CHAPTER 1

6:30 PM Sunday
ISAAC Franklin paused at the door of the den and looked down at his two sons curled up on the paisley shawl that covered the long sofa.
Byron was 11, Henry 10. With their dark, tousled hair and slim bodies they looked as if they were his natural children.
The TV set was on, but the boys were half watching, half asleep. They'd been swimming. As they did on Sundays.
It was a family tradition. Isaac's father had risen at five every morning and gone to his club to swim.
Isaac had been captain of the swimming team at boarding school and pleased his father enormously.
He still remembered his voice.
"Swimming was my salvation, it kept me sane. It will do the same for you."
His father had said it so often that Isaac became tired of hearing it. When he was twelve, he had threatened to give up swimming as an act of defiance. His father had said nothing at first. And then the same litany, "Do what you want, but swimming will keep you sane."
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That was the way his father had been. Adamant about what he believed. Isaac had inherited that strength. Without it, he would have divorced Harriett long ago, before they adopted the boys.
In fact, his father had been right. Isaac still loved to swim. It put him in touch with himself. One of the four elements was water, he often thought. One of the pure things of the earth.
In 1920 Isaac's father Murray Franklin had migrated to America to join his uncle's business -- a grimy sweatshop in the grim Lower East Side of Manhattan. He was barely 16. And barely able to hide his horror at the exhausted women slaving over their sewing machines 12 hours a day.
He had left behind his home on Hvar, an idyllic small island on the Dalmatian coast. The beauty of the islands rising steeply from the calm deep blue of the Adriatic was a memory that haunted Murray Franklin all his life.
He had swum in the bays every day. With the warm waters flowing past his body he forgot the stigma of poverty, of being Jewish, of the anxiety of waiting for his uncle's money to arrive from New York.Next »