He explained his findings to Farmingdale. “There were seventeen men on that boat, with life vests,” Eddie said. “We must search for survivors.”
Farmingdale made a skeptical gesture, but Eddie persisted to a chorus of agreement from the other men. Farmingdale shrugged and remained on the raft, recalcitrant, while the rest of them prepared the boat for a search. Pugh, the old salt, pronounced the wind still too high to raise a sail. A set of oars and oarlocks had been lost from the lifeboat, but the spares were stowed. They would row in a square, a thousand strokes in each direction, blowing the whistles on their Mae Wests every five strokes. Everyone, including Farmingdale, moved from the raft onto the boat, but they left the raft attached, unsure how many survivors they might find. Eddie carefully opened the steel cylinder containing emergency food rations and distributed a portion of pemmican and two malted milk tablets to each man, along with six ounces of water from the jug—the contents of which had been changed just four days earlier—in an enamel measuring cup.
Eddie’s ears began playing tricks as soon as the rowing began. Every pause seemed full of human-sounding cries, but they completed the eastern portion of the square without sighting anyone. They turned south with fresh rowers. Three hundred strokes in, several men heard a faint whistle, and Roger gave a shout from the bow. Abeam to port, Eddie made out an intermittent fleck of what looked like flotsam. As they rowed toward it slowly on the high seas, he saw that it was the bosun and Wyckoff lashed together. Carefully, they extended oars to the floaters and hauled them over the side of the lifeboat. Both men lay at the bottom, shivering violently, then lost consciousness. Sparks removed his leg brace and spread himself on top of the waterlogged pair to warm them.
At sunset, the sky swung open like a hatch, revealing an exotic cargo of pink and orange. They had searched the remainder of the day but found no one else. The swells began to moderate, and Eddie distributed another round of rations. Wyckoff and the bosun were able to eat and drink, although Wyckoff said little and the bosun not a word. Eddie found it eerie to have his nemesis be so silent. It was like having the bosun’s ghost on board.
As darkness fell and the weather calmed, everyone’s spirits rose. The discovery of the lifeboat virtually assured that they were in range of where the Elizabeth Seaman had gone down; help would likely reach them the following day. The best course now was to keep a sharp lookout and stay with the current, which rescuers would take into account when choosing where to search. They lowered the sea anchor, a cone-shaped canvas bag, over the bow of the lifeboat to fix them to the current. They left the raft attached, to make themselves more visible to planes. Then they set watches and took turns sleeping huddled together at the bottom of the boat on life preservers, or sitting on the thwarts with their heads against the gunwales. Eddie made a notch with his jackknife on the thwart where he slept, marking the passage of twenty-four hours away from the Elizabeth Seaman.
They woke shivering, heavy dew on their sodden clothing. Eddie distributed rations of food and water. As the sun rose, Wyckoff told them that a rogue wave had overturned boat two in the storm, sending all seventeen men into the sea. Everyone had managed to stay with the boat, clinging to the lifelines on its gunwales and waiting for a chance to flip it back over, when a shark had attacked the second cook. Some men swam away in panic at his screams; others, including Wyckoff and the bleeding man, scrambled onto the overturned boat. This proved an error, for when another wave righted it, they were tossed into a frenzy of sharks. Wyckoff had been spared somehow. He could hardly swim, but his Mae West had kept him afloat. At daybreak he caught sight of the bosun, who swam to him. They had been trying to reach the swamped lifeboat ever since.
Eddie kept his eyes on the bosun as Wyckoff spoke, wondering what kind of terror it must have taken to silence such a man.
When the sun was up, they raised the lifeboat mast, and Eddie ran up the yellow flag that was among the boat’s emergency provisions. Shortly after noon, they spotted a plane flying low. Everyone screamed and jumped from boat and raft, waving their shirts—except the bosun, who sat quietly at the bottom of the boat. The plane flew away, apparently not having seen them, a blow that left all of them spent. Still, no one doubted that the plane had been searching for survivors of the Elizabeth Seaman, and hours of daylight remained. Four men stood every watch, one facing each direction. Eddie grated his eyes against the line of horizon. It seemed always on the verge of yielding up a ship, but hours of warm, clear weather—perfect rescue weather—passed without any further sightings.
