Lady in the Lake Read online

  It’s been years since my family could afford the country club, but I remember stories about Maddie Schwartz when she was Maddie Morgenstern. I think it was my brother Nathan who had a crush on her. He’s the one who told me what a sensation she caused the day she wore a flesh-pink suit. And smart, too—graduated high school at age seventeen, did two years of college before she married. Of course, she’s almost old enough to be my mother, but why draw attention to that? My oldest brother could be my father if it came to that. Age-wise, I mean.

  Besides, Maddie is nothing like my mother. My mother was born old. In photographs from the 1920s, Papa has the look of a dandy about him, someone who enjoys himself; Mama looks stern and unhappy, even as a child. But then, Papa was second generation, whereas Mama was three when her family came over. It makes a difference, all the difference sometimes. We never speak about the family members who didn’t get out in time. “What is there to say,” Mama said when I asked.

  No, Maddie is my best shot. But I didn’t know how to get in touch with her. She’d given me her mother’s number; I suspected she didn’t have a phone. (More evidence that she was living hand to mouth.) I would have to bide my time.

  Then, just last week, I ran into Maddie’s mother, Mrs. Morgenstern, at the deli counter at Seven Locks. (That’s another thing I want to escape. My mother makes me do most of the shopping, saying it’s good training for when I keep my own house.)

  “Mrs. Morgenstern,” I said shyly. “It’s Judith, Judith Weinstein? From the club?”

  She inspected me over the rims of her glasses. “It’s been years.”

  It was hard to decode that innocuous statement, to know whether Mrs. Morgenstern was commenting on the passage of time or the scandal of bankruptcy that took the Weinsteins out of elite circles when I was still a child. I guess the fact that I can’t figure out her intent proves what a lady she is.

  “I was wondering if you knew how I could get in touch with Maddie? She was in the store the other day and”—I reached for a plausible reason—“something’s come in that’s closer to what she was looking for.”

  “Really? I can’t see how Madeline would be in the position to buy anything. But she always was impractical that way. At any rate, she has a phone now. She moved downtown.”

  She took out a tiny notebook and wrote down the seven digits. Three three two—not an exchange I know. Mrs. Morgenstern’s handwriting was remarkably like the woman herself, very straight up and down, pretty yet intimidating. I didn’t think a mother could be more domineering than my own, but Mrs. Morgenstern seemed to have her own way of getting what she wanted.

  That was Friday. I waited until today to telephone. I figured Mrs. Morgenstern must have shared the encounter by now, so Maddie won’t be too surprised by my call. And I had mentioned the Stonewall Democratic Club meeting.

  I phone at eight, figuring that’s civilized. A woman living alone should have finished dinner and the dishes by then, would be preparing to sit down and watch the evening shows. The Big Valley comes on at nine. I like to watch that myself, although my mother’s run-on commentary—“Barbara Stanwyck looks younger than that man playing her son, she’s right, you know, women do have to take responsibility for leading men on, even if they’re crazy like that, what do they call those pants, gauchos?”—makes me want to scream.

  The phone rings and rings. I let it go five, eight, twelve times—a person could be in the bathroom. Or maybe I dialed wrong. I try again, just to be sure.

  Maddie answers on the second ring, breathless.

  “Maddie? It’s Judith, Judith Weinstein.”

  “Oh my—I mean, was that you before? Letting it ring and ring? I couldn’t get to the phone and I thought, no big deal, but when it started again, I was worried it was something to do with my son—” Her words seem to be tumbling through all sorts of emotions, relief and irritation and something I can’t pinpoint.

  “I’m so sorry. I only dialed again because I thought I dialed wrong the first time.”

  “What do you want?” Her tone borders on rudeness. But she was worried.

  “Just to follow up on what I mentioned. About going to the Stonewall Democratic Club. I really think you might like it. I can even pick you up if I borrow my parents’ car.” Obviously, I want to check out the apartment, see if it is big enough. If not, I’ll have to persuade Maddie to take a two-bedroom.

