“I think we’ll wait for Grandpa out here.”
Gussie asked if she could get out of the car to play, and Isaac agreed, watching as she skipped off in the direction of the tree line that bordered Saul Green’s property. Twice she stopped to scavenge for sticks in the grass, finding first a twig and then a three-foot-long branch to wield. Gussie loved going to Alliance, though it was a fact that Isaac didn’t bring her to visit nearly often enough. Just as Isaac had once thought Atlantic City exotic, his daughter now thought Alliance so.
“Hey, Gus-Gus!” he called, beckoning her back over to the car.
She ran toward him, cutting through the air with her stick. “I’m King Arthur!” she yelled.
“I think you mean Guinevere.”
She came to a stop in front of the driver’s-side door. “No, King Arthur. I have a sword. See?”
“Ah, I do. Look, Gus, I forgot to mention something.”
She looked up at him, her eyebrows furrowed. Between her mother’s absence and her aunt’s death, the poor girl was probably waiting for another shoe to drop.
“Grandpa’s a little sensitive about his fall. So, let’s not bring it up in front of him.”
“But Nana sent rugelach.”
“Yes, yes. We’ll still give that to him. We just won’t tell him we hope he feels better. That way, we won’t make him sad,” said Isaac. “Do you understand?”
Gussie nodded slowly, and Isaac wondered, briefly, if his young daughter could see right through him. “Go have fun,” he said, with an intentionally wide smile, and he watched as she ran off.
Isaac had read half of yesterday’s newspaper before the doors of the synagogue opened. He watched as, one by one, Alliance’s residents trickled out, the men removing their taleisim and pocketing their yarmulkes as they made their way down the steps and into the yard. All of the old men, Isaac’s father among them, had built the clapboard temple together, milling the timber and framing the one-room structure when Alliance had no more than four hundred residents and less than a hundred homesteads. In many cases, men had prioritized the construction of the temple over their own homes, living in government-issued tents for an extra winter so that they could raise the roof in time for the High Holy Days.
Gussie met her grandfather at the foot of the synagogue’s stairs and threw her arms around his thick waist before pointing toward the car. Isaac gave a small wave, then opened the door and got out. He met his father in the middle of the yard, Gussie bouncing back and forth between them like an excited fox terrier.
“Isaac,” said his father, pronouncing his name Itzhak. “Dem iz a ongenem iberrashn.”
“In English!” Gussie pleaded, “I won’t be able to understand anything!”
“And that would be so bad?” said Isaac’s father, grabbing at Gussie’s nose and simultaneously slipping his thumb through his fingers. “Your nose, I have it.” Gussie reached for her grandfather’s hand, which he held just out of her reach.
“Can we give you a ride?” Isaac asked, knowing the answer would always be no on a Saturday.
“Your father, he is crazy,” Isaac’s father said, turning to Gussie. “Will you walk home with an old man?”
Gussie shouted an excited, “Yes!”
“We’ll see you at home,” Isaac’s father said, over his shoulder, as he and Gussie began picking their way through the grass, making a path toward Gershal Avenue and the homestead that sat on the far side of the hamlet.
Isaac kicked at a tall weed, then walked back over to the car. Gussie was charmed by Isaac’s father because she hadn’t been raised by him. And his father could afford to be generous with his affection because he wasn’t trying to convince his granddaughter to pull her weight on a failing farm. It had been a different story when Isaac was growing up.
His parents had arrived in Alliance in 1887 with nothing but a satchel of clothes and one small child—the eldest of Isaac’s siblings. By all accounts, their early years as colonists had been bleak. Isaac wasn’t entirely sure why this surprised anyone. His father had taught at the yeshiva in Volozhin and didn’t know the first thing about farming. He had read the writings of Michael Bakal and Moshe Herder and believed in the Return to the Soil Movement, but that didn’t mean he knew how to milk a cow or sow green beans. The Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society provided for some agricultural training but none of it could make up for the fact that Isaac’s father was, at his heart, a philosopher and not a farmer.
