Florence Adler Swims Forever(55)

Esther tucked Gussie’s handiwork into the frame of the dresser’s mirror, then nudged a table lamp a few inches to the left so that poor Little Lindy was partially obscured by the shade.

She turned back to the bed and tried to appreciate the scene in front of her—mother and child reunited—but found she couldn’t concentrate. Her hands trembled, so she busied them tidying up Fannie’s bedside table. The nurses never did a very good job keeping up with it.

“Was Isaac by yesterday?” Esther asked, as casually as she could, while she hung Fannie’s robe, discarded in a nearby chair, in the wardrobe.

Even with her back to Fannie, she could feel her daughter’s hesitation. “He popped by for lunch yesterday.”

Fannie was lying, of course. Anna and Gussie had seen him eating at Kornblau’s. Esther turned around and eyed Gussie, curious if she’d caught the discrepancy. If she had, she gave nothing away.

“And has your father been by to see you lots?” Fannie asked Gussie. It broke Esther’s heart that she had to ask.

Gussie looked at Esther and shrugged her shoulders. The child was clearly terrified of saying the wrong thing.

“Oh certainly, Gussie always enjoys seeing him around the apartment,” said Esther. Technically, that was not a lie.

“And how’s our Channel swimmer?” Fannie lobbed.

“Very busy right now,” said Esther. “Between practices and packing, we rarely see her.” She didn’t dare glance at Gussie.

“And she’s still set to leave on the tenth?”

“Yes, the tenth.”

“And does she plan on visiting me before she departs? Or has she washed her hands of her troublesome older sister entirely?”

“Fannie—”

“Mother—she hasn’t been by in close to a month. It’s outrageous.”

Esther’s confidence bloomed. Dr. Rosenthal was no doubt right about Fannie’s high blood pressure, but he was wrong to suspect that Fannie knew about Florence’s death. Never would she have been able to get those last words out if she knew the truth.

“Your father hasn’t visited either,” said Esther, grasping for a reasonable defense—and distraction. “You’re not outraged with him?”

“We both know he’d sooner eat his own hat than visit a hospital.”

It was true. Joseph wasn’t the type to go anywhere near a hospital, and Fannie knew it as well as Esther did. How did men manage to get away with that? What if Esther hadn’t been the type to make dinner in the evenings? They would all have starved.

“Your sister sends her love.”

“Bullocks. She didn’t even respond to the letter I sent her.”

“Letter?”

“I wrote to her—almost a month ago.”

“And sent it to the apartment?”

“Isaac delivered it.”

“Maybe he misplaced it?” Esther suggested, as gently as she could.

She had always hated refereeing the girls’ arguments but never more so than now, with one precious girl unable to defend herself and the other frightfully unaware of her own advantage. What Esther wouldn’t have given for her daughters to have been close. When they were young, they had done all right together, despite the seven years that separated them. But something changed as they grew older. By the summer Fannie met and married Isaac, the girls might as well have been two planets orbiting different suns.

It was the same summer Gertrude Ederle traveled to Calais to swim the English Channel. The coverage was extensive, even with so little to report in the days leading up to the big swim. Both Florence and Esther had scrambled to read Joseph’s paper when he was through with it; the two might as well have been reading about Greta Garbo or John Gilbert. Trying to predict the Channel’s tides proved to be every bit as exciting as trying to figure out which movie stars were in town for premieres at the Warner Theatre, where they were staying, and whether someone from their party might pop in for a sweet bun at Adler’s. Esther would tsk over Ederle’s photographs as if she were the girl’s matchmaker: “She really is a rather homely girl. How will she marry?” Florence, only twelve but already old enough to enjoy goading her mother, said slyly, “Maybe she doesn’t want to.”

Fannie rarely stuck her head into the living room, much less the newspaper Esther and Florence clutched between them. She had begun seeing Isaac, whom she’d met while working behind the counter at Adler’s, and in recent weeks, Isaac had made enough trips to the bakery for challah bread that it would have been safe to assume he was saying the HaMotzi every night of the week and not just on Shabbos. Isaac had called at the apartment a handful of times, awkwardly sitting in the living room until Joseph—out of discomfort more than anything else—granted the couple permission to stroll the Boardwalk without a chaperone, provided Fannie was home by nine o’clock sharp.

Nearly six weeks to the day after their courtship began, Fannie arrived home from one such walk and announced that Isaac had asked her to marry him. Esther had long anticipated the engagement of her daughters and expected such news to leave her feeling euphoric. But instead, she found that Fannie’s announcement discomfited her.

Isaac was six years older than Fannie but not so old for their age difference to matter. He was a quiet sort but Esther knew many good and quiet men. Isaac was poor but Esther reminded herself that Joseph had been poor when she had married him. They had built Adler’s together, which had been half the adventure. No, there was something else—something more unsettling than Isaac’s age or income or even his loquacity. She heard it in the tone of his voice. A belief that he was owed something. Esther did not think it unusual for a man to be dissatisfied with the circumstances into which he’d been born but she had no patience for a man who did not believe in the transformative powers of his own hard work.