Anna glanced at Bascombe’s face. For the first time, his scowling impatience and fuming concentration were legible as striving. “You came all the way out here,” she said.
“You bet I came. No better place for civilian diving than New York City. We’ve had the Normandie belly-up at Pier 88 since she caught fire a year ago—that’s a thousand-foot-long training ground. They’ve opened up a whole salvage school to get her righted, and you know where she’ll come to be refitted when they finally do? This Naval Yard right here. And something else,” he added as they approached the entrance to Building 81. “Doesn’t make a damn bit of difference about your eyesight; you can’t see a thing underwater.” With that, he left her side so abruptly, it was as if they hadn’t been speaking at all.
In their second week of training, some of the younger diving students began leaving the Yard together at day’s end. Anna heard them discussing bars—Leo’s, Joe Romanelli’s, the Oval Bar, and the Square Bar—the latter two kitty-corner from each other on Sands Street and owned by rival brothers. Now that the Germans had finally surrendered Stalingrad, morale was running high. Whenever a cluster of camaraderie began to form near Anna, she fell back, fading from the scene at just the moment when it might have seemed rude not to invite her. It was uncanny, given the distraction of her presence, how easily she could vanish. Marle, the Negro, had perfected this art. Though physically imposing, he’d a way of detaching himself from the general flow until it rushed on without him. Only Anna noticed, but she hid her awareness; an allegiance between her and Marle would jeopardize what slender ties fastened each of them to the larger group. And so the estrangement they had in common estranged them doubly from each other.
Most nights, a girl with thin blond hair awaited Bascombe outside the Sands Street gate. Anna gleaned from his conversation with the other divers that she was his fiancée, Ruby, whom he’d met after arriving in Brooklyn last summer. For a Brooklyn girl, Ruby was bizarrely ill-equipped for winter, shivering in a thin coat, then lassoing Bascombe in a lariat of sinewy arms and hanging at his neck, her forehead pressed to his. Anna liked Bascombe, which was partly to say that she liked herself in his company. Their flat, unvalenced exchanges were the closest she had ever come to feeling like a man. Bascombe in the grip of those greedy arms would be another matter, but Anna felt no envy. She had the Bascombe she wanted.
*
On the morning of their first dive, twelve divers loaded up the barge, and Lieutenant Axel steered it around the building ways, jostling waxy-looking ice cakes and hugging the piers to avoid boat traffic. Men watched from the piers, just as Anna had once done. She was nervous, knowing that Lieutenant Axel expected her to fail. But then he wanted all of them to fail. That was no secret.
Lieutenant Axel anchored the barge off the foot of Dry Dock 1. Two divers would go down at once, he explained, each with two tenders, while the rest would turn the massive flywheels on the two air compressors, one supplying air to each diver. They would rotate positions through the day until everyone had dived.
With a show of randomness, he chose Anna and Newmann to go down first. But Anna had spent enough time studying his baby ancient’s face to recognize mischief spidering across it. The lieutenant was up to something. Perhaps her job would be to shame the others, as before—Anna half hoped for this, since it meant succeeding. He selected Bascombe and Marle, the Negro, to be her tenders. Only then did Anna catch something amiss: Marle, a welder, should not have been on the barge at all. Welders and burners were making their first dives back on the West Street Pier in the new diving tank: a twenty-by-seventeen-foot cylinder with portholes for Katz and Greer to look in. Now she understood. The devilry lay in forcing proximity upon herself and Marle, the two outsiders who had worked so hard to stay apart. The intent was to rattle them and thereby worsen their chances.
Anna saw her own disquiet reflected in Marle’s face. Bascombe’s expression yielded nothing, but his jaw muscles flexed like the gills of a gasping fish. Failure was Bascombe’s enemy; he wanted no part of it. An agony of unease engulfed all three of them as the men held the canvas envelope for Anna and she stepped gingerly inside, trying not to touch them. A tender’s job was to hold and guide the diver, but being handled by these men, one a Negro, awakened in Anna a balking shyness she was certain they could detect. All of them lurched through the early steps: wrist straps and shoes and tightening of leg laces. But as Bascombe and Marle were pulling the rubber collar over the brass studs, routine began to neutralize discomfort. They tightened wing nuts over the studs, calling back and forth across Anna’s shoulders. At last they lifted the hat over her head, and she was surrounded by its tinny odor. Two hundred pounds bore down upon her when she stood. She’d remembered the fact of this weight but not the brutal sensation of being crushed by it. Could she sustain it? She could. And now? Yes. It was like someone knocking continually at a door, awaiting a new reply. And now?
Bascombe glanced through the faceplate, as pleased as she’d ever seen him—which was to say not frowning. “Under five minutes,” he said. “Newmann’s collar ain’t even fully sealed.”
Trying not to stagger, Anna shuffled toward the diving ladder. Marle checked her umbilical cord—air hose and lifeline, bound together—and she heard the hiss of air entering the helmet. At the ladder, they turned her around so her back was to the water. Marle looked in at her, his eyes engaging Anna’s with a lively, antic gaze. “Pleasure to meet you, Miss Kerrigan.”
“Likewise, Mr. Marle.”
“Good luck down there.”
“Why, thank you.”
Marle closed the faceplate and sealed it. They’d had their first conversation.