The Hours Count (7 page)

“Now?” she said. “Millie, it’s late.”

I glanced at Ed, who was already talking to Mortie Sobell as if I weren’t even here, as if he hadn’t just grabbed me.
How could he possibly know?
“I just need some air,” I said.

“But . . .” She hesitated, and I guessed there was more she wanted to say but she stopped herself and then said instead, “Take as long as you need.”

OUT ON THE
sidewalk below, the air was much too cold for early September, and I’d not stopped by my apartment for my coat. I shivered, and pulled at the sleeves of my gray dress, but I could not go back inside, up the elevator, to Ethel’s. And Ed.

I had the urge to walk, to go up the street and get on the subway and ride it somewhere. Anywhere. But I didn’t even have my purse with me. And besides, where would I go now at this hour? And even if I should ever want to leave here, I couldn’t go alone. I would never leave David behind.

I could still feel the impression of Ed’s fingertips on my wrist. I looked down and saw slight purple marks. I could also feel his lips against mine and I reached up and touched my mouth as if to brush the memory away.
I know what you’ve been doing,
he’d said. I
shivered again and wondered if it was possible, if he’d finally figured out about the diaphragm.

I hoped he was talking about something else, some imagined ill I’d committed against him. The more time that passed without me finding myself with a child, the more distant and angrier Ed became.

But I knew if he had discovered my secret now, there was not much I could do about it, and it terrified me to think what might become of David should we ever have another, more perfect child. It terrified me to think that maybe Dr. Greenberg was right, that it was me. My fault. And it was bad enough that I was ruining one child.

I felt a hand on my shoulder and I flinched. “I didn’t mean to startle you . . . Again . . .” I turned and there was the doctor I’d met upstairs.

“Dr. Gold,” I said.

“Jake,”
he reminded me gently. “I was about to head home and I noticed you standing out here. Is everything all right, Mrs. Stein?”

“Millie,”
I corrected him, too, and he smiled at me. “Yes, of course. Everything is fine.” I shook his hand away from my shoulder and forced a smile. “I just wanted some fresh air. That’s all. It was quite loud in there. And very smoky. Is the party over?” I wondered if everyone had left Ethel’s. If Ed had noticed I was gone. If David was still sleeping.

“Not yet,” he said, and I wondered why he was leaving early but didn’t ask. “Can I walk you back up before I go?”

I shook my head. “I’ll be fine. I live here, too, so I think I can find my way.” My words came out sounding short and angry, and I felt a little bad for being rude to this man who was practically a
stranger and trying to be kind. “Thank you,” I added. “But really, I’ll be okay.”

He pulled a card from his coat pocket. “Here,” he said, “take this. If you ever want to talk . . .”

My hands were shaking with cold, but I held up the card to the streetlamp to read it as Jake walked away.

Dr. Jacob Gold,
it read.
Doctor of Psychotherapy.

The next morning, I didn’t wake up until after Ed had left for work, a rare day when David slept past the first moments of sun slanting in through the tiny bedroom window, and Ed had moved carefully enough around the apartment so I hadn’t even heard him leave.

I awoke disoriented at first, David so still that I thought he wasn’t here at all until I saw him sleeping heavily on the mattress across the room. I remembered Ed’s ominous whisper in Ethel’s living room last night and I looked down to my wrist, where the purpling imprint of his fingers seemed singed into my skin.

When I had finally ridden the elevator back up to Ethel’s apartment last night, Ed had already left. I’d assured Ethel that everything was okay and I’d carried a sleeping David back home to find Ed passed out and snoring in our bed. It felt like a gift not to have to talk to him then, or this morning either, a momentary reprieve where I could gather my thoughts and figure out what to do next if he had, in fact, discovered my secret.

I stood now and tiptoed to my small wooden dresser, a relic
from Bubbe Kasha’s old apartment. I opened the top drawer and searched below my underthings. I felt it there—in the small, nondescript box where I always kept it—undisturbed. And last night felt like nothing more than a dream, Ed’s words nothing more than the ramblings of a drunk man.
He knows nothing,
I told myself, and then I said it out loud as if hearing the words would make them real.

I walked into the kitchen and made myself some coffee and then I went to the window and watched the street below. The sunshine fell upon the men walking to work and the women pushing carriages, making everything appear ultrabright, and the world beneath me seemed a thing of excessive beauty, the unreal world of storybooks. I wondered if Ethel might want to take her boys outside to play with David today before the weather turned and got too much colder.

