He’d written in a faint scattered hand from a hospital in British Somaliland. He’d been rescued at sea twenty-one days after a torpedo sank his ship. He had been with the merchant marine since 1937. All of this washed through Anna’s brain and back out, leaving it empty. He was in poor health, unsure when he would be well enough to return. I miss you girls terribly and long to see you again, he’d written, with the address of a postal box in San Francisco.
Anna sat so still, for so long, that sparrows began to puff and squabble on the fire escape rungs at her feet. Her father was alive, had always been alive. Despite the apparent impossibility of this fact, she didn’t feel surprise, exactly. More a sensation of falling headlong, dangerously, with no inkling where the fall would stop. She clutched a fire escape rail in each hand. Carefully, as though the building were moving around her, she climbed back indoors. The sun had withdrawn to the windowsills. It must be almost noon. In the kitchen, she found the pencil her mother kept nailed to the wall on a string for her shopping list. Anna flattened her father’s letter onto the counter and scrawled over it, LYDIA IS DEAD, so that the lead tore through the paper. Then she went to her old room, lay on her bed, and fell asleep.
When she woke, she knew by the light that it was afternoon. It no longer felt possible to return to Clinton Avenue. She needed to act. She turned on the radio, sat at the kitchen table, and tried to think. Who were the nuns Nell had spoken of, and how did one find them? Had they a telephone? It seemed too late to go back to Nell; whom might she turn to? Strangely, Charlie Voss came to mind, although she’d hardly seen him since moving to Rose’s. Instinct told her that Charlie might be sympathetic, but she’d no way of knowing and couldn’t afford the risk.
The Roy Shields Show came on, a program she’d often listened to with Aunt Brianne. The mere thought of her aunt was enough. Of course. Anna’s virtue and good sense were as axiomatic for Brianne as for her mother, but disillusionment wouldn’t break her. Nothing could break Aunt Brianne.
If she telephoned her aunt and left a message, she would have to wait, and Anna felt incapable of waiting. She decided instead to go directly to Sheepshead Bay, even without an address, and telephone her aunt from there. Brianne had always used a postal box; her residence changed often, and at times she hadn’t had one, depositing trunks full of furs and feathers, occasionally pieces of furniture with Anna’s parents. Anna glanced at the pile of odds and ends on her bureau. Sure enough, she had saved one of the cocktail napkins her aunt had brought for Lydia’s funeral lunch. Dizzy Swain, Emmons Avenue, Sheepshead Bay. She would begin there.
Consulting the Seamen’s Bank transit map pasted inside the kitchen cupboard, she saw that the BMT went directly to Sheepshead Bay. Anna left the apartment and walked to the subway.
She’d gone to Sheepshead Bay with her father, on “errands,” and recalled a jumble of rotting docks and small fishing boats. He’d taken her to a shanty where several men at a counter leaned over their bowls like animals at a trough. While her father conducted his business, the proprietor had brought Anna her own bowl of chowder. She remembered the taste: creamy, buttery, full of fish. Her stomach creaked at the memory.
Emmons Avenue looked wider than she’d expected, its homey scramble of docks replaced by a series of monumental piers slanting identically into the bay. She crossed to a cafeteria on the north side of the avenue and held up the cocktail napkin to the cashier, who had dyed black hair and a mustache that looked pasted on. “Do you know this place?” she asked.
“Why, sure,” he said. “Straight east on Emmons. You can catch the trolley a hundred feet from here.”
Anna gazed from the trolley window at coasties milling in the late afternoon—the eagle insignia on the officers’ caps was gold, not silver, meaning they were Coast Guard rather than navy. Across Sheepshead Bay, family homes gave way to military buildings—this must be the Maritime Training Center her aunt had spoken of. When Anna got off the trolley, she might have been on Sands Street: crowded bars, a photo studio offering twelve poses for sixty-nine cents. MADAME LAROUSSE: CARDS, OUIJA, CRYSTAL. She spotted the Dizzy Swain a block over, its sign a replica of the lovestruck shepherd holding a cocktail shaker.
The Swain was much like the Oval Bar, its reek of beery sawdust enriched by the smell of seafood. It was dense with un-uniformed men she guessed must be merchant sailors. The place seemed beneath her aunt’s level, yet there was Brianne, right at the bar! Anna rushed toward her, but it turned out that her aunt was behind the bar—she was the barmaid! Anna froze in confusion, half expecting Brianne not to know her, so otherworldly was the encounter. But her aunt let out a whoop. “Why, it’s high time! Seems I have to open up the Brooklyn Eagle if I want to catch a glimpse of my niece. Two weeks without a phone call, not to mention I’ve left three messages at White’s, and they haven’t seen hide or hair of you. Are you hungry? Chowder for my niece, Albert, and don’t skimp on the clams.”
The bluster of cheerful accusation left Anna stammering apologies. Albert, whose Adam’s apple protruded further than his nose, seated her at the bar and brought her a bowl of steaming soup. She crumbled in a handful of oyster crackers and took a spoonful. She shut her eyes: fish, cream, butter. It was the soup she remembered, only better—better for being in her mouth at that moment. It warmed the reaches of her belly and radiated out to her limbs. She had a curious sensation as she ate, as if a fish from the soup had swum against the interior of her stomach. When it happened a second time, she wondered if the chowder was giving her indigestion. But it wasn’t that. A live thing had moved inside her.
Her throat closed, and she set down her spoon. For the first time, terror ricocheted through Anna at the catastrophe she had allowed to befall her. She’d distracted herself for nearly two months—believing somehow that there would still be an avenue of retreat. Now the disaster confronted her nakedly. She was ruined.
Brianne joshed with the sailors and filled their glasses like a slatternly den mother. Anna hardly heard. She was watching an impassable distance open between herself and everything she loved: working underwater; Marle and Bascombe and the other divers; Rose and her family. The photograph in the Brooklyn Eagle: a good girl; a smiling, innocent girl. But Anna was not that girl. She was a corrupt interloper bluffing her way through her life.