Florence Adler Swims Forever: A Novel

by Rachel Beanland

  After the banks fell, the tourists stayed home, and Fannie and Isaac watched as many of Atlantic City’s steadiest businesses shuttered their doors. It was as if, almost overnight, Isaac stopped dreaming. He no longer came home from the plant with half-conceived business plans or sketched-out storefronts on the back of old receipts. He stopped talking about the house they’d buy, and he grew quieter, indifferent. He was less likely to laugh at Fannie’s jokes, more likely to lose his temper with Gussie. Where he had once tried to please and even impress Fannie’s parents, he avoided them instead, bowing out of Shabbat dinners and Sunday afternoons at the beach. But the most significant change, for Fannie, was Isaac’s utter unwillingness to consider having a second child.

  For two months after the crash, Isaac didn’t touch Fannie. When he eventually returned to her, on a cold night in January, she nearly wept with relief. The wind off the ocean rattled their bedroom windows and the radiators, recently bled, creaked under the weight of their heavy responsibility. Fannie could feel the familiar pressure building inside her, as if she, too, had a valve that just needed to be turned a few degrees. She whispered, “Keep going,” into Isaac’s ear, but no sooner were the words out of her mouth than he withdrew himself entirely, spilling a warm pool onto the pale of her stomach.

  “Why did you do that?” Fannie had asked, although she thought she knew.

  “These aren’t the circumstances in which I want to have another child.”

  Tears sprang to her eyes, but they remained concealed in the dark.

  “What are the circumstances?”

  “I don’t know, Fannie,” he said, sighing. “Not this.”

  Of all the men Fannie knew who had, in one way or another, been affected by the economic downturn, Isaac and his job at the plant seemed among the safest. In tight times, their friends and neighbors might give up new shoes and millinery but she couldn’t imagine them dispensing with bread. She supposed things could always get worse but, in all but the most dire circumstances, Fannie felt sure her father would be able to protect Isaac. He’d pink-slip any number of bench hands, oven men, and bread wrappers before he put his own son-in-law out of a job. Isaac might not be striking out on his own, but they were never going to be destitute.

  It was three years before Isaac stopped withdrawing when he climaxed. The first time, Fannie assumed he had merely made a mistake. But it happened again two nights after that, and then again the following week. She didn’t say anything for fear he’d remember himself, but she began to feel hopeful, to look forward to those moments when she could sense her husband’s muscles tighten, his breathing skip. Like she had in their early days, she locked her legs around him and arched her back, allowing her body to be pulled into his until she felt him shudder. In the dark, as Fannie waited for her husband’s breathing to resume its normal patterns and to eventually lull her to sleep, she tried to convince herself that Isaac had turned a corner, that his acquiescence was actually an expression of certitude. But in her heart, she thought it more likely that Isaac had just given up.

  * * *

  “The only thing I can’t figure out about this room,” said Fannie to Isaac, “is where the radio is.”

  Isaac looked around the room, absentmindedly. “What makes you think you’re meant to have one?”

  “Some of the women down the hall have them. I can hear their programs at night.”

  Isaac pinched the skin at the bridge of his nose, as if he couldn’t quite believe what he was hearing.

  “Do you think I’m being selfish? Obviously, it’s a very nice—”

  “Knock, knock,” came a voice from the hallway. Fannie sat up straighter when she saw it was Superintendent McLoughlin on her morning rounds.

  “Oh, I see you have company,” said the superintendent. She looked at her wristwatch.

  “Mr. Feldman, you’ll kindly recall that visiting hours begin at nine o’clock in the morning. It is only half-past seven.”

  “Is it that early?” he said with a sardonic grin, but McLoughlin did not appear to be amused.

  Fannie wondered if she should ask about the radio, hoped that Isaac might do it so she didn’t have to. McLoughlin intimidated her, had done ever since she’d met her last summer.

  McLoughlin began to read through Fannie’s chart, and Fannie took the opportunity to mouth the word radio to Isaac. He acted like he didn’t understand what she was saying, and she rolled her eyes at him, exasperated.

