Florence Adler Swims Forever: A Novel

by Rachel Beanland

  “Do you think she knows?” Esther asked.

  “I don’t have any indication that she does,” said Dr. Rosenthal. “I spoke with the superintendent and several of the nurses on the ward, and no one’s noticed anything out of the ordinary. They said a few friends of Fannie’s popped by yesterday afternoon, but everyone seemed to be in high spirits.”

  “Which friends?” Esther asked, but Dr. Rosenthal gave her a look that indicated he wasn’t the keeper of Fannie’s social calendar. “I’m sorry.”

  “You’re fine.”

  “So, you still think there’s a chance someone told her?”

  “I think maybe I was just hopeful that there was an explanation for the high readings.”

  “Have you spoken with Isaac about any of this?”

  Dr. Rosenthal shook his head. “We haven’t seen him in several days.”

  Esther cocked her head to one side. What could be keeping Isaac from the hospital? Really, it was absurd. With no child to look after and a job that, by Joseph’s account, he performed only adequately, what else did he have to do besides visit his bedridden wife?

  “You must be just missing him,” she said. “I think he visits directly after work.”

  “He must,” said Dr. Rosenthal, who looked far from convinced.

  Out of the corner of her eye, Esther noticed that Gussie was out of her chair and hopscotching her way across the hospital’s lobby.

  “Can we go up, Nana?” she asked, her voice very close to a whine. Esther abhorred whining.

  “Going to see your mother now, are you?” Dr. Rosenthal asked, tussling Gussie’s hair. She ducked out of his reach and hid behind Esther’s skirt.

  Dr. Rosenthal gave Esther a kind, if not slightly regretful, smile and began to move toward the stairs. When he was several feet away, he turned back.

  “You know, Mrs. Adler, when Superintendent McLoughlin first presented this plan, I thought it all rather peculiar. Perhaps even cruel.”

  Esther narrowed her eyes at him. Hiding Florence’s death from Fannie might be unconventional, but she’d never once thought of it as cruel.

  “But Fannie’s almost a month further along now, further than she made it with the last baby. So, who’s to say?”

  * * *

  On the ward, several of the nurses greeted Esther by name.

  “Good morning, Mrs. Adler.”

  “Morning, Mrs. Adler.”

  Dorothy, whom Esther had unfortunately come to know quite well, had taken it upon herself to establish more casual terms: “Morning, Mrs. A.”

  In Esther’s opinion, Dorothy spent far too much time standing around and gossiping. Even when she was being useful—changing the sheets or giving Fannie a sponge bath—she was always so terribly slow that Esther fought the urge to yank the bedsheet or basin from her hand and do the task herself.

  Esther nodded grimly at each of the nurses as she passed and tightened her grip on Gussie’s hand. As they approached Fannie’s room, she leaned down and hissed in Gussie’s ear, “Remember. Not a word about Florence.”

  At the door, which was ajar, Esther paused, forced herself to rework her facial muscles into a more pleasant composition. She practiced a smile. Those were always difficult. Grins were more manageable. She might have stood in the corridor all day, putting off the inevitable, had Gussie not broken free and zipped into the room ahead of her. By the time Esther rounded the corner, the girl was already in her mother’s embrace.

  Fannie peppered Gussie with kisses, exclaiming how much she’d missed her between each breath.

  “I’ve missed you, I’ve missed you, I’ve missed you, I’ve missed you!”

  Esther stiffened. Mothers today were so much more demonstrative than those of Esther’s generation had been. She wasn’t sure what it got them, other than whining children.

  She watched as Fannie made room for Gussie in the bed, patting the spot beside her. She folded her tall and lanky daughter under her arm like she was no bigger than a kitten.

  “Where have you been, my sweet girl?” Fannie cooed. “Having all sorts of adventures without your mother?”

  Gussie merely smiled and burrowed her head into Fannie’s chest. Fannie’s stomach had grown rounder, her breasts larger, in the four weeks since Gussie had last seen her mother. Esther wondered what the girl made of it all. Did she remember that Fannie had looked like this once before? It was hard to know what Gussie recalled from her mother’s last pregnancy.

