The Hours Count

by Jillian Cantor

  I start to walk toward them. I want to tell them so much. That I am here. That I am sorry for everything. That after all this time, I still remember their mother, how much she loved them. I still believe in her innocence. I want to tell them that I was there the night she died. That she did not die alone. That someone paid for everything that happened even if I am the only one to remember that part now. I want to tell them that when I close my eyes at night I can still hear their mother’s voice, imagine the way she looked, so full of life, riding down the elevator in her wide red hat.

  I take a step toward them and then I feel a hand on my arm.

  “I wouldn’t talk to them,” a voice says and I turn around. Jake. Older, grayer, slightly heavier, but undoubtedly him. His almond eyes are smiling. “Let it be,” Jake says gently. “They’re different people now.” Then he adds, “So are you.”

  I wonder if he means my double chin and I put my hand to my face, self-consciously. Jake smiles as if he finds this amusing, and I realize that wasn’t what he meant at all. Of course I am different than I was that night, that last time he saw me. It has been so very long and yet it feels like yesterday.

  Henry lets go of my arm and stares at Jake, then looks to me and raises his eyebrows. Henry is a piece of Jake, the one good thing that came out of all those terrible years.

  “You probably don’t remember,” I say to him, “but this is Dr. Gold. We knew him once a long time ago back when—”

  “Actually,” Jake interrupts me, “it’s Dr. Zitlow. But please, call me Jake.” He holds out a hand for Henry to shake and they do. Jake holds on to him for a second longer than he should, and then Dave holds out his hand to shake, and Jake lets go and turns to him.

  “Pleased to meet you,” Dave says, ever so politely.

  “David,” Jake says. “My goodness, son, is that you?” He smiles and clasps Dave on the shoulder. Dave appears wary and pulls back, and he asks Henry if he wants to go look for something cold to drink. Maybe they can sense I need some time alone because Henry agrees and the two of them walk away. And then there we are, Jake and I, by ourselves.

  “So,” Jake asks me, “what are you doing here?”

  “What are you doing here?” I shoot back.

  “I figured you would be here.”

  “Even after all this time?”

  “Even after all this time,” he says. Neither one of us speak for a moment. Jake’s eyes trail off in the direction of Henry and David, but they are lost among the crowd, and he turns back to me. “The boys are good?” he asks.

  “The boys are very good,” I say. He nods and smiles.

  I’ve thought of Jake so often in the last twenty-five years, between thinking of other things like air raid drills and putting food on the table, getting the boys to school on time, making sure David kept up with his therapy, making sure Henry’s baseball uniform was clean. At Henry’s wedding last year, I couldn’t help but think that Jake should’ve been invited, but of course by then I was long past knowing how to reach him.

  “You know, I’ve retired from the FBI,” he says now. “Last fall, actually. I bought a little cabin up in the Catskills a few months ago.”

  I close my eyes and remember the pieces of that one perfect day, those most perfect hours in the cabin, just before Russia exploded the bomb and the entire world went crazy. “I haven’t been there in so many years,” I say. And I haven’t, even in my memories.

  “It’s the same,” Jake says. “All the rest of the world has changed so much. But there, everything is exactly the same. Beautiful. Quiet.” He smiles again. “I take a little rowboat out on the creek now and then and try to catch some fish.”

  Suddenly I hear someone else talking. I look up and see Richie has taken ahold of the microphone. He talks about justice for his mother and his father even now. There are many people here and they nod and holler along with him. It reminds me of the crowd that night in front of Sing Sing, the commotion, the restlessness. The inhumanity. It’s a different world now. Stalin and Khrushchev are dead. Jimmy Carter is president, and, with his soft Southern accent, I can’t imagine him allowing a mother to be executed for something she didn’t even do. But still, I hear the shouting all around me, and I realize I’m not the only one. Other people haven’t forgotten. Even after all this time.

  “It gets lonely up there sometimes,” Jake is saying now. “It can get too quiet.”

  “I feel the same way, now that the boys are grown, and I live alone.”

  Jake looks at me for a moment, and I can see the way he looked that last night I saw him, the night Ethel died. The way he put his hand on my face in the car and promised me he would take care of everything else. I know what I have always known—that from a distance, working for the government, he brought my children back to me. I smile at him and he reaches for my hand.

  We stand there together and listen to Ethel’s children. They speak so well, they are so impassioned. They have become men in spite of what happened. Maybe because of it.

  “On the day she died,” John is saying, “my mother wrote us a letter and asked us to never forget their innocence . . .”

  In my head, I can still hear Ethel’s voice, the way she sounded singing at the piano in her apartment, clear and sweet and high as a bird. Now I imagine she is singing again for me and for Jake. For Henry and for David. But, most of all, for her children.

