Manhattan Beach Read online

  “Oh, of course,” said the secretary, who had grown friendlier over their several encounters. “I take the view for granted; sometimes a whole week goes by and I’ve forgotten to look out.”

  Anna went to a window. In the rich late-October sunlight, the Naval Yard arrayed itself before her with the precision of a diagram: ships of all sizes berthed four deep on pronglike piers. In the dry docks, ships were held in place by hundreds of filament ropes, like Gulliver tied to the beach. The hammerhead crane brandished its fist to the east; to the west loomed the building ways cages. Around all of it, railroad tracks spiraled into whorls of paisley. The diving barge had gone.

  “When I look out at all that,” said the secretary, who had come to stand beside Anna, “I think: How can we not win?”

  Mr. Voss was in his office when Anna returned to her shop. When she’d deposited the package on the desk, he said, “Come in, Miss Kerrigan. Have a seat. Shut the door.”

  They’d not exchanged a private word since their conversation of almost a month before. Anna sat in the same hard chair.

  “I trust you’ve enjoyed your lunches out?”

  “Very much,” she said. “And I haven’t been late.”

  “You have not. And you’ve become our most productive inspector, male or female.”

  “Thank you, sir.”

  In the pause that followed, Anna grew puzzled. Had he called her into his office for the sole purpose of making pleasant chat? “I’ve seen the Missouri,” she said to break the silence. “Inside the building ways.”

  “Ah,” he said. “Imagine that launching. You missed the Iowa, didn’t you?”

  “By three weeks.” She hated to think of it. Mrs. Roosevelt had been present.

  “It’s tremendous, watching a battleship slide down the ways into the water. There wasn’t a dry eye.”

  “Not even yours?” She had meant the question straightforwardly; it was impossible to imagine Mr. Voss weeping over a ship. But the remark tipped from her teasingly, and he laughed—a first.

  “Even I may have shed a tear or two,” he said. “Believe it or not.”

  She grinned at him. “They were cold tears, I’ll bet.”

  “Frozen. They hit the bricks and shattered like glass.”

  Anna was still smiling when she resumed her stool. She began working quickly, feeling she’d been away too long. It was only after several minutes that she noticed an unusual silence around her. How long had that been there? She glanced at the other girls, but not a single married would meet her eye. Not even Rose. Yet Anna felt their keen awareness of her.

  That was when she knew: the marrieds had started to talk.

  CHAPTER SIX

  * * *

  Anna met Nell at the Roxy for the eight o’clock showing of The Glass Key, with Alan Ladd. But one look at Nell’s creamy décolletage between the unbuttoned halves of her coat and she knew they weren’t going inside.

  “I’ve a different idea, if you’re feeling open-minded,” Nell said with an odd, singing gaiety. When Anna assured her of the open state of her mind, Nell went on, “A friend of mine takes a regular table at Moonshine—that’s a nightclub. He’s invited us to join.”

  “My dress won’t be right.”

  “I warned him you’d look pokey.”

  Anna laughed. In fact, her dress—hidden under her coat—was not all that bad. When she’d told her mother that a girlfriend from the Naval Yard had invited her to the pictures but presumed her clothes would be dreadful, her mother had plunged into a frenzy of outraged alteration, adding shoulder pads and a peplum to a plain blue dress Anna had bought at S. Klein for Lydia’s upcoming doctor visit. At the same time Anna had stitched a spray of turquoise beads onto the collar, hands flying alongside her mother’s as if they were playing a duet. No one who really knew clothes would be fooled by these enhancements, but their sewing wasn’t meant for scrutiny. As Pearl Gratzky liked to say, rather grandly, “We work in the realm of the impression.”

  Nell hailed a taxi and directed the driver to East Fifty-third Street. “We’re six blocks away!” Anna protested. “Let’s save our money and walk.”

  A somersault of artificial laughter greeted this suggestion. “Don’t worry,” Nell said. “This ride is the last dime we’ll spend tonight.”

  Even dimmed out, the blocks north of Times Square were aglow with more light than seemed to issue from their half-blackened streetlights and murky marquees. Anna was rarely in Manhattan after dark, and the number of soldiers amazed her: officers in heavy coats, sailors and enlisted men, others in uniforms she didn’t recognize—all hurrying, as if toward a single urgent event.

