Fannie acknowledged he had.
“Good,” said McLoughlin, closing the chart with a snap. Last summer, Fannie had assumed that somewhere in that chart, thick with notes, were answers. Why had she delivered so early? Was it her fault, Isaac’s, God’s? For a while, she had asked McLoughlin and Dr. Rosenthal every chance she got, but they never gave her any answers that satisfied her. Eventually, she’d stopped asking.
Isaac wasn’t in favor of asking so many questions, then or now. She mouthed the word radio to him again, and he shrugged his shoulders, leaving her with no choice but to make her own inquiry. “We were just wondering, are the rooms equipped with radios?”
McLoughlin looked at Isaac. If Fannie didn’t know better, she’d have said the superintendent scowled at him. “Not every room.”
“Oh?” said Fannie.
“It’s an extra charge.”
“How much?” she asked.
“More than your father wanted to pay.”
After McLoughlin left, Isaac and Fannie had very little to say to each other. Isaac sat on the edge of his chair, as if he might flee at any moment, and absentmindedly spun his hat around and around his forefinger. He had such long, elegant fingers.
Finally, Fannie couldn’t take it anymore. “You’ll ruin the brim,” she said, and he stopped.
“Did you see Gussie yesterday?” she asked, trying to find a conversation that might suit them both.
“Hmm?”
“Gussie? Mother says she’s doing well.”
“Oh yes,” he said hesitantly, “I… I did see her.”
“I’m missing her something terrible,” she said. “I guess I wasn’t expecting it to be this bad. I mean, I was only in the hospital a week, maybe ten days, last summer.”
“Mmmm.”
Were all men such poor conversationalists when thrust into situations that made them uncomfortable? Or was it just her husband? “She seems all right? Happy?” Fannie asked.
At the word happy, Isaac looked up. His forehead wrinkled.
“Happy?” he asked, as if he hadn’t understood the question.
“Happy.”
“Yes, yes. Of course, she seems happy.”
After several more conversations ended in this manner, Fannie set Isaac free. “You should get to work. Before McLoughlin has you forcibly removed for breaking hospital protocol.”
She had been trying to be funny but Isaac didn’t laugh. He was already on his feet, his hat on his head.
Isaac stooped to kiss her cheek, but she grabbed him by the tie and steered his lips toward hers. She needed to feel like the old Fannie for just a minute—the Fannie who had seen something remarkable in the way he looked at her. Isaac responded to the kiss, and for several long moments, they were back in their old hiding space, under the Boardwalk, at Sovereign Avenue. There was no Gussie, no loan, no Hyram. Their biggest worry was only whether Esther and Joseph would allow their eldest daughter to marry a man of no means.
When Fannie pulled away, Isaac’s cheeks looked slightly flushed, and the makings of a smile had crept across his face. He touched her chin and kissed the tip of her nose before turning toward the door.
“Isaac,” she called when he had nearly crossed the room’s threshold. “I almost forgot.”
She reached for the envelope, still without a stamp, on her bedside table and held it out to him.
“Will you be a dear and deliver this to Florence?”
Joseph
By the time Joseph arrived at Wischafter’s Beach Concessions, on the morning after his daughter’s burial, a beachboy of fourteen or fifteen years old was already unstacking chairs and unfurling oversized umbrellas.
“How much to rent a chair for the whole week?” asked Joseph, trying very hard to focus on the young boy’s face and not the vast ocean behind him.
“Eight dollars,” said the boy.
Joseph winced. He could buy one for less.
“There’s also a three-dollar deposit.”
Joseph reached for his wallet and began to count out the bills. He could never tell Esther he’d spent this much on something so frivolous. The boy removed a small pencil and a receipt book from his pocket.
“Name?” he asked.
“Joseph Adler.”
The boy made idle chatter as he took down the rest of Joseph’s information and signed the receipt.
“Hear about the drowning on Sunday?”
Joseph closed his eyes and saw his wife retching onto the floorboards of the hospital tent, after the beach surgeon had declared Florence dead.
“First one of the season,” the boy continued.
Joseph forced himself to ask, “Are they saying who it was?”
“Some girl.” The boy handed Joseph his receipt. “Bring this back at the end of the week—so you can get your deposit back.”
Joseph could barely nod an acknowledgment. Some girl.
“That’s yours,” the boy said, pointing to a wooden chair with a blue-and-white-striped canvas seat. A small “63” was stenciled on the frame with blue paint.
Joseph walked over to the chair, folded it, and tucked it neatly under his arm. With his free hand he touched his hat and started off in the direction of States Avenue. He hadn’t gone more than two dozen paces, had barely made it off the sand, when the boy jogged up behind him.
“Sir, you can’t take the chair off the beach. It’s yours for the week but it stays in the sand.”
Joseph put the beach chair down and reached for his wallet a second time. “I’ll tell you what,” he said. “Here’s three more dollars. Let me take the chair, and when I return it, the deposit’s yours to keep, too.”
The bakery’s administrative offices were on the third floor of the plant, well out of the way of the mixers, kneading machines, and dough dividers that cluttered the second floor and the ovens, cooling racks, bread-slicing machines, and bread-wrapping stations that filled the first.
When Joseph had designed the building six years ago, he had spent a great deal of time thinking about the best way to make a loaf of bread. So much of bread making had become mechanized—it was the only way to make any real money at it—that he had felt it necessary to reexamine every part of the process. He considered the ingredients he used—hundred-pound bags of flour, water, yeast, salt, the
