Lady in the Lake Read online

  The phone didn’t ring.

  But there was another sound, like sleet against her window. She went to the bedroom and there was Ferdie on her fire escape.

  “I was driving by,” he said, “and I saw the light on.”

  “You shouldn’t be out there,” she said, “someone will call the cops.”

  “Luckily, the cops are already here.” He swung a uniformed leg over her windowsill.

  She was between his legs when the phone started to ring. He placed a firm hand on her head and she found herself working to the phone’s rhythm. It kept ringing and ringing. Who let a phone ring twenty times? Ferdie and the phone finally gave way and she fell back, pleased with herself, when it started to ring again. It had to be Milton, and if it was Milton, then it had to be about Seth. What could have happened in the two hours since she saw him last?

  She picked up the phone, but it was just the girl from the jewelry store, asking if she wanted to go to that political meeting. Sure, why not, sometime, depending on her schedule? She would have said anything to get off the call and back to Ferdie.

  Later, as Ferdie napped beside her, Maddie wondered how she could keep her promise to her son. She had to do something with her life.

  She had to matter.

  My family ate black-eyed peas for the New Year.

  My family ate black-eyed peas for the New Year. Do you know the custom? It’s supposed to bring luck. My father didn’t like it. He didn’t like anything that had the faintest shade of hoodoo to it. If you spilled salt at the table, he thought it better to just let it lie. He would walk under ladders, cross any black cat’s path. To my father, superstitions were godless. Live right, follow the Ten Commandments, and you wouldn’t have to worry about ladders or cats or the number thirteen. But he let my mama make black-eyed peas on New Year’s Day, as long as we didn’t talk about it, and I believed in those peas.

  But when I didn’t show up on January first to eat with my family, no one paid any mind. They knew the life I was living. “Flighty,” my father would say to my mother. “She is a flighty girl and I have to blame you for that, Merva.” Even on a humdrum Saturday night, I would have worked or had a date. Sometimes I worked and had a date. No crime in that. Obviously, I would have gone out on New Year’s Eve, no matter how late I worked. It had been an unusually fine day for December, a finer one still for January, topping sixty degrees.

  It was, as it turned out, excellent dying weather.

  When did my family think to ask after me? I had been there two days earlier, to see the boys. And although I had showered them with gifts at Christmas—because I could now, I had resources—I brought them more toys on the twenty-ninth. I never came to that house empty-handed. Toys for the boys, food for Mama—hams and roasts, things she seldom allowed herself, shopping the bargains at the no-name grocery store in our neighborhood. That night, I brought her a jacket of mine I knew she liked. I would have given her cash money, too. But my father wouldn’t allow that. He said my money was dirty, that he didn’t want it. He said that I should be saving it, so I could take my boys back.

  He wasn’t wrong. But it’s a temptation, being paid in cash. It doesn’t feel real, exactly, especially if one’s other bills are taken care of. Except for my share of rent to Latetia, of course, and I never worried too much about that. If I ran short, all I had to do was cry a few pretty tears. And, sure, I spent a little on myself. Not as much as people think—my nicest clothes weren’t new, but good as. Better, I think, because the beautiful clothes in my closet arrived with histories. Any man can buy a woman clothes. My main man was taking a risk when he gave me something.

  Are you really missing if almost nobody misses you? I was dead, but being a ghost comes with fewer privileges than you might expect. I couldn’t see my family, couldn’t linger in their rooms, much as I yearned to. Besides, if I had been given the right to haunt someone, I wouldn’t have chosen my family. They deserved better than my sad little ghost, hanging around, full of self-pity.

  The mild weather quickly ended, the weather turned bitter, followed by that blizzard at month’s end. It was only then that anyone began to take my mama seriously. There had been rumors that I had gone to Florida, along with Latetia, who ran away to Elkton and eloped on New Year’s Eve. She cabled me that she was moving to Florida with her new man, but the cable sat, unread, in a pile of bills and junk shoved under the door of our place on Druid Hill Avenue. The landlord discovered it when he came by on January 15, to complain about not being paid. He was ready to put all our stuff on the street, but my mama made good on my portion, ransomed my possessions, the ones worth keeping. She bundled up my beautiful clothes and took them back to my family’s place. She wanted so to believe that I would wear them again.

