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 as if she were. I wondered if Ed and I would’ve been safer and happier there, too, rather than here in Knickerbocker Village, but Ed had insisted on staying in the city so he’d be closer to work and to his mother. And since Susan had left, I knew I needed to stay, too. Someone had to be close by for my mother and Bubbe Kasha. Besides, Ed was giving me steam heat, an elevator, a playground, and, at some point, even a nursery school for David. And our one-bedroom apartment here on the eleventh floor was quite an upgrade from our tiny one-room apartment on Delancey.
And as Ed said, with an accusing lilt to his thick Russian accent, why did we need any more than this with only one child?
Time had also reported that the American family was thriving as never before, that the average man and woman now hoped for three children. Susan was well on her way, but three? I couldn’t imagine. I could barely even imagine two, of taking care of David and a baby, and so I had taken special and quite secret steps to make sure this would not happen.
Ed was none the wiser. Ed, who had repeatedly told me that all the fears about the bomb here were silly.
It’s never going to happen in New York, he always said, waving the concerns away with the trail of smoke from his cigar, and I didn’t understand how he could be so certain about a city he had known only for a short time. Women have many babies, he told me. That’s what they do. He whispered it in my ear at night like a love song, in his thick Russian accent, just before he took his pants off and rolled on top of me.
WHEN THE ELEVATOR at long last stopped on the eleventh floor and the door opened, David and I nearly ran right into Ethel again, as she was waiting to ride the elevator down. But this time, she was alone.
“So we meet again,” Ethel said, and she laughed, as David and I stepped out. I wondered what had happened to John and how Ethel managed to be going out without him. Since David had begun showing some peculiarities in his behavior, my mother had lost interest in watching him, so now he was always with me. Sometimes I dreamed about the solace of being alone, even if only for an hour. And I was torn for a moment between feeling jealous of Ethel and excited that she lived on the same floor as us. Perhaps we really could be friends, and I imagined David playing with John, me sharing afternoon coffee with Ethel. It had been a while since I’d had a friend this close by, not since before David was born. On Delancey all my old friends had married before me and moved or we’d drifted apart, and in the room above my mother’s apartment our only companions had been her and Bubbe Kasha.
But Ethel propped open the elevator door with her thick fingers and seemed a bit impatient for us to get out, shuffling her feet as if she were in a hurry. David reached for the elevator buttons again, and I grabbed for his hands. “No. No more buttons, darling,” I told him, and he shrank until his eyes caught onto Ethel’s dress, the same bright yellow-and-red one as earlier, but now I noticed her brown curls were also topped with a dramatic red hat. Ethel was quite short, a few inches shorter than my very average height, but she held herself in such a way that I hadn’t noticed it earlier on the street.
“I have to run,” she said, pushing past us into the elevator. “I have studio time and I’m late.”
“Studio time? You’re on the radio?”
“Oh, no.” She laughed. “I’m making a recording for my John so he’ll have my voice to listen to when I’m in the hospital for the new baby.”
“Oh,” I said. “How lovely.”
She smiled and touched her free hand to her hat shyly, in a way that made me think someone else had told her this was not such a lovely idea. I wondered about her husband and if he was like Ed when it came to money. I guessed not. Studio time sounded expensive.
“I should have you and John over sometime,” I said as I watched her press the button to go down to the ground floor.
But before she had time to answer, the elevator doors shut and Ethel was riding down to her studio.
OUR APARTMENT WAS DARK, the air inside quiet and cool. Ed was still at work, and I prayed David would actually lie down and take a nap so I could have a little time to myself.
I switched on the lights, unwrapped the brisket, and put it in the oven, and after I settled David into his crib, which I understood he was getting way too big for but was trying to follow Dr. Greenberg’s advice to coddle him just a little while longer, I lit myself a cigarette and sat at our scratched wooden table. The Sabbath was only a few hours away, and Susan and Sam and the twins would arrive before sundown. They never took the twins on the train into the city, but tonight they had decided to make an exception in order to see our new place.
I inhaled the smoke from my cigarette and then exhaled. My sister and her babies and all their glowing perfection. Motherhood seemed to suit Susan, made her even prettier than she always had been, which I might have once thought impossible, but, no. Caring for the girls gave her rosier cheeks and a new sheen to her vibrant black hair and even made her laughter sound brighter. And never mind that she’d carried two babies at once, the extra weight had dropped off her waistline just like that and now her figure looked more perfect than ever. The twins were only nine months, but they already babbled and smiled and had started to make sounds that vaguely resembled dada. Sam is just in love, Susan had gushed the last time I’d seen her a few weeks earlier when we’d taken the train out to Elizabeth for Sunday brunch. And why wouldn’t he be? His children—and his wife—were perfect, and thinking about it made me well up with both jealousy and sadness.
Motherhood had done no favors for my figure. I was always a slightly heavier, slightly shorter, slightly duller version of my older sister. My mother used to tell me my features were ordinary—and not unkindly, just a statement of fact. I’d always had nice clear skin and pretty pale brown eyes, but I was neither tall nor short, beautiful nor ugly, the kind of woman who can blend into a crowd and be utterly forgettable. My most distinguishing feature was my shoulder-length medium brown curls, often impossibly unruly. I loved David, but my waist was a few inches thicker than it once was, my curls were forever a mess, and the last time Susan saw me she took one look at the bags under my eyes and told me I wasn’t sleeping enough. Yes, David was exhausting. He would be two soon and had yet to utter even a single sound. Ed claimed his ears must not work, or possibly his brain, and Dr. Greenberg said it was me, that I was too cold with him, too cross with him. Indulge him a little more, why don’t you, he had said, the entire weight of his bald head sinking into his frown.
