Manhattan Beach

by Jennifer Egan

  As it turned out, Anna did watch the launching from inside the building ways—on a newsreel at the Empress Theater in Vallejo, California. It was late April 1944, three months after the launching took place. Anna watched the reel so many times that the ticket-taker began letting her in for free; she never stayed to watch the feature. The battleship’s mountainous jutting stern dwarfed the camera’s perspective, making the sailors waving from her fantail look minuscule. The ship’s sponsor was Margaret Truman, the nineteen-year-old daughter of a Missouri senator. She cracked a champagne bottle against the hull with a report like gunfire, but Anna had already had it from Marle, who’d proved a reliable and detailed correspondent, that Miss Truman had needed three tries to break that bottle. We all said, “Kerrigan would have done better,” he wrote.

  As soon as the bottle broke, men began knocking away the wood stays that held the Missouri in place. In a matter of seconds, the “largest and most powerful battleship ever built” was sliding down the ways with a silken ease that owed much to the fact that whatever shrieking resistance had accompanied her slide was replaced, on the newsreel, by marching band music and the rousing voice of the announcer: “The Missouri is symbolic of the ever-growing strength of the United States Navy.” Men held their hats and ran after her, but the ship was past their reach—even as her stern slid down the tracks, her bow had already made its splashing entry into the East River, which parted around her with the ease of a cushion receiving a cat. And then she was floating away, her bottom half submerged, as though she had never been on land in the first place. It was like watching a creature being born, growing up, and moving irrevocably away, all in under a minute.

  The taxi turned west at Forty-second Street, toward Grand Central, sunlight stuttering through the sieve of the Second Avenue El as they drove underneath it. Then skyscrapers blocked the sun, their abrupt shadow like the sudden louring of a storm. Newspaper vendors bawled out the headlines:

  “American planes down seventy-seven Jap fliers in Guadalcanal!”

  “Biggest Pacific air battle yet! Only six U.S. planes lost!”

  “Let’s have a look at your ring,” Brianne said.

  Anna had gone to a pawnbroker on Willoughby Avenue, near the courthouse, intending to buy the cheapest ring she could find. But she’d lingered, trying on one with pinprick diamonds set in fourteen-karat gold, another of brass filigreed with a pattern of leaves. The longer she looked, the more critical the decision seemed to become. This was her wedding ring, after all; she would have to wear it every day. Why choose a dented copper oval that would stain her finger green? As Anna deliberated, studying the rings, she had a sudden, lucid impression of Dexter Styles, his restless proximity. She imagined him dismissing the pinpricks: A diamond should be big enough to see. No telling brass from gold, if you keep it polished. She chose the brass filigree.

  “Not bad,” Brianne said, running her finger over the leaf pattern, which Anna had burnished just that morning. Then, with a wink, “Your soldier has good taste.”

  Brianne splashed toilet water into her cleavage as they approached Grand Central. Soon she was flirting with the young Negro redcap. He caught Anna’s eye and they shared a smile at her aunt, pushing fifty, still reeking of Lady of the Lake.

  The rush of uniforms through the smoky concourse verged upon turmoil. The trains were overcrowded. Brianne had had to use “all my wiles” to acquire two tourist sleeper tickets from Chicago to San Francisco on short notice; Anna suspected the feat had entailed bribery, not flirtation. Moving through bands of hazy light that angled from the lunette windows overhead, she felt the taint of her failure begin to lift. There were girls everywhere: WAVES, WACS, mothers tugging children by the hand. There was nothing unusual about Anna’s departure; she was one tiny part of a migration.

  They took facing seats beside a window aboard the Pacemaker to Chicago. Six more people squeezed in alongside. Relieved of the need to hide her condition, Anna relaxed, letting her sweater fall open so her belly protruded. Apparently, that was enough to tip a balance, for she sensed her fellow passengers prising apart her circumstances until they located her wedding band. The satisfaction of their curiosity was like a sigh. There was magic in that ring. She was offered a fan, a newspaper, a glass of water. So much power in one slim band.

