The Hours Count

by Jillian Cantor

  “Mildred,” Ed said. “The paper.”

  “I will give you this paper, and then you will give me the children?” I said, trying to match his calm tone. If I could just get him to take me to the children, I could figure this out. Ed nodded and loosened his hold on my arm.

  I pulled the paper from my purse and I held it up above my head, and then, before Ed could react, I pulled away from him and ran outside. “Take me to the children,” I shouted at Ed as he ran toward me, “and then I’ll give this to you.”

  “Stupid woman.” Ed laughed, shoved me hard so I fell to the ground, and he grabbed the paper from my hands. Ed’s words stung more than the fall. I was stupid. I really was. I never should’ve trusted Ed. I should’ve gone to Jake with this paper all those years ago. But I was not going to let Ed take away my children now. I was not going to let this all be for nothing.

  I pulled myself up from the ground and dusted the dirt off my dress. “Where are the children?” I said, trying to keep my voice even.

  Ed looked at the paper, seeming satisfied that this was what he needed, that he had won. “You should think I would let you have the children now that I have them?” He grimaced. “You are a terrible mother. I will not let you ruin them both the way you have ruined one.”

  “You promised,” I said, annoyed with the way my voice trembled. Ed laughed again. The afternoon air was stifling and I couldn’t breathe.

  I looked toward the car and I noticed that he’d left the keys in the ignition. He must’ve forgotten to take them when he ran in the house after me. If I took the car, he would be stuck here, in all the corn, in the middle of nowhere. He would have to tell me where the children were if he wanted to get the car back, if he ever wanted to leave.

  My heart pounded as I ran to the car, got in, turned the key, and heard the ignition sing. I hadn’t driven anything since the meat truck back when Kauffman’s Meats still had one, when I was only a teenager, and that was so long ago now. But my feet shifted below me, finding the pedals, remembering.

  “You stupid woman!” Ed was shouting. He was behind the car, waving his arms in the air. That’s all I was to him? That’s all I ever was to him.

  I put my foot on the gas and gunned the engine. The tires squealed a little in the gravel since I hadn’t remembered to take the car out of park. Ed ran to the side and he knocked on the window. “Get out of the car!” he shouted.

  I put the car in reverse, backed up, and then stopped and turned the wheel so I was facing Ed straight on.

  “You will never see the children again if you don’t get out of the car!” he shouted at me. A coward dies many times before their death, but the valiant never taste of death but once, Ethel had said to me.

  No one is going to die, I told her.

  “Mildred, I’m warning you!” Ed shouted.

  I couldn’t lose the children. But Ed was a liar, and Ethel was going to die. Tonight. I had to help her.

  I put my foot on the gas and pressed down on the pedal. Ed didn’t have time to react, or maybe he thought a woman as stupid as me would never think to hit him with a car. But I did, as if by instinct. I wasn’t going very fast, but it was fast enough. With the power of the car, Ed did not seem large or menacing. I knocked him to the ground, just like that, as if he were a domino I toppled over with the flick of my forefinger.

  Then I heard the thud of his body against the gravel, and suddenly it hit me. What I’d done. And I let out a scream.

  I backed up and got out of car. Ed lay on the ground flat on his back, but his chest still rose and fell, up and down and up and down, and his eyes were open. His pants were torn, his leg was bleeding, but just a little. “Mildred?” he said, looking up at me, his voice ripe with surprise. “My leg.”

  “Can you get up?” I asked him. I watched him struggle to stand, but he couldn’t put any weight on his leg.

  “I think it’s broken.” He lifted up his hand for my help, but instead I reached down, plucked the paper from him, and ran back quickly to the car.

  “Mildred!” he yelled. “Come back here . . . If you leave me here, I will never let you see the children again.”

  But I was not a stupid woman. Ed was a liar. He’d always been a liar. If I helped him up right now, he wouldn’t tell me where the children were anyway.

  “GIVE ME YOUR KEYS,” Jake says.

