They sat apart. A while later Bitsy reappeared, looking peaceful for the first time all day. She sat beside her father and put her arm around him, resting her cheek on the old man’s shoulder. Gradually, Dexter’s woozy relief over Tabby’s innocence yielded to foreboding. For George to betray their father-in-law in this way—to compromise the eldest and youngest daughters right under his nose, in the home of an admiral who’d made him the guest of honor—was a transgression so egregious that it seemed to imperil all of them. What would happen if Arthur Berringer found out? How would he not find out, when he’d known of the North African landings weeks before they took place? And the thought came to Dexter that George Porter was a dead man.
But he was mixing up his realms. Only in the shadow world did men die for such things. Not in the old man’s sphere—except perhaps metaphorically. Yet Dexter couldn’t shake the sense of a menace near at hand. He remembered the moans he’d heard through the bathroom door. To his shame and confusion, their cadence aroused him now, and he found himself calling it to mind again and again: a pleasure so explosive, so transporting, that it justified even the risk of annihilation.
Dexter knew the danger of chasing a forbidden pleasure. A woman on a train to St. Louis had taught him, which was to say that he hadn’t learned it yet eight years ago, when she tapped very lightly on the door to his first-class sleeper after midnight. They had noticed each other in the dining car, exchanged a few words in the corridor. She wore a wedding ring (as did he) and a small gold cross at her neck, but a current of wayward sensuality had been unmistakable in her, making these symbols seem apotropaic. Her nocturnal visit launched an interval of debauchery that extended into the following day—fused in Dexter’s memory with the frozen farmland slipping past outside the parted window curtains. Even now, driving in January through New Jersey or Long Island, he often found himself stirred by the flickering vanishing points of the frosted fields.
They disembarked that afternoon in Angel, Indiana, intending—what? Intending to continue. They checked into a grand old hotel near the station as Mr. and Mrs. Jones. Immediately, Dexter felt a change: now that the bleak winter landscape was all around him, rather than sliding picturesquely past, he liked it less. Other irritants followed: a sudden dislike of her perfume; a sudden dislike of her laugh, the dry pork chop he was served in the hotel restaurant, a cobweb dangling from the light fixture above the bed. After making love, she fell into a torporous sleep. But Dexter lay awake, listening to the howling dogs, or was it wolves, wind clattering the loose windowpanes. Everything he knew seemed irrevocably distant: Harriet, his children, the business he’d been charged to transact for Mr. Q.—too far gone for him ever to reclaim them. He felt how easily a man’s life could slip away, separated from him by thousands of miles of empty space.
In the shorn light of predawn, he dressed, buckled his suitcase, and quietly closed the door to the hotel room. He walked to the station under drooping telephone lines and swinging traffic lights and bought a ticket for the next train. It was going the wrong direction, toward Cincinnati, but he got on anyway. He’d left a twenty-dollar bill on the bureau, a move he regretted by the time he reached the street and regretted still when he thought of it. She wasn’t a prostitute. She was someone like him.
When he’d arrived in St. Louis, nearly two days late, he found urgent telegrams from Harriet: Phillip had nearly died from appendicitis. Mr. Q.’s associate had come and gone without finding him; the trip was in vain. Dexter pleaded a sudden high fever: hallucinations on the train, unconsciousness, removal to a hospital. It was the sort of story you might get away with once in your life, at long distance, if no one had any reason to doubt you. In fact, he reflected later, it wasn’t far from the truth.
*
Marines in touring cars waited in the circular driveway of the commandant’s residence to ferry guests back to the gate ahead of the shift change. Ships bore down blankly from the piers. Bitsy had decided to spend the night at Sutton Place, meaning that Dexter was free of her, thank God. Of course, George and Regina lived just a few doors down from the old man—that would be convenient. You’ve grown like Henry, Bitsy had said. Perhaps he had.
Tabby wanted to go to Sutton Place and bake for tomorrow’s Thanksgiving feast. Dexter readily agreed and kissed her goodbye. Her flirtation with Grady seemed so innocent now—wholesome, compared with what he’d just witnessed—that he felt a kind of fondness for it.
Standing alone outside the Sands Street gate, Dexter had a need to unburden himself. He decided to telephone Harriet before driving to the club, and ducked inside Richard’s Bar and Grill, on the corner. A sailor was feeding nickels into the telephone, pleading for a date. Dexter fidgeted, looking out through a window. All at once, a mass of humanity surged from the gates: thousands of men in work clothes and the occasional girl in a dress thronging Sands Street like fans leaving Ebbets Field after a game. Dexter watched invisibly, envying their camaraderie. They were working on the war. An awareness of this fact was visible in the loose, easy way they walked. Perhaps they sensed the shimmering future the old man had described at lunch, felt their part in it.
As quickly as the crowd had amassed, it scattered. The sailor was gone, the telephone liberated. But Dexter’s wish to speak with his wife had passed. Harriet had a cool head—back in his rum-running days, she’d crouched in his automobile giggling through exchanges of gunfire. But telling her about Bitsy and George would force her to keep a monstrous secret or spill its poison. No. Telling Harriet was exactly the wrong thing—what in Christ had he been thinking? Tell no one. Let the affair run its course and hope it ended soon, without excess cuts or bruises on either side. Dexter was well accustomed to keeping secrets.
Dusk was falling when he left the bar. As he approached his car, a familiar girl passed on the sidewalk, walking quickly in the other direction. “Miss Feeney,” he called after her. It was the girl he’d been looking for, the one who had told him about the Naval Yard in the first place.
She spun around, looking spooked.
“Dexter Styles,” he said. “Are you going to work?”
“No,” she said, smiling at last. “I gave blood and left early.”
“Can I drive you home?” He was eager for the company.
Anna looked up at Dexter Styles. She’d thought of him so often since their last meeting that he seemed eerily familiar, imbued with dark significance. He stood beside his gangster’s car.
“Thanks just the same. I need to speak with my supervisor,” she said, grateful for an excuse that also happened to be true. She was going to ask Mr. Voss about volunteering to dive. She’d been waiting for the shift change.
“Don’t mention it. Good evening, Miss Feeney.”
As he tipped his hat, Anna was impelled by a sudden, visceral wish to keep him in her sights. “Would it be possible,” she blurted, “to accept your offer at another time?”