The Hours Count

by Jillian Cantor

  I walked back down the steps and looked up at Ed, still holding Henry. “Are you an atomic spy?” I asked, my voice quiet but steady now, resigned to know the truth.

  “Things are much more complicated than that.” He rocked Henry a little more. He stroked Henry’s cheek gently. “I am Russian. I was born in Russia. You always knew that about me.”

  “But you wanted to come to America so badly,” I said. “You’re American now.”

  “I am,” he said. “But that doesn’t mean America having so much power in the world doesn’t scare me. That doesn’t mean I don’t have certain loyalties to where I came from.”

  “The KGB?” I asked.

  “Mildred,” he said. “Please. Just get in the car.”

  David yanked on my arm, and I turned and looked at him. Though he was almost five, he suddenly seemed so small. What would happen to him if there was a chance Ed was right? What would happen to him should I have to go to jail?

  My heart pounded so furiously and tears welled up in my eyes, making it hard to see, but I felt myself following Ed to the street.

  THE DUSK CAME as we drove. The Sabbath began as Ed maneuvered the Fleetmaster across the bridge, leaving the lights and the bustle of the city behind us, maybe forever. And I wouldn’t let myself turn around and watch it all disappear. I wouldn’t let myself think about Jake waiting for me in the lobby of the Biltmore or about the possibility that Ed was right. That Jake wasn’t waiting there to run away with me but to question me or use me or even arrest me. Instead, I thought about what Ethel had said to me this morning, that line she remembered from her play—about a coward dying many times—and it felt like I was dying as I left the city behind.

  Henry fell asleep in my arms, and I turned around to the backseat, where David was sleeping, too. Again I thought about what would happen to them if I were not with them. Would they go live with my mother and Bubbe Kasha the way I’d just taken John and Richie to Mrs. Greenglass’s? Would Susan offer to take them? Henry? Maybe . . . But David? No. Ed, or probably any one of them, would lock David away in some sort of facility. They would never awaken in him what I knew was in there. What Jake knew was in there.

  Jake. I didn’t believe he could possibly be waiting there at the Biltmore to arrest me.

  Just on the other side of the bridge, I asked Ed to stop the car, to turn it around, to go back. “I think I’ve made a mistake,” I cried out.

  “We can never go back now, Mildred,” Ed said, and then he kept on driving, into New Jersey, into the darkness.

  June 19, 1953

  “I waited for you all night when Ethel was arrested,” Jake says. He has taken the crumpled piece of paper from my hand and now he examines it closely, trying to hold it up to the minimal light in the very bare room he has led me to. He grimaces when he seems to notice the dried blood, but he doesn’t comment on that.

  The room is empty but for the two of us, and we sit across a metal table, not meeting each other’s eyes. “I sat in the lobby of the Biltmore until six a.m. the next morning,” he says. “I was worried something terrible had happened to you.”

  “I didn’t know what to do,” I say. “Ed came for me. And I didn’t know if I could trust you.”

  “And what? You trust me now?” He folds the piece of paper back up and hands it back to me.

  “Should I?” I ask. “Trust you?”

  Jake leans in closer and under his breath murmurs, “You have a crude sketch of the atomic bomb. You have no way to prove who drew it. It could’ve been you, for all I know.”

  I remember how easy it was for me to copy the drawing and I bite my lip. But this one is real. “It wasn’t,” I say. “And turn it over. Look on the back.” He does, and he holds it close to his face, reading the words in Ed’s handwriting—For Raymond. “Ed wrote that. That’s Ed’s handwriting,” I say. “This proves he—”

  He puts a finger to his lips and moves closer to my ear so I can feel his breath on my neck as he whispers, “Proving one person’s guilt does not prove another’s innocence. The only thing you will do with this is get yourself arrested. Hell, I should arrest you right now.” He pulls back, stares at me hard, his features stoic, unmoving, and I think he might really do it here after all this time. Ed was right back when we left the city—Jake would have arrested me.

