The Hours Count (3 page)

“You should want to die of smallpox instead?” my mother asked, putting her hands on her wide hips. She wore her pale gray dress like a sack, and her hands revealed the lumpiness of her large stomach underneath.

Would I want to die of smallpox? It seemed closer, more immediate than Stalin’s bomb, but I also imagined the process would be slower and more painful. Should the bomb come and take us, I might never even know what happened. And it would take me and David, instantly and simultaneously. What would happen to David if I should die of something else on my own?

“Of course not,” I said to my mother. “I’ll come by for you Monday morning.” I paused. “You’ll still come for dinner tonight, though? And Bubbe Kasha, too?”

“Oh goodness no. I feel like I’m risking my life just having come here. All these people living here in one place. All the germs that could be in that . . .
elevator
.”

“Well, then you should have sent a telegram,” I said, unable to keep the annoyance I was feeling with her from my voice. I had been looking forward to the dinner with my family, my sister—perfect babies and all—and now it would just be Ed and me and David. Alone. I had a brisket enough to feed at least ten. And there was no option to skip Shabbat, not for Ed anyway.

“You should want for me to spend money on a telegram when I can use my own two feet?” She waved her hand in the air, blew me a kiss, and then as quickly as she’d come she was gone.

From the back room I heard the sounds of the crib bars rattling. David was awake.

I was raised Jewish—and only the second generation in America at that. My grandparents came over from Russia in 1901, but for them, and later for me, our religion always felt more cultural than spiritual. Growing up, Shabbat dinner was something we’d attend at Bubbe Kasha’s and Zayde Jerome’s apartment, but not every week. Only when my father felt like it. Some weeks he was too tired and wanted to stay in our apartment and rest, which to him meant eating my mother’s terrible split pea soup, smoking a cigarette, and then listening to Jack Haley on
The
Wonder Show
. As he always said, he could believe in God
and
listen to the radio on his night of rest.

To be married to a kosher butcher who doesn’t even want to attend Shabbat dinner,
my mother would say and cluck her tongue, and then she would light our candles. She always lit the candles and we’d always say a quick prayer. But then she would smile and pull up a chair next to the radio and eat pea soup there with our father, and Susan and I would hear the two of them laughing from the bedroom in the back of the apartment.

But Ed grew up back in Russia, much more religious than I did here. He insisted on a formal Shabbat dinner every Friday night. We used to go to the one at his mother Lena’s apartment, which was regularly attended by Ed’s younger brother, Leo, Leo’s wife, Betty, and their two daughters, but more recently I had told Ed that I would make the dinner for us. Back on Delancey Street my mother and Bubbe Kasha would walk up the steps to join us each week.

I had offered, not because I wanted to make the dinner or even cared so much about the ritual of Shabbat, but because I didn’t enjoy attending the dinner at Lena’s, the way her piercing green eyes bored holes into me. It was as if they knew my secret and she hated me for it, though there was no way she could know—Ed had no idea about the diaphragm I’d gotten from Dr. Greenberg. And I’d told no one, not even my mother or Susan.

But then I understood that wasn’t what it was at all. The last time we’d been there, two months earlier, Lena had taken me aside just before dinner. “I raised boys, you know,” she’d said, her voice curling, so I didn’t want to point out that, technically, she’d raised only Leo. Ed had grown up in Russia with an aunt and had moved to America as an adult to join Lena, only four years ago. “And neither one of them had the . . . problem that David has.” She frowned, and her green eyes felt hot against my face, as if they really and truly could burn me.

“David is fine,” I shot back at her. “Dr. Greenberg says he’s just taking his time to develop, that’s all.” That was, of course, only part of what Dr. Greenberg had said, but that was the part that had to be right.

She wagged her finger in my face. “You don’t love him enough,”
she said, but it wasn’t clear whether she was referring to David or to Ed. I didn’t answer, and when we got back to Delancey Street that night, I told Ed that I would cook us Shabbat dinner from then on. I blamed it on my mother and Bubbe Kasha, who was getting old and had a hard time with her memory, and so far they had joined us each week.

But now, tonight, I had a brisket in the oven, enough to feed ten, and no one coming to dinner.

ED WALKED IN
the door just after five, just after I’d gotten David settled with a pile of brightly colored blocks on the floor by our window overlooking Monroe Street. I’d pulled all the yellows out and had given them to him, and he sat there and stacked them over and over again, seemingly contented, lulled by their brightness. The brisket was done and I had it on the table, along with our Shabbat candles. I smoked a cigarette nervously, waiting for Ed to arrive, watching out the window at all the men in suits rushing by on their way home from work. From this high up, they were tiny, and they all looked the same, cloaked in dark suits, dark hats, and I could not make out which one was Ed until I heard the door opening, and then I knew I’d missed him entirely.

He entered the apartment wordlessly and walked toward the narrow kitchen. I heard him rustling in the cabinets, pulling out a glass and pouring his vodka. And then he entered the living room, glass in hand.

He didn’t lean in to kiss me, as my father had always done with my mother when he returned home from work each evening, or
even stoop down to pat David on the head, as I remember my father doing with me. Instead, he simply sat on the couch, downed his vodka, and then he said, “Where is everyone?”

“They’re not coming.” I squashed my cigarette out in the ashtray on the coffee table just next to where Ed rested his feet.

“What do you mean not coming?” he asked.

