Manhattan Beach Page 3

  “You were right, toots,” he said softly. “Not to mention Mr. Styles at supper. In fact, best not to say his name to anyone.”

  “Except you?”

  “Not even me. And I won’t say it, either. We can think it but not say it. Understand?” He braced himself for her inevitable guff.

  But Anna seemed enlivened by this subterfuge. “Yes!”

  “Now. Who were we talking about?”

  There was a pause. “Mr. Whosis,” she finally said.

  “That’s my girl.”

  “Married to Mrs. Whatsis.”

  “Bingo.”

  Anna felt herself beginning to forget, lulled by the satisfaction of sharing a secret with her father, of pleasing him uniquely. The day with Tabatha and Mr. Styles became like one of those dreams that shreds and melts even as you try to gather it up.

  “And they lived in Who-knows-where-land.” She imagined it: a castle by the sea disappearing under a fog of forgetfulness.

  “So they did,” her father said. “So they did. Beautiful, wasn’t it?”

  CHAPTER THREE

  * * *

  Eddie’s relief at having departed his home was a precise inversion of the relief it once gave him to arrive there. For starters, he could smoke. On the ground floor, he struck a match on his shoe and lit up, pleased not to have met a single neighbor on his way down. He hated them for their reactions to Lydia, whatever those reactions might be. The Feeneys, devout and charitable: pity. Mrs. Baxter, whose slippers scuttled like cockroaches behind her door at the sound of feet on the stairs: ghoulish curiosity. Lutz and Boyle, ancient bachelors who shared a wall on two but hadn’t spoken in a decade: revulsion (Boyle) and anger (Lutz). “Shouldn’t she be in a home?” Lutz had gone so far as to demand. To which Eddie had countered, “Shouldn’t you?”

  Outside the building, he detected a rustling murmur in the cold, whistles exchanged around burning cigarette tips. At a cry of “Free all!” he realized these were boys playing Ringolevio: two teams trying to take each other prisoner. This was a mixed building on a mixed block—Italians, Poles, Jews, everything but Negroes—but the scene could as easily be happening at the Catholic protectory in the Bronx where he’d grown up. Anywhere you went, everywhere: a scrum of boys.

  Eddie climbed inside the Duesenberg and turned the engine, listening for a whinnying vibration he’d noticed earlier and hadn’t liked the sound of. Dunellen was running down the car, as he did everything he touched—including Eddie. Prodding the accelerator, listening to the whine, he glanced up at the lighted windows of his own front room. His family was in there. Sometimes, before coming inside, Eddie would stand in the hall and overhear a festive gaiety from behind the closed door. It always surprised him. Did I imagine that? he would ask himself later. Or had they been easier—happier—without him?

  * * *

  There was always a time, after Anna’s father went out, when everything vital seemed to have gone with him. The ticking of the front-room clock made her teeth clench. An ache of uselessness, anger almost, throbbed in her wrists and fingers as she embroidered beads onto an elaborate feathered headdress. Her mother was sequining toques, fifty-five in all, but the hardest trimming jobs went to Anna. She took no pride in her sewing prowess. Working with your hands meant taking orders—in her mother’s case, from Pearl Gratzky, a costumer she knew from the Follies who worked on Broadway shows and the occasional Hollywood picture. Mrs. Gratzky’s husband was a shut-in. He’d a hole in his side from the Great War that hadn’t healed in sixteen years—a fact that was often invoked to explain Pearl’s screaming hysterics when jobs were not completed to her liking. Anna’s mother had never seen Mr. Gratzky.

  When Lydia woke from her doze, Anna and her mother shook off their lassitude. Anna held her sister in her lap, a bib tied across her chest, while their mother fed her the porridge she made each morning from soft vegetables and strained meat. Lydia emanated a prickling alertness; she saw and heard and understood. Anna whispered secrets to her sister at night. Only Lydia knew that Mr. Gratzky had shown Anna the hole in his side a few weeks ago, when she’d delivered a package of finished sewing and found Pearl Gratzky not at home. Impelled by daring that had seemed to come from somewhere outside her, Anna had pushed open the door to the room where he lay—a tall man with a handsome, ruined face—and asked to see his wound. Mr. Gratzky had lifted his pajama top, then a piece of gauze, and shown her a small round opening, pink and glistening as a baby’s mouth.

