The Hours Count

by Jillian Cantor

  “I was sent to New York as part of a counterespionage task force. After Elizabeth Bentley testified in ’47, well, we had reason to believe that there were people here who’d worked with her in her spy activities for Russia. And my job was to find out who.”

  I remembered Ruth and David speaking of Elizabeth Bentley at Ethel’s party that night I first met Jake. She was that former spy who’d became an informant for the FBI, naming names of those who’d helped her. I remembered Ruth saying she thought Miss Bentley had been lying just to save herself. But was that why Jake had been there, at that party that night, because of her? Had he thought people in that room were involved? Spying for Russia? “And were there?” I asked. “People here who worked with her?” The thought seemed ridiculous. I thought about Senator McCarthy’s speech, about the spy ring he said he’d uncovered, but those were people tied to the State Department. Not the ordinary men who lived here. I half expected Jake to laugh.

  But instead he frowned a little, and said, “I’m afraid so, Millie.”

  “Who?” I asked, shocked. Jake looked away from me, down at the floor, and I tried to think of all the men who’d been at Ethel’s party that night.

  “Millie.” Jake said my name. He shook his head a little and stared out the window, and it suddenly occurred to me what he was trying to say.

  “Ed?” I asked. “You suspected Ed was involved?” Ed and his Russian accent. I’d wondered if Julie had fired him for it, and now I understood that Jake and the FBI had used this to judge him, too. My hands began to shake. “That’s why you offered to help me,” I said, and suddenly it all seemed so clear.

  Jake hadn’t cared about me or David. He’d only wanted to find out more about Ed. I’d honestly believed that Jake had made a difference, that he’d known what he was doing, that David was getting better. But maybe he was just some huckster, and Dr. Greenberg had been right about David, about me, all along. “Are you even a psychotherapist?”

  “Yes.” He put his hands on mine to steady my shaking. “I do have a degree in psychotherapy. I was in practice for a few years in D.C. before I joined the FBI. I saw some patients like David back then, just like I told you. And I wanted to help David. And you,” he added. “Really, I did. All of that was true.” He paused. “But you’re right. I suspected Ed might be involved. And that was the real reason why I approached you . . . at first.” He lowered his eyes to the floor again, and I followed them and watched as he shifted his feet.

  I suddenly felt ill in a way I hadn’t in weeks. Jake had used me. My psychotherapy with him hadn’t been therapy at all. He’d been spying on me, on my life, on my family, my friends. “So everything was a lie,” I said.

  He looked at me, his eyes concentrated so heavily on my face that it seemed they might have the power to break me. “Not everything.”

  I thought about the way he’d helped David catch a fish on the rowboat, the hours he’d spent with David on his communication cars and blocks. He’d showed David such a genuine kindness. And me. You’re so beautiful, he’d told me on the couch, in the cabin. I imagined again what our child might look like, the way I had pictured it so many nights lying in bed in the dark, Ed snoring next to me. I imagined how he or she might have Jake’s oval face, his crooked grin, his rich brown eyes that always seemed to smile. I looked back at him, but his eyes weren’t smiling now.

  Jake thought that Ed was involved in something terrible. Spying for Russia. Ed, my husband, David’s father, the man I shared this apartment and my bed with night after night. A traitor? But if it was true I had to know it. I wanted facts. I felt desperate to understand the world around me as it truly was, not as everyone else was pretending it to be. “What do you think Ed has done?” I finally said, my voice quiet but steady.

  “We’re still trying to figure it all out. Since the Russians have gotten the bomb, everything has become even more complicated. Now we’re looking for someone specific. Someone who gave them the know-how.”

  “I thought Klaus Fuchs was already arrested for that.”

  “Fuchs wasn’t working alone. He worked with a courier, Raymond.” Jake turned to look at me. “And we think Raymond is close by.”

  “Not in the State Department, like Senator McCarthy said?” Jake shook his head. Then I said, “Here?” He nodded. “But I don’t know any Raymond.”

  “It’s a code name.”

