Florence Adler Swims Forever(16)

“That one’s got a set of lungs on him,” said Bette as she began preparing a bottle.

“May I?” asked Fannie, before reaching into the bassinet to pick him up.

“Oh sure.”

The baby was big and round, and felt heavy in her arms—nothing like Hyram but probably something like how Gussie had felt, if she remembered correctly. Gussie had been longer and leaner at birth, but with cheeks that looked like plums. Fannie held the baby high, above the bulge of her stomach, and walked over to a rocking chair, where she sat down carefully.

“You won’t break him. He’s sturdy,” said Bette as she handed Fannie a bottle.

Fannie put the small rubber nipple to the baby’s mouth, and he latched immediately, sucking down the milky concoction with a ferocity that startled her. For three weeks last summer, she had prayed daily that her own son would swallow the droplets of formula that were placed on his tongue with a medicine dropper.

This was the first time Fannie had held a baby in her arms since Hyram died. Last fall she’d gone out of her way to avoid friends with small children, skipping Ellen Perlman’s baby shower and the Hanukkah party at Beth Kehillah. Even after she found out she was pregnant again, she had let Anna take Gussie to the Baby Parade. Seeing all those infants in prams and wagons and rolling carts felt like too much. If Hyram had lived, he might have been among them, dressed up in his best gingham smock, gnawing on a cookie or perhaps a pretzel, and getting a good look at Atlantic City in all its resplendent excess.

The baby in Fannie’s arms opened his eyes lazily, looked up at her briefly, and then shut them again. “He looks so healthy,” she said, more to herself than to Bette.

Bette studied her for a moment before she said, “There’s no reason to believe yours won’t be.”



* * *



Isaac had been good about visiting Fannie the first week of her confinement, but in the last week or so, his visits had slowed considerably. Fannie knew he was busy with the bakery and Gussie, but the hospital wasn’t far from their apartment, and she felt unsettled on the days he didn’t stop by.

“Where have you been hiding, Mr. Feldman?” she asked him, when he tapped on her door early the following morning.

“Here and there,” he said as he dragged the stool closer to the bed.

Visitor’s hours didn’t begin until nine. “How’d you get past the nurses?” Fannie asked as he planted a kiss on her forehead. She tried to breathe him in.

Isaac didn’t offer her an explanation, just winked as he took a seat and crossed his legs at the knee. He was a handsome man, and Fannie knew he had to be popular with the nurses on the floor.

“Well?” she said, gesturing at the four walls that surrounded them.

“It’s a nice room.”

“Did Pop tell you he was doing this? I’m worried it must be very expensive.”

“I’m sure it is. But your father can afford it.”

Fannie cringed at the statement. Sometimes, when Isaac talked about money, she could feel herself growing pink around the neck. Her father never openly discussed his finances but Isaac was quick to remind her that only people with money could afford not to talk about it.

We have money, Fannie wanted to argue. But she knew that Isaac’s obsession had less to do with the salary her father paid him than with the circumstances in which he’d been raised. Too often, he had gone without.

When Isaac started taking Fannie out, a million years ago now, he hadn’t had two cents to rub together. He liked to promise her that, once he was a little more established, he’d be able to buy her steak dinners at the Ritz but, in the meantime, she often returned from her dates hungry enough that she had to go straight to the kitchen to make herself a sandwich. She tried to tell Isaac she didn’t need fancy dinners, so long as they were happy, but over time, his promises just grew bigger. Now he said that he wanted to be able to buy them a car, a small house in Ventnor or Margate, some clout at the synagogue.

Sometimes Fannie wondered if it had been a bad idea for Isaac to go to work for her father. When Isaac began delivering bread for Adler’s, she knew he viewed the job as temporary, as a place to catch his breath while he plotted his next move. But in 1928, two years after they were married and a year after Gussie was born, Joseph opened the plant on Mediterranean Avenue and stopped making bread in the back of the Atlantic Avenue store. Within a year, Adler’s had increased its production tenfold, and Joseph invested in more trucks to deliver bread throughout southern New Jersey.

For the first time in Fannie’s recollection, her parents seemed truly comfortable. And the expansion was good for Isaac and Fannie, too. Isaac got a promotion—overseeing all those delivery trucks, an office with a telephone, and a nice raise.

But the job made Isaac that much more beholden to Joseph, and Fannie thought it also gave Isaac too much insight into her father’s financial affairs. Her parents’ house on Atlantic Avenue, the checks they sent to Wellesley, and especially her father’s support of Florence’s Channel swim made Isaac resentful, in a way that felt unreasonable.

Isaac remained hell-bent on getting out from under Joseph’s thumb, and he began putting aside all their extra money so that he might one day start a business of his own. Fannie thought the plan was shortsighted—why couldn’t he see that her father would eventually retire from Adler’s and that, if Isaac worked hard and was patient, the business would be his? At the very worst, he’d share the responsibility of running Adler’s with whomever Florence married. On days when Isaac returned home from the plant in a good mood, Fannie tried to suggest that they use their savings for a down payment on a house instead.