Florence Adler Swims Forever: A Novel

by Rachel Beanland

  Joseph turned the car onto Light House Road. After a few minutes, the road started to rise up toward the light station and he downshifted. The car chugged up the steep incline, and at the tree line, the base of the Twin Lights came into view. Stuart let out a low whistle.

  “Not bad, eh?” Joseph said.

  The Twin Lights of Highlands looked more like a military fortress than a lighthouse. The entire structure—keeper’s quarters, storage facilities, and two towers—was made of brownstone. Joseph pulled the car off the road and parked it under a tree. “Grab the binoculars, will you?”

  The pair walked out onto the brow of the hill where the Twin Lights sat. Joseph walked the length of the station several times, wading through the tall summer grass, as he eyed Sandy Hook Bay and the harbor beyond the sandbar. Finally, when they were standing in front of the south tower, he said, “This should do” and made a nest for himself in the grass. Stuart handed the binoculars to Joseph, removed his jacket, and joined him.

  “Mr. Adler?”

  “Joseph.”

  “Joseph,” said Stuart. “Are we watching for birds or large steamships?”

  Joseph didn’t answer him, just studied the coastal highway below them, the bay and sandbar and harbor beyond. In the distance, he could make out Brooklyn’s skyline. Around a bend he could not see, he knew Chelsea Piers was busy, people pouring from the terminal onto the decks of ocean liners that would transport them to Southampton and Plymouth, Vigo and Le Havre.

  The Lafayette was small in comparison to most of the liners that crossed the Atlantic. Florence and he had settled on it because it didn’t stop in Southampton, and because it could make the transatlantic crossing in a quick six days. The ship’s manifest was also small—the ship could accommodate just one hundred and fifty people—which had made Florence hopeful that she would have the tiny, indoor swimming pool to herself. Joseph had tried to remind his daughter that the pool was probably no bigger than a matchbox but she hadn’t wanted to hear it.

  When Joseph tried to imagine what Florence’s sea voyage might have been like, swimming miniature laps in a miniature pool, all he could see was Florence at barely five years old, swimming her first laps in the Hygeia Baths. At the end of the summer season, when the ocean had turned cold and the tourists had gone home, Joseph had walked Florence north along the Boardwalk, as far as Heinz Pier, where a large electric sign advertising the baths directed people into a stuffy Georgian building with a limestone façade and an iodized copper roof. Even such a big sign couldn’t have prepared Florence for what she saw when Joseph paid the admission fee and led her inside on that brisk, autumn afternoon.

  In the center of a three-story room sat a gigantic swimming pool, full to its brim with seawater that had been pumped from the ocean a hundred yards away. The sounds of frolicking bathers ricocheted off the underside of the building’s metal roof.

  “I can swim here?” Florence had asked, disbelievingly.

  “You can,” Joseph said as she stood on the brick deck, still bundled in her coat and hat. Had Joseph not clapped his hands and motioned Florence toward the changing rooms, she might have stood there all afternoon, watching one man after another dive from a tall metal platform that was positioned along the far side of the pool.

  “Where are all the girls?” Florence asked her father when she returned to the pool deck in her bathing costume. Joseph scanned the room. Everywhere he looked, he saw nothing but men and, in some cases, adolescent boys. He nodded toward several long rows of chairs, tucked underneath the second-floor balcony and shrouded by potted ferns, where a number of women and small children perched like goldfinches.

  “Why are they sitting over there?” Florence asked.

  “They can’t swim.”

  “Should you teach them?” she had asked, and he had been so touched by her question that he wondered if she didn’t have a point.

  A steamship blared its horn as it entered New York Harbor from the Hudson River and headed out to sea. Joseph picked up the binoculars and studied the ship, looking for the name on its bow.

  “That’s not it,” said Stuart. “It’s too big.”

  Joseph replaced the binoculars in his lap.

  “Mr. Adler, may I ask you something?”

  “Joseph.”

  “Right, sorry,” said Stuart, who was very obviously never going to feel comfortable calling Joseph by his first name.

  “Go on.”

  “Do you ever regret keeping Florence’s death a secret?”

  Joseph let out a long breath and moved the binoculars from one hand to the other, absentmindedly adjusting the diopter as he did so.

  “If you don’t want to talk about it—”

  “I don’t mind talking about it. Don’t mind talking about her. In fact, I like hearing people like you say her name.”

  What could Joseph say? Keeping the secret had never been a choice. Not a real one. He thought carefully about where to begin. “When I was growing up in Hungary—what’s now Austria’s Burgenland—we never had anything. My parents pinched and saved for my brother’s steamship ticket, and when he was settled in Philadelphia and finally making some money, he paid for mine. My mother cried when the ticket arrived in the mail. She knew she couldn’t follow me, knew, in fact, that she might never see me again.”

  Stuart didn’t say anything but he didn’t need to. Joseph knew he was listening.

  “In my first years in America—in Philadelphia and then Atlantic City—I used to wonder at my parents’ decision. Had they been right to send my brother and then me? Would it have been better to use the ticket for my father, who might have immediately made a better income? If he had done well enough, he could have sent for the whole family.” Joseph plucked at a blade of grass. “But then I became a parent, and I had my answer. You give your children every possible chance.

