In less than a minute, Robert and Stuart pulled alongside the man, whose head, save his mouth and nose, was entirely submerged. Stuart jumped into the water, his rescue can under his arm, and approached the man from behind, hooking his arms under the man’s armpits. He kicked his legs as hard as he could to propel the man’s head above the waterline and allow him to get one good breath of air. Then he pushed the man back under the water, and in one fluid move, pulled the rescue can under the waterline and in front of him. Once he had rolled the man onto the can, he watched as it buoyed him back to the surface. The man sputtered and gasped but he was breathing, which was all that mattered.
While Robert hoisted the man into the boat, Stuart treaded water and allowed himself to regain his own steady breathing patterns. He looked back at their lifeguard stand, which looked tiny in comparison to The Covington, rising out of the sand behind it. Did it even matter that the stand stood in the shadow of his father’s hotel? That his father wanted to keep close tabs on him? In the course of just a few minutes, Stuart had saved a man’s life and averted a family’s suffering.
* * *
Stuart did not consider going to see his father until Robert and he had cleared the water and dragged the lifeguard stand and rescue boat back up onto high ground for the night. Together, they climbed onto the back of the stand and used their combined weight to tip it backward. On its side, it was protected from the overnight effects of high winds and drunken revelers.
Back at the beach tent, Stuart spent extra time wiping down his rescue can and straightening up the first-aid supplies. The guys who worked all the other stands on this section of the beach arrived at the tent in pairs, stowing their rescue cans, restocking their medical kits, and bragging about their biggest saves of the day. Stuart and Robert had made more than two dozen rescues over the course of eight hours, but two guys stationed at Michigan Avenue had plucked a young boy out of the water after they saw him fall out a window on Million Dollar Pier. Aside from the shock, he had been completely unharmed.
“It’s a bear to pull a rescue boat up alongside those pilings,” said Robert. “You win.”
Stuart had worked the States Avenue stand for five summers, and he knew the guys who reported in to the Maryland Avenue beach tent like they were his own brothers. There was Charles Kelly, who spent every free minute combing the beach, trying to convince the prettiest girls to enter the Miss Beach Patrol Pageant. The contest only happened once a year—in July—but the joke was that Kelly recruited contestants year-round. James Parker lived for playing pranks on the lifeguards in the other Beach Patrol tents and would gladly hide a pair of oars or a couple of the rescue boats’ drain plugs if it meant watching the guys in one of the other tents scramble to find them. And then there was Irish Dan, who was the best rower on the beach. When the waves got so big that they chased the crowds away, he challenged the other guards to sea battles, and when hurricane waves left even the ACBP’s best guards beached, Irish Dan would take a boat out alone, bragging that he could see the jitney drivers making change on the Avenue. Captain Bryant often reminded him that he’d be spending a whole lot of change if a rescue boat broke in half while he was horsing around in it.
Stuart still went out with the Maryland Avenue guys at night but it was different now. He hadn’t realized how much time they’d spent in the evenings simply unwinding their days. He still had stories to contribute—just yesterday he’d chased a purse snatcher halfway down the beach—but these were stories none of the guys had witnessed and therefore couldn’t corroborate. Part of the fun came from retelling a story everyone already knew.
Florence’s death had been the biggest story of the summer, by far, and it belonged to the guys at the Maryland Avenue beach tent. Ordinarily, a story like that would have lived forever, growing and changing with each retelling until it became a living thing. But the guys knew Stuart had been close to Florence, so when he asked them not to talk about it, they had honored the request.
“I’ll kill anyone who breathes a word,” said Irish Dan, giving Stuart a heavy slap on the back that pitched him so far forward he nearly fell face first into the sand. Stuart believed him.
Stuart understood that it would take time and effort to get to know these new guys at Kentucky Avenue, so when someone suggested that they all get a beer at the Jerome, he decided his father could wait until the following day.
* * *
At a quarter to nine in the morning, Stuart allowed one of The Covington’s doormen to usher him off the Boardwalk and into the hotel’s lobby.
“Morning, Mr. Williams.”
“Morning, Henry.”
The Covington wasn’t the largest hotel on the Boardwalk but it was large enough that Stuart didn’t enjoy telling people his father owned it. He could see their expressions go blank, as they calculated his father’s net worth and determined that Stuart was not just well off, but rich. Stuart was neither of those things—not really. His father’s money came with too many strings attached, and the money he made lifeguarding and coaching was just enough to cover his bar tabs and the rent he paid for a room in Mrs. Tate’s Northside boardinghouse.
It’s not that Stuart wanted to disassociate himself from the hotel entirely. The Covington had been a good place to grow up, although Stuart had liked it better when the place was still called Covington Cottage and felt like a ramshackle retreat. Back then, there was always wicker furniture on the veranda, which overlooked the ocean, and there was never enough staff to keep up with the sand that got tracked across the lobby’s Oriental rugs and stuck in the cracks of the wide wooden floorboards.
