The Hours Count

by Jillian Cantor

  “They’re gone,” I say softly. “I thought I was saving the children by leaving with Ed. But I wasn’t.”

  “What do you mean gone?” he asks. “Where are the children now?”

  “I don’t want to talk about it,” I say. I can’t tell him what has happened. I can’t. “Where are John and Richie?” I ask. “Are they here?”

  His face turns as if I’ve hurt him by not answering his question about my boys, but he still gives me an answer to my question. “No, they were here earlier. Now they’re in New Jersey. With friends.”

  “Will Julie be with her?” I ask. “Will they get to die together? As they lived,” I add.

  “No,” Jakes says slowly. “Julie will be executed first. Then Ethel.”

  The word executed sounds so cold and calculated, as if he’s already accepted it and moved on. But I don’t understand how the Jake I once knew possibly could. “Ethel should have a friend with her,” I say. “She shouldn’t die alone. There should be a witness here who loves her.” As I say the words, it’s as if I’ve understood them for the first time. Ethel is going to die. For no good reason. For nothing. There is nothing I can do or say now to stop it. Maybe Jake is right and there is nothing I could’ve done or said all along. I’ve held on to this stupid paper and Ed’s guilt. I’ve let go of my children. All for nothing.

  Jake doesn’t say anything for a few moments, and then he says, “I’ll get you a press credential. If anyone asks, you’re with the Times.”

  “A woman here, covering this for the Times?”

  “Don’t worry,” Jake says, “no one will ask. No one will notice you. Everyone’s eyes will be focused on her.”

  IN THE END, Ethel is led into the room where she will die in a thin green prison dress and prison slippers. I want to call out for her, to tell her that I’m here. Much too late. But still, I want to tell her that I know that she’s innocent. That I understand that she has tried so very hard to do the best for her children. That none of this is her fault. But we have been instructed not to speak, and a forbidding sign over the door reads Silence. It feels as if it were directed just at me—harshly.

  Two women lead Ethel in, and she leans up to kiss one on the cheek before they cover her eyes. She doesn’t look at the people watching, sitting here on the hard wooden benches. She doesn’t see me. She doesn’t know I’m here. As I watch them strap Ethel in, I find myself paralyzed, unable to move.

  The jolt of electricity seems to come fast, to be over quickly. Just like that. They move her dress a little, put a stethoscope to her chest, and then the doctor shakes his head and they began to reattach all the electrodes to her all over again. “What’s happening?” I whisper to Jake, forgoing the instruction of silence for an answer.

  “She didn’t die,” he whispers back. “The normal amount of electricity didn’t seem to kill her.”

  I begin to shake as if I were out in the snow without a coat on, though I’m also sweating. It’s so hot in here. But I keep my eyes straight ahead, trained on Ethel’s face. I think I know what’s in her mind, in her thoughts, in her final moments. She’s with them again, John and Richie. Maybe John is playing the phonograph much too loud and Ethel is holding on to Richie, dancing across her living room, singing along. I imagine her singing her Italian love song to Julie.

  They jolt her again, and I close my eyes and picture her singing there, at her piano in her apartment. I hear her voice pitched with joy and happiness.

  When I open my eyes again, smoke is funneling from her head, whispering toward the ceiling, the skylight up above.

  THE WORLD OUTSIDE Sing Sing is just as loud and as steamy as it was when I entered, though now I watch one of the men who’d witnessed Ethel’s death standing out front, recounting to reporters what we’d just seen. Ethel has met her maker, I hear him say, and now she has a lot of explaining to do.

  I want to run through the crowd and scream at him how wrong he is, to tell him that it is only people like him who have the explaining to do. The people who let this happen. Everyone who knew better and didn’t come forward. Like me. Everyone who might have stopped this before it got away from them. Like Jake. Everyone who was guilty of something real. Like Ed.

  Jake hears the man talking, too, and it’s as if he can sense my thoughts because he holds on tighter to my arm, unwilling to let me run or do anything too crazy. He leads me through the crowds, back out to the road, where I’d left the Fleetmaster stalled in a long line, and when we reach the car I stop walking.

