Esther studied the young woman who cradled her granddaughter. She didn’t like the feeling of being indebted to Anna, but she supposed she was nonetheless. Without being told anything, Anna had known to gather the family’s things, remove Gussie from the beach, bring her back to the apartment, and offer her whatever comfort she could while Esther and Joseph attended to the business of saying good-bye to Florence. Anna had demonstrated the kind of sure-headedness that Esther had always hoped to instill in her own daughters.
Last fall, when Joseph had proposed bringing Anna to the United States, Esther had felt powerless to stop him. Anna was the daughter of a woman named Inez, someone Joseph now told her he had grown up alongside in Hungary but whom he had, interestingly, never once managed to mention in twenty-nine years of marriage.
Inez’s letter, littered with German stamps, had arrived in the foyer of their Atlantic Avenue house like a small hand grenade last October. Joseph was at the plant, so Esther had slid the envelope open, too curious about its contents to wait until he got home. She had been disappointed when she was unable to identify the sender’s handwriting or interpret the signature, much less read the letter’s contents, which were written in Joseph’s native Hungarian.
When Joseph had finally arrived home and read the letter from start to finish, he gave Esther only the barest of translations. Inez’s first husband had been killed in the war, and in the aftermath, Inez had moved from the embattled borderlands of Austria-Hungary to Vienna with Anna. There, she had met and married Paul, who was studying at the university. When Paul secured a teaching position in Berlin, they had moved to Prussia and eventually naturalized but everything was in jeopardy now that the Third Reich had come to power. Last summer, the family’s citizenship had been revoked, and a few months later, Paul was let go from his position. As for Anna, she hadn’t secured a spot at any of the German universities to which she’d applied the previous year, and it was Inez and Paul’s sincere wish that she get out of Germany before things got any worse.
“What else does she say?” Esther had asked, glancing at the three-page letter, written in tight script.
“That’s all,” said Joseph, unable to meet her gaze, and Esther had known right away that he was lying. She could have summarized what Joseph had told her in five good sentences.
Over the next several months, Joseph helped Inez identify several American universities that might be good options for Anna. In some cases, he’d even written away for the application materials himself. Once Anna’s application had been submitted to New Jersey State Teachers College, Joseph picked up the phone, calling anyone he knew with a connection to the school or its admissions director. Esther had thought Anna sounded smart enough to get into the school on her own merit, but Joseph told her he wanted to leave nothing to chance. Even when the acceptance came through, Joseph kept working, turning his full attention to helping Inez and Paul secure all the necessary documentation for Anna’s student visa application. He offered to sponsor her, and when the visa was granted faster than expected, to put Anna up for the summer.
Esther told herself to be gracious, both about Anna’s stay and the help she knew Joseph was now providing Inez and Paul, who were also eager to get out of Germany. The situation over there did indeed sound dire, and Esther knew several families at Beth Kehillah that were trying to help relatives, in Germany and elsewhere, immigrate to the United States.
The difference, Esther reminded herself, was that Anna wasn’t a relative. She was barely even a friend. When Esther and Joseph had taken her to the Jewish Consumptive Relief Society’s fund-raiser, back in April, it had been hard to know how to introduce her. This is Anna, the daughter of an old friend of Joseph’s. Was that what Inez and Joseph had been to each other? Just old friends? Anytime Esther tried to bring up Inez, Joseph bristled.
Gussie coughed and turned over in her sleep, and Esther watched as Anna adjusted her own body to accommodate the little girl’s.
“I’m home,” Esther said aloud but Anna didn’t answer. She breathed slowly in and out, her eyes closed, one arm stretched behind her head. What Esther wouldn’t have given to be trapped in a sleep so deep that she couldn’t be woken.
* * *
By a quarter to six the next morning, Esther was waiting in a chair outside the office of the hospital superintendent, Nellie McLoughlin. Esther had been inside the office once before, last summer, when they had needed to decide what to do with Fannie’s baby, but this early in the morning, the first-floor office was shut up tight.