  The Afro-American ran the first piece about me on February 14. Happy Valentine’s Day to me; my mother loved me enough to convince people that I hadn’t just walked away on my own. The police began to ask questions, if only out of respect. The last anyone had seen me for sure was heading out on December 31—early January 1, actually—for what I told everyone was going to be a big, big night.

  Tommy, who worked the bar at the Flamingo, even remembered my last words: “They say whatever you’re doing on January first is what you’ll do all year. I don’t need to eat any black-eyed peas to know that 1966 is going to be a great year.”

  You could have read all of this in the Afro-American, Maddie Schwartz, but I’m guessing that you don’t make a habit of reading the Afro.

  March came in like a lion, they still hadn’t found me, and the daily newspapers still hadn’t written a word about me.

  Tessie Fine—she was missed right away. I know, I know: she was only eleven. And white. Still, it did not escape my attention that her disappearance was noted almost immediately. You certainly noticed. That was your first taste, the little girl. You’re a morbid one, Maddie Schwartz.

  Again, I have to ask: are you really missing if nobody misses you?

  The Schoolgirl

  The Schoolgirl

  I can’t believe I end up fighting with the principal on my eleventh birthday, but I am one of the best students at Bais Yaakov and I like to argue. I’m good at debating. I’m good at everything. I am furious that I will not be publicly called to the Torah in front of my friends and family. I want a bat mitzvah, but modern Orthodox families like mine only allow boys that. Some of the Conservative families will throw parties for the girls, as for Reform—no one cares what the Reform families do. My parents say the Reform aren’t really Jewish.

  “This is pride,” Rabbi tells me. “This has nothing to do with your life as a Jew. You yearn to show off. That is not the point of a bar mitzvah.”

  It isn’t the first time I’ve been warned about pride, so I have an argument ready. “I am proud of being a Jew, yes. And the boys are proud, too. Even though most of them do not read Hebrew as well as I do.”

  “You need to cultivate modesty, Tessie.”

  “Why?” I stamp my feet, enjoying the hard sound of the taps that my mother puts on the heels so they’ll last longer.

  “The Torah tells us . . .” I’m not really listening to Rabbi. I am readying my own argument. The beauty of the Torah is that you can always find what you need to win an argument.

  I toss my hair so my curls bounce on my shoulder, shiny as a shampoo commercial. My hair is just like my aunt’s and she calls it my crowning glory. When I read Anne of Green Gables, I never understood why Anne wasn’t delighted to be a redhead. I love being the only redhead in my class. “A cardinal among the wrens,” people say. They think they’re saying it out of my hearing. I am the tallest, too, and the first to start getting a shape. It’s my plan to take my birthday money from my grandmother and buy a bra.

  It’s a secret mission, of course. My mother would never approve. But once I smuggle the bra into the house, what can she do? A bra can’t be returned to the store after you wear it and my mother would never throw away a piece of clothing. We have lot
s of money, but my mother is frugal. She makes homemade brandy from cherries, darns our socks. I’m more like my aunt, the one they call the spendthrift.

  Rabbi drones on and on about modesty, tzniut. “We must always remember that while the pursuit of knowledge is laudable, it is not to be used for show. Or as a weapon to make others do what we want.”

  Hmmm. I have noticed that while boys are praised for using their knowledge exactly like a weapon, girls are not. I am always being told to listen, not to interrupt. Two years ago, assigned an essay on my future life, I wrote that I wanted to be an opera singer or a rabbi. They told me a girl can never be a rabbi, or even a cantor. They gave me the same speech about modesty, tzniut. If I had a dollar for every time someone quoted “All is vanity” to me, I could buy five new bras, one for each school day. Modesty is for people who aren’t lucky enough to have things about which to be conceited.