  “My daughter is gone. Nothing I do will return her to me. I try to tell myself that I am not hurting Florence or her memory by keeping her death a secret. What I am taking from the people who knew her—the chance to mourn her death and memorialize her life—can be returned to them.

  “I don’t know if Esther’s right—if this news would prove too much for Fannie to bear. What I do know,” said Joseph, raising his head, “is that this baby, this new life, is the most important thing.”

  Joseph looked over at Stuart. “I wish—”

  Just then, they heard the long blast of a horn and looked up to see a small steamship making its way through the watery gap between Staten Island and Brooklyn. Was it the Lafayette? Joseph jumped to his feet, binoculars still in hand, but when he put the instrument to his eyes, he couldn’t get it to focus.

  “You look,” he said, handing the binoculars to Stuart, who had also stood at the sound of the horn.

  Stuart held the binoculars to his eyes, adjusted the diopter, and spent a long moment studying the ship through the lenses. “It’s her,” he finally said.

  Joseph stared at the Lafayette, watching as it made its way toward the mouth of New York Bay. He hadn’t thought further ahead than putting his eyes on the French steamship. Now, as he watched it round Seagate and head out past Long Beach, growing smaller and smaller until it eventually become a black dot on the horizon, he tried to recall why this errand had seemed so necessary.

  Florence was not on that boat, would never arrive in France. He would not find her on the shores of the English Channel or at the Hygeia or even on the beaches of Atlantic City. He looked over at Stuart, who was openly weeping as he watched the boat disappear from view. Maybe Joseph’s daughter was to be found in the people who loved her the most.

  * * *

  Joseph offered to drive Stuart as far as the corner of South Carolina and Atlantic avenues, where the Boardwalk National Bank was located on the ground floor of Schlitz’s Hotel. He parked the car and stared out through the windshield at the bank’s window bars, painted green, and the pair of paneled doors that led inside. Was he really going to do this?

&
nbsp; “You bank here?” Stuart asked as he swung the car’s passenger door open wide.

  “Since the day I arrived in Atlantic City.”

  Joseph’s knees cracked as he climbed out of the car. He didn’t like the fact that his body had begun to feel the effects of a long drive or too much time spent in any one position. He patted his jacket pocket, making sure Bill Burgess’s check was still tucked inside.

  On the sidewalk, Joseph considered putting an arm around Stuart but, in the end, he settled on a firm handshake. “Thank you, Stuart.”

  “For what?”

  “For Burgess. For today.”

  Stuart didn’t say anything, just squeezed his hand in response.

  Once they had parted ways, Joseph hurried into the bank. When the receptionist asked how she could help him, he retrieved the envelope from his pocket. “I’d like to speak with someone about opening a new account.”

  * * *

  Joseph was back in the office by a little after three o’clock in the afternoon. He walked through the plant, checking on the assembly line, before making his way to the third floor, where Mrs. Simons sat at her desk, typing away at her Underwood. When she saw him come up the stairs, she hit the return, pushed her chair back, and stood to greet him.

  “I was starting to worry,” she said as she handed him a stack of checks to sign.

  He took the stack, opened the door of his office, and deposited the checks and his binoculars on his desk. Mrs. Simons followed close behind, the most important pieces of the day’s mail in hand.

  “The Baker Perkins rep is going to be by on Thursday to talk to you about the dough dividers. I put him down for eleven o’clock. And Katz & Hanstein says they’re no longer manufacturing the eighteen-ounce bread bags. Do we want to go with the next size up or look for a new supplier? They’re promising we won’t even notice a difference.”

  Mrs. Simons had been good to Joseph during the past month. Privately, he knew she mourned Florence’s death but, at the office, she had committed herself to making Joseph’s life easier, his days shorter. She no longer waited for Joseph to dictate correspondence; instead, she just left the letters, already drafted, on his desk for review. She was such a talented writer and a thorough editor that Joseph rarely, if ever, changed anything. She knew all of Adler’s suppliers by name, and whereas before she might have just stamped their invoices as received and cut their checks, now she got on the telephone and haggled with them over their prices.

  “Let’s order enough bags to get through August,” said Joseph. “In the meanwhile, you can start shopping the order around.”

  Mrs. Simons made a note on the steno pad she had carried in with the mail.

  “There’s something else,” he said. “Will you call Anna right away and help her send a telegram to her parents? We’ll pay for it. Have her tell them that they should hold off submitting the new affidavits until they receive a bank statement from me.”

  “Bank statement?” Mrs. Simons asked, looking up from her pad.

  Joseph handed her a thin piece of paper. At the top were the names Paul and Inez Epstein and at the bottom was the account balance—twelve hundred dollars. The money from Florence’s Channel swim plus a little more besides. “Then will you take this down to the post office and send it to them via airmail? Anna can give you the address.”

  Mrs. Simons took the account statement and pretended not to study it as she turned to go.

  “Oh, there’s one more thing,” she said from the doorway. “Eli Hirsch wants to know if you’ll consider cochairing the fall campaign.”