Esther wasn’t one for putting women in charge of things, but it was hard to find a person in all of Atlantic City who didn’t think McLoughlin was a skilled administrator and the right person for the hospital’s top job. McLoughlin had run the hospital’s nursing school for a decade and had played a large and visible role in the hospital’s recent fund-raising campaign, which resulted in the construction of the new wing.
“Mrs. Adler,” said a stiff voice that Esther realized belonged to a woman standing directly in front of her. She looked up from her lap to find Nellie McLoughlin, taller and more imposing than she remembered, staring down at her.
“Miss McLoughlin,” said Esther as she stood on liquid legs.
“To what do I owe the pleasure of this early morning visit?” McLoughlin asked as she slid her key into the lock.
Esther waited until McLoughlin pushed the door open and turned on the office’s overhead light before following her across the threshold, “Do you have a moment?”
“Certainly,” McLoughlin said as she placed her handbag in an empty drawer of a tall filing cabinet, then unpinned her hat and set it inside the drawer as well. She gestured toward two chairs that sat across from a modest, metal desk. “Is everything all right with Fannie?”
“It’s not Fannie,” said Esther. “It’s her sis—” She couldn’t get the word out. The room was too hot. She yanked at the collar of her dress, tried to undo the top button. Couldn’t do that either. “Sis.” It was as if, with the utterance of this one little word, she had rediscovered that Florence was dead. Esther bent at the waist, unable to breathe. She could hear McLoughlin asking if she was all right, could feel a hand on her shoulder. Esther took a series of short breaths, tried to fill her lungs, but couldn’t find enough air. She began to truly panic then, heard someone yelling for a nurse. Was it McLoughlin? This was not how she wanted this meeting to go.
“I’m fine,” she tried to say as the room grew crowded with people. There was McLoughlin, a nurse, later a man in a white coat. She focused on the small floral pattern of her own dress. The flowers were pastel blue and yellow and pink, and they danced in front of her eyes.
“I’d recommend a sedative,” Esther heard the man say. “Something to calm her down, let her rest for a while.”
“Mrs. Adler,” said McLoughlin. “Do you hear me?”
Esther nodded, tried to swim back up to the surface of her own consciousness. There was no time for any of this. She had to talk to McLoughlin, had to protect Fannie.
“I’m all right,” she whispered.
“Can you sit up?”
Esther slowly raised her head from her knees, looked around the office, and eventually made eye contact with McLoughlin. She was mortified by her own behavior. “I’m sorry.”
“You have nothing to be sorry for,” said McLoughlin, leaning against the edge of her desk. “Tell me what’s wrong.”
Esther looked at the doctor who was standing just a few feet away from the two women, then looked back at McLoughlin. The superintendent nodded her head toward the door, and the doctor disappeared through it.
“Yesterday,” Esther began. She didn’t know what to say next. She breathed in and out, slowly. “Fannie’s sister died.”
McLoughlin sank into the chair beside Esther’s. “I’m so sorry.”
Esther began to cry in earnest now. It was so unlike her but all of her habits and predilections seemed entirely baseless now. How many more times in her life would s
he have to repeat that sentence or something similar? Fannie’s sister died. My younger daughter died. One of my daughters died when she was young. If Esther lived until she was an old woman, she would still be explaining Florence’s absence, trying to understand it herself.
“She drowned off States Avenue. Yesterday afternoon.”
“No—”
Esther nodded her head, wiped at her wet cheeks with her hands.
McLoughlin handed her a handkerchief. “She was a very good swimmer, wasn’t she?”
“Incredible,” said Esther.
They sat together for quite some time, listening to the sounds of the hospital coming awake. A door opened and closed, a telephone rang in the distance, a pair of heels clicked up the stairs. Finally, McLoughlin spoke, “You’re not here because you want my help telling Fannie.”
Esther shook her head and blew her nose into the handkerchief. “I don’t want to tell her anything.”
“You’re worried about an early labor?”
“Do you think I’m being irrational?”
“Not at all. It’s a real risk. Particularly after last summer.” McLoughlin stood and walked around to the other side of her desk, where she pulled open a drawer and removed a pad of paper. “So, let’s figure out how to do this.”