  I hold my arms up in the air as if to surrender “Go ahead, then,” I say defiantly, daring him to.

  He moves his hands a little as if he’s going to reach for me. But then he seems to think better of it and he stops himself. “I’m going to walk you back out to your car now. I want you to get in, turn around, and drive back to New Jersey. Go home to your husband and your children.”

  “You knew I was in New Jersey?”

  “Of course I knew.” He laughs drily.

  “And you didn’t come to find me?”

  “I didn’t think you wanted me to,” he says.

  “But you could’ve come and arrested Ed . . . and me. It’s been three years,” I say.

  He folds his hands together on the table and looks down at them. “The Rosenbergs were found guilty. They refused to talk or implicate anyone . . .” I think of that terrible day in the spring of 1951 when I learned the outcome of the trial. Until then, I kept telling myself they would be found innocent and that I’d go back to the city, to Knickerbocker Village, and I’d tell Ethel how sorry I was for leaving the boys at her mother’s, for leaving her. I would invite them all to come stay in New Jersey with us, where no one knew who we really were, where no one bothered anyone else. But of course that never happened, and now I feel like a fool. “We had no more evidence on anyone else,” Jake is saying. “No reason to keep looking for anyone else.”

  “So what are you even doing here now?” I ask.

  “We’ve got men waiting with an open line directly to Mr. Hoover should there be any last-minute confessions.” He looks down at my paper, then back up, at me. “That’s probably the only thing that could stop this now. And even that . . . I don’t know.”

  “But Ethel has nothing to confess.” I throw up my hands, urgently wanting him to realize what we need to do. “And I’m here. Confessing, aren’t I? Call Mr. Hoover and let him know that.”

  Jake puts his finger to his lips again. “Millie.” His eyes look just the way I remember them still, the way they looked that night in Phoenicia in the cabin. “You need to go home to your children. You need to burn this piece of paper. You need to forget all about the Rosenbergs.”

  “I can’t,” I say. I try to bite back tears that have been so long coming. I close my eyes, picturing the muted curves of David’s face, the soft feel of Henry’s curls against my arm. I remember the last thing I ever said to Ethel as she stood in my doorway in Knickerbocker Village. That no one was going to die. “I want to see Ethel,” I tell him. “I’m not leaving here until I see Ethel.”

  1951–1952

  27

  In New Jersey, our only neighbors were cornfields as far as the eye could see. It was the country, the noiseless air I’d wanted for David, and yet for a little while David refused to go outside his small, windowless bedroom. Even after Ed left us again for a few weeks to go back to the city, to tie up loose ends, he said, I had a hard time getting David to come out of his room even to eat.

  Then the corn was harvested, and there was so much of it I was cooking corn for weeks. Bright yellow kernels that brought a reluctant David back to the dinner table again.

  I often considered telephoning Jake at the number I’d memorized, especially when Ed was back in the city. We didn’t have a telephone in the house, but there was one at the general store in the small nearby town. I could walk there with the children on a nice day and I could use the telephone for a dime. I used it once to call Mr. Bergman and tell him that we were safe, and I asked him to let my mother and Susan know we were all right despite Ed’s warnings before he left to not
contact anyone.

  Months had passed, but I still asked Mr. Bergman, “Has Dr. Zitlow been back to look for me?” I tried to keep my voice light so he wouldn’t understand the weight of what I was asking and become worried about me.

  “No,” Mr. Bergman said, “Mr. Zitlow hasn’t been here.” He lowered his voice. “But there have been some FBI men here, asking questions.”

  “What kind of questions?” I asked.

  “About you, and about Ed. Where you are. How well you know the Rosenbergs.” He coughed a little and cleared his throat. “I didn’t have anything to tell them. I know nothing.” I tried to imagine it, and the thought of these FBI men there, pestering Mr. Bergman, made me think, in some deep place in my heart, that maybe Ed was right, that all Jake had been interested in that night was arresting me, too.

