The Hours Count

by Jillian Cantor

  “You and your husband must be very excited about the new baby,” I said, now wanting to get the subject off Ed though I was thinking of him, of the way his fingers reached across the bed for my thigh the other night, the way he wondered if something must be wrong with me.

  John chose that moment to throw the ball hard across the floor. It hit my toe and it stung, even through the leather top of my shoe. “Ouch!” I reached down and grabbed my foot.

  “John!” Ethel admonished. “Tell Mrs. Stein you’re sorry. That it was an accident.”

  “It wasn’t an accident,” John said calmly. “I wanted to hit Millie.” He walked over and picked the ball up and began bouncing it again.

  “I’m sorry,” Ethel said to me across the table. I was surprised that she didn’t yell at him more, but I kept my mouth shut. “I think he’s nervous about the new baby. He’s very attached to me.” Her voice dipped in a way that made me wonder if she was nervous, too, and I remembered how she said she was making him a recording of her voice for when she went off to the hospital. Maybe it was not glamorous at all but practical, a method of self-preservation.

  “I’m sure it will be fine,” I said, though as my toe throbbed a little from John’s intentional ball toss I wasn’t so sure.

  “I suppose so,” she murmured, fingering the edge of her coffee cup. “But it’s much harder then I ever thought . . . Being a mother.”

  Our eyes met in a way that said we understood each other at that moment, that there was nothing else I needed to say. Ethel knew. She didn’t judge me harshly for what had happened earlier. She knew. What it was like to love a little person so much, and also for that little person to cause you so much angst.

  She looked away first and took a careful sip of her coffee.

  “There’s something wrong with him,” I blurted out, my voice low. “My David—he won’t talk.”

  “He’s young,” Ethel said.

  The way she said it, so assured, it almost made me believe it. “The doctor says I don’t love him enough. But I do.”

  “Of course you do.” Ethel’s voice softened, and she let go of her coffee cup and leaned across the table and patted my hand.

  The ball bounced furiously on, pounding in my head. “John, darling, please,” Ethel said, but the bouncing didn’t stop. He kept on going. David stared at the ball as if it mesmerized him, up and down and up and down. The yellow flashed by him again and again.

  Ethel turned back toward me and rubbed her temples. “You’re different than the other women around here,” she said. “All the others would’ve left by now.” She glanced at John, at the dreadful bouncing of the ball.

  “It’s just a little bouncing,” I said, forcing a smile, forcing myself to drown the noise out. Because now I understood why Ethel said the other day that they hadn’t been to the playground much. There was something about John. Maybe not as obvious as David’s silence, but it was there nevertheless.

  Ethel smiled at me. “I’m glad to have met you,” she said. “It’s nice to know another mother on the floor.”

  “You saved David’s life,” I said.

  “Not at all. He was walking back toward the building when I caught ahold of him. Maybe he’s not saying anything yet, but it’s all up there.” She pointed to her head.

  I knew that David was not dumb. I did. I knew that as well as I knew the ins and outs of his facial expressions now, his silent tears. But it hadn’t occurred to me that it might actually be the truth, more than a mother’s wishful thinking. Or that David had not been trying to run away this morning, to disappear, but that he had simply been trying to run back home. And it suddenly felt so good to hear Ethel say this about my David. “Still,” I said, at a loss for words but feeling I needed to add something. “He’s not even two . . .”

  “I took a wonderful parenting class last fall,” Ethel said. “If you want, I can get you the information on it.”

  “Sure,” I said, though I knew even as I said it that I could not ask Ed for money for a parenting class. But I didn’t want Ethel to think that I wouldn’t make every possible effort. She was right, being a mother was hard. Harder than I’d ever imagined.

  Suddenly the bouncing of the ball stopped, and John ran over to the table and crawled up onto Ethel’s very swollen lap. He buried his head deep into his mother’s chest, not saying anything, and Ethel kissed the top of his head. “Are you needing a nap, darling?” Ethel said quietly into his hair, such tenderness and love in her voice.

  “We should get going.” I finished off my coffee. “But thank you for having us.”

  Ethel smiled. “We’ll have to do this again.”

  “And if you ever need anything, anything at all,” I said, “I’m just down the hall.”

  5

  The telephone operators’ strike appeared to be over because as I turned the key and entered my apartment I heard the telephone jingling. My mother. Of course. I’d just left her there on the street in the rain with no explanation and she was probably frantic by now.

  “Yes, we’re fine,” I lied to her, ignoring her rush of questions, after I picked up the telephone. “David got over his fear and we got right back in line again. I just . . . couldn’t find you . . . Of course we got inoculated.” The evidence of my lie would be obvious on our unmarked arms, but I hoped when she saw us next, she would have forgotten, she would’ve moved on to something else.

  I put David down for a nap and then I stared out the window and smoked a cigarette. The rain continued and Monroe Street blurred down below, awash with water and people waiting in line to be inoculated. What would happen to us now, David and I both susceptible to some strange disease carried in from Mexico?

  Or maybe, I thought again, watching the water drip quickly down the windowpane, the bomb would come and take us instead, just as we were now. Just like this.

  ED WAS IN a foul mood when he came home that night.

