Florence Adler Swims Forever: A Novel

by Rachel Beanland

  Isaac peeked inside at the stiff bills. “It’s all there,” said Joseph. “Just write when you’ve got an address where I can start sending the checks.”

  Isaac slid the envelope into the interior pocket of his jacket and felt for the other envelope, unyielding against his rib cage. He pulled it out and handed it to Joseph. “This is for you. To give to Fannie.”

  “You didn’t go see her?”

  “I did. Last night, after you left the hospital.”

  “I wondered.”

  “I didn’t tell her I was leaving.”

  “So, this letter—”

  “Isn’t from me.”

  Joseph looked confused.

  “Open it if you’d like.”

  Joseph slid his finger under the flap, which Isaac had intentionally left unsealed. He pulled out a single sheet of paper, unfolded it, and began to read.

  “It’s from Florence?” Joseph asked, clearly startled.

  “Fannie will think so.”

  Joseph kept reading.

  “Fannie and Florence fought. Just before Florence died,” said Isaac. “And Fannie’s spent the whole summer stewing about it. She wrote Florence an apology and asked me to deliver it but, of course, there was no one to give it to.”

  “So, you forged a reply?”

  “Of sorts. If you don’t give it to her, she’ll think Florence died angry with her.”

  “Did she?”

  “Maybe,” said Isaac. “Does it matter?”

  Joseph returned to the letter and read it all the way to the end. At Florence’s signature, which Isaac had gotten just right, Joseph let out a soft moan.

  “If you tell Fannie you found this letter in Florence’s things, I don’t think she’ll figure out Florence couldn’t have written it.”

  “It’s very good. Where’d you learn to do this?”

  “There are probably some good reasons the Florida real estate market collapsed.”

  Joseph shook his head and refolded the letter, which he slid into the pocket of his own jacket.

  “So, you’ll give it to her?”

  “At some point, all this lying has to end.”

  “Please.”

  “Maybe,” said Joseph.

  “It might be the only worthwhile thing I’ve ever contributed to this family,” said Isaac. “If you don’t count Gussie.”

  Joseph let out a choked laugh. “Lucky for you, I do.”

  Without any more discussion, the two men began walking in the direction of the train station. Isaac thought about telling Joseph that he didn’t need accompaniment, that he was capable of catching the train just fine on his own. But it wasn’t all bad having someone see him off, to leave Atlantic City under the pretense that there were people who would think fondly of him when he was gone.

  Stuart

  In the elevator, on Tuesday morning, Stuart silently rehearsed what he’d say to his father.

  He had been running through the conversation in his head all morning, really ever since Saturday when he’d seen Anna at the pageant swim. Throughout the race, she had been careful to avoid looking in his direction—even when she and Gussie had walked out onto the pier. But back on the beach, during the awards presentation, she had had no choice but to see him, and he her.

  Stuart tried to put his finger on what had bothered him about all Anna’s marriage talk. It wasn’t that he couldn’t see himself as her husband, or she his wife. In fact, he could see their life together quite clearly. And it seemed nice. Better than nice. Damned near perfect. No, what bothered Stuart was that all Anna’s figuring had made him question what was real. Had she been as oblivious to his family’s wealth and position as she’d initially let on? Had she really wanted to learn to swim? Had she truly felt the weight of Florence’s loss? Until that night on the beach, it would never have occurred to him to ask these questions, though if he had, he would have answered each one with a resounding yes. Now, he couldn’t be sure.

  Stuart was embarrassed to admit to himself that there was at least some small part of him that didn’t give two shakes about Anna’s motivations. If she married him for his citizenship but he got the thrill of kissing her warm lips and the pale skin that was left exposed when the strap of her bathing suit fell off her shoulder, weren’t they both winning?

  In the end he decided that she was right to have been straightforward with him. Would he have rather she said nothing and simply allowed him to fall further and further in love with her, never recognizing what she needed? The way he figured it, everyone needed something.

  It had occurred to Stuart, as he walked back to his boardinghouse after the pageant swim, that Anna might both need something from him and also want him for her own unselfish reasons. The trick was figuring out how to separate the two.

  It wasn’t a trick that was wholly unfamiliar to Stuart. These last several years, the Atlantic City Beach Patrol, the dingy Northside room, and even cantankerous Mrs. Tate had allowed him to keep his father at arm’s length. As long as Stuart remained financially self-sufficient, he had assumed he could make any life he chose for himself.

  When Stuart realized what he had to do, his impulse had been to hurry to The Covington and get the whole idea out to his father in one giant breath. But he had decided to wait. It was too important a request to rush, so he had spent two long days watching the surf and practicing his pitch. Now here he stood in the elevator, still completely unsure of what to say.

  The elevator arrived on the second floor, and Stuart nodded to Cy before making his way to the administrative suite, where his father’s secretary, Louise, sat at her desk, guarding the door to his office with nothing more menacing than a stare.

  “Is my father available?” he asked.

  “He will be soon,” said Louise, glancing at the telephone on her desk. “He’s wrapping up a call.”

