Florence Adler Swims Forever: A Novel Read online

  “When?”

  “Maybe an hour ago.”

  Gussie watched as her grandmother took in Anna and Gussie, then the small cluster of people who had gathered farther down the beach, then the boat hastening toward the horizon. Without warning, Esther took off down the beach at a run, Joseph following close behind. Gussie had never seen either of her grandparents run anywhere before, and she was surprised at how proficient they looked doing it.

  She waded ashore, and Anna wrapped her in a towel, then led her in the direction of Garden Pier, too. By the time they reached Esther and Joseph, the rescue boat was so far from shore, it was difficult to make out what was happening. Gussie shielded her eyes with her hand, trying to see more clearly. It looked as if the vessel had stopped, and one or both of the lifeguards had jumped overboard.

  “Is it her?” Esther whispered to Joseph in a voice loud enough for Gussie to hear.

  “Who?” Gussie asked, but no one, including Anna, responded.

  After several long minutes, the rescue boat began to grow larger again. Gussie could make out only one lifeguard rowing toward the shore. Where had the other one gone? It wasn’t until the boat grew much closer that she saw the second lifeguard, bent over something in the bottom of the boat.

  The boat plowed onto the wet sand, about a dozen yards from where the small crowd had gathered. Its oars clattered against the oarlocks and landed in the sand, and the men worked quickly to lift what could only have been a person from the bottom of the boat.

  That’s when Gussie saw it—the flash of color—and she looked at Anna to see if she’d seen it, too. Anna’s hand moved to her mouth. The lifeguards lifted the body, pale and motionless, out of the boat and onto the sand but all Gussie could bear to look at was the red cap on her aunt’s head. She covered her ears with her hands as the air filled with the sound of her grandmother’s wails.

  Esther

  The Virginia Avenue Hospital Tent regularly treated sunburns, jellyfish stings, and heatstroke but, if there had been patients who suffered from those ailments when the guards arrived at the tent with Florence, they were now long gone. Everyone on the small staff—beach surgeon, doctors, nurses—worked over a single cot in the far corner of the tent.

  Esther could make no sense of the girl on the cot.

  That the girl was her daughter.

  That her daughter was not moving.

  When Esther had arrived at the tent, she had been inclined to fight her way into the center of the commotion but Joseph nudged her toward a pair of canvas chairs. “Let’s give them room to work,” he said quietly, his face ashen.

  She felt for the edge of a chair, could barely find it, then listened as the beach surgeon yelled instructions at the staff. How long had it been since Florence had been pulled from the water? Five minutes? Ten? Esther looked at her watch. It was half-past four. When had she heard the whistle blast? She hadn’t thought to check the time.

  “Keep going,” Esther heard the beach surgeon say before he shouted at the assembled lifeguards. “Boys, form a line. We need you to cycle in and out.”

  “What are they doing?” Esther asked Joseph as she watched the first guard take over for the doctor who had previously been thumping on Florence’s back.

  “Giving compressions.”

  “Yes, but why the guards?”

  “To relieve the staff,” said her husband, whose eyes never left the cot. “They’re getting tired.”

  Esther clutched her sides and put her head between her knees. How could they be tired? They’d scarcely been at this for any time at all.

  After several more minutes had passed, she sat up and forced herself to watch, through tears that blurred her vision, as one guard after another beat on her daughter’s back. Esther stared at the doctors and nurses and lifeguards for so long that they ceased to be individual people, morphing instead into an amalgam that pulsed to the beat of each round of compressions.

  She nearly missed the beach surgeon tapping the guard on the shoulder, telling him to stop. “Help me turn her over,” the beach surgeon said to one of the doctors who stood on the other side of the cot. His voice sounded garbled. The men looked at each other, with a kind of startled disappointment, and rolled Florence over, slowly, until she was faceup. They arranged her arms by her side. “Time of death,” said the beach surgeon, looking at his watch and then at Esther, “five twenty-three.”

  * * *

  Eventually, they came to take Florence away. A car pulled up along the Boardwalk and two men got out, carrying a wooden stretcher between them. Esther recognized one of the men as Abe Roth, who ran the Jewish funeral home.

