* * *
That evening, when Esther went to lie down, Joseph took the opportunity to tap lightly on the door of Fannie and Florence’s old bedroom, which Florence had briefly shared with Anna.
“Come in,” he heard Anna say from inside the room.
“Do you mind if I bother you for a minute? I’m looking for something.”
Anna had been lying on her bed—Fannie’s old bed—reading a book. But when he entered she sat up, kicked her feet over the edge of the mattress, and found her shoes. Joseph didn’t mean to make her uncomfortable, wanted her to feel as if the space were hers, too.
“Don’t get up,” he said, but she was already standing. “Please, sit.”
She did so tentatively. Her book remained closed, a finger sandwiched between the pages to hold her place. She watched him look around the room, as if he were inspecting it for the first time. Had he really never noticed how dark the room was at night?
“Is there a bulb out in that lamp?” he asked.
Anna peered under the shade and shook her head. “No, it’s fine.”
“It’s dark in here. Hardly enough light to read by.”
Anna looked at the lamp again, and then at the book in her hand. “It’s all right.”
Joseph made a mental note to look for a bigger lamp, with a stronger bulb.
The room was generously proportioned. Against one wall sat two brass beds, and between them was a Stickley bedside table that had belonged to Esther’s mother. There were also two dressers, neither of which were particularly fine pieces of furniture. On the dressers were a few knickknacks—a kaleidoscope that Joseph had given Fannie when she was too old to get much enjoyment out of it and the Pageant Cup, which Florence hadn’t bothered to remove when they’d moved out of the apartment last summer.
He began to open the drawers of Florence’s dresser, then wondered if he owed Anna some kind of explanation. “I’m looking for Bill Burgess’s address,” he said.
She placed her book on the bedside table and walked over to the dresser, turned on another lamp, which cast even less light than the one beside her bed. “Bill Burgess is her coach?” she asked.
“In France, yes. Or maybe England.”
“I haven’t seen an address book.”
“I wondered if it might be in her correspondence. Or maybe in that swimming notebook she kept. The one with the pale blue cover.”
“That’s here,” she said, leading him over to the bedside table. She pulled open the drawer, letting the delicate brass handle clink against the drawer plate, then stepped aside, sat back down on her bed. “I haven’t seen many letters. Is it possible she left them at school?”
Joseph nearly wept at the sight of the notebook. All of that energy, all of his daughter’s hopes for herself, never to be realized. He picked the book up and sat down on Florence’s bed, facing Anna. The inked words on the cover had run together since the last time he’d laid eyes on it. He ran his fingers along the words that were still legible: FLORENCE ADLER SWIMS.
He turned the first few pages slowly, reading every word. An entry from last July read, Replaced my morning meal of toast with a banana. Felt like I could have swum forever, and he had to stop. He wasn’t going to be able to get through it, not in front of Anna. “Here,” he said, handing the notebook to Anna. “Will you take a look? It’s just an address I’m looking for. So I can write to him. Tell him she’s—”
Anna nodded, opened the notebook, and began to turn its pages.
Joseph admired the girl’s seriousness, her ability to focus on the task at hand. “You remind me a great deal of your mother,” he said as he watched Anna study his daughter’s neat handwriting. “Inez was the type of girl who couldn’t be easily distracted.”
Anna beamed. “She doesn’t talk much about—her childhood.”
“By that, do you mean, she doesn’t talk much about me?”
The girl flushed.
“Why should she?” he said. “I am the past.”
“Our pasts are important, no?”
Joseph shrugged an acknowledgment. He wondered how much Inez had told her, knew that, at the very least, she’d read the words he’d included in her affidavit of support. “It’s funny what we remember.”
Anna stopped turning the book’s pages and looked at him, expectantly. He nodded his head at the notebook, urging her onward, then kept talking.
“Your mother had a bicycle and we used to ride it along the river. I pedaled, and she steered, and what I remember most of all is that her hair was always in my eyes and mouth.”
