The Hours Count (24 page)

He stood and switched on the television, turning up the volume loud enough so I could barely hear myself think anymore.

All the news tonight was about the possibility of the hydrogen bomb. I watched Ed’s face closely to see if he seemed to understand, to know more than I did about such things. But he paid attention
only to his meat loaf and his vodka. It seemed he could care less about the possibility of the hydrogen bomb. Or David. Or me.

I could still feel the weight of his hand across my stomach long after he moved away, and I understood that Ed cared about only one thing.

THE NEXT MORNING
, I was determined to follow Ed, to see where it was he was going each day. Though I’d promised Jake I would stay out of it, I was tired of sitting at home with the television and David, waiting for the world to happen all around me.

David and I left the apartment with Ed after I told Ed that I had a doctor’s appointment. We rode down the elevator together and walked with him out to the street and then to the subway station. Ed touched my stomach lightly at the top of the steps, and then surprised me by leaning in to kiss me on the cheek before running down the steps to catch the train.

I picked up David after waiting a moment and then ran after him, surprised to feel tears burning in my eyes, as if Ed’s gentle good-bye had reminded me of everything I thought I would have with him, once. Ed was not an evil man, I reminded myself. He could drink too much, and I didn’t love him the way I should, but I didn’t think he would spy for the Russians. He’d been glad to get away from Russia, to come to America. He would not be a traitor to a country he’d longed to be a part of for so very long.

I wiped my tears away and chalked them up to the child inside me, which more and more of late had given me the inability to control my emotions. David and I stepped on the same train as Ed, only one car back, and through the crowds of men I might have had
trouble keeping track of him except that he was taller than everyone else, and I focused my eyes on his familiar black derby.

Ed exited the train near Central Park, and I followed him up the stairs and then on to Sixty-first Street, where he stopped in front of a building. The address out front read
7
East 61st Street
. I committed it to memory, and then I watched as Ed walked inside. He looked perfectly normal, dressed in his suit, his overcoat, and his hat.

The uninteresting truth of it seemed to be that Ed had gotten himself another job and he hadn’t felt like sharing the details of it with me.

David and I took the long way home, walking through the park for a while before we caught the subway again. I hoped the cool air, a bit of exercise, would make me feel better, but it didn’t. By the time we eventually made it back to Knickerbocker Village, I felt that Jake was wrong. That Ed was only an accountant with a new job. And that I might never be free of him.

The days began to grow longer again, and I began to grow infinitely larger. As the spring came, I waddled down to the playground with Ethel and the boys after Ethel picked John up from school. Most days, David was silent and sullen, and I had to drag him along. He’d gotten worse again since that morning he’d spoken, since that morning Jake had left our apartment. And we’d heard nothing from Jake. But I kept telling myself that in the summer, after the baby was born, everything would change. Everything would get better, as Ethel had said. I wanted so badly for her to be right.

Ethel began to talk more and more about Mexico as if now it were a fantasy just within her reach. I envied the way it felt so real to her in the way that escaping with Jake did not yet feel real to me. Ethel told me Julie had checked with the doctor about the shots they might need and she worried about how the boys would react, but she’d scheduled their appointments anyway. And then she made appointments to get passport photos.

“You’re really going, aren’t you?” I asked her.

“Yes, I think we really are, Millie.” She sounded breathless, giddy, as if she were singing her response.

I, on the other hand, had no idea how close they were to finding or arresting Raymond. How close Jake and I were to being together. But I knew that the child in my belly continued to grow. And I continued to watch Ed carefully for any sign that he might be the man Jake thought he could be. But Ed’s late-night phone calls had all but ceased, and most nights he lay in bed, snoring, even before I fell asleep.

As my stomach grew larger and larger, so, too, did my doubts. What if Jake had changed his mind? How would I manage here at Knickerbocker Village with two children and not even Ethel to keep me company?

