Lady in the Lake Page 24

  “No one was home by the time a reporter got there. They’re probably in hiding at a relative’s.”

  “I talked to her. I had been to the apartment before—on my own time. I was so interested in Cleo’s death. I just kept thinking there had to be an answer. And now, I guess, there is.”

  “Did you take notes?”

  “Yes.”

  “Feed ’em to rewrite.”

  “But I’m right here and the first deadline isn’t until—”

  “Feed ’em to rewrite. Don’t worry, you’ll get a trib line.”

  “I’m not worried about that. I told her mother I would write the story. If you want my notes, you have to let me write it.”

  While she could not put everything she knew about Cleo Sherwood in the paper, she could tell the story of her mother. Of a woman who had lost a daughter and would now lose a husband. A woman who had a closet full of beautiful clothes and had no idea how her child had come to own them. She could tell about the psychic, the still-baffling visions of green and yellow. The waitress who knew her back at Werner’s. They had to cut quite a bit—“It’s only a sidebar, for Christ’s sake”—but she fought to keep the detail about all those altered clothes, hung on the paper-shrouded wire hangers from EZ Kleeners. She wanted Ezekiel Taylor to know that someone knew his secrets.

  September 1966

  September 1966

  No matter how hot the weather—and it was very hot in 1966—September will always be the beginning of fall and fall will always be the true start of the year. Maddie’s mother assumed her prodigal daughter would return to the Morgenstern household for Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur. Maddie remembered, wryly, how she had struggled for years to wrest the holiday dinners from her mother, how insistent she had been on creating her own traditions, how she had scandalized her mother with her recipe for haroset at last year’s Passover, made with figs and dates. It all seemed so trivial now.

  The primary fell two days before Rosh Hashanah and Maddie volunteered to take results. It was an inglorious job, but no more inglorious than the job she continued to do every day, despite her “scoop” on the Sherwood story. She typed the vote tallies in the city legislative districts, her swift fingers stopping for a second when it came time to enter the numbers for the senate seat in the Fourth District. A newcomer, Clarence Mitchell III, was the top vote-getter, but Verda Welcome was second. Ezekiel Taylor was a distant fourth.

  How silly she had been to think that any of this had anything to do with Cleo. Hindsight, they called it. Well, in hindsight, Maddie saw the world for what it was, where women belonged in it. Men were entitled to have their girls on the side, as long as they were discreet. Men, some men, felt entitled to kill the women who did not return their affections. Cleo Sherwood did not matter enough; she could not have swayed this election. She had never mattered at all.

  Here was Ezekiel Taylor, his reputation intact, his campaign underwritten by Shell Gordon’s dirty money. How silly Maddie had been. Cleo’s death had been more interesting as a mystery. Solved, it was dull. Her father’s crazed, desperate act outside the courthouse had drawn more attention than his daughter’s murder. It was one thing for a white man to kill a Negro woman, crazed with love for her. But for that woman’s father to start shooting outside the courthouse, in a crowd, grazing a young police officer—he was expected to spend as long in prison as his daughter’s killer, if not longer.

  Maddie became aware, as she kept taking calls and updating numbers, of a sensation sweeping through the newsroom. There was a surprise, something unexpected in the results. Even jaded Edna, here to write a color story on whatever patterns emerged from the statewide races, looked caught off guard.

  “What’s up?” Maddie asked Bob Bauer, who had just pulled his column from his typewriter. But instead of calling “copy,” he crumpled it and inserted a fresh sheet.

  “Damn thing’s too close to call. With all the precincts in, Mahoney’s got the lead by less than a hundred fifty votes. There’s going to be a recount. Clarence Mitchell the Third is already saying he’ll organize Negroes for Agnew if Mahoney is the candidate.”

  “How could Mahoney win?” Maddie had followed the governor’s race in the papers all summer. Mahoney was a six-time loser in state politics.

  “Sickles and Finan split the base. And Mahoney had a message that resonated, ‘Your home is your castle.’”

  “But wasn’t that racist?”

