“When she dove into that water, Florence screamed for me to save her,” Joseph said, chuckling at the memory. “She must have swum a half-dozen yards before I could convince Florence she wasn’t in need of saving.”
“I went with my father, too,” said Stuart, and for a moment he looked very far away.
“Florence had seen the seventy-ton whale at Steel Pier, but there was something special about seeing a child her own size whip in and out of the water like a trout.”
Stuart made a noise, something between a laugh and a long sigh.
“She could teach herself to do anything,” said Joseph.
Florence liked to tell people that her father had taught her to swim. It made for a good story since Joseph didn’t actually know how to swim himself. All he had really done was introduce her to the water, same as he’d done for Fannie.
He’d chosen a calm summer day and waited until the tide was low before telling Florence to get into her bathing costume. Then he’d led her down Metropolitan Avenue, across the Boardwalk, and past the bathing houses and chairs-for-rent to Heinz Pier. Over his shoulder, he carried a long cord of rope; he tied one end to a thick, wooden joist—far from the pier’s pilings—and dropped the other over the side, watching it unravel in midair.
After they had retraced their steps and returned to the beach, Joseph waded through waist-deep water to retrieve the loose end of the rope, which he pulled to shore and carefully tied around Florence’s small waist. He gave his homemade lifesaving contraption several hard tugs before pronouncing it sound.
“In the water, your arms and legs, they must always move,” Joseph offered, his only instruction.
That afternoon Florence had learned to swim—nothing that resembled a real stroke but enough to keep her head above the water.
“The only thing Florence needed to know,” Joseph said to Stuart, “was that I believed she could swim.”
“You gave her a gift,” Stuart said, meeting Joseph’s eyes for the first time during his visit.
“Did I?”
Stuart frowned.
“I propose we make a deal,” said Joseph. “From you, there will be no more talk of—”
A light knock on the office door interrupted Joseph’s negotiations.
Mrs. Simons opened the door a crack. “I have Miss Epstein here to see you.”
“Anna?” both men asked at the same time.
Isaac
When Isaac leaned back far enough in his desk chair, he could see Joseph’s office door, which had been shut all week. He always kept one eye on the door since it benefited him to know his father-in-law’s comings and goings, but this week, he had paid more attention to it than usual.
If Esther’s instructions had been for both Joseph and Isaac to return to work and act as if everything were normal, Joseph was failing miserably at that task. Nothing about his shuttered blinds or that silly handwritten sign he’d posted on his office door looked normal. And on Thursday afternoon, when Mrs. Simons was summoned into Joseph’s office and returned to her desk visibly shaken, Isaac was sure Joseph had told her the truth about Florence. The brittle woman—usually so stoic—dabbed at her eyes for several minutes before hurrying to the powder room, where Isaac could hear her sobs even over the exhaust fan.
On Friday morning there had been a revolving door of visitors to see Joseph. First Florence’s friend Stuart, and then Anna. Stuart’s visit made a certain amount of sense—the scrub had clearly been besotted by Florence. And everyone knew he was on the outs with his own father, so it wasn’t a complete surprise to see him latching on to Joseph. But Anna’s visit was less easily explained, and as a result, Isaac spent the better part of Friday wondering about it. To Isaac’s knowledge, she hadn’t come to the plant once in the more than three months she’d been staying with the Adlers. Today, she had remained inside Joseph’s office for a quarter of an hour, maybe a little longer, and when she left, she had looked relieved. Since Isaac’s office faced the street, he waited the thirty seconds he knew it would take Anna to make her way down the two flights of stairs and emerge from the building, then he stood up for a stretch and walked over to the window.
Interestingly, Stuart had waited for her. He sat out on the steps of the plant, hat in hand, face stretched toward the sun. When Anna pushed open the building’s heavy front door, Stuart jumped to his feet. Though he had tried, Isaac wasn’t able to make out what Stuart said to her, but he had watched the two of them walk off down Tennessee Avenue, before returning to his desk.
Anna was a hard one to figure out, partially because her accent was thick and partially because she had materialized out of thin air. The story was that Anna’s mother, Inez, had grown up alongside Joseph but Isaac was sure there had to be more to it than that. It was one thing for Joseph to write an affidavit for Anna—everyone knew the affidavits were as meaningless as the pieces of paper they were written on. But putting her up in his spare room was something else altogether. Isaac didn’t think it was the type of thing he’d do for just anybody.
There was little debate that things in Germany were getting bad. Since coming to power the year before, the Nazi Party had already removed Jews from the civil service, curtailed the rights of Jewish doctors, lawyers, and other professionals, forbidden performances by Jewish actors, and restricted the number of Jewish students allowed to attend German schools and universities. Joseph followed it all very closely and reported on the most notable offenses to Isaac as he came and went from their third-floor offices. In lieu of a greeting, Joseph would offer him a headline straight from the morning’s paper, “They’ve revoked the licenses
