Manhattan Beach

by Jennifer Egan

  He pulled up along an empty curb on Navy Street. The brick wall of the Yard was directly outside Anna’s window. Glancing at her, he said, “You’ll need your diving suit.”

  “I’ll— What?” He was talking nonsense. When the words forced their meaning upon Anna, she lunged at his face.

  Dexter Styles seized her hands with the artful speed of one practiced at disarming others. “Knock it off,” he breathed. “Or I won’t lift a finger.”

  She’d forced him back against his window. Blood oozed from a scratch she’d made on his temple. Anna breathed his familiar breath, and the appetite rose in her. She felt his heart stamping through his overcoat. Their faces were nearly touching; he was about to kiss her. She was dying for him to. But she knew that she would bite him—kick and scratch and scream her head off.

  He must have known, too, because he pushed her away from him slowly, keeping her hands immobilized. “Yes or no,” he said.

  She took a ragged breath. “It isn’t that simple,” she muttered finally. “You need a boatload of equipment to dive.”

  He tipped his head toward the wall, still holding her hands. “How much can you get out of there?”

  “I don’t know. Some.”

  “Whatever you can’t bring, I will.”

  His confidence affronted her. “Really. A boat. An air compressor. Hoses. A diving ladder.”

  “The boat is easy. I’ve people who can get the rest.”

  “You’ve people who can do just about anything, haven’t you?”

  “Just about.”

  “We’ll need a second diver,” Anna said. “Normally, there would be two, but we could get away with just one.”

  With a warning look, he let go her hands. “You’ve someone in mind?”

  She tried to imagine Bascombe’s reaction to such a proposal. “He doesn’t like trouble.”

  “No one does.”

  Their eyes met pragmatically. They were working together, after all.

  “How dangerous is it? Diving in an unfamiliar place?” he asked.

  “I don’t know. I don’t care.” She remembered being suspended under the veering sky, believing she would plunge to the bottom of the bay. It seemed to her now that she had fallen and survived.

  “I care,” said Dexter Styles.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  * * *

  Captain Kittredge brought the Elizabeth Seaman into Cape Town on February 25, eight days ahead of schedule, having made good on his boast by maintaining an average speed of twelve knots. He looked so picturesque, commanding the bridge with his fair hair and fine patrician hands, that Eddie sometimes imagined the Elizabeth Seaman as a yacht like the ones he’d watched, gathering into regattas at the foot of Long Island Sound, from the Bronx piers where he and the other protectory boys went swimming in summer. Kittredge was like a grown-up version of the youths he’d seen skylarking from Central Park with their tennis racquets and riding crops. The captain had so much luck, he’d luck to spare, Eddie told himself—enough for fifty-six men, he hoped.

  Channel fever set in days before land was sighted, sea projects giving way to diffuse anticipation with no clear object. Farmingdale stowed away his hemp dolls and took to winding his watch so often Eddie was sure he would snap the gears. At last the mooring lines were brought up from the storeroom and the booms raised to discharge cargo.

  After quarantine, the Elizabeth Seaman docked in Table Harbor to unload her cargo of bauxite and take on stores of fresh food and water. Cape Town was a favorite port, and those not assigned to port watch hightailed it off the ship at sundown: the merchant crew and navy gunners to the Malay Quarter, whose whores the port agent had specifically warned them against; gasheads like Farmingdale to the cheapest gin joints. Naval officers occupied a different sphere in port; Lieutenant Rosen, the armed guard commander, and his junior officer, Ensign Wyckoff, were greeted at the gangway by car and taken to dinner at a private home.

  Roger and Stanley, the merchant cadets, watched forlornly in their pressed academy uniforms as the navy officers were spirited away. Too inexperienced for brothels, they were uncertain where they belonged. Eddie promised he would take them to a nightclub before they left Cape Town.

  Radio operators had few duties in port and often disappeared, but Sparks chose to remain on the ship. “The fuck am I going to do in Cape Town?” he asked Eddie, who stayed aboard the first night in port to keep him company. “Drag this fucking leg around, saying, ‘Thank you very much, I’d like a glass of milk’? I can see their famous Table fucking Mountain right from my porthole—look, there it is, I needn’t shift a limb to play the tourist. Now I can use this radio for the purpose God intended.”