  My entire body feels numb, my skin impenetrable. I no longer feel the heat or smell the dank water of the Hudson. All I can see is the smoke, all I can smell is burning flesh, all I can hear is the sound of a body crunching against gravel.

  “Millie?” Jake says. His voice sounds strange, far away and alarmed all at once. He is bent down in front of the Fleetmaster as if sizing up the damage to the front fender. I lean down, too, and see what he sees: blood. “Did you hit a deer on the way up here?”

  “A deer? No,” I say very quietly. “Not a deer.”

  1953

  28

  Ed returned from one of his many trips to the city for what he called meetings. I imagined him there on East Sixty-first Street meeting with the KGB, so obviously in front of the FBI’s noses. One day they would arrest him, I thought, and he wouldn’t come back here. And maybe then we would be free. Or maybe the FBI would come for me, too. I had a plan to grab the children, to run into the cornfields and hide. Maybe it was a silly plan, but I felt better practicing it in my head, imagining how fast I could grab them both and where, exactly, I would run into the maze of corn to lose them. But Ed always came back and the FBI never did.

  Tonight, he made his way back into the small house, and he walked into David and Henry’s room, where I was already sleeping on the floor. I slept here often now to avoid him in the bed we were supposed to share.

  He startled me awake by pushing on my shoulder, and I jumped up in the darkness, awakening from a dream about Ethel trapped in the women’s death house at Sing Sing with no way out. Every time she was supposed to die, there was another appeal, another chance. Now Supreme Court Justice Douglas had granted a stay of execution, and I’d gone to sleep with the feeling that, finally, there was going to be good news. Ethel was going to be set free.

  “Mildred,” Ed said. “Wake up. Come with me.”

  I sat up, rubbed my eyes, and tried to focus. My back was sore from lying on the floor, but I stretched and stood and followed him into the living room. “What’s going on?” I asked.

  “Get dressed,” he said. “We are going to the city.”

  “The city?” I felt confused and wondered for a moment if I was dreaming. “But the children are sleeping.”

  “My mother will watch them,” he said. I wasn’t going to leave David and Henry with Lena. He leaned in closer to me. “Your grandmother has died, Mildred. Your mother is asking for you. The funeral is in the morning. You cannot miss that.”

  “Bubbe Kasha?” I hadn’t seen her for nearly three years, and even the last time I saw her, she hadn’t seemed well. But still, I’d imagined her living forever, sitting there in my mother’s small apartment, on the couch with her senseless knitting needles. Now I understood I would never see her again. I began to cry.

  “Come with me,” Ed said. He put his hand on my shoulder. “I’ll take you to say good-bye.”

  “I’ll wake the children up,” I said, though even as I said the words I dreaded the thought of dragging them out of slumber now and taking them into such sadness.

  “Let them sleep. They’ll be fine,” Ed said. “They will sleep for a while longer, and you’ll be back just after the funeral by lunchtime tomorrow. They are in the middle of nowhere out here. They couldn’t be safer.”

  Ed was right. There was nothing here, no dangers of taxicabs for David to chase after as in the city. And as much as
I disliked Lena, I knew that she was capable of watching them for at least a few short hours.

  “But is it even safe for us to go back into the city now?” I said, though I couldn’t imagine not being there for Bubbe Kasha’s funeral even if it wasn’t safe.

  “You will be fine,” Ed said with what seemed to be a new confidence. I wondered if he knew something I didn’t. Or maybe it was just the sound of a terrible relief in his voice, the feeling that whatever he’d done he truly believed now that he’d gotten away with it.

  ED DROPPED ME OFF on Delancey Street and he promised to return before noon. “You’re not staying?” I asked, and he said he couldn’t, that he had more business to attend to in the city. As I watched him drive away, I felt strange and out of sorts here all alone without Henry and David.

