Florence Adler Swims Forever: A Novel

by Rachel Beanland

When Isaac leaned back far enough in his desk chair, he could see Joseph’s office door, which had been shut all week. He always kept one eye on the door since it benefited him to know his father-in-law’s comings and goings, but this week, he had paid more attention to it than usual.

  If Esther’s instructions had been for both Joseph and Isaac to return to work and act as if everything were normal, Joseph was failing miserably at that task. Nothing about his shuttered blinds or that silly handwritten sign he’d posted on his office door looked normal. And on Thursday afternoon, when Mrs. Simons was summoned into Joseph’s office and returned to her desk visibly shaken, Isaac was sure Joseph had told her the truth about Florence. The brittle woman—usually so stoic—dabbed at her eyes for several minutes before hurrying to the powder room, where Isaac could hear her sobs even over the exhaust fan.

  On Friday morning there had been a revolving door of visitors to see Joseph. First Florence’s friend Stuart, and then Anna. Stuart’s visit made a certain amount of sense—the scrub had clearly been besotted by Florence. And everyone knew he was on the outs with his own father, so it wasn’t a complete surprise to see him latching on to Joseph. But Anna’s visit was less easily explained, and as a result, Isaac spent the better part of Friday wondering about it. To Isaac’s knowledge, she hadn’t come to the plant once in the more than three months she’d been staying with the Adlers. Today, she had remained inside Joseph’s office for a quarter of an hour, maybe a little longer, and when she left, she had looked relieved. Since Isaac’s office faced the street, he waited the thirty seconds he knew it would take Anna to make her way down the two flights of stairs and emerge from the building, then he stood up for a stretch and walked over to the window.

  Interestingly, Stuart had waited for her. He sat out on the steps of the plant, hat in hand, face stretched toward the sun. When Anna pushed open the building’s heavy front door, Stuart jumped to his feet. Though he had tried, Isaac wasn’t able to make out what Stuart said to her, but he had watched the two of them walk off down Tennessee Avenue, before returning to his desk.

  Anna was a hard one to figure out, partially because her accent was thick and partially because she had materialized out of thin air. The story was that Anna’s mother, Inez, had grown up alongside Joseph but Isaac was sure there had to be more to it than that. It was one thing for Joseph to write an affidavit for Anna—everyone knew the affidavits were as meaningless as the pieces of paper they were written on. But putting her up in his spare room was something else altogether. Isaac didn’t think it was the type of thing he’d do for just anybody.

  There was little debate that things in Germany were getting bad. Since coming to power the year before, the Nazi Party had already removed Jews from the civil service, curtailed the rights of Jewish doctors, lawyers, and other professionals, forbidden performances by Jewish actors, and restricted the number of Jewish students allowed to attend German schools and universities. Joseph followed it all very closely and reported on the most notable offenses to Isaac as he came and went from their third-floor offices. In lieu of a greeting, Joseph would offer him a headline straight from the morning’s paper, “They’ve revoked the licenses of Jewish accountants” or “No more medical school for Jews in Bavaria.” According to Joseph, Roosevelt had his head in the sand, and if Americans waited for Congress to do something, they’d be waiting a long time. Like many of the Jewish businessmen in town, Joseph donated to the American Jewish Committee, and Isaac suspected his gifts were generous since his name was inscribed in the “golden book” and the president of the local chapter made a habit of calling on Joseph with some regularity.

  It’s not that Isaac didn’t care about the plight of Germany’s Jews. It’s just that, in Russia, discrimination had been the least of people’s worries. The stories he’d grown up listening to—about beatings and rapes and entire villages set ablaze—made it harder for Isaac to get worked up about the fact that Jewish merchants in Germany had to mark their shops with yellow Stars of David. He found it almost quaint that his father-in-law considered the persecution of Jews to be news at all.

  Ostensibly, Anna was here because she hadn’t been able to get into college in Berlin, or anywhere else in Germany for that matter. When her mother had written to Joseph, he’d apparently been all too happy to throw money at the problem. Maybe Isaac was old-fashioned but a girl not being able to go to college hardly seemed like an international crisis.