“How old were you?”
He smiled to himself. “Maybe nine or ten years old. Just children.”
Anna kept turning the pages of the notebook but her pace had slowed. “Did you ever think about staying?” she asked.
“I did.” It was all he had thought about the autumn they were seventeen, after the steamship ticket had arrived in the mail from his brother. Inez had stared at the ticket when he’d presented it to her, as if she could will it away just by looking at it hard enough. “Marry me, then,” she had said when she knew there was no keeping him in Lackenbach. “Take me with you.”
Anna wanted a story, but Joseph wasn’t sure she wanted this one. The hurried marriage proposal, the promise that he would send for Inez when he had saved enough money, the letters back and forth across the Atlantic, which came to a sudden halt when he met Esther—none of it made him look very good.
“How much has your mother told you?” he asked Anna.
“Not much,” she said, looking up from the notebook once more. “Just that you were engaged and that it didn’t work out.”
Inez was a good woman, too decent to color her daughter’s opinion of him with the truth.
“Anna,” he said as she returned her attention to the task at hand, “I don’t want you to worry about your mother. Your parents. If the affidavit doesn’t work, there are other things we can try.”
A tear slipped down Anna’s cheek, and she wiped it away with the heel of her hand. “You don’t think the consul will accept it?”
Securing a student visa for Anna had been one thing; securing visas for her parents was turning out to be quite another. Since Joseph wasn’t a relative, he had to prove that Inez and Paul would not become public charges upon their arrival in the U.S.—that they could support themselves indefinitely, all without taking a job away from a deserving American. An impossible feat, considering the fact that their assets were frozen.
Joseph wondered how honest he should be with Anna. “I suspect we’ll need more than my affidavit alone. But who can say?”
“You’re kind to be considering this now, after—everything.”
He had been willing to help Inez and Paul before Florence’s death, so it seemed antithetical to turn his back on them now. He told himself that Florence would have wanted it this way but that wasn’t all of it. Joseph appreciated staying busy and knew he got some relief from focusing on anything as straightforward as a visa application, for all its perils and pitfalls. If he followed the right practices and procedures, paid the proper fees, it might at least be possible to conjure Anna’s parents out of thin air. The same could never be said for Florence. “It’s nothing,” he said as he watched Anna come to the last page.
“The address isn’t here,” she said as she closed the notebook. “Stuart will have it. Or be able to get it for you.”
He reached for the little book, and she gave it to him with two hands, as if it were something fragile and dear.
* * *
Stuart was sitting in the beach chair, quite awkwardly, when Joseph arrived at the office on Friday morning. As Joseph entered the room, the boy stood, too fast, and the chair folded in on itself. The frame banged loudly against the floor, and Joseph flinched.
“Your secretary said you wanted to see me.”
Joseph didn’t say a word, just walked across the room to his desk, picked up the heavy oak swivel chair behind it, and carried it over
to the fireplace.
“Sit here,” Joseph said. “You’ll be more comfortable.”
Stuart started to argue, but Joseph held up his hand, refusing to hear a word, “You’re doing an old man a favor, Stuart.”
Beneath Stuart’s healthy tan, he looked tired and gaunt. There were dark circles under his blue eyes, and Joseph wondered how much he’d slept in the five days that had elapsed since Florence’s death.
“How’s Fannie?” Stuart asked.
“You know, I’d like to tell you. But, you see, I’m not a very good father. I don’t visit.”
“The hospital?”
Joseph shook his head as he righted the beach chair. “I haven’t been inside one since the war.”
“I don’t think that makes you a bad father.”
Joseph frowned. “I could do better.”
“Were you a medic? During the war?”
“An ambulance driver.”
“You and Hemingway?”
“I suppose,” said Joseph. “Except I was driving for the U.S. Army. And I’m not sure I made it look quite so glamorous.”
