PART EIGHT
The Fog
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
* * *
“You might have given it a bit more thought beforehand!”
Nell, hissing in the morning sunlight a block from Dr. Soffit’s office. If not for the mothers and children wandering Central Park in their church hats, she would have been shouting.
“Thank you for stopping him,” Anna said.
“I shouldn’t have. You’d be all done by now, and that would be that. We could even—” She glanced toward Fifth Avenue. “We could probably still go back.”
“No. Please.” It felt to Anna as if the pleasure she took in breathing the cold dry air had nearly been lost to her. “Please, no.”
“Stop saying that!”
Anna grasped her friend’s arm, feeling something close to love for this cranky, glamorous protector. “Thank you, Nell.”
Nell stiffened, then relaxed. Anna’s effusions of gratitude seemed gradually to appease her. Or perhaps Nell’s outrage had begun to bore her, compared with the interesting new shape Anna’s trouble had assumed. “So. You’re in it to the bitter end,” she said softly. “You’ll have to go away. But I’m warning you: the good places cost an arm and a leg.”
“I’ve some money saved.”
Nell laughed. “Darling, the money comes from him. You tell him straight: if he wants his nice life to continue without conversations between you and his wife that are likely to make things pretty hot around the house, he pays. Simple as that.”
“He’s gone.”
Nell cocked her head. “Nobody’s gone until they’re dead. Find the fiend and make him pay or you’ll end up with the nuns, which I don’t advise,” she said. “Nuns are not fond of our type. I’ve that on good authority.”
“I mean he’s—gone.” Spurred by Nell’s incomprehension, she found herself adding, “Overseas.”
“Ah, a soldier. Why didn’t you say so?”
Anna hadn’t any answer, but none was required; Nell had fallen into thought. “It was a stolen interlude,” she reflected, uttering this phrase as though it placed Anna’s predicament in an entirely new category. “You were living in the moment and so was he. No thought of consequences.”
“. . . True,” Anna allowed.
“But say, why spoil your figure and waste a year of your life when you can be done in thirty minutes? Unless . . . if he shouldn’t come back . . .”
“He won’t. I’m certain of that.”
She’d gone too far. Yet the absurdity of her statement was somehow lost on Nell. “In that case, the child can carry on his line,” she mused. “Even if nobody ever knows it’s his. In a way, he’ll still be alive—you’ll have kept your soldier alive by bearing his child. That’s what you’re thinking!”
Anna was actually thinking that Nell in the role of romantic was awfully like an imposter. Clearly, her friend had been listening to too many love serials. But Nell’s habit of posing questions as if they were answers was proving convenient.
“The nuns, then,” she concluded. “You’ll grin and bear it for a year. And they’ll find him a good Christian home.”
“Or her,” Anna said.
* * *
After supper, Anna sat with Rose and her family in the front room and listened to Mozart on the gramophone. Rose’s father was absorbed in his Forward; her mother crocheted another square in the tablecloth she was making to celebrate the safe return of her sons. Hiram did his homework. Little Melvin rolled his wheeled horse over the sofa and eventually over Anna, beginning at her thighs, rolling it up her arm, over her shoulder, and then, when she didn’t object, over the top of her head.
“Don’t be a monster, Melly,” Rose said.
“I like it,” Anna said. The rounded edges of the horse’s wheels kneaded her skin and scalp pleasantly. Everything felt pleasant in this fragile, precious life she had made. In the days and weeks that followed, her contentment billowed into rapture. The trees on Clinton Avenue flashed into flower overnight. Anna swung her arms as she walked underneath them, thinking, Soon I won’t see these trees anymore, or hear the creak of their branches. She helped Rose’s mother sew her crocheted squares together. “You’ll be with us, Anna, when we use this tablecloth,” Rose’s mother said. “You’re part of our family—and your mother, too, when she comes back from nursing her sister.” Anna thanked her, filled with a teetering delight that arose from proximity to disaster. If Rose’s mother knew her secret, she would cast Anna out of her house. But she didn’t know—she’d no idea! No one had!
