The Hours Count (27 page)

“Well, Julie and I don’t know anything either,” she said. “But the FBI still showed up here this morning. It’s all becoming guilt by association. Harry Gold said he knew David. David said he knows Julie. Julie won’t give them anything, of course, but suppose they see you and I talking and then they drag you in for questioning, too?”

“That’s crazy,” I said, but I swallowed hard. Everything else that was going on felt so crazy that I wasn’t sure that Ethel’s notion was that far-flung.

But Ethel didn’t respond. She simply stood and showed us to the door. “Don’t worry,” she said, “Julie’s going to be fine. He’s going to be just fine. We all are.” The way she repeated it, it was almost as if she were trying to convince herself.
Julie’s going to fry,
Ed had said. But I tried to push his words, his voice, out of my head.

Ethel grabbed me fiercely for a hug. She held on so tightly, it was as if she thought she might never see me again.

BACK IN MY APARTMENT
, I put Henry in the crib for a nap and David in front of the television. I changed my dress and ran Ethel’s towel under cold water in the kitchen sink, attempting to remove the bloodstains which didn’t want to budge. My bleeding had stopped, but my stomach now ached, the long, vertical wound feeling fresh again, raw, as if my body had almost ripped in two.

I lit a cigarette and paced in front of the window, watching all the people on the street below moving about as if the world hadn’t changed at all. I thought again about Ed’s frightening words and I
worried about Julie, off somewhere being questioned by the FBI. Why hadn’t Jake been able to stop that? And what did Ed really have to do with all of this?

The telephone rang and I jumped, wishing that it might be Jake, that he had somehow gotten my message after all. I had so many things to ask him now. But when I picked up, I heard my mother’s impatient voice. “Mildred,” she said. “Whatever happened to you?”

I remembered.
The brisket!
The Sabbath. There was still plenty of time until sundown, but I’d left Mr. Bergman’s without anything this morning and now I didn’t have the energy to walk both children over there again and to my mother’s. “I’m sorry,” I said, “I just got so very tired. You were right, this was a lot . . . too much for me to handle.”

“But Mildred, you’re still coming, aren’t you?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “I don’t think I can.”

She lowered her voice. “There’s a man here to see you. From the FBI. He knew you were coming here today. I don’t know how, but he did. And now he’s pacing around and pestering us. He’s making Bubbe Kasha very nervous.”

“A man there? From the FBI? Who?”

“He looks very . . . official.” She lowered her voice even more. “Are you in some kind of trouble, Mildred?”

“Trouble?” I thought about Ethel’s nervousness that I shouldn’t be associated with her. Was I? If Ed was in trouble, maybe I would be lumped in with him. But if the FBI was looking for me, well, then, why wouldn’t they just come here, to our apartment?

“Jack something,” I realized my mother was saying. “Yes, that’s what he said his name was.”

“Jake,” I said.

THE WALK TO
my mother’s apartment felt like the longest walk of my life. Henry wasn’t happy to be put back in the carriage, and he cried and cried most of the way. David wanted nothing to do with holding on to my hand or the carriage after our last outing, and I feared I might literally rip in two if I were to pick him up again. “Now we are going to see Jake,” I kept saying. “I promise, I promise . . .” I gripped his hand out of fear that if I didn’t he’d run into the street, away from me, and I wouldn’t have the energy or the ability to catch him.

At last we reached Delancey Street, and the outside of my mother’s small tenement looked run-down and gray, as it had for as long as I could remember. The upstairs window, the apartment where Ed and I had lived once, was now dark. Nothing appeared different than it had in so very long. It was hard to believe that Jake was really inside.

I found the front door unlocked, as it always was, and I opened it and stepped inside. I heard the radio, smelled pea soup coming from the small stove. Bubbe Kasha sat on the couch, her knitting needles poised in her fingers, a mess of tangled yarn in her lap, as if she were making a sweater and had forgotten how halfway through.

“Hello!” I called out. “Mother?”

“Is that you, Mildred?” To my surprise, Lena stepped out of the kitchen.

I put my hand to my mouth. Were Lena and Jake both here? “Lena? What are you doing here?”

“I stopped by to see the baby,” Lena said, her voice normal and
even—not the way it would sound if she’d just seen Jake, I was fairly certain. “Ed called me this morning and told me to come.” I wondered what she knew about Ed, his activities, his disappearance.
My mother gave it to you,
Ed had said about the number this morning. So what else did Lena know that I didn’t?

