Anna cocked her head. “Would you want to care for a baby?”
Somehow it had become a proposal. Anna watched her aunt consider, the dramatic lines of her face settling into a rare look of contemplation. “It may be the only thing left that I haven’t done,” she said.
By Rochester, all that remained of the day was an orange blaze on the western horizon. Planted fields sent a tang through the open windows. To the right spread Lake Ontario, purple-black. Anna pictured Rose and little Melvin curled in her bed, Rose munching walnuts as she finished a last chapter of her Jack Asher mystery. Bascombe would have brought Ruby home by now, harbor noises crowding the night as he rode the streetcar back to his rooming house. Anna pictured all this with wistful resignation; so quickly, she had consigned that life to the past. Its telescopic fading was the price of hurtling forward into whatever smoldering promise issued from that orange blaze. She hungered toward it, longing for the future it contained. As the train roared west, Anna bolted upright. She had thought of her father. At last she understood: This is how he did it.
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
* * *
Eddie sat on a park bench across from the Empress Theater and eyed its doors, waiting for Anna to emerge. She was watching a newsreel about the USS Missouri, a battleship built at the Brooklyn Naval Yard, where she’d worked for nearly a year before her marriage.
He’d wanted to come inside with her to watch, too, but she’d put him off. “You were gone,” she said. “It won’t mean anything to you.”
“May I wait?”
“You can do whatever you want.”
Eddie was encouraged. So far, this visit was an improvement over his first, last October, when he’d taken the electric train from San Francisco and rung the buzzer of a bleak apartment after dark. He could hear the baby crying, and the sound instantly brought him low. He was on the verge of slinking away when the door opened and there she was—Anna, grown up—peering out at him. “Papa,” she said softly, and Eddie thought he saw wonder in her face, mixed with astonishment—but it may have been just astonishment. He was astonished by the pale, dark-eyed woman in the doorway, her long hair falling loose over a dressing gown.
She slapped his face with such force he saw stars. “Don’t ever come back here,” she said, and shut the door quietly—so as not to scare the baby, he later thought.
His second visit was in January, after a three-month run to the Gilbert Islands as second mate—his first voyage since the Elizabeth Seaman, owing to lingering stomach problems. He came while Anna was at work that time, to see Brianne and meet “the little gentleman”—as his sister was fond of calling the burly, fierce-eyed infant who gazed at Eddie reproachfully from a basket.
“What did his father look like?” he asked, eyeing the baby. “Have you a photograph?”
“No,” Brianne said heavily. “All of that was lost in the valise that went missing on the train.”
It was Eddie’s good fortune that Agnes wasn’t caring for the baby. Agnes had walked off the family farm last June, according to Brianne, shocking her dour relations to the same degree she had by up and running to New York at seventeen. She’d hitched a ride into town and volunteered with the Red Cross. Now she was overseas, working as a nurse’s aide. Her letters were too heavily censored for Brianne to know where she was, but Agnes had mentioned forests. Europe, they guessed.
Eddie watched the baby kicking like a restless cub. “Poor little devil,” he said.
“He isn’t poor in the least,” his sister retorted. “There was never a little gentleman so spoiled and adored.”
She seemed bizarrely at ease, feeding and burping the tyke as though he were her very own, not a rumor of booze in the house. His sister’s transformation from aging tart to fussing nanny seemed almost instantaneous, like the flick of a kaleidoscope.
“Say, where were you hiding your mothering tendencies all those years?” he asked.
“I wasn’t hiding them, I was wasting them,” she said. “On rats and louts more babyish than this one!” She swooped the cub into her arms and smattered his face with kisses until he guffawed. “Come, brother dear,” she said. “Hold your grandson.”
Eddie reached for him gingerly, fearful of hurting him. But the sturdy infant cleaved to him with such tender resolve that Eddie felt as if he were the one being held.
“Now now,” Brianne said. “Only the baby is allowed to cry.”
At the end of that visit, Eddie had gone to the Mare Island gate to wait for Anna. By then he’d done some reconnaissance and knew which road she would have to take from the shipyard up to the bungalow she and Brianne had moved into, among other Mare Island workers.
He stood back from the road among a thatch of eucalyptus trees, pungent leaves dangling around him like sickles. Anna appeared after the general rush, laughing with another girl. Her athletic walk was so like Agnes’s that he felt disoriented; which was he looking at? Anna bade her friend goodbye and quickened her pace, cheeks flushed under her hat. She looked awfully happy for a girl newly widowed. But then he supposed she’d known Lieutenant Smith for too short a time to miss him very much—especially with the little gentleman to come home to. Watching his daughter approach, Eddie had felt an annihilating emptiness, as if he’d died on the raft after all and returned as a ghost. He nearly stepped from the shadows just to see his presence register in her face, to know that he was really there. But that would dash her high spirits. So he stayed hidden and let her pass.