  “Why?” I ask, though I know why.

  “Just give them to me.” He holds out his hands, and I hesitate for only a moment before throwing the keys to him.

  I don’t care about the keys or the stupid car. Ethel is dead. My children are gone. I imagine myself now going to find John and Richie, telling them that I will take them, that I will care for them and love them the way their mother always intended for them to be loved. But they will hate me now for leaving them the way I did back at their grandmother’s. I’m sure of it. They will hate me for being unable to stop their mother’s death, for staying hidden away for so long. They should hate me. I hate myself. I am a terrible mother and a terrible friend. And besides, I will be no good to them once Jake arrests me for what I did to Ed. A coward dies many times. Here I am, dying again.

  “Come with me,” Jake says, and he puts his arm around me and leads me back the way we came. He leads me to an unfamiliar black car, opens the passenger door, and tells me to get in. I do. I’m shivering, though somehow I understand it’s still hot outside. Jake pulls a blanket from the trunk and throws it over me.

  Suddenly I am so very tired. It feels impossible that I would be able to or want to sleep after what I have done and what I have seen in the past twenty-four hours. After what I have lost and who I have become. And yet it is as if my entire body were surrendering under the weight of all of it and the warm blanket Jake has covered me with. As soon as Jake begins driving back down, moving steadily on Route 9, I lean my head against the window and I fall asleep.

  JAKE AWAKENS ME by gently shaking my leg once the car has stopped. It feels like only minutes have passed. But maybe it has been hours.

  I open my eyes and look around, squinting at the familiar shapes in front of me. Susan and Sam’s house . . . in Elizabeth?

  “I don’t understand?” I say. I’d thought Jake was taking me somewhere to arrest me. He already threatened once and that was for something I hadn’t even done.

  Jake moves closer to me. “You need to get out of the car and go inside,” he says. “Pretend nothing else happened today before I drove you here.”

  “I can’t pretend that.” I know I will never forget the image of that whisper of smoke coming out of Ethel’s head. Or Ed waiting helplessly in the gravel. Him screaming at me that I would never see my children again.

  “You have to,” Jake says.

  “What if I don’t want to?”

  “You just have to.” He pauses. “Go inside. I’m going to take care of the rest.”

  “The children!” I cry out, and Jake reaches up and puts his hand on my cheek. His hand still feels exactly the way I remember it, and for a moment I close my eyes and try to fight back tears. I think about Richie and John somewhere here in New Jersey. Orphans. Their parents gone forever. I think about Henry and David hidden away somewhere by Ed, and it feels almost wrong for me to wish that I will find them, that they are safe. I don’t even deserve that much. I have done this life of mine all wrong. Every choice I’ve made has been the wrong one. A tear escapes onto my cheek, and Jake brushes it away with his thumb.

  “I want you to know that I wanted to stop this,” he said. “I did everything I could, but it got so much bigger than me so fast. The best I could do was to save you. And the boys.” I wonder if this is what he’s doing even now—saving us. He looks at me for another moment, and then he leans across me and opens up the passenger door. “Go,” he says. I shake my head. I don’t want to leave him. “Go,” he says again.

  Somehow I get out
of the car. I walk up the front lawn and I stand on my sister’s porch, but only for a few seconds before the light turns on and she opens the door. “Mills?” I hear her voice through the screen. “Is that you? Oh my, look at you. You’re a mess. Mother called me . . .”

  I turn around and look back at the street, but Jake is already gone.

  29

  Ed is found by a corn farmer two weeks to the day after Ethel died.

  The animals have found him first, and by the time the farmer makes the discovery, Ed, the police tell me, is unrecognizable. Lucky for all of us, they say, his car was parked nearby and it had his wallet, emptied of everything but his New York driver’s license, sitting right there on the passenger seat. For that reason, the authorities believe that Ed was robbed, but because of the license they are able to find me quickly, his next of kin. I am sleeping on Susan’s couch in Elizabeth when the officers come in the middle of the night to notify me of my husband’s tragic death. I do not cry or scream or put up a fuss the way Susan does. I think of the way the smoke escaped from Ethel’s head, so quietly and yet so precisely. And then I ask them about the car and how damaged it is.