  When Lydia finished eating, Anna fiddled with the radio dial until the Martell Orchestra came on, playing standards. Tentatively, she and her mother began to dance, waiting to see if Mr. Praeger, directly below them on four, would jab at his ceiling with a broom handle. But he must have gone to a smoker fight, as he often did on Saturday nights. They turned up the volume, and Anna’s mother danced with a reckless absorption quite unlike her usual self. It jogged faint memories in Anna of seeing her mother onstage when she was very small: a distant, shimmering vision, doused in colored light. Her mother could do any dance—the Baltimore Buzz, the tango, the Black Bottom, the cakewalk—but she never danced anymore except at home with Anna and Lydia.

  Anna danced holding Lydia until her sister’s floppiness became part of the dancing. All of them grew flushed; their mother’s hair fell loose, and her dress came unbuttoned at the top. She cracked the fire escape window, and the hard winter air made them cough. The small apartment shook and rang with a cheer that seemed not to exist when her father was at home, like a language that turned to gibberish when he listened.

  When they were all hot from dancing, Anna lifted away the plank covering the bathtub and filled it. They undressed Lydia quickly and eased her into the warm water. Released from gravity, her coiled, bent form luxuriated visibly. Their mother held her under the arms while Anna massaged her scalp and hair with the special lilac shampoo. Lydia’s clear blue eyes gazed at them rapturously. Suds gathered in her temples. There was an aching satisfaction in saving the best for her, as if she were a secret princess deserving of their tribute.

  It took both Anna and her mother to lift Lydia back out before the water cooled, bubbles gleaming on the unexpected twists of her body—beautiful in its strange way, like the inside of an ear. They wrapped her in a towel and carried her to bed and dried her on the counterpane, sprinkling Cashmere Bouquet talc over her skin. Her cotton nightie was trimmed with Belgian lace. Her wet curls smelled of lilac. When they’d tucked her in, Anna and her mother lay on either side of her, holding hands across her body to keep her from falling off the bed as she went to sleep.

  Each time Anna moved from her father’s world to her mother and Lydia’s, she felt as if she’d shaken free of one life for a deeper one. And when she returned to her father, holding his hand as they ventured out into the city, it was her mother and Lydia she shook off, often forgetting them completely. Back and forth she went, deeper—deeper still—until it seemed there was no place further down she could go. But somehow there always was. She had never reached the bottom.

  * * *

  Eddie parked the Duesenberg outside Sonny’s West Shore Bar and Grill, just shy of the piers. Saturday night, three days shy of New Year’s Eve, and it was dead quiet outside—proof absolute that no ship had come in that week or the one before.

  He saluted Matty Flynn, the snow-haired barkeep, and then crossed the sawdust to the back left corner where, under a placard of Jimmy Braddock kitted out for a fight, John Dunellen conducted his unofficial business. He was a big man with savage dock walloper’s hands, though he hadn’t worked the ships in over a decade. For all his natty attire, Dunellen gave a drooping, corroded impression, like a freighter gone to rust after being too long at anchor. He was surrounded by a gaggle of sycophants, suppliants, and minor racketeers delivering a cut in exchange for his blessing. Without ships, their rackets were booming—longshoremen were desperate.

  “Ed,” Dunellen muttered as Eddie slid onto a chair.

  “Dunny.”

&
nbsp; Dunellen waved at Flynn to bring Eddie a Genesee and shot of rye. Then he sat, apparently abstracted but in fact attuned to the portable radio he carried with him everywhere (it folded into a suitcase) and played at low volume. Dunellen followed horse races, boxing matches, ball games—any event upon which bets might be placed. But his special love was boxing. He was backing two boys in the junior lightweight class.

  “You give the bride my regards?” Dunellen asked as Lonergan, a numbers man new to his circle, listened in.

  “Too heavy,” Eddie said. “I’ll wait until after New Year’s.”

  Dunellen grunted his approval. “Smooth and easy, nothing less.”

  The recipient of this particular delivery was a state senator. The plan had been to make the drop among the exodus from Saint Patrick’s Cathedral earlier that day. The father of the bride was Dare Dooling, a banker close to Cardinal Hayes. The cardinal himself had performed the nuptials.

  “Didn’t feel heavy to me,” Lonergan objected. “There was law, sure, but it was our law.”