Stuart’s great-grandfather had built the cottage in 1873—just three years after the Boardwalk went in. Philadelphians had discovered the allure of the shore, and the United States Hotel, with its six hundred rooms, couldn’t keep up with demand. Stuart’s great-grandfather could see that Atlantic City needed more hoteliers and, with the backing of his own father, purchased a tract of beachfront property where he could build a relatively simple wood-framed structure. Covington Cottage boasted eighty rooms, a half-dozen beachside changing tents—where attendants made extra money selling buckets of seawater with which to rinse off—and easy access to the railroad station. When Applegate’s Pier went in, near the already busy hotel, business boomed.
In the 1890s, Stuart’s grandfather expanded the hotel’s footprint, adding two wide wings to the cottage, which remained the beating heart of the establishment. That iteration of the hotel was the one Stuart knew the best. There was a restaurant where, in the mornings, a colored woman named Mama K served up stacks of golden pancakes, a library with lots of soft furniture, and plenty of good hiding places, but the hotel wasn’t yet so big that Stuart could get lost in it. His father had begun doing the payroll and much of the ordering, but the day-to-day management of the hotel remained the domain of his grandparents. His grandfather oversaw the front of the house, his grandmother planned the menus and arranged the lobby’s fresh flowers, and there were always odd jobs for a young boy who needed constant occupation. In the summer months, when Stuart wasn’t reordering the room keys that hung on pegs behind the front desk or running newspapers up to the rooms, he spent long hours in the swimming pool, practicing his trudgeon.
Stuart was ten years old when his grandfather died, and within just a few short years, it was as if Stuart’s father had erased him entirely. He hired a New York architectural firm to design a massive new addition for the hotel, and the plan they came back with called for knocking down Covington Cottage completely, save the façade of the original structure, to make way for two twenty-three-floor towers that would be the tallest in Atlantic City, if not New Jersey. The surviving veranda would become an arcade of shops and the swimming pool would be demolished to make room for a larger one. As construction got under way, Stuart’s father hired a New York advertising agency, too, and the ads they created, which referred exclusively to a place called “The Covington,” beckoned tourists to stay at Atlantic City�
��s “Skyscraper by the Sea” and exalted the hotel’s ocean views, private bathrooms—complete with faucets that pumped healing salt water directly from the ocean—and other modern amenities such as radios, telephones, and baby cages. Mama K was given an early retirement, and in her place, Stuart’s father hired a chef, also from New York, who had been trained at Paris’s Cordon Bleu and could turn out a menu that was both appealing to an American palate and written entirely in French.
Stuart nodded at a young man behind the reception desk whom he recognized but couldn’t name. The thing about being the boss’s son was that, whether Stuart wanted the attention or not, every single member of the staff knew exactly who he was—and who he wasn’t. When he had been coming along, everyone from the front desk attendants to the waiters to the gardeners had been kind to him, no doubt imagining that one day he’d be signing their paychecks. But as he grew older, and it became clear that he wasn’t interested in going to work for his father, he thought he had noticed the staff’s patience with him withering.
Stuart got into the elevator alongside the bellman, Cy, and a middle-aged couple who might as well have been holding placards that read FROM PHILADELPHIA’S MAIN LINE. Cy pressed the button for the second floor, where the hotel’s administrative offices were located, without waiting for Stuart to ask.
There had always been a type of guest The Covington attracted—monied, white, and Protestant—but never more so than after Covington Cottage reopened as The Covington. Stuart had noticed that, over time, much of his resentment toward the hotel itself had been redirected toward the people who frequented it. And, of course, toward his father, who maintained his grandfather’s belief that Jews—and most definitely Negros—had no business staying at a hotel as grand as The Covington.
Florence had been the one to point out The Covington’s discriminatory practices to Stuart, back when she was swimming for the Ambassador Club, and he remembered feeling embarrassed that he hadn’t even noticed there were no Jewish names in the hotel’s guestbook. “That’s why my parents don’t like you,” Florence had said, as simply as if she were explaining why she was late to swim practice. Stuart had initially felt stunned, so unfamiliar was he with the sensation of being disliked by anyone, but then he’d begun to pay attention. When he looked around The Covington’s dining rooms, bars, and ballrooms, he saw the East Coast’s most privileged elites, all eager to spend their holiday pretending they lived in a world that didn’t actually exist.
Cy let Stuart off on the second floor, and Stuart tipped his head to his companions. He could feel his chest tighten and his breathing grow shallower as he arrived at the administrative suite. Since it wasn’t yet nine o’clock, the desk of his father’s secretary sat empty. He grabbed a peppermint out of a glass jar she kept beside her typewriter, then rapped on the door that led to his father’s office.
“Who is it?”
Stuart didn’t feel the need to announce himself, given the fact that his father had summoned him. Instead, he just turned the doorknob and went inside.
“You made it, I see,” said his father, looking at his wristwatch.
“I did.”
“Twenty-three hours later.”
Stuart refused to be riled. “I’m here,” he said as he sat down, uninvited, in one of two leather club chairs that faced his father’s desk, an expensive Bauhaus contraption of mahogany and tubular steel that he’d paid to have shipped from Germany. Stuart unwrapped the peppermint as slowly and loudly as possible and popped the candy into his mouth.
