I had never met Gladys or Bernie, though I felt a sudden wave of sadness for this poor woman, Ethel’s sister-in-law. “I’m so sorry, Ethel.”
“Thanks. Me too,” Ethel said. “But Davey is a different story altogether. Davey always wants special treatment. He’s so entitled sometimes, you know. He wants more money. Less hours. And Julie does the best he can.” She sighed. “Of course my mother takes Davey’s side in everything, always. The more things change, the more they stay the same. Isn’t that right, Millie?”
“Sure,” I murmured in agreement. But when I thought back on my life, it seemed to be an ever-changing thing. My life as a girl with Susan, spending Sunday afternoons in the butcher shop, even learning how to drive the meat truck, felt nothing at all like my time sewing day after day in the factory, where, looking back now, I’d been so free. Free to catch a picture with Addie whenever the mood suited me, to listen to the radio whenever I liked and as loud as I liked it . . .
“Can you count on your family, Millie?” Ethel asked.
I thought about it for a moment. Bubbe Kasha loved me, purely and deeply, and so had my father—I was certain. My mother was sometimes bothersome, and she always put Susan first, and Susan had always been so much older, wiser, better than me. But I thought of the kind way Susan had spoken to me in the summer when I was at her home and she had said she wished for me to live closer, how she would want to help me if she could. She and my mother would be excited to learn about another baby, though I wasn’t sure how much I could truly count on them if the truth about what happened in the Catskills ever came out. “Yes,” I finally said, “I suppose I can.”
“You’re very lucky, then,” Ethel said. “I have never been able to count on my family for anything. And I don’t think I ever will.”
“But you have Julie,” I reminded her. I thought of the way Julie had pulled Ethel close in the hallway just before they left for her father’s funeral. Julie, who’d kissed her gently and called her Eth in that sweet way he had of naming her his own, someone special. “And the boys,” I added.
“I know. They mean everything to me. I love the children and Julie more than anything.” She smiled and finished off her tea. She set it down on the saucer on the coffee table. “If anything ever were to happen to them, I don’t think I’d survive.”
“God forbid, nothing is going to happen.” I quickly spit three times into my tea as Bubbe Kasha would always do whenever we spoke something out loud we shouldn’t have, something that tempted fate. Ethel did the same into her empty cup. “Please do something for me,” I said. “Don’t tell Julie about any of this.”
“Any of what?”
“That I was here. That you made me this tea. That you watched David for a little while this morning while I . . . I just don’t want Ed to know about the baby.” Then I added, “Yet.” I wasn’t sure I wanted him to know at all. Or how, or when, I would tell him if I did.
“Oh, Julie won’t talk to Ed.” She said it so succinctly, so matter-of-factly, that I raised my eyebrows in response.
“Well, he might.”
“No, he definitely won’t.”
“But it could come up at work . . .” I said, my voice trailing off as I noticed Ethel was frowning.
“You don’t know?” she said.
“Know what?”
“Ed hasn’t worked for Julie for weeks. He left Pitt with Bernie and Dave.”
I stared at her and opened my mouth to protest, but then didn’t know what to say. If Ed hadn’t been leaving to go to work for Julie every morning, then where was he going and why hadn’t he told me? Finally I managed to say, “Why didn’t you mention this before now?”
“I assumed you already knew. And, anyway, I didn’t want it to come between us,” Ethel said. “It has nothing to do with you and me, really, right . . . ?”
“Of course,” I said quickly. “Of course it has nothing to do with us.” Then I added, “Of course it won’t come between us.”
Ethel reached across the couch and squeezed my hand. “Of course it won’t,” she murmured. “Let the men be the men. And we’ll be as we always are.”
LATER, as I waited for Ed to come home from wherever it was he was, I smoked a cigarette and looked at the words Nurse Ames had scribbled on the paper. It was a man’s name and an address—in Brooklyn, I was fairly sure. The words seemed so innocent there on the paper, just scrawled out, not like something illegal, something that could kill me. I shivered at the thought.
