Manhattan Beach

by Jennifer Egan

  “The first was sloppy. If this one is sloppy, I’ll hold another tomorrow.”

  “You would enjoy that, I can well imagine,” the bosun said with a wily smile at his growing audience—the blasts had brought all hands onto the boat deck. “After all, safety drills afford you a rare opportunity to frolic in your newfound authority!”

  “Is that what this looks like to you? Frolicking?”

  “Every man frolics differently,” the bosun said.

  Eddie caught smirks on faces around him, felt a rise of incipient laughter. The mate and master stood by. If they stepped in now, Eddie would never regain his authority.

  “Do you refuse to participate in this drill, Bosun?” he asked sharply, recognizing that he’d arrived late where he should have begun.

  “I would not dream of refusing!” the bosun expostulated. “On the contrary, I am putty in your hands, Third—we all are. Please, lead us through the necessary steps!”

  It took all of Eddie’s self-restraint to ignore the sarcasm and proceed. The man raised in him a welt of provocation whose itch he could barely withstand. This time, at least, all four lifeboats were lowered and boarded successfully. Eddie resolved to hold a boat drill every week, exactly as the rules stipulated, even if it brought him to blows with the bosun. He rather hoped it would.

  * * *

  A day out of Panama, ten days into their voyage, the Elizabeth Seaman’s call numbers appeared in a radio message—a highly unusual event. Sparks deciphered the message with codebooks and brought the typed result to the captain’s office. They were not to go through the canal after all, but to continue south, around Cape Horn and across the Southern Atlantic to Cape Town, South Africa: a journey of some forty days. Captain Kittredge was convinced they could make better time.

  There was widespread chagrin over not being able to buy Panamanian rum from the bumboats that swarmed both ends of the canal, but it soon dissolved into the monotony peculiar to long voyages. Everyone resisted this at first; they were bored, stymied, restless. But within a few days, peace overcame the ship like a sigh—the relief of knowing this was all there was, or would be, for some weeks. Men took up their sea projects of whittling whistles or making square knot belts. Eighteen days out of San Francisco, Farmingdale mastered the tremor in his hands enough to fashion two dolls out of hemp. That night, when he relieved Eddie of the eight-to-twelve watch, Eddie complimented him on the dolls and asked how he’d learned to make them.

  “An old salt,” Farmingdale said. “He’s made five hundred sixty, if you can feature it. Keeps ’em in a storage locker at Rincon Annex.”

  Old salts were men who had sailed on wooden ships in their youth—sailed, in other words, when “sailing” meant actually sailing. “Is he still around?” Eddie asked.

  “Been a couple of years since I’ve seen him, come to think of it,” the second mate said.

  “They’re disappearing,” Eddie said. “The old salts.”

  Five years ago, there had been one or two aboard most ships—palm wax, needle, and twine in their pockets. Eddie suspected that the War Shipping Administration was weeding them out.

  “We’ve one here,” Farmingdale said. “Pugh, third cook.”

  “Say, that’s good luck!”

  Farmingdale inclined his head noncommittally. He was aloof and unreadable even when sober; Eddie couldn’t like him. But the presence of an old salt aboard the Elizabeth Seaman was profoundly reassuring. “Iron men in wooden boats,” they were called, as opposed to the wooden men in iron boats of today, like Kittredge, Farmingdale, and Eddie himself. Old salts partook of an origin myth, being close to the root of all things, including language. Eddie had never noticed how much of his own speech derived from the sea, from “keeled over” to “learning the ropes” to “catching the drift” to “freeloader” to “gripe” to “brace up” to “taken aback” to “leeway” to “low profile” to “the bitter end,” or the very last link on a chain. Using these expressions in a practical way made him feel close to something fundamental—a deeper truth whose contours he believed he’d sensed, allegorically, even while still on land. Being at sea had brought Eddie nearer that truth. And the old salts were nearer still.

  He left Farmingdale on the bridge and entered the notes of his watch in the logbook: their course was 170 with a fresh breeze and a moderate following sea. He stopped in the wardroom for his “night lunch,” a cold-cut sandwich and coffee, then filled a cup with milk for Sparks, the radioman, whose metal leg brace (polio, Eddie presumed) gave him trouble on the ladders. Eddie had fallen into the habit of visiting Sparks after his watch, as a way of putting off his solitary stateroom.

  “What a lovely fucking thing to do, Third,” Sparks said, taking the cup of milk.