  “Your blood pressure looks good. It’s still slightly elevated but nothing for us to be too concerned about. Has Dr. Rosenthal spoken with you about it?”

  Fannie acknowledged he had.

  “Good,” said McLoughlin, closing the chart with a snap. Last summer, Fannie had assumed that somewhere in that chart, thick with notes, were answers. Why had she delivered so early? Was it her fault, Isaac’s, God’s? For a while, she had asked McLoughlin and Dr. Rosenthal every chance she got, but they never gave her any answers that satisfied her. Eventually, she’d stopped asking.

  Isaac wasn’t in favor of asking so many questions, then or now. She mouthed the word radio to him again, and he shrugged his shoulders, leaving her with no choice but to make her own inquiry. “We were just wondering, are the rooms equipped with radios?”

  McLoughlin looked at Isaac. If Fannie didn’t know better, she’d have said the superintendent scowled at him. “Not every room.”

  “Oh?” said Fannie.

  “It’s an extra charge.”

  “How much?” she asked.

  “More than your father wanted to pay.”

  * * *

  After McLoughlin left, Isaac and Fannie had very little to say to each other. Isaac sat on the edge of his chair, as if he might flee at any moment, and absentmindedly spun his hat around and around his forefinger. He had such long, elegant fingers.

  Finally, Fannie couldn’t take it anymore. “You’ll ruin the brim,” she said, and he stopped.

  “Did you see Gussie yesterday?” she asked, trying to find a conversation that might suit them both.

  “Hmm?”

  “Gussie? Mother says she’s doing well.”

  “Oh yes,” he said hesitantly, “I… I did see her.”

  “I’m missing her something terrible,” she said. “I guess I wasn’t expecting it to be this bad. I mean, I was only in the hospital a week, maybe ten days, last summer.”

  “Mmmm.”

  Were all men such poor conversationalists when thrust into situations that made them uncomfortable? Or was it just her husband? “She seems all right? Happy?” Fannie asked.

  At the word happy, Isaac looked up. His forehead wrinkled.

  “Happy?” he asked, as if he hadn’t understood the question.

  “Happy.”

  “Yes, yes. Of course, she seems happy.”

  After several more conversations ended in this manner, Fannie set Isaac free. “You should get to work. Before McLoughlin has you forcibly removed for breaking hospital protocol.”

  She had been trying to be funny but Isaac didn’t laugh. He was already on his feet, his hat on his head.

  Isaac stooped to kiss her cheek, but she grabbed him by the tie and steered his lips toward hers. She needed to feel like the old Fannie for just a minute—the Fannie who had seen something remarkable in the way he looked at her. Isaac responded to the kiss, and for several long moments, they were back in their old hiding space, under the Boardwalk, at Sovereign Avenue. There was no Gussie, no loan, no Hyram. Their biggest worry was only whether Esther and Joseph would allow their eldest daughter to marry a man of no means.

  When Fannie pulled away, Isaac’s cheeks looked slightly flushed, and the makings of a smile had crept across his face. He touched her chin and kissed the tip of her nose before turning toward the door.

  “Isaac,” she called when he had nearly crossed the room’s threshold. “I almost forgot.”

  She reached for the envelope, still without a stamp, on her bedside table and held it out to him
.

  “Will you be a dear and deliver this to Florence?”

  Joseph

  By the time Joseph arrived at Wischafter’s Beach Concessions, on the morning after his daughter’s burial, a beachboy of fourteen or fifteen years old was already unstacking chairs and unfurling oversized umbrellas.

  “How much to rent a chair for the whole week?” asked Joseph, trying very hard to focus on the young boy’s face and not the vast ocean behind him.

  “Eight dollars,” said the boy.

  Joseph winced. He could buy one for less.

  “There’s also a three-dollar deposit.”

  Joseph reached for his wallet and began to count out the bills. He could never tell Esther he’d spent this much on something so frivolous. The boy removed a small pencil and a receipt book from his pocket.

  “Name?” he asked.

  “Joseph Adler.”

