Lady in the Lake Page 2

  At thirty-six, she had the best of both worlds. She saw a beautiful woman in her mirror, still youthful, but able to afford the things that kept you looking that way. She had one streak of silvery hair, which she had decided to consider incongruous, dashing. She plucked the rest.

  When she opened the door to Wally that evening, his open admiration was delightful to see.

  “Young lady, is your mother at home?”

  That irritated her. It was such obvious flattery, something one would say to a simpering grandmother who wore too much rouge. Did Wally think she required that kind of buildup? She tried to hide her frostiness as she served the first round of drinks and snacks.

  “So,” Eleanor Rosengren said after gulping her first highball, “did you really know each other at Park?” The Rosengrens, like Milton, had gone to public high school.

  “A little,” Maddie admitted with a laugh, a laugh meant to signal: It was so long ago, let’s not bore the others.

  “I was in love with her,” Wally said.

  “You were not.” Laughing, flustered, and—again—not complimented. She felt mocked, as if he were setting up a joke for which she would be the punch line.

  “Of course I was. Don’t you remember—I took you to the prom when—what was his name—stood you up.”

  A curious glance from Milton.

  “Oh, not stood up, Wally. Sorry, Wallace. We broke up two weeks before prom. That’s very different from being stood up.” She wouldn’t have cared about going at all if it weren’t for the new dress. It had cost $39.95—her father would have been scandalized if it had gone to waste after all the begging she had done.

  She did not provide the name for which Wally had fumbled. Allan. Allan Durst Junior. When they had first started dating, the name had sounded Jewish enough to placate her mother. His father was Jewish, sort of. But Mrs. Morgenstern was not fooled once she saw him. “That’s not someone to be serious about,” her mother had said, and Maddie had not argued. She was becoming serious about someone else, someone even less likely to win her mother’s approval.

  “Should we go into the dining room?” Maddie asked, although people were still in the middle of their cocktails.

  Wally—Wallace—was the youngest of the five at the table, but he had clearly grown used to people wanting his opinions. The obliging Rosengrens pelted him with questions over dinner. Who would be running for governor? What did he think about Agnew’s latest gaffe? Baltimore’s crime rate? What was Gypsy Rose Lee really like? (She had recently been in Baltimore to promote her own syndicated talk show.)

  For someone who did interviews for a living, Wallace was not much on asking questions. When the men offered their opinions on current events, he listened with patient condescension, then contradicted them. Maddie tried to steer the conversation toward a novel she had read, The Keepers of the House, which made some excellent points about the race problem in the South, but Eleanor said she couldn’t get through it and the men had never heard of it.

  Yet it was a successful dinner party, Maddie supposed. Milton was delighted that he had a famous friend; the Rosengrens were charmed by Wallace. He seemed to genuinely like them, too. Late in the evening, deep into his brandy, the lights dimmed so that the burning ends of their cigarettes looked like slow-moving fireflies in the living room, Wallace said, “You’ve done okay for yourself, Maddie.”

  Okay? Okay?

  “Imagine,” he continued, “if you had ended up with that fellow. Durst, that was it. He’s a copywriter. An adman.”

  She said she hadn’t seen Allan Durst since high school, which was true. Then she said she knew about his job from The Park School alumni bulletin, which was not.

  “I never heard there was a big high school love,” Milton said.

  “That’s because there wasn’t,” Maddie said, more sharply than she meant to.

  By eleven p.m. they had sent everyone home weaving, insisting they do it again. Milton toppled into bed, felled by drink and excitement. Maddie normally would have left the heavy cleaning to her Friday girl. There was no crime in letting dishes sit overnight as long as you rinsed them. Though Tattie Morgenstern had never left so much as a fork in her sink.

  But Maddie decided to stay up and put things to rights.

  The kitchen had been redone last year. Maddie had been so proud of the project when it was completed, so happy with her new appliances, yet the pleasure had burned off quickly. Now the remodel seemed silly, even pointless. What did it matter, having the latest appliances, all these sleek built-ins? No time was actually saved, although the reconfigured cabinets did make it easier to maintain two sets of dishes.