  Isaac rolled a pencil back and forth between his fingers, then tapped it on his desk. He needed a plan. The weekend was nearly upon him, and if he wasn’t careful, he would spend it in Esther and Joseph’s living room, sitting a modified Shiva.

  It wasn’t that Isaac didn’t mourn Florence’s death or want to honor her life. In fact, he felt his sister-in-law’s loss acutely. He could remember, on his early visits to the Adlers’ apartment, twelve-year-old Florence interviewing him with the same ferocity as her parents but with much less tact. Have you kissed her? she asked once, looking him straight in the eye. Isaac, who had been the baby of his own family without ever managing to be babied at all, marveled at her confidence and got some satisfaction out of watching her grow into a woman who was every bit as loud and brash as the girl she’d once been.

  Sitting Shiva for Florence would be painful. Excruciating without Fannie or any callers to offer up distractions. Isaac could try to disappear for a few hours on Saturday, tell Esther and Joseph he needed to visit Fannie. But he hated visiting the hospital almost as much as he hated visiting his in-laws’ apartment. It wasn’t just about Hyram. There was something about being on the maternity ward, surrounded by so many women, all of them concerned with the business of life and death, that left him feeling exposed. He could feel Fannie studying him, as if she could see him more clearly without the interference of the outside world.

  Isaac remembered the letter Fannie had given him when he’d visited on Tuesday, and felt for it in his jacket pocket. It was still there, folded in half, its corners beginning to curl. He removed it, smoothed it at its crease, and studied his wife’s handwriting. The loop of the F, the generous A. What would Fannie do when she learned that Florence was dead? Was Esther right? Would this news be too much for her to bear?

  Isaac was not inclined to think so. But then again, he had been the one who had urged Fannie to ride the Dodgem with him last spring.

  It had been a pretty day, still two months before Fannie’s due date, and Esther had volunteered to watch Gussie for the afternoon. The day had a carefree quality that reminded Isaac of that first summer, before they were married. The two of them had eaten a hamburger at Mammy’s and then walked to Steeplechase Pier, which had recently reopened. They picked their way through the crowd, admiring the loud games and the brightly colored carousel at the center of the pier. Behind it sat a new ride with a big yellow sign that screamed DODGEM in giant blue letters.

  “Oh, I get it,” said Fannie. “Dodge them.”

  Isaac watched as fifteen or twenty people, all in miniature metal cars with thick rubber bumpers, whipped around a small rink.

  “I suppose the point is to bump into each other?” he asked as they watched a man, who looked oversized in his little car, plow into the car of a small boy who must have been his son. Fannie didn’t say anything, just laughed when she saw the boy lurch forward in surprise.

  Isaac pulled two quarters from his pocket, held them out to Fannie, and said, “Shall we give it a spin? You’ve always wanted to learn to drive.”

  Fannie shook her head no, inclined to stay on the sidelines, but Isaac pushed.

  “It’ll be just like old times. Remember when we used to ride the Roundabout?” he said, a twinkle in his eye.

  “Do you think it’s safe?” she asked, one hand resting protectively on her stomach.

  “Perfectly.”

  When Fannie started bleeding early the following morning, Isaac hadn’t wanted to believe that the two incidents could be related. They had called Esther and Joseph immedia
tely, told them that something was wrong and that they needed them to take Gussie right away. While they waited for Joseph to come with the car, Isaac had practically pleaded for absolution from Fannie, and if not that, then for Fannie to keep the correlative circumstances to herself.

  “Fan, it was barely a bump. I mean, you didn’t feel a thing, right?”

  She didn’t say anything, just looked at him with a terrified expression on her face.

  “It was just fun, that’s all,” he said, a detectable note of fear creeping into his voice.

  Hyram was born at six o’clock in the evening but it was a quarter past nine before Isaac learned of his son’s arrival. A doctor, who introduced himself as Gabriel Rosenthal, came to find Isaac in the hospital lobby, and it was the way he said “Mr. Feldman” that made Isaac realize, with a kind of gross certainty, they would lose the child.

  Fannie had suffered a placental abruption, Dr. Rosenthal explained. There had been nothing to do but allow her to labor.

