“It’s not Fannie,” said Esther. “It’s her sis—” She couldn’t get the word out. The room was too hot. She yanked at the collar of her dress, tried to undo the top button. Couldn’t do that either. “Sis.” It was as if, with the utterance of this one little word, she had rediscovered that Florence was dead. Esther bent at the waist, unable to breathe. She could hear McLoughlin asking if she was all right, could feel a hand on her shoulder. Esther took a series of short breaths, tried to fill her lungs, but couldn’t find enough air. She began to truly panic then, heard someone yelling for a nurse. Was it McLoughlin? This was not how she wanted this meeting to go.
“I’m fine,” she tried to say as the room grew crowded with people. There was McLoughlin, a nurse, later a man in a white coat. She focused on the small floral pattern of her own dress. The flowers were pastel blue and yellow and pink, and they danced in front of her eyes.
“I’d recommend a sedative,” Esther heard the man say. “Something to calm her down, let her rest for a while.”
“Mrs. Adler,” said McLoughlin. “Do you hear me?”
Esther nodded, tried to swim back up to the surface of her own consciousness. There was no time for any of this. She had to talk to McLoughlin, had to protect Fannie.
“I’m all right,” she whispered.
“Can you sit up?”
Esther slowly raised her head from her knees, looked around the office, and eventually made eye contact with McLoughlin. She was mortified by her own behavior. “I’m sorry.”
“You have nothing to be sorry for,” said McLoughlin, leaning against the edge of her desk. “Tell me what’s wrong.”
Esther looked at the doctor who was standing just a few feet away from the two women, then looked back at McLoughlin. The superintendent nodded her head toward the door, and the doctor disappeared through it.
“Yesterday,” Esther began. She didn’t know what to say next. She breathed in and out, slowly. “Fannie’s sister died.”
McLoughlin sank into the chair beside Esther’s. “I’m so sorry.”
Esther began to cry in earnest now. It was so unlike her but all of her habits and predilections seemed entirely baseless now. How many more times in her life would she have to repeat that sentence or something similar? Fannie’s sister died. My younger daughter died. One of my daughters died when she was young. If Esther lived until she was an old woman, she would still be explaining Florence’s absence, trying to understand it herself.
“She drowned off States Avenue. Yesterday afternoon.”
“No—”
Esther nodded her head, wiped at her wet cheeks with her hands.
McLoughlin handed her a handkerchief. “She was a very good swimmer, wasn’t she?”
“Incredible,” said Esther.
They sat together for quite some time, listening to the sounds of the hospital coming awake. A door opened and closed, a telephone rang in the distance, a pair of heels clicked up the stairs. Finally, McLoughlin spoke, “You’re not here because you want my help telling Fannie.”
Esther shook her head and blew her nose into the handkerchief. “I don’t want to tell her anything.”
“You’re worried about an early labor?”
“Do you think I’m being irrational?”
“Not at all. It’s a real risk. Particularly after last summer.” McLoughlin stood and walked around to the other side of her desk, where she pulled open a drawer and removed a pad of paper. “So, let’s figure out how to do this.”
“I think we need to move her to a private room,” said Esther. “Somewhere where we can keep better tabs on who comes and goes. Her father and I can pay the difference.”
“How many people know about… Florence?” asked McLoughlin. Esther could tell she had been about to say something else, was about to use a less sanitized word like drowning or death and had stopped herself. Esther’s confidence in McLoughlin grew.
“A lot of the lifeguards. The women in the Hebrew burial society.”
“No one on the hospital staff?”
“Not to my knowledge. She was treated at the hospital tent at Virginia Avenue.” McLoughlin scribbled something on the pad.
“And there’s no announcement in the paper?” the superintendent asked.
Esther reached into her handbag, removed the morning’s newspaper, and handed it to McLoughlin. Samuel hadn’t managed to kill the story, only to soften its blow. On the front page was the headline GIRL DIES WHILE BATHING OFF STATES AV.
“Do they identify her?” McLoughlin said.
Florence was described as a local girl and a strong swimmer but was never named, thank God. “No,” Esther whispered, “but an astute reader might very well figure it out.”
McLoughlin skimmed the article, then began to write. On one sheet of paper, she listed the names of the doctors and nurses she planned to let in on the secret. “Lucky for us, the preceptors graduate tomorrow at noon. And the new class won’t start until the end of the summer.”
“Preceptors?”
“Students,” said McLoughlin. “Doesn’t matter. It’s just fewer people who have to know.”
On another sheet of paper, McLoughlin spelled out the accommodations the staff would make to limit Fannie’s access to the outside world. They’d move her to a private room, of course, but they’d also remove the room’s radio and limit Fannie’s ability to visit the sun-room, where a telephone and a radio had been installed for the use of all the women on the ward.
“Can someone read her mail?” Esther asked.
It was the only request McLoughlin seemed to bristle at. “I’d prefer we just stop her mail entirely. We can deliver anything we receive to you, and you can decide what to do with it.”
By the time they finalized the plan, it was half-past seven. McLoughlin tore the papers from the pad and folded them in half and then in quarters. “I’d better start my rounds or someone’s going to put a copy of the Atlantic City Press on Fannie’s breakfast tray.”
Esther snatched up her handbag and stood to go. “I’ll be by to visit later. After—”
McLoughlin eyed her mournfully. “Until then, you are
