The Hours Count (15 page)

“But you’ve worked with children like David before?” I pushed him.

“But no one is quite like you, Millie,” he said quietly.

There was nothing untoward about his words. They could’ve, in fact, been something any therapist could’ve said to any patient, and yet the way he said it, the way his voice tilted a little on my name, it reminded me of the way wind shifts across water and ripples the waves, and I felt a different warmth building inside my stomach than I had ever felt.

“There is no one quite like you either,” I echoed back.

ETHEL ENROLLED IN
psychoanalysis and began seeing someone named Dr. Miller four days a week, in addition to her and John’s weekly appointments with Mrs. Phillips. Ethel always seemed to have an appointment—she was always riding down the elevator to go somewhere—which left me and David going to the playground mostly without her and the boys on the days we didn’t go to see Jake.

But I lived for Tuesdays and Thursdays, for the quiet, calm moments David and I spent in Jake’s apartment. As the weeks went on and the weather turned warmer, we spent longer and longer there with Jake. Mornings turned into lunch, turned into afternoons, turned into me realizing the late hour and having to race home to make it back before Ed.

“Is he kind to you?” Jake asked me one afternoon while David was napping and we were talking. “Ed, I mean?”

Jake often asked about Ed, and I usually changed the subject. Now Jake leaned in close and I could hear his steady breathing, watch the rhythm of his heart moving beneath his sweater-vest. It was almost too hot for the vest and I wondered how Jake would dress come summer. “Kind?” I repeated. I wanted Jake to put his hand on my arm, as he often did now when he was trying to elicit a response from me. I wanted to feel the warmth of his fingertips against the bare skin of my wrist. And I edged slightly forward in anticipation, but, for the moment, Jake didn’t move.

“I mean, does he treat you well? The way a woman like you deserves to be treated.” Jake’s voice was softer than usual, and then he did move his fingers to my arm, down the sleeve of my dress, to my wrist. His thumb moved gently against my skin, and all at once I had the feeling that this was not a therapy question but a question a man might ask a woman should he feel something about her.

“Ed is not really a kind man,” I finally said, “but he’s fine.”

“Fine how?” His thumb continued to stroke my wrist gently and I didn’t want to think of Ed. I wished Jake and I were talking about something different.

“You know, he provides for us, and . . . Well, I don’t know what else to say.” I could think of nothing else, neither good nor bad, to tell Jake about Ed that I hadn’t already told him. Ed could be gruff, but even if Julie wasn’t always paying him enough, as Ruth had complained, we always had money to put food on the table and pay our rent. “You know what’s strange,” I finally said. “I’m married to him and sometimes I feel like I barely even know him.” Jake let go of my wrist quickly. “Did I say the wrong thing?” I asked him.

“There’s no right or wrong answer here, Millie.” Jake leaned back into his chair and lit his pipe. And then whatever had happened between us, real or imagined, disappeared just like that.

ONE WARM AFTERNOON
in May, Ethel accompanied me to the playground and she announced, quite suddenly and with a wide smile, that she and the boys would be getting out of the city for the summer.

“Getting out?” I asked, frowning, thinking of all the long summer days without her. I would never tell her, but I felt a little jealous of all her therapy sessions now. Her need to be somewhere each day, her ability to talk to someone so many hours a week. My life had so much silence that I looked forward to every moment in Jake’s apartment. And though David and I had been staying longer and longer, and Jake and I had been talking more and more, we still only went two days a week.

“The boys and I are going to spend the summer in Golden’s Bridge, upstate. And Julie will come up on the weekends.”

“But what about all your therapy?” I asked.

“I think that it will be the best kind of therapy for a little while. The country air!” She laughed. “You and David will come up for a visit with us, won’t you, Millie?” I agreed, though I wasn’t sure whether we would be able to or not. “Good.” Ethel squeezed my hand, and then she started humming lightly, under her breath. I didn’t recognize the song, but it seemed to me the easy sound of contentment.

THE NEXT AFTERNOON
at Jake’s apartment, after we’d eaten lunch, I told Jake about Ethel’s upcoming trip and how I felt immensely sad at the prospect of being without her all summer. He sucked on his pipe and didn’t say anything for a moment. Then he put his pipe down and said, “Millie, she may be right.”

“Right?”

“About it being the best kind of therapy.” Jake leaned across the small space between us and put his hand on my arm. Even after we left here, the sensation of his closeness lingered the way the smell of his pipe smoke did. “David could use a change of scenery.” I realized he was still talking and I came back to what he was saying. “Out of the city, away from all the noise.”

“So you think we should go visit Ethel, then?” It occurred to me as I said it that to visit Ethel would mean to miss a therapy session or two with him, and then I wasn’t sure I wanted to go.

“Well, yes, you could. But we should take him somewhere I can go, too, so I can work with him there.”