  “I brought you something,” said Gussie as she unfolded a piece of blue construction paper she’d tucked away in a pocket. Esther had never seen it before, and her chest tightened as she watched her daughter purr over its unveiling.

  “Oh my!” remarked Fannie, in an unusually high voice. Esther walked around the bed to get a look at her granddaughter’s work.

  Gussie had made a collage of babies, each one cut out from a magazine or newspaper. There were pictures of the Dionne quintuplets, a few babies that had been clipped from newspaper advertisements, and smack-dab in the middle of the collage was a photograph of the Lindbergh baby.

  “Oh, Gussie,” said Esther, unable to hide her disappointment. How had she missed this? Had she been paying so little attention to the girl?

  “I love it,” said Fannie. “How did you know I would?” She kissed the top of Gussie’s head and handed Esther the collage. “Mother, will you put this on the dresser? Somewhere I can see it?”

  Esther tucked Gussie’s handiwork into the frame of the dresser’s mirror, then nudged a table lamp a few inches to the left so that poor Little Lindy was partially obscured by the shade.

  She turned back to the bed and tried to appreciate the scene in front of her—mother and child reunited—but found she couldn’t concentrate. Her hands trembled, so she busied them tidying up Fannie’s bedside table. The nurses never did a very good job keeping up with it.

  “Was Isaac by yesterday?” Esther asked, as casually as she could, while she hung Fannie’s robe, discarded in a nearby chair, in the wardrobe.

  Even with her back to Fannie, she could feel her daughter’s hesitation. “He popped by for lunch yesterday.”

  Fannie was lying, of course. Anna and Gussie had seen him eating at Kornblau’s. Esther turned around and eyed Gussie, curious if she’d caught the discrepancy. If she had, she gave nothing away.

  “And has your father been by to see you lots?” Fannie asked Gussie. It broke Esther’s heart that she had to ask.

  Gussie looked at Esther and shrugged her shoulders. The child was clearly terrified of saying the wrong thing.

  “Oh certainly, Gussie always enjoys seeing him around the apartment,” said Esther. Technically, that was not a lie.

  “And how’s our Channel swimmer?” Fannie lobbed.

  “Very busy right now,” said Esther. “Between practices and packing, we rarely see her.” She didn’t dare glance at Gussie.

  “And she’s still set to leave on the tenth?”

  “Yes, the tenth.”

  “And does she plan on visiting me before she departs? Or has she washed her hands of her troublesome older sister entirely?”

  “Fannie—”

  “Mother—she hasn’t been by in close to a month. It’s outrageous.”

  Esther’s confidence bloomed. Dr. Rosenthal was no doubt right about Fannie’s high blood pressure, but he was wrong to suspect that Fannie knew about Florence’s death. Never would she have been able to get those last words out if she knew the truth.

  “Your father hasn’t visited either,” said Esther, grasping for a reasonable defense—and distraction. “You’re not outraged with him?”

  “We both know he’d sooner eat his own hat than visit a hospital.”

  It was true. Joseph wasn’t the type to go anywhere near a hospital, and Fannie knew it as well as Esther did. How did men manage to get away with that? What if Esther hadn’t been the type to make dinner in the evenings? They would all have starved.

  “Your sister sends her lo
ve.”

  “Bullocks. She didn’t even respond to the letter I sent her.”

  “Letter?”

  “I wrote to her—almost a month ago.”

  “And sent it to the apartment?”

  “Isaac delivered it.”

  “Maybe he misplaced it?” Esther suggested, as gently as she could.

  She had always hated refereeing the girls’ arguments but never more so than now, with one precious girl unable to defend herself and the other frightfully unaware of her own advantage. What Esther wouldn’t have given for her daughters to have been close. When they were young, they had done all right together, despite the seven years that separated them. But something changed as they grew older. By the summer Fannie met and married Isaac, the girls might as well have been two planets orbiting different suns.

