Manhattan Beach

Dexter takes Tabatha and his mentally troubled sister-in-law, Bitsy, to Naval Yard. Dexter is at first troubled by the flirtation between Tabatha and her cousin Grady: He realizes that Tabatha has come to see Grady and not the working girls. When Dexter hears sex noises, he worries that it is his daughter and Grady; however, it is Bitsy and his other brother-in-law, George.

After they have given blood, Anna’s colleague Rose warns her of the dangers of being favored by Mr. Voss and the ensuing damage to her reputation. Anna cannot locate Nell at Naval Yard, which troubles her.

Dexter bumps into Anna, “the girl he’d been looking for, the one who had told him about the Naval Yard in the first place” and offers to drive her home (157). She asks for a ride another time to help transport Lydia to the beach. 

Anna goes to Lieutenant Axel to ask about becoming a diver. His assistants, Mr. Greer and Mr. Katz, put her into the 200-pound diving dress and implore her to walk in it. She passes this first part of the test, and also unties the knot they have given her, but the two men forbid her from diving because she is a woman. Anna decides that “the lieutenant wouldn’t break her; she would break him” (170).

Dexter regrets his promise to ferry Anna and Lydia to the beach. When he arrives at their apartment to carry Lydia downstairs, he notes its femininity and the lack of a male presence. He feels uncomfortable with Lydia at first, and he feels like Anna is the one in control of the situation when she rides in the front of the car with Lydia. Anna, who has removed any photos that could connect her to Eddie from their home, keeps her real identity secret.

In the car, Dexter offers Anna a good-paying job in his dubiously legal businesses. He takes the girls to Manhattan Beach, and Lydia is fully awake and chatty. Anna feels grateful while Dexter loses track of time.

After a brief interlude of good health, Lydia becomes increasingly lethargic and dies. Both Anna and Agnes are heartbroken, and Lydia’s absence reminds them of Eddie’s disappearance. Anna surmises that “he must be dead” (201), and Agnes packs away his things and changes the locks on the doors.

Agnes decides to return her childhood home on a Minnesota farm. She asks Anna to come with her, but Anna refuses, still intent on pursuing a diving career. After seeing off her mother at Grand Central Station, Anna takes a walk through central Manhattan and remembers her father speaking to her about how he remembered Manhattan as a boy. It’s almost as if “after years of distance, Anna’s father returned to her” (210). 

Dexter has a gangster boss, Mr. Q., with whom he has worked for 30 years. Dexter only visits Mr. Q. four times a year. Mr. Q.’s cover business is food production, and during his meeting, Dexter has to bottle beans.

Mr. Q., who made his fortune as a Prohibition-era bootlegger, respects Dexter. He advised Dexter, after the repeal of Prohibition in 1933, to open a franchise of legitimate nightclubs. Dexter’s advantageous marriage and changing of his “tongue-twisting name in favor of a short, stylish one” made him a “figurehead” in Mr. Q’s enterprise (220). Dexter’s one “misjudgment” had been Ed Kerrigan, whose involvement precipitated people getting hurt. Mr. Q. reminds Dexter of this failure.

Dexter imagines how the United States will emerge as a world leader after the war. He believes that if they buy war bonds at a discount price and resell them through their business, both he and Mr. Q. will make a significant profit.

When Dexter drives away, he goes to Coney Island and remembers his father’s warning that becoming involved with Mr. Q. was synonymous with being owned by him. Dexter dismissed the warning at the time it was given, but he now feels its full force. 

At diving training, Lieutenant Axel calls Anna back to intimidate the male trainees; he notes her ability to wear the 200-pound suit and to untie a knot with a three-fingered glove. He continues to be dismissive of her throughout the training, though, and she and an African-American trainee called Marle—both of whom are outsiders—strive to avoid one another.

When it is time to do her first dive underwater, Anna reaches the sea bed and hammers pieces of wood into a box. She struggles to climb up the ladder with the weight of her suit, but she eventually makes it up, along with another student named Bascombe and Marle. Lieutenant Axel is “bewildered” by her success.

Now living alone, Anna feels solitude engulf her like a “macabre heartbeat.” The usual comforts of books and music do not work so well. She thinks back to her father and wonders: “What had he been doing, exactly? Was it dangerous?” (238). She wonders about his association with Dexter and decides she cannot square the bootlegger with the man who took Lydia to the ocean. 

After she qualifies as a diver, Anna meets Mr. Voss, her old boss, who wants to take her out to dinner. He takes her home to clean up, and she dons her mother’s “off-the-shoulder strapless dress of sea-green satin” to resemble a “glamour girl” (253). Anna and Mr. Voss flirt playfully, and he takes her to dine in Manhattan and then on to Moonshine’s. At Moonshine’s, she encounters Nell, who gave up work in Naval Yard to become the kept mistress of callous Mr. Hammond. Nell tells Anna that the couple has a contemptuous relationship and that she another lover on the side, Marco. While the two women are in the powder room, a waiter addresses Anna as Miss Feeney and implores her to visit Dexter. Dexter asks after Lydia and is saddened to learn that she has died. When he insists on driving Anna home, Anna tells Mr. Voss that she has run into a friend of her mother’s.

In Dexter’s car, Anna gives an account of the days following their visit to Manhattan Beach. In the dark, she feels “a new understanding opened between them” (265).

Overcome with lust for Anna, Dexter drives her to the old boathouse near Bay Ridge, where he does his dodgiest business deals. They make love with feverish abandon and in the morning, though they would wish to continue, Anna feels that she should go home to save her reputation.

In the car, she confesses that her true name is Anna Kerrigan, and that Eddie Kerrigan, her father, disappeared five and a half years ago. Dexter does not believe her at first and tries to pay her off. He says that if he disappeared, he would wish his own daughter to “stay as far away as possible […] to keep her safe” (275). Anna, furious, gets out of the car. 

Eddie Kerrigan is in San Francisco on New Year’s Day, 1943. He is third mate on a ship called the Elizabeth Seaman. When he boards the ship, he has a letter from Ingrid, the young German widow he met in San Francisco a week earlier, though he “could hardly picture her anymore. Faraway things became theoretical, then imaginary, then hard to imagine. They ceased to exist” (296). After reading the letter, however, he reflects that “everything he’d left behind” was still there, and “its vanishing had only been a trick” (298).

Eddie lapses into a stream of consciousness. He hears Anna’s voice as it was before he left home. He travels back to Lydia’s birth and remembers struggling to accept his disabled daughter, as he thought “the alloy of beauty and contortion” in Lydia suggested she had been cursed by something he’d done (302).

Finding himself unable to stay at home alone with Lydia while Agnes danced, he implored Agnes to stop working and went off to try his luck with Dunellen in shipping. Then, he began doing “errands” for Dunellen, serving as his go-between. He took Anna with him and combined the errands with fun activities, like going to the hippo-drome. In quiet moments, when Dunellen had no work for him, Eddie learned that “a single man controlled much of the gaming in New York City” (307). Through a series of “hairpin turns,” Eddie found Styles, and Dexter invited Eddie to come to his home—accompanied by his children. Eddie hoped that Dexter would turn his luck around.