The sound of knocking at my door startled me, and I nearly spilled my coffee. It was early, before nine, but maybe Ethel had had the same idea.

“Coming,” I said, but not too loud so as not to awaken David, and I peeked my head in the back bedroom to see if he was still sleeping. It was so unusual for him to be this undisturbed that for a moment I wondered if he was ill. But then I heard the knock on the door again and I ran to answer it before the noise woke him.

An unfamiliar woman stood in my doorway, her hand raised to knock once more. She was short and quite round, wearing a too-tight brown suit, her graying hair pulled back into a taut bun. She looked at me and she frowned, and I realized that I was still in my robe. I pulled it tighter across my chest. “Can I help you?” I asked.

She tried to peer past me into the apartment, which was quite untidy. David’s blocks still scattered across the floor. And had it
not been for the fact that I was in my robe, I would’ve stepped out into the hallway and shut the door behind me so she wouldn’t see our mess. Up on the eleventh floor we didn’t get wayward visitors, unexpected guests, or salesmen. So I felt certain this woman had knocked on the wrong door by mistake until she glanced at me, frowned again, and said, “Mrs. Stein?”

“Yes,” I managed, startled that she had, in fact, come to the right place. I noticed she was holding a thick notebook and a pen. “Can I help you?” I asked again, my tone sharper than before.

“I’m Zelda Weiss from the Jewish Children’s Home.” She paused. “Your husband called us.”

“Yes?” I managed to say again.

“He felt your son might benefit from being placed in our care.”

I know what you’ve been doing,
Ed had said, his fingers marking my arm with their forcefulness, and now he was exacting his revenge? Zelda Weiss was standing at my doorway at such an early hour because she wanted to take David. Ed wanted David sent away.

I stepped back and slammed the door, latching the chain. I pressed my back against the door, and I could hear my ragged breaths rattling in my chest. I wouldn’t let her in. I wouldn’t let her near David.

“Mrs. Stein.” She rapped on the door again. “I would just like to talk with you about your husband’s . . . concerns about . . . We can help you, you know.”

I pressed my back harder against the door, and I watched my coffee cup tremble in my unsteady hands. From the back room I heard the sounds of David awakening now. Surely he would not have slept through my slamming of the door. I could hear him kicking the wall, the steady, uneasy thumps reverberating in my brain.
It was his way. His way of saying that he was awake and he needed me. I understood it. I understood him. And no matter what Ed or anyone else thought, he would not be better off with someone else.

“Mrs. Stein!” Zelda Weiss called again through the door, her voice sounding tighter, stretched by impatience. “I am going to slide my card under the door . . . I’ll be back later in the week. Perhaps it will be a better time for you. And we can talk then.”

I watched the card come across the floor and then I picked it up. It would never be a better time and I would never talk to her. I ripped the card up and threw the ugly pieces in the trash, and then I walked into the bedroom and grabbed ahold of David.

“Good morning, love,” I said into his unruly curls, my curls.
My
son. “Mommy is here.” I held on tight, even when he struggled to break free of my grasp.

THOUGH IT
WASN
’
T
Friday and I didn’t need any meat, I got David dressed and walked with him toward Market Street and Mr. Bergman’s shop. If anyone would understand, or would have the desire to help, it would be him. I had considered calling my mother or Susan, but I worried they might agree with Ed, that they might tell me now, with David already three, I was holding on to nothing. I pictured the cool look in my sister’s hazel eyes as she might tell me that sometimes you had to be willing to let go. But I wasn’t. I wouldn’t. I never would.

I held on to David’s hand extra-tight as we walked. And I talked and talked, enough for the both of us. I smiled and hugged him along the way as I thought about how Dr. Greenberg said I was too cold. That
I
was the reason David refused to be normal.

I remembered Ed had been to see Dr. Greenberg for his yearly physical last week, and now I wondered what Dr. Greenberg had said to him. Had he told Ed what he had told me, that he believed David might do better in
another environment
, or had he simply told Ed about the diaphragm? Probably both. And I felt even more certain Ed had called Zelda Weiss to get even.

