Florence Adler Swims Forever(23)
Joseph offered Esther his arm, and they made their way out of the hotel and down Virginia Avenue to the Boardwalk, which was crowded with rolling carts full of mostly happy couples and a few dour ones. Without discussing it, they walked south, in the opposite direction of Nixon’s Theater and Esther’s parents. The piers buzzed with activity, and revelers streamed in and out of the grand lobbies of the big oceanfront hotels. Lights were strung from one side of the Boardwalk to the other, and the effect was dazzling—like a blanket of stars had been hung for their benefit. At the Chelsea Hotel the crowds began to thin, and they stopped to admire the city’s bright lights, spread out behind them. “Don’t you just love Atlantic City?” Esther said.
“Yes,” said Joseph, watching her watch the skyline. In that moment he did love Atlantic City more than any other place he’d ever known. It was a city where a Jewish boy from Galicia could find work and live cheap and save his money and even have a little fun. But most of all, it was a city that had delivered this beautiful girl to him.
At Morris Avenue, they turned around. Esther stopped to pick up a small but perfect seashell, which someone had plucked from the sand only to abandon on the Boardwalk, and when she did, she let go of Joseph’s arm. Eventually, she returned to him, seashell in hand, but then she did something unexpected. Instead of taking his arm, she moved her hand gently down his sleeve, over his shirt cuff, and into the warm center of his palm, where she laced her fingers between his.
“Is this all right?” she asked in a quiet tone, as if she were genuinely unsure what his answer might be.
In that moment, Joseph lost every English word he’d ever learned. All he could do was squeeze her hand in return. His face was close enough to hers that he wondered, briefly, what it might be like to kiss her but it was several more nights before he found out.
The kiss came on a moonlit night near Absecon Lighthouse, where the bright lights of the piers receded and the Boardwalk narrowed and veered toward the inlet. The beach was quiet and dark. Joseph was sure he had seen a humpback whale, its tail air-bound as it dove for krill, and he wanted Esther to see it, too.
Joseph moved closer to Esther, using her own hand to indicate the spot where the whale’s silhouette had disappeared from view. She studied the horizon solemnly, and he became conscious of the fact that he was holding his breath.
“You are not seeing?” he whispered into her ear.
“I am not looking,” she corrected him. The distinction was one of those subtleties of the English language that so often evaded Joseph in those early years in America. He understood it only later, after he had replayed the evening several dozen times in his head. Esther didn’t let go of his hand but she did turn toward him, her breath warm against his cheek. When he brushed his lips against hers, very softly at first, the kiss was a question.
It was another week before Esther returned to Philadelphia with her parents and another year before she worked up the nerve to tell them she was marrying Joseph. If Joseph had lost her at any point after that first night she took his hand, he would have been haunted by her always.
Joseph allowed himself to linger in the memory of their early days together, then looked at Stuart. No, he didn’t think he wanted to know the full extent of what Stuart and Florence had meant to each other, didn’t think knowing that his daughter had been loved would make her loss any easier to bear.
“Do you remember the summer the Women’s Swimming Association brought Charlotte Brown to Atlantic City?” Joseph asked.
Stuart’s face momentarily brightened. “Out at the inlet? Sure.”
“She was such a wee thing. Couldn’t have been more than a year or two older than Florence at the time. Maybe five or six years old?
“When she dove into that water, Florence screamed for me to save her,” Joseph said, chuckling at the memory. “She must have swum a half-dozen yards before I could convince Florence she wasn’t in need of saving.”
“I went with my father, too,” said Stuart, and for a moment he looked very far away.
“Florence had seen the seventy-ton whale at Steel Pier, but there was something special about seeing a child her own size whip in and out of the water like a trout.”
Stuart made a noise, something between a laugh and a long sigh.
“She could teach herself to do anything,” said Joseph.
Florence liked to tell people that her father had taught her to swim. It made for a good story since Joseph didn’t actually know how to swim himself. All he had really done was introduce her to the water, same as he’d done for Fannie.
He’d chosen a calm summer day and waited until the tide was low before telling Florence to get into her bathing costume. Then he’d led her down Metropolitan Avenue, across the Boardwalk, and past the bathing houses and chairs-for-rent to Heinz Pier. Over his shoulder, he carried a long cord of rope; he tied one end to a thick, wooden joist—far from the pier’s pilings—and dropped the other over the side, watching it unravel in midair.
After they had retraced their steps and returned to the beach, Joseph waded through waist-deep water to retrieve the loose end of the rope, which he pulled to shore and carefully tied around Florence’s small waist. He gave his homemade lifesaving contraption several hard tugs before pronouncing it sound.
“In the water, your arms and legs, they must always move,” Joseph offered, his only instruction.