The Hours Count

by Jillian Cantor

  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.

  Suddenly his hand reached across the bed for my thigh, and I noticed the bed springs were now silent in the apartment next door. Ed’s fingers pushed up my leg gently, but in a way that now made me feel sick to my stomach. If we didn’t have another child, Ed would not be able give up on David.

  “Not tonight . . . I’m bleeding,” I said to him.

  “Again?” He moved his hand. “Maybe you should see the doctor, Mildred.” He sighed. “Maybe there is something wrong with you?”

  “There’s nothing wrong with me,” I said, wondering how long I could keep this up without Ed growing suspicious. It had been six months of us “trying” so far with nothing happening. “Dr. Greenberg says it just takes time, that’s all. David isn’t even two yet.”

  But Ed didn’t say anything else and his silence hung there, an emptiness between us, as I wondered what he was thinking, if he knew I was lying. He rolled over and I could feel the weight of his back, leaning into the mattress. A few minutes later, he was snoring.

  4

  On Monday morning, my mother, Bubbe Kasha, David, and I waited in the pouring rain in a very long line on Monroe Street to get our smallpox vaccines. I was flanked by David and Bubbe Kasha, while my mother stood just in front of us, complaining about her hip hurting, as it always did in the rain. Bubbe Kasha was confused, as she tended to be these days, and kept asking why we were in line.

  David, blissfully now, said nothing and clutched tightly to my hand as I tried to shield both him and Bubbe Kasha from the rain with my umbrella, all the while getting soaked myself. There were so many people and we were packed tightly in line, water rushing over us. My brown dress was soaked and my bones ached, and I thought maybe smallpox would be better than this, especially since my mother kept talking, as she always did. “I hear the man who started this epidemic carried it in from Mexico and then spread it all through the city like a sewer rat. Imagine, the gall of some people.” She was talking too loudly, something she had begun doing lately, which I took to mean her hearing wasn’t as good as it used to be, and several strangers in line stared at her suspiciously. She seemed not to notice and shook her head, right into my umbrella, sending rainwater tumbling over both David and Bubbe Kasha until I repositioned.

  I thought about the poor man, maybe drawn to the sunshine and beauty of Mexico, who’d come back to New York only to die of a terrible disease and then be blamed for it.

  “Good thing Susan and the babies aren’t in the city,” I heard my mother saying, “in the middle of all this filth. You and Ed will probably find your way out to the country eventually, too, and then I suppose we will be forced to come live with one of you. Won’t we, Mamaleh?” Bubbe Kasha did not respond and neither did I.

  “What are we in line for?” Bubbe Kasha asked me for what felt like the hundredth time, and I calmly explained to her again about the smallpox and the necessary inoculation. But I knew I could tell her anything now and she would simply nod her head.

  She had been my sanctuary, growing up. It was her apartment I’d run to when I was upset with my mother or Susan—or both. She was the one who showed me how to knead the challah in a way that made me always feel better. She was the one who dropped butter cookies in the pocket of my dress even before the candles were lit for Shabbat dinner. “You’re too skinny,” she used to whisper even though it wasn’t true. “I need to fatten you up.”

  I hugged the umbrella under my shoulder so I could reach down and squeeze her hand now, and for a moment her thin, frail fingers clutched mine, squeezing back, the way they used to when I was a girl and my mother would prattle on and on about Susan’s many accomplishments. Susan got high marks in school, while mine were decidedly average, and she sang a solo every year at the end of school performance because she had such a lovely voice, while I was in the chorus. I was just plain old dependable Millie, the one who helped my father out in the butcher shop an
d who helped Bubbe Kasha around her apartment, while Susan was too busy with all her many activities. But with a slight squeeze of my fingers, a knowing smile cast my way, Bubbe Kasha told me that I was appreciated, that she thought I was special, too.

