She often lingered for hours on the fairgrounds when her shift was up at the Aquacade. Everything at the fair was newer than new: it was the future. The buildings were out of a dream, in shapes that no one in the Bronx had ever imagined, and at night the fair was a magic city of fountains, neon, spotlights, and fireworks. Even Manhattan looked old-fashioned after a day of gazing at Democracity or the Futurama. In the General Motors Pavilion, she saw a city of pristine skyscrapers with landing pads on each roof for helicopters and autogiros. Out one window you had a view of the ocean; out the other, zeppelins waited to whisk you off to Timbuktu. Sign me up! she said. Who wouldn’t want to live in the clouds, in a glass tower with a view of the future?
Tim had already picked out an apartment for them in Manhattan. A little taste of city life, he had said. Just until we start a family. But she knew they wouldn’t be spending their nights dancing at the Savoy or the Roseland or even that snoozy old hotel where Martin played. Tim had chosen the apartment because it was closer to his office, where he spent all of his time anyway. And the only thing the apartment looked out to was Brooklyn, and who wanted to look at Brooklyn all day? Whenever she brought it up, Tim would say, Swell, then we’ll stay in the Bronx, but she didn’t want that either.
There were almost a hundred days until the fair closed, and that meant three or four hundred more moments when she could step to the edge, raise her arms, and dive into the water. It wasn’t a bad way to spend the summer.
But summer would end, and then what?
Tim was ready to start their life together. He was past ready. He had wanted to get married right away—a two-month engagement, three months tops—but it was her family who put on the brakes. We’re doing it right this time, Daddy had said, as if her wedding was nothing but a big do-over for Rosemary’s. By waiting nine months from the engagement to the wedding, her father could prove a point to the world about the kind of girls he had raised, if anyone cared to notice.
If Peggy hadn’t been forced to spend so much time with nothing to do but choose hors d’oeuvres and napkin colors for her faraway wedding, she never would have tried out for the Aquacade in the first place. It hadn’t even been her idea. Two of her girlfriends were auditioning and Peggy went with them, and guess who they chose? Tim thought this Aquacade business was all fun and games, but once the fair opened and he saw her swimsuit, and how the Aquadudes gripped the girls by the heels and scissored their legs open and shut during the water ballet, and the way the crowd went bananas through it all—well, he wasn’t laughing anymore. If she chose the Aquacade over being Mrs. Timothy Halloran, even if only for a few more months, she could say good-bye to any chance of being married to Tim, whom she genuinely did love.
Then what would she do?
Follow the Aquacade to Cleveland or San Francisco? Make a living doing water ballet at some circus? How awful. Peggy wasn’t like the girls backstage who thought being an Aquagal was going to lead to a starring role in the next MGM picture. Those girls had stuffed themselves on dreams of a Hollywood mansion and life as the next Mrs. Johnny Weissmuller. As far as Peggy could tell, Weissmuller might be the Aquacade’s number one Aquadonis, but when he wasn’t high-diving into a bottle of Dewar’s, he was inviting every Aquabelle in sight back to his dressing room for a private lesson in the breaststroke. Playing Jane to that Tarzan? You’d have to be crazy to want that.
But hadn’t Peggy gone crazy, too? Wasn’t the heat or maybe something in the pool water driving her absolutely Bellevue-style crazy? That night with Francis: that was something a madwoman did. She had honestly been out of her mind, and when she called Rosemary the next day to say You’ll never believe what happened, the only words that came to her were The wedding is off, because how could she ever say what she had done?
All she wanted was to plunge. One last time, she wanted to leap and to plunge. This afternoon, when she swam into the darkness beneath the bandstand, it would be toward a future as Mrs. Timothy Halloran. She told herself that wasn’t half bad, when you thought about it. And perhaps this was the best time to stop, because part of her still wanted to stick with the Aquacade. That little bit of wanting would brighten the memory of diving into the pool, and would keep it from fading too quickly.
The 4:15 show finished with the grandest finale: Morton Downey sang “Yankee Doodle’s Gonna Go to Town Again,” a song Billy Rose had co-written to goose the show with a harmless bit of patriotic swagger. As the horns blared and the crowd cheered, the swimmers and dancers stretched out an American flag that was bigger than a city block. From the edge of the pool to the top of the fan-shaped staircase, the fabric rippled like a waterfall of red, white, and blue. Halfway up the staircase, Peggy gripped the shimmery edge of the flag and smiled so big that her cheeks hurt, and though she would swear it was just the chlorine, her eyes burned red and the tears streamed down her face.
THE PLAZA HOTEL
MARTIN HAD BEEN UP and down the city in search of Michael. He’d spent the night canvassing every hospital and morgue north of Fifty-First Street, grabbing a few hours of fitful sleep in the waiting room of Lenox Hill Hospital before continuing his search. He returned to the Plaza in the morning, where the elevator operator—the same one who’d said he was no seafaring man—assured Martin that he hadn’t seen either of his brothers since midday Wednesday. Martin implored the man to let him, the wayward MacFarquhar brother, into the suite, but he refused, in the politest way possible. “Rules are rules,” he said apologetically, though Martin suspected he would have bent the rules for his big-tipping brother. Against his better judgment, he visited the nearest police precinct, but when he was handed a missing-persons form reeking of mimeograph ink and loaded with questions about names and last known addresses, he stepped outside for a breath of air and just kept walking. He tried the park and poured a fortune in dimes into pay phones calling hospitals, police stations, Rosemary, the Plaza. As the day turned toward night, he found himself again at the Plaza, hoping that Michael had returned and wondering what the hell had happened to Francis. He was preparing himself to beg the desk clerk once more for a minute inside the suite—just to see if his poor, sick younger brother was alive or dead—when he spotted Francis himself, crossing the lobby with a man who loomed like a bodyguard, or a brick wall. Martin called out his name, aliases be damned: “Francis! Goddamn it—Francis! Stop!”
All around them milled the hubbub of a big night on the town: men in sharp suits and black tie, women in sea-foam satins, their hair netted with jewels or pinned up in waves of soft curls. Francis stood in their midst, harried and stunned, his face like a cracked egg that someone had tried to reassemble. His suit was rumpled like a paper bag and his shirt had been sweat through and pasted back on him to dry. He needed a good night’s sleep, a shave, and a can of pomade. He looked, in a word, un-Franciscan. The man at his side was crammed into a blue serge suit, freshly pressed or newly purchased. He wore it with all the verve of a boy at a distant aunt’s funeral.