  “A code name?” I knew I must sound like a terrible idiot repeating what Jake was saying like this, but I couldn’t help it. It was so hard to process what he was sharing with me, so far from what I’d ever imagined or thought before this moment. “And do you think Ed might be this Raymond?” I asked. “Is that why you’ve come back here?” The thought felt so ridiculous that I laughed a little as I said it. How would Ed have even gotten secrets about the bomb? Ed was an accountant, with a Russian accent. He wasn’t a nuclear scientist. Ed was just . . . Ed. He had many faults, but I couldn’t imagine this was one of them.

  “I don’t know if he’s Raymond,” Jake said, “but I’m fairly certain someone in his circle is involved in all this. We’re just not sure who yet. Or to what extent.”

  I mentally tried to go through the other men in Ed’s circle, as Jake called it, the men Ed knew from his onetime involvement in the Communist Party and the meetings he attended when we were first married, the men he’d gone to work with at Pitt. I thought of Julie, of the kind way he held on to Ethel’s shoulder on the morning of her father’s funeral. Of Ethel’s brother, Dave, whose hands had been burned as he’d tried to rescue poor Ruth from the fire. I remembered how Ruth had told me he’d been stationed at Los Alamos, but he was just a machinist, not a scientist. He didn’t know anything.

  And besides, I couldn’t imagine any of the men I actually knew working like this to betray our country. They were just a usual bunch of Jewish men. Men who sometimes talked too loud and drank too much. Fathers and husbands, decent and lousy. They went to work and earned a living and came home . . . or maybe they didn’t? Where had Ed been going every day? And what would happen to me—to us—if Ed was mixed up in all this?

  Jake put his hand gently on my arm. “I’m trying to figure out who was responsible, how it happened. And I will.” He leaned in closer. “But remember, you can’t say a word of this to anyone, Millie. Especially not Ed or Ethel.”

  “Why not Ethel?” I asked. “You can’t possibly suspect Julie?” It was one thing to think that the FBI would consider Ed suspect because of his obvious Russian accent. But Julie? Or maybe it wasn’t Julie they suspected but poor David?

  “I don’t know,” Jake said, and I wasn’t sure whether he really didn’t know or if he just didn’t want to tell me.

  “Julie couldn’t have been involved,” I said. “He’s such a nice man, such a good husband and father.” I thought of the way he held on to Ethel, the way her face lit up just seeing him enter the room. I still saw him on the weekends sometimes, riding down in the elevator with John and Richie, all of them in their Dodgers caps.

  “I don’t want you to worry about this,” Jake said. “That’s not why I told you.”

  “You don’t want me to worry? The Russians have the bomb, and you just told me the FBI thinks my husband or one of his friends is a traitor. How am I supposed to feel?” I cried out.

  “I didn’t mean to frighten you.” He moved his hand down to my leg, stroking gently with his thumb across my dress. I could feel the warmth on my thigh, even through the fabric. “I just didn’t want you to think I didn’t care about you. I wanted you to understand a little bit about me. For real,” he said. His face was close to mine, his eyes and my eyes almost near enough to touch. “After this assignment is finished, after this is all over and we’ve caught these guys . . . would you go away with me?”

  I felt tears welling up. “We could all be dead by then. Russia could drop the bomb at any moment.” It was an overwhelming sadness, the feeling t
hat this baby inside me—Jake’s baby—might never be born, or might be born into a changed world, an upside-down world.

  “That’s not going to happen,” Jake said.

  “How can you be so sure?” He pulled me against him and brushed back my hair. I allowed my body to relax into him, and for a moment I did feel safe. I did feel that everything could be okay, that Jake would make it so, that he wouldn’t let me or David or this baby get lost in all that was terrible in the world—the bomb and the Russians and . . . Ed. Maybe now they were the same thing. “Where would we even go?” I asked.

  “I don’t know,” Jake said as if my question had caught him off guard. He hadn’t actually been planning any of this. Seeing me with this new baby inside me had startled him as much as it had first startled me.