  I found my mother’s door unlocked, as it always was, and as I stepped back into her apartment it was as if nothing had changed, as if no time had passed at all. Even the smells of chicken fat and grease lingered in the air as if they had hung here through every Sabbath since I’d left.

  I walked to the small lamp on the table and pulled the chain to turn it on.

  “Mishe?” a familiar voice said. “Honey, is that you?”

  I turned, and Bubbe Kasha was lying on the couch, her face in a smile at the sight of me. “Mishe,” she said again, mistaking me for my mother.

  I rushed to her. “I thought you were . . .” I didn’t let myself say the word. She looked smaller than I remembered. Her frame was frailer, but I could hear her breath catching in her chest, the breath of an old, but very alive, woman.

  My mother ran out from the bedroom, wrapping her robe around her chest. I noticed that she had grown so much older-looking in the past three years: her hair had gone completely gray, her double chin had folded over once more into another layer. “Oh, Mildred,” she said, “you’ve come back to us.”

  And that’s when I realized what I’d done. Ed had lied to me as he lies to everyone. Ed was a liar. I’d left the children. I’d left them all alone with Ed and Lena.

  MR. BERGMAN’S butcher shop hadn’t changed much in the past three years, though it was virtually empty when I walked inside. I wondered if business had slowed or if just today, this early in the morning, it was slow.

  “Bubbelah,” Mr. Bergman exclaimed when he saw me walk through the door, and I noticed his hands and jowls shook constantly now when he talked. He, too, was older. “Where are the boychiks?”

  “I’ve ruined everything!” I cried out, and then I couldn’t stop myself from breaking into tears.

  “Bubbelah?” Mr. Bergman put his shaky hand on my shoulder and pulled me into a hug. “I’m very sorry about your friend, Mrs. Rosenberg,” he whispered into my ear.

  I pulled back and wiped at my tears, realizing that that’s why Mr. Bergman thought I was crying. “There’s been a stay by a Supreme Court justice,” I said. “I think Ethel might be set free this time.”

  “No, Mildred. Not anymore. It was thrown out today. I just heard it on the radio.”

  “No, not again.”

  “I’m afraid so,” Mr. Bergman said.

  I took a deep breath, and I thought about why I was here, in the city now. The way Ed had lied to me. The way Ed had always lied to me, been cruel to me, ruined the lives of people I loved. And I knew what I needed to do. “Do you have that letter I sent you?” Mr. Bergman nodded, and he walked into the back. He came back a moment later with the envelope, still unopened, and I took it from him and stuffed it in my purse.

  “You are not going to do anything stupid, are you, bubbelah?”

  “I’m just going to do what I should’ve done years ago.”

  ED RETURNED to my mother’s house just before noon. Just as he said he would. I felt I was going insane waiting for him, pacing by the door, until my mother put her hand on my shoulder and asked me not to wear her floor out. “Everything will work out the way it’s supposed to,” she said to me. “You’ll see.” I didn’t tell her that nothing worked out the way it was supposed to, that her old expression was lost on me now.

  I didn’t want to wait for Ed. I wanted to hire a taxi to drive me back to the house, the children, as soon as possible. But the truth was, I didn’t think I’d know how to get back there on my own. And anyway, I didn’t have the money to hire a taxi for such a long ride.

  I was relieved when I saw the Fleetmaster pull back up at last, just as he’d promised. And I wondered if maybe I’d been wrong about Ed’s intentions, if all of this was just a silly stupid mistake and my fears for the boys were overblown.

  “You were wrong about Bubbe Kasha,” I said as I got into the car, hoping that Ed would be as surprised as I was.

  “Was I?” Ed asked, seeming unconcerned. “Well then,” he said, “you should be grateful you got to spend some time with her. She is getting old, no?” His voice sounded like a threat.

  “Are the children okay?” I asked him.

  “Of course they are okay,” Ed answered.

  We didn’t talk anymore as he drove over the bridge, and then the city roads turned into empty, winding country ones. I paid attention this time just in case I might ever need to get back here on my own from the city.

  At last we found the middle of nowhere, the certain end of the earth. Ed pulled over and stopped the car right in front of the tiny, ugly house we now thought of as home.

