The Hours Count (31 page)

“This is all a terrible mistake,” I said in a low voice. “That’s why Ethel needs a chicken. She’s going to prepare one while the press watches, show them that none of this is worrisome to her. That Julie’s completely innocent.”

“A chicken?” He raised his eyebrows. “What they need is a good lawyer. Do they have one?”

“I don’t know,” I said, “I suppose they must.” I wondered how expensive a good lawyer was and whether they were able to afford one. Ethel had already said Julie was paying for David’s lawyer, and now he would need one for himself, too. They were supposed to be using that money to go to Mexico this summer.

“All right, I will get you your chickens,” Mr. Bergman said. “But first, let me tell you a story.” He cleared his throat. “When your father was still alive, back in ’28, and the slaughterhouses were trying to gouge us, do you know what he did?”

I vaguely remembered that time, when I was a little girl, before the market crashed, before the war, when people still had it in them to get all up in arms about things like the price of meat, but I didn’t remember anything specific my father did. “No,” I said. “What?”

“He organized all the kosher butchers in the city to call a strike. He was the one who said he wasn’t going to stand for it. He was going to make a difference. And do you know what happened?” I shook my head. “Even after the strike was over and things were resolved, the slaughterhouses were very angry with us. They wanted to get even. They sent us terrible meat for months. If it hadn’t been for the chickens—we always have had the best chicken”—I nodded, listening—“it would’ve put us out of business for good.”

I thought about my father, standing up and organizing all those butchers to fight for something that wasn’t right, and I felt a proud of him in a way I hadn’t ever felt before. Then I remembered why Ethel said she’d been so involved in the Party to begin with—to help organize labor unions, fairness for workers. My father would’ve understood that being a communist once didn’t mean you were a spy. “I miss him,” I said, my voice breaking.

“So do I, bubbelah.” Mr. Bergman reached across the counter and squeezed my hand. “But you know what he would tell you if he was here now?” I shrugged. “He’d tell you to go give Ethel her chicken and then get the hell out of Knickerbocker Village. Go out to New Jersey, stay with Susy for a little while. Keep away from all this.”

I was fairly sure that wasn’t what my father would tell me at all. “I can’t do that,” I said. “I’m not going to abandon my friend.” I lowered my voice and leaned in closer. “I don’t understand everything that’s gone on. I know Ethel’s brother David got into some trouble
and he’s somehow dragged Julie into it now.” I paused, wondering whether I should say this next thing to Mr. Bergman, whether I should bring him into this at all. His brown eyes were fixed so heavily on my face as if he were imploring me to continue, so I did. “But I don’t think Julie would’ve given atomic secrets to the Russians no matter what the FBI or the papers say. He’s so kind, and he’s such a good husband and father. He’s always playing baseball in the courtyard with his boys.” I said it firmly as if this were all the evidence anyone might need. But wasn’t it? A man like Julie, who loved his children and his wife so, he would never want them murdered, just like that, by the Russians suddenly dropping the bomb.

“You gotta look out for yourself in this world. You can’t worry about everybody else. I have a bad feeling about this, Mildred. They’re not going to stop with arresting just Julius Rosenberg.”

“What do you mean?”

He shrugged. “Everyone is so afraid. The Russians have the bomb now. We’re at war with Korea. The House Un-American Activities Committee is looking into so many supposed communists, and that Senator McCarthy keeps talking about all the spies in the State Department, changing his mind about how many of them there are. The government needs to look like they’re doing something or else how will everyone sleep at night?” He sighed. “What do I know? I don’t know,” he said. “Listen to me. I’m just an old man talking.”

“You’re not that old,” I said, though I worried about the tense lines around his eyes, the way his hands shook a little bit as he wrapped my chickens in brown paper.

He handed the chickens across the counter. “I’m just saying, Mildred. You’re such a nice girl. You’ve always wanted to help
everybody else. You do such a good job with your boys.” He said all these things about me as if they were fact, as if everyone knew and believed them, not just him. He patted David on the head. “But if you have to choose between helping your friend and saving yourself, you save yourself, you understand me? You save yourself.”