  Author’s Note

  I remember learning briefly about Ethel and Julius Rosenberg in a high school American History class. Years later, I had only the vague recollection that they were a married couple executed in the fifties for spying. As it turns out, they were the only civilians ever executed in the U.S. for conspiring to commit espionage. As it also turns out, the more I read about the case and the trial and the Rosenbergs themselves, the more convinced I became that Ethel was innocent, and that Julius might have been, too. I began to believe that neither one of them had deserved to die, that their executions were more a result of the political climate of the time than of anything they might have done. Of course, I wasn’t there, and I don’t know the inner workings of what happened, but the Ethel Rosenberg I read about struck me as a wife and mother just trying to do the best she could for her two young sons. When she was executed in 1953, her sons were only six and ten—quite similar to the ages of my own sons as I began writing this book. When I read the letter she wrote to her children shortly before her execution, it moved me to tears, and it made me want to create a novel around her, the woman I saw in that letter: Ethel the mother.

  This book is entirely a work of fiction, and Millie and Ed Stein and their families, as well as Dr. Jake Gold/Zitlow, are all completely fictional characters. Ethel and Julius Rosenberg did live in an eleventh-floor apartment in Knickerbocker Village in the 1940s with their two young sons until their arrests in 1950. Though I’ve researched factual details of their lives and have drawn on them, this book represents only my fictional reimagining of the Rosenbergs and their time living there.

  On August 11, 1950, the second day Ethel testified for the grand jury—and the day she was arrested—Ethel really did leave her children with a neighbor, who, when she didn’t return, took the children to Tessie Greenglass, Ethel’s mother. But that neighbor wasn’t Millie Stein, nor is there any indication that she and this neighbor were close friends as Ethel and Millie are here, and everything I’ve created about Millie’s life here is completely fictional. I also changed the timeline a bit for the purposes of my story. From what I’ve read, it seemed the neighbor spent the night with Ethel’s children and took them to Tessie Greenglass’s home the following morning. Ethel did call and speak to her older son after she was arrested and he reportedly let out such a loud scream that it would haunt Ethel for the rest of her life.

  I’ve centered the fictional events of Millie’s life around real events that happened between the years 1947 and 1953: the smallpox outbreak and telepho
ne operators’ strike in 1947, the election and the killer fog in 1948, the World Series between the Yankees and the Dodgers in 1949. The Soviets exploded their first nuclear bomb on August 29, 1949, and it was announced in the papers a month later.

  I’ve also structured Millie’s fictional events around real ones in the Rosenbergs’ lives: Ethel made a recording of her voice for her older son just before giving birth to her younger one in 1947. She took her older son to therapy with Mrs. Elizabeth Phillips at the Jewish Board of Guardians, and she later went into psychoanalysis herself with Dr. Saul Miller. Julius’s business, Pitt Machine Products, was struggling, and there was tension in the family after Ethel’s brothers left the company in 1949. Ethel and her boys spent the summer in Golden’s Bridge in 1949 and Julius came up on weekends.

  David Greenglass, Ethel’s younger brother, was arrested first, in June 1950, and he quickly confessed, implicating Julius, and then Ethel, saying she typed up Julius’s notes. Years later, in the nineties, Greenglass admitted he perjured himself when implicating his sister, Ethel, but said he was doing it to spare his own wife, Ruth, from being arrested. Just before David was arrested, his wife did suffer burns in an accident, and she had been rehospitalized for an infection when David was arrested. David had stolen a bit of uranium from Los Alamos as a souvenir and reportedly that was what first put him on the FBI’s radar. Greenglass served nearly ten years in prison. After being released, he and his family continued to live in New York under assumed names. He died in July 2014 at the age of ninety-two. The New York Times learned of and announced his death in October 2014 when they called the nursing home where he’d been living under an assumed name.

  Julius Rosenberg was taken in for questioning by the FBI on the morning of June 16, 1950, the day after David Greenglass was arrested. The FBI came to the Rosenbergs’ apartment early that morning while Julius was shaving. Twelve men came back a month later, on July seventeenth, to arrest Julius and take things out of the apartment, including the record Ethel had made for her older son. The night her husband was arrested, Ethel and the children went to her mother’s house to spend the night, but the next day she invited the press into her apartment in Knickerbocker Village, and she prepared a chicken while the press took pictures.

  In early August 1950, Ethel was called to testify before the grand jury. She consulted with Julius’s lawyer, Emanuel Bloch, and on Monday the seventh she went in and took the Fifth Amendment. She was called back on Friday, August eleventh, and again took the Fifth. She’d left the boys with her mother that Monday, but when she went to pick them up there was unpleasantness between her and her mother, who Ethel felt was taking David’s side and did not believe in Julius’s innocence. For that reason, Ethel found a neighbor to watch her boys on Friday, August eleventh. She was arrested by the FBI after her grand jury testimony as she was leaving the courthouse.

  I changed the names of Ethel and Julius’s sons for this book, though I kept their ages accurate. The boys in the pages of this book are fictional characters based loosely on what I read about the real Rosenberg boys. On the twenty-fifth anniversary of the execution, there was a rally in Union Square. I came across a picture of one of the Rosenberg boys there, all grown up, and I knew Millie had to see him again there, too.

