Florence Adler Swims Forever: A Novel

by Rachel Beanland

  Fannie threw back her blankets and got out of bed. For a moment, she felt light-headed—how many hours had it been since she’d stood up or moved around? She steadied herself, placing the palm of her hand flat against the mattress. When the spinning feeling stopped, she moved slowly across the room to the dressing table, where Dorothy had unpacked her belongings earlier that morning. She found her stationery and fountain pen in the top drawer and made her way back to the bed.

  Fannie chewed on the lid of the pen for several minutes before she began.

  Dear Flossie,

  It seems odd to write a letter when you’re not away at school, but already back in Atlantic City. I thought about wandering down the hall and asking to use the telephone but I’m not sure I trust myself to get this out properly.

  Your wanting to swim the Channel and my wanting to deliver a healthy baby are not the same thing, and it hurt me tremendously when you compared the two the other day. I know that they’re both things we want very much, but you must understand that if you fail to accomplish your goal, you hop in a boat and come home. If I fail, I will find myself holding another lifeless child in my arms.

  Fannie replayed their fight in her head. She had practically demanded, like a petulant child, that Florence remain at home until after the baby was born, and when that hadn’t worked, she’d made the mistake of reminding Florence that, by the age of twenty, she’d been a married woman—somebody’s wife.

  “And look how well that’s turned out,” Florence said in a biting voice. “Your marriage isn’t exactly a ringing endorsement of the institution.”

  Fannie’s pen hovered over the page. Should she try to defend her marriage? Fannie’s family had never warmed to Isaac, even in their very early days together when he had tried harder to impress her parents and sister. Fannie weighed her words, then decided that, maybe where Isaac was concerned, it was best to say nothing at all.

  If swimming the Channel is what you want, then I want that for you, too. I’m sorry I wasn’t more generous when you visited. Punish me if you must but don’t stay away too long. There’s something about being tucked away inside this hospital that wears on me—it’s as if I’m trapped in another world. I can see the ocean out my window but I can’t hear or smell it.

  Your Loving Sister,

  Fannie

  When she was finished writing the letter, Fannie read it through twice, then she folded the pages and stuffed them in an envelope. Just as she did, Dorothy came in with her dinner tray, so she addressed the envelope in a flash—Florence Adler, Northeast Corner of Atlantic and Virginia Avenues, A.C.

  “Dorothy, I wonder if you might be able to help me find a stamp?”

  * * *

  By half-past ten, Fannie had given up on Dorothy. Nurses who worked the day shift clocked out at seven o’clock, and she had likely gone home for the night. Knowing her, she had put Fannie’s request out of her mind the moment she’d left the room.

  Fannie was awake, and a stamp was as solid an excuse as any to take a little stroll. The nurses tsked when she got out of bed, so she didn’t try to make a habit of it, but it did feel good, every now and then, to stretch her legs. Fannie retrieved her slippers and robe and made her way out of the room and down the hall. She’d try the nurses’ lounge, see if anyone had a stamp, and maybe take the newspaper if the women were finished reading it.

  The obstetrics ward was quiet, save for the occasional sound of a baby’s cry, and dark. The only source of light came from the end of the hallway, where the nursery and the nurses’ lounge sat opposite each other.

  Tonight she heard several hushed voices coming from the lounge. Was it a bad time to ask for something so immaterial as a stamp? Fannie hated to interrupt if there was important hospital business that had stolen the women’s attention. She started to turn to go back to her room, but then she heard one of the nurses say, “It’s just about the most tragic thing I’ve ever heard.” Fannie stopped cold and listened harder, “Can you even imagine being the one to have to tell her?”

  The quintuplets. Fannie hurried to the door of the lounge and peeked her head around the corner. “Is there any news?” she asked in a panic. Three nurses sat huddled together on a mohair sofa, smoking cigarettes. Fannie knew the names of two of them—Bette and Mary—and she’d seen the other one walk quickly past her room from time to time, always with what Fannie imagined to be great purpose. Perhaps she worked in the delivery room or the operating theater. All three women looked startled to see her. Bette balanced her cigarette in the ashtray the women shared, and jumped up to take Fannie’s arm, “Are you all right? Why are you out of bed?”