  Wally had expressed surprise when he realized, during the salad course, that the Schwartzes kept a kosher household, but that was a nod to Milton’s upbringing. Two sets of dishes, never mixing meat and dairy, avoiding pork and shellfish—it wasn’t that hard and it made Milton happy. She deserved his devotion, she told herself as she soaped and rinsed the crystal, dried the good china by hand.

  Turning to leave the kitchen, she caught a wineglass drying on the drain board with the tip of her elbow. It plummeted to the floor, where it shattered.

  We’re supposed to break a glass.

  What are you talking about?

  Never mind. I always forget what a heathen you are.

  The broken glass meant five more minutes with dustpan and broom, ferreting out every sliver. By the time she finished it was almost two and yet Maddie still had trouble falling asleep. Her mind raced, going over lists of things undone and overlooked. There was nothing here in the present. The things she had failed to do were twenty years behind her, when she had first known Wally—and her first love, the one her mother never suspected. She had sworn she would be—what, exactly? Someone creative and original, someone who cared not at all about public opinion. She—they—were going to live in New York City, in Greenwich Village. He had promised. He was going to take her away from stodgy Baltimore, they were going to live a passionate life devoted to art and adventure.

  She had kept him out of her mind for all these years. Now he was back, Elijah showing up for his Passover wine.

  Maddie fell asleep paging through an imaginary calendar, trying to calculate the best time to leave her marriage. Her birthday was next month. December? No, not over the holidays, unimportant as Hanukah was. February seemed too late, January a cliché, a mockery of New Year’s resolutions. November 30, she decided. She would leave November 30, twenty days after her thirty-seventh birthday.

  We’re supposed to break a glass.

  What are you talking about?

  Never mind.

  The Classmate

  The Classmate

  I grip the steering wheel of my new Cadillac, talking my way through the drive from Maddie’s house to mine, short as it is, a dog’s leg down Greenspring, past The Park School—our alma mater, although Park was in a different location in our day—then a right turn on Falls Road, and finally up the hill into Mount Washington. I talk to myself like a coach, not that I ever played for any team. Couldn’t even make water boy. Focus, Wally, focus.

  In my head, I’m always Wally. Everyone looks up to Wallace Wright, including me. I wouldn’t dare try to talk to him the way I talk to Wally.

  I’m terrified that I’m going to cross the center line, hit another car, maybe worse. WOLD anchorman Wallace Wright was arrested for vehicular manslaughter near his Northwest Baltimore home.

  “The newsman can’t end up as the headline, Wally,” I tell myself. “Focus.”

  A cop stop would be almost as bad. WOLD anchorman arrested for drunk driving. News only because it involves a newsman. Who doesn’t drive a little tipsy from time to time? But a cop also might wave me off, even ask for an autograph.

  Where did Maddie learn to drink like that? I guess it’s like the old joke about Carnegie Hall, practice, practice, practice. I’ve never had a chance to develop the cocktail habit because I’m seldom home before eight, have to be at work the
next day by nine, on air by noon. That routine doesn’t lend itself to liquor. Or marriage.

  Mount Washington is so dark at midnight, so hushed. How have I never noticed that before? The only sound is the crunch of the fall leaves beneath my tires. By the time I creep up South Road, it seems the better part of valor to park by the curb, not attempting the driveway, much less the garage.

  Why did I stay so late? It certainly wasn’t the scintillating conversation. Because it’s not every day you get to show your first love what a mistake she made.

  If you had asked me even this morning—and people ask me many things, you’d be amazed what an oracle I am—I would have told you with all sincerity that I never thought about Maddie Morgenstern.

