Dexter listened as if from a great distance, his eyes on the eerie, festive sky. Mackey’s mention of a daughter elicited no pity from him—the opposite. A family man was doubly reckless to have broken rules that everyone in the shadow world knew like a catechism. There were no exceptions. Amazing what trouble men had, believing that. Everyone thought he was the exception.
Mackey was a louse. His family was better off without him, for all the care he’d taken to protect them. Dexter would leave this one to Heels and his boys. His own distance from what would follow made it seem as though it had already happened. It had happened the moment he’d decided it would.
“I’ve a cousin, Grady, at the Naval Academy,” Tabby was saying.
“Ho, college boy. My son is in the army.”
“He was supposed to graduate next June, but now it’s moved to December. Because the navy needs more officers.”
“Why, sure they do, all those boys in the Solomons.”
Dexter wanted Tabby away from this terrible, prattling man. The house was still at a maddening distance. Harriet had closed the blackout curtains, and it looked as though nobody lived there.
“Say, you know what I’ll do?” Mackey said suddenly to Tabby. “I think I’ll take off my shoes, too.”
“Oh, yes!” Tabby cried, clapping her hands.
“We need to get back,” Dexter muttered, but his daughter and Mackey had formed an alliance he couldn’t breach.
Mackey sat down on the sand and rolled up his trouser legs, then unrolled his socks carefully, methodically, as if stalling for time. Tabby grinned at Dexter. She must have thought she’d succeeded brilliantly, for there had been no argument.
In the long minutes Mackey spent unrolling his socks, the pink streaks faded from the sky as if someone had brushed them from a table. What remained was an aquamarine so glassy and pure it looked as though it would chime if you tapped it with a spoon.
“I haven’t done this sort of thing enough,” Mackey said with a sigh. He looked up at Dexter with his spent clown’s face. “Have you, Mr. Styles?”
It wasn’t clear what he meant. The shoes? The beach?
“Probably not,” Dexter allowed.
Mackey stood, shoes dangling from one hand, the other holding his hat to his head. His big white feet splayed obscenely against the sand. Dexter couldn’t look.
“Let’s run, Mr. Mackey,” Tabby said. “Let’s run in the sand.”
“Goodness, run?” Mackey asked, and then he laughed—a light, hollow sound that landed in Dexter’s ears like a death rattle. “All right, if you say so. We’ll run in the sand. Why not?”
And they ran, kicking up sprays of white, sending up a shout as they faded into the twilight.
?PART THREE
See the Sea
CHAPTER NINE
* * *
It took Anna and her mother both to wrestle Lydia into a floral-print tea dress with a Peter Pan collar and a neckerchief to camouflage her drooping spine. Dressing up for Dr. Deerwood was a matter of tradition and pride—Park Avenue women bought made-to-order dresses at Bergdorf’s and $125 shoes at Lieberman’s. But Lydia chafed against women’s clothing, and her mute resistance to the brassiere and slip and stockings and garters seemed to Anna to express what all of them felt.
Inspired by Nell, Anna had pinned her sister’s curls while she slept. Now she combed the golden hair so it fell across Lydia’s face peekaboo-style from under a blue beret. “Oh, Anna, that’s wonderful,” her mother said, dabbing Mille Fleurs behind Lydia’s ears. “She looks just like Veronica Lake.”
Children from the block played carefully on the sidewalk in their church outfits as Anna walked to Fourth Avenue to hail a taxi. Riding back, she stopped at Mr. Mucciarone’s grocery to pick up Silvio, who waited with hair combed and sleeves rolled. Silvio was simpleminded, couldn’t even make change at his father’s cash register. With a look of devout concentration, he carried Lydia down the six flights from their apartment. Most of his expression resided in his biceps, which trembled above his rolled sleeves as Lydia moaned and kicked. She hated being carried by Silvio. Anna suspected the problem was his smell: oniony, mineral, more pronounced at each turn of the stairs. It was the smell of a sixteen-year-old boy—the only one who had ever held Lydia, or likely would.
The children pecked like pigeons around Silvio’s legs when he emerged from the building with Lydia and placed her inside the taxi. Anna had run ahead and installed herself in the backseat to ensure that the cabbie couldn’t flee. Her mother anchored Lydia from the other side while the cabbie placed her folded chair in the trunk. A perfect mid-November day. The taxi crossed the Brooklyn Bridge and turned up the East River Drive, and there was Wallabout Bay across the river—ships and smokestacks and hammerhead crane. “Mama, look!” Anna cried. “It’s the Naval Yard!”
By the time her mother turned, the Yard was behind them. It didn’t matter; she’d little interest in it. She hardly seemed to care about the war, dutiful though she was about saving fat for the butcher and helping to sew blood pressure cuffs. It seemed to Anna that their mother spent her days listening to serials, Guiding Light, Against the Storm, and Young Doctor Malone, in the company of various neighbors. It was Anna who turned the radio to The New York Times News Bulletin at suppertime, eager for news of the U.S. landings in French North Africa. In the week since they’d taken place, the Yard had fizzed with new optimism. Anna had even heard talk of a turning point in the war, the long-awaited second front.
Anna’s own nervous excitement had a different origin: Dexter Styles. In the two weeks since she’d encountered the nightclub owner, her imagination had begun tiptoeing into dire, thrilling scenarios. Suppose her father hadn’t left home at all. Suppose he’d been obliterated by a hail of gangland bullets, Anna’s name on his dying lips like “Rosebud” in Citizen Kane? She read an awful lot of Ellery Queens. The winnowing of diffuse danger to a single corrupt soul had always been an inexhaustible pleasure for Anna. Now her own life seemed to have tipped into the world of those mysteries; the long November shadows leaned suggestively, and the sheen of streetlight on Naval Yard brick sent an ominous ripple through her belly. There was dynamism in this new foreboding, a stinging vitality, as if she’d wakened from drugged sleep.