His father just looked at him.
“Yes?” Stuart asked, when he could stand his father’s quiet surveillance no longer.
“I heard about Florence Adler.”
Stuart didn’t like the sound of her lovely name on his father’s tongue, didn’t like the way he referenced her by her first and last name, as if Stuart wouldn’t have understood whom he was talking about, otherwise.
“How did you hear?” asked Stuart.
“It doesn’t matter.”
“It does, actually.”
“Chaz told me.”
“The chief?” Stuart would have liked to hide the look of consternation on his face but he had a poor poker face. Was Chief Bryant so deep in his father’s pocket that he’d come running right over to The Covington as soon as he’d gotten word that Florence had drowned?
“He was worried about you.”
“He could have told me that.”
In response, his father lit a cigarette.
“You can’t keep interfering like this,” said Stuart.
“Since when did extending sympathy to one’s son become interfering?”
“I must have missed that part.”
“What part?”
“The part where you offered your sympathy,” said Stuart, pocketing the candy wrapper and reaching for a glass paperweight that sat on the corner of the desk.
“I’m very sorry, Stuart. I am.”
“Perhaps you should have led with that.”
“Stuart, really. You’re being ridiculous.”
“I’m being ridiculous? I’m being ridiculous? I’m not the one who’s so intent on keeping tabs on my twenty-four-year-old son that I paid off his boss to get him reassigned to my beach.”
“So that’s what this is really about?”
“You had no right to get me reassigned to the Kentucky Avenue stand. And you have no right to pretend to care about how Florence’s death is affecting me. You had no use for her when she was alive.”
“She was a perfectly fine girl. I just thought you would have been better off lavishing your limited attention elsewhere.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?” Stuart realized he was squeezing the paperweight so tightly that his hand had begun to sweat.
His father didn’t say anything, just tapped the end of his cigarette against an ashtray that was very much in need of being emptied.
“What you meant to say,” said Stuart, “was that I would have been better off lavishing my attention on someone who wasn’t Jewish.”
“I didn’t say that.”
“Yes, well, you might as well have.”
“Do you know what I think?” his father asked.
Stuart didn’t answer, just replaced the paperweight on the desk and stood to go.
“I think it suits your purposes to think of me as a villain. As long as you do, you feel justified spending your days in the sun and your nights at the club.”
“What would you know about my purposes?”
“I know one thing,” said his father as Stuart walked toward the door. “There may be plenty of men around here who make a career out of serving on the Atlantic City Beach Patrol but you’re not one of them.”
Stuart opened the door of his father’s office and walked through it as his father barked, “It’s high time you got off the beach.”
Anna
When Anna arrived at the Knife and Fork Inn, the restaurant was already crowded with businessmen sipping cocktails and dining on thick, red lobster tails. She’d been surprised when she arrived at the intersection of Atlantic and Pacific avenues, having carefully followed the directions Joseph had given her that morning, to find a building that looked as if it belonged in Belgium or the Netherlands, with its stepped gables and terra-cotta roof. The stucco exterior was dotted with little knives and forks, and she had stood for a moment, admiring the detail before reaching for the handle of the big brass door. The restaurant was dark, with thick, leaded windows that sparkled in the sunlight but let in very little light. The windows had been cracked open but there was no breeze, and the heat from the kitchen made the summer feel inescapable.
The maître d’ led Anna upstairs, to a larger room, lined with leather-tufted banquets. Linen-covered tables dotted the center of the room, and at one of them, Joseph and Mr. Hirsch, of the Atlantic City chapter of the American Jewish Committee, had already taken their seats. Joseph gestured toward her and said something to Mr. Hirsch and both men stood a
s she approached.
“Anna, Eli Hirsch,” said Joseph, pulling out a chair for Anna before the maître d’ could do so.
“I’m so pleased to meet you, Mr. Hirsch.”
“Likewise. Joseph’s told me nothing but good things.”
“He’s very kind to me,” she said as she took a good look at Joseph. Anna had worried all morning about whether this lunch meeting would be too much for him.
A waiter filled Anna’s water glass and asked if she’d like a cocktail. She hesitated, tempted to order one but unsure what to ask for.
“She’ll have an old-fashioned,” said Joseph, raising his own glass, and Anna gratefully agreed. The Adlers had told her that, until just a few years ago, alcohol consumption was prohibited here and everywhere in the U.S. Looking around Atlantic City, and certainly this dining room, it was hard to believe such a thing could be true.
Mr. Hirsch touched the rim of his already empty glass, indicating to the waiter that he’d like another.
“So, Joseph tells me you arrived in March?”
“Yes.”
“On a student visa?”
Anna nodded her head affirmatively.
“You’re a lucky girl to have had your paperwork sail through the consulate so quickly. Every Jew in Germany wants to get out, and U.S. officials are worried they’re going to be overrun.”
Florence Adler Swims Forever: A Novel Page 12