Manhattan Beach

by Jennifer Egan

  When Agnes came home late that night, she glanced at Eddie and ran to the cradle as if she’d felt the brush of a wing of the angel of death. He told her calmly that he couldn’t stay at home with Lydia anymore. That was the last show Agnes danced. She never returned, despite Mr. Z.’s pleas that she finish out the week. Overnight, she abandoned the work she adored—that had brought her to New York eleven years before, at seventeen, and brought them together. And Eddie, without savings or prospects, walked to the West Side piers to find the scrum of his youth.

  * * *

  After the morning shape-up, when the hiring boss had made his foregone choices of who would work, scores of luckless gees stubbed out their cigars and drifted dejectedly into a gauntlet of saloons, loan sharks, dope peddlers, and games of chance. Thanks to Dunellen, Eddie was guaranteed a slot from the afternoon shape if not the morning. Often he chose to pass the time in between drifting among the crowd of have-nots: Poles and Italians, Negroes, even Americans, or white men who were born here. The variety of awaiting enticements obscured their common purpose: to wring money from men who’d been unfairly denied a chance to earn any. It amazed him that Negroes showed up at all on these piers, where the only jobs they’d a hope of getting were the ones no one wanted: deep in the hold unloading bananas, for example, which bruised at a touch and were riddled with biting spiders.

  It didn’t take Eddie long to discern that the games of chance near Dunellen’s piers were all rigged: a funny deck, loaded dice, or even—especially common with African golf, as craps were known—an apparent loser who was really in cahoots with two or three other “losers” to fleece the rest. Eddie’s shock at this discovery attested to an idealism he hadn’t realized he still possessed. A man who borrowed from a loan shark knew what he was getting into, and men who took dope or drank themselves stupid deserved what they got. But a man who elected to try his luck in hopes of bringing something home to his wife deserved a chance at winning. Luck was the single thing that could rearrange facts. It could open a door where there was no door. A crooked game was worse than unfair; it was a cosmic violation.

  Eddie began warning Negroes away from Dunellen’s games. “You’ll find the play fairer elsewhere,” he would say cryptically, or “Strangers don’t win in that room.” Always with a vertiginous sense of great risk—he was defying not just Dunellen, at whose behest he’d any work at all, but the men behind Dunellen whom he didn’t know. Eddie’s shifty agitation likely explained the wary reactions his warnings provoked. “I guess I’ll play where I please,” he’d been told, and “I suppose we can take care of ourselves.” But occasionally, the men he warned would avoid the game rather than go inside. At these times Eddie was euphoric, as if he’d saved a soul.

  When the shipping dried up completely, in ’32, he became Dunellen’s full-time lackey. Anna came along after school and on weekends, and Eddie mixed Dunellen’s “errands” with trips to the Hippodrome, the Central Park menagerie, the Castle Garden aquarium. Only in Anna’s company was he truly at ease. She was his secret treasure, his one pure, unspoiled source of joy.

  “We’re stopping here quickly, to do a favor. I’ll need you to behave.”

  “Will you behave?”

  “I’ll do my best, toots.”

  “Who will be mad if we don’t behave?”

  “We mustn’t stand out, that’s all.”

  “What favor?”

  “We’re passing a hello from one man to another. But it’s a secret hello.”

  The notion excited her. “I want to say a secret hello!”

  “You can. If you give me a kiss, I’ll give the kiss to Mama, from you.”

  Anna considered. “I want to give a secret kiss to Lydia.”

  “Lydia won’t understand, toots.”

  “Yes, she will.”

  When the car was stopped at a light, Anna seized his head between her star-shaped hands and kissed the side of his face with utmost tenderness. Eddie felt a sting in his eyes.

  “That kiss,” Anna said. “That one is for Lydia.”

  At home, she watched him deliver it. Eddie did so tenderly, exactly as she had instructed. He was a bagman, after all.

