There had been the one on the train. A unique misstep—out of time and place—that had strengthened his resolve never to err again.
Now, having broken his promise a second time exactly two weeks ago on this night, Dexter was forced to consider that the old man might have brought him here to confront him with that fact. But how could he know? What George Porter had seen was nothing. And even if George suspected, Dexter’s sin paled beside his own. Anyway, the doctor had became bluff and friendly again with Dexter since that night, the manly understanding between them newly enriched.
He emerged from this brown study to find the old man watching him. “You’ve not seemed quite yourself these past weeks,” he said. “I wonder what’s on your mind.”
Dexter swallowed. How did the real adulterers do it? But there was something on his mind, of course—he’d been conniving for a month to bend the old man’s ear about it. With relief, he began, “I feel the need of a change, sir.”
“Sir?”
Dexter flushed. “Arthur.”
“What sort of change?”
“Professional.”
“You’ve quite a diversity of interests already, haven’t you?”
“That’s a fact. But I’m on the wrong side.”
Music sputtered like a distant phonograph through bursts of glacial wind. They might have been standing at the end of the earth: a gray-black landscape of water and ice.
“Right and wrong are relative terms, aren’t they, in your line of work?” the old man asked.
“I’ve always said so.”
Arthur whistled. “It’s late in the day to come down with a case of idealism.”
Dexter heard his smile. “It seems to be an epidemic,” he said.
“War will do that. One of many ancillary benefits.”
“I want to be an honest part of what comes next,” Dexter said. “Not a leech sucking blood off its back.”
The old man took a long breath, something like a sigh. “It’s a pity we’re forced to make the choices that govern the whole of our lives when we’re so goddamn young.”
“If they’re the wrong choices, then we have to make new ones,” Dexter said. “Even late in the day.”
An onslaught of wind made his eyes water, but the old man didn’t so much as hold his hat. When the blast subsided, he said, “Judging by my limited knowledge of your associates and their business practices, changing sides won’t be easy.”
“It’s already happening naturally,” Dexter said. “I’ve legitimate interests here, in Chicago, in Florida. I’ve friendships all over.”
“I don’t doubt that. You’re a likable fellow. But is your employer aware of this . . . natural divergence?”
It was the first time Dexter could recall the old man referring, singly and directly, to Mr. Q. His fleeting amazement gave way to a heady sense of convergence, as if a bridge had suddenly appeared between irreconcilable worlds. And a bridge was precisely what he needed.
“I’m certain he’s aware,” Dexter said. “But it’s up to me to take a decisive step.”
The old man was too canny not to have sensed where this talk was leading—probably he’d known from the word “professional,” or even “sir.” Dexter squared his shoulders and took a breath. “It occurred to me,” he said, swallowing back another “sir” that rose like a bubble in his throat, “that I might bring my legitimate assets and interests to you. At the bank.”
“We’d buy you out,” the old man said.
“Exactly.”
His father-in-law’s silence seemed a good sign—a sign of serious consideration. Dexter eyed the whorls of frozen sea at his feet. His life had already changed course once in this spot—why not again?
“You’re not thinking clearly, son,” the old man said at last, in the same mild way he said everything. “And that worries me considerably—for your own safety and that of persons dear to me who are under your protection.”
An entity deep within Dexter recoiled as if scalded, but he managed to say casually, “How do you figure?”
“You’ve a good life, Dexter. A beautiful family. You’re known, respected—sought after. Your name is in the papers. That’s double, triple what most men achieve in a lifetime. But it isn’t portable. You possess a currency that cannot be used in any country besides its own.”
“I don’t see it.”
“Then clear your head, son. Clear your head.” Son was a diminutive; what the old man called Cooper.
“It feels terribly clear,” Dexter said. “My head.”
“Do you know,” the old man said affably, “after the Great War, when we formed syndicates to underwrite the bond issues to build railroads and factories, we never had so much as a contract with any of our partners? Not the managing group closest to us, not even the purchasing group that sold the bonds to the public. There was no law to oversee those transactions. Trust, reputation—those were all we needed. All we had! To this day, the entirety of my business rests upon trust.”