  “One thing,” Nell said, turning to Anna in the backseat. “Not a word about what we do.”

  “What we—”

  “Shh!” Nell pressed a finger to her lips. Her nails had been lacquered scarlet since the afternoon.

  “You mean the Nav—”

  “Sh!”

  “Why not?”

  “Oh, come now,” Nell chided in a merry falsetto. “Let’s not play dumb.”

  “Which of us is playing dumb?”

  There was a pause. “You know perfectly well what I mean,” Nell said in her normal voice. She gazed seriously at Anna, dimples shadowed by the glow from outside the widow. “I need to be sure you’ll behave.”

  “Don’t worry,” Anna said. “I promise not to embarrass you.”

  The taxi deposited them east of Madison Avenue before a gleaming white door whose top-hatted sentry greeted their arrival as if it were the single event necessary to complete his happiness. They stepped into a rumbling din that startled Anna like the Naval Yard noise did after the suctioned silence of her measuring shop.

  “Better than I expected,” Nell said, sizing up her dress when they’d checked their coats and hats. “Much.”

  “Well, that’s a relief,” Anna said, but Nell caught her teasing tone and cocked her head, smiling into Anna’s eyes. “You’re funny,” she said.

  “So are you,” Anna said, and Nell took her hand, tugging her toward the boil of music and voices, and Anna supposed this exchange was as much a declaration of friendship as Nell made to any girl—like becoming blood sisters with Lillian Feeney when they were ten. What made it possible was that Nell looked so ravishing in her cream satin dress with its plunging cowl neck, it was inconceivable Anna would divert even a trace amount of male attention from her.

  Descending the shallow flight of stairs into the nightclub felt clashingly unreal—as if she’d been thrust across an invisible barrier into a moving picture. She needed to prepare, to ease in slowly, but there wasn’t time; she was engulfed by an orchestra, a fountain, a checkerboard floor, and a thousand small red tables humming like hives. Nell shimmied among these, pausing often to exchange shrill, passionate greetings with their occupants. Anna trailed anxiously behind.

  Three men awaited them at a table beside a crowded oval dance floor. They registered as more or less identical, with silk handkerchiefs in their breast pockets and expensive-looking tiepins. Their only distinguishing traits were that one of the three was handsome, and one of the non-handsome ones looked older than the rest. Of the volley of shouted pleasantries that followed, only phrases managed to punch through the general roar.

  “. . . celebrate . . .”

  “. . . the Japs made . . .”

  “. . . sitting over there . . .”

  “. . . champagne . . .”

  “. . . be a darling . . .”

  Anna tried to listen, well aware that she was coming off as stiff. She’d never been good at banter; it was like a skipping rope whose rhythm she couldn’t master enough to jump in with confidence. The war seemed not to exist here, despite the presence of officers in uniform. Why hadn’t Nell’s two younger suitors been called up?

  Clams casino arrived, along with champagne. The waiter, a boy with a noticeable tremor (4-F, Anna thought), struggled to fill five shallow glasses. Anna had never tried champagne; at the Fraterni
ty House she’d had only beer, and the liquor at home had always been whiskey. The pale gold potion snapped and frothed in her glass. When she took a sip, it crackled down her throat—sweet but with a tinge of bitterness, like a barely perceptible pin inside a cushion.

  “Say, this is delicious!” she cried, and Nell rejoined breathlessly, “Isn’t it grand? I could drink it all day long,” and Anna was on the verge of kidding that they should bring some to work in a thermos, if they could get it past the marines. She remembered not to just in time.

  Her glass emptied quickly, but the waiter was right there, refilling it. And from one moment to the next, as if turning an oven dial and feeling a hot gush of flame in reply, the scene around Anna softened into a smear of brightness—music, sparkle, laughter—an impression, as Pearl Gratzky would say, glimpsed from the corner of her eye, more than an actual place. And this change dissolved whatever barrier had been stranding Anna outside of it. She was vaulted into its midst, hot-cheeked, with a galloping heart.

