Florence Adler Swims Forever: A Novel

by Rachel Beanland

Anna was surprised when Stuart started toward the Boardwalk and not the ocean. She hesitated to follow him, wondering if perhaps he was just retrieving something, but he called over his shoulder to her, “You coming?” so she hurried to catch up.

  “Where are we going?” Anna asked as Stuart stopped at the base of the steps that led up to the Boardwalk to brush the sand from his feet.

  “You can learn to swim in the ocean but it’s easier to learn in a pool.”

  “Pool?”

  “Sure,” he said, gliding his feet, still sticky with sand, into a pair of old moccasins. “You’ll save yourself being clobbered by waves, and I’ll be able to see your stroke.”

  He stood then and took the stairs two at a time. Anna’s sandals were full of sand but she felt self-conscious around Stuart and didn’t want to keep him waiting while she removed them to shake the sand out. As she walked up the stairs and across the Boardwalk, the sand sprayed from the toes of her sandals like confetti from a parade float.

  Stuart led them to the doors of The Covington, almost directly across the Boardwalk from the beach tent, where a man in a purple jacket with gold buttons held the door open for them. “Evening, Mr. Williams,” he said to Stuart.

  “Evening, Henry.”

  “Do you come here often?” Anna asked, when they were through the door and making their way across the lobby, which was very grand.

  Stuart gave her a funny look and let out a small laugh, “Not if I can help it.”

  Florence had said something about Stuart’s father owning a hotel, but Anna had naively assumed she meant one of the little kosher hotels that lined Atlantic City’s side streets. Well, maybe not kosher, but at least small. She had pictured a narrow, three-story building with perhaps a dozen rooms and an elderly hotel proprietor who spent his days pointing tourists toward the beach. Surely, this couldn’t be the hotel Florence meant?

  “They let you use the pool?”

  “Sort of,” said Stuart as he grabbed her arm and steered her toward the elevator.

  “Second floor, Cy,” he said to the bellhop, when the elevator doors opened and they stepped inside. This had to be his father’s hotel, Anna decided. How else would Stuart know the name of the bellhop?

  When the elevator doors opened on the second floor, Stuart gestured for Anna to get out. “Cy,” he said as they stepped off the elevator, “I’m not here.”

  “Didn’t see you,” said the bellhop.

  Anna saw a small sign that read ADMINISTRATIVE OFFICES but Stuart led her in the opposite direction, down a long, carpeted corridor, dotted with club chairs and cocktail tables. Long, heavy curtains hung in the windows, which was too bad because they obscured the view of the beach, on one side of the hotel, and a large Italianate terrace on the other. Halfway down the corridor, they came to several sets of French doors, each of which led out to the terrace. “After you,” said Stuart, holding one of them open for her.

  The terrace was lovely, nestled between the hotel’s two tall towers like a precious gem. At its center was a large swimming pool, and surrounding the pool was a little cabana and an abundance of lounge chairs, potted plants, and statuary. On the far side of the pool, stairs led from the terrace down to a lawn of perfectly manicured grass, completely enclosed by a tall ironwork fence.

  “It’s hard to believe I’m still in Atlantic City,” said Anna.

  “It’s a whole different world, all right.”

  Scattered around the terrace were the last of the day’s bathers and a handful of people, already in their evening wear but committed to having a poolside cocktail before dinner.

  “Are we allowed to be here?” Anna asked Stuart as they put their things down on a lounge chair in a quiet corner of the terrace.

  “Is the pope Catholic?” said Stuart, which Anna tried her best to interpret before giving up. Sometimes American expressions made no sense at all.

  Stuart slipped off his shoes, walked over to the swimming pool, and dove in. Anna worried he’d hit his head on the bottom of the pool, but he popped up smiling a moment later. “Come on in,” he called to her.

  Anna’s hands shook as she went to unbutton her dress. Why ever had she thought swimming lessons would be a good idea? She was uncomfortable at the thought of standing before Stuart in nothing but a borrowed bathing suit, and she was terrified to get in the water. Surely it would have been less painful to avoid the ocean for the rest of her life. Anna pulled the dress down around her knees and stepped out of it, her back to Stuart. Then she took more care than necessary to fold the garment. When the dress was neatly put away and she’d shoved her hair into a cap, there was nothing left to do but turn around and make her way toward the pool. She kept her eyes on the pavement, not daring to make eye contact with Stuart.