  Though Dr. Jake Gold/Zitlow was not a real person, the idea for him came from stories I read about FBI informants infiltrating communist groups. To the best of my knowledge, however, there was no one like Jake, or Ed, in Ethel and Julius’s circle of friends. Though, there were other people at the time who passed information to the Soviets who were never prosecuted, much less executed. One of the most interesting accounts I read was a NOVA interview with Joan Hall, the wife of Ted Hall, who was a scientist at Los Alamos and who did give secrets to the Soviet Union. Joan knew about Ted’s involvement, but he was never arrested, and the truth did not come out publicly until shortly before his death in 1999. Though, unlike my fictional Ed and Millie, Ted and Joan Hall didn’t know the Rosenbergs.

  Of course, the fictional Jake was not actually at Sing Sing the night of the Rosenbergs’ execution. However, the FBI had reportedly set up a secret command post at Sing Sing with an open line to J. Edgar Hoover in case Ethel or Julius should want to confess at the very last moment. I was very much extending fictional liberties to allow Millie to be an observer to the execution. I read that Julius’s brother came up for one last visit with him that evening and was turned away, so Millie being able to get inside the prison, much less witness the execution, would’ve most likely been impossible. However, there were witnesses to the execution. A quick search on YouTube turns up a very graphic and horrific videotaped description from an actual observer, and the awful details of Ethel’s execution, including the fact that she refused to die after the normal amount of electricity, are true. Also, the execution was moved back from the usual time of eleven p.m. to eight p.m. to take place before sundown and the start of the Jewish Sabbath. But Ethel was pronounced dead at eight sixteen p.m., three minutes after the Sabbath officially began.

  In the course of writing this book, I read and/or consulted the following books and I recommend them for further reading: Ethel Rosenberg: Beyond the Myths by Ilene Philipson, We Are Your Sons: The Legacy of Ethel and Julius Rosenberg by Michael and Robert Meeropol, An Execution in the Family: One Son’s Journey by Robert Meeropol, The Brother: The Untold Story of Atomic Spy David Greenglass and How He Sent His Sister, Ethel Rosenberg, to the Electric Chair by Sam Roberts, The FBI–KGB War by Robert J. Lamphere, and Final Verdict: What Really Happened in the Rosenberg Case by Walter Schneir, as well as many of the death house letters of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, a collection of which can be found in The Rosenberg Letters, edited by Michael Meeropol. Any historical inaccuracies in these pages, intentional or otherwise, are strictly my own.

  Over the years, many people have written about the case, trying to shed new light on it, and there are many sources detailing the trial. That was not my intention here. Through fiction, I wanted to reimagine Ethel as a person, a woman, the mother whom I pictured her to be. I can’t definitively say what Ethel knew or what she didn’t, what she did or didn’t do, but the more I learned about her and the case and the trial, the more I personally came to believe she didn’t deserve to die the way she did.

  There were a few ideas I kept close to me as I wrote this book and I’ll leave you with them: Ethel was only accused and convicted of typing up notes, which later her brother admitted was a lie. She was a wife who seemed to love and respect her husband deeply. And she was a mother to two young sons whom she loved greatly and was forced to leave orphaned when she was executed on June 19, 1953.

  Acknowledgments

  An enormous thank-you to my wonderful and talented editor at Riverhead Books, Laura Perciasepe. I am so grateful for her support, guidance, and infinite wisdom, starting from the moment this novel was just a spark a few years ago. It has been such a joy to work with her, and I feel so fortunate to have had her by my side for this entire process. Thank you also to everyone at Penguin Random House and Riverhead Books for supporting me and my novels and always making me feel like a part of their amazing publishing family, with special thanks to Geoff Kloske, Jynne Dilling Martin, Margaret Delaney, Meagan Brown, Craig Burke, Kate Stark, and copy editor Tony Davis. You are the best!

  Thank you to Jessica Regel, my brilliant agent extraordinaire, whose insights helped get this book going. Her belief in me continues to amaze me, and I’m so grateful that I have her on my side! Thank you also to the team at Foundry, who have welcomed me, and this book, into their fold.

  Thank you to my family and extended family for their love and overwhelming support: my parents, my sister, and especially my husband and children, who always go along for this ride with me—often literally; they have been to more book events than I can count and still pretend to find it interesting. Thank you to my writer friends who keep me sane on a daily basis, especially Maureen Lipinski, T.
Greenwood, and Laura Fitzgerald, to whom I owe an extra thanks because she has been telling me for years that there was a story here.

  Last but certainly not least, thank you to all the readers, librarians, bloggers, and friends, both old and new, who supported me and Margot and who allow me to keep writing stories and doing what I love. Thank you for inviting me to your cities, your homes, your book clubs, and your schools and libraries, and, most of all, thank you for inviting my characters into your hearts.

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