  “You were there?” Eddie was taken aback. He disliked Lonergan; the man’s long teeth gave him a sneering look.

  “My ma was nanny to the bride,” Lonergan said proudly. “Say, I didn’t see you there, Kerrigan.”

  “That’s Eddie.” Dunellen chuckled. “You only see him when he wants you to.” He slid his eyes Eddie’s way, and Eddie felt a humid proximity to his old friend that was more familial than anything he’d ever felt for Brianne. Eddie had saved Dunellen’s life, along with that of another protectory boy—pulled them bawling and puking out of a Rockaway riptide. This truth was never mentioned but ever present.

  “I’ll look harder next time,” Lonergan said sourly. “Buy you a drink.”

  “In a pig’s nose you will,” Dunellen thundered, his abrupt fury rousing fleeting interest from the two loogans who accompanied him everywhere. Dunellen kept these snub-nosed giants at a distance; they undercut the avuncular impression he liked to make. “You don’t know Eddie Kerrigan outside this bar—capeesh? How the hell does it look if he’s hobnobbing with the high and mighty and jawing the next minute with a mutt like you? It’s none of your fucking business where Eddie goes; quit sticking your snoot where it doesn’t belong.”

  “Sorry, boss,” Lonergan muttered, high crimson swarming his cheeks. Eddie felt the ooze of his envy and wanted to laugh. Lonergan envying him! Sure, Eddie dressed well (thanks to Agnes) and had Dunellen’s ear, but he was a nobody of the highest order. “Bagman” meant exactly what it sounded like: the sap who ferried a sack containing something (money, of course, but it wasn’t his business to know) between men who should not rightly associate. The ideal bagman was unaffiliated with either side, neutral in dress and deportment, and able to rid these exchanges of the underhanded feeling they naturally had. Eddie Kerrigan was that man. He looked comfortable everywhere—racetracks, dance halls, theaters, Holy Name Society meetings. He’d a pleasant face, a neutral American accent, and plenty of practice at moving between worlds. Eddie could turn the handoff into an afterthought—Say, I nearly forgot, from our mutual friend—Why, thank you.

  For his pains, Dunellen kept him at subsistence wages: twenty dollars a week if he was lucky, which—combined with Agnes’s piecework—barely kept them from having to hock the only valuables they hadn’t already hocked: his pocket watch, which he would carry to his grave; the radio; and the French clock Brianne had given them at their wedding. A longshoreman’s hook had never looked better.

  “Anything in quarantine?” Eddie asked, meaning ships destined for one of the three piers Dunellen controlled.

  “Maybe a day, two days, from Havana.”

  “To one of yours?”

  “Ours,” Dunellen said. “Ours, Eddie. Why, you need a loan?”

  “Not from him.” Nat, the loan shark, who was throwing darts, charged twenty-five percent weekly.

  “Eddie, Eddie,” Dunellen chided. “I’ll pay you for the week.”

  Eddie had meant to leave after one drink. Now, having been challenged by Lonergan, he thought it prudent to outstay him. That meant drinking alongside Dunellen, who was three times Eddie’s girth and had a wooden leg. Eddie eyed the door, willing Maggie, Dunellen’s harridan of a wife, to roust him out of the bar as if Dunellen were a loader blowing his pay, not president of the union local on his way to becoming an alderman. But Maggie didn’t show, and eventually, Eddie found himself bawling out the words to “The Black Velvet Band” along with Dunellen and a few others, all of them wiping tears. At long last, Lonergan took his leave.

  “You don’t like him,” Dunellen said when he’d gone—the very opening he would have given Lonergan had Eddie left first.

  “He’s all right.”

  “You think he’s square?”

  “I think his game is clean.”

  “You’ve a good nose for that,” Dunellen said. “You should’ve been a copper.”

  Eddie shrugged, turning his cigarette between two fingers.

  “You think like one.”

  “I’d have had to be crooked. And what kind of copper is that?”

  From within the craggy topography of his head, Dunellen gave Eddie a sharp look. “Ain’t crookedness in the eye of the beholder?”

  “I suppose.”

  “They can’t lay off cops, even in a Depression.”

  “There’s something to that.”

