Florence Adler Swims Forever(64)
“Not bad, eh?” Joseph said.
The Twin Lights of Highlands looked more like a military fortress than a lighthouse. The entire structure—keeper’s quarters, storage facilities, and two towers—was made of brownstone. Joseph pulled the car off the road and parked it under a tree. “Grab the binoculars, will you?”
The pair walked out onto the brow of the hill where the Twin Lights sat. Joseph walked the length of the station several times, wading through the tall summer grass, as he eyed Sandy Hook Bay and the harbor beyond the sandbar. Finally, when they were standing in front of the south tower, he said, “This should do” and made a nest for himself in the grass. Stuart handed the binoculars to Joseph, removed his jacket, and joined him.
“Mr. Adler?”
“Joseph.”
“Joseph,” said Stuart. “Are we watching for birds or large steamships?”
Joseph didn’t answer him, just studied the coastal highway below them, the bay and sandbar and harbor beyond. In the distance, he could make out Brooklyn’s skyline. Around a bend he could not see, he knew Chelsea Piers was busy, people pouring from the terminal onto the decks of ocean liners that would transport them to Southampton and Plymouth, Vigo and Le Havre.
The Lafayette was small in comparison to most of the liners that crossed the Atlantic. Florence and he had settled on it because it didn’t stop in Southampton, and because it could make the transatlantic crossing in a quick six days. The ship’s manifest was also small—the ship could accommodate just one hundred and fifty people—which had made Florence hopeful that she would have the tiny, indoor swimming pool to herself. Joseph had tried to remind his daughter that the pool was probably no bigger than a matchbox but she hadn’t wanted to hear it.
When Joseph tried to imagine what Florence’s sea voyage might have been like, swimming miniature laps in a miniature pool, all he could see was Florence at barely five years old, swimming her first laps in the Hygeia Baths. At the end of the summer season, when the ocean had turned cold and the tourists had gone home, Joseph had walked Florence north along the Boardwalk, as far as Heinz Pier, where a large electric sign advertising the baths directed people into a stuffy Georgian building with a limestone fa?ade and an iodized copper roof. Even such a big sign couldn’t have prepared Florence for what she saw when Joseph paid the admission fee and led her inside on that brisk, autumn afternoon.
In the center of a three-story room sat a gigantic swimming pool, full to its brim with seawater that had been pumped from the ocean a hundred yards away. The sounds of frolicking bathers ricocheted off the underside of the building’s metal roof.
“I can swim here?” Florence had asked, disbelievingly.
“You can,” Joseph said as she stood on the brick deck, still bundled in her coat and hat. Had Joseph not clapped his hands and motioned Florence toward the changing rooms, she might have stood there all afternoon, watching one man after another dive from a tall metal platform that was positioned along the far side of the pool.
“Where are all the girls?” Florence asked her father when she returned to the pool deck in her bathing costume. Joseph scanned the room. Everywhere he looked, he saw nothing but men and, in some cases, adolescent boys. He nodded toward several long rows of chairs, tucked underneath the second-floor balcony and shrouded by potted ferns, where a number of women and small children perched like goldfinches.
“Why are they sitting over there?” Florence asked.
“They can’t swim.”
“Should you teach them?” she had asked, and he had been so touched by her question that he wondered if she didn’t have a point.
A steamship blared its horn as it entered New York Harbor from the Hudson River and headed out to sea. Joseph picked up the binoculars and studied the ship, looking for the name on its bow.
“That’s not it,” said Stuart. “It’s too big.”
Joseph replaced the binoculars in his lap.
“Mr. Adler, may I ask you something?”
“Joseph.”
“Right, sorry,” said Stuart, who was very obviously never going to feel comfortable calling Joseph by his first name.
“Go on.”
“Do you ever regret keeping Florence’s death a secret?”
Joseph let out a long breath and moved the binoculars from one hand to the other, absentmindedly adjusting the diopter as he did so.
“If you don’t want to talk about it—”
“I don’t mind talking about it. Don’t mind talking about her. In fact, I like hearing people like you say her name.”
What could Joseph say? Keeping the secret had never been a choice. Not a real one. He thought carefully about where to begin. “When I was growing up in Hungary—what’s now Austria’s Burgenland—we never had anything. My parents pinched and saved for my brother’s steamship ticket, and when he was settled in Philadelphia and finally making some money, he paid for mine. My mother cried when the ticket arrived in the mail. She knew she couldn’t follow me, knew, in fact, that she might never see me again.”
Stuart didn’t say anything but he didn’t need to. Joseph knew he was listening.
“In my first years in America—in Philadelphia and then Atlantic City—I used to wonder at my parents’ decision. Had they been right to send my brother and then me? Would it have been better to use the ticket for my father, who might have immediately made a better income? If he had done well enough, he could have sent for the whole family.” Joseph plucked at a blade of grass. “But then I became a parent, and I had my answer. You give your children every possible chance.