“Anna?” both men asked at the same time.
Isaac
When Isaac leaned back farenough in his desk chair, he could see Joseph’s office door, which had been shut all week. He always kept one eye on the door since it benefited him to know his father-in-law’s comings and goings, but this week, he had paid more attention to it than usual.
If Esther’s instructions had been for both Joseph and Isaac to return to work and act as if everything were normal, Joseph was failing miserably at that task. Nothing about his shuttered blinds or that silly handwritten sign he’d posted on his office door looked normal. And on Thursday afternoon, when Mrs. Simons was summoned into Joseph’s office and returned to her desk visibly shaken, Isaac was sure Joseph had told her the truth about Florence. The brittle woman—usually so stoic—dabbed at her eyes for several minutes before hurrying to the powder room, where Isaac could hear her sobs even over the exhaust fan.
On Friday morning there had been a revolving door of visitors to see Joseph. First Florence’s friend Stuart, and then Anna. Stuart’s visit made a certain amount of sense—the scrub had clearly been besotted by Florence. And everyone knew he was on the outs with his own father, so it wasn’t a complete surprise to see him latching on to Joseph. But Anna’s visit was less easily explained, and as a result, Isaac spent the better part of Friday wondering about it. To Isaac’s knowledge, she hadn’t come to the plant once in the more than three months she’d been staying with the Adlers. Today, she had remained inside Joseph’s office for a quarter of an hour, maybe a little longer, and when she left, she had looked relieved. Since Isaac’s office faced the street, he waited the thirty seconds he knew it would take Anna to make her way downthe two flights of stairs and emerge from the building, then he stood up for a stretch and walked over to the window.
Interestingly, Stuart had waited for her. He sat out on the steps of the plant, hat in hand, face stretched toward the sun. When Anna pushed open the building’s heavy front door, Stuart jumped to his feet. Though he had tried, Isaac wasn’t able to make out what Stuart said to her, but he had watched the two of them walk off down Tennessee Avenue, before returning to his desk.
Anna was a hard one to figure out, partially because her accent was thick and partially because she had materialized out of thin air. The story was that Anna’s mother, Inez, had grown up alongside Joseph but Isaac was sure there had to be more to it than that. It was one thing for Joseph to write an affidavit for Anna—everyone knew the affidavits were as meaningless as the pieces of paper they were written on. But putting her up in his spare room was something else altogether. Isaac didn’t think it was the type of thing he’d do for just anybody.
There was little debate that things in Germany were getting bad. Since coming to power the year before, the Nazi Party had already removed Jews from the civil service, curtailed the rights of Jewish doctors, lawyers, and other professionals, forbidden performances by Jewish actors, and restricted the number of Jewish students allowed to attend German schools and universities. Joseph followed it all very closely and reported on the most notable offenses to Isaac as he came and went from their third-floor offices. In lieu of a greeting, Joseph would offer him a headline straight from the morning’s paper, “They’ve revoked the licenses of Jewish accountants” or “No more medical school for Jews in Bavaria.” According to Joseph, Roosevelt had his head in the sand, and if Americans waited for Congress to do something, they’d be waiting a long time. Like many of the Jewish businessmen in town, Joseph donated to the American Jewish Committee, and Isaac suspected his gifts were generous since his name was inscribed in the “golden book” and the president of the local chapter made a habit of calling on Joseph with some regularity.
It’s not that Isaac didn’t care about the plight of Germany’s Jews. It’sjust that, in Russia, discrimination had been the least of people’s worries. The stories he’d grown up listening to—about beatings and rapes and entire villages set ablaze—made it harder for Isaac to get worked up about the fact that Jewish merchants in Germany had to mark their shops with yellow Stars of David. He found it almost quaint that his father-in-law considered the persecution of Jews to be news at all.
Ostensibly, Anna was here because she hadn’t been able to get into college in Berlin, or anywhere else in Germany for that matter. When her mother had written to Joseph, he’d apparently been all too happy to throw money at the problem. Maybe Isaac was old-fashioned but a girl not being able to go to college hardly seemed like an international crisis.