  Eddie checked to make sure the blackout screen was fully closed before lighting their cigarettes. Sparks was near fifty, elfin and slight, lashes invisible on his hooded eyes. “I’m part newt—my tail comes off and grows directly back,” he’d told Eddie in his spectral Irish accent. He was homosexual—Eddie knew this without knowing how he knew. Sparks had grown up in New Orleans and gone to sea in his twenties. He was a teetotaler, unusual in an Irishman. “Ah, but I dream of this stuff,” he said, gazing into the cup of milk before downing it in a cascade of voluptuous gulps. “I’ll crawl across broken glass for a cup of milk like an opium addict for a pipe.”

  “You might like opium better.”

  Sparks snorted. “It’s bad enough needing food and sleep and cigarettes, having to drag this fucking leg around. I can’t afford a habit like that.”

  “I’ve seen cripples in opium dens.”

  “Sure you have—trying to forget they’re cripples! How’s that for smarts—you’ve got a brace on your fucking leg and a monkey on your fucking back, and you think you’ve solved your fucking problem when all you’ve really done is stuck your head up your arse.”

  As Sparks shook the cup to catch the last drops of milk, Eddie was stricken with sympathy. To be a deviant and a cripple, without good looks or fortune or physical strength—how had Sparks managed to endure such a life? Yet he’d more than endured; he was ever cheerful.

  “Your mother must have loved you, Sparks,” Eddie said.

  “What on God’s green earth makes you say such a thing?”

  “Just a hunch.”

  “Well, you’d best be taking those hunches of yours and stuffing them in your ear. My ma was the ward’s chief lush. She once puked in my bed trying to give me a good-night kiss! Holy mother of Christ, she was a pig, my ma, an absolute pig.”

  “It’s bad luck,” Eddie said. “Talking that way about your mother.”

  “The bad luck was having such a mother,” Sparks said. “There was no living with her. Pa had to put her in a home. I did have a lovely sister, though. Lily. She used to call me her little dandelion—don’t you fucking laugh or I’ll nail you to the wall, you fucker.” But Sparks was laughing—he was always laughing. Only the BAMS, the broadcasting for Allied merchant ships, silenced him. It came at set hours each day, Greenwich time—which was designated by the second hour hand on his radio clock. At 0300, Sparks turned the receiver from five hundred kilocycles to a higher frequency and began listening through earphones for the Elizabeth Seaman’s call numbers. Because Allied merchant ships maintained radio silence, the whole of Sparks’s job was to listen. He went utterly still, his body inclined toward the transmitter as if he himself, or perhaps the metal leg brace, were the instrument of reception.

  Eddie left him there and brought the empty cup back down to the galley. Still reluctant to turn in, he stepped outside the door by his stateroom. The night was calm, clouds muffling a moon whose diffuse glow fluttered like thousands of moths over shifting points of sea. The ship’s roll was a welcome and soothing respite from the hard intractability of land. Eddie felt nearer that empty awareness that had sustained him during his years of jungle runs from San Francisco to China, Indonesia, and Burma via Honolulu and Manila. Above the port of Sha
nghai, on shaded streets, he’d listened to sounds of daily life outside walled courtyards: crying babies, clanging pots. Occasionally, through an open door, he’d glimpsed a woman walking on shrunken feet with the stiff, halting poise of a flamingo.

  The world’s mysteries. He’d never believed they were real. Had thought they existed only in books read aloud by charitable ladies.

  At last he returned to his stateroom. Without the ballast of bunkmates, he felt unmoored. Aimlessly, he opened the drawer to his desk and was startled to discover the envelope he’d placed there after signing articles on his first day. He’d forgotten it. He’d forgotten Ingrid—could hardly picture her anymore. Faraway things became theoretical, then imaginary, then hard to imagine. They ceased to exist.

  Now, in the small light by his sack, Eddie opened the letter—his first in over five years at sea.

  Dear Edward, it read in strong, unsentimental cursive, The weather has been fine, though after many days of fog we would appreciate some sunshine. My pupils are planting their spring victory gardens, but I worry that they will be disheartened. The war has changed many things, but I believe plants still need sunlight to grow! The boys and I speak of you often and fondly. I have offered to take them back to Playland, but they refuse. They are waiting for you.

