They hardly spoke for the rest of the ride. Bitsy smoked Lucky Strikes—fourteen in all, but who was counting—and restored her face painstakingly with a compact. By the time Dexter parked outside the Naval Yard gate with three minutes to spare, he felt as if he’d smoked a packet himself. He was certain his upholstery had darkened a shade.
Four marines met them at the gate and divided them into touring cars. Dexter lost no time maneuvering Bitsy into a different car from his own. He rode with the old man, who sat in the front seat with Tabby and the marine driver. Tabby’s eagerness for this visit, which she’d mentioned excitedly several times, had restored Dexter’s faith in her gravitas. Comparisons were a sucker’s game, but he thought her every bit as impressive, with her grown-up roll of hair and sober, interested face, as Grady in his dress blues, sitting to Dexter’s right in the backseat.
They began at the Naval Yard hospital, where a line of men and girls waited outdoors to give blood. A shipfitter’s band played “Remember Pearl Harbor.” Dexter scanned the girls, wondering whether he might see the one he’d met at the club a few weeks back, but either she wasn’t here or he didn’t recall her well enough to pick her out. Next they left the cars to watch a hammerhead crane seize a gun turret the size of a streetcar, swing it over the water, and tweeze it onto the deck of a battleship floating below. Bitsy clung to the arm of George Porter, who had come without Regina, thank God. Let George take over Bitsy duty for a while.
“Graduation in what, three weeks?” Dexter asked Grady as they watched the crane.
“Yes, sir. Three and a half.”
“When you ‘sir’ me, Grades, I think I’ve an officer standing behind me.”
“I keep telling him that,” Cooper said giddily.
“Force of habit, s—” Grady stopped himself with a grin. He was tall and beautifully made, an impish sparkle to his wide-set eyes.
“Any idea when you might be shipping out?” Dexter asked.
“The sooner the better,” Grady said. “I’m fed up with writing essays on the Punic Wars when we’ve our own war to fight.”
“We’re in no hurry to see you go,” Cooper drawled, slinging an arm around his son’s shoulders, visibly broader than his own. “There will be plenty of war left to fight.”
Grady stiffened at his father’s touch. “It’s what I’ve been trained to do, Dad,” he said.
Building 128, their next stop, was a vast machine shop housing a gristle of pistons and turbines and pulleys all juddering toward some mysterious purpose. Wind tunneled through from the river, whirling a confetti of dry leaves. Tabby was shivering. Dexter hadn’t worn a topcoat, but Grady, who carried his grandfather’s coat over one arm (the old man being bizarrely impervious to weather), went to Tabby and tucked it around her shoulders. He seemed to linger there an extra moment, holding the coat around Tabby—holding Tabby—and she tipped her face to look up at him, a private smile at her lips. Dexter went very still, eyes on his daughter and nephew, machine sounds bludgeoning his ears. What am I seeing? he thought. An image of her Wish Box pin returned to him, lacquered red, a secret curled inside it.
Back in the car, he tried to put the question from his thoughts. Grady was nearly twenty-one, had lived away from home for the better part of seven years, since he’d left for Choate. He was effectively a man, whereas Tabby was a girl of barely sixteen. But they’d been together at Newport last summer, sailing on Cooper’s yacht, lounging at the club after tennis. What might have happened between them? Grady was dutiful, yes, but also mischievous—it was all part of his charm. Dexter struggled to pull himself out of this spiral of thought. Kissing cousins was nothing new, so long as kissing was the extent of it.
Was the whole thing a trick of his mind?
Eight hundred girls worked inside Building 4, a structural shop, their last stop. It was hard to separate them from the men—the welders especially, with their thick gloves and face shields. You had to go by stature, and as their group moved from bay to bay, Dexter got better at this. Girls holding blowtorches. Girls cutting metal into pieces; girls building molds of ship parts from wood. A matter-of-factness about even the pretty ones; look or don’t look. Scarves tied over their hair. Dexter often lamented the softness of modern-day girls, but these dames looked more than capable of packing a revolver. Hell, you could wear a shoulder holster under one of those jumpsuits without anyone the wiser.
“Impressive, eh?” he remarked to Tabby.
She turned, flushed. “What?”
“The girls. Wasn’t that what you wanted to see?” he asked pointedly. “Isn’t that the reason we’re all here today?” But they were empty words. He knew the answer: Tabby’s excitement had been to see Grady, not the Naval Yard. It had all been for him.
“I don’t remember, Daddy,” she said, touching her hair distractedly. “I thought you were the one who wanted to come.”
*
When Anna reached the front of the blood donation line, she heard Deborah, a married whom Rose had nicknamed “the faucet,” ask if there was a way to ensure that her blood would go directly to her husband.
“I’m sorry, that isn’t possible,” the nurse said. “Besides, you may not have the same blood type.”
“I have,” Deborah wailed. “I’m certain I have.”
“Thar she blows,” Rose whispered.
“Are you quite sure?” the nurse asked soothingly while inserting the needle into Deborah’s arm. “One thing you must never, ever do is give somebody the wrong type of blood. That would be terribly dangerous. Unless his type is AB, which can take any kind. Do you happen to know your husband’s blood type?”
Deborah’s answer was muffled in sobs. The nurse held her arm deftly as blood twirled from it through a clear plastic tube. The shipfitters’ band was playing “Don’t Sit Under the Apple Tree.”
“Five years of marriage,” Rose said softly to Anna. “She’ll stop her blubbering, I promise.” Rose was twenty-eight, older than most of the marrieds, and had the lush dark curls that everyone envied in Jewish girls. She spoke of her husband with eye rolls and wisecracks and said she was getting more sleep with him gone. She called Melvin, their little boy, “the nuisance,” but with such a smitten look that Anna understood she’d no choice but to make light of her feeling.
As Anna watched her own blood coil through the tube, she asked, “Is it supposed to be so red?”
The nurse laughed. “What other color would it be?”
“It’s very . . . bright.”
“That’s the oxygen. You wouldn’t want it any other way.”