“Will you look at that?” my mother said, shaking her head and tsking. I looked up and the ABC News my mother was so fond of had come on the screen. “Helen Keller, a communist? Oh for goodness’ sakes, the woman is a blind deaf mute.”
I stared at the television, listening to what my mother was reacting to. The newsman spoke of a new FBI report that revealed that famous people were communists, too, and that they were dangerous, to be feared. I felt a little knot in my chest that the newsman was talking so harshly about communists. Reds, as Mr. Bergman had called them with disdain. Ed, Julie, Jake, and even Ethel once, too. But they were just normal people, my friends and family, not to be feared at all. And anyway, they’d all but left the Party behind.
Should you come across any communist propaganda, the newsman was saying now, promptly turn it in to authorities . . .
I glanced at David and his eyes were trained on the television screen. The images transfixed him, their ability to flicker in black and white in a multidimensional way. Helen Keller. She was worse off than David, wasn’t she? She was without sight, hearing, or the ability to speak, and look at that, the government feared her now. It seemed almost an admirable feat.
“Who’s Helen Keller?” Bubbe Kasha asked. She’d been so quiet, I’d almost forgotten she was here. As her mind had withered further and further away, she seemed to have less and less to say. “She doesn’t sound very dangerous.”
“She’s not, Bubbe.” I leaned across the couch and kissed her head. I couldn’t help but think of David Greenglass’s comment in my apartment that the government was just blowing smoke, hoping to get lucky. But Helen Keller? This seemed absurd. “It’s just the silly government. Nothing for us to worry about.”
My mother, who knew about Ed attending communist meetings when we were first married, turned to me. “Millie,” she said, her voice sounding like a warning.
“What?” I shrugged. Whatever Ed’s involvement was or once had been had nothing to do with me, and no one knew him or cared about what he thought the way they all knew Helen Keller.
I stood to fix everyone lunch and put Helen Keller and the FBI out of my head. That was still the way it was then. The FBI seemed like nothing that could hurt us, like something so very faraway in the remote District of Columbia. I felt no fear or disdain for them at all. I literally felt nothing. They were nothing to me.
DAVID AND I spent an entire week in Elizabeth looking after the twins, watching the television. My mother and Bubbe Kasha took the train back after three days, my mother said because Bubbe Kasha got bored in the quiet of the country air, but I guessed it was more than that: she couldn’t take the three young children—the twins’ shouting, David’s silent tantrums. I had a headache at the end of each day, but after all the children fell asleep I enjoyed every moment of lying on Susan’s couch by myself and watching her television, listening to the newsmen rattle on about the new communist report, the growing threat of the bomb should the Russians ever acquire atomic energy. I liked the way the television and the news made me feel connected to the world and reminded me that there was so much more out there beyond my tiny apartment on the eleventh floor and life with Ed. It also made me think that I was not crazy to fear the bomb so much. Russia was becoming a bigger threat. And communism as well. I’d always seen the idea of communism as something small and harmless: groups of men hanging out in an apartment complaining about Truman or smart women like Ethel organizing fights for labor fairness. But now it seemed it had become something else, something bigger and a little frightening, and I was glad the people around me had drifted away from it lately.
Despite all the bad news and fear on the television, I actually slept quite well on Susan’s couch each night. The world was safer here in the suburbs, I reminded myself, and I felt so much more at ease far from Ed. In fact, I felt better than I had in years, and, after a few days, I noticed David began to seem more content, too. Maybe Jake was right. Maybe David did need to get out of the city. Maybe we both did.
“You should move out here,” Susan said to me one night as she sat with me on the couch giving the baby, Betsy, a bottle. “It has been nice to have you here, Mills. It would be nice to see each other more.”
As young children, Susan and I hadn’t always gotten along. But in high school and afterward we were so close in age, we were almost always together doing the same things, with the same friends. Still, I’d always felt her competing with me over something. She always wanted and needed to be the best, the smartest, the prettiest, and she always was. But now she just looked swollen and tired.
I reached my hand over to touch little Betsy’s pink cheek. “Yes.” I spoke quietly so as not to disturb the baby. “David seems to really like it out here.”
Susan didn’t say anything for a few minutes, and we both listened to the gentle sounds of Betsy sucking on her bottle. “Mills,” she said. “What are you going to do about David?”
“Do?” I asked.
“What if he never talks?”
I closed my eyes and leaned back against the couch. “He will,” I said. I thought about Jake. About his belief in David, in us, about the gentle feel of his hands on my shoulders. I thought about what Susan had just said and I sat back up. “You think I should do something?” I heard my voice rising a bit. “I should put him in an institution?”
Susan shifted Betsy. “That’s not what I meant. It’s just . . . I worry about you, all alone in the city, and with him still not talking as he should.”
“You don’t need to worry about me,” I said. She reached her free hand out and placed it over mine, and I understood she was no longer competing; she was genuinely concerned. “I’ve been getting him help,” I said. “Taking him to see a doctor. But you can’t tell anyone. I don’t want Ed to know.”
“Shouldn’t Ed want him to have help?” she asked, tilting her head, confused.