  “Are you nervous?” Stuart asked, forcing her to look up.

  Anna let out an uncomfortable laugh. “Yes, quite.”

  At the edge of the pool, she crouched down and tried, as gracefully as she could, to sit. Her legs dangled in the water, which was colder than she’d imagined.

  “It’s only about three feet deep here. You can stand,” he said, extending his hand to help her into the pool.

  She had no choice but to grab it and slide off the pool’s edge and into the cold water. “Oh!” she said, without meaning to. She shuddered as the water hit her skin.

  “It’s not bad, right?”

  Once she got used to the temperature, the water actually did feel kind of nice. It was an odd sensation, to be standing in several feet of water, much different than soaking in the tub at the apartment.

  “I’m only going to teach you one thing today.”

  “Oh?”

  “Don’t sound so disappointed,” Stuart said, smiling at her. “You’re going to learn to float. If you can float, you can swim.”

  Before Anna could say anything, Stuart fell backward and began to demonstrate. “See how my arms are extended and my chin’s up. I keep my chest out, too.”

  Arms, chin, chest. It didn’t look that hard.

  “The trick with floating,” said Stuart, righting himself, “is that you’ve got to relax. If you’re not relaxed, you’ll sink like—”

  A rock? Florence? Anna could understand why he had abandoned the metaphor.

  She grabbed hold of the pool’s edge and attempted to dip her head and shoulders into the water.

  “Not that way. Come out here,” said Stuart. “I’ll hold you up.”

  Anna moved toward Stuart, as if she were walking in slow motion. When she reached him, he placed his hand, gently, on the small of her back and coaxed her to lean backward until she was staring up at The Covington’s roof line and the dusky sky that peeked out between the hotel’s looming towers. She shot her arms out to the side and puffed up her chest but could do nothing about her clenched stomach muscles. The very idea that Anna might relax in this setting was laughable.

  It was such a strange sensation, to feel the weight of her body resting in the palm of Stuart’s open hand, like she was a small bird instead of a girl, already grown.

  “Tilt your head back more,” said Stuart, his voice garbled and far away. “Tilt your head until you can see nothing but sky.”

  Was it even possible to do so? Anna lifted her chin until the hotel’s edifice disappeared from her peripheral vision and all she could see were clouds, turned pink by the sun as it sank beyond the Thorofare.

  Anna didn’t feel Stuart’s hand against her back. Had he let go?

  “Now breathe,” she heard him call to her.

  Only then did Anna realize she’d been holding her breath. She let the air out of her chest but as she did so, she could feel herself begin to sink. The sinking feeling made her panic, and her head slipped beneath the surface as she tried to feel for the floor of the pool with her feet. Almost immediately, Stuart grabbed her under an arm and pulled her up.

  “Embarrassing,” she sputtered when she’d wiped the water from her eyes.

  “Why embarrassing?” St
uart asked with a grin. “No one’s born knowing how to swim.”

  “I’m an adult, not a small child.”

  “Children have it easy. Adults always have a much harder time learning.”

  “Why is that?”

  “Children believe they can swim, so they do,” said Stuart. He reached out and grazed her wool-clad stomach with the tips of his fingers. “Adults carry around all of their fears right here.” He touched her chin, briefly. “And here.”

  Anna blinked. She wanted to remind him that there were good reasons to be afraid but she worried she’d ruin the evening. Instead, she told him she’d try again.

  They spent the next hour floating around The Covington’s pool as it slowly emptied of people. As Anna grew more confident, Stuart removed his hand from her back, and eventually he started floating beside her, their outstretched arms and legs occasionally bumping into each other as they drifted from one side of the pool to the other. Anna liked knowing that Stuart was next to her without feeling compelled to speak to him. With the water in her ears muffling the sounds of the outside world, she could almost pretend she was back in Germany, and that the boy floating next to her would whisper, Komm schon. Lass uns gehen, when it was time to go.