  “Is she—?” Isaac asked, not knowing how to finish the question.

  “She’s fine. We’re watching her closely and it looks like the bleeding has stopped.”

  “And the baby?”

  “He’s very small,” said the doctor. “It’s unlikely he’ll make it through the night.”

  “He?”

  “Yes, a boy.”

  “A boy,” Isaac repeated, numbly.

  The doctor looked at him with apologetic eyes.

  “May I see him?” Isaac asked.

  “We don’t recommend it.”

  “Yes, but I think I’d like to, if it’s all the same.”

  The doctor led Isaac upstairs to the nursery, where a nurse gestured to a chair in the middle of the room. The room was lined with bassinets, but Isaac avoided looking inside them, terrified to catch a glimpse of his son before he had fully prepared himself for the encounter. The nurse walked over to a bassinet and reached for a bundle of blankets that didn’t look much different from any of the others. She held the bundle close to her chest and hesitated as she neared Isaac.

  When she handed the bundle over to Isaac, he was surprised at how heavy and warm it felt in his arms.

  “He’s hot?” he asked, alarmed.

  “That’s just the hot-water bottle,” she explained. “We’re trying to keep his temperature up.”

  He lifted a corner of the blanket to reveal the red, wizened face of a tiny, old man—all forehead, no hair, eyes closed tight. His head couldn’t have been bigger than a billiard ball. Indeed, he was resting against a hot-water bottle, which had been wrapped in a towel.

  The child was horrifying to look at, and somehow also vaguely beautiful. It was impossible, studying him, to pick out Fannie’s sharp brown eyes or Isaac’s hairline but it must have been the promise of those features, and others like them, eventually developing, that helped him see past his son’s strangeness.

  “I convinced Fannie to ride the Dodgem cars yesterday. At Steeplechase Pier,” Isaac said as he stared down at his fragile son. He could feel his breath beginning to catch in his throat. A tear rolled down his cheek and landed on the baby’s forehead. He wiped it away with his thumb, which seemed huge when held up against his son’s miniature features. “Is this my fault?”

  “I’m sorry. I’m not familiar with them,” said Dr. Rosenthal.

  “You just bump into each other. I hit her once, maybe twice. Hard, I think. I mean, not really. It’s just an amusement.” He knew he was talking too much and tried to make himself stop. “She was laughing.”

  “I wish we knew but sometimes these things aren’t so easy to pinpoint,” said the doctor in the same tepid tone in which he’d said everything else.

  The nurse was kinder. “It’s possible she had high blood pressure, or some other condition. Sometimes these things just happen.”

  It was hard for Isaac to comprehend that this child, who had to weigh less than two pounds, was the same baby Fannie had dreamed of for so many years. Why hadn’t Isaac given him to her sooner?

  Isaac’s eyes settled on a card, which had been tucked into the baby’s bassinet. It read, Feldman, Baby Boy.

  “We’re naming him Hyram,” Isaac said.

  The doctor gave the nurse a look, and she retrieved the card from the bassinet. She pulled a pen from her pocket and scratched through the words Baby Boy. Above the strike-through, she wrote HYRAM in big, block letters. Isaac liked the way the name looked when it was all spelled out.

  “May I see Fannie?” Isaac asked.

  “She needs to rest,” the doctor warned. “Perhaps tomorrow.”

  Isaac knew what he wanted to say but it was hard to get the words out. “I think she might want to see him, before he—”

  “That’s not advisable.”

  “No?”

  The doctor shook his head.

  Sometimes Isaac wondered whether things would have been different if Hyram had in fact died that night, as the doctor warned he would. If Fannie had never seen him or held him or begun to hope that he might live. Surely, they both would have had an easier time coping with the loss, might have avoided retreating to the furthest corners of their marriage.

  No, Isaac wasn’t keen to spend the weekend at either the hospital or his in-laws’ apartment. He placed the letter in the top drawer of his desk, and was about to push the drawer shut when Joseph knocked on the frame of his door, leaning against it for support.

  “I’m going to head home a little early today,” he said to Isaac.

  “I was wondering if I might borrow your car on Saturday,” Isaac asked.

