Across the East River, the Naval Yard became visible again, the Missouri’s dark shape looming through the building ways. The battleship was ahead of schedule; already people were machinating about which seats they would try to get for her launching. The most coveted spots were inside the building ways, and Charlie Voss had promised Anna one of these. She wondered if she might somehow return to Brooklyn for the Missouri’s launching; to miss that would be like not having been at the Naval Yard at all.
As it turned out, Anna did watch the launching from inside the building ways—on a newsreel at the Empress Theater in Vallejo, California. It was late April 1944, three months after the launching took place. Anna watched the reel so many times that the ticket-taker began letting her in for free; she never stayed to watch the feature. The battleship’s mountainous jutting stern dwarfed the camera’s perspective, making the sailors waving from her fantail look minuscule. The ship’s sponsor was Margaret Truman, the nineteen-year-old daughter of a Missouri senator. She cracked a champagne bottle against the hull with a report like gunfire, but Anna had already had it from Marle, who’d proved a reliable and detailed correspondent, that Miss Truman had needed three tries to break that bottle. We all said, “Kerrigan would have done better,” he wrote.
As soon as the bottle broke, men began knocking away the wood stays that held the Missouri in place. In a matter of seconds, the “largest and most powerful battleship ever built” was sliding down the ways with a silken ease that owed much to the fact that whatever shrieking resistance had accompanied her slide was replaced, on the newsreel, by marching band music and the rousing voice of the announcer: “The Missouri is symbolic of the ever-growing strength of the United States Navy.” Men held their hats and ran after her, but the ship was past their reach—even as her stern slid down the tracks, her bow had already made its splashing entry into the East River, which parted around her with the ease of a cushion receiving a cat. And then she was floating away, her bottom half submerged, as though she had never been on land in the first place. It was like watching a creature being born, growing up, and moving irrevocably away, all in under a minute.
The taxi turned west at Forty-second Street, toward Grand Central, sunlight stuttering through the sieve of the Second Avenue El as they drove underneath it. Then skyscrapers blocked the sun, their abrupt shadow like the sudden louring of a storm. Newspaper vendors bawled out the headlines:
“American planes down seventy-seven Jap fliers in Guadalcanal!”
“Biggest Pacific air battle yet! Only six U.S. planes lost!”
“Let’s have a look at your ring,” Brianne said.
Anna had gone to a pawnbroker on Willoughby Avenue, near the courthouse, intending to buy the cheapest ring she could find. But she’d lingered, trying on one with pinprick diamonds set in fourteen-karat gold, another of brass filigreed with a pattern of leaves. The longer she looked, the more critical the decision seemed to become. This was her wedding ring, after all; she would have to wear it every day. Why choose a dented copper oval that would stain her finger green? As Anna deliberated, studying the rings, she had a sudden, lucid impression of Dexter Styles, his restless proximity. She imagined him dismissing the pinpricks: A diamond should be big enough to see. No telling brass from gold, if you keep it polished. She chose the brass filigree.
“Not bad,” Brianne said, running her finger over the leaf pattern, which Anna had burnished just that morning. Then, with a wink, “Your soldier has good taste.”
Brianne splashed toilet water into her cleavage as they approached Grand Central. Soon she was flirting with the young Negro redcap. He caught Anna’s eye and they shared a smile at her aunt, pushing fifty, still reeking of Lady of the Lake.
The rush of uniforms through the smoky concourse verged upon turmoil. The trains were overcrowded. Brianne had had to use “all my wiles” to acquire two tourist sleeper tickets from Chicago to San Francisco on short notice; Anna suspected the feat had entailed bribery, not flirtation. Moving through bands of hazy light that angled from the lunette windows overhead, she felt the taint of her failure begin to lift. There were girls everywhere: WAVES, WACS, mothers tugging children by the hand. There was nothing unusual about Anna’s departure; she was one tiny part of a migration.
They took facing seats beside a window aboard the Pacemaker to Chicago. Six more people squeezed in alongside. Relieved of the need to hide her condition, Anna relaxed, letting her sweater fall open so her belly protruded. Apparently, that was enough to tip a balance, for she sensed her fellow passengers prising apart her circumstances until they located her wedding band. The satisfaction of their curiosity was like a sigh. There was magic in that ring. She was offered a fan, a newspaper, a glass of water. So much power in one slim band.
Conversation was trickier. Everybody knew someone in the navy, and Anna’s vague replies about Lieutenant Charlie Smith only invited further questions. She solved this problem by reading: first the Times, then the Journal American. Then Ellery Queen’s The Tragedy of Z.
Softly, she asked her aunt, “Have you brought the dress?”
“Several,” Brianne said. “Each one lovelier than the last. But no need for that yet.” She whispered into Anna’s ear, “Enjoy a week of marriage before you go into mourning.”
The flotilla of warships along the Hudson River winnowed as the Pacemaker rushed north. This was the same route Anna had taken on trips to Minneapolis with her mother and Lydia, but she didn’t recall those trains moving so fast. The Pacemaker roared over crossings, laundry flapping in its wake like frightened starlings. Soldiers prowled the corridors, playing cards and flicking their cigarettes out of windows. The train’s speed roused a tingle of anticipation in Anna. She gazed from her window: town after town flung wide, then folded into vanishing. Trains going the opposite way passed with a punch.
She woke from a nap to find they’d reached Schenectady, early-evening light honeying the brick factories along the tracks. Back in Brooklyn, she would be leaving the Naval Yard with Rose by now, perhaps drinking beers at the Oval with the other divers. Already the sensation of being ripped from her life had relaxed into an ache. Sheer distance had done this. A letter mailed from Schenectady would take a day to arrive in New York; telephoning would involve multiple coins and interruptions from an operator. She’d gone far away.
Anna and Brianne repaired to the dining car as the sun was setting on Syracuse. They reviewed their plan in whispers over chicken cutlets: Lieutenant Axel had secured Anna’s job at the Mare Island Naval Shipyard, where she would dive until her condition became impossible to hide. Then she would take a leave, have the baby, and return, a widow, when she’d found someone to care for the child. “I’m hoping Mama will come,” she said.
Brianne looked miffed. “Something wrong with present company?”
Anna laughed. “You hate children, Auntie.”
“Not all children.”
“You call them brats.”
“I’ve been known to be rather wonderful to certain exceptions.”