The Hours Count (13 page)

“He’s been teaching David to communicate with colored blocks. We’re making progress.” Then I added, “Maybe.”

“That’s wonderful, Millie,” she said. “And Ed approves of this?”

“Oh goodness no. He has no idea that I’ve been doing it.”

“And you’ve been able to pay for it without his knowledge?”

“No. Jake has offered to do it for free. In exchange for writing some kind of paper about his findings. A completely anonymous paper,” I added, remembering the way Jake had phrased it that first morning I went to his apartment.

“You don’t find that odd, Millie?”

“Odd?”
I finished off my own glass of wine and put it down on the table. The air in the room felt thicker, Ethel’s words slower, the noise of the children in the background fuzzier. “Not really . . . no.”

Ethel frowned. “But nobody does something for nothing these days, Millie.”

“It’s not for nothing,” I said. “His . . . paper.” But even as I said the words aloud, I wondered if Ethel was right, if the whole thing was odd.

“Well, I’m glad to hear that you believe in all this, too,” Ethel said, and she squeezed my hand. “We’re lucky to have found each other, aren’t we, Millie?” I squeezed her hand in return. “Someday, all this therapy will make us just perfect and we’ll show them all, won’t we?” She laughed, and then I heard myself laughing, too. We both knew how ridiculous it sounded, but Ethel would find a way to begin pyschoanalysis, I knew, and I was going to continue bringing David to Jake. We had to do
something
.

“
IT HAS BEEN
three months,” Ed said that night in the darkness of our bedroom. My entire body tensed underneath the covers.

We’d moved around each other in a silence, a steady calm since that day in November when the bleeding had started. In the past few months I had come to understand that my marriage was nothing but a game, with points to be won and lost, and that when Dr. Greenberg called Ed and told him how sometimes these things happened early on with too much
activity
, I had won points. It hadn’t hurt that I had felt a strange and infinite sadness for the sudden loss of a baby I hadn’t even thought I’d wanted.
In a
different life, maybe,
I kept thinking. Ed had once woken up and found me crying in the kitchen in the middle of the night and more points had been won, though that had not been my intention. I simply had not been able to stop myself from crying.

“Not yet,” I said. “In one more week, it will be three months.”
One more week. I hoped Ed wouldn’t argue with my flimsy math. I needed another week to give myself enough time to return to Planned Parenthood to pick up my new diaphragm.

Ed shifted in the bed next to me, but I didn’t feel his hand reach for my thigh.

“Ed,” I said after a few moments of silence, “are you and Julie fighting?” The truth was, even if they were, I wasn’t entirely sure I wanted to know. Ethel was my only real friend. I couldn’t lose her. And she had already brushed off this question. But I couldn’t stop thinking about what John had said to me earlier, and also what Jake said about my silence. I wanted to be able to tell him at our next session that I had spoken up, that I’d tried to talk to Ed, to answer a question, to fix a problem.

“Fighting?” Ed said. “Mildred, where did you get that idea?”

“I watched John earlier for Ethel and he insisted that Julie was angry with you.”

I could feel the weight of his body sigh against the mattress. “Julie is angry with me? Mildred, you are so silly to listen to a child.” Ed laughed a little, and then he rolled over.

But something about the way he said it made me think that John had actually been telling the truth, and I wondered what, exactly, he’d overheard. I couldn’t fall asleep for a long while, even after I heard Ed’s familiar snores rattling next to me.

A WEEK LATER
, I picked up my small package from Planned Parenthood, and I discreetly inserted the new diaphragm every night before I got into bed. Ed moved on top of me so carefully, as if he
were afraid I might break, that I felt almost bad about my deception. But not bad enough to make me take the diaphragm out.

The winter rolled on with a steady routine. Two mornings a week, I sat in Jake’s empty apartment and watched him work on the floor with David. Afterward, I found myself talking to him. At first because he wanted me to, but then because I couldn’t stop the words from coming. I heard myself say things I wouldn’t normally say to anyone. Since Jake had seen me bleeding that morning in November, I told him about the baby, the one I’d lost and mourned—strangely, given that I did not want another baby now. I told Jake more about Ethel and how nice it was to have a friend nearby. I told Jake about John’s comment, that Ed and Julie were angry with each other, and that I’d spoken up and asked Ed why. Jake let me talk and mostly just listened, but at that he stopped me. “And what did Ed say when you asked him about it?” he asked me.

“He laughed,” I told him. “And he said it was nothing.”

Jake leaned in closer, and I felt my heartbeat quicken in a way I wouldn’t have expected. There was something so intimate about this that it almost felt wrong, more than the fact that it was
therapy
. “Do you believe him?”

“No,” I said. “I think Ed was lying to me.”

“And why do you think that?”

I thought about the way Ed had been talking on the phone late at night more and more. He spoke in hushed tones as if he were taking great pains to make sure I wouldn’t hear what he was saying. I told this to Jake.

“Do you know who he’s talking to?” Jake asked.

“No,” I answered him.

