Florence Adler Swims Forever(42)
The waiter brought the check, and Mr. Hirsch reached for his wallet.
“Let me get this,” said Joseph. “You’ve been a big help.”
“Nonsense,” said Mr. Hirsch, counting out six one-dollar bills and putting them on the table.
The ma?tre d’ brought him his hat, and he stood to go.
“Miss Epstein, there is one other solution to your parents’ predicament.”
“What’s that?” Anna asked, sitting up at attention. She watched him put on his hat.
“Marry yourself an American,” he said as he straightened the brim.
Anna let out a little laugh.
“Oh, don’t look at me like that, Joseph,” Mr. Hirsch said with a wink. “It’s still the quickest way I know to get a visa.”
* * *
The drink, combined with the afternoon heat and Mr. Hirsch’s promises, had left Anna feeling light-headed. At the door of the Adlers’ apartment, she dug in her purse for a handkerchief and her compact, blotted the perspiration from her neck and the skin around her hairline, and assessed her overall appearance in the small mirror. She made a face at herself and probably would have made several more had the door not opened to reveal Gussie.
“I thought I heard you out here!”
Gussie extended her hand to offer the secret handshake, and Anna shut her compact with a snap, slipped it back into her purse alongside the handkerchief. Then she reached for the little girl’s wrist.
“Wharp-ere warp-ere yarp-ou?” Gussie asked
“Let’s speak in English for now, okay?”
For a moment Gussie looked crestfallen but then her face brightened. “I have a letter for you!”
“Oh?” Anna had received a letter from her mother, just a few days ago, but perhaps her father had written. In place of long letters, he usually sent articles or a short story he’d torn from the pages of the magazine Kladderadatsch. Maybe it was all the years he’d spent studying and teaching English, but he seemed to understand that reading German, for Anna now, had become a kind of treat.
Gussie led her into the kitchen, where the table was covered in old newspapers, cut to bits.
“What are you working on?”
“Nana says Mother likes the Dionne quintlets.”
“Quintuplets.”
“That’s what I said.” Anna had clearly irritated the girl. She raised her eyebrows at Gussie, who was rooting through the paper scraps, looking for something. Hopefully Anna’s letter hadn’t been cut to shreds, too.
“So, you’re cutting out pictures of the babies?”
“Yes, see?” Gussie held up a piece of blue construction paper onto which she’d glued a half-dozen versions of the same photo Anna had seen plastered on every periodical at every newsstand in Atlantic City. In it, the quintuplets’ doctor loomed over a bassinet, in which all five babies, each in her own bunting, were packed like sardines. It was hard to make out their faces.
It seemed a little tactless to present a pregnant woman at risk for miscarrying with a collage of baby pictures, but Anna had to assume Esther had sanctioned the activity.
“Where’s your grandmother?”
“In her bedroom, lying down.”
“Ah.”
“Here it is!” Gussie said, removing a folded piece of paper from underneath a three-day-old section of the Atlantic City Press.
Anna’s heart sank. The note wasn’t in the light blue aerogram envelope she’d become accustomed to looking for on the dresser in the Adlers’ entryway. In fact, the note wasn’t in an envelope at all.
“Have you read it?”
Gussie nodded earnestly and handed the note over. Before Anna could unfold the piece of paper, Gussie blurted out, “It’s from Stuart!” and scurried around the table to read the note, once more, over Anna’s shoulder.
Anna,
Now is as good a time as any to learn to swim. Your first lesson is tomorrow evening at six. Meet me at the Kentucky Avenue beach tent?
Stuart
“How did you get this?” Anna asked Gussie.
“He dropped it off.”
Anna sucked in her breath, wondering how Esther would feel about a would-be suitor of Florence’s dropping off notes for Anna.
“Did your grandmother see it?”
Gussie shook her head. “She was in her room.”
Anna thought for a minute. “Maybe we don’t tell her? In case it makes her sad.”
Gussie didn’t acknowledge Anna’s request. She just walked back around the table, picked up the pair of scissors, and began to cut out a baby in a Gerber’s advertisement. The baby was jolly and round, old enough to sit up and smile. Behind the child’s head read the words For Babies Only. Anna assumed Gussie knew that this baby wasn’t one of the Dionne babies, none of whom could have been easily confused with a bouncing six-month-old. Gussie put a careful dot of glue on the backside of the baby’s picture and pressed it onto her collage.
“So, you’re including other babies?” Anna asked, unable to help herself.
“Mother likes them,” said Gussie, defensively, as she began cutting away at the next clipping. Anna couldn’t be sure but, from across the table, the baby looked like Charles Lindbergh Jr. She stood and peered over Gussie’s work, trying to read the photo’s caption. After his transatlantic flight, Charles Lindbergh had become extremely popular across Europe. His son’s kidnapping had made headlines on both sides of the Atlantic, and Anna imagined that the German people had followed the case almost as closely as their American counterparts. After the child’s body was discovered, the coverage had slowed but, now that the trial was under way, the beautiful boy’s picture was back in all the papers.