Anna stopped turning the book’s pages and looked at him, expectantly. He nodded his head at the notebook, urging her onward, then kept talking.
“Your mother had a bicycle and we used to ride it along the river. I pedaled, and she steered, and what I remember most of all is that her hair was always in my eyes and mouth.”
“How old were you?”
He smiled to himself. “Maybe nine or ten years old. Just children.”
Anna kept turning the pages of the notebook but her pace had slowed. “Did you ever think about staying?” she asked.
“I did.” It was all he had thought about the autumn they were seventeen, after the steamship ticket had arrived in the mail from his brother. Inez had stared at the ticket when he’d presented it to her, as if she could will it away just by looking at it hard enough. “Marry me, then,” she had said when she knew there was no keeping him in Lackenbach. “Take me with you.”
Anna wanted a story, but Joseph wasn’t sure she wanted this one. The hurried marriage proposal, the promise that he would send for Inez when he had saved enough money, the letters back and forth across the Atlantic, which came to a sudden halt when he met Esther—none of it made him look very good.
“How much has your mother told you?” he asked Anna.
“Not much,” she said, looking up from the notebook once more. “Just that you were engaged and that it didn’t work out.”
Inez was a good woman, too decent to color her daughter’s opinion of him with the truth.
“Anna,” he said as she returned her attention to the task at hand, “I don’t want you to worry about your mother. Your parents. If the affidavit doesn’t work, there are other things we can try.”
A tear slipped down Anna’s cheek, and she wiped it away with the heel of her hand. “You don’t think the consul will accept it?”
Securing a student visa for Anna had been one thing; securing visas for her parents was turning out to be quite another. Since Joseph wasn’t a relative, he had to prove that Inez and Paul would not become public charges upon their arrival in the U.S.—that they could support themselves indefinitely, all without taking a job away from a deserving American. An impossible feat, considering the fact that their assets were frozen.
Joseph wondered how honest he should be with Anna. “I suspect we’ll need more than my affidavit alone. But who can say?”
“You’re kind to be considering this now, after—everything.”
He had been willing to help Inez and Paul before Florence’s death, so it seemed antithetical to turn his back on them now. He told himself that Florence would have wanted it this way but that wasn’t all of it. Joseph appreciated staying busy and knew he got some relief from focusing on anything as straightforward as a visa application, for all its perils and pitfalls. If he followed the right practices and procedures, paid the proper fees, it might at least be possible to conjure Anna’s parents out of thin air. The same could never be said for Florence. “It’s nothing,” he said as he watched Anna come to the last page.
“The address isn’t here,” she said as she closed the notebook. “Stuart will have it. Or be able to get it for you.”
He reached for the little book, and she gave it to him with two hands, as if it were something fragile and dear.
Stuart was sitting in the beach chair, quite awkwardly, when Joseph arrived at the office on Friday morning. As Joseph entered the room, the boy stood, too fast, and the chair folded in on itself. The frame banged loudly against the floor, and Joseph flinched.
“Your secretary said you wanted to see me.”
Joseph didn’t say a word, just walked across the room to his desk, picked up the heavy oak swivel chair behind it, and carried it over to the fireplace.
“Sit here,” Joseph said. “You’ll be more comfortable.”
Stuart started to argue, but Joseph held up his hand, refusing to hear a word, “You’re doing an old man a favor, Stuart.”
Beneath Stuart’s healthy tan, he looked tired and gaunt. There were dark circles under his blue eyes, and Joseph wondered how much he’d slept in the five days that had elapsed since Florence’s death.
“How’s Fannie?” Stuart asked.
“You know, I’d like to tell you. But, you see, I’m not a very good father. I don’t visit.”
“The hospital?”
Joseph shook his head as he righted the beach chair. “I haven’t been inside one since the war.”
“I don’t think that makes you a bad father.”
Joseph frowned. “I could do better.”
“Were you a medic? During the war?”
“An ambulance driver.”
“You and Hemingway?”
“I suppose,” said Joseph. “Except I was driving for the U.S. Army. And I’m not sure I made it look quite so glamorous.”
He had to get to it, ask Stuart for what he needed, or he’d be telling war stories all morning. “Look, Stuart, I need some help tracking down Bill Burgess. To cancel the swim.”
Stuart looked surprised, as if he had temporarily forgotten that Florence couldn’t be both dead and a champion swimmer at the same time. He nodded slowly.
“I don’t know where he lives, or if I can get the deposit back,” Joseph said. “Florence handled it all.”
“I have an address for him in Calais.”
“Would you mind writing him? I’m not sure I feel up to it.”
Stuart shook his head vigorously, the way people do, during a crisis, when they’re grateful to have been given a task, no matter how small.
“I’ll send a telegram. I can send one to the hotel, too. Just in case he’s already left for Cape Gris-Nez.”
“Thank you. Let me give you some money to cover the cost,” said Joseph, reaching for his billfold, but it was Stuart’s turn to hold up his hand.
“Please, no. This