Isaac rolled a pencil back and forth between his fingers, then tapped it on his desk. He needed a plan. The weekend was nearly upon him, and if he wasn’t careful, he would spend it in Esther and Joseph’s living room, sitting a modified Shiva.
It wasn’t that Isaac didn’t mourn Florence’s death or want to honor her life. In fact, he felt his sister-in-law’s loss acutely. He could remember, on his early visits to the Adlers’ apartment, twelve-year-old Florence interviewing him with the same ferocity as her parents but with much less tact.Have you kissed her?she asked once, looking him straight in the eye. Isaac, who had been the baby of his own family without ever managing to be babied at all, marveled at her confidence and got some satisfaction out of watching her grow into a woman who was every bit as loud and brash as the girl she’d once been.
Sitting Shiva for Florence would be painful. Excruciating without Fannie or any callers to offer up distractions. Isaac could try to disappear for a few hours on Saturday, tell Esther and Joseph he needed to visit Fannie. But he hated visiting the hospital almost as much as he hated visiting his in-laws’ apartment. It wasn’t just about Hyram. There was something about being on the maternity ward, surrounded by so many women, all of them concerned with the business of life and death, that left him feeling exposed. He could feel Fannie studying him, as if she could see him more clearly without the interference of the outside world.
Isaac remembered the letter Fannie had given him when he’d visited on Tuesday, and felt for it in his jacket pocket. It was still there, folded in half, its corners beginning to curl. He removed it, smoothed it at its crease, and studied his wife’s handwriting. The loop of theF, the generousA. What would Fannie do when she learned that Florence was dead? Was Esther right? Would this news be too much for her to bear?
Isaac was not inclined to think so. But then again, he had been the one who had urged Fannie to ride the Dodgem with him last spring.
It had been a pretty day, still two months before Fannie’s due date, and Esther had volunteered to watch Gussie for the afternoon. The day had a carefree quality that reminded Isaac of that first summer, before they were married. The two of them had eaten a hamburger at Mammy’s and then walked to Steeplechase Pier, which had recently reopened. They picked their way through the crowd, admiring the loud games and the brightly colored carousel at the center of the pier. Behind it sat a new ride with a big yellow sign that screamedDODGEMin giant blue letters.
“Oh, I get it,” said Fannie. “Dodge them.”
Isaac watched as fifteen or twenty people, all in miniature metal cars with thick rubber bumpers, whipped around a small rink.
“I suppose the point is to bump into each other?” he asked as they watched a man, who looked oversized in his little car, plow into the car of a small boy who must have been his son. Fannie didn’t say anything, just laughed when she saw the boy lurch forward in surprise.
Isaac pulled two quarters from his pocket, held them out to Fannie, and said, “Shall we give it a spin? You’ve always wanted to learn to drive.”
Fannie shook her head no, inclined to stay on the sidelines, but Isaac pushed.
“It’ll be just like old times. Remember when we used to ride the Roundabout?” he said, a twinkle in his eye.
“Do you think it’s safe?” she asked, one hand resting protectively on her stomach.
“Perfectly.”
When Fannie started bleeding early the following morning, Isaac hadn’t wanted to believe that the two incidents could be related. They had called Esther and Joseph immediately, told them that something was wrong and that they needed them to take Gussie right away. While they waited for Joseph to come with the car, Isaac had practically pleaded for absolution from Fannie, and if not that, then for Fannie to keep the correlative circumstances to herself.
“Fan, it was barely a bump. I mean, you didn’t feel a thing, right?”
She didn’t say anything, just looked at him with a terrified expression on her face.
“It was just fun, that’s all,” he said, a detectable note of fear creeping into his voice.
Hyram was born at six o’clock in the evening but it was a quarter past nine before Isaac learned of his son’s arrival. A doctor, who introduced himself as Gabriel Rosenthal, came to find Isaac in the hospital lobby, and it was the way he said “Mr. Feldman” that made Isaac realize, with a kind of gross certainty, they would lose the child.
Fannie had suffered a placental abruption, Dr. Rosenthal explained. There had been nothing to do but allow her to labor.
