Florence Adler Swims Forever: A Novel

by Rachel Beanland

  “Anna’s parents?”

  “Right.”

  “Can’t they pay their own way over?”

  Joseph couldn’t believe his son-in-law’s gall. What concern was it of his? In another few steps they’d arrive at the apartment, and if Joseph was going to speak his mind, he needed to do so quickly, before Gussie caught sight of them and careened into her father’s arms. “I don’t like to bring this up, but do I need to remind you about your loan?”

  “Which I pay on every month.”

  “I would argue that, if you’ve got enough money to invest in land deals, you might consider paying me in full. Or, at the very least, paying a portion of your wife’s hospital bills.”

  They were nearly at the door that led up the stairs to the apartment. Joseph felt for his keys in his pocket. Had he gone too far? He tried to remember a time when he had been this honest with Isaac and couldn’t. It felt surprisingly good.

  “I’m sorry if that sounded harsh,” he said, his back to Isaac as he put the key in the lock and turned it. “I didn’t mean for it to but I’m just tapped.” Joseph opened the door and held it for his son-in-law but when he turned around to look for him, Isaac was gone.

  * * *

  Esther had been unreachable ever since Florence died, but in the past week, her demeanor had turned icy. No one had ever described her as warm but, for Joseph, the seriousness with which she approached their lives had always been part of her appeal. She could be dismissive with customers and stoic with her own children but, in front of Joseph, she revealed herself. If he caught her with her guard down, her shoulders relaxed and her eyes bright, if she laughed at something he said or if she reached for his waist, intent on pulling him close, he felt sure he had earned the most coveted prize on earth.

  There was little chance that Esther would pull him close this evening. When he entered the apartment, still puzzling over his conversation with Isaac, he followed the smell of schnitzel back to the kitchen, where he found his wife muttering over the stove. Joseph moved to kiss her hello but she swatted him away.

  “Where are Gussie and Anna?” he asked.

  “Gussie’s in the back, cutting up more magazines, and Anna’s out.”

  “Out where?”

  “How should I know where? I’m not her mother.”

  There was an accusation in her retort, and Joseph felt it with all the blunt force Esther had intended. Ever since Florence had died, Joseph had wondered whether he was asking too much of Esther. Was it cruel to allow a girl almost precisely Florence’s age to share their home? And not just any girl—Inez’s daughter?

  He wanted to tell her about the drive up to Highlands and the Lafayette sighting, about Bill Burgess’s refund and the account he’d opened for Inez and Paul. But he didn’t dare say any of it, not until her mood lifted.

  Joseph tried a safer topic. “Dinner smells good.”

  Esther was not going to be distracted by a simple compliment. “If I had to guess where Anna was, I’d tell you that she’s on the beach, getting a private swim lesson from Stuart.”

  “Our Stuart?”

  Esther narrowed her eyes at him. “I didn’t realize Stuart was ours.”

  “You know what I mean.”

  “He most certainly wasn’t Florence’s.”

  “You don’t know that.”

  “Here’s what I know,” said Esther, straightening her back and drawing in all her breath. “I want Anna out.”

  Isaac

  Isaac’s instinct, after he had turned on his heel and left Joseph fumbling for his keys on the sidewalk in front of the Adlers’ apartment, had been to go directly to the hospital, find Fannie, and tell her everything. He’d start with Florence’s death and the manic lies Joseph and Esther had told in the subsequent month but then he thought he might go further. It would feel good to tell her that her parents hated him, that they were turning Gussie against him, that he was sure her father was in love with Anna’s mother, and that he was never going to run Adler’s if Joseph had anything to do with it.

  He imagined going further still. What if he could admit to Fannie that he was a disappointment to his own father, that he was a terrible father to Gussie, that he suspected that it was his fault Hyram was dead? Did she already know all those things? Maybe she did and there was nothing to tell.

