Manhattan Beach Read online

  Her father drove one-handed, a cigarette cocked between two fingers at the wheel, the other arm around Anna. She leaned against him. In the end it was always the two of them in motion, Anna drifting on a tide of sleepy satisfaction. She smelled something new in the car amid her father’s cigarette smoke, a loamy, familiar odor she couldn’t quite place.

  “Why the bare feet, toots?” he asked, as she’d known he would.

  “To feel the water.”

  “That’s something little girls do.”

  “Tabatha is eight, and she didn’t.”

  “She’d better sense.”

  “Mr. Styles liked that I did.”

  “You’ve no idea what Mr. Styles thought.”

  “I have. He talked to me when you couldn’t hear.”

  “I noticed that,” he said, glancing at her. “What did he say?”

  Her mind reached back to the sand, the cold, the ache in her feet, and the man beside her, curious—all of it fused now with her longing for that Flossie Flirt. “He said I was strong,” she said, a lump tightening her voice. Her eyes blurred.

  “And so you are, toots,” he said, kissing the top of her head. “Anyone can see that.”

  At a traffic light, he knocked another cigarette from his Raleigh packet. Anna checked inside, but she’d already taken the coupon. She wished her father would smoke more; she’d collected seventy-eight coupons, but the catalog items weren’t even tempting until a hundred and twenty-five. For eight hundred you could get a six-serving plate-silver set in a customized chest, and there was an automatic toaster for seven hundred. But these numbers seemed unattainable. The B&W Premiums catalog was short on toys: just a Frank Buck panda bear or a Betsy Wetsy doll with a complete layette for two hundred fifty, but those items seemed beneath her. She was drawn to the dartboard, “for older children and adults,” but couldn’t imagine flinging sharp darts across their small apartment. Suppose one hit Lydia?

  Smoke rose from the encampments inside Prospect Park. They were nearly home. “I almost forgot,” her father said. “Look what I’ve here.” He took a paper sack from inside his overcoat and gave it to Anna. It was filled with bright red tomatoes, their taut, earthen smell the very one she’d noticed.

  “How,” she marveled, “in winter?”

  “Mr. Styles has a friend who grows them in a little house made of glass. He showed it to me. We’ll surprise Mama, shall we?”

  “You went away? While I was at Mr. Styles’s house?” She felt a wounded astonishment. In all the years Anna had accompanied him on his errands, he had never left her anywhere. He had always been in sight.

  “Just for a very short time, toots. You didn’t even miss me.”

  “How far away?”

  “Not far.”

  “I did miss you.” It seemed to her now that she had known he was gone, had felt the void of his absence.

  “Baloney,” he said, kissing her again. “You were having the time of your life.”

  CHAPTER TWO

  * * *

  An Evening Journal folded under his arm, Eddie Kerrigan paused outside the door to his apartment, panting from the climb. He’d sent Anna upstairs while he bought the paper, largely to put off his homecoming. Heat from the tireless radiators leaked into the hall from around the door, amplifying a smell of liver and onions from the Feeneys’, on three. His own apartment was on the sixth floor—ostensibly five—an illegality that some genius builder had gotten away with by calling the second floor the first. But the building’s chief advantage more than compensated: a cellar furnace that pumped steam into a radiator in each room.

  He was taken aback by the sound of his sister’s brawny laugh from behind the door. Apparently, Brianne was back from Cuba sooner than expected. Eddie shoved open the door with a shriek of overpainted hinges. His wife, Agnes, sat at the kitchen table in a short-sleeved yellow dress (it was summer year-round on the sixth floor). Sure enough, Brianne sat across, lightly tanned and holding a nearly empty glass—as Brianne’s glasses tended to be.

  “Hi, lover,” Agnes said, rising from a pile of sequined toques she’d been trimming. “You’re so late.”

  She kissed him, and Eddie cupped her strong hip and felt the stirring she always roused in him, despite everything. He caught a whiff of the cloved oranges they’d hung from the Christmas tree in the front room and sensed Lydia’s presence there, near the tree. He didn’t turn. He needed to ready himself. Kissing his beautiful wife was a good start. Watching her shoot seltzer into a glass of the fancy Cuban rum Brianne had brought—that was an excellent start.

