Manhattan Beach Page 9

  “Your generosity has sustained us,” the deacon intoned, eyes downcast.

  Dexter studied him in the frank sunlight: a young man, pouches under his eyes, a flush at odds with the season: booze, probably. Less common in wop clergy than Irish but certainly not unheard of, especially in a celibate. Having built his career on the force of human appetites, Dexter could only shake his head at Rome’s mad insistence that its priests leave unsatisfied the most primal urge of all. Bertoli played the ponies; Dexter had run into him twice at Belmont and once at Saratoga during his “faith retreat.” He’d been transferred to a city without a racetrack. And now his replacement, a wino, wanted higher-quality ink than he could afford on the pittance they paid him. Who could blame him?

  Dexter paid no attention to the sermon. He didn’t give a fig about religion; he’d tethered himself to Saint Maggie’s to fend off any possibility of being roped into Episcopal worship with his in-laws. All those Puritans, God help him. If you had to spend an hour in church, let it be gory, incense-drenched Catholicism. He found Mass a good time to mull over business. Today he wondered what to do about Hugh Mackey, the debt-ridden dealer who was trying to blackmail Heels. Heels was the most genial gee in the world until he got sore, and he was starting to get sore.

  After Mass, when the requisite neighborly mixing had taken place outside the church, Dexter piled his family into the Cadillac for the long drive to his in-laws’ house on Sutton Place. He’d barely pulled the car away when the twins began fencing with twigs. “Daddy!” Tabby shrieked. “Make them stop!”

  “Boys,” Dexter said sharply, and the twins fell still. A current of amusement flickered between them always, like a telegraph.

  “At the hunt club yesterday,” Tabby said, “they hit their jai alais by the terrace until people made them stop.”

  “Don’t be a tattletale,” Harriet said.

  “We were quiet,” John-Martin said resentfully.

  For reasons that eluded Dexter, his sons liked to enter promotional contests, usually at picture theaters. They tap-danced, turned somersaults, hung from bars upside down, and whistled through their teeth. When successful, they brought home bugles or harmonicas or roller skates—items they already owned or could easily afford. Dexter feared they were constitutionally unserious.

  “The hunt club doesn’t consider jai-alai-ing a sport, eh?” he couldn’t resist needling his wife. “Not in the same category as the steeplechase?”

  “There haven’t been races in years,” she said. “As you know.”

  As a girl, she’d gone to those steeplechases with her mother, who had hoped Harriet would find a husband of suitable pedigree—ideally, a Brit visiting for the Oxford-Cambridge-Rockaway team matches. “It’s just a bunch of old stoves getting stinko and leering at polo players” had been Harriet’s early description of the Rockaway Hunting Club, and she and Dexter had made a point, on their rare visits, of exercising their marriage vows in at least one new location. But in recent years, Harriet had grown inexplicably fond of the place. Now she went often, sipping pink ladies with the same old stoves she once mocked, listening to their doddering tales of meeting Queen Victoria as debutantes. She’d taken up golf. All of it bothered Dexter in some indefinable way.

  “We should never have gone,” John-Martin grumbled. “We don’t fit in.”

  “Play polo,” Dexter said. “You’ll fit in just fine.”

  “We don’t have horses,” Phillip reminded him.

  * * *

  Harriet’s parents faced each other at opposite ends of a long table in a dining room overlooking the East River just south of Hell Gate, where it joined the Long Island Sound. Beth Berringer had the classic old stove’s face: a drought-stricken delta of cracks and tributaries affixed to the reactive jaws of a Doberman. She alone could move or halt the old man with a flick of her fair blue eyes. Their son and three daughters were always present, along with spouses and some complement of the fourteen grandchildren they had collectively produced, the older boys being away at school. A roast was carved and served by two of the Romanian servants Beth Berringer favored. Arthur said grace, and there was a pause of quiet chewing, filled with the churn of East River boat traffic, before children’s voices raided the silence.

  When an apple crisp had been doused in cream and consumed, the women drifted from the table into the kitchen and library, the children to the nursery and bedrooms. The men remained, positioning themselves around Arthur in the usual formation: his only son, Arthur Jr. (known as Cooper), on his right, Dexter on his left, each flanked by another son-in-law: George Porter, a surgeon, on Dexter’s other side; Henry Foster, a schoolmaster, on Cooper’s. Thus began an hour of conversation that Dexter looked forward to all week.