  When Joseph had thrown the loan in his face, Isaac had been flabbergasted. In the five years since the two men had entered into the agreement, Joseph had never once brought it up. Isaac fulfilled his end of the deal, paying the loan’s installments by check, which he deposited directly into an account Joseph had established at the Boardwalk National Bank for that purpose. And in return, Joseph acted as if the loan didn’t exist at all.

  His father-in-law’s discretion was appreciated but didn’t help Isaac feel any less indebted to him. The loan was always there between them, the same way his own father had been permanently shackled to the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society. Isaac hated feeling beholden to anyone, and these days, he felt beholden to everyone—even Dr. Rosenthal, who had accepted Isaac’s confession the night of Hyram’s birth and, miraculously, done nothing with the information.

  An elderly couple pushed open the hospital’s heavy door, and Isaac held it for them as they moved outside. The man gripped the woman’s hand, and Isaac watched as he helped her down the steps, one at a time. While the door was still open, two young women in jewel-toned dresses skipped up the stairs and past him. One of them carried a yellow balloon that read IT’S A GIRL! in fancy script, and the other called out a quick thanks to him over her shoulder. Isaac, mesmerized by the swishing of their skirts, followed them across the lobby and up the stairs to the maternity ward, where he watched as they swooped into a room a few doors down from Fannie’s.

  Isaac forced himself to slow down, to consider what he would do when he arrived at his wife’s room. He had pictured telling Fannie this secret ever since the night Esther had called him with the news. He imagined sitting beside her hospital bed, holding both of her hands in his, and saying what? That was always the part that got him—how to say it. Fannie, your sister drowned. No. Fannie, your sister drowned in early June. No, no, no. While Isaac didn’t necessarily believe that the news would send Fannie into an early labor, he had come to think that a healthy baby, already safely delivered into her arms, might make the telling easier.

  On his walk over to the hospital, Isaac had tried to catalog the possible repercussions of telling Fannie the truth. All matters of health and well-being aside, what was on the line? It was possible that Joseph might demand repayment of the loan, even fire him, although both moves would be hard, if not impossible, for his father-in-law to pull off without penalizing Fannie in the process. If Isaac told Fannie that Florence was dead, Esther would never forgive him, certainly. But it was not as if she liked him now. Slightly smaller servings of brisket, delivered acerbically onto his plate at Shabbos dinners, seemed like something he could live with. The reality was that Esther and Joseph would have to be careful with him, or risk alienating their only surviving daughter, their only grandchildren. If either of them made Isaac’s life uncomfortable, he’d be tempted to give up Atlantic City altogether, to move his family somewhere where they could start fresh. He pictured Fannie setting up house in a tract home in West Palm Beach. On Saturday nights, maybe they’d go out with Jim and his new wife.

  Isaac had almost convinced himself that divulging the secret was the right thing to do when he rounded the corner into Fannie’s room and nearly walked straight into the wardrobe. The room was dark.

  “Fannie, you in here?” he called quietly.

  “I’m here.” Her voice sounded far away, but it couldn’t be farther away than the bed where he knew she was lying.

  Isaac stood still, one hand on the wardrobe, waiting for his eyes to adjust to the dark.

  “Should I cut on the light?”

  “No, no. The doctor wants it like this.”

  “Pitch-black?” It wasn’t pitch-bla
ck, not really. The window shade had been pulled down but there was a generous crack of light between the bottom of the shade and the windowsill. Within a few seconds, he could make out the shape of the wardrobe, the outline of Fannie’s bed, even the magazine on her bedside table. Isaac shut the door, held his hands out in front of him, and moved carefully around the bed to the chair by the window. When he had the chairback in his grip, he moved it closer to the edge of the bed and sat down, heavily. He heard the sheets rustle, Fannie move in the bed, and eventually, when his eyes were fully adjusted, he saw her face, turned toward his.

  “It’s like this all day?” Isaac asked. Joseph had told him something about a new treatment regimen but he had been so deep in his own thoughts that he hadn’t even asked about it.

  “All day.”

  “Why?”

  “Dr. Rosenthal thinks it will help bring my blood pressure down.”

  “The dark?”

  “A few things.”

  “Is it really that high?”

