“I’m happy for you,” I said. “I hope you get to go. I do.”
“Thanks, Millie.”
We were both quiet for a moment as if thinking about the way our worlds might change by summer. Knickerbocker Village wouldn’t feel the same to me without Ethel down the hall, and maybe she would feel that same way about me after I left with Jake.
“Sometimes I think I’ll look back on these last few years,” Ethel said, “and I won’t remember any of it.”
“What do you mean?” I asked.
“The struggles we went through with money, with . . . John. Someday, I’ll be old and gray, and Julie and I will be grandparents. And maybe we’ll live out in the suburbs and everything that happened in Knickerbocker Village will just feel like a dream.”
I wondered if that would be true. If someday I would be a grandmother, too, if I would forget all about the terrible hard years living with the silent David and with Ed. If my life would become something altogether different and wonderful and entirely unexpected. For the first time, it seemed possible. Jake was coming back for us.
“Oh, don’t mind me,” Ethel said, waving her hand in the air. “I just took the boys to visit my mother this morning and she was her usual awful self. David and Ruth are in such a state since their accident—understandably so. But my mother keeps blaming everything on Julie and the business, which of course makes it my fault.” I raised my eyebrows, confused. “David has a new job now and he wants to sell his shares in Pitt back to Julie for the money. Julie is getting the money together, but doesn’t have it all quite yet.” She rubbed her temples. “Oh, if only Davey had more money, he would’ve been out in the suburbs by now. He wouldn’t have had a gas heater in the bedroom.” She elevated her voice, presumably to imitate her mother.
“I’m sorry, Ethel,” I said.
“It’s all right. I’m used to it by now. I remember my mother being this exact same way when I was a girl, telling me that it was my fault this thing or the other had happened with my brothers. Nevermind that Julie gave David a job when he really needed it after he left the army, or that Julie paid for my father’s funeral when Bernie and David couldn’t afford their shares, or that he’s always loaning everyone in the family money. Oh, listen to me . . .” She laughed bitterly.
“That’s okay,” I said. “You might get to go to Mexico in a few months.” And though I’d miss her, I kind of hoped she’d get there, that she’d find happiness in the sunshine with just Julie and the boys.
She patted my hand. “When we were walking home this morning, I just thought, Someday, I’ll be older. The children will be older. Everything will be different than it is now.”
“Ethel.” I laughed. “I’m trying to make it through the next few months, trying to imagine myself with another baby.” Trying to imagine myself in the Catskills with Jake, I added silently.
“I’m always getting ahead of myself, aren’t I?” Ethel said, and she laughed, too.
WHEN DAVID WOKE UP later that afternoon, he was silent, more cranky than usual, and all my attempts to cheer him up and get him to talk again failed. He wasn’t happy with food, cars, blocks, not even the television. “Jake will be back for us soon,” I told him, “I promise.” But he lay down on the floor and began to kick the wall. I wished he would use his anger to shout “No!” at me again, but he didn’t. And after a few hours, I might have even thought I’d imagined it if it hadn’t been for the fact that Ethel had heard it, too.
When darkness fell and Ed walked inside the apartment, I’d finally gotten David to sit at the table and eat some meat loaf.
I looked at Ed differently now as he walked into the kitchen to pour his vodka, staring hard at him for any sign that he could be the person Jake was looking for—Raymond—some crazy or evil man with secrets to the nuclear bomb. It seemed impossible this could be a person I would know, a person I might have slept next to for years. But if there was even the slightest chance, I wanted to know. I needed to know the truth.
Ed seemed unaware of my extra attention, and he carried his glass of vodka to the table and sat down. He looked just as he always did. Maybe a little older, a little more tired, a little grayer around the temples than the man I’d married. His English had gotten a little better over the years. But there he was, as he always had been. Just Ed.
“David spoke,” I told him, and he raised his eyebrows.
He turned to David, and said, “So you talk now, eh, boy?”
David didn’t respond or even flinch. He stared at his meat loaf, stabbing at it with his fork. Ed shook his head and laughed a little as if he didn’t believe me.
“He did,” I said defensively. “But now he’s in a bad mood.”
“And what did he say?” Ed asked, sipping on his vodka, and smiling as if he were humoring me, because this was the most interest he’d shown in David in months, maybe years.
“Never mind.” I stood to get Ed a plate, piled some meat loaf on it, and set it down in front of him. “And how was your day?” I asked.
“My day?”
“At work.”
He shrugged and began eating his dinner. He had never spoken out loud the words that Ethel had, that he no longer worked for Pitt. That he had a new job now or that he did something each day when he left for work in a suit. And now, in light of everything Jake had told me, it seemed more important to know the truth. Where did Ed go every morning, and what did he do each day?
“Ethel told me that you don’t work for Julie anymore,” I blurted out. “That you haven’t for . . . a while.”
Ed put down his fork. “So?” he said. “You believe everything that Ethel tells you?”
“Are you saying that she’s lying?”
“Some stupid woman who lives down the hallway tells you about my job, and you think you know everything, eh?”
“Do you know a man named Raymond?” I asked him quickly before I lost my nerve.
