“You know . . .” Greer pinkened to his receding hairline. “Come on, Katz. Have a heart.”
“Oh, the pussy cushion,” Katz said at last. “You’re right, we forgot. That’s a special kind of pillow”—he spoke toward Anna without actually meeting her eyes—“that blunts those sharp collar edges. You’ll want it when we get the hat on; the two together weigh fifty-six pounds.”
Anna had no intention of asking for a pussy cushion—certainly not by name. Greer’s scalp had gone scarlet. Now the men began wrestling the rubber collar of the canvas dress over the breastplate, threading a series of holes in the rubber over long copper studs. When each rubber hole had a stud through it, they slipped copper clamps over these studs and anchored them in place with wing nuts. They used T wrenches to tighten the nuts, Greer in front of Anna, Katz behind, calling out to each other as they moved around the collar until the rubber made a tight seal between copper and canvas.
“Now the belt,” Katz said with a smile. “Eighty-four pounds.”
The belt had blocks of lead attached. They draped it around Anna’s hips while she was sitting down and buckled it against her back. Then they crossed two leather straps at her chest and lifted them over her shoulders. “Stand up and lean over so we can jock you up,” Katz said.
Rising was harder now, with the breastplate and belt weighing her down. She leaned over, aware of straps passing between her legs and jerking up at her groin. She’d no idea if this was the usual way or some humiliating adjustment concocted just for her. Greer hadn’t met her eyes since invoking the pussy cushion.
“Take a seat,” Katz said. “It’s time for the hat.”
The “hat” was the spherical brass helmet, which at close range looked more like plumbing or a piece of machinery than something a human being would wear. Anna felt a thrill of disbelief when Katz and Greer each took half and lifted it over her head. Then she was inside, encased in a humid metallic smell that was almost a taste. They screwed the base of the helmet into the breastplate like a lightbulb fitting a socket. A crushing weight bore down upon Anna through the collar’s sharp edges. She writhed under it, trying to move away or unseat it. There were two raps on top of the helmet, and the round front window popped open, admitting a shock of cool air. Greer was there. “You must tell us if you feel faint,” he said.
“I feel fine,” she said.
“Stand up,” Katz said.
She tried to stand, but the breastplate and helmet and leaden belt fused her to the bench. The only way to rise was to force her weight against those two spots where the collar cleaved her shoulders. Anna did this with a sensation of nails being pounded into her flesh. The pain made her eyes swim, and the weight threatened to buckle her knees, but she heaved herself upright, each instant bringing a fresh negotiation over whether she would be able to bear the weight another second. Yes. And yes. Yes again. Yes, yes, yes.
Katz peered through the faceplate opening. She noticed a thin white scar bisecting his right upper lip and felt an itch of hatred for him that partook of the vicious pain in her shoulders. Katz was enjoying this. “Walk,” he said.
“She’ll faint.”
“Let her.”
“I don’t faint,” Anna said. “I’ve never fainted in my life.”
Balancing the helmet’s weight on those two ravaged points of pain, she took a step, dragging a shoe over the bricks as if she were manacled in chains. Then another step. Sweat crawled over her scalp. Two hundred pounds. The hat and collar weighed fifty-six, the shoes thirty-five, the belt eighty-four. Or was each shoe thirty-five, making a total of seventy?
Another step. And then another. Sliding the shoes with no idea where she was going or why. Pain had wiped away those facts.
Someone pressed an object into her three-fingered gloves. “Untie that.”
“While I’m walking?” she shouted.
Greer appeared in front of the face opening. “You can stop walking,” he said gently. He looked worried; she supposed her expression must be contorted. Anna raised the object to where she could see it: a rope, elaborately knotted. She rearranged her hands in the three-fingered gloves—pinkie and ring fingers in one slot, pointer and index in a second, thumbs in the third—and pushed against the knot with all ten fingertips. Through the hot, slightly damp insides of the gloves, her fingers explored its contours, and the pain in her shoulders felt suddenly at a remove. There was an area in every knot that would yield when you pushed on it hard and long enough. Anna closed her eyes, her hands delivering her to a purely tactile realm that seemed to exist outside the rest of life. It was like pushing through a wall to find a hidden chamber just beyond it. She felt the knot’s weakness, like the faint, incipient bruise on an apple, and dug her fingers in. Loosening a knot always seemed impossible until it was inevitable; Anna knew this from years of rat’s nests and cat’s cradles, shoelaces, jumping ropes, slingshots—things children on the block had always brought her to unscramble. The knot made a last clutching effort to preserve itself, its reluctance to yield making it seem almost alive. Then it surrendered, the cords loose in her hands.