Sitting next to me on the park bench, Ethel hummed a little tune under her breath. The weather had turned warm enough to leave the jackets at home, and the air suddenly smelled like springtime.

ONE AFTERNOON IN MAY
, just after
Okay, Mother
had come on and Ethel was visiting, I heard a knock at my apartment door.

“Are you expecting someone?” Ethel asked.

I was so large now that even a walk to the playground had begun to seem like a journey, so Ethel had been bringing Richie over here to keep David and me company before they picked John up from school. In spite of herself, she’d begun to enjoy this show, I suspected, because she managed to make it over here just before one o’clock most days just as
Okay, Mother
was coming on.

“No,” I said, “I’m not expecting anyone.”
Jake?
I stood and waddled as fast as I could to the door.

I opened the door and an unfamiliar man in a Western Union uniform stood on the other side. “Telegram for Mrs. Mildred Stein,” he said.

I signed for the telegram and took it from him, and I noticed my hands were shaking as I ripped it open.

THE MIDDLE OF JUNE.

WE WILL BE TOGETHER AGAIN.

AWAIT FURTHER INSTRUCTIONS.

BE GOOD TO MY BABY.

I put my hand to my stomach and felt the jab of a baby elbow, or maybe it was a knee. It was sharp and it took my breath away.
Jake!
The middle of June was not that far away. I folded the piece of paper and I smiled.

“Who sent you a telegram?” Ethel was saying, and I realized for a moment I’d forgotten she was here.

“Oh, no one,” I lied. “It’s nothing.”

“Nothing?” She raised her eyebrows. “It didn’t look like nothing.”

“It’s just . . .” I waited to think of an appropriate and believable lie, but then I felt a sharp pain pinch my abdomen and I grimaced. Maybe it wasn’t an elbow, or a knee, I’d felt at all but an early contraction.

“Are you all right?” Ethel asked.

I waddled back to the couch, folded the telegram, and shoved it into the pocket of my dress. My legs felt heavier than they had
moments earlier, and suddenly the room felt warmer. Mr. James’s voice, coming from the television, sounded louder. “I’m fine,” I heard myself saying just as
Okay, Mother
was interrupted by a breaking-news bulletin.

“A man has been arrested as a Soviet go-between in the Klaus Fuchs case . . .” The newscaster’s voice sounded as if it were coming through a tin can. “Harry Gold . . .”

Harry Gold?
His name didn’t sound familiar to me, and I wondered if I’d ever met him. But, for the life of me, now I couldn’t remember what he looked like if I had. Did Ed know him?

“In Philadelphia . . .” the newscaster was saying.

Philadelphia, so I guessed he wasn’t one of Ed’s friends if he wasn’t here in New York. Was Mr. Gold
Raymond
? If that was true, then Jake had been wrong. No one in Ed’s circle had been involved at all. For some reason, instead of relief, I felt vastly unsettled, even nauseated.

“Richie,” I heard Ethel saying. “Come on. We have to go get your brother, darling.”

“Do you know him?” I said to Ethel, referring to Harry Gold, though Ethel seemed not to have been paying the television any attention, and Richie was resisting being pulled off the couch.

“Know who?”

“Harry Gold?”

Ethel glanced at the screen. “Poor man. He’s probably just the latest victim in the government’s witch hunt.”

I tried to make sense of everything in my head: Jake had just sent me a telegram telling me we could be together the middle of June on the very day they’d arrested the culprit in May? It didn’t make any sense. Why hadn’t he just come here to the apartment if
his search was over? A sharp pain overtook me once more and I clutched my stomach.

Ethel didn’t seem to notice. She leaned down and kissed my cheek. “I’ll check in with you tomorrow, Millie,” I heard her saying. “Take it easy.”

I heard the door slam behind her as they left, and then it was just me and David sitting there on the couch. Dennis James was back and he was laughing now. I breathed in and out slowly and tried to relax and pay attention to the show. But then I felt the pain again, worse than before, and I looked down and noticed a drop of blood on my shoe.