  “They can’t take her!” Esther whispered to Joseph. “Please don’t let them take her.”

  “Bubala, we will go with her. We won’t let her be alone.”

  The men bowed their heads when they arrived at the cot where Florence rested.

  “Joseph. Esther,” Abe said. “I’m so very sorry.”

  Esther couldn’t look at him. She kept her eyes on her daughter’s pale cheeks, her purple lips.

  “You’re still over at Beth Kehillah?” Abe asked. He and his wife were members of Rodef Sholom, a conservative shul on Atlantic Avenue.

  Joseph nodded.

  “We’ll give Rabbi Levy a call and let him know. He’ll get the Chevra Kadisha over to our place. I assume you want the Taharah performed.”

  Esther’s grandmother had been a member of the Chevra Kadisha in Wiesbaden, and her mother in Philadelphia. Still, Esther winced at the idea of women she barely knew touching her daughter’s lovely, long limbs, washing away the salt water and the sand that clung to her arms and legs. Florence’s arms had propelled her through the ocean but first they had propelled her across Esther’s kitchen floor. They had been soft and dimpled and smelled of Pond’s soap and talcum powder. Esther was the only one who had ever bathed her.

  “Would you like me to say the Vidui?” Abe asked.

  “What does she have to atone for?” Esther asked, her voice sharp. “She’s twenty. My beautiful girl is just twenty.”

  “Esther,” Joseph said quietly, his voice choked. To Abe, he said, “Please.”

  Abe began to chant the words as Esther sobbed into the wet silk of Florence’s bathing suit. She imagined the Hebrew letters knitting together as they floated through the air, forming an invisible blanket that, when wrapped around Florence, would keep her safe. When Abe began the Shema, Joseph joined in, “Shema Yisrael, Adonai Elohenu Adonai Echad.” Hear O Israel, the Lord is our God, the Lord is One. How many times had Esther heard this prayer? A thousand times? More? Had she ever considered what it meant? It was Joseph who was more connected to the old ways, Joseph who had grown up in the small shtetl of Lackenbach, where opportunities were scarce but Jewish law abounded.

  Women were not obligated to say the Shema but, as Abe and Joseph continued their recitation, Esther began to mutter the words through her tears. Perhaps by saying this prayer, on this beach, on this day, Esther might shield her daughter from an unknown she could neither see nor imagine. She whispered, “Adonai Hu Ha’Elohim. Adonai Hu Ha’Elohim.” Adonai is God.

  * * *

  While the women of the Chevra Kadisha observed the ritual of Taharah, washing Florence’s body and dressing it in the tachrichim they’d brought for the occasion, Esther and Joseph sat on a sofa in the front room of Roth’s Funeral Home and spoke with Rabbi Levy.

  The rabbi, whom the congregation had hired five years ago, was only adequate. He looked the part of a rabbi, with his graying beard and the spectacles he wore at the end of his nose, but in Esther’s opinion, he had always been far more concerned with the profitability of the congregation’s fund-raisers than with the spirituality of its members.

  Rabbi Levy offered to secure a shomer for Florence—a congregant who would sit guard over her body throughout the night—but Joseph wouldn’t hear of leaving his daughter with anyone.

  “It will be a long night,” said the rabbi. “Are you
sure?”

  “I’m her father,” Joseph said, and the simple explanation made Esther feel proud to have married him, to have borne the children that made those three small words true.

  Abe Roth had scoured the funeral home’s closets and returned with a dark gray suit jacket and a mink fur stole. He handed the jacket to Joseph, who left it draped across his knees. Then he wrapped the stole, which smelled of mothballs, around Esther’s shoulders. She thanked him and shuddered, involuntarily. For the first time, she realized she was still wearing her bathing costume.

  Rabbi Levy asked Esther if her family would travel from Philadelphia, and she could feel herself growing annoyed. Her father had been dead for ten years, her mother for three. The rabbi had said Kaddish for both of them, repeatedly.

  “No,” she told him, refusing to elaborate.

  “Is an afternoon service all right?”

