The Hours Count: A Novel - Softcover

June 19, 1953

On the night Ethel is supposed to die, the air is too heavy to breathe. The humidity clings to my skin, my face wet with sweat, or maybe tears. It is hard to tell the difference. To understand one thing from another anymore. It’s as if the world were ending the way I always imagined it would. And yet I’m still here. Still driving. Still breathing, somehow, despite the heavy air, despite what I have done. The sky is on the edge of dusk. No mushroom cloud. No bodies turned to dust.

I’m driving Ed’s Fleetmaster up Route 9, the road to Ossining, along the sweltering Hudson. There are a lot of cars, all headed the way I am, slowing me down. I push anxiously on the gas, wanting the miles to speed along, wanting to get there before it’s too late. I hope the car will make it, that I haven’t damaged anything that will cause it to stall now at the worst possible time.

I wish I could’ve left earlier, but I had to wait until I was able to take Ed’s car. I suppose you even might say I’ve stolen the car, but Ed and I are still married legally. And can a wife really steal a car from her own legal husband?

So much has already been stolen from me, from all of us. From Ethel. And that’s why I’m driving now.

My stomach turns at the thought of what might happen to me when I tell the truth at last. And I glance in the rearview mirror at the backseat. For so long, I have taken David with me everywhere, and it takes me a moment to remember he’s not here. It’s just me in the car and David’s gone.

But Jake will be there, at Sing Sing, I remind myself. He has to be. And if I can just see him one last time, one more moment, then it will make everything else I am about to do, everything I have lost and am losing by doing this, all worth it.

I think now about the curve of Jake’s neck, the way it smelled of pipe smoke and pine trees, just the way the cabin on Esopus Creek smelled. I inhale, wanting him to be here, to be real and in front of me again. But instead my lungs fill with that thick air, the dank smell of the Hudson, a humid summer afternoon turned almost evening. A few fireflies begin to gather just outside my window, their bodies glowing, a little early. It’s not quite dark. Not yet the Sabbath. I’m almost there, so close, and I will the darkness to hold off. Just a little longer.

Up ahead, there are dozens of red taillights and I realize that traffic has come to a standstill. I stop and put my head out the window. Farther up the road, it looks like there are barricades set up. Police with flashlights, though I’m hoping FBI, too. I switch on the radio and listen anxiously, wanting so badly for there to be good news. A last-minute stay. A decision to halt things until after the Sabbath has passed. More time.

I switch the stations, anxious for something. Anything. But all I get is music: Ella Fitzgerald singing “Guilty.” It feels like a cruel joke, and I switch again. At last I find news, but it’s not good. President Eisenhower has denied a stay of execution, saying Ethel and Julie have condemned tens of millions of people to death all around the world. No. Ethel and Julie are still set to die at eight p.m. An hour from now.

I switch the radio off, pull the car to the side of the road, and kill the engine. I take a cigarette from my purse and light it with shaking hands. I inhale the smoke and for a moment consider not getting out of the car but just waiting here in the line of traffic. But I know I can’t.

I push open my door and step out into the steamy air. I stomp out the cigarette with my worn heel. I stare at the back window and picture David there on the other side, staring back at me, his round brown eyes like the pennies he so loved to stack. “Come on now,” I would tell him if he were here. “We have to hurry if we’re going to find Dr. Jake.”

His mouth would twitch slightly at the mention of Jake’s name, and I’d wonder if maybe it might even be a little smile.

Jake’s here, I tell myself instead. All I have to do is find Jake.

And I shut the car door and begin running up the road.

1947

1

The first time I ever saw Ethel Rosenberg, she was round and bright as a beach ball. She stood on the sidewalk in front of our building at 10 Monroe Street in Knickerbocker Village, clutching a bouquet of yellow roses in one hand, her little boy in the other, and despite all her brightness and girth I might not have even noticed her at all if it hadn’t been for David, who decided at the very moment we walked by her to reach up and swipe the roses from her hand.

I saw them in a blur, yellow and green flashes tumbling all over the sidewalk, and then Ethel let out a short, startled cry.

“David!” I yelled at him, realizing what he’d done. “What’s wrong with you?” David was almost two, but he wasn’t prone to tantrums, fits of rage, or grabbing things from strangers on the street. But then I realized what it was—the yellow. David was recently infatuated with the color, drawing circles for hours with his yellow crayons. Suns, I would tell him, begging him to repeat the word after me, but he kept drawing his yellow circles without even the slightest sound.