  Agnes had stopped drinking in the evenings; she said it made her too tired. Eddie brought his sister her replenished highball glass with a fresh chip of ice and touched his glass to hers. “How was the trip?”

  “Perfectly marvelous,” Brianne said with a laugh, “until it went perfectly foul. I came back by steamer.”

  “Not so nice as a yacht. Say, that’s delicious.”

  “The steamer was the best part! I made a new friend on board who’s a much better sport.”

  “Has he work?”

  “Trumpeter with the band,” Brianne said. “I know, I know, save it, brother dear. He’s awfully sweet.”

  Business as usual. His sister—half sister, for they’d different mothers and had grown up largely apart, Brianne three years older—was like a fine automobile whose rash owner was running it to the brink of collapse. She’d been a stunner once; now, in the wrong light, she looked thirty-nine going on fifty.

  A groan issued from the front room, lodging in Eddie’s stomach like a kick. Now, he thought, before Agnes had to prompt him. He rose from the table and went to where Lydia lay in the easy chair, propped like a dog or a cat—she hadn’t enough strength to hold herself up. She smiled her lopsided smile at Eddie’s approach, head lolling, wrists bent like birds’ wings. Her bright blue eyes sought his: clear, perfect eyes that bore no trace of her affliction.

  “Hello, Liddy,” he said stiffly. “How was your day, kiddo?”

  It was hard not to sound mocking, knowing she couldn’t answer. When Lydia did talk, in her way, it was senseless babble—echolalia, the doctors called it. And yet it felt strange not to talk to her. What else could one do with an eight-year-old girl who couldn’t sit up on her own, much less walk? Pet and greet her: that took all of fifteen seconds. And then? Agnes would be watching, hungry for a show of affection toward their younger daughter. Eddie knelt beside Lydia and kissed her cheek. Her hair was golden, soft with curls, fragrant with the exorbitant shampoo Agnes insisted upon buying for her. Her skin was velvety as an infant’s. The bigger Lydia grew, the more tempting it was to picture what she might have looked like had she not been damaged. A beauty. Possibly more than Agnes—certainly more than Anna. A pointless reflection.

  “How was your day, kiddo?” he whispered again. He scooped Lydia into his arms and lowered himself onto the chair, holding her weight to his chest. Anna leaned against him, trained by her mother to scrutinize these interactions. Her devotion to Lydia puzzled Eddie; why, when Lydia gave so little in return? Anna peeled off her sister’s stockings and tickled her soft curled feet until she writhed in Eddie’s arms and made the noise that was laughing for her. He hated it. He preferred to assume Lydia couldn’t think or feel except as an animal did, attending to its own survival. But her laughter, in response to pleasure, rebutted this belief. It made Eddie angry—first with Lydia, then with himself for begrudging her a moment’s delight. It was the same when she drooled, which of course she couldn’t help: a flash of fury, even a wish to smack her, followed by a convulsion of guilt. Again and again, with his younger daughter, rage and self-loathing crossed in Eddie like riptides, leaving him numb and spent.

  And yet it could still be so sweet. Dusk falling blue outside the windows, Brianne’s rum pleasantly clouding his thoughts, his daughters nudging him like kittens. Ellington on the radio, the month’s rent paid; things could be worse—were worse for many a man in the dregs of 193
4. Eddie felt a lulling possibility of happiness pulling at him like sleep. But rebellion jerked him back to awareness: No, I cannot accept this, I will not be made happy by this. He rose to his feet suddenly, startling Lydia, who whimpered as he set her back down on the chair. Things were not as they should be—not remotely. He was a law-and-order man (Eddie often reminded himself ironically), and too many laws had been broken here. He withdrew, holding himself apart, and in swerving away from happiness, he reaped his reward: a lash of pain and solitude.

  There was a special chair he needed to buy for Lydia, monstrously expensive. Having such a daughter required the riches of a man like Dexter Styles—but did such men have children like Lydia? In the first years of her life, when they’d still believed they were rich, Agnes had brought Lydia each week to a clinic at New York University where a woman gave her mineral baths and used leather straps and pulleys to strengthen her muscles. Now such care was beyond their reach. But the chair would allow her to sit up, look out, join the vertical world. Agnes believed in its transformative power, and Eddie believed in the need to appear to share her belief. And perhaps he did, a little. That chair was the reason he’d first sought out the acquaintance of Dexter Styles.

