Joseph studied Stuart, who studied his own fingernails, bitten to the quick. “It’s not your fault, you know?”
Stuart didn’t say a thing, just nodded his head like a marionette.
Joseph tried to put himself in Stuart’s place. What if he had lost Esther that first summer, when she was as much ephemera as she was an actual woman standing in front of him?
When Esther had checked into Chorney’s, accompanied by her parents, in the summer of 1904, Joseph’s command of the English language had been so poor that he had been afraid to talk to her. In lieu of words, he had offered her the best seat in the dining room, bestowed extra hard-boiled eggs on her at breakfast, and delivered her an unsolicited slice of Boston cream pie at dinner. Her parents had raised their eyebrows at his antics but had otherwise disregarded him, so sure were they that their nineteen-year-old daughter would not return the attentions of an Eastern European Jew so recently arrived from the old country. When he cleared their table one evening, and discovered the note Esther had left for him under her discarded napkin, he had thought his heart might stop beating in his chest.
My parents are going to the theater after dinner. If you can get away, would you care to go for a walk? I’ll be in the lobby at half-past eight.
Esther
Joseph had never bused the dining room so quickly. At half-past eight, when the room was still not empty and the last of the dishes were still not clean, he traded an extra shift with another busboy for the chance to slip out early. Joseph stuffed his apron in an umbrella stand and rushed to the lobby, where he found Esther sitting on a small settee. She sat up straight and didn’t appear to have been watching for him, which gave the impression, at least to Joseph, that she had been confident he would come.
Joseph offered Esther his arm, and they made their way out of the hotel and down Virginia Avenue to the Boardwalk, which was crowded with rolling carts full of mostly happy couples and a few dour ones. Without discussing it, they walked south, in the opposite direction of Nixon’s Theater and Esther’s parents. The piers buzzed with activity, and revelers streamed in and out of the grand lobbies of the big oceanfront hotels. Lights were strung from one side of the Boardwalk to the other, and the effect was dazzling—like a blanket of stars had been hung for their benefit. At the Chelsea Hotel the crowds began to thin, and they stopped to admire the city’s bright lights, spread out behind them. “Don’t you just love Atlantic City?” Esther said.
“Yes,” said Joseph, watching her watch the skyline. In that moment he did love Atlantic City more than any other place he’d ever known. It was a city where a Jewish boy from Galicia could find work and live cheap and save his money and even have a little fun. But most of all, it was a city that had delivered this beautiful girl to him.
At Morris Avenue, they turned around. Esther stopped to pick up a small but perfect seashell, which someone had plucked from the sand only to abandon on the Boardwalk, and when she did, she let go of Joseph’s arm. Eventually, she returned to him, seashell in hand, but then she did something unexpected. Instead of taking his arm, she moved her hand gently down his sleeve, over his shirt cuff, and into the warm center of his palm, where she laced her fingers between his.
“Is this all right?” she asked in a quiet tone, as if she were genuinely unsure what his answer might be.
In that moment, Joseph lost every English word he’d ever learned. All he could do was squeeze her hand in return. His face was close enough to hers that he wondered, briefly, what it might be like to kiss her but it was several more nights before he found out.
The kiss came on a moonlit night near Absecon Lighthouse, where the bright lights of the piers receded and the Boardwalk narrowed and veered toward the inlet. The beach was quiet and dark. Joseph was sure he had seen a humpback whale, its tail air-bound as it dove for krill, and he wanted Esther to see it, too.
Joseph moved closer to Esther, using her own hand to indicate the spot where the whale’s silhouette had disappeared from view. She studied the horizon solemnly, and he became conscious of the fact that he was holding his breath.
“You are not seeing?” he whispered into her ear.
“I am not looking,” she corrected him. The distinction was one of those subtleties of the English language that so often evaded Joseph in those early years in America. He understood it only later, after he had replayed the evening several dozen times in his head. Esther didn’t let go of his hand but she did turn toward him, her breath warm against his cheek. When he brushed his lips against hers, very softly at first, the kiss was a question.
It was another week before Esther returned to Philadelphia with her parents and another year before she worked up the nerve to tell them she was marrying Joseph. If Joseph had lost her at any point after that first night she took his hand, he would have been haunted by her always.
Joseph allowed himself to linger in the memory of their early days together, then looked at Stuart. No, he didn’t think he wanted to know the full extent of what Stuart and Florence had meant to each other, didn’t think knowing that his daughter had been loved would make her loss any easier to bear.
“Do you remember the summer the Women’s Swimming Association brought Charlotte Brown to Atlantic City?” Joseph asked.
Stuart’s face momentarily brightened. “Out at the inlet? Sure.”
“She was such a wee thing. Couldn’t have been more than a year or
