The Hours Count

by Jillian Cantor

  “Ruth told me,” I said. “But she said he was just a low-level machinist, that he didn’t know anything.”

  “He didn’t. But when he left, he stole a bit of uranium,” Ethel said.

  “Stole uranium? To try to make his own bomb?” I couldn’t imagine the portly David Greenglass capable of such an enormous feat.

  “Oh goodness no. Just a tiny, tiny little bit. As a souvenir.” She shrugged. “Apparently, lots of the guys working there did it at the time. It was nothing. It was dumb, yes, but it didn’t mean anything. He was young and stupid and that’s what’s got the FBI to question him in the first place.” I thought about that time I’d mentioned David’s stint in Los Alamos to Jake, at one of our therapy sessions, and I hoped that I wasn’t responsible for all of this in some way by putting such blind trust in Jake. “That’s all that Julie and I know about. And Julie had nothing to do with any of that,” Ethel added.

  But if that were true, I wondered why the FBI was even questioning Julie now. Greenglass has already turned on him, Ed had said. But how? And David was Ethel’s brother. I couldn’t imagine how he would turn on Julie, his own sister’s husband, even if there was some bad blood between them over the business. “I don’t know, Ethel,” I said. “But I don’t like all this. I’m worried.”

  She reached up and touched my shoulder. “You should stay away from here—from me—for a little while. I don’t want you to get in any trouble over all this.”

  “But I don’t know anything about anything. And you’re my friend. I’m not going to stay away from you.”

  “Well, Julie and I don’t know anything either,” she said. “But the FBI still showed up here this morning. It’s all becoming guilt by association. Harry Gold said he knew David. David said he knows Julie. Julie won’t give them anything, of course, but suppose they see you and I talking and then they drag you in for questioning, too?”

  “That’s crazy,” I said, but I swallowed hard. Everything else that was going on felt so crazy that I wasn’t sure that Ethel’s notion was that far-flung.

  But Ethel didn’t respond. She simply stood and showed us to the door. “Don’t worry,” she said, “Julie’s going to be fine. He’s going to be just fine. We all are.” The way she repeated it, it was almost as if she were trying to convince herself. Julie’s going to fry, Ed had said. But I tried to push his words, his voice, out of my head.

  Ethel grabbed me fiercely for a hug. She held on so tightly, it was as if she thought she might never see me again.

  BACK IN MY APARTMENT, I put Henry in the crib for a nap and David in front of the television. I changed my dress and ran Ethel’s towel under cold water in the kitchen sink, attempting to remove the bloodstains which didn’t want to budge. My bleeding had stopped, but my stomach now ached, the long, vertical wound feeling fresh again, raw, as if my body had almost ripped in two.

  I lit a cigarette and paced in front of the window, watching all the people on the street below moving about as if the world hadn’t changed at all. I thought again about Ed’s frightening words and I worried about Julie, off somewhere being questioned by the FBI. Why hadn’t Jake been able to stop that? And what did Ed really have to do with all of this?

  The telephone rang and I jumped, wishing that it might be Jake, that he had somehow gotten my message after all. I had so many things to ask him now. But when I picked up, I heard my mother’s impatient voice. “Mildred,” she said. “Whatever happened to you?”

  I remembered. The brisket! The Sabbath. There was still plenty of time until sundown, but I’d left Mr. Bergman’s without anything this morning and now I didn’t have the energy to walk both children over there again and to my mother’s. “I’m sorry,” I said, “I just got so very tired. You were right, this was a lot . . . too much for me to handle.”

  “But Mildred, you’re still coming, aren’t you?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “I don’t think I can.”

  She lowered her voice. “There’s a man here to see you. From the FBI. He knew you were coming here today. I don’t know how, but he did. And now he’s pacing around and pestering us. He’s making Bubbe Kasha very nervous.”

  “A man there? From the FBI? Who?”

  “He looks very . . . official.” She lowered her voice even more. “Are you in some kind of trouble, Mildred?”