It was happening again.

But it couldn’t happen now, not with the baby so close to coming. Not with Jake so close to coming back for us.

Jake.
I remembered the telephone number he’d given me, a way to reach him in case of an emergency. I’d stashed it away in the bathroom where I stored all of my female products that Ed wouldn’t dare touch. I would get it and call him now. I tried to stand but the room twisted around me. “Darling,” I said to David, “I need your help with something.” David didn’t seem to be listening. He was staring intently at
Okay, Mother
.

I attempted once more to stand, and this time, I made it.

“Millie.” I heard Ethel’s voice from the hallway and the sound of her knocking at the door. “Can you open up? Richie forgot his bear.”

“Ethel!” I cried out. “Come back in.”

“Millie?” Then I felt her hovering over me, and I wondered if a moment or two had lapsed. If I’d closed my eyes, between her knocking on the door and me making it to the couch, because I
didn’t remember seeing her come back in, hearing the door open and close, and here I was, sitting down again, which I didn’t remember doing either. “We need to get you to the hospital,” I heard her saying, and I let my eyes close again, relieved that she understood, that she could help me.

Then I remembered the telegram in the pocket of my dress. I couldn’t let anyone else find it, a doctor at the hospital who might give it to Ed. “The telegram,” I said to Ethel. Or maybe I didn’t.

When I woke up, I was very cold. The room was dark, and I squinted to make sense of where I was. “Mills, are you awake?”
Susan?
How had she gotten here so fast? I’d just closed my eyes. Ethel was just saying we would go to the hospital. The hospital? Is that where I was?

I felt my sister’s small hand on mine, and now that my eyes had adjusted to the light, I could see that she was sitting here in a chair next to me. “The baby?” I asked.

She leaned over and switched on a light above my head. It was too bright and it blinded me momentarily. Then I could see she was smiling. “He’s fine. He’s beautiful.”

“He?”
I asked.

“Yes, Mills. Another boy.”

“Where’s David?” I struggled to sit up, to stand, to look around the room for him.

“Calm down.” Susan put her hand on my shoulder. “David is fine, too. He’s with your neighbor, Mrs. Rosenberg.”

“Ethel took him.” I sighed, grateful for Ethel and her kindness. I
knew David would be safe with her. “And the baby? He really is all right?”

“He’s in the nursery,” she said, “and he’s perfect. Ten fingers and ten toes, I promise.” She squeezed my hand. “It was you we were worried about. You lost a lot of blood.”

“What happened?” I asked.

“There was a problem with the placenta,” Susan said. “And they had to take the baby out quickly—surgically.”

But I didn’t care about any of that. “I want to see him,” I said. “I need to see the baby. Henry,” I added.

“Henry?”
Susan wrinkled her tiny nose. “Who is he named after? Someone in Ed’s family?”

“Ed’s family? No . . . not exactly,” I said slowly, remembering the way I felt that night in the cabin with Jake, everything we had shared about ourselves, of ourselves.

“You
did
lose a lot of blood . . . I’ll go get the nurse.” She stood and put her hand on my shoulder. She hesitated for a moment, and then she said, “Mills, there’s one more thing I need to tell you.”

“What is it?” I asked, not liking her serious tone.

“It’s Ed,” she said. “We haven’t been able to find him.”

“What do you mean
find him
?” I asked. “He’s probably just not home from work yet.” Work—that mysterious job he went to each day on East Sixty-first Street.

“Mills, you’ve been here a week.”

“A week?” David had been without me for a whole week? I’d never even left him for longer than a few hours since he’d been born, and the thought suddenly made me feel panicky. “That can’t possibly be right.”

“It is,” she said. “Like I said, you lost a lot of blood.”
A week?
“Mother and I haven’t been able to get ahold of Ed to let him know that the baby has been born. That you’re here. Mrs. Stein doesn’t know where he is either. We even called and checked with Leo in California. But no one seems to know . . .” She paused. “Was he going on a trip for work maybe? Or to see some friends . . . somewhere?” Her voice floundered as if she’d been going over the possibilities in her head for days and hadn’t yet come up with a reasonable explanation.