Isaac turned the car around in the grass and pulled out onto Gershal Avenue. Within moments, he had overtaken his father and Gussie, who walked hand in hand on the road’s narrow shoulder. When had his father’s back become so stooped? He honked the car’s horn as he passed and they both waved. At Almond Road, he took a right and wound his way toward his father’s farm.
The farmhouse, like many others in Alliance, had begun to fall into disrepair. Each of the community’s early settlers had been gifted forty acres of land but the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society had written them mortgages to cover the other costs associated with getting their farms off the ground. Residents built their farmhouses and barns on credit, which required profitable harvests from the start. Almost none were profitable, and most people’s mortgages quickly fell into arrears. To make ends meet, the men fell back on what they knew. At night, they traveled to Norma to work in the area’s only garment factory, or they waited for the shipments of hand-sewing projects, which garment factories in Philadelphia and New York began shipping to Alliance and other Jewish agricultural outposts by the truckload.
Isaac was born thirteen years into his parents’ failed agricultural experiment. The youngest of a dozen children, he was barely old enough to pull a sweet potato out of the ground when his older brothers and sisters began their exodus. The majority of them went to Philadelphia, thirty-five miles away. Two settled in New York and one went as far south as New Orleans. One died on a battlefield in France.
By the time Isaac was twenty, he, too, had begun plotting his departure. And not just because he couldn’t envision a lifetime spent toiling in South Jersey’s Downer soil. Alliance, and the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society in particular, had crippled his once curious father, and what Isaac wanted was to go somewhere where he wasn’t beholden to anyone.
The right thing to do would have been to sit down with his father, to tell him that he didn’t want a farming life. But he couldn’t bear to witness his father’s disappointment. Instead he packed a few things in a bag, took forty dollars out of the old Campfire Marshmallows canister his father kept in the freezer, and set out in the dark to catch a southbound train from Norma at first light.
* * *
Isaac had never left Salem County, much less New Jersey. From the train window, he watched in wonder as the flat farmland of New Jersey’s coastal plain gave way to the rolling hills of Virginia’s Piedmont region, North Carolina’s pines turned into South Carolina’s live oaks, and eventually Georgia’s wetlands melted into Florida’s swampland. By the time the train stopped in Jacksonville, it was packed with speculators headed south. Isaac had bought a ticket for Miami but all the talk in the car was of West Palm Beach, so when the train pulled into the station and half the passengers got off, Isaac did, too.
West Palm Beach sat across the Intracoastal Waterway from the resort island of Palm Beach and had initially been established as a service town—somewhere for the maids and cooks and bellmen who worked in the big Palm Beach hotels to live. But by the time Isaac arrived, it was already obvious that West Palm Beach was where the action was.
The trick to making it in West Palm Beach, said the other guys in the boardinghouse where Isaac had taken a room, was to land a job as a binder boy. Subdivisions in West Palm Beach were going in so fast and real estate agents were so busy closing deals, most negotiated entirely by mail with buyers up north, that none of them had the time to put an actual FOR SALE sign in the ground and sell to passersby—residents, snowbirds, and tin-can tourists who had driven down to Florida to see
what all the fuss was about. Real estate agents sent binder boys out to these undeveloped subdivisions to get a binder, or down payment, out of anyone who so much as stopped to ask directions.
“How’s your golf game?” one of the boys asked as he wrote down the name and address of an agent named Ted Blackwell on the back of an old receipt.
“Golf?”
“Blackwell likes to hire preppy college boys with a good swing. A decent tennis serve will work, too. You’ll see.” He handed Isaac the small piece of paper.
Isaac hadn’t been to college and had never so much as picked up a golf club or tennis racket. But when he knocked on the door of Ted Blackwell & Associates the following morning, he had concocted a story so credible that he almost believed it himself. He’d gone to the University of Pennsylvania, where he’d studied Russian literature—an easy leap considering his lineage. When he wasn’t reading Dostoyevsky, he played intramural tennis, and on the weekends, he visited his aunt and uncle on the Main Line, squeezing in a round of golf at his uncle’s club every chance he got. He didn’t like to brag, by any means, but he could hold his own.
