Manhattan Beach

by Jennifer Egan

  Anna had spent today cleaning the lufer sponge filters inside the oil separators on all ten air compressors. Most of her assignments had this air of the domestic: patching diving dresses with rubber cement; rubbing neat’s-foot oil onto the leather gaskets of helmets; separating hoses too long attached. She felt even further from the war than she had in the measuring shop—there, at least, she’d run errands to other parts of the Yard. Now, as she changed back into her street clothes in her locker-closet, Anna lapsed into a familiar state of hopeless surrender: she was weak; she felt weak. The railroad stanchions were too heavy for her to lift; Lieutenant Axel was right to keep her from them. This feeble turn of mind assuaged Anna’s scathing sense of injustice; feeling undeserving was less terrible, somehow, than feeling cheated. It evoked a novel impression of herself, tentative and fragile, like the marrieds. But a roar of fury incinerated this vision like an effigy. How she loathed Lieutenant Axel—wished that he would disappear. Hating him infused Anna with strength. But she had to conceal her rage, absorb it, even when doing so felt like drinking bleach. The slightest infraction would be grounds for her dismissal. And then the lieutenant would have won.

  Her favorite times were those when superior officers visited Building 569. In the presence of naval brass of higher rank, Lieutenant Axel looked abashed and dutiful, and Katz, his henchman, appeared starstruck to the point of paralysis. Thus reduced, they forgot their disdain for Anna. It was the only time.

  Anna left the Yard with the other divers and headed for the Oval Bar. Bascombe had engineered her inclusion in this nightly ritual as deftly as he had Marle’s: shortly after the test dive, his fiancée had approached Anna outside the Sands Street gate and said, in a voice touched by a head cold, “Basky wants me to go out with the boys, but you’ll come along, won’t you? I don’t want to be the only girl.”

  Tonight everyone wanted the story of Savino’s air embolism from Marle, who had been with him inside the recompression tank. After Savino fell unconscious, Marle said, Lieutenant Axel had increased the pressure to 120 pounds, a depth of almost three hundred feet, in hopes that the bubble would be reabsorbed into Savino’s blood. Blue ink had exploded from the lieutenant’s pen, spraying both of them. Marle had held Savino’s legs aloft and Lieutenant Axel had massaged his hands and feet, trying to increase the circulation to his brain.

  “All the time he’s talking,” Marle said as they washed down free bar food—intended to lure in sailors—with B&H beers. “Saying, ‘You’re going to be fine, son, you know how I know? You’d be dead already if you were going to die.’ ”

  “Sounds like vintage Axel to me,” Bascombe muttered, sipping Coca-Cola.

  “Like a man calming a horse. Even though Savino is out cold. ‘Someday you’ll tell those kids of yours how you risked your life so they wouldn’t have to eat seaweed and sauerkraut at Sunday dinner.’ ”

  “Laying it on a little thick, if you ask me.”

  “And he brought the man back. I watched him do it. Not that this cynic will believe it.” Marle flicked his eyes at Bascombe.

  After forty-five minutes, Savino had regained consciousness. It had taken five more hours to decompress the chamber. When at last it was done, after midnight, Savino had walked into the waiting ambulance.

  “I’m surprised Axel kept the grin off his yap,” Bascombe said. “He’s been dying to play hero from day one.”

  “That’s an act,” Marle said. “If he loses a diver, they’ll shut him down.”

  “Cry me a river.”

  Marle shook his head. He and Bascombe were often on opposite sides, but also inseparable. Bascombe wasn’t welcome in Ruby’s home; her father regarded him as a drifter and refused to shake his hand. Bascombe had taken to eating Sunday supper with Marle and his parents in Harlem.

  Anna caught the streetcar home with Ruby and Bascombe. Bascombe would escort Ruby all the way to Sunset Park, where she lived above her family’s grocery, then return to his rooming house by the Naval Yard: an hour and a half’s journey. Their engagement was secret until he could change her father’s mind. Like Bascombe’s campaign to join the navy after failing three eye tests, this one seemed, on the face of it, doomed. Yet he seethed with such roiling ambition that Anna half believed he would succeed. The campaigns were intertwined; were Bascombe to join the navy, he was certain, Ruby’s father would see him differently.

