Dear Edward, it read in strong, unsentimental cursive, The weather has been fine, though after many days of fog we would appreciate some sunshine. My pupils are planting their spring victory gardens, but I worry that they will be disheartened. The war has changed many things, but I believe plants still need sunlight to grow! The boys and I speak of you often and fondly. I have offered to take them back to Playland, but they refuse. They are waiting for you.
The tone was measured, even bland, but the effect of these words upon Eddie was galvanic. He was flooded with the memory of seeing Ingrid for the first time at Foster’s Cafeteria: a woman in a blue scarf buying a single slice of pie for her two sons, which they shared raptly and without argument. Eddie had asked her the time. She was German, it emerged—had only narrowly managed to keep her job by denouncing Hitler and her motherland before a committee. There had been a third child, a girl who’d died in infancy. Stephan and Fritz, who were seven and eight, spoke of their sister as though she had vanished the previous week. “Baby Helen,” they called her, and blessed her before each meal. Their father had died more recently, in a factory accident, but he was rarely mentioned. It was Baby Helen they remembered.
At Playland, Eddie and the little boys had ridden potato sacks down long wooden slides, getting friction burns where a knee or an elbow dragged against the wood. The fun-house floor was pocked with holes through which loud blasts of air (fired by some hidden wiseacre) were meant to lift girls’ skirts. Ingrid had a horror of these blasts, and she clung to Eddie, laughing.
As they rode the streetcar back, Eddie had placed a hand on each boy’s chest to steady them. He’d been startled by the sensation of their hearts scrambling like mice against his fingertips.
They were still there, Ingrid and her boys. They were thinking of him—waiting for him. Eddie felt this truth in his body like a layer of earth turning over. It was all still there, everything he’d left behind. Its vanishing had been only a trick.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
* * *
Eddie lay in his sack, half-asleep. They had entered the Roaring Forties, off Chile, and the Elizabeth Seaman rolled momentously. Perhaps that movement was what had awakened the old familiar rhythm inside of Eddie: a small, insistent counterpoint, like a bouncing ball.
“Are there real gangsters?”
“The pictures didn’t make them up.”
“Do they look like Jimmy Cagney?”
“Jimmy Cagney doesn’t look like Jimmy Cagney. He’s shorter than Mama.”
“Is he your friend?”
“I’ve shaken his hand.”
“Does he look like a gangster?”
“He looks like a picture star.”
“How do you know a gangster?”
“Usually, the room goes a little quiet when he walks in.”
“Are they scared?”
“If they aren’t, then he isn’t much of a gangster.”
“I don’t like being scared.”
“Good. You won’t end up kowtowing.”
“Do you kowtow?”
“Have you noticed me kowtowing?”
“Do you talk to them?”
“I say hello. Some I know from long ago.”
“Would you ever be on their side?”
“Not if I’d any choice.”
Her small warm hand slipped inside his own. It was always there, that hand, like a minnow finding its crevice.
“Are we going to see Mr. Dunellen?”
“Funny you should mention him, toots.”
“He gave me caramels.”
“Mr. Dunellen has a sweet tooth. Like you.”
“He’s your brother.”
“In a manner of speaking.”
“You saved him from the waves.”
“That’s true.”
“Did he say thank you?”
“Not in so many words. But he’s grateful.”
“Is that why he gave me caramels?”
“It might just be, toots.”
“Did he give you caramels?”
“No. But I haven’t your sweet tooth.”
Anna returned to Eddie after an absence of years: her voice, the pattering quality of it, the feel of her small hand inside his. She towed him by the hand along the halls of his memory to the room where his old life had been carefully stowed away. Inside, he found everything as he’d left it.
Sunday Mass. Lydia began to cry: a strangled sound that was louder and more wrenching than seemed possible in a baby. She wasn’t a baby, she was three—just small enough to remain inside the pram, where her condition was hidden, more or less. Agnes lifted her out to quiet her, exposing her swiveled form to the crowded church. Eddie’s shame had the blunt force of a blow to the skull; he grabbed the pew in front of theirs to steady himself. Lydia continued to choke and howl; Father couldn’t be heard. The men, wincing, pretended nothing was amiss while two wives helped Agnes from the church, one pushing the pram, the other holding Lydia’s flailing legs. Anna tried to follow, but Eddie clamped his hand around hers. His surroundings felt at a sudden weird remove, as if something had ruptured in his mind. He fastened his eyes to the priest but heard only a drone.
After Mass, a group of men drifted into somebody’s flat for a touch of that god-awful beer Owney Madden was brewing in plain sight at the biscuit factory on West Twenty-sixth. Eddie nipped in, too, intending to stay just a minute. The bad feeling he’d had in the church was still with him; he wanted to shake it before returning to Agnes. The fun of drinking Madden’s No. 1 wasn’t the taste, God knew, but trying to pinpoint what it tasted of: Sawdust? Wet newspaper? The pigeons Owney famously loved to breed? Children threw snowballs outdoors, moving aside for the occasional automobile. Eddie observed from the window as Anna, all of six, sprang at the boys from behind a snowdrift. Watching her made him feel well. I have one healthy child, he thought, thank God. Thank God.
Early-winter twilight had seeped into the snowdrifts by the time they hurried home through Hell’s Kitchen. Eddie was weaving a little from the beer. It was later than he’d meant; Agnes would have to rush to make her call. The Follies were on hiatus since the crash, but Mr. Z. had arranged for her to be hired on another show.
“I want to play outside more,” Anna informed him through chattering teeth.
“You’re wet and you’re cold. Take my hand.”
“I won’t.” But she did, in her soggy mitten, first transferring something to her other hand.
“What is that, may I ask?”
He relieved her of a snowball, tightly packed, flecked with straw and manure. “I’m saving it,” she said.
“Snow melts indoors. You know that.”
“In the icebox.”
“You’ll give us all typhoid. Leave it outside on the stoop.”
“Someone might take it!”
“Not likely, toots.”
He opened the apartment door braced for Agnes’s anger and Lydia’s cries. But a peaceful scene awaited them: Lydia lay on the settee, her hair damp. Anna ran to her sister. The kitchen tub was full of water.
“She needed a bath, that’s all,” Agnes said, drained and ashen. He wondered how long the crying had lasted.
“You had to bathe her alone,” he said. “I’m sorry.”