  “The Catskills?” I said, and my own voice sounded faraway, dreaming of that afternoon on Esopus Creek. “Maybe we could find a place just like the cabin . . .” I closed my eyes and pictured it. Jake and David out on the rowboat, catching fish. David outside in the fresh air with Jake to guide him. He would find his voice, and when he did, he would tell me how much he loved the mountains, how he couldn’t even remember the city. Knickerbocker Village. Ed. Ed. Ed would never let me go. Or maybe me, but certainly not this baby that he believed to be his. Unless Jake was right, that Ed was involved in this terrible thing. Because surely if he was, he would be arrested. And though it may have been the most awful feeling I’d ever allowed myself to feel, the idea of Ed being arrested filled me with the smallest bit of hope. “I want to help you,” I said. “If Ed did something . . . maybe I can help you.”

  “No. It’s too dangerous,” Jake said quickly. “I don’t want you to get involved.”

  “I already am involved. That’s why you approached me about therapy. You wanted information.”

  “You don’t have any information,” Jake said firmly.

  “But maybe I could get some.” Though even as I said the words out loud, I wasn’t sure how. Ed didn’t tell me anything. Being married to him, I realized now, was nothing more than sharing my bed with a stranger.

  “No. Promise me that you’ll stay out of this,” he said. I put my hand to his cheek, and I noticed now that he hadn’t shaved, that his face was rough. “Promise me, Millie.”

  “I promise,” I finally said to appease Jake, to keep him from worrying about me. Because staying out of this now that I had all this new information felt impossible. I would try to find out what I could about Ed—carefully, of course—but I would try nonetheless.

  Jake moved in even closer, and I could feel his breath against my face. “I don’t want to have to leave you here. Like this,” he murmured. “But I have to go . . . I’m flying out tonight. We just had a quick stopover in New York today, and I had to come back and see you.” I wanted to know where Jake had been, where he was going tonight, but I felt sure he wouldn’t tell me that so I didn’t ask. “Everything will be finished soon. By summer, when the baby’s born, I’ll find a way for us to be together,” he said.

  He leaned in and kissed me gently on the mouth. His lips lingered as if they wanted to stay more, do more. But then I felt his body deflate, and he pulled back a little. I held on to him tightly, the weight of his shoulders in my arms feeling exactly right. I didn’t want to let go. But he stood up, and I had no choice. He took a scrap of paper from his coat pocket and pressed it in my hand. “There’s a number here. In case you really need to reach me, in an emergency, call this and ask for me.”

  Before I could ask him anything else he shot me a wry smile and picked up his hat from the arm of the couch. He walked over to David in the kitchen, patted him on the head to say good-bye, and turned back and looked at me one last time. I gave him a small wave and bit my lip to keep from crying. I watched as he walked out the door and shut it behind him.

  “No.” I heard the sound, the startled cry.

  It took me a moment to register where it was coming from. And then I understood and turned to run to the kitchen.

  David sat there on the linoleum, banging his fists against the floor. “No!” he was shouting. “No! No! No!”

  20

  David screamed the word “no” for nearly half an hour after Jake left. At first I was so astounded to hear his voice—which was higher and clearer than I would’ve expected—that I wanted to jump up and down and scream and cry myself. “You’re talking!” I shouted with joy, and I crushed his small body into mine, but he yanked away with a strength I didn’t even know he had.

  His Nos became louder, more frantic, his kicks against the linoleum harder. I leaned in as close as I dared and tried to talk in soothing tones. “Darling, Jake will be back for us. I promise . . . You don’t need to get this upset . . . You’re talking. I’m so proud of you . . .”

  At last his shouting stopped—not from anything I was saying or doing, I was sure, but because he’d tired himself out. He lay down on the floor, curled himself in a ball, his exhaustion overtaking him. He put his thumb in his mouth, and he went limp as I picked him up and carried him into the bedroom to sleep.

  Just as I lay him down, I heard a knock at the door, and my first thought was that it was Jake coming back. That he’d found a few more stolen moments, maybe even an hour, and I smoothed down my hair and ran toward the door. But when I opened it, Ethel was standing in the hallway.

  “Is everything all right?” she asked. “I heard such a racket when I got off the elevator. I was worried.” She looked past me as if she were looking for Jake, and when she saw the emptiness of the apartment, she turned her eyes back to me.

