“Is your friend an officer?” he asked, thinking, There is probably nothing in the bag, a comb, a lipstick, a key to a door.

“A.B.,” said the girl, then, “Able-bodied seaman.” She spoke as though practicing a foreign phrase.

“He’s from the West Coast?” Fern asked, a touch of interest in her voice.

“New York.”

Fern looked meaningfully at Max. “I heard a vile story about Bull Curran,” she said in a low voice. “Vile!”

“Oh, yes,” the girl said eagerly. “He’s president of the National Maritime Union.”

Fern grimaced.

“Let it go,” Max said coldly, then to the girl, “It’s not a passenger ship then, is it? A freighter?”

“I think so,” the girl replied, then bravely, taking a chance, “Yes. It must be a freighter. But there are tankers, too. It could be a tanker.”

He couldn’t place her accent. It wasn’t uneducated, yet it didn’t tell him anything about her either. He couldn’t account for her at all. Why did he want to account for her? Fern, stupidly wary, was speaking of organizational matters. He caught the drift. She might as well use pig Latin. He was suddenly aware he was squinting and he realized, surprised, that they were already on the coastal road, traveling through the glare of sky and sea.

Fern went on and on…the Hollywood comrades preoccupied her, she was saying. They were so unstable, so superficial. And some of the European refugees—those German Jews—who had slipped into the film industry had brought with them the poison of the Social-Democratic party, unsettling the soft-brained New York swimming-pool Jews with their hysterical, vicious anti-Bolshevik attacks on Comrade Stalin’s tactics.

Max’s mother had said, last August after the Hitler-Stalin pact, “So now you’ve swallowed Hitler too! What a digestive system my son has!”

He had argued with her, argued against the sardonic stare of those narrow blue eyes, but then, knowing his passionate self-defense to be familial, not political, had given it up. Eva, who had been with him, had gone on shouting, waving her hands while his mother watched her imperturbably. Max knew she thought Eva “common,” even worse, dull. But she doted on her grandson. When Thomas was born, Mrs. Shore stopped arguing with Eva; she just listened, waiting for the baby to be brought to her arms. Max had been happy then—he had watched the baby for hours. Yet there had been some reservation in him, a touch of dread as he gazed at his child. This morning, just before he and Fern had left, he’d taken Thomas to the neighbor who often cared for him when he and Eva were away. Making the practical, ordinary arrangements in the neighbor’s oilcloth-smelling kitchen, he’d felt a great wrench as though he might never see the child again.