Florence Adler Swims Forever(99)

“I want to talk to you about something,” he finally said, then thought to add, “It’s important.”

Stuart watched his father shift in his chair.

“I was thinking I might hang up my whistle at the end of this summer. Start learning the business.”

Stuart’s father put down his pen and blinked at him, hard, as if he were trying to process what he’d just heard. “This business?”

“Yes, the hotel business. The Covington.” Stuart couldn’t believe he was saying it. Long ago, he had convinced himself that going to work for his father would feel a little like dying. “I realize I have a lot to learn.”

“Are you in some kind of trouble?”

“None,” said Stuart.

His father leaned back in his chair, appraising his son. “Then why?”

“Well, the business has been in our family for—”

“No, I mean, ‘Why now?’?”

This was a question Stuart had counted on. Did he dare admit that he loved Anna? That if his father brought him on, there was some chance he’d be bringing Anna on, too? Stuart cleared his throat, working hard to get the next part out. “There are things I want, that I need.”

His father remained quiet, patted the desk once and then twice, then stood and walked over to one of the office’s floor-to-ceiling windows, which overlooked the Boardwalk and the ocean beyond. A pair of heavy drapes obscured the view, and he pushed them out of the way to get a better look at something. “This isn’t a bad life,” he said.

“It’s not that I thought it was,” said Stuart. “It’s just—” He hesitated.

“Just what?”

“That it didn’t feel like mine.”

“Do you think it ever will?”

“I hope so.”

His father’s attention was elsewhere. Stuart got out of his chair and went to join him by the window. Outside, a kite bobbed in the air. The string of the kite led across the Boardwalk to the beach, where a small boy and his father yanked and pulled at the spool.

“There’s something else,” Stuart said, a few minutes later, when they’d both watched the kite plummet into the sand.

Stuart’s father turned his head to look at him.

“I need some money.”

“Is she in trouble?” his father asked.

“Who?”

“The Jewish girl. In the pool.”

Stuart marveled at his father’s disregard for basic social conventions. “Her name’s Anna. And we haven’t—” He stopped himself. What business was it of his father’s?

“How much?” his father said, with a slow shake of his head.

“Five thousand,” Stuart said, trying hard not to wince as he said the number aloud. His great-grandfather had spent less building the original hotel.

“Thousand?”

“I know it’s a lot.”

“Christ, son. What’s the money for, if not for Anna?”

“I can’t say.” The three little words were like a dagger, and he could tell he’d wounded his father with them.

“What are you mixed up in, Stu?”

“Nothing.”

He raised an eyebrow at him.

“Nothing illegal.”

“So, this is the only way I get you into the hotel business? Attached to a five-thousand-dollar string?”

Stuart wanted to tell him that he’d come work for him regardless, that he wasn’t the sort to hold his loyalty over anyone’s head, let alone his father’s. But he kept quiet. Maybe he was the sort.

His father let the drapes fall closed, and the kite vanished from view. “The hours are nine to five. Monday through Saturday. There are nights, too.”

Stuart nodded his head in affecting agreement.

“I’ll start you at the front desk. Rotate you through the restaurant and the bar. Maybe even have you do a stint in housekeeping. By the time you move up here, I want you to know every job in this place.”

Stuart could tell his father had spent considerable time thinking about this, imagining what the proper instatement of his son might look like.

“This is really what you want?” his father asked him.

Stuart thought about it for a moment. Could he let go of the coaching? Easily. Florence’s death had left him feeling less sure of himself, less willing to push the young women in the Ambassador Club to swim harder and farther than they’d ever swum before. If Florence could drown, anyone could.

It was the lifeguarding that would be harder to give up. From Stuart’s stand, these last six summers, he had watched the whole world unfold. The wind traced ripples across the sand, sandpipers darted to and fro, and seagulls circled overhead in search of their next meal. Children laughed and fought and cried and fell asleep, sunburned and exhausted, in the crooks of their mothers’ arms; young men used bad lines to romance girls who wouldn’t remember their names come fall; and elderly couples marked the passage of time with the steady push and pull of the tide. Stuart was privy to it all, and when he pulled someone from the water and returned them to the world, he felt like a god. But then he thought of Anna, floating beside him in The Covington’s pool. If she said yes, retiring from the ACBP wouldn’t feel like a sacrifice, not really.