“Don’t worry,” I told him, and I knew he wouldn’t hate me if I left with Jake. And that if my mother did, maybe he would help her understand that it was what I had to do. “Really.” I squeezed his hand. “I’ll be fine, okay? And if Dr. Zitlow comes back, you’ll tell him I got his message?”

He frowned a little, but then he agreed. I put the wrapped chickens into the carriage, and then I grabbed David’s hand and we walked back to Knickerbocker Village.

BACK ON THE ELEVENTH FLOOR
, I knocked on Ethel’s door and this time John answered. He stared at me and then held out his small hands as if Ethel had told him to take the chicken without saying a word to me. I bent down and put the brown package in his hands. “Does your mother need anything else?” I asked.

“Johnny, shut the door!” I heard Ethel yelling from the kitchen, where I guessed she was cleaning.

‘It’s okay,” I said to him just before he did what Ethel asked and shut the door. “Everything is going to be okay.”

IN MY APARTMENT
, I read Jake’s letter again, and I wondered where I could find the evidence he needed. After I laid the boys down for their naps, I searched the kitchen cabinets, not quite sure
what I was looking for. I pulled out Ed’s half-empty bottle of vodka, but, behind it, there was another full one. I quietly rifled through his bureau drawers but found only clothes, then looked under couch cushions, between the pages of an old copy of the
New York Times
on the coffee table. But I found nothing of any consequence. If Ed had anything that might incriminate him, I didn’t think it was in our apartment.

I stopped searching as I began to hear noises in the hallway, people walking down the hall.
The press.
They were coming to watch Ethel prepare her chicken. I felt nervous for her and I sat on my couch and lit a cigarette. I closed my eyes as I inhaled and exhaled the smoke, wishing for the moments to pass quickly until Jake sent word again.

IN THE DAYS
that followed, most of what I learned about Julie and Ethel’s situation was from other sources. I heard news in worried telephone calls from my mother and Susan, and I read bits on my own in the paper and watched it on the television. Ethel went to visit Julie in jail the Sunday after he was arrested, which I learned when I got onto the elevator as she was getting off, in tears, her face so red it seemed she had been crying for years.

“Ethel,” I said, reaching for her arm to embrace her, but she ignored me and walked off the elevator past me.

Mrs. Greenwald, an older woman who lived down the hall, stepped onto the elevator with me only after Ethel had slammed her apartment door shut. “It’s better we shouldn’t be seen on the elevator with her, eh?” Mrs. Greenwald cocked her eyebrows at me. “I waited to make sure she was gone before I came on.”

I pressed my lips tightly together, remembering what Mr. Bergman had told me, not wanting to make my own enemy.

AS AUGUST CAME
, I learned that there was going to be a grand jury hearing in Julie’s case. In the nights after I put the children to bed and the apartment was quiet, I watched the television turned down low, and I began drinking what was left of Ed’s vodka. I couldn’t even stand the taste of vodka or the way it burned my throat as it went down, but I enjoyed the warmth I felt immediately after—the feeling, at last, that everything could be okay. Maybe that was why Ed had always drunk so much of it.

Ed had been gone so long now that I convinced myself it was possible he’d left us for good. If he was never coming back, he would never miss all his vodka I was drinking. But deep down, I knew he wouldn’t have left Henry behind for good no matter what. I hoped and prayed for Julie’s ordeal to be over, for life to go back to normal and for the FBI to forget all about Knickerbocker Village, but I was pretty sure when that happened Ed would mysteriously reappear, and I could not imagine life here as it once was, me and Ed, living in this apartment as husband and wife.

THE SATURDAY NIGHT
before Ethel was called to testify in front of the grand jury, I stayed up late, drinking more vodka than usual, watching a report on television about a bomber plane that had crashed into a neighborhood in California, killing and injuring innocent people. I imagined it would be like the bomb, coming out of
the sky out of nowhere. And I shuddered at the idea, and stood up to turn the television off.

I was dizzy; I’d drunk too much vodka, and I reached out for the top of the television to steady myself. My hand caught on something odd, and, once I’d regained my balance, I ran my hand across the top of the television again. It felt like a small door built into the wooden casing surrounding the television. I turned on the lamp and came back to examine it closer. I tried to pull it open with my fingernail and realized I’d need something stronger, so I grabbed a steak knife from the kitchen and then pried the small door open.