  “Trouble?” I thought about Ethel’s nervousness that I shouldn’t be associated with her. Was I? If Ed was in trouble, maybe I would be lumped in with him. But if the FBI was looking for me, well, then, why wouldn’t they just come here, to our apartment?

  “Jack something,” I realized my mother was saying. “Yes, that’s what he said his name was.”

  “Jake,” I said.

  THE WALK TO my mother’s apartment felt like the longest walk of my life. Henry wasn’t happy to be put back in the carriage, and he cried and cried most of the way. David wanted nothing to do with holding on to my hand or the carriage after our last outing, and I feared I might literally rip in two if I were to pick him up again. “Now we are going to see Jake,” I kept saying. “I promise, I promise . . .” I gripped his hand out of fear that if I didn’t he’d run into the street, away from me, and I wouldn’t have the energy or the ability to catch him.

  At last we reached Delancey Street, and the outside of my mother’s small tenement looked run-down and gray, as it had for as long as I could remember. The upstairs window, the apartment where Ed and I had lived once, was now dark. Nothing appeared different than it had in so very long. It was hard to believe that Jake was really inside.

  I found the front door unlocked, as it always was, and I opened it and stepped inside. I heard the radio, smelled pea soup coming from the small stove. Bubbe Kasha sat on the couch, her knitting needles poised in her fingers, a mess of tangled yarn in her lap, as if she were making a sweater and had forgotten how halfway through.

  “Hello!” I called out. “Mother?”

  “Is that you, Mildred?” To my surprise, Lena stepped out of the kitchen.

  I put my hand to my mouth. Were Lena and Jake both here? “Lena? What are you doing here?”

  “I stopped by to see the baby,” Lena said, her voice normal and even—not the way it would sound if she’d just seen Jake, I was fairly certain. “Ed called me this morning and told me to come.” I wondered what she knew about Ed, his activities, his disappearance. My mother gave it to you, Ed had said about the number this morning. So what else did Lena know that I didn’t?

  I shook my head, confused. But before I had a chance to ask, my mother stepped out of the kitchen behind Lena. “Oh, Mildred, there you are.” Her voice was an octave too high. “Lena just stopped by for a surprise visit, and now I need you to run to Waterman’s Grocery and pick me up this list of things for our dinner. Lena and I will watch the babies.” She pressed a scrap of paper in my hand and pushed my shoulder toward the door. David, having looked around the room and realized that Jake wasn’t here after all, had thrown himself down on the floor and begun repeatedly kicking and wailing. Lena shook her head in disgust, and then picked Henry up and kissed his tiny cheek. “Here is our little angel,” I heard her say.

  I peeked at the scrap of paper and saw it wasn’t a grocery list at all, that it said: Need to talk to you.—J.

  “I’ll take David with me,” I said. I ignored the ache in my abdomen and picked him up and carried him out, still kicking.

  JAKE WAS SITTING at the counter at Waterman’s Grocery, eating a sandwich as I imagined he had always done every night when he’d lived in the apartment upstairs. He looked just like a normal man, a handsome man, a kind man . . . the type of man I could’ve fallen in love with years ago before I’d even heard of Ed. I imagined I might have seen him sitting here one evening, on a stool, leaning over the counter, eating a sandwich, as I stopped to pick up groceries after my shift at the factory. That we could have met, then and ther
e, and everything else that followed since would’ve been different. But of course in those years Jake was living and working in Washington, D.C., or maybe still back on the farm in Maryland. Had it not been for Ed, I would’ve never met Jake at all.

  Suddenly David noticed Jake, and he ran away from me faster than I could run after him. He jumped on the stool next to Jake and wrapped his arms around Jake’s neck. Jake turned, saw me standing there, and offered me a small smile, which quickly turned into a worried look. He stood and rushed to me, David clinging to his arm. “You’re bleeding,” he said.

  I looked down and saw a little more blood seeping through my dress. “It’s nothing,” I said, “I just pulled another stitch.”

  “Millie, it’s not nothing.” He pulled a napkin from the counter and gently held it to my dress. The feel of his hands, so close to my skin but not quite, made me want to cry, and all at once, in that smallest of gestures, I felt inherently that I could trust him. Jake was good and kind, even if he hadn’t always told me the truth.

