Manhattan Beach

by Jennifer Egan

  “Tending in the morning, diving in the afternoon.”

  “All right if I send these dopes along and hope they learn a thing or two by watching?”

  “Of course, sir.”

  The change in her relations with Lieutenant Axel had happened perhaps three weeks before. From one day to the next, he seemed to grow accustomed to Anna, as if the attrition of habit had caused the scaffolding of his prejudice to crumble spontaneously. It was a stunning, almost magical reversal, and although it had begun before Anna found the pocket watch, she felt as if the watch had catalyzed the transformation. Now she found herself cast in the unlikely role of favorite—pet—as if the animus between herself and Lieutenant Axel had been converted into intimacy. He spoke to her in shorthand, and she understood it. His disparaging remarks about girls were compliments to Anna, for she was not like other girls. “Do me a favor, Kerrigan,” he’d told her the week before. “Cover up your hair on the barge, or we’ll have every birdbrained secretary on the goddamn Yard pounding on our door.”

  “They might not want to dive, sir.”

  “Probably true. There aren’t many as crazy as you. But I’m warning you, if they start turning up in droves, it’ll be your job to send them packing.”

  “Unless they’re any good,” she’d said. But the lieutenant merely snorted, as she’d known he would—wanted him to, it seemed to Anna later, when her disingenuousness shamed her.

  “Get a feel for the new men,” he told her now. “Tell me if any stands out. And Kerrigan.” He lowered his voice, glancing at the door. “Rattle them a little. You know what I mean. Separate the men from the boys.”

  She left his office feeling buoyed by the flattery and guilty for enjoying it. She put on her work clothes and went outside to the pier. Sunlight poured through the building ways, and she closed her eyes, letting it warm her face. The pressure of her problem began to ease, like a fresh blow that had finally ceased to ache. The solution was obvious: diving would put an end to it. Trouble like hers was incompatible with this work; her monthly would come. That afternoon she had cramps while inspecting the hull of a torpedoed destroyer, five trainees observing her from the barge. She worried that the diving dress would be soiled—luxurious fretting that made her smile in the privacy of her helmet. When at last she asked Greer to stand guard at the restroom, she was incredulous to find she’d been wrong.

  Each morning she awoke convinced that her trouble would end that day. By evening she was too exhausted to dwell on the fact that it hadn’t. The weather warmed enough that she and Rose began walking home along Clinton Avenue from Flushing rather than take a second trolley. On Friday, which was Sabbath for the Jews, Rose and her family lit two candles after supper and gathered around the table with a loaf of bread. While they added extra blessings for Sig and Caleb, in the army, Anna issued her own fervid prayer: Please let my trouble end. Unless her trouble ended, all of this would shortly disappear: the candles, the bread. Rose and her family. There were other kinds of homes where girls in trouble went to live.

  In a separate chamber of Anna’s mind, a clock had been set in motion. If the diving failed to work, there was another way, but you couldn’t wait too long. Two weeks after her faint, Anna opened her eyes one morning and thought, I have to do something. She’d no idea how to begin, but the answer came as if she’d been planning it all along: She would find Nell. Nell would know what to do. Nell had done it herself.

  After work, she took the subway to Union Square. Old men who’d fought in the Great War were playing chess in their heavy coats, pins and medals affixed to their hats. “I’ve Heard That Song Before” played on a portable phonograph, and teenagers were holding each other in their coats, dancing to the music. Watching them, Anna was stricken with longing. She had danced that way with boys at Brooklyn College, but she’d never felt as innocent as these teenagers looked. She had always been hiding something. She was hiding something now.

  Twenty-one Gramercy Park South. It was uncanny how Nell had made her repeat it.

  At the mention of Nell’s first name—still the only name Anna had—a doorman in a gray military-looking uniform went to a wall switchboard and plugged in a cable. Anna touched the pocket watch. She’d hoped that Nell would be at home preparing for the evening, and it seemed she was right. An elevator man ferried her to the eighth floor and released her into an alcove containing two paneled doors facing each other across a gush of red roses whose breadth was amplified by a mirror hanging just behind them. Anna’s wan reflection startled her. She was pinching color into her cheeks when Nell emerged from the left door wearing a satin peignoir whose lapels effervesced with tiny white feathers, like soapsuds. She seemed to take a moment to recall who Anna was; then she threw her arms around her, holding her cigarette away so as not to burn her. “How are you, darling?” she cried. “I haven’t seen you in ages, you naughty thing. Where have you been hiding?” Anna made a neutral murmur to each shrill utterance, and in the course of this back-and-forth, something settled in Nell. She drew away, narrowing her eyes at Anna. “Come in and tell me what’s wrong,” she said.

