The Hours Count (18 page)

“And where are you going?” I asked.

But he didn’t answer.

Outside, it was dawning slowly, and the light began to filter in through the cabin’s windows, a soft and surreal pink. The world, the beauty and calm perfectness of the nature that surrounded us, none of that matched Jake’s mood, what was happening here inside the cabin.

He leaned back in, closer to me, so I could hear his steady breathing. I turned back to look at him, and his shirt was on and buttoned. “Look, Millie. I’m sorry that I lied to you about the telephone. But it really had nothing to do with you . . . or us.”
Us?
As if we were something now. Were we? “I didn’t want to lie to you.”

“But you did anyway,” I said. “And you’ve lied to me about other things, too.” I thought about the way he claimed to know Ethel when she seemed not to know him at all.

“I can’t explain it to you now. I wish I could, but I can’t.” He put his hand on my face and traced my cheekbone with his thumb. “I have to go now. I’m sorry.”

“But I don’t want you to leave us,” I said, my anger over the silly telephone dissipating into a sense of loss.

Jake’s face softened and he put his hand on the afghan, pulling it tighter around my shoulders. “I promise you, I’ll get back to the city as soon as I can. And I’ll do everything I can to keep you and David safe.”

“Safe? From what?” None of this made sense. Why would he have to leave here now, at dawn, and where was he going? “Jake?” I could still feel what I felt last night, my body against Jake’s, my
naked skin against his, a feeling and an openness I’d never felt before, a rush of pleasure I’d never experienced, and now it all seemed unreal, like a lie.

“Please, Millie, get dressed,” Jake said more sternly than he’d ever spoken to me, and I suddenly felt ashamed for everything that had happened. “We have to go.”

He stood and walked into the back room, got David up, and led him into the kitchen, where I heard him talking calmly about breakfast.
Breakfast?
I clung to my dress, removed the afghan, and tugged the dress down over my shoulders. I buttoned it slowly, my fingers trembling. I understood what I’d done. It was all wrong, and now it seemed I was already being punished for it in a way I didn’t even quite understand.

“Millie.” I looked up and Jake was standing there again, hovering over me, while David sat in the kitchen, eating a piece of bread.

I felt tears stinging in my eyes and I bit my lip to try to keep them away. “Why won’t you tell me what’s happening?” I asked him.

Jake hesitated, and then he leaned down and whispered in my ear. “No matter what else happens, I need you to remember that last night wasn’t a lie.”

Even after he stood back up, I could feel the warmth of his breath against my skin, I could feel the warmth of his words echoing in my head. I could feel them even hours later as David and I stepped off the train in Golden’s Bridge.

OUTSIDE THE CITY
, everything about Ethel seemed different, more relaxed. Her curls were looser, her skin had reddened, and her
posture had eased. She told me her back was feeling good out here in the country air, that she could breathe deeper away from all the noise.

A few hours after my arrival, we lay next to each other in our bathing suits, on matching lounge chairs, on a deck that led out to the lake. I supposed it was quite beautiful here, all the green of the trees, the blue of the perfect water glistening in the sunshine, but somehow I didn’t have it in me to notice.

“John has been swimming every day,” Ethel said, raising her hand up to her eyes to shield them from the sun or perhaps to get a better view of me. “It exhausts him, but in a good way. He’s seeming calmer here.” I listened but didn’t say anything. I’d been quite silent since we’d arrived. At first I said we were tired, which was true, we were. But now, in the piercing sunlight of the late afternoon, I still couldn’t understand what had happened with Jake this morning at the cabin. Why he’d lied. Why he’d left. What I’d done. What we’d done. My entire body felt numb, my bare toes incapable of soaking in the warmth of the August sun.

David sat rather calmly at the edge of the lake, stacking smooth stones, and I wondered if he had begun to feel it in his chest the way I felt now, this steadily growing hole. The absence of something . . . or someone. Or maybe he didn’t even understand it yet. Jake was gone. Somewhere. Something had happened in his worried early-morning phone call—I just didn’t know what. It seemed so strange that Jake spoke of the Russians, and that Ed had the night before we left. It made me feel that Jake was lying to me about a lot of things, that maybe he and Ed were friends, that they were connected in something somehow. And with the Russians? The mere thought
made my head ache, and it made no sense why a man like Jake, or Ed, would have the need to be so secretive or urgent.

