“She drowned off States Avenue. Yesterday afternoon.”
“No—”
Esther nodded her head, wiped at her wet cheeks with her hands.
McLoughlin handed her a handkerchief. “She was a very good swimmer, wasn’t she?”
“Incredible,” said Esther.
They sat together for quite some time, listening to the sounds of the hospital coming awake. A door opened and closed, a telephone rang in the distance, a pair of heels clicked up the stairs. Finally, McLoughlin spoke, “You’re not here because you want my help telling Fannie.”
Esther shook her head and blew her nose into the handkerchief. “I don’t want to tell her anything.”
“You’re worried about an early labor?”
“Do you think I’m being irrational?”
“Not at all. It’s a real risk. Particularly after last summer.” McLoughlin stood and walked around to the other side of her desk, where she pulled open a drawer and removed a pad of paper. “So, let’s figure out how to do this.”
“I think we need to move her to a private room,” said Esther. “Somewhere where we can keep better tabs on who comes and goes. Her father and I can pay the difference.”
“How many people know about… Florence?” asked McLoughlin. Esther could tell she had been about to say something else, was about to use a less sanitized word like drowning or death and had stopped herself. Esther’s confidence in McLoughlin grew.
“A lot of the lifeguards. The women in the Hebrew burial society.”
“No one on the hospital staff?”
“Not to my knowledge. She was treated at the hospital tent at Virginia Avenue.” McLoughlin scribbled something on the pad.
“And there’s no announcement in the paper?” the superintendent asked.
Esther reached into her handbag, removed the morning’s newspaper, and handed it to McLoughlin. Samuel hadn’t managed to kill the story, only to soften its blow. On the front page was the headline GIRL DIES WHILE BATHING OFF STATES AV.
“Do they identify her?” McLoughlin said.
Florence was described as a local girl and a strong swimmer but was never named, thank God. “No,” Esther whispered, “but an astute reader might very well figure it out.”
McLoughlin skimmed the article, then began to write. On one sheet of paper, she listed the names of the doctors and nurses she planned to let in on the secret. “Lucky for us, the preceptors graduate tomorrow at noon. And the new class won’t start until the end of the summer.”
“Preceptors?”
“Students,” said McLoughlin. “Doesn’t matter. It’s just fewer people who have to know.”
On another sheet of paper, McLoughlin spelled out the accommodations the staff would make to limit Fannie’s access to the outside world. They’d move her to a private room, of course, but they’d also remove the room’s radio and limit Fannie’s ability to visit the sun-room, where a telephone and a radio had been installed for the use of all the women on the ward.
“Can someone read her mail?” Esther asked.
It was the only request McLoughlin seemed to bristle at. “I’d prefer we just stop her mail entirely. We can deliver anything we receive to you, and you can decide what to do with it.”
By the time they finalized the plan, it was half-past seven. McLoughlin tore the papers from the pad and folded them in half and then in quarters. “I’d better start my rounds or someone’s going to put a copy of the Atlantic City Press on Fannie’s breakfast tray.”
Esther snatched up her handbag and stood to go. “I’ll be by to visit later. After—”
McLoughlin eyed her mournfully. “Until then, you are not to worry. She’s in good hands.”
Esther knew she should thank McLoughlin, wanted to even, but when she went to say something, she found she had no words left.
* * *
Joseph arrived home an hour before the burial.
When he walked through the door, he looked pale and exhausted. His already thin hair was flat, his hazel eyes—normally bright and gleaming—had turned a sludge brown, and the dark circles under them looked unlikely to ever be erased. Esther wrapped her arms around him and they stood like that for a long time, not moving, barely breathing.
“Are you all right?” she finally asked.
“I can’t,” he said quietly as he unlocked her arms and moved toward the bedroom, where she had already laid his best suit out on the bed. She tried to swallow the rebuff, to remind herself that they each hurt in their own ways.
Isaac cut his arrival close, showing up at the apartment just a few minutes ahead of the rabbi. Gussie flew into his arms and refused to be put down, clutching his neck that much tighter every time he tried to release her. Ordinarily, Esther might have told her to stop being ridiculous but today she just sat quietly on the sofa and watched the scene unfold, her eyes watering as she thought about how Joseph had spent the last eighteen hours with his own daughter.
Esther couldn’t believe that Isaac was really going to wear his beige sport coat to the burial. It had no lines to speak of and looked about as sharp as a paper bag on Isaac’s tall frame. Were Fannie and Isaac’s circumstances so dire, the salary Joseph paid Isaac so insufficient, that he couldn’t have purchased something more appropriate this morning? A lightweight worsted suit in gray or blue would have been useful to own under any circumstance, and Sam Sloteroff would surely have given him a good price on it.
Despite the jacket, Isaac was a handsome man. He had a high forehead and a strong jaw and teeth that were unnaturally straight. At thirty-three, his dark hair was starting to recede, but Esther imagined that he’d remain an attractive man, even when it was gone.
Last evening, Esther had telephoned Fannie and Isaac’s apartment three times before Isaac picked up. When he finally answered, near midnight, he had seemed out of breath, and Esther wondered briefly if he’d been drinking. He told her he’d been asleep, which explained the endless ringing and his hard breathing, but not his stoic reaction when she told him that Florence was dead. Isaac asked so few questions, demanded so few answers, that Esther found it difficult to believe he could have possibly heard her. He’d known Florence since she was twelve years old. Surely the duration of their relationship, if nothing else, demanded a real reaction.
It wasn’t until she proposed keeping Florence’s death from Fannie that Isaac seemed to come fully awake.
“What will we tell her?” he had asked, his voice unsteady.
“Nothing. Or rather, the ordinary things,” said Esther. “That she’s busy training to swim the Channel. That she’s preparing for the trip to France.”
“How long can we possibly keep that up?”
“Florence is set to leave on the tenth of July.”
The line went quiet. Was. Florence was set to leave on the tenth of July.
“It feels wrong,” said Isaac. “Not telling her. She’d want to know.”
“Isaac,” said Esther, not yet pleading but utterly prepared to, “you remember what it was like.”
“We don’t know what caused the early labor.”
“Do you want to risk it? And possibly lose another son?” She was playing almost all of her cards now, even the ones she’d promised herself she wouldn’t touch.