  It was the same summer Gertrude Ederle traveled to Calais to swim the English Channel. The coverage was extensive, even with so little to report in the days leading up to the big swim. Both Florence and Esther had scrambled to read Joseph’s paper when he was through with it; the two might as well have been reading about Greta Garbo or John Gilbert. Trying to predict the Channel’s tides proved to be every bit as exciting as trying to figure out which movie stars were in town for premieres at the Warner Theatre, where they were staying, and whether someone from their party might pop in for a sweet bun at Adler’s. Esther would tsk over Ederle’s photographs as if she were the girl’s matchmaker: “She really is a rather homely girl. How will she marry?” Florence, only twelve but already old enough to enjoy goading her mother, said slyly, “Maybe she doesn’t want to.”

  Fannie rarely stuck her head into the living room, much less the newspaper Esther and Florence clutched between them. She had begun seeing Isaac, whom she’d met while working behind the counter at Adler’s, and in recent weeks, Isaac had made enough trips to the bakery for challah bread that it would have been safe to assume he was saying the HaMotzi every night of the week and not just on Shabbos. Isaac had called at the apartment a handful of times, awkwardly sitting in the living room until Joseph—out of discomfort more than anything else—granted the couple permission to stroll the Boardwalk without a chaperone, provided Fannie was home by nine o’clock sharp.

  Nearly six weeks to the day after their courtship began, Fannie arrived home from one such walk and announced that Isaac had asked her to marry him. Esther had long anticipated the engagement of her daughters and expected such news to leave her feeling euphoric. But instead, she found that Fannie’s announcement discomfited her.

  Isaac was six years older than Fannie but not so old for their age difference to matter. He was a quiet sort but Esther knew many good and quiet men. Isaac was poor but Esther reminded herself that Joseph had been poor when she had married him. They had built Adler’s together, which had been half the adventure. No, there was something else—something more unsettling than Isaac’s age or income or even his loquacity. She heard it in the tone of his voice. A belief that he was owed something. Esther did not think it unusual for a man to be dissatisfied with the circumstances into which he’d been born but she had no patience for a man who did not believe in the transformative powers of his own hard work.

  There had been no good way for Esther to convey her concerns to Fannie without pushing her away. So, when Fannie had stood before Esther and Joseph in the living room, waiting anxiously to hear what her parents thought of the match, they had stuck to practical questions of common concern. Esther asked when the couple intended to marry, and Joseph wanted to know if Fannie planned to complete the second year of her secretarial degree. Florence took the opportunity to ask whether she should begin to call Isaac brother. “Isaac should suffice,” said Esther, without taking her eyes off her older daughter. It was much later that night, after the girls had gone to bed, that Esther realized she’d failed to give Fannie her congratulations.

  By the time Ederle was ready to enter the Channel waters, Fannie’s wedding preparations were well under way. Joseph insisted they hold the ceremony, which would be a small affair, at Beth Kehillah. There was some conversation about a luncheon at The Breakers, but Esther decided a hotel reception would be ostentatious and potentially uncomfortable for Isaac since his family was not of means. She insisted that there was nothing the matter with holding the luncheon at home and that the gefilte fish they’d buy at Casel’s was every bit as good as what they’d find on The Breakers’ menu. Esther could tell Fannie was disappointed but she cheered considerably when Esther suggested that they take the train to Philadelphia to purchase Fannie’s wedding dress at Wanamaker’s.

  Ederle landed on a small beach a few miles north of Dover, England, at approximately half-past nine on the night of August 6, and the wires lit up as scores of American journalists transmitted news of the accomplishment back to a country that had been collectively holding its breath. Florence had been glued to the radio all day, yelling updates from the living room as they came in. Eventually Esther stopped pretending to attend to her daily chores, found some socks that needed darning—usually a task she saved for the evenings—and joined her.

  Europeans, asleep in their beds, had to wait until morning to learn that the Channel had been conquered by a woman but, in Atlantic City and elsewhere in the United States, Ederle’s accomplishment made the evening radio programs.

