Esther, usually so good at acting disinterested in Anna’s affairs, pulled a chair out from the table and sat down on it—hard. “He did?” She didn’t look entirely surprised.
“I said yes.”
“What about Trenton?”
It was a natural question and one that Anna was going to get from her parents, too.
“New Jersey State Teachers College was as much about keeping me safe as it was about anything else.” Was that true? She didn’t even know anymore. If the Nazis hadn’t come to power, she would undoubtedly have remained in Germany and attended college. But she wasn’t the same girl she’d been then. So much had happened since.
“Stuart might wait,” Esther said.
“He might. But I don’t want to.”
“What will your mother have to say?”
“About the fact that he’s not Jewish?”
Esther cocked her head to one side, as if to ask, What else is there?
“She’ll be disappointed, naturally,” said Anna, wrapping her hands around the warm mug. She took a sip of the hot coffee, felt it find its way down the back of her throat and bloom in her chest. “They both will be.”
Esther looked at her like she’d gone mad.
“I don’t think it will be so bad as you think.”
“No?”
“There are advantages to marrying Stuart,” said Anna. “They’ll see that.”
“Visas?”
Anna nodded. She didn’t want to give Esther the wrong idea, didn’t want her to think that the decision to marry Stuart was a calculated one. But Esther was a shrewd woman. Surely, she could understand that this match had other benefits?
“His citizenship is one thing,” said Esther. “But you know his father doesn’t give him a dime?”
Anna took another sip of coffee. There was a small part of her that was going to enjoy delivering this next piece of news. “Actually, he’s joining the business.”
She looked suitably surprised. “Florence always said…”
Anna waited for her to finish but Esther’s voice trailed off.
“I know this is very hard,” Anna finally offered.
“I think about it sometimes,” said Esther. “Whether I would have cut her off if she’d married him.”
“He loved her very much. He’s told me so.”
Esther pressed her hands flat against the table and studied them carefully. Was she going to cry? It was difficult for Anna to tell.
“I do know,” said Anna, slowly, “that Stuart wasn’t what Florence wanted.”
Esther looked up at her then, her eyes shiny. “What did she want?”
Anna recalled the way Florence had looked at her in bed, the night the letter had arrived, and shut her own eyes tight. Florence could have laid claim to them all but there was only one thing she had ever really wanted. Anna opened her eyes. “To swim forever.”
A tear ran down one of Esther’s cheeks. It hung at the tip of her chin before falling into her lap. Anna wished for more to say but could think of nothing that would do Esther any good. When the silence grew unbearable, she asked, “Will you tell Fannie today?”
Esther shook her head yes and exhaled slowly, as if she couldn’t quite believe what she was about to say. “I have to explain Isaac’s absence, so I assume I’ll do it all in one go.” She nodded toward her bedroom, where Anna assumed Joseph was still asleep. “Joseph will help.”
“You’ll feel better when you’ve told her. Everything.”
“Will I?” Esther asked, looking Anna straight in the eyes. “Or will I just feel like Florence is really gone?”
Anna reached for Esther’s hands across the table. Of course, Esther preferred to imagine her daughter was on a beach in Cape Gris-Nez. It was how Anna liked to think of Florence, too. Standing tall and proud, her arms stretched above her head, watching the water and waiting for a tide generous enough to carry her across the English Channel and all the way to Dover.
Author’s Note
The character of Florence Adler is based on a real girl who grew up in Atlantic City. Her name was Florence Lowenthal and she was my great-great-aunt.
Florence was the fifth of six children. Her parents, Hyman and Anna Lowenthal, ran a jewelry and pawnshop at the corner of Virginia and Atlantic Avenues, and they raised their children—Ruth, Miriam, Grace, Daniel, Florence, and Joseph—in a house at 129 States Avenue.
Florence swam for the all-female Ambassador Swim Club and graduated from Atlantic City High School in 1926—the same year that Trudy Ederle became the first woman to swim the English Channel. In her high school yearbook, Florence’s senior quote read, Teach me how to swim, and her probable destination was listed as Swimming the Atlantic. After high school, she swam for the University of Wisconsin, then transferred to the University of Pennsylvania. Her dream was, like Ederle, to conquer the Channel.
On July 3, 1929, Florence went out for a swim along the coast of Atlantic City. Two lifeguards, “Jing” Johnson and Neil Driscoll, saw her swimming along easily, just past the breakers at States Avenue. Only moments later, they noted that she had stopped moving. The guards deployed a lifeboat immediately, and when they had her back onshore, they rushed her to the Virginia Avenue Hospital Tent, where, for two hours, the chief beach surgeon, two additional doctors, and forty off-duty lifeguards alternated in performing artificial respiration. Florence’s death was the first beach fatality of the summer. She was nineteen years old.
A front-page story, which included her name, ran in the Atlantic City Daily Press the following day. Reports blamed Florence’s death on the ocean’s cold temperatures but I think it is likely she suffered from hypertrophic cardiomyopathy and that her heart simply stopped beating. She was buried on the fourth of July in Egg Harbor’s Beth Kehillah Cemetery.
My grandmother, Frances Katz, was six years old when she witnessed the Atlantic City Beach Patrol bring her young aunt’s body back to the beach. For the rest of her life, she recalled two things about that day—Florence’s red bathing cap and the
