“It’s a diversion, plain and simple,” said Jim. “Palm Beach is years away from getting electricity and water all the way out here. A tennis court says we’re building infrastructure, that we’re here to stay.”
“Are we?” Isaac asked.
“Sure, why not?”
Had Isaac known how quickly everything would end, he might have done things differently. He liked to think he would have spent less and saved more.
Jim, Isaac, and the rest of Blackwell’s binder boys earned their commission when the binder checks cleared the bank, but even on a week when nothing cleared, it hardly mattered. Showing their binder receipts was enough to get them served in any of Palm Beach’s restaurants and clubs. They’d flash their receipts at Bradley’s Beach Club or John G’s and drink until they couldn’t remember their way home, only to have to return the following week to deliver half their earnings to the house manager. Isaac didn’t mind. For the first time in his life, he had more money than he knew what to do with. The more he spent, the farther away his father’s farm began to feel.
At the height of the boom, Blackwell was moving Isaac and Jim to a new subdivision every few days. He didn’t even take the time to put in a fancy sign or a tennis court anymore. The people Isaac was selling binders to would have paid for swamp, so desperate were they to get in on a good thing. The prices were going up and up and up, and for a while, it seemed that the price of the property had no bearing on people’s ability, or willingness, to pay. Somehow, somewhere, they always found the money.
Even Isaac, who knew that higher prices meant bigger commissions, wondered how high the market could really go. In early 1925, Forbes published a special report, warning that the price of real estate in Florida was based solely upon the expectation of finding a customer. In the months that followed, Isaac had to work to calm skittish buyers, and by that summer, he was losing more customers—people who still wanted a binder but couldn’t afford the steep investment.
Construction costs skyrocketed, thanks to gridlock on the rails and a shortage of building supplies, and by the spring of 1926, the state’s real estate market was in shambles. Blackwell’s business was going belly-up, and he had little choice but to get rid of his binder boys.
Jim was determined to wait out the crisis in Florida, to see what other opportunities might arise, but Isaac had begun to wonder if it might be time to try his luck somewhere new. When Blackwell, who was enterprising to the end, scored Isaac a free seat on a Philadelphia-bound train, he took it. Isaac dreaded telling Jim, but his friend only laughed when he heard the news.
“You know Blackwell struck a deal with Applegate Funeral Home?”
Plenty of people liked to retire to Florida, Jim explained, but no one wanted to be buried in the swamp. Blackwell had guessed, correctly, that Marcus Applegate was buying round-trip tickets for his staff, every time they needed to accompany a casket north.
“Blackwell offered up his binder boys. Applegate only has to buy a one-way ticket, guys like you go back where you came from, and everyone’s happy.”
Isaac couldn’t say he was happy but he raised his glass anyway, “To going back where we came from.”
“But never forgetting the swamp.”
After the casket was delivered, Isaac could have gone home. In fact, he did for a few days. But if Alliance had felt stifling before, it felt suffocating after five years in West Palm Beach. In the years Isaac had been gone, his mother had died and his father had grown slower, quieter, less sure of himself. The house had begun its gradual decline and so had his relationship with the man who could no more understand Isaac’s meteoric success than the rapid waning of his fortunes.
Isaac was twenty-six and so poor that he walked the forty miles from Alliance to Atlantic City. It took him twelve hours. He would have walked to the ends of the earth to get away from that farm and the disappointed look on his father’s face but, as it happened, he only needed to walk as far as Adler’s Bakery.
Isaac sat out on the porch and watched his father and daughter’s slow approach. Gussie ran ahead to open the gate, then held it open until Isaac’s father entered the yard.
“Will you get your grandpa a drink of water?” Isaac’s father asked her when they neared the porch, and she ran off, into the house, the screened door slapping at her heels.
“Gussie told me about Florence,” he said, in Yiddish.
The use of Florence’s name, so far from his in-laws’ apartment, gave Isaac an odd jolt. Alliance and Atlantic City felt worlds away from each other.
“It came as a shock,” said Isaac.
“Terrible.”
“She was a good swimmer. A great swimmer, really.”
“I remember. What do they think happened?”
“No one knows. Maybe a cramp. Or a rip current.”
“And Gussie saw the whole thing?”
“Unfortunately, yes.”
“Poor—” Isaac’s father said, but stopped short when Gussie returned to the porch, walking ever so slowly so as not to spill the water, which she’d filled to the brim of a tall glass.
“Could I have a glass of water as well?” Isaac asked her. She sighed dramatically, as if she were always being put out with such requests, but then ran back inside the house.
“How is Fannie taking it?”
“We’re not telling her,” said Isaac, watching his father for some indication of his opinion on the matter. Surely other normal people thought Esther’s plan preposterous?
Isaac’s father gave nothing away, just asked, “Is the pregnancy so risky?”
“I’ve wondered the same thing. I don’t know. Her blood pressure is a little high, and we don’t know what happened”—Isaac paused—“last time.”
In between the dozen Feldman children who had lived, there had been several others who had not. It had never occurred to Isaac to ask his parents about those children until