  By the time Stuart deemed Anna highly proficient at floating, it had gotten dark and the tips of her fingers had turned to prunes. A waiter, who was clearing away empty cocktail glasses and straightening wayward chaise lounges, warned them that the pool would be closing in a few minutes. Anna could tell Stuart was about to say something to him, when a middle-aged man in a three-piece suit walked out onto the terrace and straight toward them.

  “Stuart, if you’d told me you were coming, I would have had something sent out.” Anna thought she detected Stuart’s shoulder muscles tighten.

  “Anna, this is my father, John Williams. Father, this is Anna Epstein.”

  She made a move to get out of the pool—it felt improper to meet Stuart’s father, or anyone for that matter, wearing nothing but a bathing suit—but Stuart grabbed her wrist and muttered, quietly, “Please stay.”

  She looked at her wrist and then at Stuart. “I’m pleased to meet you, Mr. Williams,” she said.

  “Ah, an accent. Germany, I presume?”

  “Ja ich bin Deutscher,” she said, trying her best to be charming.

  “What brings you to Atlantic City?” Mr. Williams asked.

  Anna was about to answer when Stuart spoke for her, offering up the curtest of explanations: “College.”

  Mr. Williams gave Stuart a warning look, so Anna added, “I start in the fall.”

  “No good schools in Germany?”

  Again, Stuart jumped in. “Not if you’re Jewish.” Anna thought she detected a challenge, of sorts, in the tone of Stuart’s voice. As if he was daring his father to say something. But Mr. Williams seemed perfectly reasonable and said only, “That’s too bad.”

  By the time Stuart’s father took his leave, a few minutes later, the evening’s mood had changed. Stuart seemed quieter and less confident, and Anna had begun to shiver with cold.

  “Let’s get you dried off,” said Stuart as he hoisted himself out of the pool and walked over to the little cabana, water streaming from his bathing suit, to grab two towels. Anna shimmied along the pool’s edge to the ladder, hopeful that she could display more grace getting out of the pool than she’d exhibited getting into it.

  “You seem angry with your father,” she said as Stuart handed her a towel.

  “I don’t know if angry is the right word,” Stuart said, towel-drying his hair. “Maybe frustrated.”

  Anna unfurled the towel and wrapped it around her torso.

  “He’s been wanting me to come work for him for years. Ever since I finished high school.”

  “In college even?”

  “Didn’t go.”

  Anna pulled her towel tighter and arched her eyebrows at him.

  “You’re surprised?”

  Anna could feel the color rising in her face. “A little.”

  “At some point, I decided that if he wanted me to do something, it had to be the wrong thing.”

  “But you didn’t want to go?”

  Stuart shrugged.

  “So why—”

  “I got into Temple but it wasn’t an Ivy, so he had a hard time hiding his disappointment.”

  Anna wasn’t familiar with the term Ivy, and she hated to interrupt to ask.

  “That was the same summer I started lifeguarding. I was making my own money and began to envision a life in which I wasn’t beholden to a guy I could never please.”

  “He’s really so unhappy?”

  Stuart nodded his head at the hotel. “He wasn’t content to own a hotel that my great-grandfather and grandfather had built. He had to tear it down and build the biggest hotel in Atlantic City.”

  “It’s the biggest?”

  “Not anymore,” Stuart said, with a hint of amusement on his face. “The Traymore did a big addition the year after he reopened. Now we’re the third biggest, soon to be the fourth.”

  “Maybe it’s not so terrible,” said Anna, who was trying to reconcile Stuart’s stories with her own, albeit brief, impressions of his father. “That he wants the best for himself. And you.”

  “Maybe. If it didn’t extend to all areas of his life.” Stuart lifted his eyes to the sky, gesturing toward the top of The Covington’s south tower. “There’s a penthouse apartment up there, where he’s installed a prettier, younger version of my mother.”

  Anna didn’t know what to say. She could scarcely believe she was having this conversation at all. “Does your mother know?”

  “Everyone does. My mother hasn’t set foot inside the hotel in five years, maybe more. Can you imagine the two of them running into each other in the lobby? We’ve got a house in Ventnor but as soon as the weather warms up, Mother heads off to our summer cottage in Cape May.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “Oh, don’t be,” said Stuart. “Every family has its issues. I offer my family’s up to you only as explanation for why I’m such a pain in the ass.”

