“Probably not,” Stuart agreed, letting the car go quiet again before he asked, “So, assuming we’re not dropping in on the Ederles, what’s in Highlands?” He gestured at the binoculars that Joseph had tucked into the seat. “Bird-watching?”
Joseph glanced at the binoculars, then at Stuart. Would it be kinder to let him in on the plan now or later? He wasn’t quite so quick-thinking or clearheaded as Esther, wasn’t ever certain that he knew what was in anyone else’s best interest. No, he’d tell him later, Joseph finally decided. He was enjoying the ride—and Stuart’s company—too much to sap all the pleasure from the day.
Joseph had been to Highlands several times before but the craggy landscape always took him aback, so different was it from the rest of the Jersey shore. A yellow ribbon of sand stretched from Cape May to Atlantic City and all the way to Sea Bright, but when it reached the Atlantic Highlands, a headland rose more than two hundred feet above sea level. A long and narrow sandbar stretched into New York Harbor, protecting Highlands from the worst of the northeast’s winds, and it was that sandbar, the Navesink Highlands in the background, that Joseph had first laid eyes on when he had come to America. He had stood on the deck of the Frankfurt, among hundreds of other hopeful immigrants—Austrians, Poles, Russians. A murmur went through the crowd. “New Jersey,” someone said to the person next to him. “New Jersey?” the next person asked. Everyone knew about New York but nobody knew about New Jersey. “America,” someone translated. A tiny American flag waved at them from the Twin Lights but only the young, whose eyes were still good, could see it. Joseph let out a whoop and jumped in the air, causing some of the older women who stood nearby to eye him with suspicion. It would be another half hour before the Statue of Liberty and the docks of Ellis Island came into view, before the tugboats came to meet the ship and lead it into the harbor but, as far as Joseph was concerned, he had already arrived.
Joseph turned the car onto Light House Road. After a few minutes, the road started to rise up toward the light station and he downshifted. The car chugged up the steep incline, and at the tree line, the base of the Twin Lights came into view. Stuart let out a low whistle.
“Not bad, eh?” Joseph said.
The Twin Lights of Highlands looked more like a military fortress than a lighthouse. The entire structure—keeper’s quarters, storage facilities, and two towers—was made of brownstone. Joseph pulled the car off the road and parked it under a tree. “Grab the binoculars, will you?”
The pair walked out onto the brow of the hill where the Twin Lights sat. Joseph walked the length of the station several times, wading through the tall summer grass, as he eyed Sandy Hook Bay and the harbor beyond the sandbar. Finally, when they were standing in front of the south tower, he said, “This should do” and made a nest for himself in the grass. Stuart handed the binoculars to Joseph, removed his jacket, and joined him.
“Mr. Adler?”
“Joseph.”
“Joseph,” said Stuart. “Are we watching for birds or large steamships?”
Joseph didn’t answer him, just studied the coastal highway below them, the bay and sandbar and harbor beyond. In the distance, he could make out Brooklyn’s skyline. Around a bend he could not see, he knew Chelsea Piers was busy, people pouring from the terminal onto the decks of ocean liners that would transport them to Southampton and Plymouth, Vigo and Le Havre.
The Lafayette was small in comparison to most of the liners that crossed the Atlantic. Florence and he had settled on it because it didn’t stop in Southampton, and because it could make the transatlantic crossing in a quick six days. The ship’s manifest was also small—the ship could accommodate just one hundred and fifty people—which had made Florence hopeful that she would have the tiny, indoor swimming pool to herself. Joseph had tried to remind his daughter that the pool was probably no bigger than a matchbox but she hadn’t wanted to hear it.
When Joseph tried to imagine what Florence’s sea voyage might have been like, swimming miniature laps in a miniature pool, all he could see was Florence at barely five years old, swimming her first laps in the Hygeia Baths. At the end of the summer season, when the ocean had turned cold and the tourists had gone home, Joseph had walked Florence north along the Boardwalk, as far as Heinz Pier, where a large electric sign advertising the baths directed people into a stuffy Georgian building with a limestone façade and an iodized copper roof. Even such a big sign couldn’t have prepared Florence for what she saw when Joseph paid the admission fee and led her inside on that brisk, autumn afternoon.
In the center of a three-story room sat a gigantic swimming pool, full to its brim with seawater that had been pumped from the ocean a hundred yards away. The sounds of frolicking bathers ricocheted off the underside of the building’s metal roof.
“I can swim here?” Florence had asked, disbelievingly.
“You can,” Joseph said as she stood on the brick deck, still bundled in her coat and hat. Had Joseph not clapped his hands and motioned Florence toward the changing rooms, she might have stood there all afternoon, watching one man after another dive from a tall metal platform that was positioned along the far side of the pool.
“Where are all the girls?” Florence asked her father when she returned to the pool deck in her bathing costume. Joseph scanned the room. Everywhere he looked, he saw nothing but men and, in some cases, adolescent boys. He nodded toward