  One of the officers says, “The car? It’s in mint condition, Mrs. Stein.” And he hands me back the keys that I handed to Jake two weeks earlier.

  “Then how did he die?” I ask them. The officers glance at each other, and Susan looks at me as if I were crazy.

  “There’s evidence he struggled during the robbery and . . .” But he doesn’t finish his sentence because I gasp and suddenly begin to cry.

  Susan puts her arm around me and tries to comfort me. “It’ll be okay,” she tells me over and over again.

  I let her believe my tears of sadness are for Ed. But really they are tears of understanding the weight of what Jake did . . . for me. Tears of knowing that I’d been right about him all along. Jake only ever wanted to protect me. Jake loves me. But I am also sure now I will never see him again.

  A FEW DAYS LATER, they find Lena in a hotel room in Philadelphia with Henry and David. Actually, it is the FBI who find Lena, and an unfamiliar agent comes to Susan’s house to tell us of her whereabouts. He also tells me how strange it is that they have become involved in such a thing. “Children in a hotel room with their grandmother?” He shrugs. “Isn’t normally FBI territory. My boss called this one in as a special favor.”

  Susan and I drive to Philadelphia in the now perfect Fleetmaster and we knock on Lena’s hotel room door. When David is the one to open it, I grab him and promise him I will never let him go again. Lena cries, but then she lets me take Henry from her arms.

  “Where is my Ed?” she asks me coldly. “You don’t have his permission to take his children, Mildred.”

  I stop a moment from kissing my boys to look her straight in the eyes and say, “These are my children. You’re the one who took them.” Then I say without even blinking, “Ed has died.”

  “I don’t believe you,” she says, but her voice falters.

  “It’s true. The police say he was killed in a robbery.” I keep my voice steady on the lie. And as time goes on, I will even begin to believe this as truth myself.

  Lena’s face falls, and she suddenly appears small and frail and old. “A robbery,” she says meekly. “But Ed had nothing.”

  I remember that Ed was her child and that she has lost something, too. We’ve all lost something. I picture her rifling through my things, trying to help Ed cover up his espionage and then helping him steal my children away. I want to hate her. I have so many reasons to hate her. But suddenly I feel bad for her.

  “You’ll come for the Sabbath one night soon,” I tell her. “The boys will be glad to see you.”

  But I never see Lena again. A few weeks later, Mr. Bergman tells me he heard that Lena died in her sleep of heart trouble. Without her children, it seems that Lena died of a broken heart.

  THE BOYS AND I never move back to the city.

  For a little while, we live with Susan and Sam, and then once Henry is old enough for school I get a job selling shoes at Little’s Department Store and eventually we move into a tiny house of our own only a few miles away from Susan and her family. My boys grow up near their girl cousins, playing in the long yards of the suburbs, never knowing a world where you don’t have half an acre to stage a baseball field. They also never know a world where there is a kosher butcher shop just around the corner filled with the familiar smells of meat and family and the Sabbath.

  What surprises me most is the way the days sometimes feel so long and yet the years so short. It’s all the hours between that count. All the endless weary and wonderful hours in which I raise two boys on my own, neither one of them ever knowing their fathers. But every birthday, every milestone, I find myself thinking not of Ed or even Jake who are missing all of it but of Ethel, of all the hours she missed with her sons. Of all the hours that were stolen from her.

  I try to keep track of Ethel’s boys, but the last news I hear comes in the mid-fifties when I read they are taken in by a childless couple, then adopted. The boys changed their last names, became new, and, I hope, happy children. That is what Ethel would’ve wanted for them, after all, if she couldn’t be with them.

  After this, the newspapers stop reporting about the children. As if the Rosenbergs never even existed at all, not even through their sons.