  Anna got off at Atlantic Avenue. She was alone for the first time since morning, but the isolation of weeks ago could get no purchase on her now. She was too preoccupied. She sat at the kitchen table with an evening newspaper and the unopened mail and thought about Dexter Styles. He rarely crossed her mind at work, as if the marine guards had barred his entry from the Yard. But at home she confronted afresh the certainty that he knew what had happened to her father. He’d cautioned her not to look into the matter—warned her, even.

  She slid open the fire escape window and climbed outside into the hard winter air. She tried to bring her father to mind—to see him as she would any other man, with no relation to herself. Night after night he’d sat where she was sitting now, smoking, gazing down at the street. Thinking—about what? For all the time she’d spent with him, Anna hadn’t any idea. It was as if being his daughter had blinded her uniquely, as if anyone else—everyone—had seen and known him in a way she could not.

  Something was going to happen; she and Dexter Styles weren’t finished yet. This inevitability turned a gyre of excitement in Anna that made her forget her father. It was Dexter Styles she longed for—not the gangster but the lover. The tawdriness of the scene she’d wakened to had blurred away, leaving only sensation. In moments, she regretted even having told him who she was—she didn’t want to give him up. She went back inside the apartment to bathe and then to bed, her mother’s letter still unopened. In the dark, she gave herself to memories of Dexter Styles.

  Had he threatened her? Or merely warned her?

  * * *

  Two days later, Anna was assigned to the barge in diving dress, tending Majorne. She’d gotten this far twice without going down. Still, after days of working indoors or marooned on the West Street Pier, she was grateful just to be on the open water. Sunlight struck Wallabout Bay like the flare of a welding torch as she watched Majorne’s bubbles.

  “Kerrigan. Wake up!”

  It was Katz, idling in the motored dinghy around a corner of the barge. She was needed. The front tender helped her lift the crate containing the weighted parts of her dress onto the dinghy, which yawed under its weight. As Katz motored through ice slurry, he explained that there was a jammed screw—as propellers were known—on the battleship that had recently been floated from Dry Dock 6 to Pier J. Allied ships were unidentified, but Anna knew from her visits to the captain of the Yard’s office that this was the USS South Dakota—“Battleship X,” as she was called in the newspapers, for security. She’d downed twenty-six Jap planes in the battle of Santa Cruz.

  The battleship loomed spectacularly, shrinking everything around her, even the hammerhead crane, to an afterthought. Savino and Grollier were already at the flywheels of an air compressor on the edge of Pier J. Savino still wasn’t diving since his air embolism; Grollier, who had already dived that morning, was in partial dress. Anna’s job was to inspect the battleship’s four propellers, locate the problem, return topside, and explain what needed to be done. Grollier, recently trained as a burner, would go down to make the repair.

  “Shouldn’t I make the repair if I can?” Anna asked, betraying more eagerness than she’d meant to.

  “The only reason you’re diving at all is we’ve no one else,” Katz said.

  She flushed. “That wasn’t my question.”

  “Just do as you’re told.”

  A stage—a platform lowered by ropes—had been prepared for her descent. As the water closed around her, she rediscovered the sensation of being weightless. She felt the pull of the East River’s infamous currents even on the ship’s lee side. Down she went through soft
fronds of daylight alongside the stupendous hull. Its sheer scale suggested violence. Anna wanted to touch it. Holding a rope of the stage, she swung her body toward the ship’s hull and let her gloved hand slide over its outer shell while the stage pulled her down. Her skin prickled into gooseflesh. The ship felt alert, alive. It exuded a hum that traveled through her fingers up her arm: the vibration of thousands of souls teeming within. Like a skyscraper turned on its side.

