“They have the chair,” Eddie said, “and she needs it.”

He hadn’t intended to ask his friend for the money, but now he felt a sudden rise of hope that Dunellen might offer it. He had it, God knew. Might easily have the sum on him now, in his mammoth roll—warmed, like the rosaries, by his fierce body heat.

“Nat could help you with that,” Dunellen said thoughtfully, after a long pause. “I’d have a word, buy you as much time as you need. Take it right off your pay if that would help any.”

It took Eddie a moment, in his half-stupor, to absorb Dunellen’s meaning. He was sending Eddie to the loan shark. And judging by the soft look in his eyes, Dunellen regarded the steer as an act of charity.

Eddie took great care not to react. “I’ll think about it,” he said mildly. If he remained at Sonny’s another minute, Dunellen would read his displeasure and punish him for it. “ ’Night, Dunny,” he said, sliding the Duesenberg’s key across the table. “Thanks.”

When the lunch whistle blew at eleven-thirty, she was itching to get outside. In order to justify leaving the building, she didn’t bring a lunch—a ploy she knew did not fool Mr. Voss. But he couldn’t very well deny a girl food, so he watched grimly as she made for the door while the marrieds unwrapped sandwiches from waxed paper and talked about husbands in boot camp or overseas; who’d had a letter; clues or hunches or dreams as to where their beloveds might be; how desperately frightened they were. More than one girl had wept, describing her terror that a husband or fiancé would not return. Anna couldn’t listen. The talk stirred in her an uncomfortable anger at these girls, who seemed so weak. Thankfully, Mr. Voss had put an end to that topic during working hours, prompting an unlikely trill of gratitude in Anna. Now they sang songs from their colleges while they worked: Hunter, St. Joseph’s, Brooklyn College, whose song Anna finally learned—not having bothered to in the year she was a student there.

Your supervisor doesn’t mind you going out?”

“He likes me,” Nell said, an explanation Anna guessed she must employ—perhaps correctly—to account for much of what happened to her.

“Ours likes us to stay in,” Anna said, aware that she was playacting a little, invoking a version of Mr. Voss that was slightly outdated. Hanger-on seemed to be the part she was auditioning for, perhaps the only one available.

“Try lipstick,” Nell said. “Works wonders.”

“He isn’t that type.”

Nell’s face was all sunny curves; she looked perpetually on the verge of laughter. Yet her blue gaze was rife with calculation. “There’s no other,” she said.

Anna ate her spaghetti and meatballs with her eyes fixed on the water. She was waiting for the diver to surface, but he did not. He was breathing underwater. She tried to picture him at the bottom of the bay—would he walk or swim? What was down there? Jealousy and longing spasmed through her. “Would they ever let us do that?” she murmured.

“Would you want to?”

“Wouldn’t you?”

Nell gave a disbelieving laugh. “They’d never let us. But they might just make us. If the men keep leaving in droves.”

Angels are the best liars, that’s what I think,” Nell said morosely. After a moment she asked, “Are you an angel, Anna?”

Anna was aware of the rattle of fall leaves over the pavement, the gardenia smell of Nell’s perfume. No one had ever asked her that question before. Everyone simply presumed that she was.

“No,” she said. “I’m not an angel.” Her eyes met Nell’s, and they understood each other.

“A picture. Maybe the drugstore.” The studied way she avoided his eyes told him boys would be present. Natalie was boy-crazy, and Tabby had grown prettier than Dexter would have liked. Not that he wished ugliness on his only daughter, but showy beauty was an invitation to dependence. He’d have liked her to have the hidden kind, visible only to those who looked closely. She’d made a lapel pin out of an aspirin box painted over with red nail varnish, and called it a Wish Box. Apparently, there was a secret wish inside, written on a slip of paper. The idea of Tabby maintaining a secret vexed him a little.

[...] while Dexter’s power derived from physical force, the old man’s had been distilled into abstraction. The Berringers were wearing top hats to the opera when Dexter’s people were still copulating behind hay bales in the old land. He liked the thought that his own power would one day be refined into translucence, with no memory of the blood and earth that had generated it.

“Ah. Your supervisor. Mr. . . . Voss.” He drew out the name as though its syllables were the last bits of meat he was sucking from a bone. Then he grinned. “I imagine he’s just as eager to please you as you are to please him.”

The mockery blindsided Anna, but the crude power of the insult expressed itself more slowly, like a burn. It made the lieutenant seem unhinged. She noticed an unnatural hush quivering around them in the small building, and wondered if he was performing for a hidden audience.

Coldly, she said, “Is there a test you give people to see if they can dive?”

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.

Most nights, a girl with thin blond hair awaited Bascombe outside the Sands Street gate. Anna gleaned from his conversation with the other divers that she was his fiancée, Ruby, whom he’d met after arriving in Brooklyn last summer. For a Brooklyn girl, Ruby was bizarrely ill-equipped for winter, shivering in a thin coat, then lassoing Bascombe in a lariat of sinewy arms and hanging at his neck, her forehead pressed to his. Anna liked Bascombe, which was partly to say that she liked herself in his company. Their flat, unvalenced exchanges were the closest she had ever come to feeling like a man. Bascombe in the grip of those greedy arms would be another matter, but Anna felt no envy. She had the Bascombe she wanted.