David slept soundly on his mattress in the next room, and I went to the doorway and watched him. He was getting so big, and my heart folded with a love for him that felt larger, more all-consuming, than any other feeling I’d ever felt. What would happen to him should something happen to me? What would happen to him should I have another baby to care for?
The door opened and it startled me, and then I made my way back to the perfect blue couch. In the dark, only the glow of my cigarette illuminated the living room. “How was work?” I said to Ed as he walked into our apartment, a shadow.
He hung up his hat, turned on a light, and went straight for the kitchen, ignoring my question. I heard the vodka crackling over ice, and then he came and sat down at the opposite end of the couch from me and put his feet up on the coffee table. I took a slow drag on my cigarette and blew the smoke into the air in such a way that I could barely make out the features of his face. “How was work?” I asked again.
“Work was work.” He drained the glass of vodka and put it on the coffee table. I slipped a coaster underneath it and put my cigarette out in the ashtray.
“You’ve been lying to me,” I said quietly.
He laughed a little as if I’d startled him or amused him—I couldn’t tell. “And you’ve been lying to me,” he said with such certainty that I couldn’t breathe. What did he know? About the diaphragm? David’s therapy? The Catskills? Jake?
Before he could elaborate, I made a decision in an instant. It was self-preservation, not just for me but for David. “There’s going to be another baby,” I heard myself saying. I felt the scrap of paper in my palm and I crumpled it in my fist.
For a moment, the air was still, I could hear Ed breathing. And then he said, “You’ve been to the doctor?”
“Yes. Today.”
“Well, then, that is very good news.” He picked up his glass and walked back into the kitchen to refill it. I wanted to ask him more about what had happened at work, but if I asked him to explain his lies, then I worried he might ask me to explain mine.
I WASN’T SURE where Ed went the next morning, when he left in a suit and tie as he always did. For that matter, I wasn’t sure where he’d been going for weeks. But I said nothing else to him about it, and I thought about how I might investigate on my own. I wondered if Ethel knew more than she’d let on yesterday. I intended to ask her.
Before he left, Ed brought me a piece of toast in bed and reminded me, his voice sounding unusually kind, to rest so what happened last time wouldn’t happen again.
“Rest?” I laughed, but I felt a bit of warmth for him that I hadn’t felt in so long. David was awake and had begun jumping on his mattress. His arms flailed high in the air, toward the ceiling. Someday, he would be tall enough to reach it, I thought.
“I am sending my mother over to help you today,” Ed said.
“That’s really not necessary.” I felt suddenly overwhelmed with dread at the thought of having to navigate my day with Lena around. And today was a Thursday, a day David and I would walk to Waterman’s Grocery and look for Jake, though I wondered what I would say now if we found him. What he would say if I told him about the baby. But I didn’t care. It was a Thursday, and Jake might have returned and could be expecting us.
“I have already called her,” Ed said. “She will be here any minute.”
AS SOON AS ED LEFT, I jumped out of bed, ignoring the dizzin
ess and the nausea, and I ran for the telephone and dialed Lena’s number. It rang and it rang and I knew she’d already left, a realization soon confirmed by a knock at the door.
She looked smaller than I remembered her, standing out there in the hallway. I hadn’t seen her in months and, in that time, it seemed she had shrunk. Her hair was the color of dirty snow, and she had it pulled back into an imperfect bun, whisps of brown-white framing her face. “Hello,” I said. “Thank you for coming all the way over here. But it’s not necessary. I don’t want to be a burden.”
“Nonsense.” She pushed her way past me and walked into the apartment. She sniffed the air. “I smell dust. You haven’t been keeping this place clean, eh, Mildred?”
“I have.” I suddenly felt defensive, the way I always did around Lena—though, truthfully, I couldn’t remember the last time I’d dusted.
Lena ran a fingertip across the coffee table, examined closely, and frowned. “You are supposed to rest in bed,” she said. “I will clean this place up, get things in order.” Lena pulled a duster off my shelf and began moving it across the coffee table.