  A fast number began. The younger non-handsome suitor reintroduced himself—Louie—and asked Anna to dance, cheerfully swatting away her demurral. “Stop fibbing, every girl dances. Up you go,” he said, taking her hand and hauling her over the checkerboard tiles. Anna noticed he’d a slight limp. So that was it. She worried fleetingly that the twenties dances she’d learned from her mother—the Peabody, the Texas Tommy, the Breakaway—would not be convertible to the Benny Goodman–style swing this orchestra played. But Louie made it easy, moving her around with a deft economy behind which she sensed a great deal of care—possibly to conceal his limp, which he managed flawlessly.

  “Are you having fun?” he asked. “Are you sure?” Louie had apparently assigned himself the role of host, responsible for the happiness of their party. “What about Nell, is she having fun? You can never tell with that one.”

  “She is,” Anna reassured him. “We all are.”

  Back at the table, their glasses had been filled again. Nell returned from dancing with the handsome suitor, and Anna supposed he must be her sweetheart. But as she and Nell pushed through the crowd toward the ladies’, Nell whispered, “My date is a no-show, the swine.”

  “Oh,” Anna said, confused. “Is he—”

  “He looks like Clark Gable, that’s what everyone says. Let’s check the entrance.”

  When their checking turned up nothing, Nell grew fretful. “Damn that louse!”

  “Is he unreliable?”

  “He’s—attached. He can’t always get away.”

  “Attached meaning . . .”

  Nell nodded. “But his wife is a shrew.”

  “Have they children?”

  “Four. But he’s hardly alive at home—he just counts the minutes until he can see me again.”

  “You sound like a girl in a love serial,” Anna said.

  “You shouldn’t listen to those,” Nell said. “You’ll rot your brains.”

  “My mother puts them on.”

  “Why isn’t he here? The whole point of those drips at our table is to give me a spot to perch until he arrives.”

  “Louie isn’t a drip,” Anna said. “He’s a sweet man.”

  “They’re one and the same,” Nell said.

  Anna returned to the table bent on dancing with the handsome suitor, now that she knew he wasn’t attached to Nell. Instead, she found herself back on the floor with Louie, who kept her entertained by pointing out a brigadier general, a state senator, and a famous Negro scholar. There was Laird Cregar, whom she’d seen in This Gun for Hire last spring, and Joan Fontaine, who’d won an Academy Award for Suspicion, a picture Anna had loved. Shadowy tales of the city were always her favorites—the sort of pictures that made your stomach seize when you heard footsteps behind you after leaving the movie palace.

  “You know everyone, Louie!” she said.

  “I suppose I do,” he said. “The shame of it is, they don’t know me.”

  Anna studied him: a slight man, teeth overlarge in his narrow face. The limp. “What sort of work do you do?”

  “Actuarial,” he muttered, brushing past the topic before Anna could ask what it meant. “Yourself?”

  Having barely avoided mention of the Naval Yard several times, Anna was ready. “Secretary,” she said vaguely.

  “I suppose the purpose of joints like this is to make us forget about jobs like ours,” Louie said. “Moonshine has just the right naughty edge.”

  “Where?” Anna cried. “I don’t see the naughty edge.”

  “Ah, you can’t—that’s the point. They’ve gaming upstairs, high rollers only. Baccarat, canasta, poker—so my sources tell me. And you’ve all types in here, including gangsters. You girls love the gangsters, of course.”

  “I’ve never met one!” Anna said. “Can you point one out?”

  “Well, the owner’s a gangster, so they say. Or was, during Prohibition. He generally sits over there.” Louie squinted toward a back corner of the room. “Name of Dexter Styles. Owns a number of clubs, so he isn’t always here.”

  “Dexter Styles,” Anna said. She knew the name. “What does he look like?”

  “Like a pugilist. Big strong fellow, dark hair. He may be there now, I can’t tell.”