  The boy made idle chatter as he took down the rest of Joseph’s information and signed the receipt.

  “Hear about the drowning on Sunday?”

  Joseph closed his eyes and saw his wife retching onto the floorboards of the hospital tent, after the beach surgeon had declared Florence dead.

  “First one of the season,” the boy continued.

  Joseph forced himself to ask, “Are they saying who it was?”

  “Some girl.” The boy handed Joseph his receipt. “Bring this back at the end of the week—so you can get your deposit back.”

  Joseph could barely nod an acknowledgment. Some girl.

  “That’s yours,” the boy said, pointing to a wooden chair with a blue-and-white-striped canvas seat. A small “63” was stenciled on the frame with blue paint.

  Joseph walked over to the chair, folded it, and tucked it neatly under his arm. With his free hand he touched his hat and started off in the direction of States Avenue. He hadn’t gone more than two dozen paces, had barely made it off the sand, when the boy jogged up behind him.

  “Sir, you can’t take the chair off the beach. It’s yours for the week but it stays in the sand.”

  Joseph put the beach chair down and reached for his wallet a second time. “I’ll tell you what,” he said. “Here’s three more dollars. Let me take the chair, and when I return it, the deposit’s yours to keep, too.”

  * * *

  The bakery’s administrative offices were on the third floor of the plant, well out of the way of the mixers, kneading machines, and dough dividers that cluttered the second floor and the ovens, cooling racks, bread-slicing machines, and bread-wrapping stations that filled the first.

  When Joseph had designed the building six years ago, he had spent a great deal of time thinking about the best way to make a loaf of bread. So much of bread making had become mechanized—it was the only way to make any real money at it—that he had felt it necessary to reexamine every part of the process. He considered the ingredients he used—hundred-pound bags of flour, water, yeast, salt, the precise number of minutes it took for the dough to rise, the number of loaves of bread he could fit in an oven, how long the bread needed to cool before it could be removed from the tray, and now that the American public demanded sliced bread, how many slices he could get out of a loaf. Wherever there were efficiencies to be had, he found them. To that end, he had put the new machines on the first and second floors, and relegated himself, a secretary, Isaac, and a small fleet of driver-salesmen to the third. He had taken an office at the back of the building, where he could watch the delivery trucks load up each morning and putter into the lot, empty, at night.

  Joseph’s legs burned as he reached the top of the stairs and hurried toward his office. A few drivers were on the phones but Mrs. Simons was not at her desk, and for that, Joseph was exceptionally grateful. He propped the beach chair against his legs while he searched her desk for a sheet of stationery, which he found in the third drawer he tried. With a black pen, he wrote PLEASE DO NOT DISTURB in large block letters. Did that read too harshly? Perhaps it did. He added Important Business in cursive script underneath, hoping it softened the directive, and taped the crude sign to his door.

  Once inside the office, Joseph closed the door behind him and locked it. Then he walked over to the window and rolled down the shade. He leaned the beach chair against the fireplace and went to his desk, where he rooted through his own drawers, looking for the stub of a candle. He used the matches in his pocket to warm the wax and secure the candle to the lid of an empty coffee can. Then he placed the makeshift candle holder on the mantel, lit the candle, and said a prayer. When he was sure that the flame would not go out, he unfolded the beach chair.

  The Talmud described Job’s suffering as he mourned the loss of his children, Now they sat down with him to the ground for seven days and seven nights, but no one said a word to him because they perceived that the pain was very severe. Job and his progeny had been dead for more than two thousand years, but Shiva chairs were still intentionally slung low to allow mourners to sit as close to the ground as possible.

  Joseph sat down heavily in his makeshift Shiva chair, buried his head in his hands, and wept.

  * * *

  There were good reasons to keep Florence’s death from Fannie, but by the third day of his self-imposed mourning ritual, Joseph had come to the conclusion that a small list of people did indeed need to be told about his younger daughter’s passing.

