Florence Adler Swims Forever(38)

Back at the beach tent, Stuart spent extra time wiping down his rescue can and straightening up the first-aid supplies. The guys who worked all the other stands on this section of the beach arrived at the tent in pairs, stowing their rescue cans, restocking their medical kits, and bragging about their biggest saves of the day. Stuart and Robert had made more than two dozen rescues over the course of eight hours, but two guys stationed at Michigan Avenue had plucked a young boy out of the water after they saw him fall out a window on Million Dollar Pier. Aside from the shock, he had been completely unharmed.

“It’s a bear to pull a rescue boat up alongside those pilings,” said Robert. “You win.”

Stuart had worked the States Avenue stand for five summers, and he knew the guys who reported in to the Maryland Avenue beach tent like they were his own brothers. There was Charles Kelly, who spent every free minute combing the beach, trying to convince the prettiest girls to enter the Miss Beach Patrol Pageant. The contest only happened once a year—in July—but the joke was that Kelly recruited contestants year-round. James Parker lived for playing pranks on the lifeguards in the other Beach Patrol tents and would gladly hide a pair of oars or a couple of the rescue boats’ drain plugs if it meant watching the guys in one of the other tents scramble to find them. And then there was Irish Dan, who was the best rower on the beach. When the waves got so big that they chased the crowds away, he challenged the other guards to sea battles, and when hurricane waves left even the ACBP’s best guards beached, Irish Dan would take a boat out alone, bragging that he could see the jitney drivers making change on the Avenue. Captain Bryant often reminded him that he’d be spending a whole lot of change if a rescue boat broke in half while he was horsing around in it.

Stuart still went out with the Maryland Avenue guys at night but it was different now. He hadn’t realized how much time they’d spent in the evenings simply unwinding their days. He still had stories to contribute—just yesterday he’d chased a purse snatcher halfway down the beach—but these were stories none of the guys had witnessed and therefore couldn’t corroborate. Part of the fun came from retelling a story everyone already knew.

Florence’s death had been the biggest story of the summer, by far, and it belonged to the guys at the Maryland Avenue beach tent. Ordinarily, a story like that would have lived forever, growing and changing with each retelling until it became a living thing. But the guys knew Stuart had been close to Florence, so when he asked them not to talk about it, they had honored the request.

“I’ll kill anyone who breathes a word,” said Irish Dan, giving Stuart a heavy slap on the back that pitched him so far forward he nearly fell face first into the sand. Stuart believed him.

Stuart understood that it would take time and effort to get to know these new guys at Kentucky Avenue, so when someone suggested that they all get a beer at the Jerome, he decided his father could wait until the following day.



* * *



At a quarter to nine in the morning, Stuart allowed one of The Covington’s doormen to usher him off the Boardwalk and into the hotel’s lobby.

“Morning, Mr. Williams.”

“Morning, Henry.”

The Covington wasn’t the largest hotel on the Boardwalk but it was large enough that Stuart didn’t enjoy telling people his father owned it. He could see their expressions go blank, as they calculated his father’s net worth and determined that Stuart was not just well off, but rich. Stuart was neither of those things—not really. His father’s money came with too many strings attached, and the money he made lifeguarding and coaching was just enough to cover his bar tabs and the rent he paid for a room in Mrs. Tate’s Northside boardinghouse.

It’s not that Stuart wanted to disassociate himself from the hotel entirely. The Covington had been a good place to grow up, although Stuart had liked it better when the place was still called Covington Cottage and felt like a ramshackle retreat. Back then, there was always wicker furniture on the veranda, which overlooked the ocean, and there was never enough staff to keep up with the sand that got tracked across the lobby’s Oriental rugs and stuck in the cracks of the wide wooden floorboards.

Stuart’s great-grandfather had built the cottage in 1873—just three years after the Boardwalk went in. Philadelphians had discovered the allure of the shore, and the United States Hotel, with its six hundred rooms, couldn’t keep up with demand. Stuart’s great-grandfather could see that Atlantic City needed more hoteliers and, with the backing of his own father, purchased a tract of beachfront property where he could build a relatively simple wood-framed structure. Covington Cottage boasted eighty rooms, a half-dozen beachside changing tents—where attendants made extra money selling buckets of seawater with which to rinse off—and easy access to the railroad station. When Applegate’s Pier went in, near the already busy hotel, business boomed.

In the 1890s, Stuart’s grandfather expanded the hotel’s footprint, adding two wide wings to the cottage, which remained the beating heart of the establishment. That iteration of the hotel was the one Stuart knew the best. There was a restaurant where, in the mornings, a colored woman named Mama K served up stacks of golden pancakes, a library with lots of soft furniture, and plenty of good hiding places, but the hotel wasn’t yet so big that Stuart could get lost in it. His father had begun doing the payroll and much of the ordering, but the day-to-day management of the hotel remained the domain of his grandparents. His grandfather oversaw the front of the house, his grandmother planned the menus and arranged the lobby’s fresh flowers, and there were always odd jobs for a young boy who needed constant occupation. In the summer months, when Stuart wasn’t reordering the room keys that hung on pegs behind the front desk or running newspapers up to the rooms, he spent long hours in the swimming pool, practicing his trudgeon.