  “Maybe to you. To some guy who’s watching the value of his home plummet because his neighborhood is changing, it’s different. You can’t mess with a man’s home. It defines him.” He looked at the paper in his typewriter. “That’s it, that’s it. You can’t mess with a man’s home. I’ve got my lede, Maddie, so if you’ll excuse me . . .”

  It rained all day the next day. It rained almost four inches, a record. It was not a cleansing rain, the kind that left a city refreshed. Humidity lingered and Maddie’s straightened hair seemed to shrink as her natural waves returned. Everyone at the paper was tired and cranky, working on too little sleep and too much coffee.

  On Thursday, she went to her mother’s house, carrying a dish of homemade chicken liver with pistachios.

  “Is this from Seven Locks?” her mother asked.

  “Actually, I made it myself.” She had, a laborious job that involved pushing the chicken livers through a sieve. “It’s kosher.”

  Her father picked the nuts out—“They’re bad for my bowels,” he said—but her mother’s inability to criticize the dish was a kind of validation. Unfortunately, it also freed her to move on to Maddie’s personal life.

  She began: “Yom Kippur is coming.”

  “Of course.”

  “So, are you going to go back home? If you ask Milton to take you back, he would probably consider it. After all, part of atoning is to forgive others.”

  “I have nothing to atone for,” Maddie said sharply. “And nothing for which I need to be forgiven.”

  “Are you dating?” There was something sly about her mother’s question, a hint of things unsaid, but Maddie’s mother had no way of knowing what happened at the corner of Mulberry and Cathedral.

  “No.” It wasn’t a lie. Maddie reasoned it wasn’t a date if all you did was have sex in your own apartment. She thought about the night at the ballpark, how thrilling it was simply to sit by him, shoulder to shoulder.

  Then she thought about John Diller, eyes narrowed, saying, “That source.”

  Her mother said: “Really, Maddie, I understand, believe me. The summer before your senior year in high school, I went a little crazy. It’s natural. You spend your life raising a child, then it’s time for the child to move on. It happens to every woman I know. Debbie Wasserman got caught shoplifting at the Giant over on Ingleside. She drove all the way over there to steal a Sara Lee swirl cake.”

  Maddie slathered some chicken liver on a piece of toast. It really was excellent. She was a better cook in her galley kitchen with the two-burner stove than she had been in Pikesville, with a freezer full of Hutzler’s cheese bread and all her little tricks for making dinner parties seem homey and homemade.

  “I don’t think that’s my situation. I have a brain. It almost atrophied from lack of use and now I want to use it.”

  “At a newspaper. And the Star, of all places.” The Morgenstern household took the Beacon in the morning, the Light in the afternoon, and was suspicious of those who didn’t follow suit. Her mother had never even seen Maddie’s work. “Look, I’m just telling you, Madeline. I know.”

  Her mother leveled her gaze at Maddie and suddenly she was sixteen again, but only for a moment. She wondered what her mother did know. Did she suspect that Maddie was not a virgin before she married, that she had visited an abortionist on lower Park Heights? It seemed impossible that she would figure out that Maddie had sought Allan out, made love to him again, then come home and conceived a child with Milton. More impossible still that she could have heard any whispers about Maddie and Ferdie. (H
ow silly their names sounded together, she realized, and yet how right.) And if Diller knew about them—well, so what? It wasn’t as if her mother was going to run into the Star’s cop reporter, or even his wife, at the Seven Locks market.

  “You could be home by October first,” her mother said now. “Every marriage has its bumps.” She glanced at her husband, who had made a neat pile of pistachios on his plate. He had been chosen for her, Tattie’s parents designating him as the only acceptable suitor for their oldest daughter, not that different from a shidduch or the Fiddler on the Roof days. Her mother’s German Jew parents would be horrified by such a comparison, even in the privacy of Maddie’s mind, but it was apt enough. Her father wasn’t even first generation; he had been born on the boat en route to the United States. Nineteen oh six. Sixty years ago. How could 1906 and 1966 be part of the same century? In 1906, there had been no world wars, most people didn’t have telephones and cars. In 1906, women couldn’t vote and black men could by law, but not in practice.

