The Hours Count

by Jillian Cantor

  “No. He wouldn’t approve.”

  “Why do you think that?”

  I thought about what Ethel said about how she felt she wasn’t supposed to believe in psychotherapy but she did anyway, and I just knew Ed absolutely would not. I wasn’t sure if it was because of the politics he believed in or the way he was brought up in Russia or just because he might not like the idea of me talking about him to another man about private things that we could not really even talk about with each other. “I don’t know,” I finally said, “I just know he wouldn’t.”

  Jake leaned back into his chair and sucked on his pipe again. “Why don’t you tell me about your circle of friends. Do you have anyone you can lean on for help with David?”

  “I don’t have many friends,” I said, and saying it out loud somehow made the sad truth of it sink in. I’d had friends at the factory and friends in high school—girlfriends, of course. Susan and I were only a year apart, and there were a group of girls on Delancey we’d always hung around with together—Sylvia, Clara, and Elsie. But then there was the war and we all went to work. And by the time Susan got married and moved out to the suburbs, it seemed the other girls had all but floated away, out of my life for good. So maybe the truth was that they were Susan’s friends all along, not mine. Then there was Addie, who I used to sometimes catch a picture with back when we worked at the factory together. But she got married and moved upstate just before I married Ed, and now we exchanged only the infrequent letter or two a year. “It’s hard,” I heard myself saying to Jake now. “With David . . . I don’t have much time for friends.”

  “What about the Rosenbergs, the Greenglasses, the Sobells?” Jake asked.

  “Those are Ed’s friends,” I said quickly, “not mine.” Then I added, “Except for Ethel. She’s my neighbor, as you know.” She’d known Ed first, but she was mine now, wasn’t she? I’d trusted her enough to ask her advice and to listen to her about Planned Parenthood. She promised she would never tell Julie and I had promised to keep her secret about psychotherapy from Ed. Which I had.

  I suddenly thought of Jake that night in Ethel’s apartment, in the throng of men shouting to hear one another over John’s phonograph, and I wondered how he was involved with all of them. I got the sense he disliked Ed, and Ethel seemed not to know Jake very well, so what was his role in all of it?

  I looked at David out of the corner of my eye, his dark bread almost completely devoured. His red blocks stacked so neatly. And I bit my lip and didn’t ask. Jake’s politics and friendships were his own business, after all.

  “So Ed has many friends, people to talk to, and you talk to no one?” I realized Jake was saying now.

  Jake’s statement startled me even though it was fairly accurate, that Ed had friends and I did not. Ed had people to call at night on the telephone and he did often. I never called anyone but my mother and Susan. But when I overheard Ed’s conversations, they were always political. I’d never heard him speak of David, to anyone. Barely even to me.

  “I talk to Ethel sometimes,” I finally said.

  “What’s that like?”

  “It’s nice. We understand each other.”

  “And her husband is more supportive of therapy?”

  “I . . .” I had no idea how Jake knew about Ethel’s therapy, but I was certain she wouldn’t have told him. Maybe Julius had? “I don’t know,” I finally said.

  Jake picked his pipe back up and put it in his mouth as if he were thinking. “So, mostly, you’re isolated,” Jake said eventually, not unkindly. “David lives in silence and so do you.”

  It sounded awful to hear it that way from him, but even more awful to understand how right he was. “I don’t see how any of this is helping,” I said, and put my cigarette out in the ashtray on Jake’s table. I stood quickly and grabbed my purse.

  Jake reached out and put his hand gently on my arm again. “I just want to know your world,” he said. “To understand it.”

  I pulled myself out of his grasp. “This is my world,” I said, gesturing toward David, his blocks, his silence.