  Fannie thought she noticed the purposeful nurse dabbing at the corners of her eyes with her fingertips. “I thought I might borrow a stamp. Is there any news—”

  The women looked at each other, stricken.

  “—about the Dionne babies?”

  Fannie watched as the women’s faces rearranged themselves right in front of her.

  “Yes! Yes!” said Mary, “The babies are all still alive! It’s a miracle!”

  Bette steered her into a rattan chair that sat opposite the sofa, “Here,” she said, sliding a stack of magazines, a copy of the Atlantic City Press, and the ashtray farther down the coffee table. “Put your feet up at least.”

  “Cigarette?” asked the purposeful nurse, holding out a pack of Chesterfields.

  “Yes, please,” said Fannie, reaching forward to retrieve one.

  Mary passed her a lighter. Fannie hadn’t had a cigarette in more than two weeks, and how long had it been before that? Maybe the Newman party? She took a long draw. There was something about the cigarette that made the evening feel festive, like the women who sat across from Fannie might be friends and not hospital staff paid to change her linens and bring her meals.

  “What’s the latest on the babies?” Fannie asked, eyeing the paper.

  Mary picked it up and rearranged it, handing the folded pages to Fannie. There, at the top of page twenty-one, was the headline TWO OF THE QUINTUPLETS ARE NOT SO WELL. The paper had devoted nearly two full columns to the five girls, born a little more than a week ago—two full months early—in Ontario, Canada.

  Fannie couldn’t let go of the story. According to the paper, in all of human history, only thirty cases of quintuplet births had ever been recorded. In not a single case had all the children lived. That these babies had managed to stay alive for more than a week was remarkable.

  “Edith says it sounds like Marie’s not doing so well,” said Bette.

  Fannie made note of the fact that Edith must be the name of the purposeful nurse. Then she asked, “Marie’s the really tiny one?”

  “Yes,” said Edith.

  “I love all their names—don’t you?” said Mary.

  Bette shook her head agreeably. “They’re so French.”

  Fannie scanned the article. “It doesn’t seem like the doctor’s very optimistic.”

  The women clucked, and Fannie pressed her mouth into a frown of concern. The truth was that there was a small part of her—a tiny part of her really—that hoped something would go wrong with the quints. That one woman, who already had five children at home, should give birth to not one infant but five, and that they all might survive, made Fannie sick with jealousy.

  The Dionne children had spent their first five days of life in a basket of blankets and hot-water bottles, positioned close to the stove. They were fed a mixture of breast milk, corn syrup, water, and rum, and when, on the fifth day, they had not yet died, they were moved to a donated incubator, not unlike the one in which Hyram had spent the final days of his life.

  It wasn’t as if Fannie were the first woman to ever lose a child. She knew that. If forced, she could probably list the names of a half-dozen women who had lost a baby in childbirth or shortly thereafter. There was Mildred Greenberg, whose husband drove for Adler’s and Alice Cohen, who played bridge with Rachel Stern. Ethyl Kauffman and Gladys Rivkin. All of them got dressed each
day, cooked and cleaned, shopped, and eventually had more babies. Fannie had run into Gladys in the lobby of the Warner Theatre, on a night when she and Isaac had gone to the pictures to see I’m No Angel. Fannie hadn’t been able to pay attention to the film because she had spent so much time studying the back of Gladys’s head, wondering how she managed to laugh at anything.

  “I keep telling Dr. Rosenthal we should get a couple of those new incubators up here on the ward,” said Edith.

  Bette gave her a look but Edith didn’t appear to notice. “It’s ridiculous that a Boardwalk amusement has more success saving babies than a modern hospital.”

  “Fannie’s baby spent some time at Couney’s incubator exhibition last summer,” said Bette. “Isn’t that right, Fannie?”

  Fannie nodded, perhaps too vigorously. “We moved him from the hospital to Couney’s because we had hoped it would give him a better chance.”

