The same thing happened when she imagined using the public telephone at White’s to call Stella or Lillian or Aunt Brianne. She’d gone to Casablanca with Brianne and skated with her friends at the Empire Roller Dome. But at the end of these interludes, the others returned to their homes and Anna to her isolation. No one could protect her from it.
She bolted the apartment door, pulled down the shades, and turned on every light and the radio. First news, then music. She’d abandoned her favorites, Count Basie and Benny Goodman; their boiling sound was too suggestive of the city’s furrowed darkness. Instead, she turned the dial in search of Tommy Dorsey, Glenn Miller, even the Andrews Sisters, whose syrupy crooning used to gag her. Now it had the reassuring effect of whistling as you walked on a dark street. She read her mother’s letter. Her missives were short and stuck mostly to facts: the punishing Minnesota winter, the health of the cows and sheep, news of Anna’s cousins in training or overseas.
In each letter, her mother seemed at one point to forget herself—or Anna—and wander into more introspective territory: I keep expecting to wake up one morning and know what to do, the way I knew to come to New York after high school. But any decision I make seems to last about twenty-four hours, if that.
And another time:
The boys of my youth are fat, balding, and in three cases dead (1 turned tractor, 1 riding accident, 1 throat cancer). I look at my face and see no real change; obviously I am kidding myself!
And once:
The moon out here is too bright.
When she’d finished eating, Anna cleaned and dried Mrs. Mucciarone’s dish and set it aside to return the following morning. She began a letter to her mother, taking satisfaction in relaying details that would not have interested her had she been here. Tonight she wrote about Lieutenant Axel’s glee at frightening them. She wrote until she felt tired enough to sleep, then sealed the letter and turned off the radio and all of the lights except the one in her bedroom. She lay in her bed and hugged Lydia’s pillow. For as long as she could remember, there had been another creature nearby at night, breathing, radiating warmth. She clutched the pillow as if plugging a wound, and inhaled the faint essence of her sister that still clung to it.
Last, she opened her Ellery Queen. For all their varied and exotic settings, mystery novels seemed to happen in a single realm—a landscape vaguely familiar to Anna from long ago. Finishing one always left her disappointed, as if something about it had been wrong, an expectation unfulfilled. Her dissatisfaction accounted for the number of mysteries she read, often returning several to the library in a week. Since her mother’s departure, these novels had become trapdoors leading Anna to memories of accompanying her father as a little girl. Holding his hand on an elevator while an old man with mussed hair sleepily turned a crank. Walking beside him down an empty corridor lined with doors, gold lettering on pebbled glass panes, the sound of their footsteps twanging the walls. Looking down from a skyscraper window at yellow taxicabs buzzing like bees under greenish thunderclouds. Anna knew to keep her back turned until she heard the rustle of paper, the weight of a parcel sliding across a desk. A drawer whispering shut. Afterward there would be a rush of ease, everyone suddenly jolly.
What had he been doing, exactly? Was it dangerous? Here was the mystery that seemed now to have been flashing coded signals at Anna from behind every Agatha Christie and Rex Stout and Raymond Chandler she’d read. Becoming aware of this deeper story made it burn through the allegorical surface of whatever plot she was reading until she found herself not reading at all, but holding the book and remembering. Puzzling. Mr. Styles was part of the mystery. But that Mr. Styles—who had known her father—seemed a different man from the one who had taken her with Lydia to Manhattan Beach. His act of kindness had left Anna with one of her happiest memories. Reverting to Mr. Styles the nightclub owner, the gangster—or former gangster—felt like forfeiting their exalted, mystical day. She refused. She returned to her book and read herself to sleep. In the middle of the night, she woke and turned out the light.
*
In class the next morning she heard a faint murmur, distinct from the voice of Lieutenant Axel. To her left, Bascombe sat looking straight ahead. His expression was blank, yet somehow Anna knew the murmuring issued from him. Was he talking to himself? The topic was rules and regulations—the importance of abstaining from beer twenty-four hours before a dive.
“They tell you all kinds of bunk that ain’t true,” the patter continued. “Bubbles in the blood got nothing to do with bubbly drinks. Not that I give a damn—I’m a teetotaler.”
She stared straight ahead, certain that Lieutenant Axel would hear him and blame her.
“Don’t let ’em fill up your head with that crud. They think you’ll believe anything because you’re a girl. They’ve no intention of letting you dive, by the way.”
“What do you mean?” Anna hissed despite herself.
“They expect you’ll wash out when we get in the water next week,” he reported in a monotone. “Overheard ’em.”
Anna’s pulse began to race. She stared at Lieutenant Axel and remembered their earlier meeting—the hopelessness of trying to persuade him even after she’d worn the dress. Did he still plan to thwart her?
In her distraction, she forgot to put on her coat before leaving Building 569 to walk to the building ways cafeteria for lunch. Bascombe brought the coat and caught up with her. “Climbing the ladder in the wet dress is the hardest part,” he muttered as if still in the classroom, falling into step beside her. “Especially for lightweight divers.”
“You’ve dived before?” she asked, keeping her own eyes forward.
“Nah. I worked as a tender in Puget Sound.”
“Canada?”
“West Coast. Near Seattle, Washington. It was a body job: a contract diver was pulling corpses out of two carriers before they went into dry dock. January 1942. Yep, you’re thinking right, you’re thinking right: they’d towed ’em all the way from Hawaii.”
She glanced at him, disbelieving.
“Top-secret. Not one of us navy.”
“Was there a second tender?”
“No, ma’am. Just me. Diver taught me what to do. He bagged the bodies underwater, and I pulled ’em up. His air supply came direct from the dock.”
Anna liked this way of talking: an exchange of information without having to witness the wet depth of another person’s gaze. “Is that why you want to dive?” she asked.
“I suppose,” he said. “Keep trying to join the navy. Tried in Seattle, tried again in Frisco, then San Diego, but I can’t get my goddamn eyes to read those itty-bitty letters on the chart. They say if you’re good enough, you can cross over from civilian diving into navy.”