The Hours Count (8 page)

I bit my lip. “Do you really think so, that he’s happy?”

“I know so,” Mr. Bergman said. “If this woman bothers you again, you call me, okay? I’ll come talk to her for you. I’ll tell her what a good mother you are.”

I smiled at him and he patted my hand. He was very sweet, but I didn’t want to tell him what I already understood, that I doubted there would be anything he could do to stop Ed if Ed set his mind on something. No matter how much he wanted to.

The day dragged on, and by midafternoon my stomach began to ache with worry. I worried about that Weiss woman coming back, about whether Mr. Bergman was right when he told me he thought David was happy. But most of all I worried about Ed coming home from work, about having to have a conversation with him after last night and Zelda Weiss’s visit this morning. I knew the hour would turn past five and Ed would walk down Monroe Street and ride the elevator up as always. My stomach ached even more at the thought.

To make matters worse, David refused to nap, which was becoming more and more common these days, and every time I tried to lay him down on his mattress he would just kick the wall and kick the wall and cry until finally I relented and let him come back out into the living room, where I smoked a cigarette and he stacked his yellow blocks in a tower. I watched them go higher and higher. They would fall soon and he would cry again, but for
the moment he was enthralled and I closed my eyes and took a drag on my cigarette.

I heard a knock at the door. “Shhh,” I commanded David—unnecessarily, I thought, until, ignoring me, he toppled the blocks and began to kick the floor in frustration.

“Millie, are you in there? It’s Ethel.” My whole body eased with relief and I put my cigarette out in the ashtray and walked to the door to open it. Ethel stood in the hallway with John, who immediately peered behind me, noticed David kicking the floor, and then ran into the apartment past me. “John!” Ethel called, shooting me an apologetic look. “It’s not polite to just barge in.”

“It’s all right,” I said as I watched John pick up the yellow blocks, his movements calming David down. I felt an inkling of tenderness for John that I hadn’t before. It was like he was learning how to understand David, to care for him, as a friend. I opened the door wider and invited Ethel in, too.

“We can’t stay,” Ethel said, her voice taking on that familiar nervous edge that had been absent for a little while last night while her boys slept. “Richie is napping. I don’t want to leave him for long.” She folded her arms. She was wearing a worn flowered housedress, a dress that might have been beautiful, once years ago before she’d given birth to her babies, maybe when she dreamed of being a Broadway star, America’s leading actress. But now the pink had faded to almost beige, the left sleeve was torn, and the shoulder appeared to be stained with baby food. “I’m sorry about John barging in like that.” She sighed.

I glanced at him, now rebuilding the tower with David, whose face was suddenly calm and serious. “No,” I said, “not at all. David is
glad for the company. And so am I.” I smiled at her. “Can I get you a cup of coffee? A quick one?”

“No thanks,” she said to me. “John,” she said him. “Five minutes and then we have to get back to check on your brother.” John ignored her and continued building with the blocks. “I just wanted to check in with you, Millie. Make sure everything was . . . all right.”

I wondered how she could know about Zelda Weiss, but she didn’t of course. She was asking because of the way Ed had treated me in her apartment and how I’d run out last night. “Everything is fine,” I lied, and even as I said the words I realized that I didn’t mean to, that I wanted to tell Ethel the truth. But I didn’t know how someone whose husband loved her so obviously and completely as Julie did would be able to understand what I was feeling now for Ed.

Ethel held her shoulders up, uncertain. I sat down on our couch and patted the seat next to me until Ethel relaxed and sat down, too. Though I understood she wouldn’t—and couldn’t—stay long, I thought she felt the way I did, this rare moment when John and David were both content and happy, transfixed with blocks and each other, nothing more than normal little boys. And nothing less.