  “If I send you a letter,” I said quietly, my mouth close to the receiver, “can you keep it safe for me until I might need it someday?”

  “I would do anything for you, bubbelah,” he said. “You know I would.”

  ED RETURNED after a month away, in March 1951, with a ragged-looking Lena and the television set from our apartment in Knickerbocker Village. I wondered if he’d checked the secret compartment and noticed the slight differences in the paper I’d put in his envelope, but he didn’t say anything to me about it so I guessed he hadn’t, that he believed everything was just as he’d left it. I’d already sent the real paper in a letter to Mr. Bergman, and, anyway, I was just happy to have the television again and be reconnected to the world just as Ethel and Julie’s trial was wrapping up.

  Until then, I’d followed the trial by walking to the general store and buying the local paper. Removed from the city, I couldn’t help but feel the news was watered down. But from what I could tell, both Ethel and Julie, and Mortie Sobell, were accused of conspiracy to commit espionage, which sounded to me like a fancy way of saying a whole lot of nothing. The prosecutor, a man by the name of Irving Saypol, claimed that Ethel and Julie conspired to get weapons to the Soviets, weapons which could destroy us all. There seemed to be very little evidence, other than David and Ruth Greenglass’s testimony that Julie passed information and that Ethel helped by typing up notes. Ethel had been so sure that Julie hadn’t been involved, when we’d spoken in the elevator, that I knew even if there was the smallest chance he had been, she most certainly had not had anything to do with espionage. She had never typed up notes like that, and I felt it was so obvious her brother was lying. I wondered what was more painful for her, to be accused of such terrible things—to be on trial, to be away from her children, to have her husband accused and in peril—or the fact that her brother had betrayed her so. The thought of being away from my children for days felt unbearable, much less for months, and I imagined that was the worst of it for Ethel. That was worse than anything.

  After the arrival of the television, I turned it on and watched the news unfold, so close and so real, right there. It was unusually cold for the end of March, and the tiny house did not have the steam heat we’d grown accustomed to in Knickerbocker Village. I sat wrapped in a blanket, shivering, the television on all day. Henry was crawling, and he made circles around the tiny house, while David stacked dried corn ears and pennies in lieu of the blocks I’d left behind in our apartment.

  On March 28, 1951, the trial ended at last. On the television, in grainy black and white, I saw Julie and Ethel being led out of the courthouse, holding on to each other tightly as they were plunged into the bitter cold. Someone ripped them apart, and Ethel appeared to cry out to stop them. I put my hand up to the television, wishing I could push them closer, back together, just like that. But I felt only heat and static and I pulled my hand away. I thought about the paper I’d found hidden in this television and how I might go now to the city and get it back from Mr. Bergman. I wanted to help Ethel so badly, but I glanced at David, stacking his pennies in silence, and I knew I couldn’t risk it.

  The next day, everything happened so quickly. The jury came back, and then it was announced that they were all found guilty. My hands shook and I started to cry.

  Ed and Lena were sitting on the couch and had been watching with me. Lena was unusually quiet, and even when the verdict was announced by the newscaster, she only looked up from her knitting for a moment, looked at Ed, and then looked back down. Ed drained his glass of vodka and put it down on the table. “At least it is over now,” he said. “Ethel will be shown leniency. They won’t do anything to a woman. A mother. She’ll be free in a week,” he said.

  “And Julie?” I said bitterly.

  Ed didn’t answer me, and he stood and turned off the television.

  A WEEK LATER, the newscasters read Judge Irving Kaufman’s sentence with stoic faces. I began watching with the hope that Ed was wrong and that both Julie and Ethel would be let go, that this would all be over. And then I began to listen to what it was Irving Kaufman said, what Ethel had heard him say to her, somewhere across the bridge, inside the bleak courtroom. A crime worse than murder . . . Ethel knew what she was doing . . . Julius and Ethel Rosenberg . . . sentenced to death.

  The valiant never taste of death but once, Ethel had said.