  It had been weeks since they’d heard any news in the radio silence, and what those hushed BBC announcers had to report was mostly good: Rommel’s prize tanks fleeing helter-skelter in Tunisia; the Russians surging in Kharkov; the Allies pounding Messina.

  “We’re winning the fucking war, Third,” Sparks said. “What do you say to that?”

  “Who can tell, with those voices,” Eddie said. “They could say I was a dead man, and I’d think I was hearing good news.”

  Sparks reared back in disdain. “Third,” he said. “I’d never have thought you’d be a pussy for a posh accent.”

  Eddie conjured the lacerating snap of the bosun’s speech. “I wouldn’t have, either,” he said.

  He climbed down through the empty ship to return Sparks’s cup to the galley. The bosun was there, drinking coffee and reading. At the sight of Eddie, he stood and clapped the book shut, holding his place with two fingers. Eddie, too, was taken aback.

  “I’m surprised you’re not ashore, Bosun,” he said.

  “What conceivable reason could you have to be surprised, Third?” the bosun said sourly. Clearly, he’d not expected to see anyone, and seemed out of sorts.

  “We’ve shipped together before,” Eddie reminded him. “Then you went ashore whenever you’d the chance.”

  “As you did, if memory serves,” the bosun retorted. “Perhaps your dizzying new stature accounts for your change of routine. But you’ll note that I merely speculate. It is none of my affair what you do—or do not—with your liberty, just as it is none of your affair what I do with mine.”

  “Keep your shirt on,” Eddie said. “I was making conversation.”

  The bosun eyed him skeptically, holding his place in the book. Eddie caught the surprising pink of his palm against the blue-black iridescence of his skin. When he’d worked under the bosun, those flashes of pink had mesmerized Eddie like a flutter of wings.

  “Making conversation has its uses, I will grant you,” the bosun said. “In the present case, however, the explanation strikes me as disingenuous for the simple reason that it ignores our unwavering acrimony. We are, as it were, beyond making conversation. Ipso post facto, your statement cannot be taken at face value.”

  “Do you talk this way to everyone?”

  “What can be the purpose of your question, Third?” the bosun erupted, losing his bookmark and throwing up his hands in frustration. “Do you intend it rhetorically or literally?”

  “Literally,” Eddie said, not entirely certain of the difference.

  “Very well, then. You are a literal man, Third, and I will give you a literal and, if you will permit me, bracingly candid response.” The bosun took a step closer and lowered his voice. “I do not talk this way to everyone. Men so far outside my intellectual scope do not normally crave extensive and repeated interactions, as you do. Your reasons for persisting in this effort elude me, I confess. I could speculate, of course, but that would be a fool’s errand—in part because it would imply that our inner lives had the slightest modicum of solidarity—which I more than doubt—but also because it would indicate that I care one jot about what moves and motivates you, Third, which I do not.”

  Eddie lost his way early on, but he knew he was being insulted. Blood rose to his face. “Fine, then,” he said. “Good night.”


  He turned and left the galley, taking scant satisfaction in the bosun’s visible surprise. Eddie felt like a whipped dog but knew he’d only himself to blame. What did he want from the bosun? He didn’t know.

  The next afternoon, he left the ship with the cadets to explore Cape Town. It was larger than Eddie had expected, a real city crouched under the earthen gaze of Table Mountain. The cadets bought chocolate and satsuma oranges. Eddie bought Player’s Navy Cut cigarettes and smoked them as they walked along Adderly Street, a grand thoroughfare lined with columned buildings. He knew within twenty minutes why the bosun had stayed aboard. Negroes were kept apart from whites in every sphere: buses, shops, theaters, picture houses. Eddie was accustomed to seeing Negroes treated badly—on the West Side piers, wops were regarded as Negroes and Negroes as something worse. Still, he was shocked when a policeman asked an elderly Negro lady to leave a bench where she’d stopped to rest with her shopping bags. The imperious bosun would never set foot upon the soil of such a place. Still, Eddie had to admire a man with enough self-restraint to resist touching land after forty-seven days at sea, purely on principle.

