She’d gone too far. Yet the absurdity of her statement was somehow lost on Nell. “In that case, the child can carry on his line,” she mused. “Even if nobody ever knows it’s his. In a way, he’ll still be alive—you’ll have kept your soldier alive by bearing his child. That’s what you’re thinking!”
Anna was actually thinking that Nell in the role of romantic was awfully like an imposter. Clearly, her friend had been listening to too many love serials. But Nell’s habit of posing questions as if they were answers was proving convenient.
“The nuns, then,” she concluded. “You’ll grin and bear it for a year. And they’ll find him a good Christian home.”
“Or her,” Anna said.
*
After supper, Anna sat with Rose and her family in the front room and listened to Mozart on the gramophone. Rose’s father was absorbed in his Forward; her mother crocheted another square in the tablecloth she was making to celebrate the safe return of her sons. Hiram did his homework. Little Melvin rolled his wheeled horse over the sofa and eventually over Anna, beginning at her thighs, rolling it up her arm, over her shoulder, and then, when she didn’t object, over the top of her head.
“Don’t be a monster, Melly,” Rose said.
“I like it,” Anna said. The rounded edges of the horse’s wheels kneaded her skin and scalp pleasantly. Everything felt pleasant in this fragile, precious life she had made. In the days and weeks that followed, her contentment billowed into rapture. The trees on Clinton Avenue flashed into flower overnight. Anna swung her arms as she walked underneath them, thinking, Soon I won’t see these trees anymore, or hear the creak of their branches. She helped Rose’s mother sew her crocheted squares together. “You’ll be with us, Anna, when we use this tablecloth,” Rose’s mother said. “You’re part of our family—and your mother, too, when she comes back from nursing her sister.” Anna thanked her, filled with a teetering delight that arose from proximity to disaster. If Rose’s mother knew her secret, she would cast Anna out of her house. But she didn’t know—she’d no idea! No one had!
And so Anna swilled the dregs of a life that was already over—yet still, by a miracle, hers to enjoy. She craved lemonade. When everyone had gone to bed, she squeezed lemons into cold water at the kitchen sink, adding sugar she’d bought with her own ration coupons so it wouldn’t be missed. The sweet-tart concoction gave her shivers of pleasure. She guzzled it in her room while the tree outside her window splayed its new leaves like poker hands. It was impossible to resist waiting one more day to dismantle this sweetness. Just one! And then one more! But the days added up, and soon it was May and she’d no more plan than she’d had in March. A slight bulge appeared in her lower abdomen, but this was easy to conceal; at work she wore her baggy jumpsuit or the diving dress, and the men had grown as indifferent to her physical person as they were to each other’s. Rose’s mother credited her own excellent cooking for helping Anna to “fill out” what had been, in her view, a gaunt frame. She began packing lunches for Anna without charging extra.
Now that she’d learned to weld and burn, Anna’s diving work included hull patches and screw jobs, working alongside other divers on mats pulled taut beneath battleships. The vast hulls ticked and hummed under her hands. Never had the enchantment of weightlessness been greater. She hung from screws and let the current waft her heavy shoes. At times she still wondered if her trouble might end naturally this way, but she no longer expected such a reprieve; nor did she want it, exactly. When Bascombe organized the divers to give blood to the Red Cross, Anna demurred at the last minute, pleading a stomachache.
A crew of Normandie salvage divers visited the Yard from Pier 88, in Manhattan, and Lieutenant Axel chose Anna to lead the tour of his diving program. Her photograph was printed in the Brooklyn Eagle. LADY DIVER SHOWS NORMANDIE SALVAGERS BROOKLYN STYLE, the headline read. Anna was smiling in the picture, hatless in her jumpsuit, the wind blowing her hair from clips. Within a day of its appearance, the image seemed an artifact from long ago. She kept it beside her bed and looked at it every night before going to sleep. That is the happiest I will ever be, she told herself. Yet she could enjoy that happiness one more day—like waking from a dream of bliss and being allowed, briefly, to resume it.
“What in hell shall I do without you, Kerrigan?” Lieutenant Axel remarked one evening as she hosed off diving dresses.
Anna was wary. “Why should you have to, sir?”
“Russians have broken the Caucasus Line. We’ll have Tunis and Bizerte in a matter of days. Soon enough, the boys will be back here looking for their jobs.”
“Oh,” she said with relief. “That.”
“I’ll be out on my ass before you can say Jack Robinson. Back in my dory, waiting for the catfish to bite.” He screwed up his eyes at her. “What’ll you do, Kerrigan? Hard to see you tying on a frilly apron.”
“Thank you, sir.”
He cackled. “Wasn’t meant as a compliment, but you’re welcome just the same.”
If he knew her secret, he would cast her out. But he didn’t know. A stolen, perilous joy.
Anna’s duplicity pained her only when she was writing to her mother. Her newsy accounts of Naval Yard life felt like an alibi, and she considered spelling out the truth—it would be easier by letter. But the news would crush her mother, and she would blame herself for having left Anna alone. There would be no one for her mother to confide in; if Anna’s aunts or grandparents were to know, Anna would never again be welcome in their house. Another blighted child. She couldn’t bring more shame upon her mother, who had lost so much.
On the first Saturday in June—Anna’s day off that week—she stopped by her old building in the morning to fetch the mail while Rose and her family went to Shabbat services. Leaning in the vestibule, she noticed an airmail envelope with exotic stamps amid the usual letters and V-mails. Her own name was penned across the front in a crimped, slanted cursive that looked jarringly familiar. Her father’s, she would have sworn.
Anna climbed the six flights to her old apartment for the first time since her move, aware of her heavy tread on the stairs she’d once flitted up like a dragonfly. The apartment smelled like an old icebox. Anna slid open a window and brought the mysterious letter outside onto the fire escape. Her father’s pocket watch was in her purse—proof absolute, from the bottom of New York Harbor, that he wasn’t alive. Yet she knew the letter was from him. She knew.