  The tone was measured, even bland, but the effect of these words upon Eddie was galvanic. He was flooded with the memory of seeing Ingrid for the first time at Foster’s Cafeteria: a woman in a blue scarf buying a single slice of pie for her two sons, which they shared raptly and without argument. Eddie had asked her the time. She was German, it emerged—had only narrowly managed to keep her job by denouncing Hitler and her motherland before a committee. There had been a third child, a girl who’d died in infancy. Stephan and Fritz, who were seven and eight, spoke of their sister as though she had vanished the previous week. “Baby Helen,” they called her, and blessed her before each meal. Their father had died more recently, in a factory accident, but he was rarely mentioned. It was Baby Helen they remembered.

  At Playland, Eddie and the little boys had ridden potato sacks down long wooden slides, getting friction burns where a knee or an elbow dragged against the wood. The fun-house floor was pocked with holes through which loud blasts of air (fired by some hidden wiseacre) were meant to lift girls’ skirts. Ingrid had a horror of these blasts, and she clung to Eddie, laughing.

  As they rode the streetcar back, Eddie had placed a hand on each boy’s chest to steady them. He’d been startled by the sensation of their hearts scrambling like mice against his fingertips.

  They were still there, Ingrid and her boys. They were thinking of him—waiting for him. Eddie felt this truth in his body like a layer of earth turning over. It was all still there, everything he’d left behind. Its vanishing had been only a trick.

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  * * *

  Eddie lay in his sack, half-asleep. They had entered the Roaring Forties, off Chile, and the Elizabeth Seaman rolled momentously. Perhaps that movement was what had awakened the old familiar rhythm inside of Eddie: a small, insistent counterpoint, like a bouncing ball.

  “Are there real gangsters?”

  “The pictures didn’t make them up.”

  “Do they look like Jimmy Cagney?”

  “Jimmy Cagney doesn’t look like Jimmy Cagney. He’s shorter than Mama.”

  “Is he your friend?”

  “I’ve shaken his hand.”

  “Does he look like a gangster?”

  “He looks like a picture star.”

  “How do you know a gangster?”

  “Usually, the room goes a little quiet when he walks in.”

  “Are they scared?”

  “If they aren’t, then he isn’t much of a gangster.”

  “I don’t like being scared.”

  “Good. You won’t end up kowtowing.”

  “Do you kowtow?”

  “Have you noticed me kowtowing?”

  “Do you talk to them?”

  “I say hello. Some I know from long ago.”

  “Would you ever be on their side?”

  “Not if I’d any choice.”

  Her small warm hand slipped inside his own. It was always there, that hand, like a minnow finding its crevice.

  “Are we going to see Mr. Dunellen?”

  “Funny you should mention him, toots.”

  “He gave me caramels.”

  “Mr. Dunellen has a sweet tooth. Like you.”

  “He’s your brother.”

  “In a manner of speaking.”

  “You saved him from the waves.”

  “That’s true.”

  “Did he say thank you?”

  “Not in so many words. But he’s grateful.”

  “Is that why he gave me caramels?”

  “It might just be, toots.”

  “Did he give you caramels?”

  “No. But I haven’t your sweet tooth.”

  Anna returned to Eddie after an absence of years: her voice, the pattering quality of it, the feel of her small hand inside his. She towed him by the hand along the halls of his memory to the room where his old life had been carefully stowed away. Inside, he found everything as he’d left it.

  Sunday Mass. Lydia began to cry: a strangled sound that was louder and more wrenching than seemed possible in a baby. She wasn’t a baby, she was three—just small enough to remain inside the pram, where her condition was hidden, more or less. Agnes lifted her out to quiet her, exposing her swiveled form to the crowded church. Eddie’s shame had the blunt force of a blow to the skull; he grabbed the pew in front of theirs to steady himself. Lydia continued to choke and howl; Father couldn’t be heard. The men, wincing, pretended nothing was amiss while two wives helped Agnes from the church, one pushing the pram, the other holding Lydia’s flailing legs. Anna tried to follow, but Eddie clamped his hand around hers. His surroundings felt at a sudden weird remove, as if something had ruptured in his mind. He fastened his eyes to the priest but heard only a drone.

