The Hours Count (11 page)

I remembered what Ethel had said, that she barely knew Jake, that she wasn’t even sure who’d invited him.
He’s lying to me,
I thought.
Why?

But maybe he wasn’t lying. Maybe Julie had invited Jake and hadn’t told her. Jake’s eyes were so kind, he was so kind, I wanted to trust him, I wanted to let him help us. “Okay,” I said, pushing all of my doubts aside. After all, Jake was, as Bubbe Kasha would say, offering me a
mitzvah
. And
mitzvot
were not to be questioned.

I stood and the ache in my stomach grew sharper, so sharp that I couldn’t breathe for a moment, and I doubled over in pain.

“Millie,” I heard Jake saying, though now his voice sounded very far away as if he were on the other side of a tunnel. “Are you all right? You’re bleeding.”

“Bleeding?”
I said. Qr maybe I didn’t say anything at all. I looked down and there was a spot of red on the top of my scuffed black
shoe.

“Where’s David?” Jake asks. He whispers the words in my ear, David’s name, like a lullaby, still soft and sweet and beautiful. Jake steps around the barricades, away from the lights, and he pulls my arm to take me with him. But we’re on the wrong side of things. I wanted Jake to take me in, not to step out here, and I propel myself forward, back toward the entrance, until he catches me and holds my arms, holding me back.

“Millie.” His voice is low, even, just the way I always remember it was back when everything was still perfect. “You didn’t answer my question.”

But I’m not going to. I’m unwilling to tell him, to let him see what has become of me, of us, since I’ve seen him last. “You have to stop them,” I say instead.

“I can’t,” he says. “It has gone so far beyond you or me . . .”

“But you know that Ethel is innocent,” I say, pushing harder to get away from him, to run past the barriers, but I have no plan for what I will do once I’m inside. Who will I talk to if not Jake? The names of all the men from the trial run carelessly through my head in an infinite loop. All the Irvings. Irving Kaufman. Irving Saypol. I never liked the name Irving . . . and I am certain they’re nowhere near Sing Sing tonight anyway. I picture them in their large, comfortable houses, enjoying a nightcap on their back patios, watching fireflies. And it doesn’t seem fair. None of this is fair.

Jake doesn’t answer me, and I look up and catch his face in the orange glow of a flare, the soft yellow of the moonlight. He looks older than I remember him. He has stubble across his cheeks and chin as if he hasn’t remembered to shave in weeks. I want to reach up and touch his face, to feel the coarseness of the stubble the way I once did, but now I clench my fists tightly at my sides. “You can’t let her die,” I say. “You just can’t.”

Jake looks away from me so I can’t tell what he’s thinking, and then the flare burns out and dusk has come on so fast that I can see him standing there next to me only as a shadow. How many times have I imagined this moment, standing this close to him again? And yet never like this. Never with Ethel’s life so wrongly about to slip away from her. Above us, a helicopter begins to circle, drowning out everything else for a moment, even my thoughts.

“I’ll tell them everything,” I say to Jake. But now I have to shout for my voice to be heard over the sound of helicopter. “Just get me inside!”

“Millie . . .”

“Think about her children,” I say. “What will John do without her? And little Richie?”

“I’m thinking about
your
children,” Jake says.

My children.
My throat begins to tighten at the thought. It’s hard to breathe, the humidity clinging so heavy to my lungs that I think it might choke me.

The brownstone on West Sixteenth Street was unremarkable. It might have been someone’s home or any kind of doctor’s office. I pulled the slip of paper from my purse and double-checked the address before walking up the steps to go inside. Ethel had written down this address for me last week on a scrap of paper she’d pulled from her purse as we’d watched the children play together at the playground. Her handwriting was perfectly legible and neat, even scribbled hastily leaning against a bench:
17 W. 16th Street.

“How do you know about this?” I’d asked her, wondering how she always seemed to know so much more than I did . . . about everything. It was as if Ethel belonged to this secret club that I never even knew existed. A club of women who loved their husbands? But not the same club that Susan belonged to, so maybe it wasn’t that at all. Ethel was just always so smart, so aware of the world. I was sure she listened to more news programs on the radio than I did or talked to more people than I did.

But Ethel had shrugged as if this secret knowledge were
something simple, something all women inherently had.
Planned Parenthood.
It sounded like something docile—welcoming, even. And I supposed maybe she knew about this place the way she knew about the sliding scale therapy at the Jewish Board of Guardians.