And so Anna swilled the dregs of a life that was already over—yet still, by a miracle, hers to enjoy. She craved lemonade. When everyone had gone to bed, she squeezed lemons into cold water at the kitchen sink, adding sugar she’d bought with her own ration coupons so it wouldn’t be missed. The sweet-tart concoction gave her shivers of pleasure. She guzzled it in her room while the tree outside her window splayed its new leaves like poker hands. It was impossible to resist waiting one more day to dismantle this sweetness. Just one! And then one more! But the days added up, and soon it was May and she’d no more plan than she’d had in March. A slight bulge appeared in her lower abdomen, but this was easy to conceal; at work she wore her baggy jumpsuit or the diving dress, and the men had grown as indifferent to her physical person as they were to each other’s. Rose’s mother credited her own excellent cooking for helping Anna to “fill out” what had been, in her view, a gaunt frame. She began packing lunches for Anna without charging extra.
Now that she’d learned to weld and burn, Anna’s diving work included hull patches and screw jobs, working alongside other divers on mats pulled taut beneath battleships. The vast hulls ticked and hummed under her hands. Never had the enchantment of weightlessness been greater. She hung from screws and let the current waft her heavy shoes. At times she still wondered if her trouble might end naturally this way, but she no longer expected such a reprieve; nor did she want it, exactly. When Bascombe organized the divers to give blood to the Red Cross, Anna demurred at the last minute, pleading a stomachache.
A crew of Normandie salvage divers visited the Yard from Pier 88, in Manhattan, and Lieutenant Axel chose Anna to lead the tour of his diving program. Her photograph was printed in the Brooklyn Eagle. LADY DIVER SHOWS NORMANDIE SALVAGERS BROOKLYN STYLE, the headline read. Anna was smiling in the picture, hatless in her jumpsuit, the wind blowing her hair from clips. Within a day of its appearance, the image seemed an artifact from long ago. She kept it beside her bed and looked at it every night before going to sleep. That is the happiest I will ever be, she told herself. Yet she could enjoy that happiness one more day—like waking from a dream of bliss and being allowed, briefly, to resume it.
“What in hell shall I do without you, Kerrigan?” Lieutenant Axel remarked one evening as she hosed off diving dresses.
Anna was wary. “Why should you have to, sir?”
“Russians have broken the Caucasus Line. We’ll have Tunis and Bizerte in a matter of days. Soon enough, the boys will be back here looking for their jobs.”
“Oh,” she said with relief. “That.”
“I’ll be out on my ass before you can say Jack Robinson. Back in my dory, waiting for the catfish to bite.” He screwed up his eyes at her. “What’ll you do, Kerrigan? Hard to see you tying on a frilly apron.”
“Thank you, sir.”
He cackled. “Wasn’t meant as a compliment, but you’re welcome just the same.”
If he knew her secret, he would cast her out. But he didn’t know. A stolen, perilous joy.
Anna’s duplicity pained her only when she was writing to her mother. Her newsy accounts of Naval Yard life felt like an alibi, and she considered spelling out the truth—it would be easier by letter. But the news would crush her mother, and she would blame herself for having left Anna alone. There would be no one for her mother to confide in; if Anna’s aunts or grandparents were to know, Anna would never again be welcome in their house. Another b
lighted child. She couldn’t bring more shame upon her mother, who had lost so much.
On the first Saturday in June—Anna’s day off that week—she stopped by her old building in the morning to fetch the mail while Rose and her family went to Shabbat services. Leaning in the vestibule, she noticed an airmail envelope with exotic stamps amid the usual letters and V-mails. Her own name was penned across the front in a crimped, slanted cursive that looked jarringly familiar. Her father’s, she would have sworn.
Anna climbed the six flights to her old apartment for the first time since her move, aware of her heavy tread on the stairs she’d once flitted up like a dragonfly. The apartment smelled like an old icebox. Anna slid open a window and brought the mysterious letter outside onto the fire escape. Her father’s pocket watch was in her purse—proof absolute, from the bottom of New York Harbor, that he wasn’t alive. Yet she knew the letter was from him. She knew.
He’d written in a faint scattered hand from a hospital in British Somaliland. He’d been rescued at sea twenty-one days after a torpedo sank his ship. He had been with the merchant marine since 1937. All of this washed through Anna’s brain and back out, leaving it empty. He was in poor health, unsure when he would be well enough to return. I miss you girls terribly and long to see you again, he’d written, with the address of a postal box in San Francisco.