  * * *

  Eddie knew he was sluicing the corruption by delivering the boodling payoffs that sustained it—to aldermen, state senators, police superintendents, rival pier bosses, and back again, at different times. Yet he maintained an observational stance—he wasn’t really doing what he was doing; he was watching it. This distinction was essential to assuage his sense of failure and despair—the stubborn, beckoning vision of an oncoming trolley wheel. Gradually, his routes began to ramify beyond Dunellen’s piers to gaming halls where Dunny had an interest but not control. There was cheating here, too, but never when a higher-up was present. That meant the cheating wasn’t sanctioned from above, but a sub-racket of the dealers and game runners to increase their take without risking a suicidal move like robbing the house. It might therefore be stopped, if Eddie knew what higher-up to tell.

  When Dunellen hadn’t any work for him, Eddie sometimes posed as a regular player to study the crookedness, and the crookedness inside that. He imagined he was a detective—real police, not the corrupt pawns who were the only bulls he knew. He wrote nothing down. The cheating was all in his head: who; when; how; how much. Meanwhile, a larger structure disclosed itself gradually—to know who paid whom was, in some sense, to know everything. It turned out that a single man controlled much of the gaming in New York City in late 1934. The path of profits to this personage contained switchbacks and hairpin turns that only a person making and receiving deliveries could begin to track. There was always a man behind the man, and another man behind that one—all the way up to God, Eddie supposed.

  Two days after Christmas, Eddie polished his shoes, brushed his hat, and trimmed it with an iridescent green feather Agnes had saved from her piecework. He paid this almighty stranger a call at Nightlight, a former speaky in the West Forties that ambushed Eddie with nostalgia when he walked inside. He must have been here with Agnes and Brianne and the other dancers, back in the time he’d come to think of as Before.

  According to the front-of-house man, the boss was not present. Eddie said he’d wait, ordered a rye and soda, and opened his silver pocket watch on the bar. He’d been a sucker in his nostalgia, he saw; the joint played on that, its seediness manufactured, or at least aware. He sensed that gaming was taking place, watched until he found the door, and guessed at the stakes by the men and women passing through it in paste pearls and last year’s hats. Nightlight’s racket wasn’t gambling, that was clear. It was something else—a way of making money that involved losing money on the surface.

  Twenty-four minutes later, another man came along and asked whether Eddie would like to see the boss. Eddie followed him to a back room, where a gee with a Dick Tracy jaw was surrounded by wop goons. Eddie was shocked. Outside the purview of his piers, Dunellen was doing business with the Syndicate. That could only mean he hadn’t any choice.

  Styles sent his lackeys packing. When Eddie had taken a seat across his desk, he said, “Are you police?”

  Eddie shook his head. “A concerned citizen.”

  Styles laughed. “What can I do for you, Mr. Kerrigan?”

  Eddie laid out his discoveries game by game: location, means of cheating, approximate take. Styles listened in silence. Once or twice he interjected, “That’s none of ours,” but mostly, he listened. When Eddie had finished, he asked, “Why tell me this?”

  “I’d want to know, if I were you.”

  “Of course I want to know. What do you want?”

  Eddie hadn’t expected to reach this point so quickly. He found himself uncertain what to say—what he wanted from Styles, exactly.

  “I can give you something right now,” Styles said. “Just about anything, in fact.”

  He eyed Kerrigan, searching for the weakness. Money wasn’t his object, or he’d have demanded it before singing. What, then? In a mick it was usua
lly booze, but Kerrigan hadn’t the look of a lush. Nor was there much propensity for violence in those scrappy limbs, though he’d likely fight hard in self-defense. Women? Micks were famously prudish, faithful to their blowsy wives—perhaps recalling the bonny colleens they’d been before the assembly line of children, or from fear of their drunken, bellicose priests.

  “Girls?” He was watching Kerrigan’s face, awaiting that trigger flinch that would let him know he’d found it. “We’ve girls galore around here.”

  “I’ve a beautiful wife, Mr. Styles.”

  “So have I,” Dexter said. “We’re lucky.”

  Money, then. He was disappointed in Kerrigan; it would be less than he’d have gotten by demanding it first. “What do you call a fair price for the information you’ve given me?”