  “Oh.” It’s as if she has no memory of our conversation. She seems vague. If I didn’t know better, I would think she’s a little drunk. But nice Jewish ladies don’t get drunk on a Wednesday night.

  “There’s a meeting next week. It’s interesting. I know, it seems like it’s not important, supporting Democrats in a state like Maryland, but you can’t take things for granted. The primary matters and there are so many ways to get involved.”

  “Can I call you back? Not tonight, but—later this week?”

  “Sure, I’ll give you my number.”

  Maddie must have put the phone down. I hear the kinds of sounds one makes when trying to find paper and pencil, but also—something else. A rumble, a sharp little yelp from Maddie—“No! I mean—no!” As if she has banged her hip into a drawer, but also, it seems to me, as if she enjoys the sensation.

  “I’m ready,” she says, and I rattle off my parents’ number, although by now I never expect to hear from Maddie Schwartz. Maddie Schwartz, I’m pretty sure, does not spend her Wednesday nights watching The Big Valley. I am surer still she does not want a roommate.

  Settling in with my parents in front of the television, I try not to sigh as my mother talks on and on, sharing her every thought, some of them even related to the program we’re watching. My father is silent, as usual. He never really came back from losing Weinstein’s Drugs. I always thought that part of the problem was that his name was intertwined with the store, that seeing the business fall apart and the signs come down was like watching his own body dismantled and sold for pennies on the dollar.

  Tonight, he allows himself one comment and it’s about the actress playing Audra. “She’s really striking.” Mama takes great offense. “Oh, so now you like blondes. That’s a nice change of pace for you.”

  I have to find a way out of this house.

  February 1966

  February 1966

  Maddie laid her head on the gingham cloth, marveling at what she was about to do. It seemed so unlikely—dangerous, even. But Ferdie wanted her to do it. Not that he had said as much, not in so many words. He hadn’t really said anything at all, just tried to run his fingers through her hair, only to have them repelled by the hairspray she needed to keep her longish bouffant in shape.

  “I know a woman—” he’d begun.

  “I assume you know a lot of women,” Maddie had teased. She did assume that. Ferdie might even have been married for all she knew. What did it matter? There was no way they were going to go any place outside her apartment, not with her divorce pending and not with—it just wasn’t a good idea, the world being the world, Baltimore being Baltimore.

  “A woman for hair,” he’d said. “What they call a kitchen magician. She’d do it cheap.”

  “Do what?”

  “Iron it.” The word had come out as one syllable, arn. Ferdie was fourth-generation Baltimore, his roots deeper than Maddie’s. The Platt family had come north from the Carolinas after the Civil War, and thanks to a lawsuit in the early fifties, he had been able to attend Poly, a fact he had managed to drop into conversation early on. One had to be an outstanding student to go to Polytechnic, the all-boys public high school for those with an engineering bent, yet Ferdie was mysterious about the gap between his high school graduation and his decision to join BPD. To Maddie’s ear, he sounded like any working-class Baltimorean, with his long O’s and extra R’s. The first few times he had called her, on the phone he had insisted they needed, she had thought it was some strange white man. Although he was far from a stranger by the time she moved to the corner of Mulberry and Cathedral Street.
r />   He had come by the apartment on Gist Avenue two days after the “burglary.” The matter had been turned over to two detectives, who took a report and told Maddie they would check with the pawnshops, but she shouldn’t expect much. Because she knew there was no ring to be found, she put the matter out of her head, so she was surprised—and a little fearful—when Ferdie Platt dropped by.

  “Just checking on you,” he’d said. Every word seemed layered with irony and innuendo. Did his all-seeing eyes stop on the African violet as he scanned the apartment? Did he know its secret? Was it racist to think that a Negro cop suspected her when she hadn’t worried about the white detectives who took the official report?

  Then he had stared at her, really stared at her, held her gaze and—oh. She had forgotten about that kind of look.

  “I want to check that sliding door.”

  “The one in my bedroom?” Her voice squeaked on the last word.

  “The one where the burglar entered.”

  “The one in my bedroom.”

  “Right.”