I watched David, sitting by the window, playing with his communication cars. Lena hadn’t even noticed him when she’d walked in. Or at least she’d pretended not to. It was as if his silence made him invisible to her, transformed him from a little boy—her grandson—into something she wanted to ignore or even forget. He lined up the reds in rows. He was hungry. I hadn’t gotten him any breakfast yet.
“I am very glad my son called,” Lena said as she dusted. “I am worried about him now.”
“Why?” I asked, wondering if Lena knew something about Ed’s job that I didn’t.
Lena looked up from her dusting. “Why, Mildred? Everyone hates Russia now. Ed still sounds so Russian. People might get the wrong idea.”
Maybe Lena was right to be worried. “Has he talked to you about it?”
“Oh goodness no. He’s so strong. He carries it all inside him the way men do, you know. But a mother worries.” She looked pointedly at me as if I could never understand, as if David still not speaking meant that I did not worry enough, and I gave up on the conversation and walked back into my bedroom to get dressed.
I pulled a dress over my head and did up the buttons, realizing it was the same dress I’d worn that night in the Catskills, the dress Jake had unbuttoned so gently. Now I had to pull the fabric to stretch it across my swollen and tender chest. But I let my fingers linger across the buttons the way Jake’s had.
I heard David banging his cars against the floor, and I walked back into the living room, quickly buttoning up the rest of the buttons. Lena stood there, in front of him now, and yelled, “Bad boy. You are such a bad, bad boy!” She ripped a red car from his hand, and he began to flail.
I ran over to her and pulled the car and the duster from her hands. “What are you doing?” I cried. David kicked the floor and started crying. I bent down and said, “Darling, I know, red. You’re hungry. Just give me a minute to talk to Nana, okay?” But David was gone, past the point of reasoning.
“Look,” I said to Lena, and it took all my strength not to reach over and grab her, to shake her and tell her how stupid I thought she was, how it was not all right for her to yell at David like that. I breathed in and out. “I appreciate your kindness.” I spoke as firmly as I could. “But I don’t need your help today. David and I will be fine on our own.”
She pulled the duster away from me. “My son asked me to come here while he was at work,” she said firmly. “I will stay until he comes home.”
“Fine.” I crossed my arms in front of my chest. But my breasts felt so tender and swollen that I had to loosen my defiant stance a little. I walked into the kitchen to grab some bread for David, and hopefully calm him down, but the refrigerator was empty. Ed must’ve given me the last slice this morning. Perfect.
I walked back into the living room, grabbed David’s hand, and pulled him up so quickly that I surprised him, and, for the moment, he stopped flailing. Maybe he could sense my anger, and it was something unexpected. “Darling, we don’t have any bread left,” I said carefully, wanting him to understand I wasn’t mad at him. “We’ll walk over to Waterman’s Grocery and get you some food.”
I wasn’t sure if David understood, if he could sense what I was really saying. Waterman’s Grocery. Jake. That today was Thursday, and Jake would have to return to the city eventually. But whether he understood or not, David stopped flailing and followed me to the door without a fight.
Lena walked over to the telephone. “I will call Ed at work,” she said, waving the heavy black receiver in the air as if a threat.
“Go ahead.” I was fairly positive that Lena didn’t know that Ed no longer worked at Pitt. That she, like me, had no idea where he was.
THE AIR HAD turned cold suddenly. It had seemed just last week to still be summer and now it was as if we’d skipped fall altogether and had headed straight for winter, though it was only October. In my rush to get away from Lena, I’d left our coats behind, and David shivered. I pulled him closer to me.
We walked inside Waterman’s Grocery and went up to the counter, where I ordered David some toast, eggs, and milk. “Who’re you rooting for?” Mr. Waterman asked me as he put a plate of food in front of David.
“What do you mean?”
“The Dodgers or the Yankees?” I shook my head. “The World Series, Mrs. Stein. They’re one–one right now. I say the Dodgers are going to take it.”
“Yes, of course,” I said, willing David to eat quickly before Lena made her way over here, which I thought she might do once she realized she couldn’t reach Ed at Pitt. Inwardly, I chided myself for being stupid enough to mention Waterman’s Grocery, out loud and in front of her, despite the fact that it had worked to get David out of the apartment without a fight.