I hadn’t told Ethel still about Jake, that David and I were seeing him two mornings a week, though I listened with interest as she told me about Elizabeth Phillips, whom she and John were going to see once a week now at the Jewish Board of Guardians. “It’s helping. Mrs. Phillips gives good advice,” she’d said, though I couldn’t tell if there had been an air of skepticism in her voice or if she was just cold sitting outside. It was way too cold to be out on the playground—January, the dead of winter. But the sun had been shining and we were both so tired of being cooped up in our tiny apartments with restless children.

That was last week. This morning, I’d left David at Jake’s apartment and I’d come here.

I hadn’t been to see a doctor since that day in November, that first day David and I went to Jake’s apartment. Dr. Greenberg had examined me that afternoon and had later assured an anxious Ed over the telephone that since the bleeding had begun so early, it would not affect us in the long term. Dr. Greenberg had also said no marital relations for at least three months so that my body would have time to heal. And that had been such a relief that I’d been able to swallow down my own feelings of guilt, the understanding that I might have made it happen, that I had wished it upon myself.

I pushed the thought away now as I walked up the steps of the brownstone. This morning was the first time I’d left David at his therapy alone, and I’d refused to meet Jake’s eyes when he’d asked where I was going. In all these months, we had never talked about
that first morning in his apartment, but I understood Jake carried around a secret about me, another secret that I hoped he wouldn’t share. Only Ed knew about the baby I had lost. I hadn’t even told Ethel or my mother. Certainly not Susan, who was in the family way again herself. And all I’d said to Jake this morning was, “I’m going on an errand. If you don’t mind?”

I knew he wouldn’t, but still I couldn’t look at him, as if he might see it in my eyes where it was exactly that I was running off to on this mysterious, unnamed errand.

He’d simply said, “When you get back, maybe you and I could talk?”

I’d so far avoided any kind of therapy of my own with Jake by running out and claiming David and I had things to do, so many errands to run. My mother and Bubbe Kasha to check on. Mr. Bergman to visit. Jake hadn’t pushed the issue until now. And Ethel had told me that she had also been talking on her own with Mrs. Phillips, so I was fairly sure that Jake’s wanting to talk with me wasn’t out of the ordinary. But I didn’t want to. I didn’t want to tell Jake things—deeply personal things—about myself because I had this nagging feeling in my stomach that he would look at me and I would begin to weep. Just like that. Uncontrollably.

First things first,
I reasoned as I walked inside the brownstone. Nevermind that the mere act of walking inside here filled me with dread. If Ed were to find out . . . (although Ethel promised me he never would, that the women here at Planned Parenthood would be discreet, not like Dr. Greenberg). Ed had become even more anxious for another child since Leo, Betty, and the girls had relocated to California last month and Lena was more focused on Ed than ever. But no one would tell Ed anything here, I reminded myself.
And I put my hand tightly against my stomach, breathed deeply, and walked up to the desk.

“Mildred Kauffman,” I told the receptionist, my maiden name feeling like a forgotten freedom and an awful lie. I was her once, this factory girl who never imagined a life where she couldn’t want another child, where she would lie so terribly to her husband.

“The nurse will be right with you, hon.” The receptionist was a blond girl, a wisp of a thing, with a kind smile. This place couldn’t be more different than Dr. Greenberg’s office, and all at once that put me at ease.

A few minutes later, a nurse came out to greet me and take me back into the examining room. She was young, too, and quite pretty. I wondered if that was a requirement for working here. “Come on back, Mildred,” she said. “I’m Anna.” Her voice was so warm, and I followed her back to the examining room.

She offered me a chair to sit in and she sat down across from me as if we were just about to have a friendly conversation. Who knew that a place like this existed? I had imagined something illicit, the kind of places you would hear whispered about among the girls who’d lived on Delancey Street when I was in high school. Harriet Edelstein was rumored to have gotten herself in trouble in high school and then to have found a butcher—not a kosher one either—who had sliced the baby out of her but had done such a terrible job that she almost bled to death, and we heard she would never be able to have children at all. It had been years since I’d seen Harriet, and now I wondered what happened to her, what had ever become of the girl we all whispered about.

“What can we help you with?” I realized the nurse Anna was asking me now and I looked up again. She was smiling at me.

“I cannot be in the family way,” I said curtly the way Mildred Kauffman, a single gal from Delancey Street, might have said it once. Although I never would’ve said that to a stranger, never would’ve considered doing anything like this before I got married, and so the whole thought of it was so absurd that I nearly had to stop myself from laughing.

“Of course,” Anna said. “And are you pregnant right now?”

Pregnant.
She put it so bluntly, but that was really what it was, wasn’t it? Referring to the condition as
in the family way
might imply that Ed and I were truly a family, that any baby was born of love. Saying
pregnant
was clinical but felt right. “No,” I finally answered.

“I can fit you for a diaphragm,” she said, again so bluntly.