  “I don’t know. Yes?”

  Had their conversations always been so circular? Fannie had been in the hospital for close to two months, and it was as if, in that time, he had forgotten how to talk to her. Had he ever been any good at it? He wasn’t sure.

  Isaac’s conversational skills couldn’t have been much better when he had wandered into Adler’s Bakery eight years ago.

  “Can I help you?” Fannie had asked, with curiosity, as she leaned into the counter.

  Isaac ordered a loaf of challah, hoping it would keep him for a meal or two, then reached into his pocket and counted out the last of his loose change. He’d been in Atlantic City for nearly a week, and if he didn’t land a job soon, he’d be walking the forty miles back to Alliance with his tail between his legs.

  “This is your first time here?” she said as she bagged the bread.

  “I’m new to town.”

  “From where?”

  Isaac hated claiming Alliance as his hometown. It told people too much about him. “West Palm Beach.”

  Fannie raised her eyebrows as she handed him the bag. “Exotic.”

  “Sometimes,” he said, wanting badly to come off as a guy who got around.

  Isaac handed Fannie the change. She was an attractive girl, not beautiful like some of the girls he’d gone out with in West Palm Beach, but definitely pretty.

  Isaac bought three more loaves of challah, on three subsequent visits, before he saw Fannie again. The following Friday, to save himself from buying a fourth loaf unnecessarily, he walked past the store twice, just to be sure she was working behind the counter.

  “I came in yesterday but you weren’t here,” he said, once he had made it to the front of the line.

  “I’m at secretarial school on Thursdays.”

  “Ah. And Wednesdays?”

  “You came in on Wednesday as well?” Fannie asked, a large smile spreading across her face.

  Isaac tried to think of what he used to say to prospective buyers at Orange Grove Estates—people who had no business buying property but who wanted it very badly all the same. Sometimes, the right approach was to play along, to treat them like Rockefellers while ignoring the holes in their shoes. But other times, it paid to be honest, to acknowledge that the payments might make things tight at first but that, if they hung in there, they’d be rewarded.

  He couldn’t offer Fannie dinner, or even a cocktail. The people behind him in line stirred, and he tried to think of something fast. “I’ll take another loaf,” he said. “And maybe later we could walk over to the harbor and feed some to the ducks.”

  She laughed then. “We won’t tell my father what you think of his bread.”

  “Actually, I think this loaf is very fine,” Isaac said. “It’s the other two loaves, back at my room, that have gone a little dry.”

  One look at her and he knew she was sold. If he’d been selling binders, he could have asked her to sign one on the spot.

  “Hey, Fan,” Isaac said, into the dark void of the hospital room. “Do you remember that first day we met? In the bakery?”

  “Ummm-hmmm,” she said.

  “What did you think of me?”

  The room was quiet for a minute.

  Isaac stood up and moved over to the bed, feeling for the edge of the mattress and the thin sheet that covered his wife. He touched her shoulder. “Move over?”

  She turned away from him, inched toward the far side of the bed to give him enough space to crawl in beside her. When they were settled, his arm around her bulging middle, her backside nestled against his groin, the sheet pulled over them both, she spoke. “Back then, I thought that if I didn’t touch you, I might die.”

  He smiled into the nape of Fannie’s neck, could feel himself becoming aroused. Their courtship had consisted of little more than a series of long walks, each an excuse to discover the quietest parts of Atlantic City, the places where they could explore each other in private. Between New Hampshire and Maine avenues, the crowds thinned considerably but the Boardwalk remained elevated. In the evenings, after the sun set, Isaac would lead Fannie down the stairs to the beach and under the Boardwalk, where he could kiss her mouth, her neck, her collarbones, and as they grew more comfortable together, even the pink flesh of her breasts, her nipples hard as cherry pits in his mouth. The footsteps of the occasional passerby overhead mingled with the crash of the waves to drown out Fannie’s soft moans. Several times Fannie had begged for all of him, but Isaac practiced enough restraint for them both, waiting until her parents had agreed to the marriage, until he had started work at Adler’s, until their wedding date was within sight. On the day that Trudy Ederle swam the English Channel, while the rest of Atlantic City’s residents sat with their ears close to their radios, Isaac had secreted Fannie up to the room he’d rented on Lexington Avenue, and devoured her. “First American Woman Finishes,” Fannie had proclaimed into his bare chest, and he had rolled her over onto her back and begun again.