  I thought it was because of the rain, still coming down furiously, still beating on the windowpane and Monroe Street below, when he stormed in, slamming the apartment door behind him in a way that made me jump.

  It was late, later than usual. David was already asleep in his crib, and I hoped the door slamming wouldn’t wake him, which would only agitate Ed further. Ed smelled of vodka, so I assumed he hadn’t come straight home from the office.

  I thought I should find him a dry shirt or that my hands should find the back of his neck to massage it, but he tensed when I looked at him and he looked back in a way that frightened me a little, so I did nothing. “Can I get you anything?” I asked him.

  “Get me something?” His voice curled and his accent thickened the way it did when he was upset. He frowned at me and I felt I knew what he was implying: I was good for getting him one thing only, and I hadn’t yet gotten him that.

  He sat down on the couch, loosened his tie, and sighed, and I tentatively sat down next to him. “I’m sorry,” he said after a little while. “I did not mean to be so . . .” He didn’t finish his sentence, and I wasn’t sure if it was because he couldn’t find the right word or he just didn’t want to.

  “David found his way back to the building today,” I told him proudly, leaving out the other parts about me losing him in the rain and him running into the street on his own. “He’s really very smart,” I added.

  Ed nodded but didn’t comment. I wasn’t sure what I was expecting, but I felt vaguely disappointed at his nonreaction. “I am having trouble at work,” Ed said instead.

  “Trouble?” I heard the unnatural way my voice rose.

  “They should want to get rid of me.”

  “Get rid of you?” It had been there in the back of my mind and yet I hadn’t imagined what would happen if Ed would lose his job. I couldn’t go back to the factory now. What would I do with David? And how would we be able to pay the forty-six dollars a month for this apartment if
Ed didn’t have a job?

  “I thought for so very long that America was the land of opportunity. That you could be anything you wanted here.” He sighed again. “But the truth is, you can’t. You can only be what they want you to be.”

  “Is it the loyalty oath? Why don’t you just sign it?” I asked.

  “It’s more complicated than that, Millie.”

  I waited for him to say more but he didn’t, so I added, “It’s just a piece of paper. It doesn’t mean anything.”

  Ed shrugged. “There is an issue of trust.”

  “Trust?”

  “I don’t want you to worry. Everything will work out, okay? People still need a good worker. Even a Russian one.” His voice curled on the word Russian, and, as he said it, I thought that I wasn’t so sure.

  “Mr. Bergman would always have a place for you in his shop,” I said.

  “You should want for me to work with raw meat all day?” I didn’t understand why this would be so bad. My father did it every day for years and he had always been a happy man. “You don’t worry. I have friends of my own, you know.”

  By friends I knew Ed meant the men he attended political meetings with, or had before it had become so unfavorable to be labeled a communist. I went to a democracy meeting once a few years ago with my friend Addie, who worked at the factory with me, but the truth was, I didn’t much like the other women there. They were trying to organize a rally for youth labor rights—a worthy cause, I agreed. But the women spent most of the meeting arguing with one another over who should have what role in the whole thing, and I’d left the meeting with a headache. When I got home, Susan and my mother had both reminded me that being involved in such things would only make me less likely to find a man. Which seemed funny now, seeing as how Ed was involved, and I wondered if he would like me more if I were involved, too. But since I’d had David, I had neither the time nor the energy to think about saving the rest of the world. Politics felt large and faraway. And I didn’t know Ed’s friends, as he called them now. They were not the kind of friends we’d ever had over for dinner. But I remembered what Ethel said earlier about how her husband knew Ed, and now I wondered if Julius was one of them. “Do you know Julius Rosenberg?” I asked. “I met his wife Ethel the other day.”

  “Yes,” Ed said. “I have known the Rosenbergs for a few years.”

  “Why didn’t you ever introduce me to Ethel?” I asked, feeling offended, as if Ed did not think me good enough to share with his friends. “She’s very nice.”

  Ed shrugged. “I didn’t think you should have any interest in politics.”

  “Well, I don’t, really,” I said. “But it seems Ethel doesn’t either. And they live down the hall from us here. They have a little boy, too.”

  Ed shrugged again.

  “Why don’t you just sign the silly oath?” I repeated to him. “Wouldn’t that be so much easier than finding another job?”

  Ed reached up and touched my cheek. His head moved in close to my face, close enough so I could feel his breath on my neck, and it was hot and smelled of vodka. “There is more to this than an oath, Mildred.” He kissed my cheek softly, and his finger strummed across the top of my collarbone, down my chest, across my stomach, until it stopped there. “But don’t worry yourself. I will figure everything out. You should only concern yourself with staying strong and healthy and growing us another child,” he said.

  6

  A few weeks went by and the smallpox epidemic passed, David and I still remarkably alive, no worse for the wear, David still remarkably silent.

  On a sunny day two weeks after I’d seen Ethel, David and I walked to Mr. Bergman’s to pick up an extra brisket, and then when we got back off the elevator on the eleventh floor we walked down to the end of the hallway and I knocked on the door to G.E. 11.