  Dunellen seemed to fade out. His inattention led some men to take him lightly or act too freely in his presence—a mistake. He was like one of those poisonous fish Eddie had heard of that took on the look of a rock to fool its prey. Eddie was on the verge of rising to go when Dunellen turned to him, tamping Eddie with a wet, beseeching gaze. “Tancredo,” he moaned. “Wop bastard likes the fights.”

  Stoking Dunellen’s obsession with the wops would cost Eddie thirty minutes, at least. “How are your boys?” he asked, hoping to distract him.

  At the mention of his boxers, Dunellen’s face loosened like a cold roast warming over a flame. “Beautiful,” he murmured, and to Eddie’s alarm, he waved for another round. “Just beautiful. They’re quick, they’re smart, they listen. You should see them move, Ed.”

  Dunellen was childless, an oddity in this milieu, where the average man had between four and ten offspring. Opinion was divided on whether Maggie’s shrewishness was the cause or the result of their unproductive union. One thing was certain: had Dunellen coddled sons as he did his middle lightweights (there were always two), he would have been openly derided. At their fights, he cringed and convulsed like an old maid watching her lapdog face off against a Doberman. The green sunshade he wore to the ring failed to conceal the freshets of tears that coursed from his small, cruel eyes.

  “Tancredo’s got his hands on them,” he said in a trembling voice. “My boys. He’ll fix it so they haven’t a chance.”

  Even drunk, Eddie had no trouble deciphering Dunny’s predicament: Tancredo, whoever the hell he was, was demanding a piece of Dunellen’s lightweights in exchange for letting them fight—or possibly win—in certain rings the Syndicate controlled. The arrangement was identical to the one Dunellen imposed upon all manner of businesses around his piers: if you failed to pay, unemployment was the best you could hope for.

  “They’ve my balls in a vise, Ed. The wops. Can’t sleep for thinking of it.”

  It was Dunellen’s cherished belief that the Wop Syndicate, as he liked to call it, had a design ulterior to its evident goals of profit and self-preservation: to exterminate Irishmen. This theory hinged on certain events he revisited like stations of the cross: the dissolution of Tammany by Mayor LaGuardia, the Valentine’s Day Massacre in Chicago (seven Irishmen killed), and the more recent murders of Legs Diamond, Vincent Coll, and others. Never mind that those killed had all been killers. Never mind that the Syndicate was not all wops, or that Dunellen’s personal enemies were, to a man, fellow micks: rival pier bosses, rogue hiring bosses, union holdouts—any one of whom might vanish, courtesy o
f Dunellen’s loogans, until the spring thaw sent their bloated bodies wafting to the surface of the Hudson River like parade floats. For Dunellen, the threat of the Wop Syndicate was biblical, cosmic. And while normally this fixation posed no greater danger to Eddie than boring him silly, he’d spent today in the company of a Syndicate boss.

  “You’re thinking something,” Dunellen said, peering at Eddie invasively. “Cough it up.”

  From within the abstracted, half-drunken heap that was John Dunellen, there prickled a supernatural awareness, as if his perceptions were routed through his radio and magnified. Here was the Dunellen most men failed to see until it was too late—the one who could read your thoughts. You lied to him at your peril.

  “You’re right, Dunny,” Eddie said. “I would’ve liked to be a cop.”

  Dunellen eyed him a moment longer. Then, detecting the truth of the statement, he relaxed. “What would you do,” he breathed, “about Tancredo?”

  “I’d give him what he wants.”

  Dunellen reared back into a thunderhead of protest. “Why the fuck should I?”

  “Sometimes fighting’s no good,” Eddie said. “Sometimes the best you can do is buy time, wait for an opening.”

  Occasionally, as now, the ocean rescue that had forged the bond between them and still radiated, allegorically, through all of their discourse, broke the surface and moved into the light. Dunellen and Sheehan were the older boys; Bart the brain, Dunny the mouth. When Eddie saw them thrashing, unable to get back to shore, he ran into the water and swam to them. He put an arm around each boy’s neck and shouted into their terrified faces, “Stop fighting. Float and let the tide pull us out.”

  They were too tired not to obey. They floated, and when they’d caught their breath, Eddie led them swimming along the shore a half mile out. They were all water rats, having dived from city piers to escape the summer heat practically since they could walk. A mile down the beach, Eddie saw an opening in the breakers and herded Bart and Dunny back in.