  Agnes cleared the toques and sequin chains from the kitchen table and set four places for supper. She would have liked for Lydia to join them, would happily have cradled her in her own lap. But that would ruin the meal for Eddie. So Agnes left Lydia alone in the front room, compensating, as always, by keeping her own attention fixed upon her like a rope whose two ends she and her younger daughter were holding. Through this rope Agnes felt the quiver of Lydia’s consciousness and curiosity, her trust that she wasn’t alone. She hoped that Lydia could feel her own feverish love and assurance. Of course, holding the rope meant that Agnes was only half-present—distracted, as Eddie often remarked. But in caring so little, he left her no choice.

  Over bean-and-sausage casserole, Brianne regaled them with the story of her smashup with Bert. Relations had already soured when she’d delivered an accidental coup de grâce by knocking him from the deck of his yacht into shark-infested waters off the Bahamas. “You’ve never seen a man swim faster,” she said. “He was an Olympian, I tell you. And when he collapsed onto the deck and I pulled him to his feet and tried to throw my arms around him—it was the first amusing thing he’d done in days—what does he do? Tries to punch me in the nose.”

  “Then what happened?” Anna cried with more excitement than Eddie would have liked. His sister was a rotten influence, but he was uncertain what to do about it, how to counter her.

  “I ducked, of course, and he nearly toppled back in. Men who’ve grown up rich haven’t the first idea how to fight. Only the scrappy ones can. Like you, brother dear.”

  “But we haven’t yachts,” he remarked.

  “More’s the pity,” Brianne said. “You’d look very smart in a yachting cap.”

  “You forget, I don’t like boats.”

  “Growing up rich turns them soft,” Brianne said. “Next you know, they’re soft everywhere, if you take my meaning. Soft in the head,” she amended to his severe look.

  “And the trumpeter?” he asked.

  “Oh, he’s a real lover boy. Curls like Rudy Vallee.”

  She would need money again soon enough. Brianne was long past her dancing days, and even then her chief resource had always been her beaus. But fewer men were flush now, and a girl with bags under her eyes and a boozy roll at the waist was less likely to land one. Eddie found a way to give his sister money whenever she asked, even if it meant borrowing from the shylock. He dreaded what she might become otherwise.

  “Actually, the trumpeter is doing rather well,” Brianne said. “He’s been working at a couple of Dexter Styles’s clubs.”

  The name blindsided Eddie. He’d never heard it uttered by Brianne or anyone else—hadn’t even thought to gird himself against the possibility. From across the table, he sensed Anna’s hesitation. Would she pipe up about having spent the day with that very man at his home in Manhattan Beach? Eddie didn’t dare look at her. With his long silence, he willed Anna to be silent, too.

  “I suppose that’s something,” he told his sister at last.

  “Good old Eddie.” Brianne sighed. “Always the optimist.”

  The clock chimed seven from the front room, which meant that it was nearly quarter past. “Papa,” Anna said. “You forgot the surprise.”

  Eddie failed to take her meaning, still rattled by that close shave. Then he remembered, rose from the table, and went to the peg where his overcoat hung. She was good, his Anna, he marveled as he pretended to search his pockets while steadying his breath. Better than good. He tipped the sack onto the table and let the bright tomatoes tumble out. His wife and sister were duly staggered. “Where did you get these? How?” they asked in a welter. “From who?”

  As Eddie groped for an explanation, Anna put in smoothly, “Someone from the union has a glass growing house.”

  “They live well, those union boys,” Brianne remarked. “Even in a Depression.”

  “Especially,” Agnes said dryly, but in fact she was pleased. Being on the receiving end of perks meant that Eddie was still needed—something they were never guaranteed. She took salt and a paring knife and began to slice the tomatoes on a cutting board. Juice and small seeds ran onto the oilcloth. Brianne and Agnes ate the tomato slices with moans of delight.

  “Turkeys at Christmas, now this—there must be an election coming up,” Brianne said, smacking juice from her fingers.

