“You know Blackwell struck a deal with Applegate Funeral Home?”
Plenty of people liked to retire to Florida, Jim explained, but no one wanted to be buried in the swamp. Blackwell had guessed, correctly, that Marcus Applegate was buying round-trip tickets for his staff, every time they needed to accompany a casket north.
“Blackwell offered up his binder boys. Applegate only has to buy a one-way ticket, guys like you go back where you came from, and everyone’s happy.”
Isaac couldn’t say he was happy but he raised his glass anyway, “To going back where we came from.”
“But never forgetting the swamp.”
After the casket was delivered, Isaac could have gone home. In fact, he did for a few days. But if Alliance had felt stifling before, it felt suffocating after five years in West Palm Beach. In the years Isaac had been gone, his mother had died and his father had grown slower, quieter, less sure of himself. The house had begun its gradual decline and so had his relationship with the man who could no more understand Isaac’s meteoric success than the rapid waning of his fortunes.
Isaac was twenty-six and so poor that he walked the forty miles from Alliance to Atlantic City. It took him twelve hours. He would have walked to the ends of the earth to get away from that farm and the disappointed look on his father’s face but, as it happened, he only needed to walk as far as Adler’s Bakery.
Isaac sat out on the porch and watched his father and daughter’s slow approach. Gussie ran ahead to open the gate, then held it open until Isaac’s father entered the yard.
“Will you get your grandpa a drink of water?” Isaac’s father asked her when they neared the porch, and she ran off, into the house, the screened door slapping at her heels.
“Gussie told me about Florence,” he said, in Yiddish.
The use of Florence’s name, so far from his in-laws’ apartment, gave Isaac an odd jolt. Alliance and Atlantic City felt worlds away from each other.
“It came as a shock,” said Isaac.
“Terrible.”
“She was a good swimmer. A great swimmer, really.”
“I remember. What do they think happened?”
“No one knows. Maybe a cramp. Or a rip current.”
“And Gussie saw the whole thing?”
“Unfortunately, yes.”
“Poor—” Isaac’s father said, but stopped short when Gussie returned to the porch, walking ever so slowly so as not to spill the water, which she’d filled to the brim of a tall glass.
“Could I have a glass of water as well?” Isaac asked her. She sighed dramatically, as if she were always being put out with such requests, but then ran back inside the house.
“How is Fannie taking it?”
“We’re not telling her,” said Isaac, watching his father for some indication of his opinion on the matter. Surely other normal people thought Esther’s plan preposterous?
Isaac’s father gave nothing away, just asked, “Is the pregnancy so risky?”
“I’ve wondered the same thing. I don’t know. Her blood pressure is a little high, and we don’t know what happened”—Isaac paused—“last time.”
In between the dozen Feldman children who had lived, there had been several others who had not. It had never occurred to Isaac to ask his parents about those children until after Hyram died, and by then his mother was gone and his father’s memory was failing. There were logistical questions he had wanted to ask. Was it all right to plan a small burial for a dead baby? Should they sit Shiva? And then there were more personal questions. When would the pain in his chest go away? When would he stop seeing his son’s face when he closed his eyes at night? In the end, he had asked his father nothing.
Gussie and Isaac sat with his father on the farmhouse’s wide front porch into the early evening when the sun sank low in the sky. Isaac tried not to catalog the house’s failings—the peeling paint, the wood rot, the tree that had grown too close to the porch.
When the mosquitoes came out, Isaac’s father shuffled inside to take thecholentoff the stove. He poured wine and unwrapped a loaf of rye bread, a few slices already cut away.
“No challah?” Isaac asked.
“No challah,” said his father, “but this will do.” Isaac wondered how often his father was getting into Vineland to shop and made a note to bring groceries the next time he visited.
Isaac knew that, if it weren’t for this visit, his father would be back at the synagogue now, marking the end of Shabbos with theHavdalah. To his credit, he didn’t try to get Isaac to go. Instead, he lit a candle and led a blessing, both tasks Isaac’s mother would have done when she was alive. After he sang theShavua Tov,Gussie joined in.Eliyahu hanavi, Eliyahu hatishbi, Eliyahu hagiladi. Bimheirah b’yameinu, yavo eileinu, im Mashiach ben David.
