Anna had spent today cleaning the lufer sponge filters inside the oil separators on all ten air compressors. Most of her assignments had this air of the domestic: patching diving dresses with rubber cement; rubbing neat’s-foot oil onto the leather gaskets of helmets; separating hoses too long attached. She felt even further from the war than she had in the measuring shop—there, at least, she’d run errands to other parts of the Yard. Now, as she changed back into her street clothes in her locker-closet, Anna lapsed into a familiar state of hopeless surrender: she was weak; she felt weak. The railroad stanchions were too heavy for her to lift; Lieutenant Axel was right to keep her from them. This feeble turn of mind assuaged Anna’s scathing sense of injustice; feeling undeserving was less terrible, somehow, than feeling cheated. It evoked a novel impression of herself, tentative and fragile, like the marrieds. But a roar of fury incinerated this vision like an effigy. How she loathed Lieutenant Axel—wished that he would disappear. Hating him infused Anna with strength. But she had to conceal her rage, absorb it, even when doing so felt like drinking bleach. The slightest infraction would be grounds for her dismissal. And then the lieutenant would have won.
Her favorite times were those when superior officers visited Building 569. In the presence of naval brass of higher rank, Lieutenant Axel looked abashed and dutiful, and Katz, his henchman, appeared starstruck to the point of paralysis. Thus reduced, they forgot their disdain for Anna. It was the only time.
Anna left the Yard with the other divers and headed for the Oval Bar. Bascombe had engineered her inclusion in this nightly ritual as deftly as he had Marle’s: shortly after the test dive, his fiancée had approached Anna outside the Sands Street gate and said, in a voice touched by a head cold, “Basky wants me to go out with the boys, but you’ll come along, won’t you? I don’t want to be the only girl.”
Tonight everyone wanted the story of Savino’s air embolism from Marle, who had been with him inside the recompression tank. After Savino fell unconscious, Marle said, Lieutenant Axel had increased the pressure to 120 pounds, a depth of almost three hundred feet, in hopes that the bubble would be reabsorbed into Savino’s blood. Blue ink had exploded from the lieutenant’s pen, spraying both of them. Marle had held Savino’s legs aloft and Lieutenant Axel had massaged his hands and feet, trying to increase the circulation to his brain.
“All the time he’s talking,” Marle said as they washed down free bar food—intended to lure in sailors—with B&H beers. “Saying, ‘You’re going to be fine, son, you know how I know? You’d be dead already if you were going to die.’?”
“Sounds like vintage Axel to me,” Bascombe muttered, sipping Coca-Cola.
“Like a man calming a horse. Even though Savino is out cold. ‘Someday you’ll tell those kids of yours how you risked your life so they wouldn’t have to eat seaweed and sauerkraut at Sunday dinner.’?”
“Laying it on a little thick, if you ask me.”
“And he brought the man back. I watched him do it. Not that this cynic will believe it.” Marle flicked his eyes at Bascombe.
After forty-five minutes, Savino had regained consciousness. It had taken five more hours to decompress the chamber. When at last it was done, after midnight, Savino had walked into the waiting ambulance.
“I’m surprised Axel kept the grin off his yap,” Bascombe said. “He’s been dying to play hero from day one.”
“That’s an act,” Marle said. “If he loses a diver, they’ll shut him down.”
“Cry me a river.”
Marle shook his head. He and Bascombe were often on opposite sides, but also inseparable. Bascombe wasn’t welcome in Ruby’s home; her father regarded him as a drifter and refused to shake his hand. Bascombe had taken to eating Sunday supper with Marle and his parents in Harlem.
Anna caught the streetcar home with Ruby and Bascombe. Bascombe would escort Ruby all the way to Sunset Park, where she lived above her family’s grocery, then return to his rooming house by the Naval Yard: an hour and a half’s journey. Their engagement was secret until he could change her father’s mind. Like Bascombe’s campaign to join the navy after failing three eye tests, this one seemed, on the face of it, doomed. Yet he seethed with such roiling ambition that Anna half believed he would succeed. The campaigns were intertwined; were Bascombe to join the navy, he was certain, Ruby’s father would see him differently.
Anna got off at Atlantic Avenue. She was alone for the first time since morning, but the isolation of weeks ago could get no purchase on her now. She was too preoccupied. She sat at the kitchen table with an evening newspaper and the unopened mail and thought about Dexter Styles. He rarely crossed her mind at work, as if the marine guards had barred his entry from the Yard. But at home she confronted afresh the certainty that he knew what had happened to her father. He’d cautioned her not to look into the matter—warned her, even.
She slid open the fire escape window and climbed outside into the hard winter air. She tried to bring her father to mind—to see him as she would any other man, with no relation to herself. Night after night he’d sat where she was sitting now, smoking, gazing down at the street. Thinking—about what? For all the time she’d spent with him, Anna hadn’t any idea. It was as if being his daughter had blinded her uniquely, as if anyone else—everyone—had seen and known him in a way she could not.
Something was going to happen; she and Dexter Styles weren’t finished yet. This inevitability turned a gyre of excitement in Anna that made her forget her father. It was Dexter Styles she longed for—not the gangster but the lover. The tawdriness of the scene she’d wakened to had blurred away, leaving only sensation. In moments, she regretted even having told him who she was—she didn’t want to give him up. She went back inside the apartment to bathe and then to bed, her mother’s letter still unopened. In the dark, she gave herself to memories of Dexter Styles.
Had he threatened her? Or merely warned her?
*
Two days later, Anna was assigned to the barge in diving dress, tending Majorne. She’d gotten this far twice without going down. Still, after days of working indoors or marooned on the West Street Pier, she was grateful just to be on the open water. Sunlight struck Wallabout Bay like the flare of a welding torch as she watched Majorne’s bubbles.
“Kerrigan. Wake up!”
It was Katz, idling in the motored dinghy around a corner of the barge. She was needed. The front tender helped her lift the crate containing the weighted parts of her dress onto the dinghy, which yawed under its weight. As Katz motored through ice slurry, he explained that there was a jammed screw—as propellers were known—on the battleship that had recently been floated from Dry Dock 6 to Pier J. Allied ships were unidentified, but Anna knew from her visits to the captain of the Yard’s office that this was the USS South Dakota—“Battleship X,” as she was called in the newspapers, for security. She’d downed twenty-six Jap planes in the battle of Santa Cruz.
The battleship loomed spectacularly, shrinking everything around her, even the hammerhead crane, to an afterthought. Savino and Grollier were already at the flywheels of an air compressor on the edge of Pier J. Savino still wasn’t diving since his air embolism; Grollier, who had already dived that morning, was in partial dress. Anna’s job was to inspect the battleship’s four propellers, locate the problem, return topside, and explain what needed to be done. Grollier, recently trained as a burner, would go down to make the repair.
“Shouldn’t I make the repair if I can?” Anna asked, betraying more eagerness than she’d meant to.
“The only reason you’re diving at all is we’ve no one else,” Katz said.
She flushed. “That wasn’t my question.”