“The Baker Perkins rep is going to be by on Thursday to talk to you about the dough dividers. I put him down for eleven o’clock. And Katz & Hanstein says they’re no longer manufacturing the eighteen-ounce bread bags. Do we want to go with the next size up or look for a new supplier? They’re promising we won’t even notice a difference.”
Mrs. Simons had been good to Joseph during the past month. Privately, he knew she mourned Florence’s death but, at the office, she had committed herself to making Joseph’s life easier, his days shorter. She no longer waited for Joseph to dictate correspondence; instead, she just left the letters, already drafted, on his desk for review. She was such a talented writer and a thorough editor that Joseph rarely, if ever, changed anything. She knew all of Adler’s suppliers by name, and whereas before she might have just stamped their invoices as received and cut their checks, now she got on the telephone and haggled with them over their prices.
“Let’s order enough bags to get through August,” said Joseph. “In the meanwhile, you can start shopping the order around.”
Mrs. Simons made a note on the steno pad she had carried in with the mail.
“There’s something else,” he said. “Will you call Anna right away and help her send a telegram to her parents? We’ll pay for it. Have her tell them that they should hold off submitting the new affidavits until they receive a bank statement from me.”
“Bank statement?” Mrs. Simons asked, looking up from her pad.
Joseph handed her a thin piece of paper. At the top were the names Paul and Inez Epstein and at the bottom was the account balance—twelve hundred dollars. The money from Florence’s Channel swim plus a little more besides. “Then will you take this down to the post office and send it to them via airmail? Anna can give you the address.”
Mrs. Simons took the account statement and pretended not to study it as she turned to go.
“Oh, there’s one more thing,” she said from the doorway. “Eli Hirsch wants to know if you’ll consider cochairing the fall campaign.”
Joseph had known it was only a matter of time before Hirsch asked him for something. A request for a big donation, Joseph had been expecting. Cochairing the campaign was something else altogether.
“Shall I tell him it’s a bad time?” Mrs. Simons asked.
Joseph thought of the two reference letters—the American Jewish Committee’s and Ike Bacharach’s—which Hirsch had executed in record time. “No, you’d better not.”
Mrs. Simons raised her eyebrows before making another notation on the pad.
It was all well and good for the members of Beth Kehillah and Rodef Shalom to give their spare change to the American Jewish Committee, but lately, and particularly today, Joseph felt weary of all the altruism. Hirsch’s organization had raised nearly a million dollars in the past year, ostensibly to help people just like Inez and her husband, but Hirsch hadn’t offered up a dime of it when Joseph and Anna had explained the couple’s predicament over lunch. Where was all the money going?
Joseph’s real worry was that no amount of money would cut through the bureaucratic red tape, much of which had been imposed by the American government and not the Nazis. He thought it very telling that, when push came to shove, Inez had not placed her faith in the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society or the German Relief Fund or the American Jewish Committee but in a man she hadn’t seen in more than thirty years.
Joseph tapped lightly on the door of Isaac’s office.
“Yes?”
“I’m going home for dinner. Why don’t you come?”
“There’s so much to do here,” said Isaac. “I might stay for a while.”
There was perhaps nothing that annoyed Joseph more than his son-in-law pretending to be busy. Isaac was supposed to be running the sales team but everyone—including the driver-salesmen—knew that Mrs. Simons was really in charge. In the mornings, the drivers went over their orders and tweaked their routes, reporting any discrepancies to Mrs. Simons before they got on the road. And in the late afternoons, when they returned to the office to work the phones and follow up on the next day’s orders, it was Mrs. Simons who got peppered with questions about inventory and pricing. If a big order came through or a new customer came on board, the drivers celebrated with Mrs. Simons, not Isaac, who spent most of his day just trying to keep up. When she eventually retired, Joseph had no idea what he and Isaac would do.
“The work will be here tomorrow,” Joseph said to Isaac. “Come.”
Isaac stood, nodded a few times, as if he were trying to collect his thoughts, and began shuffling the papers on his desk, in search of something. Eventually he located a thin manila folder and put it in his satchel.
“Did you see Fannie yesterday?” Joseph asked when they were on the street.
“Unfortunately, I didn’t get over there.”
“Esther says Dr. Rosenthal has Fannie on a new regimen. To get her blood pressure down.”
“That’s good.”
Joseph wondered at his son-in-law. Did he not want to know what the regimen was? He seemed completely distracted.
“Did I see Stuart this morning, in front of the plant?” Isaac asked. If he was asking, then of course he had. When Joseph had invited Stuart to get in the car, Isaac had undoubtedly seen the whole thing from his office window.
“I took a drive up to Highlands. Asked him to go. Stuart was too polite to turn an old man down.”
“You’re not old.”
“No?”
“I would have been happy to drive you.”
“Next time?”
They crossed Atlantic Avenue and made their way north.
“You seem distracted, Isaac,” said Joseph. “Is it Fannie or something else?”
“Hmm?”
“I said that you seem distracted.”
Isaac shifted his satchel to his other shoulder. “I guess I am.”
“Want to talk about it?”
Isaac hesitated
