She waded ashore, and Anna wrapped her in a towel, then led her in the direction of Garden Pier, too. By the time they reached Esther and Joseph, the rescue boat was so far from shore, it was difficult to make out what was happening. Gussie shielded her eyes with her hand, trying to see more clearly. It looked as if the vessel had stopped, and one or both of the lifeguards had jumped overboard.
“Is it her?” Esther whispered to Joseph in a voice loud enough for Gussie to hear.
“Who?” Gussie asked, but no one, including Anna, responded.
After several long minutes, the rescue boat began to grow larger again. Gussie could make out only one lifeguard rowing toward the shore. Where had the other one gone? It wasn’t until the boat grew much closer that she saw the second lifeguard, bent over something in the bottom of the boat.
The boat plowed onto the wet sand, about a dozen yards from where the small crowd had gathered. Its oars clattered against the oarlocks and landed in the sand, and the men worked quickly to lift what could only have been a person from the bottom of the boat.
That’s when Gussie saw it—the flash of color—and she looked at Anna to see if she’d seen it, too. Anna’s hand moved to her mouth. The lifeguards lifted the body, pale and motionless, out of the boat and onto the sand but all Gussie could bear to look at was the red cap on her aunt’s head. She covered her ears with her hands as the air filled with the sound of her grandmother’s wails.
Esther
The Virginia Avenue Hospital Tent regularly treated sunburns, jellyfish stings, and heatstroke but, if there had been patients who suffered from those ailments when the guards arrived at the tent with Florence, they were now long gone. Everyone on the small staff—beach surgeon, doctors, nurses—worked over a single cot in the far corner of the tent.
Esther could make no sense of the girl on the cot.
That the girl was her daughter.
That her daughter was not moving.
When Esther had arrived at the tent, she had been inclined to fight her way into the center of the commotion but Joseph nudged her toward a pair of canvas chairs. “Let’s give them room to work,” he said quietly, his face ashen.
She felt for the edge of a chair, could barely find it, then listened as the beach surgeon yelled instructions at the staff. How long had it been since Florence had been pulled from the water? Five minutes? Ten? Esther looked at her watch. It was half-past four. When had she heard the whistle blast? She hadn’t thought to check the time.
“Keep going,” Esther heard the beach surgeon say before he shouted at the assembled lifeguards. “Boys, form a line. We need you to cycle in and out.”
“What are they doing?” Esther asked Joseph as she watched the first guard take over for the doctor who had previously been thumping on Florence’s back.
“Giving compressions.”
“Yes, but why the guards?”
“To relieve the staff,” said her husband, whose eyes never left the cot. “They’re getting tired.”
Esther clutched her sides and put her head between her knees. How could they be tired? They’d scarcely been at this for any time at all.
After several more minutes had passed, she sat up and forced herself to watch, through tears that blurred her vision, as one guard after another beat on her daughter’s back. Esther stared at the doctors and nurses and lifeguards for so long that they ceased to be individual people, morphing instead into an amalgam that pulsed to the beat of each round of compressions.
She nearly missed the beach surgeon tapping the guard on the shoulder, telling him to stop. “Help me turn her over,” the beach surgeon said to one of the doctors who stood on the other side of the cot. His voice sounded garbled. The men looked at each other, with a kind of startled disappointment, and rolled Florence over, slowly, until she was faceup. They arranged her arms by her side. “Time of death,” said the beach surgeon, looking at his watch and then at Esther, “five twenty-three.”
Eventually, they came to take Florence away. A car pulled up along the Boardwalk and two men got out, carrying a wooden stretcher between them. Esther recognized one of the men as Abe Roth, who ran the Jewish funeral home.
“They can’t take her!” Esther whispered to Joseph. “Please don’t let them take her.”
“Bubala, we will go with her. We won’t let her be alone.”
The men bowed their heads when they arrived at the cot where Florence rested.
“Joseph. Esther,” Abe said. “I’m so very sorry.”
Esther couldn’t look at him. She kept her eyes on her daughter’s pale cheeks, her purple lips.
“You’re still over at Beth Kehillah?” Abe asked. He and his wife were members of Rodef Sholom, a conservative shul on Atlantic Avenue.
Joseph nodded.
“We’ll give Rabbi Levy a call and let him know. He’ll get the Chevra Kadisha over to our place. I assume you want the Taharah performed.”
Esther’s grandmother had been a member of the Chevra Kadisha in Wiesbaden, and her mother in Philadelphia. Still, Esther winced at the idea of women she barely knew touching her daughter’s lovely, long limbs, washing away the salt water and the sand that clung to her arms and legs. Florence’s arms had propelled her through the ocean but first they had propelled her across Esther’s kitchen floor. They had been soft and dimpled and smelled of Pond’s soap and talcum powder. Esther was the only one who had ever bathed her.
“Would