  He noticed Tabby idling by the pocket doors to the dining room. “Come on over, Tabs,” he called to her, having first received a nod of approval from the old man. “Sit with us a minute.”

  He moved an extra chair to the corner between himself and Arthur. Tabby sat, coughing gently in the spiraling smoke from Cooper’s cigarette, the old man’s pipe, and George Porter’s cigar. Dexter and Henry Foster didn’t smoke—the one trait he’d in common with the schoolmaster, who wore patched tweed and drove a decomposing tin lizzie.

  Arthur poured each of them a glass of port. He’d retired from the navy as a rear admiral after the Great War and gone into banking, but even military posture couldn’t raise him above middling height. He’d small pink hands, thinning white hair, was well tailored (Brooks Brothers), but not as well as he might have been (Savile Row). He drove a mud-colored ’39 Plymouth. Yet what emanated from these nondescript trappings was a more potent distillation of life than Dexter had encountered in any man. He admired his father-in-law without reservation.

  “So, my boys,” the old man said, ignoring Tabby. “What do you hear?”

  He didn’t mean from newspapers. The old man had come to know Roosevelt as governor and went often to Washington, where he’d worked on war bond issues and helped to craft lend-lease. His navy intimates commanded fleets. Arthur Berringer knew a great many things, in other words, but he recognized that his rarefied connections lofted him above the better part of human experience.

  Henry Foster began with news from the Westchester town where his prep school, Alton Academy, was situated: a local woman had grown convinced that the family next door—neighbors of eight years—were German spies disguised as Americans. “She thought they were hiding their accents, even the children,” he said. “She could hear the German poking through. They had to commit her to a sanitarium.”

  “What do you make of it?” the old man asked George Porter, the surgeon.

  “The stress of war working on a weak mind,” George said. “She may well recover.”

  Dexter watched for Tabby’s reaction, but she kept her eyes down, pulling the rind from a lemon slice.

  “Suppose the neighbors really are German,” Cooper suggested, causing his father to wince.

  “We’ll have to keep Alton Academy open through Thanksgiving,” Henry went on. “Husbands overseas, mothers taking jobs . . . some boys haven’t anywhere else to go.”

  Hoping to engage Tabby, Dexter said, “We’ve had girls in the club who work at the Naval Yard, right in Brooklyn. Welding, plumbing . . . apparently, there are hundreds of them.”

  The old man looked skeptical. “Hundreds?”

  “Sounds dangerous,” Cooper said with a glance at his father, although it wasn’t clear whether he meant dangerous to the girls or to the world. Likely Cooper didn’t know. He was a weaker, far less intelligent version of his father, the embodiment of the limitations of their breed. The old man saw this; there was no way not to, with Cooper working for him at the bank. In moments of disappointment between father and son, Dexter felt the ease and strength of his own bond with his father-in-law. Cooper would never tell Arthur Berringer anything he didn’t know, whereas Dexter saw and knew things the old man couldn’t afford to, without personal compromise. He was near
er the earth, its salts and minerals, than any Berringer had been in several generations. And he was the only son-in-law not to require a penny of the old man’s dough.

  “Oh, I don’t know, Coop,” his father said gently. “Dangerous?”

  “Girls haven’t any practice at building ships.”

  Tabby watched her grandfather, but the old man’s gaze never touched her. A weakness of his generation: they’d no idea of the worth of women.

  “Were the girls masculine?” George Porter asked Dexter with a chuckle. He came often to Moonshine with his wife, Regina, Harriet’s battle-ax of an older sister, in their refurbished ’23 Duesenberg, painted chiffon yellow. Thanks to Dexter’s hidden window, he knew that the dapper doctor brought other women, too. George knew that Dexter knew, and this made for a warm understanding between them.

  “Just ordinary girls,” Dexter said. “The kind you see in Automats at lunchtime.”

  “I don’t go to Automats,” said the old man. “Paint us a picture.”

