When Lydia finished eating, Anna fiddled with the radio dial until the Martell Orchestra came on, playing standards. Tentatively, she and her mother began to dance, waiting to see if Mr. Praeger, directly below them on four, would jab at his ceiling with a broom handle. But he must have gone to a smoker fight, as he often did on Saturday nights. They turned up the volume, and Anna’s mother danced with a reckless absorption quite unlike her usual self. It jogged faint memories in Anna of seeing her mother onstage when she was very small: a distant, shimmering vision, doused in colored light. Her mother could do any dance—the Baltimore Buzz, the tango, the Black Bottom, the cakewalk—but she never danced anymore except at home with Anna and Lydia.
Anna danced holding Lydia until her sister’s floppiness became part of the dancing. All of them grew flushed; their mother’s hair fell loose, and her dress came unbuttoned at the top. She cracked the fire escape window, and the hard winter air made them cough. The small apartment shook and rang with a cheer that seemed not to exist when her father was at home, like a language that turned to gibberish when he listened.
When they were all hot from dancing, Anna lifted away the plank covering the bathtub and filled it. They undressed Lydia quickly and eased her into the warm water. Released from gravity, her coiled, bent form luxuriated visibly. Their mother held her under the arms while Anna massaged her scalp and hair with the special lilac shampoo. Lydia’s clear blue eyes gazed at them rapturously. Suds gathered in her temples. There was an aching satisfaction in saving the best for her, as if she were a secret princess deserving of their tribute.
It took both Anna and her mother to lift Lydia back out before the water cooled, bubbles gleaming on the unexpected twists of her body—beautiful in its strange way, like the inside of an ear. They wrapped her in a towel and carried her to bed and dried her on the counterpane, sprinkling Cashmere Bouquet talc over her skin. Her cotton nightie was trimmed with Belgian lace. Her wet curls smelled of lilac. When they’d tucked her in, Anna and her mother lay on either side of her, holding hands across her body to keep her from falling off the bed as she went to sleep.
Each time Anna moved from her father’s world to her mother and Lydia’s, she felt as if she’d shaken free of one life for a deeper one. And when she returned to her father, holding his hand as they ventured out into the city, it was her mother and Lydia she shook off, often forgetting them completely. Back and forth she went, deeper—deeper still—until it seemed there was no place further down she could go. But somehow there always was. She had never reached the bottom.
*
Eddie parked the Duesenberg outside Sonny’s West Shore Bar and Grill, just shy of the piers. Saturday night, three days shy of New Year’s Eve, and it was dead quiet outside—proof absolute that no ship had come in that week or the one before.
He saluted Matty Flynn, the snow-haired barkeep, and then crossed the sawdust to the back left corner where, under a placard of Jimmy Braddock kitted out for a fight, John Dunellen conducted his unofficial business. He was a big man with savage dock walloper’s hands, though he hadn’t worked the ships in over a decade. For all his natty attire, Dunellen gave a drooping, corroded impression, like a freighter gone to rust after being too long at anchor. He was surrounded by a gaggle of sycophants, suppliants, and minor racketeers delivering a cut in exchange for his blessing. Without ships, their rackets were booming—longshoremen were desperate.
“Ed,” Dunellen muttered as Eddie slid onto a chair.
“Dunny.”
Dunellen waved at Flynn to bring Eddie a Genesee and shot of rye. Then he sat, apparently abstracted but in fact attuned to the portable radio he carried with him everywhere (it folded into a suitcase) and played at low volume. Dunellen followed horse races, boxing matches, ball games—any event upon which bets might be placed. But his special love was boxing. He was backing two boys in the junior lightweight class.
“You give the bride my regards?” Dunellen asked as Lonergan, a numbers man new to his circle, listened in.
“Too heavy,” Eddie said. “I’ll wait until after New Year’s.”
Dunellen grunted his approval. “Smooth and easy, nothing less.”
The recipient of this particular delivery was a state senator. The plan had been to make the drop among the exodus from Saint Patrick’s Cathedral earlier that day. The father of the bride was Dare Dooling, a banker close to Cardinal Hayes. The cardinal himself had performed the nuptials.
“Didn’t feel heavy to me,” Lonergan objected. “There was law, sure, but it was our law.”
“You were there?” Eddie was taken aback. He disliked Lonergan; the man’s long teeth gave him a sneering look.
“My ma was nanny to the bride,” Lonergan said proudly. “Say, I didn’t see you there, Kerrigan.”
“That’s Eddie.” Dunellen chuckled. “You only see him when he wants you to.” He slid his eyes Eddie’s way, and Eddie felt a humid proximity to his old friend that was more familial than anything he’d ever felt for Brianne. Eddie had saved Dunellen’s life, along with that of another protectory boy—pulled them bawling and puking out of a Rockaway riptide. This truth was never mentioned but ever present.
“I’ll look harder next time,” Lonergan said sourly. “Buy you a drink.”
“In a pig’s nose you will,” Dunellen thundered, his abrupt fury rousing fleeting interest from the two loogans who accompanied him everywhere. Dunellen kept these snub-nosed giants at a distance; they undercut the avuncular impression he liked to make. “You don’t know Eddie Kerrigan outside this bar—capeesh? How the hell does it look if he’s hobnobbing with the high and mighty and jawing the next minute with a mutt like you? It’s none of your fucking business where Eddie goes; quit sticking your snoot where it doesn’t belong.”
“Sorry, boss,” Lonergan muttered, high crimson swarming his cheeks. Eddie felt the ooze of his envy and wanted to laugh. Lonergan envying him! Sure, Eddie dressed well (thanks to Agnes) and had Dunellen’s ear, but he was a nobody of the highest order. “Bagman” meant exactly what it sounded like: the sap who ferried a sack containing something (money, of course, but it wasn’t his business to know) between men who should not rightly associate. The ideal bagman was unaffiliated with either side, neutral in dress and deportment, and able to rid these exchanges of the underhanded feeling they naturally had. Eddie Kerrigan was that man. He looked comfortable everywhere—racetracks, dance halls, theaters, Holy Name Society meetings. He’d a pleasant face, a neutral American accent, and plenty of practice at moving between worlds. Eddie could turn the handoff into an afterthought—Say, I nearly forgot, from our mutual friend—Why, thank you.
For his pains, Dunellen kept him at subsistence wages: twenty dollars a week if he was lucky, which—combined with Agnes’s piecework—barely kept them from having to hock the only valuables they hadn’t already hocked: his pocket watch, which he would carry to his grave; the radio; and the French clock Brianne had given them at their wedding. A longshoreman’s hook had never looked better.
“Anything in quarantine?” Eddie asked, meaning ships destined for one of the three piers Dunellen controlled.
“Maybe a day, two days, from Havana.”
“To one of yours?”
“Ours,” Dunellen said. “Ours, Eddie. Why, you need a loan?”
“Not from him.” Nat, the loan shark, who was throwing darts, charged twenty-five percent weekly.