Last fall, when Joseph had proposed bringing Anna to the United States, Esther had felt powerless to stop him. Anna was the daughter of a woman named Inez, someone Joseph now told her he had grown up alongside in Hungary but whom he had, interestingly, never once managed to mention in twenty-nine years of marriage.
Inez’s letter, littered with German stamps, had arrived in the foyer of their Atlantic Avenue house like a small hand grenade last October. Joseph was at the plant, so Esther had slid the envelope open, too curious about its contents to wait until he got home. She had been disappointed when she was unable to identify the sender’s handwriting or interpret the signature, much less read the letter’s contents, which were written in Joseph’s native Hungarian.
When Joseph had finally arrived home and read the letter from start to finish, he gave Esther only the barest of translations. Inez’s first husband had been killed in the war, and in the aftermath, Inez had moved from the embattled borderlands of Austria-Hungary to Vienna with Anna. There, she had met and married Paul, who was studying at the university. When Paul secured a teaching position in Berlin, they had moved to Prussia and eventually naturalized but everything was in jeopardy now that the Third Reich had come to power. Last summer, the family’s citizenship had been revoked, and a few months later, Paul was let go from his position. As for Anna, she hadn’t secured a spot at any of the German universities to which she’d applied the previous year, and it was Inez and Paul’s sincere wish that she get out of Germany before things got any worse.
“What else does she say?” Esther had asked, glancing at the three-page letter, written in tight script.
“That’s all,” said Joseph, unable to meet her gaze, and Esther had known right away that he was lying. She could have summarized what Joseph had told her in five good sentences.
Over the next several months, Joseph helped Inez identify several American universities that might be good options for Anna. In some cases, he’d even written away for the application materials himself. Once Anna’s application had been submitted to New Jersey State Teachers College, Joseph picked up the phone, calling anyone he knew with a connection to the school or its admissions director. Esther had thought Anna sounded smart enough to get into the school on her own merit, but Joseph told her he wanted to leave nothing to chance. Even when the acceptance came through, Joseph kept working, turning his full attention to helping Inez and Paul secure all the necessary documentation for Anna’s student visa application. He offered to sponsor her, and when the visa was granted faster than expected, to put Anna up for the summer.
Esther told herself to be gracious, both about Anna’s stay and the help she knew Joseph was now providing Inez and Paul, who were also eager to get out of Germany. The situation over there did indeed sound dire, and Esther knew several families at Beth Kehillah that were trying to help relatives, in Germany and elsewhere, immigrate to the United States.
The difference, Esther reminded herself, was that Anna wasn’t a relative. She was barely even a friend. When Esther and Joseph had taken her to the Jewish Consumptive Relief Society’s fund-raiser, back in April, it had been hard to know how to introduce her. This is Anna, the daughter of an old friend of Joseph’s. Was that what Inez and Joseph had been to each other? Just old friends? Anytime Esther tried to bring up Inez, Joseph bristled.
Gussie coughed and turned over in her sleep, and Esther watched as Anna adjusted her own body to accommodate the little girl’s.
“I’m home,” Esther said aloud but Anna didn’t answer. She breathed slowly in and out, her eyes closed, one arm stretched behind her head. What Esther wouldn’t have given to be trapped in a sleep so deep that she couldn’t be woken.
By a quarter to six the next morning, Esther was waiting in a chair outside the office of the hospital superintendent, Nellie McLoughlin. Esther had been inside the office once before, last summer, when they had needed to decide what to do with Fannie’s baby, but this early in the morning, the first-floor office was shut up tight.
Esther wasn’t one for putting women in charge of things, but it was hard to find a person in all of Atlantic City who didn’t think McLoughlin was a skilled administrator and the right person for the hospital’s top job. McLoughlin had run the hospital’s nursing school for a decade and had played a large and visible role in the hospital’s recent fund-raising campaign, which resulted in the construction of the new wing.
“Mrs. Adler,” said a stiff voice that Esther realized belonged to a woman standing directly in front of her. She looked up from her lap to find Nellie McLoughlin, taller and more imposing than she remembered, staring down at her.
“Miss McLoughlin,” said Esther as she stood on liquid legs.
“To what do I owe the pleasure of this early morning visit?” McLoughlin asked as she slid her key into the lock.
Esther waited until McLoughlin pushed the door open and turned on the office’s overhead light before following her across the threshold, “Do you have a moment?”
“Certainly,” McLoughlin said as she placed her handbag in an empty drawer of a tall filing cabinet, then unpinned her hat and set it inside the drawer as well. She gestured toward two chairs that sat across from a modest, metal