“I think we need to move her to a private room,” said Esther. “Somewhere where we can keep better tabs on who comes and goes. Her father and I can pay the difference.”
“How many people know about… Florence?” asked McLoughlin. Esther could tell she had been about to say something else, was about to use a less sanitized word like drowning or death and had stopped herself. Esther’s confidence in McLoughlin grew.
“A lot of the lifeguards. The women in the Hebrew burial society.”
“No one on the hospital staff?”
“Not to my knowledge. She was treated at the hospital tent at Virginia Avenue.” McLoughlin scribbled something on the pad.
“And there’s no announcement in the paper?” the superintendent asked.
Esther reached into her handbag, removed the morning’s newspaper, and handed it to McLoughlin. Samuel hadn’t managed to kill the story, only to soften its blow. On the front page was the headline GIRL DIES WHILE BATHING OFF STATES AV.
“Do they identify her?” McLoughlin said.
Florence was described as a local girl and a strong swimmer but was never named, thank God. “No,” Esther whispered, “but an astute reader might very well figure it out.”
McLoughlin skimmed the article, then began to write. On one sheet of paper, she listed the names of the doctors and nurses she planned to let in on the secret. “Lucky for us, the preceptors graduate tomorrow at noon. And the new class won’t start until the end of the summer.”
“Preceptors?”
“Students,” said McLoughlin. “Doesn’t matter. It’s just fewer people who have to know.”
On another sheet of paper, McLoughlin spelled out the accommodations the staff would make to limit Fannie’s access to the outside world. They’d move her to a private room, of course, but they’d also remove the room’s radio and limit Fannie’s ability to visit the sun-room, where a telephone and a radio had been installed for the use of all the women on the ward.
“Can someone read her mail?” Esther asked.
It was the only request McLoughlin seemed to bristle at. “I’d prefer we just stop her mail entirely. We can deliver anything we receive to you, and you can decide what to do with it.”
By the time they finalized the plan, it was half-past seven. McLoughlin tore the papers from the pad and folded them in half and then in quarters. “I’d better start my rounds or someone’s going to put a copy of the Atlantic City Press on Fannie’s breakfast tray.”
Esther snatched up her handbag and stood to go. “I’ll be by to visit later. After—”
McLoughlin eyed her mournfully. “Until then, you are not to worry. She’s in good hands.”
Esther knew she should thank McLoughlin, wanted to even, but when she went to say something, she found she had no words left.
* * *
Joseph arrived home an hour before the burial.
When he walked through the door, he looked pale and exhausted. His already thin hair was flat, his hazel eyes—normally bright and gleaming—had turned a sludge brown, and the dark circles under them looked unlikely to ever be erased. Esther wrapped her arms around him and they stood like that for a long time, not moving, barely breathing.
“Are you all right?” she finally asked.
“I can’t,” he said quietly as he unlocked her arms and moved toward the bedroom, where she had already laid his best suit out on the bed. She tried to swallow the rebuff, to remind herself that they each hurt in their own ways.
Isaac cut his arrival close, showing up at the apartment just a few minutes ahead of the rabbi. Gussie flew into his arms and refused to be put down, clutching his neck that much tighter every time he tried to release her. Ordinarily, Esther might have told her to stop being ridiculous but today she just sat quietly on the sofa and watched the scene unfold, her eyes watering as she thought about how Joseph had spent the last eighteen hours with his own daughter.
Esther couldn’t believe that Isaac was really going to wear his beige sport coat to the burial. It had no lines to speak of and looked about as sharp as a paper bag on Isaac’s tall frame. Were Fannie and Isaac’s circumstances so dire, the salary Joseph paid Isaac so insufficient, that he couldn’t have purchased something more appropriate this morning? A lightweight worsted suit in gray or blue would have been useful to own under any circumstance, and Sam Sloteroff would surely have given him a good price on it.
Despite the jacket, Isaac was a handsome man. He had a high forehead and a strong jaw and teeth that were unnaturally straight. At thirty-three, his dark hair was starting to recede, but Esther imagined that he’d remain an attractive man, even when it was gone.
