The Hours Count

by Jillian Cantor

  On the long ride up, I thought about my sister, Susan. She and her husband, Sam, had retreated to the suburbs of Elizabeth last year shortly before the twins were born. Susan told me there was safety in the suburbs, that no one would think to bomb there because life was more spread out, slower, less people as targets. And Time magazine had recently reported the same thing. Not that I was surprised, as Susan was always right—or, at least, she acted as if she were. I wondered if Ed and I would’ve been safer and happier there, too, rather than here in Knickerbocker Village, but Ed had insisted on staying in the city so he’d be closer to work and to his mother. And since Susan had left, I knew I needed to stay, too. Someone had to be close by for my mother and Bubbe Kasha. Besides, Ed was giving me steam heat, an elevator, a playground, and, at some point, even a nursery school for David. And our one-bedroom apartment here on the eleventh floor was quite an upgrade from our tiny one-room apartment on Delancey.

  And as Ed said, with an accusing lilt to his thick Russian accent, why did we need any more than this with only one child?

  Time had also reported that the American family was thriving as never before, that the average man and woman now hoped for three children. Susan was well on her way, but three? I couldn’t imagine. I could barely even imagine two, of taking care of David and a baby, and so I had taken special and quite secret steps to make sure this would not happen.

  Ed was none the wiser. Ed, who had repeatedly told me that all the fears about the bomb here were silly.

  It’s never going to happen in New York, he always said, waving the concerns away with the trail of smoke from his cigar, and I didn’t understand how he could be so certain about a city he had known only for a short time. Women have many babies, he told me. That’s what they do. He whispered it in my ear at night like a love song, in his thick Russian accent, just before he took his pants off and rolled on top of me.

  WHEN THE ELEVATOR at long last stopped on the eleventh floor and the door opened, David and I nearly ran right into Ethel again, as she was waiting to ride the elevator down. But this time, she was alone.

  “So we meet again,” Ethel said, and she laughed, as David and I stepped out. I wondered what had happened to John and how Ethel managed to be going out without him. Since David had begun showing some peculiarities in his behavior, my mother had lost interest in watching him, so now he was always with me. Sometimes I dreamed about the solace of being alone, even if only for an hour. And I was torn for a moment between feeling jealous of Ethel and excited that she lived on the same floor as us. Perhaps we really could be friends, and I imagined David playing with John, me sharing afternoon coffee with Ethel. It had been a while since I’d had a friend this close by, not since before David was born. On Delancey all my old friends had married before me and moved or we’d drifted apart, and in the room above my mother’s apartment our only companions had been her and Bubbe Kasha.

  But Ethel propped open the elevator door with her thick fingers and seemed a bit impatient for us to get out, shuffling her feet as if she were in a hurry. David reached for the elevator buttons again, and I grabbed for his hands. “No. No more buttons, darling,” I told him, and he shrank until his eyes caught onto Ethel’s dress, the same bright yellow-and-red one as earlier, but now I noticed her brown curls were also topped with a dramatic red hat. Ethel was quite short, a few inches shorter than my very average height, but she held herself in such a way that I hadn’t noticed it earlier on the street.

  “I have to run,” she said, pushing past us into the elevator. “I have studio time and I’m late.”

  “Studio time? You’re on the radio?”

  “Oh, no.” She laughed. “I’m making a recording for my John so he’ll have my voice to listen to when I’m in the hospital for the new baby.”

  “Oh,” I said. “How lovely.”

  She smiled and touched her free hand to her hat shyly, in a way that made me think someone else had told her this was not such a lovely idea. I wondered about her husband and if he was like Ed when it came to money. I guessed not. Studio time sounded expensive.

  “I should have you and John over sometime,” I said as I watched her press the button to go down to the ground floor.

  But before she had time to answer, the elevator doors shut and Ethel was riding down to her studio.

  OUR APARTMENT WAS DARK, the air inside quiet and cool. Ed was still at work, and I prayed David would actually lie down and take a nap so I could have a little time to myself.

  I switched on the lights, unwrapped the brisket, and put it in the oven, and after I settled David into his crib, which I understood he was getting way too big for but was trying to follow Dr. Greenberg’s advice to coddle him just a little while longer, I lit myself a cigarette and sat at our scratched wooden table. The Sabbath was only a few hours away, and Susan and Sam and the twins would arrive before sundown. They never took the twins on the train into the city, but tonight they had decided to make an exception in order to see our new place.

