“You said Jim thinks you can get them down to thirty dollars an acre?”
Isaac went mute as he watched his father pry the lid off the can and count out a small wad of bills.
“This should be enough for about ten acres?” he said, handing Isaac three hundred dollars. There was very little money left in the can.
Isaac had talked a good game the previous evening but now he wondered whether he’d pushed too far. If he took this money, combined it with his own, and bought the binder, he’d be on the hook for finding the rest of the money, for getting investors on board, for closing the deal.
It was a lot of pressure. But wasn’t this what Isaac wanted? Not just the chance to make something of himself but the chance to show his father what he was capable of?
“You’re sure about this?” Isaac asked.
Before his father could answer, Gussie came barreling out of the house and into her grandfather’s arms.
“Come back to Atlantic City with us! Please!”
Isaac’s father rubbed the top of her head and chuckled. “No cities for me, Augusta. But tell your father to bring you back soon.”
“You can sleep in my room,” said Gussie.
“Time to go, Gus,” said Isaac as he held the car door open for her.
Isaac shook his father’s hand and gave him a firm pat on the back. He couldn’t bear to look him in the face, to catch his father studying him in the early morning light. “I’ll let you know when the purchase has gone through,” he told the patch of earth between them.
“Give my best to Fannie. And tell her parents I’m sorry.”
Isaac nodded, got into the car, and started the ignition. He gave his father a small wave as he released the clutch and pulled out of the yard.
“Feel better!” Gussie shouted into the dust as the car sped down the farm’s dirt drive.
As Isaac wound his way through Alliance and back toward Vineland, he could think of nothing but the money in his pocket. Between what Isaac had saved and what his father had just given him, he had enough for a binder. He’d call Jim first thing Monday and ask him to send the paperwork. Once Isaac signed, he’d have thirty days—maybe sixty—to get together the rest of the money to close the deal. Selling a few folks on an investment opportunity this good wouldn’t be as easy as it had been in ’25 but it wouldn’t be hard either.
“Hey, Gus,” Isaac said as they passed the synagogue and then the cemetery. “Grandpa said you told him about Florence.”
“Sorry,” she whispered from the seat next to him.
“It’s okay. He’s allowed to know.”
“I thought he might be sad.”
“Like you’re sad?”
Out of the corner of his eye, Isaac could see her bob her head.
“I’m sad, too,” he said.
“Mama will be the most sad,” Gussie offered.
“That’s true.”
Isaac watched the road peel away in front of him for several minutes.
“Has your grandmother talked to you about how we’re not going to tell Mother about Florence for a little while?”
His daughter nodded again. “Because of the baby.”
“Right,” said Isaac. “When you see her, it’s going to be hard not to say anything.”
Gussie was quiet for a few minutes.
“Why can’t the baby know?”
Stuart
Florence had been dead a week, but Stuart continued to take the rescue boat out each morning at six o’clock, as if nothing had changed.
He had begun taking Florence out in the boat early the previous summer, when she had returned from Wellesley obsessed with the idea of swimming the English Channel. Since Ederle’s swim in 1926, two other women had successfully made the crossing—one just three weeks after Ederle made headlines and another the following year. In the seven years that had elapsed since, no one else—woman or man—had made it across. Why not me? Florence had written to Stuart from school.
In her letters, Florence admitted to spending late nights at the library, reading through old newspapers, looking for clues as to how to best train for a Channel swim. She had so many questions, and her coach, who did all her swimming in the pool, could only answer some of them. Florence wanted to know how Ederle and the others had managed to stay warm, what they’d eaten, how they’d appropriately gauged the weather, and how they’d kept the salt water, which was a major irritant, from their eyes. Her list of questions had grown so long, she told Stuart, that she kept them in a small notebook, which she had bought expressly for that purpose.
When it came to open-water swimming, Stuart was Florence’s best resource, and she wrote to him with increasing frequency as the winter months passed and her notebook grew fat with scribbling. Stuart didn’t know the Channel but he knew the ocean—both what it could give a swimmer who was paying attention and what it could take away. As important, he knew Florence. He knew what each muscle in her body was capable of, where she had exposed weaknesses, where her confidence might be a gift and where it might get her into trouble. In one of her early letters, Florence had told Stuart that she wanted to attempt her crossing the following August, before she returned to Wellesley for her sophomore year, but Stuart persuaded her to give it one more year. The English Channel, he had written to her, will still be there in 1934.
Stuart suggested Florence spend the summer of 1933 training to swim the perimeter of Absecon Island. It was a twenty-two-mile swim, roughly the same distance as the swim from Cape Gris-Nez to Dover, albeit under much more pleasant conditions. The Channel’s waters were rarely warmer than sixty degrees, and the air was just as cold. In the Straits of Dover, weather could change abruptly, so even if a swimmer left France under sunny skies, it was likely she’d encounter drenching rain, thick