  After dark, he brought the cadets to a nightclub he’d heard Lieutenant Rosen mention at chow that morning. As Eddie had hoped, Rosen himself was there, along with Ensign Wyckoff, and they invited Eddie and the cadets to their table. Rosen was a handsome Jew, a reservist who worked in advertising. Wyckoff looked at least a decade younger: a pudgy, freckled enthusiast. Elatedly, he described to Eddie a tour of wine vineyards that he and Rosen had made that afternoon with their South African hosts. They’d watched the grape harvest, and Wyckoff had purchased two cases of wine.

  “Wine?” Eddie said. “You’re pulling my leg.”

  Wyckoff was serious. After the war, he hoped to become a wine merchant.

  “I’ve never cared for wine,” Eddie admitted, although he did like champagne mixed with Guinness—black velvet, they called it.

  “I’ll change your mind, and that’s a promise,” Wyckoff said, already in the salesman’s mode.

  A large orchestra was playing “White Christmas,” which mingled strangely with the smell of ripening citrus. Mulatto girls sat with Allied officers at their tables and danced with them. These weren’t prostitutes or even B-girls, who were charged with encouraging sailors to buy them drinks. More likely they were clerks or shopgirls. What money changed hands would be a gift, not a fee. Eddie had partaken of many such arrangements over the years, but found himself observing the present scene with disdain. Then he realized why: he was picturing it through the bosun’s eyes.

  * * *

  The day before they were to sail, Farmingdale failed to report for duty and could not be found. The Elizabeth Seaman couldn’t sail without a second mate, so she missed the convoy she was to have joined through the Mozambique Channel, a stretch of sea between Madagascar and the African coast where many Allied ships had been lost to Nazi submarine wolf packs. Farmingdale turned up three days later in the army stockade, his offense so grievous that the army refused to release him until the Elizabeth Seaman was ready to cast off lines.

  On March 9, military police delivered the second mate to the gangway, and he was summoned directly to the master’s office. For all Kittredge’s pretty-boy looks, no one could say he didn’t let Farmingdale have it. If there was one thing this captain could not abide, it was being left behind. Now a laggard, the Elizabeth Seaman was forced to sail independently on an evasive course—twenty degrees to the right for ten minutes, then twenty degrees to the left, then back to her original course for ten minutes more, and so on—not only at night, when U-boats were most active, but all day. They sailed toward the Mozambique Channel with davits swung out, ready to lower the lifeboats if their ship should be hit.

  Farmingdale was a pariah. For two days, he came late to chow and sat with the cadets at their small table. He wore a quixotic smile, as though his isolation were a rare privilege. On the third day, Eddie tried to signal forgiveness when Farmingdale relieved him of the morning watch. Eddie made a point of greeting him warmly, even giving him a conciliatory pat as he relayed their course and position. But Farmingdale heaved an impatient sigh at these transparent efforts and stared off, stroking his snowy beard as though it were a secret trove of strength.

  That afternoon, Sparks received a second direct radio message for the Elizabeth Seaman, and their course was altered. Shortly before midnight, at a rendezvous point fifty miles northeast of Durban, seventy-seven ships materialized around theirs as if through divine intervention. An immense effort was required to maneuver the Elizabeth Seaman into her station without colliding with other ships, all of them blacked out except for a faint light at the stern. Eddie stood with the captain on the flying bridge, working the engine room telegraph to communicate speed and direction to the engineers below. He couldn’t help ascribing almost supernatural powers to Kittredge. His American good luck had come to their rescue. Eddie had craved such luck all his life—reached for it every way he could. Perhaps having luck meant you didn’t have to reach.

  The convoy course was transmitted in Morse code by blinker signal lights that operated like venetian blinds. From the commodore’s ship in the middle of the first row, the signal was passed backward along each column of ships, a process that took nearly thirty minutes to complete. Then, as one invisible mass, the convoy set a course of forty-three degrees toward the Mozambique Channel.