“Millie,” Ethel said, leaning in closer and interrupting my thoughts, “are you sure everything is all right? You seem so nervous.”

“Nervous?”

“Are you worried about more riots?”

“Yes, the riots,” I murmured.

“We’ll be safe here at the cabin. They were rioting only because Paul Robeson had a concert scheduled.” I remembered what I’d heard on the radio about Paul Robeson being named a communist and being called to testify before the Un-American Activities Committee last spring. Last month, Jackie Robinson had been called in to testify against him, and now it seemed poor Robeson couldn’t catch a break. Ethel laughed a little. “It’s all so silly, isn’t it? That a man with such a beautiful voice can’t share his gift with the world. He can’t give a concert in peace just because he has aligned himself with a certain political view.”

I thought about Ethel’s beautiful voice. She had made the choice to become a wife and a mother rather than pursue her dream to become a Broadway star, but what if she hadn’t? Ed had claimed that the government was only out to get Paul Robeson because he was a Negro, and I’d felt bad that the color of his skin had made any bit of difference. “It must be hard enough to be a Negro without being a communist, too,” I said.

“As if it’s any easier being a Jew,” Ethel said. In our own little pocket of New York City, being a Jew wasn’t hard. It was what everybody was. It was who we were and what we knew, but I read the paper enough to know that it wasn’t like that everywhere, that there
were probably as many anti-Semites as there were anti-Negros. “Sometimes I think the whole world is going crazy.” Ethel pulled her hat down over her eyes and leaned back in her chair.

I did the same. I closed my eyes, but all I could see was Jake, the way he looked buttoning up his shirt. The way he’d felt last night, his skin so close to mine.

“Something else is bothering you,” Ethel said. At the sound of her voice I jumped and opened my eyes again. “Was it the therapy you attended in the Catskills? It wasn’t going well. Is that why you had to cut it short?”

“Yes,” I said. I couldn’t tell her the truth.

“Millie.” She put her hand on my arm. “You can’t give up. You have to keep trying.” I thought about what Jake said, that he would get back to the city when he could. How long would that be? And what were David and I supposed to do in the meantime? I bit my lip to keep from crying. “Come on now,” Ethel said. “It couldn’t have been all that bad. Look how contented David looks now sitting by the water.”

He was stacking his rocks and unstacking them again, but his posture appeared relaxed, at ease, the way it had on the rowboat yesterday. Maybe I needed Jake more than he did. Maybe this therapy I’d had him enrolled in had become about me and the way I was feeling about Jake, not about David at all. “I’m a terrible mother,” I said.

“Oh, Millie, stop it.” She bit at the skin around her thumbnail. “I’m going to tell you something I’m not proud of. I have trouble controlling my temper with John sometimes.” She lowered her voice. “I’ve spanked him before when I just couldn’t take it anymore.” She turned and looked off at him in the water. John waved to
her, and she lifted her hand and waved back. “I didn’t mean to hit him. I felt terrible about it afterward. But I can lash out, you see? And I’ve been working on that in therapy.”

“Ethel, everyone lashes out,” I said.

“You don’t,” she countered back. “You have the patience of Job with David. You are the exact opposite of a terrible mother.”

“People lash out in different ways,” I said, and I wondered if that’s what I’d been doing with Jake. Lashing out?
No.
I didn’t think so.

She turned back to watch John gliding nearly effortlessly through the water. “Whatever you’re feeling blue about today, it’ll pass, Millie. It always does.”

I hoped Ethel was right, but I wasn’t sure how I’d ever forget what had happened between Jake and me in the cabin. I wasn’t sure I wanted to. And I had no idea where I was supposed to go from here.

After we returned to the city, the time ticked by ever so slowly without our biweekly visits to Jake’s apartment. Each Tuesday and Thursday, David and I still walked to Waterman’s Grocery and then climbed the twisty stairs, hopeful that when I knocked, Jake would answer the door. But he didn’t. No one did. I even began to wonder about the awful cat inside and whether she had died from lack of food and water, but I couldn’t bring myself to walk into Waterman’s and tell Mr. Waterman or ask him about Jake’s continued absence. I knew nothing of where Jake had gone, what had become of him, or when he would return. And what if Mr. Waterman knew more? What if he told me Jake was gone, forever? I couldn’t bear to hear that.

