Gussie led her into the kitchen, where the table was covered in old newspapers, cut to bits.
“What are you working on?”
“Nana says Mother likes the Dionne quintlets.”
“Quintuplets.”
“That’s what I said.” Anna had clearly irritated the girl. She raised her eyebrows at Gussie, who was rooting through the paper scraps, looking for something. Hopefully Anna’s letter hadn’t been cut to shreds, too.
“So, you’re cutting out pictures of the babies?”
“Yes, see?” Gussie held up a piece of blue construction paper onto which she’d glued a half-dozen versions of the same photo Anna had seen plastered on every periodical at every newsstand in Atlantic City. In it, the quintuplets’ doctor loomed over a bassinet, in which all five babies, each in her own bunting, were packed like sardines. It was hard to make out their faces.
It seemed a little tactless to present a pregnant woman at risk for miscarrying with a collage of baby pictures, but Anna had to assume Esther had sanctioned the activity.
“Where’s your grandmother?”
“In her bedroom, lying down.”
“Ah.”
“Here it is!” Gussie said, removing a folded piece of paper from underneath a three-day-old section of the Atlantic City Press.
Anna’s heart sank. The note wasn’t in the light blue aerogram envelope she’d become accustomed to looking for on the dresser in the Adlers’ entryway. In fact, the note wasn’t in an envelope at all.
“Have you read it?”
Gussie nodded earnestly and handed the note over. Before Anna could unfold the piece of paper, Gussie blurted out, “It’s from Stuart!” and scurried around the table to read the note, once more, over Anna’s shoulder.
Anna,
Now is as good a time as any to learn to swim. Your first lesson is tomorrow evening at six. Meet me at the Kentucky Avenue beach tent?
Stuart
“How did you get this?” Anna asked Gussie.
“He dropped it off.”
Anna sucked in her breath, wondering how Esther would feel about a would-be suitor of Florence’s dropping off notes for Anna.
“Did your grandmother see it?”
Gussie shook her head. “She was in her room.”
Anna thought for a minute. “Maybe we don’t tell her? In case it makes her sad.”
Gussie didn’t acknowledge Anna’s request. She just walked back around the table, picked up the pair of scissors, and began to cut out a baby in a Gerber’s advertisement. The baby was jolly and round, old enough to sit up and smile. Behind the child’s head read the words For Babies Only. Anna assumed Gussie knew that this baby wasn’t one of the Dionne babies, none of whom could have been easily confused with a bouncing six-month-old. Gussie put a careful dot of glue on the backside of the baby’s picture and pressed it onto her collage.
“So, you’re including other babies?” Anna asked, unable to help herself.
“Mother likes them,” said Gussie, defensively, as she began cutting away at the next clipping. Anna couldn’t be sure but, from across the table, the baby looked like Charles Lindbergh Jr. She stood and peered over Gussie’s work, trying to read the photo’s caption. After his transatlantic flight, Charles Lindbergh had become extremely popular across Europe. His son’s kidnapping had made headlines on both sides of the Atlantic, and Anna imagined that the German people had followed the case almost as closely as their American counterparts. After the child’s body was discovered, the coverage had slowed but, now that the trial was under way, the beautiful boy’s picture was back in all the papers.
“Gussie, don’t use that picture.”
“Why?”
“Because.”
“Because why?”
“Because”—Anna hesitated—“that baby is dead.”
Gussie put her scissors down. “Like Hyram?”
Anna nodded.
Gussie placed the clipping back down on the table and smoothed its edges. Was she hurt? Anna couldn’t tell.
“Do you have a bathing suit to wear?” Gussie asked, and Anna wondered if this was the child’s own small attempt to get back at her. She didn’t have a bathing suit. She’d worn a cotton dress to the beach on the day Florence had died, and Gussie knew it.
“I don’t,” Anna admitted, watching Gussie for a response.
“You could wear one of Florence’s.”
“I think that might be unkind.”
Gussie shrugged her shoulders. “She can’t wear them anymore.”
Anna waited until the apartment grew quiet, Gussie tucked into bed on the sun porch, Esther and Joseph retired to their bedroom down the hall. Then she rose from her own bed, went to Florence’s dresser, and switched on the lamp. She thought she remembered Florence keeping her bathing suits in the top left drawer, but when she slid it open, as quietly as she could, she was confronted with a jumble of slips and stockings. So, she eased the drawer closed and tried another one.
Florence’s drawers were a mess, which came as no surprise to Anna. She was the type of person who left wet bathing suits hanging on bedposts and her shoes in exactly the spot where she kicked them off at night. Magazines and books were left open to the page where she’d stopped reading, a testament to her assumption that she’d return to them before too long.
Anna, who was grateful the Adlers had found room in the apartment for her at all, had been in no position to demand that Florence make her bed or push in her drawers. For the brief time the two girls had shared the room, Anna had just tidied up after her—folding down the pages of Florence’s books and magazines so that they might be stacked on the dresser and lining up her shoes, toes in, under the window, where Anna kept her own. Anna would have liked to think that Florence appreciated her efforts, but she wasn’t sure she even noticed. Florence struck Anna as the type of girl who was used to being looked after, used