  At sunrise, during general quarters, Eddie gazed out alongside the mate at an ocean studded by nearly eighty ships arrayed in a vast design with the ritual splendor of chess pieces. “That is beauty like no other I’ve seen,” he said.

  “Prettier near the middle,” the mate said, chuckling, for their station was perilously close to one of the “coffin corners” most vulnerable to U-boats. It didn’t matter. The convergence was so spectacular, so monumental in its scale and span, that being part of it made Eddie feel invincible. He saw ships’ flags from Portugal, Free France, Brazil, Panama, South Africa. On the Dutch freighter to starboard, two children scampered among linens billowing from a wash line. Apparently the ship’s master had fled Holland with his family to escape the Nazis.

  Fifteen smaller, faster escort vessels—destroyers and corvettes—flitted alongside the expanse of ships like police horses at a parade. While a convoy couldn’t stop for a disabled ship, an escort vessel would stay behind and help to rescue its crew. This fact, more than any other, relieved Eddie.

  Only one man aboard the Elizabeth Seaman was unhappy with the new arrangement: her captain. Convoys had to run at the speed of the slowest ship, and because this one included a Panamanian coal burner, they were held to eight knots. “We made better time zigzagging,” Kittredge groused to the chief engineer, who sat to his right at chow.

  After midnight, when Eddie was relieved by Farmingdale (still wearing his whimsical smile), he found Wyckoff, the naval ensign, waiting outside his stateroom with a bottle of wine. “We’ll drink it outdoors,” he said. “It’s a perfect night. Where you drink wine matters as much as the wine itself.”

  They sat on the number two hatch cover. The night was cool and clear, a rolling sea just visible under a paring of moon. Eddie couldn’t see the ships around them, but he perceived their density, five hundred feet away fore and aft, a thousand feet abeam, all nosing together through the swells like a spectral herd. Eddie heard the cork leaving Wyckoff’s bottle, caught a tart, woody smell of the wine. The ensign poured a modest amount into two enameled cups. “Don’t drink it yet,” he cautioned as Eddie lifted his. “Let it breathe.”

  The Southern Cross hung near the horizon. Eddie preferred the southern sky; it was brighter, denser with planets.

  “All right. Now,” Wyckoff said after several minutes. “Take a sip and move it around your mouth before you swallow.”

  It sounded loopy, but Eddie did as instructed. At first there was just the ashy pucker he’d always disliked in wine, but that flavor yielded to an appealing overripeness, even a
suggestion of decay. “Better,” he said with surprise.

  They drank and looked at the stars. After the war, Wyckoff said, he hoped to find a job planting grapes in the valleys north of San Francisco. There had been vineyards there, but the dry agents had burned them during Prohibition.

  “What about you, Third?” he asked. “What will you do after the war?”

  Eddie knew what he wanted to say, but waited several moments to be sure. “I’ll go back home to New York,” he said. “I’ve a daughter there.”

  “What’s her name?”

  “Anna.”

  These syllables, which Eddie hadn’t uttered aloud in years, seemed to crash together like a pair of cymbals, leaving behind a ringing echo. Abashed, he looked away. But as the seconds passed without reaction from Wyckoff, Eddie realized how unremarkable his disclosure was. Nowadays, most men on ships had left other lives behind. The war had made him ordinary.

  “How old is she?” Wyckoff asked. “Your Anna.”

  Eddie took a moment to calculate. “Twenty,” he said with surprise. “She’ll have been twenty just last week.”

  “Grown-up!”

  “I suppose twenty is grown-up.”

  “I’m twenty-one,” Wyckoff said.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  * * *

  There were nights in the Mozambique Channel when the escort vessels dropped depth charges, filling the air with a tingling crackle. The general quarters bell rang and rang, bringing all hands on deck, and the convoy zigzagged for long stretches. Eddie stood on the flying bridge, raw-eyed, trying to maintain the Elizabeth Seaman’s station among the rows and columns of turning blacked-out ships. When he collapsed into his sack, he slept fitfully, Anna prowling his thoughts like a restless spirit.