“There’s some kind of smallpox outbreak, I guess,” I said. “So Susan didn’t want to bring the twins into the city, and my mother and Bubbe Kasha thought it better to stay home.” I tried to read his face, to judge his reaction. But his expression was blank, his gaze fixed straight ahead on the beige wall, and I couldn’t tell if he was angry or just tired. I thought about what Mr. Bergman asked, about whether Ed was having trouble with work now that everyone was making such a big deal out of Truman’s loyalty oath. Ed’s Russian accent, even four years after he’d come to America, was so thick, so obvious, that it worried me that it would brand him now that everyone had started worrying about Stalin and Russia and American loyalty in a way they hadn’t before. “I have the brisket ready,” I added. “And the candles.”

He finished off his vodka and put the empty, sweating glass down on the coffee table. “You should have telephoned me at work,” he said. “Then I would have had time to let Mother know she would have three more at the table tonight.”

“I couldn’t,” I said quickly. “The phone operators’ strike, remember? No calls are going through.” Though the truth was, I wouldn’t have called him at work anyway. And now it would be too late to go to Lena’s, there was no way to telephone her, and besides, the brisket was already done. Ed would not let a cooked brisket go to waste. “Come on,” I said to him, sitting down on the couch next to him and
gently reaching my hand around to the back of his neck. “Let’s eat.” Ed had a thick neck, and I could feel it was knotted with tenseness. I rubbed it softly with my fingers, hoping it would calm him.

David picked that moment to accidentally knock his stack of yellows over so that they scattered all about the floor. I watched as his mouth turned from content to aghast in a matter of seconds, and his face turned bright red, his eyes welling with tears.

Ed pulled out of my grasp and he stood, clearly agitated now. David kicked the floor, making loud, booming thuds over and over again. “Do something with him, would you?” Ed demanded. And he walked back into the kitchen.

I went to David and held on to him, trying to soothe him by picking the yellows back up, stacking them again, but this time David knocked them back over intentionally. I wasn’t supposed to yell. I was supposed to give him extra love, Dr. Greenberg had said, so I hugged his small body to me tightly. I rocked him back and forth and back and forth until his breathing evened and his crying stopped. “I wish you could just tell me what you were thinking,” I whispered into his soft curls. “Wouldn’t that be a whole lot easier for both of us?” But the only sound I heard came from the kitchen: Ed pouring another vodka.

I led David to the table, where I handed him his cup of milk, and then I walked into the narrow kitchen and put my hand on Ed’s shoulder. “Come on,” I said to him. “Let’s sit down and light our candles and eat. David has calmed down, and the meat is growing cold. We can still celebrate the Shabbat together as a family in our nice new apartment.”

Ed finished off his second vodka, and I could feel the tension ease from his shoulders. He put the glass in the sink and nodded.

LATER
, Ed and I lay on opposite sides of our hard mattress, not quite touching. The room was still, but I could hear the even sounds of David asleep, breathing in his crib, and the sounds of the neighbors next door, who I hadn’t met yet, their bed springs squeaking up and down and up and down. It was clear what they were doing in there, and I hoped it wouldn’t give Ed any ideas.

Ed wanted another child, another boy, so very badly. We had been married only a month when I got pregnant with David, and we had barely known each other but everything had seemed like a grand adventure to me then. Playing house with a man and a child in the one-room apartment above my mother’s—it was such a relief to be doing what I always thought and dreamed I would—leaving my days as a working girl at the factory behind for a quiet domesticity.

My marriage to Ed was something my mother and Lena cooked up one evening a few years ago at a Hadassah meeting. Lena had for years tried to bring Ed to New York, but it was not as easy to emigrate from Russia in the ’40s, during the war, as it had been when Bubbe Kasha and Zayde Jerome came in 1901 with my mother. Lena had finally gotten him here at the end of ’43 and then she had to marry him off, of course. Ed had been living in New York only a month when I first saw him, and he was ten years older than me. Back then I’d still been working at the Cupid Garment Factory with Susan. The work there was easy, and though I took no particular joy in sewing, I liked the camaraderie with the other girls there, all just like me, young, unmarried, unfettered. But my friends at the factory started getting engaged one by one, including Susan. I
feared I might become a spinster, stuck sewing forever. Ed appeared to be the answer to everything.

It didn’t hurt that he was very nice to look at. He was tall, with a thick head of brown hair. He had very nice broad shoulders and a squarish nose that sat firmly in the center of his face. The first time I ever saw him, inside Lena’s threadbare apartment, he was sitting at Lena’s worn table, looking at me shyly, his hands shaking a little as we were introduced. He was nervous in front of me at first, a quality I found endearing.

I wasn’t lucky—or even beautiful—like Susan, who had known and loved Sam practically forever. He’d grown up down the street from us on Delancey and he’d gone to high school with us. We’d always known he and Susan would get married, and they did, just after he came home from the war. But I’d had no one, and with all the men gone, and my thirties rapidly approaching, it had seemed I might never find anyone, that I might live on Delancey with my mother and Bubbe Kasha forever. And then I saw Ed there at Lena’s kitchen table so eager to please me, for me to like him, and a few weeks later, when he asked, I agreed to marry him.

I never thought about the years and years that would stretch ahead in our marriage, making the life that lay ahead of me sometimes feel like an impossibly long and arduous void. I didn’t know about the way Ed would drink too much vodka when things bothered him or the way Ed would need another child that I might not be ready to have. Ed was so happy when David was first born. Ed’s younger American-born brother, Leo, had so far given Lena only two granddaughters, and here Ed, always trying to prove himself to Lena after so many years away from her in Russia, had produced the first grandson, a boy to carry on the family name. But since it
had become clear that David might not exactly be a normal, perfect boy, Ed had become obsessed with having another. It felt to me he wished to throw David away as you would wayward garbage. Ed had grown so cold and distant with David in a way I could not understand nor accept, that it often occurred to me now how little I had ever really even known Ed—or loved him—at all.