  * * *

  Anna returned to Gramercy Park early Sunday morning. She and Nell walked to Park Avenue, Nell’s sharp heels striking the pavement like nails being hammered. Her peroxided hair appeared blanched in the morning sun, and there were blue shadows under her eyes. She’d become a person who looked best in artificial light.

  When they were seated in a taxi, Anna returned to the topic of price softly, so the cabbie wouldn’t hear. She’d no notion what the procedure would cost and was hoping she could pay over time.

  “Hammond is paying,” Nell whispered back. “I told him it was for me.”

  “Suppose he finds out?”

  “Believe me,” Nell said, “he owes me.”

  “Thank you,” Anna breathed, but the phrase seemed hardly sufficient. “And for coming with me. I never expected it.”

  Nell shrugged. There was something curiously impersonal about her ministrations; Anna was fairly certain she would have done the same for any girl who came to her in trouble.

  “You heard about Dexter Styles,” Nell said.

  Anna fixed her gaze on the blur of tall gray buildings outside the window. “I saw it in the paper,” she said. “Horrible.”

  “No one talks of anything else.”

  “Do they know who did it? Or why?”

  “There are a thousand rumors. Some people say it was the Chicago Syndicate. They’re more ruthless than the New York one, supposedly.”

  “Why would they kill him?” Anna asked.

  “There’s an investigation, but no one will talk. Unless they want the same treatment.”

  “Maybe Dexter Styles talked.”

  Nell considered this. “But why?” she said. “People say he was three quarters legitimate. Seven eighths! Why risk all that?”

  “Had he children?” Anna knew the answer, but she wanted to keep the conversation going. It relieved her to talk about Dexter Styles.

  “Twin sons and a daughter. Stunner of a wife—society girl, rich family. He’d the world by the tail, that’s what everyone thought.”

  “It’s so sad,” Anna said, and felt a welling of sorrow. She fixed her eyes on the window, afraid that Nell would know.

  “People were crying at the club,” Nell said.

  His death was shared by many—by hundreds, Anna thought, and felt herself dissolve into their midst. She had known Dexter Styles much less than those others. Hardly at all. Yet darts of memory pierced her resolve: the feel of him in her arms; his hoarse whisper. And what she was going to do now.

  The taxi brought them to the corner of East Seventy-fourth Street, just blocks from Dr. Deerwood’s office. The coincidence dazed Anna. It had just gone April—they would have been bringing Lydia for her next appointment in a matter of weeks. She wondered whether Nell’s doctor might be in the same building as Dr. Deerwood, the same office—whether he might actually be Dr. Deerwood. Chilly sunli
ght flooded the intersection; pigeons crowded the air. Nell put on a pair of dark sunglasses, like a picture star. Her pale wool coat had epaulettes of gold braid on the shoulders. Church bells began to ring.

  “Where is the office?” Anna asked.

  “Down the street. He doesn’t like taxis to stop outside on weekends. It draws attention.”

  They walked toward Madison Avenue. Anna’s head ached, and she wished the bells would stop. In the middle of the block, Nell turned to a row house with striped awnings and sculpted hedges. Down a small flight of stairs, a rectangular brass plaque read DR. SOFFIT, OBSTETRICS. Nell pressed a buzzer and a door-pull released, admitting them to a waiting area akin to Dr. Deerwood’s in its sumptuousness, although the decor was different. This office had silvery wall-to-wall carpeting and a crescent-shaped couch upholstered in gray velvet. Anna began to sweat. The church bells seemed to ring inside her head. “I wish they would stop,” she whispered.

  Nell jumped. “Who?”

  A faint chemical odor hung on the air as if, behind the carpeting and velvet, there were a hospital room. And there must be. You couldn’t have an operation on a crescent-shaped couch.

