Manhattan Beach

by Jennifer Egan

Never part with a fact unless you’ve no choice.

came back by steamer.”

but he was a nobody of the highest order.

“Bagman” meant exactly what it sounded like: the sap who ferried a sack containing something (money, of course, but it wasn’t his business to know) between men who should not rightly associate.

Dunellen was childless, an oddity in this milieu, where the average man had between four and ten offspring.

He carried a rosary in each pocket. “I should pray for her more myself,” Eddie said. “Sometimes it’s harder to ask God for your own.”

was a restless, desperate wish for something to change. Anything. Even if the change brought a certain danger. He’d take danger over sorrow every time.

The Berringers were wearing top hats to the opera when Dexter’s people were still copulating behind hay bales in the old land.

family man was doubly reckless to have broken rules that everyone in the shadow world knew like a catechism.

There were no exceptions. Amazing what trouble men had, believing that. Everyone thought he was the exception.

Sensing the need of a fresh topic, Dexter said, “Say, I was pleased to see so many girls at work in your Naval Yard, Admiral.” “Ah, I’m glad you noticed,” the commandant said. “The girls have surpassed our highest expectations. You’d be surprised—I know I was—they actually have some advantages. They’re smaller, more limber; they can fit inside spaces the men can’t. And housework makes them dexterous, all that knitting and sewing, darning socks, mincing vegetables…” “We treat our girls too gently, that’s a fact,” declared a dyspeptic-looking

It was Dexter who had divined, even before Prohibition ended in ’33, that rather than howl like scalded dogs, as so many in the underworld were doing, they should open a series of legitimate clubs that would cleanse Mr. Q.’s gargantuan liquor trade earnings.

And felt again the sting of his father’s slap, the wet ache in his eyes.

Anna knew to keep her back turned until she heard the rustle of paper, the weight of a parcel sliding across a desk. A drawer whispering shut. Afterward there would be a rush of ease, everyone suddenly jolly. What had he been doing, exactly? Was it dangerous? Here was the mystery that seemed now to have been flashing coded signals at Anna from behind every Agatha Christie and Rex Stout and Raymond Chandler she’d read.

Apparently, she was the last girl in New York who didn’t smoke.

Everything that had happened between her and Dexter Styles seemed now to have been leading her to this revelation.

the noble air of a profile on a coin,

He was a bagman, after all.

Eddie knew he was sluicing the corruption by delivering the boodling payoffs that sustained it—to aldermen, state senators, police superintendents, rival pier bosses, and back again, at different times. Yet he maintained an observational stance—he wasn’t really doing what he was doing; he was watching it.

There was always a man behind the man, and another man behind that one—all the way up to God, Eddie supposed.

Among their shared irreverences was a disdain for golf—Dexter

he saw it as sloth masquerading as sport.

most men on ships had left other lives behind. The war had made him ordinary.

“You’re a lawyer, so I hear,” Eddie said. “State attorney’s office. You, Ed?” “Oh, this and that.”

the ancient man everyone referred to as “the skipper” began making noises that seemed to approximate speech.

The sun had set, rinsing the sky in pink.

all that remained of the day was an orange blaze on the western horizon.

not a rumor of booze in the house.

there was a disconcerting calm about him.

Apparently it’s true that “The uniform makes the man.”

One thing was certain: Rose had been wrong about the world becoming small again. Or at least it would not be the same small world it had been. Too much had changed.