  She led him there, but they’d never made it to the sliding door. As soon as he had her over the threshold, he snaked his arms about her waist, turned her around, and started kissing her. In some part of her mind, she was offended by his presumption, but the rest of her body shouted down that remnant of Mrs. Milton Schwartz. She had been flirting with him in the drugstore that day, and if it had been an empty exercise at the time, she was glad to have her bluff called. She hadn’t felt like this—well, she wouldn’t say Milton never had made her feel this way, but she had been married a long time.

  He didn’t even bother to take off her clothes or his, just pushed her down on the bed, her skirt flipped up so it almost covered her face. He’s probably not circumcised, Mrs. Milton Schwartz fretted, but Maddie didn’t care. And what about pregnancy?

  He’ll do the right thing, she told her former self.

  Then she was moaning, making sounds she barely recognized. Maddie had always enjoyed sex with Milton, but Ferdie was forcing her to consider the idea that maybe she just enjoyed sex.

  Her real worry was that this would be all he wanted, this one time.

  “We had to get that out of the way,” he said when he was done. He kissed her, grabbed tissues from the bedside table to clean himself and dab at the sheet. “The next time will be slow and pretty. But I haven’t been able to think about anything else since I met you.”

  Even in her haze, Maddie assumed this was a lie. He was too sharp, too focused, to lose himself to a daydream. Still, there was nothing wrong with this brand of flattery. How she had missed it. Oh, sometimes a husband got drunk over the years, cornered her at a party, and swore he was obsessed with her, but Maddie had always ducked those sloppy, unpromising embraces with practiced good humor.

  This was something different.

  “The next time—” she began, although she wasn’t sure what she was going to say. That there would be no next time? That she couldn’t wait for it?

  “Don’t worry,” he said. “I’ve got no place to be.”

  Later, under the sheets, they inspected each other’s naked bodies, satisfied customers. He was circumcised, after all—“Jew doctor,” he said, when her hand lingered. The biggest surprise on his compact, athletic body was his navel, an outie, very large and bumpy. For his part, he seemed most interested in her breasts and her hair. She wanted to ask if she was the first white woman he had been with, but the question seemed rude. It was easier to make love a third time.

  His suggestion that she “arn” her hair did not come up for several weeks, after she had moved and they had established a pattern. He would call, ask if she was free. She always was, for him. He would show up with Chinese takeout or pizza. They ended up eating the food cold, often in bed, between slugs of foamy beer. He liked Ballantine’s Ale, so she kept that on hand and drank it with him, although she preferred wine or vermouth.

  He called before he came so she could sneak down and leave the lower door unlocked. He arrived after dark and disappeared in the early morning hours. He always wore his uniform. Inevitably, people saw him—and her next-door neighbor did more than see him, Maddie knew. Funny, she had not been loud before. But she wanted someone to hear, to know that she was having sex two, three times a night, even if it was just her motley assortment of neighbors. Sometimes, Ferdie liked to bend her over the sink in her bathroom, and while he kept his eyes tightly shut, she was mesmerized by their images in the mirror. She had never looked so pale and tiny. Before Ferdie, she had thought of herself as dark.

  And somehow this had led her to a stranger’s home not that far from that apartment on Gist Avenue, Maddie’s cheek pressed against the gingham cover of an ironing board, waiting for the kitchen magician to straighten her hair. The woman was tall and broad, wearing a shapeless dress and slippers. Her own hair was covered by a kerchief.

  “How’d you hear about me?” she asked.

  Ferdie had coached Maddie on what to say. “My mother’s cleaning lady.”

  “You can get the same style putting your hair up on orange juice cans.” She pronounced it urnge. “But this will last a little longer, if there’s not too much dampness in the air.”

  When it was done, Maddie wasn’t sure how she felt. Beautiful, yes, not unlike an actress she had seen on several television shows as of late, with big brown eyes and long, glossy hair. But she also felt as if she had surrendered part of herself, especially when she went to pick up Seth and he said: “What have you done?”

  For a second, she didn’t realize he meant the hair.

  She touched her straight, shining locks, imagined Ferdie’s fingers in it, hoped he would call before it began to frizz again. “Just wanted to try something different.”