  Jake looked around, then back at me. “Where’s the baby?” he asked softly.

  “With my mother and Lena.” His face fell a little as if he’d been looking forward to seeing Henry, and I felt terrible for having left Henry behind. “You’ll meet him next time,” I said, though my voice caught, uncertain.

  He nodded, pulled a dollar from his pocket, and left it on the counter for Mr. Waterman. “We need to go somewhere else . . . to talk. Can you walk to catch the subway?”

  “Of course I can walk,” I said, though as I said it I wasn’t so sure. Now that I was here, with Jake so close, I felt the exhaustion and the pain that had been coming on all day after doing so much. I felt like my entire body had deflated and that it wanted to collapse. I wanted Jake to hold me up, to help me, to take me away from all of this as he’d promised once.

  Jake picked David up and held on to him with one arm. With the other, he reached for my hand. “We’ll take a cab,” he said.

  “Where are we going?” I asked, but Jake didn’t answer. And the truth was, I would’ve gone anywhere with him then, it didn’t even matter where.

  AN HOUR LATER, we were in a room in the Biltmore in Grand Central Terminal City. I understood there was probably a reason we were so close to the train station. Jake would be leaving me again soon. But I didn’t say anything as Jake checked us in under the names Dr. and Mrs. Zitlow. If the hotel clerk noticed the look on my face, or the blood stained across my horrible, large dress, he didn’t mention it. He simply handed Jake the key and ushered us to the elevator.

  David had fallen asleep in the cab in Jake’s arms, and once we were in the room, Jake set him down carefully on the settee by the window. I sat on the corner of the bed and watched the gentle way that Jake maneuvered him. David shifted and put his thumb in his mouth. “He spoke, you know,” I said.

  “He did?” Jake smiled, and he sat down on the edge of the bed next to me.

  He put his arm around me, and I leaned into him and put my head on his shoulder. The warmth of him there next to me felt exactly right, as if this strange hotel room in a part of the city I’d never been, suddenly felt like home. “When you left my apartment that day months ago . . . He shouted no. He didn’t want you to leave. He was inconsolable.”

  “Millie.” Jake leaned away from me, leaned forward, and put his head in his hands.

  I wanted to pull him back toward me, to lie down here with him and pretend it was just me and him, that the whole rest of the world and all the craziness didn’t matter. But it did. I had so many questions for him. So many things I needed to understand.

  “Why didn’t you tell me you were working with Ed?” I asked. “That Ed was part of the FBI? Why do you keep lying to me?”

  Jake turned and looked at me. He ran his thumb across my cheek. “I’m not working with Ed,” he said.

  “But I called the number you gave me. And Ed knew. Ed thought I’d called the number for him.”

  “You must’ve told the operator your name, and she just assumed you were calling for Ed.”

  I remembered how Jake had told me to ask for him and how I must’ve forgotten when I called. I’d somehow messed everything up. “I’m sorry,” I said. “I didn’t—”

  He held up his hand. “Millie, you have nothing to be sorry about. Look, I should’ve . . . I tried to tell you as little as possible. I didn’t want you to know too much. It’s better that way . . . for you.” He looked me in the eye carefully. “Do you know how Ed came over to this country?”

  I shrugged, confused we were starting all the way back there. “On a boat,” I said. “Just the way my grandparents did.”

  “Yes . . . but those were different times. My grandparents came from Schedrin when my mother was a baby, when this country still welcomed the Russian Jews.” In a different moment, I would have wanted to know more about Jake’s family right then. I wanted to see pictures of his grandparents and his parents, and the twin brother he lost, to understand who he was and where he came from, where Henry’s history began. “But that’s not what I mean,” Jake was saying now. “Did he ever tell you why he was able to come over in the forties, like that, during the war? When it was so much harder to emigrate.”

  “No, I guess not.” I knew it had been a struggle, that Lena had called Ed’s residence in New York a blessing—a miracle, even—but I had never thought to question how or why it had happened. It simply had. And before I met him. Ed was in Russia and then he was here. And then he was married to me.

