“Isaac?”
“The bank is calling in their margin. I’ve got two weeks to pay them in full.”
It took several long seconds for Fannie to recover herself. She could scarcely imagine ever having twenty-five hundred dollars, let alone coming up with it in a fortnight.
“What will we do?” she finally asked.
Isaac didn’t need to tell her that the only good option was to go to her father for help and hope that he wasn’t in the same financial straits. Buying the Mediterranean Avenue property and building the plant had required capital, and she prayed her father’s money was in the bricks and mortar of Adler’s Bakery and not in the New York Stock Exchange. Fannie offered to talk to him but Isaac wouldn’t hear of it. The financial markets and their repercussions were not a woman’s concern.
It took Isaac several days to work up the courage to approach Joseph but, after he did, he felt relieved. Coming up with the cash Isaac needed wouldn’t be easy, Joseph said, but he could do it. They agreed to a loan, at no interest, payable over ten years.
“How did he seem?” Fannie had asked Isaac after he explained the terms.
“What do you mean? He seemed like he was going to loan us the money.”
“Was he surprised?” she asked, but what she really meant was disappointed.
After the banks fell, the tourists stayed home, and Fannie and Isaac watched as many of Atlantic City’s steadiest businesses shuttered their doors. It was as if, almost overnight, Isaac stopped dreaming. He no longer came home from the plant with half-conceived business plans or sketched-out storefronts on the back of old receipts. He stopped talking about the house they’d buy, and he grew quieter, indifferent. He was less likely to laugh at Fannie’s jokes, more likely to lose his temper with Gussie. Where he had once tried to please and even impress Fannie’s parents, he avoided them instead, bowing out of Shabbat dinners and Sunday afternoons at the beach. But the most significant change, for Fannie, was Isaac’s utter unwillingness to consider having a second child.
For two months after the crash, Isaac didn’t touch Fannie. When he eventually returned to her, on a cold night in January, she nearly wept with relief. The wind off the ocean rattled their bedroom windows and the radiators, recently bled, creaked under the weight of their heavy responsibility. Fannie could feel the familiar pressure building inside her, as if she, too, had a valve that just needed to be turned a few degrees. She whispered, “Keep going,” into Isaac’s ear, but no sooner were the words out of her mouth than he withdrew himself entirely, spilling a warm pool onto the pale of her stomach.
“Why did you do that?” Fannie had asked, although she thought she knew.
“These aren’t the circumstances in which I want to have another child.”
Tears sprang to her eyes, but they remained concealed in the dark.
“What are the circumstances?”
“I don’t know, Fannie,” he said, sighing. “Not this.”
Of all the men Fannie knew who had, in one way or another, been affected by the economic downturn, Isaac and his job at the plant seemed among the safest. In tight times, their friends and neighbors might give up new shoes and millinery but she couldn’t imagine them dispensing with bread. She supposed things could always get worse but, in all but the most dire circumstances, Fannie felt sure her father would be able to protect Isaac. He’d pink-slip any number of bench hands, oven men, and bread wrappers before he put his own son-in-law out of a job. Isaac might not be striking out on his own, but they were never going to be destitute.
It was three years before Isaac stopped withdrawing when he climaxed. The first time, Fannie assumed he had merely made a mistake. But it happened again two nights after that, and then again the following week. She didn’t say anything for fear he’d remember himself, but she began to feel hopeful, to look forward to those moments when she could sense her husband’s muscles tighten, his breathing skip. Like she had in their early days, she locked her legs around him and arched her back, allowing her body to be pulled into his until she felt him shudder. In the dark, as Fannie waited for her husband’s breathing to resume its normal patterns and to eventually lull her to sleep, she tried to convince herself that Isaac had turned a corner, that his acquiescence was actually an expression of certitude. But in her heart, she thought it more likely that Isaac had just given up.
“The only thing I can’t figure out about this room,” said Fannie to Isaac, “is where the radio is.”
Isaac looked around the room, absentmindedly. “What makes you think you’re meant to have one?”
“Some of the women down the hall have them. I can hear their programs at night.”
Isaac pinched the skin at the bridge of his nose, as if he couldn’t quite believe what he was hearing.
“Do you think I’m being selfish? Obviously, it’s a very nice—”
“Knock, knock,” came a voice from the hallway. Fannie sat up straighter when she saw it was Superintendent McLoughlin on her morning rounds.
“Oh, I see you have company,” said the superintendent. She looked at her wristwatch.
“Mr. Feldman, you’ll kindly recall that visiting hours begin at nine o’clock in the morning. It is only half-past seven.”
“Is it that early?” he said with a sardonic grin, but McLoughlin did not appear to be amused.
Fannie wondered if she should ask about the radio, hoped that Isaac might do it so she didn’t have to. McLoughlin intimidated her, had done ever since she’d met her last summer.
McLoughlin began to read through Fannie’s chart, and Fannie took the opportunity to mouth the word radio to Isaac. He acted like he didn’t understand what she was saying, and she rolled her eyes at him, exasperated.
“Your blood pressure looks good. It’s still slightly elevated but nothing for us to be too concerned about. Has