“We?” I tried to imagine taking Jake with us to visit Ethel, what Ethel would even say. A trip upstate with a man who wasn’t my husband? What would I tell Ed?

“I have a friend who has a cabin in the Catskills,” Jake said. “And I’ll be going up for a few weeks this summer anyway.”

“The Catskills.” I sighed. So Jake would also be leaving us this summer.

“You could take a vacation to see Ethel and stop by the cabin to
see me for a few days,” Jake said. “It’s not too far from Golden’s Bridge, relatively speaking.”

A vacation?
Ed and I had never been on a vacation, and I only remembered one time as a little girl taking a vacation, staying in a house at the Jersey Shore with one of my father’s brother’s families. My mother had hated every moment of it and had taken out her misery by yelling at me and Susan the entire time.

I allowed myself to picture this calm and quiet cabin of Jake’s friend in the Catskills, maybe on a lake, where the world would be peaceful and where David would at last feel an inner stillness, an ability to find words. It seemed too easy that the Catskills or a quietness of scenery would change everything.

“David would enjoy the fresh air,” Jake said. “I could take him fishing.”

“He would love that,” I murmured. Though what I was thinking was how
I
would love it. Spending a few summer days together at this cabin, away from the city. Me and Jake and David and the open beautiful country. I tingled with anticipation just thinking about it. Entire long days with Jake, not just a few stolen hours a week. And nights, too. Where would we all sleep? Then it hit me: How would I ever be able to pull this off? “I’m sure it’s lovely,” I said, not looking up to meet Jake’s eyes. “But I don’t know . . . Ed wouldn’t approve at all.”

“You could bring him,” Jake said quickly, and I couldn’t help but frown at the thought that Jake would even want Ed to come with us. Or that Jake would believe, given all I’d told him about Ed, that this could ever happen. We both knew that would be impossible, that telling Ed about David’s therapy with Jake might
mean the end of our sessions altogether. Ed could never know. About any of this.

“You know Ed wouldn’t approve,” I said, pulling casually on a string at the end of my dress sleeve. I could pull it and unravel the whole thing. My clothes were getting so worn. I tried to tuck the string in my closed palm so Jake wouldn’t notice.

“Well, just consider the trip,” Jake said. “Just you and David, then.” He stared at me with such intensity that I felt I could hear what he was thinking, that he wanted to be alone with me as much as I wanted to be alone with him. I realized I was blushing, and then I looked away, stood, and got David ready to go home.

Susan gave birth to her third child, another girl, in the middle of June, two days after Ethel and the boys left for Golden’s Bridge for the summer. David and I took the train to Elizabeth with my mother and Bubbe Kasha, as soon as Susan telephoned my mother to let her know her contractions were five minutes apart, and I was glad to be leaving the city for a few days, too, even if New Jersey and several days of babysitting were vastly less exciting than a vacation upstate.

Once we arrived at their sprawling two-story house, Sam left for the hospital to be with Susan, and I was suddenly in charge of everyone: the twins, David, Bubbe Kasha, and my mother.

I turned on Susan’s small television, and they were all immediately transfixed, including David. Such a magical machine! If only I could convince Ed to get one for us, I imagined my daily life with David would become infinitely easier. As the adults sat on the couch, the children on the rug, and we all stared at the screen, I tried to dream up ways to negotiate with Ed, and I knew finding myself expecting another child, giving him another child, would
probably get me anything I wanted. But I felt a dull ache in my stomach just thinking about it. I wondered what would feel worse: to actually have another child who I might damage like David or to lose another child in a warm pool of blood at my feet?

“Will you look at that?” my mother said, shaking her head and tsking. I looked up and the ABC News my mother was so fond of had come on the screen. “Helen Keller, a communist? Oh for goodness’ sakes, the woman is a blind deaf mute.”

I stared at the television, listening to what my mother was reacting to. The newsman spoke of a new FBI report that revealed that famous people were communists, too, and that they were dangerous, to be feared. I felt a little knot in my chest that the newsman was talking so harshly about communists.
Reds,
as Mr. Bergman had called them with disdain. Ed, Julie, Jake, and even Ethel once, too. But they were just normal people, my friends and family, not to be feared at all. And anyway, they’d all but left the Party behind.

Should you come across any communist propaganda,
the newsman was saying now,
promptly turn it in to authorities . . .

I glanced at David and his eyes were trained on the television screen. The images transfixed him, their ability to flicker in black and white in a multidimensional way. Helen Keller. She was worse off than David, wasn’t she? She was without sight, hearing, or the ability to speak, and look at that, the government
feared
her now. It seemed almost an admirable feat.

“Who’s Helen Keller?” Bubbe Kasha asked. She’d been so quiet, I’d almost forgotten she was here. As her mind had withered further and further away, she seemed to have less and less to say. “She doesn’t sound very dangerous.”