I expected him to react the way Ethel did earlier, so it surprised me when suddenly his eyes widened and he reached across the table for my wrist. He caught it with his hand, hard enough so it hurt. “Where did you hear that name?” he asked, tightening his fingers.
“Nowhere.” My heart pounded so hard and so fast as I remembered the word Jake had used to describe what was going on—dangerous. “Just a man Ethel was talking about earlier.” I squirmed to pull away out of his grasp. For a moment, he didn’t let go. Then he seemed to catch sight of my belly and he loosened his grip on my wrist. He put his hand to my burgeoning stomach almost tenderly. “You worry about what you need to worry about,” he said, “I will worry about the rest of it.”
He stood and switched on the television, turning up the volume loud enough so I could barely hear myself think anymore.
All the news tonight was about the possibility of the hydrogen bomb. I watched Ed’s face closely to see if he seemed to understand, to know more than I did about such things. But he paid attention only to his meat loaf and his vodka. It seemed he could care less about the possibility of the hydrogen bomb. Or David. Or me.
I could still feel the weight of his hand across my stomach long after he moved away, and I understood that Ed cared about only one thing.
THE NEXT MORNING, I was determined to follow Ed, to see where it was he was going each day. Though I’d promised Jake I would stay out of it, I was tired of sitting at home with the television and David, waiting for the world to happen all around me.
David and I left the apartment with Ed after I told Ed that I had a doctor’s appointment. We rode down the elevator together and walked with him out to the street and then to the subway station. Ed touched my stomach lightly at the top of the steps, and then surprised me by leaning in to kiss me on the cheek before running down the steps to catch the train.
I picked up David after waiting a moment and then ran after him, surprised to feel tears burning in my
eyes, as if Ed’s gentle good-bye had reminded me of everything I thought I would have with him, once. Ed was not an evil man, I reminded myself. He could drink too much, and I didn’t love him the way I should, but I didn’t think he would spy for the Russians. He’d been glad to get away from Russia, to come to America. He would not be a traitor to a country he’d longed to be a part of for so very long.
I wiped my tears away and chalked them up to the child inside me, which more and more of late had given me the inability to control my emotions. David and I stepped on the same train as Ed, only one car back, and through the crowds of men I might have had trouble keeping track of him except that he was taller than everyone else, and I focused my eyes on his familiar black derby.
Ed exited the train near Central Park, and I followed him up the stairs and then on to Sixty-first Street, where he stopped in front of a building. The address out front read 7 East 61st Street. I committed it to memory, and then I watched as Ed walked inside. He looked perfectly normal, dressed in his suit, his overcoat, and his hat.
The uninteresting truth of it seemed to be that Ed had gotten himself another job and he hadn’t felt like sharing the details of it with me.
David and I took the long way home, walking through the park for a while before we caught the subway again. I hoped the cool air, a bit of exercise, would make me feel better, but it didn’t. By the time we eventually made it back to Knickerbocker Village, I felt that Jake was wrong. That Ed was only an accountant with a new job. And that I might never be free of him.
21
The days began to grow longer again, and I began to grow infinitely larger. As the spring came, I waddled down to the playground with Ethel and the boys after Ethel picked John up from school. Most days, David was silent and sullen, and I had to drag him along. He’d gotten worse again since that morning he’d spoken, since that morning Jake had left our apartment. And we’d heard nothing from Jake. But I kept telling myself that in the summer, after the baby was born, everything would change. Everything would get better, as Ethel had said. I wanted so badly for her to be right.
Ethel began to talk more and more about Mexico as if now it were a fantasy just within her reach. I envied the way it felt so real to her in the way that escaping with Jake did not yet feel real to me. Ethel told me Julie had checked with the doctor about the shots they might need and she worried about how the boys would react, but she’d scheduled their appointments anyway. And then she made appointments to get passport photos.
“You’re really going, aren’t you?” I asked her.
“Yes, I think we really are, Millie.” She sounded breathless, giddy, as if she were singing her response.
I, on the other hand, had no idea how close they were to finding or arresting Raymond. How close Jake and I were to being together. But I knew that the child in my belly continued to grow. And I continued to watch Ed carefully for any sign that he might be the man Jake thought he could be. But Ed’s late-night phone calls had all but ceased, and most nights he lay in bed, snoring, even before I fell asleep.
As my stomach grew larger and larger, so, too, did my doubts. What if Jake had changed his mind? How would I manage here at Knickerbocker Village with two children and not even Ethel to keep me company?
Sitting next to me on the park bench, Ethel hummed a little tune under her breath. The weather had turned warm enough to leave the jackets at home, and the air suddenly smelled like springtime.
ONE AFTERNOON IN MAY, just after Okay, Mother had come on and Ethel was visiting, I heard a knock at my apartment door.
“Are you expecting someone?” Ethel asked.
I was so large now that even a walk to the playground had begun to seem like a journey, so Ethel had been bringing Richie over here to keep David and me company before they picked John up from school. In spite of herself, she’d begun to enjoy this show, I suspected, because she managed to make it over here just before one o’clock most days just as Okay, Mother was coming on.