Blackwell looked Isaac up and down as he listened to his pitch. Then he told him to follow him outside. “Get in the car,” he said, nodding toward an Isotta Tourer that was parked on the street. Isaac knew it would do him no good to tell Blackwell that this was his first automobile ride, so he tried to be casual opening the door, climbing into the seat. Blackwell pulled the car out into traffic and drove across the causeway, through West Palm Beach, and then north for several miles, until the city fell away and they were surrounded by longleaf pines and rubber vines. Isaac hoped he looked comfortable in the passenger seat, like someone who was used to riding around in fine Italian cars.
“Ten years ago, no one thought this would ever be anything but swamp,” said Blackwell as he waved at the greenery out the window.
Just when the landscape had grown so desolate that Isaac couldn’t imagine selling it to a blind man, Blackwell began to slow the car. Ahead was a turnoff, marked by a pair of large and rather elaborately constructed brick columns. As the car approached the turn, Isaac saw that, hanging from the columns, there was a wrought-iron sign. He craned his neck, trying to read it, but Blackwell beat him to the punch: “Welcome to Orange Grove Estates.”
Blackwell pulled between the columns and into Orange Grove Estates, or at least the entrance of what would one day be Orange Grove Estates. Fifty yards of road had been laid, the land on either side of it cleared, but the road ended abruptly in a thicket of palm fronds and brittle thatch. There was a small gatehouse, located just behind the sign, and a tennis court, tucked against the tree line, as if it had sprung from the earth like a shoot. Three cars were parked next to it.
“Was there an orange grove here?” Isaac asked.
“Not in my lifetime.”
Blackwell pulled his car alongside the others and cut the engine. “Jim’s busy right now, so we’ll wait.”
Jim was a boy, about Isaac’s age, with a shock of blond hair and a noticeable swagger. Isaac watched from the car as he led two couples to the edge of the clearing, making sweeping gestures toward the thick underbrush that picked up where the road left off.
Blackwell looked at his watch. “Give him a quarter of an hour. He’ll have both binders by noon.”
Blackwell was right on the money. By five minutes till, Jim had the paperwork spread out over the hood of one car, each man so eager to sign that he would have killed his grandmother just to get ahold of her pen. Jim took their checks, folded them in half, and shoved them into his breast pocket. Then he handed each man a copy of the paperwork and shook his hand in turn. Isaac made note of the handshake—Jim used his left hand to squeeze each man’s shoulder, as if they were old friends who had great affection for one another. He waved as the men got into their cars and drove away.
Once both cars were gone, Jim walked over to Blackwell’s car and leaned into the open window.
“I brought you a new recruit,” said Blackwell. “This is Isaac Feldman. UPenn grad. Train him up and then maybe I’ll send him over to Sea Breeze.”
Jim nodded toward the tennis court. “How’s your game?”
“Fair, I’d say.”
“I’ll be the one to say,” Jim said, the hint of a smile curling the corners of his mouth.
In the weeks that followed, Jim said plenty. He taught Isaac how to talk up Orange Grove Estates—mention how close it is to the beach, don’t mention that it hasn’t been plumbed. He told Isaac what to say when it looked like a buyer was waffling, something that was happening with less and less frequency these days, and how to handle the wives who thought they deserved some say over their husband’s investment decisions.
The one thing that couldn’t be talked around or through was Isaac’s tennis game. “Show me your serve,” Jim said, not a quarter of an hour after Blackwell drove off, leaving Isaac to catch a ride home with Jim.
Isaac did his best to hit the ball across the net and watched as it landed on the other side of the court with a satisfying thunk. Not too bad, he thought. Jim shook his head and tsked. “You’ve never hit a tennis ball before in your life.”
Isaac worried Jim would out him to Blackwell, so he was pleasantly surprised when, instead, Jim offered to teach him how to play the game. He showed him where to stand and how to move, taught him how to serve and score.