  I can’t wait to come to school in my white blouse, sheer enough that the other girls will see I have proper straps, not an undershirt. I’m going to buy a Vassarette bra because they’re the best, I saw the ads when I sneak-read Seventeen magazine at the drugstore. I’ll button my cardigan over my shirt so my mother doesn’t know what I’m doing.

  I have been planning this shopping trip for days. First, I tell a convincing lie to the mother who drives carpool this afternoon. The underwear store is next to a pet store, so I tell Mrs. Finkelstein that my brother’s fish needs fish food and she can let me off there. She frets—she is supposed to take me to the door—but my house is only two blocks away and we are within the eruv. The days are getting longer, but it’s still cold and today is particularly nasty, with a wet rain, hard as pebbles. She wants to get home, too, and I’m the last girl to be dropped off. There is no parking space—there are never parking spaces along this block—so she makes me promise to go straight home.

  I make that pledge easily, no need to cross my fingers. What is “straight home,” after all? I can’t get home without walking past the lingerie store.

  Aware that Mrs. Finkelstein is watching, I push my way into the pet store, which smells horrible. It is the most boring kind of pet store, all fish and turtles and snakes, nothing with fur. Fur. I’m going to get a fur coat when I turn eighteen. My grandparents, who own a fur store, have promised me this. But I want it sooner, maybe at age sixteen. That’s still five years away, a whole new decade. I want a fur. I want a ring like my mother’s, with a big green stone that my mother says isn’t an emerald, but I think it must be. I want glittery earrings. I want to marry a rich man or make a lot of money on my own so I can have whatever I want, when I want it.

  But, right now, I want a Vassarette bra, preferably in pink.

  “Can I help you?” A man’s voice, coming from the back of the pet shop. I am pretending to inspect the snakes in the glass boxes in the front of the store, but I am really trying to keep watch through the dusty window, making sure that Mrs. Finkelstein’s car has pulled away and gone through the light.

  “No,” I say, using what my family calls my duchess airs. “I’m just looking.”

  The man is skinny and pale, with orange hair and red-rimmed eyes. If a cold could be a person, it would look like this man. His eyes remind me of white mice, not that this shop sells anything as cuddly as mice. He has a sniffle and poor posture.

  “You’re a redhead,” he says. “Like me.”

  No, I’m not. No, he’s not. He’s an orange head. I turn my back to him.

  “Do you want a snake? Or maybe a pair of little turtles?”

  “I’ll tell you if I see anything I want. A person can walk around a store and look at things.”

  “But some of our fish require special tanks, and you can’t put just any two fish together—”

  “I’ll tell you if I need you,” I say. I don’t want to talk to a man who works in a dirty, smelly store. An orange-headed man who thinks he can tell me, Tessie Fine, with ten dollars in my pocket, what I am allowed to do. My aunt doesn’t let shopkeepers speak to her this way. I’ve seen her in Hutzler’s, when the salesladies try to spray her with perfume. “Darling,” she says, drawing out the r-sound, “I wear only Joy.” The customer is always right.

  “Okay, but you can’t go around just touching things . . .”

  I don’t want to touch anything here, but he can’t tell me what to do.

  “It’s a free country.” I stamp my foot. I like the sound of my metal-capped heels on the wood floor.

  “Don’t do that,” the man says, making a face as if the sound is painful to him.

  “You can’t tell me what to do.” I stamp my foot. It is a glorious sound. I stamp and I stamp and I stamp and I—

  March 1966

  March 1966

  “Is there anything more annoying than not getting to do something you never wanted to do in the first place?”

  Maddie was trying to make a joke on herself, an observation about the eternal push-and-pull between mothers and daughters.

