“How old were you?”
She was no virgin when they’d met. At the time, it hadn’t occurred to Dexter to demand details of when or with whom. It might have been Boo Boo, ten years older. She’d likely have married the polo champion if he’d asked, but she’d been too young and far, far too wild. Not even a father like hers could compensate. They all had fathers like hers.
“The boys are being very good,” he said to conciliate.
“They’re good boys,” she said. “You don’t credit them enough.”
“I’ll credit them more.”
“Will you?” He felt her warm breath at his ear and knew they would make love that night. The events of the boathouse moved to the horizon of his thoughts. But they would not entirely disappear.
“If it will make you happy.”
“Very happy.”
The orchestra concluded with “Tangerine,” from that not very good picture starring Dorothy Lamour. Family groups began fumbling into the dark. The old man, along with Cooper, Marsha, and Grady’s sisters (average girls toiling invisibly in his glare), would see Grady off tomorrow at Pennsylvania Station. For the rest of them, this was goodbye.
Dexter left the clubhouse alongside George Porter, an arm around the doctor’s shoulders to dispel his evident worry about Dexter’s confab with the old man. George must know him better than that.
Grady seemed taller than he had even a few weeks before, his gaze nearly level with Dexter’s own. Moonlight touched the brass buttons of his uniform. Dexter felt his throat tighten as he shook his nephew’s hand. For all his confidence that Grady would survive, he’d an eerie intimation that he wouldn’t see him again.
Tabatha threw her arms around Grady’s neck and hung there, sobbing. Dexter hovered nearby, concerned that her display was unseemly. But his mother-in-law merely said in a taut voice, “They’ve always been so close.”
Dexter tried to make her out in the moonlight. Could it be? Under cover of darkness, rogue tears had seeped from Beth Berringer’s stingy eyes and now sparkled with gaudy subversion in her kaleidoscopic wrinkles.
“Grady needs to say other goodbyes, darling,” Harriet admonished gently, prying Tabby away from her cousin.
Tabby ran to Dexter, and he wrapped her in his arms. “Shh, Tabby Cat,” he said, holding her. “Come now. Everything will be all right.”
“It won’t be like this,” she said. “Not ever again.”
“Grady will come back healthy as a horse, I promise.”
She drew away, trying to see him. “You can’t promise that, Daddy.”
She’d a point; he was talking out of his hat. “I can promise that because I believe it. I haven’t the slightest worry about Grady Berringer: zero.”
It was hooey of the highest order, yet Dexter felt the calming effect of his words as if his daughter’s heart were relaxing inside his own chest. He felt the likeness of their flesh, their common smell, their way of moving. She was his own. And he was hers.
Harriet walked ahead toward the Cadillac, one arm around each of the twins. Dexter followed, still holding Tabby. No one spoke; there was only the crunch of their shoes on the gravel path. And just then, as he held his anguished daughter in the moonlight, Dexter knew what action he must take.
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
* * *
Anna often recalled hauling herself up the ladder on test day, triumphant. A moving picture would have ended there, with the promise that, at long last and against all odds, she’d earned the respect of the crusty lieutenant. In fact, he liked her less. He referred to his divers as “boys,” “men,” or “gentlemen.” He fell silent when Anna passed, as if she were a black cat. She understood that her hope of pleasing him could be achieved only by quitting, and he gave her no reason to stay.
Over two weeks had passed since the test day, and she’d not been back in the water even once. The men dove often; Bascombe and Marle had worked together, patching the submerged hull of an Allied destroyer. Anna had been nominally made a rigger, meaning that her specialty was salvage: the raising of sunken objects. The Normandie, at Pier 88, was a salvage operation, as had been the scuttled German fleet at Scapa Flow. But there were no sunken ships in Wallabout Bay; instead, there were several thousand railroad ties that had slid from a barge a decade ago and now interfered with the passage of certain deep-bottomed ships. With the exception of Anna, those chosen to remove these ties were the biggest and least skilled of the diving class—Savino, for example, who had nailed a hole through his diving dress on test day. Anna had had to patch that hole; Savino, meanwhile, was chosen to receive welding lessons in the diving tank. There his mishaps continued; two days before, he’d shattered his faceplate on the corner of the steel panel he was trying to weld. They’d pulled him up quickly—Marle was one of his tenders—and Savino had seemed all right at first, just some pressure bleeding from his ears and nose. But inside the recompression tank, he had fallen unconscious. Lieutenant Axel suspected an air embolism, meaning that Savino had taken a breath and held it before they’d pulled him up. As the pressure around him dropped to sea level, the pressure exerted by the air inside his lungs would have mounted until a bubble was expelled into his bloodstream. It would travel through veins and arteries until it lodged in a passage too small to pass through—in Savino’s case, one bringing blood to the brain. Air embolisms were often deadly, but Savino had survived. He hadn’t returned to work yet.