  13

  Back in my apartment, I lit another cigarette while David took a nap. All the therapy with Jake, the block stacking and the communicating, had worn him out and he’d lain down without a fuss for the first time in a long while. I sat on our couch and turned the radio on low so as not to wake David, and the news came to me almost incoherently at first, a hiss of men’s voices. It was snowing in Los Angeles for the very first time. Truman had a Fair Deal now, though the newsman did not say exactly what was so fair about it, and I wondered how it would make my life better. Was he advocating for the same magical pill Mrs. Sanger wished for? I highly doubted it. Alger Hiss had been indicted for perjury last month and there would be a trial in the spring. I remembered what Mr. Bergman had said about him, and I wondered what, exactly, he was guilty of lying about.

  My head ached and I put my cigarette out and turned the radio off. I lay down on the couch and closed my eyes for a few moments, exhausted from the day: my trip to Planned Parenthood, my conversation with Jake. I could hear his voice in my head now saying that he wanted to know about me, about my world, and it held me like the warmth of a blanket and settled me into a sweet and easy nap.

  The telephone rang and I jumped up and quickly answered it before it could wake David. “Millie.” I heard a voice on the other end of the line, my name coming out in one great big hurried rush. I thought of Jake—Jake’s voice, Jake’s pipe smoke, Jake’s warm apartment. “Thank goodness,” the voice was saying, and I realized it was a woman and that I’d answered the phone still half asleep. Ethel. “I’m so glad I caught you at home,” she said.

  I sat up and tried to push the tiredness and the feeling of Jake away. Jake was back in his own apartment, probably working on therapy with someone else. I was here. Alone. “Is everything okay?” I asked Ethel.

  “My father has taken a turn for the worse and I want to go see him. I can take Richie with me. He’ll sleep in his carriage. I feel terrible asking, but . . .” I understood what she was asking, if I would be able to watch John while she went. She lowered her voice. “Please, Millie, just for a little while. Would you mind terribly?”

  I knew Ethel’s father had fallen and broken his hip last winter and that he’d been steadily worsening for the last several months. I also knew that Ethel loved her father deeply. My own father had died quickly of a massive coronary. One moment in the butcher shop he was standing up, talking to a customer, and the next dead on the floor. At least, that was how Mr. Bergman had told it to us, telling us that we should take comfort in knowing that he didn’t suffer. But if I had seen it coming, I would’ve spent every possible moment with him that I could’ve.

  “Of course,” I heard myself saying to Ethel now, though all the while wondering what I was going to do with John? A boy who not only talked but argued. “David is napping, but when he wakes up, I’ll set them up with some blocks . . . or take them to the playground.”

  “Oh, Millie, thank you. I owe you one.”

  “Nonsense,” I said. “You’d do the same for me.” Then I added, “We’re friends, aren’t we?”

  “You’re the best,” Ethel said in response, and then she hung up.

  TWENTY MINUTES LATER, I found myself sitting on the couch across from John while he stared at me and frowned. “Shall we listen to the radio?” I asked, knowing even as I said it that he would not be happy with the volume at which I listened to it in order to keep David happy. “Or I can take out some of David’s toys for you?”

  “I don’t want to be here,” John said curtly.

  I pulled a cigarette out of my pack and lit it, my fingers twitching a little. “I know, darling, but your mother will be back soon. She just had to visit with someone for a little while.” I thought it best to keep it vague in case John didn’t know the details of Mr. Greenglass’s recent decline.r />
  John’s frown creased even deeper. “Julie is mad at Ed, you know.”

  “What?” I was taken aback by his revelation, so I didn’t correct his manners. He had an unusual habit of calling adults, even Ethel and Julie, by their first names, and though I’d heard him do it before it still startled me each time. But what did John mean that Julie was mad at Ed? I certainly hadn’t heard a word of that from Ethel . . . or Ed.

  “Julie is very angry with him,” John repeated. “That’s why I don’t think I should be here.”

  Julie was so kind and even-tempered that it was hard to imagine him being very angry with anyone. I inhaled and then exhaled slowly, wishing for my cigarette to calm me the way it normally did. But it didn’t seem to be working. “Well, I’m sure it’s nothing,” I said to John. “And besides, your mother does want you to be here. She’s my friend, you know. And Mr. Stein and your daddy are at work now, so let’s not worry about them.” But if John was right, if Julie and Ed were mad at each other, what would that mean for me and Ethel?

