Lady in the Lake

I had been working in radio, prized for my voice, but not considered camera ready. The Donadio gig meant an extra twenty-five dollars a week. The only stipulation was that I must never tell anyone, and I was more than happy to keep that promise.

One Saturday, as I was removing my makeup, a cop killing came over the scanner. I was the only reporter available. Somehow, during the fourteen months I had been masquerading as Donadio, I had gotten taller, my hair smoother, my complexion paradoxically clearer. Maybe I did a better job cleaning my face once I started wearing clown makeup. At any rate, my face and body finally fit my booming baritone. I went to the scene, I gathered the facts, a star was born. Not Maddie, not that putz she dated in high school, not her perfectly nice lawyer husband. Me, Wally Weiss. I’m the star.

We met in, of all the unlikely places, our school’s ham radio club. We quickly established that we shared an intense admiration for Edward R. Murrow, whose London reports during the war had made a big impression on us. I had never met any girl who wanted to talk about Murrow and journalism before, much less a pretty one. It was like that first great work of art that transfixes you, that novel that stays with you the rest of your life, even if you go on to read much better ones. It was all I could do not to stare at her, mouth hanging open.

Maddie’s appearance at the ham radio club turned out to be a one-off; she had thought it was a radio club, for people interested in writing and performing, not a room full of losers who liked to tinker. She switched to the school newspaper, quickly landed a column and started running with a very fast, goyish crowd, including Allan Durst. Obviously, Maddie Morgenstern could never be serious about him, but her parents were shrewd enough not to fight a high school romance. I heard they had even invited the Durst parents to their home for Shabbos. The mother was a famous artist, painting huge abstracts that hung in museums, the father a competent painter of portraits, specializing in Baltimore dowagers.

Allan dropped Maddie right before prom. I found her weeping in an empty classroom. It was an honor to have her confide in me. I suggested she take me as her date.

“What could be a greater insult?” I said, patting her back with a flat up-and-down motion, almost as if burping a child. My hand brushed what felt like the clasp of a bra, my most erotic experience to date.

She agreed to my plan with an almost painful alacrity.

I bought her a wrist corsage with the most expensive orchid to be had in Baltimore. She did her part, ignoring Allan, who had come stag, and laughing at my jokes as if I were Jack Benny. Allan approached her at one point and asked for a dance “for old times’ sake.” Maddie cocked her head to the side as if she were trying to remember exactly what old times they had shared, then said, “No, no, I’m very happy to spend the evening with my date.”

I whirled her away, feeling every inch the young Fred Astaire. If you think about it, Astaire wasn’t conventionally handsome. He was never the tallest guy in the room, he wasn’t an athlete. But he was Astaire.

As I drove her home after the dance, she slid across the seat of my father’s Buick and rested her head on my shoulder. She confided in me that she wanted to write, really write, poetry and fiction, which was almost more exciting than her very real kiss at the front door. Back in the car, I discovered that the flower had fallen from its ribbon. Maybe its fragrance was nothing more than the usual orchid smell, but to me it carried Maddie’s distinctive scent, as singular as her voice, subdued and husky for a teenage girl. Maddie never squealed, she was no bobby-soxer. She was dignified, regal, the girl who always played Queen Esther in the Purim play.

I called her three days later to ask for a movie date, a proper date, having calculated that three days was the right amount of time. Not too eager, not too detached. Very Astaire.

Her tone was puzzled, polite. “You’re a sweet kid, Wally, to worry about me,” she said. “But I’m fine.”

Within a year, she was engaged to Milton Schwartz, big and hairy and older, twenty-two to her eighteen, his first year of law school already behind him. I went to their wedding. It was like watching Alice Faye run away with King Kong.

I had not thought of Milton Schwartz again for almost twenty years when I ran into him in the locker room at the new tennis barn, the only convenient place for me to exercise before work, given its proximity to Television Hill. We were well matched at singles and Milton clearly enjoyed having a famous friend. It was only a matter of time before he asked me if I would like to have dinner at his house. “No big deal,” he said. “Just the wife, maybe our neighbors, anyone you want to bring.”

Bettina and I have been apart almost two years and although I date, there’s no one serious. I decided to go stag, like Allan at the senior prom. Milton knew that I had attended the same high school as Mrs. Schwartz but said his wife had never spoken of me. Rather than feeling demoralized that Maddie didn’t brag about our acquaintanceship, I saw it as a compliment. If she hadn’t mentioned to her husband that she knew Baltimore’s Midday Fog, it must be because she had the occasional fantasy, a what-might-have-been moment. At her kitchen table, with her coffee, a cigarette burning between her fingers, she relived that prom night and my phone call three days later, kicked herself for not saying yes. Her dark hair would be prematurely gray, her hourglass figure dumpy and plump. Neither of those things were true, as it turned out, but that’s how I imagined her.

I was surprised to discover they kept a kosher house. I never set out to distance myself from Judaism, but a television personality such as myself has to connect with his audience, and my audience is mostly Christian. That’s the cost of being an oracle. Then again, there is Orthodox and there’s Orthodox, and the refusal to mix meat and dairy was the Schwartz household’s only concession to Judaism I could see. I was a little shocked by the things they said about the changing neighborhoods to the south, the more religious Jews who lived along Park Heights Avenue, to whom they clearly felt superior. If you ask me, there’s no one more anti-Semitic than a middle-class Jew.

But we did not spend that much time talking about Judaism. We discussed politics, with the Schwartzes and their guests deferring to me, as people tend to do. We laughed about Spiro Agnew’s most recent blunder, the speech at Gettysburg where he was clearly confused about which side had prevailed on that battlefield. By the after-dinner drinks, everyone felt warm and familiar. I thought it was safe to bring up the prom—and Maddie’s subsequent refusal to go on another date with me.

And she denied it. She insisted I had never asked her out at all.

Yes, she agreed, we had gone to the prom, but she was adamant that I never called her again, when I know I did.

“Because of course I would have gone out with you!” she said, by way of argument for her memory over mine. But she couldn’t help undercutting it: “If only to be polite.”

Still, her heat on this topic was disproportionate. There was no reason to get so angry about it.

Safe on my own doorstep, I drop my keys two, three times before I stumble into my house, still baffled by Maddie’s hostility. Is it because she could tell I saw through her? I may have been the one with a goyish name, but I was still a Jewish boy in my heart, whereas the Schwartzes, with their two sets of dishes, were ersatz. Everything in their house was for show.

My house is so quiet—and so dusty—since Bettina moved out. I thought she would fight to keep it. The house had been her chief preoccupation for our six years together. But, by the end, Bettina wanted no part of it or me. We didn’t have kids. I still don’t know how I feel about that. A child would have been delighted to have Donadio for his dad.

Although exhausted and stumbling drunk, I go to the “study” that Bettina made for me, in our marriage’s first, hopeful year. It is all leather and mahogany, with English horse-racing prints that embarrass me, although I suppose the proximity of Pimlico justifies such airs. Bettina arranged the books for visual appeal, which drives me mad, but I finally find the one I want: my old battered copy of Arch of Triumph, relegated to an upper shelf with the other paperbacks. When I first read it, it made me want to write, make other people feel as novels made me feel. Instead, I tell them the headlines and the weather, raise an occasional eyebrow at a celebrity.

And there it is, between pages 242 and 243, Maddie’s orchid, brown and brittle.