“Well, the owner’s a gangster, so they say. Or was, during Prohibition. He generally sits over there.” Louie squinted toward a back corner of the room. “Name of Dexter Styles. Owns a number of clubs, so he isn’t always here.”
“Dexter Styles,” Anna said. She knew the name. “What does he look like?”
“Like a pugilist. Big strong fellow, dark hair. He may be there now, I can’t tell.”
Marco, the handsome suitor, finally asked Anna to dance. He looked like a screen heavy with his curly dark hair and brooding eyes, his scowling mouth. He was Italian—perhaps that was why he hadn’t been called up. He pronounced Mussolini a pig perfunctorily, as if checking a box, then fell silent. His gaze roved the dance floor, and Anna soon realized he was keeping Nell in sight as she danced with the non-handsome suitor who wasn’t Louie. Anna danced badly with Marco, and he with her. The third time he stepped on her foot, she excused herself, smarting with disappointment. Rather than rejoin Louie, she made her way toward the corner where he’d said the club’s owner liked to sit. Four men leaned around a table. Anna’s champagne smear had given her a feeling of half-invisibility, and she walked straight to the table and looked down. The men noticed her as one. She knew immediately which was Mr. Styles—and realized, in that instant, that she had met him before.
“Powder room’s all the way at the front,” one of the men said.
“No, I— Excuse me,” Anna said, and veered away. Dexter Styles was the man from the beach. This discovery arrived in a hot-cold rush, disorienting her as if the room had flipped on its side. A lost memory surfaced: riding in the car with her father. Playing with another girl. This man, Dexter Styles, on an icy beach. The coincidence felt miraculous. Without pausing to consider, Anna rushed back to the table to inform him of it.
The men glanced up a second time, a chill in their collective regard signaling that she’d outworn her welcome. The champagne blur abandoned her, and she felt exposed, unbuffered from the hostility of the youngest of Mr. Styles’s associates, who had big jowls and bushy, uneven hair. “You’re turning into a bad habit, baby,” he said. “Scram.”
Dexter Styles was on his feet instantly, standing between Anna and the table. “What can I do for you, miss?” he asked with remote politeness, his eyes barely grazing her face. He’d no memory of her, of course. The trip to Manhattan Beach faded into the distant past like an apple core flung from a train window. The very idea of invoking it seemed absurd. A silence opened between them and multiplied.
“I work at the Naval Yard, in Brooklyn,” Anna blurted at last, the error of this choice assailing her before she’d finished the sentence.
“You don’t say.” She’d managed to snare the roving beam of his attention. “I read in the papers that girls had started working there. What do you do?”
“I measure parts with a micrometer,” she said. “But girls do welding, riveting . . .”
“They weld?”
“Just like the men. You can’t tell them apart until they take off the mask.”
“Is it natural? Men and women working together like that?”
He was gazing at her directly. “I don’t know,” she said, flustered. “I mostly work with girls.”
“Well, it was a pleasure talking with you, Miss . . .”
“Feeney,” she said impulsively, extending her hand. “Anna Feeney.”
“Dexter Styles.”
They shook, and he touched the arm of a hovering waiter and said, “Gino, would you show Miss Feeney back to her table and send her party a bottle of champagne on the house? Good luck to you, Miss Feeney.”
She was dismissed. Dexter Styles rejoined his companions, and Anna wandered through the crowd, ears ringing with the strangeness of all that had just transpired. It wasn’t so much that she’d used Lillian Feeney’s name—a phony name seemed all of a piece with this place—but that in doing so, she had obscured the connection between them. Why, when Mr. Styles might have recognized her name and remembered?
Back at the table, Anna remained pensive despite Louie’s strenuous efforts to draw her out. She couldn’t see Dexter Styles from where she sat—would likely never see him again. Only when she envisioned the conversation that might have followed the use of her real name did she understand her instinctive feint. And how is your father? Where is he nowadays? What is he doing? Those questions would surely have come, and the thought of trying to answer mortified her.
Their waiter arrived with the fresh bottle of champagne. Nell and Marco returned from the dance floor, Marco looking deeply satisfied.
“What’s the matter?” Nell asked, dropping into a chair beside Anna. “Are you too tight?”
“Maybe.” But she felt the opposite: that she’d not had enough champagne to quash the sudden dull sadness—emptiness, really—that had overwhelmed her.
“I’m ready to call it a night,” Nell said.
For Louie, this prospect amounted to an emergency. “Aw, come on, girls,” he cried. “Have some champagne—they’ve sent us a bottle on the house! I’ve been waiting all my life for a bottle on the house!”
“Sweet old Louie,” Nell said.
“I aim to please. Sad faces mean I’ve failed.”
Anna sensed a scurrying desperation beneath his cheer, and it pained her. “You’ve been wonderful, Louie,” she said, putting an arm around his narrow shoulders. She kissed his cool, waxen cheek.
“Ooh-la-la,” Louie cried.
Nell embraced him from the other side. Marco and the older non-handsome suitor both laughed. It was impossible not to wish Louie well.
“I’m going to faint,” Louie said. “Catch me when I do, will you, girls?”
*
None of the furor within Moonshine leaked onto East Fifty-third Street; it was like passing from one world into another. Anna glanced at her watch and received a shock; it was after one A.M. “I have to get home,” she said.
Nell made no answer; she was drooping to precisely the degree she’d been artificially enlivened at the start of the night. “Will you see him tomorrow?” Anna asked.
Nell shook her head. “He can’t get away on weekends. That’s why I’m so steaming mad that he didn’t show, the rat.”
“Did he buy you that dress?”
“In Palm Beach,” Nell said. “He’d a business trip to Miami, and I went with him. Now I’ve shocked you, haven’t I?” she added with reckless gloom.
“A little,” Anna admitted. “It seems . . . dangerous.”
“Only for him—I’ve nothing to lose. And he says I’m worth any risk.” She smiled wanly. “Don’t tell me you thought I was an angel.”
“I didn’t. Think that.”
“There’s no such thing, anyway.”
Anna said nothing.
“Angels are the best liars, that’s what I think,” Nell said morosely. After a moment she asked, “Are you an angel, Anna?”
Anna was aware of the rattle of fall leaves over the pavement, the gardenia smell of Nell’s perfume. No one had ever asked her that question before. Everyone simply presumed that she was.
“No,” she said. “I’m not an angel.” Her eyes met Nell’s, and they understood each other.
Nell took Anna’s arm, her spirits revived. They walked past town houses like handcrafted jewel boxes. “You hide it very well,” she said softly.