A second test involved the recompression chamber, whose purpose was to simulate the pressure of being underwater. Men whose eustachian tubes were blocked by ear damage or infection would have trouble equalizing the pressure on their eardrums. These unfortunates would experience piercing pain and even ruptured eardrums, should they decide to “play the hero” (the lieutenant warned, chuckling) and suffer in silence. Those with lung problems might just find themselves unable to breathe inside the tank. And then there were the men whose bodies responded to pure oxygen under pressure by going into seizures, no one quite knew why.
When they were suitably jittery, Lieutenant Axel admitted them to the recompression chamber in groups of six. It was a room-size cylinder divided into sections, the largest of which contained a bench where five men crammed together like pigeons on a wire to leave space around Anna. The expressionless front tender was among them; Paul Bascombe, she learned when all of them introduced themselves.
“You pass this one with flying colors, too?” Bascombe asked, glancing in Anna’s general direction.
“No, it’s my first time,” she said, sounding overly bubbly to herself. “And I wasn’t so very good in the dress. They’re just using me to needle you.”
“I figured.”
This irked her. “I did untie the knot.”
A silence overtook the group as the air warmed and grew close. “Try to whistle,” Bascombe said.
They all tried, including Anna, but no one could make a sound. “What the hell,” someone said.
“It’s the pressure. Listen to our voices,” Bascombe said. “I promise mine ain’t always this squeaky.”
Anna tested her own voice softly while the men drowned her out with impressions of Tweety Bird and Bugs Bunny. The more they were able to forget her, the easier they seemed.
The recompression chamber reduced their overall ranks by four more—so reported a euphoric Lieutenant Axel before dismissing them at the end of the first day. Sacco and Mohele had ear pain; Hammerstein began to wheeze; and McBride “felt funny in the head” and was quickly removed.
The next four days were spent in the classroom, where the lieutenant lectured them on diving physics, standard equipment and maintenance, air composition, and depth charts. For every hour spent at a depth of thirty-three feet or more, they would have to spend eight hours topside in order to be considered “clean” to dive again. “There’s no shortcut, boys,” he admonished them. “Don’t go playing the tough guy unless you want nitrogen bubbles coming out through your ears and eyes and nostrils until every soft tissue in your body is hemorrhaging. The longest you can spend at a depth of forty feet without recompression is two hours. At fifty feet it’s seventy-eight minutes. These shouldn’t be numbers you have to think about—they should be as familiar as your birthday, your anniversary, or December seventh, 1941.”
There was a lesson on potential hazards. “As divers, you’ll earn two dollars and eighty-five cents an hour,” Lieutenant Axel said. “But I’ve noticed civilian divers sometimes forget that ‘hazard pay’ means the work is dangerous.” With the lip-smacking relish of a man reading off a dessert menu, he described fouled airlines; being dragged by a boat, “blowing up,” and flying to the surface like a cork; nitrogen narcosis; and of course, the infamous “squeeze.” Littenberg and Maloney, both married with several children, did not return the next morning. “Went home and spoke with their wives,” Lieutenant Axel gloated. “We lose a couple that way every time.”
Then a troubling reflection passed visibly over his childish brow. “Say, Katz,” he said in an undertone. “How many have we left?”
There was one Negro: a welder called Marle who looked close to Anna’s age and completed each challenge with ease. She was keenly aware of Marle but also eager to avoid him—a wish that shamed her, although she sensed Marle shared it. They sat at opposite corners of the classroom—Anna in back, where she wouldn’t feel watched from behind; Marle in front, where he took tiny, meticulous notes with his left hand. On the rare occasions when they crossed paths, recognition flared between them, and they both slid their eyes away.
At the end of each day, the divers already trained returned to Building 569 from their jobs in Wallabout Bay or from working on the freshwater pipeline that ran from Staten Island to a navy monitoring center elsewhere in the harbor. Anna and the other trainees dispersed into the dusk, some through a small gate near the diving tank, others the long way, through the Sands Street gate. Anna always took the longer route to look for Nell, although she no longer really expected to find her.
On the fifth night of diving school, she spotted Rose leaving the inspection building. They embraced and walked arm in arm out the Sands Street gate. “The shop isn’t the same without you,” Rose said. “All the girls say so.”
“No one to gossip about,” Anna said.
“They say Mr. Voss is pining. He looks pale and slightly thinner.”
“Sounds like they’re the ones in love with him.”
Rose chortled. Anna walked her to Flushing Avenue and waited with her for the streetcar, hoping her friend would ask her to supper. But when the crowded car arrived, Rose hopped aboard and seized an overhead strap, waving goodbye to Anna through the window.
Anna watched the streetcar slide east toward Clinton Hill. Only when she turned to walk toward her own streetcar stop on Hudson did solitude engulf her. In daylight it retreated; she’d tried in vain, during diving school, even to remember what it felt like. But at dusk it closed back around her with macabre comfort. It had a pulse and a heartbeat. Its clutch removed Anna from the realm of mothers pulling children by the hand, and men hurrying home with evening papers under their arms. She climbed onto her streetcar, accordion doors knocking shut behind her, and watched the night slide past outside the window. It quivered with a danger against which her lonely routine formed a last thin line of defense. But what was the threat?
Supper awaited her, still warm, at Mr. Mucciarone’s grocery counter. As Anna took the covered dish from Silvio, a memory brushed her like a cat circling her shins: Lydia, whimpering in Silvio’s arms. In her own building, she opened the mail slot and found the usual letter from her mother, along with V-mails from two neighborhood boys. She climbed the stairs, mail in one hand and supper in the other, passing the Feeneys’ two apartments, which had been like an extension of her own when she was small. In her solitude, she couldn’t bring herself to knock. You mustn’t, she thought. They aren’t expecting you.