I shook my head, and I remembered the events of that last afternoon in my apartment. Ethel left and then she came back. A man named Harry Gold was arrested—we saw it on the television. But he was in Philadelphia. Jake sent a telegram.
Await further instructions,
I remembered.
Take care of my baby.

“I don’t know,” I said. “I don’t know where Ed is.”

Susan smiled. “Well, I’m sure it’s just a misunderstanding. We’ll find him.”

But maybe we wouldn’t. Maybe Ed was gone. Truly gone. Maybe he had left me before I’d had the chance to leave him. But even as I thought it, it didn’t sit right with me. Ed might leave me and David, but he wouldn’t leave this baby.

HENRY WAS A CALM BABY
, and beautiful. I’d been right about the eyes: they were purely Jake’s, and each time I looked at him, I thought about the hopeful future that surely awaited us, so soon now.

It was June by the time we left the hospital weeks later, and Ed was still nowhere to be found. Susan had to leave to go back to her children in New Jersey, but my mother took a taxi with me from the
hospital to Knickerbocker Village and she promised to stay and help out as much as she could while I recovered. I appreciated the offer of help so much that I was able to tune out her constant chatter in the taxicab and to feel only grateful as she helped me and Henry get out of the car.

The weather was damp and much too cold for June, and I shivered and held tiny Henry tight to me as we walked into the building.

“The Dodgers had to cancel their games . . . This weather,” my mother was saying as we walked toward the elevator.

I hadn’t seen David in weeks, and as we rode up to the eleventh floor, I felt anxious to see him again, to hold on to him. When the elevator stopped, I handed Henry and the key to my apartment to my mother and I ran down the hallway to Ethel’s door, which I quickly realized was too much activity for me. I put one hand to my aching stomach, as if I could hold myself together, and I knocked with the other hand—softly, at first, then harder when no one answered.

At last the door swung open and Ethel stood there in front of me, her face red and splotchy. She’d been crying. “Ethel, what is it?”

“David—” she said, and my heart began to beat quickly. I pushed past her into the apartment. Julie was talking on the telephone, frowning, but I ran past him to the back bedroom, where all three boys were sitting on the floor, racing cars.

“Darling!” I rushed to David and leaned down and grabbed him. Too hard, and it hurt to hold him so tight like that against the long incision down my stomach. David didn’t say anything, but I felt his finger clutch at my dress. I kissed his head. “Oh, darling, it’s so good to see you again. I’ve missed you so much.” I stood up and
held on to his hand, and I noticed Ethel, standing in the doorway, still crying.

“I’m sorry.” She blew her nose. “I didn’t mean to frighten you, Millie. It’s David, my brother. He’s just been arrested.”

“Arrested? Why?”

“For espionage.”

“Espionage? David? But that other man, Harry Gold, was the one who did it . . . We saw it on the television.”

She blew her nose again. “Well, Harry Gold said David was involved, and now they’ve taken him in, too.” She held her hands up in the air. “Ruth’s back in the hospital with an infection, and their poor babies have no one to take care of them. Oh, it’s all such a mess.”

“Oh, Ethel.” I walked to her and put a hand on her shoulder. “I’m so sorry. That’s awful. Poor Ruth.” She shrugged and bit her lip a little to keep from crying more. “This is all my fault of course, according to my mother. Julie and I got him involved with the Party to begin with. She might as well have said that we’re the ones who arrested him, too.”

“Do you think your brother really is a . . . spy?” I asked, lowering my voice. Did David have secrets about the bomb from his time in New Mexico, secrets that he gave to Russia? Could David Greenglass have been the man Jake had been looking for in Ed’s
circle
all along?