By sunset the men were baffled, grumbling, hungry. What was the matter with those fucking planes? Were blind men flying them? Eddie said nothing. He was wishing Kittredge were there. It was impossible to imagine a rescue plane bypassing their lucky captain.
The bosun sat vacantly at the bottom of the boat. “Some help you were, lazy bastard,” Farmingdale chuckled with a glance at the others. Eddie sensed he was trying to provoke the bosun into speaking, as if that might change their luck. Eddie wondered if it might. “We know you can talk,” Farmingdale needled him. “Third knows better than anyone.” He cast a sly look Eddie’s way—an invitation. Eddie gave a neutral smile.
On their third dawn, the wind was no more than a breeze. Farmingdale thought they should ride the current one more day before setting sail for land. They sighted a ship far away, but their leaps and cries did no good. In the last of the daylight, they prepared to begin sailing the next morning toward Africa’s long sandy coast. The Elizabeth Seaman had sunk a thousand miles due east of Somaliland. Farmingdale estimated that the current had taken them north, which would make the distance to land even shorter. Sailing with a good westerly wind, they might make landfall in fifteen days or less. The combined rations from the raft and lifeboat—supplemented, hopefully, by fishing and more rain—should be enough to sustain them that long. And they might still be rescued on the way.
Night fell cold and hard. They lit flares at the same time from boat and raft, and continued their watches, hoping to spot a neutral ship with her running lights on. Eddie sat on a thwart, unable to sleep. He thought of the ocean as it looked on pilot charts, crowded with depth contours and shipping lanes and arcs of current. There seemed no relation between those images and the emptiness surrounding him now. Overhead was the extravagant canopy of stars that had so astounded him when he first went to sea, a shimmering excess like the inside of Ali Baba’s cave. Viewed from the deck of a ship, that sky was a spectacle reserved for those privileged enough to see it. Now the stars looked random, accidental—like the sea itself. Anna had stopped coming to him in his dreams; he’d traveled beyond her reach. Eddie understood that he had passed through another layer of life into something deeper, colder, and more pitiless.
He made a third notch in the thwart.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
* * *
After the dive, Anna turned Lydia’s bed on its side so it leaned against the wall. She closed the door to her parents’ bedroom, moved the kitchen table into the front room, and dragged the radio there, too. She wanted the apartment to be different, to mark the change she felt—the weight of her discovery.
Her father’s pocket watch leaked seawater for several days. When it dried, its hands were frozen at ten past nine. Cupping her palm around its lozenge of weight gave Anna a surge of strength, of protection. It was a relic from an underworld she’d visited once, under perilous conditions, purely in order to retrieve it. She slept with it under her pillow.
Within days of the dive, she knew that she wanted to leave the apartment. Girls weren’t allowed in the rooming house where Bascombe lived. There was a YWCA near her building, but it had a waiting list—and anyway, she wanted to be closer to the Yard. There were rooms to let along Sands Street; she’d seen the odd handwritten card in the window of a bar or uniform shop. She wondered if it might be possible to rent one of those rooms without anyone finding out she was living there. But the wrong kinds of girls did such things, and the dange
r of discovery was too great.
One evening she chanced upon Rose leaving work. As they walked arm in arm through the Sands Street gate, Anna mentioned her dilemma—rather, a version of it in which her mother had to return to the Midwest to nurse an ill sister, and naturally Anna couldn’t live alone. Rose clapped her hands: her mother’s tenant, a newlywed, had decided to follow her husband to a naval base in Del Mar, California. There would be a room to let in their apartment, on Clinton Avenue! Anna agreed on the spot to take it.