  Eddie collected his thoughts, unsatisfied. “As I see it,” he began, “you could run your business better and at the same time make it cleaner—more fair, I mean—to the men who try their luck.” This sounded disingenuous, even silly. He sensed Styles’s bafflement—but sensed, too, that Styles enjoyed being baffled.

  “Is it your impression, Mr. Kerrigan, that I run a charitable organization?” he asked.

  Eddie couldn’t help but smile.

  “You think like a police,” Styles said. “Why not join?”

  “I’d still be working for you.”

  Only then did Eddie understand what his object had been, coming here. He wanted a job.

  “Some men find it a bitter pill to swallow, working for me,” Styles said. “They don’t like the change in times.”

  Eddie took this to mean he wasn’t the first waterfront mick to come calling out of sheer desperation. “I guess that depends,” he said, “who they were working for before.”

  Styles leaned back, sizing him up. Eddie did the same of the younger man across the desk: the phony name with a wop name crumpled just behind it, a restless dissatisfaction that registered as curiosity, energy. And underneath that, a sadness deep enough to bear its weight. Eddie saw a man he recognized and liked. He felt an affinity for Dexter Styles, whose very power derived from the fact that it was outside his scrum—in defiance of it. An allegiance purely of choice.

  “It happens you’re right,” Styles said. “I’d like to clean up those games you mention. And I’d like to know what other leaks I’ve got. They’ve a tendency to vanish when my boys show up.”

  “You need an ombudsman,” Eddie said. It was a word he’d discovered years ago, in a newspaper. He’d been waiting ever since for a chance to use it.

  Styles smiled, bemused. “All right, then: an ombudsman. But we can’t meet here. Or be seen together.”

  “Naturally.”

  “Bring your family to my home and we’ll talk some more. You’ve children?”

  “Two daughters.”

  “I’ve a daughter, too. They can play together. Will Saturday do?”

  A light rain was falling when Eddie left the Nightlight, but in his elevated state he barely noticed. He strode down Fifth Avenue, empty of everyone but the gutter snipes searching for discarded smokes. Soon he was passing the encampments at Madison Square. Fires hissed and smoked in the damp. He smelled coffee and condensed milk boiling in cans—a sweet, metallic odor that always set his teeth on edge. Normally, that smell made him cringe with awareness that John Dunellen alone—that bloated, capricious monster—stood between Eddie and the men boiling coffee outdoors.

  He’d found an opening, a way out. Lydia would have her chair. And maybe, Eddie thought, dazzled by the tiny globes of rain sparkling in the trees, maybe it would help her in ways he hadn’t foreseen in his gloom. Perhaps, after all, Lydia would begin to right herself.

  To his original goal—granting men an honest audience with Lady Luck—Eddie gave not a thought during his wet, dark, ecstatic walk. What he felt was the sheer relief of having saved himself.

   PART SIX

  The Dive

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  * * *

  Dexter had tried in vain, in the month since his disappointment with Mr. Q., to maneuver a private conversation with his father-in-law at one of their Sunday lunches. The difficulty of doing so had turned out to be an advantage; with each week, Dexter became more certain of what he wished to propose. At last, at a hunt club dinner dance, the old man caught his eye across a table strewn with half-eaten slices of baked Alaska and said, “I could do with some fresh air. Yourself?”

  Dexter rose in the smoky candlelight. The orchestra had sidled into “White Christmas,” wearing dangerously thin by mid-February, and he was more than willing to suspend his patrol of the fox-trotting faithful. He’d been watching for Tabatha and Grady, but what he kept seeing instead was his wife in the arms of Booth Kimball (known, in seriousness, as Boo Boo), a polo champion she’d been in love with as a girl. Boo Boo had married Lady Something-or-other and moved to London shortly after Dexter and Harriet married. Now, not having seen the man in over a decade, Dexter hardly recognized him—Boo Boo’s hair had gone snow-white. “You dodged a bullet, sweets,” he’d whispered to Harriet during cocktails, nudging his chin in Boo Boo’s direction. To which she’d intoned sepulchrally, “Pippa died of cancer last year.”

