* * *
Eventually, they came to take Florence away. A car pulled up along the Boardwalk and two men got out, carrying a wooden stretcher between them. Esther recognized one of the men as Abe Roth, who ran the Jewish funeral home.
“They can’t take her!” Esther whispered to Joseph. “Please don’t let them take her.”
“Bubala, we will go with her. We won’t let her be alone.”
The men bowed their heads when they arrived at the cot where Florence rested.
“Joseph. Esther,” Abe said. “I’m so very sorry.”
Esther couldn’t look at him. She kept her eyes on her daughter’s pale cheeks, her purple lips.
“You’re still over at Beth Kehillah?” Abe asked. He and his wife were members of Rodef Sholom, a conservative shul on Atlantic Avenue.
Joseph nodded.
“We’ll give Rabbi Levy a call and let him know. He’ll get the Chevra Kadisha over to our place. I assume you want the Taharah performed.”
Esther’s grandmother had been a member of the Chevra Kadisha in Wiesbaden, and her mother in Philadelphia. Still, Esther winced at the idea of women she barely knew touching her daughter’s lovely, long limbs, washing away the salt water and the sand that clung to her arms and legs. Florence’s arms had propelled her through the ocean but first they had propelled her across Esther’s kitchen floor. They had been soft and dimpled and smelled of Pond’s soap and talcum powder. Esther was the only one who had ever bathed her.
“Would you like me to say the Vidui?” Abe asked.
“What does she have to atone for?” Esther asked, her voice sharp. “She’s twenty. My beautiful girl is just twenty.”
“Esther,” Joseph said quietly, his voice choked. To Abe, he said, “Please.”
Abe began to chant the words as Esther sobbed into the wet silk of Florence’s bathing suit. She imagined the Hebrew letters knitting together as they floated through the air, forming an invisible blanket that, when wrapped around Florence, would keep her safe. When Abe began the Shema, Joseph joined in, “Shema Yisrael, Adonai Elohenu Adonai Echad.” Hear O Israel, the Lord is our God, the Lord is One. How many times had Esther heard this prayer? A thousand times? More? Had she ever considered what it meant? It was Joseph who was more connected to the old ways, Joseph who had grown up in the small shtetl of Lackenbach, where opportunities were scarce but Jewish law abounded.
Women were not obligated to say the Shema but, as Abe and Joseph continued their recitation, Esther began to mutter the words through her tears. Perhaps by saying this prayer, on this beach, on this day, Esther might shield her daughter from an unknown she could neither see nor imagine. She whispered, “Adonai Hu Ha’Elohim. Adonai Hu Ha’Elohim.” Adonai is God.
* * *
While the women of the Chevra Kadisha observed the ritual of Taharah, washing Florence’s body and dressing it in the tachrichim they’d brought for the occasion, Esther and Joseph sat on a sofa in the front room of Roth’s Funeral Home and spoke with Rabbi Levy.
The rabbi, whom the congregation had hired five years ago, was only adequate. He looked the part of a rabbi, with his graying beard and the spectacles he wore at the end of his nose, but in Esther’s opinion, he had always been far more concerned with the profitability of the congregation’s fund-raisers than with the spirituality of its members.
Rabbi Levy offered to secure a shomer for Florence—a congregant who would sit guard over her body throughout the night—but Joseph wouldn’t hear of leaving his daughter with anyone.
“It will be a long night,” said the rabbi. “Are you sure?”
“I’m her father,” Joseph said, and the simple explanation made Esther feel proud to have married him, to have borne the children that made those three small words true.
Abe Roth had scoured the funeral home’s closets and returned with a dark gray suit jacket and a mink fur stole. He handed the jacket to Joseph, who left it draped across his knees. Then he wrapped the stole, which smelled of mothballs, around Esther’s shoulders. She thanked him and shuddered, involuntarily. For the first time, she realized she was still wearing her bathing costume.
Rabbi Levy asked Esther if her family would travel from Philadelphia, and she could feel herself growing annoyed. Her father had been dead for ten years, her mother for three. The rabbi had said Kaddish for both of them, repeatedly.
“No,” she told him, refusing to elaborate.
“Is an afternoon service all right?”
Esther looked at Joseph, who had the same pronounced jaw as both his daughters. It had suited Florence but made Fannie look so serious, even as a young girl.
She whispered Fannie’s name. Was this the first time, since Florence’s death, that she had so much as thought of her surviving daughter? “Joseph,” she said, louder this time, “Fannie.”
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 baby had been 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 the Press,” she said. “We have to keep this out of the paper.”