Dexter left the restaurant and in some sense never returned, although of course he came and went. And those were mythical years to work for Mr. Q., thanks to Congressman Andrew Volstead of Minnesota and his ilk, who believed that drink would bring ruination upon the United States. Dexter was barely nineteen when the legislation passed, and defying it was a delirious kick. He loved driving fine automobiles on country roads and was good at giving chase. In the worst case, there were always woods, and he could run like hell. Flattening himself by a brook to mask the sound of his panting, smelling moss and pine and ash, a splatter of stars overhead—beauty and exhilaration beyond anything he could have fathomed.
Dexter got back in his automobile and drove a few blocks north, to the corner of Mermaid and West Nineteenth. The restaurant had closed in ’34. Dexter could have saved it, but his pop would accept no more than relief from his own protection payments. The cancer got him at fifty-eight, although Dexter had never really heard him cough before the bank took his restaurant away.
It had been years since he’d stood on this corner, yet the place looked eerily unchanged: the cockeyed window shades and dusty bar, the gold lettering of his own unpronounceable name flaking away inside the window glass. A single broken table, upended. Dexter must have served his father’s famous pescatore at that table, a white linen napkin hung crisply over his forearm as he poured the wine. Electrified by the invisible landscape he’d discovered: a latticework of codes and connections that shrank the everyday world into nonexistence. At times he’d thought he could actually hear Mr. Q.’s power pulsing through ordinary life inaudibly as a dog whistle. Nothing could have stopped him from finding his way to its source.
“What I want for you, Dexter,” Mr. Q. had told him on that first visit, “is that you be your own man. Your own man.” Cupping Dexter’s peach-fuzzed cheeks in his hot, heavy hands, gazing into his lovestruck eyes: “Your own man, you understand?”
Dexter had understood his words and believed them. Only now, reading the code of repetitions and opposites, did he know what Mr. Q. had really meant.
He’s an old man, Dexter thought, recalling his boss’s labored breathing on the stoop this afternoon. He won’t live forever. And felt again the sting of his father’s slap, the wet ache in his eyes.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
* * *
Lieutenant Axel’s reason for calling Anna back became clear on the first morning of training, when he hollered at the group of thirty-five volunteers, “The dress weighs two hundred pounds. The hat alone weighs fifty-six. The shoes together are thirty-five. Now, before you start rolling your eyes about carrying all that weight, you should know that that girl standing over there—she’s on the tall side, but she’s no Sherman tank, like a lot of the females you see around here—she not only wore the dress without bellyaching, walked in the dress without bellyaching, but she also untied a bowline on a bight wearing three-fingered gloves. How many of you gents can even tie a bowline on a bight?”
Two hands rose. The other men glanced warily at Anna. She felt herself blush—from embarrassment but also from false pretenses. She hadn’t known the name of the knot she’d untied, much less how to tie one. Nor had any of these volunteers—mostly from the trades, by the burly look of them—appeared to cower at the prospect of shouldering two hundred pounds. Lieutenant Axel was a man who rejoiced in discomfiting others; with his wizened, beardless face, he brought to mind a sadistic child. In the course of that day, he managed to call attention to DelBanco’s fatness, Greer’s slightness, Hammerstein’s asthma, Majorne’s “four eyes,” Karetzky’s flat feet, Fantano’s slight limp, McBride’s poor balance, Hogan’s flatulence, and so on. Most of the men were too old for the service, but to Lieutenant Axel, a master naval diver at the time of his retirement, they might as well have been 4-F. And what better way to rattle them than with the threat of failing where a girl had succeeded?
Everyone except Anna had to wear the dress. For each wearer there were two tenders, just as Katz and Greer had been for her. Lieutenant Axel stood on a bench, bellowing instructions into a snowfall outside Building 569. Anna was back tender to a machinist called Olmstead, whose wrists were almost too bulky for the straps to buckle around the sleeves of his size-three dress. When at last Anna managed to fasten one, Olmstead brayed an ostentatious groan of relief, followed by a sly look. She kept her head down and feigned oblivion, relieved that the other tender—fair-haired, with a blank, dyspeptic face—seemed genuinely oblivious. Together he and Anna buckled the belt onto Olmstead, who then stood to be “jocked up.”
“Tighter, darlin’,” Olmstead crooned as Anna hiked the straps under his groin for the other tender to fasten to the front of the belt. “One more good pull. Ohhh, there you go, darlin’. That’s it, just a little . . . uh . . .”
“Call me ‘darlin’, one more time, pal,” said the front tender in an inflectionless drawl, “you’ll get it in the puss.”
“Not you! Her!” Olmstead was mortified.
“It ain’t her pulling.” The tender’s eyes were narrow and metallic, like fishhooks. He never glanced at Anna.
Olmstead spat on the pier and fell silent. When Anna and the other tender hoisted the enormous helmet to lower it over his head, he said, “Wait.” Turning to Anna, he asked, “Can I breathe inside there?”
“Of course,” she said coolly, fighting a tremble in her arms as she and the front tender held the helmet aloft. “It’s a little musty, but you’ll breathe just fine.”
“Wait,” Olmstead said again.
“We’re falling behind,” the front tender said. “On it goes.”
They lowered the helmet, matching its threads to those in the breastplate collar and screwing it on. The front tender tapped the top of the helmet, meaning that Olmstead should stand and be inspected by Lieutenant Axel. He rose from the bench and began to thrash. The dress baffled his movements and the shoes rooted him to the pier, giving the impression of a tree harried by a gale. Only when the front tender managed to open his faceplate did a roar yaw through the premises: “I can’t breathe. Get me out! I can’t breathe in here!”
Lieutenant Axel was there with Greer a moment later, expertly removing the helmet, releasing Olmstead from the belt, collar, shoes, and dress. The machinist slunk away from the pier. With pleasure verging on glee, Lieutenant Axel informed the group, “That, gentlemen, was what they call claustrophobia: fear of enclosed spaces. There’s usually one claustrophobic in every group, and I like to flush him out early. Such men have no business trying to become divers.”
“What a bum,” the front tender muttered—to himself, Anna supposed, since he seemed unaware of her. “We dressed him perfect, and we’ve no credit for it.”