  At last she made out the whorls of the after starboard screw and signaled to Katz that she’d reached it. Descending lines had been hung to help her maneuver, and she used these to float herself toward the screw. It was fifteen feet high, its five blades curved like the inside of a seashell. Anna moved among them, running her gloves along the edges of each blade to the center ring where they met. Nothing fouled them. Taking care not to foul her own lines, she climbed around the screw to the shaft connecting it to the engine. She followed this to the forward starboard screw, which had four blades rather than five. It, too, was clear. Now she gripped the forward edge of the ship’s rudder—like the steel door to a bank vault—and used it to pivot around to the port side of the hull, which faced the river. Currents buffeted her, swells of passing boats. On the forward port screw, she found the problem: a rope the width of her arm had snared among the blades. It was being held tight by one of the infamous railroad ties, which dangled several feet below.

  A pull from Katz. Anna pulled back. Now she was supposed to return topside so that Grollier could cut through the obstructing rope with his oxy-hydrogen torch. But why should she go back up? Why not saw through the rope by hand, using the hacksaw in her tool bag? Anna made this choice in perfect knowledge that it was the wrong one. Following rules had got her nowhere. Passing tests had got her nowhere. In the course of getting nowhere, she had given up on some larger vision in which being good and trying to please made any sense. Why not take what she could while she had the chance?

  She moved around the fouled screw blades, tugging at lengths of rope. The tightest segment was near the center, a figure eight caught between the two most vertical blades. Anna removed her hacksaw on its manila cord and began to saw at this portion of rope. It was slow work. Katz signaled again, then again. Each time she gave one pull in return—I’m all right—and continued with her work.

  Katz signaled that he was sending down a slate. Anna repeated the signal but did not go starboard to write on it. As soon as they read her findings, she would be ordered topside, already in trouble. Why not stay down and finish what she’d begun? Like a thief trying to crack a safe before an alarm rang, Anna sawed in the half-dark, possessed by a feral determination she knew was pure selfishness, bound to hurt her in the end. She didn’t care. The rope began to strain where she sawed; she felt its tension pass into the dwindling number of intact strands until they quivered like fiddle strings. Then the rope snapped with a twang she could hear over the hiss of her air. Its two ends hung in the murk, hemp threads oscillating like tentacles. Anna climbed over the screw, tugging at other segments of rope, trying to redistribute their slack. The effort made her light-headed. All at once the ropes began to slip, the stanchion’s deadweight lulling them gently away from the screw blades. Then all of it fell away, rope frills waving as they fluttered into the dark.

  Back on the rising stage, Anna experienced a first pinch of regret. Her modest achievement, easily replicable by Grollier with his torch, shrank beside the enormity of her offense. Even before the stage had reached the pier, she saw the scar burning scarlet on Katz’s upper lip. “It’s done,” she said quickly when he opened her faceplate. “The screw is clear.”

  “How dare you ignore my orders?” he roared before she could step off the stage.

  “It’s done,” she said, swallowing. “The job is done.”

  “Who the fuck do you think you are? I sent down a slate and you ignored the slate.”

  An animal smell, like ammonia, rose from inside Anna’s dress. She was afraid. “Let me off,” she said.

  But Katz seemed out of his right mind. “Wait until I tell the lieutenant, you lousy cunt,” he bawled, jabbing his head at her so she saw gold fillings in his mouth and smelled baloney on his breath. “He’ll give you the bum’s rush so fast you’ll see stars.”

  He was going to kill her; she could feel that he wanted to. She leaned backward, clutching the ropes of the stage.

  “She’s falling,” someone screamed. “Grab her, grab her!”

  The weight of the destabilized dress was too great to arrest; Anna’s left glove lost its grip on the rope, and she toppled like a tree, aware that gravity was pulling her away from her feet but unable to stop her fall. She saw veering sky and must have screamed. Or maybe the screaming was Katz.

  Then she hung suspended. Katz had seized her lifeline and stopped her plunge at the last possible instant, before the heels of her boots left the stage. Anna held her body rigid, trying to anchor them in place. If her shoes slid off the edge, the weight of the dress would hurtle her straight to the bottom of the bay—along with Katz, if he didn’t let go. The lifeline was fastened to goosenecks at the back of her helmet and threaded through eyelets at the front of her breastplate. Gingerly, terrified of flipping over, Anna reached up a gloved hand and tried to close her faceplate.

