It was such a strange sensation, to feel the weight of her body resting in the palm of Stuart’s open hand, like she was a small bird instead of a girl, already grown.
“Tilt your head back more,” said Stuart, his voice garbled and far away. “Tilt your head until you can see nothing but sky.”
Was it even possible to do so? Anna lifted her chin until the hotel’s edifice disappeared from her peripheral vision and all she could see were clouds, turned pink by the sun as it sank beyond the Thorofare.
Anna didn’t feel Stuart’s hand against her back. Had he let go?
“Now breathe,” she heard him call to her.
Only then did Anna realize she’d been holding her breath. She let the air out of her chest but as she did so, she could feel herself begin to sink. The sinking feeling made her panic, and her head slipped beneath the surface as she tried to feel for the floor of the pool with her feet. Almost immediately, Stuart grabbed her under an arm and pulled her up.
“Embarrassing,” she sputtered when she’d wiped the water from her eyes.
“Why embarrassing?” Stuart asked with a grin. “No one’s born knowing how to swim.”
“I’m an adult, not a small child.”
“Children have it easy. Adults always have a much harder time learning.”
“Why is that?”
“Children believe they can swim, so they do,” said Stuart. He reached out and grazed her wool-clad stomach with the tips of his fingers. “Adults carry around all of their fears right here.” He touched her chin, briefly. “And here.”
Anna blinked. She wanted to remind him that there were good reasons to be afraid but she worried she’d ruin the evening. Instead, she told him she’d try again.
They spent the next hour floating around The Covington’s pool as it slowly emptied of people. As Anna grew more confident, Stuart removed his hand from her back, and eventually he started floating beside her, their outstretched arms and legs occasionally bumping into each other as they drifted from one side of the pool to the other. Anna liked knowing that Stuart was next to her without feeling compelled to speak to him. With the water in her ears muffling the sounds of the outside world, she could almost pretend she was back in Germany, and that the boy floating next to her would whisper, Komm schon. Lass uns gehen, when it was time to go.
By the time Stuart deemed Anna highly proficient at floating, it had gotten dark and the tips of her fingers had turned to prunes. A waiter, who was clearing away empty cocktail glasses and straightening wayward chaise lounges, warned them that the pool would be closing in a few minutes. Anna could tell Stuart was about to say something to him, when a middle-aged man in a three-piece suit walked out onto the terrace and straight toward them.
“Stuart, if you’d told me you were coming, I would have had something sent out.” Anna thought she detected Stuart’s shoulder muscles tighten.
“Anna, this is my father, John Williams. Father, this is Anna Epstein.”
She made a move to get out of the pool—it felt improper to meet Stuart’s father, or anyone for that matter, wearing nothing but a bathing suit—but Stuart grabbed her wrist and muttered, quietly, “Please stay.”
She looked at her wrist and then at Stuart. “I’m pleased to meet you, Mr. Williams,” she said.
“Ah, an accent. Germany, I presume?”
“Ja ich bin Deutscher,” she said, trying her best to be charming.
“What brings you to Atlantic City?” Mr. Williams asked.
Anna was about to answer when Stuart spoke for her, offering up the curtest of explanations: “College.”
Mr. Williams gave Stuart a warning look, so Anna added, “I start in the fall.”
“No good schools in Germany?”
Again, Stuart jumped in. “Not if you’re Jewish.” Anna thought she detected a challenge, of sorts, in the tone of Stuart’s voice. As if he was daring his father to say something. But Mr. Williams seemed perfectly reasonable and said only, “That’s too bad.”
By the time Stuart’s father took his leave, a few minutes later, the evening’s mood had changed. Stuart seemed quieter and less confident, and Anna had begun to shiver with cold.
“Let’s get you dried off,” said Stuart as he hoisted himself out of the pool and walked over to the little cabana, water streaming from his bathing suit, to grab two towels. Anna shimmied along the pool’s edge to the ladder, hopeful that she could display more grace getting out of the pool than she’d exhibited getting into it.
“You seem angry with your father,” she said as Stuart handed her a towel.
“I don’t know if angry is the right word,” Stuart said, towel-drying his hair. “Maybe frustrated.”
Anna unfurled the towel and wrapped it around her torso.
“He’s been wanting me to come work for him for years. Ever since I finished high school.”
“In college even?”
“Didn’t go.”
Anna pulled her towel tighter and arched her eyebrows at him.
“You’re surprised?”
Anna could feel the color rising in her face. “A little.”
“At some point, I decided that if he wanted me to do something, it had to be the wrong thing.”
“But you didn’t want to go?”
Stuart shrugged.
“So why—”
“I got into Temple but it wasn’t an Ivy, so he had a hard time hiding his disappointment.”
Anna wasn’t familiar with the term Ivy, and she hated to interrupt to ask.
“That was the same summer I started lifeguarding. I was making my own money and began to envision a life in which I wasn’t beholden to a guy I could never please.”
“He’s really so unhappy?”
Stuart nodded his head at the hotel. “He wasn’t content to own a hotel that my great-grandfather and grandfather had built. He had to tear it down and build the biggest hotel in Atlantic City.”
“It’s the biggest?”
“Not anymore,” Stuart said, with a hint of amusement on his face. “The