As the days went by, I began to wonder whether our night in the cabin had even been real, if it had been anything more than a dream. If Jake had been nothing but an imaginary man. David still wasn’t speaking, and I’d been feeling too tired lately to keep up
with the colored cars, the colored blocks. David was really no better off than he’d been last fall, I’d finally admitted to myself.

The city seemed to stand still, everything exactly as it was, except now there was no Jake in it. Ed drank his vodka and fell into bed each night, fumbling clumsily on top of me. Ethel and the boys returned to the city, and John began the school year. Ethel and I took Richie and David to the playground, trying to take advantage of the last of the warm days before winter.

And still each Tuesday and Thursday morning I set out with renewed hope that Jake would’ve returned, and then I found myself at Mr. Bergman’s shop, just around the corner from Waterman’s, when Jake’s apartment turned up empty again.

“Bubbelah, boychik,” Mr. Bergman cried out with joy each time we walked in through the doorway. Today we made our way carefully to the counter, and, as we approached, I nearly lost my footing, the smell of meat so strong that I thought I might be sick. “Not that I don’t enjoy your frequent company,” he said as he leaned across the counter to kiss my cheek and place some yellow gumdrops in David’s outstretched hand, “but I am beginning to worry something is wrong.”

“Nothing is wrong,” I said quickly.

“Eh?” Mr. Bergman raised his eyebrows. I clutched my stomach uneasily, wishing the meat didn’t smell so strong today. “Have you seen the newspaper this morning?”

I shook my head, and he pulled the paper out from underneath the counter, pushing it my way so I could see it but David couldn’t. A picture of a mushroom cloud graced the front page, with the headline “Truman Says Russians Detonated Test Bomb.”

“What? When?” My hands shook as I grabbed the paper and scanned it for information. The article said that the Russians had detonated their first test bomb on August twenty-ninth. A month ago. I exhaled and calmed a little at the thought that some time had passed and we were all still here.

“It is very scary,” I realized Mr. Bergman was saying as he took back the paper. “Today a test. Tomorrow . . .” He snapped his fingers and folded the paper back behind the counter. “Manhattan could be dust. Just like that. Goddamn Russians.”

The Russians.
I could hear Jake’s voice, the urgency, as he spoke on the phone that night in the cabin.
A month ago.
The night we spent together was that very same night that the paper reported the Russians had detonated the bomb, wasn’t it? Did Jake somehow learn about the test bomb then when he’d received his strange telephone call? But how? And why would someone call him to tell him? “I think I’m going to be sick,” I said.

“I didn’t mean to frighten you, bubbelah.” Mr. Bergman reached across the counter and put a hand on my shoulder, but I ran toward the back room, where I knew from my days in the shop as a small girl that there was a sink. The meat smell was so very strong in my nose that the deeper I tried to breathe, the worse it got. Maybe some of the meat had gone bad and Mr. Bergman hadn’t realized it. Was it possible he was getting too old to run the shop?

In the back room, the smell was less, and I took a slow, deep breath. The smell dissipated and the nausea calmed. “Millie,” I heard Mr. Bergman’s voice calling from the front. His head peeked through the doorway. “Are you all right?” I took another breath and I nodded. He smiled. “Should I congratulate you, then?”

“Congratulate me?” It was only as I said the words that I
realized what Mr. Bergman must think. “Oh no,” I said, shaking my head, “I couldn’t possibly be . . .” I had worn the diaphragm I’d gotten at Planned Parenthood so faithfully every single night. Every single night . . . except for one. I hadn’t taken it with me to the Catskills. That night with Jake, on the couch, in the cabin. “No,” I repeated meekly, “I couldn’t possibly . . .”

“Let me get you some seltzer,” Mr. Bergman said, motioning for me to come back out front. For a moment, I couldn’t breathe. My feet refused to move, my lungs refused to move. And then I heard myself saying, “No, I don’t think so. Thank you, but David and I should get back.” I hustled David out onto the street.

Outside, it was windy. The leaves had begun to turn and they swirled in golden colors off the trees. The world was the color of dust, and as I walked back toward Monroe Street I could hardly see. If the bomb came and took us right now, I felt I might welcome it. That it would be an easy way to go.