After lunch, as a reward for their fine behavior, Nurse allowed them to bundle into coats and hats and bolt from a back door along a path that ran behind Mr. Styles’s house to a private beach. A long arc of snow-dusted sand tilted down to the sea. Anna had been to the docks in winter, many times, but never to a beach. Miniature waves shrugged up under skins of ice that crackled when she stomped them. Seagulls screamed and dove in the riotous wind, their bellies stark white. The twins had brought along Buck Rogers ray guns, but the wind turned their shots and death throes into pantomime.
Anna watched the sea. There was a feeling she had, standing at its edge: an electric mix of attraction and dread. What would be exposed if all that water should suddenly vanish? A landscape of lost objects: sunken ships, hidden treasure, gold and gems and the charm bracelet that had fallen from her wrist into a storm drain. Dead bodies, her father always added, with a laugh. To him, the ocean was a wasteland.
Anna looked at Tabby (as she was nicknamed), shivering beside her, and wanted to say what she felt. Strangers were often easier to say things to. Instead, she repeated what her father always said, confronted by a bare horizon: “Not a ship in sight.”
The little boys dragged their ray guns over the sand toward the breaking waves, Nurse panting after them. “You’ll go nowhere near that water, Phillip, John-Martin,” she wheezed at a startling volume. “Is that perfectly clear?” She cast a hard look at Anna, who had led them there, and herded the twins toward the house.
“Your shoes are getting wet,” Tabby said through chattering teeth.
“Should we take them off?” Anna asked. “To feel the cold?”
“I don’t want to feel it!”
“I do.”
Tabby watched Anna unbuckle the straps of the black patent-leather shoes she shared with Zara Klein, downstairs. She unrolled her wool stockings and placed her white, bony, long-for-her-age feet in the icy water. Each foot delivered an agony of sensation to her heart, one part of which was a flame of ache that felt unexpectedly pleasant.
“What’s it like?” Tabby shrieked.
“Cold,” Anna said. “Awful, awful cold.” It took all of her strength to keep from recoiling, and her resistance added to the odd excitement. Glancing toward the house, she saw two men in dark overcoats following the paved path set back from the sand. Holding their hats in the wind, they looked like actors in a silent picture. “Are those our papas?”
“Daddy likes to have business talks outdoors,” Tabby said. “Away from prying ears.”
Anna felt benevolent compassion toward young Tabatha, excluded from her father’s business affairs when Anna was allowed to listen in whenever she pleased. She heard little of interest. Her father’s job was to pass greetings, or good wishes, between union men and other men who were their friends. These salutations included an envelope, sometimes a package, that he would deliver or receive casually—you wouldn’t notice unless you were paying attention. Over the years, he’d talked to Anna a great deal without knowing he was talking, and she had listened without knowing what she heard.
She was surprised by the familiar, animated way her father was speaking to Mr. Styles. Apparently they were friends. After all that.
The men changed course and began crossing the sand toward Anna and Tabby. Anna stepped hurriedly out of the water, but she’d left her shoes too far away to put them back on in time. Mr. Styles was a broad, imposing man with brilliantined black hair showing under his hat brim. “Say, is this your daughter?” he asked. “Withstanding arctic temperatures without so much as a pair of stockings?”
Anna sensed her father’s displeasure. “So it is,” he said. “Anna, say good day to Mr. Styles.”
“Very pleased to meet you,” she said, shaking his hand firmly, as her father had taught her, and taking care not to squint as she peered up at him. Mr. Styles looked younger than her father, without shadows or creases in his face. She sensed an alertness about him, a humming tension perceptible even through his billowing overcoat. He seemed to await something to react to, or be amused by. Right now that something was Anna.
Mr. Styles crouched beside her on the sand and looked directly into her face. “Why the bare feet?” he asked. “Don’t you feel the cold, or are you showing off?”
Anna had no ready answer. It was neither of those; more an instinct to keep Tabby awed and guessing. But even that she couldn’t articulate. “Why would I show off?” she said. “I’m nearly twelve.”
“Well, what’s it feel like?”
She smelled mint and liquor on his breath even in the wind. It struck her that her father couldn’t hear their conversation.
“It only hurts at first,” she said. “After a while you can’t feel anything.”
Mr. Styles grinned as if her reply were a ball he’d taken physical pleasure in catching. “Words to live by,” he said, then rose again to his immense height. “She’s strong,” he remarked to Anna’s father.
“So she is.” Her father avoided her eyes.
Mr. Styles brushed sand from his trousers and turned to go. He’d exhausted that moment and was looking for the next. “They’re stronger than we are,” Anna heard him say to her father. “Lucky for us, they don’t know it.” She thought he might turn and look back at her, but he must have forgotten.
*
Dexter Styles felt sand working its way inside his oxfords as he slogged back to the path. Sure enough, the toughness he’d sensed coiled in Ed Kerrigan had flowered into magnificence in the dark-eyed daughter. Proof of what he’d always believed: men’s children gave them away. It was why Dexter rarely did business with any man before meeting his family. He wished his Tabby had gone barefoot, too.
Kerrigan drove a ’28 Duesenberg Model J, Niagara blue, evidence both of fine taste and of bright prospects before the crash. He had an excellent tailor. Yet there was something obscure about the man, something that worked against the clothing and automobile and even his blunt, deft conversation. A shadow, a sorrow. Then again, who hadn’t one? Or several?
By the time they reached the path, Dexter found himself decided upon hiring Kerrigan, assuming that suitable terms could be established.
“Say, have you time for a drive to meet an old friend of mine?” he asked.
“Certainly,” Kerrigan said.
“Your wife isn’t expecting you?”
“Not before supper.”
“Your daughter? Will she worry?”
Kerrigan laughed. “Anna? It’s her job to worry me.”
*
Anna had expected any moment to be called off the beach by her father, but it was Nurse who eventually came, huffing indignantly, and ordered them out of the cold. The light had changed, and the playroom felt heavy and dark. It was warmed by its own woodstove. They ate walnut cookies and watched the electric train race around the figure eight Anna had built, real steam straggling from its miniature smokestack. She had never seen such a toy, could not imagine how much it might cost. She was sick of this adventure. It had lasted far longer than their sociable visits usually did, and playing a part for the other children had exhausted Anna. It felt like hours since she’d seen her father. Eventually, the boys left the train running and went to look at picture books. Nurse had nodded off in a rocking chair. Tabby lay on a braided rug, pointing her new kaleidoscope at the lamp.