“But you do trust me,” Dexter said. “You’ve shown that time and again.”
“I trust you entirely. You’d have made a tremendous banker, Dexter. A partner, nothing less.” This was a reference to Cooper, a junior in the firm unlikely to rise much further despite his pedigree. “I’ve absolute faith in your vision. Which is why I’m mystified by your failure to see that your reputation—your history—is prohibitive.”
Dexter strained to regroup. How had he not foreseen this objection? But he had—it was the first thing he’d foreseen. He’d simply counted on the old man’s power, reputation, and independence to sweep it aside.
“I never thought you cared for other men’s opinions,” he said.
“Personally, I don’t,” the old man said. “In business, I’ve no choice. I know exactly how far I can go. Am I saying no bank in New York would have you? Certainly not. There are banks where reputation matters less. But why? Why become a middling banker at a middling firm, forever trying to prove you’ve gone straight?”
“That isn’t what I want.”
“It’s the best you’ll get if you pursue this line. If I were you, I’d stay exactly where I was. Recognize the myriad advantages of your position and enjoy them. Trying to change the position midstream is likely to mean losing those advantages without gaining any new ones.”
The wisdom of Arthur’s words was manifest, irrefutable, yet Dexter already knew he couldn’t heed them. Something had shifted inside him. “I’ve paid too much for my advantages,” he said, surprising himself with this disclosure. He was speaking of the blood on his hands.
His father-in-law seized Dexter’s shoulders in his delicate grasp. His very compactness seemed a source of authority, Dexter’s comparative bulk a feature of blundering youth. “We all pay for our advantages,” the old man said, with meaning. “There’s not a man in this world who hasn’t, and I include the priests. Every man has his secrets, his costs of doing business. It’s no different in my line. Don’t be fooled by the marble columns—the Romans had those, too, and they fed their prisoners to lions. There’s a good deal of brutality behind institutions like mine, leavened by an equal measure of hypocrisy.”
Dexter’s eyes smarted, not from the wind. How he loved Arthur Berringer for believing they were alike! The old man’s “brutality” was not the same as Dexter’s, of course, whatever he might think. Still, there was an intensity behind the words that made him wish he could see his father-in-law’s face. But darkness was the essential feature of their exchange.
By tacit agreement, they began following the orchestra sounds back toward the clubhouse. At last it came into sight: an unearthly colonnade leaking festivity into the icy lunar landscape.
“Not enough has been written about the treachery of middle life,” the old man mused, his voice carrying over the wind. “Dante went to hell to escape it, and I’ve seen plenty of other men do the same, metaphorically speaking. Be patient, Dexter. Wars have a way of shifting the terrain into configuration
s we can’t foresee, hard as we might try. This is no time for bold moves.”
Dexter liked that word, “configuration.” The tide had turned in the war, unmistakably—what the old man had foreseen last fall was already coming to pass. But a dissatisfaction of weeks—months—had accumulated in Dexter’s limbs, and he needed to act. Even the wrong move was more appealing than none at all.
George Porter hovered just inside the blackout curtains, anxiously grooming his mustache. “I was wondering where you’d gone off to,” he greeted them searchingly. Dexter was too distracted to reassure him.
Every Berringer except the boys away at school was present tonight, filling four tables in the crowded dining room. Dexter had been seated next to Bitsy. With poor Henry casting baleful looks at them from across the table, he’d questioned her over dinner. Yes, the baby was crying less. No, she was not as unhappy as before. Her calm made Dexter suspect that she and George had found an available nook during cocktail hour. There were plenty of those at the hunt club, as Dexter well knew from the days when Harriet had brought him here as an act of insurrection. Charm and a heavy bankroll could secure one’s entrée to many places in this world, but not the Rockaway Hunting Club. Dexter’s frigid reception by the old stoves and their prissy progeny had amused him back then—what did he care? They could cold-shoulder him, refuse to host his nuptials (a thing that had made the old man very angry), but he’d snagged one of their own and was swinging her hand as they walked beside the swimming pool at night, looking for a place to fuck. The fillip of collective opprobrium had summoned their lust like a knife chiming crystal; its ringing emanations filled the trees and shook in the moonlight until they could think of nothing else. Conjugal bliss had been achieved in a sand trap, behind a garden shed, under a case containing photographs and trophies from the famed steeplechase races. Eight months pregnant, Harriet had serviced him under a tablecloth during a presentation of awards for lawn tennis.