  After Mass, a group of men drifted into somebody’s flat for a touch of that god-awful beer Owney Madden was brewing in plain sight at the biscuit factory on West Twenty-sixth. Eddie nipped in, too, intending to stay just a minute. The bad feeling he’d had in the church was still with him; he wanted to shake it before returning to Agnes. The fun of drinking Madden’s No. 1 wasn’t the taste, God knew, but trying to pinpoint what it tasted of: Sawdust? Wet newspaper? The pigeons Owney famously loved to breed? Children threw snowballs outdoors, moving aside for the occasional automobile. Eddie observed from the window as Anna, all of six, sprang at the boys from behind a snowdrift. Watching her made him feel well. I have one healthy child, he thought, thank God. Thank God.

  Early-winter twilight had seeped into the snowdrifts by the time they hurried home through Hell’s Kitchen. Eddie was weaving a little from the beer. It was later than he’d meant; Agnes would have to rush to make her call. The Follies were on hiatus since the crash, but Mr. Z. had arranged for her to be hired on another show.

  “I want to play outside more,” Anna informed him through chattering teeth.

  “You’re wet and you’re cold. Take my hand.”

  “I won’t.” But she did, in her soggy mitten, first transferring something to her other hand.

  “What is that, may I ask?”

  He relieved her of a snowball, tightly packed, flecked with straw and manure. “I’m saving it,” she said.

  “Snow melts indoors. You know that.”

  “In the icebox.”

  “You’ll give us all typhoid. Leave it outside on the stoop.”

  “Someone might take it!”

  “Not likely, toots.”

  He opened the apartment door braced for Agnes’s anger and Lydia’s cries. But a peaceful scene awaited them: Lydia lay on the settee, her hair damp. Anna ran to her sister. The kitchen tub was full of water.

  “She needed a bath, that’s all,” Agnes said, drained and ashen. He won
dered how long the crying had lasted.

  “You had to bathe her alone,” he said. “I’m sorry.”

  Agnes washed hastily, using the water left in the tub. Eddie leaned over the settee and kissed Lydia’s downy cheek. Whatever had broken inside him at church seemed, for the moment, to mend.

  When the girls were asleep, he sat on the front stoop—they’d a ground-floor apartment in Hell’s Kitchen—and smoked, oblivious to the cold. He had heard of children who were clubfoots, Mongoloids, halfwits, and gimps; who’d fallen out windows, been trampled by horses, brained themselves diving off Hudson River piers onto submerged piles. Why was this worse? He could not explain why. The alloy of beauty and contortion in Lydia suggested some gross misstep of his own. She was not as she should be, not remotely, and the shadow of what she should have been clung to her always, a reproachful twin. Often, when alone, Eddie revisited the moment when the doctor had first come to him from the delivery room: the dark look, the offer of a cigarette, Eddie’s terror that the baby—a son, he’d hoped—was dead. Now, in his reimagining, the doctor delivered the very news he’d dreaded to hear that day: I’m so terribly sorry. Your baby is stillborn. And for a moment, Eddie catapulted into a life remade by this adjustment: they would move to California, where everything was supposed to be better! Agnes would go back to being the lazy vixen he’d wed, who’d teased him in bed with feathered fans and stabbed out her cigarettes into piles of mashed potatoes. But Eddie paid dearly for this flight of fancy when the grim facts of his life tumbled back over him. There would be no move, no change, no end to this.

  He went indoors to check on the girls and add more coal to the stove. Lydia slept in a cradle in the kitchen, where it was warmest. Even breathing was a trial for her. In . . . out. In . . . out. The pause between her breaths seemed longer than natural, as if, having managed to exhale, she had to muster the energy to begin anew. The curious detachment Eddie had felt at Mass returned, its numbing remoteness bringing relief from his despair. He was an observer, no more, watching a man lift a pillow and set it lightly upon the face of his sleeping daughter. Her breathing slowed as she struggled to contend with this new weight. Eddie watched the man press down upon the pillow. The child’s small chest bones flexed and worked above the collar of her nightdress. Her head began to move as she tried to turn her face. The man pushed harder. Eddie was astonished by her frantic efforts to find air. She would never walk, never talk, but still she groped for life—fought for it. The ferocity of her instinct forced Eddie back inside himself with the violence of a door slamming into its frame. He dropped the pillow and scooped Lydia from the cradle. He wanted to howl, but that would frighten her, so he kissed her tiny face, wetting it with tears until her eyes fluttered open and she smiled up at him. He held her, weeping softly, and rocked her back to sleep. In his mind’s eye, he threw himself from a roof or under the wheels of a trolley—punishments he deserved, even craved. Suicide was a coward’s choice, as much a sin as the other, yet the fantasies were rapturous. He couldn’t make them stop.