  “Everything is fine,” I said. “It was David. He was talking!”

  Ethel broke into a wide smile, and she reached across the doorway and grabbed me in a hug. “Oh, Millie, that’s wonderful. I knew he would.” She pulled back and smiled at me again, and suddenly it was as if our relationship had never been strained, as if Ed and Julie had never had a falling-out. Ethel and I were just neighbors again, two anxious and weary mothers, friends.

  “Can you come in?” I asked her, opening the door wider.

  She glanced down the hallway toward her own apartment, where I guessed Richie was napping and John was listening to the radio. “Just for a moment,” she said, and she stepped inside.

  “Can I get you something to drink?” I asked, but she declined and sat down on the couch in the spot where Jake had been sitting not too long ago.

  “So I guess the therapy really is helping,” she said, though I couldn’t help but think there was a skeptical tone to her voice.

  “Yes,” I murmured, “I guess so.” I wanted to tell her that it wasn’t just the therapy but the therapist, David’s enormous love for Jake. But Ethel smiled, all traces of skepticism seemed to be gone, and I didn’t volunteer any more about Jake.

  “Oh, Millie.” Ethel squeezed my hand. “Everything is going to get better from now on, I can feel it.”

  I would miss her when I left with Jake, when we went to the Catskills. I hoped she would come with the boys to visit sometime, take the train to Phoenicia as David and I had done. Though I wondered if she’d come to hate me, to judge me, when I left Ed and Knickerbocker Village—and her—behind. Or maybe she would hate me after Jake found this mysterious Raymond and it turned out to be one of the men she knew much better than I did.

  “I always knew he would do it, that he would talk when he was ready,” I realized she was saying. “Tell me, Millie, what did he say?”

  “He said, No. He got upset when Jake . . . Dr. Gold was leaving, and he shouted, No! No! No!”

  She nodded. “I thought it quite unorthodox that a therapist was coming to your apartment like that, but it sounds like he knew what he was doing.”

  I bit my lip to keep from telling her the truth, though suddenly I wanted to. But I couldn’t, especially not her. “Ethel,” I said instead. “Do you know anyone named Raymond?”


  “Raymond?” She thought about it. “No. I don’t think so. Why? Should I?”

  “No,” I said. “Never mind. Just forget I said anything.”

  “Okay,” Ethel said, and then she laughed and leaned in closer. “Oh, Millie, I haven’t told you yet. I have some good news at last.”

  “Good news,” I murmured, thinking that maybe Jake was wrong. Ethel knew everyone and everything around us, yet she seemed to have no recognition at all of this Raymond. A code name, Jake had said. And Ethel wasn’t really involved in politics anymore, so maybe she wouldn’t know him anyway.

  “Julie tells me things are going better for us,” Ethel was saying. “That we may finally take our big vacation to Mexico this summer.”

  “Mexico?” I thought of the man who’d carried smallpox to New York a few years earlier. He’d been vacationing there, hadn’t he? But all I said was, “Ethel, that’s so far.” If they went to Mexico this summer and then I left with Jake, it was possible I might never see her again come fall. “Why not Golden’s Bridge again?”

  Ethel smiled as if the prospect of going far, far away from here were absolutely divine. “I’ve always dreamed of Mexico. There’s so much sunshine there,” she said. “And the tropical ocean. Can you imagine? The children having that as their playground all summer long? I never had an opportunity like that as a child.” She smiled. “And Julie will be able to be with us the whole summer this year. All of us together there as a family.” She leaned back against the couch and folded her arms across her chest. I wondered how Julie would be able to manage that, leaving his business for the entire summer, but I didn’t want to ask and upset Ethel, not when we finally seemed to have found this friendly rhythm again. “Of course,” she said, “it’s just something we’re talking about now. Just in the early stages. It might not even happen . . . Ruth is doing better, thank goodness, and they think the baby will be just fine, but I’ll have to make sure before I’d leave them.” She tugged at the bottom of her dress’s sleeves. The cuffs were lace and torn, and it seemed odd to me that they would be able to afford an expensive trip but that Ethel was still wearing such a tattered dress.