And yet I’d tried everything: coaxing him, playing with him, listening harder, hugging him more, punishing him, yelling at him. I read Parents magazine with a rapt hunger for answers that were never there. I learned about illnesses and tantrums, but nothing at all about what to do with a child like mine who just would not speak.
I heard a knock at the door, interrupting my thoughts. I checked the time, but it was only three thirty, too early for anyone to arrive for dinner and too early for Ed to be home from work. For a moment, I wondered if it was Ethel back from the studio and wanting to take me up on my offer for coffee. “Coming,” I called, but not too loud so as not to wake David, and I squashed out my cigarette, stood, and smoothed down my dress with my hands, then smoothed my curls.
I opened the door and saw my mother standing there in the hallway, looking as if she’d just swallowed a lemon, a frown so big enveloping her plump cheeks that it seemed to weigh them down, to make her entire face sag. “You’re so early,” I said, opening the door wider, “I don’t have anything ready yet.”
She pushed past me into the apartment. “Dinner is canceled,” she said. “Susan just sent me a telegram. Thank goodness she figured it out.”
The telephone operators had been on strike for two weeks, rendering our new shiny black telephone entirely useless. We had been promised a party line as part of our forty-six dollars a month rent, which also included electricity. It was an excellent deal, according to Ed. Not so excellent when the phone was unworkable because of the operators’ strike.
“Canceled?” I asked, trying not to let the disappointment I felt seep into my voice.
“There’s a smallpox outbreak in the city,” my mother said. “Susan heard on the radio and she can’t bring the twins into the city under these conditions.”
Susan had yet to bring the twins into the city under any conditions, and I fought the urge to roll my eyes. “Smallpox outbreak?” I’d heard nothing of it yet, but I hadn’t listened to the radio all morning. David did not like the sound and he would cry when I’d turn it on—more evidence that he could at least hear. I’d asked Ed for a television, hoping that David would be drawn more to it, the visual stimulus, but he’d yet to oblige what he called my expensive whims.
“There’s going to be inoculation clinics in the streets starting Monday,” my mother said. “We’ll go. You’ll come for me in the morning.”
“Is that really necessary?” I murmured, thinking ahead to the way David would react to an inoculation in the street. It had been bad enough when Dr. Greenberg had inoculated him for whooping cough in the office, after I’d read the terrifying article about it in Parents. David had clung to the examining table and kicked and cried such hard, silent tears that I thought his entire small body might burst.
“You should want to die of smallpox instead?” my mother asked, putting her hands on her wide hips. She wore her pale gray dress like a sack, and her hands revealed the lumpiness of her large stomach underneath.
Would I want to die of smallpox? It seemed closer, more immediate than Stalin’s bomb, but I also imagined the process would be slower and more painful. Should the bomb come and take us, I might never even know what happened. And it would take me and David, instantly and simultaneously. What would happen to David if I should die of something else on my own?
“Of course not,” I said to my mother. “I’ll come by for you Monday morning.” I paused. “You’ll still come for dinner tonight, though? And Bubbe Kasha, too?”
“Oh goodness no. I feel like I’m risking my life just having come here. All these people living here in one place. All the germs that could be in that . . . elevator.”
“Well, then you should have sent a telegram,” I said, unable to keep the annoyance I was feeling with her from my voice. I had been looking forward to the dinner with my family, my sister—perfect babies and all—and now it would just be Ed and me and David. Alone. I had a brisket enough to feed at least ten. And there was no option to skip Shabbat, not for Ed anyway.
“You should want for me to spend money on a telegram when I can use my own two feet?” She waved her hand in the air, blew me a kiss, and then as quickly as she’d come she was gone.
From the back room I heard the sounds of the crib bars rattling. David was awake.
3
I was raised Jewish—and only the second generation in America at that. My grandparents came over from Russia in 1901, but for them, and later for me, our religion always felt more cultural than spiritual. Growing up, Shabbat dinner was something we’d attend at Bubbe Kasha’s and Zayde Jerome’s apartment, but not every week. Only when my father felt like it. Some weeks he was too tired and wanted to stay in our apartment and rest, which to him meant eating my mother’s terrible split pea soup, smoking a cigarette, and then listening to Jack Haley on The Wonder Show. As he always said, he could believe in God and listen to the radio on his night of rest.
To be married to a kosher butcher who doesn’t even want to attend Shabbat dinner, my mother would say and cluck her tongue, and then she would light our candles. She always lit the candles and we’d always say a quick prayer. But then she would smile and pull up a chair next to the radio and eat pea soup there with our father, and Susan and I would hear the two of them laughing from the bedroom in the back of the apartment.
But Ed grew up back in Russia, much more religious than I did here. He insisted on a formal Shabbat dinner every Friday night. We used to go to the one at his mother Lena’s apartment, which was regularly attended by Ed’s
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