  But Judith Weinstein must have thought this a profound inquiry, worthy of a thoughtful answer, for she did not reply right away. Maddie could not see Judith’s face—they were working their way down a narrow path, with Maddie leading the way—but Judith, when she finally answered, sounded like someone who yearned to be agreeable, even if she didn’t quite agree.

  “It is frustrating that we made the effort and they wouldn’t let us help. But they didn’t stop us, did they?”

  Her voice was as wobbly as their footing. Judith probably thought Maddie was insane, following these old trails through the arboretum, darkness encroaching. How had they ended up here?

  Because her mother had called her that morning, as she had every morning at nine since Maddie’s phone was installed, and it never occurred to Maddie not to pick up. It was the one thing that was the same about her old and new lives, the daily call from her mother.

  “Maddie, have you heard about Tessie Fine?”

  “Of course, Mother. I’m on Cathedral Street, not in Siberia. We get the same newspapers. I listen to WBAL.”

  Maddie’s mother had made a small but distinct “Pffft.” This meant she disagreed with Maddie’s facts but couldn’t be bothered to argue. She also seemed to shudder reflexively at the mere mention of “Cathedral,” as if the street name was an affront. She’d have been more horrified if she realized that Maddie’s apartment, while on the Mulberry side of the building, actually overlooked the cathedral.

  “It’s been two days. Our synagogue has been sending volunteers. You meet up at the parking lot, then go in pairs . . .”

  The “you” was specific, not general. Maddie’s mother, Tattie Morgenstern—some strange childhood bastardization of Harriet that she refused to stop using—was telling Maddie that she would go to the parking lot, she would be paired up, she would walk an assigned route in the ever-expanding perimeter around the tropical fish store where Tessie Fine was last seen.

  Baltimore had been aflame with the story. Tessie Fine, so pretty, so young. She had told the mother who dropped her off that she was going to buy food for her brother’s fish. But her brother had no fish. The man in the store said she had walked in but left five minutes later without buying anything. He said she had been rude to him. Family and friends said, with evident admiration, “Yes, that’s our Tessie.”

  Maddie’s mother knew Tessie’s grandmother. She didn’t like her, but she knew her. They had been children together, classmates at The Park School when it was still on Auchentoroly Terrace. Park, although nonsectarian, was the preferred school for the German Jewish families, whose children had not been welcome at the city’s older private schools at the time. As the neighborhood around Druid Hill Park “changed”—the preferred euphemism for integration—the families and the school migrated to the northwest. Maddie had attended Park at its Liberty Heights location; now it was in Brooklandville, almost all the way to the Beltway, and Seth was a third-generation student. Maddie had even had a date or two with Tessie’s father, when they
were young teens.

  Tessie’s father, Bobby Fine, was more conservative than his parents. He chose to live within the eruv in Park Heights. According to Tattie, his mother blamed Bobby’s wife for this unseemly embrace of Orthodoxy. It was one thing to have two sets of dishes and eschew shellfish and pork. But Bobby’s wife took Judaism too far. It seemed to Maddie that there was no end to Tattie Morgenstern’s opinions about religion, about which was the correct one (Conservative Judaism), how much was the right amount. She also used “Presbyterian” as a pejorative for all things Protestant.

  Over the years, Maddie had seen Tessie’s mother here and there, registering her as a mousey thing, albeit well-dressed. But the Fine and Schwartz social circles did not overlap and it seemed vulgar to encroach on the Fine family tragedy. If they had been true friends, Maddie would have gladly assisted. But they had not even attended each other’s weddings and—

  Maddie didn’t want to follow her own chain of thought, about the next Fine family ritual that she would not be attending.

  “So awful,” Tattie said. “I don’t know how any parent could survive this.”

  “She could be alive,” Maddie said. A happy resolution to the case was still possible, wasn’t it? A little girl could wander away, get lost, maybe bump her head and not know who she was? But Ferdie had said much the same thing as Tattie just last night: Tessie Fine was almost certainly dead and the homicide detectives who had caught the case were under pressure to make some kind of progress as quickly as possible.