She held them out and someone took them. Katz looked in through the window. Anna expected hostility, but he spoke with evident wonder. “Well done.” More surprising than his palpable admiration was Anna’s swoon of pride; she hadn’t wanted to defeat Katz after all, it seemed, but to impress him.
They unscrewed the helmet and lifted it from her shoulders, followed by the belt and breastplate. Released from their weight, Anna felt as if she were floating, even flying. Her buoyancy infected the tenders, as if her success belonged to them, too—or placed her in a category nearer their own. They helped her from the shoes and belt and dress in the same high spirits they’d started out with, except that those high spirits had been at her expense, and these included her. Soon she was standing on the pier in her jumpsuit, as before. It had gone dark without her noticing.
“You want to tell him?” Greer asked Katz.
“You think he’ll blame us?”
“He’ll blame someone.”
“You do it,” Katz said. “He likes you better.”
“Most people do,” Greer said with a wink at Anna.
Lieutenant Axel listened wincingly to Greer’s account of Anna’s achievements, then dismissed him curtly from the office. Greer tipped his cap at Anna, making her part of a conspiracy.
“Have a seat, Miss Kerrigan,” the lieutenant said.
Anna’s soaring lightness made it hard to keep from smiling, but she mastered the urge, determined not to seem smug. The lieutenant watched her a long moment, drumming his fingers on his desk. “You wore the dress,” he said, using a conciliatory tone that alarmed her. “But that isn’t the same as diving.”
“You said that was the test.”
He took a long, patient breath. “It is enormously taxing for the human body to perform underwater,” he said. “I understand that may be hard to believe; you see the pretty waves, the nice sea foam. You like to swim. But it isn’t like that underneath. Water is heavy. The pressure of that weight is something ferocious. We’ve no idea how the female body would react.”
“Let me try,” she said, her mouth suddenly dry.
“You’re a strong girl, Miss Kerrigan, you’ve proved that. But in good conscience, I can’t let you go down there any more than I would my own daughter.”
He was protective, sympathetic, sorry—unrecognizable as the snide man who had greeted her. Anna liked the first one better. With him, it seemed, she’d had a chance.
“Let me try,” she said again. “If I fail, then we’ll know.”
“Have you ever seen a man with the bends?” the lieutenant asked, leaning forward as if to share an intimacy. “The nitrogen bubbles trapped in his blood must find a way out, so they push through the soft tissues. Men bleed from their eyes and nose and ears. Or the squeeze? The entire diver—I mean to say a whole man—is squashed by the ocean’s pressure into just that helmet you wore. So when you say,
If I fail, failing underneath fifty feet of water ain’t the same as failing topside.”
“Those things could happen to anyone who makes a mistake,” Anna said. “Not just a girl.” But she felt snuffed by a sense of foregone failure.
The lieutenant smiled: white teeth, tanned, beardless skin. “I like you, Miss Kerrigan,” he said. “You’re full of spirit. My advice is, go back to your shop—whatever it is you do here at the Yard—and give that work everything you have. Help us win this war so we’re not eating Wiener schnitzel and dried octopus for Sunday dinner when it’s over.”
He slapped the desk, apparently believing this to be the last word. But Anna couldn’t seem to move. She was so close. She had untied the knot! Time seemed to elongate, allowing her to consider every possible course and know its result. Anger would revolt him; tears would prompt sympathy but prove her weak; flirtation would put her back where she’d started.
He was waiting for her to go.
“Lieutenant Axel,” she said at last in a flat, neutral voice. “Everything you’ve asked me to do, I’ve done. How can you turn me away? There’s no basis for it.”