  John crossed his arms in front of his chest, and I heard David kicking the wall, a sound which brought me relief. John had come to adore him and certainly some blocks with David would occupy his thoughts, as long as both children could control their tempers.

  I brought David out and set them up with the blocks, and David yawned and rubbed his eyes and then immediately dove in for the reds. “You’re hungry, darling?” I asked. John answered that he was, so I went into the kitchen and sliced some bananas for the children. David’s favorite.

  I set them in a bowl in front of them and waited for David to devour them hungrily the way he had devoured his bread earlier at Jake’s. But David glanced up, noticed the bananas, and then promptly ignored them. “Eat up, darling,” I said, pushing the bananas toward him, but he ignored them still and instead he built the red blocks into a tower.

  John took some of the banana slices and stuffed them in his mouth. “He’s not hungry, Millie,” he told me, pointing toward David.

  “Mrs. Stein. And don’t talk with your mouth full,” I reminded him. “And he is hungry,” I added. “That’s why he’s using the red blocks.”

  John shook his head. “He just likes red now.”

  ETHEL SHOWED UP at my door just before five, and by then I’d already had to separate John and David, as they were throwing blocks at each other. David was in the bedroom with the yellow taxicab Jake had let him have, and John was lying on the couch, his ear pressed to the radio to listen to The Lone Ranger. He was angry that I wouldn’t let him turn it up any higher, but he had relented finally and put his ear close. I wondered if Ethel was right, if therapy was helping him. But I felt like a fool for believing that it was actually helping David. Progress. Yes, now David was just fixated on a new color. John had put it so simply: He just likes red now.

  Ethel stood in the hallway holding a squirming Richie in her arms, who struggled to be let down to run to his brother. Ethel’s cheeks were flushed and her eyes were red as if she’d been crying. “How was he?” she asked.

  “Fine,” I lied. She half smiled at me as if to say she knew I was lying but she was grateful for it. “How was your father?”

  “Not good,” she said. “And my mother . . .” She sighed. “She’s just never nice to me. I think she hates me, to tell you the truth, Millie.”

  “She’s your mother,” I said. “Of course she doesn’t hate you.”

  “It’s always been this way with her. I’ve never been good enough. Never as good as my brothers.” She shrugged as if to say it didn’t matter, that she was used to it by now, though I wondered if one could ever get used to an unkindness from one’s own mother. My mother favored Susan of course, she always had. But I never had the feeling that she hated me.

  “Do you want to come in for a little while?”

  “I shouldn’t,” she said. “Julie will be home soon, and I should go get dinner ready.” But even as she said it she stepped inside the apartment and I shut the door behind her. “Maybe just a few minutes,” she murmured.

  “Do you want something to drink?” I asked. “We have some Mogen David. And vodka.”

  “Vodka?” She laughed.

  “Ed drinks it. It’s very . . . Russian.”

  “I imagine it must be hard to find these days with everything Russian so out of fashion.” She rolled her eyes and sat down on one of the chairs at our small table. I had no idea whether the vodka was hard to find or not as Ed was the one keeping it in constant supply in our kitchen cabinet, bringing it home in brown paper bags after work. I wondered if Ethel was right, that vodka was hard to find these days and, as such, maybe Ed kept track of how much was in the bottle. I pulled out the bottle of wine from under the sink instead. I poured two very large glasses and handed one to Ethel.

  Ethel lifted her glass to toast me. “To parents,” she said, and I wasn’t sure whether she meant her father, our parents, or us, but I clinked glasses with her and murmured it back.

  “Is Julie mad at Ed?” I asked her suddenly.

  “What?” She laughed a little and took another sip of her wine.

  “Nothing. It’s silly. John mentioned it to me, and it’s just . . . well, I wouldn’t want anything going on between them at work to change things between us.”

  She waved her hand in the air and laughed. “Let the men be the men,” she said. “Who knows half the reasons why they do the things they do.”

