Florence Adler Swims Forever(21)

The room was generously proportioned. Against one wall sat two brass beds, and between them was a Stickley bedside table that had belonged to Esther’s mother. There were also two dressers, neither of which were particularly fine pieces of furniture. On the dressers were a few knickknacks—a kaleidoscope that Joseph had given Fannie when she was too old to get much enjoyment out of it and the Pageant Cup, which Florence hadn’t bothered to remove when they’d moved out of the apartment last summer.

He began to open the drawers of Florence’s dresser, then wondered if he owed Anna some kind of explanation. “I’m looking for Bill Burgess’s address,” he said.

She placed her book on the bedside table and walked over to the dresser, turned on another lamp, which cast even less light than the one beside her bed. “Bill Burgess is her coach?” she asked.

“In France, yes. Or maybe England.”

“I haven’t seen an address book.”

“I wondered if it might be in her correspondence. Or maybe in that swimming notebook she kept. The one with the pale blue cover.”

“That’s here,” she said, leading him over to the bedside table. She pulled open the drawer, letting the delicate brass handle clink against the drawer plate, then stepped aside, sat back down on her bed. “I haven’t seen many letters. Is it possible she left them at school?”

Joseph nearly wept at the sight of the notebook. All of that energy, all of his daughter’s hopes for herself, never to be realized. He picked the book up and sat down on Florence’s bed, facing Anna. The inked words on the cover had run together since the last time he’d laid eyes on it. He ran his fingers along the words that were still legible: FLORENCE ADLER SWIMS.

He turned the first few pages slowly, reading every word. An entry from last July read, Replaced my morning meal of toast with a banana. Felt like I could have swum forever, and he had to stop. He wasn’t going to be able to get through it, not in front of Anna. “Here,” he said, handing the notebook to Anna. “Will you take a look? It’s just an address I’m looking for. So I can write to him. Tell him she’s—”

Anna nodded, opened the notebook, and began to turn its pages.

Joseph admired the girl’s seriousness, her ability to focus on the task at hand. “You remind me a great deal of your mother,” he said as he watched Anna study his daughter’s neat handwriting. “Inez was the type of girl who couldn’t be easily distracted.”

Anna beamed. “She doesn’t talk much about—her childhood.”

“By that, do you mean, she doesn’t talk much about me?”

The girl flushed.

“Why should she?” he said. “I am the past.”

“Our pasts are important, no?”

Joseph shrugged an acknowledgment. He wondered how much Inez had told her, knew that, at the very least, she’d read the words he’d included in her affidavit of support. “It’s funny what we remember.”

Anna stopped turning the book’s pages and looked at him, expectantly. He nodded his head at the notebook, urging her onward, then kept talking.

“Your mother had a bicycle and we used to ride it along the river. I pedaled, and she steered, and what I remember most of all is that her hair was always in my eyes and mouth.”

“How old were you?”

He smiled to himself. “Maybe nine or ten years old. Just children.”

Anna kept turning the pages of the notebook but her pace had slowed. “Did you ever think about staying?” she asked.

“I did.” It was all he had thought about the autumn they were seventeen, after the steamship ticket had arrived in the mail from his brother. Inez had stared at the ticket when he’d presented it to her, as if she could will it away just by looking at it hard enough. “Marry me, then,” she had said when she knew there was no keeping him in Lackenbach. “Take me with you.”

Anna wanted a story, but Joseph wasn’t sure she wanted this one. The hurried marriage proposal, the promise that he would send for Inez when he had saved enough money, the letters back and forth across the Atlantic, which came to a sudden halt when he met Esther—none of it made him look very good.

“How much has your mother told you?” he asked Anna.

“Not much,” she said, looking up from the notebook once more. “Just that you were engaged and that it didn’t work out.”

Inez was a good woman, too decent to color her daughter’s opinion of him with the truth.

“Anna,” he said as she returned her attention to the task at hand, “I don’t want you to worry about your mother. Your parents. If the affidavit doesn’t work, there are other things we can try.”

A tear slipped down Anna’s cheek, and she wiped it away with the heel of her hand. “You don’t think the consul will accept it?”

Securing a student visa for Anna had been one thing; securing visas for her parents was turning out to be quite another. Since Joseph wasn’t a relative, he had to prove that Inez and Paul would not become public charges upon their arrival in the U.S.—that they could support themselves indefinitely, all without taking a job away from a deserving American. An impossible feat, considering the fact that their assets were frozen.

Joseph wondered how honest he should be with Anna. “I suspect we’ll need more than my affidavit alone. But who can say?”