Our couch was our only new piece of furniture in the apartment, the only thing Ed and I had bought rather than pillaged from Bubbe Kasha’s old treasures when she left her apartment and moved in with my mother just after we got married. I’d found the couch at Macy’s for fifteen dollars, and Ed had said he was happy to buy it for me as a wedding gift.
This is love,
I’d thought. A fifteen-dollar couch in the most beautiful shade of royal blue I’d ever seen. How stupid I’d been to believe that.

I wanted to tell Ethel about Zelda’s visit this morning. I wanted to ask for Ethel’s advice. But Julie was Ed’s employer. Julie had been
Ed’s friend first before I’d even met Ethel. And instead I heard myself telling Ethel about the silly couch and how Ed had bought it for me as a wedding present.

“It’s a lovely couch,” Ethel murmured, paying no attention to it. “Did you have a nice time last night?” she asked carefully.

“It was nice to get out of my apartment. To meet people . . . You know how it is.”

“I do,” Ethel said. “I used to see them all the time when I was younger, when Julie and I were first married. Oh, I was so involved in the cause!”

“Why were you so involved?” I asked her, wondering what had drawn Ethel, a woman now so involved in her children and her quiet life here in Knickerbocker Village, to this particular crowd of people.
Reds,
as Mr. Bergman had called them with so much disdain. I remembered Susan telling me about an article she’d read in
Look
magazine a while back that detailed “how to spot a communist” and her warning me to be careful and on the lookout, especially here in the city. But Ethel was not the kind of woman I’d imagined when Susan described what she’d read in the article—severe-looking people dressed in all black who seemed favorable to Russia. Ed, Susan had proclaimed, was excused because he’d grown up in Russia. He didn’t know any better. And besides, I’d told her he was distancing himself as time went on.

“You know, I was only fifteen when I graduated from Seward Park,” I realized Ethel was saying and I turned my attention back to her.

“Fifteen.” I raised my eyebrows, impressed that Ethel had graduated from high school so young.

She laughed as if she were embarrassed by her own intelligence.
“I got a job as a clerk at a shipping company and I saw the terrible way all the women were treated. I organized a strike of a hundred fifty women—
I
did that—and I was promptly fired of course. But boy, Millie, did I feel alive. Doing something to improve people’s lives. That’s when and why I joined the Party, to continue that kind of work, do some good in this country. Labor unions and fairness for workers. I thought I was going to change the world.” She laughed again.

I thought about what Mr. Bergman said earlier. “But now I guess things have changed. No one wants to be a communist anymore.”

“Oh, I don’t know that it’s the Party that’s changed, Millie,” she said. “It’s the whole rest of the world. Julie almost lost his first job with the Signal Corps before it even began because they drummed up some petition I’d signed years ago. And then he did eventually lose his job over his ties to the Party. It doesn’t matter that he’s a good man and a good worker. It’s all so silly. People are afraid. All this business now with the House Un-American Activities Committee. Honestly, what does it mean to be
un-American
?”

It seemed obvious to me that a woman like Elizabeth Bentley who had admitted to giving American secrets to Russia was quite un-American, but I wasn’t sure what any of that had to do with men like Julie and Ed who’d lost their jobs over a silly loyalty oath. I agreed with her about that. “Is that why you’re not as involved as you once were?” I asked. “You’re afraid?”

She laughed. “Oh, Millie. Most days, all the energy I have goes to caring for the children. Who has time for anything else?”

I swallowed hard, Zelda’s words about wanting to take David echoing in my head. Now I wasn’t even sure what I’d do without
him. What else was there, really, for a woman like me? A boring life spent sewing in a hot factory?

Ethel leaned in closer and lowered her voice. “Can I tell you a secret?” I nodded, happy she trusted me enough to ask. And I immediately felt bad that I’d placed her on Ed’s side, even for a second. “And you won’t tell . . . anyone?”

By
anyone
I thought she meant Ed and that maybe she was picturing the way Ed had held on to my arm too tightly in her apartment last night and she knew I wouldn’t tell him a thing. “Of course,” I said. “I won’t tell a soul. I promise.”

