Manhattan Beach

Despite her triumphant dive, Lieutenant Axel still treats Anna as a second-class employee. He makes her a rigger, responsible for surfacing sunk objects. She senses that “she and Dexter Styles [a]ren’t finished yet” and pines for him (333), both because of the information he might have on her father and because she wants to sleep with him again.

When she spots Dexter’s Cadillac, the two are filled with desire, and she challenges Dexter with the notion that her father is dead. Dexter tells her that he can find out. He tells her that she will need her diving suit and that she will need to dive in an unfamiliar, potentially dangerous place; he will provide the boatload of equipment that she’ll need.

Eddie’s ship docks in Cape Town, South Africa, as the war decisively turns in favor of the Allies. The ship’s African-American bosun refuses to dock, a statement against apartheid. Eddie tells Ensign Wyckoff that after the war, he will return to New York and reunite with his daughter, Anna.

On the ship, Eddie recalls the time when he told Anna that she could no longer accompany him on his missions because he was working for Dexter Styles. Upset, she threatened to punish him by becoming “a floozy like Aunt Brianne” (354). In Dexter’s employment, Eddie traveled to roadhouses and casinos and stored up his findings, which he related to Dexter in the old boathouse. Eddie told Dunellen that he’d found work at a theatre to throw his old friend off the scent.

After cheating on his wife with a prostitute he met on one of Styles’s casino errands, Eddie was disgusted with himself. He was also astonished by another sighting on the same night: Dunellen meeting Tancredo, in his own interest. When Eddie returned home and was invited by then 14-year-old Anna out for a chocolate russe, she was no longer the “garrulous sprite” he remembered but a difficult-to-define girl: “languorous, indifferent […] disciplining herself not to look out the window” (363). He sensed that Anna had lost her innocence while he was out on one of Dexter’s errands. He also learned that Dunellen had been shot dead by someone riding in a passing car.

At 11 o’clock at night, Anna prepares to dive for her father’s remains at the bottom of New York Harbor. Marle and Bascombe, her diving buddies, assist her, as does Dexter. Anna dives first and then Dexter, despite having no diving training, insists on joining her. While they are under water, Anna asks Dexter why they killed her father. Dexter replies that criminal gangsters take revenge “when they’re crossed” (384); however, Dexter has no idea how Eddie crossed the gangsters. They find Eddie’s precious pocket watch from Mr. De Veer, a token that seemingly confirms his death.

Privately, Dexter wonders why the impoverished Kerrigan would have done what he did, especially “when his family needed him so badly” (388). Despite a close shave for Dexter, both he and Anna emerge from the depths alive.

When Dexter returns home, he craves reconciliation with Harriet, but she is preoccupied with the return of Booth, an old beau. Dexter suspects that she has had an affair.

While he attempts to bond with his twin sons, Dexter is called over by a man named Healey who says that a tip has come from Mr. Q. He goes go to the boathouse, where he finds Badger—now called Jimmy and no longer Dexter’s subordinate—waiting. Jimmy lords the change in power structure over Dexter and shoots him in the back.

In the moments before his death, Dexter realizes that Mr. Q. and his father-in-law have collaborated all along. They set up his death because he is off his game, and they consider him a hazard. While he is dying, Dexter recalls how his own men drugged Eddie, tied him up, and dumped into New York Harbor with a chain around him, so his body would sink. Although Dexter’s men assumed that Eddie drowned, Eddie mimicked a “spastic writhing” to make them think that he had gone unconscious. He washed up on Staten Island, attached himself to a ship, and found the lowly job of coal passer. Initially regretful of walking out on his family, Eddie felt overpowered by the bitter feeling of being “superfluous,” even to Anna, who had once adored him.

Eddie’s boat collides with a submarine, and it sinks near Somaliland as the men abandon ship. They wear their life vests and expect to be rescued by a plane. When no planes come, the survivors board a lifeboat and hope to be rescued by a neutral ship. Eddie calculates that they are about 15 days from land.

Anna treasures her father’s watch and sleeps with it under her pillow. She moves out of her apartment into a room owned by a former work colleague’s family. When Anna finds out that Dexter Styles is dead, she vomits. Her fellow divers insist that she go to hospital to get her vitals checked, in case diving has brought on her condition. At the hospital, a nurse asks whether she is married, in case there is a chance that she could be pregnant. Anna remembers that her period has not arrived for two months.

Initially, Anna hopes that diving will end her “trouble” (436). When it doesn’t, she visits Nell, who takes her to a covert abortionist. As the chloroform mask goes on, Anna has visions of a healthy Lydia and stops the procedure in its tracks.

Still at sea, in the lifeboat, Eddie watches his colleagues starve and die, one by one. At the end, only he and the African-American bosun are left, so hungry that they hallucinate. Eddie thinks that he can see Lydia, that he is following her, and that he can hear her voice “coming not in sentences so much as waves, a language he’d once discounted, but now at last could understand” (455). He regrets abandoning his family.

Anna rides out her time with Rose’s family until her pregnancy becomes too visible, and then she sets off. Back home, she finds a letter from her father, whom she had presumed dead; he is in a hospital in British Somaliland. When Anna asks her aunt for advice, Brianne advises Anna to marry a homosexual, or in the worst instance, give the baby up to nuns. Brianne then reveals that she has known Eddie is alive all along; he has been sending her money to pass on to the family. Angry, Anna vows to go to California in a widow’s outfit to make a new life for herself.

Anna persuades Lieutenant Axel to write a letter declaring that “she’s the best goddamn diver in my unit” (477), so that she can get a job in California’s Mare Island. She boards the train with Aunt Brianne—wearing a wedding band—and plans to work until her pregnancy becomes impossible to hide. She will then take leave, have the baby, and leave it in Aunt Brianne’s care. Though she feels sad and nostalgic about leaving New York, Anna sees parallels between her choices and her father’s.

Anna gives birth to Baby Leon and lives with Brianne in San Francisco. Brianne takes to mothering Leon, and Anna happily works as one of the Mare Island divers; Agnes works for the Red Cross. When Eddie visits them for the first time, Anna slaps him. Eventually, after getting used to her father’s presence, “she [takes] her father’s hand” (492), and they reconcile while watching ships pass on the ocean.