I bent down to gather up the flowers, and I noticed David was crying silently. He hated it when I yelled at him, and I immediately felt bad for being so cross. It was exactly what Dr. Greenberg had told me not to do, and here I was, doing it anyway. “I’m so sorry,” I murmured, handing Ethel back her flowers. “He didn’t mean to . . .”

“Yes he did,” her little boy shot back at me. I judged him to be older than David, though I couldn’t be sure how much, and he spoke to me like that, so clearly and completely. And rudely . . .

I nodded at him. David had meant to. But what else was there to say?

We had lived on Monroe Street only a week by then—David, Ed, and I—and I had thought, however stupidly at the time, that it might change us. The outdoor playground, the scores of other children, the loving families that nested all about Knickerbocker Village like indigenous birds, that somehow we would become shiny like all the rest of them just by virtue of living here. But aside from the steam heat, the laundry room, and the elevators, nothing was different in Knickerbocker Village than it had been in our efficiency above my mother’s apartment on Delancey Street.

“It’s all right,” Ethel said. “They’re only flowers. And you’ve gathered them all back up. No harm done, see, John?” She handed the bouquet to her boy and she turned back to me. She patted David on the head and his sobs worsened, shaking his shoulders, but he still did not make a sound. “You’re new around here?” she asked, turning back toward me, her voice clear and sweet now.

I hugged David close to my hip, willing him to stop so that we might have a moment to befriend someone in the building. So far the other mothers at the playground had eyed me and David with trepidation. And why shouldn’t they? When David would only sit by himself, silently stacking rocks in even piles, while all the other children laughed and shouted and ran around the courtyard together.

“I’m Millie Stein.” I reached out for her hand to shake it. “And this is my son, David.” Her grip was firm but delicate, yet her fingers looked decidedly swollen, like the kosher sausages Mr. Bergman sold in the butcher shop.

“Millie,” she said. “Nice to meet you. I’m Ethel Rosenberg. And this is John.”

“You live here, in Knickerbocker Village?” I asked her. “I haven’t seen you at the playground yet.”

She looked down. “We don’t get to the playground too often these days,” she said softly. I assumed it was because of her large, heaving belly, her being so firmly in the family way—about eight months along, I judged—remembering how uncomfortable I’d been at that stage and trying to imagine feeling that way with another child to tote along.

But at the mention of the word playground, John suddenly clung to Ethel’s bright dress, twisting it between his fingers. “I want to go to the playground,” he whined. Ethel shook her head, and he began to cry. Not the way David cried, silently, but loud, disturbing cries, reminding me of the feral cats that used to run around outside our apartment on Delancey, howling at all hours of the night in hunger or pain.

Ethel offered me a fleeting smile, and then she quickly pulled John and her round body back toward our building. “I’ve got to get him inside, but maybe I’ll see you around,” she called over her shoulder.

I could hear John crying even after she walked inside, the sound coming through the brick walls like a siren.

David, however, had stopped. His eyes followed after them with what I imagined to be curiosity.

DAVID AND I were on our way to visit Mr. Bergman that morning we first met Ethel and John, and after parting ways, David and I continued walking slowly down Monroe Street toward Market Street and Kauffman’s Meats, the kosher butcher shop once run by my father and, since his death five years ago, run by Mr. Bergman, his business partner.

I watched our footsteps making shadows on the sidewalk, overrun quickly by people humming by all around us. Now that the war was so firmly over, the city moved again. People smiled, the crowds on the sidewalks bright flashes of warmth and laughter. People everywhere were happy. Or at least it seemed that way to me. Every woman I saw seemed to have the bright pink stain of love and happiness across her cheeks, a look I tried to replicate myself with Helena Rubinstein blush, but somehow when I saw my own face staring back at me in the mirror, it never seemed quite the same.

Mr. Bergman set aside a brisket for me every Friday, free of charge. His best cut, he said, and we both pretended that that was why David and I came to see him each week. The truth was, the inside of the shop, the smells of meat, Mr. Bergman’s thinning gray hair and thick gray beard, still seemed to be a familiar little piece of my father.

“Mildred! And boychik!” His voice rang out across the counter as we walked in through the glass front door, and the bell clanged cheerfully behind us. The sound startled David and he jumped a little. He is not deaf, I reassured myself yet again despite Ed’s insistence that he must be.