  But the moment I saw her on her own threshold, I realized she had always been with me, my audience of one. She was there Monday through Friday, when I faced the cameras between noon and twelve thirty on the midday news show. On Wednesday nights, when I did “Wright Makes Right.” Whenever I was lucky enough to substitute for Harvey Patterson, whose job I will take one day. Maddie somehow managed the trick of being a seventeen-year-old girl and a suburban matron, sitting at home with a cup of coffee, the morning housework finished, watching channel 6 and thinking: I could have been Mrs. Wallace Wright if I played my cards right.

  She’s even there when I put on makeup and play Donadio, the sad, silent clown that was my fluke entree at WOLD-TV.

  I had been working in radio, prized for my voice, but not considered camera ready. The Donadio gig meant an extra twenty-five dollars a week. The only stipulation was that I must never tell anyone, and I was more than happy to keep that promise.

  One Saturday, as I was removing my makeup, a cop killing came over the scanner. I was the only reporter available. Somehow, during the fourteen months I had been masquerading as Donadio, I had gotten taller, my hair smoother, my complexion paradoxically clearer. Maybe I did a better job cleaning my face once I started wearing clown makeup. At any rate, my face and body finally fit my booming baritone. I went to the scene, I gathered the facts, a star was born. Not Maddie, not that putz she dated in high school, not her perfectly nice lawyer husband. Me, Wally Weiss. I’m the star.

  We met in, of all the unlikely places, our school’s ham radio club. We quickly established that we shared an intense admiration for Edward R. Murrow, whose London reports during the war had made a big impression on us. I had never met any girl who wanted to talk about Murrow and journalism before, much less a pretty one. It was like that first great work of art that transfixes you, that novel that stays with you the rest of your life, even if you go on to read much better ones. It was all I could do not to stare at her, mouth hanging open.

  Maddie’s appearance at the ham radio club turned out to be a one-off; she had thought it was a radio club, for people interested in writing and performing, not a room full of losers who liked to tinker. She switched to the school newspaper, quickly landed a column and started running with a very fast, goyish crowd, including Allan Durst. Obviously, Maddie Morgenstern could never be serious about him, but her parents were shrewd enough not to fight a high school romance. I heard they had even invited the Durst parents to their home for Shabbos. The mother was a famous artist, painting huge abstracts that hung in museums, the father a competent painter of portraits, specializing in Baltimore dowagers.

  Allan dropped Maddie right before prom. I found her weeping in an empty classroom. It was an honor to have her confide in me. I suggested she take me as her date.

  “What could be a greater insult?” I said, patting her back with a flat up-and-down motion, almost as if burping a child. My hand brushed what felt like the clasp of a bra, my most erotic experience to date.

  She agreed to my plan with an almost painful alacrity.

  I bought her a wrist corsage with the most expensive orchid to be had in Baltimore. She did her part, ignoring Allan, who had come stag, and laughing at my jokes as if I were Jack Benny. Allan approached her at one point and asked for a dance “for old times’ sake.” Maddie cocked her head to the side as if she were trying to remember exactly what old times they had shared, then said, “No, no, I’m very happy to spend the evening with my date.”

  I whirled her away, feeling every inch the young Fred Astaire. If you think about it, Astaire wasn’t conventionally handsome. He was never the tallest guy in the room, he wasn’t an athlete. But he was Astaire.

  As I drove her home after the dance, she slid across the seat of my father’s Buick and rested her head on my shoulder. She confided in me that she wanted to write, really write, poetry and fiction, which was almost more exciting than her very real kiss at the front door. Back in the car, I discovered that the flower had fallen from its ribbon. Maybe its fragrance was nothing more than the usual orchid smell, but to me it carried Maddie’s distinctive scent, as singular as her voice, subdued and husky for a teenage girl. Maddie never squealed, she was no bobby-soxer. She was dignified, regal, the girl who always played Queen Esther in the Purim play.

  I called her three days later to ask for a movie date, a proper date, having calculated that three days was the right amount of time. Not too eager, not too detached. Very Astaire.

  Her tone was puzzled, polite. “You’re a sweet kid, Wally, to worry about me,” she said. “But I’m fine.”