“Why waste the money putting a tennis court in the middle of nowhere?” Isaac asked Jim one day, from the shade of a black mangrove on the property.
“It’s a diversion, plain and simple,” said Jim. “Palm Beach is years away from getting electricity and water all the way out here. A tennis court says we’re building infrastructure, that we’re here to stay.”
“Are we?” Isaac asked.
“Sure, why not?”
Had Isaac known how quickly everything would end, he might have done things differently. He liked to think he would have spent less and saved more.
Jim, Isaac, and the rest of Blackwell’s binder boys earned their commission when the binder checks cleared the bank, but even on a week when nothing cleared, it hardly mattered. Showing their binder receipts was enough to get them served in any of Palm Beach’s restaurants and clubs. They’d flash their receipts at Bradley’s Beach Club or John G’s and drink until they couldn’t remember their way home, only to have to return the following week to deliver half their earnings to the house manager. Isaac didn’t mind. For the first time in his life, he had more money than he knew what to do with. The more he spent, the farther away his father’s farm began to feel.
At the height of the boom, Blackwell was moving Isaac and Jim to a new subdivision every few days. He didn’t even take the time to put in a fancy sign or a tennis court anymore. The people Isaac was selling binders to would have paid for swamp, so desperate were they to get in on a good thing. The prices were going up and up and up, and for a while, it seemed that the price of the property had no bearing on people’s ability, or willingness, to pay. Somehow, somewhere, they always found the money.
Even Isaac, who knew that higher prices meant bigger commissions, wondered how high the market could really go. In early 1925, Forbes published a special report, warning that the price of real estate in Florida was based solely upon the expectation of finding a customer. In the months that followed, Isaac had to work to calm skittish buyers, and by that summer, he was losing more customers—people who still wanted a binder but couldn’t afford the steep investment.
Construction costs skyrocketed, thanks to gridlock on the rails and a shortage of building supplies, and by the spring of 1926, the state’s real estate market was in shambles. Blackwell’s business was going belly-up, and he had little choice but to get rid of his binder boys.
Jim was determined to wait out the crisis in Florida, to see what other opportunities might arise, but Isaac had begun to wonder if it might be time to try his luck somewhere new. When Blackwell, who was enterprising to the end
, scored Isaac a free seat on a Philadelphia-bound train, he took it. Isaac dreaded telling Jim, but his friend only laughed when he heard the news.
“You know Blackwell struck a deal with Applegate Funeral Home?”
Plenty of people liked to retire to Florida, Jim explained, but no one wanted to be buried in the swamp. Blackwell had guessed, correctly, that Marcus Applegate was buying round-trip tickets for his staff, every time they needed to accompany a casket north.
“Blackwell offered up his binder boys. Applegate only has to buy a one-way ticket, guys like you go back where you came from, and everyone’s happy.”
Isaac couldn’t say he was happy but he raised his glass anyway, “To going back where we came from.”
“But never forgetting the swamp.”
After the casket was delivered, Isaac could have gone home. In fact, he did for a few days. But if Alliance had felt stifling before, it felt suffocating after five years in West Palm Beach. In the years Isaac had been gone, his mother had died and his father had grown slower, quieter, less sure of himself. The house had begun its gradual decline and so had his relationship with the man who could no more understand Isaac’s meteoric success than the rapid waning of his fortunes.
Isaac was twenty-six and so poor that he walked the forty miles from Alliance to Atlantic City. It took him twelve hours. He would have walked to the ends of the earth to get away from that farm and the disappointed look on his father’s face but, as it happened, he only needed to walk as far as Adler’s Bakery.
* * *
Isaac sat out on the porch and watched his father and daughter’s slow approach. Gussie ran ahead to open the gate, then held it open until Isaac’s father entered the yard.
“Will you get your grandpa a drink of water?” Isaac’s father asked her when they neared the porch, and she ran off, into the house, the screened door slapping at her heels.
“Gussie told me about Florence,” he said, in Yiddish.
Florence Adler Swims Forever: A Novel Page 9
