Florence Adler Swims Forever: A Novel

by Rachel Beanland

“I think there are men who are not well suited for family life.” Joseph didn’t want to insult Isaac, if anything he wanted to flatter him. So, he added, “Particularly men who have seen something of the world, who have a keen interest in business.”

  “Fannie might disagree with you.”

  “She might,” said Joseph. “Which is why I’m hoping this conversation can remain between us.”

  Isaac looked at him again. Both of them knew Joseph had just handed Isaac a sizable bargaining chip.

  “Where would I go?”

  “I don’t know. Back to Florida maybe?”

  “I may not be cut out for real estate.”

  “I’ll give you a good reference,” said Joseph. “Do something else.”

  “A grand won’t last long if I can’t find work.”

  Joseph began to feel hopeful. Isaac hadn’t spit in his face, hadn’t stormed off to find Fannie. If he was doing any amount of math, it meant he was considering the offer. “I could throw in some more.”

  “How much?”

  What a son of a bitch. Isaac was going to take the offer, Joseph realized. Maybe not in its current form, maybe not tonight. But eventually they would strike on the right number and he would go. Fannie, Hyram, Gussie, this new baby. Isaac would shake them all off like brambles stuck to the leg of his trousers after a long walk in the woods. Was this the right thing for Joseph to do? It didn’t feel good but neither had watching his elder daughter disappear into an unhappy marriage.

  “A few thousand.” Now Joseph was dipping into his own savings, into money he might have used for Inez and Paul. He had wanted to tell Anna that she could count on him for more help but Esther’s words rang in his ears. What about Fannie? Is she entitled to a safety net?

  “How would this work?” Isaac said.

  “I’ll give you a lump sum to get you started. Withdraw it from the bank and hand it to you.” Joseph had to think fast. How was he going to ensure Isaac didn’t walk back into Fannie’s life five years from now? “Then I’ll send you monthly payments for the rest of my life.”

  “And if you should die?”

  “I’ll outline the agreement in my will. Make sure you’re taken care of.”

  Isaac rubbed his eyes and looked at Joseph. “When do you envision all of this happening?”

  Joseph looked at his watch. “The bank doesn’t open for another five hours or so. Go home, sleep on it, and if it’s what you want to do, meet me there at ten.”

  “The baby?”

  “Wait if you want. But I think it will make it harder.”

  “Make what harder?” Esther asked, and both men jumped.

  “We didn’t hear you,” said Joseph as he pulled himself to his feet.

  “You must be more tired than you realize,” she said, never taking her eyes off Isaac, who remained in his chair. “You made it, I see.”

  “I did.”

  Esther’s contempt for her son-in-law simmered so close beneath the surface of her skin that it was all Joseph could see. He would have liked to take her aside, to tell her his plan, but he couldn’t risk it. Fannie would be fragile after the baby was born, particularly after she was told about Florence. Esther might very well advocate waiting until Fannie was on her feet. Or, in the plain light of day, leaving well enough alone.

  “Still no progress?” Joseph asked.

  Esther shook her head. “The doctor is insisting we go home.” To Isaac, she said, “It looks like I ruined your night for nothing.”

  “Oh, it’s fine,” said Isaac.

  Esther tilted her head and narrowed her eyes at him. “I wasn’t apologizing.”

  Dear God. His wife was going to undo all the progress he had just made. Joseph reached for Isaac’s shoulder and gave it an affectionate squeeze. “Tomorrow?”

  Isaac looked very far away. He blinked hard, twice. “Hmm?”

  “Tomorrow. We said ten.”

  “What’s happening at ten?” said Esther.

  Joseph didn’t answer her, just looked at Isaac with a steady gaze.

  “I’ll come by the apartment at ten,” said Isaac. “I’d like to see Gussie.”

  The mention of his granddaughter’s name made Joseph’s legs go numb.

  “There’s a good chance we’ll be back over here,” said Esther.

  Joseph studied his son-in-law’s face, trying to discern his intentions. Had he underestimated Isaac? There was only one way to know. “I’ll wait.”