  Esther looked at Joseph, who had the same pronounced jaw as both his daughters. It had suited Florence but made Fannie look so serious, even as a young girl.

  She whispered Fannie’s name. Was this the first time, since Florence’s death, that she had so much as thought of her surviving daughter? “Joseph,” she said, louder this time, “Fannie.”

  Joseph rubbed his hands against the side of his face, as if he could no longer take in any new information.

  There could be no funeral. Nothing public, anyway. “Fannie can’t know.”

  “Is Fannie not well?” the rabbi asked.

  He knew about last year’s loss. Most of the congregation did. Fannie had carried the baby nearly to term, had been told by most of the women in the congregation, at one point or another, that she was carrying high and that the baby would be a boy. Kena horah. The fact that the baby had been a boy hadn’t made it any easier for Fannie to return to the sanctuary on the High Holy Days.

  “Fannie’s expecting again,” said Esther, her blood simmering beneath the surface of her skin. “She’s been at Atlantic City Hospital for two weeks.” Surely, she’d mentioned it to him. If she hadn’t, someone on the women’s committee had.

  “When is the child due?” the rabbi asked.

  “Not until August.”

  “And you want to keep this news from her?”

  Esther looked at Joseph. “We can’t risk her losing another baby.” Her husband continued to stroke his face, his eyes unfocused. “You agree, don’t you, Joseph? Joseph?”

  “What?” he finally said.

  “That we can’t tell Fannie. Not when the pregnancy is already so precarious.”

  “What you’re proposing will be extremely difficult,” said the rabbi, looking across the room to Abe for support.

  Esther considered all the different ways Fannie might learn that her sister was dead. The plan was not without risk. But what felt riskiest was telling Fannie the truth.

  “We sit Shiva so we can have the time to look inward, to properly reflect on our loss. But we invite the community in because mourning is intensely lonely, and our friends and family can offer comfort.” Rabbi Levy continued to talk long after Esther had stopped listening.

  “What time is it?” she interrupted.

  The rabbi consulted his pocket watch. “Half-past eight.”

  “Abe, is there a telephone I might use?”

  He motioned down the hallway, “There’s one in my office.”

  Joseph grabbed her by the arm as she stood, “Bubala?”

  “I’m going to call Samuel Brody, over at the Press,” she said. “We have to keep this out of the paper.”

  * * *

  It was late when Rabbi Levy dropped Esther off at the apartment but, even in the dark, she recognized the young man sitting on her front stoop.

  “Do you know him?” the rabbi asked.

  “Yes.”

  The rabbi let the car run while he walked around to open Esther’s door and help her out. “I’ll collect you tomorrow at two.”

  She nodded, unable to take her eyes off Stuart, who was still in his ACBP uniform. When he stood the streetlamp illuminated his face, and she saw that he’d been crying.

  The rabbi’s car puttered away, and Esther motioned for Stuart to sit. Then she joined him. “Are Anna and Gussie upstairs?”

  He shook his head. “When I got over here, Anna answered the door. I didn’t believe it was true until I saw her face.”

  “How’s Gussie?”

  “Confused, I think.”

  Something about Florence’s friendship with Stuart had never sat right with Esther. It was her experience that boys like him, whose fathers owned hotels on the Boardwalk and not shops north of Arctic Avenue, went away to college and usually to the sorts of schools she and Joseph lambasted. Schools like Princeton and Yale that had, in the last several years, implemented strict quotas and new admissions standards to keep their classrooms from swelling with too many Jewish students. That he had joined the Atlantic City Beach Patrol as a lifeguard, and cobbled together a coaching career in the off-season, struck Esther as a move designed to infuriate his father as much as anything else. His father was worth infuriating—The Covington Hotel was one of several hotels that refused Jewish guests—but sometimes Esther wondered if Stuart’s friendship with Florence was just another way to get under his father’s skin.