“She’s not, Bubbe.” I leaned across the couch and kissed her
head. I couldn’t help but think of David Greenglass’s comment in my apartment that the government was just blowing smoke, hoping to get lucky. But Helen Keller? This seemed absurd. “It’s just the silly government. Nothing for us to worry about.”

My mother, who knew about Ed attending communist meetings when we were first married, turned to me. “Millie,” she said, her voice sounding like a warning.

“What?” I shrugged. Whatever Ed’s involvement was or once had been had nothing to do with me, and no one knew him or cared about what he thought the way they all knew Helen Keller.

I stood to fix everyone lunch and put Helen Keller and the FBI out of my head. That was still the way it was then. The FBI seemed like nothing that could hurt us, like something so very faraway in the remote District of Columbia. I felt no fear or disdain for them at all. I literally felt nothing. They were nothing to me.

DAVID AND I
spent an entire week in Elizabeth looking after the twins, watching the television. My mother and Bubbe Kasha took the train back after three days, my mother said because Bubbe Kasha got bored in the quiet of the country air, but I guessed it was more than that: she couldn’t take the three young children—the twins’ shouting, David’s silent tantrums. I had a headache at the end of each day, but after all the children fell asleep I enjoyed every moment of lying on Susan’s couch by myself and watching her television, listening to the newsmen rattle on about the new communist report, the growing threat of the bomb should the Russians ever acquire atomic energy. I liked the way the television and the news made me feel connected to the world and reminded me that
there was so much more out there beyond my tiny apartment on the eleventh floor and life with Ed. It also made me think that I was not crazy to fear the bomb so much. Russia was becoming a bigger threat. And communism as well. I’d always seen the idea of communism as something small and harmless: groups of men hanging out in an apartment complaining about Truman or smart women like Ethel organizing fights for labor fairness. But now it seemed it had become something else, something bigger and a little frightening, and I was glad the people around me had drifted away from it lately.

Despite all the bad news and fear on the television, I actually slept quite well on Susan’s couch each night. The world was safer here in the suburbs, I reminded myself, and I felt so much more at ease far from Ed. In fact, I felt better than I had in years, and, after a few days, I noticed David began to seem more content, too. Maybe Jake was right. Maybe David did need to get out of the city. Maybe we both did.

“You should move out here,” Susan said to me one night as she sat with me on the couch giving the baby, Betsy, a bottle. “It has been nice to have you here, Mills. It would be nice to see each other more.”

As young children, Susan and I hadn’t always gotten along. But in high school and afterward we were so close in age, we were almost always together doing the same things, with the same friends. Still, I’d always felt her competing with me over something. She always wanted and needed to be the best, the smartest, the prettiest, and she always was. But now she just looked swollen and tired.

I reached my hand over to touch little Betsy’s pink cheek. “Yes.”
I spoke quietly so as not to disturb the baby. “David seems to really like it out here.”

Susan didn’t say anything for a few minutes, and we both listened to the gentle sounds of Betsy sucking on her bottle. “Mills,” she said. “What are you going to do about David?”

“Do?”
I asked.

“What if he never talks?”

I closed my eyes and leaned back against the couch. “He will,” I said. I thought about Jake. About his belief in David, in us, about the gentle feel of his hands on my shoulders. I thought about what Susan had just said and I sat back up. “You think I should
do
something?” I heard my voice rising a bit. “I should put him in an institution?”

Susan shifted Betsy. “That’s not what I meant. It’s just . . . I worry about you, all alone in the city, and with him still not talking as he should.”

“You don’t need to worry about me,” I said. She reached her free hand out and placed it over mine, and I understood she was no longer competing; she was genuinely concerned. “I’ve been getting him help,” I said. “Taking him to see a doctor. But you can’t tell anyone. I don’t want Ed to know.”

“Shouldn’t Ed want him to have help?” she asked, tilting her head, confused.

“Just promise me you won’t say a word to anyone.”

“Okay,” she said, “I promise.” Betsy was asleep now, and Susan gently pulled the bottle from her lips. Then she turned back to look at me. “You know if I can ever help you in any way, I would. All you have to do is ask.”

I stroked Betsy’s pink and perfect arm with my thumb. “I know,” I told Susan. “But we are going to be just fine.”

I GOT BY
each night with only a short phone call to Ed—to ask how his day was, to ask if he’d found the food I’d stored for him in the refrigerator before I left.

“You are coming home soon?” he said to me on the seventh day, saying it more like a command than a question.

“Tomorrow,” I answered, and that was only because I wanted to be back in time for our appointment with Jake. David had missed him over the past week.
I
had missed him. I wasn’t sure when he was leaving for the Catskills, and now I was determined to figure out the details to make our trip happen.