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.
“When they find her—” Maddie tried again.
“If,” corrected her mother. “When I was a girl, I remember hearing about a pervert who raped little girls and then killed them. It was where you live now, which was a ghetto then. A ghetto now, really. Anyway, he attacked one little girl and her mother had a gun and shot him, so that was the end of that.”
Maddie’s neighborhood was not a ghetto and her mother’s story was lifted almost verbatim from the pages of A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, a book beloved by mother and daughter. But there was no point in calling her on it. Tattie Morgenstern believed everything she said.
“I hope they do find her, and soon,” Maddie had said, surprised by her own fervency.
She’d told her mother she had to go, although she didn’t have to do anything. She had the insurance money for her “stolen” ring and the proceeds from her car sale to tide her over until Milton was forced to pay alimony. Her lawyer was confident that Maddie soon would have her half of the house, her half of almost everything, including Seth. Until then, she could live off her savings, if she was careful.
She’d put on her coat and headed out for a walk. Her neighborhood wasn’t that bad. She had a strange fantasy, strange even to her. She imagined one of the men she saw on the street grabbing her, trying to drag her into an alley. He would be foreign, spewing unintelligible syllables, pawing at her. It would be terrifying, yet also exciting, proof of how desirable she was, even at her age. With her straightened hair and tight sweaters, she looked younger than thirty-seven. The man would try to force his mouth on hers, then somehow—she didn’t have to explain it, dreams had their own logic—Ferdie would be there, he would save her and they would both be so overwhelmed that they would find someplace nearby—a bathroom, a car—to make love. Risking exposure in every sense of the word.
It was a strange fantasy, but fantasies were never wrong, or so Maddie had read somewhere.
Lost in those thoughts, Maddie had walked farther than she’d planned. What should she do today? The giddy freedom of her early weeks, of having no one to care for, had ebbed and the affair—was that the right word?—heightened the do-nothingness of the rest of life. She was trying not to be too available to Ferdie. Sometimes, she forced herself to go out for dinner around the time he usually called, just to keep him on his toes. She still had the instincts that had made her one of the most sought-after girls in Baltimore, in her day. Back then, she’d even kept a little notebook, with a code, that allowed her to remember how far she had progressed with each boy she dated. K (obvious), SK (“soul kiss,” which she thought a much nicer term than “French kissing”), OC, OB, UB (“over clothes,” “over bra,” “under bra”). Only two boys had gone US (“under skirt”) and she had married the second one.
Wally Weiss had not merited a mention in her notebook. He had received only one kiss, one time, and it was sisterly, more of a promise that one day he would find a girl to K, SK.
Yet she had not been physically coy with Ferdie. She blushed with the memory of how quickly they had progressed. The first time he had grabbed her and kissed her, she had assumed it was because he knew. She was lying about the ring and this was the price she had to pay. She was a bad girl and he had this over her. But since that first encounter, she had come to realize that Ferdie had no idea she was, in fact, a criminal. She had found a pawnshop that wasn’t fussy about paperwork, easy to do in her neighborhood, and it paid her half of what Weinstein’s had offered, but it was all profit at this point. Maddie had used the cash to buy things for the apartment—bistro chairs and a marble-topped table, velvet throw pillows, a pretty rug.
She had stopped at the Beehive for a to-go cup of its strong, scorched coffee. Lying on her bed—so decadent, to be on a bed in the daytime, if one wasn’t sick—she had tried to focus on her library book, Herzog. The poetry she had loved and tried to write as a teenager no longer affected her, but the recommended novels at the Pratt didn’t move her, either. She had chosen Herzog because someone from Hadassah said it was anti-Semitic and she liked to make up her own mind about these things. Maddie was not persuaded, not so far, that Bellow was a “self-loathing Jew,” but she squirmed uncomfortably at the coincidence of the titular character’s second wife’s name, Madeleine, so close to hers. She was an awful person, this Madeleine. It was hard not to take it personally.
Maddie wondered if she would ever be someone’s second wife. She wanted to live passionately, fully. Is that possible in a marriage of long standing? She and Milton had been very amorous in their early years. She was almost too amorous. She still blushed at the memory, the two of them a week out from their wedding, parked in a popular spot near Cylburn Arboretum, so close to doing the deed.
He’d said no.
He’d said no.
She’d had her hand on him, something she did for him and just one other man, something else she never wrote down. Her diary was like a general’s campaign, noting only what territory had been seized from her. It did not occur to her to document her own sorties. And there had come a time when she wrote nothing at all, when it was unthinkable to admit what she was doing—and with whom.
She parted her legs and tried to guide Milton inside her; she thought it was the greatest gift she could bestow. They were betrothed, almost married. What could be the harm?
“I don’t want to lie before God,” Milton said. For a second, she thought he meant lying down.
“Of course,” she said, her always reliable instincts guiding her to what was necessary to rescue her dignity, her reputation. “I was just so carried away by you, Miltie.”
On her wedding night, she remembered to mimic the pain she had experienced her true first time. If Milton ever suspected his bride was not a virgin, he was polite enough—or disappointed enough—not to let on. It was an important first lesson in a young marriage. Let some lies lie.
At noon, Maddie had put away her book and poked around the icebox for something to eat. Her practice for the past few years had been to lunch on things like melba toast and cottage cheese. Yet Ferdie wanted her to put on weight, was forever urging food on her. “Someone needs to take care of you, baby,” he said, clearly having decided that her thinness was a by-product of her caring for others, not a rigidly achieved state. Maddie, who had always followed fashion, couldn’t help noticing that a girl named Twiggy was suddenly everywhere. The new styles favored thin women. Of course, she was too old for such clothes. Or was she? No matter how thin she got, her breasts never seemed to shrink. She thought of how many boys had begged, begged, to progress from OC to OB to UB, how the discovery of her breasts took their breaths away, like they were men seeing land after a long time at sea.