  Isaac

  Isaac was surprised to find that, even after eight years of marriage, he could still fit everything he owned in one suitcase. In the breaking light of the early morning, he had packed his clothes and his good pair of shoes, his pomade and his shaving brush. Now he walked from one room of the apartment to another, examining the contents of cupboards, closets, and drawers, looking for items that were his and his alone.

  In a chest in the bedroom, he found the tallis he’d worn to services when he was growing up, the tzitzis at each of the four corners tied by his mother’s hand. He packed it away in his suitcase. In a drawer in the kitchen, he found the old can opener that he’d bought at a five-and-dime in Florida. Technically, it was his and not theirs. He picked it up, felt the heft of it in his palm, and placed it back in the drawer. What if Fannie needed to open a can of dried milk or processed peas for the baby and couldn’t find it?

  In the dining room, Isaac removed an old shoe box from the sideboard. In it, he and Fannie had stored important papers, photographs, letters that one or both of them wanted to keep. He took out his birth certificate and set it aside, then considered a recent bank statement. There was no point in bothering with it; nothing was in the account anyway. Near the bottom of the box, there was a small stack of letters that his father had sent him during the years he lived in West Palm Beach. One of them, written out of anger shortly after Isaac left Alliance, told him not to bother coming home. Another delivered the news that his mother had died. Isaac couldn’t bear to think of his father now, so he left the letters as they were—sandwiched between Gussie’s immunization card and a bill of sale for the Monitor Top refrigerator. Once he was settled, he’d write to his father, enclose a check to cover what was missing from the Campfire Marshmallows can. It would be a relief to square up with the old man, even if the accompanying letter was hard to compose.

  At the very bottom of the box was a portrait of Fannie, Gussie, and Isaac. Fannie had had it taken at Perskie’s when Gussie was two or three years old. The child had been tired and refused to sit still, and the image had suffered as a result. Fannie looked miserable, and Gussie was a blur, her likeness closer to that of an aura than a little girl. The photographer had offered to retake the photograph, and so this failed version had been relegated to the shoe box—too dear to be thrown out but too imperfect to be framed. Isaac held the photograph close to his face and studied his own expression, which was not as dour as Fannie’s but every bit as distant. He tried to remember the particulars of that day. Had they eaten breakfast together? Gone for a long walk? Had he been happy? He moved to put the photograph back in the box but decided to keep it aside instead.

  There was one document Isaac knew he wouldn’t find in the shoe box. He tried to remember what he’d done with it. He had carried it in his jacket pocket for several weeks this summer but, at some point, he had surely put it away. In a box? A drawer? Where? He could picture the envelope, its corners tattered, his wife’s handwriting scrawled across the front. He walked back to the bedroom, checked the pockets of his suit coat, and came up with nothing. It was possible that he had left it at the office. He looked out the bedroom window, which faced Atlantic Avenue. A paper boy whizzed by on his bicycle. Two blocks east, the sun was rising over the Atlantic. Isaac checked his watch. He had three hours before he was due to meet Joseph. There was still time.

  * * *

  Joseph seemed very relieved to find Isaac at his front door at a few minutes after ten. If Joseph had gotten any sleep the night before, Isaac couldn’t tell. Bu
t then again, Isaac hadn’t slept at all.

  “Come in.”

  “Where’s Gussie?”

  “In her room,” said Joseph, taking a step backward to allow Isaac to maneuver past him and down the narrow hallway.

  Isaac began to make his way toward the sun porch and could hear Joseph following a few steps behind. “Where’s Esther?”

  “She went back over to the hospital.”

  “Any word?”

  “No, none.”

  “I thought I might take Gussie for a walk.”

  “I don’t know that that’s a good idea.”

  “Sure, it is.”

  Isaac found Gussie playing jacks on the floor of her room. Her back was to him and her hair shone in the bright light of the morning sun. He watched her count off several attempts before he interrupted.

  “Threesies, huh?”

  She whipped her head around to find him leaning in the open doorway. “Father!” she said as she jumped up, sending the little red ball and several jacks skittering across the hardwood floor.

  Isaac’s throat grew tight as he felt her arms reach around his waist. Eventually, he found his words: “Get your shoes on, Gus-Gus.”