  Her parents seemed impossibly distant from her. She seemed distant from herself. Maddie couldn’t believe that she was related to the woman who used to sit in this same chair, eating this same Rosh Hashanah meal, minus her fancy chopped liver. She felt a chill, almost as if a ghost passed through her, but it was the ghost of who she used to be. Forget 1906 and 1966. Maddie couldn’t believe that 1965 and 1966 were part of the same century. She was different. Couldn’t her mother see how different she was?

  A week later, on Yom Kippur, she didn’t attend synagogue, although she fasted until sundown out of habit. She then ordered too much food at Paul Cheng’s with Seth, taking home the leftovers, confident that Ferdie would drop by.

  He did.

  October 1966

  October 1966

  “When’s your birthday?”

  Ferdie and Maddie were in a tangle of limbs, enjoying that first truly chilly night of fall, the night when quilts return to the bed and one leaves the window open a scant two inches. Even here, above the traffic and dirt of Mulberry Street, the air smelled fresh and new.

  “Why do you ask?”

  “Why wouldn’t I ask? We’ve been seeing each other almost a year and you haven’t had a birthday yet, not that I know of.”

  “Only nine months,” Maddie said.

  “That’s almost a year, isn’t it?” Amused, but also with a tinge of hurt, as if she were downplaying whatever they had.

  “November,” she said. “November tenth.”

  “And you’ll be thirty-eight.”

  Her turn to be hurt. She didn’t think she looked her age. Ferdie must have realized his gaffe because he added: “I asked for your driver’s license the day we met. I remembered the year but not the date. What do you want for your birthday?”

  “Oh, I don’t need a gift.”

  “Maybe I need to give you one, have you ever thought about that?”

  It was almost instinctive, almost, to begin kissing him, to move her body down the length of his, past that lean torso, that knot of a belly button, down, down, down. It was only later that Maddie realized how many times she had done just this to avoid certain conversations. When Ferdie said anything that sounded romantic, partnerlike, she distracted him with sex. Distracted herself, too. She liked pleasing him because he always pleased her back. Her pleasure had seemed secondary to the other men she had known. Sometimes she enjoyed it, sometimes she faked it, and Milton couldn’t tell the difference. Allan had loved seduction, the buildup. She wondered now, for the first time, if Allan preferred taking virgins because they had nothing to which to compare the experience. As someone’s first lover, one is inevitably the best.

  “Thirty-eight is such a stupid age,” she said later. “It’s not forty, yet it’s not not forty.” A beat. “How old are you? When is your birthday?”

  “December. December twenty-fifth.”

  He didn’t give his age, though.

  “Ah, so you probably never have much of a birthday. But December twenty-fifth means nothing to me. We can do what the Jews do, eat Chinese food.” She didn’t add, and go to a movie, although a matinee, then Chinese food, had been the tradition in the Schwartz household.

  “In bed.” He seemed glum.

  “That’s the old joke. Take your fortune cookie, read the fortune, and add the words in bed. It always works.” He didn’t laugh. “We can do whatever you like on your birthday.”

  “I would like—” Her heart almost stopped, terrified that he would ask for something she could never give him. Instead, he buried his face between her breasts, but he wasn’t trying to distract her. “I would like to give you the world, Maddie.”

  “I don’t need the world,” she said. “You’ve given me more than I could ever imagine.”

  With that, she slipped on a robe and went to fix a tray. The second feature on channel 2 was Devil’s Harbor, some kind of a crime film, while the Moonlight Movie on 11 was Her Master’s Voice, which seemed to be a comedy—mismatched lovers, Shakespeare’s favorite story, but executed at a much lower level. Maddie let Ferdie choose and was surprised when he picked the comedy, already thirty minutes in.

  She would be exhausted at work tomorrow, keeping such late hours. But who cared? She didn’t need to be fresh to open mail, answer phones, and fetch Mr. Helpline’s lunch.

  “I’m going to get you the best gift,” Ferdie said suddenly, his hand on her thigh. She thought he wanted to make love again, but he continued to watch the movie. At some point, she fell asleep, and when her alarm sounded at six thirty, only the tray with the empty plate and two drained glasses proved that he had ever been there.