Anna sat so still, for so long, that sparrows began to puff and squabble on the fire escape rungs at her feet. Her father was alive, had always been alive. Despite the apparent impossibility of this fact, she didn’t feel surprise, exactly. More a sensation of falling headlong, dangerously, with no inkling where the fall would stop. She clutched a fire escape rail in each hand. Carefully, as though the building were moving around her, she climbed back indoors. The sun had withdrawn to the windowsills. It must be almost noon. In the kitchen, she found the pencil her mother kept nailed to the wall on a string for her shopping list. Anna flattened her father’s letter onto the counter and scrawled over it, LYDIA IS DEAD, so that the lead tore through the paper. Then she went to her old room, lay on her bed, and fell asleep.
When she woke, she knew by the light that it was afternoon. It no longer felt possible to return to Clinton Avenue. She needed to act. She turned on the radio, sat at the kitchen table, and tried to think. Who were the nuns Nell had spoken of, and how did one find them? Had they a telephone? It seemed too late to go back to Nell; whom might she turn to? Strangely, Charlie Voss came to mind, although she’d hardly seen him since moving to Rose’s. Instinct told her that Charlie might be sympathetic, but she’d no way of knowing and couldn’t afford the risk.
The Roy Shields Show came on, a program she’d often listened to with Aunt Brianne. The mere thought of her aunt was enough. Of course. Anna’s virtue and good sense were as axiomatic for Brianne as for her mother, but disillusionment wouldn’t break her. Nothing could break Aunt Brianne.
If she telephoned her aunt and left a message, she would have to wait, and Anna felt incapable of waiting. She decided instead to go directly to Sheepshead Bay, even without an address, and telephone her aunt from there. Brianne had always used a postal box; her residence changed often, and at times she hadn’t had one, depositing trunks full of furs and feathers, occasionally pieces of furniture with Anna’s parents. Anna glanced at the pile of odds and ends on her bureau. Sure enough, she had saved one of the cocktail napkins her aunt had brought for Lydia’s funeral lunch. Dizzy Swain, Emmons Avenue, Sheepshead Bay. She would begin there.
Consulting the Seamen’s Bank transit map pasted inside the kitchen cupboard, she saw that the BMT went directly to Sheepshead Bay. Anna left the apartment and walked to the subway.
She’d gone to Sheepshead Bay with her father, on “errands,” and recalled a jumble of rotting docks and small fishing boats. He’d taken her to a shanty where several men at a counter leaned over their bowls like animals at a trough. While her father conducted his business, the proprietor had brought Anna her own bowl of chowder. She remembered the taste: creamy, buttery, full of fish. Her stomach creaked at the memory.
Emmons Avenue looked wider than she’d expected, its homey scramble of docks replaced by a series of monumental piers slanting identically into the bay. She crossed to a cafeteria on the north side of the avenue and held up the cocktail napkin to the cashier, who had dyed black hair and a mustache that looked pasted on. “Do you know this place?” she asked.
“Why, sure,” he said. “Straight east on Emmons. You can catch the trolley a hundred feet from here.”
Anna gazed from the trolley window at coasties milling in the late afternoon—the eagle insignia on the officers’ caps was gold, not silver, meaning they were Coast Guard rather than navy. Across Sheepshead Bay, family homes gave way to military buildings—this must be the Maritime Training Center her aunt had spoken of. When Anna got off the trolley, she might have been on Sands Street: crowded bars, a photo studio offering twelve poses for sixty-nine cents. MADAME LAROUSSE: CARDS, OUIJA, CRYSTAL. She spotted the Dizzy Swain a block over, its sign a replica of the lovestruck shepherd holding a cocktail shaker.
The Swain was much like the Oval Bar, its reek of beery sawdust enriched by the smell of seafood. It was dense with un-uniformed men she guessed must be merchant sailors. The place seemed beneath her aunt’s level, yet there was Brianne, right at the bar! Anna rushed toward her, but it turned out that her aunt was behind the bar—she was the barmaid! Anna froze in confusion, half expecting Brianne not to know her, so otherworldly was the encounter. But her aunt let out a whoop. “Why, it’s high time! Seems I have to open up the Brooklyn Eagle if I want to catch a glimpse of my niece. Two weeks without a phone call, not to mention I’ve left three messages at White’s, and they haven’t seen hide or hair of you. Are you hungry? Chowder for my niece, Albert, and don’t skimp on the clams.”