  It was Stuart who had encouraged Florence to apply to Wellesley; he had even taken the liberty of writing to Wellesley’s swim coach, a Miss Clementine Dirkin, on Florence’s behalf. Dirkin was apparently an icon in the Women’s Swimming Association, and Stuart had argued—quite convincingly—that Florence needed to go to a school where women weren’t relegated to synchronized swimming competitions, as was so often the case. At Wellesley, he promised, Florence would not just be swimming the 400, 800, and 1500 events but she’d be medaling in them.

  Of course, it was Joseph, and not Stuart, who had taught Florence to swim. But for the last six years, ever since Florence had joined the Ambassador Club and then gone away to school, it was Stuart who had pushed her to swim faster and farther. He was always on the lookout for new races, always talking about the next big swim. Without Stuart, would Florence have swum the pageant swim? The solo swim around Absecon Island? Certainly, she wouldn’t have set her sights on the English Channel. Were it not for him, Esther couldn’t help but wonder, would her dear girl still be alive?

  “I would have followed her in the boat.”

  “I know,” she said, her voice as coarse as sandpaper.

  “What was she doing out there on her own?”

  Esther didn’t know what to say, how to begin to admit that her daughter had acted rashly.

  “Please,” she said. “Don’t.”

  Stuart wiped his eyes with the palms of his hands. “When will she be buried?”

  “Tomorrow.”

  “That soon?”

  “Jews don’t wait.”

  Stuart studied his knees. “May I come?”

  Her inclination was to tell him no, that the graveside service would be for family only. If Fannie couldn’t be there, it seemed unfair for Stuart to be. But Esther could imagine Florence chiding her for her bad behavior. It was obvious that Stuart loved Florence, and Esther found herself wondering if her daughter had known. Perhaps she had even loved him back. Sol and Frances Goldstein, who lived around the corner, had sat Shiva for their eldest daughter when she married a goy, and at the time, Esther hadn’t so much as batted an eye. Treating a daughter who was alive and well—and even happy—like she was dead, all because she’d married outside the faith, felt suddenly preposterous.

  “We’ll go to Egg Harbor at two o’clock tomorrow afternoon.”

  “The City Cemetery?”

  “No, Beth Kehillah.”

  A passing car backfired, and Esther jumped.

  “One of the guards told you?” she asked.

  “Word spread fast that there’d been a drowning at States Avenue.”

  “Does everyone know it was Florence?”

  “Some of the guards do. Why?”


  “We don’t want Fannie to know,” said Esther. “Not after what happened last summer.”

  “I see,” said Stuart, although it was not entirely obvious to Esther that he did.

  “Will you help?”

  “I can talk to the guys if you want.”

  Esther considered the offer for a moment before she answered him, “Would you mind?”

  * * *

  A lamp was on in Gussie’s room, and in the middle of the floor lay the canvas bag Esther had taken to the beach earlier that day. Alongside it was Florence’s bag, a prettier, pleated tote. The bag’s contents—a hairbrush, a towel, and several hairpins—spilled out onto the floor, and Esther stooped to pick up the items. When she had gathered them all, she allowed herself to let out a silent moan.

  On the little cot, Anna and Gussie slept. The cot was barely wide enough for one of them. They fit side by side only because Anna had wrapped her arms around Gussie, tucking the small girl into the cave of her chest. Gussie’s dark brown hair splayed out in all directions and her mouth hung open. In the last year, she had grown taller and lost much of her baby fat but, asleep, she still looked young.

  Esther thought about waking Anna to remind her that she’d be more comfortable in a regular bed. If Anna had been Florence, she might have absentmindedly rubbed her back, grabbed one of her hands, and pulled her to her feet, enjoying that groggy moment when her adult daughter leaned into her, needing her. But Anna was not Florence, and Esther couldn’t bear to have one more conversation than she absolutely needed to about the day’s events. The telephone call she had to make to Isaac was going to take all the energy she had left.

  The sun porch was hot and stuffy. One window sat open but Esther pushed open two more. It was too dark to see the beach two blocks away but she could hear the waves crashing against the shore. The perpetual movement of the ocean had always soothed her, particularly during times of trouble, but now the sound left her feeling outraged. That the ocean could take something so precious from her, without even stopping its dance to acknowledge her loss, seemed cruel.