  “The FBI recruited him,” Jake said. “He had some . . . ties in Russia that they were interested in getting closer to.”

  “KGB?” I asked, thinking back to what Ethel had told me.

  “Yes, KGB,” Jake said, his voice calm and even, the way it always was when he’d been helping David. “But a few years after the Bureau brought him here, they began to question which side he was really on. Who Ed was really working for.”

  “I don’t understand,” I said, frustrated. “Until this morning, I thought Ed was an accountant.” I thought about the job he got fired from years ago before he went to work at Pitt—had there even been a job? The way Lena always complained that it was so hard for him here in America because he was Russian. The way Ethel had called him a liar . . .

  “In 1947, the FBI began to suspect that Ed was a double agent.”

  “A double agent?”

  “That he was working for both the FBI and the KGB.” He paused a moment to gauge my reaction, but I tilted my head, still confused. “Basically, we were unsure where and to whom his loyalties lie. And that’s why they first sent me to New York—to keep an eye on Ed.”

  “And that’s why you offered David and me free therapy?” I said. “To keep an eye on Ed?”

  “At first, yes.”

  “And then?” I asked hesitantly.

  “You know,” he said. But I stared at him. I wanted to hear him say it. “And then I got to know David. And you. You were so lonely, so isolated. And until we began talking, I didn’t even realize how much I was, too.” He kissed the side of my head gently and pulled me closer to him. “You’re so beautiful. So smart and kind and devoted to David. And from everything you’ve told me, I know Ed doesn’t love you and David the way you deserve to be loved. And it kills me.” His voice cracked a little, and I curled myself into him. I stayed there for a moment, just feeling the weight of his body against mine, imagining what it might be like if we actually were Dr. and Mrs. Zitlow, sleeping here for the night, on our way to somewhere else, somewhere new.

  “So is Ed a double agent?” I asked quietly, resigned to know the truth now whatever it may be.

  Jake leaned up and looked me in the eye. “Millie, I don’t want to upset you more than I already have, but I really do think Ed’s at the root of all of this. I think he orchestrated the whole thing with Gold and Greenglass and . . .” I swallow
ed hard, but I thought about what Ethel said, about Ed trying to get Julie involved with the KGB, and I nodded. “But I have no hard proof. And now there’s a problem.”

  “What kind of problem?”

  “David Greenglass,” Jake said. “He confessed. And he claims that Julius Rosenberg was the ringleader.”

  “That can’t be right,” I said, thinking of everything Ethel told me earlier.

  “Something doesn’t feel right to me here, but Greenglass is putting it all down in writing and I don’t have anything else to show them to the contrary.” He touched my cheek and leaned in a little closer. “I hate to ask you this, Millie, but can you tell me anything else about Ed? Anything that might suggest that Julius is innocent and that it’s Ed who’s behind all this?”

  “Yes,” I said, and then I told Jake every suspicious thing I’d noticed about Ed. Once I started talking, I couldn’t stop. I told Jake about Ed’s phone call the night before the Catskills just before Russia exploded the bomb, about what Ethel had said about Ed talking to Julius about the KGB, about how Ed had been gone now for weeks—I didn’t know where—and even about that morning I followed Ed to what I thought was his new job on East Sixty-first Street.

  “East Sixty-first Street?” Jake stopped me. “Seven East Sixty-first Street.”

  “Yes,” I said, “I think that was it. Why? You know it?”

  “The former Soviet consulate. We always suspected that was the KGB meeting place.”

  “So Ed is guilty,” I murmured. “Are you going to arrest him?”

  “No, what you’ve told me isn’t enough. I need proof. Something solid we could use in court. Greenglass is going to sign a confession and testify against Julius. And that’s something we can use.”

  David Greenglass was going to sign a confession and testify against his own brother-in-law in court? “Why would he do that?” I put my hand to my mouth as I thought of Ethel and her boys, and I wondered what would happen to them if Julie was arrested.