Manhattan Beach: A Novel

PART ONE

The Shore

CHAPTER ONE

They’d driven all the way to Mr. Styles’s house before Anna realized that her father was nervous. First the ride had distracted her, sailing along Ocean Parkway as if they were headed for Coney Island, although it was four days past Christmas and impossibly cold for the beach. Then the house itself: a palace of golden brick three stories high, windows all the way around, a rowdy flapping of green-and-yellow-striped awnings. It was the last house on the street, which dead-ended at the sea.

Her father eased the Model J against the curb and turned off the motor. Toots, he said. Don’t squint at Mr. Styles’s house.

Of course I won’t squint at his house.

You’re doing it now.

No, she said. I’m making my eyes narrow.

That’s squinting, he said. You’ve just defined it.

Not for me.

He turned to her sharply. Don’t squint.

That was when she knew. She heard him swallow dryly and felt a chirp of worry in her stomach. She was not used to seeing her father nervous. Distracted, yes. Preoccupied, certainly.

Why doesn’t Mr. Styles like squinting? she asked.

No one does.

You never told me that before.

Would you like to go home?

No, thank you.

I can take you home.

If I squint?

If you give me the headache I’m starting to get.

If you take me home, Anna said, you’ll be awfully late.

She thought he might slap her. He’d done it once, after she’d let fly a string of curses she’d heard on the docks, his hand finding her cheek invisibly as a whip. The specter of that slap still haunted Anna, with the odd effect of heightening her boldness, in defiance of it.

Her father rubbed the middle of his forehead, then looked back at her. His nerves were gone; she had cured them.

Anna, he said. You know what I need you to do.

Of course.

Be your charming self with Mr. Styles’s children while I speak with Mr. Styles.

I knew that, Papa.

Of course you did.

She left the Model J with eyes wide and watering in the sun. It had been their own automobile until after the stock market crash. Now it belonged to the union, which lent it back for her father to do union business. Anna liked to go with him when she wasn’t in school—to racetracks, Communion breakfasts and church events, office buildings where elevators lofted them to high floors, occasionally even a restaurant. But never before to a private home like this.

The door-pull was answered by Mrs. Styles, who had a movie star’s sculpted eyebrows and a long mouth painted glossy red. Accustomed to judging her own mother prettier than every woman she encountered, Anna was disarmed by the evident glamour of Mrs. Styles.

I was hoping to meet Mrs. Kerrigan, Mrs. Styles said in a husky voice, holding Anna’s father’s hand in both of hers. To which he replied that his younger daughter had taken sick that morning, and his wife had stayed at home to nurse her.

There was no sign of Mr. Styles.

Politely but (she hoped) without visible awe, Anna accepted a glass of lemonade from a silver tray carried by a Negro maid in a pale blue uniform. In the high polish of the entrance hall’s wood floor, she caught the reflection of her own red dress, sewn by her mother. Beyond the windows of an adjacent front room, the sea tingled under a thin winter sun.

Mr. Styles’s daughter, Tabatha, was only eight—three years younger than Anna. Still, Anna allowed the littler girl to tow her by the hand to a downstairs nursery, a room dedicated purely to playing, filled with a shocking array of toys. A quick survey discovered a Flossie Flirt doll, several large teddy bears, and a rocking horse. There was a Nurse in the nursery, a freckled, raspy-voiced woman whose woolen dress strained like an overstacked bookshelf to repress her massive bust. Anna guessed from the broad lay of her face and the merry switch of her eyes that Nurse was Irish, and felt a danger of being seen through. She resolved to keep her distance.

Two small boys—twins, or at least interchangeable—were struggling to attach electric train tracks. Partly to avoid Nurse, who rebuffed the boys’ pleas for help, Anna crouched beside the disjointed tracks and proffered her services. She could feel the logic of mechanical parts in her fingertips; this came so naturally that she could only think that other people didn’t really try. They always looked, which was as useless when assembling things as studying a picture by touching it. Anna fastened the piece that was vexing the boys and took several more from the freshly opened box. It was a Lionel train, the quality of the tracks palpable in the resolve with which they interlocked. As she worked, Anna glanced occasionally at the Flossie Flirt doll wedged at the end of a shelf. She had wanted one so violently two years ago that some of her desperation seemed to have broken off and stayed inside her. It was strange and painful to discover that old longing now, in this place.

Tabatha cradled her new Christmas doll, a Shirley Temple in a fox-fur coat. She watched, entranced, as Anna built her brothers’ train tracks. Where do you live? she asked.

Not far.

By the beach?

Near it.

May I come to your house?

Of course, Anna said, fastening tracks as fast as the boys handed them to her. A figure eight was nearly complete.

Have you any brothers? Tabatha asked.

A sister, Anna said. She’s eight, like you, but she’s mean. Because of being so pretty.

Tabatha looked alarmed. How pretty?

