Anna listened in wonderment. “I see.”
“Man-to-man: This ain’t some dizzy blonde who likes to chum it up with the lads, because that’s what they’ll think. You’re shocked, I see that, but the world can be an ugly place. She’s the best goddamn diver in my unit, so wipe that smirk off your map and put her on the payroll, for Pete’s sake.” His cheeks flamed as he faced off against the base suppositions of his imagined interlocutor. “We’ve a war to win, goddamn it! We need the very best men out there—uh, people. I’ve a Negro working for me, Mr. Marle. Happens to be my best welder. Do I mind that he’s a Negro? Hell, I’d take a giraffe if they sent me one that could weld underwater like he can.”
His vehemence bent Anna’s memory. Had she exaggerated the lieutenant’s harshness early on? Been oversensitive? She could no longer recall. “Do you think you’ll persuade them?” she asked.
“I’ve an idea of their language, I suppose, the way their minds work. Enough to communicate.”
“Thank you, sir.”
He was quiet a moment, observing his folded hands on the desk. “That’s the first thing,” he resumed more calmly. “And the second is: the Pacific is lousy with sharks. I’m told you can watch great whites gobbling seals in the Frisco Bay like candy dots. May I ask what you intend to do about it?”
*
Just twelve days elapsed between Anna’s announcement that she must join her mother in California and her departure. During that time—or rather, after work and during her one day off in that time—she gave notice to her landlord, boxed and mailed her mother’s clothing and linens, put the furniture into storage, closed her account at Williamsburgh Savings, and sent her balance by telegraph wire to the Bank of America in Vallejo, California. She visited Lydia’s grave, promising to send for her sister when she was situated. Bascombe, Marle, Ruby, and Rose (whose family was bereft at the prospect of Anna’s going) all offered to help, but she couldn’t risk accepting. A more radical tale had been required to explain her departure to her mother and neighbors: after a two-week courtship, she’d been whirled off her feet straight to the altar and now was following her new husband to the Mare Island Naval Shipyard. She bought a wedding band at a pawnbroker’s and slipped it on each time she entered her old block. The fabrication required a giddy, breathless delivery that exhausted Anna more than any amount of packing or lifting. Even writing it out in letters to Stella, Lillian, her mother, and the neighborhood boys in the service drained her. She doused the stationery in rose-scented toilet water and strewed exclamation points. Lying to her mother was hardest, but it was only temporary—a way of establishing the story for her family in Minnesota. Anna would tell her the truth when they saw each other.
She named her husband Charlie. Lieutenant Charlie Smith!!!!!!
Sustaining two incompatible falsehoods required not just vigilant precision in the donning and doffing of her wedding band but the enforcement of an absolute separation between her old life—her mother and neighborhood—and her present one at the Naval Yard. It meant not saying goodbye to Charlie Voss, whom Anna doubted she could lie to, face-to-face. She would write him from California.
Over a final round of beers at the Oval Bar, she gave her friends the address of the Charles Hotel in Vallejo. She promised to kiss the Pacific shore for Bascombe and mail a palm frond to Ruby. For Marle, who hoped to move to California after the war, she promised to find out which places were friendliest to Negroes. Then she hugged Ruby, shook the hands of sixteen divers, and walked to the Flushing Avenue streetcar for a final supper with Rose and her family.
Brianne arrived by taxi at noon the next day. Rose and her father had left for work, so Rose’s mother saw Anna off, exclaiming at the quantity of luggage already in the taxi: two cartons, a valise, an overnight case, a cosmetics case, and a large trunk—all Brianne’s. Her aunt’s involvement in Anna’s move had escalated from promising to see her off at the station, to accompanying her as far as Chicago, to going with her to California on her way to visit friends in Hollywood, to staying in Vallejo long enough to help her settle in, to remaining through the birth because who could leave a girl at such a time, to a revelation that had wakened Brianne from deep sleep (by her own report) and jettisoned her from her four-poster bed: she was sick to death of New York, pining for California weather, and long overdue for a permanent move there. She had stored her furniture alongside Anna’s.
Rose’s mother held up little Melvin, and they waved together as the taxi pulled away. Anna saw that she was weeping. The silvery trees along Clinton Avenue shook in a coal-scented breeze tinged with chocolate. When they were out of sight, Anna leaned back against the taxi seat and shut her eyes. An unnatural energy had propelled her through the many steps leading up to this departure. Now that those steps were complete, her excitement collapsed into emptiness. She had never wanted to leave and didn’t now.
Brianne wagged a hand-painted Chinese fan, liberating an odor of stale powder from inside her dress. Anna felt a throe of revulsion. She didn’t want to go—especially not with this musty old woman for a companion. She rolled down her window and let the breeze box her face. The cabbie took a left on Flushing and drove west alongside the Naval Yard—past Building 77, from whose high windows Anna had looked down at the ships in dry dock; past the Cumberland gate and the officers’ mansions with tennis courts behind them. On a hill above the smokestacks, she glimpsed the gabled yellow commandant’s house.
The driver turned right at Navy Street, and they passed the Sands Street gate and Building 4, where Nell had worked. Anna felt physical pain in her chest and throat as they approached the Yard’s extreme northwest edge. Building 569 was just across that wall! An ordinary day, perfect diving weather! She felt as if she, too, were across the wall, lugging equipment onto the barge with her friends and, at the same time, driving away from them forever. The separation was violent—a rending expulsion. Anna seized upon landmarks as if clawing a hillside to stop her slide: the Woolworth Building! The old Seaport piers! The harplike spokes of the Brooklyn Bridge!