Nell gave a disbelieving laugh. “They’d never let us. But they might just make us. If the men keep leaving in droves.”
Anna’s mind closed around this notion like a lucky coin. Two hundred seventy Naval Yard workers had been furloughed for the draft in September, according to the Shipworker. More men were leaving every week.
“That will be the day I walk out for good,” Nell said. She’d removed a compact from her jumpsuit and was powdering her nose and applying lipstick.
As Anna returned their cutlery to the canteen, she felt a seismic rearrangement within herself. It was clear to her now she had always wanted to be a diver, to walk along the bottom of the sea. But this certainty was fraught with worry that she would be denied.
After lunch, Mr. Voss sent her to Building 77, so routine by now that the marrieds no longer even remarked upon it. On the fifteenth floor, Anna asked the captain’s secretary whether she might look out the windows, in hopes of glimpsing the diving barge.
“Oh, of course,” said the secretary, who had grown friendlier over their several encounters. “I take the view for granted; sometimes a whole week goes by and I’ve forgotten to look out.”
Anna went to a window. In the rich late-October sunlight, the Naval Yard arrayed itself before her with the precision of a diagram: ships of all sizes berthed four deep on pronglike piers. In the dry docks, ships were held in place by hundreds of filament ropes, like Gulliver tied to the beach. The hammerhead crane brandished its fist to the east; to the west loomed the building ways cages. Around all of it, railroad tracks spiraled into whorls of paisley. The diving barge had gone.
“When I look out at all that,” said the secretary, who had come to stand beside Anna, “I think: How can we not win?”
Mr. Voss was in his office when Anna returned to her shop. When she’d deposited the package on the desk, he said, “Come in, Miss Kerrigan. Have a seat. Shut the door.”
They’d not exchanged a private word since their conversation of almost a month before. Anna sat in the same hard chair.
“I trust you’ve enjoyed your lunches out?”
“Very much,” she said. “And I haven’t been late.”
“You have not. And you’ve become our most productive inspector, male or female.”
“Thank you, sir.”
In the pause that followed, Anna grew puzzled. Had he called her into his office for the sole purpose of making pleasant chat? “I’ve seen the Missouri,” she said to break the silence. “Inside the building ways.”
“Ah,” he said. “Imagine that launching. You missed the Iowa, didn’t you?”
“By three weeks.” She hated to think of it. Mrs. Roosevelt had been present.
“It’s tremendous, watching a battleship slide down the ways into the water. There wasn’t a dry eye.”
“Not even yours?” She had meant the question straightforwardly; it was impossible to imagine Mr. Voss weeping over a ship. But the remark tipped from her teasingly, and he laughed—a first.
“Even I may have shed a tear or two,” he said. “Believe it or not.”
She grinned at him. “They were cold tears, I’ll bet.”
“Frozen. They hit the bricks and shattered like glass.”
Anna was still smiling when she resumed her stool. She began working quickly, feeling she’d been away too long. It was only after several minutes that she noticed an unusual silence around her. How long had that been there? She glanced at the other girls, but not a single married would meet her eye. Not even Rose. Yet Anna felt their keen awareness of her.
That was when she knew: the marrieds had started to talk.
CHAPTER SIX
* * *
Anna met Nell at the Roxy for the eight o’clock showing of The Glass Key, with Alan Ladd. But one look at Nell’s creamy décolletage between the unbuttoned halves of her coat and she knew they weren’t going inside.
“I’ve a different idea, if you’re feeling open-minded,” Nell said with an odd, singing gaiety. When Anna assured her of the open state of her mind, Nell went on, “A friend of mine takes a regular table at Moonshine—that’s a nightclub. He’s invited us to join.”
“My dress won’t be right.”
“I warned him you’d look pokey.”
Anna laughed. In fact, her dress—hidden under her coat—was not all that bad. When she’d told her mother that a girlfriend from the Naval Yard had invited her to the pictures but presumed her clothes would be dreadful, her mother had plunged into a frenzy of outraged alteration, adding shoulder pads and a peplum to a plain blue dress Anna had bought at S. Klein for Lydia’s upcoming doctor visit. At the same time Anna had stitched a spray of turquoise beads onto the collar, hands flying alongside her mother’s as if they were playing a duet. No one who really knew clothes would be fooled by these enhancements, but their sewing wasn’t meant for scrutiny. As Pearl Gratzky liked to say, rather grandly, “We work in the realm of the impression.”
Nell hailed a taxi and directed the driver to East Fifty-third Street. “We’re six blocks away!” Anna protested. “Let’s save our money and walk.”
A somersault of artificial laughter greeted this suggestion. “Don’t worry,” Nell said. “This ride is the last dime we’ll spend tonight.”
Even dimmed out, the blocks north of Times Square were aglow with more light than seemed to issue from their half-blackened streetlights and murky marquees. Anna was rarely in Manhattan after dark, and the number of soldiers amazed her: officers in heavy coats, sailors and enlisted men, others in uniforms she didn’t recognize—all hurrying, as if toward a single urgent event.
“One thing,” Nell said, turning to Anna in the backseat. “Not a word about what we do.”
“What we—”
“Shh!” Nell pressed a finger to her lips. Her nails had been lacquered scarlet since the afternoon.
“You mean the Nav—”
“Sh!”
“Why not?”
“Oh, come now,” Nell chided in a merry falsetto. “Let’s not play dumb.”
“Which of us is playing dumb?”
There was a pause. “You know perfectly well what I mean,” Nell said in her normal voice. She gazed seriously at Anna, dimples shadowed by the glow from outside the widow. “I need to be sure you’ll behave.”
“Don’t worry,” Anna said. “I promise not to embarrass you.”
The taxi deposited them east of Madison Avenue before a gleaming white door whose top-hatted sentry greeted their arrival as if it were the single event necessary to complete his happiness. They stepped into a rumbling din that startled Anna like the Naval Yard noise did after the suctioned silence of her measuring shop.
“Better than I expected,” Nell said, sizing up her dress when they’d checked their coats and hats. “Much.”