  “Did you worry?” he asked now.

  She shifted slightly to make room for his erection between them. “Worry?”

  “That I wouldn’t be enough?”

  She hesitated, or at least he imagined she might have if they hadn’t been interrupted by a subtle tremor that emanated from the spot beneath his hand.

  “Do you feel that?” Fannie whispered.

  “That’s him?”

  “Or her.”

  “Right. Or her.”

  Isaac couldn’t tell Fannie that Florence was dead. Not today. He liked her like this—warm and supple, forthright and forgiving. He moved his hand across her stomach and along her hip bone, fingering the waist of her underwear. He tugged at the garment slowly, pulling it down over her exposed hip.

  “Isaac, the baby,” Fannie warned, which might have convinced him to stop had she not, at the same time, shifted her weight to accommodate him as he worked the underwear down around her knees.

  It had been two months, maybe longer, since he’d felt his way into the warm, wet spot between her thighs. “I’ll be gentle, Fan. I promise.”

  He needn’t have promised much. He was barely inside her before his body started to buzz and then to pulse. On this front, he could hold nothing back.

  * * *

  Isaac’s tryst with his wife was enough to buoy him for the remainder of the week. The following morning, he was at his desk earlier than normal, prepared to make the necessary concessions to his father-in-law. Joseph, of course, would hear none of it and accepted all of the blame for their dispute. After all, Isaac was fulfilling the terms of their loan agreement, and he presumed the hospital fee would be worked out. How his son-in-law spent the rest of his income was entirely his own affair. The following evening, Isaac was in good enough spirits to accept a dinner invitation from Esther and Joseph, and would have, if forced, described the walk from the plant to his in-laws’ apartment with Joseph as pleasant. After the meal was finished, he even made the time to take Gussie out for a custard at Koh
r’s. He saw Fannie twice more that week, although on neither occasion did they dare shut themselves in the room as they had on Tuesday evening.

  Isaac’s good humor might have lasted him into the weekend were it not for a note he got from Vic Barnes, asking if they could meet for a drink at The Covington the following Monday night. Isaac felt sure that, if Vic wanted to buy in to the Florida deal, he would have come and found Isaac directly. Why waste three days’ time, particularly when he knew Isaac was working under a deadline?

  Isaac hated meeting anyone—for business or pleasure—at The Covington. If the hotel’s management made a point of saying Jews weren’t allowed to stay in the guest rooms, it stood to reason they also didn’t want them sipping vermouth and gin out of their martini glasses. No waiter was going to be so bold as to check Isaac’s ID at the bar, see the last name Feldman, and ask him to leave, but the idea made him uncomfortable nonetheless. He wondered if Vic hadn’t suggested the place for that reason.

  He scanned the room, saw Vic seated at a small table near the back of the bar. Vic might not have been Jewish, but even he looked out of place at The Covington.

  “Vic,” said Isaac as he approached the table.

  “Isaac.” Vic didn’t stand up, which wasn’t a good sign.

  Isaac pulled a chair out and sat down. “What are you drinking?”

  “A gin rickey.”

  He hailed the waiter, pointed to Vic’s drink, and thrust two fingers in the air.

  Vic launched into a long-winded story about a crackdown on liquor licenses, but Isaac had no patience for it; he had kept him in suspense for long enough. At the first pause in conversation, after their drinks had arrived, Isaac interrupted him. “So you’ve had some time to think?”

  Vic cleared his throat, sat up straighter. “I’ve talked to some of my guys. No one thinks Florida is coming back.”

  “It’s been eight years.”

  “Yeah, and the prices have remained flat.”

  “Which means they’re ripe for a rebound.”