  I got out of the car and ran inside the house before Ed even turned off the engine. “David!” I called out as I entered. “Henry!”

  The house was dark and felt unusually still, and I closed my eyes and I sunk to the floor. I noticed the television was on as if someone had rushed out of here in a hurry and had forgotten to turn it off. Ed? Or Lena and the children? I imagined David kicking as Lena pulled him away. And I remembered that day when she yelled at him so harshly. She didn’t understand him at all. She wouldn’t be able to keep him safe. She might not even want to.

  “There is something we need to discuss, Mildred.” Ed had walked into the house behind me. He put his hands under my arms and pulled me back up to standing. He pulled me close against him, and his breath felt hot on my neck. I struggled to get away from him, but he twisted my arm back behind me. “Mildred, are you listening to me?”

  “Where are the children?” I asked, my voice sounding much calmer than I felt. “You told me they were okay. You lied.”

  Ed pulled my arm tighter, and I let out a little cry. “It seems we each have something the other wants,” he said.

  “Where are the children?” I repeated.

  “Where is the real paper?” Ed countered.

  “I don’t know what you mean,” I said, the thought that it was now inside my purse and not safe at Mr. Bergman’s terrifying me a little. I wondered how long Ed had known.

  He twisted my arm harder. “I would not give you so much credit. Not only did you steal from me but you tried to cover it up.”

  “You’re not making any sense,” I said, though I felt a nervous heat rising up my neck, my face.

  “You are the only one who could have that paper, Mildred. You are the one who copied it and tried to fool me. My mother searched through all of your things here and she could not find it.”

  “Lena searched through my things?” I imagined her thin fingers poking into my stuff and imagined the look on her face as she’d come across the diaphragm. “Well, then, you know I don’t have it,” I said defiantly.

  “What I know is, you are lying to me.” Then he dropped my arm suddenly, and I shook it a little to ease the shooting pain running straight down my wrist and through to my fingers. “If you should not hide something here, I asked myself, where would you hide it? At your mother’s house? With that crazy butcher you like so much?”

  It frightened me a little the way Ed seemed to know me better than I thought, better than I ever knew him. I opened my mouth
to protest, but suddenly Ethel’s and Julie’s pictures flashed on the television screen and I reached across Ed to turn up the volume. “The Supreme Court Special Session has denied Justice Douglas’s stay of execution,” the newscaster read from his paper and then looked at the camera. “The Rosenbergs will die tonight at eight p.m. at the death house at Sing Sing Prison, shortly before the Jewish Sabbath begins.”

  “Tonight?” I cried out. “No, they can’t . . .” Ed turned the television off and grabbed my arms again and pushed me up against the wall. “Why do you want this paper of yours so badly?” I asked Ed. “Why now? Julie and Ethel are already going to die.”

  “So what?” Ed spat at me, his breath warm against my face. “You think they wouldn’t kill us, too?” I shivered on the word us. “You think your friend Ethel knows any more than you do about what has happened? They don’t care.”

  Ethel. I wasn’t sure what Julie had done, if he’d done anything, but I knew Ethel believed he hadn’t. I was sure that Ed was right about this one thing, that Ethel knew and understood as much about this whole thing as I did. And she was going to die tonight. For real, this time. For nothing. “No,” I moaned. “This can’t be happening. You conspired to commit espionage and you’re letting Ethel and Julie take the fall for you?” My voice trembled but grew louder as I kept speaking. “You want Russia to bomb us? You want us all to die? You won’t be happy until you destroy us all, will you?”

  “I will make it very simple for you,” Ed said, speaking in a calm, even tone. “You give me the paper you took from me and maybe I will let you see the children again.”

  I thought about Ethel. She’d been separated from her children for almost three years. Three years. I wanted to save her. I wanted to give this paper to the FBI today and I wanted her to live. I wanted her to go back to her children and love them and care for them. But more than anything, I wanted to hold on to Henry’s soft curls and give David a silent hug.