merchant service wasn’t the navy, for Pete’s sake. Merchant officers hadn’t so much as set uniforms. Yet now that he’d become an officer, even in the abstract, Eddie sensed that the passive tranquility he’d cultivated during five and a half years at sea was in jeopardy.
Not that he hadn’t worked hard. He’d worked like a coolie—that had been an essential part of the
peace. In his first jobs, on the engine room’s “black gang,” he’d shoveled coal, fed furnaces, and broken up fires; cleaned and lubricated the ship’s scalding, sweating innards at temperatures of 125 degrees while being bludgeoned by an engine roar that had left a permanent jingle in his ears. Exhaustion had emptied his soul. After eight months he’d crept from the engine room to join the deck crew, the garish sunshine hounding him mercilessly at first. When at last his eyes had adjusted, he’d looked out and noticed the sea as if it were entirely new: an infinite hypnotic expanse that could look like scales, wax, hammered silver, wrinkled flesh. It had structure and layers you couldn’t see from land. Fixing his eyes upon this unfamiliar sea, Eddie had learned to float in a semi-conscious state, alert but not fully awake. Blood broke in golden flashes inside his eyeballs. A humming emptiness filled his mind. Not to think, not to feel—simply to be, without pain. He remembered his old life, but those memories occupied just one room in his mind, and there were others—more than Eddie had realized. He learned to avoid that particular room. After a while, he forgot where it was.
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