  “No. No,” Katz rasped from above her. “Don’t move.”

  Hand over hand, with shuddering arms, he began to pull her lifeline toward himself by agonizing degrees, pivoting Anna’s rigid 320-pound bulk toward a vertical position. His face was scored with sweat, his eyes locked to Anna’s, as if the effort were happening there. She concentrated on not bending, an imperative that caused a conflagration of pain in her back. She was afraid of vomiting into the helmet. She longed to close her eyes, but it felt essential to maintain eye contact with Katz. Slowly, gravity began to pour the weight of her dress back toward her shoes. At last she bent her knees and rocked forward, nearly collapsing facedown on the stage. Katz caught her and pulled her upright, then guided her carefully onto the pier.

  Savino and Grollier led her to the diving bench and unscrewed her helmet. Anna sat leaning over her knees, still thinking she might be sick. A hush encompassed all of them. Had she fallen into the freezing bay with her faceplate open, Anna could have drowned by the time they’d managed to haul her back up. She looked at the wet gray clouds that had covered up the sky while she was below. In one way, it felt like nothing: she was here, everything was fine. But it seemed possible that she still might fall.

  Katz stood apart. He ran his hands through his hair and shook his head, then walked to the gangway to speak with the sailor on watch. Grollier and Savino removed Anna’s belt and breastplate and shoes. Anna clutched at familiar sounds of the Yard—motors, machinery, shouts—as if they could stop her fall.

  Eventually, Katz returned, and they began loading equipment onto the truck. Anna was breaking down the flywheels on the air compressor when three naval officers approached from the ship’s gangway in double-breasted blue overcoats with gilt buttons and gold epaulettes.

  The senior officer was tall and trim; even his salt-and-pepper hair looked rigorous under the crisp blue hat with its gold braid. “I want to thank you, gentlemen—ma’am—personally,” he said, shaking each of their hands and betraying no surprise at the sight of Anna. “Fine work, Mr. Katz. Fine, efficient work.”

  Katz received this praise flinchingly, as if the words were goring him. Wet snow had begun to fall, but Anna hardly noticed it in the presence of these officers. They had come from the skyscraper ship; they would sail it into battle. In touching its hull, Anna had touched the war directly for the first time—felt the vehemence of its pulse.

  When the officers had gone, the gray day closed back around them. Anna felt calm, but Katz was grave and distracted. His eyes wandered to hers, and without intending to, she smiled at him. Katz smiled tentatively back. They each took half the compressor and loaded it onto the truck.

  * * *

  Anna was cr
ossing Navy Street, arm in arm with Ruby, when she recognized Dexter Styles’s Cadillac idling outside Richard’s Bar and Grill. She had looked for it every night.

  “Excuse me,” she told her friends. She didn’t want them to meet, or even see, Dexter Styles. “I need to speak with someone.”

  She crossed Sands Street, trailed by their curiosity. Dexter Styles stepped from his automobile and opened the passenger door. The familiar leather smell surrounded her.

  She felt a change in him as soon as he sat beside her, an uncharacteristic quiet. The shadow of his beard was gray against his skin. He pulled away from the curb and nosed the car alongside a throng of Yard workers and sailors. Anna watched them longingly through her window. A minute ago she’d been among them, laughing with her friends. She felt as if she’d fallen down a well to someplace cavernous and bleak.

  “He’s dead,” she said when they’d driven a block in silence. “Isn’t he.”

  “Yes.”

  She swallowed. “Where?”

  “I can find out.”

  She stared at the windshield wipers, their back-and-forth gumming the traffic lights into viscous colored syrup. The hunger for Dexter Styles was still alive in her, a field of feverish energy with no affinity for the man beside her. He was a different man, cool and withdrawn. But it was Anna who had changed. Returned. That was how it felt: as if a long, disjointed detour had delivered her at last to a familiar landscape. “Well, then do it!” she said, her voice rising. “Find out! What are you waiting for?”