  “I’ll come,” said Joseph.

  Isaac stifled a laugh. “You will not.”

  “Why can’t Papa come?” Gussie asked as she rooted around under the bed for her sandals.

  “Because Papa is very busy,” said Isaac, reaching for one sandal, which he had spotted under her bedside table. He tossed it onto the floor, beside her. “Isn’t that right, Papa?”

  Gussie scooted back out from under the bed, holding the second sandal up in the air, triumphant.

  “I’m not,” said Joseph. “In fact, I’d prefer to come.”

  Isaac found it impossible to make eye contact with Joseph, so he simply turned and began walking toward the front of the apartment. He passed Esther and Joseph’s room and then Anna’s. “If you must send someone to mind us, send Anna.”

  Isaac called to Gussie over his shoulder and kept walking, out the door and down the stairs to the waiting sidewalk. Gussie followed a few steps behind.

  “Should we wait for Anna?” Gussie asked when she was outside. She bent down to finish buckling her sandals.

  Isaac looked over his shoulder at the bakery and the little door that led to the building’s upstairs apartment. “She won’t be long.”

  “Where are we going?”

  “A walk?”

  Isaac had thought about where he wanted to take Gussie, about how he wanted to remember her and she him. He pictured her on the Boardwalk, the wind ruffling her hair, but couldn’t think much further ahead than that.

  He took Gussie’s small, sweaty hand in his and headed down Virginia Avenue, toward the ocean. By the time they passed the Islesworth Hotel, Anna had caught up with them, although she seemed to instinctively know to keep her distance. He wondered how much Joseph had told her.

  “Want a frozen custard?” he asked Gussie as they approached the Boardwalk.

  “It’s ten in the morning.”

  “Right.” Isaac had grown so unfamiliar with reading his daughter’s cues that he could no longer tell discordance from disinterest. “Shall we get one anyway?”

  Gussie shrugged her shoulders, and Isaac led her several more blocks to Kohr Bros., where he exchanged two nickels for a pair of cake cones, piled high with an orange-and-vanilla swirl.

  “You forgot Anna,” said Gussie as he handed one to her.

  “I don’t think she’s hungry,” he said, glancing over his shoulder at Anna, who was pretending to be well occupied with a rack of souvenir postcards, which sat outside the shop next door.

  “How do you know? Hey, Anna—”

  Isaac poked Gussie’s arm and said, “Knock it off.”

  Gussie stared at her feet and the cone in her hand leaned perilously to one side. He hadn’t meant to upset her and certainly didn’t want his reprimand to become a lasting memory. Isaac reached out, righted the cone, touched Gussie’s chin.

  “Sorry, Gus.” To Anna, he shouted, “Do you want a cone?”

  She shook her head no.

  “See, she doesn’t want one.” Gussie seemed satisfied, so he asked, “Do you want to get a chair? Sit for a while?”

  Gussie made slow progress as she followed Isaac onto the sand and toward a row of canvas-clad beach chairs. The custard was melting fast in the hot sun, and she stopped every few feet to lick the cone and her own hand clean. Isaac had rented two chairs and pulled them close together by the time Gussie caught up with him.

  “Sit,” he said, reaching for his handkerchief. He wondered if he should wait until she was finished before allowing her to mop herself up with it. If he had been more gracious to Anna, she probably would have managed the cleanup. He looked behind them. Anna had remained on the Boardwalk, where she stood leaning against the railing, as watchful and rigid as an egret in the marsh grass of the Thorofare.

  There was no good way to tell her, Isaac decided. Whatever he said was sure to break her heart. “Gus-Gus, I’m going to go away soon.”

  Gussie stopped working on her cone and looked over at him. “Where?”

  “Florida, probably.”

  “Florida,” she repeated—the word almost a question but not quite.

  “You’ve never been there but it’s very pretty. And hot.”

  “How long will you be gone?”

  “Awhile.”

  “How long?” she asked again. Isaac stared at his daughter. She could scarcely wait for the first day of school, her birthday, or the Easter Parade. Time moved slowly for a girl of seven. Weeks felt like months, months like years. Could she even comprehend real years? That enough of them, when strung together, made up a lifetime?