  Stuart took a seat in one of the chairs that lined the far wall. He was tempted to take a peppermint from the glass dish on Louise’s desk but didn’t want to risk walking into his father’s office with his mouth full. After several minutes of jiggling his knee, the light on Louise’s phone switched off and she said, “You can go in now.”

  Stuart stood, smoothed his pants, and made his way into his father’s office.

  “Morning,” he said, closing the door quietly behind him.

  “To what do I owe this pleasure?” his father asked, looking up from a stack of papers.

  The lead-in was the part Stuart was least sure of. Should he make polite conversation about the Phillies’ double header or get right to the point? He considered walking over to the bar in the corner of the office and pouring his father a scotch. Anything to ease his way into the conversation. But all of it—the baseball stats and the booze—seemed disingenuous. Stuart wanted to be the type of man who said what he meant.

  “I want to talk to you about something,” he finally said, then thought to add, “It’s important.”

  Stuart watched his father shift in his chair.

  “I was thinking I might hang up my whistle at the end of this summer. Start learning the business.”

  Stuart’s father put down his pen and blinked at him, hard, as if he were trying to process what he’d just heard. “This business?”

  “Yes, the hotel business. The Covington.” Stuart couldn’t believe he was saying it. Long ago, he had convinced himself that going to work for his father would feel a little like dying. “I realize I have a lot to learn.”

  “Are you in some kind of trouble?”

  “None,” said Stuart.

  His father leaned back in his chair, appraising his son. “Then why?”

  “Well, the business has been in our family for—”

  “No, I mean, ‘Why now?’ ”

  This was a question Stuart had counted on. Did he dare admit that he loved Anna? That if his father brought him on, there was some chance he’d be bringing Anna on, too? Stuart cleared his throat, working hard to get the next part out. “There are things I w
ant, that I need.”

  His father remained quiet, patted the desk once and then twice, then stood and walked over to one of the office’s floor-to-ceiling windows, which overlooked the Boardwalk and the ocean beyond. A pair of heavy drapes obscured the view, and he pushed them out of the way to get a better look at something. “This isn’t a bad life,” he said.

  “It’s not that I thought it was,” said Stuart. “It’s just—” He hesitated.

  “Just what?”

  “That it didn’t feel like mine.”

  “Do you think it ever will?”

  “I hope so.”

  His father’s attention was elsewhere. Stuart got out of his chair and went to join him by the window. Outside, a kite bobbed in the air. The string of the kite led across the Boardwalk to the beach, where a small boy and his father yanked and pulled at the spool.

  “There’s something else,” Stuart said, a few minutes later, when they’d both watched the kite plummet into the sand.

  Stuart’s father turned his head to look at him.

  “I need some money.”

  “Is she in trouble?” his father asked.

  “Who?”

  “The Jewish girl. In the pool.”

  Stuart marveled at his father’s disregard for basic social conventions. “Her name’s Anna. And we haven’t—” He stopped himself. What business was it of his father’s?

  “How much?” his father said, with a slow shake of his head.

  “Five thousand,” Stuart said, trying hard not to wince as he said the number aloud. His great-grandfather had spent less building the original hotel.

  “Thousand?”

  “I know it’s a lot.”

  “Christ, son. What’s the money for, if not for Anna?”

  “I can’t say.” The three little words were like a dagger, and he could tell he’d wounded his father with them.

  “What are you mixed up in, Stu?”

  “Nothing.”

  He raised an eyebrow at him.

  “Nothing illegal.”

  “So, this is the only way I get you into the hotel business? Attached to a five-thousand-dollar string?”

  Stuart wanted to tell him that he’d come work for him regardless, that he wasn’t the sort to hold his loyalty over anyone’s head, let alone his father’s. But he kept quiet. Maybe he was the sort.

  His father let the drapes fall closed, and the kite vanished from view. “The hours are nine to five. Monday through Saturday. There are nights, too.”

  Stuart nodded his head in affecting agreement.

  “I’ll start you at the front desk. Rotate you through the restaurant and the bar. Maybe even have you do a stint in housekeeping. By the time you move up here, I want you to know every job in this place.”

  Stuart could tell his father had spent considerable time thinking about this, imagining what the proper instatement of his son might look like.

  “This is really what you want?” his father asked him.

  Stuart thought about it for a moment. Could he let go of the coaching? Easily. Florence’s death had left him feeling less sure of himself, less willing to push the young women in the Ambassador Club to swim harder and farther than they’d ever swum before. If Florence could drown, anyone could.

  It was the lifeguarding that would be harder to give up. From Stuart’s stand, these last six summers, he had watched the whole world unfold. The wind traced ripples across the sand, sandpipers darted to and fro, and seagulls circled overhead in search of their next meal. Children laughed and fought and cried and fell asleep, sunburned and exhausted, in the crooks of their mothers’ arms; young men used bad lines to romance girls who wouldn’t remember their names come fall; and elderly couples marked the passage of time with the steady push and pull of the tide. Stuart was privy to it all, and when he pulled someone from the water and returned them to the world, he felt like a god. But then he thought of Anna, floating beside him in The Covington’s pool. If she said yes, retiring from the ACBP wouldn’t feel like a sacrifice, not really.