  I inhaled the smoke from my cigarette and then exhaled. My sister and her babies and all their glowing perfection. Motherhood seemed to suit Susan, made her even prettier than she always had been, which I might have once thought impossible, but, no. Caring for the girls gave her rosier cheeks and a new sheen to her vibrant black hair and even made her laughter sound brighter. And never mind that she’d carried two babies at once, the extra weight had dropped off her waistline just like that and now her figure looked more perfect than ever. The twins were only nine months, but they already babbled and smiled and had started to make sounds that vaguely resembled dada. Sam is just in love, Susan had gushed the last time I’d seen her a few weeks earlier when we’d taken the train out to Elizabeth for Sunday brunch. And why wouldn’t he be? His children—and his wife—were perfect, and thinking about it made me well up with both jealousy and sadness.

  Motherhood had done no favors for my figure. I was always a slightly heavier, slightly shorter, slightly duller version of my older sister. My mother used to tell me my features were ordinary—and not unkindly, just a statement of fact. I’d always had nice clear skin and pretty pale brown eyes, but I was neither tall nor short, beautiful nor ugly, the kind of woman who can blend into a crowd and be utterly forgettable. My most distinguishing feature was my shoulder-length medium brown curls, often impossibly unruly. I loved David, but my waist was a few inches thicker than it once was, my curls were forever a mess, and the last time Susan saw me she took one look at the bags under my eyes and told me I wasn’t sleeping enough. Yes, David was exhausting. He would be two soon and had yet to utter even a single sound. Ed claimed his ears must not work, or possibly his brain, and Dr. Greenberg said it was me, that I was too cold with him, too cross with him. Indulge him a little more, why don’t you, he had said, the entire weight of his bald head sinking into his frown.

  And yet I’d tried everything: coaxing him, playing with him, listening harder, hugging him more, punishing him, yelling at him. I read Parents magazine with a rapt hunger for answers that were never there. I learned about illnesses and tantrums, but nothing at all about what to do with a child like mine who just would not speak.

  I heard a knock at the door, interrupting my thoughts. I checked the time, but it was only three thirty, too early for anyone to arrive for dinner and too early for Ed to be home from work. For a moment, I wondered if it was Ethel back from the studio and wanting to take me up on my offer for coffee. “Coming,” I called, but not too loud so as not to wake David, and I squashed out my cigarette, stood, and smoothed down my dress with my hands, then smoothed my curls.

  I opened the door and saw my mother standing there in the hallway, looking as if she’d just swallowed a lemon, a frown so big enveloping her plump cheeks that it seemed to weigh them down, to make her entire face sag. “You’re so early,” I said, opening the door wider, “I don’t have anything ready yet.”

  She pus
hed past me into the apartment. “Dinner is canceled,” she said. “Susan just sent me a telegram. Thank goodness she figured it out.”

  The telephone operators had been on strike for two weeks, rendering our new shiny black telephone entirely useless. We had been promised a party line as part of our forty-six dollars a month rent, which also included electricity. It was an excellent deal, according to Ed. Not so excellent when the phone was unworkable because of the operators’ strike.

  “Canceled?” I asked, trying not to let the disappointment I felt seep into my voice.

  “There’s a smallpox outbreak in the city,” my mother said. “Susan heard on the radio and she can’t bring the twins into the city under these conditions.”

  Susan had yet to bring the twins into the city under any conditions, and I fought the urge to roll my eyes. “Smallpox outbreak?” I’d heard nothing of it yet, but I hadn’t listened to the radio all morning. David did not like the sound and he would cry when I’d turn it on—more evidence that he could at least hear. I’d asked Ed for a television, hoping that David would be drawn more to it, the visual stimulus, but he’d yet to oblige what he called my expensive whims.

  “There’s going to be inoculation clinics in the streets starting Monday,” my mother said. “We’ll go. You’ll come for me in the morning.”

  “Is that really necessary?” I murmured, thinking ahead to the way David would react to an inoculation in the street. It had been bad enough when Dr. Greenberg had inoculated him for whooping cough in the office, after I’d read the terrifying article about it in Parents. David had clung to the examining table and kicked and cried such hard, silent tears that I thought his entire small body might burst.

  “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.

  3

  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.