  Conversation was trickier. Everybody knew someone in the navy, and Anna’s vague replies about Lieutenant Charlie Smith only invited further questions. She solved this problem by reading: first the Times, then the Journal American. Then Ellery Queen’s The Tragedy of Z.

  Softly, she asked her aunt, “Have you brought the dress?”

  “Several,” Brianne said. “Each one lovelier than the last. But no need for that yet.” She whispered into Anna’s ear, “Enjoy a week of marriage before you go into mourning.”

  The flotilla of warships along the Hudson River winnowed as the Pacemaker rushed north. This was the same route Anna had taken on trips to Minneapolis with her mother and Lydia, but she didn’t recall those trains moving so fast. The Pacemaker roared over crossings, laundry flapping in its wake like frightened starlings. Soldiers prowled the corridors, playing cards and flicking their cigarettes out of windows. The train’s speed roused a tingle of anticipation in Anna. She gazed from her window: town after town flung wide, then folded into vanishing. Trains going the opposite way passed with a punch.

  She woke from a nap to find they’d reached Schenectady, early-evening light honeying the brick factories along the tracks. Back in Brooklyn, she would be leaving the Naval Yard with Rose by now, perhaps drinking beers at the Oval with the other divers. Already the sensation of being ripped from her life had relaxed into an ache. Sheer distance had done this. A letter mailed from Schenectady would take a day to arrive in New York; telephoning would involve multiple coins and interruptions from an operator. She’d gone far away.

  Anna and Brianne repaired to the dining car as the sun was setting on Syracuse. They reviewed their plan in whispers over chicken cutlets: Lieutenant Axel had secured Anna’s job at the Mare Island Naval Shipyard, where she would dive until her condition became impossible to hide. Then she would take a leave, have the baby, and return, a widow, when she’d found someone to care for the child. “I’m hoping Mama will come,” she said.

  Brianne looked miffed. “Something wrong with present company?”

  Anna laughed. “You hate children, Auntie.”

  “Not all children.”

  “You call them brats.”

  “I’ve been known to be rather wonderful to certain exceptions.”

  Anna cocked her head. “Would you want to care for a baby?”

  Somehow it had become a proposal. Anna watched her aunt consider, the dramatic lines of her face settling into a rare look of contemplation. “It may be the only thing left that I haven’t done,” she said.

  By Rochester, all that remained of the day was an orange blaze on the western horizon. Planted fields sent a tang through the open windows. To the right spread Lake Ontario, purple-black. Anna pictured Rose and little Melvin curled in her bed, Rose munching walnuts as she finished a last chapter of her Jack Asher mystery. Bascombe would have brought Ruby home by now, harbor noises crowding the night as he rode the streetcar back to his rooming house. Anna pictured all this with wistful resignation; so quickly, she had consigned that life to the past. Its telescopic fading was the price of hurtling forward into whatever smoldering promise issued from that orange blaze. She hungered toward it, longing for the future it contained. As the train roared west, Anna bolted upright. She had thought of her father. At last she understood: This is how he did it.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

  * * *

  Eddie sat on a park bench across from the Empress Theater and eyed its doors, waiting for Anna to emerge. She was watching a newsreel about the USS Missouri, a battleship built at the Brooklyn Naval Yard, where she’d worked for nearly a year before her marriage.

  He’d wanted to come inside with her to watch, too,
but she’d put him off. “You were gone,” she said. “It won’t mean anything to you.”

  “May I wait?”

  “You can do whatever you want.”

  Eddie was encouraged. So far, this visit was an improvement over his first, last October, when he’d taken the electric train from San Francisco and rung the buzzer of a bleak apartment after dark. He could hear the baby crying, and the sound instantly brought him low. He was on the verge of slinking away when the door opened and there she was—Anna, grown up—peering out at him. “Papa,” she said softly, and Eddie thought he saw wonder in her face, mixed with astonishment—but it may have been just astonishment. He was astonished by the pale, dark-eyed woman in the doorway, her long hair falling loose over a dressing gown.

  She slapped his face with such force he saw stars. “Don’t ever come back here,” she said, and shut the door quietly—so as not to scare the baby, he later thought.