Now, however, the configuration had shifted. Tabby and the twins had been embraced from the start, and Harriet was a prodigal returned—welcomed the more warmly for the distance she’d traveled. Only Dexter remained outside. His own generation was friendly enough; the wives flirted with him rashly when they were tight. But the old guard treated him with a weary revile whose foremost ingredient was boredom. He was far too familiar to be shocking, but they hated him still.
Grady and the other departing boys began waltzing with their proud, frightened mothers. The boys blazed in their fine uniforms, already heroes. Dexter decided to look for Mr. Bonaventura, who ran the kitchen (even Puritans knew that when it came to food and drink, you needed a Brazilian), to discuss the source of his black-market beef. The roast had been tough; Dexter knew he could do better and liked the notion of transacting this bit of business while the Puritans danced. But even as he strode toward the padded swinging door to the kitchen, a part of him shrank from this course. It was more of the same—the same, the same—and within the span of an instant, the idea of haggling with Mr. Bonaventura over beef went from vaguely promising to wretchedly bad. He was as sick of himself as the stoves were of him.
Rooted mid-ballroom, Dexter recognized his bind: any action he’d the power to take would push him further in the direction he wished to withdraw from. There was, quite literally, nothing he could do.
Yet in that discovery, he felt a stirring of possibility. Suppose doing was the wrong idea. Perhaps there was something he could undo.
He spotted his wife leaving the ladies’ lounge and caught her hand. She looked startled and pleased as he pulled her onto the crowded dance floor. A stiffness had arisen between them since the night he’d spent with Kerrigan’s daughter. That interlude had been difficult to shake: the shock of learning who she was, above all, but also the smell and feel and taste of her. He’d returned to the boathouse two days later to investigate those empty bottles and determine who the interlopers had been. But no sooner was he surrounded by the props of that night—table, stove, a stocking crumpled on the floor—than he’d found himself leaning against a wall with a hand in his trousers. He’d not returned to the boathouse since. Nor had he made love to Harriet—an aberration she had accepted with surprising equanimity. Now, having watched her in the arms of the newly bereaved Boo Boo, Dexter was determined to resume their normal relations. He held her close, breathing the musky smell of her hair and feeling, in her sinuous hips, the memory of childhood horseback riding she’d long since recanted.
“Remember how we used to be in this place?” he asked.
“Oh yes.”
“Let’s hope it isn’t like that with Tabby and Grady.”
He’d meant to be funny, but she tensed in his arms. “She’s sixteen.”
“How old were you?”
She was no virgin when they’d met. At the time, it hadn’t occurred to Dexter to demand details of when or with whom. It might have been Boo Boo, ten years older. She’d likely have married the polo champion if he’d asked, but she’d been too young and far, far too wild. Not even a father like hers could compensate. They all had fathers like hers.
“The boys are being very good,” he said to conciliate.
“They’re good boys,” she said. “You don’t credit them enough.”
“I’ll credit them more.”
“Will you?” He felt her warm breath at his ear and knew they would make love that night. The events of the boathouse moved to the horizon of his thoughts. But they would not entirely disappear.
“If it will make you happy.”
“Very happy.”
The orchestra concluded with “Tangerine,” from that not very good picture starring Dorothy Lamour. Family groups began fumbling into the dark. The old man, along with Cooper, Marsha, and Grady’s sisters (average girls toiling invisibly in his glare), would see Grady off tomorrow at Pennsylvania Station. For the rest of them, this was goodbye.
