Read Keeping Secrets for Free Online

stuck out her hand. Jake couldn’t believe it—a Jew with a Southern accent. “I’m on my way to get some Chinese food for supper. Would you like to join me?”
    Over chow mein she told him she’d been in New York a year. She was from Georgia, from a small town. She was working as a clerk and seeing doctors at Mount Zion. Something about her heart. Two weeks later they had married at City Hall. Helen was lovely in a pale-blue gabardine dress. Jake’s vanilla-colored suit looked like ice cream. The next day they moved to Baltimore. The jobs were better there, Helen had said, shipbuilding for the war. It was early spring 1943.
    “Will you have to go into the service again?” Helen asked Jake while sweeping the steps of their little row house, its redbrick face like that of a hundred thousand others.
    “I served my time. And until they call me again, I’m not volunteering.” They didn’t call, and Jake went to the shipyard every day and stayed home evenings with Helen, listening to the radio. They had just settled in, new curtains just hung, when she told him about the baby. At first he thought she was joking.
    But she wasn’t joking when she extracted the promise from Jake. “If anything happens, you never give our baby up. Do you hear?”
    “Don’t be silly,” he’d answered, when he’d gotten used to the idea, patting her stomach beneath a brown-and-white polka-dotted dress. “Nothing’s going to happen.” He’d reached across their kitchen table and touched her light-brown hair. “You’ll see.”
    But he’d promised.
    Had she known then that they would never cuddle a child together, watch her grow into a long-legged little girl? Had she always known that her heart wasn’t up to it?
    “Don’t make me laugh so hard.” (Or love so hard, she’d whisper.)
    “Jake, if you tickle me anymore, I swear I’m going to have an attack.”
    “Honey, would you carry this sack for me? I can’t walk up these stairs as fast as you.”
    Then she’d grown pale, and a little clammy, but what did he know? What did a Yankee Russian Jew know about a Southern lady and her games? All he knew was that he loved her. Nothing else mattered.
    And for a brief time, all was golden. They named the beautiful blue-eyed baby Emma after Helen’s mother. Then came that afternoon just nineteen days after Emma was born, when Jake came home from work to a house that was too still.
    He had raced the last few blocks from the trolley down Independence Avenue, hurried so that the roses wouldn’t wilt and the milk wouldn’t grow warm. He’d made it. The milk was still cold when he walked in the door, the cream separated, rich and thick in the bottle’s neck.
    “Helen,” Jake had called.
    He waited for her answer from the bedroom, but none came.
    Then there was a whimper which swelled into a wail. He dropped the roses and the milk on the table and stepped to the bedroom door.
    “Helen?”
    Emma was in her crib, her little pink mouth wide with rage.
    Helen was lying face down on the floor on the far side of the bed. She was marble pale, marble cold and very still.
    “Probably heart failure,” said the white-coated doctor summoned by the frantic call on a neighbor’s phone.
    It didn’t matter what the doctor thought was probable, what he guessed. No matter what he called it, Helen was dead.
    Just the day before they had eaten half a cake decorated with little pink roses, thirty-seven candles, and “Happy Birthday, Jake” spelled out in blue icing.
    Jake sat in their quiet kitchen, with the cake on the cabinet growing stale, for what might have been hours, could have been days. Emma never left his arms. She was all he had left.
    Then as if waking from a dream he asked himself, What next?
    His mother, Riva, had been gone for several years. His older sister, Rhoda Goldberg, rambled through her big house carrying pictures of her son Marty, the bravest little boy in New Jersey, as if she could find him again if only she opened the