“Why are they sitting over there?” Florence asked.
“They can’t swim.”
“Should you teach them?” she had asked, and he had been so touched by her question that he wondered if she didn’t have a point.
A steamship blared its horn as it entered New York Harbor from the Hudson River and headed out to sea. Joseph picked up the binoculars and studied the ship, looking for the name on its bow.
“That’s not it,” said Stuart. “It’s too big.”
Joseph replaced the binoculars in his lap.
“Mr. Adler, may I ask you something?”
“Joseph.”
“Right, sorry,” said Stuart, who was very obviously never going to feel comfortable calling Joseph by his first name.
“Go on.”
“Do you ever regret keeping Florence’s death a secret?”
Joseph let out a long breath and moved the binoculars from one hand to the other, absentmindedly adjusting the diopter as he did so.
“If you don’t want to talk about it—”
“I don’t mind talking about it. Don’t mind talking about her. In fact, I like hearing people like you say her name.”
What could Joseph say? Keeping the secret had never been a choice. Not a real one. He thought carefully about where to begin. “When I was growing up in Hungary—what’s now Austria’s Burgenland—we never had anything. My parents pinched and saved for my brother’s steamship ticket, and when he was settled in Philadelphia and finally making some money, he paid for mine. My mother cried when the ticket arrived in the mail. She knew she couldn’t follow me, knew, in fact, that she might never see me again.”
Stuart didn’t say anything but he didn’t need to. Joseph knew he was listening.
“In my first years in America—in Philadelphia and then Atlantic City—I used to wonder at my parents’ decision. Had they been right to send my brother and then me? Would it have been better to use the ticket for my father, who might have immediately made a better income? If he had done well enough, he could have sent for the whole family.” Joseph plucked at a blade of grass. “But then I became a parent, and I had my answer. You give your children every possible chance.
“My daughter is gone. Nothing I do will return her to me. I try to tell myself that I am not hurting Florence or her memory by keeping her death a secret. What I am taking from the people who knew her—the chance to mourn her death and memorialize her life—can be returned to them.
“I don’t know if Esther’s right—if this news would prove too much for Fannie to bear. What I do know,” said Joseph, raising his head, “is that this baby, this new life, is the most important thing.”
Joseph looked over at Stuart. “I wish—”
Just then, they heard the long blast of a horn and looked up to see a small steamship making its way through the watery gap between Staten Island and Brooklyn. Was it the Lafayette? Joseph jumped to his feet, binoculars still in hand, but when he put the instrument to his eyes, he couldn’t get it to focus.
“You look,” he said, handing the binoculars to Stuart, who had also stood at the sound of the horn.
Stuart held the binoculars to his eyes, adjusted the diopter, and spent a long moment studying the ship through the lenses. “It’s her,” he finally said.
Joseph stared at the Lafayette, watching as it made its way toward the mouth of New York Bay. He hadn’t thought further ahead than putting his eyes on the French steamship. Now, as he watched it round Seagate and head out past Long Beach, growing smaller and smaller until it eventually become a black dot on the horizon, he tried to recall why this errand had seemed so necessary.
Florence was not on that boat, would never arrive in France. He would not find her on the shores of the English Channel or at the Hygeia or even on the beaches of Atlantic City. He looked over at Stuart, who was openly weeping as he watched the boat disappear from view. Maybe Joseph’s daughter was to be found in the people who loved her the most.
Joseph offered to drive Stuart as far as the corner of South Carolina and Atlantic avenues, where the Boardwalk National Bank was located on the ground floor of Schlitz’s Hotel. He parked the car and stared out through the windshield at the bank’s window bars, painted green, and the pair of paneled doors that led inside. Was he really going to do this?
“You bank here?” Stuart asked as he swung the car’s passenger door open wide.
“Since the day I arrived in Atlantic City.”
Joseph’s knees cracked as he climbed out of the car. He didn’t like the fact that his body had begun to feel the effects of a long drive or too much time spent in any one position. He patted his jacket pocket, making sure Bill Burgess’s check was still tucked inside.
On the sidewalk, Joseph considered putting an arm around Stuart but, in the end, he settled on a firm handshake. “Thank you, Stuart.”
“For what?”
“For Burgess. For today.”
Stuart didn’t say anything, just squeezed his hand in response.
Once they had parted ways, Joseph hurried into the bank. When the receptionist asked how she could help him, he retrieved the envelope from his pocket. “I’d like to speak with someone about opening a new account.”
Joseph was back in the office by a little after three o’clock in the afternoon. He walked through the plant, checking on the assembly line, before making his way to the third floor, where Mrs. Simons sat at her desk, typing away at her Underwood. When she saw him come up the stairs, she hit the return, pushed her chair back, and stood to greet him.
“I was starting to worry,” she said as she handed him a stack of checks to sign.
He took the stack, opened the door