  “I was nervous, too, my first time,” Nell said. She sounded nervous now.

  “How many times has it been?”

  “Three. Well, two. This would be the third.”

  “What about after?”

  “You’ll be drowsy,” Nell said. “Crampy. But fine, really. By the next day you’re good as new.”

  Anna hadn’t meant that, exactly, but it hardly mattered. Mingled with her fear was an accumulation of hope, familiar from years of bringing Lydia to Dr. Deerwood. The doctor would come. The doctor would come! Magazines had been fanned precisely over a lacquered coffee table: Collier’s, McClure’s, The Saturday Evening Post. Nell opened a copy of Silver Screen, and Anna looked over her shoulder at the blondes: Betty Grable, Veronica Lake, Lana Turner, all of whom once seemed like possible versions of Lydia. Anna fixed her eyes on the door that led from this room to the next. The door was upholstered. A beautiful door. She found she was clutching Nell’s hand.

  “It doesn’t hurt,” Nell said. “He gives you chloroform and you go to sleep.” She was looking at a feature about movie stars’ hairstyles—rolls, waves, curls—but her eyes didn’t move on the page. Anna sensed her wish to be done and away. Soon the doctor would come. Dread and longing churned in Anna’s stomach.

  She was staring at the door when it opened. Dr. Soffit was younger than she’d expected—that was to say, younger than Dr. Deerwood. He was tall and sandy-haired and wore a wedding band. He greeted Nell warmly and shook Anna’s hand with a gentle earnestness, looking into her eyes. He led them through the upholstered door into a room that was less hospital-like than Anna had feared, with small paintings of fruit hanging from moldings. A high bed was covered with white sheets. In an adjacent room, Anna removed her slip and pulled a soft cotton smock over her brassiere and panties. Her flat, muscular belly seemed to mock the proceedings. Suppose it wasn’t even true? Suppose she wasn’t in trouble after all? How could she know, without the test?

  Or had they given her the test?

  Nell sat in a chair beside where Anna’s head would go. “Miss Konopka won’t see anything,” Dr. Soffit said. “But she’ll be right beside you, holding your hand while you sleep. Won’t you, Miss Konopka?”

  “You bet I will,” Nell said. She seemed relieved to have the doctor there.

  Konopka. A Pollack, Anna heard in her father’s voice, and began to cry. She lay back on the table, legs straight in front of her, clutching her hipbones through the sheet. Nell lifted one of Anna’s hands and pressed it between her own, which were trembling. “In thirty minutes this will be done,” she said, but the gravity of the moment had burned off the layers of pretense that usually swirled around Nell, leaving her exposed in a state of raw urgency. “He’s getting the chloroform now. Then you’ll go to sleep.”

  “Try to relax, Miss Kerrigan,” Dr. Soffit said.

  He was behind Anna, out of sight, his voice indistinguishable from Dr. Deerwood’s. Anna lurched upright, trying to see him. Her heart kicked in her chest.

  “Relax,” Dr. Soffit said gently. He sat down beside her, holding something in his hands. The doctor would come. The doctor had come! He was here to make everything right.

  But it wasn’t Dr. Soffit who came to Anna then; it was her sister. With an immediacy she hadn’t experienced since the night with Dexter Styles, she recalled Lydia’s milky, biscuity smell, the softness of her skin and hair. Her coiled, unfinished state. The fluttering insistence of her heart. And hovering around her always, like gossamer, the dream of who she might have been.

  The dream: a running, beautiful girl, knees flashing in the sun. A girl glimpsed from the corner of the eye. It seemed to Anna now that she might bring that girl to life.

  The doctor placed a cone over her mouth. Sweet fumes issued from it, a concentration of the chemical odor she’d detected in the anteroom. “No,” she said.

  Nell leaned over her, and Anna saw her own terror mirrored in the eyes of her friend. The fumes touched her brain, a sleepy shadow gathering like a cloud on the verge of discharging rain. She imagined leaving the doctor’s office with no one, with nothing. A void inside her where something had been.

  The running girl. The dream.

  “No,” she said again, to Nell. “Make him stop.” But the cone muffled her voice, and she couldn’t hear herself.