I shook my head, confused. But before I had a chance to ask, my mother stepped out of the kitchen behind Lena. “Oh, Mildred, there you are.” Her voice was an octave too high. “Lena
just
stopped by for a surprise visit, and now I need you to run to Waterman’s Grocery and pick me up
this
list of things for our dinner. Lena and I will watch the babies.” She pressed a scrap of paper in my hand and pushed my shoulder toward the door. David, having looked around the room and realized that Jake wasn’t here after all, had thrown himself down on the floor and begun repeatedly kicking and wailing. Lena shook her head in disgust, and then picked Henry up and kissed his tiny cheek. “Here is our little angel,” I heard her say.

I peeked at the scrap of paper and saw it wasn’t a grocery list at all, that it said:
Need to talk to you.—J
.

“I’ll take David with me,” I said. I ignored the ache in my abdomen and picked him up and carried him out, still kicking.

JAKE WAS SITTING
at the counter at Waterman’s Grocery, eating a sandwich as I imagined he had always done every night when he’d lived in the apartment upstairs. He looked just like a normal man, a handsome man, a kind man . . . the type of man I could’ve fallen in love with years ago before I’d even heard of Ed. I imagined I might have seen him sitting here one evening, on a stool, leaning over the counter, eating a sandwich, as I stopped to pick up groceries after
my shift at the factory. That we could have met, then and there, and everything else that followed since would’ve been different. But of course in those years Jake was living and working in Washington, D.C., or maybe still back on the farm in Maryland. Had it not been for Ed, I would’ve never met Jake at all.

Suddenly David noticed Jake, and he ran away from me faster than I could run after him. He jumped on the stool next to Jake and wrapped his arms around Jake’s neck. Jake turned, saw me standing there, and offered me a small smile, which quickly turned into a worried look. He stood and rushed to me, David clinging to his arm. “You’re bleeding,” he said.

I looked down and saw a little more blood seeping through my dress. “It’s nothing,” I said, “I just pulled another stitch.”

“Millie, it’s not nothing.” He pulled a napkin from the counter and gently held it to my dress. The feel of his hands, so close to my skin but not quite, made me want to cry, and all at once, in that smallest of gestures, I felt inherently that I could trust him. Jake was good and kind, even if he hadn’t always told me the truth.

Jake looked around, then back at me. “Where’s the baby?” he asked softly.

“With my mother and Lena.” His face fell a little as if he’d been looking forward to seeing Henry, and I felt terrible for having left Henry behind. “You’ll meet him next time,” I said, though my voice caught, uncertain.

He nodded, pulled a dollar from his pocket, and left it on the counter for Mr. Waterman. “We need to go somewhere else . . . to talk. Can you walk to catch the subway?”

“Of course I can walk,” I said, though as I said it I wasn’t so sure. Now that I was here, with Jake so close, I felt the exhaustion and the
pain that had been coming on all day after doing so much. I felt like my entire body had deflated and that it wanted to collapse. I wanted Jake to hold me up, to help me, to take me away from all of this as he’d promised once.

Jake picked David up and held on to him with one arm. With the other, he reached for my hand. “We’ll take a cab,” he said.

“Where are we going?” I asked, but Jake didn’t answer. And the truth was, I would’ve gone anywhere with him then, it didn’t even matter where.

AN HOUR LATER
, we were in a room in the Biltmore in Grand Central Terminal City. I understood there was probably a reason we were so close to the train station. Jake would be leaving me again soon. But I didn’t say anything as Jake checked us in under the names Dr. and Mrs. Zitlow. If the hotel clerk noticed the look on my face, or the blood stained across my horrible, large dress, he didn’t mention it. He simply handed Jake the key and ushered us to the elevator.

David had fallen asleep in the cab in Jake’s arms, and once we were in the room, Jake set him down carefully on the settee by the window. I sat on the corner of the bed and watched the gentle way that Jake maneuvered him. David shifted and put his thumb in his mouth. “He spoke, you know,” I said.

“He did?” Jake smiled, and he sat down on the edge of the bed next to me.

He put his arm around me, and I leaned into him and put my head on his shoulder. The warmth of him there next to me felt exactly right, as if this strange hotel room in a part of the city I’d never
been, suddenly felt like home. “When you left my apartment that day months ago . . . He shouted no. He didn’t want you to leave. He was inconsolable.”

“Millie.” Jake leaned away from me, leaned forward, and put his head in his hands.

I wanted to pull him back toward me, to lie down here with him and pretend it was just me and him, that the whole rest of the world and all the craziness didn’t matter. But it did. I had so many questions for him. So many things I needed to understand.

“Why didn’t you tell me you were working with Ed?” I asked. “That Ed was part of the FBI? Why do you keep lying to me?”