  BY THE MID-FIFTIES, Senator McCarthy is censured and, a few years later, he dies. It falls out of fashion to hate the communists so, and people start to forget about the espionage they once so greatly feared. People seem to forget about Ethel and Julius, too. But not me. I know I will never forget everything Ethel and I shared in our apartments—our children, our families, our fears—and especially not that night in June 1953. I know the memory of Ethel’s last breath will stay with me forever.

  In the late fifties, Henry brings home a comic book from school and a description of the air raid drills where he hides under his desk should the bomb ever come. And suddenly it all seems ridiculous. Fear is the worst thing of all. Fear is what killed Ethel. You cannot live your life being afraid. “The bomb isn’t coming to New Jersey,” I tell Henry, but nonetheless he learns how to use his desk as a shield.

  Still, the world moves on and on, the bomb never coming.

  IN 1960, everything changes for us. Not only do women have the Pill now but also a special government-owned school opens nearby for children with problems and they come to me, inviting David to attend. At the ripe old age of fourteen, David at last gets the kind of intensive therapy Jake started with him years earlier and he suddenly begins to talk the way Henry did at age two and a half, one delicious word after another, as if he were gulping them down and spitting them back out. If you were to see him now from the outside, you might understand that there is something not quite right with him, but then he might tell you to stop staring. It’s not polite. Dave is, to this day, meticulous about politeness.

  IN THE SEVENTIES, Henry gets accepted to medical school at Penn and he finds himself with a government scholarship. Dave gets a job working for the IRS. He is painstakingly thorough with the filing and the order of life, and before long he enrolls in a night school program to become an accountant himself.

  And I find myself living in my small house in Elizabeth, New Jersey, all alone. In the mirror I begin to see an old woman with a double chin identical to the one my mother and Bubbe Kasha once had. I have the Sabbath dinner with Susan and Sam each week, but otherwise the world passes all around me in quiet. I eagerly await my Fridays with my sister, my weekly phone calls from Henry, and Dave’s Sunday visits.

  But I stay away from the neighbors. I don’t let myself make friends. Even now, after all this time, I prefer to keep to myself.

  IN JUNE 1978, I find a small mention in the Times that there is going to be a march in Union Square on the nineteenth, the twenty-fifth anniversary of the execution.

  Twenty-five
years since the murder, I think.

  Henry has a wife now and lives in Philadelphia, and Dave doesn’t like to travel beyond his normal range, but, still, I guilt them both into driving me up to the city. I know I could take the train, but then I might not have a reason to make the boys come with me. And they have to come with me. “You might not remember,” I tell them each over the telephone several nights in a row, “but you were friends with the Rosenberg boys. You lived down the hall from them. Their parents were innocent and they were murdered,” I add.

  Henry sighs heavily, in that way he has, and I can picture him running his hands through his brown curls in that way that reminds me so much of his father. I know that he will drive me there. And he does.

  Henry drives, I sit in the front, and Dave is in the back. I think of how this is so very different and yet so very similar from the car ride I took with Ed that summer evening so very long ago. And then I close my eyes and remember that drive I took alone on this day twenty-five years earlier.

  After Henry finds a place to park, we mill around the crowds of people. I haven’t been to the city in years, and now it is familiar and unfamiliar to me all at once. Mr. Bergman and Bubbe Kasha died in the early sixties, and my mother sold the butcher shop and used the proceeds to buy herself a little condo in Miami Beach, where Susan and I try to go every winter to visit her. I’ve had no reason to come back here since, and even the smells and the sounds of the taxicabs are so foreign that they make me feel as if I don’t belong here anymore.

  Then, as we pull up to the gathering of people, I see the reason I came. The boys. Ethel’s boys! I would’ve recognized John and Richie anywhere. All these years later, I would’ve known it was them. They are so tall now, such . . . men, but they look just like Ethel and Julie, a wonderful combination of both of them. You would be proud, I say to Ethel in my head. So handsome!