  Somehow Nell understood—perhaps she read the meaning in Anna’s eyes as they rolled back inside her head.

  “Wait,” Nell said sharply, and lifted the cone from her face.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

  * * *

  Eddie worried that being confined to just the lifeboat, without the raft to spread out on, would feel impossibly cramped. He worried that Farmingdale would resist letting Pugh take charge of the sailing. He worried about how far they would have to deviate from their course to stay with the wind; whether they could make four knots using the sail; and he worried, above all, about rations: whether they should continue drinking three six-ounce allotments of water each day or cut one out; whether Sparks’s fishing would ever yield a bite; whether they might somehow navigate toward an island, as the captain and mate of the SS Travessa had done in 1923. Those gentlemen had sailed two lifeboats seventeen hundred miles across the Indian Ocean, but they’d had instruments and charts. Eddie had only a compass.

  What he hadn’t considered, as he sat awake the night before they were to sail, craving a cigarette—just one, or better yet, fifty—was that the wind would die out.

  On their fourth dawn, the air was hot and still, the sea like a sheen of sweat. The gunners wanted to row for the sake of doing something, and Farmingdale agreed, which forced Eddie to point out, as respectfully as he could, that rowing would waste energy and resources to no purpose. They were at least a thousand miles from the African coast—not a rowable distance. Other men joined Eddie’s plea, and Farmingdale relented with the show of waggish whimsy that Eddie was coming to recognize as his way of confronting defeat.

  They let it be a lost day, a day to rest up before sailing the next. Men not on watch avoided the sun by lying under the spray curtain in the lifeboat, or under the boat cover, which they spread out like a tarp on the raft. At night they set off the last of their flares and maintained their watches. The cold kept waking Eddie. He thought he felt a wind, a spray of surf, but it turned out he was dreaming.

  The next day was the same, and the next. The only bearable hours were in the early morning, when the sun sucked the dew from their boat and fell deliciously on their chilled bodies; and the evening, when a first intimation of cool salved their scorched limbs like the touch of a nurse, before cold set in and made them cling to each other, shivering under the lifeboat’s six blankets. Eddie distributed rations during these lulls, and all enjoyed a fleeting contentment. Clearly, they had drifted into the equatorial, a zone where the tra
de winds could not be relied upon to move a boat. These calm spells never lasted long, Pugh assured them, a day or two, rarely more. But each windless day felt like ten. Their discouragement was compounded by occasional zephyrs for which they raised the sail, full of hope, only to have the wind die twenty minutes later. They were consuming rations they would need if they were ever to have a chance of making land. Their best hope was to be picked up by another ship—pinned, as they were, like a specimen to silk. They saw three more ships at a distance. Each time, they screamed and hollered and jumped, then collapsed and lay as if dead. There were no more planes; they were too far from land. The early rescue planes would have come from a ship.

  On the third windless day—the sixth since the Elizabeth Seaman went down—they agreed to cut their rations by a third. Eddie’s dungarees were already slipping over his hips. He’d tightened his belt three notches. They talked about food in the florid detail with which protectory boys had talked about sex, and for the same reason: talk was all they had.

  Without the midday ration to look forward to, they toppled into lassitude. Ostergaard, an AB, lay asleep in the sun for hours, pushing away whatever cover they tried to force upon him. By evening he was feverish from sunstroke. Roger had taken first aid, and tended to the AB with wet bandages and calamine lotion from the boat’s first aid kit. The AB begged for water so piteously that Roger and Eddie each forfeited half the evening ration to double his. The next morning, Ostergaard had vanished from the lifeboat. Eddie, who’d slept on the raft along with several others, found it difficult to believe that none of the thirteen men aboard the boat had seen or heard the AB go over. He eyed them with suspicion—especially Farmingdale. While he distributed the morning rations, Eddie felt men scrutinizing him, as if they suspected him of playing favorites or taking more than his share. Morale was crucial to lifeboat survival, Eddie knew, and they were lacking the surest morale boosters: booze and cigarettes. But Farmingdale, their leader, was largely to blame. Rather than keep the peace, he was one of the most captious, especially toward the bosun. That same morning, he blocked Eddie from giving the bosun his portion of condensed milk.