  There was Clementine Dirkin, the swim coach at Wellesley. Joseph had never met her but Florence had always spoken fondly of her, and he assumed she could be counted on to tell the appropriate administrative staff and share the news with Florence’s teammates. He imagined the girls gathering together, when they arrived back on campus in September, to console one another and decide how best to memorialize their lost friend. Would they dedicate a race to her memory? Lay trinkets of one kind or another in front of her locker? Install a plaque in the natatorium? Joseph wanted to believe that his daughter’s death left a hole the girls would find impossible to fill.

  Then there was the business of unwinding Florence’s Channel swim, which Joseph wasn’t entirely sure how to approach. Florence had made many of the arrangements herself, skirting Esther and going directly to Joseph to ask whether she might purchase a steamer ticket or book a month’s stay at the Hôtel du Phare in Cape Gris-Nez. Joseph had balked at the figures Florence had presented but she convinced him not to look at the swim and its underlying costs as an expense but rather an investment. If she made it across the Channel, she’d earn back his money in sponsorships and speaking fees, and Adler’s Bakery could boast that their rye bread had propelled the first Jewish woman across the English Channel. “I’ll write the jingle,” Florence had teased.

  The most expensive part of Florence’s plan had been engaging the coach who would steer her across the Channel. There were two men, in particular, Bill Burgess and Jabez Wolffe, who had successfully swum the English Channel themselves and now made their living helping other men—and a few women—do the same. They knew the Channel’s tides and currents, could watch for the right weather and water conditions. It was the coach, Florence had explained to Joseph, who would make or break her swim. He would teach her how to navigate the currents, arrange for her meals, and engage the local pilot boat that would trail her the thirty miles to Dover. Most important, if she became overly fatigued or delirious, which could easily happen during the daylong swim, it was the coach who would make the decision to yank her from the water.

  There had been a national uproar in 1925, when Wolffe had pulled Trudy Ederle out too soon. The rules were clear: if a swimmer was touched, for any reason, he or she was immediately disqualified. Ederle said she hadn’t been ready to quit when Wolffe reached for her, and she complained loudly, to any journalist with a pen in hand, that he had tapped her out without cause. When she returned to France the following summer, engaging Burgess and not Wolffe to be her coach, she had also brought her father with her and given him strict instructions to watch Burgess’s every move. Joseph thought the papers, at
least, had made it look as if the father and daughter were a good team.

  “If you want, you could come along,” Florence had said to Joseph as he wrote a check, payable to Bill Burgess, for her deposit, “Be my right-hand man.” The offer was tempting, but there was the bakery to consider, and also the cost of another steamship ticket and hotel room. Now, as he sat Shiva for his younger daughter, he wished he’d taken her up on it. Of course, they never would have made it to France, but Florence would have died knowing that her father’s love for her was as wide as any channel she might ever try to conquer. Surely, she knew that anyway?

  Joseph had no idea how to go about tracking down Bill Burgess. If he couldn’t find Burgess’s address in Florence’s correspondence, he thought it likely that he’d find it in the notebook she had carried back and forth to Wellesley the last two years. For as long as Florence had been talking about swimming the English Channel, she’d been recording her training regimen, diet, and even her sleep in a small notebook with a pale blue cover. On it she’d written in bold lettering, FLORENCE ADLER SWIMS THE ENGLISH CHANNEL. As if it were already fact.

  Joseph was impressed by her careful notes, neatly labeled diagrams, tables drawn with a ruler to keep the lines straight. On some pages, she’d glued newspaper articles about other swimmers, other long-distance attempts. He remembered feeling a little awestruck as he flipped through the notebook’s pages, wondering if—hoping—his daughter applied the same exactitude to her schoolwork.

  Yes, the notebook would surely deliver a clue as to Burgess’s whereabouts. And, for Dirkin, perhaps a letter was the best course of action. Something she could pass along to the administration, to be filed away alongside Florence’s partially completed transcript. Joseph heaved himself out of his beach chair and went to stand on the other side of his desk. He drummed the blotter as he considered his options. Finally, he called for his secretary, “Mrs. Simons, will you come in here for a moment?”