  * * *

  Anna’s least favorite part of learning to swim was sneaking back into the Adlers’ apartment after Stuart dropped her off each evening. What she was doing wasn’t wrong but she also knew that there was something tactless about taking up the same pastime as a beloved daughter, so recently drowned. She tried to imagine explaining her motivations to Esther and cringed at the thought.

  “Where did you get off to?” a voice called from the kitchen as Anna tiptoed down the apartment’s long hallway. Anna stopped in her tracks, squeezed her eyes shut for a long second, then allowed herself to move in the direction of Esther’s voice. She found her polishing silver at the kitchen table.

  There was no getting around the fact that Anna’s hair was still wet. She tucked a loose strand behind her ear. “I was down at the beach for a little while.” Not a complete lie.

  “You went swimming?” said Esther, not looking up from the tarnished serving spoon she worked between her hands with a rag.

  “Just got my hair wet.”

  Esther let out an audible humph and Anna wondered how much she suspected. By now, Anna had had four swimming lessons. Stuart had taught her how to breathe, inhaling big mouthfuls of air that she slowly exhaled, through her mouth, underwater. He’d insisted that she practice her breathing technique for an embarrassingly long time, first by dipping her face in the water and then by bobbing along the side of the pool. Anna cringed, imagining what the hotel’s paying guests must think of her—a grown woman who could spend a half hour bouncing in and out of the water like a metal spring. Eventually Stuart had taught her to push off from the side of the pool and glide along the top of the water with her arms positioned above her head, and most recently, he’d added a scissor kick to the enterprise. Anna was meant to push off the wall, glide until her body lost its momentum, and then continue to kick until she had to come up for air. She grew mildly
annoyed when Stuart kept telling her the same thing—that she needed to kick her legs harder if she wanted to keep them anywhere near the surface of the water. But she forgave him because he also promised her that, with time and practice, she’d continue to improve.

  “Do you need help?” Anna asked, with a nod toward the neat stacks of silverware Esther hadn’t yet gotten to. She prayed the answer was no, could think of nothing worse than having to pull out a chair, sit, and make polite conversation as Florence’s wet bathing suit soaked through her dress.

  Esther shook her head, stared at the spoon in her hands forlornly, as if the reflection the shallow bowl of the spoon offered her were one she didn’t recognize. Anna felt an urge to rest a hand on Esther’s shoulder, to tell her the silver could wait, that maybe she was pushing herself too hard. But instead she said a quiet good night and slunk off to her bedroom, where she wasted no time removing her dress, peeling off the wet bathing suit underneath, and hanging it from the bleed valve on the backside of the radiator, where Esther was unlikely to find it if she went looking.

  * * *

  Just as Anna did not feel she had the right to be homesick, when her parents and Joseph had sacrificed so much for her to come to America, she also did not feel she had the right to mourn Florence’s death. She could help with Gussie, taking her on outings to Steel Pier or the Inlet. She could make simple meals on the afternoons when Esther looked too far away to slice a tomato, much less make sandwiches. She could run books and magazines over to the hospital for Fannie. In doing those things, she liked to believe that she was acknowledging that Florence’s death had meant something to her.

  The truth was that Florence’s death had meant a great deal to Anna. More than anyone else in the Adler family, Florence had seemed attuned to Anna’s deep unhappiness. Immediately, she’d begun suggesting outings to Anna. The outings were never presented as options—more like commands. “Come with me to White Tower. I’m dying for a hamburger,” she’d said on the afternoon of her arrival, after she’d greeted her parents and put her things away. It was Florence who had given Anna her first proper tour of Absecon Island. She’d pointed out all of her favorite spots—Absecon Lighthouse, which sat at the northern tip of the island, and the Italianate mansion with the funny address—One Atlantic Ocean—that perched at the end of Million Dollar Pier. Both, Florence said, served as guideposts when she was out on the open water. Anna learned where to get the best fried oysters and the tastiest egg sandwich, and since she enjoyed being told these things, she didn’t dare admit that she’d never dream of spending so much as a nickel on a sandwich she could just as easily make at home.