Manhattan Beach

“Would she pipe up about having spent the day at Manhattan Beach? Eddie didn’t dare look at her. With his long silence, he willed Anna to be silent, too.” 

Here, Egan shows how Anna has gained an instinct for the secrecy of her father’s missions. At the young age of nearly 12, she is able to read his cues and respond accordingly.

“Each time Anna moved from her father’s world to her mother and Lydia’s, she felt as if she’d shaken free of one life for a deeper one. And when she returned to her father, holding his hand as they ventured out into the city, it was her mother and Lydia she shook off, often forgetting them completely.” 

Anna moves between the parallel worlds of both her mother and Lydia and her father. She sees no overlap between the worlds, and both afford her the opportunity to take on a different identity. 

“Anna felt her own distance from something urgent, elemental […] It was what had drawn her to the Naval Yard last summer, when word first came out that girls would be hired. Yet even here the war seemed maddeningly abstract, at too great a distance to be felt.” 

Nineteen-year-old Anna longs for excitement and the feeling that she is part of the wartime action. Even at Naval Yard, however, measuring ship parts in Mr. Voss’s factory, she feels distant from the real action that is taking place in Europe, and therefore, she feels frustrated.

“A vibration seemed to flow from inside Lydia, as if she were a radio tuned to a distant frequency. She knew all of Anna’s secrets; Anna had dropped them into her ears like coins down a well.” 

Although disabled Lydia cannot talk and understand in the usual way, Anna trusts her with the most private aspects of herself. The simile of coins down a well relates to desire, and many of Anna’s desires feel inexpressible in a world that expects girls to behave in a certain way.

“For the rest of high school and during her first year at Brooklyn College, Anna tried to impersonate a girl who knew nothing. How would that girl react when a boy backed her into a wall and tried to kiss her? […] The breadth of her experience was perilous; if boys had an inkling of all she’d done, she would be cast out.” 

Anna’s early sexual experience at the age of 14 fills her with shame. As a result, she retreats from sexuality to portray a semblance of virtue aligned with the morals of the time.

“Lieutenant Axel led the way to a bench at the top of the West Street Pier, where a diving suit lay folded. Its bulk and stiffness made it appear sentient, like a person doubled over. Anna quickened at the sight of it.”  

The diving suit’s animate, anthropomorphic qualities signal that it will give its wearer a change of identity. The quickening that Anna feels indicates her recognition of herself as a diver and her eagerness to inhabit this new role.

“There was an area in every knot that would yield when you pushed on it hard and long enough. Anna closed her eyes, her hands delivering her to a purely tactile realm that seemed to exist outside the rest of life. It was like pushing through a wall to find a hidden chamber just beyond it.” 

The knot that Anna has to untie as part of her test to become a diver, reveals her extraordinary tactile method of problem solving. The knot also acts as a metaphor for Lieutenant Axel, who seems impenetrable and unyielding to Anna’s requests. 

“Now she sat up independently, holding her head away from the stand. The Landrace fell from her face as she confronted the sea, lips moving, like a mythical creature whose imprecations could summon storms and winged gods, her wild blue eyes fixed on eternity.” 

This passage illustrates Lydia’s transformation on Manhattan Beach. The sea air revives her and makes her physical abnormalities take on a mythical scope. She transcends her mortal body and its limitations to become eternal.

“It came to Agnes that this was the very station—perhaps the very platform—where she had arrived, at 17, to seek her fortune. As she waved, she thought, this is the end of the story.” 

In this point of symmetry, Agnes leaves on a train similar to the one that brought her to New York City from her hometown in Minnesota. Agnes returns home, leaving behind the dramatic world that defined her adult life for something that she hopes will be purer.

“After years of distance, Anna’s father returned to her. She couldn’t see him, but she felt the knotty pain of his hands in her armpits as he slung off the ground to carry her […] His hand was a socket she affixed hers to always, wherever they went, even when she didn’t care to. Anna stopped walking, stunned by the power of these impressions. Without thinking, she lifted her fingers to her face, half expecting the warm, bitter smell of his tobacco.” 

As she is walking by 42nd Street, Anna is overwhelmed by the physical memory of her father; she thinks she can hear, feel, and smell him, the way she did when they were close. 

“He’s an old man, Dexter thought, recalling his boss’s labored breathing on the stoop this afternoon. He won’t live forever. And felt again the sting of his father’s slap, the wet ache in his eyes.” 

This passage reflects Dexter’s unease regarding his dealings with Mr. Q.. He tries to reassure himself that his boss is mortal and aging, at the same time remembering his own father’s dire warning that Mr. Q. will own Dexter and has the potential to make Dexter disappear if crossed. The warning, encapsulated in a visceral memory of a slap and tears, is something that lasts to this day. 

“His hectoring worked upon Anna like smelling salts. Or maybe it was having rested. Or breathed fresh air. Whatever the reason, she climbed the ladder. One step, then another. She was stronger than she knew.” 