  Joseph had known it was only a matter of time before Hirsch asked him for something. A request for a big donation, Joseph had been expecting. Cochairing the campaign was something else altogether.

  “Shall I tell him it’s a bad time?” Mrs. Simons asked.

  Joseph thought of the two reference letters—the American Jewish Committee’s and Ike Bacharach’s—which Hirsch had executed in record time. “No, you’d better not.”

  Mrs. Simons raised her eyebrows before making another notation on the pad.

  It was all well and good for the members of Beth Kehillah and Rodef Shalom to give their spare change to the American Jewish Committee, but lately, and particularly today, Joseph felt weary of all the altruism. Hirsch’s organization had raised nearly a million dollars in the past year, ostensibly to help people just like Inez and her husband, but Hirsch hadn’t offered up a dime of it when Joseph and Anna had explained the couple’s predicament over lunch. Where was all the money going?

  Joseph’s real worry was that no amount of money would cut through the bureaucratic red tape, much of which had been imposed by the American government and not the Nazis. He thought it very telling that, when push came to shove, Inez had not placed her faith in the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society or the German Relief Fund or the American Jewish Committee but in a man she hadn’t seen in more than thirty years.

  * * *

  Joseph tapped lightly on the door of Isaac’s office.

  “Yes?”

  “I’m going home for dinner. Why don’t you come?”

  “There’s so much to do here,” said Isaac. “I might stay for a while.”

  There was perhaps nothing that annoyed Joseph more than his son-in-law pretending to be busy. Isaac was supposed to be running the sales team but everyone—including the driver-salesmen—knew that Mrs. Simons was really in charge. In the mornings, the drivers went over their orders and tweaked their routes, reporting any discrepancies to Mrs. Simons before they got on the road. And in the late afternoons, when they returned to the office to work the phones and follow up on the next day’s orders, it was Mrs. Simons who got peppered with questions about inventory and pricing. If a big order came through or a new customer came on board, the drivers celebrated with Mrs. Simons, not Isaac, who spent most of his day just trying to keep up. When she eventually retired, Joseph had no idea what he and Isaac would do.

  “The work will be here tomorrow,” Joseph said to Isaac. “Come.”

  Isaac stood, nodded a few times, as if he were trying to collect his thoughts, and began shuffling the papers on his desk, in search of something. Eventually he located a thin manila folder and put it in his satchel.

  “Did you see Fannie yesterday?” Joseph asked when they were on the street.

  “Unfortunately, I didn’t get over there.”

  “Esther says Dr. Rosenthal has Fannie on a new regimen. To get her blood pressure down.”

  “That’s good.”

  Joseph wondered at his son-in-law. Did he not want to know what the regimen was? He seemed completely distracted.

  “Did I see Stuart this morning, in front of the plant?” Isaac asked. If he was asking, then of course he had. When Joseph had invited Stuart to get in the car, Isaac had undoubtedly seen the whole thing from his office window.

  “I took a drive up to Highlands. Asked him to go. Stuart was too polite to turn an old man down.”

  “You’re not old.”

  “No?”

  “I would have been happy to drive you.”

  “Next time?”

  They crossed Atlantic Avenue and made their way north.

  “You seem distracted, Isaac,” said Joseph. “Is it Fannie or something else?”

  “Hmm?”

  “I said that you seem distracted.”

  Isaac shifted his satchel to his other shoulder. “I guess I am.”

  “Want to talk about it?”

  Isaac hesitated for a moment, then released a torrent. “There’s a good opportunity for me in Florida. A guy I know is selling a parcel of land, outside of Lake Okeechobee, for thirty dollars an acre. If I can get together three thousand dollars, it’s mine.”

  “That’s a lot of money.”

  “I’ve been shopping it around to investors. All I need is a few more people to buy in, and then it’s a win for everyone.”

  “A lot of men in this town lost their shirts on Florida land deals in ’
26.”

  “Sure, I know,” said Isaac. “It’s part of the reason I’m getting this parcel so cheap. Playing the long game.”

  They passed City Hall. “Did you hear the Commodore is sick?” Joseph asked, eager for a distraction. The city commissioner, Louis Kuehnle, was an Atlantic City legend.

  Isaac couldn’t be deterred. “I thought it might be a good opportunity for you. A chance to diversify your investments. If you agreed to buy fifty acres, I’d have enough commitments to close the deal.”

  “Have you talked to Fannie about any of this?”

  “A little.”

  “What did she say?”

  “You know how women are. They’ve got no head for business.”

  How could Joseph tell Isaac that his plan was not just stupid but irresponsible? That investing in real estate he’d never seen was akin to buying the air he breathed. Sure, it was there but could he touch it?

  “It’s a bad time for me,” said Joseph, thinking about the bank statement he’d just given Mrs. Simons. Directly in front of them sat the old bakery, the apartment above it.

  “I still owe Abe for the burial, and I’m trying to help Anna’s parents get over here, if I can.” Joseph was also paying for Fannie’s hospital room—Isaac hadn’t even attempted to pay the bill since Esther had upgraded her to a private room—but he let that go unsaid.