Extremely pretty, Anna said gravely, then added, She looks like our mother, who danced with the Follies. The error of this boast accosted her a moment later. Never part with a fact unless you’ve no choice. Her father’s voice in her ears.

Lunch was served by the same Negro maid at a table in the playroom. They sat like adults on their small chairs, cloth napkins in their laps. Anna glanced several times at the Flossie Flirt, searching for some pretext to hold the doll without admitting she was interested. If she could just feel it in her arms, she would be satisfied.

After lunch, as a reward for their fine behavior, Nurse allowed them to bundle into coats and hats and bolt from a back door along a path that ran behind Mr. Styles’s house to a private beach. A long arc of snow-dusted sand tilted down to the sea. Anna had been to the docks in winter, many times, but never to a beach. Miniature waves shrugged up under skins of ice that crackled when she stomped them. Seagulls screamed and dove in the riotous wind, their bellies stark white. The twins had brought along Buck Rogers ray guns, but the wind turned their shots and death throes into pantomime.

Anna watched the sea. There was a feeling she had, standing at its edge: an electric mix of attraction and dread. What would be exposed if all that water should suddenly vanish? A landscape of lost objects: sunken ships, hidden treasure, gold and gems and the charm bracelet that had fallen from her wrist into a storm drain. Dead bodies, her father always added, with a laugh. To him, the ocean was a wasteland.

Anna looked at Tabby (as she was nicknamed), shivering beside her, and wanted to say what she felt. Strangers were often easier to say things to. Instead, she repeated what her father always said, confronted by a bare horizon: Not a ship in sight.

The little boys dragged their ray guns over the sand toward the breaking waves, Nurse panting after them. You’ll go nowhere near that water, Phillip, John-Martin, she wheezed at a startling volume. Is that perfectly clear? She cast a hard look at Anna, who had led them there, and herded the twins toward the house.

Your shoes are getting wet, Tabby said through chattering teeth.

Should we take them off? Anna asked. To feel the cold?

I don’t want to feel it!

I do.

Tabby watched Anna unbuckle the straps of the black patent-leather shoes she shared with Zara Klein, downstairs. She unrolled her wool stockings and placed her white, bony, long-for-her-age feet in the icy water. Each foot delivered an agony of sensation to her heart, one part of which was a flame of ache that felt unexpectedly pleasant.

What’s it like? Tabby shrieked.

Cold, Anna said. Awful, awful cold. It took all of her strength to keep from recoiling, and her resistance added to the odd excitement. Glancing toward the house, she saw two men in dark overcoats following the paved path set back from the sand. Holding their hats in the wind, they looked like actors in a silent picture. Are those our papas?

Daddy likes to have business talks outdoors, Tabby said. Away from prying ears.

Anna felt benevolent compassion toward young Tabatha, excluded from her father’s business affairs when Anna was allowed to listen in whenever she pleased. She heard little of interest. Her father’s job was to pass greetings, or good wishes, between union men and other men who were their friends. These salutations included an envelope, sometimes a package, that he would deliver or receive casually—you wouldn’t notice unless you were paying attention. Over the years, he’d talked to Anna a great deal without knowing he was talking, and she had listened without knowing what she heard.

She was surprised by the familiar, animated way her father was speaking to Mr. Styles. Apparently they were friends. After all that.

The men changed course and began crossing the sand toward Anna and Tabby. Anna stepped hurriedly out of the water, but she’d left her shoes too far away to put them back on in time. Mr. Styles was a broad, imposing man with brilliantined black hair showing under his hat brim. Say, is this your daughter? he asked. Withstanding arctic temperatures without so much as a pair of stockings?

Anna sensed her father’s displeasure. So it is, he said. Anna, say good day to Mr. Styles.

Very pleased to meet you, she said, shaking his hand firmly, as her father had taught her, and taking care not to squint as she peered up at him. Mr. Styles looked younger than her father, without shadows or creases in his face. She sensed an alertness about him, a humming tension perceptible even through his billowing overcoat. He seemed to await something to react to, or be amused by. Right now that something was Anna.

Mr. Styles crouched beside her on the sand and looked directly into her face. Why the bare feet? he asked. Don’t you feel the cold, or are you showing off?

Anna had no ready answer. It was neither of those; more an instinct to keep Tabby awed and guessing. But even that she couldn’t articulate. Why would I show off? she said. I’m nearly twelve.

Well, what’s it feel like?

She smelled mint and liquor on his breath even in the wind. It struck her that her father couldn’t hear their conversation.

It only hurts at first, she said. After a while you can’t feel anything.

Mr. Styles grinned as if her reply were a ball he’d taken physical pleasure in catching. Words to live by, he said, then rose again to his immense height. She’s strong, he remarked to Anna’s father.

So she is. Her father avoided her eyes.

Mr. Styles brushed sand from his trousers and turned to go. He’d exhausted that moment and was looking for the next. They’re stronger than we are, Anna heard him say to her father. Lucky for us, they don’t know it. She thought he might turn and look back at her, but he must have forgotten.