  “Dunellen wants to be alderman,” Agnes said.

  “God help us, the skinflint. Go on, Eddie. Taste one.”

  He did at last, amazed by the twanging conjunction of salt and sour and sweet. Anna met his eyes without so much as a smirk of collusion. She’d done beautifully, better than he could have hoped, yet Eddie found himself preoccupied by some worry—or was he recalling a worry from earlier that day?

  While Anna helped her mother clear the table and wash up, and Brianne helped herself to more rum, Eddie opened the front window that gave onto the fire escape and climbed outside for a smoke. He shut the window quickly behind him so Lydia wouldn’t take a draft. The dark street was soaked in yellow lamplight. There was the beautiful Duesenberg he’d once owned. He recalled with some relief that he would have to return it. Dunellen never let him keep the car overnight.

  As he smoked, Eddie returned to his worry about Anna as if it were a stone he’d placed in his pocket and now could remove and examine. He’d taught her to swim at Coney Island, taken her to Public Enemy and Little Caesar and Scarface (over the disapproving looks of ushers), bought her egg creams and charlotte russes and coffee, which he’d let her drink since the age of seven. She might as well have been a boy: dust in her stockings, her ordinary dresses not much different from short pants. She was a scrap, a weed that would thrive anywhere, survive anything. She pumped life into him as surely as Lydia drained it.

  But what he’d witnessed just now, at the table, was deception. That wasn’t good for a girl, would twist her the wrong way. Approaching Anna on the beach today with Styles, he’d been struck by the fact that she was, if not precisely pretty, arresting. She was nearly twelve—no longer small, though he still thought of her that way. The shadow of that perception had troubled him the rest of the day.

  The conclusion was obvious: he must stop bringing Anna with him. Not immediately, but soon. The thought filled him with a spreading emptiness.

  Back inside, Brianne administered a sloppy rum-scented kiss to his cheek and went to meet her trumpeter. His wife was changing Lydia’s diaper on the plank that covered the kitchen tub. Eddie wrapped his arms around her from behind and rested his chin on her shoulder, reaching for a way they had been together easily, always, believing it for a moment. But Agnes wanted him to kiss Lydia, take the diaper and pin it, being careful not to prick her tender flesh. Eddie was on the verge of doing this—he would, he was just about to—but he didn’t,
and then the impulse passed. He let go of Agnes, disappointed in himself, and she finished changing the diaper alone. She, too, had felt the pull of their old life. Turn and kiss Eddie, surprise him; forget Lydia for a moment—where was the harm? She imagined herself doing this but could not. Her old way of being in the world was folded inside a box alongside her Follies costumes, gathering dust. One day, perhaps, she would slide that box from under the bedsprings and open it again. But not now. Lydia needed her too much.

  Eddie went to find Anna in the room she and Lydia shared. It faced the street; he and Agnes had taken the room facing the airshaft, whose unwholesome exhalations stank of mildew and wet ash. Anna was poring over her Premiums catalog. It bewildered Eddie, her fixation on this diminutive pamphlet full of overvalued prizes, but he sat beside her on the narrow bed and handed over the coupon from his fresh Raleigh packet. She was studying an inlaid bridge table that would “withstand constant usage.”

  “What do you think?” she asked.

  “Seven hundred fifty coupons? Even Lydia will have to take up smoking if we’re to afford that.”

  This made her laugh. She loved it when he included Lydia; he knew he should do it more often, seeing as it cost him nothing. She turned to another page: a man’s wristwatch. “I could get that for you, Papa,” she said. “Since you’re doing all the smoking.”

  He was touched. “I’ve my pocket watch, remember. Why not something for you, since you’re the collector?” He thumbed in search of children’s items.

  “A Betsy Wetsy doll?” she said disdainfully.

  Stung by her tone, he turned to a page with compacts and silk hosiery.

  “For Mama?” she asked.

  “For you. Now you’ve outgrown dolls.”

  She guffawed, to his relief. “I’ll never want that stuff,” she said, and returned to glassware, a toaster, an electric lamp. “Let’s pick something the whole family can use,” she said expansively, as if their tiny family were like the Feeneys, whose eight healthy children crowded two apartments and gave them a monopoly on one of the third-floor toilets.