  “Maybe a year, or a little longer.” He added, “It could be a very long time, in fact.”

  “What about the baby?”

  What could he say? That he wouldn’t meet the baby? She’d never understand. “I think you’ll be a very good big sister. You’re such a big help and so very kind.”

  Gussie didn’t answer, didn’t arch her back into the compliment, the way she often did when adults said something nice about her. In fact, Isaac might have wondered if she’d heard him at all but for the fact that she had stopped licking the custard. She leaned forward in her chair, holding the cone away from her body, and for several minutes, both of them watched in a kind of quiet torpor as the treat dripped down her hand and onto the sand. Isaac held his handkerchief at the ready but didn’t hand it to her, not until the mess had congealed into a thick pool between them.

  * * *

  When they arrived back at the apartment, Joseph asked Anna to look after Gussie and led Isaac into the kitchen, where he’d spread out several pieces of paper, neatly typed.

  “What’s this?”

  “Everything we discussed last night.”

  Isaac whistled. “You had a longer night than I did.”

  “Aaron Wexler drew it up this morning.”

  Isaac sat down in a kitchen chair, picked up one of the documents, and began to scan it. “You don’t trust me to stay gone?”

  “I think, with something this sensitive, it’s better if we spell out the terms.”

  Isaac tried to focus on the small type.

  “The terms are the same,” said Joseph. “Aaron recommended we add something about divorce.”

  “Divorce?” It hadn’t occurred to Isaac that he and Fannie would divorce.

  “It just says that if Fannie ever wants one, you’ll grant it to her.”

  “And if I want one?”

  “Do you?”

  “Not particularly. But for the sake of argument, let’s say I did.”

  Joseph looked uncomfortable. Aaron must not have accounted for that in the contract. “If you asked for one and Fannie didn’t want to grant it, we’d all be in a rather awkward situation.”

  “Because you’d have to show her this contract.”

&nbs
p; “Well, yes,” said Joseph. “And because she hasn’t actually agreed to anything.”

  “Relax, old man,” said Isaac, thumping Joseph on the shoulder. “I don’t want a divorce.”

  Isaac read the document twice. The money added up, and his inheritance would be generous. He wasn’t to contact Fannie but he could write to Gussie twice a year. “It says here that you’re supplying my train ticket?”

  “I got you a seat on the four o’clock. You can go all the way to Miami, or get off sooner.”

  “Don’t even trust me to get out of town on my own?”

  “I just thought it’d be easier.”

  Isaac let out a sharp breath. “Nothing about this is easy.”

  Joseph looked at Isaac, then at his hands. “I know.”

  “Where’s a pen?” said Isaac. There were already two on the table but Joseph was so flustered, he handed Isaac a third one, from his breast pocket.

  “Wait,” said Joseph.

  “What for?”

  “We need a witness,” he said, and called for Anna, who entered the room so quietly that she might as well have been a light fixture or a potted plant.

  “So, I suppose Joseph has filled you in?” Isaac said when she sat down across from them at the kitchen table.

  Anna looked embarrassed to be in the room. Joseph handed her a pen and she took it without looking either man in the eye. Isaac assumed that this deal of Joseph’s negated any assistance he might otherwise have offered her parents.

  Isaac held the nib of his pen over the signature line and hesitated, briefly. Was this what he wanted? To leave and not come back? If he stayed, could he change? Become a better husband? A better father? A better son?

  Joseph leaned forward, ever so slightly, in his chair. How badly his father-in-law wanted him gone. Isaac stared at the contract hard, until the words began to blur together. He suspected Fannie would be fine without him. Gussie, too. It was an awful lot of money. Isaac pushed every pure and decent thought he’d ever had from his head and signed.

  * * *

  Joseph instructed Isaac to wait outside the bank while he went in to make the withdrawal. The idea miffed Isaac initially. It wasn’t as if what they were doing was illegal. But what did Isaac really care? He set down the suitcase he’d carried from the apartment and removed his hat. When Joseph emerged, several minutes later, with a fat deposit envelope, he handed it to Isaac.