The bluster of cheerful accusation left Anna stammering apologies. Albert, whose Adam’s apple protruded further than his nose, seated her at the bar and brought her a bowl of steaming soup. She crumbled in a handful of oyster crackers and took a spoonful. She shut her eyes: fish, cream, butter. It was the soup she remembered, only better—better for being in her mouth at that moment. It warmed the reaches of her belly and radiated out to her limbs. She had a curious sensation as she ate, as if a fish from the soup had swum against the interior of her stomach. When it happened a second time, she wondered if the chowder was giving her indigestion. But it wasn’t that. A live thing had moved inside her.
Her throat closed, and she set down her spoon. For the first time, terror ricocheted through Anna at the catastrophe she had allowed to befall her. She’d distracted herself for nearly two months—believing somehow that there would still be an avenue of retreat. Now the disaster confronted her nakedly. She was ruined.
Brianne joshed with the sailors and filled their glasses like a slatternly den mother. Anna hardly heard. She was watching an impassable distance open between herself and everything she loved: working underwater; Marle and Bascombe and the other divers; Rose and her family. The photograph in the Brooklyn Eagle: a good girl; a smiling, innocent girl. But Anna was not that girl. She was a corrupt interloper bluffing her way through her life.
She finished her soup without tasting it. The creature didn’t stir again, but she felt it coiled inside her: a darkness she’d hidden since childhood, now in animate, corporeal form. Only her father had guessed at her deviousness and low morals; he alone had sensed what she’d become. His disenchantment with Anna had driven him away. She had always known this.
Her aunt was beside her, a hand on her shoulder. “Francine has agreed to start early, so we can go upstairs and have a nice chat,” Brianne said. Anna thanked Francine, whose expression resided wholly in her freckled décolletage, and followed Brianne out of the Dizzy Swain. They took a side door into a stairwell whose carved oak banister seemed a relic of better times. They climbed to a wainscoted hallway scented with onion and boiled potatoes. The puzzle of her aunt’s circumstanc
es distracted Anna. How did the Lobster King fit in?
After a second turn of stairs, Brianne fished a key from some aperture in her bust and opened a door. Anna followed her into a room whose one window admitted indirect light. Her gaze caught on furniture she recalled from her childhood: a red upholstered chaise; a Chinese screen; a coat stand that looked made from cursive. The room’s walls and ceiling seemed to contract around the furniture, making it appear outsize and too tightly packed. Her aunt turned on lamps, revealing a small sink, a gas ring with a coffeepot, a drying rack strung with girdles and brassieres.
“Does the Lobster King . . . live nearby?” Anna asked.
“He’s gone,” her aunt said, inserting a Chesterfield between her lips and lighting it with a device shaped like Aladdin’s lamp. “A louse like all the rest.”
“So . . . you haven’t any friend?”
Brianne drew on her cigarette, then balanced it carefully in an upright silver ashtray. “I’ve many friends, but they’re females,” she said through a gust of smoke. “Except my landlord, Mr. Leontakis. He owns the Swain. A Greek,” she added, as if in apology.
She lowered herself onto the red chaise and tapped the upholstery beside her. Anna’s legs wobbled as she sat. Brianne pressed Anna’s sweating hands between her own, which were stubby and soft. My one bad feature, she used to say of her hands. Thank God it’s not my face. Anna looked in her aunt’s eyes and realized that she’d guessed.
“When did you last have the curse?” she asked.
“I can’t remember.”
“Roughly.”
“This happened on February the ninth.”
Brianne whistled. “I knew I should have visited more often.”
It was her sole expression of regret. When she spoke again, it was to pose a series of practical questions with the warm impartiality of a doctor. Anna answered in a monotone. No, she’d not been surprised or taken advantage of. No one else knew of her condition. She did not care to name the father, nor would she see him again. She presumed she would give up the child but was not entirely certain.
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