“Just promise me you won’t say a word to anyone.”
“Okay,” she said, “I promise.” Betsy was asleep now, and Susan gently pulled the bottle from her lips. Then she turned back to look at me. “You know if I can ever help you in any way, I would. All you have to do is ask.”
I stroked Betsy’s pink and perfect arm with my thumb. “I know,” I told Susan. “But we are going to be just fine.”
I GOT BY each night with only a short phone call to Ed—to ask how his day was, to ask if he’d found the food I’d stored for him in the refrigerator before I left.
“You are coming home soon?” he said to me on the seventh day, saying it more like a command than a question.
“Tomorrow,” I answered, and that was only because I wanted to be back in time for our appointment with Jake. David had missed him over the past week. I had missed him. I wasn’t sure when he was leaving for the Catskills, and now I was determined to figure out the details to make our trip happen.
16
The night before David and I were supposed to take the train to the Catskills, I was so nervous I couldn’t fall sleep.
It was the end of August and the air was stifling in our apartment, the open windows failing to create much breeze. I lay in bed, sweating, dreaming up every possible thing that could go wrong, feeling something awful in my stomach, something like dread. Only, I realized it wasn’t dread at all. It was an excitement I hadn’t felt in so long that I’d completely forgotten the feeling. It was the way I’d felt back in high school when I’d admired a boy—Charles, his name was—a friend of Sam’s. We’d made a date to get ice cream once, me and Charles and Susan and Sam, and the entire day leading up to it my stomach felt exactly this way. Until the ice cream date, when Charles barely noticed me and spent most of the time staring at Susan, which was embarrassing all around, and then the feeling in my stomach actually did turn into an awful, sinking dread.
Ed remained in the living room, which surprised me because I thought he would be in here trying one last desper
ate and futile time to make a child before I left. I was beginning to wonder, How much longer? How much longer would he wait before growing suspicious again, or angry, that it was taking so long? How much longer would David be safe? And that only made the urgency to follow Jake’s advice that much stronger, to do everything possible to get David to improve, before it was too late and Ed took away my options.
David was sleeping soundly on his mattress. I could hear his rhythmic breathing, so peaceful and easy sounding. He had made progress with Jake recently, I was sure of it. He would now show me his red blocks for hungry, his blue for tired—most of the time anyway—and overall this was resulting in fewer tantrums, fewer . . . misunderstandings. But he had hit a wall, both literally and figuratively, after we returned from Susan’s in June. On our first visit back, as Jake had urged David to repeat sounds, David had begun punching the wall. He was four now, and a big boy for four, with a strength that sometimes terrified me. Especially when I thought about the fact that his progress only went so far. He was four and he still wasn’t speaking. Susan was right to be worried. I was worried.
But Jake had remained calm when David punched his wall over and over again. I’d wanted to run to David, to pull him away from everything that made him frustrated and angry, but Jake put his arms around me and held me back. “Let him be frustrated,” Jake whispered, the feel of his breath against my neck warm and soothing. “We’re going to take him to a place where there aren’t any walls.” In the cool, fresh air of the mountains, with its open spaces and colors, and no distractions, he explained, David would be able to feel in a new way without all the confines we had in the city. I wasn’t sure I understood, or believed, that the Catskills would be any different, but the thought of a few days in the mountains, away from here, away from Ed, with Jake, filled me with an undeniable sense of joy that I hadn’t felt in so long, if ever. And I knew I would find a way to make it happen.
The sound of Ed’s voice from the living room suddenly brought me back here, to my apartment. I smelled his cigar smoke, wafting into the bedroom. The dank smell of it sickened me, blanketed me, until I could smell or think of nothing else other than the discomfort I felt with him. The way he covered me, the way he always smelled of the cigar smoke even when he wasn’t smoking.
I wondered who he was talking to, and I tiptoed to the edge of the bedroom door to listen. I hoped it wasn’t Julius. Ethel was involved in my deception for the upcoming few days. Ed believed that David and I were going only up to Golden’s Bridge to visit with Ethel and the boys, which we were, on Wednesday. Ethel knew that I was taking David to Phoenicia for a few days first, to get him help, but she seemed to believe it was some kind of group pyschotherapy getaway, and I didn’t correct her and tell her it would be only me and David and Jake. I was worried if she knew the truth she’d say, “Millie, I’m worried about you. What are you really doing, heading up into the mountains with this Dr. Gold?” Or maybe she wouldn’t have said that at all. Ethel understood the need to want something—just right there, underneath the surface. I had the feeling that if Dr. Miller told Ethel she needed do something to be cured, she would listen and do whatever she could to find inner peace.
Ethel had telephoned me earlier this morning. “Did you hear about the riot in Peekskill last night?” I hadn’t. “Anti-communist, anti-Negro, anti-Semitic . . . The whole world is becoming anti-everything. Anti- all of us.” She sighed. “It seems no place is safe for us anymore. Not even up here in the mountains.” She paused. “I’m worried about you. Heading up here all by yourself.”
“I’m not going to Peekskill,” I said, though the truth was, I wasn’t exactly sure of the geography of the country towns once one got outside the city, toward the Hudson Valley and the mountains.