“Since we’re speaking frankly, Miss Kerrigan, I’ll tell you that there was never any chance of your diving.” Gone was the avuncular cajoler. Now he spoke in a plain, unvarnished manner much like Anna’s own. “Your Mr. Voss must be blind with love if he thought I’d put a girl underwater. I told the commandant when he telephoned that it was out of the question. Said I’d put you in the dress and give you a chance to see for yourself.”
“But I wore the dress,” Anna said. “And I walked. And I untied the knot.”
“You surprised me, I’ll admit that,” he said. “But your diving was never a possibility, so it isn’t one now. I’m sorry; I can well imagine that this is frustrating. But those are the facts.”
They regarded each other across the desk in a state of perfect understanding. Anna rose from her chair.
She found herself back outside Building 569 with no memory of having put on her coat or whether she’d seen Katz and Greer again on her way out. In the dark, she began the long walk back to the Sands Street gate. Cold wind scrubbed away the memory of the dizzy pleasure she’d felt at her victory. She passed the building ways, clusters of artificial light exaggerating the dead ships’ hulls within.
The answer was no.
Never in her life had Anna been obstructed by such naked prejudice. Those are the facts, the lieutenant had said, but there weren’t any. As Anna walked, her disappointment and wretchedness hardened into a stony opposition that partook of the hatred she’d felt earlier for Katz. The lieutenant wouldn’t break her; she would break him. He was her enemy. It seemed to Anna now that she had always wanted one.
She imagined the knot in her hands, the clenched aliveness of it. There was always a weakness, it was just a matter of finding it.
Those are the facts.
There were no facts. There was just him. One man. And not even a beard.
CHAPTER TWELVE
* * *
In the four days that passed between agreeing to chauffeur Miss Feeney’s crippled sister to the beach and the appointed Sunday morning, Dexter’s minimal enthusiasm for the adventure dissipated entirely. His children would not be there. At Thanksgiving dinner, Beth Berringer had unveiled a plan for the entire family to attend church at Saint Monica’s, on York Avenue, as a prelude to volunteering with Bundles for Britain. Bundles was the project of a Park Avenue girl; Dexter dismissed it as society dressed up as war work. There was a lot of that going around.
The old man seemed as eager as he to dodge the proceedings, and invited Dexter instead to lunch and billiards at the Knickerbocker. This was a tempting offer, for both the gorgeous mural at the bar and the aghast looks of the Puritans who recognized him. Had Miss Feeney a telephone, he’d have deferred the appointment as a first step toward making it vanish. But she hadn’t one, and with the holiday, a letter might not arrive in time. The only way out would be not to show up at all, and whatever Dexter might be, he wasn’t a heel. So he told his father-in-law that he’d promised to drive an employee’s crippled sister to the beach that morning, and vowed to join him at the club as soon as he’d finished.
Therefore: No Tabby. No twins or Harriet. A mild day, unseasonably warm for the end of November, eliminating foul weather as an excuse. Miss Feeney’s street looked much as he’d expected, children buzzing around the Cadillac even before he’d parked it. They wouldn’t have seen a Series 62 very often, if ever. Stepping from his automobile, Dexter anchored his hat and tipped back his head, squinting into the glare. A waving hand in an upper window banished his last hope: that Miss Feeney herself might have forgotten.
He pushed through a squeaky front door into a vestibule still fragrant with Friday’s fish. Everything about the place was familiar; above all, the echoey clatter of his footsteps in the stairwell. Christ, how many floors were there? Barbaric to have a cripple living all the way up.
The apartment was small, crowded, close. Femininity breathed from every surface down to the cheap wainscoting. Perfume, women’s hair, fingernails, their monthly time—all of it enclosed him in a gamy, intimate cloud that made his head swim. It was almost a surprise to find Miss Feeney, with her arched eyebrows and man’s handshake, standing in this female miasma. She seemed to have nothing to do with it.