  “Yes,” Stuart said to his father. “It’s what I want.”

  “Lou,” his father called, in a loud enough voice to register with his secretary in the next room. A few seconds later, she popped her head inside the door.

  “Bring me a check.”

  * * *

  Stuart took the check directly to the Boardwalk National Bank and was halfway to the Adlers’ apartment when he ran straight into Anna. The meeting felt fortuitous until he realized she hadn’t even seen him. Her hair was wet and loose around her face, she’d skipped a button on her dress, and she was moving so fast, he might easily have missed her altogether.

  “Hey!” he called to her, trying to get her attention, but she didn’t turn her head, just kept moving past him down Atlantic Avenue. “Hey, Anna!”

  She stopped suddenly, whipped her head around, searched the faces of the people around her until she realized Stuart was standing just a few feet away from her.

  “What’s wrong?” he said.

  “It’s Gussie,” she said, a note of panic in her voice. “I can’t find her.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “When I got out of the bath, she wasn’t in the apartment.”

  “Where are Joseph and Esther?”

  “At the hospital. The baby’s coming.”

  “Could she have gone to the hospital?”

  “I called over and checked.”

  Stuart didn’t think he had ever met a child who disappeared with the kind of regularity that Gussie did. “What about Isaac? Could she be with him?”

  Anna shook her head fiercely. “He left yesterday on the four o’clock train.”

  “For where?”

  “Florida, I think.”

  “For good?”

  Anna nodded her head.

  “Christ,” said Stuart.

  Anna covered her face with her hands, and her shoulders began to heave.

  Stuart closed the remaining distance between them. He grabbed Anna by the shoulders but let go of her almost immediately, worried he’d overstepped. He’d yet to apologize for the way he had treated her on the beach the other night. It was quite possible she wanted nothing to do with him or his money but there was no use thinking about that now. “Where do you think she went?” he asked.

  “I thought she might be looking for you.”

  Stuart pictured the rock, with the pair of painted sea horses on it. He’d put it in his pocket, and later found it when he was emptying his loose change into a small jar he kept on his dresser top. “I haven’t been in the stand today. But let’s check there first.”

  They took off at a run toward Kentucky Avenue. At the corner of Atlantic and Tennessee, Anna stepped off the curb and might have been hit by a speeding truck had Stuart not grabbed her by the hand and pulled her back onto the sidewalk. When the avenue cleared and they could safely cross, he didn’t let go. They ran down Ohio Avenue, past the hospital and the junior high, and didn’t stop until they were standing in front of The Covington.

  The beach was unusually crowded for it being so late in the afternoon. Stuart let go of Anna’s hand and checked his watch. Any minute, the lifeguards would lower their stands and come in for the night.

  “What if she’s not here?” Anna gasped.

  From across the beach, Stuart could already tell the stand was vacant. Like Stuart, Robert was off for the day, so Stuart watched as two subs tipped the stand backward into the sand.

  “Hey, guys!” he called as he made his way toward them. “You see a little girl this afternoon? Dark hair. Seven years old. She might have come around asking for me.”

  “She was wearing a yellow-and-white gingham dress,” Anna offered.

  The young men looked at each other, as if they were trying to do a quick inventory of the thousands of small children who had required their attention. One of them said, “The beach was packed today, so I can’t say for sure. But no one came asking for you.”


  “Dear God,” said Anna, moving a hand to her mouth. “What if she went swimming?”

  “She hates swimming,” Stuart reminded her matter-of-factly, and watched as Anna’s face brightened.

  “Where else could she be?” he asked her.

  Anna listed off several places: the incubator exhibition, the plant, Fannie and Isaac’s apartment—although she was sure Gussie didn’t have a key.

  They made their way from one place to the next as quickly as possible. “Does she know Isaac’s gone?” Stuart asked Anna as they tried the door to the apartment.

  “I think so,” she said. “Isaac came to talk to her before he left.”

  “And he told her he was leaving?”

  “He must have. She wouldn’t talk to me about it, though.”

  “What about the train station?”

  “Right, he took the train—”

  “No, I mean, Gussie,” said Stuart. “Could she be at the train station?”

  Anna stopped, looked at him, and took off down the stairs at a sprint.

  * * *

  By the time they arrived at the station, the sun was low in the sky, and Stuart’s heart was hammering in his chest. He paused in front of a newsstand to catch his breath and wait for Anna to catch up with him but when she did, she blazed past him, through the big front doors and into the station building. Stuart hurried in behind her and watched as she ran through the lobby to the waiting room. She scanned the wooden benches and luggage stands, then stopped to ask a depot agent if he’d seen a little girl matching Gussie’s description. Stuart scanned the room quickly, then yelled to Anna, “I’ll check the platforms.”

  He jogged through the station building to the train shed, where several hulking trains sat, ready to board. At the sight of them, Stuart’s pulse quickened. The trains blocked his sight line, making it impossible to scan the platforms with any ease. He picked a platform and ran to the end of it, skirting waylaid luggage and clusters of passengers and standers-by. No Gussie.