As we walked, I couldn’t shake the feeling that David and I were being followed, that someone—Zelda Weiss?—was watching us, judging me. I glanced uneasily behind my shoulder, and for a moment I thought I recognized a man on the street, that doctor from last night, Jake. But then I turned around again and he was gone, and I told myself no one was watching us. That now I was becoming paranoid.

“
BOYCHIK
, what a wonderful surprise!” Mr. Bergman called out when we walked in his shop and up to the counter. But even his kind, booming voice couldn’t cheer me up.

“Mildred,” Mr. Bergman said as he passed David a yellow gumdrop. David swallowed it hungrily, and I realized I hadn’t fed him breakfast yet, a thought that only made me feel worse. “I don’t have a brisket set aside for you today. Do you need something? I can go in the back and see what I can find.”

I shook my head, but I didn’t realize I was crying until Mr. Bergman pulled his handkerchief from his pocket and handed it across the counter. I used it to wipe my eyes, and Mr. Bergman put his hand on mine. The shop was quiet this morning, a Tuesday, unlike the pre-Shabbat bustle of a midday Friday that I was used to when I
usually came in here. I worried that business wasn’t as good as it once was when my father was alive.

“Bubbelah, what’s wrong?” he said gently. “Is it Ed?”

I nodded, and I wondered how Mr. Bergman could be so wise. But he had never seemed to like Ed. Before our wedding he’d told me his concerns, that Ed and I had such different pasts, that Ed was so much older than me, that none of us knew Ed nearly as well as we knew Sam, but I had brushed them all away with a flick of my wrist and had chalked up his worries to a fatherly sort of overprotectiveness.

He scowled now. “Damn Reds he’s got himself mixed up with.”

I thought of the party last night at Ethel’s. Ed’s friends. Ethel’s friends, too.
Reds,
as Mr. Bergman said with disdain as if a simple color could be worthy of so much hatred. I thought of the way Julius had held on so sweetly to Ethel last night and the kind way that that doctor, Jake, had asked me if I’d needed anything as I’d stood out on the night street in the cold. “What do you mean?” I asked him.

“He’s going to get himself in a whole heap of trouble with that crowd. You keeping up with the papers, Millie?” I told him I was, though probably not as much as I should. “All this business with Mr. Hiss.”

“Mr. Hiss?” I asked, the name sounding only vaguely familiar to me.

“Alger Hiss. Big government man. That Bentley woman called him a communist, and now they say he was a spy for Russia, too.”

I thought about what Ruth had said last night, that Bentley would
say anything
. “Maybe Miss Bentley’s lying,” I said.

“Doesn’t matter if she is or not. Alger Hiss is ruined now. I’m telling you, there aren’t many things worse than being labeled a communist these days.” He shook his head. “Look at the Hollywood Ten, rotting in jail.”

I wondered what Mr. Bergman would say if he knew that I’d gone to Ethel’s party last night, that the
Reds
Ed was mixed up with had been so kind to me and were our neighbors. I wondered what would happen if anyone found out about the politics they were discussing. But who would care anyway? Sure, maybe it was unfavorable to be labeled a communist these days, but there were no high-profile government men or Hollywood types in Ethel’s apartment last night.

I wasn’t planning on telling Mr. Bergman any of this now, though. It wasn’t Ed’s friends who were the problem, and I remembered why I’d come here and tears welled up in my eyes again. “It’s not the politics,” I said, wiping at my face with his handkerchief. “It’s . . .” I glanced at David. He stared at me intently as if he were hanging on to my every word. Was he? Did he know what I was saying even if he wouldn’t acknowledge it and respond yet? I lowered my voice and leaned in closer to Mr. Bergman. “A woman came to my apartment this morning from the Jewish Children’s Home. Ed called her.”

“I don’t understand,” he said, running his plump fingers through his thinning gray hair. I tilted my head in David’s direction, unwilling to say it out loud in front of him, that Ed wanted them to take David away, that he wanted to punish me and this was his way.

Mr. Bergman frowned and reached beneath the counter for his bag of gumdrops. He sifted through it until he found three more
yellows and he placed them gently into David’s open and eager palm.

“Ed wants them to take him,” I whispered, once David was concentrating hard on the yellow candies.

“Take him?”
Mr. Bergman’s voice rose. “He is a happy boy. There is a shadow of your father in his eyes . . .” Mr. Bergman was right. David had my light brown eyes, my father’s eyes, and very obviously Ed’s square nose.