  When the news broke, Joseph was home but Fannie was out running errands. She arrived back at the apartment to find the family exuberant but gave them only the briefest of greetings before hurrying back to her bedroom to get ready for an evening out with Isaac. Esther watched Florence thump down the hallway after her: “Fannie! Trudy did it! She made it!” From where Esther sat on the sofa, she could hear her elder daughter reply with a brief, “Yes, I heard.” Something about the emptiness of that response made Esther’s chest begin to hurt.

  Within two weeks, Fannie was married and had moved into Isaac’s apartment. Esther told herself it couldn’t be helped—the slow dissolution of the girls’ relationship. Fannie was busy learning to make a home, and after she had Gussie, learning to be a good mother. Florence was years away from any of that. She was still young enough to love being at home with her parents, to ask for penny candy after dinner, and to treat the Ambassador Club swim tryouts like they were preliminaries for the Olympic Games. Esther had told herself that one day, when the girls were older, their age difference would matter less. Florence would get married and have children, and Fannie would be there to offer advice on the best way to burp a baby or remove a stain from a shirt collar. Maybe, eventually, they would rediscover each other. She pictured two old women, walking the Boardwalk arm in arm. That they would never get the chance to come back to each other, to start again, was inconceivable to Esther, even now.

  Gussie and this new baby would also be seven years apart in age. Was it an unlucky number? As Esther stood in a hospital room, watching her elder daughter seethe with resentment toward a sister who could neither make amends nor fight back, she prayed that Fannie would be able to knit her children’s lives together more neatly than Esther had managed to.

  “Have you been to the beach much?” Fannie asked Gussie, obviously trying to change the subject.

  Gussie looked at Esther.

  “Not much,” Esther said. “It’s so crowded this time of year.”

  “Anna goes,” Gussie offered.

  “To the beach?” Fannie asked.

  “I suspect the girl’s trying to teach herself to swim,” said Esther. “She won’t confirm it. Just lurks about.”

  “That’s not true,” said Gussie.

  “What’s not?” said Fannie.

  “She doesn’t lurk. And she’s not teaching herself to swim.”

  “Then what’s she doing?” asked Esther.

  “Stuart is teaching her to swim.”

  Esther started to say something, then realized she didn’t know what to say. Stuart? Really?

  “Why wouldn’t she just ask Florence to teach her?” Fannie
asked Esther. “Are Stuart and she an item? Doesn’t Stuart have a thing for Florence?”

  Esther flushed. She could feel herself losing control of the conversation, of Gussie, of the secret.

  “I couldn’t say,” said Esther, trying her best to look not only uninformed but uninterested. She stood up and grabbed for her handbag. “What I can say is that I need to get your daughter home to her lunch. Gussie, give your mother a kiss good-bye.”

  “It’s so unfair,” Fannie whispered into her daughter’s hair. “I didn’t even get to see you twirl your baton. Bring it the next time you come?”

  “My baton?”

  Enough was enough. Esther grabbed Gussie’s hand and yanked her from the bed.

  “Don’t keep her away so long next time,” Fannie shouted after them as Esther herded Gussie out of the room and into the corridor.

  Esther waved a hand in the air, threw a “See you tomorrow” over her shoulder, and shut the door behind her with a louder bang than she’d intended.

  It wasn’t until she and Gussie were down the stairs, through the lobby, and out the hospital’s front doors that her breathing returned to normal. Still, her legs shook. They walked over to Pacific Avenue, and Esther hailed a jitney to take them the rest of the way home. The driver pulled the string that opened the car door, and Esther waited while Gussie climbed in and scrambled to the far side of the car.

  “So, Stuart’s really teaching Anna to swim?” she asked once she was inside the jitney, the door shut behind her.

  “Should I not have said that?” Gussie asked. “I didn’t know that was a secret.”

  “No, no. It’s fine. You did fine.”

  Something wasn’t sitting right with Esther, and she didn’t know what it was. She wasn’t thrilled about Anna spending time with Stuart, and most certainly didn’t like the idea that he might be so quickly redirecting any affection he’d once had for Florence. But she reminded herself that Stuart was as unsuitable a match for Anna as he’d been for her daughter. She didn’t know Anna’s parents but she could only imagine that Anna would be on the next boat back to Germany if she announced she was going out with a goy, even a very wealthy one.