His face was so close to mine, his eyes staring at me so intensely, that I had the strange feeling that he was about to kiss me, and then suddenly he seemed to catch himself and he sat back. “Have you thought about trying to get to know Ed’s friends better?” His voice was so calm and even, and he gently picked up his pipe the way he always did, that I wondered if I’d imagined his closeness a moment ago, and now I felt embarrassed. I put my hands to my cheeks to hide the sudden redness. But Jake seemed not to notice, as he was still talking, contemplating his pipe. “Other than Ethel, I mean. The men Ed works with?”

I thought of that night in Ethel’s apartment, how just when I’d begun to talk with Ruth and David Greenglass, Ed had grabbed my arm and embarrassed me. Did he not want me to know his friends or was he just drunk and angry that night? “I don’t know,” I said to Jake. “Ed likes having a life at work and friends separate from me, I think.”

“But you could just have them over for dinner,” Jake said. “Get to know them a little more, see for yourself how Ed and Julius and the rest of them are getting along.”

I was uncertain whether Ed would like it if I invited his friends and associates over for dinner. Yet it seemed the type of thing most women would think of naturally, an instinct that I did not seem to have as Ed’s wife, or maybe as David’s mother. It was something Lena or even Susan would scold me for not having done sooner. And then I felt a little silly for not having reached this conclusion on my own. “That’s a good idea, thanks,” I said to Jake, and I laughed a little. “Maybe I really did need this therapy for myself.”

He looked away and put his pipe back down on the table and
then he picked up his pocket watch. “Look at the time,” he said quickly. “I have another appointment.”

“Oh, right, of course. I’m sorry to have kept you too long.” I expected him to say that it was okay, that he enjoyed our extra talk, but he didn’t say anything else. And then I felt certain that I had imagined our closeness. Jake was a psychotherapist, and David and I were his patients. That was all.

ON SUNDAY AFTERNOON
, Julius and Ethel and the boys arrived first, followed soon after by Ruth and David Greenglass. I’d told Ethel to invite her other brother, Bernie, who also worked at Pitt, and his wife, Gladys, but she hadn’t been feeling well lately and they’d declined.

I felt a little thrill that I’d taken Jake’s advice and that it had worked out so well and so quickly. It wasn’t hard to get a few of the people of Ed’s world all together here in our apartment. I’d only had to tell Ethel to spread the word and to offer roasted chickens—Mr. Bergman’s finest ones, of course—and some Mogen David. And before I knew it, Julie and David Greenglass and Ed were perched on my perfect blue couch, drinking wine and involved in what appeared to be a very robust discussion that involved loud voices and excited, flailing hands. Ruth sat on one of the arms, smoking a cigarette, listening, but not saying much. Ethel was in the back bedroom, checking on the children.

“More wine?” I asked, bringing the Mogen David over to the couch. Julius declined, but Dave and Ed held their glasses forward for me to pour more. Ruth did, too. I envied her for the way she sat
here among the men as if she belonged, but then she smiled at me kindly and I felt bad for feeling jealous. I thought about going to check on David, but Ethel was back there in the bedroom with them and I remembered the point of this little dinner was for me to get to know these people more, so I poured myself a glass of wine and sat on the edge of the coffee table.

“I think everything at the shop is coming around,” Julie said to David and Ed. David shrugged, and Ed drank his wine.

“That’s wonderful,” I said. Ed ignored me, but Julie shot me a kind smile.

“But you shouldn’t want for your own brother-in-law to be educated?” Ruth said pointedly to Julius, and I had the feeling this was the middle of an ongoing discussion that she’d jumped right back into. She blew a ring of smoke in his direction.

“Of course I want that for you,” Julie said, turning to David. “But I need you there to supervise the shop. Now more than ever.”

Ruth laughed bitterly. “For all the business you’re having these days.”

“Like I said,” Julie said firmly, “it’s coming around.”

Ruth raised her eyebrows.

“There is business,” Ed said, and it both surprised me and pleased me to hear him speak up, to defend Julius. Maybe John was wrong. Maybe it was David and Julius who were angry with each other and Ed wasn’t involved at all. “We have a very big opportunity coming our way, don’t we, Julie?”

Julie glanced at Ed and twirled his mustache and didn’t say anything for a moment, but then he finally said, “Yes, of course. We have plenty of opportunities.” He turned back to Ruth. “David will have time for night school soon.”

“Right.” Ruth put her cigarette to the side and looked for an ashtray. I picked one up off the coffee table and handed it to her and she thanked me. She put it down and stood. “Do you need any help in the kitchen, Millie?”

I was fine and the chickens were almost done, but I told her she could help me set the table.

“Leave the wine,” Ed said as I stood up. I put the bottle on the coffee table, and Ed topped off his and David’s glasses.

“What do you think they’ll do to old Alger?” Ed said to the other men.

“They’ll only use him,” David said. “Damn government can’t prove anything ever, so they blow a lot of smoke and hope to God they get lucky one of these days.”

“They are so stupid, no?” Ed laughed. “But sometimes I am very worried.” His voice grew more serious. “If America has too much power, the world will become very dangerous.”