Since she was earning enough money to keep the apartment and rent the room at Rose’s, Anna decided not to mention her move to her mother or aunt. It required too much explanation. She and Brianne met less often anyway, and usually at a picture theater. As long as Anna collected the mail every couple of days, even the neighbors weren’t likely to miss her.
She bought a large cardboard please-don’t-rain suitcase (as her father used to call them), filled it with clothing, toiletries, and Ellery Queens, drank what was left in the milk bottle, and wrapped the butter in a dish towel. She sat once more at the table where it seemed now that she’d spent the better portion of her life—eating, sewing, cutting paper dolls out of butcher paper. The fire escape cleaved the sunlight into slabs, each swarming with dust like the glittering mica flecks in the water of Wallabout Bay. The building felt heavy and still. In the kitchen, she ran her hands over the tin-lined sink where she and her mother had bathed Lydia until she was too big to fit inside it. She looked into the mirror where her father used to shave. Then she left the apartment, locking the door behind her.
Descending the six flights, she half expected a curious neighbor to intercept and question her. But no one came or even—that she could hear—shuffled to a peephole. Perhaps everyone was still asleep. She stepped into the softening air of late March and noticed strangers on the block. A man carried a suitcase, hurrying, looking up at numbers chiseled over doorways. He was arriving.
Anna’s new bedroom was at the back of Rose’s apartment, facing a tree that looked as if it were lifting barbells. An old man on a horse cart delivered butter and milk. Rich people once lived on Clinton Avenue, and the biggest houses had their own stables, empty now, some used for automobiles. Two of Rose’s brothers were in the army, but the youngest, Hiram, was still at home, and he covered his schoolbooks in the same licorice-scented oilcloth Anna had used as a child to cover hers. She adored this new home.
Some evenings, she met Rose outside their old shop and they rode the Flushing Avenue streetcar together, sharing an evening newspaper. Only a few weeks ago, Anna had watched Rose from outside this same streetcar, feeling she might drown in her solitude. She touched the pocket watch.
On afternoons when she dived, she worked later, and Rose knew not to wait. Those evenings, Anna went to Sands Street with the other divers. She was careful to suck a peppermint on the streetcar back to Rose’s, not wanting to smell of beer when she said good night to Rose’s parents.
Living with Rose made it awkward to spend time with Charlie Voss, who was still Rose’s supervisor. Anna went to his office to explain after the marrieds had gone home one evening.
“I understand, of course,” he said. “It’s a shame.”
“I’ll miss you, Charlie.”
“You’ll stop by now and then?” he asked. “When the coast is clear?”
“I promise.”
Leaving the Yard after work, she still looked for Dexter Styles’s automobile on Sands Street—always with a throb of disappointment when she didn’t see it, followed by relief.
Two weeks after her harbor dive, while she was waiting for the other divers to get their food at the Oval Bar, Anna opened her Herald Tribune to glance at the encouraging headlines she was coming to expect: Rommel barely hanging on in Tunisia; the Russian army forcing the Germans back toward Smolensk. When she flipped the paper over, her eye caught on an item at the lower left:
MISSING NIGHTCLUB OWNER FOUND DEAD
BULLET-RIDDLED BODY LEFT NEAR
ABANDONED RACETRACK.
Anna stared at the photograph. Although she was not aware of reading, words seemed to crawl inside her: A two-week search for missing nightclub impresario Dexter Styles ended in gruesome tragedy on Sunday, when Andrew Metuchen and Sandy Kupech of Sheepshead Bay, both ten years old, discovered his body near the vestiges of the old racetrack . . .
She pushed the newspaper away and took a sip from her beer. She watched the divers around her wolfing down bay mussels and pigs in blankets. Her head felt like a balloon floating several feet above her body. She heard breaking glass and realized she was falling.
They brought her to with smelling salts. She lay on her side, sawdust under her cheek. Ruby’s face hovered just above, her smeary eye makeup close enough to Anna that its floral sweetness sickened her. She vomited and tried to stand. Eventually, Bascombe and Marle hoisted one of her arms around each of their necks and helped her up. They walked her out of the bar past smirking sailors who presumed she was drunk.