“Who’s your husband rooting for?” Mr. Waterman was saying. “I picture him as a Yankees man. Am I right?” Before I could answer, something brushed against my legs and I looked down and realized it was the black cat. Jake’s cat. She hissed at me and tried to jump up on the counter, but Mr. Waterman reached for her and threw her out back. “Damn cat,” he said when he walked back in. “The tenant upstairs keeps letting her out by accident.”
“The tenant?” I asked, trying to keep my voice even, steady. “Come on,” I said to David. He was almost finished eating the food on his plate. I leaned in and whispered one word in his ear: “Jake.” That was all he needed to hear. He quickly put his fork down and allowed me to take his hand. I paid and thanked Mr. Waterman, and David and I ran quickly out, then up the winding stairs. It was hard for me to breathe by the time I reached Jake’s door. I knocked on it, lightly at first, then harder.
At last the door opened and David stood up on his toes in anticipation, squeezing my hand tightly. An unfamiliar older man stood in the doorway. “Can I help you?” he asked.
“I’m looking for Jake . . . Dr. Gold. The tenant who lives here.”
“Sorry, don’t know him,” the man said, moving to shut the door. But I put my hand up to stop him.
“Sir, please,” I said. “This is very important.”
“I wish I could help you, lady, but, like I said, I don’t know him. I just moved in. Rented the place from Stan Waterman last week. Maybe you should talk to him.”
And that was when it hit me—when it truly hit me—Jake was gone. Jake was actually gone. He wasn’t ever coming back to this place. I had no way to find him. No way to reach him.
I SPENT THE REST of the day in bed, in and out of sleep, half dreaming of Jake and half listening to the sounds of Lena vigorously cleaning my apartment. David stayed with me, calmly sitting on the end of my bed, content to gently play with his cars among my covers. I thought he could sense it, too, that everything was wrong now. Jake was gone. He was really gone. And I didn’t know or understand how he could leave
us just like that. Where it was he might have gone after receiving a phone call where he spoke about the Russians. Maybe their bomb? I felt chilled at the thought that Jake knew too much and that then he had disappeared. Just like that. I couldn’t help but think of all the warnings about communists and their propaganda, that they were somehow to blame for everything the Russians knew. That’s what Jake was, a communist, wasn’t he? Had he done something so terrible that he might never be able to return here? I felt tears in my eyes at the thought that he might be in danger, that he might never come back.
After darkness fell over the room, I heard the apartment door open and close. Then Ed’s large voice and Lena’s smaller one. I supposed she must be telling on me, recounting my horribleness, to Ed. The pitch of their voices rose. I had the door shut so the words were muffled, and I couldn’t hear what they were saying. But I didn’t even care.
Then the apartment door opened and shut again. Lena was gone. Ed was silent. I heard the bedroom door creak open and I squeezed my eyes shut, pretending to be asleep.
“Mildred.” Ed said my name softly. I steeled myself for a lecture from him about the way I’d treated Lena, but instead I felt him sit on the edge of the bed and gently put his hand on my shoulder. “Mildred, are you awake? I have brought you a present.”
“Hmmm?” I murmured, feigning waking up. I sat up and blinked my eyes to adjust to the darkness.
“Come in the other room.” Ed grabbed onto my hand. I stood, and the dizziness and nausea returned all at once, so I stumbled a little, and Ed quickly reached for my arm. “Are you okay?” he asked. In his voice there was something that sounded like genuine concern—not for me, I understood, but for the baby.
“Yes, I’m fine,” I said. I heard David’s little feet hit the floor. He was following behind us. Ed ignored him.
Ed opened the bedroom door and an unfamiliar yellow light funneled in from just past the coffee table. I blinked, but it was still there. I turned the corner and saw where the light was coming from . . . a television! And a large one at that—I guessed it to be twice the size of Susan’s—just beyond the coffee table. “I don’t understand,” I said, but I couldn’t keep my eyes off it. A baseball player stood on the other side of the glass, a Yankee poised at bat, looking so real, as if he were almost just right here in our living room. “But we can’t afford this,” I finally said.
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