  Within a year, she was engaged to Milton Schwartz, big and hairy and older, twenty-two to her eighteen, his first year of law school already behind him. I went to their wedding. It was like watching Alice Faye run away with King Kong.

  I had not thought of Milton Schwartz again for almost twenty years when I ran into him in the locker room at the new tennis barn, the only convenient place for me to exercise before work, given its proximity to Television Hill. We were well matched at singles and Milton clearly enjoyed having a famous friend. It was only a matter of time before he asked me if I would like to have dinner at his house. “No big deal,” he said. “Just the wife, maybe our neighbors, anyone you want to bring.”

  Bettina and I have been apart almost two years and although I date, there’s no one serious. I decided to go stag, like Allan at the senior prom. Milton knew that I had attended the same high school as Mrs. Schwartz but said his wife had never spoken of me. Rather than feeling demoralized that Maddie didn’t brag about our acquaintanceship, I saw it as a compliment. If she hadn’t mentioned to her husband that she knew Baltimore’s Midday Fog, it must be because she had the occasional fantasy, a what-might-have-been moment. At her kitchen table, with her coffee, a cigarette burning between her fingers, she relived that prom night and my phone call three days later, kicked herself for not saying yes. Her dark hair would be prematurely gray, her hourglass figure dumpy and plump. Neither of those things were true, as it turned out, but that’s how I imagined her.

  I was surprised to discover they kept a kosher house. I never set out to distance myself from Judaism, but a television personality such as myself has to connect with his audience, and my audience is mostly Christian. That’s the cost of being an oracle. Then again, there is Orthodox and there’s Orthodox, and the refusal to mix meat and dairy was the Schwartz household’s only concession to Judaism I could see. I was a little shocked by the things they said about the changing neighborhoods to the south, the more religious Jews who lived along Park Heights Avenue, to whom they clearly felt superior. If you ask me, there’s no one more anti-Semitic than a middle-class Jew.

  But we did not spend that much time talking about Judaism. We discussed politics, with the Schwartzes and their guests deferring to me, as people tend to do. We laughed about Spiro Agnew’s most recent blunder, the speech at Gettysburg where he was clearly confused about which side had prevailed on that battlefield. By the after-dinner drinks, everyone felt warm and familiar. I thought it was safe to bring up the prom—and Maddie’s subsequent refusal to go on another date with me.

  And she denied it. She insisted I had never asked her out at all.

  Yes, she agreed, we had gone
to the prom, but she was adamant that I never called her again, when I know I did.

  “Because of course I would have gone out with you!” she said, by way of argument for her memory over mine. But she couldn’t help undercutting it: “If only to be polite.”

  Still, her heat on this topic was disproportionate. There was no reason to get so angry about it.

  Safe on my own doorstep, I drop my keys two, three times before I stumble into my house, still baffled by Maddie’s hostility. Is it because she could tell I saw through her? I may have been the one with a goyish name, but I was still a Jewish boy in my heart, whereas the Schwartzes, with their two sets of dishes, were ersatz. Everything in their house was for show.

  My house is so quiet—and so dusty—since Bettina moved out. I thought she would fight to keep it. The house had been her chief preoccupation for our six years together. But, by the end, Bettina wanted no part of it or me. We didn’t have kids. I still don’t know how I feel about that. A child would have been delighted to have Donadio for his dad.

  Although exhausted and stumbling drunk, I go to the “study” that Bettina made for me, in our marriage’s first, hopeful year. It is all leather and mahogany, with English horse-racing prints that embarrass me, although I suppose the proximity of Pimlico justifies such airs. Bettina arranged the books for visual appeal, which drives me mad, but I finally find the one I want: my old battered copy of Arch of Triumph, relegated to an upper shelf with the other paperbacks. When I first read it, it made me want to write, make other people feel as novels made me feel. Instead, I tell them the headlines and the weather, raise an occasional eyebrow at a celebrity.

  And there it is, between pages 242 and 243, Maddie’s orchid, brown and brittle.