  His second visit was in January, after a three-month run to the Gilbert Islands as second mate—his first voyage since the Elizabeth Seaman, owing to lingering stomach problems. He came while Anna was at work that time, to see Brianne and meet “the little gentleman”—as his sister was fond of calling the burly, fierce-eyed infant who gazed at Eddie reproachfully from a basket.

  “What did his father look like?” he asked, eyeing the baby. “Have you a photograph?”

  “No,” Brianne said heavily. “All of that was lost in the valise that went missing on the train.”

  It was Eddie’s good fortune that Agnes wasn’t caring for the baby. Agnes had walked off the family farm last June, according to Brianne, shocking her dour relations to the same degree she had by up and running to New York at seventeen. She’d hitched a ride into town and volunteered with the Red Cross. Now she was overseas, working as a nurse’s aide. Her letters were too heavily censored for Brianne to know where she was, but Agnes had mentioned forests. Europe, they guessed.

  Eddie watched the baby kicking like a restless cub. “Poor little devil,” he said.

  “He isn’t poor in the least,” his sister retorted. “There was never a little gentleman so spoiled and adored.”

  She seemed bizarrely at ease, feeding and burping the tyke as though he were her very own, not a rumor of booze in the house. His sister’s transformation from aging tart to fussing nanny seemed almost instantaneous, like the flick of a kaleidoscope.

  “Say, where were you hiding your mothering tendencies all those years?” he asked.

  “I wasn’t hiding them, I was wasting them,” she said. “On rats and louts more babyish than this one!” She swooped the cub into her arms and smattered his face with kisses until he guffawed. “Come, brother dear,” she said. “Hold your grandson.”

  Eddie reached for him gingerly, fearful of hurting him. But the sturdy infant cleaved to him with such tender resolve that Eddie felt as if he were the one being held.

  “Now now,” Brianne said. “Only the baby is allowed to cry.”

  At the end of that visit, Eddie had gone to the Mare Island gate to wait for Anna. By then he’d done some reconnaissance and knew which road she would have to take from the shipyard up to the bungalow she and Brianne had moved into, among other Mare Island workers.

  He stood back from the road among a thatch of eucalyptus trees, pungent leaves dangling around him like sickles. Anna appeared after the general rush, laughing with another girl. Her athletic walk was so like Agnes’s that he felt disoriented; which was he looking at? Anna bade her friend goodbye and quickened her pace, cheeks flushed under her hat. She looked awfully happy for a girl newly widowed. But then he supposed she’d known Lieutenant Smith for too short a time to miss him very much—especially with the little gentleman to come home to. Watching his daughter approach, Eddie had felt an annihilating emptiness, as if he’d died on the raft after all and returned as a ghost. He nearly stepped from the shadows just to see his presence register in her face, to know that he was really there. But that would dash her high spirits. So he stayed hidden and let her pass.

  It was enough, he told himself after that, to know that she was happy. That all three of them were happy. It should have been enough, but it was not. At the urging of his paramour, a term Ingrid used laughingly (a widowed schoolteacher being the last thing one pictured), he had returned this afternoon to try again. He’d completed another run, this time to New Guinea—part of a force pressing the Japs farther back toward their homeland in hopes of prompting a surrender. He’d been reunited with Wyckoff on that voyage, and they’d drunk another bottle of wine on the deck, under the stars. Eddie was developing a taste for the stuff. The warm Pacific breeze lapping at their faces had made the agonies of the Elizabeth Seaman seem no more substantial than a nightmare.

  Pugh, the indomitable old salt, had steered the lifeboat all the way to British Somaliland, with Wyckoff, Sparks, Bogues, and the rest still alive and in passable health upon arrival. Captain Kittredge’s boat had been picked up long before, with all hands accounted for. That meant that roughly half the Elizabeth Seaman’s merchant and navy crews had survived the wreck. The War Shipping Administration had a policy of immediate duty for shipwreck survivors—to keep them from spreading their horror stories, so the rumor went. All were back on ships except Pugh, who had retired to live with his daughter, and the bosun, who still could not speak in his old way. He’d returned to Lagos, where Eddie had promised to visit him after the war. They exchanged frequent letters, addressing each other as “brother,” and Eddie found, to his morbid satisfaction, that his own writing style was reduced to a schoolboy stutter beside the bosun’s extravagant prose.

