Florence Adler Swims Forever(33)
When it came to open-water swimming, Stuart was Florence’s best resource, and she wrote to him with increasing frequency as the winter months passed and her notebook grew fat with scribbling. Stuart didn’t know the Channel but he knew the ocean—both what it could give a swimmer who was paying attention and what it could take away. As important, he knew Florence. He knew what each muscle in her body was capable of, where she had exposed weaknesses, where her confidence might be a gift and where it might get her into trouble. In one of her early letters, Florence had told Stuart that she wanted to attempt her crossing the following August, before she returned to Wellesley for her sophomore year, but Stuart persuaded her to give it one more year. The English Channel, he had written to her, will still be there in 1934.
Stuart suggested Florence spend the summer of 1933 training to swim the perimeter of Absecon Island. It was a twenty-two-mile swim, roughly the same distance as the swim from Cape Gris-Nez to Dover, albeit under much more pleasant conditions. The Channel’s waters were rarely warmer than sixty degrees, and the air was just as cold. In the Straits of Dover, weather could change abruptly, so even if a swimmer left France under sunny skies, it was likely she’d encounter drenching rain, thick fog, and gale-force winds before she reached England.
Florence hadn’t been keen to put off the Channel for another year but she did like the fact that Ederle had pulled off a similar stunt to great effect. Weeks before she swam the Channel, Ederle had swum from New York’s Battery Park to Sandy Hook, New Jersey. Aside from the seventeen-mile swim being good practice, it had turned out to be excellent publicity. Stuart argued that, if Florence wanted the Press or one of Atlantic City’s big businessmen to take her Channel swim seriously—and potentially sponsor it—she needed to make a name for herself in her own hometown, and she begrudgingly agreed.
Most mornings that first summer she was home from school, Florence had met Stuart on the beach in front of the Maryland Avenue beach tent. The sun wasn’t yet up but, by the time he dragged a rescue boat across the sand and pushed it off its rollers and out into the open water, Florence seated at the bow, the horizon had turned pink. She didn’t talk much as he rowed out past the breaking waves, but he liked having her in the boat anyway. On the nights when he stayed out too late at the Ritz’s Merry-Go-Round bar or Garden Pier’s ballroom, it might have been tempting to shut his alarm off and turn back over in bed. But instead, he nursed his coffee and gave Florence last-minute reminders to relax her shoulders or extend her pull a little farther. If she had questions she asked them but, more often than not, she simply nodded, stretched her arms above her head several times, pulled off her cover-up, and plunged into the water.
While Florence swam, Stuart rowed behind her, careful to maintain a distance of several boat lengths, lest she stop suddenly and he plow into her. Sometimes he tried hollering at her, either to read from the stopwatch he kept in his pocket or to warn her she was veering off course, but between the cap she wore over her ears, the natural hum of the ocean’s underworld, and the sound of her own arms churning the water around her head, it was difficult to get through to her. It didn’t matter much anyway. She knew Atlantic City’s landscape well enough to know that Central Pier was a half mile down the beach from Garden Pier, and that Million Dollar Pier was a half mile farther still.
Eventually, Stuart would shout to Florence that it was time to get back in the boat, and she’d acquiesce, allowing him to grab her under the arms and haul her over the side of the boat and into the bilge like a fresh catch. He knew there were many mornings she would have preferred to wave the boat away and to keep swimming, to return to the beach when it suited her, but Stuart, who made hundreds of saves each summer, wouldn’t hear of it. “You’re not invincible, you know,” he often told her.
The row back to shore was always Stuart’s favorite part of the morning. With her swim behind her and the sun in the sky, Florence was much more talkative. She’d wrap a towel around herself, swallow what was left of Stuart’s coffee, and ask questions she already knew the answers to—did her frame look tighter and did he think she had a chance at the Pageant Cup again this year? That’s one of the things he liked most about Florence. How sure she was of herself. He also liked her collarbones, which danced up and down when she laughed. Oh, and her eyes. He liked her eyes very much.
On days when Stuart didn’t have to be up in the stand immediately, he took his time getting back to the beach. Florence frequently teased him, “My father has, at this point, already called the Coast Guard.”
Now, without Florence in the boat, the vessel felt large and unwieldy. The ocean was bigger, lonelier. The beach farther away. Stuart imagined rowing toward the horizon until he could no longer see the Boardwalk, or even the small spit of land on which Atlantic City was precariously perched. With no landmarks except the sun, could he find his way home? Would he want to?
* * *
Stuart was on his way to find breakfast when he came upon the Adlers, standing near the entrance of Steel Pier. At least it looked like the Adlers from so far away. He squinted, trying to get a better look, and counted heads. Joseph, Esther, Isaac, Anna, and little Gussie. Yes, it was definitely them. He raised an arm in the air and waved but no one seemed to notice.
“Mr. Adler. Mrs. Adler,” he called, once he was within shouting distance. They looked up. Esther didn’t look pleased to see him but she didn’t look disappointed either. A good sign, he thought.