Last evening, Esther had telephoned Fannie and Isaac’s apartment three times before Isaac picked up. When he finally answered, near midnight, he had seemed out of breath, and Esther wondered briefly if he’d been drinking. He told her he’d been asleep, which explained the endless ringing and his hard breathing, but not his stoic reaction when she told him that Florence was dead. Isaac asked so few questions, demanded so few answers, that Esther found it difficult to believe he could have possibly heard her. He’d known Florence since she was twelve years old. Surely the duration of their relationship, if nothing else, demanded a real reaction.
It wasn’t until she proposed keeping Florence’s death from Fannie that Isaac seemed to come fully awake.
“What will we tell her?” he had asked, his voice unsteady.
“Nothing. Or rather, the ordinary things,” said Esther. “That she’s busy training to swim the Channel. That she’s preparing for the trip to France.”
“How long can we possibly keep that up?”
“Florence is set to leave on the tenth of July.”
The line went quiet. Was. Florence was set to leave on the tenth of July.
“It feels wrong,” said Isaac. “Not telling her. She’d want to know.”
“Isaac,” said Esther, not yet pleading but utterly prepared to, “you remember what it was like.”
“We don’t know what caused the early labor.”
“Do you want to risk it? And possibly lose another son?” She was playing almost all of her cards now, even the ones she’d promised herself she wouldn’t touch.
“So instead I should just lie to her for two months?”
“It’s not lying,” said Esther, weakly.
“What about Gussie? She’ll be an accomplice in this? Or is she just going to be kept from her mother all summer?”
“No, of course not. She’s a smart girl. We’ll explain it.”
“And the staff at the hospital? Surely some of them have already wandered in off the ward to give their condolences?”
“Very few people
know. And I’ll speak to Miss McLoughlin first thing in the morning.”
The line fell quiet again. Esther could hear the slow in and out of Isaac’s breathing.
“Isaac, please,” Esther begged. “I’ve lost enough today.”
Still, he didn’t give.
Esther could stand it no longer. She played her final card.
“It would mean so much to Joseph.”
Isaac owed his entire livelihood to Joseph. She knew it, Isaac knew it, and Isaac knew that she knew it. Without Adler’s Bakery and the job Joseph had fashioned for him at the plant, their son-in-law would be nowhere.
“And if I go along with this,” he asked, “what then?”
“After the baby is born, I can tell her.”
When he didn’t respond immediately, she held her breath, frightened she had said the wrong thing.
Finally, he said, “No, I’ll tell her.”
Esther swallowed hard, “That would be fine, too.”
It was the following morning—after her visit with Nellie McLoughlin—before Esther felt she’d fully recovered from her conversation with Isaac. She returned home and made her way through the apartment, preparing the rooms for Shiva. She covered mirrors with sheets and poured out standing water from teakettles, watering cans, and washbasins. Anna tried to be helpful, unfolding and refolding bed linens and offering to drape the mirror above Florence’s dressing table, so that Esther might avoid the room entirely.
Before Esther draped the mirror in her own bedroom, she studied her reflection. Her hair was gray and had been since the girls were small, but for years it hadn’t mattered. Her face had looked young, and inside, she still felt like the nineteen-year-old girl who had once been so bold as to ask Joseph, a handsome young waiter at Chorney’s Hotel, to go for a walk. Joseph and she had married and started the bakery, the girls had been born and grown up, Fannie had married and had Gussie, Florence had gone away to school, and the house had grown quiet again. How often had Esther remarked to Joseph, “I can’t believe I’m old enough to have a married daughter” or “To think I’m a grandmother! How can this be?” Now, as she rubbed her hands against her temples, pulling the puffy skin around her eyes as tight as she could, she felt every one of the forty-nine years that had marched across her face. Esther threw a sheet over the mirror, disgusted with herself. Jews covered their mirrors during Shiva to prevent exactly this kind of shallow reflection.
Florence Adler Swims Forever: A Novel Page 3
