Joseph’s legs burned as he reached the top of the stairs and hurried toward his office. A few drivers were on the phones but Mrs. Simons was not at her desk, and for that, Joseph was exceptionally grateful. He propped the beach chair against his legs while he searched her desk for a sheet of stationery, which he found in the third drawer he tried. With a black pen, he wrote PLEASE DO NOT DISTURB in large block letters. Did that read too harshly? Perhaps it did. He added Important Business in cursive script underneath, hoping it softened the directive, and taped the crude sign to his door.
Once inside the office, Joseph closed the door behind him and locked it. Then he walked over to the window and rolled down the shade. He leaned the beach chair against the fireplace and went to his desk, where he rooted through his own drawers, looking for the stub of a candle. He used the matches in his pocket to warm the wax and secure the candle to the lid of an empty coffee can. Then he placed the makeshift candle holder on the mantel, lit the candle, and said a prayer. When he was sure that the flame would not go out, he unfolded the beach chair.
The Talmud described Job’s suffering as he mourned the loss of his children, Now they sat down with him to the ground for seven days and seven nights, but no one said a word to him because they perceived that the pain was very severe. Job and his progeny had been dead for more than two thousand years, but Shiva chairs were still intentionally slung low to allow mourners to sit as close to the ground as possible.
Joseph sat down heavily in his makeshift Shiva chair, buried his head in his hands, and wept.
There were good reasons to keep Florence’s death from Fannie, but by the third day of his self-imposed mourning ritual, Joseph had come to the conclusion that a small list of people did indeed need to be told about his younger daughter’s passing.
There was Clementine Dirkin, the swim coach at Wellesley. Joseph had never met her but Florence had always spoken fondly of her, and he assumed she could be counted on to tell the appropriate administrative staff and share the news with Florence’s teammates. He imagined the girls gathering together, when they arrived back on campus in September, to console one another and decide how best to memorialize their lost friend. Would they dedicate a race to her memory? Lay trinkets of one kind or another in front of her locker? Install a plaque in the natatorium? Joseph wanted to believe that his daughter’s death left a hole the girls would find impossible to fill.
Then there was the business of unwinding Florence’s Channel swim, which Joseph wasn’t entirely sure how to approach. Florence had made many of the arrangements herself, skirting Esther and going directly to Joseph to ask whether she might purchase a steamer ticket or book a month’s stay at the Hôtel du Phare in Cape Gris-Nez. Joseph had balked at the figures Florence had presented but she convinced him not to look at the swim and its underlying costs as an expense but rather an investment. If she made it across the Channel, she’d earn back his money in sponsorships and speaking fees, and Adler’s Bakery could boast that their rye bread had propelled the first Jewish woman across the English Channel. “I’ll write the jingle,” Florence had teased.
The most expensive part of Florence’s plan had been engaging the coach who would steer her across the Channel. There were two men, in particular, Bill Burgess and Jabez Wolffe, who had successfully swum the English Channel themselves and now made their living helping other men—and a few women—do the same. They knew the Channel’s tides and currents, could watch for the right weather and water conditions. It was the coach, Florence had explained to Joseph, who would make or break her swim. He would teach her how to navigate the currents, arrange for her meals, and engage the local pilot boat that would trail her the thirty miles to Dover. Most important, if she became overly fatigued or delirious, which could easily happen during the daylong swim, it was the coach who would make the decision to yank her from the water.
There had been a national uproar in 1925, when Wolffe had pulled Trudy Ederle out too soon. The rules were clear: if a swimmer was touched, for any reason, he or she was immediately disqualified. Ederle said she hadn’t been ready to quit when Wolffe reached for her, and she complained loudly, to any journalist with a pen in hand, that he had tapped her out without cause. When she returned to France the following summer, engaging Burgess and not Wolffe to be her coach, she had also brought her father with her and given him strict instructions to watch Burgess’s every move. Joseph thought the papers, at least, had made it look as if the father and daughter were a good team.
“If you want, you could come along,” Florence had said to Joseph as he wrote a check, payable to Bill
