“Every Sunday.”
The train’s whistle blew. Agnes felt her daughter’s impatience that she go, and it made her want to cleave, as if holding Anna would somehow awaken in her daughter the need to be held. Agnes clasped her fiercely, trying through sheer force to open the folded part of Anna, so deeply recessed. For a hallucinatory moment, the sinewy shoulders she held seemed to be Eddie’s. Agnes was hugging goodbye the whole of her life: husband, daughter, and fragile younger daughter whom she’d loved the most. She climbed aboard the second-class sleeper and waved to Anna from the window. The train began to move, raising a flock of flapping arms. It came to Agnes that this was the very station—perhaps the very platform—where she had arrived, at seventeen, to seek her fortune. As she waved, she thought, This is the end of the story.
The train rounded a corner, and everyone’s arms dropped as though a string holding them aloft had been cut. People left quickly to make room for new travelers boarding the train across the platform, new loved ones sending them off. Anna stayed where she was, watching the empty track. At last she climbed the steps to the concourse, turning sideways to let soldiers and families rush past. A novel awareness began to assert itself: there was nowhere she needed to be. Just minutes ago, she’d been rushing like the people on those steps, but now she’d no reason to rush or even to walk. The weirdness of this sensation strengthened when Anna found herself back on Seventh Avenue. She stood in the twilight, wondering whether to turn left or right. Uptown or downtown? She’d money in her pocketbook; she could go wherever she wanted. How she’d craved the freedom of not having to worry about her mother! Yet it arrived as a kind of slackness, like the fall of those waving arms when the train turned.
She began walking north, toward Forty-second Street, resolved to see a picture at the New Amsterdam. Shadow of a Doubt was only ten minutes in when she reached the theater; she could sit in the very hall—perhaps the very seat—where, as a little girl, she’d watched her mother dance. But Anna no longer wanted to sit and watch a scary picture. She wanted to mirror the purpose that seemed to fuel everyone else on Forty-second Street: clutches of laughing sailors; girls with hair pinned and sprayed; elderly couples, the ladies in fur, all moving in haste through the murky half-light. Anna watched them searchingly. How did they know where to go?
She decided to head back home. Walking toward the IND on Sixth Avenue, she passed a flea circus, a chow-meinery, a sign advertising lectures on what killed Rudolph Valentino. Gradually she began to notice other solitary figures lingering in doorways and under awnings: people with no obvious place they needed to be. Through the plate-glass window of Grant’s at the corner of Sixth, she saw soldiers and sailors eating alone, even a girl or two. Anna watched them through the glass while, behind her, newspaper vendors bawled out the evening headlines: “Tripoli falls!” “Russians gaining on Rostov!” “Nazis say the Reich is threatened!” To Anna, these sounded like captions to the solitary diners. The war had shaken people loose. These isolated people in Grant’s had been shaken loose. And now she, too, had been shaken loose. She sensed how easily she might slide into a cranny of the dimmed-out city and vanish. The possibility touched her physically, like the faint coaxing suction of an undertow. It frightened her, and she hurried toward the subway entrance.
But when she reached the stairs to the IND, curiosity about her new state kept Anna from descending just yet. She continued to Fifth Avenue, where faint streetlights smoldered along its dusky cavern. The public library hulked like a morgue. Her father had watched that library being built on the site of a reservoir when he was a boy. This fact returned to Anna a moment ahead of her father’s voice, which murmured so casually that it seemed always to have been there: Top hats up and down the street . . . pampered horses too good for a carrot if you held one up . . . a single mansion where the whole Plaza Hotel is now, can you feature that? His voice: offhand, confiding, dry from weariness and smoke. His voice in the car, even when she wasn’t listening.
After years of distance, Anna’s father returned to her. She couldn’t see him, but she felt the knotty pain of his hands in her armpits as he slung her off the ground to carry her. She heard the muffled jingle of coins in his trouser pockets. His hand was a socket she affixed hers to always, wherever they went, even when she didn’t care to. Anna stopped walking, stunned by the power of these impressions. Without thinking, she lifted her fingers to her face, half expecting the warm, bitter smell of his tobacco.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
* * *
One of the queer facts of Dexter’s long association with Mr. Q.—nearly thirty years, if you counted from when he first become enamored of the minions in his father’s restaurant—was how rarely he saw the man. Four times a year at most, unless there was trouble. Yet Mr. Q. was omnipresent: the silent partner and primary investor in all of Dexter’s schemes, the first to profit from them. The transit of money between them was ongoing and intricate. It took the form of legitimate checks and surreptitious bundles that moved in both directions—Dexter’s ultimate job being the protection of his boss’s gargantuan illegal earnings from the arachnid appetite of the Bureau of Internal Revenue. No man had the power to intimidate Mr. Q., but the mechanistic forces of taxation and audit were another story. Even the great Al Capone had succumbed. It was the syndicate no syndicate could beat.
To the naked eye, Mr. Q. still partook of an agricultural economy that dated back to the previous century, when he’d arrived by clipper ship as a young man and found Brooklyn teeming with farms. He made wine, preserves, milk, and cheeses at home in Bensonhurst and sold them from an unprepossessing storefront a half mile away, operated by his four sons.
Dexter pulled up in front of this storefront now, as he did every Monday morning (the only day he arose with the rest of the world), a checkbook in his breast pocket and neatly wrapped bundles of cash in several others. A bell jingled as he pushed open the door. Frankie, Mr. Q.’s eldest son, who looked close to sixty (though no one really knew), sat at the counter. Like his brothers, Giulio, Johnny, and Joey, Frankie had thin brilliantined hair and an expressionless face. All of them smelled like cloves or pepper, a dry-goods smell, although it might have been the shop itself. Dexter rarely saw them outside it.
“Good morning, Frankie.”
“Morning yourself.”
“Enjoy your weekend?”
“Oh, sure.”
“Awful cold, wasn’t it?”
“Why, yes, it was, now you mention it.”
“The missus well?”
“She is at that.”
“And the grandchildren?”
“Oh, sure, they’re swell.”
“Getting big, I imagine.”