  October 1966

  October 1966

  Milton wanted to meet. For lunch, he said, making the phone call himself instead of relying on Seth to transmit the message. Just the two of them, he said. He suggested Danny’s, an old favorite, and Maddie had to explain that she had an hour for lunch, at most, and she almost always ate at her desk. By the time she made her way to Danny’s, she’d have only enough time to order a drink, bolt it, and return to work.

  “Dinner, then. Tio Pepe’s?”

  No, that was too grand. She countered with Maison Marconi’s, within walking distance of her apartment. She would have time to get home, change, and meet him there for dinner at a very respectable six thirty. Plus, although the food was delicious, Marconi’s was overlit, not the least bit romantic.

  Still, the request worried her. There had been phone calls before, some angry, some benign, some both. But they had not been alone, face-to-face, since January. He had continued to send a little money to her, but never on a predictable schedule and never the same amount twice. Seth would hand her an envelope of cash at their weekly meetings. “To cover dinner, Dad says.” Inside would be far more money than required by dinner at the Suburban House or Paul Cheng’s Cantonese, but also less than her monthly rent. An odd gesture, one that could be seen as hostile or well-intentioned. Maddie had decided to take the more generous view. She had broken the man’s heart. And for what? It probably would have been much easier on Milton if she had left him for a richer, more successful man—say, Wallace Wright. If she had left him for anyone or anything tangible. From where he sat, it must have seemed insulting for his wife to leave only to work as a newspaper clerk, one with little hope of advancement. (She had not had a byline proper since the story on the Sherwoods. Her achievements kept being written off as flukes, feats she could not repeat.) He had never seen her apartment, of course, but he must have had some inkling of it. The whole thing could have fit into their living room in Pikesville.

  Yes, how baffling this whole adventure must have been to Milton. How baffling it was to Maddie.

  She dressed carefully, trying to find a middle ground between her old and new selves. One of her longer dresses, slightly below the knee. High heels instead of the boots she now preferred. She put her hair up, back-combing it just a little. Her only jewelry was a pin she had found in a secondhand store in Fells Point, a
cursive M of sterling silver. She wondered often about the woman who had given it up, what her M had stood for. She remembered how delighted she had been to realize, upon marriage, that her monogram would be two small M’s—Madeline Morgenstern—on either side of an S, for Schwartz. It was so beautifully symmetrical, those two M’s bracketing the S. How she had doted on the embroidered pieces of her trousseau.

  But now it seemed to her that those two M’s dwarfed by the S had predicted all too well what her life would be. A handmaiden first to Milton, then to Seth.

  She applied a pale lipstick, one of the newer shades.

  In the bright lights of Marconi’s, Milton looked nervous. Oh dear. He leaned in, seemingly to kiss her on the cheek, then apparently thought better of it and offered her a comically firm handshake. Hail, fellow, well met.

  They talked about Seth until the chopped salad arrived, then about work—Milton’s, not Maddie’s—while they waited for their entrees. (Dover sole for Milton, sweetbreads for Maddie. She really wanted the lobster cardinale but felt it would be gauche to order the most expensive thing on the menu. And she still held on to the habit of not eating shellfish in front of observant Milton.) The conversation was pleasant, but throughout there was a sense that Milton was postponing what he really wanted to say.

  Over the ice cream with the famous chocolate sauce, he blurted out:

  “You don’t wear your rings anymore.”

  “They were—” She had almost forgotten the story. “They were stolen. From the first apartment. That’s part of the reason I moved.”

  “I’m not sure you picked a safer part of town.”

  “I live not even two blocks from here. If it’s safe enough to drive down for dinner, how bad can it be?”

  She regretted telling him that her apartment was nearby. He would probably insist on taking her to her door. What if he tried to kiss her? She had loved Milton, she really had. If it hadn’t been for Wally Weiss, she might never have realized she had fallen out of love with him. She remembered fondly his broad, fuzzy chest, how safe she had felt with him.