Inez’s letter, littered with German stamps, had arrived in the foyer of their Atlantic Avenue house like a small hand grenade last October. Joseph was at the plant, so Esther had slid the envelope open, too curious about its contents to wait until he got home. She had been disappointed when she was unable to identify the sender’s handwriting or interpret the signature, much less read the letter’s contents, which were written in Joseph’s native Hungarian.
When Joseph had finally arrived home and read the letter from start to finish, he gave Esther only the barest of translations. Inez’s first husband had been killed in the war, and in the aftermath, Inez had moved from the embattled borderlands of Austria-Hungary to Vienna with Anna. There, she had met and married Paul, who was studying at the university. When Paul secured a teaching position in Berlin, they had moved to Prussia and eventually naturalized but everything was in jeopardy now that the Third Reich had come to power. Last summer, the family’s citizenship had been revoked, and a few months later, Paul was let go from his position. As for Anna, she hadn’t secured a spot at any of the German universities to which she’d applied the previous year, and it was Inez and Paul’s sincere wish that she get out of Germany before things got any worse.
“What else does she say?” Esther had asked, glancing at the three-page letter, written in tight script.
“That’s all,” said Joseph, unable to meet her gaze, and Esther had known right away that he was lying. She could have summarized what Joseph had told her in five good sentences.
Over the next several months, Joseph helped Inez identify several American universities that might be good options for Anna. In some cases, he’d even written away for the application materials himself. Once Anna’s application had been submitted to New Jersey State Teachers College, Joseph picked up the phone, calling anyone he knew with a connection to the school or its admissions director. Esther had thought Anna sounded smart enough to get into the school on her own merit, but Joseph told her he wanted to leave nothing to chance. Even when the acceptance came through, Joseph kept working, turning his full attention to helping Inez and Paul secure all the necessary documentation for Anna’s student visa application. He offered to sponsor her, and when the visa was granted faster than expected, to put Anna up for the summer.
Esther told herself to be gracious, both about Anna’s stay and the help she knew Joseph was now providing Inez and Paul, who were also eager to get out of Germany. The situation over there did indeed sound dire, and Esther knew several families at Beth Kehillah that were trying to help relatives, in Germany and elsewhere, immigrate to the United States.
The difference, Esther reminded herself, was that Anna wasn’t a relative. She was barely even a friend. When Esther and Joseph had taken her to the Jewish Consumptive Relief Society’s fund-raiser, back in April, it had been hard to know how to introduce her. This is Anna, the daughter of an old friend of Joseph’s. Was that what Inez and Joseph had been to each other? Just old friends? Anytime Esther tried to bring up Inez, Joseph bristled.
Gussie coughed and turned over in her sleep, and Esther watched as Anna adjusted her own body to accommodate the little girl’s.
“I’m home,” Esther said aloud but Anna didn’t answer. She breathed slowly in and out, her eyes closed, one arm stretched behind her head. What Esther wouldn’t have given to be trapped in a sleep so deep that she couldn’t be woken.
* * *
By a quarter to six the next morning, Esther was waiting in a chair outside the office of the hospital superintendent, Nellie McLoughlin. Esther had been inside the office once before, last summer, when they had needed to decide what to do with Fannie’s baby, but this early in the morning, the first-floor office was shut up tight.
Esther wasn’t one for putting women in charge of things, but it was hard to find a person in all of Atlantic City who didn’t think McLoughlin was a skilled administrator and the right person for the hospital’s top job. McLoughlin had run the hospital’s nursing school for a decade and had played a large and visible role in the hospital’s recent fund-raising campaign, which resulted in the construction of the new wing.
“Mrs. Adler,” said a stiff voice that Esther realized belonged to a woman standing directly in front of her. She looked up from her lap to find Nellie McLoughlin, taller and more imposing than she remembered, staring down at her.
“Miss McLoughlin,” said Esther as she stood on liquid legs.
“To what do I owe the pleasure of this early morning visit?” McLoughlin asked as she slid her key into the lock.
Esther waited until McLoughlin pushed the door open and turned on the office’s overhead light before following her across the threshold, “Do you have a moment?”
“Certainly,” McLoughlin said as she placed her handbag in an empty drawer of a tall filing cabinet, then unpinned her hat and set it inside the drawer as well. She gestured toward two chairs that sat across from a modest, metal desk. “Is everything all right with Fannie?”
“It’s not Fannie,” said Esther. “It’s her sis—” She couldn’t get the word out. The room was too hot. She yanked at the collar of her dress, tried to undo the top button. Couldn’t do that either. “Sis.” It was as if, with the utterance of this one little word, she had rediscovered that Florence was dead. Esther bent at the waist, unable to breathe. She could hear McLoughlin asking if she was all right, could feel a hand on her shoulder. Esther took a series of short breaths, tried to fill her lungs, but couldn’t find enough air. She began to truly panic then, heard someone yelling for a nurse. Was it McLoughlin? This was not how she wanted this meeting to go.
“I’m fine,” she tried to say as the room grew crowded with people. There was McLoughlin, a nurse, later a man in a white coat. She focused on the small floral pattern of her own dress. The flowers were pastel blue and yellow and pink, and they danced in front of her eyes.
“I’d recommend a sedative,” Esther heard the man say. “Something to calm her down, let her rest for a while.”
“Mrs. Adler,” said McLoughlin. “Do you hear me?”
Esther nodded, tried to swim back up to the surface of her own consciousness. There was no time for any of this. She had to talk to McLoughlin, had to protect Fannie.
“I’m all right,” she whispered.
“Can you sit up?”
Esther slowly raised her head from her knees, looked around the office, and eventually made eye contact with McLoughlin. She was mortified by her own behavior. “I’m sorry.”
“You have nothing to be sorry for,” said McLoughlin, leaning against the edge of her desk. “Tell me what’s wrong.”
Esther looked at the doctor who was standing just a few feet away from the two women, then looked back at McLoughlin. The superintendent nodded her head toward the door, and the doctor disappeared through it.
“Yesterday,” Esther began. She didn’t know what to say next. She breathed in and out, slowly. “Fannie’s sister died.”
McLoughlin sank into the chair beside Esther’s. “I’m so sorry.”
Esther began to cry in earnest now. It was so unlike her but all of her habits and predilections seemed entirely baseless now. How many more times in her life would she have to repeat that sentence or something similar? Fannie’s sister died. My younger daughter died. One of my daughters died when she was young. If Esther lived until she was an old woman, she would still be explaining Florence’s absence, trying to understand it herself.