It was enough, he told himself after that, to know that she was happy. That all three of them were happy. It should have been enough, but it was not. At the urging of his paramour, a term Ingrid used laughingly (a widowed schoolteacher being the last thing one pictured), he had returned this afternoon to try again. He’d completed another run, this time to New Guinea—part of a force pressing the Japs farther back toward their homeland in hopes of prompting a surrender. He’d been reunited with Wyckoff on that voyage, and they’d drunk another bottle of wine on the deck, under the stars. Eddie was developing a taste for the stuff. The warm Pacific breeze lapping at their faces had made the agonies of the Elizabeth Seaman seem no more substantial than a nightmare.
Pugh, the indomitable old salt, had steered the lifeboat all the way to British Somaliland, with Wyckoff, Sparks, Bogues, and the rest still alive and in passable health upon arrival. Captain Kittredge’s boat had been picked up long before, with all hands accounted for. That meant that roughly half the Elizabeth Seaman’s merchant and navy crews had survived the wreck. The War Shipping Administration had a policy of immediate duty for shipwreck survivors—to keep them from spreading their horror stories, so the rumor went. All were back on ships except Pugh, who had retired to live with his daughter, and the bosun, who still could not speak in his old way. He’d returned to Lagos, where Eddie had promised to visit him after the war. They exchanged frequent letters, addressing each other as “brother,” and Eddie found, to his morbid satisfaction, that his own writing style was reduced to a schoolboy stutter beside the bosun’s extravagant prose.
*
Anna did not see her father when she left the theater, and assumed he must have gone. She felt a beat of distress until he rose from a bench across the street and waved. She waved back, surprised by the intensity of her relief. By the time he reached her, she was angry again and wanted to send him away. But what was the point? Clearly, he intended to return and keep returning. She couldn’t hit him every time.
As they walked together up the hill toward her bungalow, Anna sensed how much he’d changed. He was older, his face creased, hair gone silver, but that wasn’t it—in fact, his scrawny handsomeness was the most familiar part of him. He’d shed a brooding abstraction that seemed, in its absence, to have been his most singular trait. That and the smell of smoke. But he no longer smoked, and there was a disconcerting calm about him. He’d been so near death at the time of his rescue, Brianne said, they couldn’t find his heartbeat.
Her father had become a stranger: a man she was meeting for the first time and sizing up as she would anyone. Anna dimly recalled having wanted to see him this way, but the fulfillment of the wish left them with little to say to each other. He knew nothing of her life; could not appreciate, for example, the delight she’d taken in a letter she’d received from Marle just yesterday:
An angel smiled down on our friend Mr. Bascombe: the navy has accepted him. Before he took the train to boot camp in Great Lakes, Illinois, Ruby’s mother cooked him supper and her old man raised a glass to his health. Apparently it’s true that “The uniform makes the man.” Wish I could tell you more, but B. was reticent as ever, couldn’t even get the menu. Bldg 569 isn’t the same without him.
“You know about Mama,” Anna said to break the silence.
He nodded. “Those soldiers are lucky to have her.”
Anna missed her mother, who had joined the Red Cross just after Anna’s move to California, before she announced her pregnancy. Her mother still believed in the doomed Lieutenant Charlie Smith. Anna wondered now if she would ever tell her the truth—whether it would even matter by the time the war ended. One thing was certain: Rose had been wrong about the world becoming small again. Or at least it would not be the same small world it had been. Too much had changed. And amid those shifts and realignments, Anna had slipped through a crack and escaped.
“She’ll be a nurse when she comes back,” she told her father.
“She’s been a nurse for many years,” he said.
They paused to catch their breath at the top of the hill. The Mare Island Naval Shipyard was arrayed below them at the foot of San Pablo Bay, a peninsula studded with piers along a channel full of warships. Anna loved being able to look down upon it every day before work and know which ships had sailed overnight and which new ones had berthed. She owed her job to a miracle, for by the time she and her aunt had settled in Vallejo, she’d felt too pregnant to dive. She worried it might harm the baby. She and Brianne had taken jobs at a diner—Brianne as a waitress, Anna as a cashier—and waited in a cramped, dingy apartment for the baby to arrive. It had been an awful time.
Last November, six weeks after Leon was born, Anna had finally presented her transfer documents at Mare Island. By then, Lieutenant Axel’s telephone call was long forgotten. But it turned out not to matter; three Normandie salvage divers were employed at Mare Island now, and one of them—a supervisor—had been on Anna’s tour of the Brooklyn Naval Yard. All three remembered her photograph from the Eagle. She was given a job at eighty dollars a week, and now worked underwater most days.
“Funny you’ve so many destroyers,” her father said, looking down at the Yard, “with so few convoys out of the Golden Gate.”
“Just four,” she said.
“Six.”
Anna looked again. “You’re confusing your ships.”
He pointed, counting. At three, she stopped him. “That’s a minesweeper, Papa.”
He took a long look, then turned to her, smiling. “I stand corrected.”
The fog had begun its creeping advance, a lone tendril leading the way from the Pacific. Foghorns lowed in the distance. They sounded deeper and louder than the foghorns Anna had heard all her life. But then, this fog was different, solid-looking enough to mold with your hands. It gushed in overnight, engulfing whole cities like amnesia.
Ahhh Ohhhh
Ahhh Ohhhh
The ships were calling to avoid each other, but it always sounded to Anna as if they were lost, seeking companionship in the depthless white. The sound stirred in her a foreboding she couldn’t explain. At night, wakened by the foghorns, she reached inside the basket where Leon slept, searching for the rampant patter of his heartbeat.
“Look,” her father said. “Here it comes.”
She was surprised to find him watching the fog. It rolled in fast: a wild, volatile silhouette against the phosphorescent sky. It reared up over the land like a tidal wave about to break, or the aftermath of a silent, distant explosion.
Without thinking, she took her father’s hand.
“Here it comes,” she said.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
* * *
I was heartened, during the years I spent circling Manhattan Beach, to know that if nothing more came of the endeavor than the pleasure of having researched it, I would count myself lucky. The good times began in 2004 at the New York Public Library, where I was a Fellow at the Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers, led by Jean Strouse. There, librarians Rob Scott and Maira Liriano helped familiarize me with the historical dominance of New York City’s waterfront—a feature of the landscape that had mostly escaped me in many years of living here.