Florence Adler Swims Forever(89)
“Neither of us likes the idea of this apartment sitting empty,” she said.
Joseph neither scoffed nor pleaded. All he said, when he finally managed to look at her, was her name.
* * *
“Esther,” said Anna, from the other side of the cracked bedroom door. “Are you in here?”
Esther dabbed at her eyes, and Joseph straightened his collar. “You’re back?” she said as Anna pushed open the door.
“I’m sorry if I’m interrupting.” Anna looked from Esther to Joseph to the tangle of clothes on top of the bedspread.
“We’re just going through some of Florence’s things,” Esther explained. The bottom drawer of Anna’s dresser was still open, and Esther worried Anna would see she had rifled through her paperwork. “Where’s Gussie?”
“In her room.”
“And how was the pageant?”
“Good.” Anna glanced at the open drawer and then at Joseph, who looked lost in thought. “I need to tell you both something.”
Joseph looked up from the stockings he held in his hands.
“At the awards ceremony, after the swim, they held a moment of silence in Florence’s memory.”
Esther blinked, twice, trying to comprehend what Anna had just said. “A moment of silence?”
Anna nodded.
“Did you hear that, Joseph?” Esther asked her husband, but he didn’t respond, just began to run his thumb and forefinger along his eyebrows, which were knitted with worry. Now wasn’t the time to push him on Anna or on Inez and Paul’s immigration papers or on who would go where at the end of the season. “Joseph,” she repeated, “what do we do?”
Fannie
Fannie sat bolt upright in bed. She held her stomach with one hand, grabbed hold of the mattress with the other.
“Nurse!” she yelled into the dark of her hospital room. “Nurse!”
This feeling was nothing like the small pinches of pain she’d felt periodically over the last several weeks. “If you shift your weight and the contraction goes away,” Dr. Rosenthal had told her recently, “it’s a Braxton-Hicks—nothing to worry about.”
“Isn’t it typical that a woman’s health condition should be named for a man?” she had said through gritted teeth as she shifted onto her other side.
Now the pain was so consuming she could scarcely recall her own name, much less anyone else’s. It was as if an iron anvil had been placed on top of her pelvis. All she could do was try to breathe.
Fannie didn’t remember much about her previous labors. Gussie had been born such a long time ago now, and Fannie had been so young then, and also so naive. She had assumed her body would do what it was supposed to do when it was supposed to do it, and it had. Then Hyram had come early enough that there had been no false labor, only the real thing, with all the ensuing pain and heartache.
The cramping eased, and Fannie relaxed her grip on the mattress. She thought to check the time but couldn’t see the clock.
From the nurses’ lounge, she could hear the hum of a radio. “Nurse!” she tried again, louder this time.
By the time Dorothy appeared in her doorway, Fannie had been seized by another contraction. The pain shot from her back through to her abdomen. “I think it’s begun,” she tried to say, but had difficulty getting the whole sentence out.
“Looks that way. How regular are they coming?”
“I don’t know. I’ve only had a few.”
Dorothy put her head back out into the hall. “Hey, Helen! Call Dr. Rosenthal, will you? Fannie looks ready to go.”
For a brief moment, Helen’s face appeared beyond Dorothy’s. Then it disappeared. “Would you please have her call my husband, too?” Fannie asked, between deep breaths.
“You hear that?” Dorothy said, over her shoulder. She turned back to Fannie. “While we wait on Dr. Rosenthal, let’s see if we can try to get you comfortable.”
Dorothy rearranged Fannie’s pillows and urged her to relax against them. Of course, Fannie couldn’t relax but she could and did take notice of Dorothy’s conduct. In this particular set of circumstances, the nurse came off as extremely competent.
“My guess,” said Dorothy, “is we’ll move you to the labor room soon.”
With Hyram, Fannie had been put on such a heavy dose of morphine she could barely recall the labor room at all. She had drifted in and out of consciousness, numb not only to her contractions but to the moments between each contraction, too.
The delivery room was harder to forget. The bright white light, the long white leggings that, once on, acted like straps, securing Fannie to the table. She had felt like a chained animal, had been sure she would die with her hands and feet in the stirrups and an ether mask clamped onto her face. The idea of being back in that same room, alone, trapped in a twilight sleep from which she couldn’t wake, made her feel dizzy with fear.
Within a few minutes, Helen returned with word that Dr. Rosenthal was on his way. “I couldn’t reach your husband,” she said, “but I called your parents.”
“Is my mother coming?”
“It sounds like it.”
Fannie felt a wild urge to send word to her sister in France but reminded herself it would be best to wait until she was holding a healthy baby in her arms. While she waited for the doctor, she composed the telegram in her head. BABY ARRIVED TODAY STOP NO COMPLI CATIONS STOP WISH YOU WERE HERE STOP. Was the “wish you were here” part too much? It was true.