The short sentences following Anna’s triumphant ability to pass the diving test reflect her exhilarated exhaustion. Bascombe’s masculine hectoring works like feminine smelling salts for sharpening her conviction.

“The night was everywhere reaching and black; it filled the car and surrounded Anna. But her dread of the dark had vanished. Without knowing when or how, she had released herself to it—disappeared through a crack in the night. Not a soul knew where to find her. Not even Dexter Styles.” 

In Dexter’s car, on the way to their boathouse tryst, Anna finds liberation in the darkness she once feared. In it, she can disappear, reinvent herself, and give in to her desires.

“The name filled the room as if she’d sung it out. Or as if someone else had. For hearing it—her father’s name—seemed to vault Anna instantly outside her debauched circumstances. Her father was Eddie Kerrigan. Everything that had happened between her and Dexter Styles seemed now to have been leading her to this revelation.” 

In their post-coital car chat, when they are both still lusting for each other, Anna reveals her true identity to Dexter. She posits that her missing father is at the core of the sexual charge between them, as the desire to find Eddie supersedes her lust for Dexter. 

“He’d forgotten Ingrid—could hardly picture her anymore. Faraway things became theoretical, then imaginary, then hard to imagine. They ceased to exist.”  

Eddie, who is still alive, copes with all he has left behind—his first family, then his German sweetheart, Ingrid—by abstracting them from his reality. This way, he does not have to deal with the pain of loss.

“Luck was the single thing that could rearrange facts. It could open a door where there was no door.” 

Although in this passage, Eddie regrets Dunellen’s rigged games piers, which deprived hard workers of their luck, his comments on luck apply to the book as a whole. Luck helps Eddie stay alive, both when Dexter’s men try to kill him and when his ship sinks near Somaliland. 

“Grady seemed taller than he had even a few weeks before, his gaze nearly level with Dexter’s own. Moonlight touched the brass buttons of his uniform. Dexter felt his throat tighten as he shook his nephew’s hand. For all his confidence that Grady would survive, he’d an eerie intimation that he wouldn’t see him again.” 

The romanticized image of the young officer in his moonlit uniform, gives over to the haunting premonition that Dexter will never see him again. Grady’s fate remains unknown; Dexter’s own demise will be the reason he never sets eyes on Grady again. 

“Something had changed about Anna, permanently, fundamentally—he was certain of it. He’d looked away from his daughter—looked where Styles paid him to look—and she’d gone astray.” 

Eddie realizes that, in paying so much attention to his work for Dexter Styles, he has neglected to keep up with his daughter. Away from his vigilance, she gets away. The permanent change he mentions may refers to Anna’s loss of virginity at age 14.

“In that incandescence she barely made out the familiar engraving of a stranger’s initials. Her father’s watch […] ‘I found him,’ she said. ‘He’s here.’” 

This apparent finding of Eddie’s remains underwater is a false bottom for Anna; in reality, Eddie is alive, his whereabouts a mystery. The separation of Eddie from his watch, which belonged to the stranger who helped Eddie as a child, symbolizes the stripping away of Eddie’s former identity. 

“‘You’re off your game. Father said so, too.’ She broke away, took a cigarette from the silver case on her bureau, and placed one between the bright stripes of her lips.” 

The events leading up to Dexter’s murder in the boathouse signal that he has been losing control in every area of his life, including the domestic realm. Harriet, Dexter’s high-born wife, coolly informs him that she, her father, and everyone else know that he is off his game—a warning that he has been outplayed. 

“Nell opened a copy of Silver Screen, and Anna looked over her shoulder at the blondes: Betty Grable, Veronica Lake, Lana Turner, all of whom once seemed like possible versions of Lydia.” 

In the waiting room for the abortionist, Anna is confronted with memorabilia that describe actresses of the same physical type as Lydia. She has an intimation of what her blonde younger sister could have looked like and aspired to, had she been well. These reminders of Lydia make Anna change her mind about the abortion. 

“He recalled his younger daughter—her mind locked inside a body condemned to stillness. His discovery of their likeness pierced Eddie with such intensity that he cried out, although no sound came. Mashed against the raft, longing to float, he remembered Lydia in her bath, her relief and laughter at the pleasure of lying suspended in warm water […] And for the first time, the only time, the crime of his abandonment assailed Eddie, and he cried out […] as he groped for the child he had abandoned—the family he had abandoned.” 

Physically identifying with Lydia in his near death experience, Eddie finally feels bonded to her and regrets his abandonment of Lydia and his family. The groping gesture indicates his wish to grasp that which he left behind, and it will propel him toward survival and redemption.

“She had consigned that life to the past. Its telescopic fading was the price of hurtling forward into whatever smoldering promise issued from that orange blaze. […] As the train roared west, Anna sat bolt upright. She had thought of her father. At last she understood: This is how he did it.” 

As Anna leaves behind her life in New York’s Naval Yard, she experiences a surge of optimism about her future in the unknown West. She also identifies with what she believes to be her father’s abandonment of his former life.