  “Finally,” my mother exclaimed, and I looked up and saw that at long last we were at the front of the line. My mother pulled Bubbe Kasha away from me and pushed up her sleeve. Then did the same thing herself. Their pale, wrinkly arms hung there in the rain, waiting to get inoculated, and it was at that moment that I thought to move the umbrella to look down at David. His eyes were wide and his mouth had dropped open a little. He was not dumb, I reminded myself again. He understood exactly what was happening, what was about to happen to him. I saw it in his eyes, the fleeting recognition, the memory of the whooping cough vaccine that morning not too long ago in Dr. Greenberg’s office. He understood even if he didn’t say it.

  “It’s all right, darling,” I leaned down and whispered in his ear. “It’s just a little poke. But it will keep us from getting sick.”

  “Ouch!” my mother yelled too loudly as the needle hit her arm. “That hurts.”

  David’s eyes widened farther, and he struggled out of my grasp and began running through puddles right into Monroe Street. It took me a second to understand what was happening, that David had gotten away from me and was in the street, and then I ran after him, a yellow taxicab swerving and honking at me.

  There were so many people in line that it wrapped around the block, past the entrance to our building, and it was raining so hard that I struggled to see, to make sense of where I was looking. David. My David. I couldn’t see him, and certainly I wouldn’t be able to hear him.

  “David!” I screamed. “Don’t run. Don’t move. You don’t have to get a shot!”

  In response, I heard only the rain hitting the sidewalk, the squeal of car brakes in the street, my mother’s voice yelling, “Millie, get back here. Should you want to die of smallpox?” She was oblivious to what had happened, and I didn’t turn back to tell her.

  My heart pounded so loud and hard, louder and harder than the rain, and I turned frantically in circles looking for him—in the street, across the street, then back by the entrance to our building. “David!” I screamed his name again and people in line looked at me, but no one left their place to ask who I was looking for, why I was screaming. “My son!” I shouted at them. “Have any of you seen my son? A little boy?”

  David was so small and he couldn’t talk. How would he ever find me again? What had I done, taking him to get inoculated in the street and not watching him carefully enough?

  “Millie.” I heard a familiar woman’s voice saying my name and I looked up. It was Ethel. John clung to her hip, and she was holding on to David, his small legs wrapped around her rotund belly.

  “David!” I grabbed him from her and held him tightly to my chest. His tiny arms clasped my neck in such a way that I knew what he wanted to say even if he couldn’t: He loved me, and he was sorry.

  “I saw him wandering in the street”—I realized Ethel was talking—“and I grabbed him.”

  She walked in through the front entrance of our building as she talked, pulling herself and John out of the rain, and I followed her, David still clutching tightly to my neck, me clutching back. “Don’t you ever do that again,” I said to him, not sure if he understood or not, but the way he curled his head into the crook of my neck I hoped he did.

  The elevator doors opened and Ethel and John stepped in. I ran to catch up with them. “Thank you,” I said to Ethel. She nodded, holding John tightly to her hip but staring straight ahead as if she didn’t want to talk to me now. What she must think of me!

  The elevator doors shut, and we began moving slowly up to the eleventh floor. “Really,” I said to her, “we were waiting in line for the smallpox inoculations and he got startled and . . .” My voice broke and I couldn’t hold back the tears. To think what had happened, what might have happened.

  “Of course,” Ethel said. “I did what anyone would have done.”

  I thought of all the strangers waiting in line, staring anxiously at me as I screamed for David. “No, really,” I said. “I owe you . . .”

  The elevator doors opened again and Ethel and John stepped off onto the eleventh floor. They walked to apartment G.E. 11 at the end of the hallway, down a few doors from ours. Ethel pulled her key from her pocket and fumbled to get it in the lock. I was soaked to the bone and my teeth were chattering. David’s tiny body heaved with shivers, but I got off the elevator and ran after her.

  I reached up and touched Ethel’s shoulder, and she turned to look at me again. “I can imagine what you must think of me,” I said, and she shook her head as if to say she didn’t think anything of me. John tugged at the bottom of her red dress, impatient, and she put her key back in the lock. “Would you at least come over for a cup of coffee after we all change into dry clothes? Let me thank you,” I said. “The boys could even play . . . maybe.”