  “But Julie hasn’t mentioned anything to you?”

  She put her hand over mine. “Really, Millie, don’t pay any attention. Sometimes John just says things.” I nodded. Of course it was silly to worry about the ramblings of a child, even one as bright and perceptive as John. We sipped our wine in silence for a few moments and then Ethel leaned in close. “I think I’m going to go see a new doctor . . . for psychoanalysis.”

  “But you already talk to Mrs. Phillips?” I was confused how, exactly, this was different.

  “Yes, and Mrs. Phillips is quite lovely, but we talk only once a week alone and only about John. I feel I need to go deeper, to do psychoanalysis myself. To get myself together. To be a better mother. To move past my childhood . . .” I thought about Jake’s questions about my life, about her, about Julius, and I wondered if that’s what I was doing there with him? Becoming a better mother? Ethel finished off her wine and put the glass on the table, making sure it was resting on a coaster even now that it was empty. “I know I shouldn’t,” Ethel said, “but I’ve come to believe that talk therapy is the solution to all of our problems.” She smiled at me. “You probably think I’m crazy, too, but you’re very sweet not to say it.”

  “No,” I said, “I don’t think you’re crazy at all.” I hesitated for a moment, remembering what Jake had said about me being isolated, living in silence just like David. I didn’t want to be that way. I wanted to trust someone. “I’ve been seeing a psychotherapist, too. Well, David has been . . . But me, too. It’s Julie’s friend from the party last spring, Dr. Gold.”

  “Who?” she asked.

  “Dr. Gold . . . Jake.”

  “You mentioned him once before,” Ethel said, “but I don’t really know him. I can’t picture him.”

  Jake seemed to know her and Julie. But maybe he just knew Julie more, and Ethel had been so preoccupied lately, as had I, with her children and with her family, that she didn’t notice a new person around.

  “He’s been teaching David to communicate with colored blocks. We’re making progress.” Then I added, “Maybe.”

  “That’s wonderful, Millie,” she said. “And Ed approves of this?”

  “Oh goodness no. He has no idea that I’ve been doing it.”

  “And you’ve been able to pay for it without his knowledge?”

  “No. Jake has offered to do it for free. In exchange for writing some kind of paper about his findings. A completely anonymou
s paper,” I added, remembering the way Jake had phrased it that first morning I went to his apartment.

  “You don’t find that odd, Millie?”

  “Odd?” I finished off my own glass of wine and put it down on the table. The air in the room felt thicker, Ethel’s words slower, the noise of the children in the background fuzzier. “Not really . . . no.”

  Ethel frowned. “But nobody does something for nothing these days, Millie.”

  “It’s not for nothing,” I said. “His . . . paper.” But even as I said the words aloud, I wondered if Ethel was right, if the whole thing was odd.

  “Well, I’m glad to hear that you believe in all this, too,” Ethel said, and she squeezed my hand. “We’re lucky to have found each other, aren’t we, Millie?” I squeezed her hand in return. “Someday, all this therapy will make us just perfect and we’ll show them all, won’t we?” She laughed, and then I heard myself laughing, too. We both knew how ridiculous it sounded, but Ethel would find a way to begin pyschoanalysis, I knew, and I was going to continue bringing David to Jake. We had to do something.

  “IT HAS BEEN three months,” Ed said that night in the darkness of our bedroom. My entire body tensed underneath the covers.

  We’d moved around each other in a silence, a steady calm since that day in November when the bleeding had started. In the past few months I had come to understand that my marriage was nothing but a game, with points to be won and lost, and that when Dr. Greenberg called Ed and told him how sometimes these things happened early on with too much activity, I had won points. It hadn’t hurt that I had felt a strange and infinite sadness for the sudden loss of a baby I hadn’t even thought I’d wanted. In a different life, maybe, I kept thinking. Ed had once woken up and found me crying in the kitchen in the middle of the night and more points had been won, though that had not been my intention. I simply had not been able to stop myself from crying.