So you met Lady Law

So you met Lady Law, Maddie Schwartz. I knew her, when I was a child. Everyone in that neighborhood knew her. She was the one who comforted me when your future husband made me cry. Milton made lots of children cry. Did you know that? He was a miserable fat boy, sitting in his family’s corner grocery, studying his books. I was only six years old, a first grader, and this college boy decided to taunt me because he heard another child use my nickname, Cleo. My real name is Eunetta. Can you blame me for preferring Cleo?

The nickname had been bestowed by other children, as nicknames usually are. I suppose some people anoint themselves, but that’s a little sad, isn’t it? We were studying the ancient Egyptians and there was a drawing of Cleopatra, in profile. A boy, thinking he was mocking me, said, “Miz Henderson, this looks like Cleo, her with her nose always up in the air.” My nose is—was—beautiful. Straight, delicate, perfectly formed. It was like walking around with a ten-carat diamond, only no one could take it from me. So people tried to make me feel bad about it, tried to pretend that my beauty was ugliness, that up was down, black was white. But their teasing couldn’t get to me because they couldn’t mask their envy. I had light eyes and a pretty mouth and slanting cheekbones. But, really, it was my nose that organized everything, made me beautiful. I never had an awkward phase, conceited as that might sound. Maybe I should have. Men started coming around way too early, when I was fourteen, fifteen, and by the time I was twenty-one, I was tired of fighting them off. That’s how I ended up with two babies and no husbands.

Soon I simply was Cleo; no one remembered “Eunetta,” and no one realized they had saved me from the one ugly thing about me. I didn’t think about it twice until the day that Milton heard my cousin use my name in his parents’ store: “Whatcha gonna get with your pennies, Cleo?” Uncle Box had been to visit. He wasn’t our uncle and I don’t know why he was called Box and I don’t know what ever happened to him. All we knew at the time was that he came and he went, and when he came, it was like a party, a party for no reason, the best kind of party. The children got money while my father glowered in the corner. My father hated parties, fun, anything that suggested that we might enjoy our time on this earth.

“Probably some Now and Laters,” I said to Cousin Walker.

“Cleo?” Milton asked as I pushed my money toward him. “What kind of name is that?”

“It’s short for Cleopatra,” I said. “People say I look like her.”

He laughed. “Like some dumb colored kid could ever look like Cleopatra. That’s the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard. She was royalty. You’re just a poor jig.”

“Jig.” That was most definitely the word he used. “Jig,” short for “jigaboo.” The other children laughed at me, as if they were somehow not implicated by Milton’s disdain. I was alone, mocked. I burst into tears and ran from the store, forgetting my candy and my money.

“Why are you crying, little girl? Are you lost? Is there trouble at home?”

I raised my face, holding my arm across the bridge of my nose, my beautiful straight nose, ashamed of my tears. I would pay for those tears with my schoolmates. They would want to see them again. They would try to see if they could break me as that horrible fat Milton Schwartz had. I looked up, up, up, into the face of Lady Law. Everyone knew Miz Whyte. She was police, but she was okay. She didn’t want to lock people up if she didn’t have to, but lord help you if you tried to walk down the street with a bottle in a brown bag when Miz Whyte was out and about.

I stammered out my story in a jumble of hot, humiliated words, but somehow she followed every detail.

“There are people, scholars, who believe that Cleopatra was Nubian,” she told me. “Now, let’s go back to that store and get your money back.”

She escorted me into the grocery. I got my candy and my money, which astonished me. Was that justice, was that the law? Did Milton owe me candy for free because he had tried to take something from me? When someone tried to hurt you, did they owe you more than you deserved? Who owes you, Maddie Schwartz, and who do you owe?

At any rate, I promised myself at age six that the one thing that nobody would take from me again was my dignity. But the promises we make to our young selves are hard to keep, as you have learned, Maddie Schwartz. For twenty years, however, I did keep my dignity. I cried over no man, not even the two who left me with two little boys and no wedding rings. I held my head high even when I had to wear clothes from the church box. I was Cleopatra, a Nubian queen in hiding.

And then I met a man, the king I always wanted, and that was the end of me.

Now it was five, almost six months later. The water in the lake was warming, shifting. Tiny creatures nibbled at what was left of my clothes. Rays of light pierced the murk at midday, but it couldn’t reach me. Somehow that thing that had become me, that inconsiderate, restless rag of a body that had replaced my beautiful one—it moved, blocking or disconnecting a wire. A man heading to a rendezvous at the reptile house one night noticed the lights at the fountain had gone out. At least, I’ve decided that’s who it must have been, what he was up to. Someone with a secret life, his heart racing, his senses at full alert. Everybody in the neighborhood knew what kind of men hung around the reptile house at night. Like calls to like. A man with a hidden life could feel a secret at the heart of something ordinary, sense that the dead lights were part of something larger. Something deader. He wrote a letter to Mr. Helpline, wondering why this bit of civic beauty had been allowed to go dark. He sent me to you; you sent a man to the fountain, rowing across the lake that was like the river outside of hell in the myths they taught us in school.

May you all rot in hell.

What was the verse they taught us in school? “For want of a nail . . .” Well, for want of a lightbulb, I was about to be found, and yes, a kingdom of sorts would be lost. Lives would be ruined, a king would be toppled, hearts would be broken.

And all that’s on you, Maddie Schwartz. I had the good sense, the dignity, to stay silent.

Part II

June 1966

June 1966

When Maddie stepped off the elevator, cardboard box from the luncheonette in hand, she immediately registered what she could only describe as an absence in the newsroom, a place already familiar and dear to her. A layer of sound had been stripped away. The wire machines still clacked and caroled and the phones rang, but the conversations were muted. No shouts, no laughter. Only essential murmurs, the bare minimum of words required as the newspaper steamrolled toward its final edition, the 8-star.

The features editor, a deep-bosomed, red-faced woman named Honor Livingston, was waiting in the “Helpline” cubbyhole with the paper’s top editor, Mr. Marshall. It was like finding God loitering by your mailbox. Maddie put down the cardboard box of sandwich and coffee with trembling hands. Something terrible had happened, that was the only explanation. Seth? Milton?

“Madeline Schwartz,” Mr. Marshall began.

“Yes,” she said, although he had not been asking a question. It was disturbing that he knew her name. Was she in trouble? What could she have done? Had there been a mistake in her story about Mrs. Whyte? How bad could it be? She was still on probation, she could be let go without cause. Maybe Cal had accused her of something awful because she had stood up for herself over the overtime issue.

“There are two police detectives in my office, waiting to speak to you.”

Her knees buckled and she bolstered herself, palms flat to her desk. Seth, one part of her mind screamed, even as another part whispered: Ferdie. But no one knew about Ferdie. She was in trouble. Something terrible had happened.

“We don’t have much time,” Mr. Marshall said, his voice low and swift. “It was a lucky thing you were at lunch when they arrived.” Maddie registered the inaccuracy of this; she was fetching lunch, not taking it for herself. She brought her lunches from home most days. “The police are here because, Mr. Heath tells us, you called DPW about the lights at Druid Hill Park.”

“Yes, I do that sometimes. Handle smaller problems. Did I make a mistake?”

“A worker has found a body there, a Negro woman. They want to know why you called, what you can tell them about the person who inquired about the lights.”