  No one is going to die, I told her.

  “You have to stop this,” I turned to Ed and said in agony.

  “Me?” Ed sucked on his cigar and looked down at his feet. “And what do you think I should do that would stop this?”

  “You know the truth about what really happened, don’t you? You work for the FBI . . . or the KGB. You can come forward and tell them the truth.”

  “You should want me to come forward?” Ed said. “And what do you think they would do to you?”

  Lena grimaced at her knitting needles. “You would not last one day in jail, Mildred. You are much too soft.”

  I opened my mouth to protest, but then Henry crawled up to the couch and pulled himself up to stand, wanting me eagerly to pick him up. I pulled him into my lap and put my face into his sweet baby curls.

  Lena was wrong. Jail didn’t scare me. Not being here to take care of Henry and David did.

  IN THE LITTLE HOUSE in the cornfield, Henry turned one and began to walk and chatter and utter nonsense words. David turned six and stayed shrouded in silence. In the summer he spent hours in the backyard, watching the crows fly over the cornfields, and I remembered the way he looked in the rowboat in Phoenicia. I couldn’t help but think it wasn’t the country air that had helped him at all but rather the presence of Jake.

  I often thought about John and Richie, living with their unforgiving grandmother on Sheriff Street. Later, I would learn that they were there only a short time until she gave them away, first to an orphanage, then to their other grandmother. I’d like to think if I’d known what was to come, I would’ve gone back to the city to rescue them, to bring them out here to live with us. I’d like to think I never would’ve taken them to Sheriff Street at all, that I would’ve taken them with us from the start and taken care of them. I liked to think I would’ve done the right thing just once. But I had no idea what would happen to Ethel. It was unimaginable to me back then.

  For months, though, I had nightmares about Ethel’s children. Especially John.

  In my dreams, I kept seeing him walking around Monroe Street, all bundled up in his old brown winter coat but without any shoes. Without his mother there, he’d forgotten to put them on. Or someone had forgotten to buy them for him.

  WHEN WINTER CAME again and snow fell upon the corn, there were appeals to the higher courts. All denied.

  I thought so often about the paper I’d sent to Mr. Bergman that very well could implicate Ed, but I felt he was right that it would somehow implicate me, too. I couldn’t let them take me away from David and Henry the way they’d taken Ethel away from John and Richie. I couldn’t bear the thought and so I kept quiet, living in the cornfield, protecting my children, listening to Lena complai
n about David, listening for Ed coming to bed at night. There was no Planned Parenthood out here in the middle of nowhere and, luckily, I’d packed my diaphragm that night when I left. I couldn’t imagine finding myself with more children, all the way out here, all alone.

  At the end of December 1952, the papers reported that Ethel’s and Julie’s death sentences had been handed down. They were set to die in three weeks.

  And then there was another stay and they weren’t. Their deaths came and went, something unreal, something that began to seem like little more than a threat.

  I never thought it would actually happen.

  June 19, 1953

  “It’s too late to see Ethel now,” Jake says. He stands and puts his arms on my shoulders to move me toward the door. “Ethel can’t have any more visitors.” He lowers his voice, and he stops pushing me forward to hold on to me. It feels something like a hug, and it still gives me warmth the way it always did when Jake touched me.

  “She can’t die,” I say. “I should’ve come sooner. I should’ve brought you this that night years ago.”

  Jake moves his arms back to his sides. “Ed was right,” he says, “I would’ve arrested you if you had shown me this back then. I would have had no choice.”

  “I don’t believe you,” I say, because now that he has stood so close again, now that I have given him a chance to turn me in again and he hasn’t taken it, I think he’s lying just to get me to leave. “You never would’ve taken me away from my children, would you?”

  Jake looks down, refusing to meet my eyes. “How are they? How’s Henry? And David?” The way he says their names, the way his voice is soft and still filled with kindness, I know my instinct is right, and I hate myself for knowing this so solidly only now. When it is too late.