Joseph rubbed his hands against the side of his face, as if he could no longer take in any new information.
There could be no funeral. Nothing public, anyway. “Fannie can’t know.”
“Is Fannie not well?” the rabbi asked.
He knew about last year’s loss. Most of the congregation did. Fannie had carried the baby nearly to term, had been told by most of the women in the congregation, at one point or another, that she was carrying high and that the baby would be a boy.Kena horah. The fact that the babyhadbeen a boy hadn’t made it any easier for Fannie to return to the sanctuary on the High Holy Days.
“Fannie’s expecting again,” said Esther, her blood simmering beneath the surface of her skin. “She’s been at Atlantic City Hospital for two weeks.” Surely, she’d mentioned it to him. If she hadn’t, someone on the women’s committee had.
“When is the child due?” the rabbi asked.
“Not until August.”
“And you want to keep this news from her?”
Esther looked at Joseph. “We can’t risk her losing another baby.” Her husband continued to stroke his face, his eyes unfocused. “You agree, don’t you, Joseph? Joseph?”
“What?” he finally said.
“That we can’t tell Fannie. Not when the pregnancy is already so precarious.”
“What you’re proposing will be extremely difficult,” said the rabbi, looking across the room to Abe for support.
Esther considered all the different ways Fannie might learn that her sister was dead. The plan was not without risk. But what felt riskiest was telling Fannie the truth.
“We sit Shiva so we can have the time to look inward, to properly reflect on our loss. But we invite the community in because mourning is intensely lonely, and our friends and family can offer comfort.” Rabbi Levy continued to talk long after Esther had stopped listening.
“What time is it?” she interrupted.
The rabbi consulted his pocket watch. “Half-past eight.”
“Abe, is there a telephone I might use?”
He motioned down the hallway, “There’s one in my office.”
Joseph grabbed her by the arm as she stood, “Bubala?”
“I’m going to call Samuel Brody, over at thePress,” she said. “We have to keep this out of the paper.”
It was late when Rabbi Levy dropped Esther off at the apartment but, even in the dark, she recognized the young man sitting on her front stoop.
“Do you know him?” the rabbi asked.
“Yes.”
The rabbi let the car run while he walked around to open Esther’s door and help her out. “I’ll collect you tomorrow at two.”
She nodded, unable to take her eyes off Stuart, who was still in his ACBP uniform. When he stood the streetlamp illuminated his face, and she saw that he’d been crying.
The rabbi’s car puttered away, and Esther motioned for Stuart to sit. Then she joined him. “Are Anna and Gussie upstairs?”
He shook his head. “When I got over here, Anna answered the door. I didn’t believe it was true until I saw her face.”
“How’s Gussie?”
“Confused, I think.”
Something about Florence’s friendship with Stuart had never sat right with Esther. It was her experience that boys like him, whose fathers owned hotels on the Boardwalk and not shops north of Arctic Avenue, went away to college and usually to the sorts of schools she and Joseph lambasted. Schools like Princeton and Yale that had, in the last several years, implemented strict quotas and new admissions standards to keep their classrooms from swelling with too many Jewish students. That he had joined the Atlantic City Beach Patrol as a lifeguard, and cobbled together a coaching career in the off-season, struck Esther as a move designed to infuriate his father as much as anything else. His father was worth infuriating—The Covington Hotel was one of several hotels that refused Jewish guests—but sometimes Esther wondered ifStuart’s friendship with Florence was just another way to get under his father’s skin.
