The Talmud described Job’s suffering as he mourned the loss of his children,Now they sat down with him to the ground for seven days and seven nights, but no one said a word to him because they perceived that the pain was very severe.Job and his progeny had been dead for more than two thousand years, but Shiva chairs were still intentionally slung low to allow mourners to sit as close to the ground as possible.
Joseph sat down heavily in his makeshift Shiva chair, buried his head in his hands, and wept.
There were good reasons to keep Florence’s death from Fannie, but by the third day of his self-imposed mourning ritual, Joseph had come to the conclusion that a small list of people did indeed need to be told about his younger daughter’s passing.
There was Clementine Dirkin, the swim coach at Wellesley. Joseph had never met her but Florence had always spoken fondly of her, and he assumed she could be counted on to tell the appropriateadministrative staff and share the news with Florence’s teammates. He imagined the girls gathering together, when they arrived back on campus in September, to console one another and decide how best to memorialize their lost friend. Would they dedicate a race to her memory? Lay trinkets of one kind or another in front of her locker? Install a plaque in the natatorium? Joseph wanted to believe that his daughter’s death left a hole the girls would find impossible to fill.
Then there was the business of unwinding Florence’s Channel swim, which Joseph wasn’t entirely sure how to approach. Florence had made many of the arrangements herself, skirting Esther and going directly to Joseph to ask whether she might purchase a steamer ticket or book a month’s stay at the Hôtel du Phare in Cape Gris-Nez. Joseph had balked at the figures Florence had presented but she convinced him not to look at the swim and its underlying costs as an expense but rather an investment. If she made it across the Channel, she’d earn back his money in sponsorships and speaking fees, and Adler’s Bakery could boast that their rye bread had propelled the first Jewish woman across the English Channel. “I’ll write the jingle,” Florence had teased.
The most expensive part of Florence’s plan had been engaging the coach who would steer her across the Channel. There were two men, in particular, Bill Burgess and Jabez Wolffe, who had successfully swum the English Channel themselves and now made their living helping other men—and a few women—do the same. They knew the Channel’s tides and currents, could watch for the right weather and water conditions. It was the coach, Florence had explained to Joseph, who would make or break her swim. He would teach her how to navigate the currents, arrange for her meals, and engage the local pilot boat that would trail her the thirty miles to Dover. Most important, if she became overly fatigued or delirious, which could easily happen during the daylong swim, it was the coach who would make the decision to yank her from the water.
There had been a national uproar in 1925, when Wolffe had pulled Trudy Ederle out too soon. The rules were clear: if a swimmer was touched, for any reason, he or she was immediately disqualified. Ederlesaid she hadn’t been ready to quit when Wolffe reached for her, and she complained loudly, to any journalist with a pen in hand, that he had tapped her out without cause. When she returned to France the following summer, engaging Burgess and not Wolffe to be her coach, she had also brought her father with her and given him strict instructions to watch Burgess’s every move. Joseph thought the papers, at least, had made it look as if the father and daughter were a good team.
“If you want, you could come along,” Florence had said to Joseph as he wrote a check, payable to Bill Burgess, for her deposit, “Be my right-hand man.” The offer was tempting, but there was the bakery to consider, and also the cost of another steamship ticket and hotel room. Now, as he sat Shiva for his younger daughter, he wished he’d taken her up on it. Of course, they never would have made it to France, but Florence would have died knowing that her father’s love for her was as wide as any channel she might ever try to conquer. Surely, she knew that anyway?
Joseph had no idea how to go about tracking down Bill Burgess. If he couldn’t find Burgess’s address in Florence’s correspondence, he thought it likely that he’d find it in the notebook she had carried back and forth to Wellesley the last two years. For as long as Florence had been talking about swimming the English Channel, she’d been recording her training regimen, diet, and even her sleep in a small notebook with a pale blue cover. On it she’d written in bold lettering,FLORENCE ADLER SWIMS THE ENGLISH CHANNEL.As if it were already fact.
Joseph was impressed by her careful notes, neatly labeled diagrams, tables drawn with a ruler to keep the lines straight. On some pages, she’d glued newspaper articles about other swimmers, other long-distance attempts. He remembered feeling a little awestruck as he flipped through the notebook’s pages, wondering if—hoping—his daughter applied the same exactitude to her schoolwork.
Yes, the notebook would surely deliver a clue as to Burgess’s whereabouts. And, for Dirkin, perhaps a letter was the best course of action. Something she could pass along to the administration, to be filed away alongside Florence’s partially completed transcript. Joseph heavedhimself out of his beach chair and went to stand on the other side of his desk. He drummed the blotter as he considered his options. Finally, he called for his secretary, “Mrs. Simons, will you come in here for a moment?”
That evening, when Esther went to lie down, Joseph took the opportunity to tap lightly on the door of Fannie and Florence’s old bedroom, which Florence had briefly shared with Anna.
“Come in,” he heard Anna say from inside the room.
“Do you mind if I bother you for a minute? I’m looking for something.”
Anna had been lying on her bed—Fannie’s old bed—reading a book. But when he entered she sat up, kicked her feet over the edge of the mattress, and found her shoes. Joseph didn’t mean to make her uncomfortable, wanted her to feel as if the space were hers, too.
“Don’t get up,” he said, but she was already standing. “Please, sit.”
She did so tentatively. Her book remained closed, a finger sandwiched between the pages to hold her place. She watched him look around the room, as if he were inspecting it for the first time. Had he really never noticed how dark the room was at night?
“Is there a bulb out in that lamp?” he asked.
Anna peered under the shade and shook her head. “No, it’s fine.”
“It’s dark in here. Hardly enough light to read by.”
Anna looked at the lamp again, and then at the book in her hand. “It’s all right.”
Joseph made a mental note to look for a bigger lamp, with a stronger bulb.
The room was generously proportioned. Against one wall sat two brass beds, and between them was a Stickley bedside table that had belonged to Esther’s mother. There were also two dressers, neither of which were particularly fine pieces of furniture. On the dressers were a few knickknacks—a kaleidoscope that Joseph had given Fannie when she was too old to get much enjoyment out of it and the Pageant Cup,which Florence hadn’t bothered to remove when they’d moved out of the apartment last summer.
He began to open the drawers of Florence’s dresser, then wondered if he owed Anna some kind of explanation. “I’m looking for Bill Burgess’s address,” he said.
She placed her book on the bedside table and walked over to the dresser, turned on another lamp, which cast even less light than the one beside her bed. “Bill Burgess is her coach?” she asked.
“In France, yes. Or maybe England.”
“I haven’t seen an address book.”
“I wondered if it might be in her correspondence. Or maybe in that swimming notebook she kept. The one with the pale blue cover.”
“That’s here,” she said, leading him over to the bedside table. She pulled open the drawer, letting the delicate brass handle clink against the drawer plate, then stepped aside, sat back down on her bed. “I haven’t seen many letters. Is it possible she left them at school?”
Joseph nearly wept at the sight of the notebook. All of that energy, all of his daughter’s hopes for herself, never to be realized. He picked the book up and sat down on Florence’s bed, facing Anna. The inked words on the cover had run together since the last time he’d laid eyes on it. He ran his fingers along the words that were still legible:FLORENCE ADLER SWIMS.