“No, of course not,” Ethel said quickly, and she blew her nose one more time. But I couldn’t tell if she really believed in him or if she just had trouble comprehending that her brother, a man she had grown up with, could be capable of such a thing. “I don’t know,” Ethel added softly. “I don’t know what to believe anymore.”

“Do you know where Ed is?” I asked.

She hesitated, and then said, “I don’t know where he is. But he’ll be back for you soon.”

“How do you know?”

She walked out of the room and then walked back in. “Here.” She handed me a crumpled piece of paper and I looked at it and realized it was the telegram I’d gotten the day Henry was born. “I took this, like you asked me to, and I thought you were telling me to read it, so I did. But, don’t worry, I didn’t mention it to your sister . . . I didn’t know what you’d want to tell her. Anyway, according to this, Ed will be back very soon. The middle of June.”

“Oh, no,” I heard myself saying, “the telegram isn’t from . . .”
Take care of my baby.
But I took the telegram from Ethel, looked at it, and read it again, and that wasn’t what it said.
Be good to my
baby.
Who wrote that? Jake? It had to be Jake, but now that I was looking at it again the words didn’t sound like him. What if Ethel was right? “Ethel, do you understand what’s going on with Ed? Did Ed do . . . something? Is that why he has disappeared now?” I asked. “He’s friends with David. If David was involved in . . . well, maybe Ed was, too?”

“I don’t know what Ed did.” Ethel lowered her voice. “But I know Julie doesn’t trust him.”

“Doesn’t trust him how?” I asked, and Ethel shrugged a little. “Is Julie involved in all this mess, too?”

“Of course not,” Ethel snapped so quickly that I instantly felt bad for asking. “Julie’s just trying to help. That’s all he ever tries to do, and a lot of good that’s gotten him.” She folded her arms tightly and slumped over.

“I’m sorry. I didn’t mean . . .”

“I know,” Ethel said. “I know you didn’t. Everything’s becoming such a mess. I don’t think we’ll even get to Mexico this summer now. Julie’s loaning David money for his legal defense, and, after that, we won’t have much left.”

“I’m sorry,” I said again, though, inwardly and selfishly, I felt relieved that Ethel would be here in Knickerbocker Village with me until I left. “David and I should go. I left my mother with Henry.”

Ethel’s face softened, and she put her hand on my arm. “Henry. How lovely, Millie. I’d love to come meet him . . . soon. After we get all of this nonsense ironed out.”

“Thank you so much for taking care of David while I was in the hospital. You’ll let me know if I can do anything to help you. Anytime, okay?”

We hugged, and then with David holding tightly to my hand, I walked back down the hallway toward our apartment.

LATER THAT NIGHT
, with my mother having gone back to Delancey Street to care for Bubbe Kasha and with David and Henry both asleep, I walked into the bathroom to search for the hidden scrap of paper with the number Jake gave me.

In case of an emergency,
he’d said. Was this an emergency, really? His son’s birth. Ed’s bizarre disappearance. The arrest of Ethel’s brother. Any one of those things could be considered an emergency, could it not? Or most certainly a necessity to speak to him. I wanted so badly to tell him about the soft feel of Henry’s beautiful plump cheeks, the way his tiny fingers reached for mine as I gave him a bottle earlier.

I took the scrap of paper into the living room and dialed the
number, my finger trembling in the rotary. And then I listened to the ringing and ringing and ringing until finally a woman’s voice came on the line.

“This is Millie,” I whispered, not sure why I was whispering though it felt I should be. I cleared my throat, and spoke a bit louder. “Millie Stein,” I said.

“Mrs. Stein, what is the message?” she said curtly as if hundreds of other women had called and left messages for Jake.
Had they?

“Can I speak with him?” I asked, holding my breath, longing to hear his voice, to have him tell me that everything would be okay, that we would be together soon, before Ed even came back from wherever he was. Or that Jake would tell me that he was the one who sent the telegram. That he was going to come and help with his newborn son.