“Is she in trouble?” his father asked.
“Who?”
“The Jewish girl. In the pool.”
Stuart marveled at his father’s disregard for basic social conventions. “Her name’s Anna. And we haven’t—” He stopped himself. What business was it of his father’s?
“How much?” his father said, with a slow shake of his head.
“Five thousand,” Stuart said, trying hard not to wince as he said the number aloud. His great-grandfather had spent less building the original hotel.
“Thousand?”
“I know it’s a lot.”
“Christ, son. What’s the money for, if not for Anna?”
“I can’t say.” The three little words were like a dagger, and he could tell he’d wounded his father with them.
“What are you mixed up in, Stu?”
“Nothing.”
He raised an eyebrow at him.
“Nothing illegal.”
“So, this is the only way I get you into the hotel business? Attached to a five-thousand-dollar string?”
Stuart wanted to tell him that he’d come work for him regardless, that he wasn’t the sort to hold his loyalty over anyone’s head, let alone his father’s. But he kept quiet. Maybe he was the sort.
His father let the drapes fall closed, and the kite vanished from view.“The hours are nine to five. Monday through Saturday. There are nights, too.”
Stuart nodded his head in affecting agreement.
“I’ll start you at the front desk. Rotate you through the restaurant and the bar. Maybe even have you do a stint in housekeeping. By the time you move up here, I want you to know every job in this place.”
Stuart could tell his father had spent considerable time thinking about this, imagining what the proper instatement of his son might look like.
“This is really what you want?” his father asked him.
Stuart thought about it for a moment. Could he let go of the coaching? Easily. Florence’s death had left him feeling less sure of himself, less willing to push the young women in the Ambassador Club to swim harder and farther than they’d ever swum before. If Florence could drown, anyone could.
It was the lifeguarding that would be harder to give up. From Stuart’s stand, these last six summers, he had watched the whole world unfold. The wind traced ripples across the sand, sandpipers darted to and fro, and seagulls circled overhead in search of their next meal. Children laughed and fought and cried and fell asleep, sunburned and exhausted, in the crooks of their mothers’ arms; young men used bad lines to romance girls who wouldn’t remember their names come fall; and elderly couples marked the passage of time with the steady push and pull of the tide. Stuart was privy to it all, and when he pulled someone from the water and returned them to the world, he felt like a god. But then he thought of Anna, floating beside him in The Covington’s pool. If she said yes, retiring from the ACBP wouldn’t feel like a sacrifice, not really.
“Yes,” Stuart said to his father. “It’s what I want.”
“Lou,” his father called, in a loud enough voice to register with his secretary in the next room. A few seconds later, she popped her head inside the door.
“Bring me a check.”
Stuart took the check directly to the Boardwalk National Bank and was halfway to the Adlers’ apartment when he ran straight into Anna. The meeting felt fortuitous until he realized she hadn’t even seen him. Her hair was wet and loose around her face, she’d skipped a button on her dress, and she was moving so fast, he might easily have missed her altogether.
“Hey!” he called to her, trying to get her attention, but she didn’t turn her head, just kept moving past him down Atlantic Avenue. “Hey, Anna!”
She stopped suddenly, whipped her head around, searched the faces of the people around her until she realized Stuart was standing just a few feet away from her.
“What’s wrong?” he said.