  Edith leaned forward. “And did it?”

  “No—”

  Edith seemed disappointed, not necessarily because Fannie had lost her son but because the outcome undermined her argument that incubators were the future of medicine. She sank heavily into the sofa, leaned her head back as she took a long drag of her cigarette, and exhaled toward the ceiling.

  A baby began to cry across the hall.

  “I’ve got it,” said Bette, stubbing out her cigarette in the ashtray. “Fannie, you care to join me or are you on your way back to bed?”

  “Me?” Fannie asked, unsure if she had heard Bette correctly.

  “Yes, you. Do you want to come feed a baby?”

  “I’d love to,” she said, putting down the paper and reaching across the table to extinguish her own cigarette in the now-crowded ashtray. She supposed the stamp could wait. She stood, said good night to Mary and Edith, and followed Bette across the hall, where more than a dozen bassinets lined both sides of the nursery. About half of them were filled with newborn babies. In the far corner, near the window, one infant had worked its arms free from its bunting and was squawking at the ceiling, all red in the face.

  “That one’s got a set of lungs on him,” said Bette as she began preparing a bottle.

  “May I?” asked Fannie, before reaching into the bassinet to pick him up.

  “Oh sure.”

  The baby was big and round, and felt heavy in her arms—nothing like Hyram but probably something like how Gussie had felt, if she remembered correctly. Gussie had been longer and leaner at birth, but with cheeks that looked like plums. Fannie held the baby high, above the bulge of her stomach, and walked over to a rocking chair, where she sat down carefully.

  “You won’t break him. He’s sturdy,” said Bette as she handed Fannie a bottle.

  Fannie put the small rubber nipple to the baby’s mouth, and he latched immediately, sucking down the milky concoction with a ferocity that startled her. For three weeks last summer, she had prayed daily that her own son would swallow the droplets of formula that were placed on his tongue with a medicine dropper.

  This was the first time Fannie had held a baby in her arms since Hyram died. Last fall she’d gone out of her way to avoid friends with small children, skipping Ellen Perlman’s baby shower and the Hanukkah party at Beth Kehillah. Even after she found out she was pregnant again, she had let Anna take Gussie to the Baby Parade. Seeing all those infants in prams and wagons and rolling carts felt like too much. If Hyram had lived, he might have been among them, dressed up in his best gingham smock, gnawing on a cookie or perhaps a pretzel, and getting a good look at Atlantic City in all its resplendent excess.

  The baby in Fannie’s arms opened his eyes lazily, looked up at her briefly, and then shut them again. “He looks so healthy,” she said, more to herself than to Bette.

  Bette studied her for a moment before she said, “There’s no reason to believe yours won’t be.”

  * * *

  Isaac had been good about visiting Fannie the first week of her confinement, but in the last week or so, his visits had slowed considerably. Fannie knew he was busy with the bakery and Gussie, but the hospital wasn’t far from their apartment, and she felt unsettled on the days he didn’t stop by.

  “Where have you been hiding, Mr. Feldman?” she asked him, when he tapped on her door early the following morning.

  “Here and there,” he said as he dragged the stool closer to the bed.

  Visitor’s hours didn’t begin until nine. “How’d you get past the nurses?” Fannie asked as he planted a kiss on her forehead. She tried to breathe him in.

  Isaac didn’t offer her an explanation, just winked as he took a seat and crossed his legs at the knee. He was a handsome man, and Fannie knew he had to be popular with the nurses on the floor.

  “Well?” she said, gesturing at the four walls that surrounded them.

  “It’s a nice room.”

  “Did Pop tell you he was doing this? I’m worried it must be very expensive.”

  “I’m sure it is. But your father can afford it.”

  Fannie cringed at the statement. Sometimes, when Isaac talked about money, she could feel herself growing pink around the neck. Her father never openly discussed his finances but Isaac was quick to remind her that only people with money could afford not to talk about it.

  We have money, Fannie wanted to argue. But she knew that Isaac’s obsession had less to do with the salary her father paid him than with the circumstances in which he’d been raised. Too often, he had gone without.

