She had been trying to be funny but Isaac didn’t laugh. He was already on his feet, his hat on his head.
Isaac stooped to kiss her cheek, but she grabbed him by the tie and steered his lips toward hers. She needed to feel like the old Fannie for just a minute—the Fannie who had seen something remarkable in the way he looked at her. Isaac responded to the kiss, and for several long moments, they were back in their old hiding space, under the Boardwalk, at Sovereign Avenue. There was no Gussie, no loan, no Hyram. Their biggest worry was only whether Esther and Joseph would allow their eldest daughter to marry a man of no means.
When Fannie pulled away, Isaac’s cheeks looked slightly flushed, and the makings of a smile had crept across his face. He touched her chin and kissed the tip of her nose before turning toward the door.
“Isaac,” she called when he had nearly crossed the room’s threshold. “I almost forgot.”
She reached for the envelope, still without a stamp, on her bedside table and held it out to him.
“Will you be a dear and deliver this to Florence?”
Joseph
By the time Joseph arrivedat Wischafter’s Beach Concessions, on the morning after his daughter’s burial, a beachboy of fourteen or fifteen years old was already unstacking chairs and unfurling oversized umbrellas.
“How much to rent a chair for the whole week?” asked Joseph, trying very hard to focus on the young boy’s face and not the vast ocean behind him.
“Eight dollars,” said the boy.
Joseph winced. He could buy one for less.
“There’s also a three-dollar deposit.”
Joseph reached for his wallet and began to count out the bills. He could never tell Esther he’d spent this much on something so frivolous. The boy removed a small pencil and a receipt book from his pocket.
“Name?” he asked.
“Joseph Adler.”
The boy made idle chatter as he took down the rest of Joseph’s information and signed the receipt.
“Hear about the drowning on Sunday?”
Joseph closed his eyes and saw his wife retching onto the floorboards of the hospital tent, after the beach surgeon had declared Florence dead.
“First one of the season,” the boy continued.
Joseph forced himself to ask, “Are they saying who it was?”
“Some girl.” The boy handed Joseph his receipt. “Bring this back at the end of the week—so you can get your deposit back.”
Joseph could barely nod an acknowledgment.Some girl.
“That’s yours,” the boy said, pointing to a wooden chair with ablue-and-white-striped canvas seat. A small “63” was stenciled on the frame with blue paint.
Joseph walked over to the chair, folded it, and tucked it neatly under his arm. With his free hand he touched his hat and started off in the direction of States Avenue. He hadn’t gone more than two dozen paces, had barely made it off the sand, when the boy jogged up behind him.
“Sir, you can’t take the chair off the beach. It’s yours for the week but it stays in the sand.”
Joseph put the beach chair down and reached for his wallet a second time. “I’ll tell you what,” he said. “Here’s three more dollars. Let me take the chair, and when I return it, the deposit’s yours to keep, too.”
The bakery’s administrative offices were on the third floor of the plant, well out of the way of the mixers, kneading machines, and dough dividers that cluttered the second floor and the ovens, cooling racks, bread-slicing machines, and bread-wrapping stations that filled the first.
When Joseph had designed the building six years ago, he had spent a great deal of time thinking about the best way to make a loaf of bread. So much of bread making had become mechanized—it was the only way to make any real money at it—that he had felt it necessary to reexamine every part of the process. He considered the ingredients he used—hundred-pound bags of flour, water, yeast, salt, the precise number of minutes it took for the dough to rise, the number of loaves of bread he could fit in an oven, how long the bread needed to cool before it could be removed from the tray, and now that the American public demanded sliced bread, how many slices he could get out of a loaf. Wherever there were efficiencies to be had, he found them. To that end, he had put the new machines on the first and second floors, and relegated himself, a secretary, Isaac, and a small fleet of driver-salesmen to the third. He had taken an office at the back of the building, where he could watch the delivery trucks load up each morning and putter into the lot, empty, at night.
Joseph’s legs burned as he reached the top of the stairs and hurriedtoward his office. A few drivers were on the phones but Mrs. Simons was not at her desk, and for that, Joseph was exceptionally grateful. He propped the beach chair against his legs while he searched her desk for a sheet of stationery, which he found in the third drawer he tried. With a black pen, he wrotePLEASE DO NOT DISTURBin large block letters. Did that read too harshly? Perhaps it did. He addedImportant Businessin cursive script underneath, hoping it softened the directive, and taped the crude sign to his door.
Once inside the office, Joseph closed the door behind him and locked it. Then he walked over to the window and rolled down the shade. He leaned the beach chair against the fireplace and went to his desk, where he rooted through his own drawers, looking for the stub of a candle. He used the matches in his pocket to warm the wax and secure the candle to the lid of an empty coffee can. Then he placed the makeshift candle holder on the mantel, lit the candle, and said a prayer. When he was sure that the flame would not go out, he unfolded the beach chair.