Dexter Styles felt sand working its way inside his oxfords as he slogged back to the path. Sure enough, the toughness he’d sensed coiled in Ed Kerrigan had flowered into magnificence in the dark-eyed daughter. Proof of what he’d always believed: men’s children gave them away. It was why Dexter rarely did business with any man before meeting his family. He wished his Tabby had gone barefoot, too.

Kerrigan drove a ’28 Duesenberg Model J, Niagara blue, evidence both of fine taste and of bright prospects before the crash. He had an excellent tailor. Yet there was something obscure about the man, something that worked against the clothing and automobile and even his blunt, deft conversation. A shadow, a sorrow. Then again, who hadn’t one? Or several?

By the time they reached the path, Dexter found himself decided upon hiring Kerrigan, assuming that suitable terms could be established.

Say, have you time for a drive to meet an old friend of mine? he asked.

Certainly, Kerrigan said.

Your wife isn’t expecting you?

Not before supper.

Your daughter? Will she worry?

Kerrigan laughed. Anna? It’s her job to worry me.

Anna had expected any moment to be called off the beach by her father, but it was Nurse who eventually came, huffing indignantly, and ordered them out of the cold. The light had changed, and the playroom felt heavy and dark. It was warmed by its own woodstove. They ate walnut cookies and watched the electric train race around the figure eight Anna had built, real steam straggling from its miniature smokestack. She had never seen such a toy, could not imagine how much it might cost. She was sick of this adventure. It had lasted far longer than their sociable visits usually did, and playing a part for the other children had exhausted Anna. It felt like hours since she’d seen her father. Eventually, the boys left the train running and went to look at picture books. Nurse had nodded off in a rocking chair. Tabby lay on a braided rug, pointing her new kaleidoscope at the lamp.

Casually, Anna asked, May I hold your Flossie Flirt?

Tabby assented vaguely, and Anna carefully lifted the doll from the shelf. Flossie Flirts came in four sizes, and this was the second smallest—not the newborn baby but a somewhat larger baby with startled blue eyes. Anna turned the doll on her side. Sure enough, just as the newspaper ads had promised, the blue irises slid into the corners of the eyes as if keeping Anna in sight. She felt a burst of pure joy that nearly made her laugh. The doll’s lips were drawn into a perfect O. Below her top lip were two painted white teeth.

As if catching the scent of Anna’s delight, Tabby jumped to her feet. You can have her, she cried. I never play with her anymore.

Anna absorbed the impact of this offer. Two Christmases ago, when she’d wanted the Flossie Flirt so acutely, she hadn’t dared ask—ships had stopped coming in, and they hadn’t any money. The extreme physical longing she’d felt for the doll scissored through her now, upsetting her deep knowledge that of course she must refuse.

No, thank you, she said at last. I’ve a bigger one at home. I just wanted to see what the small one was like. With wrenching effort, she forced herself to replace the Flossie Flirt on the shelf, keeping a hand on one rubbery leg until she felt Nurse’s eyes upon her. Feigning indifference, she turned away.

Too late. Nurse had seen, and knew. When Tabby left the room to answer a call from her mother, Nurse seized the Flossie Flirt and half flung it at Anna. Take it, dear, she whispered fiercely. She doesn’t care—she’s more toys than she can ever play with. They all have.

Anna wavered, half believing there might be a way to take the doll without having anyone know. But the mere thought of her father’s reaction hardened her reply. No, thank you, she said coldly. I’m too old for dolls, anyway. Without a backward glance, she left the playroom. But Nurse’s sympathy had weakened her, and her knees shook as she climbed the stairs.

At the sight of her father in the front hall, Anna barely withstood an urge to run to him and hug his legs as she used to do. He had his coat on. Mrs. Styles was saying goodbye. Next time you must bring your sister, she told Anna, kissing her cheek with a brush of musky perfume. Anna promised that she would. Outside, the Model J gleamed dully in the late-afternoon sun. It had been shinier when it was their car; the union boys polished it less.

As they drove away from Mr. Styles’s house, Anna searched for the right clever remark to disarm her father—the kind she’d made thoughtlessly when she was smaller, his startled laughter her first indication she’d been funny. Lately, she often found herself trying to recapture an earlier state, as if some freshness or innocence had passed from her.

I suppose Mr. Styles wasn’t in stocks, she said finally.

He chuckled and pulled her to him. Mr. Styles doesn’t need stocks. He owns nightclubs. And other things.

Is he with the union?

Oh no. He’s nothing to do with the union.

This was a surprise. Generally speaking, union men wore hats, and longshoremen wore caps. Some, like her father, might wear either, depending on the day. Anna couldn’t imagine her father with a longshoreman’s hook when he was dressed well, as now. Her mother saved exotic feathers from her piecework and used them to trim his hats. She retailored his suits to match the styles and flatter his ropy frame—he’d lost weight since the ships had stopped coming and he took less exercise.

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 1934. 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.

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