  The task of multiplying Miss Feeney into several girls was becoming onerous. The duplication had been instinctive—a long-standing wish to head off even the faintest speculation about his fidelity. It was one thing for George Porter, a minister’s son from an old family, to cheat discreetly. Dexter had no such leeway. His fealty to Harriet had been a condition of the old man’s blessing, and Dexter had given it gladly. In this way, as in so many others, his father-in-law had done him a favor. Womanizing was as bad as being a hophead or a cokie, for all the mayhem Dexter had seen it wreak in men’s lives.

  “Early twenties . . . dark-haired, Irish names,” he said. “Nice wholesome girls. Not fashionable.”

  “Fashionable enough to be at Moonshine,” said Henry Foster, who disapproved of nightclubs.

  “They did look a bit out of place,” Dexter reflected. “Someone brought them, I suppose.”

  “They sound identical,” his father-in-law said, with a laugh. “You’re sure they weren’t twins?”

  Dexter flushed. “I suppose I didn’t look closely.”

  “Say, why don’t I phone the Naval Yard’s commandant,” the old man said. “We were together in the Philippines. Arrange for a tour when Grady comes home from Annapolis.”

  “Yes!” Tabby cried, catching everyone off guard. “Please, Grandpa! I’d like to see the Naval Yard.”

  Dexter nearly swooned from astonishment and pride.

  “When will Grady be home for Thanksgiving?” the old man asked Cooper.

  They all inclined toward the name: Cooper because Grady was the lustrous jewel of his bland existence, the rest of them—why? There was a radiance about Grady, the eldest of the Berringer grandchildren, as if all of the old man’s wit and mischief, his easy touch with other men, had bypassed Cooper and resurged, thrillingly, in his eldest child. Grady seemed destined for great things, as the saying went, and Dexter was not above envying Cooper such a son.

  “Tuesday before Thanksgiving,” Cooper said, puffing up a little, as he always did when discussing Grady. “But he’s awfully busy with early graduation—I’ll have to ask Marsha.”

  “Wednesday before Thanksgiving then,” the old man said, ignoring his son’s equivocation. “I’ll telephone the admiral tomorrow morning. You’ll come, too, Tabatha?” Her name sounded oddly formal on his lips.

  “Yes, Grandpa,” she said, subdued in the aftermath of her outburst. “I’d like to come.”

  “I’m afraid I’ll have to stay at Alton,” Henry said. “But I’m sure Bitsy would like to come, if someone would fetch her at the station.”

  “Of course,” Dexter said, to Henry’s obvious relief. Bitsy, Harriet’s younger sister, had been the ideal schoolmaster’s wife until eight months ago, when she’d become “overwrought,” as Henry put it, after the birth of their fourth child. She’d begun studying Russian with a tutor and chanting passages from Pushkin. She spoke of wanting to travel the world and live in a yurt. Poor Henry hadn’t any idea what to do.

  George’s drab daughters, Edith and Olive, hovered in the doorway, skeins of mud-colored wool dripping from their knitting needles. Something for soldiers. “We’ve been waiting,” Olive said to Tabby reproachfully, and she rose and went with them, Dexter basking in the wonderful knowledge that she’d done well.

  “And you, Arthur?” he asked his father-in-law when the girls had gone. “What do you hear?”

  “Well. Unlike you gentlemen, I don’t actually do anything other than listen at doors,” the old man said. “But my listening tells me that something is imminent. With us at the fore.”

  It took all of them a moment to absorb this. Even Cooper understood that the old man meant an aggression. “In Europe or Asia, Pop?” he asked.

  “No self-respecting commander would ever let such a thing slip,” the old man said gruffly. “Of course, there are more possibilities than just those two.”

  Dexter guessed then that he meant North Africa, where the Brits were finally mustering some grit against Rommel. “We need the battle experience,” he said, working it out in his mind.

  The old man grazed his eyes. “Precisely.”

