Harriet’s parents faced each other at opposite ends of a long table in a dining room overlooking the East River just south of Hell Gate, where it joined the Long Island Sound. Beth Berringer had the classic old stove’s face: a drought-stricken delta of cracks and tributaries affixed to the reactive jaws of a Doberman. She alone could move or halt the old man with a flick of her fair blue eyes. Their son and three daughters were always present, along with spouses and some complement of the fourteen grandchildren they had collectively produced, the older boys being away at school. A roast was carved and served by two of the Romanian servants Beth Berringer favored. Arthur said grace, and there was a pause of quiet chewing, filled with the churn of East River boat traffic, before children’s voices raided the silence.
When an apple crisp had been doused in cream and consumed, the women drifted from the table into the kitchen and library, the children to the nursery and bedrooms. The men remained, positioning themselves around Arthur in the usual formation: his only son, Arthur Jr. (known as Cooper), on his right, Dexter on his left, each flanked by another son-in-law: George Porter, a surgeon, on Dexter’s other side; Henry Foster, a schoolmaster, on Cooper’s. Thus began an hour of conversation that Dexter looked forward to all week.
He noticed Tabby idling by the pocket doors to the dining room. “Come on over, Tabs,” he called to her, having first received a nod of approval from the old man. “Sit with us a minute.”
He moved an extra chair to the corner between himself and Arthur. Tabby sat, coughing gently in the spiraling smoke from Cooper’s cigarette, the old man’s pipe, and George Porter’s cigar. Dexter and Henry Foster didn’t smoke—the one trait he’d in common with the schoolmaster, who wore patched tweed and drove a decomposing tin lizzie.
Arthur poured each of them a glass of port. He’d retired from the navy as a rear admiral after the Great War and gone into banking, but even military posture couldn’t raise him above middling height. He’d small pink hands, thinning white hair, was well tailored (Brooks Brothers), but not as well as he might have been (Savile Row). He drove a mud-colored ’39 Plymouth. Yet what emanated from these nondescript trappings was a more potent distillation of life than Dexter had encountered in any man. He admired his father-in-law without reservation.
“So, my boys,” the old man said, ignoring Tabby. “What do you hear?”
He didn’t mean from newspapers. The old man had come to know Roosevelt as governor and went often to Washington, where he’d worked on war bond issues and helped to craft lend-lease. His navy intimates commanded fleets. Arthur Berringer knew a great many things, in other words, but he recognized that his rarefied connections lofted him above the better part of human experience.
Henry Foster began with news from the Westchester town where his prep school, Alton Academy, was situated: a local woman had grown convinced that the family next door—neighbors of eight years—were German spies disguised as Americans. “She thought they were hiding their accents, even the children,” he said. “She could hear the German poking through. They had to commit her to a sanitarium.”
“What do you make of it?” the old man asked George Porter, the surgeon.
“The stress of war working on a weak mind,” George said. “She may well recover.”
Dexter watched for Tabby’s reaction, but she kept her eyes down, pulling the rind from a lemon slice.
“Suppose the neighbors really are German,” Cooper suggested, causing his father to wince.
“We’ll have to keep Alton Academy open through Thanksgiving,” Henry went on. “Husbands overseas, mothers taking jobs . . . some boys haven’t anywhere else to go.”
Hoping to engage Tabby, Dexter said, “We’ve had girls in the club who work at the Naval Yard, right in Brooklyn. Welding, plumbing . . . apparently, there are hundreds of them.”
The old man looked skeptical. “Hundreds?”
“Sounds dangerous,” Cooper said with a glance at his father, although it wasn’t clear whether he meant dangerous to the girls or to the world. Likely Cooper didn’t know. He was a weaker, far less intelligent version of his father, the embodiment of the limitations of their breed. The old man saw this; there was no way not to, with Cooper working for him at the bank. In moments of disappointment between father and son, Dexter felt the ease and strength of his own bond with his father-in-law. Cooper would never tell Arthur Berringer anything he didn’t know, whereas Dexter saw and knew things the old man couldn’t afford to, without personal compromise. He was nearer the earth, its salts and minerals, than any Berringer had been in several generations. And he was the only son-in-law not to require a penny of the old man’s dough.
“Oh, I don’t know, Coop,” his father said gently. “Dangerous?”
“Girls haven’t any practice at building ships.”
Tabby watched her grandfather, but the old man’s gaze never touched her. A weakness of his generation: they’d no idea of the worth of women.
“Were the girls masculine?” George Porter asked Dexter with a chuckle. He came often to Moonshine with his wife, Regina, Harriet’s battle-ax of an older sister, in their refurbished ’23 Duesenberg, painted chiffon yellow. Thanks to Dexter’s hidden window, he knew that the dapper doctor brought other women, too. George knew that Dexter knew, and this made for a warm understanding between them.
“Just ordinary girls,” Dexter said. “The kind you see in Automats at lunchtime.”
“I don’t go to Automats,” said the old man. “Paint us a picture.”
The task of multiplying Miss Feeney into several girls was becoming onerous. The duplication had been instinctive—a long-standing wish to head off even the faintest speculation about his fidelity. It was one thing for George Porter, a minister’s son from an old family, to cheat discreetly. Dexter had no such leeway. His fealty to Harriet had been a condition of the old man’s blessing, and Dexter had given it gladly. In this way, as in so many others, his father-in-law had done him a favor. Womanizing was as bad as being a hophead or a cokie, for all the mayhem Dexter had seen it wreak in men’s lives.
“Early twenties . . . dark-haired, Irish names,” he said. “Nice wholesome girls. Not fashionable.”
“Fashionable enough to be at Moonshine,” said Henry Foster, who disapproved of nightclubs.
“They did look a bit out of place,” Dexter reflected. “Someone brought them, I suppose.”
“They sound identical,” his father-in-law said, with a laugh. “You’re sure they weren’t twins?”
Dexter flushed. “I suppose I didn’t look closely.”
“Say, why don’t I phone the Naval Yard’s commandant,” the old man said. “We were together in the Philippines. Arrange for a tour when Grady comes home from Annapolis.”
“Yes!” Tabby cried, catching everyone off guard. “Please, Grandpa! I’d like to see the Naval Yard.”
Dexter nearly swooned from astonishment and pride.
“When will Grady be home for Thanksgiving?” the old man asked Cooper.
They all inclined toward the name: Cooper because Grady was the lustrous jewel of his bland existence, the rest of them—why? There was a radiance about Grady, the eldest of the Berringer grandchildren, as if all of the old man’s wit and mischief, his easy touch with other men, had bypassed Cooper and resurged, thrillingly, in his eldest child. Grady seemed destined for great things, as the saying went, and Dexter was not above envying Cooper such a son.