“No,” I said, “I’m not expecting anyone.” Jake? I stood and waddled as fast as I could to the door.
I opened the door and an unfamiliar man in a Western Union uniform stood on the other side. “Telegram for Mrs. Mildred Stein,” he said.
I signed for the telegram and took it from him, and I noticed my hands were shaking as I ripped it open.
THE MIDDLE OF JUNE.
WE WILL BE TOGETHER AGAIN.
AWAIT FURTHER INSTRUCTIONS.
BE GOOD TO MY BABY.
I put my hand to my stomach and felt the jab of a baby elbow, or maybe it was a knee. It was sharp and it took my breath away. Jake! The middle of June was not that far away. I folded the piece of paper and I smiled.
“Who sent you a telegram?” Ethel was saying, and I realized for a moment I’d forgotten she was here.
“Oh, no one,” I lied. “It’s nothing.”
“Nothing?” She raised her eyebrows. “It didn’t look like nothing.”
“It’s just . . .” I waited to think of an appropriate and believable lie, but then I felt a sharp pain pinch my abdomen and I grimaced. Maybe it wasn’t an elbow, or a knee, I’d felt at all but an early contraction.
“Are you all right?” Ethel asked.
I waddled back to the couch, folded the telegram, and shoved it into the pocket of my dress. My legs felt heavier than they had moments earlier, and suddenly the room felt warmer. Mr. James’s voice, coming from the television, sounded louder. “I’m fine,” I heard myself saying just as Okay, Mother was interrupted by a breaking-news bulletin.
“A man has been arrested as a Soviet go-between in the Klaus Fuchs case . . .” The newscaster’s voice sounded as if it were coming through a tin can. “Harry Gold . . .”
Harry Gold? His name didn’t sound familiar to me, and I wondered if I’d ever met him. But, for the life of me, now I couldn’t remember what he looked like if I had. Did Ed know him?
“In Philadelphia . . .” the newscaster was saying.
Philadelphia, so I guessed he wasn’t one of Ed’s friends if he wasn’t here in New York. Was Mr. Gold Raymond? If that was true, then Jake had been wrong. No one in Ed’s circle had been involved at all. For some reason, instead of relief, I felt vastly unsettled, even nauseated.
“Richie,” I heard Ethel saying. “Come on. We have to go get your brother, darling.”
“Do you know him?” I said to Ethel, referring to Harry Gold, though Ethel seemed not to have been paying the television any attention, and Richie was resisting being pulled off the couch.
“Know who?”
“Harry Gold?”
Ethel glanced at the screen. “Poor man. He’s probably just the latest victim in the government’s witch hunt.”
I tried to make sense of everything in my head: Jake had just sent me a telegram telling me we could be together the middle of June on the very day they’d arrested the culprit in May? It didn’t make any sense. Why hadn’t he just come here to the apartment if his search was over? A sharp pain overtook me once more and I clutched my stomach.
Ethel didn’t seem to notice. She leaned down and kissed my cheek. “I’ll check in with you tomorrow, Millie,” I heard her saying. “Take it easy.”
I heard the door slam behind her as they left, and then it was just me and David sitting there on the couch. Dennis James was back and he was laughing now. I breathed in and out slowly and tried to relax and pay attention to the show. But then I felt the pain again, worse than before, and I looked down and noticed a drop of blood on my shoe.
It was happening again.
But it couldn’t happen now, not with the baby so close to coming. Not with Jake so close to coming back for us.
Jake. I remembered the telephone number he’d given me, a way to reach him in case of an emergency. I’d stashed it away in the bathroom where I stored all of my female products that Ed wouldn
’t dare touch. I would get it and call him now. I tried to stand but the room twisted around me. “Darling,” I said to David, “I need your help with something.” David didn’t seem to be listening. He was staring intently at Okay, Mother.
I attempted once more to stand, and this time, I made it.
“Millie.” I heard Ethel’s voice from the hallway and the sound of her knocking at the door. “Can you open up? Richie forgot his bear.”
“Ethel!” I cried out. “Come back in.”
“Millie?” Then I felt her hovering over me, and I wondered if a moment or two had lapsed. If I’d closed my eyes, between her knocking on the door and me making it to the couch, because I didn’t remember seeing her come back in, hearing the door open and close, and here I was, sitting down again, which I didn’t remember doing either. “We need to get you to the hospital,” I heard her saying, and I let my eyes close again, relieved that she understood, that she could help me.
Then I remembered the telegram in the pocket of my dress. I couldn’t let anyone else find it, a doctor at the hospital who might give it to Ed. “The telegram,” I said to Ethel. Or maybe I didn’t.
22
When I woke up, I was very cold. The room was dark, and I squinted to make sense of where I was. “Mills, are you awake?” Susan? How had she gotten here so fast? I’d just closed my eyes. Ethel was just saying we would go to the hospital. The hospital? Is that where I was?
I felt my sister’s small hand on mine, and now that my eyes had adjusted to the light, I could see that she was sitting here in a chair next to me. “The baby?” I asked.
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