Dexter left the clubhouse alongside George Porter, an arm around the doctor’s shoulders to dispel his evident worry about Dexter’s confab with the old man. George must know him better than that.
Grady seemed taller than he had even a few weeks before, his gaze nearly level with Dexter’s own. Moonlight touched the brass buttons of his uniform. Dexter felt his throat tighten as he shook his nephew’s hand. For all his confidence that Grady would survive, he’d an eerie intimation that he wouldn’t see him again.
Tabatha threw her arms around Grady’s neck and hung there, sobbing. Dexter hovered nearby, concerned that her display was unseemly. But his mother-in-law merely said in a taut voice, “They’ve always been so close.”
Dexter tried to make her out in the moonlight. Could it be? Under cover of darkness, rogue tears had seeped from Beth Berringer’s stingy eyes and now sparkled with gaudy subversion in her kaleidoscopic wrinkles.
“Grady needs to say other goodbyes, darling,” Harriet admonished gently, prying Tabby away from her cousin.
Tabby ran to Dexter, and he wrapped her in his arms. “Shh, Tabby Cat,” he said, holding her. “Come now. Everything will be all right.”
“It won’t be like this,” she said. “Not ever again.”
“Grady will come back healthy as a horse, I promise.”
She drew away, trying to see him. “You can’t promise that, Daddy.”
She’d a point; he was talking out of his hat. “I can promise that because I believe it. I haven’t the slightest worry about Grady Berringer: zero.”
It was hooey of the highest order, yet Dexter felt the calming effect of his words as if his daughter’s heart were relaxing inside his own chest. He felt the likeness of their flesh, their common smell, their way of moving. She was his own. And he was hers.
Harriet walked ahead toward the Cadillac, one arm around each of the twins. Dexter followed, still holding Tabby. No one spoke; there was only the crunch of their shoes on the gravel path. And just then, as he held his anguished daughter in the moonlight, Dexter knew what action he must take.
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
* * *
Anna often recalled hauling herself up the ladder on test day, triumphant. A moving picture would have ended there, with the promise that, at long last and against all odds, she’d earned the respect of the crusty lieutenant. In fact, he liked her less. He referred to his divers as “boys,” “men,” or “gentlemen.” He fell silent when Anna passed, as if she were a black cat. She understood that her hope of pleasing him could be achieved only by quitting, and he gave her no reason to stay.
Over two weeks had passed since the test day, and she’d not been back in the water even once. The men dove often; Bascombe and Marle had worked together, patching the submerged hull of an Allied destroyer. Anna had been nominally made a rigger, meaning that her specialty was salvage: the raising of sunken objects. The Normandie, at Pier 88, was a salvage operation, as had been the scuttled German fleet at Scapa Flow. But there were no sunken ships in Wallabout Bay; instead, there were several thousand railroad ties that had slid from a barge a decade ago and now interfered with the passage of certain deep-bottomed ships. With the exception of Anna, those chosen to remove these ties were the biggest and least skilled of the diving class—Savino, for example, who had nailed a hole through his diving dress on test day. Anna had had to patch that hole; Savino, meanwhile, was chosen to receive welding lessons in the diving tank. There his mishaps continued; two days before, he’d shattered his faceplate on the corner of the steel panel he was trying to weld. They’d pulled him up quickly—Marle was one of his tenders—and Savino had seemed all right at first, just some pressure bleeding from his ears and nose. But inside the recompression tank, he had fallen unconscious. Lieutenant Axel suspected an air embolism, meaning that Savino had taken a breath and held it before they’d pulled him up. As the pressure around him dropped to sea level, the pressure exerted by the air inside his lungs would have mounted until a bubble was expelled into his bloodstream. It would travel through veins and arteries until it lodged in a passage too small to pass through—in Savino’s case, one bringing blood to the brain. Air embolisms were often deadly, but Savino had survived. He hadn’t returned to work yet.
Manhattan Beach Page 28