He had to get to it, ask Stuart for what he needed, or he’d be telling war stories all morning. “Look, Stuart, I need some help tracking down Bill Burgess. To cancel the swim.”
Stuart looked surprised, as if he had temporarily forgotten that Florence couldn’t be both dead and a champion swimmer at the same time. He nodded slowly.
“I don’t know where he lives, or if I can get the deposit back,” Joseph said. “Florence handled it all.”
“I have an address for him in Calais.”
“Would you mind writing him? I’m not sure I feel up to it.”
Stuart shook his head vigorously, the way people do, during a crisis, when they’re grateful to have been given a task, no matter how small.
“I’ll send a telegram. I can send one to the hotel, too. Just in case he’s already left for Cape Gris-Nez.”
“Thank you. Let me give you some money to cover the cost,” said Joseph, reaching for his billfold, but it was Stuart’s turn to hold up his hand.
“Please, no. This is the least I can do.”
Joseph studied Stuart, who studied his own fingernails, bitten to the quick. “It’s not your fault, you know?”
Stuart didn’t say a thing, just nodded his head like a marionette.
Joseph tried to put himself in Stuart’s place. What if he had lost Esther that first summer, when she was as much ephemera as she was an actual woman standing in front of him?
When Esther had checked into Chorney’s, accompanied by her parents, in the summer of 1904, Joseph’s command of the English language had been so poor that he had been afraid to talk to her. In lieu of words, he had offered her the best seat in the dining room, bestowed extra hard-boiled eggs on her at breakfast, and delivered her an unsolicited slice of Boston cream pie at dinner. Her parents had raised their eyebrows at his antics but had otherwise disregarded him, so sure were they that their nineteen-year-old daughter would not return the attentions of an Eastern European Jew so recently arrived from the old country. When he cleared their table one evening, and discovered the note Esther had left for him under her discarded napkin, he had thought his heart might stop beating in his chest.
My parents are going to the theater after dinner. If you can get away, would you care to go for a walk? I’ll be in the lobby at half-past eight.
Esther
Joseph had never bused the dining room so quickly. At half-past eight, when the room was still not empty and the last of the dishes were still not clean, he traded an extra shift with another busboy for the chance to slip out early. Joseph stuffed his apron in an umbrella stand and rushed to the lobby, where he found Esther sitting on a small settee. She sat up straight and didn’t appear to have been watching for him, which gave the impression, at least to Joseph, that she had been confident he would come.
Joseph offered Esther his arm, and they made their way out of the hotel and down Virginia Avenue to the Boardwalk, which was crowded with rolling carts full of mostly happy couples and a few dour ones. Without discussing it, they walked south, in the opposite direction of Nixon’s Theater and Esther’s parents. The piers buzzed with activity, and revelers streamed in and out of the grand lobbies of the big oceanfront hotels. Lights were strung from one side of the Boardwalk to the other, and the effect was dazzling—like a blanket of stars had been hung for their benefit. At the Chelsea Hotel the crowds began to thin, and they stopped to admire the city’s bright lights, spread out behind them. “Don’t you just love Atlantic City?” Esther said.
“Yes,” said Joseph, watching her watch the skyline. In that moment he did love Atlantic City more than any other place he’d ever known. It was a city where a Jewish boy from Galicia could find work and live cheap and save his money and even have a little fun. But most of all, it was a city that had delivered this beautiful girl to him.
At Morris Avenue, they turned around. Esther stopped to pick up a small but perfect seashell, which someone had plucked from the sand only to abandon on the Boardwalk, and when she did, she let go of Joseph’s arm. Eventually, she returned to him, seashell in hand, but then she did something unexpected. Instead of taking his arm, she moved her hand gently down his sleeve, over his shirt cuff, and into the warm center of his palm, where she laced her fingers between his.
“Is this all right?” she asked in a quiet tone, as if she were genuinely unsure what his answer might be.