Mr. Bergman waved and I waved back. David clung to the side of my dress until Mr. Bergman leaned across the counter. “I have a present for you, boychik.” He opened his hand to reveal a yellow gumdrop and David took it and chewed it greedily.

“You spoil him,” I said, but I smiled, enjoying how this moment felt normal for David. I remembered the gumdrops Mr. Bergman would sneak to my sister, Susan, and me when we came into the shop as girls.

“And for you,” he told me, “a bigger cut this week. Because I hear you are having company tonight to enjoy the Shabbos.”

I nodded and thanked him. It was the first Friday night in our new apartment, and everyone from my family was coming to us tonight: my mother, Bubbe Kasha, Susan, Sam, and the twins. Whenever there was a family get-together, we normally all flocked to my sister Susan’s house, so this would be a first—everyone coming to me.

“How is the new place?” Mr. Bergman asked as he handed my brown-paper-wrapped brisket across the counter and David chewed happily on the candy.

“Wonderful,” I said, though I had not yet decided for myself whether it was truly wonderful or not, but it certainly did have a lot of nice, modern features. “There’s an elevator that takes us all the way up to the eleventh floor.”

“Your mother told me.”

I smiled, unsurprised. I was sure all of Delancey Street had heard about the elevator multiple times, even the feral alley cats. Which was a change for my mother, whose usual favorite topic of conversation was my older sister Susan, her adorable baby girl twins, and her recent move to the suburbs in Elizabeth, New Jersey.

“And how is Ed?” Mr. Bergman asked, his voice taking on a slightly higher pitch, a peculiar end note. I often thought Mr. Bergman saw Ed the way Ed’s mother, Lena, saw me. With disdain and mistrust. Though I couldn’t imagine that Mr. Bergman knew much about me and Ed, beneath the surface, it was almost as if some shadow of my father still existed within him. He worried about me.

“Ed is well,” I said. Our weekly dance.

Mr. Bergman frowned. “And he isn’t having a problem at work with this loyalty oath everyone is talking about now?”

“Why should he?” I asked, though I swallowed hard, not willing to admit to Mr. Bergman that I had already worried as much but had been afraid to broach the subject with Ed myself. Ed clung to his Russian past like a winter coat, something that enveloped him absolutely even though it had been four years since he’d come to America.

“I just thought . . . Well, never mind.” Mr. Bergman waved his hand in the air. Behind us another customer demanded service by clearing her throat loudly and talking in Yiddish to what looked like her mother. Mr. Bergman held up his hand to indicate he’d be with her in a moment.

“Millie,” he said, leaning over across the meat case so he could lower his voice to a whisper. “I’m worried about you. Things are not the same as they used to be for a Russian Jew in New York. It’s not like it was when our relatives came over forty years ago.” Mr. Bergman shook his head. “They say Stalin is the next Hitler, you know? And what will happen if he gets the bomb?”

“You worry too much,” I told him, and I grabbed my brisket and David and headed back toward Knickerbocker Village.

2

Mr. Bergman was not the only one who worried about the bomb. The truth was, I thought of it often—we all did—the idea that this utterly destructive thing could come suddenly, and seemingly out of nowhere, all the way across the ocean from Russia, instantly turning New York City into dust. We could be the next Hiroshima, Nagasaki. And no amount of blush could hide this fear.

As David and I walked through the front entrance of 10 Monroe Street, I imagined the bomb coming just then, the imprint of our bodies etched forever wordlessly in the ground where the two thirteen-story brick buildings of Knickerbocker Village once stood, our remnants just shadows, nothing more. In midtown, Ed’s body would become a shadow beneath his office building. And somewhere across the ocean, Stalin would be laughing at us.

But it didn’t happen, and David and I rode the elevator back up to the eleventh floor as peacefully as we’d come down an hour earlier, stopping at each floor along the way, as David wanted each button to light up yellow. I allowed him to do it if only to keep him from crying again.

On the long ride up, I thought about my sister, Susan. She and her husband, Sam, had retreated to the suburbs of Elizabeth last year shortly before the twins were born. Susan told me there was safety in the suburbs, that no one would think to bomb there because life was more spread out, slower, less people as targets. And Time magazine had recently reported the same thing. Not that I was surprised, as Susan was always right—or, at least, she acted ...