Florence Adler Swims Forever(46)

She looked at her wrist and then at Stuart. “I’m pleased to meet you, Mr. Williams,” she said.

“Ah, an accent. Germany, I presume?”

“Ja ich bin Deutscher,” she said, trying her best to be charming.

“What brings you to Atlantic City?” Mr. Williams asked.

Anna was about to answer when Stuart spoke for her, offering up the curtest of explanations: “College.”

Mr. Williams gave Stuart a warning look, so Anna added, “I start in the fall.”

“No good schools in Germany?”

Again, Stuart jumped in. “Not if you’re Jewish.” Anna thought she detected a challenge, of sorts, in the tone of Stuart’s voice. As if he was daring his father to say something. But Mr. Williams seemed perfectly reasonable and said only, “That’s too bad.”

By the time Stuart’s father took his leave, a few minutes later, the evening’s mood had changed. Stuart seemed quieter and less confident, and Anna had begun to shiver with cold.

“Let’s get you dried off,” said Stuart as he hoisted himself out of the pool and walked over to the little cabana, water streaming from his bathing suit, to grab two towels. Anna shimmied along the pool’s edge to the ladder, hopeful that she could display more grace getting out of the pool than she’d exhibited getting into it.

“You seem angry with your father,” she said as Stuart handed her a towel.

“I don’t know if angry is the right word,” Stuart said, towel-drying his hair. “Maybe frustrated.”

Anna unfurled the towel and wrapped it around her torso.

“He’s been wanting me to come work for him for years. Ever since I finished high school.”

“In college even?”

“Didn’t go.”

Anna pulled her towel tighter and arched her eyebrows at him.

“You’re surprised?”

Anna could feel the color rising in her face. “A little.”

“At some point, I decided that if he wanted me to do something, it had to be the wrong thing.”

“But you didn’t want to go?”

Stuart shrugged.

“So why—”

“I got into Temple but it wasn’t an Ivy, so he had a hard time hiding his disappointment.”

Anna wasn’t familiar with the term Ivy, and she hated to interrupt to ask.

“That was the same summer I started lifeguarding. I was making my own money and began to envision a life in which I wasn’t beholden to a guy I could never please.”

“He’s really so unhappy?”

Stuart nodded his head at the hotel. “He wasn’t content to own a hotel that my great-grandfather and grandfather had built. He had to tear it down and build the biggest hotel in Atlantic City.”

“It’s the biggest?”

“Not anymore,” Stuart said, with a hint of amusement on his face. “The Traymore did a big addition the year after he reopened. Now we’re the third biggest, soon to be the fourth.”

“Maybe it’s not so terrible,” said Anna, who was trying to reconcile Stuart’s stories with her own, albeit brief, impressions of his father. “That he wants the best for himself. And you.”

“Maybe. If it didn’t extend to all areas of his life.” Stuart lifted his eyes to the sky, gesturing toward the top of The Covington’s south tower. “There’s a penthouse apartment up there, where he’s installed a prettier, younger version of my mother.”

Anna didn’t know what to say. She could scarcely believe she was having this conversation at all. “Does your mother know?”

“Everyone does. My mother hasn’t set foot inside the hotel in five years, maybe more. Can you imagine the two of them running into each other in the lobby? We’ve got a house in Ventnor but as soon as the weather warms up, Mother heads off to our summer cottage in Cape May.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Oh, don’t be,” said Stuart. “Every family has its issues. I offer my family’s up to you only as explanation for why I’m such a pain in the ass.”



* * *



Anna’s least favorite part of learning to swim was sneaking back into the Adlers’ apartment after Stuart dropped her off each evening. What she was doing wasn’t wrong but she also knew that there was something tactless about taking up the same pastime as a beloved daughter, so recently drowned. She tried to imagine explaining her motivations to Esther and cringed at the thought.

“Where did you get off to?” a voice called from the kitchen as Anna tiptoed down the apartment’s long hallway. Anna stopped in her tracks, squeezed her eyes shut for a long second, then allowed herself to move in the direction of Esther’s voice. She found her polishing silver at the kitchen table.

There was no getting around the fact that Anna’s hair was still wet. She tucked a loose strand behind her ear. “I was down at the beach for a little while.” Not a complete lie.

“You went swimming?” said Esther, not looking up from the tarnished serving spoon she worked between her hands with a rag.

“Just got my hair wet.”

Esther let out an audible humph and Anna wondered how much she suspected. By now, Anna had had four swimming lessons. Stuart had taught her how to breathe, inhaling big mouthfuls of air that she slowly exhaled, through her mouth, underwater. He’d insisted that she practice her breathing technique for an embarrassingly long time, first by dipping her face in the water and then by bobbing along the side of the pool. Anna cringed, imagining what the hotel’s paying guests must think of her—a grown woman who could spend a half hour bouncing in and out of the water like a metal spring. Eventually Stuart had taught her to push off from the side of the pool and glide along the top of the water with her arms positioned above her head, and most recently, he’d added a scissor kick to the enterprise. Anna was meant to push off the wall, glide until her body lost its momentum, and then continue to kick until she had to come up for air. She grew mildly annoyed when Stuart kept telling her the same thing—that she needed to kick her legs harder if she wanted to keep them anywhere near the surface of the water. But she forgave him because he also promised her that, with time and practice, she’d continue to improve.