In that moment, Joseph lost every English word he’d ever learned. All he could do was squeeze her hand in return. His face was close enough to hers that he wondered, briefly, what it might be like to kiss her but it was several more nights before he found out.
The kiss came on a moonlit night near Absecon Lighthouse, where the bright lights of the piers receded and the Boardwalk narrowed and veered toward the inlet. The beach was quiet and dark. Joseph was sure he had seen a humpback whale, its tail air-bound as it dove for krill, and he wanted Esther to see it, too.
Joseph moved closer to Esther, using her own hand to indicate the spot where the whale’s silhouette had disappeared from view. She studied the horizon solemnly, and he became conscious of the fact that he was holding his breath.
“You are not seeing?” he whispered into her ear.
“I am not looking,” she corrected him. The distinction was one of those subtleties of the English language that so often evaded Joseph in those early years in America. He understood it only later, after he had replayed the evening several dozen times in his head. Esther didn’t let go of his hand but she did turn toward him, her breath warm against his cheek. When he brushed his lips against hers, very softly at first, the kiss was a question.
It was another week before Esther returned to Philadelphia with her parents and another year before she worked up the nerve to tell them she was marrying Joseph. If Joseph had lost her at any point after that first night she took his hand, he would have been haunted by her always.
Joseph allowed himself to linger in the memory of their early days together, then looked at Stuart. No, he didn’t think he wanted to know the full extent of what Stuart and Florence had meant to each other, didn’t think knowing that his daughter had been loved would make her loss any easier to bear.
“Do you remember the summer the Women’s Swimming Association brought Charlotte Brown to Atlantic City?” Joseph asked.
Stuart’s face momentarily brightened. “Out at the inlet? Sure.”
“She was such a wee thing. Couldn’t have been more than a year or two older than Florence at the time. Maybe five or six years old?
“When she dove into that water, Florence screamed for me to save her,” Joseph said, chuckling at the memory. “She must have swum a half-dozen yards before I could convince Florence she wasn’t in need of saving.”
“I went with my father, too,” said Stuart, and for a moment he looked very far away.
“Florence had seen the seventy-ton whale at
Steel Pier, but there was something special about seeing a child her own size whip in and out of the water like a trout.”
Stuart made a noise, something between a laugh and a long sigh.
“She could teach herself to do anything,” said Joseph.
Florence liked to tell people that her father had taught her to swim. It made for a good story since Joseph didn’t actually know how to swim himself. All he had really done was introduce her to the water, same as he’d done for Fannie.
He’d chosen a calm summer day and waited until the tide was low before telling Florence to get into her bathing costume. Then he’d led her down Metropolitan Avenue, across the Boardwalk, and past the bathing houses and chairs-for-rent to Heinz Pier. Over his shoulder, he carried a long cord of rope; he tied one end to a thick, wooden joist—far from the pier’s pilings—and dropped the other over the side, watching it unravel in midair.
After they had retraced their steps and returned to the beach, Joseph waded through waist-deep water to retrieve the loose end of the rope, which he pulled to shore and carefully tied around Florence’s small waist. He gave his homemade lifesaving contraption several hard tugs before pronouncing it sound.
“In the water, your arms and legs, they must always move,” Joseph offered, his only instruction.
That afternoon Florence had learned to swim—nothing that resembled a real stroke but enough to keep her head above the water.
“The only thing Florence needed to know,” Joseph said to Stuart, “was that I believed she could swim.”
“You gave her a gift,” Stuart said, meeting Joseph’s eyes for the first time during his visit.
“Did I?”
Stuart frowned.
“I propose we make a deal,” said Joseph. “From you, there will be no more talk of—”
A light knock on the office door interrupted Joseph’s negotiations.
Mrs. Simons opened the door a crack. “I have Miss Epstein here to see you.”
“Anna?” both men asked at the same time.
Isaac
Florence Adler Swims Forever: A Novel Page 7