  Joseph looked confused. It was Shabbos, and he had no doubt assumed Isaac would spend Saturday at the apartment, squeezing a week’s worth of mourning into a single day.

  “My father took a fall.”

  “Oh—I’m sorry, Isaac.”

  “He’ll be fine. But I thought I’d take Gussie to see him. Maybe stay in Alliance overnight.”

  Joseph didn’t say anything. Isaac sensed that his daughter was acting as a salve in the apartment, and that at least for Esther, Gussie’s presence—and the care she required—was providing a welcome distraction from grief.

  “We’ll be back early on Sunday. With enough time to end Shiva.”

  Joseph nodded his head slowly. “I’m sure it will be good for Gussie to get out of the house.”

  * * *

  Isaac and Gussie could have taken the train from Atlantic City to Norma and walked the half mile between the railway station and Alliance. But arriving by car was much more fun.

  Joseph’s Oakland was a practical automobile, not at all flashy but also not without pep. Isaac followed Atlantic Avenue out of the city until, at Mays Landing, it became Highway 40 and he could pick up speed. He glanced over at Gussie to gauge her reaction. With the windows down, his daughter’s hair whipped wildly across her face. Occasionally, she peeled a strand out of her mouth and tucked it behind her ear. He should have thought to tell her to bring a scarf. No matter. She seemed happy.

  When he had arrived at Joseph and Esther’s apartment at half-past nine that morning, Gussie had met him at the front door.

  “She’s been watching for you since a quarter past eight,” Esther had told him, and Isaac wondered if she meant to insinuate that he was late, or that his daughter didn’t see enough of him. Gussie wore a yellow-and-white gingham dress, which looked freshly pressed, and carried a rucksack and a bag from the bakery.

  “I’m sending some rugelach to your father,” Esther had said, “for his recovery. Will you give him our best?” and Isaac had immediately regretted his own duplicitousness.

  Gussie didn’t say much as the car sped down the four-lane road, and Isaac wondered if she’d gotten enough sleep.

  “You all right?” he asked.

  Gussie turned to look at him, seemed confused by the question. It was one, he realized, that no one ever asked her.

  “You’re sleeping okay?”

  She nodded, returned her eyes to
the road. Isaac wondered if it might be wise to address Florence’s death directly, to let Gussie know that she could talk to him about it if she wanted. He considered what he might say to her. That death comes for us all? That Florence was with God? That they’d carry her memory with them, always? It all sounded ridiculous, so in the end, he kept his mouth shut. There was absolutely nothing to say to a seven-year-old about any of this sad business.

  The little communities of Mizpah and Buena Vista rushed by, and it wasn’t until Isaac coasted into Vineland that he was forced to slow down. The highway turned into a broad avenue, with rows of flowers and shrub trees bordering the houses that lined the street. While he was growing up in Alliance, Vineland had felt like a big city, though compared to Atlantic City, it was still a small town. Isaac’s family had walked the half mile between Alliance and Vineland to purchase items they couldn’t grow or make on the farm—things like winter jackets and shoes. As a boy, Isaac had assumed that Alliance would one day catch up with Vineland, that when his father and mother and their neighbors had worked hard enough, Alliance would also have a picture house and a pharmacy and a five-and-ten store.

  On the other side of Vineland, the city lots gave way to countryside—big patches of fields between groves of birch trees. Isaac looked at his watch. It was a quarter past ten. He was sure he’d find his father at shul, particularly since he hadn’t told him he was coming. Isaac turned onto Gershal Avenue and after a few more minutes pulled the car into the grass in front of Congregation Emanu-El. The Oakland was the only car on the property. Some of the men in the community, although certainly not Isaac’s father, were doing well enough to own a car but no one would have dared to drive one on Shabbos. Isaac rather enjoyed the idea of the men saying their last Aleinu, closing their prayer books, and coming out onto the steps of the congregation to be confronted by Isaac and his automobile. He imagined them all returning to their farmhouses, telling their wives that Isaac Feldman looked like he was doing well for himself.

  “Are we going in?” Gussie asked when Isaac threw on the parking brake but didn’t cut the ignition.