The Hours Count (22 page)

In the winter of 1950, President Truman announced that we were developing a hydrogen bomb. I watched his speech on the television, the steady way he promised we would defend ourselves against the Russians at all costs. Across the ocean, in Britain, a scientist by the name of Klaus Fuchs admitted to spying and giving the Russians nuclear secrets. His arrest seemed to me the end of something, a way to tame some of our fear, a way for us to breathe easier again. But then a senator, McCarthy, made a speech that he had a list of communists and a spy ring . . . in the State Department! And suddenly all the world was afraid again. As news about Senator McCarthy’s speech had come on one night as we’d eaten dinner, Ed had laughed and shaken his head. “Idiot,” he’d muttered. But when I’d asked him what he meant, he wouldn’t elaborate.

I didn’t understand the idea of hydrogen in a bomb, but it sounded terrible, worse than just the regular atomic bomb. Vastly more destructive and explosive. If such a thing were even possible.

I tried not to think about it as I headed off to Mr. Bergman’s
shop with David. My stomach had grown larger and my constitution stronger this past month. I felt the baby’s tiny flutters now as David and I walked out of Knickerbocker Village into the frigid winter air. I rested my hand on my stomach, hoping to calm the tiny feet, and also myself. Just because they were developing a hydrogen bomb didn’t mean they’d make it work, didn’t mean they’d actually use it, I reasoned. It didn’t mean anything at all. At least not to us.

David yanked hard on my arm, and I looked up, and for a moment, I thought my eyes were playing tricks on me. He was here again on Monroe Street, looking as he had the first morning when I met him out here, dressed in that same brown coat and brown derby hat.
Jake.
I blinked hard, wondering if he was real. I’d seen him standing here before. Or at least, I’d thought I had. But then I would run to catch up with him and he would disappear. Or I’d walk up to talk to him and he would turn and he wouldn’t be Jake at all.

But this time, David saw him, too, and he let go of my hand and started running down the street. “David, wait!” I called, running after him.

David was fast, and when I caught up to him, Jake had already grabbed him. “Hold on there, son.” At the sound of his voice, I knew he was real. David grabbed onto his arm, his awkward attempt at a hug. Or maybe it was his way of saying that now that he’d found Jake again, he wasn’t prepared to let him go.

Jake looked up. “Millie . . .” His eyes met mine over David’s head. I suddenly felt completely exposed and I tried to pull my coat tighter across my midsection, hoping Jake’s eyes wouldn’t fall there and notice the bulge immediately before we had a chance to talk.

“I wasn’t sure we’d ever see you again.” I attempted a smile, but
midway my face seemed to freeze and all I could manage was half a frown.

“Can we go inside to talk?” Jake asked. “I don’t have much time.”

WE RODE THE ELEVATOR
back up in silence, and when the bell dinged and we stepped out on the eleventh floor, we practically ran into Ethel and her boys, waiting to step onto the elevator. Ethel glanced at Jake, as if maybe she recognized him vaguely, and she shot me a funny look.

“You know him,” John turned and said to Ethel, and I remembered that morning when John had found Jake and me talking in the hallway and I’d promised him Jake wasn’t a stranger.

“You remember Dr. Jake Gold,” I said to Ethel. Then I leaned in and lowered my voice. “David’s psychotherapist.” Jake tipped his hat quickly in her direction, but I noticed he wouldn’t meet her eyes.

“Of course,” Ethel said, then frowned. We’d been to the playground together only once since that afternoon Ethel came over to watch
Okay, Mother
. Of course, the weather had been cold, and no one was playing outside anyway. I’d been feeling sick until the past few weeks. And David and Ruth had had a terrible accident last month. Ruth’s nightgown caught the gas heater and she caught on fire, and she’d been hospitalized with severe burns. I’d read the horrible account of it in the
New York Post
and went to Ethel’s right away to see if I could help. But she’d said what they really needed was O negative blood for Ruth, and neither I nor any of my family members had it. And that had been the end of our conversation.

“How’s Ruth doing?” I asked Ethel now.

“Getting better,” Ethel said quickly, and then pulled herself and the boys onto the elevator without any more pleasantries. Things between us had been strained lately, and no matter what we had once promised each other, I felt it was the weight of whatever went on between Julie and Ed. I still hadn’t been able to figure out why Ed didn’t work for Pitt any longer or what Ed did each morning when he left for work. Ed was no source of information for me, and I was pretty sure Ethel knew more than she’d told me. Ed had been friends with the Rosenbergs first, and I had begun to wonder if him unraveling that friendship somehow stunted Ethel’s and my friendship. Nevermind that Ethel still seemed mad that I’d asked if Julie fired Ed because of his Russian accent. That certainly hadn’t helped.

The elevator doors shut and then the hall was quiet. Jake put his hand on my shoulder, and I let out a breath I didn’t realize I’d been holding and walked down the hallway and opened up the door to my apartment.

“That’s quite a television,” Jake said as the three of us walked in. I nodded, but didn’t say anything about Ed bringing it home or about him lying about how he got it.

I unbuttoned my coat and hung it on the coat rack, forgetting for a moment about the breadth of my stomach underneath. It wasn’t until I felt Jake’s hand—right there, on the bulge—that I remembered again that he didn’t know. “Millie.” He said my name carefully, and I bit my lip to keep from crying. “You and Ed are having another baby?”

I turned and looked at him “Not Ed,” I said.