“I’m thinking about therapy.” She lowered her voice and tilted her head toward John almost imperceptibly so he wouldn’t notice.

I thought of the doctor I’d met last night at her apartment and his card that had read
Doctor of Psychotherapy
. “With Dr. Gold?” I asked her.

“Who?” Ethel raised her eyebrows.

“That doctor who was at your party last night.”

“Oh, no.” Ethel waved her hand. “I’d never met him before last night. I’m not even sure who invited him . . . no. The Jewish Board of Guardians.” The Jewish Board of Guardians sounded suspiciously similar to the organization Zelda Weiss said she worked for. “They accept payment on a sliding scale based on income”—I realized Ethel was still talking—“so we should be able to afford it.”

I nodded, though I was not altogether sure what therapy entailed, exactly, nor why one went even for an affordable fee.

“But you won’t tell anyone, right? I know I’m not supposed to believe in this sort of thing. But the truth is, I think I do believe in it. I think maybe if he can talk to someone . . . I don’t know, he
might have an easier time of things. It’s been so hard for him since Richie arrived.”

I wasn’t sure if she meant that it was Jews or communists who weren’t supposed to believe in this sort of thing. I could imagine both my mother and Bubbe Kashe pishposhing the idea of psychotherapy, of doctors who wanted to dole out talk not medicine, and it also seemed like something Ed would be firmly against.

To look at John right now, sitting here, playing so calmly with David, one would not think he needed anything. But the restless boy who blared his phonograph late into the party last night? I understood what Ethel was saying. John was older than David and his imperfections shone more obviously for all to see. Ethel was feeling desperate. She was doing everything she could to help her son. “You’re such a good mother,” I said to her. And then I had to tell her about Zelda. I felt certain that she would understand. “Ed wants to take David from me. To send him away,” I whispered so the boys wouldn’t hear.

“What?” Ethel reached her hand across the couch for mine, grabbed ahold, and squeezed. “You won’t let him,” she said with an aplomb that I didn’t quite feel.

“No, of course not,” I murmured. Even as I said the words, I didn’t quite understand how I would stop him. What was I going to do? Ethel and Mr. Bergman seemed so certain that Ed could be stopped, but what if he couldn’t?

I felt tears welling up in my eyes, and then Ethel squeezed my hand again. “You’ll figure something out, Millie. I know you will.” She smiled at me. “We always do, don’t we?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “I really don’t.”

“Listen,” she said. “If you want my advice . . .” I nodded, I did. “The men are sweet enough when it comes to the children, but they’re really just big children themselves sometimes. Sure, they love to play catch in the courtyard and play cowboys and Indians and all that . . .” Ed had never once done any of those things with David. “Maybe Ed just needs something to appease him.”

“Appease him?”
I thought of the gumdrops Mr. Bergman gave to David. If only it were that easy.

I heard a noise and I looked up. David’s blocks had all crashed to the hard floor again. His curls were disheveled and his face turned in that way it did when he was upset and overtired, but before I could stand and reach for him he kicked John instead of his usual routine of kicking the floor. John’s tiny nostrils flared and his cheeks turned red before he threw one of David’s precious blocks in retaliation across the room at the window.

Ethel and I stood quickly and shouted at our sons in unison.

I grabbed David and held him close to me in a cross between a hug and a stranglehold and said, “David, that’s not nice. You can’t kick your friends.”

“Good luck with Ed,” Ethel said to me as she pulled a now crying John toward the door. Just before she walked out she turned back and said, “You’re a good mother, too, Millie. Don’t forget that.”

And then as quickly as they’d come in, they were gone, my apartment was silent and still once again, a mess of yellow blocks across the living room floor, David’s tangled curls against my forearm, his body limp against mine on my perfect blue couch. “Everything’s going to be all right, darling.” I sang the words to him like a refrain, trying to make myself believe it.