  If true, it was a staggering thing to know in advance. So far, what Arthur Berringer told them had always proved true. Dexter used to puzzle over why the old man would share sensitive facts with the likes of Cooper, who lacked intelligence or judgment, or Dexter, whose business took place on both sides of the law. It had occurred to him that his father-in-law might be feeding them false facts—either to test them or to use them as mouthpieces for rumors he wanted spread. But Dexter had never repeated a word; such was the old man’s power. And that was the answer. Arthur Berringer confided freely in his son and sons-in-law for the same reason Dexter left his front door unlocked: he’d the power to make them trustworthy. But while Dexter’s power derived from physical force, the old man’s had been distilled into abstraction. The Berringers were wearing top hats to the opera when Dexter’s people were still copulating behind hay bales in the old land. He liked the thought that his own power would one day be refined into translucence, with no memory of the blood and earth that had generated it.

  “The Allies will win this war,” the old man said.

  “Isn’t that . . . premature?” George asked.

  “Well, I wouldn’t say it to just anyone,” the old man said. “But it is a fact.”

  “I doubt the navy sees it that way, Dad,” said Cooper.

  “It’s not the navy’s job to think that way, son. Or the army’s. Or the Coast Guard’s. Their job is to win. It is the bankers’ job to anticipate—second job, that is, after we’ve paid for the war itself.”

  For Arthur Berringer, all of human achievement—be it the Roman conquests or American independence—was a mere sideshow of the machinations of bankers (taxation in the first instance; the Louisiana Purchase in the second). Like any hobbyhorse, this one occasioned its share of weary sighs from family members. Not Dexter. For him, the existence of an obscure truth recessed behind an obvious one, and emanating through it allegorically, was mesmerizing. It was what had first intrigued him, at age fifteen, about the two men who came every third Monday to see his father at his Coney Island restaurant. Another man came less often, always in brand-new spats, a red handkerchief gushing from his breast pocket. Dexter’s father always went behind the bar to pour this man’s brandy rather than have the barkeep do it.

  The blank face his pop wore after these visitations betrayed humiliation and anger, and Dexter knew better than to ask what they meant. But he was drawn to the men—a smoldering of dim feeling behind their eyes, a heaviness to their hands when they gave him a pat or a swat. He curried their favor, refilling their glasses, lingering at their tables when his father wasn’t watching. They took notice of him gradually, with a mute animal awareness. Later, when men who’d fought the Great War returned, Dexter recognized, in their fractured gazes and somnolent movements, something of what he’d first admired in Mr. Q.’s men. By then he knew what it meant: intimac
y with violence.

  “Of course,” Arthur added with a laugh, “since the Depression, we bankers have had the leisure and . . . solitude, you might say, to think about the future. The Civil War left us with a federal government. The Great War made us a creditor nation. As bankers, we must anticipate what changes this war will thrust upon us.”

  “What do you anticipate?” asked Henry, who distrusted Roosevelt.

  The old man leaned forward and took a long breath. “I see the rise of this country to a height no country has occupied, ever,” he said quietly. “Not the Romans. Not the Carolingians. Not Genghis Khan or the Tatars or Napoleon’s France. Hah! You’re all looking at me like I’ve one foot in the funny farm. How is that possible? you ask. Because our dominance won’t arise from subjugating peoples. We’ll emerge from this war victorious and unscathed, and become bankers to the world. We’ll export our dreams, our language, our culture, our way of life. And it will prove irresistible.”

  Dexter listened, a dark umbrella of worry opening slowly inside him. He’d been a soldier for over two decades, observing a chain of command to ensure the prosperity and vigor of the organization he served: a shadow government, a shadow country. A tribe. A clan. Now, suddenly, everyone was an American. A common enemy had made for strange bedfellows; rumor had it that the great Lucky Luciano had struck a deal with the feds from his jail cell to root out Mussolini sympathizers from the waterfront. What would Dexter’s own place be when the war ended?

  “I won’t have much part in all this,” Arthur Berringer said. “I’ll be too old to see it fructify.” He waved away their rustle of demurral. “It will belong to you, my boys, you and yours. Make certain you’re ready.”

  He spoke casually, as if reminding them of a departing ferry. In the stillness that followed, Dexter heard a rapid, flickering pulse, like a clock run amok. His own pulse, he supposed.

  The old man slapped his hands on the table and rose. Lunch was concluded. The room was foggy with smoke. The men shook hands and dispersed into the din of femininity and childhood.