  She hesitated momentarily. “I don’t think so.”

  “Another time, then?” Though I understood there would not be another time, that whatever I thought about Ethel and me becoming friends would not happen now after she had seen firsthand what kind of mother I was. After this, Ethel and I would be nothing more than strangers who would pass each other by in the hall, getting on and off the elevator.

  “You never let me have friends,” I heard John say as we walked down the hallway toward our apartment. His voice sounded so crisp and perfect and clear that it surprised me. Granted, he was obviously older than David, but it was as if I’d forgotten the way normal little boys sounded. That they had voices, demands.

  “Millie,” Ethel called down the hallway after me. I turned back to look at her, and from farther away, I noticed her stomach was so big that there barely seemed to be anything else to her tiny frame. “Why don’t you come here for a cup of coffee after you dry off. John has so many toys. David might enjoy playing with some of them.”

  ETHEL’S APARTMENT was quite similar to mine, right down to the linoleum squares in the tiny, narrow kitchen. The exceptions were the large upright piano in the living room, the views of the courtyard and the East River, and the multitude of toys scattered all about the floor. She was right about John having so many, and with that, the piano, and her studio time, it seemed Ethel and her husband had a lot more money than Ed and I had.

  Now that we were in dry clothes, David seemed tired, and he still clung to my neck and sucked his thumb. We sat at Ethel’s table while she brewed some coffee in the kitchen, and John tossed a ball against the hard floor, trying to get David to join in.

  “Why doesn’t he say anything?” John implored me, frowning.

  “He just . . .” I didn’t have an answer that I could give a child. Or anyone. “He just doesn’t talk yet,” I said, brushing the damp brown curls from David’s forehead. “He’s younger than you.”

  “He doesn’t need to talk to play with you,” Ethel said to John, putting two steaming cups of coffee on the table. I was still chilled, my curls were still damp, and the steam felt wonderful against my face. “Why don’t you show him some of your things?” Ethel said.

  I pulled David from my lap and put him on the floor, but he reached right back up for my neck. “Do you mind if I sit down here with him?” I asked Ethel.

  “Not at all.” And she joined us on the floor, too. John handed David the ball he’d been bouncing, and David pulled his thumb from his mouth to use his hands to examine the ball carefully. It was red with yellow squares, and I watched David’s eyes widen with interest.

  John pulled the ball back and began bouncing it again. And David reached his arms back, trying to recapture it. “Make sure you’re sharing,” Ethel said to John. He squirmed and pulled out of Ethel’s grasp.

  “It’s all right,” I said, sensing John was on the edge of a ta
ntrum. “There are plenty of toys to go around here.” I searched the floor for something else yellow, saw a bright yellow bird stuffed animal, and picked it up and handed it to David.

  John bounced his ball without complaining, though the repetitive noise of it against the floor was dreadful, and David seemed content to turn the yellow bird over and over again.

  Ethel glanced at me and struggled to get off the floor. I stood up, gave her a hand, and then we both sat back down at the table. She put her hand across her large belly and looked at me carefully as if she were judging the plain features of my face and the wild way I could feel my curls re-forming as my hair was drying, maybe even judging me.

  “So how long have you lived here?” I asked in an attempt to keep the conversation away from my terrible faults as a mother.

  “Five years this month.”

  “And you like it here?” I wanted her to tell me that she did, that Knickerbocker Village held all the secrets for any family to be happy.

  She shrugged. “It’s fine,” she said in a way that made me think it was not fine at all. “We’re settled here, I guess. For now. It’s close enough to my husband’s work.”

  “Where does your husband work?” I asked.

  “Oh, Julie’s an engineer. He started his own machinist shop last year with my brothers.” She shrugged again but didn’t volunteer anymore. “I think Julie knows your husband, actually. Ed Stein, right?” I nodded and opened my mouth in surprise, but then she added, “Politics,” in a way that made me think she paid about as much attention as I did to the meetings Ed sometimes attended.