“If anything were to happen to you . . .” Ethel said.
“I’ll be fine,” I said. “And I’ll see you later in the week.” I wondered if I might put her mind at ease if I told her that Jake was meeting us right at the train station tomorrow. But I couldn’t bring myself to tell her that, as if telling her would mean admitting something I wasn’t ready to admit even to myself.
Ed’s voice got louder in the living room now—he was angry. And I glanced at David to see if he was stirring, but, luckily, he wasn’t. I leaned closer to the door to listen, to try to find out if he was talking about me, if he was angry with me. Was Ethel worried enough that she had told Julie my real plan and now Julie was on the phone telling Ed? I didn’t think she would do that to me, but I felt very nervous as I pushed my ear to the door.
“What?” I heard him say. “You think everything we have done, it wasn’t worth it?” He lowered his voice and said something else I couldn’t make out, and then I heard him say, “You think our friends in Russia don’t appreciate what we have done for them?”
I wondered what friends in Russia Ed was talking about. He never talked to me about friends—or the life—he’d left behind there. In fact, he had never talked to me about Russia at all. When we were first married, I would sometimes ask him, and he would say that was a life he had finished, that he wanted to forget. So it seemed odd to hear him talking about it now on the phone, and I wondered if he had a secret life, too, if he was an entirely different man when he wasn’t here with me.
“So, what?” Ed said. “So they destroy us?”
I tiptoed away from the door, relieved that he didn’t seem to be talking about me or about David. Then I got back into bed and attempted to go to sleep. But even long after Ed’s talking quieted down and all I heard was the gentle humming of the radio from the next room, I couldn’t get his words out of my head: So they destroy us? He’d just tossed off the words carelessly. Destruction seemed to mean so little to Ed, as if it were nothing, that the thought of it gave me a chill even in the heat of the bedroom.
THE NEXT MORNING, David and I took the subway to Grand Central Terminal to board the Hudson River Line. I kept looking behind us the whole way, worried Ed might be following us, watching. Which he wasn’t, of course, since he’d left for work before we even left the apartment. And, anyway, if I really was going straight to visit Ethel, as I’d told him, I’d also be taking the train.
I was surprised by the ease of my deception, the way David and I boarded the railroad car without anyone giving us so much as a second glance, the way we disembarked at Kingston and then got on the Catskill Mountain Railroad to Phoenicia just as Jake had told us to.
I scanned the platform when we pulled into the station in Phoenicia, and there were only a few casually dressed people outside. Life appeared to be vastly calmer and slower here, and I was relieved to see no signs of any kind of riot like the one Ethel had spoken of.
Jake stood there, just as he said he would, on the platform, and from the other side of the train window he already looked different here than he had in the city a few weeks ago. His shoulders appeared broader, more relaxed, and he was smoking a cigarette instead of his pipe. He had one hand on the cigarette, the other resting easily in the pocket of his brown jacket, as if this were something he did every day: waited at the train station. Though I felt certain he didn’t for his other patients, that he didn’t invite them up here. Just the way he didn’t invite his other patients to stay for lunch at his apartment either. What did he say to me? Every case is different. You’re different, Millie. I felt a rush of tenderness for him and I wanted to be off the train, standing next to him.
“Come on,” I said to David, holding on to him with one hand, our suitcase with the other. “Dr. Jake is waiting for us outside.” At the mention of Jake’s name, David’s eyes seemed to light up. I wasn’t imagining it—at least, I didn’t think I was. I hadn’t told him before this moment who we were going to see when we got to the mountains. Not that he could tell Ed even if he wanted to, but, still, I’d been afraid to utter the truth out loud. David loved the train, the sway of the cars on the tracks, the blur of trees and towns on the other side of the wi
ndow. Even on the short ride to Susan’s house, the train was one place where he always seemed content, so he hadn’t protested getting on this morning. But now I imagined the thought behind his new, wide smile—that the wonderful train could take him to Jake, too.
He yanked on my hand, and I stumbled a bit as we descended the stairs to the platform. The moment we were off the train I noticed the smell of flowers and the sudden chill in the air that hadn’t been there in the city. I smiled. I had pulled this off! I had actually gotten David here, away from Ed, to a place of quiet and beauty, to a place with no walls. To Jake.
Jake seemed to notice David first and he quickly dropped his cigarette and crushed it beneath his brown leather shoe. He walked toward us and patted David on the head. “Good to see you up here in the fresh air, son.” He looked past David to me, and our eyes met as if we both understood the gravity of this moment. The choice I had made by coming here, with David, with a suitcase.
“How was the ride?” Jake asked as he took the suitcase from my hand. Our fingertips brushed for a moment in the exchange, and I pulled back and felt myself blushing.
“The ride was fine,” I said. “David enjoyed it.”
“No problems, then?” Instinctively, I knew he meant with Ed, not with David. I thought of Ed’s anger on the phone last night and how angry he would be if he knew where we were right now. But I simply shook my head and offered Jake a smile. “Good,” Jake said. “Come on, let’s get in the car. It’s a little bit of a ride to the cabin.”
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