Florence Adler Swims Forever(24)

That afternoon Florence had learned to swim—nothing that resembled a real stroke but enough to keep her head above the water.

“The only thing Florence needed to know,” Joseph said to Stuart, “was that I believed she could swim.”

“You gave her a gift,” Stuart said, meeting Joseph’s eyes for the first time during his visit.

“Did I?”

Stuart frowned.

“I propose we make a deal,” said Joseph. “From you, there will be no more talk of—”

A light knock on the office door interrupted Joseph’s negotiations.

Mrs. Simons opened the door a crack. “I have Miss Epstein here to see you.”

“Anna?” both men asked at the same time.





Isaac


When Isaac leaned back far enough in his desk chair, he could see Joseph’s office door, which had been shut all week. He always kept one eye on the door since it benefited him to know his father-in-law’s comings and goings, but this week, he had paid more attention to it than usual.

If Esther’s instructions had been for both Joseph and Isaac to return to work and act as if everything were normal, Joseph was failing miserably at that task. Nothing about his shuttered blinds or that silly handwritten sign he’d posted on his office door looked normal. And on Thursday afternoon, when Mrs. Simons was summoned into Joseph’s office and returned to her desk visibly shaken, Isaac was sure Joseph had told her the truth about Florence. The brittle woman—usually so stoic—dabbed at her eyes for several minutes before hurrying to the powder room, where Isaac could hear her sobs even over the exhaust fan.

On Friday morning there had been a revolving door of visitors to see Joseph. First Florence’s friend Stuart, and then Anna. Stuart’s visit made a certain amount of sense—the scrub had clearly been besotted by Florence. And everyone knew he was on the outs with his own father, so it wasn’t a complete surprise to see him latching on to Joseph. But Anna’s visit was less easily explained, and as a result, Isaac spent the better part of Friday wondering about it. To Isaac’s knowledge, she hadn’t come to the plant once in the more than three months she’d been staying with the Adlers. Today, she had remained inside Joseph’s office for a quarter of an hour, maybe a little longer, and when she left, she had looked relieved. Since Isaac’s office faced the street, he waited the thirty seconds he knew it would take Anna to make her way down the two flights of stairs and emerge from the building, then he stood up for a stretch and walked over to the window.

Interestingly, Stuart had waited for her. He sat out on the steps of the plant, hat in hand, face stretched toward the sun. When Anna pushed open the building’s heavy front door, Stuart jumped to his feet. Though he had tried, Isaac wasn’t able to make out what Stuart said to her, but he had watched the two of them walk off down Tennessee Avenue, before returning to his desk.

Anna was a hard one to figure out, partially because her accent was thick and partially because she had materialized out of thin air. The story was that Anna’s mother, Inez, had grown up alongside Joseph but Isaac was sure there had to be more to it than that. It was one thing for Joseph to write an affidavit for Anna—everyone knew the affidavits were as meaningless as the pieces of paper they were written on. But putting her up in his spare room was something else altogether. Isaac didn’t think it was the type of thing he’d do for just anybody.

There was little debate that things in Germany were getting bad. Since coming to power the year before, the Nazi Party had already removed Jews from the civil service, curtailed the rights of Jewish doctors, lawyers, and other professionals, forbidden performances by Jewish actors, and restricted the number of Jewish students allowed to attend German schools and universities. Joseph followed it all very closely and reported on the most notable offenses to Isaac as he came and went from their third-floor offices. In lieu of a greeting, Joseph would offer him a headline straight from the morning’s paper, “They’ve revoked the licenses of Jewish accountants” or “No more medical school for Jews in Bavaria.” According to Joseph, Roosevelt had his head in the sand, and if Americans waited for Congress to do something, they’d be waiting a long time. Like many of the Jewish businessmen in town, Joseph donated to the American Jewish Committee, and Isaac suspected his gifts were generous since his name was inscribed in the “golden book” and the president of the local chapter made a habit of calling on Joseph with some regularity.

It’s not that Isaac didn’t care about the plight of Germany’s Jews. It’s just that, in Russia, discrimination had been the least of people’s worries. The stories he’d grown up listening to—about beatings and rapes and entire villages set ablaze—made it harder for Isaac to get worked up about the fact that Jewish merchants in Germany had to mark their shops with yellow Stars of David. He found it almost quaint that his father-in-law considered the persecution of Jews to be news at all.

Ostensibly, Anna was here because she hadn’t been able to get into college in Berlin, or anywhere else in Germany for that matter. When her mother had written to Joseph, he’d apparently been all too happy to throw money at the problem. Maybe Isaac was old-fashioned but a girl not being able to go to college hardly seemed like an international crisis.

Isaac rolled a pencil back and forth between his fingers, then tapped it on his desk. He needed a plan. The weekend was nearly upon him, and if he wasn’t careful, he would spend it in Esther and Joseph’s living room, sitting a modified Shiva.