“Is there nothing else?” I wasn’t sure if I’d be able to get this past Ed again or what he might do if he were to find out.

“There are things for men, of course,” Anna said, and I shook my head. “But for women?” She sighed. “This is your best option right now. Mrs. Sanger is hoping for a kind of magic pill to be invented. Wouldn’t that be wonderful?”

“A magic pill?”

“Well, not
really
magic, but she believes it can be a done. A simple pill a woman could take just to prevent pregnancy.”

I nodded, but her magical pill seemed just as faraway as a killer fog or the thought of the bomb across the ocean in Russia.

WHEN I ARRIVED
back at Jake’s, I found him and David on the floor, lining up Jake’s colored blocks. Jake had been trying to teach David the colors as symbols and had been encouraging me to practice with David at home. Red was for “hungry.” Blue for “tired.”
Yellow seemed to be for everything else so far and that had been the most frustrating part. David was still—always—drawn to the yellows, and so most of the time I had no idea what it was he wanted.

David looked up at me when I walked in and then quickly looked away. He reached into the pile of blocks and he pulled out a red one, holding it up without meeting my eyes.

“You’re hungry, darling?” I asked, and I felt something tugging in my chest. Was David really in there, locked up inside himself, just as Jake said he was? “Is he”—I turned to Jake—“hungry?” Or was it just an accident that David had grabbed red instead of yellow this time?

Jake pulled his pocket watch out of his jacket pocket and showed it to me. Nearly noon. I realized how long I’d been gone. Almost three hours!

“I’m sorry,” I said to Jake. “I didn’t realize my errand would take so long.”

“That’s quite all right. David and I made some progress today, didn’t we, son?” David didn’t answer or even look up, but I noticed he was stacking the red blocks now, forcing them into a delicate triangular tower. Red, not yellow. All at once—like that. It was no accident. It was progress. David had told me something. Or at least I thought he had.

I felt an enormous surge of gratitude for Jake, for the way he spoke to David.
Son.
He’d been saying it colloquially, from a distance—as his doctor, of course—but I had never heard Ed speak to David with so much kindness.

“I should get him home, get him some lunch.” I bent down to clean up the blocks.

I felt Jake’s hand on my shoulder, and I stopped for a moment. “Millie,” he said. “Leave it.” He stared straight at me so intensely, in a way that I was not used to a man—or anyone, for that matter—staring at me. “I have some bread and milk in the icebox. Why don’t you let me get him some of that and then you and I can sit and talk?”

“I wouldn’t want to—”

“Nonsense.” He walked to the kitchen before I could finish my thought, and he returned a moment later with a glass of milk and a plate with some dark bread. He didn’t have a dining table here, a place to eat his meals, and I suddenly wondered where he ate. Whether he walked downstairs to Waterman’s Grocery to sit at their counter each night. Whether he ever had someone here to cook for him. Yet I got the impression that the only people Jake brought here were his patients, not that I ever saw any of them.

But I didn’t ask. I watched David happily accept Jake’s bread from his spot on the floor and he quickly took a large bite of it. He
was
hungry. He’d communicated. He’d actually communicated.

“This is amazing,” I said to Jake. “Red. He actually showed us red when he was hungry.”

Jake smiled and motioned for me to take one of the chairs. I did, and so did he. They were closer together than I remembered from the last time, and Jake leaned forward so he was close enough to me that I could see every crevice of his face, the tiny wrinkles around his eyes, the faint shadow of hair on his chin. He smelled vaguely of pinecones and peppermint . . . and something else, a smokiness. Not cigar smoke like Ed. Something familiar and pleasant.

“Millie,” Jake said. “I’ve been wanting to talk with you.”

I cleared my throat. “About?”

“Just about you,” he said. “Why don’t you tell me a bit about your life at home . . . with David and Ed?”

I shrugged, not at all sure how this was going to help David. “I don’t know what to say. I’m not good at this type of thing.”

He smiled and his face softened again. He pulled a pipe off the lone end table. “Do you mind?” I shook my head. He filled it with tobacco and lit it. That was the smell.
Pipe smoke.
I pulled a cigarette from my purse and Jake lit it for me. I closed my eyes and inhaled deeply before exhaling. When I opened my eyes again, Jake’s face was obscured, hazy through our shared smoke.

“If it were up to Ed, David would be in some kind of an institution.” I exhaled again and I felt my eyes burning. I blinked hard and hoped Jake wouldn’t notice. Jake put his pipe down on the rest on the end table and he leaned in closer and waited for me to continue. “Ed would like to pretend that David doesn’t exist.” I swallowed hard. “He would like to replace him with another, more perfect boy.” As the words came out of me I heard their awfulness, and I put my hand up to my mouth.