  When Isaac started taking Fannie out, a million years ago now, he hadn’t had two cents to rub together. He liked to promise her that, once he was a little more established, he’d be able to buy her steak dinners at the Ritz but, in the meantime, she often returned from her dates hungry enough that she had to go straight to the kitchen to make herself a sandwich. She tried to tell Isaac she didn’t need fancy dinners, so long as they were happy, but over time, his promises just grew bigger. Now he said that he wanted to be able to buy them a car, a small house in Ventnor or Margate, some clout at the synagogue.

  Sometimes Fannie wondered if it had been a bad idea for Isaac to go to work for her father. When Isaac began delivering bread for Adler’s, she knew he viewed the job as temporary, as a place to catch his breath while he plotted his next move. But in 1928, two years after they were married and a year after Gussie was born, Joseph opened the plant on Mediterranean Avenue and stopped making bread in the back of the Atlantic Avenue store. Within a year, Adler’s had increased its production tenfold, and Joseph invested in more trucks to deliver bread throughout southern New Jersey.

  For the first time in Fannie’s recollection, her parents seemed truly comfortable. And the expansion was good for Isaac and Fannie, too. Isaac got a promotion—overseeing all those delivery trucks, an office with a telephone, and a nice raise.

  But the job made Isaac that much more beholden to Joseph, and Fannie thought it also gave Isaac too much insight into her father’s financial affairs. Her parents’ house on Atlantic Avenue, the checks they sent to Wellesley, and especially her father’s support of Florence’s Channel swim made Isaac resentful, in a way that felt unreasonable.

  Isaac remained hell-bent on getting out from under Joseph’s thumb, and he began putting aside all their extra money so that he might one day start a business of his own. Fannie thought the plan was shortsighted—why couldn’t he see that her father would eventually retire from Adler’s and that, if Isaac worked hard and was patient, the business would be his? At the very worst, he’d share the responsibility of running Adler’s with whomever Florence married. On days when Isaac returned home from the plant in a good mood, Fannie tried to suggest that they use their savings for a down payment on a house instead.

  When the stock market collapsed, in the fall of 1929, Isaac started staying away from the apartment for long stretches of time. When he was home, he went to bed early, barely acknowledging Fannie or Gussie. This behavior went on for weeks, until finally one night, Fannie shook him awake. “Eno
ugh. You have to tell me what’s going on.”

  Isaac rubbed his eyes, disoriented. “I lost all the money.”

  Fannie felt relief wash over her. That was all?

  “Isaac, it was what? Two hundred and fifty dollars?” said Fannie. “We can save it again.”

  “I used it to buy stocks on margin.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “I put up our money, and the bank loaned me ten times that amount.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “The bank loans us the money, and when the market goes up, we pay the bank off.”

  “What happens when the market goes down?”

  Isaac didn’t say anything.

  “Isaac?”

  “The bank is calling in their margin. I’ve got two weeks to pay them in full.”

  It took several long seconds for Fannie to recover herself. She could scarcely imagine ever having twenty-five hundred dollars, let alone coming up with it in a fortnight.

  “What will we do?” she finally asked.

  Isaac didn’t need to tell her that the only good option was to go to her father for help and hope that he wasn’t in the same financial straits. Buying the Mediterranean Avenue property and building the plant had required capital, and she prayed her father’s money was in the bricks and mortar of Adler’s Bakery and not in the New York Stock Exchange. Fannie offered to talk to him but Isaac wouldn’t hear of it. The financial markets and their repercussions were not a woman’s concern.

  It took Isaac several days to work up the courage to approach Joseph but, after he did, he felt relieved. Coming up with the cash Isaac needed wouldn’t be easy, Joseph said, but he could do it. They agreed to a loan, at no interest, payable over ten years.

  “How did he seem?” Fannie had asked Isaac after he explained the terms.

  “What do you mean? He seemed like he was going to loan us the money.”

  “Was he surprised?” she asked, but what she really meant was disappointed.