His eyes widened in surprise, and then, in another instant, his face softened. I saw him the way he looked that night, on the couch,
in the cabin. The way his skin still smelled of the sun, that day, and creek water and pipe smoke. “Are you sure?” he asked.

“Yes, very sure.”

“A baby,” he said as if it were a lark and something he had not considered as real or possible until right this very moment—that he might become a father. That he would not be alone in the world any longer. He moved his hand gently across the entire length of my stomach as if he were feeling it in order to understand that it was true. That it was his. “If I had known . . .”

“You would have come back sooner?” I asked.

“Oh, Millie.” He sighed and moved his hand back down to his side. “I came back as soon as I could.” He stepped away from me and began pacing the short length of my apartment, from the kitchen to the window and back.

David watched him from the couch, his eyes wide with something, I wasn’t sure what. Wonder? Happiness? He would never understand. Jake was here. And he would leave again. Just like that. I already felt sure of it. “We need a plan,” Jake said as he paced. “After the baby’s born, I’ll come back. We’ll be a family. The four of us.”

“Jake.” I put my hand on his shoulder to get him to stop, to stand still, to talk to me. “I need you to tell me what’s going on first. Where have you been? Who called you that night at the cabin?”

“I can’t tell you that,” he said.

“Well, I need you to tell me something.” The words came out sharper than I meant them to, but I was suddenly so tired—tired of everyone lying to me, hiding things from me, thinking I couldn’t or wouldn’t or didn’t want to understand. It was one thing with Ed. But, with Jake, it felt . . . different. If we really were going to be a family—
a
family—
then I needed it to be real, to be based in truth.

Jake sighed again and sat down on the couch. David quickly gathered up all his cars, brought them to the couch, and began lining them up in rows next to Jake. But these rows were different than usual, the colors all mishmashed together. Yellow met red met blue. He was trying to express something he didn’t understand how to, maybe feeling something he hadn’t quite felt before.

I understood. I felt it, too.

“Darling.” I put my hand softly on David’s shoulder. “Can you go into the kitchen and go grab yourself a snack from the counter?” He ignored me, and he seemed to become more anxious, rearranging the cars, without any order and more frantically, so they were crashing into one another, tiny toy accidents. “Jake will still be here in a few moments. I promise.”

David stopped moving the cars and looked to Jake, who said, “Go ahead, son. Listen to your mother.”

David looked back to the cars, and perhaps their disorder was too much of a mess for him to protest any further, but I was surprised when he stood, when he listened, when he walked into the kitchen. It was as if the mere presence of Jake made him better, made him try harder.

I slid the cars over and sat down on the couch next to Jake. He looked at me and he reached for my hand. “Can I trust you, Millie?”

“Of course you can trust me.” I felt a little hurt that he had to ask.

“I mean it. If I tell you something, can you promise me you won’t tell anyone else?”

“I promise. I won’t tell a soul.”

He leaned in closer to me, close enough so I could feel the warmth of his breath against my cheek. “I wasn’t in New York to do therapy,” he said.

I exhaled, his confession seeming so obvious that it was almost as if I’d already known it somewhere deep down.
Nobody does something for nothing these days,
Ethel had told me. Jake’s free therapy had been too good to be true. “But you were really helping David before you left,” I said.

“I know.” Jake leaned down and held his head in his hands, running his fingers through his hair. “Dammit,” he said.

“So why were you here?” I asked. “What did you want with us?”

“The FBI sent me.”

“The FBI?” The letters sounded like nonsense coming out of my mouth, so unexpected they didn’t even seem real. I’d thought maybe this had something to do with him being a communist, with all the politics everyone around me had once been so deeply involved in, but the FBI? The FBI was something far away, foreign. Part of Washington, D.C. It had nothing to do with all of us here. “The FBI?” I repeated. “I don’t understand. Why would the FBI send you here?”

“I was sent to New York as part of a counterespionage task force. After Elizabeth Bentley testified in ’47, well, we had reason to believe that there were people here who’d worked with her in her spy activities for Russia. And my job was to find out who.”

I remembered Ruth and David speaking of Elizabeth Bentley at Ethel’s party that night I first met Jake. She was that former spy who’d became an informant for the FBI, naming names of those who’d helped her. I remembered Ruth saying she thought Miss Bentley had been lying just to save herself. But was that why Jake had been there, at that party that night, because of her? Had he thought people in that room were involved? Spying for Russia? “And were there?” I asked. “People here who worked with her?” The
thought seemed ridiculous. I thought about Senator McCarthy’s speech, about the spy ring he said he’d uncovered, but those were people tied to the State Department. Not the ordinary men who lived here. I half expected Jake to laugh.

But instead he frowned a little, and said, “I’m afraid so, Millie.”

“Who?” I asked, shocked. Jake looked away from me, down at the floor, and I tried to think of all the men who’d been at Ethel’s party that night.

“Millie.” Jake said my name. He shook his head a little and stared out the window, and it suddenly occurred to me what he was trying to say.

“Ed?” I asked. “You suspected Ed was involved?” Ed and his Russian accent. I’d wondered if Julie had fired him for it, and now I understood that Jake and the FBI had used this to judge him, too. My hands began to shake. “That’s why you offered to help me,” I said, and suddenly it all seemed so clear.

Jake hadn’t cared about me or David. He’d only wanted to find out more about Ed. I’d honestly believed that Jake had made a difference, that he’d known what he was doing, that David was getting better. But maybe he was just some huckster, and Dr. Greenberg had been right about David, about me, all along. “Are you even a psychotherapist?”