  * * *

  Anna did not see her father when she left the theater, and assumed he must have gone. She felt a beat of distress until he rose from a bench across the street and waved. She waved back, surprised by the intensity of her relief. By the time he reached her, she was angry again and wanted to send him away. But what was the point? Clearly, he intended to return and keep returning. She couldn’t hit him every time.

  As they walked together up the hill toward her bungalow, Anna sensed how much he’d changed. He was older, his face creased, hair gone silver, but that wasn’t it—in fact, his scrawny handsomeness was the most familiar part of him. He’d shed a brooding abstraction that seemed, in its absence, to have been his most singular trait. That and the smell of smoke. But he no longer smoked, and there was a disconcerting calm about him. He’d been so near death at the time of his rescue, Brianne said, they couldn’t find his heartbeat.

  Her father had become a stranger: a man she was meeting for the first time and sizing up as she would anyone. Anna dimly recalled having wanted to see him this way, but the fulfillment of the wish left them with little to say to each other. He knew nothing of her life; could not appreciate, for example, the delight she’d taken in a letter she’d received from Marle just yesterday:

  An angel smiled down on our friend Mr. Bascombe: the navy has accepted him. Before he took the train to boot camp in Great Lakes, Illinois, Ruby’s mother cooked him supper and her old man raised a glass to his health. Apparently it’s true that “The uniform makes the man.” Wish I could tell you more, but B. was reticent as ever, couldn’t even get the menu. Bldg 569 isn’t the same without him.

  “You know about Mama,” Anna said to break the silence.

  He nodded. “Those soldiers are lucky to have her.”

  Anna missed her mother, who had joined the Red Cross just after Anna’s move to California, before she announced her pregnancy. Her mother still believed in the doomed Lieutenant Charlie Smith. Anna wondered now if she would ever tell her the truth—whether it would even matter by the time the war ended. One thing was certain: Rose had been wrong about the world becoming small again. Or at least it would not be the same small world it had been. Too much had changed. And amid those shifts and realignments, Anna had slipped through a crack and escaped.

  “She’ll be a nurse when she comes back,” she told her fath
er.

  “She’s been a nurse for many years,” he said.

  They paused to catch their breath at the top of the hill. The Mare Island Naval Shipyard was arrayed below them at the foot of San Pablo Bay, a peninsula studded with piers along a channel full of warships. Anna loved being able to look down upon it every day before work and know which ships had sailed overnight and which new ones had berthed. She owed her job to a miracle, for by the time she and her aunt had settled in Vallejo, she’d felt too pregnant to dive. She worried it might harm the baby. She and Brianne had taken jobs at a diner—Brianne as a waitress, Anna as a cashier—and waited in a cramped, dingy apartment for the baby to arrive. It had been an awful time.

  Last November, six weeks after Leon was born, Anna had finally presented her transfer documents at Mare Island. By then, Lieutenant Axel’s telephone call was long forgotten. But it turned out not to matter; three Normandie salvage divers were employed at Mare Island now, and one of them—a supervisor—had been on Anna’s tour of the Brooklyn Naval Yard. All three remembered her photograph from the Eagle. She was given a job at eighty dollars a week, and now worked underwater most days.

  “Funny you’ve so many destroyers,” her father said, looking down at the Yard, “with so few convoys out of the Golden Gate.”

  “Just four,” she said.

  “Six.”

  Anna looked again. “You’re confusing your ships.”

  He pointed, counting. At three, she stopped him. “That’s a minesweeper, Papa.”

  He took a long look, then turned to her, smiling. “I stand corrected.”

  The fog had begun its creeping advance, a lone tendril leading the way from the Pacific. Foghorns lowed in the distance. They sounded deeper and louder than the foghorns Anna had heard all her life. But then, this fog was different, solid-looking enough to mold with your hands. It gushed in overnight, engulfing whole cities like amnesia.