She led him past the gloomy kitchen to the front room, where every pretty thing her family had managed to hold on to through the Depression was on display. There wasn’t much. A stained glass aureole of Saint Patrick banishing snakes, a feathered fan pinned to the wall beside a calendar of the Dionne quintuplets. Several empty rectangles where pictures had been removed from hooks. He nearly asked why, but the answer arrived in that feminine cloud: there was no man here. Dead or gone away. Likely the latter, judging by those empty patches on the walls. Everyone liked to remember the dead.
Shouts of children from the street mingled with the ticking of an old clock, gold angels at its base, the time off by twenty minutes. The treasure of the house: the thing that everyone would lunge for in a fire. Like his mother’s bell. “Check for me my bell,” she would say, and Dexter would run to fetch it, holding the clapper. She’d brought it with her from Poland, and its silver stream of sound evoked her descriptions of girlhood: churches, snowdrifts, skating on ice-covered ponds in the dark. Warm bread pulled from howling red ovens. He was not accustomed to thinking of his mother. The familiar apartment, the sound of his footsteps in the stairwell, had done it. Or perhaps the presence of an invalid.
“Where is your sister?” he asked.
She led him into a room barely large enough to hold two narrow beds. The shade was drawn on the single window. A beautiful girl lay splayed on one of the beds in what appeared to be an erotic faint, pale curls scattered in the half-light like spilled coins. The vision disconcerted Dexter. He moved closer, blinking to dispel it, and saw that her face was like that of someone very frightened or in a death throe. Her limbs jerked as he watched: a lack of control that was permanent. She wore a blue velvet dress and wool stockings and appeared to be asleep. Dexter imagined the effort that must have gone into dressing her and was relieved he’d fulfilled his promise to show.
“She looks . . . well,” he said, feeling that some remark was expected.
“Doesn’t she?” The sister gazed with such love and pride at the malformed creature before them that Dexter doubted himself for blundering into this family’s pain. But then it hadn’t been his choice. She had engineered it.
“So. What next?” he asked, eager to be moving again.
“I’ll get our coats.”
He nearly followed her from the room, so reluctant was he to be left alone with the cripple. He went to the window and lifted the shade to check on the Cadillac. Then he glanced at the bed, reassured to find the prone girl’s eyes still shut. He thought of the father, Feeney, having to look upon this daughter day after day. The agony of it. A whisper of what might have
been in that beautiful hair. Was that why he’d gone—if he’d gone? Dexter liked the Irish, was drawn to them, although time and again they had proved untrustworthy. It wasn’t duplicity so much as a constitutional weakness that might have been the booze or might have been what drove them to it. You wanted a mick to help you dream up schemes, but in the end you needed a wop or a Jew or a Polack to bring them off.
Miss Feeney returned, leaned over the bed, and shimmied her sister’s crimped limbs into a smartly trimmed navy blue wool coat. Her expertise left no doubt as to how much time she’d spent caring for her. All her life, Dexter guessed.
He scooped the cripple from the bed and hefted her into his arms. Only when her smell reached him did he realize he’d been dreading it, expecting that rank odor of bodies in rooms without much air. But she smelled fresh, wonderful, even, that version of flowers that inheres in feminine creams and shampoos. She smelled like a girl who had bathed that very morning, pointing toes from the suds to shave her legs smooth. He shielded her head from the doorframe and angled her into the front room, her golden hair dousing his sleeves.
“What is her name?” he asked.
“I’m sorry, it’s Lydia. Lydia, this is Mr. Styles. He’s kindly offered to take us to the beach.”
Not exactly, Dexter thought, permitting himself a wry smile as he followed her to the front door, carrying her sister. When he looked back down at Lydia, her eyes had opened and were fixed upon his face. The engagement startled him physically, as if a pair of hands had seized him. Her eyes were luminous blue, unblinking, like the eyes of the dolls Tabby used to play with.
Descending, he watched the soiled walls, feeling with his feet for turns in the stairs. It was awkward work. “She’s so calm,” marveled the healthy sister from behind. She was carrying a folded wheelchair that looked heavier than Lydia. “She whimpers and cries when Silvio carries her.”
“I’m flattered.”
Outside, she greeted one or two children by name. He shifted the cripple in his arms and began opening the door to the backseat, but the sister said in a rush, “We’d like to ride in front, if that’s all right.”