Free The Hours Count by Jillian Cantor Page A

said him. “Five minutes and then we have to get back to check on your brother.” John ignored her and continued building with the blocks. “I just wanted to check in with you, Millie. Make sure everything was . . . all right.”
    I wondered how she could know about Zelda Weiss, but she didn’t of course. She was asking because of the way Ed had treated me in her apartment and how I’d run out last night. “Everything is fine,” I lied, and even as I said the words I realized that I didn’t mean to, that I wanted to tell Ethel the truth. But I didn’t know how someone whose husband loved her so obviously and completely as Julie did would be able to understand what I was feeling now for Ed.
    Ethel held her shoulders up, uncertain. I sat down on our couch and patted the seat next to me until Ethel relaxed and sat down, too. Though I understood she wouldn’t—and couldn’t—stay long, I thought she felt the way I did, this rare moment when John and David were both content and happy, transfixed with blocks and each other, nothing more than normal little boys. And nothing less.
    Our couch was our only new piece of furniture in the apartment, the only thing Ed and I had bought rather than pillaged from Bubbe Kasha’s old treasures when she left her apartment and moved in with my mother just after we got married. I’d found the couch at Macy’s for fifteen dollars, and Ed had said he was happy to buy it for me as a wedding gift.
This is love,
I’d thought. A fifteen-dollar couch in the most beautiful shade of royal blue I’d ever seen. How stupid I’d been to believe that.
    I wanted to tell Ethel about Zelda’s visit this morning. I wanted to ask for Ethel’s advice. But Julie was Ed’s employer. Julie had beenEd’s friend first before I’d even met Ethel. And instead I heard myself telling Ethel about the silly couch and how Ed had bought it for me as a wedding present.
    “It’s a lovely couch,” Ethel murmured, paying no attention to it. “Did you have a nice time last night?” she asked carefully.
    “It was nice to get out of my apartment. To meet people . . . You know how it is.”
    “I do,” Ethel said. “I used to see them all the time when I was younger, when Julie and I were first married. Oh, I was so involved in the cause!”
    “Why were you so involved?” I asked her, wondering what had drawn Ethel, a woman now so involved in her children and her quiet life here in Knickerbocker Village, to this particular crowd of people.
Reds,
as Mr. Bergman had called them with so much disdain. I remembered Susan telling me about an article she’d read in
Look
magazine a while back that detailed “how to spot a communist” and her warning me to be careful and on the lookout, especially here in the city. But Ethel was not the kind of woman I’d imagined when Susan described what she’d read in the article—severe-looking people dressed in all black who seemed favorable to Russia. Ed, Susan had proclaimed, was excused because he’d grown up in Russia. He didn’t know any better. And besides, I’d told her he was distancing himself as time went on.
    “You know, I was only fifteen when I graduated from Seward Park,” I realized Ethel was saying and I turned my attention back to her.
    “Fifteen.” I raised my eyebrows, impressed that Ethel had graduated from high school so young.
    She laughed as if she were embarrassed by her own intelligence.“I got a job as a clerk at a shipping company and I saw the terrible way all the women were treated. I organized a strike of a hundred fifty women—
I
did that—and I was promptly fired of course. But boy, Millie, did I feel alive. Doing something to improve people’s lives. That’s when and why I joined the Party, to continue that kind of work, do some good in this country. Labor unions and fairness for workers. I thought I was going to change the world.” She laughed again.
    I thought about what Mr. Bergman said earlier. “But now I guess