  After a few moments, Ethel opened the door. She looked exhausted. Her body seemed entirely the breadth of the baby, and her face peaked and wrinkled in an almost unnatural way. “I brought you this.” I held out the brown-paper-wrapped brisket, my excuse for stopping by.

  “Oh, Millie,” she said. “How thoughtful of you.” She took the package from me, hesitated, and then asked if we’d like to come in, which was what I’d hoped for. The brisket was not so much thoughtful as it was selfish. These past weeks had stretched out, one lonely, quiet day after another, interrupted only by short, silent walks to the playground, where the other mothers had stared at me and David without inviting us into their conversations.

  Ethel’s apartment was dimly lit, the shades still drawn though it was midmorning, and toys were scattered all about the floor. I scanned the room for John and soon found him in the corner by the window, where he appeared to be . . . setting an envelope on fire.

  “Ethel!” I pointed toward John and pulled David back behind me instinctively. Ethel sighed in a way that told me that this was not entirely surprising to her and then walked heavily—the weight of a the baby pulling her so far down now—to scold John about the matches. She appeared ready to give birth any moment, and it seemed John was not at all ready for what was to come.

  “This was so kind of you to bring me a brisket,” Ethel said, waddling back toward me, matches and half-burned envelope in hand. She put them down on the console table and took the brisket and placed it in her refrigerator. “Would you like a cup of coffee?” she asked.

  “If it’s not too much trouble,” I said.

  “Not at all.” I wasn’t sure I believed her, but she was already pouring the water, so I let her go ahead.

  David sat on the floor with John, watching with his mouth open while John tossed his blocks around carelessly and then laughed. Ethel ignored him, and I hoped David wouldn’t get any bad ideas. But it was so nice to be in someone else’s company that, for the moment, I didn’t even care.

  “You know Julie might have a job for Ed,” Ethel said nonchalantly as she handed me the coffee, as if this were a conversation we were in the middle of, not one we were just beginning after not seeing each other for weeks. I had yet to meet Julie, but a picture of him and Ethel, looking happy in their bathing suits, sat on top of the piano. They fit each other, I thought, simply from the way he had a sweetly protective arm around her shoulders, which looked altogether different than how Ed had ever had an arm around me. “He’s had trouble, too,” Ethel said, and shrugged. “He knows what it’s like. That’s why he started his own business.”

  “Julie is from Russia, too?” I asked.

  Ethel laughed and I smiled at her, until I realized maybe she was laughing at me. Ed had said he’d known the Rosenbergs for years—and, in fact, there was a whole world that Ed and Ethel and Julie belonged to that I did not. I was the one left out. It occurred to me that maybe politics wasn’t as large and distant as I’d once thought but that it was about connections and friendships, things I sorely lacked these days. “I’m sorry to sound like such a ninny,” I said. “I just haven’t been that involved in politics.” I hoped Ethel wasn’t going to think I was just some silly, stupid woman she couldn’t be friends with now.

  “I used to. Before John.” Ethel waved her hand in the air. “But who has time for that now, right?” She reached across the table, patted my hand, and smiled kindly, so I knew she wasn’t laughing at me—not in a mean way, anyway. “Julie’s having a get-together here next week. You should all come,” she said, and I promised her that we would.

  But the next week Ethel gave birth to another baby boy, and they would not have a get-together at her apartment again for months.

  June 19, 1953

  I run up the side of Route 9, past cars at a standstill, people honking on their horns, impatient. Where do they think they’re going? Why are they here? It can’t possibly be for the same reason I am. Mostly, they are here as onlookers or protestors, I think, or a strange combination of both. I hate them all for slowing me down, for blocking my way.

 
I should’ve come sooner, but I never believed it would come to this. I never believed that Ethel would actually die for something that she didn’t do. I can’t wrap my head around it even now, in this moment. Ethel will die by electricity. Not a bomb, nor disease, but by current being forced through her body so hard that it will stop her heart.

  The thought nearly stops mine, and I have to stop running. The night air is so thick. I am breathing hard and sweating, but I stop to catch my breath and then I keep running. I hit a barricade. Policemen are lined up behind it, shining flashlights at the cars. Thankfully, mine is too far back for their lights.

  “Miss!” one of them yells at me, shining his light in my eyes, and I hold up my hands in an attempt to shield them. For a moment, I think he knows what I have done today, that it is spilled across my face. But, of course, he can’t possibly. That is not why he’s shining his light on me. “You can’t go past this point,” he says.

  “I need to!” I shout at him. “I have to talk to the FBI.”

  “Now, miss . . .” The police officer steps forward and places a large hand on my shoulder. I pull away.

  “I have information for them,” I say. One of the other officers laughs and I understand he is laughing at me: I sound insane.

  “Look,” I say, “Ethel is innocent. I have to—”

  “Miss,” the officer interrupts, pulling harder on my arm. “You need to stay back behind the barricade. No one is allowed past this line for any reason.”

  My face is wet, I realize, and it’s not sweat. I am crying. Crying so hard that I can’t see what is in front of me. The police officers, the barricades, the lights blur into fountains of black and orange and yellow. I hear laughter. They are laughing at me and they are laughing at Ethel. Somewhere, a church bell chimes. Seven fifteen.