  Marco, the handsome suitor, finally asked Anna to dance. He looked like a screen heavy with his curly dark hair and brooding eyes, his scowling mouth. He was Italian—perhaps that was why he hadn’t been called up. He pronounced Mussolini a pig perfunctorily, as if checking a box, then fell silent. His gaze roved the dance floor, and Anna soon realized he was keeping Nell in sight as she danced with the non-handsome suitor who wasn’t Louie. Anna danced badly with Marco, and he with her. The third time he stepped on her foot, she excused herself, smarting with disappointment. Rather than rejoin Louie, she made her way toward the corner where he’d said the club’s owner liked to sit. Four men leaned around a table. Anna’s champagne smear had given her a feeling of half-invisibility, and she walked straight to the table and looked down. The men noticed her as one. She knew immediately which was Mr. Styles—and realized, in that instant, that she had met him before.

  “Powder room’s all the way at the front,” one of the men said.

  “No, I— Excuse me,” Anna said, and veered away. Dexter Styles was the man from the beach. This discovery arrived in a hot-cold rush, disorienting her as if the room had flipped on its side. A lost memory surfaced: riding in the car with her father. Playing with another girl. This man, Dexter Styles, on an icy beach. The coincidence felt miraculous. Without pausing to consider, Anna rushed back to the table to inform him of it.

  The men glanced up a second time, a chill in their collective regard signaling that she’d outworn her welcome. The champagne blur abandoned her, and she felt exposed, unbuffered from the hostility of the youngest of Mr. Styles’s associates, who had big jowls and bushy, uneven hair. “You’re turning into a bad habit, baby,” he said. “Scram.”

  Dexter Styles was on his feet instantly, standing between Anna and the table. “What can I do for you, miss?” he asked with remote politeness, his eyes barely grazing her face. He’d no memory of her, of course. The trip to Manhattan Beach faded into the distant past like an apple core flung from a train window. The very idea of invoking it seemed absurd. A silence opened between them and multiplied.

  “I work at the Naval Yard, in Brooklyn,” Anna blurted at last, the error of this choice assailing her before she’d finished the sentence.

  “You don’t say.” She’d managed to snare the roving beam of his attention. “I read in the papers that girls had started working there. What do you do?”

  “I measure parts with a micrometer,” she said. “But girls do welding, riveting . . .”

  “They weld?”

  “Just like the men. You can’t tell them apart until they take off the mask.”

  “Is it natural? Men and women working together like that?”

  He was gazing at her directly. “I don’t know,” she said, flustered.
“I mostly work with girls.”

  “Well, it was a pleasure talking with you, Miss . . .”

  “Feeney,” she said impulsively, extending her hand. “Anna Feeney.”

  “Dexter Styles.”

  They shook, and he touched the arm of a hovering waiter and said, “Gino, would you show Miss Feeney back to her table and send her party a bottle of champagne on the house? Good luck to you, Miss Feeney.”

  She was dismissed. Dexter Styles rejoined his companions, and Anna wandered through the crowd, ears ringing with the strangeness of all that had just transpired. It wasn’t so much that she’d used Lillian Feeney’s name—a phony name seemed all of a piece with this place—but that in doing so, she had obscured the connection between them. Why, when Mr. Styles might have recognized her name and remembered?

  Back at the table, Anna remained pensive despite Louie’s strenuous efforts to draw her out. She couldn’t see Dexter Styles from where she sat—would likely never see him again. Only when she envisioned the conversation that might have followed the use of her real name did she understand her instinctive feint. And how is your father? Where is he nowadays? What is he doing? Those questions would surely have come, and the thought of trying to answer mortified her.

  Their waiter arrived with the fresh bottle of champagne. Nell and Marco returned from the dance floor, Marco looking deeply satisfied.

  “What’s the matter?” Nell asked, dropping into a chair beside Anna. “Are you too tight?”

  “Maybe.” But she felt the opposite: that she’d not had enough champagne to quash the sudden dull sadness—emptiness, really—that had overwhelmed her.

  “I’m ready to call it a night,” Nell said.

  For Louie, this prospect amounted to an emergency. “Aw, come on, girls,” he cried. “Have some champagne—they’ve sent us a bottle on the house! I’ve been waiting all my life for a bottle on the house!”

  “Sweet old Louie,” Nell said.

  “I aim to please. Sad faces mean I’ve failed.”

  Anna sensed a scurrying desperation beneath his cheer, and it pained her. “You’ve been wonderful, Louie,” she said, putting an arm around his narrow shoulders. She kissed his cool, waxen cheek.