  “Haven’t you tried enough different things this year?”

  Could he know? Maddie had noticed that the more sex she had with Ferdie, the more men seemed to notice her on the street, almost as if she were giving off some animalistic scent. But Seth was just a sullen teenager, doing what sullen teenagers do, torturing his mother. He was angry with her. Of course he was. She should have waited to leave, she supposed, until he was out of high school.

  Her midweek “dates” with Seth were always awkward. She’d tell him to choose the restaurant, he’d say he didn’t care, she would pick the Suburban House or the chop suey place on Reisterstown Road, and then he would complain about her selection. She asked him questions, he grunted one-syllable answers. They were both relieved when it was over.

  Tonight, however, she tried to press him. “Seth—if you’re angry with me, that’s okay.”

  “Well, thanks.” They were at the Suburban House, where he had ordered a grilled cheese sandwich and fries, and she had let it pass, not bothering to lecture him about his complexion, with which he had just recently won a delicate truce. He ate with his mouth open. She didn’t have the energy to correct that, either.

  “I’m really sorry that your father and I are getting a divorce.”

  He shrugged, dragged a French fry through ketchup. “No skin off my butt.”

  “Seth. You don’t even know what that means, not really.”

  He stopped to think. “Sure I do. It means—”

  “Well, it’s not nice. And it’s not how you speak to your mother.”

  “You left. You’re not my mom.”

  “I’ll always be your mother. I just didn’t want to be your father’s wife anymore.”

  She could see him trying to feign nonchalance. But he couldn’t help himself. “Why? You don’t fight. Well, you do now, but you didn’t before. I don’t get it.”

  “I’m not sure I can put it into words. It’s as if I had a glimpse of—like in the poem, the road not taken. I don’t think I’m the person I was meant to be.” She added hastily, “I was meant to be your mother. You had to exist, the world needs you, Seth. That was part of my destiny. But not all of it. You’re almost grown. I want to do something with my life.”

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p; “Like a job? But you’ve never worked. What would you do?”

  Maddie did not fault Seth for not realizing that he had been her work. She hadn’t seen it that way either. Running a household, raising a good if somewhat sullen boy, being a devoted wife—up until she left—these things were not work. Your children gave you cards on Mother’s Day. Your husband, if he was prosperous enough, gave you jewelry on your birthday. Every culture was full of folk songs lauding mothers. But it wasn’t a job.

  As a boy, Seth had read biographies about the childhoods of great Americans—presidents, sports figures. The series included a few girls and some were outstanding—Jane Addams, Amelia Earhart, Betsy Ross. But one of the chosen women was Juliette Low, the founder of the Girl Scouts, a pretty minor accomplishment, in Maddie’s eyes. How brilliant did one have to be to come up with a female version of the Boy Scouts? The series was so desperate for females to include that they even devoted one volume to Nancy Hanks, whose only role in history was to give birth to Abraham Lincoln.

  “I know I have only two years of college, but there’s a lot I could do.”

  “Like what?”

  “I could—work at a museum. Or maybe get a job at the radio station.” Wally Weiss owed her that much, she thought wryly, although she could not imagine calling on him for help.

  Sensing weakness, Seth asked if he could have a second Coke.

  “Sure,” Maddie said, defeated. It was folly to expect a child to care about a parent’s dreams and desires.

  When she got home, she stared at the phone, willing it to ring. Ferdie almost never called on Wednesdays. Not because he knew of her standing dinner with Seth, but because—well, he never said and she didn’t want to ask. There was a wife, there had to be a wife. That Maddie could endure. But she was pretty sure there were other women, too, and she was wild with curiosity about them. She stared at the phone, all too aware that she was living that Dorothy Parker story, the one about the girl’s plaintive prayer to God to make the phone ring. Maddie had loved Dorothy Parker as a teenager but never worried about boys calling her. Everything had gone according to her plans until the summer after high school, when she tried to reel in a fish that was much too big for her inexpert hands. She was self-aware enough to realize that the relationship with Ferdie brought back that outlaw time, that it made her feel young, having to pursue another relationship in secret.