The cold street air was a relief. Anna walked with her eyes shut, relinquishing most of her weight. It felt like sleepwalking. Something awful had happened in the bar, but she’d escaped. After many twists and turns, they were indoors again, and she recognized the briny burnt-rubber smell of the diving dresses. They’d brought her to the recompression tank.
Marle got in with her. “Any pains?” he asked, setting the dial. “What about before you fainted?”
“It isn’t the bends,” she told him, and then remembered what had made her faint. Her hands began to shake.
“Who was your tender?”
“Katz,” she said through chattering teeth. “But I wasn’t down too long.”
“He was the one wearing the watches.”
She vomited again.
When her recompression was complete, Marle unscrewed the door to the tank, and they stepped back out. Bascombe and Ruby were waiting. Bascombe gave Anna a long look through his narrow silver eyes, and she wondered whether he’d seen the headline. They hadn’t spoken again about their illegal dive beyond noting that the equipment smuggled from the Yard had been returned without incident. Anna had been afraid her friends would avoid her after that night, but it was the opposite: now the bond between them felt familial and complex.
Marle agreed not to record Anna’s symptoms or recompression in the diving log if she promised to go directly to the hospital and have her vital signs checked. A marine guard ferried her up the hill on his motorbike. She described to an intake nurse what had happened, and was told to wait. The newspaper headline floated in Anna’s mind preposterously. It couldn’t be true, but it exhausted her to keep discounting it.
A naval nurse woke her eventually; she’d dozed in her chair with her head against the wall. By her wristwatch, it was after nine. The nurse looked hardly older than Anna, a blond chignon tucked behind her cap. She took Anna’s temperature and administered the blood pressure cuff with a look of pure concentration that Anna admired. With a small bright light, she peered inside Anna’s eyes and ears. She held a cold stethoscope to her heart and noted each result on a clipboard.
“Everything looks fine,” she said. “How do you feel?”
“All right,” Anna said. “Just tired.”
“The doctor wanted me to ask whether you’re married.”
“No,” Anna said, surprised. “Why?”
“If you were, he would recommend a pregnancy test. Some girls faint early on.”
“Ah.”
“He thought you might have taken your ring off to dive.”
“Did you . . . give me the test?”
“No, of course not. I would have to draw blood.”
“It isn’t necessary,” Anna said.
She left the hospital, stepping between square white columns down a shallow flight of steps that faced the grassy oval where she and Rose had given blood the previous fall. She lingered in the shadows, fixing her eyes on a pale columnar sculpture she remembered from that day. It had a
n eagle on top. She hadn’t had her monthly since joining the diving program—two months. She’d assumed that diving itself was the reason, and had been relieved, dreading the complications. This new interpretation arrived not as a possibility but as a certainty.
Anna returned to the apartment to find Rose’s father in the front room, reading the Forward by his green glass desk lamp. She thought she saw a flicker of disapproval—or perhaps just concern—at her tardy, disheveled state. In her own room, she lay in bed with her hands over her belly and stared at the tree outside her window. She reminded herself that she didn’t know for sure. But she did know. She was in trouble, at long last.
The next morning she left early, without eating. She placed the pocket watch in her purse with an ominous sense that she’d reached the limit of its protective powers. Riding the streetcar to Flushing Avenue, she was stricken with nausea compounded by monstrous hunger. At a cafeteria on the corner of Flushing and Clinton, she joined a legion of Naval Yard workers lining up for eggs, hash browns, coffee, and dry toast—there was a freeze on butter and other “edible fats.” She felt steadier after having eaten, and walked the rest of the way to work. She stopped at Lieutenant Axel’s office to say good morning. He was always the first to arrive.
“Kerrigan,” he called. “I was hoping you’d turn up. Come in a minute.” When she was standing before his desk, he said, “I’ve five new trainees coming in today, don’t know their elbows from their asses. What have you scheduled?”
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