  The old man led the way through the velvet blackout curtains into an arctic gale. “Fresh air,” he said fondly over a lacerating wind. “Feels good.” He wore a thin silk scarf—little more than a cravat—and a bowler, but he was famously, almost comically hardy. Dexter had never seen him sweat even wearing a dinner suit in dead summer. He’d a quick knifelike walk that required Dexter to stride in earnest to keep up, although he was several inches taller.

  A lunar sheath of old snow encrusted the fairways, but the paths where the caddies walked were mostly clear. They followed one of these to the shore, remarking during lulls of wind on how fine Grady looked in his uniform, the terrors his departure was giving his poor mother. This weekend was his final leave before shipping out. With three other native sons in similar straits—two army, one Coast Guard—this dinner dance had become a farewell party. Cooper was queasy with fear for his son, but Dexter felt confident that not even a world war could extinguish Grady’s promise.

  They reached Crooked Creek, a tendril of frozen greenish sea neutered by its slog around Long Beach, through the Broad Channel, and over various marshy hassocks. Dexter would have liked to keep walking—he preferred to move as he talked—but the old man came to a halt.

  “I like to be near water whenever possible, don’t you?” he said, gazing into the dark. “Melville put it best: ‘Nothing will content men but the extremest limit of the land’—but that’s not it, I can’t recall the quote. It’s in our nature to seek out the edge. Even on a golf course.”

  “Especially then,” Dexter said, and they both laughed. Among their shared irreverences was a disdain for golf—Dexter because he hadn’t the patience to learn a game whose experts had imbibed it with mother’s milk; the old man because he saw it as sloth masquerading as sport.

  Dexter recognized this spot: it was the very one where he’d asked for Harriet’s hand so long ago. That had been summer, trees buckling under loads of leaves, the freshly mowed fairways huffing up a smell that always reminded him of fresh money. Now, as he looked toward the blacked-out horizon, he found himself recalling some version of that earlier conversation.

  “Your friends and my friends, Mr. Styles,” his future father-in-law had remarked over gibbering cicadas, “I think it’s fair to say they wouldn’t like each other much.”

  This dire understatement seemed to flirt with humor, but Dexter took it straight. “I suppose they wouldn’t have much in common, sir,” he said.

  “Oh, I think they’d have a great deal in common, although they might not like to admit it. Or possess a shared language with which to do so.”

  This extraordinary statement had silenced Dexter.

  “You might think it strange, Mr. Styles, how little I care who your friends are.”

  “I’m . .
. glad to hear it, sir.”

  “Harriet is nuts about you, that’s what matters to me. And now you must consider very carefully how nuts you are about Harriet. She will be your one and only. That is where I draw the line, Mr. Styles. Not at your friends, not at your line of work, your reputation, your history. Fidelity. That will be your promise to me.”

  “I promise,” Dexter said with all the careful reflection of a young man eager to keep fucking the banker’s daughter he’d been fucking and have it be legal.

  “I want my daughter to be happy,” Mr. Berringer said, watching him with calm appraisal. “And I will be monitoring her happiness with vigor and care.”

  “I understand, sir.”

  “You don’t,” he said pleasantly. “You can’t. But I hope for your sake that you’ll keep the promise nonetheless. A promise means no exceptions. Understood?”

  Of course he hadn’t understood. And later, when he began to, Dexter could only marvel at the sleight of hand whereby his father-in-law had jimmied himself out of a straitjacket with enough leverage to extract promises. Houdini couldn’t have topped it: his daughter was knocked up and refused to have it taken care of. Had Arthur withheld his consent, she’d have run away with Dexter: a disgrace. The old man hadn’t had enough room to scratch his nose, yet he’d bargained as if the advantage were all his—intuiting with eerie perspicacity that, although criminal, Dexter was a man of his word. Monogamy was nothing short of exotic in his line of work, yet no sooner had the ice-creamy arm of a chorus girl encircled his neck than Dexter felt watched: Would this be the slip? The thin end of the wedge? It worked better than a cold shower. Afterward, he was always relieved, grateful, even. Dames were as bad as dope for turning a man against his interests. And Harriet was better-looking than all of them.